Anastasia, Absolutely Page 6

  "Not me," Meredith said. "I agree with Daphne. Call the cops. No question."

  Anastasia sighed and folded her paper again. "I can't figure out why everything is so easy for everyone else but me. Don't you think about the what ifs? What if the shoplifter is a woman?"

  "Who cares? I'd report her. It would be sexist not to," Daphne said firmly.

  Meredith agreed. "Yeah, I would, too," she said.

  Anastasia was thinking. "What if," she said finally, "the shoplifter is a friend of yours? That's the next question. We're supposed to do two over the weekend," she reminded them.

  "A close friend?" asked Daphne. "I haven't looked at question five yet."

  Anastasia nodded. "Your very best friend," she said solemnly. "Wouldn't you be indecisive then?"

  All four girls fell silent. Outside, the rain pelted the windows.

  "I don't think it would be a problem," Sonja ventured after a moment's thought.

  Anastasia heard the tentative quality in her reply. "Ha!" she said. "See? Then you'd be wishy-washy like me, I bet anything. You wouldn't be able to make up your mind! Right?"

  But Sonja shook her head firmly. "No," she said. "That's why you guys are my best friends. Because you all have values the same as mine. None of you would ever shoplift, would you?"

  "No." Daphne, Meredith, and Anastasia all agreed that they wouldn't.

  "So," Sonja pointed out. "It's easy. I just wouldn't have friends who would break the law."

  "I wouldn't either," Meredith agreed cheerfully.

  "Me neither," Daphne said, picking up a magazine. After a moment's silence, Anastasia said, "Yeah. Right." She went to the VCR and pushed play. On the screen, Laurence Olivier appeared, smiling his sophisticated, somewhat sinister smile.

  Anastasia Krupnik

  VALUES

  5. Suppose you happened to see a good friend shoplifting. Would you report it to the store manager?

  Well. I guess I would. No, wait. I think. I'd tell the friend first that I'd seen her. I'd ask her to put the stuff back, and if she did, I wouldn't tell. And I think she would put it back. Partly because she'd be afraid I'd report her. But partly because I'd remind her that stealing is wrong.

  If she didn't put it back, then I guess maybe I'd report it Because in the long run it would be the best thing for her, to be punished. Not jail or anything, though. Maybe some criminals deserve to go to jail, but I think it's possible for somebody to do a criminal act without being a real criminal, Maybe they would just be someone who made a really dumb mistake that happened to be a federal offense.

  I don't think that person, the one who just made a dumb mistake and who might happen to be your good friend, should have to have a trial or anything. Maybe that person has her whole life in front of her.

  6

  Question five really got to her. Anastasia thought about it a lot over the remainder of the weekend. She thought about it even after she had finished writing her response to it.

  Anastasia knew a lot of kids who shoplifted. Some of them bragged about it. But she thought they were losers, the same way she thought that kids who smoked were losers.

  Yet even though she knew who they were, and thought they were losers, she had not reported them to anyone.

  She could have. She could have gone to, say, Mrs. Johnson, the guidance counselor; or to Mr. Francisco—even better, since he was so cool and so easy to talk to—and she could have said, "You know that baseball cap that Ben Barstow always wears? I happen to know that he stole it from a store in Copley Place. He was telling everybody about how he just put it on and walked out of the store."

  She could have, but she hadn't. And she knew she wasn't going to.

  She reread her answer, wondering if she had lied without intending to. She had not told Ben that she knew about his shoplifting; why should she, when he had bragged about it already? But she had not reported him, either.

  Anastasia read the question again at the same time, trying to apply it to Ben Barstow. She felt relieved. It wasn't a lie, because the question had specifically said "a good friend."

  Ben Barstow was not a good friend. She didn't even like Ben Barstow much. Not many kids did. They called him Ben Barstool.

  She read question four again, just to see whether perhaps Ben Barstow fit into that one. But no. Question four definitely said "a stranger."

  Still, she realized, thinking about it some more, the whole thing was making her a little uncomfortable. She wondered uneasily what her own friends would do if they knew that she was a lawbreaker.

  Early Sunday morning, Anastasia got up grudgingly when the dog, who had learned to nudge open the door to the room where he slept, padded up the stairs to her bedroom on the third floor and stood impatiently beside her bed, touching her face affectionately with his damp nose.

  "I wish you'd learn that weekends are a time of rest, Sleuth," she muttered as she pulled her sweatpants on and looked around in the dim dawn light for a shirt. "I don't mind school mornings because I have to get up anyway, but couldn't you sleep late on Saturdays and Sundays, like most people?"

  The dog, sitting on the floor beside her bed, listened to her voice with interest as he watched her dress. He cocked his head as if he were trying to think of an answer.

  Anastasia read his mind and sighed. "I know," she said, tugging on her socks, "you're not a person, you're a dog."

  His tail thumped against the floor.

  She tied her sneakers and reached for her glasses on the table beside her bed. No need, she had decided, to comb her hair for dog-walking. She never saw anybody who mattered.

  Alert and attentive, Sleuth stood and headed for the stairs. He knew by now that Anastasia's glasses were the signal. When she put her glasses on, she was ready to take him out. Eagerly he led her down two flights of stairs to the front hall, and went to the table where his leash was kept in a drawer. He wiggled with excitement while she clipped it to his collar. Then he waited while she picked up her father's thick Sunday New York Times from the front steps, took it out of its plastic bag, and wadded the bag into her pocket.

  "Okay, Sleuth, heel," Anastasia said, as she did every morning. Happily letting her think that she was in charge, he pranced by her side and surveyed the neighborhood to be sure it hadn't undergone any changes during the night. He sniffed one bush, decided against it, chose another and lifted his leg briefly, then looked intently for a long time at an empty, crumpled Marlboro package in the gutter.

  "Don't even think about sniffing that, Sleuth," Anastasia said. "It'll give you cancer." Disdainfully she picked it up between her thumb and first finger and put it into the plastic bag. She didn't want it messing up the street in front of her house, and figured it deserved to be in a dog-poop bag which would end up... in the trash can, she reminded herself, as she now did every morning. She never took mail with her now on her morning walk. One thing about making a really awful mistake, Anastasia realized, was that you never made it a second time.

  She had never, in fact, taken the route of the first morning again. Today, Sunday, she decided that she would.

  Criminal Returns to Scene, she said to herself as she made the turn that would take her toward the corner of Chestnut and Winchester. It was a little like getting back on a horse after having been thrown: a scary but necessary thing to do.

  Not that Anastasia had ever in her life been thrown from a horse, or even ridden a horse. Many of her friends—especially Meredith, who went to riding camp every summer—were horse-crazy. Meredith always spent half the month of September talking about Blaze, or Golden Girl, or whatever horse had been her favorite that summer. Meredith owned jodhpurs and jodhpur boots and a riding helmet and sometimes was very boring when talking about horse shows.

  Anastasia didn't have any interest in horses. But she did remember that if a horse threw you off, you were supposed to get up, dust off your jodhpurs, and climb right back on. If you didn't, fear had gotten the better of you, and so had the horse.

  She decided
that the same thing applied to the corner of Chestnut and Winchester streets. If she couldn't bring herself to walk past it again, fear would have conquered her. So she jerked at the leash when Sleuth started to turn right at the usual place, and turned left instead. She hoped that the corner would look the way it had in her past life, in her precriminal existence, with a fat blue mailbox sitting there, waiting to be filled by innocent letter-writers and bill-payers.

  She took a deep breath, building her own self-confidence, and said to the dog, "See, Sleuth? I'm going back to the scene. It hasn't gotten the best of me."

  Sleuth, hearing her voice, looked up at her with his shaggy non-face. He didn't care which way they went, as long as there were bushes to inspect, lampposts to sprinkle, dead leaves to probe suspiciously with his nose and paws, and dog scents to analyze.

  "Maybe someday," Anastasia told him as they approached the corner, "this will feel like a comfortable, familiar spot to me. Maybe I'll actually mail a letter here again."

  But when they arrived at the spot, the mailbox was still missing. There were scars in the sidewalk where it had been removed.

  "You know a weird thing?" Anastasia said to Sonja and Meredith in the school cafeteria on Monday. The three of them were eating lunch together. Daphne was working in the library again.

  "What?" Sonja asked, poking through the salad on her plastic plate, looking for some lettuce that didn't have rust-colored stains on its edges. "What's weird? Aside from this salad, I mean."

  "The mailbox on the corner of Chestnut and Winchester streets is gone." Anastasia said it very casually, and took a bite of her grilled cheese sandwich.

  "Why is that weird? Who cares about mailboxes?" Meredith asked. "You know what I think is weird? Our new gym teacher. I wish Ms. Willoughby hadn't left."

  Anastasia wished that too, because she had been very fond of Ms. Willoughby. But she didn't want to talk about gym teachers. "It isn't that I care about mailboxes particularly," she explained. "But I just think it's strange, that it would be on that corner for about a thousand years, and then suddenly it isn't."

  Sonja gave up on her salad and started investigating her vegetable soup with a spoon. "You mean that same corner where the police were last week?"

  Anastasia nodded.

  "Probably there was a car accident, and somebody bashed into that mailbox, and so they had to throw it away," Sonja suggested. She stirred until a bit of carrot floated to the surface, and then finally took a bite of soup. "Yuck," she said, making a face. "I hate this lunch."

  Anastasia brightened. She hadn't thought of that possibility. "Yeah! Maybe a car hit it and that's why the police were there, and probably the mailbox got absolutely flattened, and they had to take it to the dump!"

  That's it! Anastasia thought. That's what happened! They took the whole thing to the dump after a car hit it, and so no one ever found out what I did! It felt as if a weight had been lifted.

  "Well, they couldn't just take it to the dump, even if it was flat," Meredith pointed out.

  "Why not?"

  "Because first they'd have to pry it open and get the contents out. They can't just throw away mail."

  "The police could," Anastasia insisted. "The police can do just about anything they want."

  "Nope," Sonja said. "Maybe our town police can do pretty much anything in this town. But mailboxes belong to the government. If the police took mail to the dump, it would be a federal offense. They'd go to some federal prison."

  "What is a federal prison?" Anastasia asked. She really didn't understand about federal offenses, even though they sounded very grave.

  Sonja shrugged. "I don't know exactly. But it's not like regular jail or anything. It's where serious criminals go, like politicians who take bribes. And people who tamper with the mail."

  "I don't understand tampering exactly," Anastasia confessed nervously. The weight that had been lifted was back, heavier than ever.

  "It means messing with," Meredith said. "Like Sonja is right now tampering with that soup. A minute ago Sonja tampered with her salad."

  Sonja and Meredith laughed. They both seemed awfully lighthearted, Anastasia thought gloomily. They wouldn't be so all-fired merry if they knew that they were having lunch with someone who had tampered with mail. Who had messed with mail in about the messiest way possible.

  Daphne appeared suddenly. She dropped her books on the table and flopped into an empty chair beside Sonja. "There wasn't anybody in the library," she announced, "and all the books were shelved. So I spent my time reading about transvestism."

  "Want my soup? I hate it," Sonja asked her.

  Daphne glanced at it and shook her head.

  "She tampered with it already," Meredith said, giggling.

  "Reading about what?" Anastasia asked.

  "Transvestism," Daphne repeated. "That's when people are compelled to wear clothes of the opposite sex. It's not curable, as far as they know."

  Anastasia frowned. "Why would you want to cure it?" she asked. "I wear my dad's shirts a lot. But I wouldn't exactly say I'm compelled " she added.

  Sonja pinched a bit of her sweater between two fingers and held it out. "See this? It's my brother's. He got it for his birthday and he said it sucked. So my mom said I could have it. I don't want to be cured. I really like this sweater."

  Daphne sighed. "I was looking it up because of my mother. My mother bought a necktie."

  Nobody said anything. Anastasia felt herself begin to laugh.

  "What's so funny?" Daphne asked gloomily.

  "Nothing. I'm sorry," Anastasia said. "But I wouldn't worry about it, Daph. Neckties are cool. Sunday's New York Times magazine had a whole fashion section, and a lot of models were wearing neckties."

  "Females?"

  "Yeah. Females. Really."

  Daphne leaned over and began picking at the leftovers on her friends' trays. "Life is hard," she said dramatically. "You can't rely on anything. First my father was a respectable minister, and next thing I know he's a lovesick idiot talking baby talk to a woman who gets paid to sing at funerals and weddings.

  "And one day my mother is my mother, wearing an apron and high-heels, and next time I look, she has a crew cut and a necktie." Daphne picked up a soggy bit of lettuce leaf, tasted it, made a face, and giggled a little.

  Meredith, Sonja, and Anastasia all chuckled sympathetically.

  "Sometimes," Anastasia said in a high, lighthearted voice, "someone who is a person with good values turns out to be a serious criminal, right?" She laughed self-consciously.

  "Yeah, right," Daphne said. "Don't you guys change on me, okay?"

  Anastasia made a decision suddenly. "I can't hang out with you guys this afternoon," she said to her friends. "I have a problem that I have to deal with. I have to go right home after school and make a phone call."

  Daphne, Meredith, and Sonja all looked at Anastasia quizzically. They all knew about each other's problems. But the buzzer indicating the end of lunch period sounded, and they had to hurry. She had no time to explain, and wasn't certain she wanted to anyway.

  Quickly they collected and returned their lunch trays and headed out to Mr. Francisco's class.

  "Anastasia? Could you stay, just for a minute? I'd like to speak to you."

  "Sure." Anastasia was gathering her books. She felt a little flattered. Mr. Francisco had never really singled her out before, although he had always seemed interested in her answers to the questions they discussed in class.

  "I'll see you in the morning," Sonja whispered.

  "Okay."

  Anastasia waited beside Mr. Francisco's desk while the room emptied. It was very noisy until the students left; all of the eighth-graders were still arguing over the shoplifting issue. The discussion in class had been very heated. Some of the kids (mostly boys, Anastasia had noticed with a little surprise) thought shoplifting was no big deal, and that store owners should simply expect it to happen.

  "You tell that boyfriend to get his act together, or you'll tu
rn him in," Anastasia heard Mr. Francisco say teasingly to Marlene Braverman as she was leaving the room. Marlene had admitted in class that her boyfriend, a ninth-grader in another town, shoplifted all the time and that although she didn't like it much, she wouldn't dream of reporting him.

  Marlene laughed and headed out into the hall; the room was quiet and empty.

  Mr. Francisco closed the door and came back to his desk, where Anastasia was waiting.

  "I'm kind of concerned about you, Anastasia," he said.

  "Because I write wishy-washy answers?"

  He laughed. "No, actually, your answers to my questions are terrific. I wish all the kids in the class would give things as much thought as you do. You seem to know intuitively that there's more to decision-making than quick, easy answers. You're good at examining things, and seeing all the different options."

  Anastasia brightened a little. "But I can never make up my mind," she pointed out.

  Mr. Francisco shrugged. "That will come," he said. "That's part of maturing. You guys are still eighth-graders. Of course you don't have answers yet. But you're beginning to see the questions."

  "But my dad is wishy-washy, too," Anastasia confessed. "Do you think it's hereditary?"

  Mr. Francisco started to laugh. "Your dad is wishy-washy? I've got news for you, Anastasia Krupnik! Did you know that I went to Harvard?"

  Anastasia shook her head.

  "I was an English major. I took several courses from your father: Shakespeare, and Victorian poetry, and something else, I forget what.

  "And boy, does he know his stuff! I tried to bluff my way through some exams because I hadn't done the reading. I was young, then, and irresponsible. But Dr. Krupnik—I mean your father—could see right through me. He really came down hard. He flunked me in a course. I had to go to summer school to make it up.

  "Think that's wishy-washy?" Mr. Francisco was grinning.

  Anastasia smiled. "No," she said. "I didn't know he ever flunked anybody. He's always so nice at home."