meet you in Parliament Plaza. In my Philadelphia, there is no Parliament Plaza! My city isn’t even the capital of my country, which is the United States of America, not Great Britain or whatever you call your union of America and England. It seems like the only place we can meet is here, in Gloria’s Gateway Books and Records. Here our worlds touch, for some reason. And maybe more than just our two worlds, judging by all the weird books on the shelves.
Next weekend I can’t come because it’s Thanksgiving—if you have that holiday in your world. Well, here it’s a big national holiday that starts on Thursday the 23rd. And I have to go out of town to stay with my father all through the holiday weekend. I won’t get home till Sunday the 26th. (My parents are divorced, and my dad lives outside Washington, DC. Ha, you probably don’t have that city in your world at all!)
So can you please, please come here next Monday evening the 27th at 5:00, after your family goes home? Your midterms should be all over by then, right?
Yours truly,
Teresa
Well, “yours truly” was pretty lame-o compared to “your humble servant,” but it was the best I could do. Though maybe there were one too many “pleases” in that letter. I added a P.S.: Where is Gingo Teag? I never heard of it. Then I folded the letter in half and put it exactly where I had found Tom’s letter, in the same spot on the floor where I had found the loose pages from his journal. I weighed it down with my battered old copies of Madeline L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet—the only sequels to A Wrinkle in Time that I’d been able to find in the disaster area of my room, but those are the best ones anyway. As I stood up I knocked a couple of books off the shelves and had to bend over again to pick them up. The books were The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens, and Josef in the Promised Land, by Franz Kafka. (Doesn’t Gloria use alphabetical order? Maybe they have a different alphabet where she comes from.)
I stood up and put Tom’s letter in my bookbag, yelping as the cramps in my thighs turned into pins-and-needles. Maybe I’d been crouching down reading too long. Then I started going through the piles of books I’d moved last time to make the doorway. I silently promised Gloria I’d only take one home this time—Mom would kill me if I lost my replacement phone, and the only other thing of value I’d been able to find that morning was the framed certificate from when I won the spelling bee in third grade. But who cares about spelling? Most kids my age sure don’t, not when their computers can spell anything for them. Still, I must admit I’m a little proud of having spelled “porphyry” right when I was only eight. Maybe the certificate will be okay as payment after all.
So after rubbing my legs until the pins-and-needles disappeared, I squatted down once more. There was a 950-page history of the twentieth century by someone named Janusz Spiegelman, which seemed to have been all different after 1916—the Allies had won World War I two years ahead of schedule, and nobody had ever heard of Hitler or Stalin—and it looked like it was very important, but not a lot of fun.
But there were two other books I liked so much I had a hard time choosing between them. Race To Mars was “the authoritative account” of how four American astronauts beat the Russians to the Red Planet during the Bicentennial in 1976, at the end of President Robert F. Kennedy’s second term. It had a fold-out poster with a detailed blueprint of the ship, the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., nicknamed “Joe-Kay.” NASA would love that, but why would they listen to me?
The other book was The Ultimate Aubergine Cookbook, which had more ways to cook an eggplant than even Nana knew about. It was published by something called the Brook Farm Collective in Massachusetts. “To celebrate our Sesquicentennial—150 years as a model for these Cooperative States of America!—this humble cookbook is offered to our friends in all the phalansteries and cooperatives from Nova Scotia to Key West.” (CSA? Phalansteries? Even Wikipedia probably never heard of some of this stuff.) Maybe I could use that book to get Mom interested in cooking again, instead of microwaving Ramen noodles all the time. As it is, I have to do the cooking if I want anything fancier, but I only know the hearty Italian basics Nana taught me. Don’t get me wrong, I love them, but it would be great to try something different for a change—and to get Mom to help out.
I took my time, because I loved the cozy safe feeling of being in the bookstore with Tiferet around somewhere, and also I was afraid of walking home through the cold, strange streets. Once I got home, of course, Mom would want to know where I’d been. Italian mothers are the worst!
“You said you were only going out to South Street for an hour,” she’d say, “it’s been dark for hours, where were you?”
What normal 17-year-old girl has a sunset curfew, I wanted to ask her? But I wouldn’t because I hated seeing her get all frustrated and then crying. Still, better thinking about that than the fear in my guts, growling softly.
Suddenly there was a scrabbling and a thump. I looked up, startled, as Tiferet padded into the secret room.
“Where have you been, puss?” I asked, stroking the cat, which mewed and darted away. “Okay, I’ll come see what you want,” I said, following her out.
I stopped short when she came to the counter where the cash register sat, because there was a handwritten note there, just like last time.
What you have brought is enough for both of the books you want, dear. And don’t worry so much about walking home now, or finding your way back next time. Don’t try so hard. Relax and enjoy the walk. Your feet will take you where you need to go.
“That’s ridiculous,” I grumbled aloud. Wait. How did Gloria know what I had brought with me and what I was thinking? Chilly bugs walked up and down my spine. How had Gloria even known I was interested in two books? I wasn’t carrying them—oh yes, I was, they were tucked right under my arm. All right, then.
I walked around the counter, glanced at myself gloomily in the mirror, and slipped the spelling bee certificate out of its frame. Tucked behind it was a picture of Nana tickling me when I was a baby. Oh, Nana. Tears trickled down my cheeks, and I quickly put it in my pocket. No way is Gloria getting that!
The certificate, however, fit easily in the slot. What should I do with the empty frame? Sneaking it out of the house had been hard enough, and I didn’t want to risk bringing it back and having Mom spot it and ask a lot of questions. There wasn’t a trash can, so I just left it on the counter. Now I had to face the night walk home. I took a deep breath and pushed my way out through the door into the cold and damp.
Chapter 4
It was not at all difficult for my parents and Jodie to note that something was bothering me all Union Day week-end. I had been taciturn ever since Tuesday evening, when I had stood and waited under the statue of Sir Andrew, the mighty conqueror of West Florida, for an hour and a half as the cold bit deeper and deeper at my fingers and the tips of my nose and ears.
Mum would have shouted at me for half an hour at least had she known that I had braved the cold without the mittens she had knitted me. She still wanted to protect her poor baby against the Arctic cold of a Philadelphia winter. Well, that may have been how she saw it, but what seventeen-year-old bloke is going to go out wearing handmade baby blue mittens, with little brown harry bears on them, yet? Nor could I explain that to her and hurt her feelings.
So instead I practically got frostbite waiting for this imaginary Teresa to show up, which of course she failed to do. The time passed slowly as I clapped my hands together and watched the M.P.s in their frock coats or long skirts and the Lords in their periwigs and ruffled shirts strut past, along with businessmen, tourists, and students like myself.
As a diversion I eavesdropped on a honeymooning
