The Boy on Cinnamon Street

  The Boy on

  CINNAMON

  STREET

  By PHOEBE STONE

  To David, who rescued me.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Author’s note

  Acknowledgement

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  My name used to be Louise but it’s not anymore. I had a T-shirt made that says across the front NO LONGER LOUISE. I changed my name because Louise rhymes with cheese and fleas and sneeze. So now I’m Thumbelina. I know. I know. It’s over the top. It’s unrealistic. It’s childish and stupid. Nobody has that name. But the thing is, I’m little. I’m only four feet seven and I’m in seventh grade. This means I have a seventh-grade soul that’s stuck in a fourth-grade body. This is major annoying. I’m planning on growing taller soon.

  I came up with the idea of Thumbelina when I was walking along the river with my friend Henderson. He was looking at the sky. Henderson always looks at the sky when he’s thinking and he’s always thinking. He was saying, “Actually everybody has a story, a fairy tale in their heart that they adhere to. That’s why Hans Christian Andersen is so awesome.”

  “Adhere to?” I said. This is the way this kid talks, seriously. Then I started looking up at the sky with Henderson. He’s very tall and I’m very small, and people started honking at us because it looked like we might wander into the half-frozen river by mistake. But while I was cloud watching with Henderson, it came to me. I “adhere to” the story of Thumbelina.

  That was around the time in my life that things started shifting, like slabs of ice on a river. It all began with a very very snowy winter and a pizza I ordered after my grandma had a yard sale. I think of that pizza now as a cosmic wheel spinning through the universe, changing everything.

  Chapter

  One

  Through the window, I can see South Pottsboro is frozen solid. It’s icy and windy out there. In this case the word south is misleading. I don’t see any palm trees. Dumpy, boring Pottsboro would be more accurate. There’s another snowstorm on the way and my grandma is having an indoor yard sale in the foyer of our condo building. A yard sale during a snowstorm?

  My grandma is like, “Blah blah blah. We’re the first people this season to have a sale. We’ll be swamped.”

  My grandpa is all huffy because he doesn’t want to put his slippers in the yard sale. He’s wearing them to keep them safe, which is totally embarrassing because these slippers look like roadkill. Seriously.

  And the lady downstairs already has plenty against my grandpa because he does noisy limbering-up exercises in our living room and then that lady starts pounding on our door. My grandma is very two-faced at these times. She’s so sweet to that lady then, but later, in the middle of the night, I can hear my grandma and grandpa laughing and giggling and calling her a big jerk.

  In the middle of the night through the walls, I hear my grandma and grandpa talking about other things too. Sometimes they aren’t giggling. They’re talking about me. Sometimes my grandma starts sobbing and my grandpa goes, “Baby doll, give her a little time. She just needs more time. Relax. Relax.” And then the room goes stone silent like they both died in there.

  Right now my grandpa and I are going outside to the steps to put up a flyer on the glass front door. It says YARD SALE TODAY: EXERCISE BICYCLE, DISHES, BOOKS, AND A BALANCE BEAM. Okay. The balance beam is mine. I used to be in gymnastics until about a month ago. Okay. It used to be my life. I spent a million hours a week on that balance beam. I lived on that freaking beam. But it was my idea to sell it.

  It’s cold out here. My grandpa’s scarf (which he calls a muffler) blows around. My grandpa blows around in the wind. When he leans over, a silver letter opener falls out of his pocket onto the snow. “Hey,” says my grandpa, “nobody was gonna buy a letter opener anyway. Nobody writes real letters anymore. Right, pal?”

  “Whatever, Grandpa,” I say. Right now I would like to do a cartwheel, but I don’t. This cartwheel feeling wells up in me constantly, the same way my breath comes up out of me. I used to do cartwheels like the way other people say yes or no. Cartwheels used to be my yes and my no. From here I can see my balance beam. It’s lying there waiting for me to run toward it, waiting for my handsprings and my double twists. I turn away. My grandma was like, “Are you sure you want to sell this, Louise?” I didn’t answer her.

  Henderson says that hikers freezing to death on Mount Everest don’t feel a thing. He says they think they’re falling asleep next to a warm fire when actually they’re lying in a snowbank, their body temperatures dropping to below zero while they are slowly becoming blocks of ice.

  Soon enough the front doors open and a whole herd of revved-up South Pottsboro shoppers pour in. “Bingo!” says my grandma, twinkling at all the customers milling around. I swear my grandma stepped out of The Wizard of Oz. This includes the Munchkin vocabulary.

  “She’s a pro. Your grandma’s no space cadet, that’s for sure,” says my grandpa, swinging his arms around.

  Now people start picking up things: my grandpa’s ripped magazines, my grandma’s sweaters, beat-up rusty pots and pans. There’s a row of old shoes under the table and in the lineup I see a pair of my mom’s. They’re kind of worn to the side and you can see where her toes rested against the soft leather. They’re sky blue and each shoe carries with it the shape of my mom’s foot and the whole shift and feel of her weight. A little girl is jumping around holding them now because she wants them for her dress-up box. “Okay,” says the lady with her. “We’ll buy them.” When the lady hands my grandma two dollars, my grandma looks down. Her face gets lost and blurry and she holds the shoes in her hands for just a second too long.

  I look up now and Mrs. Stevenson is sitting on my balance beam. She’s Terry Stevenson’s mom. “Sold,” she says, glaring at some man who is walking by. “Sold,” she says again when he turns around. “How much is the balance beam?” she calls out. “I’d like to buy it for my daughter. You’re not part of the team anymore, Louise?” She looks over at me with a blank smiling face, the kind of empty, almost hurt smile other people’s mothers always give you, as if they cannot bear to give any part of a real smile to anybody but their own child. I don’t answer. I don’t feel like answering anybody today.

  My balance beam is one of the first things to sell, but it is one of the last things to leave. It sits in the foyer late into the afternoon. Then the snowstorm gets worse and the electricity goes out and it’s all shadowy and dark down there. Then it’s a good thing that beam is pushed off to the side because anybody could stumble over it in the dark and really get hurt. You could tell how much Mrs. Stevenson wanted that beam beca
use she sends over four high school kids to get it during the worst part of the storm.

  Chapter

  Two

  After the yard sale, I decide to order a pizza. This is a no-brainer as I practically live on pizza. Palomeeno’s Pizza is very dependable. They would deliver pizza even if there were a tornado in South Pottsboro with roofs flapping around and houses flying off their foundations, like in The Wizard of Oz.

  For some dumb reason, I am thinking about my mom’s sky blue shoes when I place the order on my cell. My dad liked those shoes. They were the kind of shoes you had to follow across the rug because of that color. I can’t remember anything else. Zippo. Squat. I’m glad that kid bought those shoes because now I won’t have to see that color by mistake when I open a closet door. Lake blue. Pond blue. Dark sky blue.

  When the doorbell buzzes, my grandma is there before I am. She’s always hoping to nose around and get chatty with some boring dork. My grandpa is right behind her, looking for a chance to barge in on what she’s doing. So with a lineup like this, there is no chance I’ll even see this pizza for a while. I lean against the refrigerator, ho-humming to myself.

  My grandma throws the door open, and under normal conditions, an hour later, after we’ve heard the guy’s entire life history, she’ll hand me the pizza. But not this time. No, this is different. The door is standing open and my grandma sort of freezes when she sees the delivery kid. Then she crumples against my grandpa and backs away.

  “Okay, thank you, son,” my grandpa says too loudly. I hate when he calls total strangers son. He takes the pizza and hands it to me, saying, “Thank you. Thank you. You got correct change, pal?” He leads my grandma to the couch with his arm around her. I can hear them now murmuring and whispering together in the living room.

  I give the kid the money from the pizza money jar. He seems to be about fourteen years old. I think a junior from South drives the pizza van and I’m guessing this kid does the running around. To me he doesn’t look like a serial killer. He looks all happy in a pizza delivery dude sort of way because he found the place easily, didn’t get lost, and isn’t having any trouble getting paid. The pizza smells promising. It’s the perfect thing to order during a snowstorm after you have just sold the most important thing in your life. Ha ha.

  I look again at the kid in the cheerful red jacket with the pizza name tag on the pocket. I look at his face and suddenly out of nowhere I feel like I’m falling or sliding. Henderson saw this film taken on Mount Everest and this woman climber forgot to hitch back on to the rope and she went flying off the mountain a million miles an hour, grabbing at the snow. They filmed her falling. The thing is, after that, the other hikers had to keep on going, trying to get to the summit.

  I take the pizza box. It feels so warm. It smells so hopeful. By the time I get to the living room and flop down on the couch and open the lid, my grandma and grandpa are fully recovered from whatever it was. My grandpa, as usual, is being a couch hog. But still, my grandma looks at me and says, “You okay? Everything all right, sweetie? That pizza looks delicious!” which is weird and getting weirder because my grandma hates pizza.

  My grandpa reaches for a slice. My grandma frowns. “What?” he says, looking down at his old slippers. “They’re comfortable. Who cares what they look like?”

  “Men. I’m not talking about the slippers,” says my grandma, taking the slice of pizza out of his hand and putting it back in the box. “You’re having wild salmon for dinner.”

  “Grrr,” says Grandpa. “Watch out for me. I’m a party animal.” He tightens his arm around my grandma and nuzzles against her. She’s wearing her green organic sweatshirt that says, I’M ECO MEAN AND GLOBAL GREEN. And she’s got Grandpa squeezed into one that’s too tight for him and has a hood, which he’s wearing now. It makes him look like a big pizza-stealing elf.

  “By the way, pal,” says my grandpa, “there’s a note for you sticking out from under the doormat in the hall.” He puts his arm around me too and then he says, “Two beautiful dolls and I’m here in the middle. I call that luck.”

  “Grandpa, you’re sitting on my skirt. I can’t get up,” I say, pushing him away.

  Out in the hall, I look down at the wool doormat. It has a picture of a sheep featured on it and below it says, WOOLCOME HOME. I see the white paper poking out from one of the corners. I know the routine. How many of these letters and notes did I used to get from Merit Madson? Every time I turned around, I would find another. And what did they say? Oh, cute little things like Quit the gymnastics team or your toast. (It should have been “you’re toast,” but Merit Madson can’t spell.) Last month I felt something in my boot, something scratching my ankle. I reached down and pulled out a freaking letter from Merit Freaking Madson. It said something really encouraging about me finding another after-school sport.

  I do see the note, but I don’t want to pick it up. On the other hand, I don’t want my grandpa to read it. Since he’s been retired, my grandma says, he has nothing to do but nose around in other people’s business. My business. So I reach for the note and open the folded paper.

  I look down at it and read, I am your biggest fan. I reread it to make sure I got it right. I did. It says clearly, I am your biggest fan.

  What? I mean, seriously, what?

  My grandpa comes to the open door and so does my grandma. They look like Mr. and Mrs. Mouse with these curious eyes peering out at me. I’m not your baby mouse, Grandpa. I don’t eat corn like you do and I want to go back to Cinnamon Street and live there. Alone.

  “Louise?” says my grandma.

  “I’m not Louise anymore. I changed my name,” I say and I push by them and go in my room and slam the door.

  Outside my window, the snowstorm is whirling and raging like white anger and when I push my face against the glass, I can see millions and billions of snowflakes dancing and diving past my window. Henderson says snowflakes are little universes unto themselves. Each snowflake a little world different from all the others. And then he tells me to stick my head out into a snowstorm and look straight up, to understand everything. This is how he talks, I’m not kidding you. I think about the pizza delivery guy again. In my mind I look at the name tag on his jacket. It says Benny McCartney. Did Benny McCartney leave me the note? Does Benny McCartney like me? Or has there been some kind of cosmic mix-up, some kind of mistake, a big mistake, like forgetting to hitch back on to a rope when you’re halfway up Mount Everest in the middle of winter.

  Chapter

  Three

  “Duh, I must be brain-dead,” I say to my friend Reni on the phone. “I don’t understand this note. I’m totally spooked about it. I feel like I just arrived from planet Ha Ha The Joke’s On Me.”

  “Duh, I must be brain-dead too,” says Reni. “So let’s go be brain-dead losers together and stuff ourselves with ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s. Then you can show me the note and we can get Henderson to put it under a microscope and analyze the handwriting. He’ll be able to tell you who wrote it. Possibly.”

  “Okay, I’ll meet you there,” I say. Reni’s the best. She and Henderson are the only friends that I have in the entire universe. That includes all the millions and billions of solar systems and all the trillions and jillions of light-years and black holes and meteor showers that Henderson loves to talk about.

  I get on the Toot Toot Tourist Trolley and find a seat along the aisle facing out. The toot toot part was my grandpa’s idea. It was supposed to attract droves of tourists. So far it hasn’t worked. I look out the window across the aisle from me, watching South Pottsboro flash by. I put my hand in my pocket. I can feel the papery edge of the letter I got last night. I pull it out and look at it, keeping the corners folded so no one can see it. I study the way the words sit on the page, the way the pen looped across the paper.

  At my stop I put the note away and get off the trolley.

  Now I’m in Middle Pottsboro, headed for Ben & Jerry’s. I have to climb over a pile of snow at the edge of the street t
hat’s about as high as Mount Everest. Snow is piled along the sidewalks and this is March, I’m not kidding you. Everybody is like, “Whoa, more snow?” I can’t believe Ben & Jerry’s has a huge long line going out the door even though it’s snowing. Through the crowds, I spot Reni.

  “Reni. Reni. Reni,” I call out. She smiles. Her full name is Irene Nancy Elliot and she’s five feet eight. I didn’t know her when I went to North last year. I know her from when she took an after-school gymnastics class for weight loss at South this year. I was a team leader for that class. I had her doing all kinds of cartwheels right away. Now to get Reni going sometimes, I put up my fists and start jumping around her, saying, “Come on, Reni, put ‘em up. Put ‘em up.” And I start boxing and punching at the air in front of her. Because I’m only four feet seven, she looks way down at me sweetly and starts laughing. This always makes her laugh.

  I cut into the line headed toward Reni. She has just made it inside. As soon as I get to her, we both start jumping up and down and screaming. Reni started it. “I can’t believe you got that note. It’s so sweet. You’re so lucky. Wow,” goes Reni.

  I’ve been jumping up and down with her but I’m not sure why. “I am?” I say.

  “Yes,” says Reni. She smiles. She has a truly lovely smile; even my grandma says so. Her whole face just lights up like fireworks with extra flashes falling away into the darkness. “Let me see the note,” she says.