Shoebag Returns Read online

  Cats do not like the sound of cockroach laughter.

  Arachnid laughter was bad enough, and rare at that, but something about a roach giggle got on Butter’s nerves.

  And something about a particular roach roaming around the premises puzzled Butter, for not only could he change into a human when it suited him, apparently he could rise from the dead, as well.

  Or was this another roach up there in the plastic container?

  Butter opened both eyes.

  More laughter … and Butter was off his rump and in a crouch, creeping carefully toward the desk.

  A leap, and he was right next to the plastic container.

  There was Cook’s T-shirt with the faces of that old rock group on it!

  Butter peered into the tank and saw the Mexican blonde stiffen as he brought up one paw, resting it on the piece of screen. Carefully, while the hairy spider dived behind the rock, Butter reached in. He fished the roach out and flipped him to the floor.

  It was the same roach, all right, and Butter decided he should investigate him. Bite away the silk strings around his body. Maybe even taste him.

  But a cat’s playfulness always comes before his curiosity, and now that Butter knew the creature was not dead, but only playing dead, Butter would bat him around a bit.

  He pushed the screen back in place, for Butter was wary of the tarantula, wary of all those tanksters from the Science Room.

  Butter jumped down, ready for a little hockey game, using his paw for a stick and the wrapped-up roach for a puck.

  Cats could always find fun games to play.

  Thirty-six

  WITH ONE LONG HAND, its pointed nails beautifully manicured at the end of its long fingers, Miss Rattray plucked Stanley Sweetsong out of the procession leaving the Science Room.

  “Don’t think I don’t know who put that Butterfinger in the tarantula’s tank!” she said.

  “Why would I do such a thing, ma’am?” said Stanley.

  “Butterfinger, Butter Club,” Miss Rattray answered. “I am not all that dense that I cannot make that connection, Sweetsong.”

  “But only club members have keys to the Science Room, Miss Rattray.”

  “And you never will have a key to that room, at the rate you’re going!” she told him.

  Behind her, the general was waving his checkbook. “Miss Rattray? Let me leave something for you in my daughter’s name. We are off to Tennessee momentarily, but we are in a good mood … and all we need is a pen.”

  “I have a pen,” Stanley said, reaching into his pocket.

  “Don’t put it away after the general uses it,” Ethel Lampert’s mother called out. “I think I’ll make a small contribution myself. Ethel has never seemed happier. Is that secret club she belongs to a stamp club?”

  “If it is a secret club,” Miss Rattray said, thinking fast, “probably its aims are secret, too.”

  Under her breath, Miss Rattray told Stanley, “We have a lot to talk about, Sweetsong, and —”

  Now Mrs. Flower interrupted, “I have an extra pen, Miss Rattray, and Mrs. Lampert can use it aprés moi. For I intend to write a check myself, providing my daughter is discouraged from hunting down creatures for those unpleasant tanks!”

  “And providing these poor unfortunates in the tanks get good homes in a proper zoo!” Mrs. Lampert called out.

  Seldom so flustered she could be sidetracked from a scolding, Miss Rattray did not finish her remarks to Stanley. Instead, she called out, “Check-writers may follow me to my office where there are ample pens … and also chairs to sit on.”

  Then she turned back to Stanley. “You had better find Mr. Samsa, Sweetsong! After all, you are his escort.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Lucky for you,” she said, “that this day did not end in disaster. … Lucky for you that it had its benefits.”

  “Lucky for the snake and the frog, too,” said Stanley.

  “Lucky for Miss Rattray’s School for Girls,” Miss Rattray said, and sniffing, added, “and now … one boy.”

  Thirty-seven

  SO THAT WAS AN actor!

  Josephine Jiminez sat in the Music Room where she had reigned as P and thought about Gregor Samsa.

  She was not eager to join the crowd flocking after him en route to the Science Room. She was too nervous to witness the Butter Surprise, for as P she would be responsible if anything went wrong.

  No one had really understood Gregor Samsa’s speech.

  All the other speakers on Career Day had tried to make their jobs sound fascinating, but Samsa had shouted out “If you can give up theater, do it! Fast! Whatever you can give up, give it up! For it’s only what you can’t give up that will always work for you! Whether it’s playing a bass riddle, writing a play, loving someone, or studying to be a marine biologist, if you can’t give it up, you will just have to do it!”

  During the question period, someone had asked him what he thought he would be, if he were not a star.

  “A roach!” he’d answered. “A cockroach!”

  There were gasps from the parents and giggles from the girls, and Miss Rattray had risen from her chair behind him on the podium and said, “Enough!” in the tone she used whenever she feared something was not going as planned.

  Then as they’d all filed out of the auditorium, Josephine’s mother had said to her, “Gregor Samsa seems to think as you do, dear: that if you’re not important, you’re like a roach.”

  “Gregor Samsa thinks like Dr. Dingle,” Josephine answered. But there was no point, anymore, in trying to explain that misunderstanding. Nothing Josephine could say would change anything now.

  After she took one last, long, loving look around the Music Room, Josephine sighed and set off to finish her packing.

  As she walked back to her room, for the last time wearing her secret yellow sock under her regulation white one, her yellow WE’RE BUTTER badge pinned behind the lapel of her royal blue blazer, an opening line popped into her head.

  It was Monroe talking. Act I. Scene I.

  MONROE: “Bagg is your name? Bagg?”

  He was addressing the googly-eyed doll, Huntsville, one of the Cast of Characters who rarely spoke.

  HUNTSVILLE: Yes, Stuart Bagg. Here for the magical crowning of the Q of T.”

  MONROE: The Q of T? T has no Q!

  Josephine decided she would call this new creation, “Magic Can Happen Anywhere — Even In Tennessee.”

  She felt a slight lift to her walk as she climbed the stairs to the Lower School, and headed down the hall to her room. She was still concentrating on the play-in-progress for the Black Mask Theater when she came upon Butter, booting something about with one paw.

  “What are you up to, Butter?”

  The cat stopped, paw raised, eyes blinking.

  Josephine bent down to see what it was.

  The antennae were the only things the roach could move, for he was wrapped up like something left there by a spider.

  “Give it up, Butter!” said Josephine. But remembering Gregor Samsa’s assembly speech, and knowing a cat could not abandon such a grand game, Josephine picked the roach up herself.

  No sooner had she done that than who should appear from around the corner?

  “A cat!” shouted Gregor Samsa. “Oh, no!”

  “It’s only the kitchen cat,” said C. Cynthia Ann Flower. “It’s only Josephine Jiminez and the kitchen cat!”

  Quickly, Gregor Samsa darted into Stanley Sweetsong’s room. “Oh, no!” he shouted again. “The roach is gone! The roach must have been eaten alive!”

  “What is all this about roaches?” said C. Cynthia Ann Flower, testily.

  “Oh, no. Oh, no!” cried the Great Breath spokesboy returning to the hall, holding his head with both hands. “The roach has been eaten alive!”

  “Who cares about roaches?” C. Cynthia Ann Flower said.

  “Roaches have been around for two hundred-fifty million years!” said Gregor Samsa. “Now one of them is dead.”r />
  “Not,” Josephine Jiminez said.

  “Not?” Gregor Samsa said.

  “Look,” Josephine Jiminez said.

  She opened her hand with the roach in her palm.

  “Eeeeek!” C. Cynthia Ann Flower screeched.

  “Hooray!” said Gregor Samsa. “May I have him?”

  “Don’t hurt him,” Josephine Jiminez said.

  “Don’t touch him!” C. Cynthia Ann Flower said.

  But Gregor Samsa picked him up very gently.

  “Put it down and step on it!” said C. Cynthia Ann.

  “I don’t step on things,” Gregor Samsa said.

  “I don’t step on things, either,” Josephine Jiminez told him.

  “Now, let’s get this little guy undone,” said Gregor Samsa. “C. Cynthia Ann? You go on without me.”

  “Will you write me?” she asked him.

  “Not if you step on things,” he answered.

  “I won’t. I never will again!”

  “She will so,” said Josephine Jiminez.

  “Only if it’s you,” said C. Cynthia Ann.

  The famous spokesboy was not listening to the girls. He was holding the roach very close to his long, thin face, and he was singing to him. Some strange little song about parties in kitchens.

  Definitely a weirdo, Josephine Jiminez decided.

  C. Cynthia Ann Flower had her limits: Mon Dieu! Singing to a cockroach only proved Gregor Samsa’s point, made that afternoon in assembly.

  If you can give it up, do.

  She did.

  She fled, head held high as Miss Rattray’s, feet moving as fast as Butter’s, who trotted beside her. Red Better sock in place. WE’RE BETTER button pinned on.

  She had better things to do than listen to a boy sing to a cockroach … and better boys in her future than the spokesboy for a chewing gum, which Miss Rattray’s girls never chewed anyway.

  Thirty-eight

  I’D LOVE TO CHEW Great Breath with you! Gregor Samsa.

  “Do you want it, Stanley?” Josephine Jiminez asked.

  “He signed it for you,” said Stanley, who didn’t really want an autographed photograph of the Great Breath spokesboy.

  “Gregor was nice,” she said. “Weird but kind.”

  “Kind of weird.”

  “Stars aren’t ever normal.” Josephine flinched after she said the word “normal,” so used to being sprayed by Dr. Dingle’s sneeze. “So maybe I have a chance to be a star myself, someday, of something.”

  “Someday,” Stanley agreed. “Of something.”

  They shifted around and looked away from each other.

  “Well,” said Stanley, “you’ll be leaving now, hmmm?”

  “Yes, off to the magic of Knoxville (known for coal, marble, aluminum sheeting, and textiles), Tennessee.” Josephine made a face.

  Usually Stanley would grin at one of her cynical remarks, but smiling did not come easily at that moment.

  It was hard to say good-bye.

  “I really like your secret tarantularium,” she said. “The Mexican blonde should be very happy in there.”

  “She’ll be going to Castle Sweet in a week to live with Weezer.”

  “Will you tell all the Butters good-bye for me?”

  “We’ll remember our P every time we meet. We’ll eat a Butterfinger in your memory.”

  “Step on C. Cynthia Ann Flower’s toe once a month in assembly, in my memory,” said Josephine.

  “I will. It’s the only thing I’ll ever step on.”

  “And if you ever see Stuart Bagg again, tell him I’ll get over it, and I’ll get on with it.”

  “Hold your horses,” Stanley said, reaching for the Hootie & The Blowfish T-shirt.

  “That’s what Bagg always said.”

  “I want you to take this.”

  “And that’s his lucky T-shirt, Stanley.”

  “He never wanted to wear it, though. He liked my clothes better.” He handed it to her and she thrust it into her bag, along with Monroe and the photograph of Gregor.

  “Well … ahoy!” she said, her voice breaking.

  “Ahoy and good-bye,” said Stanley.

  Then they shook hands in the secret way, thumbs-up and touching.

  “We’re Butter,” they said together.

  Thirty-nine

  IF EVER SOMEONE SAVES your life, you should look out for whoever it is.

  Stay near her.

  Stick by her.

  Shoebag knew that was what he had to do.

  If ever you can find your way home, you should try to do it.

  If you have a family somewhere you should try to find them.

  Even if they live in Tennessee.

  Even if they live inside a Macintosh.

  Shoebag knew that was what he had to do.

  Curled up in the ear of Monroe, the Kewpie doll, covered by the Hootie & The Blowfish T-shirt, he stared at the photograph of his good friend, Gregor Samsa.

  “Before you ever try the formula again,” Samsa had said, “be sure you have a good reason, and be sure to do it on a Wednesday night.”

  “But will it work? What if when I’m human I suddenly become a roach again?”

  “Then you will have a lot of explaining to do,” said Gregor, “which is why I’m glad I know my place.”

  It was dark inside the bag, but not bumpy any longer since Josephine had set it down on the floor, in the back seat of the Chrysler.

  There were plenty of delicious crumbs scattered about near her comb and her change purse. Butterfinger crumbs, Pepperidge Farm goldfish crumbs, crumbs from Dipsy Doodles and Nabisco Old Fashioned Ginger Snaps … Shoebag would not go hungry. It was the first time he had ever gone on a journey all by himself. Roachdom being what it was, he supposed it would not be the last time.

  But for now: so long.

  So long to Stanley Sweetsong and his Gap/Levi’s/Polo/Lands’ End/Doc Marten wardrobe. Stanley would be okay from now on, Shoebag was sure.

  So long to crabby Cook and crafty Butter.

  So long to the jumping spider, Blonde, and the Zap man.

  So long to Mr. Longo, the king snake, and the African frog.

  So long to all the Butters, and even the Betters.

  So long to Miss Rattray’s School for Girls (and now one boy).

  So long.

  So long.

  Until we meet again.

  A Personal History by M. E. Kerr

  My real name is Marijane Meaker.

  When I first came to New York City from the University of Missouri, I wanted to be a writer. To be a writer back then, one needed to have an agent. I sent stories out to a long list of agents, but no one wanted to represent me. So, I decided to buy some expensive stationery and become my own agent. All of my clients were me with made-up names and backgrounds. “Vin Packer” was a male writer of mystery and suspense. “Edgar and Mamie Stone” were an elderly couple from Maine who wrote confession stories. (They lived far away, so editors would not invite them for lunch.) “Laura Winston” wrote short stories for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal. “Mary James” wrote only for Scholastic. Her bestseller is Shoebag, a book about a cockroach who turns into a little boy.

  My most successful writer was Vin Packer. I wrote twenty-one paperback suspense novels as Packer. When I wanted to take credit for these books, my editor told me I could not, because Vin Packer was the bestselling author—not Marijane Meaker.

  I was friends with Louise Fitzhugh—author of Harriet the Spy—who lived near me in New York City. We often took time away from our writing to have lunch, and we would gripe about writing being such hard work. Louise would claim that writing suspense novels was easier than writing for children because you could rob and murder and include other “fun things.” I’d answer that children’s writing seemed much easier; describing adults from a kid’s eye, writing about school and siblings—there was endless material.

  I asked Louise what children’s book she would recommend, and she said I�
�d probably like Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, a book for children slightly older than her audience. I did like it, a lot, and I decided my next book would be a teenage one (at the time, we didn’t use the term “YA” to describe that genre). I knew I would need yet another pseudonym for this venture, so I invented one, a take-off on my last name, Meaker: M. E. Kerr. (Louise, on the other hand, never tried to write for adults. She was a very good artist, and her internal quarrel was whether to be a writer or a painter.)

  Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! was my first Kerr novel. The story of an overweight and sassy fifteen-year-old girl from Brooklyn, New York, Dinky was an immediate success. Between 1972 and 2009, thirty-six editions were published in five languages.

  Gentlehands, a novel as successful as Dinky but without the humor, is a romance between a small-town boy and a rich, sophisticated Hamptons summer girl. The nickname of the boy’s grandfather is Gentlehands, but he is anything but gentle. An escaped Holocaust concentration camp guard, he once took pleasure in torturing the female prisoners. His American family does not know about his past until the authorities track him down. Harrowing as the story is, the New York Times called it “important and useful as an introduction to the grotesque character of the Nazi period.”

  One of the hardest books for me to write was Little Little, my book about dwarfs. I kept worrying that I wouldn’t get my little heroine’s voice right. How would someone like that feel, a child so unlike others? After a while, I finally realized we had a lot in common. As a gay youngster, with no one I knew who was gay, I had no peers, no one like me to befriend—just like my teenage dwarf. She finally goes to a meeting of little people and finds friends, just as years later I finally met others like me in New York City.

  I also used my experience being gay in a Kerr novel called Deliver Us from Evie. I set the story in Missouri, where I had studied journalism at the state university. I had been a tomboy, so I made my lead character, Evie, a butch lesbian. She is skillful at farm chores few females would be interested in, dresses boyishly, and has little interest in the one neighborhood boy who is attracted to her. I didn’t want to feminize her to make her more acceptable, and I worried a bit that she wouild be too much for the critics. Fortunately, my readers liked Evie and her younger brother, Parr, who doesn’t want to take over the family farm when he grows up. The book is now in two thousand libraries worldwide.