Louise was so disappointed that she forgot why she’d been on the Pittsburgh forum in the first place until they reached school. The day got worse as she searched through the forums and discovered no one had a telephone directory for Pittsburgh.
“This day sucks.” Louise explained what she’d found out and why she’d been looking.
“We have Alexander’s street address.” Jillian pushed Tesla into their shared locker. “He’s not going to fit in this when winter comes and we have two coats and snow boots to store in here.”
Louise really hoped that by winter they’d have worked something else out, although Tesla was making it so they had a great deal of freedom to move through the city. “Anything we mail has to hit Cranberry days before Shutdown to make it across to the border. If we miss the window, it will sit at the post office for a month until the next Shutdown.”
“So?” Jillian leaned against the wall and watched the ebb and flow of fifth-graders in the hallway. “It’s not going to go bad unless we send something like cookies. Real homemade cookies, not the Girl Scout cookies. We can only call during the twenty-four hours of Shutdown. The first five hours are while we’re asleep. Then we’re here at school. And if we make a call at home, Mom and Dad are going to want to know who the heck we’re talking to.” Because they never talked to people other than Aunt Kitty on the phone.
“I’d rather talk to Alexander instead of mailing her a letter.” Louise started to check sites that might have a Pittsburgh phone book. They were places like the universities and government offices, so she needed to actually hack the sites to search them. At least she could bounce through the café next to the school, so she didn’t have to worry about being traced. “Just dropping a letter into the mail feels a little like writing a letter to Santa Claus. In September! If she answers back, it could take months for her letter to get to us.”
“Her answering would be Christmas?”
“Duh!”
“Shoot! Well, the day just got worse,” Jillian warned. “Incoming.”
Louise looked up from her tablet. “Huh?”
Jillian nodded down the hall, where Elle stood surrounded by the girls from the other fifth-grade class, taught by Mr. Howe. “Elle is passing out invitations to the girls.”
“Already? I thought her birthday was next month.” Elle’s elaborate birthday parties were a yearly ritual. Pride and etiquette demanded that Elle invite all the girls in their grade; thus, they were always included. It had taken them two disasters to realize that they were invited only in form, not in spirit. They hadn’t attended in third or fourth grade.
“I only did one invitation.” Elle handed it over like it should have been on a silver platter. “But it’s for both of you. That’s why I just put ‘Mayer’ on it.”
“And this is yours.” Elle handed Jillian their broken camera that had been standing in as mini-Tesla. “I have no idea how it ended up in my bag, or why you’d want something so broken, but my mother said I had to make sure you got it.”
“Thank you.” Louise knew her mother would ask later if she’d thanked Elle for the invitation or not. She also knew that because there was only one invitation, Jillian figured that they were both covered by Louise’s thanks.
Invitation delivered, Elle turned on her heel and wove down the hallway, skillfully avoiding the curious boys to intercept Zahara. The beautiful African-American girl was in Mr. Howe’s class. She was always late to the fifth-grade floor because she had to deliver her younger brother to his classroom downstairs.
Jillian tore open the envelope and muttered a dark curse at the invitation. “Little Mermaid.”
“You’re kidding me.” Louise had never understood the appeal of The Little Mermaid. “I thought she would have grown out of that.”
Jillian kept cursing.
“We don’t have to go,” Louise said.
“This isn’t about Elle’s birthday, it’s about the class play. She wants to do the play The Little Mermaid, and she’s going to be Princess Ariel. I’ll end up as the Sea Witch.”
“Oh shoot,” Louise hissed.
“It wouldn’t be so bad if we did the original Hans Christian Andersen story where the mermaid dies after the prince marries another woman. At least that mermaid was a soulless creature made of water who was really after immortality by exchanging a three-hundred-year lifespan for a soul. The husband was just icing on the cake. No, no, we’ll be doing the story where she gives everything up for a boy, including everyone that she loves dear, screws the world to hell and back and then needs him to kill the villain while she’s helpless someplace else. Oh, God, I’m so sick of these wussy princesses and evil women. We’ve done the evil witches of Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel, the evil queen of Snow White and the evil stepmother of Cinderella. Is this some kind of campaign against femininity? Our choices are the evil and usually ugly powerful female or the helpless princess, desired just for her beauty? And what the heck is this shit about evil stepmothers anyway?”
“Well, it’s following a biological imperative that a female devotes all her attention to the children that carry her DNA as opposed to the DNA of another female.”
“Oh, shut up, monkey girl, we are not cuckoo birds, tossing eggs out of nests and getting someone else to raise our chicks. We’re humans!”
“Okay, Wilbur. What are we going to do about Elle and these damn mermaid zombie chicks?”
Jillian giggled. “Oh, it would be worth it if I could rewrite it to zombies.” She grinned. “The boys would love it if it was a zombie play.”
“They’re never going to let us do a major rewrite of a play again.”
Jillian nodded, thinking. “Too bad there are more girls than boys. That way, if we found a play that the boys liked, they could just outvote the girls. Something cool. Like Macbeth.”
“Like Macbeth but in plain English.”
“It should have sword fights,” Jillian said firmly.
“Robots. Dinosaurs.”
“Elves.”
“At least try to think like a boy,” Louise said.
“It has to be a real play, not something we write, that boys will like.”
“Do you think they made Lord of the Flies into a play?”
“All the characters in that are boys. There has to be at least one or two girl parts, just so we can sway the girls that don’t fall under Elle’s spell. If we can get a couple of the girls on our side, it would work.”
They thought for a moment. Louise found herself eyeing Tesla sitting statuelike inside their locker. Their mother had thought he looked liked Nana, the Darling’s Saint Bernard nanny.
“What about Peter Pan? Pirates. Sword fights. Indians.”
“Native Americans,” Jillian muttered, frowning as she thought through the casting. “Elle would want to be Wendy. That would leave Mrs. Darling or Tinker Bell for me.”
“You’d be Peter. He’s usually played by a girl.”
Jillian’s face lit up. “Oh, God, that’s perfect. Elle wouldn’t want to be a boy, and I would have the lead!”
They had Library as their first-period class, so they spent the hour digging through what had been produced for Peter Pan.
“God, I’m starting to understand why Mom never showed us the cartoon. What the hell happened? You take the most manly of boys — he runs around naked except for some leaves, and he fights pirates — and you turn his story into this.” Jillian turned her tablet to show off the big-busted blond Tinker Bell. “In the novel, Tinker Bell dies a year after Wendy goes back to London, and Peter forgets all about her.”