13 Little Blue Envelopes
Maureen Johnson
Everything about Ginny will change this summer, and it’s all because of 13 little blue envelopes…Perfect summer read from Queen of Teen 2012Ginny, aged 17, is left 13 little blue envelopes by her free-spirited young Aunt Peg. Little does she know just how much they will change her life…• Inside envelope No 1 is money and instructions to buy a plane ticket.• Inside envelope No 2 are directions to a specific London flat• Inside envelope No 3 a note to Ginny says: Find a starving artist.• And because of envelope No 4 Ginny and a man called Keith go to Scotland together, with somewhat disastrous – though utterly romantic – results.
13 Little Blue Envelopes
Maureen Johnson
Copyright (#ulink_3c69da4a-ab1b-5eca-8f24-7bd277fe37fd)
First published in the USA by HarperCollins Publishers 2006
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2009
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
13 Little Blue Envelopes
Copyright © 2005 by Alloy Entertainment and Maureen Johnson
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007319909
EBook Edition © MARCH 2010 ISBN: 9780007372553
Version: 2014-10-03
Dedication (#ulink_aff52827-9445-5186-a6eb-f7b1bf539436)
For Kate Schafer, the greatest traveling companion in the world, and a woman who is not afraid to admit that she occasionally can’t remember where she lives.
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#uc8ffb83e-fe77-5b45-ab34-36eb4014a85c)
Title Page (#uff31f232-fbcd-5115-b488-b3fb33b3198d)
Copyright (#u6566a713-f312-5460-8d61-a3ad0f3aa7d1)
Dedication (#ue074d4f8-f8af-5829-91e3-10c8ca37c145)
Prologue (#ubc8c578c-f403-5091-9215-4bad6c09048c)
Envelope 1 (#u3aae8c57-20b9-50c5-ac2e-56bac1d8b555)
A Package Like a Dumpling (#uff66e397-0ca8-5784-b3f0-eb973105bf88)
The Adventures of Aunt Peg (#u6de471ce-c7cc-5f15-af35-d92d341cec76)
Envelope 2 (#u6cd40f82-f0a7-574e-8349-64bb0b420817)
54a Pennington Street, London (#uf26fffe4-4264-539a-9d29-c20660055c92)
Harrods (#u7338fdc1-ddc3-5c1c-8577-47d90becc831)
Good Morning, England (#u4c960695-15b2-51e8-97bb-2046baa05979)
Richard and the Queen (#ube30e15d-cb05-5270-87d5-19a7dd9ce644)
Envelope 3 (#uece9143f-7ef6-5572-94c1-d6026aa234e1)
The Benefactor (#uba93b779-dcc7-54e1-9c9a-d59078f481ab)
Jittery Grande (#ua718786a-3cd4-574f-8da4-f20cfea924c2)
Bright Ideas (#ub20750fb-311b-5ebd-93f3-d181149a5e1c)
The Hooligan and the Pineapple (#u490efb76-0bd3-5c24-8899-e83628995e13)
The Not-so-Mysterious Benefactor (#u5ce57c4a-0e63-5af0-8539-4724c7106947)
Envelope 4 (#u797266a5-3ce5-5093-88e1-9c934ad7ca22)
The Runner (#uae6d7eb1-4c24-5ac9-8dac-cc229c4cd3da)
The Master and the Hairdresser (#udc798c61-9aa0-5965-8ec1-3fb3feb620c9)
The Monsters Attack (#u26ed546b-5cab-596d-bb20-b1cac734709d)
Envelopes 5 & 6 (#u3b88bfbb-16d2-50be-9cc4-00d8073a4b15)
The Road to Rome (#ue665aa52-3ff7-5d3b-b0c4-400ab5c71dbb)
Virginia and the Virgins (#u73e6835b-a76d-5ea3-bfd2-2285fbded789)
Boys and Cake (#u05905a24-36f6-50a3-bd37-06ebbffea5aa)
Beppe’s Sister (#u1e4b3716-0a6b-58cc-877f-b227265c67eb)
Envelopes 7 & 8 (#u41c3268f-d5fe-5fa5-aebd-5f49b2c3ea46)
The Surfboard Sleepers (#u27853bdc-bf03-5155-9816-0ab21c0b4f33)
Les Petits Chiens (#ufd77918f-a111-5695-aa16-e72af2aad7d2)
A Night on the Town (#u2aed0f30-9923-5012-9bd7-bd954ea837be)
The Best Hotel in Paris (#u974781e3-0933-58f9-a231-b30dafc02917)
Envelope 9 (#ub92ba391-1b6c-57a9-a47e-0e870ba7655f)
Charlie and the Apple (#u6f053a2d-7b77-5c9c-8388-d52e23b85a86)
Homeless, Homesick, and Diseased (#u85fe19f5-b457-58c2-a656-a1e9f3791699)
Life with the Knapps (#u3b94e346-08af-5a5f-9c22-4ed08bd84ed0)
Contact of Various Kinds (#uab828e0a-968f-5018-a7d4-060b4c960d97)
The Secret Life of Olivia Knapp (#uae0ba4ec-edf3-580f-9049-de2a00b4aaab)
Envelope 10 (#ud3dcf2a6-925d-534b-817a-2051f5fd7919)
The Viking Ship (#ueeda1740-6089-5deb-9be6-a070f9dd2d30)
Hippo’s (#uba66b5c2-2698-5385-895c-f8ba1347ff56)
The Magical Kingdom (#uc6a939c9-ae39-586a-a1bc-66effb622621)
Envelope 11 (#u58a67a15-7a0b-53ee-b623-fad91031a3fd)
The Blue Envelope Gang (#u769b2822-df60-5cfe-8643-1d5489b61c2d)
Envelope 12 (#u82aa24c5-f61c-5303-bfe0-67d451484476)
The Red Scooter (#u0dcf5231-baa7-5319-a939-deb0cedac12a)
The Only ATM on Corfu (#u149304c1-763b-5b44-9407-27472e4add09)
The Runaway Niece (#ucaaf19cb-f328-5ca7-a2f5-ee6d0b909772)
The Green Slippers and the Lady on the Trapeze (#ud7a89b8f-3a93-53c3-bb1e-2f3707ebfb54)
The Magical Key to Harrods (#uc99ae9a6-731a-5182-a9e6-0950d1099f91)
The Padded House (#ub6e68b81-4825-50bd-9d11-31589014dc61)
Seventy Thousand Burlap Sacks (#ub2068f21-d955-576f-bd7c-24df07115db2)
Lucky Thirteen (#ub2514817-3f0a-59eb-8035-6d62dbd5f204)
Keep Reading (#u2b04230e-6782-55b3-8be3-d6c792f7c71f)
EXTRAS (#u9e2b7502-c3fc-5a14-a336-f5fa02407309)
Acknowledgments (#ube121fc1-9949-56e0-a9a4-1e57c4c335cd)
Also by the Author (#ufc0ef4be-1ac2-566d-8a0d-98264de30440)
About the Publisher (#ud208fc45-9d32-5268-a2e9-662f61f5622e)
Prologue (#ulink_f89bbf5d-e06b-5899-9a6d-b3a068b5d853)
Rule 1:
You may bring only what fits in your backpack. Don’t try to fake it with a purse or a carry-on.
Rule 2:
You may not bring guidebooks, phrase books, or any kind of foreign language aid. And no journals.
Rule 3:
You cannot bring extra money or credit/debit cards, traveler’s checks, etc. I’ll take care of all of that.
Rule 4:
No electronic crutches. This means no laptop, no cell phone, no music, and no camera. You can’t call home or communicate with people in the U.S. by Internet or telephone. Postcards and letters are acceptable and encouraged.
That’s all you need to know for now. See you at 4th Noodle.
Envelope 1 (#ulink_44861d38-088c-5962-bd89-1d95e44fafaf)
Dear Ginger,
I have never been a great follower of rules. You know that. So it’s going to seem a little odd that this letter is full of rules I’ve written and that I need you to follow.
“Rules to what?” you have to be asking yourself. You always did ask good questions.
Remember how we used to play the “today I live in” game when you were little and used to come visit me in New York? (I think I liked “I live in Russia” best. We always played that one in winter. We’d go to see the Russian art collection at the Met, stomp through the snow in Central Park, then go to that little Russian restaurant in the Village that had those really good pickles and that weird hairless poodle who sat in the window and barked at cabs.)
I’d like to play that game one more time—except now we’re going to be a little more literal. Today’s game is “I live in London.” Notice that I have included $1,000 in cash in this envelope. This is for a passport, a one-way ticket from New York to London, and a backpack. (Keep a few bucks for a cab to the airport.)
Upon booking the ticket, packing the backpack, and hugging everyone good-bye, I want you to go to New York City. Specifically, I want you to go to 4th Noodle, the Chinese restaurant under my old apartment. Something is waiting there for you. Go to the airport right from there.
You will be gone for several weeks, and you will be traveling in foreign lands. These are the aforementioned rules that will guide your travels:
Rule 1: You may bring only what fits in your backpack. Don’t try to fake it out with a purse or a carry-on.
Rule 2: You may not bring guidebooks, phrase books, or any kind of foreign language aid. And no journals.
Rule 3: You cannot bring extra money or credit/debit cards, traveler’s checks, etc. I’ll take care of all that.
Rule 4: No electronic crutches. This means no laptop, no cell phone, no music, and no camera. You can’t call home or communicate with people in the U.S. by Internet or telephone. Postcards and letters are acceptable and encouraged.
That’s all you need to know for now. See you at 4th Noodle.
Love,
Your Runaway Aunt
A Package Like a Dumpling (#ulink_b0a76d76-f7fc-5cb3-8bbc-871d791ac82e)
As a rule, Ginny Blackstone tried to go unnoticed—something that was more or less impossible with thirty pounds (she’d weighed it) of purple-and-green backpack hanging from her back. She didn’t want to think about all the people she’d bumped into while she’d been carrying it. This thing was not made for wearing around New York City. Well, anywhere, really…but especially the East Village of New York City on a balmy June afternoon.
And a chunk of her hair was caught under the strap on her right shoulder, so her head was also being pulled down a little. That didn’t help.
It had been over two years since Ginny had last been to the 4th Noodle Penthouse. (Or “that place above the grease factory,” as Ginny’s parents preferred to refer to it. It wasn’t entirely unfair. 4th Noodle was pretty greasy. But it was the good kind of greasy, and they had the best dumplings in the world.)
Her mental map had faded a bit in the last two years, but 4th Noodle’s name also contained its address. It was on 4th Street and Avenue A. The alphabet avenues were east of the numbers, deeper into the super-trendy East Village—where people smoked and wore latex and never shuffled down the street with bags the size of mailboxes strapped to their backs.
She could just see it now…the unassuming noodle shop next to Pavlova’s Tarot (with the humming purple neon sign), just across the street from the pizza place with the giant mural of a rat on the side.
There was a tiny tinkle of a chime and a sharp blast of air-conditioning as Ginny opened the door. Standing behind the counter was a pixie of a woman manning three phones at once. This was Alice, the owner, and Aunt Peg’s favorite neighbor. She smiled broadly when she saw Ginny and held up a finger, indicating that she should wait.
“Ginny,” Alice said, hanging up two of the phones and setting down the third. “Package. Peg.”
She disappeared through a bamboo curtain that covered a door into the back. Alice was Chinese, but she spoke perfect English (Aunt Peg had told her so). But because she always had to get right to the point (4th Noodle did a brisk business), she spoke in halting single words.
Nothing had changed since the last time Ginny had been here. She looked up at the illuminated pictures of Chinese food, the shiny plastic visions of sesame shrimp and chicken and broccoli. They glowed, not quite tantalizingly, more radioactively. The chicken pieces were a little too glossy and orange. The sesame seeds too white and too large. The broccoli was so green it seemed to vibrate. There was the blown-up and framed picture of Rudy Giuliani standing with a glowing Alice, taken when he had shown up one day.
It was the smell, though, that was most familiar. The heavy, fatty smell of sizzling beef and pork and peppers and the sweetish odor of vats of steaming rice. This was the scent that seeped through Aunt Peg’s floor and perfumed her. It rang such a chord in Ginny’s memory that she almost swung her head around to see if Aunt Peg was standing there behind her.
But, of course, she couldn’t be.
“Here,” Alice said, emerging from the beaded curtain with a brown paper package in her hand. “For Ginny.”
The package—an overstuffed padded brown envelope—was indeed addressed to her, Virginia Blackstone, care of Alice at 4th Noodle, New York City. It was postmarked from London and had the faintest aura of grease.
“Thanks,” Ginny said, accepting the package as gracefully as she could, given that she couldn’t lean over without falling face-first onto the counter.
“Say hi to Peg for me,” Alice said, picking up the phone and launching straight into an order.
“Right…” Ginny nodded. “Um, sure.”
Once she was out on the street, scanning Avenue A nervously for the cab she was going to have to hail for herself, Ginny wondered if she should have told Alice what had happened. But she was soon distracted by the sheer terror that her task caused her. Cabs were yellow beasts that sped through New York, whisking people who had to be places to the places they had to be and leaving terrified pedestrians scrambling for cover.
No, she thought, raising a timid hand as far as she could as a herd of her prey suddenly appeared. There was no reason to tell Alice what had happened. She barely believed it herself. And besides, she had to go.
The Adventures of Aunt Peg (#ulink_9a64c91c-0a11-55c7-8390-fe4e33601683)
When Aunt Peg was Ginny’s age (seventeen), she ran away from her home in New Jersey, just two weeks before she was supposed to go off to Mount Holyoke on a full scholarship. She reappeared a week later and seemed surprised by the fact that people were upset with her. She needed to think about what she wanted to accomplish in school, she explained, so she’d gone off to Maine and met some people who built hand-crafted fishing boats. Also, she wasn’t going to school now, she informed everyone. She was going to take a year off and work. And she did. She gave up her scholarship and spent the next year waitressing at a big seafood restaurant in downtown Philadelphia and living with three other people in a small South Street apartment.
The next year, Aunt Peg went to a tiny college in Vermont where nobody got any grades and where she majored in painting. Ginny’s mom, Aunt Peg’s older sister, had a pretty clear vision of what “real” college majors included, and this was not one of them. To her, majoring in painting was an act of insanity akin to majoring in photocopying or reheating leftovers. Ginny’s mom was born practical. She lived in a nice house and she had a little baby (Ginny). She encouraged her younger sister to become an accountant, like herself. Aunt Peg replied in a note that said she had picked up a minor in performance art.
As soon as she graduated, Aunt Peg went off to New York and moved into the 4th Noodle Penthouse, and there she remained. That was about the only constant in her life. Her job changed constantly. She was a manager at a major art supply store until she accidentally hit the zero one too many times on an online order form. Instead of the twenty non-returnable, custom-made Italian easels she was supposed to get, she was surprised to take delivery of two hundred. She answered phones as a temp at Trump headquarters until she happened to take a call from Donald himself. She thought it was one of her actor friends pretending to be Donald Trump—so she immediately launched into a tirade on “scumbag capitalists with bad toupees.” She enjoyed recounting the experience of being escorted out of the building by two security guards. To Aunt Peg, these jobs were just the things she did until her art career took off.
Again, this caused Ginny’s mother to despair over her little sister—and she always tried to remind Ginny that though she should love her aunt, she shouldn’t try to be like her. There was never really any danger of this. Ginny was just too well behaved, too normal for that ever to be an issue. Still, she loved her visits to Aunt Peg’s. Though they were erratic and all too infrequent, they were also magical experiences during which all normal rules of living were cast aside. Dinner didn’t have to be balanced and on the table at six—it could be Afghan kebabs and black sesame ice cream at midnight. Evenings weren’t spent in front of the TV. Sometimes they wandered through costume shops and boutiques, trying on the most expensive and outrageous things they could find—things Ginny would have been mortally embarrassed to put on around anyone else, and frequently things so pricey that she felt like she needed permission touch them. (“It’s a store,” Aunt Peg would say as she put on the five-hundred-dollar, saucer-sized sunglasses or the huge feathered hat. “The stuff is here to try on.”)
The best part about Aunt Peg was that when Ginny was around her, she felt more interesting. She wasn’t quiet and dutiful. She was louder. Aunt Peg made her different. And the promise had always been that Aunt Peg would be there—throughout high school, throughout college—to guide Ginny. “That’s when you’ll need me,” Aunt Peg always said.
One day, in November of Ginny’s sophomore year, Aunt Peg’s phone stopped working. Ginny’s mom sighed and figured the bill hadn’t been paid. So she and Ginny got in the car to drive up to New York to see what was going on. The apartment above 4th Noodle was vacant. The super told them that Aunt Peg had moved out several days before, leaving no forwarding address. There was a little note, though, stuck under the welcome mat. It read: Something I just have to do. Be in touch soon.
At first, no one was too concerned. It was assumed that this was just another Aunt Peg escapade. A month went by. Then two. Then the spring semester was over. Then it was summer. Aunt Peg was simply gone. Then came a few postcards, basic assurances that she was doing well. They were postmarked from a variety of places—England, France, Italy—but they contained no explanations.
So Aunt Peg was exactly the kind of person who would send her to England alone, with a package from a Chinese restaurant. That wasn’t so odd.
The odd part was that Aunt Peg had been dead for three months.
That last fact was a little hard to swallow. Aunt Peg was the most lively person Ginny had ever known. She was also only thirty-five years old. That number was stuck in Ginny’s head because her mother kept repeating it over and over. Only thirty-five. Lively thirty-five-year-olds weren’t supposed to die. But Aunt Peg had. The phone call had come from a doctor in England explaining that Aunt Peg had developed cancer—that it had come quickly, that everything had been tried but nothing could be done.
The news…the illness…it was all very distant to Ginny. Somehow, she’d never really believed it. Aunt Peg was still out there somewhere in her mind. And Ginny was somehow speeding toward her in this plane. Only Aunt Peg could make something like this happen. Not that Ginny hadn’t had to do her part. First, she’d had to convince herself that she could follow what seemed like an obvious flight of insanity from an aunt who wasn’t known for her reliability. Once she’d done that, she had to convince her parents of the same thing. Major international treaties had been negotiated in less time.
But now she was here. No going back now.
The plane was cold. Very cold. The lights were down, and it was completely black outside the small windows. Everyone but Ginny seemed to be asleep, including the people to either side of her. She couldn’t move without waking them up. Ginny wrapped herself in the tiny and ineffectual airline blanket and clutched the package to her chest. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to open it yet. Instead, she’d spent most of the night looking out of her darkened airplane window at a long shadow and several blinking lights, at first thinking she was looking at the coast of New Jersey and then maybe Iceland or Ireland. It wasn’t until the dawn, when they were just about to land, that she saw that the whole time she’d been looking at the wing.
Below them, through a cottony veil of clouds, was a patchwork of green squares. Land. This plane was actually going to land, and they were going to make her get out. In a foreign country. Ginny had never been anywhere more exotic than Florida, and nowhere by herself.
She pried the package from her own grip and set it on her lap. The time had clearly come to open it. Time to find out what Aunt Peg had planned for her.
She pulled open the seal and reached inside.
The package contained a collection of envelopes much like the first. They were all blue. They were made of heavy paper. Good quality. The kind from one of those boutique paper stores. The front of each envelope was either illustrated in pen and ink or watercolor, and they were bundled together with an overstretched rubber band that had been doubled around them.
More importantly, they were each marked with a number, starting with two and running to thirteen. Envelope 2 had an illustration of a bottle, with a label that read OPEN ME ON THE PLANE.
So she did.
Envelope 2 (#ulink_4fb6a656-ddbc-5bf4-98f5-f958e181dfec)
Dear Ginger,
How was 4th Noodle? It’s been a while, huh? I hope you had some ginger dumplings for me.
I’m well aware that I owe you an explanation about a lot of things, Gin. But let me start by telling you about my life in New York, before I left, two years ago.
I guess you know that I caught a lot of flak from your mom (because she cares for her wayward little sister) for never having a “real job,” and not being married, and not having kids and a house and a dog. But I was okay with that. I thought I was doing things right and other people were doing them wrong.
One November day, though, I was riding on the subway up to my new temp job. That blind guy with the accordion who rides the 6 train was playing the Godfather theme song right in my ear, just like he did every other time in my life I’ve ever taken the 6. And then I got off at 33rd Street and bought myself a cup of burned, stale coffee from the closest deli for 89 cents, just like I did every other time I went for a temp job.
That day I was going to a job in an office in the Empire State Building. I have to confess, Gin…I get a little romantic about the old Empire State. Just looking at it makes me want to play some Frank Sinatra tunes and sway a little. I have a crush on a building. I’d been in there several times but never to work. I always knew there were offices in there, but that fact never penetrated, really. You don’t work in the Empire State Building. You propose in the Empire State Building. You sneak a flask up there and raise a toast to the whole city of New York.
And as I walked up to it and realized that I was about to enter that beautiful building to file or make copies—I stopped. Too quickly, actually. The guy behind me walked right into me.
Something had seriously gone wrong if I was going into the Empire State for that.
That was how it all started, Gin. It was right there on the 33rd Street sidewalk. I never went to work that day. I turned around, got back on the 6, and went home. As much as I loved my apartment, something in me was saying…it’s time! Time to go! Like that rabbit in Alice in Wonderland who runs past saying, “I’m late!”
Late for what, I couldn’t really tell you. But this feeling was so intense, I couldn’t shake it. I called in sick. I wandered around my apartment in circles. Something wasn’t right about what I was doing. I’d been comfortable in my apartment for too long. I was doing boring jobs.
I thought about all the artists I’d admired. What did they do? Where did they live? Well, for the most part, they lived in Europe.
What if I just went to Europe? Right then? The people I admired had sometimes starved and scraped their way along, but it had helped them create. I wanted to create.
By that night, I had purchased my ticket to London. I borrowed $500 from a friend to do it. I gave myself three days to get everything settled. I picked up the phone to call you a few times, but I didn’t know what to say. Where I was going…why…I had no answers. And I didn’t know how long I’d be gone.
This is the position you are in right now. You are about to go to England with no idea of what’s in store for you. Your path, your instructions, are in these envelopes. Here’s the catch: You may only open them one at a time and only once you’ve completed the task in each letter. I am relying on your honesty—you could open them all now, and I’d certainly never know. But I’m serious, Gin. It won’t work unless you open them exactly as I’ve said.
On landing, your first task is to get from the airport to where you’ll be staying. To do this, you’ll need to take the underground, otherwise known as the tube (in American, the subway). I’ve enclosed a £10 note for this. It’s the orange thing with the queen on it.
You need to get to the stop called Angel, which is on the Northern Line. You’ll be in a part of London called Islington. When you get out, you’ll be on Essex Road. Go right. Walk for about a minute until you reach Pennington Street. Hang left and look for 54a.
Knock. Wait for someone to open door. Rinse and repeat as necessary until door opens.
Love,
Your Runaway Aunt
P.S.
You will notice that an ATM card for Barclays Bank is also in this envelope. Of course, it wouldn’t be safe to write the PIN number down. When you get to 54a, ask the person who lives there, “What did you sell to the queen?” The answer to that question is the PIN. When you’ve solved that, you may open #3.
54a Pennington Street, London (#ulink_cb2767cf-0858-5949-8f69-918c04b878b6)
She was standing somewhere in Heathrow Airport. She’d been shuffled off the plane, had pulled the notorious backpack from the luggage carousel, waited in an hour-long line to get her passport stamped, and been ignored by some customs officers. Now she was staring at a London tube map.
It looked like a nursery school poster designed to attract the eyes of toddlers. It was stark white, with bright primary-colored lines snaking around it. The stops had solid-sounding names, like Old Street and London Bridge. Royal sounding: Earl’s Court, Queensway, Knightsbridge. Entertaining: Elephant & Castle, Oxford Circus, Marylebone. And there were names she recognized: Victoria Station, Paddington (where the bear lived), Waterloo. And there was Angel. To get there, she’d have to change at a place called Kings Cross.
She pulled out her £10 note, found a ticket machine, and followed the instructions. She walked up to one of the entrance aisles and faced a pair of metal doors, almost like saloon doors. She looked around, unsure of what to do next. She tried to push the gate gently, but nothing happened. Then she saw a woman next to her put her ticket into a slot on the little metal box next to her, and the doors opened. Ginny did the same. The machine sucked in the ticket with a satisfying swoosh, and the doors clapped open and she passed through.
Everyone was moving in the same direction, so she kept going, trying not to stumble against the backs of the bags other people were wheeling. When the train slid up to the stark white platform, she didn’t think to unhook herself from the pack, so when she got on, she could only fit on the very edge of a seat.
It wasn’t like the subway she had taken in New York. These were much nicer. The doors made pleasant bonging noises as they opened, and a British voice warned her to “mind the gap.”
The train moved aboveground. They were riding along behind houses. Then it was back underground, where the stations became more crowded. All kinds of people shuffled on and off, some with maps and backpacks, others with folded newspapers or books and blank expressions.
The cooing British voice said, “Angel,” a few stops later. She couldn’t turn around, so she had to back off the train, feeling for the space with her foot. A sign suspended from the ceiling said WAY OUT. As she approached the exit, there was another set of metal gates. This time, Ginny was certain that they would yield when she approached, kind of like an automatic door. But they didn’t. Not even when she walked right into them.
An annoyed British voice from behind her said, “You have to put in your ticket, love.”
She turned to face a man in a navy blue uniform and a bright orange work vest.
“I don’t have it,” she said. “I put the ticket in the machine. It took it.”
“You’re supposed to take it back,” he said with a sigh. “It comes back out.”
He went over to one of the metal boxes and touched some unseen button or lever. The gates clapped open for her. She hurried through, too embarrassed to even look back.
The first thing that hit her was the smell of a recent rain. The sidewalk was still wet and was fairly thick with people who politely moved around her and her backpack. The street was jammed full of real London traffic, just like in the pictures. The cars were tightly packed together, all going in the wrong direction. An actual red double-decker bus lumbered along.
As soon as she turned off the main road, everything became much quieter. She found herself on a narrow street with a zigzagging line that cut down the middle. The houses were all chalk white and were nearly identical except for the colors of their doors (mostly black, but occasionally there was a red or a blue) and they all had multiple chimney pots poking out of the top, along with antennas and satellite dishes. The effect was weird—it was like a space station had crashed into a Charles Dickens story.
Number 54a had a jagged crack running down the six concrete steps that led to its front door. Several large pots lined these steps, each containing plants that didn’t exactly look like they had been condemned to death on purpose. They were weak and small but still making an effort. Someone had obviously tried, and failed, to keep them alive.
Ginny paused at the base of the steps. This had a very good chance of being a major mistake. Aunt Peg had some very unusual friends. Like the performance artist roommate—the one who ate her own hair onstage. Or the guy who spent a month communicating only through interpretive dance as a form of protest (against what, no one really knew).
No. She had come this far. She wasn’t going to give up on the very first step. She walked up the stairs and knocked at the door.
“Hang on a moment,” a voice called from inside. “Just a moment.”
The voice was British (which really shouldn’t have surprised her but still did). It was also male. Not an old voice. She heard a thumping—someone running downstairs. And then the door swung open.
The man standing in front of her was in the process of getting dressed. The first thing that surprised Ginny was that he was wearing half a black suit (the pants). A silver gray tie hung loosely around his neck, and his shirt was only half tucked in. Aunt Peg’s friends did not usually wear suits (or even parts of suits) and ties. It was less of a surprise that he was handsome—tall, with very dark, slightly curly hair and highly arched eyebrows. Aunt Peg attracted people with lots of personality, lots of charm.
The man gaped at her for a moment, then hurriedly tucked in his shirt.
“Are you Virginia?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Ginny said. The yeah came out too broad, and she suddenly heard her own accent. “I mean, yes. That’s me. I’m Ginny. How did you know?”
“Just a guess,” he said, his eyes lingering over her bag. “I’m Richard.”
“I’m Ginny,” she said again. She gave her head a quick snap to try to get the blood flowing up there again.
Richard clearly had a moment of confusion over what kind of greeting to give her. He finally stuck out his hand for her bag.
“It’s a good thing you caught me. I wasn’t sure when you were coming. I wasn’t even sure if you were coming.”
“Well, I’m here,” she said.
They nodded at each other for a moment in acknowledgment of this fact until Richard seemed to be physically struck by a thought.
“You should come in,” he said.
He opened the door wider and grimaced only slightly as he relieved Ginny of the groaning purple-and-green backpack.
Richard gave her a quick tour that revealed that 54a Pennington Street was just a house—not an artists’ colony, or a commune, or any kind of sociological experiment. It was a fairly plainly decorated one at that. It looked like it might have been shipped straight out of an office supply catalog. Low-pile carpet. Simple furniture in flat navy blues and blacks. Nothing on the walls. Nothing, that is, until they came to a small, sunny bedroom.
“This was Peg’s room,” Richard said, opening the door. But Ginny didn’t need to be told that. It was a miniature version of the 4th Noodle apartment. In fact, the room resembled the apartment so closely it was almost spooky. It wasn’t that she had furnished it or painted it exactly the same—it was the method. The walls had been washed down in pink and then covered in an elaborate collage of…well, trash, really. (When Ginny’s mom got annoyed with her little sister, she tended to make comments about Aunt Peg’s trash-picking habit. “She’s got other people’s garbage all over her walls!”)
But it wasn’t bad, smelly trash—it was labels, bits of old magazines, candy bar wrappers. If anyone else had attempted this, the result would have been dizzying, nauseating. But Aunt Peg managed to arrange it all by color, by type style, by image, so that it all looked like it belonged together. Like it all made sense. One wall had been left collage-free, and on it hung a poster Ginny recognized. It was a French painting of a young woman standing behind a bar. It was an old picture, from the late 1800s. The woman wore an elegant blue dress, and the bar she was tending was opulent—marble, loaded down with bottles. The mirror behind her head reflected a crowd and a show. But she looked terribly, terribly bored.
“It’s Manet,” she said. “It’s called The Bar at the Folies-Bergère.”
“Is it?”
Richard blinked, as if he’d never noticed the poster there before. “I don’t really know anything about art,” he said apologetically. “It’s nice, I suppose. Nice…colors.”
Good one, Ginny thought. Now he probably thought she was some kind of art nerd who was only here because she had outgrown art-nerd camp. She only knew the name and artist of this one because Aunt Peg had had the exact same picture in her apartment, and the title and artist had been written at the bottom of the print.
Richard was still staring blankly at the poster.
“I don’t really know much about it either,” Ginny said. “It’s okay.”
“Oh. Right.” He seemed a bit reassured by that. “You look exhausted. Maybe you’d like to have a rest? Again, I’m sorry, I wish I had known when…but you’re here, so…”
Ginny looked at the bed, with its crazy-quilt cover. This was Aunt Peg’s handiwork as well. She’d had similar items all over her apartment, all made of random, mismatched pieces of cloth. She wanted to stretch out on this bed so badly she could almost taste it.
“Well, I…I have to go,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to come with me? I work at Harrods. The big department store. It’s as good a place as any to start seeing London. Peg loved Harrods. We can sort everything out later. What do you say?”
“Sure,” Ginny said, with one final, sad look at the bed. “Let’s go.”
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