Slam Book Read online

  Slam Book

  Ann M. Martin

  For JANE, my sister

  Contents

  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

  A Personal History by Ann M. Martin

  Chapter One

  ANNA WALLACE OFTEN THOUGHT—later, after it was all over—that if she’d known the chain of events the slam book was going to set in motion, she’d never have gone to the family picnic. But on that Labor Day weekend, during those last precious days of summer vacation before she entered Calvin High School, Anna hadn’t even known what a slam book was.

  So she’d gone to the picnic. And that was how it had all started.

  Anna and her parents had driven from Calvin, Pennsylvania, to Clearwater, the next town over, for the annual gathering of the Wallace clan. Anna was proud of her big family—all the aunts and uncles and cousins and greats and great-greats—but sometimes they could become overwhelming.

  It was during the long gap between the serving of lunch and the serving of dessert that Anna decided she’d had enough. She wandered away from a knot of relatives and caught sight of Bucky, her collie, sitting next to the food table, greedily eyeing a platter of cold cuts that had become greasy in the heat.

  “You want something?” Anna whispered to him. She knew she wasn’t supposed to feed him cold cuts, but he looked so pathetic.

  Anna swiped a piece of baloney, rolled it up, held it above Bucky’s head, and allowed him to jump for it. Bucky swallowed his prize in an instant.

  “How could you even taste that?” Anna asked him at the same time that a voice behind her said, “I saw that!”

  Anna whirled around and faced her sister, Hilary. Anna giggled. “You always catch me!”

  “You’re always doing something to be caught at,” Hilary replied good-naturedly. She smoothed Anna’s hair back from her forehead.

  Seth, Hilary’s little boy, ran to Anna and wrapped his arms around her legs. “Aunt Annie?” he said.

  Anna hoisted him onto her hip. “What, Sethie?”

  “Ice cur-ream?” he pronounced carefully.

  “Sorry, kiddo,” said Hilary, taking him from Anna. “There’s no ice cream yet. Besides you’ve had enough junk today to last you until World War Three.”

  “Hilary!” exclaimed Anna. “Talk to him so he can understand you. Little kids don’t like to be left out of things.”

  Hilary looked searchingly at her sister. “What are you saying, toots? Do you feel left out?”

  “No … Well, sometimes.”

  “Gosh. I thought you had it so easy, being the little caboose in our family. You’ve been practically like an only child since I got married.”

  “I hate that term—caboose. I’m the youngest kid, that’s all. And I don’t think I was entirely unexpected, was I?” Anna had asked her parents this question an uncountable number of times, but she wasn’t sure she had ever gotten a straight answer.

  “Even if you were, it doesn’t mean you were unwanted,” said Hilary.

  Anna glanced around at her relatives. The adults had taken all the food into her aunt Meg and uncle Ray’s house. Paper plates and cups and napkins were being whisked into garbage bags. The back door opened, and her aunt emerged with a tray of desserts. Dessert was her specialty.

  “I know I wasn’t unwanted …” Anna regarded Hilary thoughtfully. Hilary was twenty-three—nine years older than she was. She’d been married for three years. She and her husband, Tom, were expecting another baby in January.

  “Anna! Hey, Anna! I’ve got something to show you!” It was Peggy, Anna’s cousin, Aunt Meg and Uncle Ray’s daughter. “Get your dessert and let’s go up to my room.”

  Hilary put Seth down and gave Anna a quick hug. “Go on with Peggy,” she said. “And if I ever call you our little caboose again, remember that it’s a term of affection and that I can’t help myself.”

  “And furthermore,” replied Anna, “that it makes you the freight car of the family.”

  “Very funny,” said Hilary, smiling. She patted her bulging stomach.

  Peggy took Anna’s elbow. “God, what a spread,” she exclaimed, guiding her cousin down the length of the newly laden food table, which Bucky was contemplating with a doggie expression that was a mixture of longing and greed. The girls looked at pies, brownies, cookies, ice cream, watermelon slices, blueberry cobbler, and cheesecake. “I don’t think there’s enough dessert here,” said Peggy. “Do you? Maybe I should run out and buy another vat of ice cream.”

  “Just to be on the safe side,” agreed Anna, giggling. Peggy was her favorite cousin. Anna had seventeen cousins, not counting the children of her oldest cousins, who were actually her first cousins once removed. Anna and Peggy were the youngest, so they had a lot in common.

  “Seriously, do you want any dessert before we go to my room?” Peggy asked Anna.

  “I want everything,” Anna replied honestly, “but I’ll settle for vanilla ice cream.”

  “Anna, that is so boring.”

  “It’s always been my favorite,” Anna said defensively. She helped herself to ice cream, while Peggy cut a wedge of cheesecake.

  “Hey, Anna, grab your dish and let’s go,” Peggy said suddenly, under her breath. “Aunt Sophie’s heading over here.”

  Anna didn’t hesitate. She dashed after Peggy, who was heading for the back door of her house. Sophie was the oldest of the aunts and smelled of cough medicine and lavender toilet water—a lousy combination on a hot day. Also, she was sprouting whiskers on her chin and had picked up on every bad old-lady habit Anna could think of. She tucked Kleenex under the sleeves of her dress, wore baggy stockings, and dyed her hair so that it was tinged with blue. Occasionally, she put on a hair net.

  Anna had never told anyone, but what she disliked most about Sophie was that when her aunt was young she looked just like Anna. (Anna had compared photographs.) So Anna was afraid she would grow up to become another Sophie—a scary thought, when what she wanted to be was popular.

  Anna and Peggy clattered up the stairs to Peggy’s room and flopped on her bed with their desserts. Peggy ate lying on her stomach.

  “How can you do that?” asked Anna. “I’ve never understood how anyone can eat in a prone position.”

  “It aids digestion,” replied Peggy seriously. “Hey, you want to see something? It’s a secret. My mom and dad don’t know about this.”

  “How can I resist?” said Anna. “What is it?”

  “Just the key to popularity, that’s all.”

  Anna raised her eyebrows. She was already pretty popular—at least she had been in junior high—but a little boost in high school couldn’t possibly hurt.

  Peggy set her plate on the floor. She eased herself forward and off the bed, landing on her hands and knees. Then she turned around and reached under the mattress. “Move over,” she told Anna. “You’re sitting on it.”

  Anna scrunched over obligingly.

  Peggy withdrew her hand. She offered Anna a school composition book with a mottled black-and-white cover.

  Anna took it curiously.

  “Go on. Open it,” said Peggy, climbing back on the be
d.

  Anna opened the cover. At the top of the first page the name “Jenny Whitelaw” was scrawled in Peggy’s round penmanship. Underneath it, written with many different pens and in many different hands, was a list of comments:

  Smartest girl in the class.

  Brains aren’t everything.

  Rats on her so-called “friends.”

  No. Only rats on her enemies. Jenny is loyal.

  The list went on almost until the end of the page.

  Anna flipped through the book. Each page was similar, but with a different name at the top. Most were girls’ names, some were boys’ names. She paused every now and then to read another comment.

  “Has gorgeous hair,” was written under the name “Louisa Matthews.”

  “Thinks he knows everything,” was written under “Ken Johnson.”

  Christine Mazur’s page started off with “Says she wears a 36B. Really wears a 34A. Stuffs cups.”

  Anna began to giggle. “What is this?” she asked Peggy.

  “A slam book. You’ve never seen one?”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “It’s great!” exclaimed her cousin. “I started this one last January. See, what you do is pass the book around at, like, slumber parties, or in the cafeteria or during study hall. You make up a page for anyone you want—kids you like, kids you hate, cute boys, dorks, whoever. Then people write what they really think about those kids. You don’t have to sign your name, so you can say anything. There’s even a page for me in there.”

  “Can I look?” asked Anna.

  “Sure,” replied Peggy. “Here, let me find it.”

  Anna passed the book to her cousin, and Peggy opened it to the back. She turned a few pages. “This is it,” she said after a moment.

  Anna peered over at the book, which lay open in Peggy’s lap.

  “‘Peggy Wallace,’” she read aloud. “‘Nice clothes … Snores at night.’”

  “Suzanne wrote that after a slumber party,” said Peggy with a giggle.

  “How do you know who wrote it?”

  “I can tell the handwriting.”

  “But I thought … oh, well.” Anna looked back at the book. “‘Tortured Mr. Bickman.’ Who’s Mr. Bickman?”

  “He was this jerk substitute.” Peggy looked rather proud of herself.

  “Oh … ‘Funniest girl in the class … Boy crazy.’” Peggy blushed. “‘Needs to—needs to lose some weight’? That’s not very nice,” said Anna

  Peggy shrugged. “Well, it isn’t always. In fact, it isn’t usually. But it can be funny. Look at the third page in the book.”

  Anna took the book out of Peggy’s lap and opened it to the third page. “Garrett Greeson,” she read.

  “The biggest dork ever known to mankind,” Peggy added.

  Anna read aloud: “‘Briefcase, slide rule, pens in pocket, pimples on face, all present and accounted for.’” She giggled. “‘Most likely to father a geek.’” Anna laughed loudly. “You know what, Peggy?” she exclaimed. “I want to start one of these. It’ll be a way to show I’m not just a little nobody freshman at Calvin High. Soon all the kids will know me … You can pass a slam book around to upperclassmen, can’t you? Or to kids you don’t know?”

  “Sure,” replied Peggy. “Carefully. And you’ve got to be careful that the book doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Some kids think their pages are funny. Others don’t. Garrett Greeson didn’t.”

  Anna wasn’t listening. “I’m going shopping for school stuff tomorrow with Jessie and Randy and Paige. I’ll buy a book then.”

  Peggy had one last warning for Anna. “Remember,” she said as she slid the slam book back under the mattress, “don’t let your parents see it.”

  Chapter Two

  “MOM,” SAID ANNA, “SINCE it’s the last day of summer vacation, don’t you think I deserve a special treat?”

  Mrs. Wallace looked skeptically at her daughter. “Exactly what do you have in mind?”

  “Well, I need school supplies—”

  “Honey, I gave you money this morning.”

  “I know,” replied Anna, “and Jessie and Randy and I were going to ride our bikes over to the shopping center, but then I thought you could drive us out to the mall instead. It’s so much bigger. It has better stores. Please?”

  “That’s it?” Mrs. Wallace asked after a pause. “That’s all you want? I thought maybe you were going to ask for blood from a stone.”

  “Mo-om.”

  “Of course I’ll drive you to the mall. Call Jessie and Randy. Tell them we’ll pick them up on the way.”

  Anna was on the phone immediately. But she used the upstairs extension for privacy. She didn’t want her mother to hear the first of her three calls. It was to Paige Beaulac, whom Mr. and Mrs. Wallace didn’t like. For that matter, neither did Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, Randy’s parents, nor Mrs. Smith, Jessie’s mother. Mr. Smith didn’t care about much of anything, except his job.

  “Can you meet us out there?” Anna asked Paige.

  “Sure,” was the casual reply. “I’ll get Dwight to drive me.” Dwight was the Beaulacs’ chauffeur.

  “Great,” replied Anna. “We’ll see you by the fountain. We’ll probably get there around two-thirty.”

  Then Anna phoned Jessie and Randy, and soon she and her mother were backing out of the driveway.

  “I suppose Jessie is glad school’s starting again,” commented Mrs. Wallace.

  “Oh, you know she is. She can’t wait.”

  Jessie Smith was one of the few kids in Calvin who was always glad to see school start again. It wasn’t that she was a hotshot student or anything. She wasn’t. She was mediocre. But school was a place to go to. If she got busy enough, joined enough activities, she could spend most of the day at Calvin High—from seven-thirty in the morning until five-thirty or maybe six. Evenings could be spent at the public library doing homework. Or maybe with Anna, as they often were.

  Anna knew that Jessie had to be an expert at staying out of her house. It was the only way to escape the fighting. And Jack, of course.

  “He ought to be put away!” Anna had once heard Jessie shriek at her father. “Jack ought to be locked up.”

  Mr. Smith had looked at Jessie with annoyance. He opened his mouth to speak, and Anna had wished that for once in his life he would be on Jessie’s side, but all he had said was, “Is that any way to talk about your brother?”

  Jessie had stormed out of the kitchen, followed nervously by Anna, and had invited herself over to the Wallaces’, where she spent a good deal of what Mrs. Wallace called “refugee time.”

  “People have said a lot worse about Jack,” Jessie had told Anna later that night as they were getting ready to go to bed. “Why don’t my parents ever listen to them? Why don’t they listen to me?” Then, without pausing, she had answered her own question. “Because they’re too busy fighting, that’s why. Honestly, you wonder what ever possessed them to get married in the first place. If my father’s as big a drag as Mom is always saying, then why did she say yes when he proposed? If she’d said no, they wouldn’t have gotten married and they wouldn’t have had Jack and they wouldn’t have had me and we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  Anna had stared wide-eyed at Jessie. Eight years of friendship had not accustomed her to Jessie’s outbursts. Her own family was so quiet and smooth. She couldn’t imagine having to share a house with the bickering Smiths, let alone with Jack.

  “I wish they’d just split up,” Jessie had continued explosively. “I really do. It would be better for everyone. And I’d live with my mother, and Jack would live with my father. Divorced families do that sometimes, you know—divide up the kids along with the money and furniture. Then Jack would be out of my life, and I’d have Mom to myself, and the two of us could lead a nice, normal, quiet life.” Jessie paused. “Did you know Jack was arrested last weekend?” she went on.

  Anna nodded.

  “Breaking and entering,” Jessie had sa
id, shaking her head. “You know what he wanted the money for, don’t you?”

  Anna knew. “Drugs.”

  “He’s got a problem,” Jessie said. “I wish Mom and Dad would see it.”

  “I’m sure they do see it,” Anna had told her friend, “but they don’t want to. It’s like, if they don’t do anything about it, then they don’t have to admit there’s a problem. And who wants to admit their son’s a drug addict?”

  Jessie had reluctantly agreed with Anna. For the time being, all she could do was stay away from home as much as possible.

  Jessie was waiting when the Wallaces stopped in front of her house. She was sitting solemnly on the low stone wall, her long braid hanging in front of her right shoulder. But she leaped to her feet and tossed her braid back as the car drew up. “Hi, you guys!” she called happily. She climbed into the back seat.

  In the front seat, Anna and her mother smiled at one another. They knew why Jessie was happy.

  “On to Randy’s,” Anna announced.

  Randy Taylor lived just two streets away.

  Until fifth grade, she, Jessie, and Anna had been the very best of friends. Then the Taylors had moved to Chicago for three years. When they returned shortly before the start of eighth grade, the girls had picked up their friendship, but it hadn’t been quite the same.

  In Chicago, Randy had had experiences that Anna would never be able to understand fully. It was on the second day of sixth grade that Randy had first been called an Oreo. Until then, the only Oreo that Anna or Randy had known about was the cookie. When Randy had looked confused, the name-caller had said, “Oh, come on, girl. You know what an Oreo is—black on the outside, white on the inside. That’s you. You’re more white than black.”

  “I am not!” Randy had retorted. “I’m black. Look at me.”

  The other girl shook her head and turned away. “Like I said, black on the outside, white on the inside.”

  Anna thought about this from time to time; the unfairness of it all. Somehow, that comment had changed Randy’s life. In Calvin, the Taylors were the only black family in the neighborhood, so Randy had grown up playing with Anna and Jessie and other white kids. In fact, the Taylors were one of the few black families in all of Calvin. The girls hadn’t thought much about it, though, until the Taylors had gone to Chicago. There, Randy was thrust into a black world—except that the kids wouldn’t accept her. “You’re white, girl. White on the inside.” Well, fine. Randy decided to seek white friends. But in Chicago, in her “integrated” school, the white kids played with the white kids and the black kids played with the black kids, and nobody wanted to play with Randy.