Yours Turly, Shirley Page 9

  “Oh,” said Shirley with a groan, “I thought I was finished.”

  Far from it. Over the next few days, Shirley rewrote her composition three times. She was surprised. She did find things she wanted to change or fix, or make clearer or funnier or sadder. When her composition said just what she wanted it to say, Mr. Soderman helped her with the spelling and punctuation. Not that he did anything for her. He sent Shirley to the dictionary fifteen different times, to look up words she hadn’t spelled right.

  When Shirley finally gave her paper to Mr. Bradley, she breathed a sigh of relief.

  Then she forgot about the assignment.

  “No more school! No more books! No more teachers’ dirty looks!” sang Shirley.

  It was the last day of fourth grade. Shirley had been waiting weeks to teach that poem to Jackie. She recited it for her as they walked to school in the morning.

  “Now you try it,” Shirley said.

  “No more school No more books! No more teachers’ dirty … dirty looks!” Jackie cried triumphantly.

  “What did you say?” Shirley asked her sister in amazement. “Say that last part again.”

  “No more teachers’ dirty looks!” I can say it, Shir-Shirley!”

  “You sure can! That’s great!”

  Shirley and Jackie skipped on to school. Jackie made up a new poem. “Lester and Lance! Lester and Lance! They lost their stinky underpants!”

  Shirley dissolved in laughter.

  The last day of school was one of the days of the year that Shirley liked best. There was no work to be done—just desks to be cleaned out, old papers to be handed back, and maybe games to be played or even a party to be held.

  Mr. Bradley got down to business right away.

  “Desks first,” he announced. “I want them cleaned inside and out.”

  Shirley’s desk was stuffed. It was so full that she dragged the trash can up to it and just kept pulling paper out and throwing it away. She did find two interesting things that she kept, however—a whole pack of strawberry bubble gum and her squirting ring. It was the ring she had brought to school on the first day of fourth grade. That had been ten months ago. It felt like ten years.

  When Shirley was done cleaning her desk, she filled her ring with water.

  “Hey, Ned,” she said, holding out her hand, “look.”

  Ned was scrubbing the top of his desk with Fantastik. He glanced up. “Oh,” he said, “your squirting ring. You found it. Here. Squirt some water on my desk, would you? It needs it.”

  “Aw, you’re no fun,” said Shirley.

  Ned crossed his eyes at her.

  By the afternoon, Mr. Bradley’s classroom looked clean—and empty. Shirley’s bulletin board masterpiece was gone. The walls were almost bare. Shirley thought the room seemed sad.

  She was glad when Mr. Bradley said, “Before the bell rings, class, we have one special, last-day thing to do.”

  Good, thought Shirley. She hoped it would be a party.

  Mr. Bradley held up a bunch of papers. “Remember your compositions about families?” he said.

  A few kids groaned. They hadn’t remembered. Shirley was one of the groaners. This was the last thing she needed—one final bad grade to show her parents. What a way to end the year.

  “I didn’t grade your papers,” Mr. Bradley said. (He didn’t?) “But,” he went on, “they were so good that I’ve decided to award prizes to five of you. Some of you put a lot of thought and effort into your compositions, and I’d like the rest of the class to hear what you wrote. So we’ll spend this last half hour awarding prizes and reading the winning papers.

  “The prizes will be given for the best organized composition, the most thoughtful, the most original, the best written, and finally the all-around best composition.”

  Shirley and her classmates sat up a little straighter. This was pretty exciting. And it was unexpected. Mr. Bradley had never given out prizes. What would they be?

  “The prize for the best organized composition,” Mr. Bradley said, “goes to Patrick Blake. His prize is a copy of Stuart Little by E. B. White.”

  Shirley clapped her hands as Patrick walked to the front of the room to get his brand-new paperback book and his composition.

  Books! Shirley thought excitedly. The prizes were books! Maybe Patrick would lend Stuart Little to her. She hadn’t read that yet. She sat back to see what the other books would be.

  Mr. Bradley called three more students to the front of the room and gave out three more books: for the most thoughtful composition, A Bear Called Paddington; for the most original, The Secret Garden; for the best written, Winnie-the-Pooh.

  One more prize to go.

  “And finally,” Mr. Bradley said, a huge grin on his face, “the prize for the all-around best composition goes to … Shirley Basini.”

  Shirley knew she hadn’t heard right. How could she have? A prize for her? A school prize?

  “Come on up, Shirley,” said her teacher, “your composition was wonderful.”

  Shirley got slowly out of her seat and walked to Mr. Bradley. He handed her composition to her. And then he gave her a copy of Henry and Ribsy.

  Shirley could only stare at it. When she finally looked up at Mr. Bradley, she whispered, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” he replied. “You deserve it. Good work, Shirley.”

  Shirley knew that she read her composition to the class that afternoon. She knew that they clapped. But by the time she and Jackie got home after school, she barely remembered any of it. All she could think of was her paper with the big gold star on the top. And Henry and Ribsy. Her very own copy.

  “Jackie,” she said, “can you keep a secret?”

  “Yes,” replied her sister. “I like secrets. I can keep one.”

  “Good. Let’s not say anything about my prize for a while. Let’s wait until after dinner. Then I can show Mom and Dad the book and the composition. I can surprise them.”

  “Okay,” agreed Jackie.

  Waiting until after dinner wasn’t easy. Shirley kept wanting to blurt out her good news, especially when her mother said, “Did anything interesting happen on your last day of school, girls?”

  Shirley and Jackie looked at each other over the tops of their glasses of milk. “Nope,” Shirley managed to reply after she’d swallowed.

  Then Joe phoned. He was still at his college, but he would be home very soon. Shirley wanted badly to tell him about her prize—but she wanted to tell her parents first.

  “Mom? Dad?” Shirley said when the Basinis had finished talking to Joe. “Can you come into the living room? I have something to show you.”

  Jackie began jumping up and down. “It is exciting!” she cried. “It is very exciting!”

  Shirley told her parents and Jackie to sit on the couch. When they were ready, she made her entrance, carrying the composition and the book. She held up the composition so that everyone could see the star.

  “I won a prize in school today,” she announced, “for writing the all-around best composition about families. And Mr. Bradley gave me a prize.” She produced Henry and Ribsy, which she’d been hiding behind her back.

  “Shirley! How wonderful!” exclaimed her mother.

  “Congratulations, peanut!” said her father.

  Her parents and Jackie were smiling. They asked lots of questions. Then Mrs. Basini said, “Would you read us your composition, honey? We’d love to hear it.”

  “Of course,” Shirley replied importantly. And she began reading.

  “A family is what you make it. A family is a group of people who love each other and help each other. Maybe they’re related, maybe they’re not.” She read on and on—about people in a family sometimes not being together but always feeling together, and the part about a family opening up, making room for a new member, and then closing around the new member to include her. “That’s you, Jackie,” Shirley added.

  Then Shirley read the parts about things that had happened after Joe h
ad gone away and after Jackie had arrived. Once she’d started writing, she’d remembered lots of details. “Put them in,” Mr. Soderman had urged her. “They’ll make your composition come alive.” Shirley had followed his advice.

  When Shirley finished reading, she was surprised to find that her mother was crying.

  “Why?” asked Shirley, startled.

  “Because what you wrote was lovely and insightful. And, honestly, you do have an eye for detail and a good memory. You’re like a sponge, soaking up everything around you.”

  A sponge! Mrs. Basini had called Shirley a sponge—just like Jackie!

  Shirley beamed.

  Then her father said, “We were going to wait a few weeks to give you this news—to take the edge off your first morning at summer school—but I think we’ll tell you now. We have a surprise for you, Shirley.”

  “You do?” asked Shirley.

  “Yes. We’ve signed you up for art classes this summer. You did such a good job with the bulletin boards all year, that we thought—”

  “Oh, thank you!” Shirley cried, before her father could finish. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  “Don’t worry, Jackie,” Mr. Basini went on, “we didn’t forget you. There’s a special program at the school library in July and August. We signed you up for that.”

  “Oh, goody! Thank you, Daddy! Thank you, Mommy!”

  “You know what?” Shirley said suddenly. “I wasn’t sure what fourth grade was going to be like. I thought it was going to be terrible.”

  “And I wasn’t sure what America would be like,” said Jackie.

  “But we survived, didn’t we?” Shirley said to her. “We both survived. I think the Basini sisters can do just about anything.”

  “Yes,” replied Jackie. “Even beat Lester and Lance.”

  And Shirley and Jackie walked upstairs to their bedroom singing, “Lester and Lance! Lester and Lance! They lost their stinky underpants!”

  A Personal History by Ann M. Martin

  I was born on August 12, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey. I grew up there with my parents and my sister, Jane, who was born two years later. My mother was a preschool teacher and my father was an artist, a cartoonist for the New Yorker and other magazines.

  When I was younger, my parents created an imaginative atmosphere for my sister and me. My dad liked circuses and carnivals and magic, and as a teenager, he had been an amateur magician. My father would often work at home, and I would stand behind his chair and watch him draw. When he wasn’t working, he enjoyed making greeting cards.

  My parents were very interested in my sister’s and my artistic abilities, and our house was filled with art supplies—easels, paints, pastels, crayons, and stacks of paper. Coloring books were allowed, but only truly creative pursuits were encouraged, and I took lots of art classes.

  Our house was as full of pets as it was of art supplies. We always had cats, and, except for the first two years of my life, we always had more than one. We also had fish, guinea pigs, and turtles, as well as mice and hamsters.

  When I think about my childhood I think of pets and magic and painting and imaginary games with my sister. But there is another activity I remember just as clearly, and that’s reading. I loved to read. I woke up early so I could read in bed before I went to school. I went to bed early so I could read before I fell asleep. And from this love of books and reading came a love of writing.

  In 1977 I graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts. I taught elementary school for a year, which is what I had wanted to do, and used children’s literature in the classroom. I loved teaching, but by the end of the school year I had decided that what I really wanted to do was work on children’s books. So I moved to New York City, entered the publishing field, and at the same time, began writing seriously. In 1983, my first book, Bummer Summer, was published.

  In 1985, after the release of my first three books—Bummer Summer, Inside Out, and Stage Fright—an editor at Scholastic asked if I’d be interested in writing a series about babysitting. She had a title in mind—the Baby-Sitters Club—and she was thinking of a miniseries consisting of four books. So I created four characters: Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and Mary Anne, and planned to write one book featuring each girl. The series was supposed to start in 1986 and end in 1987. Instead, it ended fourteen years later in 2000, with over two hundred titles and four related series, including Dawn’s spinoff, California Diaries.

  Saying good-bye to the Baby-Sitters Club was sad. It had been nice not to have to let go of the characters at the end of each book. But by 2000, I had found that I wanted more time to spend working on other kinds of stories (though I did return to the series to write a prequel, titled The Summer Before, in 2010).

  I felt myself drawn to the 1960s, the most important decade of my childhood. I think this interest was due in large part to the fact that my mother’s diaries came into my possession, and I spent a good deal of time reading them, especially the ones that covered the 1960s. The next thing I knew, I had written three books set in that decade. The second, A Corner of the Universe, is the most personal of all the books I’ve written. It’s loosely based on my mother’s side of the family, and in a way, it started on a summer day in 1964 when I learned that my mother’s younger brother, Stephen, who had died shortly before my parents first met, had been mentally ill. Stephen was the basis for the character of Adam in A Corner of the Universe. The book won a Newbery Honor in 2003.

  The life I lead now is not terribly different from the one I led as a child, except that I no longer live in Princeton. I moved to the Catskill Mountains in New York a number of years ago. Animals are still very important to me. Influenced by the many stray cats I’ve known, and inspired by my parents, who used to do volunteer work for Princeton’s animal shelter, I became a foster caregiver for an animal rescue group in my community. I also still have cats of my own, and only recently said good-bye to my dog, Sadie, the sweetest dog ever. She was the inspiration for my book A Dog’s Life.

  Although I grew up to become a writer, my interest in art never left, except that now I’m more interested in crafts, and especially in sewing and needlework. I like to knit, but I most enjoy sewing, especially making smocked or embroidered dresses. And of course, I continue to write. In 2014, the fourth Doll People book, The Doll People Set Sail, will be published, as well as Rain Reign, a novel about a girl with Asperger’s syndrome and her beloved dog, Rain.

  Here I am as a newborn in the hospital in August 1955.

  Me at age two at my home in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1957.

  This is the house where I grew up on Dodds Lane in Princeton.

  My family always had cats—and except for when I was in college, I’ve always had at least one. This is a photo of Kiki, Sweetheart, Tigger, and Fluffy from my childhood home (Kiki is a little hard to see).

  Reading at bedtime with my mother (and cats Sweetheart and Honey) when I was about seven, circa 1962.

  On the left is my mother’s younger brother, Stephen, with my grandfather and my uncle Rick. Stephen was mentally ill and the basis for the character of Adam in A Corner of the Universe.

  Graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts in 1977.

  Here I am at home in New York City in 1989, surrounded by fan mail.

  This is my house in New York, around 1993. It recently celebrated its one hundredth birthday.

  Wildlife plays a larger role in my life now than when I was young. I will often find deer, wild turkeys, and garden toads in my backyard. Here is a black bear investigating my hose!

  My dog, Sadie, one week after I brought her home in 1998.

  At home in the country in 2000 with Peanut, one of the many kittens I’ve fostered.

  This is the room where I do all of my sewing and card-making.

  A few of my handmade greeting cards!

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or
mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1988 by Ann M. Martin

  Cover design by Andrea Worthington

  978-1-4532-9806-0

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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