“BOAN SWOIR!”
It was Sunday afternoon and Lisa’s parents looked up from their books to smile at their daughter, who was suddenly standing in the doorway to the living room chirping hello to them in French.
“Boan swoir yourself,” her father the Commandant replied. “Did you have a good time in Sarpsborg?”
“I’m so happy to see you guys again,” Lisa said, going over first to her father and then her mother and giving them each a good, long hug.
“Well that was an enthusiastic hug,” her mother laughed. “Did Anna’s father give you a ride back here? I thought I heard a car engine out front.”
“That was Doctor Proctor’s motorcycle,” Lisa said. “I ran into him on my way back and he gave me a ride. Nilly and I are invited to dinner in his yard. Is that okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” her mother said. “Just don’t stay out too late, it’s a school night. Did you practice your clarinet? You’ve got band practice tomorrow, you know.”
“Oops. I’ll do that now.”
Lisa dropped her knapsack on the floor and ran up to her room, and soon her parents heard the reedy hollow sound of a clarinet playing … Say, could that be the Marseillaise?
“Do you know what I like best about living on Cannon Avenue?” the Commandant asked, humming along to the melody. “That it’s so safe and boring here, you don’t have to worry about anything at all happening.”
JULIETTE, LISA, AND Nilly were sitting at the picnic table in the tall grass under the pear tree in Doctor Proctor’s yard, waiting. They cheered when they saw Doctor Proctor emerge from the house balancing a tray with a five-foot-long Jello-O on it.
“Help yourselves,” he said, plunking the tray down onto the table.
Nine minutes later they were all leaning back, their stomachs bulging, wearing satisfied grins.
“I just talked to Joan on the phone,” Juliette said. “Unfortunately, she didn’t get that hairdresser’s job at Montmartre. The lead stylist thought her methods were a little, uh, dramatic. And bowl cuts haven’t come back in style yet.”
“It’s just a matter of time,” Nilly said.
The other three didn’t respond, just silently and skeptically eyed the bright red bowl cut Joan had given Nilly as a good-bye present along with a kiss in the middle of his freckled nose.
“What are you looking at?” Nilly said. “Trendsetters have to lead the way, right?”
“Anyway.” Doctor Proctor chuckled. “She got another job. Didn’t she, Juliette?”
“Yup,” Juliette said. “As a tourist guide at the Museum of the History of France at the Palace of Versailles. She’s going to tell people about the Middle Ages and especially about the famous Joan of Arc, who led the French in battle against the English and was ultimately burned at the stake. The museum director was very impressed at her detailed knowledge.”
The professor cleared his throat: “As long as we’re on the subject of friends who are no longer with us. Before you guys came over, I took a spin down to Rosenkrantz Street and the Trench Coat Clock Shop.”
Everyone looked at him.
“The clock shop wasn’t there,” Proctor said. “There was an old jewelry store there instead.”
“Old?” Nilly burst out. “Impossible! The Trench Coat Clock Shop was there last Friday!”
The professor nodded. “I know. But according to an old cab driver who was parked nearby, the jewelry store had been there since he was a kid. And he’d never heard of a Trench Coat Clock Shop.”
They sat in silence for a while, everyone lost in his own thoughts. When Lisa went to take a bite of her Jell-O, she was surprised to find that her plate was empty. She looked over at Nilly, who looked at her with innocent blue eyes, but puffed-out balloon cheeks, as he hurriedly tried to swallow the last of the evidence.
“Nilly!” she said. “You ate mine!”
His response was drowned out by all the Jell-O dribbling out the corners of his mouth.
Nilly tilted his head back and repeated, “Sho shue me!”
The professor, Juliette, and Lisa, none of them could help but laugh at that.
Then they started retelling all the fantastic things they’d experienced over the last two days. Or the last nine hundred years. Depending on how you looked at it. About Nilly who had ridden in the Tour de France and called off the Battle of Waterloo. About Lisa who had designed the Eiffel Tower and blown out a whole witch’s pyre with her fart. About Doctor Proctor who was almost beheaded, but saved at the last minute by some clever trumpet playing. And about Juliette who was finally free and hadn’t heard a peep from Cliché.
“Cheers!” Doctor Proctor said sincerely, and they all raised their glasses of pear juice. “Not to changing history, but to changing the future.”
And they drank to that. But there was no longer any future for this Jell-O or this Sunday evening. The tray in front of them was bare, the moon had risen, and the birds that had settled on the pear tree to listen to all their incredible exploits were starting to yawn.
So they said good night, and Proctor and Juliette went into the blue house, Lisa into the red, and Nilly into the yellow.
In her room Lisa thought about the clock shop that was gone and how, well, how it was like it had never existed. She decided to look through her schoolbooks until she found her history book, flipped to the chapter on Joan of Arc, and looked at the famous painting of her death. And gasped in shock even though she was half expecting it.
The picture had changed.
The woman didn’t have long auburn hair anymore but inky black hair. She was wearing red lipstick, had long fingernails with red fingernail polish, and down—under her dress—wasn’t that … a roller skate?
Lisa gulped and thought about Raspa, who had given her life for love. And maybe also to make up for everything she’d tried to destroy. Lisa remembered something that Nilly had told Mrs. Strobe in class back at the beginning of this story:
“To be a real hero, you have to be really dead.”
Lisa decided that tomorrow she would copy and enlarge the picture of Raspa and hang it up on the wall over her bed. Not just because it was a truly magnificent picture and everyone knew that the woman in the fire was a hero, but because it would remind Lisa of something important. That even if a person did something wrong, it was never—never—too late to fix it again. When you thought about it that way, anyone could change history at least a little bit at any time.
Then Lisa closed her history book and looked over at Nilly’s bedroom window.
And sure enough: The shadow play had begun. It clearly depicted a little boy and a slightly bigger woman dancing the cancan and every once in a while kissing a little. Lisa giggled. You would almost think Nilly was in love. And now he was standing on his bed and he started jumping up and down. The shadow, which was twice as big as the tiny little boy, did a somersault, and Lisa laughed so hard she hiccupped. Laughed so hard she cried. Laughed so hard she had to put her head down on her pillow and close her eyes. And when she did that, she fell asleep.
