THAT DAY, THE NEXT day after Martha and Ivy were accused by Kelly, was a time that no one in the Abbott family would ever forget. When Martha walked into the dining room that morning, all the rest of them already knew something that made a very great difference. Martha heard about it later in bits and pieces.
She heard that after Tom had found her crying, he had gone to the kitchen, where his mother and grandmother were, and asked what was the matter with the Mouse. So Mrs. Abbott explained, trying to make it sound not too serious so as not to worry Tom, who was always too quick to get caught up in everyone else’s problems. When she finished the story, she said, “We don’t really think that Martha was involved, but if it turns out that she was, it should be easy to prove that she was very little to blame. She has never been in any trouble in her life except when she was under the influence of that Carson child. It’s very much our fault for not being more firm about ending the relationship.”
Tom hadn’t said a word while Mrs. Abbott was talking, but his face had looked more and more strange; and when she had finished, he suddenly reached out and snatched a dishtowel and bowl out of his mother’s hands and threw them across the room with all his might. The bowl smashed into the refrigerator with a great shattering crash, and Tom turned and stalked into the living room and sat there, silent and glowering, refusing to speak to anybody until his father came home from the Simmons’.
Then Tom told all of them about what had really been happening. He started by explaining that one of his friends, Brent Hardison, whose parents had been bridge friends of the Abbotts for years, was a pusher.
“A pusher,” Tom said impatiently, when his father asked him what on earth he thought he was talking about. “A pusher. A dope peddler. He buys grass and speed and acid in the city, and he sells them at school. He’s been doing it for months.”
Then Tom went on to say that on Saturday night he and two other guys had some pills that one of the guys got from Brent. Tom wasn’t sure what they were. Maybe speed, maybe not. Tom hadn’t taken much stuff like that before, and he didn’t know too much about it. Anyway when the effects began to wear off, they decided that they wanted to buy some more, but they were all broke by then—all three of them. They were in one of the guys’ cars, parked down on Warwick near the Junior High, and all of a sudden Tom remembered that when he was in school there, he was the one who took the cafeteria money to the office, because he was such a good reliable boy. And he had seen where the secretary always put it, along with the money from all the other rooms, in the drawer of her desk.
Because they were still feeling strange from the pills, Tom couldn’t remember all the details too clearly, but he did remember that when it turned out there wasn’t any money in the drawer, they had all gotten angry and smashed things up a little. Then they had climbed back out the window and gone home.
The earthquake that shook the Abbotts’ house that night had aftershocks that went on shaking for a long time. Tom and the two other boys who had broken into the school were not sent away to jail or reform school as Martha had feared that she would be. Instead, after their fathers had paid for the damage, they were only put on probation, for a long time; and Tom and the one other boy who also played football were kicked off the team. Brent Hardison, though, spent a long time in Juvenile Hall and then was sent away to a boarding school by his family.
Tom signed up for some art classes to fill the gap in his schedule that football had left, and the adult Abbotts all talked about how bravely he had made the adjustment, with no morbidness or complaints. But Tom told Martha that when he said he really didn’t mind, he meant it.
That very big difference that Martha sensed that morning when she walked into the dining room never entirely went away. It came and went, and changed in various ways—but things were never quite the same in the Abbotts’ house after that. The most important change, as far as Martha could see, was that the Abbotts listened to each other. Not that they always understood each other, or even agreed with each other much more. But it seemed to Martha that after that day, everyone tried a little harder to listen.
A smaller difference that happened soon after that day was that the Abbotts and their next door neighbors, the Peters, stopped speaking to each other for a while. A few days after everything happened, Mr. Abbott went over to talk to the Peters. By then the whole neighborhood was talking about what Tom and his friends had done, but apparently no one was talking about the lie that Kelly had told. During the course of the conversation, Mr. Abbott asked Mr. Peters if he knew about the accusation that Kelly had made concerning Martha and Ivy. And Mr. Peters said quickly that he did know about it, and that Kelly had explained it to him and his wife, and to Mr. Gregory, by the way, to everyone’s complete satisfaction.
Kelly, he said, had explained that it wasn’t a lie. That she had heard Martha and Ivy talking about the break-in—as if they had done it. Afterwards Kelly realized that the girls had only been pretending—the way those two were always doing. Just playing one of their games of make-believe. But at the time Kelly hadn’t doubted the truth of what she had overheard.
So it was Kelly’s word against Martha’s, and Mr. Abbott left the Peters without saying any more about it; but when he got home he told Tom. So Tom asked Martha and, of course, Martha told him that it wasn’t true. She and Ivy had talked about the play that noon hour, and a little about what Kelly and her friends were up to, with all their whispering. But they hadn’t even discussed the break-in, let alone pretended that they had done it.
The next Saturday Tom was out in front of the Abbotts’ house washing the car when Kelly and a bunch of her friends came up the street. Martha was sitting on the windowseat in her room, and she saw them coming and wondered what would happen. Tom was barefoot and wearing denim cutoffs. He was still tan from a summer of surfing and his blond hair, streaked by the sun, was lighter than his skin, and his football muscles bulged under his T shirt. He had certainly never looked handsomer, and Martha was pretty sure Kelly’s gang of eighth grade boy-worshippers couldn’t resist him; and she was right. They couldn’t. Instead of going into the Peters’ house, they giggled over to watch the car washing.
Even though Martha opened her window a crack, she couldn’t hear everything that was being said. The six girls squealed and laughed and pushed each other, each trying to get closest to where Tom was working. Finally Ginny Davis grabbed the rag out of the bucket and started to help wash the car. Immediately the others began to fight over the rag, tearing off pieces, so that they could help, too. But when Kelly got a piece, Tom straightened up from the hubcap he was scrubbing and took the rag firmly out of Kelly’s hands.
“Not you, Dimples,” he said coldly. “I don’t let liars wash my car.”
Kelly stared at Tom for a second before she turned and stomped home. Halfway there she stopped and called to her friends, and they started to put down their rags. But Tom grinned at them and said, “You mean I’m going to lose all my slaves?” and so they all stayed, washing and then waxing, and flirting for over an hour. After that the Peters stopped talking to the Abbotts for quite a while.
One of the best differences after that fateful day was the one that involved just Tom and Martha. Tom had always been nice to Martha, in the way that he was nice to nearly everybody; but he had always been too busy to spend much time with her. But after that spring, they began to really talk to each other. They talked about things that Martha had never talked about to anyone except Ivy, and also about things that really mattered to Tom. Some of the things she found out about Tom were a surprise to Martha.
One thing that surprised Martha was the way Tom talked about his art classes. He told Martha that he had always wanted to take art, but he’d never had the time before with so many hours of sports and courses that were required for college. Martha knew that Tom could draw well, but she’d never thought about him being really interested in art. It was a surprise to her to think about Tom wanting to take art and not being able to, because she’d always thought of Tom and Cath both as being able to do anything and everything they ever wanted to. There were other things that Tom told her that surprised her. For instance, he told her once that he was glad, in a way, that Kelly had accused Martha of the vandalism at Rosewood Junior High.
When Martha asked why on earth he was glad about a thing like that, he said because it had trapped him into deciding something for himself. Before that, he said, he’d pretty much just gone along doing what was expected of him—partly because he was just the “why-not” type and partly because he’d always felt he really didn’t have much choice. He’d gotten in the habit of going along with whoever was leaning on him hardest at the time. And then that night it dawned on him all of a sudden that when things had gone so far that a couple of harmless kids like Martha and Ivy could get the blame for a crazy thing like what happened to the school office—then it was about time somebody started telling things straight no matter who got hurt. The getting hurt part bothered him, though. He hated the idea of being a fink and getting his friends busted. But when he’d stopped to think about it, he’d known they were going to get busted sooner or later, no matter what. And maybe sooner was better than later. Anyway, Tom said, he was glad that for once in his life he’d done something that he’d decided to do—all by himself.
Although the differences at the Abbotts’ after that terrible Monday, were, for the most part, more good than bad; there was one very important difference that was bad, all bad. Ivy was gone again.
On that morning, the one after Martha had cried herself to sleep without knowing about Tom’s confession, everyone had tried to get in touch with Ivy and the Carsons to tell them what had happened; but no one could reach them. Finally it became apparent that some time in the middle of the night the Carsons had packed up and climbed into their old red truck and disappeared. Everyone thought it was certainly too bad that they had gone off that way, without even knowing the truth about what had happened; but soon nearly everyone forgot about it. After all, everyone said, the Carsons were always coming and going, anyway. Undoubtedly, they’d have left soon, even without the accusation against Ivy; and they’d probably be back someday, and then everything could be straightened out.
But Martha couldn’t just forget about it like everyone else. She went over and over what might have happened when Ivy told her parents. Martha was certain that the Carsons hadn’t believed that Ivy was innocent. After all, nearly all the other Carson kids had been guilty at one time or another, so why not Ivy? Because, of course, the Carsons didn’t understand, any more than anyone else did, about how Ivy was so different.
Another thing that Martha couldn’t forget—never, as long as she lived—was the way she and Ivy had parted. To Martha that was the most terrible part of all. She went over her last conversation with Ivy at least a thousand times, wishing she hadn’t said what she had about a changeling, wishing she’d run after Ivy until she caught her—no matter how long it took or how far she had to go. Wishing she hadn’t let Ivy go off without a chance to say good-by or to take back the things she’d said.
Most of the time Martha felt certain that Ivy would have taken them back, if there’d been time. But with her gone, there was no way to find out for sure. So all Martha could do was go over and over the whole thing in her mind, as if somehow it might finally turn out differently.