17
After the first Banana Pants rehearsal, Maude climbed up the twenty-seven slightly crooked stairs into her house. “Hello!” she shouted.
“Greetings,” said Walt, who was in a backbend. “How’s the creative endeavor going?”
“Well, we’re certainly endeavoring,” she said. “My onion-ing is top-notch of course. Unfortunately, Norbert wrote so much today that I’m not actually an onion until act four.” Maude scrunched her face in thought. “Or maybe it’s act five.”
“Whatever the act, you’ll make a terrific onion,” Walt said.
“The only problem is that the curtain I have to raise is actually pretty heavy.”
“Theater curtains can be tricky,” Walt said.
“Other than that, I’m sure Banana Pants will be . . .” How will it be? Maude wondered. In addition to the heavy curtain, Donut had nearly fainted when he saw how many lines Norbert had written for him. He’d recovered from that only to nearly faint again when he saw the extremely tight yellow pants Agatha and Agnes had sewed. Plus, Felix’s sets were getting enormous, Fletcher didn’t seem to understand that he was the best dancer in the class, and Desdemona thought everyone knew how to cartwheel. Luckily for Maude, the onion didn’t dance or sing or cartwheel.
“Once I get the curtain raised, my parts should be okay,” Maude told Walt. She felt extremely relieved that Banana Pants was Hillary’s problem, since she had much more important things to think about, like which companies the princess should write to next.
Walt flipped, stood up, and picked up a gold envelope from the table. “Look what I got in the mail today.”
“You got a letter?” Maude asked.
Walt nodded and held it out. “Read it.”
Maude read the letter. For a moment, she wondered if, in her late-night letter-writing craze, she’d accidentally written the letter to her dad. But that was bananas! This was not the kind of letter Maude would write. She wrote important letters! But she knew, without a doubt, who would write this kind of letter. Not only did it sound like a certain princess who lived one point two miles away, but there was also a tiny crown on the bottom of the page. Only one family in town had stationery like that!
“I don’t think who you think wrote that letter wrote it,” Maude told her dad. “It was definitely, without a doubt, not Miss Kinde. I know that one hundred percent. For a fact.”
Walt smiled. “I don’t care who wrote it. I’m just excited to see the play. What do you think about having a cast party here?”
“Cast party?” Maude asked, but really she was thinking, How could Miranda write that letter? How could she do such a thing?
“It’s customary to have a party after a show,” Walt said. “Let’s have it here. We still have plenty of soup. Everyone could come!”
“Everyone?” Maude asked. “Miss Kinde?”
“Sure. Miss Kinde, the whole cast and crew of Banana Pants, Principal Fish, Miranda’s parents, Donut’s mom, everyone!”
“No,” Maude said. “I don’t want anyone eating soup here.”
“Oh,” Walt said sadly. “It might be nice . . .”
“No cast party,” she said firmly.
“All right,” Walt said. “But if you change your mind, you know where to find me.” He picked up a book called Everything You Wanted to Know About Beetles but Were Afraid to Ask. “I’ll be in my office if you need me,” he said.
“Maybe you should change your mind,” Michael-John said.
Maude jumped. She hadn’t even noticed her brother was sitting on the couch, surrounded by books and sleeping pets.
“About the cast party?” she asked. Not only was she surprised that she hadn’t seen him, she was more surprised that he had an opinion about cast parties.
Michael-John nodded.
“I don’t want Miss Kinde eating soup here!” Maude stomped her foot, which startled Rosalie and Onion the Great Number Eleven awake. Rudolph Valentino kept sleeping.
“It wouldn’t be just Miss Kinde. Dad said everybody would be invited. Anyway, I thought you liked Miss Kinde.”
“I love Miss Kinde. But . . .” How could Maude explain any of this to her brother?
“I think it might be good for us to have a party here, Maude. It’s been a long time,” Michael-John said.
It was true. Before Maude and Michael-John’s mom died, they’d had loads of parties: soup parties, dance parties, turn-out-the-lights-and-sing-as-loud-as-you-can parties.
“Dad needs friends,” Michael-John said.
“Dad has friends,” Maude said, although she wasn’t so sure. She’d never really thought about it.
“Dad knows a lot of people,” Michael-John said. “The beetle experts, all the yogis, the quotation society. But those people aren’t really friends. You know what a real friend is.”
Maude looked at the secret-admirer letter on the table. “Friends are overrated,” she said.
“Friends are extremely important,” Michael-John said.
“Do you have friends?” Maude asked her brother, even though she knew he didn’t because he just stayed home in pajamas reading dictionaries all day. Although, actually, he wasn’t in pajamas now.
Michael-John’s eyes grew wide. “Of course I have friends! I have tons of friends, Maude.”
“Oh,” Maude said.
“Wait—do you think I just stay home in my pajamas reading dictionaries all day?”
Maude was shocked. “Uh, um, well . . . Who are your friends? When do you see them?”
“My friends are other students who choose to do school at home,” Michael-John said. “I see them Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. And the occasional Tuesday afternoon.”
Stunned, Maude put her glasses on. How could I not know this? she wondered. Then again, when was the last time she’d asked her brother what he’d done while she was at school? Normally, she burst into the house, announced what she’d done that day, and had a snack. Today she hadn’t even noticed him! And he was right there.
“Just today, I met up with Gwyneth-Rose, Sarah-Rose, Sadie, Jedidiah, Rachel-Jane, and Fred,” Michael-John continued. “We went to the museum and rode mountain bikes.”
“Oh.” Maude put her glasses back on top of her head and stroked her chicken.
“I know you have perfect vision,” Michael-John said. “But once in a while, maybe you should look up from your letter writing and see what other people are doing. You might be surprised.”
“I see plenty of things,” Maude said quietly.
But Michael-John had gone back to reading his comic book and didn’t seem to hear her.
