Fabulous Five 015 - Melanie's Identity Crisis (3 page)

Shane caught up with Melanie a block from school the next
morning. He was puffing and panting as if he had run all the way from home.

"Hey, what's up?" she asked as he slowed beside
her. "You usually beat me to school by at least fifteen minutes."

He looked worried as he shook his head. "It's Igor. I've
been holding his claw most of the night. Finally the sun came up and he dropped
off to sleep."

"Is he still pining away for a girlfriend?" she
asked, trying her best to swallow the giggle that was bubbling up in her
throat. She didn't want Shane to know that she burst out laughing every time
she thought about a lovesick iguana.

"Yeah," said Shane. "We thought we had it
figured out. The pet shop at the mall said we could put him in the pen with
their iguanas if we promised to buy whichever one he took an interest in, and
we were sure he'd find someone he could relate to there." He gave Melanie
a quick look. "Iguanas are sensitive, you know. Just any girlfriend won't
do."

"Really?" asked Melanie.

Shane nodded. "Anyway, we put his collar with his
identification tags on him and took him out there as soon as my folks got home
from work yesterday, but it was a disaster."

"A disaster?" Melanie echoed. "Weren't there
any girl iguanas at the pet shop?"

"Oh, there were plenty of girls," Shane assured
her. "That wasn't the trouble. There were plenty of boy iguanas, too, and
they jumped on poor Igor the minute he started getting friendly with one of the
girls. It's a good thing we didn't just drop him off and head back home. If we
hadn't hung around a few minutes and been there to rescue him, he might have
been killed."

"Wow. Is he okay?"

Shane nodded again. "He's okay, but he's really in a
blue funk."

Melanie gave Shane a sympathetic look. "I can certainly
see why he'd be depressed," she said.

By now they had reached the school ground, and Shane waved
good-bye and peeled off toward a group of boys congregated near the baseball
diamond. Melanie watched him go, shaking her head. Sometimes she wasn't sure
just how seriously to take the things he said. And she couldn't help feeling a
catch in her throat when she thought that all he seemed to want to talk to her
about was Igor.

"Why are you standing over here all by yourself?"

Melanie was startled by Beth's words. She blinked and looked
at her friend, who was bounding toward her from the direction of the rest of
The Fabulous Five.

"Don't tell me you have amnesia and don't remember your
name, who your best friends are, or where you stand every morning before
school," Beth quipped.

Melanie gave her a sheepish grin. "No, I was just
talking to Shane. You wouldn't believe what he told me about his latest
attempts to find a girlfriend for Igor." Melanie repeated Shane's story
for Beth, and they both had a good laugh. "Come on," said Melanie. "I
just remembered my name, who my best friends are, and where I always stand
before school every morning."

When they reached their usual spot by the fence, which was
becoming a gathering place for more than just The Fabulous Five, Joel Murphy
was talking.

". . . so that's why I need an extra copy of the family
tree."

"I missed that," said Melanie. "Why do you
need an extra copy of the family tree? Did somebody chop yours down?" she
added, and then laughed at her own joke.

Joel rolled his eyes toward the sky. "Get serious,"
he said. "I need two copies because I have two fathers, my real dad and my
stepdad. I can't get all those names on one sheet."

"Joel, that's silly," insisted Jana. "You
only need to trace the family you're related to. I have a father and a
stepfather, too, and that's what I'm doing. You didn't get any genes from your
stepdad."

Joel looked at Jana out of the corner of his eye and then
shrugged. "I thought if I turned in two, maybe I'd get a better grade."

Just then the first bell rang, and Melanie headed for her
locker. What Jana had said about herself and Joel's not being related to their
stepfathers made her think about Funny again. Poor Funny. She didn't have any
choice about which family she would trace. It would have to be the Hawthornes.
And when she did, she still wouldn't know anything about herself. It was no
wonder she felt like a nobody.

Melanie thought about Funny a lot during the morning, and by
the time lunch period arrived and The Fabulous Five were sitting at their table
in the cafeteria out of earshot of anyone else, she had decided to talk to them
about Funny's predicament. She would ask them to keep it a secret because she
didn't want to betray Funny's confidence. But just the same, she felt that
Funny needed help, more help than she could give her alone.

"Gosh, I didn't know she was adopted," said
Christie when Melanie had finished telling them the story. "I feel sorry
for her."

"I don't," piped up Katie. The others gave her strange
looks and she added, "Not because she's adopted anyway. Lots of people
are. It's no big deal. I only feel sorry for her if she's having trouble
handling it."

"I didn't know she was adopted either," said Jana.
"But it wouldn't have made any difference in how much I like her. I'll
have to admit, though, I thought she had been acting strangely for the past
couple of days. She's usually so bouncy and full of fun, but now that you
mention it, she's been awfully quiet lately."

Melanie sighed. "Since she confided in me, I feel as if
I ought to be able to give her some good advice, but I can't. I don't know any
more about what she should do than she does."

"Do you know what I think?" asked Katie in a voice
that made the others put down their sandwiches and look at her. "I think
she should definitely talk to her parents. I mean, after all, they're . . .
well, they're her
parents.
I'm sure they're prepared for her to have
questions about herself, and they've probably got some answers ready for her."

"You're right," agreed Melanie, and the others
nodded. "It's really the only thing that makes sense. If anyone can help
her, they can."

"I agree," said Christie. "I'd go to my
parents if I was worried about something like that."

Melanie felt better. Since Funny was in her Family Living
class the last period of the day, she could talk to her then. She could get to
the classroom early and wait outside the door until Funny showed up. She'd
figure out exactly what to say when the time came.

"Hi, Funny. Can I talk to you a minute?" Melanie
called as she saw Funny coming toward the Family Living classroom.

Funny's expression was still uncharacteristically sober, but
she brightened a little when she saw Melanie. "Hi, Mel," she said,
smiling faintly and heading in Melanie's direction.

Melanie cleared her throat nervously. She still hadn't
figured out exactly the right words to use. "I've been thinking about your
genealogy project. You know . . . why you don't want to do it," she began.

Funny looked at her sharply, and Melanie went on before she
could lose her nerve. "I think you should talk to your parents. Maybe you
could just show them the chart, explain the project, and let them take it from
there. They're smart. They'll know what you're thinking, and they'll understand
how you feel. After all, they love you, don't they?"

"But that's just the point," Funny insisted. "It
might make
them
feel bad."

"Maybe. But maybe not, too. They've known since they
adopted you that someday something like this might come up."

Funny sighed. "I know you're right," she said. "It's
just that it's going to be hard."

Melanie reached out and gave Funny's hand a warm squeeze. "'Tell
you what," she said brightly. "I'll keep my fingers crossed for you.
And my toes! And my ears! And my eyes!" At that she crossed her eyes and
made a goofy face, which sent Funny into peals of laughter.

"Oh, Melanie. You're a terrific friend. I'll talk to
them tonight and tell you what I find out in the morning."

Funny was still smiling when the two girls got to class and
took their seats. Melanie was pleased to see Funny back to her old self, but
she hadn't been kidding her when she said she would keep everything crossed
that she possibly could. It would be awful for Funny if her parents did
actually get upset.

"Who has found out something interesting?" asked
Mrs. Clark once the class had come to order.

Curtis Trowbridge was the first to raise his hand.

"Tell us what you found, Curtis," said Mrs. Clark.

"One of my ancestors, Jonathan Barlowe, was a spy in
the Revolutionary War and he's buried in the old cemetery north of town."

A few wows and all rights sounded through the class as
Curtis looked around proudly.

"Good detective work," said Mrs. Clark. "I'm
sure there are several of you whose families settled in this area many years
ago and who have ancestors buried in the old cemetery. Because of that, I have
scheduled a special field trip for Friday afternoon. We are going to go to the
old cemetery and become grave rubbers."

"Grave robbers!" cried Tony. "That's against
the law."

Melanie chuckled, thinking about how Tony probably knew more
about the law than anyone else in the class since he had been taken to Teen
Court so many times for breaking school rules.

"I didn't say grave
robbers
, Tony," Mrs.
Clark corrected. "I said grave
rubbers.
What that means is, we're
going to make gravestone rubbings. We'll take heavy wrapping paper, masking
tape, and a box of large wax crayons with us. Then we'll find some old
gravestones, preferably marking the graves of some of your own ancestors, and
we'll tape the paper over the words carved in the stone. Then we'll rub the
crayons over the carvings and make our own picture of the gravestone. Now, who
can tell me what important information we can get off the gravestones?"

Melanie only half-listened to the other students say things
such as names, dates of birth, dates of death, and things like that. She was
already thinking about asking her grandmother if Great-great-grandmother Cordia
was buried in that cemetery and planning to make a rubbing of her gravestone if
she was.

After school, she hurried straight to her grandmother's
house without going either to Bumpers or home. Her grandmother, Marounah Lee
Phillips Pennington, was a tiny woman who stood less than five feet tall. "Come
on in, love," her grandmother called out when Melanie rang the bell and
peeked in the back-door window of her neat little brick house just four blocks
from the Edwardses.

"Hi, Gran," said Melanie, stepping into Gran
Pennington's sunny yellow kitchen where cookies and hot chocolate were waiting
on the table. Melanie had called her grandmother the night before and told her
about the genealogy project and the kind of information she would be needing.

"I suppose you want to get right to the important
stuff," said her grandmother with a twinkle in her eye. She was loading
the plate of cookies onto a tray as she spoke. "Get your cocoa and come on
up to the spare bedroom. That's where I keep the trunk with all the old letters
and pictures."

Melanie followed the elderly woman into a tidy room and sat
down gingerly on an ancient four-poster bed. The lace bedspread was
hand-crocheted, and little lace doilies decorated the tall chest of drawers.
But the thing that caught Melanie's attention was an old brass-bound trunk with
a domed lid, which sat beneath the window.

Gran Pennington saw her look of admiration and said, "That
trunk belonged to your great-great-grandmother, Cordia Mae Lee. Now there was
someone who was a character." She laughed softly as she put the cookies on
the bureau and sat down in a rocking chair.

Melanie's heart skipped a beat. It was almost as if her
grandmother had known whom she most wanted to talk about.

"But back to the chest. Before she was married it was
her hope chest. Do you know what a hope chest is?"

Melanie took a sip of her cocoa as she thought a moment and
then shook her head. She had never heard of such a thing.

"In your great-great-grandmother's day, young ladies
did fancy needlework. They embroidered pillow slips and made lace tablecloths
and things of that sort and put them away in trunks like this so that when they
got married, they would already have some of the things they would need."

"Neat!" cried Melanie. "I wonder why girls
don't do that now?"

Gran Pennington nodded her head knowingly. "Well, I
expect it's because girls nowadays are too busy. They can't sit still long
enough to embroider pillow slips."

Melanie started to mention that she had begun working on a
counted cross-stitch picture once, but of course she had never finished it.

"You said on the telephone that you'd like to ask me
some questions," her grandmother said. "I'm ready if you are."

Melanie swallowed a mouthful of warm chocolate chip cookie
and opened her notebook. "Okay," she said, making a number 1 beside
the top line. "Tell me about yourself. When were you born? Where? When did
you get married to Grandpa Pennington? That sort of stuff."

Dutifully, Gran Pennington recited the information while
Melanie wrote it in her notebook. Every so often the older lady would remember
a story about her childhood or the early days of her marriage, and Melanie
would make notes about that, too, and about Grandpa Pennington, who had died
two years ago. Finally they had exhausted the questions about Gran Pennington,
and Melanie brought up her great-great-grandmother.

"You said Cordia Mae Lee was a character. Mom said
something like that, too. What can you tell me about her? Is she buried in the
old cemetery north of town?"

"Yes, she's buried there, and I even have some pictures
of her in one of these old albums." Gran Pennington carefully lifted the
trunk lid and removed a fragile leather-bound album with PHOTOGRAPHS written
across the front in scrolly gold letters. She opened it, turned a few yellowed
pages, and smiled. Then she handed the album to Melanie.

"There she is, sitting under a shade tree in front of
the old family home. She was very musical. In fact, that's where your mother
gets her talent on the piano. You know," she added brightly, "I've
never noticed until now just how much the two of you favor each other. You even
have Cordia's reddish-brown hair and blue eyes."

Melanie blinked as she looked at the picture. There was
Great-great-grandmother Cordia, sitting under a tree with sheets of music
spread around her and smiling at the camera. But what gave Melanie such an
eerie feeling was that her grandmother had been right about how much she
resembled her relative from long ago. It was almost as if she were looking at
herself in a mirror.

"Now let me see, what can I tell you about her?" said
Gran Pennington, rubbing her chin and gazing thoughtfully into the distance. "As
you can see, your great-great-grandmother was a very pretty young woman,"
she began slowly. "So pretty, in fact, that the young men swarmed around
her like bees around honey."

Tingles raced up Melanie's spine, and she couldn't help
smiling with pleasure. "Really?" she whispered.

"That's right. In fact, some of the girls in her sewing
circle at church snubbed Cordia for a while because their own boyfriends were
trying to call on her. And there's another story about a young man who
threatened to climb to the top of the church steeple and jump off when she
wouldn't go riding with him in his buggy."

"Well, it sounds as if it wasn't her fault,"
Melanie said defensively. "She couldn't help it if the boys thought she
was gorgeous and totally irresistible."

Gran Pennington laughed. "Oh, she could have helped it
if she'd wanted to. The truth is, she was a
flirt!
In fact, according to
some, she usually had two or three beaus at once, and she tried to keep each
one from knowing about the others. Can you imagine a thing like that?"

Melanie gulped and looked down at the album where
Great-great-grandmother Cordia smiled at her. What would Gran Pennington think
if she knew how much her own granddaughter loved to flirt? And that Melanie
always had two or three crushes of her own?

"Thumb on through the album, if you like,"
suggested Gran Pennington. "There are pictures in it of Cordia with
several of her boyfriends, or beaus, as she called them. Let's see . . ."
Gran reached over and flipped a few pages. "Here she is again with one of
them."

Melanie felt a ripple of excitement at the sight of the
happy couple, smiling at each other instead of the camera. Cordia was sitting
in a swing tied to the leafy branch of a tree, and she was looking up at a
blond-haired boy who seemed about to give the swing a push. Under the picture
were the faded words:
John
,
my very best beau.
"Oh,"
Melanie sighed aloud, trying to imagine herself in the very same pose with
Scott or Shane or Garrett.

"Take the album home with you, if you'd like,"
Gran Pennington offered. "I'm sure you'll enjoy looking through it, and
you can bring it back when you've finished."

Melanie smiled appreciatively as her grandmother went on, "Here.
Look in the trunk. She saved a whole bundle of love letters from young men who
wanted to court her. She tied them in a pink ribbon, and they're in here with
the other family albums and some other papers and letters that I've collected
over the years."

Melanie's eyes brightened. Love letters? The idea was so
romantic that it made a lump form in her throat. Maybe someday someone will
write love letters to me, she thought. Maybe Scott or Shane or maybe someone I
haven't even met yet.

"I'll just go down and do some things in the kitchen,
and you can look through the trunk to your heart's content. You may find all
sorts of information for your genealogy project. How's that?"

"Gosh. Thanks, Gran. That would be super."

As soon as her grandmother left, Melanie knelt before the
old trunk and carefully lifted the lid. It was filled with yellowed papers and
fragile photograph albums just as Gran had said it would be, and a stale, musty
odor drifted into the air. She wanted to look at everything, but first she had
to find Great-great-grandmother Cordia's love letters.

Beneath the first layer she found them. The pink ribbon was
faded and the bow flattened from years in the trunk, but Cordia Mae Lee's name
was on the front of every envelope.

With trembling hands she lifted the packet out of the trunk
and placed it in her lap. Then she slid the first letter from under the pink
ribbon and opened it.