The Heart and Mind of Frances Pauley Read online

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

  Text copyright © 2018 by April Stevens

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Sophie Blackall

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schwartz & Wade Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Schwartz & Wade Books and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stevens, April, author.

  Title: The heart and mind of Frances Pauley / by April Stevens.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Schwartz & Wade Books, [2018] | Summary: “Frances Pauley learns the value of friendship while staying true to herself”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017006817 | ISBN 978-1-5247-2061-2 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-5247-2062-9 (library binding) | ISBN 978-1-5247-2063-6 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Friendship—Fiction. | Individuality—Fiction. | Death—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.S84315 He 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9781524720636

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Two

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Sam and Willa

  Unlike her sister, Figgrotten went right outside after school and climbed the rocks behind their house and looked for things. Mostly birds, but bugs and different stones too. She had made herself a kind of room up on the rocks. It had sticks around it for walls and a built-in rock-chair that had moss growing on it, and it had a dent that sometimes, after it rained, served as a nice sink.

  Figgrotten’s sister, Christinia, on the other hand, would go straight to her bedroom and make her bed and put away all her clothes and dust her furniture, then put on sappy music and stare at herself in the mirror. She had long hair that she kept perfect and pinned.

  Figgrotten did not even try to manage her own hair, as it was not that kind of hair. It felt like dry grass, and after a bad experience with a burr once, she kept it shorter and most often wore a hat. It was one of those hats with the earflaps that hung down. She wore it not only to cover her hair but also because when she wore it she felt snappier. Christinia found the hat an embarrassment, and this seemed to be another reason Figgrotten liked to wear it. She’d discovered that the more Christinia hated certain things about her, the more she clung to those things in defiance.

  Her best friend in the whole world, Alvin Turkson, was always saying, “People have to accept each other or wars break out.” But Christinia was the opposite of accepting, in fact, she seemed downright intolerant of Figgrotten these days. At night, when her sister would strum her guitar in her bedroom next door and sing in her beautiful voice, Figgrotten’s heart would get tugged at and a loneliness would come over her. She would have liked to go in and sit with Christinia and tell her she loved her singing, but now she knew to keep her distance.

  Figgrotten had been going up to her rocks for years. It was where she felt most herself. Sometimes she was out there until after dark and Christinia would come out on the back lawn and say the word “dinner” in a sour, disgusted voice and Figgrotten would climb down and go back inside. The fact was, she hated being inside. She felt like she couldn’t breathe indoors. Especially at dinnertime, when she was made to take off her hat and wash her hands and eat in the stuffy kitchen.

  Often, at dinner, she’d ask questions that seemed to confuse her family. Things like “I read that Margaret Mead used to just hang up the phone when she was done talking to people. She didn’t even say goodbye. Just clunk, put the receiver down. Do you think that was because the people she studied didn’t have telephones?” Figgrotten really liked Margaret Mead, an anthropologist who had studied tribes of people living in the middle of nowhere without telephones or toilets. The thing that had drawn Figgrotten to her to begin with was a photograph she’d found of Margaret Mead in the World Book Encyclopedia. She looked a bit strident, wore a cape and a hat, and carried a walking stick. At first Figgrotten even thought her face looked kind of manly. She stared at the picture for quite a while. Then she started reading about Margaret Mead’s life and found it super interesting.

  She’d never even heard of anthropology before this, but once she did, she thought it might be something she might like to do when she grew up. Mostly because it involved a lot of outdoor work. One thing Figgrotten knew for sure was that if she had to work inside somewhere, she’d probably suffocate. But the other thing that she liked about anthropology was that it involved observing people, and Figgrotten was a natural observer. She observed birds and trees and clouds and, once she stopped to think about it, she did lots of observing of people too. Her sister, of course, being one of those people. Not because she found Christinia all that interesting, but more because she was trying to figure out exactly what made her tick.

  Figgrotten kept her bedroom windows open at night, and she’d brought a lot of branches up there so that it felt kind of woodsy. Initially this exasperated her mother, but now her mom didn’t go into her room as much. She told Figgrotten that she just couldn’t take the mess. At first Figgrotten wasn’t sure what to make of her victory, but soon she came around to it. Not having her mom come in there all the time and yell at her about all the leaves and sticks actually made life in the house calmer.

  Due to the open windows, Figgrotten’s room would get super cold in the winter, which was how she liked it. She slept in her wool hat and socks, and sometimes, when it was really blowing in there, she wore her wool coat to bed. She’d bundle up and lie stiff as a board and breathe in the cold clear air. She loved it! Loved the way the air hit the back of her throat, startling her a little each time.

  Back when Christinia was still talking to Figgrotten, Christinia would go into Figgrotten’s room and just about go berserk. She’d beat at the branches and get all crazy that the place was so untidy.

  “What is the matter with you?” she once shrieked. “Why can’t you be normal? And why do you have that stupid name pinned to your door? That’s just so weird!”

  Christinia was referring to the name Figgrotten, which Figgrotten had given to herself a few years ago, writing
it out in her then-crooked handwriting and tacking it on her door. Her real name was Frances Pauley, which she felt didn’t suit her, so she put all sorts of words together, backward and forward. Once “fig” and “rotten” rolled off her tongue together that first time, it stuck. And from then on she thought of herself not as Frances but as Figgrotten, adding the extra g because that’s the growly way it sounded to her. Giving herself this name felt strangely freeing. It allowed her to be able to just be herself more. Not Frances. But Figgrotten.

  Figgrotten thought it was a dumb way to live, feeling like everything had to be the way you thought it should be or you’d just freak out. So she’d finally said to Christinia, “What makes you think you’re so normal? And what makes you the expert on what normal even is?” which made her sister’s mouth drop open at first before tears came into her eyes and she burst out through the branches, slamming the door behind her. It obviously had never occurred to Christinia before that normal might not be the same thing for everyone. Though Figgrotten knew what she’d meant and Christinia was more typical than she was. Anyway, that was the last time Christinia had been in Figgrotten’s room, and that had happened right before school started. Then there had been another incident in the auditorium soon after that, in September, that seemed to make things worse.

  Now, in January, they pretty much never talked. Just the sight of Figgrotten seemed to infuriate Christinia and make her look sickened. So there seemed no choice but to give Christinia a super wide berth and avoid her at all costs. It wasn’t what Figgrotten would have wanted. They used to have fun together. Sometimes they would make things to eat in the kitchen. Brownie pies and little pizzas on toast. Back when they were younger, Figgrotten and Christinia would watch cartoons on Sunday mornings and play I Spy in the backseat of the car when they went places. Figgrotten definitely missed those times, but she somehow knew something about Christinia had changed, and this change made Figgrotten feel uneasy. Come to think of it, she didn’t quite even know who Christinia was anymore.

  At least Figgrotten got along nicely with her parents. The reason for this, mostly, was that she was an excellent student and she also did her chores like they were going out of style. She loved doing chores, actually. She enjoyed checking things off a to-do list. Garbage taken out, clothes folded, cat fed. So, other than her devotion to the out-of-doors and the condition of her room, her parents didn’t have a whole lot to complain about. She was the best student in her class and she liked homework as well and did all of it up on the rocks each afternoon. She first did her math, which she liked the least; then she did her reading and poetry and vocabulary words. Then, as a kind of dessert, she’d read the encyclopedia.

  She’d never even heard of encyclopedias before she found a whole set of World Book volumes down in her dad’s office in the basement of their house. He’d had them from when he was a kid and then never had the heart to chuck them all out. Once Figgrotten got her hands on one, she knew why he’d kept them. They were impossible to put down. The color photos, the short paragraphs about absolutely everything. While she could have sat down at the family’s big computer in the living room and probably found all this stuff, having the books to hold while she was up on the rocks made them especially perfect. Plus, when she looked online, there was too much information for her to sort through. In a book it was more pared down and not so overwhelming.

  At the moment, she was pawing through the C’s, though she didn’t go through the books in order, and had just gulped down two fascinating paragraphs about crows. Not everything gripped her, but crows were interesting. She’d always known, from being up on the rocks and being surrounded by them, that they were not your average sort of bird. They didn’t just go about their business. They had a complex life up in the trees and spent half their time screaming and yelling at each other. Sometimes, Figgrotten had observed, they went absolutely bananas, and if she spent a little time looking around she could usually figure out what it was that was getting them all flustered. Sometimes it was a hawk, circling up above. Sometimes it was Figgrotten’s cat, Clark, sitting out on the back porch cleaning his paws. Anyway, crows, Figgrotten learned, were birds with an above-average intelligence. Not unlike herself. Perhaps this was why she felt a kinship to them.

  * * *

  —

  At the beginning of the school year, in September, her fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Stanley, hadn’t been sure what to make of Figgrotten. He told her parents that for such a clever girl she rarely contributed to class discussions and sometimes he caught her staring out the window. But Figgrotten had her reasons for this, and once she was able to explain, she and Mr. Stanley became friends. She didn’t like to talk too much in class because she found when she did the other kids became sort of lumpy and sullen.

  She’d discovered this in first grade when the teacher had gotten on the subject of dinosaurs and she became so excited that she would raise her hand to the point where she lifted straight out of her seat, all while making little oohing noises. She pretty much took over each class with her questions and hand-raising, until finally she noticed that each time her hand went up, most of her classmates sank down in their seats and some even looked like they were going to be sick. The fact was, she started to figure out they hadn’t a clue half the time what she was even talking about. So, once she saw that she was being annoying, she quieted herself down. And now, sometimes, she had to admit she was a little bored because of this, and the only way she could combat the boredom was to look out the window at the sky and think.

  “An improper fraction. Anyone, anyone?” Mr. Stanley would be up at the front of the classroom, and Figgrotten would have two layers of thoughts. One was about fractions and the other was simply How incredible that there’s a moon up there in the sky in the middle of the day.

  “Frances.” Mr. Stanley would walk over to Figgrotten and touch her shoulder. “An improper fraction?”

  “It’s a fraction that has a top number that is larger than the bottom number,” Figgrotten would answer, trying not to sound unwilling but feeling everyone slump down a little. It was sort of awful, but she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know. That would be just plain ridiculous. She knew that lots of the kids in her class had sharp minds, but for some reason they didn’t use them the way they should. It just didn’t make sense to her. Being a thinker wasn’t something you needed to hide. It was just something, Figgrotten had learned, you didn’t necessarily want to flaunt.

  Figgrotten’s favorite time of day, like everyone else’s, was recess. She would burst through the doors, out of the overheated and stuffy classroom, and gulp in fresh air. The playground was a fenced-in area with a jungle gym and swings and a basketball court. The crazy thing was that the woods were right out past the fence, and of course that was where the playground should have started. Out there in the woods was where kids could actually have some fun. In fact, Figgrotten had written Mr. Stanley a letter about this earlier in the year.

  Mr. Stanley,

  I think our playground would be better if part of the woods were fenced in too. That way kids could be out in nature during recess and there is a lot more to learn in the woods than on mowed grass and pavement.

  Frances

  * * *

  —

  Mr. Stanley had written back to her.

  Dear Frances,

  You have made a valid point. I will bring this up with Mrs. Flynn and get back to you.

  Sincerely,

  Mr. Stanley

  But nothing came of any of it. Figgrotten was told a week later that Mrs. Flynn, the principal, said that to refence the playground would cost too much money, and also the woods were not “to code” and were filled with things that could be dangerous. Sticks that could poke into eyes and insects that could crawl up pant legs. Figgrotten noticed when Mr. Stanley reported this to her that his mouth tightened up a bit and moved slightly to one side of
his face. It seemed he was holding back from grimacing. She could only take this to mean he too was not happy with Mrs. Flynn’s boring way of thinking. Figgrotten let it go at that. But it bothered her. Being boring bothered her just about more than anything.

  However, despite all this, recess remained her most stimulating period at school, as she liked to tell anyone who asked. Even within the chain-link fence, nature prevailed. There were a few little shrubs around, and under the shrubs, in the moist earth, interesting things could be found. Spider eggs and worms and, of course, bugs. Bugs were everywhere if you spent two seconds looking for them. Figgrotten gave herself the task of finding and identifying one bug, one worm, and one bird during each recess. She brought out her notebook with her lists and drawings and got right to work. Often, whether she wanted company or not, she’d be joined by one or two kids. In general, kids tended to be curious. They were like cats in that way. Whether they wanted to admit it or not, they always wanted to know what was going on. And most often, with Figgrotten, something was going on. She’d be down on her hands and knees under a forsythia bush and she’d be muttering, “Holy moly, what the devil is that?”

  “What? What? What is it?”

  “I think it’s a bug with a kind of horn on its head. Kind of like a rhino.”

  And before long there’d be twenty kids pushing to check it out while Figgrotten drew a picture of it and wrote “Bug with rhino horn” for later identification and then stood up and dusted herself off.

  She felt exhilarated after such finds and could only imagine what it must have been like for people who really, truly discovered things. For instance, Donald Johanson, the guy who found Lucy, the four-million-year-old skeleton, must have just about jumped out of his underwear when he dug her up.