Anastasia at This Address by Lois Lowry

sloop."
    "Oh. Well, sorry about that." Anastasia glanced at the toy sloop, which still sat on her windowsill.
    Sam sighed. "If I open up my GI Joe bank, I can give you twenty-five pennies," he suggested. "Would you give me back my sloop for—"
    "
My
sloop," his sister corrected.
    His face fell. "Would you give me your sloop for twenty-five pennies?" he asked.
    "Nope. It's not for sale. I need it."
    Sam put his thumb into his mouth. He eyed the sloop sadly. Finally, pouting, he turned and trudged back down the stairs.
    Anastasia opened her closet door and looked at the beautiful blue dress hanging there. She wondered if she would be truly beautiful herself, for the first time, when she was wearing the dress, carrying the bouquet of pink flowers, and walking down the aisle of the Congregational church.
    There had been times in the past when Anastasia had thought:
Now.
Now is the time I am going to be beautiful. Then she had had a new haircut or something and looked in the mirror afterward, and it hadn't happened.
    Her parents both said that they thought she was beautiful already. But parents
always
said that to their kids, so their opinions weren't trustworthy on that particular issue.
    Thinking about beauty made Anastasia think of her promise to send Septimus a photograph. She groaned to herself and pulled open the top drawer of her desk, the drawer where she kept important junk.
    Her mother had an Important Junk drawer in the kitchen. It was filled with bits of string, thumbtacks, receipts from the dry cleaner, warranty papers from the microwave and the Cuisinart, and recipes torn out of magazines (Anastasia had secretly thrown away the one for Chicken Livers Supreme).
    Anastasia's Important Junk drawer was very different from her mother's. There was a deck of cards. Anastasia never played cards, but someone had pointed out to her that in this particular deck, the queens looked a lot like Anastasia, though they weren't wearing glasses.
    She looked fondly at the queen of hearts. Then she sorted through the whole deck and tossed all the cards except the queens and kings (Sam called them the Qs and Ks) into her wastebasket. She really liked looking at the queens and picturing herself with contact lenses and fancy headgear. As for the kings—well, you never knew. They certainly didn't look at all like Steve Harvey, who had freckles and somewhat shaggy hair, not at all like the long, carefully curled hair of the kings. But they were quite handsome and might just be an omen of someone in her future.
    Maybe even Septimus Smith.
    She put a rubber band around the eight Qs and Ks and returned them to the drawer.
    She pulled out a crumpled piece of notebook paper and reread an essay she had once written for school. The assignment had been to write something called "Turning Point," about a time in her life which had been just that: a turning point. She had written about the birth of her brother and the death of her grandmother; both things had happened the same day, when Anastasia was ten.
    Mr. Rafferty had given her an A+ for "Turning Point"; and Mr. Rafferty didn't give many A+'s, certainly not to Anastasia Krupnik. She had intended to frame the essay but somehow had never gotten around to it, because frames cost so much. But she thought she would probably keep it forever so that her children could read it someday.
    She folded "Turning Point" carefully and replaced it in the drawer.
    In the bottom was a collection of photographs. She spread them across her desk, stared at them, and sighed.
    Anastasia, age twelve, sticking her tongue out at the camera. No way could she send that to Septimus Smith.
    Anastasia, age eleven, dressed for Halloween with a stupid bright red wig on her head, a dumb checkered dress with a pinafore over it, and striped tights. Raggedy Ann. Gross. Someone named Septimus Smith had probably never even
heard
of Raggedy Ann. She pushed the photograph aside and picked up another.
    Anastasia just last month, grinning