Addie on the Inside by James Howe Page A

and then talk about you
behind your back? Were there mean girls
when you were my age?”
    Grandma’s shears go
snip
, and she straightens
herself to look me in the eye. “There have always
been mean girls, Addie. I just don’t know
that they were ever so well organized. But then
back in the day we didn’t have as many means
of organizing.” She leans over and snips. “Cell
phones and the Internet and what have you.
Cruelty has gone multimedia so production
has gone up.” She hands me the tulips
and we turn back to the house.
    â€œRise above it,” she says, her hand
on my shoulder. The air is turning colder
as I tell her, “I’ll try.”

Home
    It isn’t because I was silent today
and took from the silence lessons to keep.
I have always loved this quiet time of the week,
or have for as long as I’ve been allowed
to stay up this late. Ten o’clock on Friday night.
Dinner has been eaten, the dishes have been washed
and dried, the cats are curled around somebody’s feet.
Kennedy mine, Johnson my mother’s. The PBS
documentary on sea turtles ended five minutes ago,
and the TV put to bed. I finger the edge
of my Garfield and Odie bookmark, flip the tassel aside,
find my place in
The Secret Life of Bees
. My father
in his chair is reading too but I can’t quite see the title,
and he is already so lost in the words I don’t want
to interrupt him to ask. My mother, nestled
in the other corner of the sofa, is knitting another hat
for another child who needs a hat somewhere in the world.
    Johnson must be worn out from the day’s activities,
whatever they were for him, because he doesn’t lift
a paw to bat at the needles flashing and clicking
above his head or the yarn dangling inches from his
whiskers. Kennedy stretches and yawns, looks up at me
with one eye open, one eye closed. I’d tell him he’s got
sticky-eye (that’s what I call it), but he’d just look at me
as if to say,
Get a life
.
    Grandma shakes her head at something she’s just read,
takes off her drugstore glasses, and gazes into space.
She’ll be going home soon, sitting alone in the living room
she once shared with my grandfather, his chair empty
across from hers, his papers still stacked at its side.
I remember that chair, Grandpa sitting there, me
climbing up his leg and onto his knees when I was little
and he was still strong. How he would bounce me to Boston
to get a loaf of bread. Trot trot home again . . .
    Grandma sighs, then winks when she sees me looking.
My mother curses a missed stitch, my father grunts
and turns a page. I roll my head slowly to relieve the crick
that has announced itself in my neck and return to my book
reluctantly, not quite ready to leave Paintbrush Falls, New York,
for Tiburon, South Carolina, to join Lily in her search for a home
when I have found what she is looking for right here.

A Nice Lunch
    â€œI’ll make us a nice lunch,” Grandma says
the next morning when I find her packing
and go into a pout. “Just you and me.
Your parents will be out. Now, put your
lip back where it belongs.” She hands me
a shawl, the one she calls her Carmen
shawl. “Here,” she says, “this goes perfectly
with your eyes.”
    â€œFor keeps?” I ask as if I’m five years old.
“For keeps,” she says with a wink. “And I’m just
getting myself organized. I don’t leave until next week,
so who knows what other treasures I may yet
bestow upon you. In the meanwhile, how about
I make us a nice lunch?”
    How did this happen?
When did my grandmother
become my best friend?

What If
    It is not clear what some students at South Hadley High
School expected to achieve by subjecting a freshman
to the relentless taunting described by a prosecutor and
classmates. Certainly not her suicide.
    â€”The New York Times
    The air is sweet and full of spring
as I read these words, sitting
with my grandmother