Anastasia Again! by Lois Lowry Page B

This young girl was not a very adaptable person," she wrote.
    She chewed on her eraser again, and watched Frank
the Second swirl gently around his bowl. Frank hadn't even seemed to notice that he was living in the suburbs now.
    She wondered if whoever published her book would mind if it had footnotes. At the end of the sentence she had just written, she made an asterisk.
    Now it said, "This young girl was not a very adaptable person." *
    At the bottom of the page, she wrote:

7

    Anastasia took the new goldfish up to her tower bedroom. He (she? it was hard to tell, with goldfish) had survived the trip home from the dime store comfortably, and she set the little bowl on her desk beside Frank Goldfish's bowl.
    "Frank," she said, "this is going to be your next-door neighbor."
    Then she opened the little bag of goldfish things on which she had spent most of her savings.
    "Frank," she said, "don't be embarrassed about all this stuff. I got it because I thought Gertrustein would probably like it. I know
you
wouldn't like it." And she put into the new goldfish bowl a handful of pink pebbles, a plastic castle, and a little fake man in a diving suit,
    Frank made a face as if he had eaten a lemon.
    "Yeah, I know, Frank. It's really stupid looking. But you haven't met Gertrustein. Her house is full of stuff that you and I wouldn't like. But
she
likes it, and that's what matters. And this is going to be her goldfish."
    She sprinkled some fish food into both bowls and watched the two goldfish eat. She wondered if goldfish ever felt lonely.
She
was beginning to feel lonely. On the way to the dime store, she had seen some kids her age: a boy mowing a lawn a few houses away and two girls sitting together on a porch. Maybe if she walked past, she could say hi. But what if they didn't say hi back? Or what if they
did?
What would she say next?
    She lay on her bed and looked around the room. Through the windows, she could see the tops of trees and a lot of sky. It was nice, being up in a tower. Vaguely she remembered the fairy tale of Rapunzel, who had been locked in a tower, and who had hung her long hair from the window so that her lover could climb up. That was kind of neat.
    But then Anastasia ran her fingers through her own hair, which had begun to be pretty long—halfway down her back—but she realized that it needed washing again. Yuck. If a lover tried to climb her greasy hair, he would slide back down.
    Not that she wanted a lover, anyway, for pete's sake. But a
friend
would be nice.
    Her old furniture was all in this room, but the room didn't feel familiar yet. She began to wish that she hadn't thrown her orangutan poster away. And she missed her
old wallpaper. She had gotten to know the funny-looking bicycle riders on her old wallpaper quite well. She had even given them names. The lady in the long skirt who rode a unicycle and played a violin was named Sibyl. The man on an old-fashioned racing bike who rode no-hands and played a flute was Stanley. Stanley had chased Sibyl around the walls of her old bedroom for years. She wanted them back.
    This
wallpaper was old, with dumb flowers. In some places, in the corners, it was peeling a little.
    Anastasia clattered down the stairs and found her mother arranging the kitchen cupboards.
    "Mom, I miss Stanley and Sybil."
    Her mother frowned at a souffle dish and finally put it into the cupboard beside the refrigerator.
    "Who are Stanley and Sybil? I thought you would miss Jenny MacCauley."
    "I
do
miss Jenny. But I'm going to call her on the phone. Stanley and Sybil are the people on my wallpaper."
    Her mother smiled. "Oh, of course. I forgot they had names. Stanley had that sexy little mustache. I'm not surprised that you miss them."
    "My room doesn't feel like mine. I
like
it. But it's strange, still."
    Her mother took a heavy bowl out of the packing carton. "If you were a yellow pottery bowl with squiggle designs on your sides, where would you want to live?" she asked.
    Anastasia thought,