Hal Bennett
Wow! So this is big! Since most of you guys, especially CactusDove, are sure that this is Amanda’s purple pen, we decided to visit the museum for ourselves. RRRules said she had already been there and found that the stone was dedicated to Gemma Valentino, but we just had to see it for ourselves. Nia was tied up after school with model UN so Callie and I hopped on our bikes and rode to the OMAA. I hadn’t been there since middle school when they took us on a field trip to study fossils and rock cycles, thrilling stuff. It still looked the same. We climbed the stairs and hunted around the Main Room for the stone, but we didn’t see it right away. We were feeling pretty much the opposite of patient, so I asked one of the guards where I could find the star sapphire from the newspaper and he pointed to a glass case that we had passed several times. Oops. As soon as we got to the big glass box, Callie let out a gasp.
“SarahB was right. Amanda knew all along.” Callie turned to look at me, her eyes teary. “She figured out everything, the money, my house.” Callie pointed to the center of the case and there it was: a small, delicate necklace on a velvet cushion with a stone of the most intense yellow I had ever seen. Callie grabbed my arm, “This is Amanda’s necklace! And she told me it was sea glass.” She shook her head. “Maria_Hasseem’s theory was dead on. Amanda must have sold it to the museum.”
“So she is Edward Lear,” I said, “it came from her ‘personal collection?’” I laughed, Amanda logic—you just gotta go with it. E. Lear reversed = Lear E. as in Callie Leary. She was too clever. Callie smiled, pressing her face close to the glass of the display case. She reminded me about the time Amanda showed her the necklace.
“Isn’t this beautiful?”
We were sitting in the window seat of the library downtown. Amanda’s hair was long and straight, parted in the middle, and she was wearing a headband with a peace symbol in the center of it around her forehead, and a long-fringed, beaded shirt. She held a tiny piece of yellow glass in her hand, and when I held mine out, she dropped the glass onto my palm. It felt smooth and warm.
“I love the color,” I said.
“I wonder whence it came,” Amanda mused.
“Don’t you know? I mean, where did you find it?” I asked.
“No, I mean in the grand scheme of things. What was it before it was a piece of sea glass?”
I held up the small nugget of yellow and tried to imagine it as part of something bigger. “A necklace?”
“Mmmm, I like that. Maybe an ancient necklace passed down from one generation to another. Mother to daughter for hundreds of years….”
“My mom has a necklace that she got from her,” I said, picturing the small shamrock my mom always wore around her neck. “She got it for her sixteenth birthday.” I didn’t add what I was thinking, which was that I was supposed to get it for my sixteenth birthday.
Assuming, of course, that I ever saw my mother again….
“Look! I was able to mix this exact shade of yellow.”….
“Nice,” I agreed.
“Harder than it might look,” she said. “But worth it. I like a challenge. And check this out.” She pointed to the next page where a picture that seemed to be from a kids book was pasted. Two animals, a bird and a cat, were sitting in a boat with their back to the viewer. “Isn’t that cool?” said Amanda, running her finger over the drawing.
“Um, yeah. Sure.” I waited a second for her to explain, then finally asked, “What is it?”
Amanda was still staring at the page. “It’s the owl and the pussycat.”
“It’s the owl and the pussy cat.”
When she didn’t continue, I prompted, “And…?”
Reciting from memory, Amanda went on, “The owl and the pussycat went to sea/ In a beautiful pea-green boat.”
I’d heard of the owl and the pussycat, but I didn’t see what a pea-green boat had to do with a piece of yellow sea glass. I shook my head. “Okay, you’ve totally lost me.”
“Don’t you remember how it ends?” asked Amanda.
When I said I didn’t, Amanda recited when I guess was the end of the poem
“And hand in hand on the edge of the sand, / they danced by the light of the moon, / The moon, / The moon, / They danced by the light of the moon.”
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