Read Anastasia Again! for Free Online Page A

noise that holds back a brand new laugh.
    ***
    It was hard, packing. Not hard on the muscles—Anastasia had pretty good muscles—but hard on the head. And hard on the heart.
    Anastasia found her mother crying, one afternoon. Not curled-up-on-a-bed, pounding-your-fists-into-the-pillow sort of crying. Just silent, tears-running-down-your-cheeks crying. Her mother was standing in the pantry, packing dishes, and there were tears on her face.
    "Did you hurt yourself?"
    Her mother sniffed and smiled. "No. I'm just sad."
    Anastasia picked up a plate and looked at it. It was an ordinary yellow plate. It made her think of spaghetti and of meat loaf. It didn't make her feel sad.
    "If I were you, I would feel good about this plate," she told her mother. "
Most
people in the suburbs eat off of plastic dishes."
    "Assumptions again."
    "No, really. They do. Except when they eat TV dinners. Those they eat right out of the tin tray."
    Her mother leaned against the cupboard and began to laugh. "Anastasia, haven't you figured out yet that your assumptions all turn out to be
wrong?
Take the new house, for example. You thought we'd have to move to a split-level house in a development. Instead we found that wonderful house with a tower."
    Anastasia shrugged and grinned.
    "How did you become such an expert on suburban life, anyway?"
    "Told you. Books and TV. Mostly TV commercials. You never see
city
people worrying about ring-around-the-collar."
    "Well, we won't worry about it either, not even when we live in the suburbs."
    "Why were the dishes making you cry?"
    "It wasn't the dishes. I was feeling sad about the stained glass in these cupboard doors. I've always loved this stained glass."
    Anastasia looked at the stained-glass windows of the cupboards. She remembered when Sam was a tiny baby, and they had kept his little crib in the pantry. She used to open the cupboard door, stand behind it, and make faces at the baby. The very first time Sam had smiled was when Anastasia had been making a purple-and-amber face at him, wiggling her nose.
    Oh, dear. Now Anastasia was starting to feel sad, too.
    She wiggled the loose pane of colored glass. "Maybe we could take it out and take it with us, Mom."
    "No. It doesn't belong to us."
    "Of
course
it belongs to us! It's always been ours! All my
life
I remember this stained glass!"
    "But we don't own this building, or the things that are part of it. So when we leave, we have to leave all these things for the next people who will live here."
    Good grief. Anastasia hadn't even thought about someone else living in their apartment. All of a sudden, she thought of the wallpaper in her bedroom. She had chosen it herself, when she was eight. It was blue and white, with people riding old-fashioned bicycles on it; some of them were playing flutes and violins while they rode.
    She didn't want anyone else to have that wallpaper. But there was nothing she could do.
    Well, there was something. She thumped her way down the echoey hall to her room, which seemed hollow and empty now. The rug was rolled up, and the curtains had been taken down. Her desk, usually cluttered with
paint boxes and notebooks and comics, was bare, except for the goldfish bowl where Frank swam lazily back and forth, back and forth.
    "Frank," she said, "don't tell anyone that I'm doing this." Frank made a kissing face at her.
    Anastasia found a pencil stub in the trash can. She knelt on the bare floor in a corner of the room and wrote, on the wallpaper, in her best printing: "This is my room forever. Anastasia Krupnik."
    That made her feel better.
    Then she thumped down the hall to her father's study. He was standing beside his own bare desk by the wall with his back to her, and he jumped, startled, when she came in.
    He looked guilty. Anastasia was an expert on guilty looks.
    "What are you doing, Dad?" she asked.
    "Nothing," he said very quickly.
    "Nothing" was what you always said when you were doing something that you felt guilty about and someone