Falling In Read online

  Falling In

  Also by Frances O’Roark Dowell

  Dovey Coe

  Where I’d Like to Be

  The Secret Language of Girls

  Chicken Boy

  Shooting the Moon

  The Kind of Friends We Used to Be

  The Phineas L. MacGuire Books

  (Illustrated by Preston McDaniels)

  Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Erupts!

  Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed!

  Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Blasts Off!

  Falling In

  by Frances O’Roark Dowell

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events,

  real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names,

  characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s

  imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or

  persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Frances O’Roark Dowell

  Plant illustrations from USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / Britton, N.L.,

  and A. Brown. 1913. An illustrated flora of the northern United States,

  Canada and the British Possessions. Vol. 3: 361.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a registered trademark

  of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,

  please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949

  or [email protected].

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  Book design and hand-lettering by Sonia Chaghatzbanian

  The text for this book is set in Adobe Caslon.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1209 MTN

  First Edition

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dowell, Frances O’Roark.

  Falling in / Frances O’Roark Dowell. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Middle-schooler Isabelle Bean follows a mouse’s squeak into a closet

  and falls into a parallel universe where the children believe she is the witch they

  have feared for years, finally come to devour them.

  ISBN 978-1-4169-5032-5 (hardcover)

  [1. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.D75455Fal 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009010412

  ISBN 978-1-4169-9902-7 (eBook)

  For my brother De, who helped me make up the story

  about the carnival under the family room closet,

  and for my brother Doug, who believed us

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author would like to acknowledge the following people for their help with this book: Caitlyn Dlouhy, Genius, and Kiley Frank, Assistant Genius, for being, well, geniuses; Lizzy and Barbara Dee, for once again helping me find a title; Sonia Chaghatzbanian for the fabulous jacket and interior design; Alison Velea, copy editor extraordinaire; Elizabeth Blake-Linn, who made the most marvelous cover sparklies sparkle; and Trena Griffith-Hawkins’ 2008–2009 Durham Academy Huskies, Falling In’s first audience. Thanks for listening, guys!

  The author would also like to acknowledge the following members of her tribe, who are all kind, funny, and incredibly good-looking, and who manage against all odds to keep her sane enough to write books: Amy Graham, Kathryn and Tom Harris, Danielle Paul, the O’Roarks, the Dowells, the most fabulous Jonikas gals, and as always, and with big, big love, Clifton, Jack, and Will Dowell (and, of course, Travis).

  There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

  Leonard Cohen

  1

  On the morning this story begins, Isabelle Bean was convinced she was teetering on the edge of the universe. Which is why, instead of copying spelling words off the board as instructed by Mrs. Sharpe, she had her ear pressed to her desk. All morning a strange sensation had buzzed along her fingers every time she’d put her pencil to a piece of paper, and by the time spelling period had come around, she had determined that the buzzing was coming up from the floor, through the desk’s legs, and up to the desktop.

  She closed her eyes in order to concentrate more fully on the buzzing. It was like the buzz that a house makes when it thinks no one’s home—the refrigerator humming a little tune, the computer purring in the corner, cable lines wheezing softly as they snake through the walls and underneath the floorboards.

  Being a careful listener from way back, Isabelle knew this wasn’t the school buzzing. Elliot P. Hangdale Middle School never buzzed. In the mornings it rumbled and moaned as the children settled themselves into their desks and teachers cleared their throats, and in the quiet of the afternoon, students, janitors, and administrative assistants dozing off in every corner, it emitted a low-pitched whine, as though begging someone to bring it a glass of water.

  So if it wasn’t the school that was causing Isabelle’s ear to tingle, then what? Isabelle felt if she could just hold her head still enough, for just a few seconds more, the answer would rise up from the floor and deposit itself into her brain, and maybe, finally, the floor would open up beneath her and she would fall into a far more interesting place than Mrs. Thalia Sharpe’s sixth-grade classroom.

  “Isabelle Bean, I’ve asked you a question! What is your answer, please?”

  Isabelle’s head jerked up and snapped back so violently she was surprised it didn’t fly straight off her neck. Mrs. Sharpe’s squeal of a voice always had this effect on her various limbs and appendages, as though Isabelle were a puppet and Mrs. Sharpe’s high-pitched voice her master. Fortunately for Isabelle, Mrs. Sharpe’s general inclination was to ignore her, but even Mrs. Sharpe couldn’t ignore what appeared to be blatant napping.

  “And your answer is?” Mrs. Sharpe drummed her fingers against her desk to demonstrate her impatience.

  “One hundred ninety-seven?” Isabelle guessed, remembering a moment too late that it was spelling period, not math.

  Her classmates twittered and giggled. One boy in particular, Ferguson Morse, was especially tickled by Isabelle’s answer, and when Ferguson was tickled he began to hiccup violently. Ferguson’s hiccups caused Monroe Lark to laugh so hard he rolled out of his chair and into the middle of the aisle. Within seconds, the class was in a complete uproar.

  “Isabelle Bean!” Mrs. Sharpe bellowed from the front of the classroom, pointing a finger violently toward the door. “To the principal’s office!”

  Isabelle sighed a feather-brush sort of a sigh. Why always the same old thing? Couldn’t Mrs. Sharpe come up with something more original? Why not shoot Isabelle out of a cannon, send her flying over the top of the playground’s monkey bars? Why not enlist her in the Foreign Legion and deport her to deepest, darkest France?

  That was the problem with adults, Isabelle thought sadly as she stood and brushed a few eraser crumbs from her lap. They lacked originality. Why, just this morning over breakfast her mother had made the most hopelessly boring suggestion that she and Isabelle should go shopping this weekend. “Janice Tribble told me there was a big sale at the mall,” her mother had said, reaching across the table
for the jam jar. “Twenty percent off everything at the Junior Wear Jamboree.”

  “You want me to go to the mall?” Isabelle could hardly believe it. The mall? Home of dreary raincoats and unnecessary sportswear? Capital of cinnamon buns that smelled wonderful, but tasted like sponges left for months under the sink? The very thought made Isabelle want to lie down and go to sleep for a hundred years.

  “People do it all the time, Isabelle,” her mother said in a weary voice, a V of disappointment or worry or sadness (or some heavyhearted combination of all three) appearing between her eyes. “It’s quite a convenient way to purchase clothing.”

  “I’ve decided to make all my clothes from now on,” Isabelle reported. The idea had burst into her head that very second, the way ideas did all the time—ideas like little constellations of sparks and light and bright colors—and she immediately liked it. So what if she didn’t exactly know how to sew? So what if she had the dexterity of a webbed-toed walrus? Why should that stop her?

  “Izzy, you can’t even—,” her mother started, then stopped. She studied the jam jar (boysenberry, Isabelle’s favorite), then carefully dolloped a blob onto her toast and spread it with the back of her spoon before cutting the toast into four little triangles. As she lifted a triangle to her mouth and began nibbling on a corner, a splotch of jam dropped on her chin, and Isabelle thought about reaching across the table to dab at it with her napkin, but decided she liked how the blob of jam looked. Like a beauty mark, she thought.

  “I just remembered that I’m allergic to the mall,” Isabelle said after a few moments of her mother’s chewing. “But if you really want to go shopping, maybe we could go to a thrift store. That could be fun, don’t you think?”

  Mrs. Bean grimaced. “Hand-me-down clothes. I wore them my whole childhood. They smell like attics and old people snoring.”

  “Sometimes they do,” Isabelle agreed. “But sometimes they don’t. Besides, you can always wash them.”

  “The smell never goes away, no matter how many washings,” Mrs. Bean said, tucking the last bit of toast in her mouth. Picking up her plate, she stood to go into the kitchen, then paused and looked back at Isabelle, her face brightening. “How about catalogs? We could order you some new things from catalogs.”

  Oh, what was the use? Isabelle nodded at her mother. “Sure, maybe we could do that.”

  Grown-ups, she thought as she grabbed her backpack to go meet the bus. The mall! Catalogs! Why couldn’t they ever do something the slightest bit unusual? Unexpected?

  Laziness, maybe. Or lack of imagination.

  That was it: Lack of imagination.

  Sometimes Isabelle dreaded growing up.

  The path to Vice Principal Closky’s office was a familiar route. Over the years Isabelle had demonstrated an impressive talent for irritating teachers to the extremes of their patience. It wasn’t something she set out to do. In fact, she never quite understood what she did to raise her teachers’ blood pressure to such dangerous levels. Neither did her teachers, and this irritated them even more. Teacher’s college had equipped them to handle nose pickers, fire starters, back talkers, hitters, biters, and whiners. But quiet girls who weren’t shy, girls who talked in riddles but were never actually rude, girls who simply refused to comb those confounded bangs out of their eyes, well, girls like that were beyond them.

  Isabelle slowed to admire the latest crop of fifth-grader artwork hanging on the wall between Ms. Palmer and Mr. Wren’s classrooms and took a moment to peer into the cafeteria, which seemed to her a more cheerful place at nine thirty in the morning than when it was overtaken by screaming kids and yellow trays still steaming from the dishwasher. Reaching the door to Vice Principal Closky’s outer office, she decided a short rest was in order. She enjoyed her visits with the vice principal, but resting now would serve in the long run to delay her return to Mrs. Sharpe’s classroom.

  The hallway’s gray linoleum felt cool beneath her legs, which Isabelle had stretched out in front of her so she could examine her boots. She’d found them the day before in a pile of junk set out for the garbage collectors. Isabelle couldn’t resist picking through roadside junk, much to her mother’s dismay. She’d made loads of good finds over the years, including a bike with a bent tire that had only taken two good thwacks of a hammer to restore to its proper alignment, and a goldfish, still very much alive, swimming in a goldfish bowl. Although her mother had a strict no-pets policy, Isabelle had been able to effectively argue that fish weren’t pets, since you couldn’t actually pet them.

  The boots had been stuffed under the cushion of a crumbling Barcalounger. They were women’s red leather lace-up boots, shiny and new-looking, flat heeled with surprisingly pointy toes. Isabelle’s feet had grown two sizes over the past summer, and the boots fit her nicely once she’d stuffed some toilet paper in them. And while it would be hard to argue that they in any way matched her current outfit of a hooded gray sweater and loose jeans, Isabelle felt that her boots somehow completed her.

  She looked up when she heard giggling voices floating down the hallway. Two girls in gym suits walked toward her—or rather, one was walking and the other was limping, her arm flung around the other girl’s shoulder as if to steady herself. Isabelle recognized the limping girl as Charley Bender.

  If you had to see somebody in the hallway, Charley Bender wasn’t so bad, Isabelle supposed. She wasn’t exactly Isabelle’s cup of tea, but she was okay for the kind of girl who was usually picked third or fourth for games in PE, who stuttered a bit at the beginning of class presentations but calmed down after a minute or two and was only halfway boring on the topic of the Major Domestic Imports of Southern Lithuania.

  But Isabelle had noticed that Charley Bender was one of the few people at school who said hello to Morris Kranhopf, a boy who had to wear a shoe with a special raised heel, because his left leg was shorter than his right. And so she guessed that Charley was decent for someone who was as average as an apricot.

  (Were apricots average? Isabelle wondered. Better make that apples. Or acorns.)

  “Is the nurse in?” Charley called to her, as though Isabelle were the receptionist. “I need her to wrap up my ankle. Gopher hole.”

  “Gopher hole what?” Isabelle asked. “Gopher hole who?”

  “She stepped in a gopher hole, birdbrain,” Charley’s helper said. “She’s lucky she didn’t break her ankle.”

  Lucky, Isabelle mouthed to herself. Now that was the truth. Girls like Charley Bender were usually lucky, in her experience. Why was that? Where other people would have broken five bones in their foot, the Charley Benders of the world only twisted their ankle. They were forever reaching the doorway just as the rain began to pour from the sky, or jumping onto the curb only seconds before the speeding car rounded the corner. What fairies stood over the cradle and cast their lucky spells the day Charley Bender was born?

  “So, have you seen the nurse?” Charley asked again.

  “I’m not here to see the nurse,” Isabelle replied.

  Charley sighed. “Maybe I’ll just check for myself.” She poked her head into the doorway one door down from the principal’s office.

  “Is she there?” her friend asked. “Because Mr. Lasso said I had to get right back to class, but I guess I could wait with you if the nurse isn’t there.”

  “Not there,” Charley reported. “But I can wait by myself. I don’t mind.”

  Not needing any further encouragement, her friend turned and trotted back down the hallway. Charley Bender disappeared into the nurse’s office, and Isabelle resumed admiring her red boots.

  A sudden squeak followed by a piercing squeal punctured Isabelle’s reveries. Both noises came from the nurse’s office. Isabelle was sure the squeal had issued forth from the mouth of Charley Bender, but where had the squeak come from?

  Intrigued, she decided to investigate.

  2

  But first, something more about Isabelle Bean.

  (What? You’re ready to get on with
the story? You hate it when a story gets started and then slows to a complete halt? Me too. I totally sympathize. But this will only take a second—two seconds at most—I promise. Trust me.)

  You know her, of course. Isabelle Bean is the girl who sits in the back corner of the classroom near the pencil sharpener. She isn’t invisible, exactly, but she might as well be. She hardly ever speaks unless spoken to (and then only in riddles), never makes eye contact, has bangs that hang down almost to her nose so even if somebody wanted to look her straight in the eye, they couldn’t.

  It goes without saying that very few people want to look Isabelle Bean straight in the eye.

  It’s not that she smells bad. She doesn’t. She takes a bath every night. And it’s not that she’s dumb, although it’s true she has a bad habit of not doing her homework except when she really feels like it, which is almost never.

  And it’s not that Isabelle Bean is a bully. She’s never beaten anyone up or even made the smallest threat. No one is physically scared of her, except for a few of the very nice girls in Mrs. Sharpe’s class, girls whose hair smells like apple blossoms and whose mothers still read them bedtime stories. These are the girls who sharpen their pencils at home so they never have to walk near Isabelle’s desk.

  There’s a barely visible edge of otherworldliness to Isabelle, a silver thread that runs from the top of her head to the bottom bump of her spine. It frightens other children away. They’re afraid that if they sit too close, the thread will weave itself into their hair and pull them into dark places they can’t find their way out of. A girl named Jenna claimed it reached out to grab her one day as she walked up the aisle on her way to recess, but she had her scissors in her pocket (don’t ask why) and nipped it before it could entangle her.

  A girl who sits in the back corner, a girl who is as silent as a weed, a girl who everyone stays away from as though she were contagious. No friends, of course. Oh, there was that one back in second grade, the one who always came to school with yesterday’s dirt still underneath her nails, but that didn’t last long. The other girls stole her away. It was a game they liked to play, Keep Away from Isabelle. Rules: Leave one girl (that weird Isabelle Bean) outside so other girls (everybody else) can congratulate themselves for being inside. Old news, old news.