Circa Now Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Amber McRee Turner

  Cover design by Tanya Ross-Hughes

  Photo of girl © Corbis Images

  Additional images © Shutterstock

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion Books, an imprint

  of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

  without written permission from the publisher. For information address

  Disney • Hyperion Books, 125 West End Avenue, New York, NY 10023-6387.

  ISBN 978-1-4231-8783-7

  Visit www.DisneyBooks.com

  E3-20200225-PDJ-PC-VAL

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. Studio Monroe

  2. The Shopt

  3. Undone

  4. Paper Flowers

  5. The Boy

  6. Miles

  7. The Reunion

  8. Code 32

  9. PTSD

  10. Nattie and Nest

  11. Crinkle

  12. Maple Grove

  13. Captain Mann

  14. The Wart Scenario

  15. Something to Smile About

  16. Shopping for Miles

  17. Platypi

  18. No News

  19. Stanley Gets Flattened

  20. Something Important to Say

  21. Pink Lady

  22. The Gush of a Memory

  23. Three Snaps

  24. On the Chin

  25. Kinfolk

  26. The Message

  27. All Those Pages Underneath

  28. Missing Found Person

  29. Parting Clouds

  30. Mrs. Linholt Can Wait

  31. A Job to Do

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Circa Monroe’s walk home from school was so gusty, she thought the wind might very well snatch the books from her backpack and rearrange their pages.

  “See you tomorrow, Circ!” said her best friend, Nattie, pulling her hat down over a mess of braids and veering off at her own driveway. “If the school doesn’t get blown to Botswana.”

  “Yeah, we wish,” said Circa. “See ya, Nat.”

  Circa continued a few doors down and steadied herself at her own mailbox. Even from the curb, she could hear her dad’s poor attempt at singing, the warm-cool April wind giving a lift to every sour note. Circa smiled, grabbed a fistful of photography catalogs from the mailbox, and made a run for the door, just fast enough to avoid being blown off course. She straightened the crooked Studio Monroe sign next to the entrance and walked into the big, cozy room at the end of her house.

  “I’m home,” she called to her mom, whose legs jutted out beneath a giant tropical photo backdrop. The wind that snuck inside pressed the backdrop up against Laurel Monroe’s short, slight frame, making her look like a dancing palm tree.

  “Hey, babe,” said the mom behind the tree. “Glad you made it. I was about to send your dad out to fetch you.”

  “My bags are packed…” Dad sang out super loud and twangy from his swivel office chair at the other end of the room. He had headphones in his ears, and his back was turned to the door.

  “So how was your day?” Mom asked.

  “Okay,” Circa said, tossing her backpack onto the floor.

  “My guitar too…” Dad sang.

  “Truly okay?” said Mom, lowering the backdrop enough to show her skeptical eyes. Circa knew well that Mom knew well that many school days had been less-than-stellar this year, thanks to a couple of what Dad liked to call “persistent nasties” in Circa’s class.

  “Medium okay,” answered Circa, sneaking catlike across the room toward Dad. She crouched behind his chair and got set to pinch the headphones from his ears.

  Dad threw back his head and crooned even louder. “Taxi’s coming. Nothing I can do.”

  Circa stealthily reached up toward his headphones. Then, in a flash, Dad spun his office chair around and shouted, “Well, I’ll be! Lookee who’s home!”

  Circa stumbled backward. “Dad!” she gasped. “I thought I had you.”

  “Nope.” Dad unplugged his headphones. “Saw your reflection in the monitor,” he said smugly. “Not to mention that an eleven-year-old ought to know by now that three thirty is her dad’s favorite time of day for one reason and one reason only.”

  Dad reached out for Circa and wrapped her in a big, solid hug. This coffee-smelling, corduroy-soft start to an afternoon in the studio made three thirty a pretty good time of day for her too.

  “Got any homework?” Mom said as she tacked the big backdrop to the wall.

  “Just some Spanish vocabulary is all,” said Circa. “But I can practice that with Nat on the way to school tomorrow.”

  “Well, then, by all means, come on over and join me,” said Dad. He pushed a plate of apple slices across the desk toward Circa and picked the topmost sliver for himself. Circa settled herself onto the tall wooden stool near his chair and grabbed the next slice.

  “Check it out,” Dad said, admiring his piece of apple. “Thinnest ever.”

  Circa held her own slice up between her face and Dad’s iPod screen. It was so thin she could make out the shapes on the album art on the little screen through it. It was the head and shoulders of a man wearing a big hat.

  “This is for real thinnest ever,” Circa said, making her dad puff up with pride. Slicing apples superthin was one of his best food tricks. “Um, Dad, you do realize you were listening to that exact same song when I left this morning.”

  “I know,” he said. “I keep waiting for it to end. It must be the longest song in the world.”

  Dad opened wide and placed another slice of apple on his tongue, then backed it into his mouth. “Good thing it’s my favorite, huh?” he said as he chewed.

  “Maybe not a good thing for the people who have to hear you sing it,” said Circa, grinning. Mom snorted out an amen from across the studio.

  Circa picked through the apple stack to find the flimsiest one and surveyed the room to test what shapes she could see through it. Through the apple, Studio Monroe was a mushy blur of shadowy shapes. Behind the apple, Studio Monroe was a cavey-comfy place with low ceilings, wood-paneled walls, and squishy tan carpet. Halfway down one of the long walls was a door that led to the kitchen, with the living room just off of that, but truth be told most of the Monroe living was done right here. The place was lit by a scattering of mismatched lamps made from antique camera equipment. The north end of the room, where Laurel Monroe ran her portrait business, was full of neatly arranged tripods and props. Down there, the walls were decorated with smiling portraits of folks of all ages: school photos, engagement pictures, anniversary shots.

  The south end of the room, where Circa sat, was where Dad worked to restore damaged photos to their original luster. To do this, all he really needed was a scanner, his computer, and a printer, but his desk was still a mess of papers held down by coffee mugs. The walls on his end of the studio were crowded with a magnificent display of befores and afters, framed duos of faded, torn, or scorched images from the past married up with their patched and revived counterparts. These were the things that mad
e up Studio Monroe, and it was all beautiful to Circa, even distorted through a piece of apple.

  Dad wadded up the cord to his headphones and tossed them aside as Mom yanked another tightly rolled backdrop from a long cardboard box across the way.

  “How’s Mom feeling today?” Circa whispered to Dad.

  “Quiet,” he said. “Kind of teetering on the edge of a blue funk, but I’m keeping an eye on her.”

  Circa watched Mom unroll the backdrop and smooth it out onto the floor to check for flaws. Mom had once described depression as carrying a wet bag of sand everywhere you go. Heavy and messy and hard to shake. Circa knew Mom had tried at least three different doctors in the past for her bouts with sadness and anxiety. There was one who insisted she take a medicine even though it gave her awful nightmares, another who totally creeped her out by hugging her too close, and another who said all she really needed was to go out and get some sun. “Quacks,” Dad would call them each time that Mom came home upset by a visit. Then he would just work harder to help her get by. Sometimes just his company was enough, but for particularly anxious times, she had tiny pink tablets of some kind of store-brand medicine he’d buy for her.

  “So tell me, Circ, what was the best part and worst part of your day today?” Dad said.

  “Let’s see,” said Circa, turning her attention back to the plate of apple. “Best is hard to pick, because I aced my history test and my math quiz.”

  “That’s my girl.” Dad nodded.

  “Worst is easy though,” she said. “Chad Betts called me Circus Monroe again.”

  Circa held her left hand up and folded in all the fingers but the one that wasn’t there.

  “Chad Betts?” said Dad. “You’re telling me the kid that once peed his pants inside this very studio was making fun of you for not having a pinkie finger?”

  “Yeah,” said Circa. “Nat told him to quit it, and then we joked I should just call him something right back. Like Chad Wets or something.”

  This prompted a look of concern from Dad. He started tapping on his front teeth with his fingernail.

  “Don’t worry,” Circa continued. “I handled it all nice, just like you would have told me to.”

  Dad quit tapping and gave her his usual one-sided smile.

  “But then Chad still sang circus music every time he passed me today,” she added, killing Dad’s smile.

  “Well, Circ, sometimes we don’t get the results we want right away,” he said, jiggling the mouse to wake up the computer. “And just because doing the right thing can be prickly, that doesn’t make it any less right.”

  “Sure felt extra prickly today,” said Circa.

  Dad patted her on the knee. “I will tell you this,” he said. “I’m even more proud of you for how you handled Chad Betts than I am about the quizzes.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” From the corner of her eye, Circa could see Mom remove Chad Betts’s sixth-grade picture off her gallery of portrait work and drop it into the trash can. Her own tiny revenge.

  Dad double-clicked to open his Photoshop program.

  “Whatcha working on today?” Circa asked, leaning onto her elbows to get a close look at the screen. “Any Maple Grove stuff?”

  “I wish,” Dad said. “You and I need to pay a visit to Maple Grove sometime this week, so we can pick up a new batch of photos to scan. There’s a ton of work to be done by August.”

  Dad’s suggestion gave Circa a stir inside. She loved to visit the Maple Grove Residence. Her own great-aunt, Ruby, had been one of the first people to move into Maple Grove when it opened a couple years back, and Circa and Dad had been going there every other week since then. Circa loved getting to drink glass-bottle Cokes and play hair salon with Great-Aunt Ruby.

  After Ruby died, Circa got to know the other people who lived up there, like Miss Rempy and Hank-not-the-Mayor and Maki Lee, each of whom sometimes knew her right back and sometimes didn’t. Ever since Dad had explained to her what the residence actually was—a place for people who have sicknesses like Alzheimer’s and dementia that cause them to forget things—Circa appreciated her new friends even more, knowing how much they enjoyed sharing found bits of stories with other people. “After all,” Dad had always said, “just because the book’s too high up on the shelf to reach, doesn’t mean the story’s not there.”

  “How many do you have left to work on?” asked Circa.

  “As it stands, still dozens,” Dad said. “After our next visit, maybe a dozen more.”

  In the past year, Circa and Dad had been to Maple Grove a bunch of extra times to help plan the details of their big “Memory Wall” project. Pictures of things like old school buildings, local restaurants, climbing trees, parks, and picnics—either from the residents of Maple Grove or from local archives—would soon hang together to fill a whole wall with sparks of memory…and Studio Monroe would be restoring all of it.

  She and Dad loved to look at the big empty wall in the Maple Grove lobby and daydream about the finished project, and how, come August, it would be a magnificent showcase of the missing pieces of their friends’ lives. It made Circa feel proud that Studio Monroe was going to do something good for people whose actual memories were as torn and faded as their paper ones. To help them reach their stories.

  “I can’t wait till you fix up some of the Nelsons’ pictures,” said Circa. “Lily said they used to win swing dance contests.”

  “I can picture it in my head,” Dad said as he clicked FILE: OPEN to bring up a fresh photo. “I’d rather be swing dancing myself than working on this one here.”

  “Not a Maple Grove picture?” said Circa.

  “Unfortunately, no,” said Dad. “It’s the Linholt family reunion one.”

  “I thought you were finished with that,” she said.

  “Yeah, I thought I was too,” said Dad. “But that nitpicking Mrs. Linholt called today in a huff about the last proof I e-mailed her. Seems I hadn’t made the skin coloring ‘pink and healthy’ enough, and she thought I’d stretched the photo out and made everybody—namely herself—look fatter.”

  Circa laughed, accidentally spitting a fleck of apple onto the screen. “Oops, sorry,” she said, getting even more tickled.

  “Anyway,” Dad said, wiping the monitor dramatically with his cuff, “I have to tweak the picture right now. Mrs. Linholt wants to pass out the prints at tonight’s reunion.”

  “Where is it?” said Circa.

  “The same park that this one was taken,” said Dad.

  “Even if it’s stormy?” said Circa.

  “Yeah, Todd, can you pinken up that sky too?” Mom interjected as she tacked a field of yellow tulips to the wall.

  “Nope, changing the weather costs extra,” Dad said. “But you’ve got a point there.…Since no one’s been in to pick this up, all I can figure is they must have rescheduled.”

  Circa leaned closer. “So are you going to make Mrs. Linholt look skinnier?” she asked.

  “Nope,” Dad said with a smile. “Plastic surgery costs extra too.”

  He dug around on his desk for the original, damaged Linholt reunion photo. “Do you know, I’ve spent more time on this than on any one picture before.” He held up the damaged reunion pic and compared it with the skin tones on the computer.

  “Looks the same to me,” said Circa.

  “Me too,” he said. “But if the Linholts want to be pinker, I guess I’ll make the Linholts pinker.”

  Circa finished off the apple stack while Dad worked, watching each careful pixel-by-pixel edit. She loved watching him edit a picture, studying his every click and drag and cut and paste and brushstroke, memorizing his techniques in hopes of having her very own swivel chair and computer right next to his someday. Plain and simple, Todd Monroe was the best photo restorer there ever was. He claimed he’d gotten that gene from his own aunt Ruby, who was once a whiz at doing photo
touch-ups back in a time when all the restoring was done with tiny brushes and colored ink. He even kept a collection of her dried-up ink bottles on a shelf above his desk.

  As Circa watched, she wondered how anyone with just brushes and ink could make photo magic happen like Dad and his computer. With the Linholt Reunion photo, like all his others, she could hardly tell where the original photo ended and his work began. And like always, thinking about Dad’s talent soon turned Circa’s mind to the one thing that he did even better than photo restoring. She reached across the desk to a disheveled collection of file folders and pulled out a well-worn folder labeled simply SHOPT.

  That one word alone instantly brightened her pixels.

  “Is there anything new in here?” Circa asked in a half-singy way, hoping Dad had found some time in the midst of Linholt pinkening to add something new to the Shopt file for her.

  Dad got a serious look. “Isn’t it past your bedtime, young lady?”

  Everyone in the room knew good and well that four twenty-one was not past Circa’s bedtime, but for as long as she could remember, Dad had made this dumb joke at least once a day. Rolling her eyes at him, she laid the Shopt folder open across a small, clean portion of desk and began to thumb through the large stack of photo prints. There were dozens of them, each one a copy of a picture that Dad at one time or another had worked his restoration magic on. They came into Studio Monroe as ordinary pictures in need of repair, but this particular collection of prints had since been turned into something extra special just for Circa. Dad had begun by scanning the original photo, and then, on his computer, had made his own custom version by Photoshopping extraordinary things in, sometimes snagging pieces from other pictures, sometimes simply drawing things in fresh. Like fish floating in soap bubbles. Or clouds shaped like trumpets. Even once, a giant glowing hamburger. These whimsical creations he’d nicknamed simply “the Shopt.”

  Dad’s changes somehow made the pictures even better than they ever could have been before. Scenes that started out as big snoozers, like a class picture or yet another wedding shot, seemed to undergo a magical transformation with the Shopt additions. And yet the pictures were only the half of it, for Dad would also always make up a fantastical story to go along with the stuff he’d put in. He’d scribble the story underneath the picture, sometimes continuing onto the back with his crazy tale.