Forever Twelve by Stacy McAnulty

Author:Stacy McAnulty [McAnulty, Stacy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

IVY

Yesterday, two seconds after Este stormed out of the dining hall, Ivy’s brain had finally put it together. Einstein! She remembered that at her going-away party, Gigi had told a story about meeting Albert Einstein on a train to Boston. It had seemed like pure fiction at the time. Mr. Freeman certainly didn’t believe it. Now Abigail also claimed to have met the famous physicist. It could not be a coincidence. Could it?

Ivy sat alone on her bed with her laptop balanced on pillows. The Pine Grove Assisted Living logo and a message thanking her for patiently waiting were on the screen. Ivy nervously cracked her knuckles. When she lived at home, Ivy and her dad had dropped in to see Gigi in person about once a month. But during the COVID pandemic, they were forced to video-chat. The first time they tried, Gigi was confused and thought she was watching the local news.

The video came to life. A young man on the screen spoke to Ivy’s great-grandmother, who was sitting in a chair. “Here ya go, Miss Betty. You holler if you need me.”

“Ivy!” Her great-grandmother smiled and squeezed her hands against her chest. “It’s so good to see you, my dear.”

“Hi, Gigi, how are you?”

“Still kicking.” She wore a neon-pink jacket that was so bright it hurt Ivy’s eyes. “I want to hear about you and your fancy school.”

“It’s not fancy.” In Ivy’s opinion, a fancy boarding school would require uniforms, and students would live in a castle. Or maybe the only boarding school she could picture—before coming to West Archer—was Hogwarts. “It’s a lot of work but amazing. We recently learned about Einstein and his theory of relativity. Didn’t you meet Einstein once?”

Gigi laughed. “I don’t think so. That would have been a hoot.”

Ivy’s stomach sank. Maybe her assumption was wrong. She was staring off into her room, trying to think of a way to jog Gigi’s memory, when her eyes landed on her cocoa-stained sweatshirt.

Betty is important. That’s what Ronan had said. It didn’t make sense then and still didn’t. But Ivy now had a hunch—an improbable, impossible hunch.

“The reason I’m calling is,” Ivy began, “I need your help on a project. Can you tell me about your family? Your mom and dad and siblings.” Her lie about the genealogy project was getting a lot of mileage with her dad and now Gigi.

“I see. You don’t want to chat with your great-grandmother. You only want me to do your homework.” The crooked smile on Gigi’s face gave away that her feelings weren’t actually hurt. “My parents owned a small farm in western Pennsylvania. My father also fixed cars, and my mother worked in a bakery on weekends. Money was always tight with eleven children.”

“Eleven? That’s a lot of kids.” Ivy had thought her mother’s side of the family was tiny. Gigi had just expanded it exponentially.

“Yes. My mother had a set of twins, and four of us were adopted. Still, she was pregnant six times in eight years.

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