Anastasia Has the Answers Read Free Page A

knew how lethal it could be.
    "BASH!" Sam came zooming across the room, and the tower flew in all directions.
    "Good one, Sam," said Gertrude. "But time to pick up the blocks, now. I'm going to start dinner."
    "I invented that game," Anastasia said, as she knelt to help pick up the blocks. "I invented that game when I was three years old, just the age Sam is right now. I probably should have patented it and copyrighted it and sold it. I would be a millionaire by now."
    "I invented blue milk from food coloring," Sam said. "Could I be a millionaire from that?"
    Anastasia shrugged. "I dunno. What about you, Gertrude? Did you ever invent anything?"
    Mrs. Stein thought. "Crawling on the floor playing with blocks at the age of seventy-six, as a cure for arthritis. How about that?"
    "I don't think it'll sell," Anastasia told her regretfully.

3

    Sam was asleep, and Anastasia had helped Gertrude with the dishes. Now that Gertrude was ensconced in front of the TV with her favorite program on, Anastasia went to the garage.
    It was dark outside, and she turned on the light inside the garage and looked around. There was her parents' battered old car—they had taken a cab to the airport—and there was her father's workbench, with a few scattered tools.
    Anastasia grinned. Her father was a terrible handyman. He hit his thumb if he tried to hammer a nail; and if he happened to hit the nail, it bent.
He had to squint through his glasses, aiming a screwdriver at the head of a screw, and even then, he rarely hit it right.
    Once, they had decided that Sam would enjoy a tree house. So Anastasia and her father went to the lumberyard and bought wood.
    The boards were still there, leaning against the wall of the garage.
    The nails were still there, in ajar.
    The hammer was still there, lying on the workbench.
    The book with pictures of wonderful tree houses—the same book that had given them the idea—was still there, very dusty, on a shelf in the garage.
    And the tree was still there, in the yard.
    But they never could quite figure out how to build the tree house.
    She looked around some more. There was the lawn mower, standing in the corner, waiting for summer. There was the snow shovel, standing beside it. There were her mother's gardening tools and a few flowerpots. A plastic gas container. Two gallons of paint—one of these days, her father kept saying, he would paint the trim on the house. Sam's tricycle. Sam's plastic wading pool, deflated. And there—there it was, what Anastasia had been looking for.
    A rope.
    Anastasia looked up. The cobwebbed ceiling of the garage was nowhere near as high as the ceiling of the school gym. But there were beams up there,
strong enough to hold a rope, and if she could figure out how to tie the rope around one of them, she would have a place to practice.
    Anastasia was absolutely determined that she would learn to climb a rope and that the day would come when Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby would look at her with awe and delight instead of pity.
    She could
see
that awed and delighted face, brown and cheekboned, poking up out of the neck of a Vassar sweat shirt, in her imagination.
    "Anastasia Krupnik!" Ms. Willoughby would say. "I have never in my entire life known a young girl as determined and energetic and dedicated and (well, why not, since it was just a fantasy, anyway?)
gifted
at rope-climbing as you!"
    Anastasia picked up the heavy, coiled rope and eyed the distance to the roof of the garage warily.
    Her fantasy continued. A headline in the
Boston Globe:
BOSTON'S GOLD MEDALIST RETURNS FROM OLYMPICS. In smaller letters: ANASTASIA KRUPNIK TAKES GOLD IN ROPE-CLIMBING . A picture: Anastasia smiling graciously, humbly, wearing her gleaming medal. The caption: "I owe my success to my seventh-grade gym teacher, Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby." And another picture in the center spread after the reader had turned the pages for the rest of the article: Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby herself, hugging Anastasia warmly,