Anastasia Again! by Lois Lowry

up there? May I come up?" It was her mother calling.
    "Sure. Come on up."
    Her mother appeared in her room, puffing from two flights of stairs, but grinning. "Guess what! They still make Stanley and Sibyl! I've just been to the wallpaper store."
    "No kidding!"
    "No kidding. It costs more than it used to, but that's
okay. I ordered three rolls, and it'll be in next week. We'll have to strip off the old stuff. Oh, I see you've already started!"
    "Yeah, I was just lying here thinking, and I was kind of peeling while I was thinking."
    "I like to have something to do with my hands, too, while I'm thinking. Usually I knit. But I can see where peeling wallpaper would be okay, too." Her mother picked at a corner and pulled back a strip of the top layer. "What are you thinking about?"
    One of the good things about Anastasia's mother was that she never laughed at you. Especially not at your problems. Anastasia always imagined Dear Abby bent double most of the day, laughing at people's problems and having to bite her tongue in order to keep a straight face while she wrote what sounded like a very serious answer.
    But her mother was definitely not like that.
    "I have a dumb problem," she said to her mother gloomily. "It's about Sam."
    "About Sam? Has he been coloring in your notebook again? Or poking at Frank Goldfish? It's been at least six months since he's flushed anything down the toilet—I think the last time was my silver earrings, and that was just after Christmas..."
    "No, no. It isn't anything that Sam has done. It's that ... well, you know how weird Sam is."
    "Not
weird,
Anastasia. Unusual, maybe. Precocious."
    Anastasia groaned. "Well, anyway, when we were still living in Cambridge before we moved, I was talking to Robert Giannini—who really
is
weird, by the way, I'm sorry, but there isn't any other word for Robert Giannini—and he asked me how my brother was. He's never seen Sam. And I was trying to describe Sam to Robert Giannini. And somehow, I haven't figured out how, I
never
will figure out
how
, Robert got the idea that Sam was deformed..."
    "Deformed?
Sam?
"
    "Yeah. It was because I was trying to explain how Sam grew at different rates, because that's what Dad told me, that his brain developed faster than some other parts of him. That's
true,
Mom. You know he talks like Einstein, but he still sucks his thumb and wears diapers..."
    "Yes, but that's not
deformed,
Anastasia."
    "I know that, and you know that. But for some reason Robert Giannini got the idea that poor old Sam is crippled..."
    "Handicapped," corrected her mother.
    "Okay, handicapped. And he started being very sad about it and telling me about his retarded cousin and asking if we had taken Sam to Children's Hospital and telling me about the March of Dimes..."
    "Good grief."
    "Mom, you know what? Robert Giannini was making premature assumptions."
    "And you were letting him, Anastasia."
    Anastasia sighed. "I know. But I don't know how it happened. And now, guess what."
    "I'm not sure I want to guess what. You mean there's
more?
"
    "Mom, Robert Giannini is going to ride his bike out here next Saturday."
    Her mother groaned.
    It was at this point, Anastasia was quite sure, that Dear Abby would take a deep breath in order to stop laughing and would write: "Dear Confused, It is very simple to solve this ridiculous problem. You must simply explain to your friend that it was a matter of poor communication, of misunderstanding, of premature assumptions. Tell him the truth about your brother. A real friend will understand."
    But Anastasia's mother didn't say any of that. She didn't laugh. She just groaned.
    "You want to hear a story about a terrible thing I did once?" she asked, looking embarrassed.
    "Yeah." For some reason, when you had done something stupid, it always made you feel better to hear about stupid things that other people had done.
    "Well, do you remember what my name was before I got married?"
    "Sure. Katherine Klein."
    "Well. When I was in art