Meli's Way

What Readers are Saying about Meli's Way

Meli's Discoveries

Meli’s Way is a delightful novel featuring a clear-thinking fourteen-year who persuades her mother to allow her to change schools. Meli’s former private school shapes students towards a conventional expectations and values, but when Meli meets Gray, a self-styled dancer who attends the alternative public high school Ciudad City School of the Future, Meli realizes that she too may have an unscripted identity that might be uncovered and developed in a less scripted school. A new set of sharply drawn friends and teachers at the new school—including Tim, the sweet male teacher who becomes the sensible and unrequited object of Meli’s burgeoning romantic interests—raise moral and personal questions for the curious and observant Meli as she sleuths down answers. In the course of this, Meli discovers her own values and—through an accident of classroom study and perspicacious follow-up—her mother’s surprising hidden history. This deeply satisfying book, written in lucid and entertaining prose, is suitable to both adult and young adult readers.

--Carole Rosenthal

By the story's end, we see that that we have learned about about the power of friendship, community, accepting yourself and others, even your mother. For, as Meli valuably learns, parents were once people who lived complex, sometimes troubling lives that had nothing at all to do with you.

-- Diane Simmons 

Meli's Winning Ways

If Meli's Way is in your stack of young adult books to read, move it to the top! If it's not in the stack, put it there. This is one of the best young adult novels I've read in a long time, one that would be an especially good choice for gifted high-school students (because of the issues the plot raises, like having intellectual interests that others don't share). The story is rich in humor, realism, and drama; and the terrorist attack that is the climax of the plot is convincing and sad in its resonance with the aftermath of the attack of 9/11.. The main character, Meli, is winning in her prickliness, social awkwardness, and defensiveness. A lot of the fun of this story is in watching her ability to let her defenses down and yield to feelings for others grow as she makes friends at the charmingly off-beat Ciudad City School of the Future

--Edwina Pendarvis,  

Willis’s writing is concrete and credible. I found the protagonist’s voice believably precocious. Meli’s metaphors often delight and stun, for example, "my hand was like this little tan brown animal stuck to the end of my arm, doing what it wanted, not what I wanted, and his voice was rich and bubbly like sauce cooking slowly." But it’s the insights at the heart of this novel that provide its lasting value. Far beyond mere entertainment, Meli’s Way reveals Willis’s deep understanding of young people; it provides knowledge based on her characters’ (and perhaps her own) experience that could take readers to another level of maturity. At the very least, they will be given plenty of nutritious, non-fattening food for thought.

--Ed Davis 

You're entirely in the mind of this girl, but it's very fascinating, and those of us who are no longer teens are in the process illuminated by her light.

--Allan Appel,  

A most satisfying conclusion for those of us who travel with her!

-- Deborah Clearman

Meli's Way

by Meredith Sue Willis

Published by Montemayor Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2015 Meredith Sue Willis

This book is also available in print from your local bookstore, online seller, and many websites, as well as from the publisher. The ISBN of the Montemayor Press hard copy edition is 978-1-932727-15-9. See more books by Meredith Sue Willis at and more books from Montemayor Press at Montemayor Press, Montemayor Press, P.O. Box 546, Montpelier, VT 05601

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

Also by Meredith Sue Willis

Fiction for Adults and Teens

A Space Apart

Higher Ground

Only Great Changes

Quilt Pieces (with Jane Wilson Joyce)

In the Mountains of America

Trespassers

Oradell at Sea

The City Built of Starships

Out of the Mountains

Re-Visions

Love Palace

For Children

The Secret Super Powers of Marco

Marco’s Monster

Billie of Fish House Lane

Nonfiction on Writing

Personal Fiction Writing

Blazing Pencils

Deep Revision

Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the teenagers I've taught over the years

and the teenager in all ov us

Table of Contents

partone

one

two

three

four

five

six

seven

eight

nine

ten

eleven

twelve

thirteen

fourteen

parttwo

fifteen

partthree

sixteen

seventeen

eighteen

nineteen

twenty

twentyone

abouttheauthor

Meli’s Way

By Meredith Sue Willis

Part One

- 1 -

There’s an explosion at the end of this story, and a little bit of sex in the middle, but those things are just bumps in the road or maybe boulders in a river. They made me change direction, but I’m the river, not the rocks.

The spring before all this happened, I decided to leave Cranfort School. It was the first day after vacation. I was waiting in the rain to catch the uptown bus when I suddenly had a picture of myself in my mind. I saw myself in my school blazer walking down the main corridor with the real Oriental carpets and oak paneling, and all the other girls in their school blazers, and as I walked, my feet went slower and slower, and a sound track said, No, No, No.

My mother always told me Cranfort School was where every girl would go if she could. Not only rich girls but interesting girls went there, she said. Interesting girls like me. Of course, no one showed much interest in me, not that I cared.

When I got to school that day, I watched myself, and it was just what I had imagined on the bus. My feet dragging and my heart beating No no no. Nothing horrible happened. I always got along at Cranfort because I’m tallish but not the tallest and pretty but not that pretty, and mainly, because I’m good at being quiet. I even had a couple of semi-friends at Cranfort, weird kids like me, but that day, even with friends, the voice kept booming, No. No. No.

At lunch I took my tangerine and peanut butter and sprouts on whole wheat sandwich and slipped out the emergency exit door. The older girls kept the door propped open so they could go outside and smoke without the alarm going off. I passed the garbage bins, and walked over to the Museum eating my sandwich and tangerine.

The Museum is only a block and a half from Cranfort, and as often as possible I used to slip out and go look at the Chinese vases and then slip back. I had had days of No before, and it had always been enough to go to the vases until I was calm and accepted my fate. This day the rain had stopped although it was still misty, and I could feel the No dying down as I crossed Fifth Avenue.

What I love most in the Museum up there on the Chinese vase balcony is their graceful giant shapes and splendid colors that haven’t dimmed in eight hundred years. This is what makes me a weird kid. Sometimes if I stand in front of them very quietly, concentrating, there will be a little shudder in the air, and then I’ll be inside, in this perfect place, and whatever problem I have makes a shift, and I either have a solution or it isn’t a problem anymore.

But that day I never got to the vases.

I passed the people selling artwork and the food carts, toward the big stairs where people sit and eat their lunches. There weren’t too many out that day because the steps were wet, but there was a man playing a violin with his violin case open for you to throw in money. And next to him, a girl was doing something between a gymnastics floor routine and a dance.

A shaft of sun hit her just as I got there, and I stopped to watch. At first I thought she was with the violin player. She was wearing a magenta colored top with fringes and tight exercise pants and ballet slippers and a knitted cap over her hair the same color as her top. She was also wearing a grungy black backpack. She stood on one foot and lifted her other leg high up first in front of her, then she swung it behind and arched her back and made herself into a U and then almost an O.

I was thinking that would be better than going to school, to be a street performer, but all of a sudden the violinist seemed to get mad, and stopped playing. He slammed his case shut over the dollar bills and coins, and moved all the way to the other side of the steps. The people who were watching looked a little confused, but the girl kept right on doing her dance stretch, so I figured she had not been with the violin player after all. A couple of people followed the violinist, but the rest of us watched her, a girl about my age, with light brown skin, doing all kinds of graceful flexible things with her legs and back and arms, making curves that reminded me of the vases.

Then it was like she came out of a trance and noticed us looking at her, and she giggled and dropped her leg and sort of collapsed into a pile, and when people realized she was through, they went on up to the museum or over to the violinist or the hot dog cart, but I stayed.

I suddenly realized that I knew her. Or rather, I’d seen her at the deli downstairs from our apartment where I get salad bar for me and my mother when Ronnie, our babysitter/housekeeper is off. She always wore red black and green Rasta caps or French berets or fancy crocheted caps like the one she was wearing today.

I never start conversations with strangers, but this was an unusual day. I said, I see you in the deli downstairs from where I live.

She tucked her legs up and held them and looked at me over her knees. Oh yeah, she said. You buy salad.

I’m Melisandre Rossi.

Hi, she said. Gray Jacobs, like the color. I buy potato salad. My mother pretends to be so healthy, but she’s always indulging herself with high cholesterol things like potato salad. Personally, I eat anything. I burn tremendous amounts of calories dancing.

You study dance?

She extended one leg and leaned over it. Yes.

A special school for dancers?

No, I go to a public school, but it’s set up so people can do what they’re interested in. The only thing we do all together is field trips. They’re at the museum today, but I didn’t choose to go in.

She talked on, the way people my age usually do that typically makes me zone out, but she was so nice to look at with her long legs and arms and all that flexibility and how she didn’t seem to mind getting muddy from the wet museum steps. Mainly, though, I was thinking about a school where you could do what you were interested in. It was like the sun had come out a little more.

I said, So at your school, you can get special permission to go to dance classes?

No, it’s part of your Individual Study Plan. Everyone goes out for something–special classes or psychotherapy. The pregnant girls are always out for check-ups. It’s called the Ciudad City School of the Future, and we’re supposed to be speaking Spanish half the time but no one does, and we go on all these crunchy-communal field trips, but it was old furniture today, and I’m totally bored by old furniture. We have plenty of old furniture at my house.

I said, I might like your school. I’ve been thinking of transferring. Maybe I’ll get my mother to find out more it.

She nodded. Cool. Since we live close, I could walk you over in the morning, but you’d have to go home by yourself in the afternoon, because I go to dance class.

I go everywhere by myself all the time, I told her. We talked a little more, and I invited her over to my house after dinner. This was unusual for me, to have a friend over. My weird kid Cranfort friends lived out in Queens somewhere. I knew Ronnie would get all embarrassing and try to make us ice cream sundaes or something for small children instead of teens. Ronnie thinks I don’t have a normal life.

Gray said sure, what time and which apartment number. Like visiting friends was something normal to her.

And then, without ever going up to the balcony to see my jars, I went back to Cranfort and slipped in through the smokers’ door, and all afternoon, there was a dark glass between me and the teachers, but where the booming had been, ideas were dripping out of me like I was a coffee maker. I would transfer to Gray’s school where they let you study whatever you wanted and I would go to the museum every afternoon and in the mornings go out for Chinese lessons and pottery classes. The Cranfort girls hurried around me in their gray flannel skirts and blue blazers, and I was already somewhere else.

I told my mother at dinner two nights later. Gray had been over twice, and I had found out everything I needed to know. My mother had been out one of the nights, and the night she was there, she’d been busy with work. Ronnie of course acted like the queen of England was visiting, just the way I’d known she would. Gray liked our apartment, especially how much space there is and the finches. We have a walk-in cage with finches. Gray told me that she and her mother live in a junior one bedroom with three other people sometimes four in order to make the rent.

I chose Ronnie’s night off to tell my mother. Ronnie is great, but she complicates things because she has lots of opinions, especially now that she’s studying to be a Certified Public Accountant, and also she is harder to get around than my mom, maybe because she’s so much closer to my age.

Mom had been at the gym. Her hair was tied back and she didn’t have any make-up on. She was reading documents at the table. She’s in public relations and specializes in product placement in media, but she says that even though she isn’t a lawyer, she reads contracts as well as one. She’s old, my mom, but very careful with her appearance. Well, to be honest, she’s obsessed about it. She hasn’t had any plastic surgery yet, but she talks about it all the time.

I said, So, I’ve been thinking about something.

She gave a little grunt, deep in her reading.

I said, Cranfort School isn’t really working out for me.

She didn’t hear at first. It takes a while for things to sink in sometimes. We had salads from the deli that night, whole wheat rolls with mine, and wine but no bread with hers. Our dining room table is in the very center of the condo. It is a few steps above the living room with a pass-through to the kitchen on the same level and a high space overhead, right up to the skylight. Gray said it was like being on the deck of a ship with the living room for the sea.

The condo was a gift from my father. My parents never married, but when I was little, he always stayed with us when he was in New York. Then he got married to this younger woman and started a regular family back in Italy, so I have a little half-sister and half-brother I’ve never met in Tuscany, Italy. He still sends money for my education and also gifts, and he and his wife write and say they want me to visit them in Italy.

It isn’t that my mother ignores me, but it does take her a while to come up for air when she’s working. I’m unusually patient for someone my age, and my mother treats me like I’m older than I am. She got very dependent on me when my father stopped visiting. She also got anxious about everything, finances, her looks, her love life. Sometimes she asks me if she’s been a good mother. And sometimes she goes on and on about how lovely my hair is, my skin, how lucky I am that I got the Mediterranean complexion, it doesn’t age the way Northern European skin like hers does. Blah blah blah.

I’m always having to reassure her, like she was the daughter instead of me. There are a lot of ways in which I’m not a typical Cranfort girl or any other kind of girl, really. Another way I’m unusual is that I’m not obsessed about looks like most kids my age, and also all my best friends so far have been adults. Ronnie, for example. She’s of South Asian Indian background