Susan Phillips - Fancy Pants

Dallie draped his arm over Francesca's shoulder. "You got any idea why he has a picture of two doorknobs on that banner?"

"It's a barbell," she replied, holding her breath as Gerry just cleared the seawall and landed on the lawn about fifty yards away.

"Holly Grace is really going to give him hell for this," he commented, thoroughly enjoying himself. "Damn, she's mad."

"Mad" wasn't the word for it. Holly Grace was furious. She was so enraged she could barely contain herself. While Gerry struggled to gather up the parachute, she screamed every foul word at him that she could think of.

He balled the parachute and the banner together and threw them down on the grass so that he finally had two hands free to deal with her. When he saw her flushed face and felt the heat of her fury, he realized he was going to need both of them.

"I'll never forgive you for this," she cried, taking a punch at his arm, to the delight of the network cameramen. "You don't have enough experience to make a jump like that. You could have been killed.

I wish you had been!"

He pulled off his helmet, and his curly hair was as disheveled as a dark angel's. "I've been trying to talk

to you for weeks, but you wouldn't see me. Besides, I thought you'd like it."

"Like it!" She nearly spit at him. "I've never been so humiliated in my life! You've made a spectacle out of me. You don't have an ounce of common sense. Not one single ounce."

"Gerry!" He heard Naomi call out and from the corner of his eye, he saw the statue's security people running toward him.

He knew he didn't have much time. What he had done was definitely illegal, and he didn't doubt for a moment that they were going to arrest him. "I just publicly committed myself to you, Holly Grace. What more do you want from me?"

"You publicly made a fool of yourself. Jumping out of an airplane and almost drowning with that stupid banner. And why did you put a dog bone on it? Do you mind telling me what you meant by that?"

"Dog bone?" Gerry threw up his arms in frustration. No matter what he did, he couldn't seem to please this woman, and if he lost her this time, he would never get her back. Just the thought of losing her gave him a cold chill. Holly Grace Beaudine was the one woman he'd never been able to bring to heel, the one woman who made him feel that he could conquer the world, and he needed her the same way he needed oxygen.

The security people had almost reached him. "Are you blind, Holly Grace? That wasn't a dog bone. Jesus, I just made the most terrifying commitment of my entire life, and you missed the whole point."

"What are you talking about?"

"It was a baby rattle!"

The first two security men grabbed him.

"A baby rattle?" Her fierce expression melted in surprise and her voice softened. "That was a baby rattie?"

A third security officer pushed Holly Grace aside. Apparently deciding Gerry wasn't going to give them any real trouble, the officer cuffed Gerry's hands in front of his body.

"Marry me, Holly Grace," Gerry said, ignoring the fact that his rights were being read to him. "Marry me and have my baby-have a dozen of them! Just don't ever leave me."

"Oh, Gerry…" She stood looking at him with her heart in her eyes, and the love he felt for her swelled in his chest until he ached. The security people didn't want to look like bad guys in front of the press, so they let him lift his cuffed wrists and slip his arms over her head. He kissed her so intently that he forgot to make sure they were turned to face the network television cameras.

Luckily, Gerry had a partner who wasn't as easily distracted by females.

Far overhead, from a small window in the crown of the Statue of Liberty, another banner began to unfurl, this one a bright canary yellow. It was made from a synthetic material that had been developed for the space program-a material that was lightweight and could be compacted for portability into a package not much bigger than a wallet, and then would generously expand once it was released. The canary yellow banner slipped down over Lady Liberty's forehead, unrolled along the length of her nose, and gradually opened as it came to a stop at the base of her chin. Its message was clearly legible from the ground, simply printed in seven thick black letters.

NO NUKES

Francesca saw it first. And then Dallie. Gerry, who had reluctantly ended his embrace with Holly Grace, smiled when he spotted it and gave her a quick kiss on the nose. Then he lifted his handcuffed wrists to the sky, tilted back his head, and balled his hands into fists. "Way to go, Teddy!" he cried.

Teddy!

Francesca and Dallie looked at each other in alarm and then began running across the lawn toward the entrance to the statue.

Holly Grace shook her head at Gerry, not sure whether she should laugh or cry, knowing only that she had an interesting life ahead of her.

"It was too good an opportunity to pass up," he began to explain. "All these cameras-"

"Be quiet, Gerry, and tell me how I go about getting you out of jail." It was a skill that Holly Grace suspected she would be making good use of in the years to come.

"I love you, babe," he said.

"I love you, too," she replied.

Political actions weren't unknown at the Statue of Liberty. In the sixties, Cuban exiles chained themselves to Liberty's feet; in the seventies, anti-war veterans hung an upside-down flag from the crown; and in the eighties, two mountain climbers scaled the surface of the statue to protest the continued imprisonment of one of the Black Panthers. Political actions weren't unknown, but none of them had ever involved a kid.

Teddy sat by himself in the hallway outside the statue's security office. From behind the closed door, he could hear his mom's voice and occasionally Dallie's. One of the park rangers had brought him a can of 7-Up, but he couldn't drink it.

The week before, when Gerry had taken Teddy over to Naomi's to see her new baby, Teddy overheard Gerry and Naomi arguing, and that was how he learned about Gerry's plan to parachute onto the island. When Gerry had taken him home, Teddy questioned him. He felt like a hotshot when Gerry finally confided in him, even though he thought it might have been just because Gerry was feeling sad about losing Holly Grace.

They had talked about the No Nukes banner, and Teddy begged Gerry to let him help, but Gerry said he was too young. Teddy hadn't given up. For two months he had been trying to think of a social studies project spectacular enough to impress Miss Pearson, and he realized this was it. When he tried to explain that, Gerry had given him a long lecture about how political dissent shouldn't be undertaken for selfish reasons. Teddy had listened closely and pretended to agree, but he really wanted an A on his social studies project. Dorky old Milton Grossman had only visited Mayor Koch's office, and Miss Pearson had given him an A.

It defied Teddy's imagination to think what she might do to a kid who helped disarm the world!

Now that he had to face the consequences, however, Teddy knew that breaking the window in the crown had been stupid. But what else could he have done? Gerry had explained to him that the windows in the crown opened with a special key some of the maintenance people carried. One of those people was a friend of Gerry's, and this guy had promised to slip up into the crown as soon as the President's security people left and unlock the middle window. But when Teddy got to the crown, all sweaty and out of breath from having climbed the stairs as fast as he could to get there ahead of everybody else, something had gone wrong because the window was still locked.

Gerry had told Teddy that if there was a problem with the window he was supposed to climb right back down and forget about the No Nukes banner, but Teddy had too much at stake. Quickly, before he had time to think about what he was doing, he had snatched the metal lid from a trash can and banged it against the small center window a few times. After four tries, he finally broke the glass. It had probably only been an echo in the crown, but when the glass broke, he thought he could hear the statue cry out.