Lois Lowry: The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline

The museum wasn't a long walk. Caroline headed east to Central Park, and then south to 79th Street, where the enormous building covered the entire block.

In front of the museum, next to the huge statue of Theodore Roosevelt, a boy was unwrapping a candy bar. He dropped the wrapper on the museum steps.

"Excuse me," Caroline said to him politely and pointed to the nearby sign: LITTERING IS FILTHY AND SELFISH. SO DON'T DO IT.

The boy looked at her for a moment. Then very carefully he reached into his pocket, removed a wadded-up tissue, and dropped it ostentatiously next to his candy wrapper. He grinned nastily and sauntered off.

Caroline looked around for a policeman. But there were only two nuns, a taxi driver leaning against his parked cab, and a couple of mothers with a troop of Brownies.

She thought about making a citizen's arrest. But the boy was bigger than she—he looked at least fifteen—and besides, he was already down at the corner of 78th Street.

She sighed and picked up his trash with two fingers. It was almost as bad as touching parsnips. She dropped it into a trash can angrily and headed up the steps into the museum.

"Hello, Mr. Erwitt," she called into the office inside the front door. Mr. Erwitt looked up from his desk and waved.

"Hello there, Caroline," he called back. "Great exhibit in Meteorites, Minerals, and Gems this afternoon!"

"Thanks anyway, Mr. Erwitt," she said. "I have work to do on the fourth floor."

She showed her membership card to the woman at the admissions booth, took the little blue button that indicated she hadn't sneaked in, and attached it to her raincoat. Then she walked past the postcard counter and the gift shop, down the hall to the elevator.

The fourth floor was absolutely her favorite place in the entire museum. No question. Biology of Invertebrates, on the first floor, was okay; and so was Small Mammals. On the second floor, African Mammals was kind of interesting because of the stuffed elephants and the gorilla who looked like King Kong and had a leaf sticking out of his mouth to indicate that he was a harmless plant-eater. Primates, on the third floor, wasn't too bad.

But the fourth floor was heaven. The Hall of Early Dinosaurs even had blue walls, which was what Caroline had always supposed heaven had.

She went into the blue-walled Early Dinosaur room and stood there, awed, as she always was. There, in the center, were the Stegosaurus, the Allosaurus, and the gigantic Brontosaurus—only their bones, of course—standing in their huge, awkward poses.

"Hi, you guys," said Caroline. She thought of them as old buddies. She always came in to say "Hi," even when she was going to the Late Dinosaur exhibit, as she was today.

They all smiled their toothy smiles at her. Even Allosaurus, a fierce flesh-eater, looked sweet and happy and a little embarrassed, standing there without his skin, quite helpless.

Then she went over to say "Hi" to the mummified Anatosaurus in his glass case. They had found him in Wyoming, of all places, with his skin still on. Sometimes Caroline wished her father had moved to Wyoming instead of Des Moines; she would be tempted to visit him more often if he had. There might be a mummified Anatosaurus buried in his back yard.

Finally, she walked to the end of the huge room and said, "Greetings, Jaws," to the jaws of the giant extinct shark that hung at the entrance to the room of Fossil Fishes.

The jaws just hung there, wide open, as if they were waiting for a dentist to say "Spit."

Caroline wasn't all that crazy about the shark jaws. They gave her the creeps. But she always said "Greetings" to them, politely, before she left the Hall of Early Dinosaurs. She did it for the same reason that she was always very nice to Marcia-Anne Hennessy, the worst bully in her class at school.

She didn't want the giant shark jaws, or Marcia-Anne Hennessy, ever to take a dislike to her.

Then Caroline took out her notebook and headed to her destination: Late Dinosaurs. That room was just as big, though the walls were green. And in the center, dominating the Triceratops and the two Trach-odonts next to him, stood the hideous, monstrous Tyrannosaurus Rex. Even without his skin, quite naked and with all his bones exposed, he was horrifying. It made Caroline shiver just to look at him. It also gave her a stiff neck, because he was so tall that she almost had to do a backbend to see his face towering above her, looking down, with his sharp teeth exposed. If ever, by magic, he should come to life, Caroline thought a little nervously, he would only have to bend his mammoth neck, snap his jaws, and in one bite he could consume a whole Scout troop.

"Boo!"

Caroline jumped and dropped her pencil.

"Sorry, Caroline," said the man behind her. "I didn't mean to scare you, really."

Caroline smiled sheepishly. "That's okay, Mr. Keretsky. You just startled me. How are you?"

Gregor Keretsky was Caroline's hero. Stacy had two heroes: Woodward and Bernstein, the journalists who had broken the Watergate story in the Washington Post. And J.P.'s hero was Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian electrical engineer who had invented the wireless receiver. Caroline could drive her brother into a screaming rage whenever she wanted to just by referring to Goo-goo Macaroni.

But she did that only when she was driven to desperation, because she knew how sacred people's heroes were. She was lucky that her hero was right here, in the Museum of Natural History, and that he was one of her best friends. Gregor Keretsky was a vertebrate paleontologist, one of the world's experts on dinosaurs. His office was on the fourth floor of the museum, and sometimes he invited Caroline to have a cup of tea with him. She loved his office; it had bookcases filled with every book that had ever been written about dinosaurs, and some of them had been written by Gregor Keretsky himself.

"I'm fine"—her hero grinned—"and I've been looking for you. I knew my little paleontologist friend would be here, because it is Saturday. And I need your help once again, Caroline."

Caroline sighed. Poor Mr. Keretsky. He had this problem that she helped him with from time to time.

"Neckties?" she asked.

He nodded, embarrassed. "Tomorrow I fly to London. There is a conference there on Monday morning."

"Let's take a look," said Caroline, and she followed him to his office.

He closed the door, because this was a very private consultation. Then he took a bag marked "Brooks Brothers" out of a desk drawer. He took three neckties out of the bag and laid them on the top of the desk.

"What do you think?" he asked helplessly.

Poor Mr. Keretsky was colorblind. No one knew, not even his secretary. And he had no wife. Caroline was the only person in the world to whom he had confided his secret problem since 1946. In 1946, when he had left Europe and come to live in the United States, the Department of Motor Vehicles had refused him a driver's license because he couldn't tell a red light from a green.

His suits were all gray, and his shirts were all white. So those were not a problem. But neckties, he said, made him crazy. He desperately needed help with neckties.

"These two," said Caroline decisively after looking them over. "Keep these two. But take this one back." She wrinkled her nose and handed him the third tie. "It's purple and brown. Really ugly, Mr. Keretsky. Very severely ugly."

"Are you sure?" he asked sadly. "I do like the pattern on this one. It has a—what would you say?—a pleasant geometric order to it."

"Nope," said Caroline firmly. "Take it back."

"The woman at the store said that it was very, very attractive," Mr. Keretsky pointed out.

"What did it cost?"

He turned it over and looked at the price tag. "$22.50," he said.