by Obert Skye
My coward friends took off running down the street and left me alone with Mrs. Gwinn.
After only two minutes inside Mrs. Gwinn’s smelly house, here’s what I learned. One: she grunts a lot when she walks. I know this because I had to listen to her make noises that most animals would be embarrassed to have associated with them.
The second thing I learned about her was when she says “move a few boxes upstairs,” what she really means is “move hundreds of boxes filled with heavy books up a tall, thin set of rickety steps.”
There were so many boxes in her basement.
I started the afternoon liking books. I ended the afternoon with a sore back and being mad at them. When it reached seven o’clock, I wasn’t even halfway done, but the Gwinnster stopped me and handed me a note for my mother and then told me I could go. I took the envelope and ran from the house. I didn’t stop running until I reached my bedroom window. I slid it open, climbed into my room, and collapsed on my bed. I was beat, bothered, bruised, and at the end of my rope. But at least I had the winter break party tomorrow at Janae’s to look forward to. And it was way better looking forward to something like that than looking backward at what I’d just left.
CHAPTER 5
UNJUSTLY PUNISHED
I had been lying on my bed for only two minutes when Libby stuck her big head in my bedroom and yelled,
Ten seconds later, my mother was in my room questioning me about Mrs. Gwinn. She was curious to know what went on in her house. So I told her the truth and nothing but the truth.
I handed my mom the note Mrs. Gwinn had given me. I figured it was a card to thank me and let me know that I was forgiven for the soggy newspaper. My mother opened the envelope and read the note aloud.
I couldn’t believe it. It would take hours to move the rest of those boxes. Besides, I couldn’t go back the next day, because it was Janae’s winter break party. The Gwinnster would have to wait.
I told my mom about Janae’s party and how important it was for me to show up, but she still wouldn’t back down. She thought the most important thing a young man could do was carry boxes of books that no one was ever going to read upstairs while missing out on the social event of the season.
My mom didn’t like the way I was talking. I should have played it cool. I should have just kept my mouth shut and waited until she was napping to ask permission to skip out on Mrs. Gwinn and go to Janae’s tomorrow. I know all that, but for some reason, I kept saying things that were making the situation even messier.
I had gone too far. The after-school party was slipping away. I saw myself having to spend my whole break moving boxes. I saw my friends having fun and me being surrounded by nothing but bad smells and books. I’d thought books were good, but they were turning out to be bad.
I was getting really upset with my mom. It wasn’t like me to do so, but I was doing so. Sometimes middle-school students don’t know how to feel. We’re funny that way. I want to be a nice person others like to be around, but then sometimes I act like a real wedge. Which is what Jack calls people he thinks are dumb.
Nudge is what Trevor calls people because he thinks wedge sounds too mean. The point is that sometimes I act nudgelike, but it’s not because I want to. My mind is just being stubborn.
I feel like I’ve grown up a lot in the last six months. My closet has been a big part of that, but I’m also halfway done with my last year of middle school. Things are changing. Even my friends are changing. Teddy is taller than ever. Aaron’s voice is super deep now, and every lie he tells sounds serious and like an old man is saying it.
Rourk sweats more than he used to, and Jack … is the same. Trevor also seems a little different. He now wears jeans with weird things and dumb words on the back pockets because, as he puts it,
Things are changing. I’m growing up, I even have a sort-of girlfriend. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to act stubborn, but because I’m getting older, I’m having a hard time keeping my mouth shut. And right then, the more I kept talking, the more determined my mother was to ruin my life.
I wanted to storm off and slam my door, but we were in my room, so I had to wait for my mom to walk out and then shut the door behind her. I was pretty upset. I shook my head, wondering what was going on with my life. I looked at Beardy and growled.
Beardy looked offended—bad-talking books was not something he was fond of. I thought about saying sorry, but I was still too mad. Besides, I always felt stupid apologizing to my doorknob.
When my dad came home that evening, I tried to win him over in an effort to get him to change my mom’s mind about tomorrow. But as usual, he was on my mom’s side. When I told him that he was partly to blame for all of this because he was the one who got the paper route, he said,
I begged him to understand how important Janae’s winter break party was to my social well-being. I reasoned with him about how I needed to be true to my word and show up at the gathering.
I explained my feelings of how I knew deep in my soul that the party was the right thing to do. I offered to move boxes for Mrs. Gwinn on Saturday. I laid out every excuse and reason I could think of, but in the end he said,
AHHHHHHHH! Okay, if you’re an adult reading this, you should know that kids hate hearing things like that. It’s not like this was the end of some epic movie and my dad was handing me a glowing sword to chop apart a bunch of enchanted teacups for my mom.
No, this was my life, and my dad was handing me some line about how I should forget everything I wanted to do and instead do what my mom “kind of” wanted me to do. Well, I “really” wanted to hang out with Janae, and what was happening seemed completely unfair.
After dinner, I climbed out my window to go to the rock island in the cul-de-sac. My friends were there comparing feet and arguing about whose were the biggest.
I told them to stop acting like babies and then started to whine about how my parents weren’t going to let me go to Janae’s tomorrow afternoon. I suggested that maybe all of them should skip the party and come help me move boxes. I tried to make it sound like Mrs. Gwinn’s house was fun, but there wasn’t much I could think of.
They weren’t interested in warm tap water. They were, however, pretty interested in making me feel even more horrible about not being able to go to the party.
I couldn’t stand hearing what they were saying, so I left the island and returned home. I didn’t know why the universe hated me at the moment, but I felt picked on. I also felt bummed out. In fact, in the history of time, I don’t think there had ever been anyone sadder than me.
CHAPTER 6
TOTALLY CREAKY
Friday morning, my father woke me up so that we could hit the paper route. If my bad luck kept going, I would probably mess up again and have to spend my entire winter break cleaning someone’s sewer or repairing a toilet.
I couldn’t believe how sore and out of sorts I was because of Mrs. Gwinn and her stupid books. As I folded the papers to get them ready, I was mad. When we got in the car and began driving around the neighborhood, I was steaming. And when we got to Mrs. Gwinn’s house, I was scared. Instead of throwing her paper, I took it up to the porch and rested it nicely against the door. There was no way she could complain about that. My dad was impressed.
I tried using the positive energy to talk my dad into letting me off the hook. I wanted him to tell me that I could go to Janae’s party. I wanted him to tell me that he and my mom had been wrong and that I was a perfect kid who didn’t need to help Mrs. Gwinn move a single book. So I asked him nicely if he and my mom would please change their minds, and he replied,
When I got to school, we had an assembly during first period. It wasn’t a great assembly. It was just a chance for Mr. Kerr to go on and on about what a wonderful new library we were going to have. He told the crowd that it would be remodeled over winter break, and when we came back to school in two weeks, we would all be blown away by how beautiful it was. At that point in the assembly, Jack decided to yell
,
Everyone laughed, but Mr. Kerr didn’t seem bothered. He just moved his mouth closer to the microphone and said very seriously,
I think he was hoping we’d all laugh, but nobody did. So he said a few more things about how much he loved libraries, and then he laughed his evil laugh and sat down. The assembly ended with Principal Smelt and his band, Leftover Angst, singing a new song they had written about our librarian, Mrs. Lip.
I kept trying to think of a way to get out of going to Mrs. Gwinn’s. I couldn’t act sick because then I wouldn’t be allowed to go to the party. I couldn’t just skip out on Mrs. Gwinn because she would call my mom to see where I was and then I’d be in even more trouble. I couldn’t ask Janae to postpone her party because, well …
I should have felt good when the last bell rang. School was out for the next two weeks. My heart should have been filled with nothing but happiness. Instead, it was filled with things far less joyful.
Right after I got home, I ran to Mrs. Gwinn’s house. I wanted to make one last attempt to get out of moving boxes. I was going to be honest with her. Beneath her rough exterior, there had to be a person who could sympathize with my problem. I would appeal to her human side. I would speak my heart, and she would be so moved that she’d let me go and give me twenty dollars to spend on snacks to bring. I rang her doorbell. The moment she opened up, I stated my case.
After I was done speaking, I took a second to catch my breath. Mrs. Gwinn stared at me until I felt so uncomfortable that I started to sweat. Finally, she opened her mouth and said,
I couldn’t believe it. I had poured my heart out, and she didn’t care. Mrs. Gwinn had no soul, no kindness, and no humanity.
It was bad enough having to carry all those books up the stairs. But what made it even worse was thinking about the things my friends were doing now at Janae’s. Each box of books I carried made me madder and madder and sadder and sadder. It felt like the whole world was out to get me: Mrs. Gwinn, my parents, books, my friends. I couldn’t see how anyone thought this was fair. Why didn’t my friends have my back?
Why didn’t they come help me? I would have helped them. I would never have left my friends to work alone. Okay, sure, three weeks ago, I didn’t help Trevor when he had to clean out his garage, but that was different. I was busy listening to music in my room. And it’s true that I decided to skip out on helping Jack clean his gutters, but I couldn’t make it because there was a show I had DVRed that I had been wanting to watch for almost a month. So maybe I should have been a better friend, but cleaning garages and gutters is nothing like having to miss a party while working for the Gwinn.
After I was halfway done bringing boxes upstairs, Mrs. Gwinn told me to start unloading some of the books onto the empty bookcases.
If I left at six, I would be able to go to the last hour of Janae’s party. I could walk in like a working man, and everyone would be super impressed.
I excitedly carried boxes up the stairs as quickly as I could. I got one bookcase filled and was working on the second when I heard an uncomfortable creaking noise. I looked around, wondering what it was. I checked the clock on the wall. It was five minutes to six, and I had the second bookcase almost filled. My back was sore, my legs were tired, and my stomach felt like a big wad of worry. Plus, my hands and body were completely dirty due to the dusty boxes and old books I had been handling. I continued to put the last books onto the shelf, marveling at some of the awful titles.
It was clear that Mrs. Gwinn’s home library was going to be as mean and angry as she was. The only book I saw of hers that had any interest to me was one that mentioned the Thumb Buddies—the small thumbtack characters that I secretly collect.
But even that book was mean-spirited, and it only had two pages on the Thumb Buddies and no information that I didn’t already know. I filled up another shelf, and again I heard the noise.
For a second, I thought it might be the sound of some new creature. It was not unlike my closet to set things loose in a secretive fashion—Katfish had hunted me down; Seussol had stowed away. But I knew that today was the twenty-third of December, and according to the date I saw when I unlocked Beardy, I wasn’t supposed to get my next visitor until tomorrow, the twenty-fourth.
The sound was louder now. I hollered out for Mrs. Gwinn. I knew from experience that sometimes she made weird noises, and I figured it could easily be her.
If it was her, she wasn’t here to admit it. I put some more books on the shelf and glanced around nervously.
I shelved the last book and twisted to get up off my knees and out of Mrs. Gwinn’s creepy house. As I was turning, the noise screamed again, but this time my eyes could see exactly where it was coming from.…
CHAPTER 7
BENT
The first bookcase was pulling away from the wall and falling DIRECTLY TOWARD ME!
Before I could move out of the way, the bookcase and all its books crashed down on me. The crash caused the second bookshelf to wobble and fall too. I couldn’t move because my legs were tucked underneath me. The books might have protected me from the shelves, but now I was pinned by piles of words and paper.
I tried yelling louder and longer, but still no response. I knew Mrs. Gwinn was in the house, because there was no way she would leave me alone with her stuff. But for some reason, she wasn’t answering my cries for help.
It wasn’t the most urgent situation, but I was stuck, and I needed to get to the party. All of that didn’t matter, however, because as loud as I screamed, nobody came. I tried to wiggle and thrash my way out, but no luck. From where I was buried, I could see that her fruit-themed wall clock said it was already five after six.
I didn’t have any time to mess around, but the clock kept ticking and I was still stuck. At six thirty, I started to panic. And by a quarter to seven, I felt hopeless. What had I been thinking? I knew books were bad! I knew it! The creatures that had come out had tricked me into thinking books would make things better. I was a fool! This was probably the plan the whole time. The creatures had worked me over, and the second I let my guard down, they attacked me with books and were teaching me one last lesson.
When the clock struck seven, I gave up all hope. Not because I thought I was going to die—I mean, I knew my parents would come looking for me eventually, because they had other things they wanted to punish me for. I knew I’d live, but I had no hope for Janae’s. The party was over, and I had been a no-show.
I really needed to move my right arm, because my rear end itched and I couldn’t reach it. I tried to scrunch my buns together to see if that would help, but it didn’t. Finally, I heard Mrs. Gwinn. She came into the room and acted like I had made the mess on purpose.
I explained that I didn’t mean to get buried. I also informed her that I had been trapped for over an hour.
It took a few minutes for her to pull the bookshelves off me. Then she shoved some books like a bulldozer, and I was able to flip over onto my hands and knees and eventually stand. My legs were kind of asleep, and I wobbled like a dying top.
Mrs. Gwinn was not happy about what had happened. She felt bad for her shelves and was ready for me to go. She could also see that there was no way I was ever coming back.
She didn’t say thanks. She just slammed the door as I walked away. My whole body ached. I was also dirty and sore. I felt pretty certain that I never wanted to see a book again.
As I walked past Janae’s house on my way home, I could see the last of her guests leaving. They had huge smiles on their faces and were laughing like people who hadn’t spent their evening buried under books. All five of my friends were already on the island discussing the night.
It didn’t surprise me that Janae had guessed that. Everyone knew Trevor was scared of chewed gum. One time, Jack had put a piece on Trevor’s back, and he had spun around in a circle for fifteen minutes trying to get it off. Eventually, he had to run to his house, where his mom pulled it off while wearing rubber gloves.
Trevor’s mom tried
to ground Jack for doing the prank, but since Jack’s parents couldn’t really get him to behave, she had little success.
I told all my friends what had happened at Mrs. Gwinn’s with the bookshelves attacking me and how I was lucky to be alive.
Unfortunately, they were probably right.
CHAPTER 8
DUBBED OUT
When I got home, I was too tired to climb through my window, so I went to the front door. It was locked. I rang the bell and Libby answered.
