“Where did you go?” she asked. “I was beginning to wonder if maybe it was a mistake, bringing you to see all this.”
“It wasn’t,” I said. “Not even a little bit. Sorry if you thought that. I just wanted to run and grab some stuff, and I knew that if I told you that, you’d say you were fine and didn’t need anything, but you totally do, and see? I brought . . . this.”
I swung my backpack around onto the floor beside me, and it hit the ground with a thunk. It was a big bag, a navy blue camping pack Dad had used in college. It was dingy and faded and spattered with paint. One of the straps was broken. Every time we cleaned out the closets, Mom threatened to throw it away, but Dad had refused to let her. “My misspent youth is in that bag,” he’d said to her, more than once. “It’s full of stories the kids aren’t ready for yet. But someday, when they’re older, they’ll want to hear about the year I studied art in Paris, and then hiked across Europe with that banjo player and his dog, don’t you think?”
Then Mom would roll her eyes and storm out, and Sam and I would look at each other and nod, because we did want to hear those stories.
One time, when Mom had suggested we donate the bag to Goodwill, Dad had actually growled at her. “Argh!” he’d said. “How can you suggest such a thing, you unsentimental woman? Don’t you remember that one misty night, on the mountain above Chattanooga?”
He’d raised his eyebrows at her, and Mom had blushed and left the room, shouting, “What am I going to do with you, Paul Davidson!”
Dad had shoved the bag back into the closet then and winked at me. “You never know,” he’d said. “Someone might need this good old bag again someday.”
And now, at last, someone did.
I crouched down beside it, unbuckled the top, and began to unpack everything I’d brought with me. Cans and bottles. Bags and jars. They spread and rolled out onto the floor around me.
“I know it looks like a weird bunch of stuff,” I said without looking up. “But there’s a method to my madness. I promise.”
Jasper leaned over from her chair to see what I was doing as I attempted to untangle a long strand of lights that had gotten caught on the lining of the bag. She shook her head at me. “Nice idea,” she said. “But I told you, I don’t have power.”
“Not so fast,” I said in triumph as the little solar panel came free from the bag. “Check this out.”
“Oooooooh,” said Jasper. She set down her spoon.
“Right?” I said. “We were going to decorate our back deck with these last summer. But it never happened, and they’ve been living in a desk drawer ever since. The trick will just be to put the solar panel somewhere it can get light, but then make sure the bulbs are somewhere nobody can see them through the windows if they happen to walk past.”
“Wow,” said Jasper. “I underestimated you, Leah. You’re a serious sneak, huh?”
“I read a lot of books,” I explained. “You know, about kids having adventures and stuff? I’ve sort of been training for this moment all my life. But I guess every kid fantasizes about running away from home, and . . .”
“No, Jasper said firmly. “They don’t.”
At the sound of her voice, I glanced up from my tangle of lights. “Huh?”
“Kids who might have to do it don’t fantasize about it at all. They plan.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. That . . . makes sense. Sorry.”
I was so curious about why Jasper was here. I wanted that story. I could feel it in my belly, like an actual hunger. But she’d made it clear I shouldn’t ask her. So I only looked back down at the lights, pretended to unsnarl a knot I’d already loosened.
“It’s okay,” said Jasper softly. “I got what you meant, and the lights—they’re perfect. Thank you.”
After that, we fell into a frenzy of cleaning, organizing, and prettying up. The room was sweltering, and the first thing I did was to try to open a window, but they were all swollen shut, so I didn’t say anything about the heat, just wiped the beads of sweat from my lip and kept going. It’s funny how being a little bit hot can be uncomfortable, but somehow, being super sweaty can be kind of okay, especially when you’re working hard, or running, or something like that. Like sweat is different when you earn it.
Using the spray bottle of cleanser and the paper towels I’d brought from home, Jasper and I scrubbed every inch of that kitchen, which was really the only room she seemed to be using. With a broken broom we found in a closet, we swept all the debris and dirt out the back door and right into a bush.
Together, we dragged the bed into the yard, where we gulped fresh air and whacked at the mattress with sticks until it was as clean as it was going to be. Then we dragged it back inside and made it up with a fresh set of too-large sheets and a sky-blue blanket stolen from the linen closet at my house. Carefully, gently, I tucked the blanket under the mattress just so. Much more neatly than I ever made my own bed.
Once the place was clean, we decorated. Jasper spread Mom’s old flowered tablecloth on the rickety table, and that brightened things up right away. Just beyond the back door, I set out the little solar panel and then carefully threaded the lights along the floor, snaking them through the kitchen and out into the hallway, so that they reached nearly to the tiny bathroom. Together we arranged the other things I’d brought with me on the kitchen counter—a flashlight, bug spray, candles and matches, extra batteries, and a strange assortment of foods. Jasper laughed as she pawed through the groceries I’d brought. Saltines and Nutella and several jars of pickles. A six-pack of fancy root beer in brown glass bottles, and a box of Cheerios. A packet of Oreos and three peaches. Right away she opened a jar of pickles with a satisfying pop and shoved two in her mouth. “Mmmmm, pickles,” she said. “I haven’t had a dill pickle in ages.” She licked her fingers.
“Interesting,” I said. “You went for the pickles first. I would have guessed the Oreos.”
“Nah,” she said. “You have to eat your dinner before your dessert. Right?”
“Oh, right, dinner!” I said, and pulled out my phone to check the time. I was lucky. It was only 4:50. Mom and Dad weren’t even home yet. I thought a second before texting.
Hey Mom. I got invited to dinner at a friend’s house. Can I stay? PLEASE?
It only took about two seconds to get a reply:
A playdate! How GREAT! Sure. BE HOME BY DARK!
I groaned faintly at the word playdate but didn’t say anything to Jasper. Just texted back.
THANKS!
“Sorry,” I said. “Just needed to check in with my mom. I didn’t know how late it had gotten. But she says I can stay. For dinner.”
Jasper laughed and raised the pickle jar. “Well, then,” she said, “let’s have dinner.”
Standing there, pickle in hand, I glanced around at the room, which was a different place altogether now. Cozy. A home. It gave me a little swell of joy, to see the difference I’d made. “I know you didn’t want help,” I said. “That you don’t like when people—”
Jasper rolled her eyes. “Pshhh. Please, I’m over it,” she said. “At least for now. Because look at this place . . . and also . . . in case you’ve forgotten, PICKLES. Have another!”
With a laugh, I took another pickle. Then we munched for a minute and stared at the newly cleaned kitchen. It was still old and small, but now it was ours, mine and Jasper’s. It felt like there was nobody else in the entire world beyond this room. Just us, in this secret place. We could hide here forever, and nobody would know. There would be no weird silences here, or funny glances. No shadows or ghosts. I took a deep breath of the hot, musty air and smiled.
When the pickles were all gone and Jasper had poured the juice down the sink drain, I had one final thought. I went outside and picked a big bouquet of roses from the old bush beyond the door. I got pricked a bunch, but I didn’t mind. The dark red petals smelled wonderful, heavy and rich and sweet. I went back inside and set them in the empty pickle jar.
“There,”
I said. “Is there water in the sink?”
“Nope.”
“What have you been doing for showers and tooth brushing and stuff like that? What have you been doing when you need to use the bathroom?”
I guess Jasper could read my face, because she shook her head and laughed. “Don’t worry, it’s not that bad. I haven’t been pooping in the creek or anything. There’s a hose at the farm, and I fill a jug once a day. I keep it in the bathroom. If you just pour it into the toilet after you go, the toilet sort of flushes itself. I’m not exactly sure how. Something to do with gravity, I guess.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow, how’d you learn that? You just guessed?”
Jasper shook her head. “Someone must have shown me when I was little. I guess the fact that you didn’t know it means you’ve never had your water cut off before.”
“No,” I said. “I guess I haven’t.”
“Stick with me and I’ll teach you all kinds of useful things,” she said. Then she walked off toward the bathroom and returned with the plastic jug full of water. She poured some of it into the pickle jar of roses and set the bouquet on the table.
After that, there was nothing more to do, really, inside the kitchen. As much as I loved the new room, we were both sweating pretty hard, so Jasper and I grabbed two root beers, stepped back outside, and walked around to the front of the house, to the little overgrown porch. The front door was padlocked, and parts of the wooden floor in front of it had fallen away, but the steps were made of concrete, and it was nice and shady there on the stoop, beneath the kudzu hanging off the roof.
We brushed fallen leaves off the steps and sat. Jasper took the top step and I sat below her. Then we drank our root beer, and after a while, the cicadas started up, with their crazy loud chirping buzzing noises, which came in waves, louder for a bit, then subsiding into a softer sort of hum. It was calm, and it felt good to have worked hard with Jasper, to have helped. There was dirt all over me, and cobwebs in my hair, but I didn’t care.
“What a day!” said Jasper.
“Has it only been a day? It feels like longer to me. Like I’ve been here a week.” And it really did. As if time had slipped. As if hours spent with Jasper took longer than regular hours, counted for more. Like dog years.
Jasper laughed. “If you’d been here a week, someone would have come looking for you.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” I sighed. “You know, sitting here like this, with you, reminds me of how it was . . .”
“How what was?”
“Just . . . how it used to be at home. Before Sam died.”
“Really? How so?”
“Just, you know . . . in the summer, on a day like today. Dad would grill burgers on the deck, and Sam would ‘help,’ which basically meant standing next to Dad and passing him the hamburger flipper whenever he needed it. Even when he was really little, Dad would pretend Sam was actually useful. Mom and I would sit nearby with a drink, and watch, and try not to laugh our sodas out our noses, because the hamburger flipper was bigger than Sam was, and he looked so silly. But he was so proud.”
“It sounds nice,” said Jasper. “Relaxing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s what I always thought family was supposed to be. Relaxing. You know?”
“Not quite,” said Jasper, shaking her head.
“Well, that was how it was, for me,” I said. “Not perfect. My parents are . . . parents. And Sam drove me crazy, jumping on things all the time, and telling me about his boring video games nonstop. But I mean, it’s like . . . school can be hard and friends are complicated, sometimes. Mean girls pick on you and boys tease you and teachers are confusing. But at home, for me, it was always just . . . home. Dad was a dad and Mom was a mom, and Sam and I were the kids, and we did things the way we did things. We knew how to be us. So even when we fought and annoyed each other, it just felt easy. Because I always knew how things would be.”
“That sounds really nice,” said Jasper. “My house wasn’t like that at all.”
“No?” I said, turning around to face her.
“No. Just . . . no.”
She didn’t say anything more, so after a moment I turned back around, stared at the step below me. “Well, it was like that for me. But then Sam died. And it was like . . . we didn’t know how to be us anymore, without him. Like we were a table that lost a leg, and now the whole thing was tilted. And I guess that’s not really a table, is it? It’s never relaxing or easy, anymore.”
I paused and waited for Jasper to say something in reply. It felt like I’d been talking for too long. But when I turned to look at her again, Jasper was just staring at me hard, and looking sad, like she might cry. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want things to be sad and hard here. I hadn’t meant to do this, to change the way things felt in this magical place. I wanted it to be all pickles and root beer. That was the whole point of helping.
“Anyway!” I said as cheerfully as I could. “I only really meant to say how nice this is, to sit on a porch, like I used to do at home. It’s such a regular thing to do. And I haven’t done it in so long. Isn’t that funny?”
Jasper shook her head. She was still wearing her serious face. She took a slow sip of her drink and said, “Hey, I know I probably don’t need to say this. But I’m going to anyway, just in case.”
“What?” I asked.
“You can’t tell anyone,” she said. “About me, or this place. Nobody at all.”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “Anyway, I wouldn’t want to. I like it like this. Just us. A secret.”
Jasper nodded. “Right, okay,” she said. “But it’s more than that. This isn’t a game. We aren’t playing Narnia or Hogwarts. This is my real life. It would be bad for a lot of people if anyone found me here.”
“What kind of bad?” I asked. “How bad?”
Jasper shook her head. “Don’t worry, nobody would die or anything. Just—I’m supposed to be living with my sister, and she doesn’t care that I left. She’s got her own kids to take care of. And—other problems. But if anyone found out I wasn’t at her place, and that she hadn’t reported me missing, she’d get into big trouble.”
I didn’t know what trouble she meant, really. In fact, I had a hard time wrapping my head around it. I couldn’t fathom how her sister could possibly let her run off. Or why she was living with her sister in the first place. But Jasper’s voice was so serious, and I knew what she needed me to say.
“Sure.” I nodded. “I get it.”
“Good,” said Jasper. “Thank you.”
“How old is she, your sister, anyway?” I asked.
“Twenty-nine,” said Jasper.
“Wow, that’s old!”
“Yeah, but we have different dads,” said Jasper, as though that explained everything.
“Oh,” I said. “How many kids does she have?”
Jasper took a swig of her root beer. “Two. A girl and a boy. Madison and Connor. And they’re cute, but, wow, are they busy. Lots of work!”
“I bet,” I said.
“Anyway,” said Jasper, “the point is that my sister doesn’t need any more stress right now. She didn’t mind me leaving. She knows I can take care of myself for a while. But I swore I wouldn’t get her into any trouble. And I won’t. Okay? I can’t. If anyone found out, I don’t even know exactly what would happen. Foster care, I guess, for me.”
“Foster care?”
“Maybe. Or some kind of group home. I’m not sure.”
“There’s a boy in my class,” I said. “Seth. And he was in foster care, when we were littler, and then his foster parents adopted him, and they actually seem pretty great. His mom was our room parent last year, and—”
“What’s your point?”
“Oh, I just . . . I don’t know. I thought it might help, to know that it’s not always so bad. Maybe?”
It took her a minute to reply. At first I thought she was mad at me, but when she finally spoke, her vo
ice just sounded sort of quiet. “The truth is, I don’t know what it would be like. My mom made it sound . . . not good. She called it the System. She said I didn’t want to be in the System. That if that happened, I’d be really unhappy, and we’d never be back together.”
“Oh,” I said.
“So maybe you’re right. My mom was unreliable for sure. But whatever the System would be like, I don’t think it would be like . . . this.”
I looked out at the green vines sprawling all over. There was a hummingbird just a few feet away, zipping around. “Yeah,” I said. “I see what you mean.”
“Thanks,” Jasper said, polishing off her soda and setting the bottle down on the step below her.
I wondered again what exactly had happened to make Jasper leave her sister’s house. But I didn’t say anything else. She didn’t want to talk anymore, and I figured we had plenty of time. All the time in the world.
We just sat there together then. Feeling sorry for each other, I guess, and feeling sorry for ourselves, but lucky too. Feeling everything. All the things. Holding on to everything at once.
Then I looked up and realized the sky had pinked up like it does sometimes in the summer, before the sun goes down. I sighed and rose from my step. “Well,” I said. “I should head home, I guess.”
Jasper jumped up. “Thank you. Seriously, this place is so much better now. I really appreciate everything.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “It was fun.”
We stood there for a second, like neither of us was sure what to do next. I didn’t want to leave, but I knew I had to. I almost wanted to hug her, but I knew that would be weird. “Hey,” I said at last. “One more thing. Before I go, can I get your number?” I pulled out my phone.
Jasper shook her head. “I don’t have a phone,” she said. “Wish I did.”
“Really?” I asked, puzzled. “I could’ve sworn I saw you checking a phone earlier, at the bus stop.”
“Yeah,” said Jasper. “But I don’t have a number or any cell service. It’s just an old phone of my sister’s. She gave it to me so I can check in with her when I’m near free Wi-Fi. Like at a coffee shop. And I have some dumb games on it.”
My Jasper June Page 8
