“Oh. So that means that when you’re here, you have no way of calling or emailing or anything at all?”
“Nope,” said Jasper, grinning. “I’m super-extra old school. If I need you, I’ll just have to scream real loud.”
I laughed. “Well, feel free to scream any old time.”
“Will do!” said Jasper. “And maybe I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Definitely,” I said. “Come over!”
“I will,” she said. “But also, you can come here too. Now that you know everything.”
“I will too!” I called out as I scrambled down the hill and pushed my way through the vines and brambles to the creek bed. I picked my way carefully down the creek as the pink sky deepened above, and then sprinted hard once I hit the pavement.
Now that I knew everything? I didn’t feel like I knew anything at all. As full as the day had been, I’d barely scratched the surface. But even so, what a day it had been. A filthy, sweaty, magical, confusing day.
Back at home, I stepped up to the front door and peered through the glass. My parents were in the living room, sitting on the sofa. Plates on the coffee table in front of them. Mom with her salad. Dad with what looked like a frozen pot pie. It was strange to see them like that. Through glass. Almost like I was watching a movie about them.
They sat together, but apart, at opposite ends of the couch, facing the TV. It was funny, how a TV let you be with someone even if nobody touched or said a word. I wondered if either of them was even paying attention to the show. They both looked lost in thought.
But I couldn’t stand there forever like that. I had to step into the room, so I put my hand on the doorknob and turned it. Mom looked up, saw me, and clicked the remote in her hand, right away. The TV went dark.
“Leah!” she said. “How was your day? Who were you with?”
“Oh, a new friend,” I said. “You don’t know her. And it was fun. But I’m really stinky. I walked all over today. Red’s Farm and the neighborhood. Just exploring. I think I’ll go take a shower.”
“Okay,” she said. “That’s fine. But come say hello when you’re done.”
“Okay.”
I quickly cut through the room and toward the hallway, but then Dad called out. “Oh, hey, Leah?”
I turned back around in the doorway. “Yeah?”
“I just wondered . . . did you do some work in the yard this week? I noticed someone mowed.”
“Yeah!” I said, scrambling to remember what he was talking about. It seemed like it had been weeks since I’d mowed and raked. So much had happened since then. “Yeah, that was me. A couple of days ago. I’d almost forgotten about that. It just was looking kind of ratty around here.”
“Well, that’s nice of you!” said Dad. He sounded more excited than an hour of raking should really make anyone. “Thanks, kiddo.”
“You’re . . . welcome,” I said. “It was no big deal. I was bored, and it seemed like a thing I could do. To help out.”
“It was,” said Mom, nodding. “It was really thoughtful.”
Then we all were quiet for a minute, and I couldn’t tell if there was something else I was supposed to say. I stood there, waiting, in the hallway, until the TV clicked back on and released me.
Looking Up
The next morning, I woke up different. Or rather, I woke up differently. All at once, the second my eyes fluttered open. I sat up in a rush and realized I was excited. Excited? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d woken up excited.
It was the way I used to wake up on Saturday mornings with Sam. On the weekends, Mom and Dad liked to sleep in, and so the rule had always been that Sam and I could watch as much TV as we liked, and eat anything we wanted for breakfast, so long as we were quiet.
“Don’t disturb the bears,” Dad would say.
So if I woke up first, I’d knock on Sam’s door, and if he woke up first, he’d come into my room and tap on my forehead. Then we’d head to the living room for cookies with canned whipped cream or ice cream sandwiches or BBQ potato chips.
Saturday mornings hadn’t felt that way since last year. Sneaking into the living room alone didn’t feel the same, and neither did eating junk food for breakfast. Instead, I stayed in bed and tried to force myself back to sleep. But now I found myself with that Saturday-morning feeling at the thought of heading back over to Jasper’s house. So I pulled on a sundress and a pair of sandals, gave my teeth a quick scrub, and quietly made my way down the hall, past my parents’ door, which was still closed, though the clock on the wall told me it was after nine. I left a note on the kitchen table:
Going to the coffee shop for a muffin. Back later.
The day was already crackling hot when I stepped through the kitchen door and into the driveway, but the sun felt good on my shoulders, coming out of the chilly air-conditioning inside. I was out in the street and walking fast when I had a thought and stopped. I turned back home, but instead of the house, I went to the garage.
We’d never really used our garage to store our cars like other people did. The garage was small for two cars, and Mom and Dad had never been able to agree on whose car got to go in it. They’d decided long ago it was better if neither one did. “Better two cars with equal amounts of bird poop than one clean car and a divorce,” Dad had said.
So the garage was mostly a spider habitat and a place to store all the junk that didn’t really have a spot inside the house. Now I pushed the door open and stumbled into a decade of outgrown tricycles and broken mops and boxes of hand-me-down rain boots that had never been handed down. There was slightly broken furniture that Mom intended to drag to the curb, but apparently not until it had a half inch of dust on it. It was almost like she couldn’t let things go until they’d gotten so filthy she would never let them inside the house again.
I sneezed twice as I moved partway through the mess, and then I reached up and flicked on the light. Across the room I spotted what it was what I’d come for: a blue plastic cooler, hung on the wall by its handle, beside a tangled pile of bright orange extension cords.
To get to it, I stepped over an old green end table, covered in mildewed paperback books, and then a huge clear plastic bag full of Duplo blocks. I made my way across the room, but halfway there, I found that there was a spot in the middle of the garage where it looked like someone had recently cleared away all the junk and laid down a fresh blue tarp in the empty space. I was standing in the middle of the tarp when it hit me that it wasn’t dusty at all. Instead, the tarp was covered in paint drips. Fresh ones. As if someone had been working on a project and stepped away only a few hours ago. But who, and what? I looked around in every direction and didn’t see what someone might have been painting. There was nothing.
At least this spot is easier to walk through, I thought, and stepped over to the wall to reach for the cooler. But when I did, I jostled the extension cord loose, and it came tumbling down from its rusty nail and rained down right on top of me. I let go of the cooler and threw my hands up over my head, but when I did, I stumbled, and we all fell together—me, the cooler, and the jumble of orange cord.
“Ouch,” I said softly, sitting up on the tarp and brushing dead moths from my hair. I sneezed twice and wiped at the dust on my face with an equally dusty hand. Ugh.
I could only pray that Mom and Dad hadn’t woken up to the sounds in the garage. As quietly as possible, I reached over and tried to untangle the cooler from the extension cord. But when I did that, I happened to glance up, up at the ceiling, where the one bare light bulb burned. I caught my breath when I saw what it illuminated.
A cornfield.
Stretched across the ceiling, someone had been painting a cornfield. A farm. Miles of green and gold, tiny cornstalks waving in an imaginary breeze. A vast blue sky was spread over the field, shimmering with heat and sun, broken by the occasional bird. And cutting through the field was a small brown road that ran to a white farmhouse off in the distance. I sat there, on the tarp, staring at that field, lu
sh and thick, with bits of light scattered everywhere. I couldn’t take my eyes away from it.
Then I noticed a single brown spot, lost in the sea of green. I stood up and stretched to my tiptoes, but I couldn’t quite make it out. I dragged a chair over and climbed up to peer closer. The brown spot was a head of hair, and beneath the hair was a face. It was a small boy lost in the sea of green.
I stared at that boy, drowning in his field. I stared, and closed my eyes as I felt a sob rising in my throat. Then I swallowed the sob, opened my eyes, and climbed down off the chair.
There was only one person who could have painted this field. But Dad didn’t paint anymore, ever. In fact, he didn’t do much of anything but sit and stare at his phone. Part of me wanted to run inside and knock on my parents’ door, pull my father out of his room and the chilly house, into the hot garage, to tell me what this was on the ceiling. But I didn’t. If he wanted anyone to know about this, then he wouldn’t have been doing it in secret in the garage without telling us. And if he didn’t want to talk to me, I wasn’t going to ask him. He could keep his secret. I had my own.
I quickly returned the extension cord to the wall, put the chair back where I’d found it, and swept the dead moths and dust from the blue tarp. Then I turned off the light, closed the door behind me as quietly as I could, and ran to Jasper’s, the cooler bumping against my legs. I’m not sure why, but suddenly, I was in a hurry. I felt like I was racing something, although I wasn’t sure what. My sandals thwacked the street all the way there, and by the time I was cutting up along the creek, my blood was racing in my ears, and I was out of breath.
It felt good to run. Away.
When I pulled myself up the hill of kudzu and popped through into the secret green world, I saw Jasper right away, sitting on the stoop in front of the house. And my hurry disappeared. My breath slowed and the day all around me softened, relaxed. I raised the cooler and waved it at her. “Look!” I said. “I brought you a present.”
She was swigging out of a root beer bottle. When she saw me, she waved back. “Hey!”
I walked over. “Root beer for breakfast?”
“No, silly!” she said. “I refilled it with water.”
“Ah, okay,” I said, walking up the steps and sitting down on the step beneath her. Then I added, “I brought you a cooler!”
“Perfect.” She laughed. “Now we just need an ice maker.”
“Yeah, well, one thing at a time.”
We sat for a minute like that. Jasper was sipping her water, and I was still trying to catch my breath, but also trying to decide whether to tell her about the mural on the ceiling of the garage. It felt important—that my dad was painting something, and that he was doing it alone, in secret—but I wasn’t sure exactly why or what it meant. And I knew it wouldn’t sound important if I said it out loud. My dad is painting a cornfield on the ceiling just sounded bizarre inside my head.
Instead I asked, “So, what do you want to do today?”
Jasper set down her bottle. “Hmm. Good question. What are our options?”
“Well,” I said. “I don’t have any especially great ideas. We can sit around here or go wandering. My parents are at home today. Saturday. So it’s probably better to stay away.”
“Ahhh,” said Jasper. “Well, then, besides hanging out with your parents, what would you do today, if you could do anything? Like, if you could make a wish?”
I thought for a minute before I said, “Orlando. I’d wish to go to Orlando.”
“Really?” Jasper said. “Have you ever been to Orlando? It’s not awesome.”
“Hogsmeade, silly,” I said. “Harry Potter world. I’ve never been.”
“Ohhhh, that would be nice,” Jasper said. “But I’d wish for the real thing, if we’re wishing. If we could really go to Hogwarts. Either that or Paris. Or maybe I’d just go swimming.”
I looked up. “Swimming?”
“Sure,” said Jasper. “I haven’t been swimming in a long time. I love to swim. And it’s so hot, and I’m so sweaty and gross. I could use a bath.”
I hadn’t thought about the fact that Jasper didn’t really have any place to shower. “But there is somewhere to go swimming,” I said, standing up and turning around to face her. “We don’t need wishes for that.”
“Where?”
“Just over in Grant Park,” I said.
“Where’s that?” asked Jasper. “Is it far? Is it nice?”
“You haven’t been to Grant Park?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t been anywhere, much.”
“I thought everyone knew Grant Park,” I said. “It’s huge. The zoo is there, and there’s festivals and things all summer long. And there’s a public pool, with a splash pad and everything. It’s less than a mile away.”
“Are you kidding me?” Jasper jumped up from her step. “I haven’t been swimming in forever. Can we go? Please? Right now?”
“Sure!” I said.
“I don’t have a suit,” she said, “but maybe I can just wear shorts?”
“I can loan you a suit. We’ll just have to swing by my house first.”
“But what about your parents?” asked Jasper.
“Oh, they’re okay,” I said. “They drive me nuts, but they won’t be rude or anything. And anyway, they’ll probably still be sleeping.”
Before I had even finished the sentence, Jasper was off the step and headed down the hill. “Come on!” she cried.
I followed, smiling. Running hard again. Thinking about how easy it was to make Jasper happy. And how nice that was, for a change.
A Quick Dip
I was wrong. My parents weren’t asleep when I got home. As I opened the front door and stuck my head into the living room, I heard noises from the kitchen—coffee cups and NPR.
Behind me, Jasper whispered, “I’ll just wait out here.” And before I could say anything, she slipped away, down the steps.
I stepped inside, and right away, Mom was standing in front of me. “Leah! There you are,” she said. “Your dad and I were just wondering when you’d be back.”
“I left a note,” I said.
She nodded stiffly. “Yes, we found it. But we weren’t sure how early you went out. It seems like you’ve been coming and going a lot the last few days.”
“Oh,” I said. “It was . . . just a little while ago. I just came back to grab my swimsuit. I’m . . . going swimming with a friend.”
Mom looked more interested than usual. “Swimming with a friend? That’s a nice thing to do on a hot day. Is the pool open this early?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But we can hang out at the park until it does.”
“Okay,” said Mom. “Who’s the friend? Tess?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Tess isn’t here this summer. This is . . . a new friend I met. But that reminds me, I saw Bev yesterday. She said to tell you hi. She was on her way to some meeting.”
“Oh!” said Mom, momentarily distracted. “That’s . . . nice.”
“She said you should call her,” I added.
Mom closed her eyes briefly, a long blink. Then she opened them again and shifted the subject back. “So this new friend of yours, she’s the same girl from yesterday?”
“Yeah, she’s just moved to the neighborhood and hasn’t been to Grant Park before. I told her I’d show her the pool. She’s waiting for me, so I’m in kind of a hurry.” All these words tumbled out of my mouth, and it felt like I was saying too much, and also a little like I was lying, even though everything I was saying was true.
“We’d love to meet her. It sounds like you girls are really hitting it off.”
“Sure!” I said. “But she’s . . . not here right now.” I supposed this was technically true, since here and out in the street aren’t exactly the same.
Mom smiled. “Well, okay, have fun. Don’t forget sunscreen.”
“Thanks!”
I headed for my room, where I grabbed a couple of bathing suits from my dresser. T
hen I searched around the closet for my goggles. I hadn’t been swimming in a long time, and I couldn’t remember seeing my goggles in forever, but I hated to swim without them. They weren’t in there. And they weren’t under my bed or in the corner under the chair either.
At last, I sighed, walked over to my desk, and pulled open my junk drawer. My dreaded junk drawer. The land of no return. It was a total disaster, but when I couldn’t find something, it usually turned up in there.
Once, a few years back, Dad and Mom had had a fight about making me clean my room. Mom had been yelling at me about all the little toys and trinkets I’d strewn all over my furniture and floor. She’d told me that everything had a place, and my job was to put things in their right places. Dad had laughed at her. I remembered how he’d picked up a Popsicle stick with flowers drawn on it in glitter glue. “And where do you suppose the proper place for this is?” he’d asked Mom. “Give the kid a little leeway, Rachel.”
Mom had stared at him for a minute and then gone over to my desk, opened the bottom drawer, pulled out my construction paper and modeling clay, and moved them to the office. From that day forward, whenever I wanted to keep little things that didn’t have a place, I’d just shoved them into the drawer. I almost never opened it except to shove more in, so it was always stuffed full. But somehow it made me feel good, to know that if I wanted to save something, I could. That there was a place for the things that had no other place.
Now, as I reached to pull it open, the drawer jammed. It wouldn’t open at all. Almost as if someone was inside the drawer, pulling from the other side. I yanked on it and rocked the whole desk. I could almost feel the room shaking. Argh. I tried to wiggle it, jimmy it loose, but nothing worked.
Finally, I gave up. Jasper was waiting, and this was taking way too long. I’d just have to deal with chlorine eyes. Swimsuits in hand, I ran to the linen closet for towels, and then I made for the living room. But just as I was opening the front door, Mom appeared in the hallway and called out after me.
My Jasper June Page 9
