by Susan Shreve
“Maybe you can start to get your things together for camp while we're at church,” my mom says at that very moment, knowing as she does exactly what's going on in my mind, as if she gets lost in my brain.
Just the sound of the word in my ear—“camp”—makes the blood go out of my legs and I feel weak enough to fold in half.
“I'm so glad I remembered.” My mother brightens. “You'll be leaving in two weeks and we've been so busy I haven't given camp a moment's thought.”
“Me neither,” I say.
“So we'll pick you up at home after church is over, El,” my father says, stopping the car in front of the church, telling me he'll leave a key for me under the front door-mat, and off they drive, happily thinking about the weeks I'll be away at camp and it'll be just the two of them and Milo.
I walk toward the Sunday school building, watching out of the corner of my eye as our car pulls away from the curb, a little screech of tires and it heads down Miler's Road, turns right toward my grandmother's house, and disappears.
I count to fifty just in case they decide to drive around the block. Then I cross Miler's toward Pageant Street and the shopping center on my way to the Watsons' house to meet Tommy Bowers. It's almost ten o'clock. I'll probably be exactly on time, so I hope he hasn't forgotten our plan.
Usually I wear T-shirts with pants and skirts, but today I'm wearing a blouse that my mom loves because it's girly, with yellow flowers and a baby collar. I hate it because of the flowers and the stupid collar but it's the perfect camouflage for the diamond necklace, which I take out of my skirt pocket, stopping at the intersection of Pageant and Ives to fasten it. When I'm done, I slip the necklace under the collar so it's hidden, which is why I needed to wear this baby-collar blouse. It wouldn't exactly work to hide a diamond necklace under a T-shirt.
It's a beautiful, sunny day and the trees are almost in full bloom. The azaleas, mainly pink, line the front yards of the houses on Pageant Street, and all along the road the yellow tree roses that our neighborhood is famous for blow their sweet perfume into the air. I'm thinking how very happy I am.
Not that I'm usually unhappy. I used to be what my father called “Sally Sunshine” and my mother called “Our Little Cockeyed Optimist.” But lately I've been feeling blue. Blue is a good word for a low-grade sadness, the way the color washes over you with its cool, slow-moving air. I've had a lot of that kind of air lately, but this morning, even with the threat of camp, I feel as if balloons are under my feet and I could take off from here and fly to the Watsons' house.
Tommy is under the Watsons' porch when I arrive. He's actually sitting in one of those striped beach chairs, which he must have brought from his house, leaning back with his arms folded behind his head. When I duck under the porch and see him there dappled in the light coming through the porch lattice, there's a sudden rush of blood through my body.
The dirt room is entirely different from how it was yesterday. There's a rug and beach chairs and a round table with a pitcher of pink lemonade and a bowl of potato chips and a beach umbrella with towels underneath it just the way it would be if we were at the ocean, except for the orange balloons. There are about ten of them, with strings of yellow ribbon, and the balloons must be filled with helium because they're hovering along the ceiling of the porch, their streamers waving.
“Wow,” I say. “This is amazing.”
“You're five minutes late.” Tommy gets another beach chair, which he unfolds and sets next to his.
“Sit,” he says.
I sit down and cross my legs, tucking my feet under my bottom. Underneath my shirt, I feel the diamond necklace cold against my skin, but I'm not going to tell him I have it on, not now. I'm waiting for the perfect time.
I notice that he has a cigarette behind his ear, and I reach over and take it, putting it between my lips.
“Light?” he asks.
I giggle. I can't help myself.
“Not just yet,” I say.
Tommy has a faraway look on his face as if he's thinking about something, and then he turns to me.
“So I know what we're going to do.”
“About what?” I ask. He has this way of leaving things out when he talks to me, as if we've known each other forever and I should be able to fill in the blanks.
“About here.” He gestures, indicating the cave under the Watsons' porch.
“It looks beautiful. I know that,” I say. And it does. A birthday party room, and it seems so strange and funny to me that a boy, any boy but particularly a boy like Tommy, the Master of Cool, would know how to make a damp, dark cave under an ordinary porch into a party room.
Tommy has taken back the cigarette, put it behind his ear.
“So now I'll tell you what's going to happen.”
He picks up a plastic bag from G.C. Murphy's, which he dumps into the canvas bowl of the beach chair, and out come shaving cream and deodorant and a bag of lollipops.
“I've been shaving for over a year now in case you were wondering,” he says, tearing open the bag of lollipops. “Ever since my voice changed.”
“What happened to your voice?” I ask.
“Can't you tell?”
“I only heard your voice yesterday for the first time, so I don't know what it was like before.”
“Different,” he says.
He's walking over to the lattice door to the Watsons' porch with a bunch of lollipops, raking the ground with his foot, flattening the dirt, using his foot as a hoe. Now he's on his knees sticking the lollipops into the ground, long rows of lollipops lined up like so many flowers. When he finishes, there are four rows of lollipops about twelve inches in length, only the cellophane tops of yellow and purple and red and green lollipops showing above the ground, the sticks concealed.
“This is a lollipop garden.” He stands up, brushes off his hands and the knees of his jeans. “Can you tell?”
What I want to say but it would make Tommy mad is, “Why do we want a lollipop garden?” But I don't.
“Cool,” I say instead.
He folds his arms across his chest and the way he's standing makes him look older. “You don't understand what a lollipop garden is,” he tells me, and he isn't smiling.
I feel suddenly weird, as if my stomach is full of soapy water and, any time now, bubbles are going to slip out from between my lips and fill the cave under the porch and I won't be able to stop them.
“So tell me what it is,” I say.
He's looking at the line of lollipops, straightening the crooked ones, turning them so they all face the same way so the lines of purple and yellow and red and green are straight, and then he stands back.
“Perfect,” he says. “Don't you think?”
I nod. “But I don't know what I'm supposed to be seeing.”
“I told you, it's a lollipop garden,” he says, exasperated.
“I see that,” I say. “I just don't understand it.”
“The plan is about magic,” Tommy says, returning to his chair. “We're going to invite all the little kids in the neighborhood to meet us under the Watsons' porch next Saturday. We'll tell the kids they've been specially chosen for an unusual experiment in the growing of lollipops, and they'll feel so important and so lucky to know us that they won't tell their parents what goes on under the Watsons' porch.”
“What does go on?” I ask Tommy.
“Magic, dumbbell,” he says, looking at me strangely, as if I'm turning into the wrong kind of girl. “Haven't you ever wanted to be a magician?”
“I never thought I could be,” I say. It's the right thing to say.
“Of course you can be. You especially,” he tells me, full of excitement, his arms moving as he speaks.
I'm thinking Tommy Bowers is a strange boy and I've never met anyone like him. Some kind of mixture of bad boy and grown man my father's age. Just when I think I have him figured out, he ages to this other serious personality. So I need to be careful or he'll bolt from this new friendship of ours.<
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“This is how it will happen,” he's saying, as if I'm in first grade and haven't learned to read. “The first time the kids come, we'll give them seeds, and the next week when they come, the seeds will have grown into lollipops. Very simple magic.”
“Lollipops with cellophane and sticks?”
“Kids want to believe, so they'll believe us. I understand kids.”
“Well, I don't. So what happens next?”
“Then we'll be like parents,” Tommy says. “Don't you get it? They'll think we're magic like parents are and all the kids will believe us, and on Saturdays when they meet us under the Watsons' porch, they'll be our family.”
“I already have a family,” I say too quickly. Much too quickly.
Tommy's face turns flat, a look I haven't seen on him before, as if he's all one color and the color is snow white.
“Well, I don't have a family,” he says to me. “So I'm making one.”
I feel the bubbles surfacing from my stomach, coming up my esophagus, tickling the inside of my mouth, and I want them to dissolve before I explode with them.
I have let him down.
“I'm so sorry,” I say. “I don't know what's the matter with me. I should have understood.”
Tommy shrugs.
“It's just the truth. You don't have to be sorry.”
I collapse in the beach chair next to him and he's leaning back, as he does, his arm under his head like a pillow, a look on his face as if he's thinking about something and doesn't want me to know what it is.
“So tell me how we'll make the garden,” I say.
“What do you want to know?” he asks.
“Everything,” I say.
And he tells me.
The plan is that each Saturday we distribute six or so seeds to every child—like zucchini seeds or pumpkin seeds or carrots—my mother has some packets of seeds in her potting shed. The kids will push the seeds into the ground in little rows and then we'll serve lemonade and cookies and tell stories and maybe play some games and then they'll go back to their own houses until the next Saturday.
In the meantime, Tommy will buy bags of lollipops and on Saturday mornings we will plant them where the zucchini and pumpkin and carrot seeds have been.
I lean back in my beach chair under the porch and watch Tommy taking the lollipops out of the ground, putting them back in the bag, tossing me one, sticking one in his own mouth, and I'm just watching him. I like watching him.
Above us, I hear the sound of someone walking, a click… click… click, so it must be one of the Watson sisters and she's walking very slowly. I put my finger to my mouth to warn Tommy and he stops collecting the rows of lollipops and looks up at the floorboards. There are spaces between the boards and if one of the Miss Watsons were agile, which neither is, she could lean down and, with the sun behind her, she could see us under her porch. We stay very still and wait. Especially Tommy. I hide my face in my knees because I can't help laughing. He's assumed a pose of one of those human statues you see in shopping malls—standing on one foot, the other off the ground and straight behind him like a dancer's, his arms stretched forward as if he's carrying a tray, his expression one of mock horror.
But in time, not even very long, a door opens above us and then voices and the click… click… click and silence.
Tommy sits back down on the beach chair next to me.
“What're we going to do now?” I ask.
“Figure out how to get the kids to agree to come next Saturday,” Tommy says.
He takes his sunglasses out of his pocket, cleans them with his T-shirt, and puts them on, as if there were any danger of too much sun under the porch.
“So,” he says, looking over at me with sleepy eyes, half closed, “did you get my present or not?”
I reach down under my yellow flowered blouse and pull out the diamond necklace.
“They're real diamonds,” he says.
“I know,” I say.
“I couldn't find the necklace you mentioned but I saw this one in a jewelry store downtown and I just got it.”
“You bought it by yourself?”
“Of course I bought it myself.” He gave me a funny look. “I wasn't exactly going to send Clarissa to get it,” he says. “I walked downtown and went along High Street and came to this jewelry store. The necklace was in the window, so I went in, checked out if it was real diamonds, and when the man said it was, I bought it. I told the guy at the shop it was for my mother.”
“It's very amazing,” I say softly.
He's quiet for a moment but I can tell he's pleased, and then he crosses his legs, stuffs his hands in his pockets, and says without looking at me, “I'm glad you like it.”
Under the Watsons' porch, it's airless and silent. I look down, embarrassed to look at him, and he stares through the tiny spaces of lattice at the grass beyond and neither one of us can think of anything to say, but I'm more comfortable not talking. Even though I want to tell him how sorry I am that he's never had a real family, how sorry I am that I misunderstood why he wanted to invent a magic place for kids to come to when all I want to do is hang out here under the Watsons' porch with him. But I'm thinking how lonely it must have been all of his life, never to have a safe house, and since that's all I've ever had, I don't know what it would be like without my home. But I don't say anything because nothing I can think of saying seems to be enough.
Finally he gets up, folds his chair and I fold mine, and we lean them against the wall of the house.
“You give me a list of the kids, and today while you're having lunch at your grandmother's, maybe I'll go around the neighborhood and let the younger kids know about the lollipop garden.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
“I'm not exactly sure what I'll say,” Tommy says. “I'll figure a way to get them to come next Saturday morning.”
He follows me out into the sunlight and we walk down the Watsons' driveway and turn right toward Tommy's house and mine.
The Brittle twins are sitting on the bottom step of their house kicking the dirt with their feet as we pass.
“Hey, guys,” Tommy says.
“Hi,” they say, moving the bill of their baseball caps backward so they can better see us. “Are you Ellie's friend?”
I have a sudden sinking feeling in my stomach and want to warn Tommy that the Brittle twins may not be friendly to him, that their parents are snakes with poison in their mouths, but I don't have time to say anything.
“Ellie and I are going to be having a party next Saturday at ten o'clock in the morning and we'd like you guys to come.”
“What kind of party?” Alexander asks. “Birthday?”
“Nope,” Tommy says. “Magic party.”
“I love magic parties,” Anthony says.
“You've never been to a magic party,” Alexander says.
“Well, you're invited to one now. There,” Tommy points to the Watsons' house. “You turn up the driveway and walk to the end and walk under the Watsons' porch and there we'll be.”
“How come?” Anthony asks.
“We're there because we're getting ready for the magic party,” Tommy says.
“Dumbbell,” Alexander says to his brother.
“Tell your friends,” Tommy says, and we move down the street. “Tell all your friends on the block. Everyone under ten. It's an under ten magic party.”
It's almost one and I'm expecting my parents to come home from church any minute.
“Will I see you later?” I ask.
“I don't know about tonight,” Tommy says. “Clarissa has plans for us.”
I can tell he has something more to say, so I ask him to call me from his bedroom when he gets back from his plans. I'll be waiting on the sunporch tonight.
“Ellie?”
“Yes?”
“I don't want you to take off the necklace I gave you.”
“Okay.” My voice sounds tentative.
He reaches over and buttons
the top button of my blouse so the necklace doesn't show.
“And keep it hidden,” he says.
We walk down the street, our shoulders touching, and as we pass his house, he pauses before running up the steps.
“So I'll see you later.”
“Yes,” I say. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!
5. Complications
I'm sitting on our porch railing so I'll be able to see my parents' car when it turns the corner into our street, and thinking about the dilemma of Camp Farwell, where I'm signed up like I was last summer and the summer before that for six weeks in the Green Mountains of Vermont.
Now that Tommy Bowers has arrived to cheer up my summer, I don't want to go anywhere for a single day, including a vacation with my parents, maybe to the beach. I actually didn't really want to go before Tommy arrived but I had rationalized that it would be okay since summer is boring at home. I'm not in the center of things in the sixth grade, and although I have friends, none of them live in my neighborhood, and P.J., probably my closest friend at the moment, goes to camp in Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, for the whole summer.
So in January when my parents asked me did I want to go back to Camp Farwell, I told them maybe, probably, yes, I did. And now I've changed my mind.
Camp isn't cheap and my parents aren't rich, so it isn't going to be easy to get out of going two weeks before camp begins but maybe I can. If I do skip, my parents will have enough money for a trip to the beach, just the two of them, leaving Milo at my grandmother's house and me home alone to fend for myself.
At this moment on a perfect June day, a circle of heat from the sun warming my arms and legs, I feel sick at heart when I think of swimming in the cold, cold lake of Camp Farwell and arts and crafts and tennis and standing at the baseline practicing my serve and horseback riding and the theater revue done every summer for the parents on visiting day. We have very few real adventures at Camp Farwell. There are two very chaperoned visits to the boys' camp on the other side of the lake and two visits to Newbury, Vermont, for a baked-bean supper at the Congregational church, and that's it for entertainment except talking after lights out to the girls in the bunks on either side of me.
