by Anne Nesbet
Chapter One: Going, Going, Gone
Chapter Two: Batman, Good-Bye
Chapter Three: Think of It This Way
Chapter Four: The Jonah Book
Chapter Five: A City Behind a Wall
Chapter Six: Yo-Yo in Berlin
Chapter Seven: The Party Party
Chapter Eight: The Second Test; Also the Third
Chapter Nine: A Voice in the Night
Chapter Ten: Cloud and Changeling
Chapter Eleven: Rapunzel
Chapter Twelve: The Mere Ghost of Cloud-Claudia
Chapter Thirteen: Brave New World
Chapter Fourteen: Other Towers
Chapter Fifteen: The Wall Goes Horizontal
Chapter Sixteen: Cloud in the Window
Chapter Seventeen: A Bad Case of Farsickness
Chapter Eighteen: Pretending to Be What You Are
Chapter Nineteen: The Pan-European Picnic
Chapter Twenty: The Telltale Tiara
Chapter Twenty-One: New Places on the Map
Chapter Twenty-Two: World Peace Day
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Boy from Over There
Chapter Twenty-Four: It Could All Explode
Chapter Twenty-Five: Field Trip
Chapter Twenty-Six: “Be Prepared! Always Prepared!”
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Out into the Dark
Chapter Twenty-Eight: And Then Bad Things Happened
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Doing the Right Thing
Chapter Thirty: Out
Chapter Thirty-One: Cloud and Wallfish
Chapter Thirty-Two: No Names
Chapter Thirty-Three: A Walk in the Woods
Chapter Thirty-Four: Crazy Kid with a Cloud
Chapter Thirty-Five: Crumbling Walls
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Noah knew something was up the moment he saw his mother that May afternoon in fifth grade. She swooped up in a car he didn’t recognize — that was the first thing. And, secondly, his father was sitting in the other front seat, and in Noah’s family, picking up kids at school was a one-parent activity.
There in the back was his raggedy brown duffel, the one with the duct tape hiding a rip, perched on top of a pile of suitcases. He had to sidle in carefully if he didn’t want to topple any bags.
There wasn’t even an extra inch left on that whole seat for his backpack — he just swung it around and balanced it on his knees.
“Um, hi,” he said to his parents. “What happened to our car? What’s all the luggage about?”
“Shut that door,” said his mother. “Rental car. We have to hurry. It’s a sudden adventure. And hand that backpack up to your father.”
The car pulled away from the curb so quickly that the tires let out a hint of a squeal (which was cool).
Noah’s father turned around and gave him a reassuring smile.
“You’re going to do just fine,” he said as he hauled Noah’s backpack into the front seat. (Do fine? thought Noah.) “Of course, we meant to give you a little more notice. What’ve you got in here, anyway?”
Apparently that wasn’t a question that could wait for an answer. Before Noah could go peep, his father had given the backpack’s searchlight-yellow zipper a tug, and everything inside tumbled out in a heap of pencils, erasers, and crumpled papers. Plus two books and a banana.
“Hey!” said Noah, leaning as far forward as the seat belt would allow. His mouth almost failed to make any sound at all, he was so surprised. His parents were tidy people, usually.
“Only what’s essential. That’s all we can take,” said his dad, while his hands went picking through the debris so speedily his fingers turned into an efficient blur. He had a trash bag at his feet, it turned out, and all the papers were going right in there. Then he turned back with a wink. “What do you think — is this banana essential?”
“What are you doing?” said Noah. He didn’t care about the banana. It was everything else that mattered. “Take where? Wait, don’t throw that out — that’s my math homework.”
“Not anymore!” said Noah’s mother. “We’re getting on a plane — can’t take any extra junk.”
“We’re getting on a plane?” said Noah. “Right now?”
“Yep!” said his mother. “It’s that trip we’ve been talking about taking. Did you think those language tapes were just for fun? Hey, come on now, German! It’s your superpower, remember? Der-die-das-die.”
She sang the last bit. It was true that they had been listening to language tapes at home. There was a German grammar book that came with the tapes, and they had made up songs for some of the charts. The only way Noah could get through those charts was by singing them. German has way too many consonants — and way too much grammar, his mother liked to say.
Actually, however, Noah sort of liked all that grammar. His brain was very good at patterns, and learning to understand a language is all about recognizing patterns. His mother was almost not kidding about it being Noah’s superpower.
As superpowers go, though, it was a more or less invisible one: Noah was a whole lot better at understanding than he was at speaking.
“But we can’t go anywhere now,” said Noah. “This isn’t vacation time. Vacations happen in the summer.”
Because it was supposed to be a vacation. That was the whole idea: they were going to go to Germany — on vacation — to go to the Black Forest, eat cake, poke at cuckoo clocks, and tour at least one castle.
“Plus anyway I have soccer tomorrow. I can’t miss soccer. And Zach’s birthday is Saturday!”
“Change of plans,” said his mother. “Sorry. Couldn’t be helped. And it turns out it’s going to be a different Germany. Not the usual Germany. The other one. We have a few hours for organizing and getting our stories straight, and then we fly.”
Flabbergasted. That was the word that filled Noah’s head, though he kept it safely inside. Flab-ber-gas-ted.
And for the birthday party, Zach’s mom was going to rent the first Indiana Jones movie on video. Indiana Jones! Noah opened his mouth, but before he could say one single useful, coherent thing, his father interrupted. Sometimes parents don’t notice when a kid has vital things to say. Sometimes they’re too busy sorting through that kid’s books, papers, and candy wrappers.
“Hey, look at this!” said Noah’s father. He had Noah’s current book in his hands — an old edition of Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass that used to be his mother’s. Noah had picked it off the shelf that very morning, because he always had to have something to read in his bag, just in case. This particular book looked battered but cheerful. It had lost its dust jacket years ago; rows of red-ink and black-ink rabbits trotted away on the cover in a diamond pattern.
Noah’s father was staring at those rabbits; he looked doubtful.
“What do you think, Lisa? This okay?”
“That’s not extra junk. That’s my book I’m reading,” said Noah, holding out his hand. He had only gotten through the first chapter or so in school today, but it was turning out to be a very weird story. Old-fashioned but weird. Noah liked it.
“No name written in it, yes? Then it’s all right, I’d say,” said his mother.
But as his father tossed the book back to Noah, it hit the side of the seat, and a card fell out of it, dislodged from all those pages where it must have been wedged in pretty tightly before.
“What’s that?” said Noah’s mother, and the car swerved a little to the right as she swung her head around to take a look.
“Don’t worry,” said Noah’s father. “Eyes on the road. I’ve got this. Noah —”
But Noah was staring at the square in his hand.
“A photograph!” he sai
d. A tiny girl stared out at him, standing very straight and upright by the knees of a large, wide-smiling man in an armchair. “Hey! Who’s this kid? Who’s that man?”
“Oh dear!” said his mother, and she swerved so abruptly off the highway into a rest area that Noah had to hang on to the seat in front of him. “Oh dear!” she said again. “I shall be too late!”
And the car screeched to a halt. There wasn’t much to see at this rest stop. The kind of gravelly asphalt that just sits there dreaming of taking the skin off some poor kid’s knees, a few sorry trees, a building with restrooms in it, and a couple of picnic tables covered with bird poop and future splinters.
Noah’s hands were trembling.
“Too late for what?” he said.
“It’s a quote,” she said, and at that very moment Noah remembered where he had heard those words before: that’s what the White Rabbit says at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland. Right as he leads Alice down the rabbit hole and into the world where everything’s weird.
That gave Noah the strangest feeling. What were his parents up to?
“Look,” said his mother cheerfully. “It’s all a surprise, I know, but the good part is, we’re going somewhere where almost nobody gets to go.”
“Think of it as an expedition,” said his dad. His smile was conspiratorial. “If someone invites you to the South Pole, what do you do? You say yes. Right? This is like that, only not the South Pole.”
Noah’s mother dismissed the South Pole with a wave.
“Back to facts,” she said. “It’s not going to be easy, maybe, Noah, but you can do it. Hand that photo over, though, please.”
Noah stretched his hand out, but slowly, giving his eyes time to see the picture first. That tiny girl — she looked familiar around the edges. She was dressed up in party clothes, with a tiara on her head and a wand in her hand, and her eyes were dark and sparkly, like she had just figured out all sorts of things other people couldn’t imagine. She was maybe four years old, that little girl, and it looked like she was noticing every detail of your clothing, your hair, the nervous twitches that meant you might be trying to get away with something.
It was the look of the eyes that gave her away: this little girl was his mother. No doubt about that. There she was, four years old, maybe, and already formidable.
“Mom, it’s you!” he said. He had never seen a picture of his mother as a child before. He knew that was strange, but some families don’t have cameras. Or there’s a fire and all the photo albums burn right up. These things do happen. “Is that your dad, then? Is that . . . Grandpa?”
A folded newspaper dangled from the man’s hand — you could see about half the headline, in those big dark letters that newspapers use when they want to shout: CORONA —
Something else Noah had never seen a picture of before: any of his grandparents.
“Come on, now. Let go of that thing,” said his mother. He hadn’t realized he was still hanging on to it, but it was a picture filled with data, a puzzle of a picture, and Noah’s mind had woken right up as he looked at it.
So as Noah put the photo into his mother’s hand, he did that thing he could do with his brain: took a picture of the photograph, so he could study it later.
He used to think everyone could do this, but in second grade after his koala report, which had lasted forty minutes and contained a gazillion details, his teacher had given Noah two thumbs-up and called his memory “practically photographic.” It seemed to him true and not true, both at once. A “photographic memory” sounds like it should be just like a camera, but Noah’s brain was a fussy, not-so-perfectly-working camera. He couldn’t take a brain-photo of everything all the time — he could still forget plenty of stuff — but when the brain-camera worked, when Noah heard that tiny, secret click, then that picture was tucked away in his brain-file forever. His parents knew Noah had a good memory, but they didn’t know the truth, that Noah’s memory was perfect — sometimes. Imperfectly perfect. Perfect in a not-so-perfect sort of way.
That was Noah’s own secret. In a family as sharp-eyed as Noah’s, it was good to have some secrets even your mother didn’t know.
“Well, look at that,” said Noah’s mother, eyeing the photo with the strangest expression on her face. “Coronation day! I was a handful and a half, even then. Thought I should be queen of the world.”
“And why not?” said Noah’s father.
He smiled at Noah.
“Hey, look, there’s a vending machine! Why don’t you go ahead and get yourself a soda?” Noah’s father said. He pressed some coins into Noah’s hand. “And using the restroom’s a good idea, too. It’s going to be a bit of a long drive from here.”
Noah opened the door, but he didn’t yet get out of the car.
A horrible thought had swept down out of the clear blue sky and perched itself on Noah’s shoulder like a ten-ton crow. Noah turned and looked at his parents, his usually less-bizarre-acting parents, and asked, just to be sure: “You didn’t murder somebody, did you? Or rob a bunch of banks?”
His parents both laughed. His mom had a laugh that was like a sharp hoot of some wild, fast-flying bird, but his father chuckled in long, rolling rumbles.
“Nah,” said his father. “Nothing like that.”
“An expedition,” said his mother. “An urgent expedition, remember? So hurry.”
Secret File #1
WHAT THE MICROPHONE WOULD HAVE TOLD YOU
An important note: If you had been listening in to Noah’s family’s conversation, perhaps by having left a radio-transmitting microphone in the car they were driving, which is something people sometimes do, you would not have heard it the way I just wrote it out for you above. That is not only because conversations in real life are always jerkier and messier and more mumbly than the ones in books, but also in this case because everything Noah said always came out in shards and pieces, and that is very hard to portray in words. I have written down what he meant to say, and what his parents (who had years of practice understanding him) knew he was trying to say, but not what you yourself or your hidden microphone would have heard him saying.
Noah stuttered. Not just a cute hiccup around a “Denver” or a “dictionary,” either. Any number of sounds could just knock him right down.
For Noah, talking was like riding a bike with a wheel that liked to freeze up, almost out of nowhere. He would be sailing along down a sentence (so to speak), and along would come a word with a b or an m in it, something totally everyday like “bunch of books” or “mummy,” and that wheel would simply stop short, like an invisible wall had suddenly sprung up in the road before him, and he and his bicycle would just bang right into that wall and stop.
When this happens over and over, it becomes very tempting to ride your bike like you wish it had training wheels: to pedal along very, very slowly and carefully. Maybe even not to ride at all.
But Noah didn’t want to stay still, and he didn’t want to be silent, so he kept opening his mouth and plowing on. That was the sort of person he was. He was not a training-wheels kind of kid.
“Noah never stops trying! His attitude is good! He’s very persistent!” said all his teachers. “He’ll surely outgrow his difficulties with time!”
But it looked like maybe not, on the outgrowing thing. Noah had peeked into the books on stuttering his mother brought home from the library, and from all those pages of tiny print he had gathered that although little tiny kids often outgrow a stutter by the time they’re medium-little kids, someone who’s as old as eleven may — may — be a stutterer all his life long.
“But there’s nothing you can’t do!” his mother had said to him a hundred times. “Look at all those famous actors who used to stutter! Think of them! James Earl Jones, the guy who does Darth Vader’s voice — I heard he used to stutter.”
It didn’t always help, thinking of famous actors who used to stutter. They sure didn’t seem to be stuttering now. Noah would have paid all the dimes in his dime collect
ion to hear some famous movie actor open his mouth and get stuck. Darth Vader with a stutter! Noah would have liked to hear that!
Anyway, this is all just to say that much of what Noah said to his parents in the conversation in the car had a sort of explosive, machine-gun stop-and-start quality and would not necessarily have been understood by a casual bystander. But Noah and his parents understood each other, after long practice, reasonably well.
Let’s be clear, though: understanding the words your parents say is not the same as understanding what they’re up to when they announce out of the blue that you’ll be leaving your old life behind this very minute, right now, today.
It turns out that even people who don’t stutter at all can sometimes be thoroughly incomprehensible.
When Noah Came Out Of The Restroom, He Found His Parents Gathered Around A Trash Can In The Parking lot. His father was stuffing garbage bags full of who-knows-what into the trash can, and his mother was holding a match to the corner of something in her hands. It turned out to be the very photograph Noah had just found in his mother’s old book.
“Stop! What are you doing?” said Noah. Or, rather, intended to say. He was so horrified that his voice stopped, too. He made a sound that was itself a little like fire hissing, and that was all.
The only photo he had ever seen of his mother as a child, and she was burning it up?
“Don’t wave your arms around like that,” said his mother as she calmly watched the flames eat away at the edges of the picture and then stamped the ashes into the pavement. “There, that’s better. One of those good rules for all travelers: don’t draw attention to yourself, ever.”
“It’s just a picture,” said his dad, but at least he sounded a little sad about it. None of this made sense. Then Noah caught a glimpse of a neon-yellow zipper in the garbage can.
“That’s my backpack,” he said. “It’s new.”
And it had excellent Batman logos on the many pockets. It was a terrific backpack.
“Can’t be helped,” said his mother. “It has to go. It has your name scrawled right across the top in indelible marker.”
Why was that a problem? If you didn’t have your name on your backpack, you couldn’t bring it on the aquarium field trip: his mom knew that. She had written that N. KELLER there herself, just last month. And now they were throwing the whole backpack out?
