His mom shrugged and turned away, but not before Josh saw her eyes shift to the far dark corner. He went right over. Hidden behind a stack of rakes and shovels was his bike, smaller than he remembered. Still, he pulled it out and dragged it to the driveway.
“Josh! You will absolutely kill yourself!”
Josh knew she was probably right, but it was hard to think logically with his brain squished by his tiny helmet. Swinging his leg over the seat, he tried to make his voice sound calm. “What does Dad always say? There are two things you have to do in life: pay taxes and ride a bike.”
“But it’s so small! It’s too small for you, Josh.”
Josh’s knees banged against the handlebars when he tried to pedal. He wobbled and tipped and almost fell. But then something changed. It was as if suddenly, two strong hands were holding him up. And from somewhere far away, a crowd started to cheer. Those hands and that cheering, they made his legs pump faster, which, after all, is the key to staying upright on a bike.
Josh’s mom stood at the end of the driveway, scratching her rash. “Be careful!” she called.
Josh was surprised by how good it felt to be out on a bike. Actually, how great it felt. He followed the curvy street until he came to a stop. He took a right, then a left. He traveled farther out and in a different direction than he had before with his mom.
When he turned around and started back, all the streets and houses looked like his. But one street had a bunch of little kids, all on bikes. They were zooming in circles and popping wheelies. Their bikes were pretty much the same size, but Josh didn’t care.
“You’re doing great,” Big Brother said in his ear.
“Thanks. It was all your idea.”
“The first of many,” he said. “And it’s death and taxes.”
“What?”
“The two things you can’t escape. According to Dad.”
“Oh. What’s the one about riding your bike?”
“You never forget how to ride a bike.”
Josh said, “Well, that’s surprisingly true. Dad’s right about that.”
He thought about his dad, how happy he’d be at that moment. He always wanted Josh to be out in the neighborhood, a member of the army of kids on bikes. And as Josh turned another corner he finally understood why: It felt good to be moving smooth and fast because of his own two legs. It felt like freedom.
Big Brother said, “Fun, huh? Now you need to get Mom to let you ride your bike to school.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I mean it.”
“But Mom drives me in the morning. And I walk home. That’s the deal.”
“That’s going to change.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
Josh’s neck twitched. “It’s too small for me. And it’s bright yellow. With SpongeBob all over it.”
“You can raise the seat, you know. And the handlebars. You just need a wrench. It’s fairly straightforward. And you should adjust the straps on your helmet—”
“Why are you being so bossy?”
“Because I have plans for you,” he said softly. “That’s why I’m here.”
“You can’t just come back and make plans.”
“If you want me to stay,” he said, “that’s how it’s going to be.”
Josh turned his SpongeBob bicycle in a wide, wobbly circle and rode away from Big Brother. A crow called down from a wire, like it had some important news to report.
Josh heard Big Brother. “Life is a glorious adventure.”
“What?” he snapped back over his shoulder. “What are you yakking about now?”
“Today,” he called. “When you were searching for an inspirational quote before your walk home. Here’s one: ‘Life is a glorious adventure . . . or it is nothing.’”
Josh put down his head and pedaled furiously away.
SKELETON HOUSES
Josh had been in such a hurry to get away from Big Brother’s bossy voice that he hadn’t paid much attention to where he was riding. After a series of wrong turns he found himself at the far edge of the development, right next to the forest. Rising above a mess of dirt piles, tree stumps, and rough, trampled grass were several new Bear Creek homes, under construction. Josh stopped and straddled his bike. He had seen houses being built, but he’d never examined one closely. Houses have bones, he thought. Wooden bones.
He looked past the gaping skeleton houses to the thick dark forest. The air had gone still, as if the birds and insects and even the wind were waiting for something in that strange borderland between civilization and forest.
Josh knew that this would all be put together. There would be plywood and trim and thick coats of paint to cover everything. All the ratty dirt patches would be smoothed, and chunks of green lawn would be rolled out to make yards. Then the street would get a name. Buttercup Lane, maybe, or Chestnut Way. And people would drive up with their boxes of stuff and never think about what had come before. But for now there was this: the in-between space that had not been completely tamed.
The sun dropped low to the circle of trees and a new chill crept into the air. Josh shivered and turned his bike around. He tried not to think ahead, to the ride back through the maze of streets that all looked the same. He wished Big Brother would show up and help him find his way.
He heard noises then—shouting and laughter—and found himself being overtaken by a group of kids on bikes. They were the same kids he’d passed earlier, four of them, riding up fast.
Josh’s heart pounded. He judged they were in second grade, maybe third. Their bikes seemed threatening, with thick tires and fire-patterned racing stripes. When they circled around, Josh saw they were carrying objects—boards and bricks and chunks of cement. One kid had a bright-orange traffic cone. For a moment, no one spoke. Then a crow called from a nearby tree, breaking the silence.
“Hello,” one of the kids said.
“Hello,” said Josh.
“You want to jump with us?”
“Jump?”
“We’re going to make an obstacle course.”
“Oh,” Josh said. “Thanks, but I have to go home.”
The kids nodded and rode ahead to the dirt mound behind the skeleton house. Josh really did need to be going home but he stayed where he was, watching as the four kids turned the building site into something else: an obstacle course with ramps and jumps and cones. When it was finished, they lined up at the far edge of the dirt yard and took turns. They cheered when one of them landed the perfect jump and ran over to check when another fell.
“Loser touches the house!” they called, over and over.
One girl left her bike in the dirt after a wipeout. She walked over to Josh with a slight limp. “I thought you said you had to go home.”
“Well, I do.” He cleared his throat. “Are you okay?”
She nodded and bent over to brush off her jeans. “You should try it.”
He shook his head.
“Why are you just standing here?”
Josh didn’t actually know why he was. Just standing there. He looked at the construction site that was now a track. “I’m new here. I was just . . . riding around.” It was the only thing he could think to say.
“I like your bike.”
“Thanks.” Josh was embarrassed but also pleased. She asked what grade he was in and he told her. Then she told him that she was in second grade, at Mountain View K–8. “That’s where I go, too,” he said. “But I just started.”
Two other kids dropped their bikes and ran over. “He’s just standing here,” the girl informed them.
One of the boys had a sling on his arm. “You’re brave. We never come here alone.”
“Yeah,” another added.
Josh felt his face flush. “I’m not brave.”
The girl said, “He’s new. He d
oesn’t know.”
“Know what?”
One of the kids pointed. “See that path over there? The one that goes into the forest? If you walk on that path, you come to an old house where somebody died. A girl. It’s all boarded up but there are noises that come from the walls. Like crying and stuff.”
“Nobody can live there,” another one said.
Josh squinted to where the boy was pointing. He saw a tall pine tree, covered with dark shapes. Crows. There must have been fifty of them!
The kids saw him looking. “Do you know what a group of crows is called?”
Josh thought. “A flock?”
“No. A murder.”
“That can’t be right.”
“It is. And the crows get mad if we look at them. They can recognize faces.”
Josh turned his face, so the crows wouldn’t be able to recognize it. “Have you gone in there?” Josh asked. “On the trail?”
“It’s no trespassing.”
“Then how do you know about the house?”
The four zipped their mouths tight and glanced sideways at each other. The first girl said quickly, “Why don’t you want to try our obstacle course? It’s fun. Loser touches the house. But we won’t make you do it.”
“What does that mean?” Josh asked.
“Whoever wipes out the most has to sneak into the woods and touch the house.” The other three glared at the girl, whose mouth had obviously come unzipped. She shrugged them off like it didn’t matter. “He’s not going to tell anybody.”
“I won’t,” Josh said. “Tell anybody. But I can’t ride your obstacle course. I have to go home now.” Still he stood there, squinting through the bones of the skeleton house, trying to spot the path into the woods from a hundred yards away, trying not to look at the crows.
The kids lost interest in the new boy with the bright yellow bike. They rode back and took turns with their ramps and dirt piles and obstacles, even the boy with the sling.
The crows called at once, startling Josh out of the strange scene he’d found himself in. It was a ghost story, he thought. A group of kids telling about a house in the woods. A house at the end of a path that no one could go on. Crying walls. A murder of crows guarding the trail. That was a ghost story.
The crows called out again.
“Big Brother?” Josh whispered, still looking to the woods, hoping to see the path. He saw a flash of something—a bright shadow? Two eyes? But then it was gone, whatever he’d seen or hadn’t seen.
The sky seemed darker when Josh turned to leave. He thought of those fairy tales, the scary ones, where a person wandered into a forest for an hour but it was really one hundred years. He waved goodbye to the kids, but they didn’t notice. Their voices echoed behind him, laughing and shouting. He wondered about echoes, how they worked. For a moment he thought of them as real people, hiding in the forest and calling back whatever they heard. Echo people.
Josh was anxious to be home, but every turn put him on a street that, except for a flowerpot or a flagpole, looked just like his. It was like another bad fairy tale, or a nightmare, and his chest was beginning to get that tight feeling when he took another turn and found himself at the entrance to the development, right next to the waving bear. Josh let out a relieved breath. He knew how to get home from there.
He wondered if the kids were still out with their ramp, not far from a haunted house in the woods. He wondered if one of them was going to have to touch it. He shivered thinking of all the things around him, all the things he couldn’t see.
WALLS
Josh set his bike in the corner of the garage, which still reeked of turpentine and spilled paint. “Mom?” he called.
He found her in the kitchen, holding an empty pot and a package of macaroni. Unopened boxes labeled KITCHEN were piled along the counters. Josh could tell she’d been worried but was trying not to show it. “How was your ride?”
“Good,” he said. “I met some neighborhood kids.”
“That’s wonderful!” Her forehead lost its worried furrow. “Do they go to your school?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s wonderful!” she said again. “What did you all do? Did you ride somewhere?”
Josh didn’t want to tell her about the house in the woods. The house where somebody died. “They had a ramp. They were doing jumps.”
Worried again.
“Small ramps. They are younger than me.”
“Oh. How young?”
He shrugged. “Maybe second grade. Or third.”
“Well,” she said. Her smile turned quivery. “That’s a start. Your father will be so happy to hear you were riding your bike! Mac and cheese in ten minutes.”
Later that night, Josh said good night to his mom. He went upstairs and got into bed, but was too scared to turn off the light. When he heard the phone ring, he knew it was his dad calling to check in. He also knew his parents would have a long, murmuring conversation about him.
Josh looked around at some of the posters his dad had given him over the years.
Push at your own edges
Stop playing it safe
Heroes are made not born
If you can’t find the path, make one
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade
The posters, Josh suddenly saw, were arranged in this new room just as they’d been arranged in his old room. They’d moved all this way, to a new town and a new house for a new start, but he couldn’t tell by looking at his room. He’d even picked the same color for the walls. What was the good of having inspirational posters if a person just tacked them back on a wall without looking? Without seeing? Without being inspired?
It made him think of the kids he’d met earlier, and the obstacle course. Why didn’t he try it? What had he been afraid of? That he’d fall? That they’d laugh at him? Call him Kleenex?
He’d just been afraid for so long—and doing things the same way for so long—that he didn’t know how to do anything differently. Would he ever? Or would he always surround himself with these same walls?
The more Josh stared at the posters and asked himself those questions, the more the walls seemed to close in. He heard his mom’s footsteps coming up the stairs. She was still talking on the phone and he heard, “I’ll just check if he’s awake.”
Josh jumped out of bed, raced across the room, turned off the light and dashed back. He was just pulling the covers up to his chin when he heard the faint knock on his door, then the click of the knob.
“Josh? Honey? You still awake?”
Josh froze, afraid she would know he was faking it. Then he wondered why he was faking it. Didn’t he want to talk to his dad? He loved his dad.
He could pretend to wake up right then. He could. He could take the phone. He could tell his dad—tell his dad—tell him what? That Big Brother was back? That the invisible crack in the universe had somehow opened again? What would his dad say to that? What would his mom do? As he was pondering this, the door clicked shut. Josh heard more murmuring and then his mom’s footsteps as they shuffled down the hallway.
He opened his eyes. The room was dark but one of his posters had a sparkly border that glowed in the dark, making it seem like a door to another world. The sparkles made him think about the girl from school, the one with the rainbow shirt and mismatched shoes. Would there be others?
“Big Brother,” he whispered.
Back when Josh was younger, just a whisper like that was all it took. But things were different. He closed his eyes to block out the dark door with the sparkly border. It made him think of things he didn’t want to think about. The kids with their obstacle course. The skeleton house. The path in the woods. School the next day.
He was drifting off to sleep when he remembered the rest. There was a house. A girl. Walls that cried. It was the right kind of ghost story. The
spooky kind, the movie kind—the kind that everyone wanted to hear.
HIDDEN
The next morning Josh practiced in the mirror before going downstairs. “Mom, I’m going to ride my bike to school today.” He said it to his reflection, making his face look serious but relaxed. Confidence!
He ran through the list of all the reasons why it was a good idea: excellent exercise; he was old enough; all the kids did it. He didn’t know if the last one was true, but he had seen a bike rack with bikes near the bus zone.
Josh didn’t want to lie to his parents, but they seemed to like the fake version of him better than the real one. Thinking about that made his eyebrows droop in an unconfident way. So he turned his back on the mirror and marched downstairs, straight to the kitchen. “Hey, Mom—”
His mom set down her coffee cup, glanced at his khaki pants, and frowned. “Why aren’t you wearing your new jeans? I washed them for you.”
“I think you need to wash them again.”
“Maybe you just don’t like jeans.” She poured milk over his cornflakes and held out the bowl. “You’ve always been a little particular. Remember when you couldn’t wear pants at all? You had to wear shorts, even in the winter?”
“Yeah.” Josh looked down at the cornflakes and took a deep breath. “So I’m going to ride my bike to school today.” He tried to make his voice light, the way he’d practiced, and keep his eyebrows straight.
“No you’re not,” she said, as expected.
So Josh said, “Let’s call Dad.”
Ten minutes later, after he’d figured out how to adjust the seat and handlebars with the wrench he’d found in the box labeled TOOLS, Josh was riding down the road on his bright yellow SpongeBob SquarePants bicycle. “Big Brother,” he whispered, “I hate you.”
But a funny thing happened. The longer Josh was on his bike, the better he felt. His neck stopped twitching. His backpack felt lighter. Even the forest didn’t seem so creepy. In no time at all, he was riding past The Last Stop, through town, and turning into the parking lot of Mountain View K–8.
He found the bike rack near the bus zone. A couple of older kids were locking up their bikes and Josh braced himself for the teasing and laughter that would come when they looked at his bright-yellow one. But they didn’t even glance his way.
Last Meeting of the Gorilla Club Page 6
