by EA Young
Chapter 9
A short, stubby shadow with no neck blocked the doorway. It raised its arms and started wailing, “Aaaaaarrgh!”
Then another one appeared. “Wuuuuuoooo!” he cried, following his leader. One-by-one Clarence and his friends moaned and flailed their way down into the basement. One kid backed me against the wall.
Still holding Trevor’s hand, I waited for them to pass into the big empty cellar before I climbed back up the steps. I shook my head. They were an insult to real ghosts.
Then I thought: Why should I let them get away with this?
I gripped the door handle and waved at my friends to follow. They did and I snapped the lock.
“Aaaarrr-ey! Hey! Who locked the door? Tyrone? Kriston? Open the door man. I’m scared of the dark!”
I leaned hard on the door to keep Clarence in the basement. “Make sure none of my brothers are coming,” I warned the others.
Cheri’s face went pale. “I thought they were already in there!”
I squinted at her. “When they pull a prank they don’t pull a stupid one!” I pointed.
Cheri’s whole body twisted and she was heading straight for the front door when Terence swung it wide open and glided in with Tyrone. Then she bolted up the staircase.
“Hey!” Clarence hollered, banging on the door. “Let me out!”
I let them both get as close as the kitchen doorway.
“Don’t!” I warned.
They froze in their tracks and looked at me.
I shook my head. “I’m not getting blamed again.” I braced harder against the door.
They kept looking at me.
I raised my eyebrows. “You want Pop to come in here and see this?” I challenged.
Now they looked at each other.
“You can’t keep him locked up in there like that,” Terence said.
I glared at him. “Who told him to go down there in the first place? Why couldn’t he stay outside?”
“We’re just playing a game,” Tyrone said, innocently.
“Well, so am I,” I jeered.
He moved a little closer. I swung my leg at him. “Get away from me!” The blood started rushing to my head.
“What’re you getting so worked up for?” Terence said.
“Because I’m not getting into any more trouble thanks to him.” I brushed my cheek against my shoulder to soak up the sweat.
“Nobody’s getting you into any trouble,” Tyrone said, making another move toward me.
I aimed my foot at him again. “Are you going to get him out of here?” I asked.
They looked out the corner of their eyes at each other. “Sure,” they promised.
I glared at them. “Don’t give me that!” I snapped. “I want him out of here before he sells more poison ivy or puts another hole in the step. How am I supposed to explain that kind of stuff?”
“She won’t say nothing!” Clarence yelled. “Your parents wouldn’t believe her anyway. She’s got no proof. It’s her word against ours, and besides, you told your folks that we were working on our science project. How can we work if she’s got me locked up in the basement?”
Cheri’s head leaned over the banister. Terence and Tyrone didn’t move.
“She already flunked school,” Clarence continued. “All she wants is for us to flunk so we can be left back too. You think they’ll believe her now?”
My cheeks burned inside.
“You wait and see, when we graduate college, she’ll still be stuck in fifth grade.” His laugh echoed through the door. “Who knows if she’ll ever make it out of grammar school.” The others were laughing in there with him. “You better ask the nuns to pray your pop lives forever so he can support you the rest of your life.”
I stared at the basement door, his honking laugh pounding my eardrums. I banged it hard with my fist and then sprinted out into the backyard.
“Get down, get down!” I hollered, brushing thick dirty paws off my shirt. “Sit, sit!”
They wouldn’t listen. King tried to slobber me with kisses. Precious nibbled at the seat of my pants. “Will you sit?”
Then, through an open window, I heard Clarence yell out, “Where’s her bedroom? Man, I’ll fix her!”
I rushed back inside and saw him rubbing his right ear. “Stay away from my room,” I warned him.
What was I doing?
I dashed into the living room and suddenly the place was in an uproar again.
Kids scattered, my brothers on a manhunt and Clarence craving revenge. Barks, crashes, and outbursts resounded throughout the entire house.
Later, hiding under my bed, I watched the top landing outside the door to see if Clarence would show up.
I was steaming.
What did he care about some science project? All he wanted to do was make trouble. I wasn’t the one preventing him from doing his work: he had come down into that basement on his own. If they really wanted to start their project, they would have started before Clarence started teasing us.
I pressed my chin against the floor.
His words really bothered me. Would my parents believe him? Would everybody leave me for sixth grade? Did I want to spend another year in fifth grade, this time with Terence? They’d have to put me in another school. Brothers and sisters couldn’t stay in the same classroom. Everyone would leave me then. I didn’t want to go through the same class over and over again with a whole new bunch of different students every year. I wanted to go to new classes with my friends every year.
I saw two small feet pass by so I called out to them.
Trevor bent down, smiled, and crawled under to join me, but then somebody grabbed him by his sneakers and pulled him out, screaming.
I stuck my head out and watched Terence carry Trevor, who was still screaming, out the door. I braced my foot against the bedpost and pushed myself halfway out.
Tyrone landed right on my back. “I was waiting for you up here,” he cackled, lugging me downstairs. He dropped me in front of the couch, keeping a firm grip on my shoulders.
I watched everybody run from everybody until the moment had come. Clarence saw me and was coming after me.
Tyrone tightened his grip.
“Eeny meeny miney mo,” Clarence said, strutting over. “Who will be the first to go?” His hands were hidden behind his back. “So, thought you were slick, didn’t you?” His beady little eyes were steadily watching me. “Lockin’ Clarence up in the basement.”
“Can I get in on this?” a kid asked.
“No!” Clarence stated. “Let’s see how slick you are now,” he told me. Slowly, he raised his arms from behind his back.
I broke loose, kicked Tyrone in the knee, and leaped up the staircase, and straight into Terence who was coming down. He brought me back downstairs.
“Don’t let the prisoners escape,” Clarence instructed. Four other boys pulled Courtney and Cheri into the living room and dropped them in front of the couch, our jail cell, beside me.
“Keep them together,” Clarence ordered. “We’ll pack them all in at once.”
“That’s not how it’s done,” Courtney argued, getting back up.
“You’re supposed to put everybody in their own separate cell. You can’t crowd them all in one place.”
“I can if it’s my cell,” Clarence threw at her.
“But that’s not how it’s done,” Courtney disputed, resting both hands on her hips in authority.
Clarence closed in on her. “Who’s running this jailhouse?” he demanded as the others banded behind him, giving support.
Courtney lips didn’t move again. She sat back down.
“How long should we keep them here?” a boy asked.
“For the rest of their lives,” Clarence snickered.
“You got the rope?”
“Right here.” Gloating, Clarence shook out a clothesline.
Just then I stood up and put my ear to the hallway. “I hear Pop,” I announced.
Everybody went bug-eyed scanning the
windows while I flew back upstairs.
The second race was on, and I was ahead of the game. And Clarence thought he was so smart.
This time I hid in the attic beside a window that faced the driveway. Twenty seconds later a van pulled up. I took a peep.
Oooh no! It was Pop!
I snuck down to the second floor and flattened myself across the landing. I peeked over the rim.
The door opened and Pop walked in. “Hey, hey, hey, HEY, HEY!” he hollered. He placed Mom outside and grabbed the first kid running. “What is the problem?”
Wide-eyed and breathing hard, the whole herd showed up.
Pop searched heads. He wasn’t fooled, he knew exactly who was missing. “Justine!” he bellowed.
I ducked my head. I was not ready for this.
Just then I heard the patter of feet behind me. I looked back and saw Austin coming out of his room, rubbing his eyes. He stood beside me on the landing.
“Austin,” I heard Pop call, “where’s your sister?”
Austin pointed.
I backed away from the landing once I saw hair rising, then a forehead, then eyebrows, then a pair of eyes.
I braced against the wall.
“Hey Pop, Mom wants you!” Kriston blared. “She thinks it’s time!”
Pop came to a sudden halt and twitched one cheek. Then he tumbled backwards, grabbing the banister.
“Dad!” I screamed, following him down the stairs. He missed four steps but landed on his feet. He had a firm grip on the banister.
“Dad, are you all right?” Terence asked, grabbing him by the shoulder. Everybody circled around him.
“Yeah, fine,” he said, sitting on the steps.
“Justin, honey!” Mom exclaimed, clutching his other shoulder.
Pop waved his hand at her like it was nothing. “What were you all doing running around the house?” he inquired. “Didn’t I tell you before to stop that? Why do I have to keep repeating myself? This house is not a place for you to act like animals.”
He was fine.
I wrapped my arms around his waist as he got up.
“I’m not telling you again,” he continued. “The next time I catch you running around like that, you’ll find your things out in the backyard with the mutts!” Then he looked at Clarence and quietly pointed a finger to the door.
Clarence inched sideways and slithered out of the house.
Pop led Mom out to the van. After she got in, Pop closed the door and went around to the driver’s side. He started the engine, then he backed the van out the driveway.
I watched it disappear down the road.
I sighed.
How could he be so calm taking Mom to the hospital and yet still lose everything when he had to deal with us?
“We better go back inside,” Tanya suggested, leading the way.
Clarence leaped out from a bush. “Is he gone?” he asked, scanning the road.
“Yeah,” Tyrone said. My brothers and the rest of them invaded the living room. The others followed me up the stairs.
“Boy, look at the dent your father left,” Courtney said, pointing at the step where he had landed. The center of it did sink in a little.
I dropped my rear end on the top landing and lay my head on my knees.
Cheri sat beside me. “Don’t worry, Justine, he’s fine,” she told me. “You know anybody else who can just get up like that and drive their wife to the hospital to have a baby?”
“Be glad the stairs didn’t break,” Tanya said, which reminded me of the hole in the basement
I sighed. “What was that crash?”
Everyone looked at each other.
“What crash?” Tanya asked.
“I heard crashes in here somewhere. What happened?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t hear any crash.”
I sighed again. That was all I needed, another secret disaster hiding somewhere, waiting to be discovered.
“Whatever happened to your washing machine?” I asked Cheri.
“It died,” she told me. “Mom got the insurance for a new one. She loves it.”
“Did she ever find out about the flood?” I asked.
She shook her head no.
Tanya scooped Kriston’s basketball off the floor and started dribbling.
“We’re not allowed to do that in the house,” I told her.
“How about if we roll it?” Tanya asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Are there any more balls in here?” she asked. “We can play race the balls back and forth, without bouncing, and whoever lets their ball go past, loses.”
“Oh yeah,” Courtney said. “I know that game.”
They ran into the bedrooms to collect balls. I didn’t think this was a good idea.
“You see, we sit in a big circle,” Tanya explained, “and we roll the balls back and forth at each other like we’re playing catch; only, we can’t throw.”
The others came back loaded with baseballs, foam balls, ping-pong balls, and golf balls.
“What if you break something?” I asked, starting to worry again.
“We’ll only use the soft balls,” Tanya said.
Courtney and I sat at one end of the hallway and Tanya and Cheri sat at the other. Tanya spun a lime green baseball towards me and at the same time sent the foam ball to Courtney. We rolled them back and got socked with a Ping-Pong ball and a golf ball. We kept rolling balls back at each other and tried not to let any go past. I didn’t want the balls to bump into the furniture.
We were getting better at it, and I stopped feeling nervous. Then Courtney missed a foam ball, and I flinched as she chased it down the stairs.
“Wait!” Cheri shrieked, laughing hard. “She lost her partner!”
“I guess this isn’t so bad,” I said to Tanya. Our first and only ball game for the summer.
I lay back and stared down the hall, getting an upside-down view of Austin’s bedroom. “Hey look at this,” I said. “Upside-down this looks like it could be another house.”
I felt the vibration as their backs hit the floor.
“We’re walking on the ceiling,” Cheri said.
“Hey you know how the rooms look when you see them through a mirror?” Tanya asked. “Like someone could really be living there except they’re in another room and that’s why you can’t see them?” She sat up straight. “Sister said something about dimensions. Do you think she was talking about that?”
“Hey Justine, come down here a minute!” Terence’s muffled voice called out
The rest of us hopped up and scampered down to the living room where they were crowded around the TV set watching some science-fiction movie.
“You had Sister Flynn for science, right?” Terence asked me.
“Yeah.”
“How’d she grade those projects you did?”
“By whoever was most scientifically creative,” I said, sitting on the arm of the couch.
“What kind of stuff did you hand in?” Terence asked.
I thought hard. “One kid did a small platform of a bunch of prisms reflecting the electromagnetic spectrum,” I explained. “Another one cross-bred chromosomes in plants. Another one did an arrangement of bonds and atoms. And another one did a plastic polypeptide chain.” Whoa! Did that come out of my mouth?
“What did you do?” a kid asked me.
“I think I did a solar system with—”
“She drew the planet earth,” Tyrone cut in.
I glared at him. He grinned.
“I’ll make you a deal,” offered another kid who I didn’t even know. “I’ll pay you two dollars to do my science project.”
I glimpsed over at Terell.
“Don’t do that to her,” Tyrone pleaded.
The girls smiled, but I waited for him to hit me good.
“You know she can’t even remember which planet she’s living on.” He came through too.
Clarence laughed the hardest. Courtney flung a pillow at him.
I browsed through a couple of pages, catching titles of certain subjects. “What do you know about constellations?”
I asked the kid.
“Nothing,” he said. “They’re stars, right?”
I took a look at him. Was he serious or was this another prank?
“What do you know about photosynthesis?”
“Is that something with a camera?”
I looked at the others; blank faces everywhere.
I skimmed through some more. “What about DNA?”
He paused, shaking a finger at me. “That stands for something, doesn’t it?”
Clarence hugged his face into the pillow and laughed some more.
Maybe I wasn’t as bad off in the brain department as I had thought. “Natural Selection?”
The kid waited, rotating his hand. “A natural selection of what?”
One more time. I flipped through the last encyclopedia, ran my finger down the page, and looked him dead in the face. “Bugs.”
“Oh yeah!” he sang out. High fives went up all over the place. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Courtney asked him, “Are you trying to get your parents to buy you a pet?”
Everyone stopped laughing and looked at her.
“No,” he said. “I just figured that’s a good idea for a science project is all.” He smirked at Tyrone and Clarence.
“Well, if you think your parents are going to let you have bugs as pets, you’re crazy.” Courtney explained. “You know how much money it costs to have an exterminator come every year? And all those pesticides the city puts in trees?” She looked at him even harder. “You can’t start a bug farm here. This is a residential area.”
Clarence glared at Courtney and whispered something to the others. They all had weird looks on their faces.
Tanya leaned over. “What are they whispering about?” she whispered.
“Maybe they’re planning to get the school involved because it’s a science project,” Cheri said. “So that they can prove it’s educational for them to have a bug farm.”
“Oh there’s nothing that can be penetrated into their tiny little brains,” Courtney said. “They’re just pretending.”
I glanced through the book some more. “So how about the nervous system?”
He wouldn’t answer.
I raised my head. “Well, what do you want to do?”
He shrugged. “Think about it, I guess.”
“I think that’s the reason why they make us do this in the first place,” Courtney commented just as the phone rang.
I hopped up to answer it. “Hello?”
“Hey baby!” Pop called. “Your little sister’s here.”
“My sister?” I said. “I have a sister?” I felt the tip of my ears tingle and my stomach sink in. And already it was my little sister. “What’s her name?”
“Doreen, after your grandma,” he said. “How are your brothers coming with that project?”
“Fine,” I told him. “We decided on the nervous system.”
“We?”
“I mean they,” I hurried. “When are you coming home?”
“I’ll be there soon, baby,” he said. “Your mom did all the work but she wants me to go home and rest.”
“Kiss her for me,” I said. “Bye Daddy.”
“I’ll do that. Bye.”
I placed the receiver down and sauntered back into the living room. I actually had a sister. I couldn’t believe it.
“Doreen’s here,” I announced.
“Who’s Doreen?” Tyrone asked.
“Our little sister.” I flopped down on the couch, feeling strange inside.
“A sister?” Clarence said, disgusted. “You’ve got another sister?” he asked my brothers and shook his head. “Wait till she sees what she’s coming home to.”
I sneered at him. “You shut up.”
My brothers sat quietly staring at me with a strange look in their eyes and small grins on their faces. Then, I realized that Doreen would be moving into my room.
“Did you ask him about your composition?” Cheri questioned.
“Oh no!” I jumped up. “I told him I’d be ready when he got back.” I ran up to my room and looked around. I gathered my notebook, assignment pad and pen, and ran downstairs to wait for him out front.
The sun had already set. Its brightness was covered by a glowing blanket of blue that surrounded the early evening sky.
“What paper is this?” Terence asked as the rest of them sat around the front steps.
“I have to do a composition on some topic for English.”
“A topic on what?” he asked, leaning over my shoulder.
“Something that’s important to me,” I told him. “I’m doing mine on our family.”
“Why’d you pick that?”
I squeezed my pen. “If you ask me another question . . .”
“All right, all right, all right,” he responded, but he still looked at me funny.
Suddenly a horn tooted and Pop drove up to the house. Clarence swooped below the trees into the neighbor’s yard. Everyone else backed away as Pop got out of the van.
“See you later, Justine,” Tanya said, walking down the sidewalk.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Home,” she said and hurried off.
“Bye, Justine,” Courtney whispered and snuck inside her house.
The rest of them spread out, each one down his or her own block. “How’s my best girl?” Pop asked, leaning his foot against the steps. “Ready to begin?” His face had a strange glow as he stood there staring at me.
“How you doing, Pop?” Tyrone asked, resting his hand on Pop’s shoulder.
“Fine,” Pop told him. “Why?”
Shaking his head he said, “No reason. It’s just that you don’t usually come home looking like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like that.” Tyrone pointed at his gleaming expression.
“You boys go in the house,” Pop told them. “Get dinner out of the fridge. Except you, Tyrone.” He sat down beside me. “All right, what’s this assignment?”
Suddenly I was speechless. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. My stomach and my head were both acting funny. I felt pricks all over my skin. I had started to believe the worst might be true.
What if Clarence was right? I didn’t want everybody to leave me in the fifth grade. What was I going to do? We could not study together. Everybody always had a different solution, and when no one’s solution worked, we could never figure out the correct answer.
My solid ground felt soggy. I felt that I would sink right through the front lawn, but something was still holding me up. What if my friends made it to the sixth grade and I did wind up stuck behind? I almost wanted to fall through the ground and disappear, but something wouldn’t let me. I felt like being quiet, waiting for this feeling to end, but Pop wanted an answer.
He still looked confident; would he ever understand how I felt? “I have to do a composition on why my family is important to me.” I clicked my pen. “And how I feel about the new baby.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” he said, pocketing his sunglasses. “It won’t be the same as having another brother, you know. She’ll be in your room, which means you get a little more responsibility. Are you sure you’ll be able to handle that?”
I shrugged. “I guess so.” I wasn’t sure I could handle anything anymore, but I couldn’t tell him that.
“It won’t be easy having a baby share the same room with you,” he said. “You won’t have much time to yourself anymore. Your mom feels it would be good for you because this way you won’t be in your room by yourself all the time.”
But I liked being in my room by myself.
“You’ve got to do the big sister role one more time,” Pop said, holding my
hand. Now he had a serious, worried look on his face. “Doreen isn’t used to us yet; we’ll have to be sensitive about that. She’ll probably cry a lot. You think you’ll be able to handle that?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I told him. I stared down at the ground, wondering what I was being forced into this time.
“Pop,” I mumbled. “If I don’t pass the fifth grade, does that mean I’ll be stuck in grammar school forever?”
“No.” He shook his head. “You’ll just have to take it over again next year.”
I cringed. Then I’d have to go to another school, everybody would leave me. What was the point of trying anything if the same old challenge was waiting to knock me down?
I dropped my chin into the palm of my hand.
“When Clarence graduates from college—”
“What college?” Pop interrupted. “He can’t make it through the third grade and already you’ve got him graduating from college.” He looked at me. “Why are you worrying about him? What has he got to do with anything? His grades don’t affect you. Never mind about Clarence, worry about your own work.” Pop roughly brushed blades of grass off the leg of his pants.
I heard the bushes shake behind me. I looked but Clarence wasn’t there.
I leaned my head on top of my knees. Clarence had broadcasted all my business to everybody, trying to prove that I wasn’t good enough, but he never once mentioned his own bad grades. Why did I ever believe anything Clarence said?
That was it. No more sharing study secrets. The less anyone knew about my business, the better off I was.
I felt a little confidence coming back and I was glad. All my homework had been done in no time. My room was straightened out neatly, and all my clothes were organized. With the little bit of studying I had left to do maybe, just maybe, I would have some time for summer. What could go wrong now? Clarence, that’s what.
“Why does he keep saying things to upset me?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Clarence,” I told him.
Pop gazed down the road. “He doesn’t have anything else to do.”
“Does that go for Tyrone too?”
“That’s different.”
I looked up at him. “Why’s that different?”
“Tyrone’s your brother,” he said. “And you’re a part of each other’s lives whether you like it or not.”
“I never said I didn’t like it,” I pointed out. “All I said was I get tired of them bugging me. It’s like a disease with them, especially Tyrone.”
“Is that why you hit him?” Pop asked.
“Well, he got on my nerves.”
“But you didn’t have to hit him.”
I couldn’t think up a good response to Pop’s reasoning.
“Out of all the teasing, nagging, hassling, pestering, and annoyances they spring on you day after day after day, has any one of them ever hit you?” he asked.
I shook my head no.
“Do you know why?”
“No,” I mumbled.
“Because as impossible as it may seem, they do love you.”
I watched his lips curve into a smile. “How are they showing this love for me?”
“Anything they can do to get your attention, they will try at least once, and if it works they’ll keep on doing it.”
“Well, why can’t they find some other way to get my attention?”
“Because they know this one works.”
“So then what am I supposed to do?”
“Ignore them,” he said. “Don’t pay them any mind. Let Tyrone ramble off at the mouth, and when he sees he can’t upset you, he’ll get bored and move on to something else.” He tossed a beetle off his sneaker.
I never thought of it that way. “And if that doesn’t work, can I come back to you?” I asked.
“Baby you can come to me anytime,” he said. “Anytime! If you have a problem or want to talk.” He brushed my cheek. “My first baby girl!” he asserted. “I watched your mom holding Doreen today and it reminded me so much of the day you were born.”
A tingle ran up my spine as I watched a tear form in his right eye.
“Some nights I used to come home and find the two of you in our room, you on the bed smiling pretty and getting tickled. Your mom loving every minute of it, and I knew I was home.” He stared at me. “I was home.”
I felt my chin quiver. Embarrassed, I looked away a minute so it would stop. “Don’t you think that’s a bit much for a bunch of fifth-graders?” I asked him.
He laughed and hugged me. I hugged him back.
“Your Grandma Doreen wanted to take you home and keep you forever,” he said.
“You didn’t think to give her Tyrone?”
“We did.”
I waited for him to finish. “What happened?”
“She gave him back an hour later.”
Our eyes locked and we burst out laughing. I laughed as we went inside.
