by kc dyer
The house itself looked pretty creepy up close. Peeling paint, broken windows—the whole haunted/possessed/scene-of-the-crime thing that reminded her of every scary movie she’d seen. Nobody had been looking after the garden, either. Compared to all the neat gardens along the street, this yard had been allowed to run wild. There were still lots of flowers, but they were spilling out of the beds and were all through the lawn, maybe seeded into the grass by the wind.
She walked around the back, her thoughts on those crab apple trees. Near the back of the lot was the old stone building that Nan had mentioned. It was in even worse shape than the main house, and Darby could see where most of the roof had caved in. Something moved in the shadows and she nearly jumped out of her skin. But when Maurice, Nan’s cat, padded past, she had to laugh out loud. The cat hopped up onto the stone windowsill of the old building and Darby promised herself she’d quit watching scary movies in the future.
Besides, behind the house it was beautiful—kind of like a secret garden. Blackberries were growing wild all over the back area behind the trees. And the trees themselves were loaded with apples, all smaller than her fist. It smelled great, too. Not like dead stuff or the decay of a really old place. Just fresh and flowery and—
Almost sweet.
Darby shivered. Too much like an old witch’s candy house in the fairy-tale woods. She clutched her skateboard a little tighter and retraced her steps around the house.
By the time she got to the front, she began to feel a little foolish for being so easily creeped out. Here it was a hot, otherwise boring, beautiful day. And this old house might be a good place to escape to if Gramps kept up the weird behaviour. Sheesh. Half the time he acted more like a kid than a grandfather.
Darby stopped in her tracks, and realized she had been wrong about there being no one else her age nearby.
The boy was wandering along the street in front of the house. He was wearing a red T-shirt and kicking something back and forth on the road. He had a kind of pattern going—two kicks left foot, kick right. Switch feet.
She stepped back into the shadow of the big tree at the front of the old house to watch him. She couldn’t quite see what he was kicking. Was it a rock? Rubber ball? No—something the same size as a rock, but different.
The pattern shifted again, this time with a little twist. Three kicks left foot, two kicks right, toe flip. It was the toe flip that gave it away. Not a rock—a chestnut. Spiny as a sea urchin and still green with early summer.
This is supposed to be fun? The thought of having to stay in a place so boring for the whole summer made Darby groan aloud.
Red T-shirt looked a bit startled for a moment, then he kicked the chestnut high so it sailed over the hedge at the side of the house.
“What’s your problem?” he said.
Darby shrugged and stepped onto the road. She dropped her board and rolled it back and forth under one foot. “So this is what kids around here do with their time, eh? Kick chestnuts around all day? Not my idea of fun.”
Red T-shirt scuffed his foot in the rusty soil along the side of the road. “I usually do it with a soccer ball,” he said loftily, “but mine’s flat today.”
He started to walk away again but stopped abruptly and spun on one heel to look at her.
“You must be the kid staying at the Christophers’ place,” he said.
“How’d you know that?” It wasn’t like she was hanging out in front of the house. They had to be more than a block away from her grandparents’ place.
He grinned. “Oh y’know—word gets around.”
Great. This was some lame small town, all right. Everybody seemed to make a hobby of sticking his or her nose into everybody else’s business.
He glanced pointedly at the board under Darby’s foot. “Skateboarder, eh?”
She nodded. “But I’m only here for a few weeks,” she said. “Don’t expect me to teach you any tricks or anything.”
“Whatever.” He turned to walk away and the rest of his words were cut off by the rising breeze.
Darby shivered a little. She realized it was getting a bit late and suddenly she didn’t really want the conversation to end. After all, apart from Shawnie, this was the first person under sixty she’d spoken to since she had been here. And maybe talking to him would take her mind off the crushing boredom of an afternoon in this stupid little town.
“Hey—what did you say?” she yelled after him.
He kept walking with his shoulders hunched like he wasn’t going to answer, but when he got to the corner, he stopped and turned. “I said, maybe when you’ve been here a while you’ll learn to be a little friendlier.”
Darby leaned onto her board and rolled forward a few feet. “What?”
But he just flashed her a grin and walked off along the laneway.
“Stupid kid,” she said loudly, hoping he would hear and come back to take her up on it. Even an argument would be better than the boredom. But if he had heard, he didn’t come back. Like she was the unfriendly one. Darby sighed a little. Even the other kids around here were stupid and boring. She gave the ground a vicious kick and shot off on her board, right down the middle of the street.
She’d glided nearly a whole block when a car came around the corner and paused to let her move to the side of the road. Darby flipped up her board to watch the car crawl safely by. At home in Toronto, a car going by meant she and her skateboard might have ended as a splintery smear on the road. But here even the cars moved slowly.
Her heart sank, but she tried to shake it off. How stupid was that? Not being mowed down by a car actually made her feel homesick? She shook her head a little and dropped her board back on the road with a clatter.
From her spot on the road, she could see the sun as it dipped slowly behind the old blue house, lighting up the gingerbread trim in a brilliant golden glow.
The sky was pink and serene, and a bird somewhere nearby twittered its evening song. The scene couldn’t be tamer if it came from an oil painting on Nan’s wall. She kicked off again.
Darby wasn’t about to admit it, but the truth was that she couldn’t actually skateboard very well. I might be a total amateur, she thought, but nobody around here needs to know that, least of all some lame local kid who can’t even conduct a decent conversation.
At least she’d get a chance to work on her boarding. A single bright spot in a dismal summer forecast. Nan and Gramps’s house came into sight and Darby zipped back toward it. She passed the yellow house next door—Shawnie’s place, obviously. The day was shifting into twilight, clear and calm, with no sign of the earlier breeze. Lights were starting to come on up and down the street as people got home from work. She could smell a barbecue in someone’s yard and her stomach rumbled a bit.
As far as Darby could tell, everything was perfectly normal on the start of another quiet evening in Charlottetown.
So why couldn’t she shake the feeling that no matter how fast she rolled along, someone was following her?
It took Darby until the next day to finally make it to the park she’d seen just up the street from her grandparents’ house. It turned out to be—big surprise—pretty old. It was mostly filled with huge overgrown trees shading an old slide that was tilting at a dangerous angle. She found a single wooden swing suspended from the branch of a giant old chestnut tree. The ground was littered with spiky little chestnut burls like the one Red T-shirt had been kicking down the street the day before.
After breakfast, Nan had told Darby that she had a job for her to do, and that she was expected home at eleven. That gave Darby a couple of hours to practise skateboarding, which was fine by her. In fact, it fit right into Darby’s new survival plan.
She might be stuck in a dead-end town for the summer, but at least she had her board. And by the time she got back to Toronto, Darby decided, she was going to have mastered all the tricks on her Tony Hawk DVD.
She flew back and forth along the street, thinking about staying on her skateboard and gl
iding all the way home to Toronto. Problem was, Charlottetown was on an island. Darby smiled a little, picturing herself with super-boarding powers skating across the waters of Northumberland Strait toward her home in Toronto.
Of course, she wouldn’t even need superpowers. There was a bridge—the Confederation Bridge—running from Borden across the water to New Brunswick.
That had to be one big bridge. Gramps had said it was thirteen kilometres long. Darby hadn’t known there was a bridge that long in the whole world.
It would make an awesome skateboard ride.
Deep in thought, she didn’t notice a change in the road surface until it was too late. Her front wheel hit a rock, and the board stopped short. Darby managed to stay on her feet, but she wrenched her ankle just a little on the landing. She walked back, picked up her board and limped over to the swing, swaying gently under the big shady trees.
She sat on the swing, one toe on the skateboard at her feet. A minute’s rest wouldn’t hurt. Her ankle had stopped stinging already. She couldn’t move much and still keep her foot on the board, but that was okay since she didn’t feel like swinging anyway. If she made time to practise like this every day, she’d be an expert by the time she got home. As long as she didn’t hit any more rocks.
She remembered getting the skateboard for her last birthday. There had been only a week or so left before the snow arrived, so she didn’t really get any good practice time in. But as soon as spring arrived, she worked on mastering a long stretch of pavement at school, and then it was time to hit the road.
Yonge Street.
The longest street in Canada. It ran north from her house near Lawrence Avenue up through Thornhill and Richmond Hill and Aurora. Who knew how far it actually went? It was way longer than the Confederation Bridge. And one day Darby planned to skate the whole thing, hills and all. But first things first. When she got her board, her primary goal was to master the Eaton Centre. And that meant travelling Yonge Street the other way—down toward the lake.
All Darby’s friends at school had done it. The good boarders said they had, anyway. Apparently the key is in the speed, though of course route planning is also essential. Darby’s friend Sarah has been skateboarding since before she could walk. At least, that’s what she tells everybody. Sarah said the Eaton Centre was just a matter of watching for the security guards and skating right on their tails. They’d never even know Darby was there.
Easy. According to Sarah.
Darby leaned back on the swing and looked up at the clear blue sky dappled with shadows from the leaves of the huge tree. Everything had been going according to plan for conquering the Eaton Centre, until her parents started to whisper.
She first noticed it at the dinner table. It had been some ordinary discussion about her day at school and how much homework her lame science teacher had loaded on—but somehow it ended up as a heated whispering match between the parental units. Soon the whispering progressed into an exchange of furious glares and even worse—silences. And it wasn’t just at one dinner—oh, no. Once Darby had clued in, she could see the signs everywhere. Her parents would stop talking when she entered the room. Or they’d change the subject, and Darby began hearing undertones in every conversation.
I’m no idiot, she thought. I can read the signs. Darby had watched enough daytime TV to recognize what was happening. After all, it wasn’t like she was the first kid whose parents ever split up.
But it still felt like a body blow when she found out they were dumping her with her grandparents for the summer. Not that they told her anything. As far as anyone knew, it was all about some stupid household renovation.
Sure.
Darby lay in bed the night before she left for Charlottetown and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be divorced. Would she live part-time with one parent like Sarah did with her dad? Or maybe she wouldn’t even get to see her dad anymore. Caitlyn Morris, from gym class, claimed she hadn’t seen her dad since she was eight.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst of it was …
Something hit Darby on the head.
She shook herself out of the reverie and looked around. Sure enough, there was a chestnut on the ground. But where …? And the feeling was back. Like someone was in the trees watching her.
The branch above her head rustled and Darby looked up, startled. A large grey squirrel sat staring at her with bold black eyes. In both paws he held a giant chestnut.
“So it was you, was it?” she said to the squirrel, with a shaky laugh. “What is it with chestnuts in this place?”
“Maybe because they taste so good,” said the squirrel.
Darby gasped. But before she could completely embarrass herself by responding to the rodent, a boy stepped out from behind the tree.
“Very funny,” she blurted, trying madly not to blush at the thought of the close call. She scrambled away from the swing and flipped her skateboard into one hand.
The boy stared at her. He had curly hair—black as a raven’s wing—and his blue eyes sparkled from a darkly tanned face.
“You thought the squirrel was speaking,” he said, with barely contained glee.
“Did not.”
“Maybe not, maybe so.” He strode forward and took over Darby’s spot on the swing, leaning back and pushing off hard with his legs. “It’s not nice to tease people,” he said in a reasonable tone. “Better to make friends.”
Suddenly he stopped, planted his feet and stood up with one hand outstretched. “My name is Gabriel.”
Darby stared at his hand for a minute, thinking. At least this guy was willing to talk to her, unlike Red T-shirt.
“I’m Darby,” she said at last, and shook his hand quickly. His skin was cool, which was good because Darby hated sweaty hands. She snatched her skateboard up and stepped out of his way in case he decided to hop on the swing again.
“You are here only for the summer?” he asked.
Darby shrugged. “Not the whole summer, if I have anything to do with it. I’m from Toronto.”
He nodded. “Myself, I have lived in this small place since I was a baby.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “You don’t sound like you’re from here,” she said. “You have a French accent.”
“I speak French at home,” he said, stepping away from the swing and flipping a rock from the ground onto his toe. He kicked his foot sharply and the rock sailed over his head, but before it could hit the ground he kicked it up with his other heel and it slapped neatly into the palm of his left hand.
She refused to be impressed. “You obviously don’t spend enough time watching TV.”
“I do not know about that,” he said. “Me? I just like rocks.” He held out his hand, and the rock sat smooth and flat and red on his palm.
This was turning into another bizarre conversation. Between Gramps and Red T-shirt and now this guy—man, was everyone in this town weird?
“Okay, so it’s a nice rock,” Darby admitted. “And it’s that colour because of the iron in the soil. Everybody knows that.”
The boy laughed. “Yes, the soil means there are no white dogs on the Island, for sure.”
“Or white runners,” she said, looking down at the rust-coloured stain on her new shoes.
Gabriel leaned back on the swing. “You can have white shoes anywhere,” he said. “I think the rocks are red because they are the heart of this place. And this red island is the heart of the country.”
“Oh, please.” Darby rolled her eyes. “Uh, sorry Mr. Romantic Imagery, but there’s no way that PEI is the heart of Canada. I live in Toronto. Have you ever been there?”
Gabriel shook his head.
“Well, it’s the biggest city in the country. Millions of people all living and working in one place. Way more than live on this whole island, let alone in this stupid little town.”
Darby’s face started to feel hot and she was embarrassed to feel tears stinging behind her eyelids. She blinked them back and to c
over up, shouted at him. “Everything is really exciting and there is so much to do. Movies and concerts and theatre and …”
“And?”
She grabbed the rock out of his hand and threw it across the street as hard as she could. It cracked into the high branches of an oak and crashed down to the base of the massive trunk. A few leaves fluttered to the ground.
“And, it’s way better than this lame little place.”
Unexpectedly, the boy didn’t argue with Darby. She thought insulting his town should at least have gotten a rise out of him. But nothing. He just stared at her and picked up another rock.
“There may be more to this place than you think,” he said, at last. “Many cultures have come together on this small island.”
Darby swallowed the lump in her throat. Throwing the rock had helped her get control of the sudden bout of homesickness. The last thing she needed was to let some local guy see her get all teary.
“In Toronto, we have Caribana in the summer and we have the most amazing Chinatown and the Danforth has awesome Greek food. There’s nothing like that here.”
“I think you need to look more closely,” he argued. “Look just at the people living on this street. I am Acadian, your grandparents—”
“Are from Canada,” she cut him off. She wasn’t going to let the conversation get around to Gramps if she could help it. “And I don’t know anybody on the street, anyway.” No point mentioning she had met Shawnie. Besides, Shawnie wouldn’t have helped his argument anyway because with her Mi’kmaq heritage, she was just another boring Canadian.
“Why do you hate this place so much?” he asked.
Darby shrugged and looked at her watch. Time to go back and help Nan. “I don’t know. It’s boring. It’s not like home and—”
“And?”
“And I’m an outsider, okay? Some lady in the bank today told Nan that I was from away. From away? What a laugh. This little island is a joke. It’s so small you can hardly find it on a map! And yet the whole rest of the world is considered ‘away’? I bet nothing exciting has ever happened here. I don’t get why you think it’s so great, anyway. You’ve probably never been anywhere else.”
