The Ethan I Was Before

by Ali Standish

  I hesitate for a moment. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself. I want to know what’s in there.

  I raise my hand to the knob and start to push.

  “Hey!”

  My hand wrenches back to my side, and I turn to see Grandpa Ike towering over me. He must have gotten home while I was making my snack.

  His eyes are bloodshot, his cheeks red with fury.

  He reaches past me and slams the door shut, making my heart jerk in my chest.

  “Did you open it?” he says, cornering me against the wall. “Did you touch anything?”

  I shake my head. “N-no. No, it was open already.”

  He mutters something under his breath.

  How can this be the same man who just this afternoon was teaching me to drive?

  “You tell your mother she is not welcome in my room. Same goes for you, you hear me?”

  I nod furiously.

  “This room is off-limits. Off. Limits.”

  Then he shoulders past me and shuts the door before I can even open my mouth to say “I’m sorry.”

  Company

  THE NEXT MORNING, I don’t mention anything to Mom or Dad about what happened with Grandpa Ike, whose truck is already gone again from the driveway. I feel sticky with shame thinking about him catching me pushing his door open.

  But I also can’t stop wondering what’s in that room.

  I take my bike to school, so that Coralee won’t have to ride around me in slow circles when we go to Mack’s. Suzanne doesn’t speak to me or look at me all day, not even in social studies class when we’re assigned to be in the same small group to make a poster about the Mayans. At lunch, Coralee and I sit together with a few other kids on the opposite side of the cafeteria from Suzanne’s table.

  After school, we head straight for Mack’s, just like yesterday, but when we get there, a sign hangs on the door. Gone to Pleasant Plains to pick up feed. Back tomorrow.

  “Looks like we’re not going to get to use the library today,” Coralee grumbles.

  “Should we go to the Fish House?” I ask. “Reese might give us free hush puppies. I think he has a crush on my mom or something.”

  “Gross,” Coralee replies, wrinkling her nose. “His eyebrows are, like, one mega-eyebrow.”

  “Definitely,” I agree.

  “Anyway, we could go. But I saw your best friend Daniel walking in there with Jonno when we passed by.”

  I pull a face. “Let’s not do that, then.”

  I’m not afraid of Daniel and Jonno, but I would rather not have to worry about them taping a Kick Me sign to my back in the Fish House like they did during English today. (“That’s all they could come up with?” said Coralee. “Pathetic. They’re like cartoon bullies. They’re not even worth the title.”)

  “Do you want to come to my house?” I ask after a minute. “It’s a couple miles, but I don’t think my parents would mind.”

  “Sure,” Coralee says without a pause. “Does your mom make saltwater taffy?”

  “Um. No?”

  “Just asking. I have low blood sugar, so I always like to have some taffy on me. Let’s stop at the Sand Pit and get some first.”

  After a quick taffy run, we start toward home. Coralee pumps her short legs twice for every pump of mine. Once we hit the gravel road, she skids to a stop.

  “Hey!” she calls. “What’s that house?”

  She’s pointing to the abandoned Blackwood house. It looms crookedly out of the tangled, cricket-filled forest like an ancient shipwreck. Green fuzzy moss has taken over the roof. The gutters are rusted over, and long tangles of Spanish moss cascade down from them, obscuring the front porch from view. Sharp slivers of glass, like daggers, are all that remain of the second-story windows.

  “I’m not sure,” I say, stopping and planting a foot in the gravel. “It’s just some old house that used to belong to a family called the Blackwoods. No one lives there now.”

  Coralee frowns. “There’s something weird about it,” she says. “Something spooky.”

  “There’s a lot that’s spooky about it.” I don’t tell her that it’s actually giving me the creeps just standing here looking at it. “Should we go? I’m thirsty.”

  Mr. Bondurant, who is sitting on the porch of his trailer across the road, stares curiously at us. I avoid his gaze, but Coralee waves and shouts hello. To my surprise, he waves back at her.

  “Do you know him?” I ask.

  “Nope,” she says. “Just being friendly. Aren’t people friendly in Boston?”

  “They keep to themselves, mostly.”

  Coralee follows me the rest of the way home, and it’s not until we come to a stop in front of my house, gravel spraying behind our back wheels, that I start to feel self-conscious. The gray paint on the wooden facade is chipped and faded, grime covers the attic windows, and Mom hasn’t gotten around to ripping up all the weeds in the garden yet.

  But Coralee is looking up and grinning. “Cool house!” she exclaims. “I like the porch swing.”

  “Thanks,” I reply, flustered but happy that Coralee is impressed.

  The garage is open, and she follows me in to park our bikes beside the Fixer-Upper.

  When we enter through the garage door, which leads straight into the kitchen, Mom is standing at the counter in stretchy pants, with one foot planted on her inner thigh so that she’s balancing on the other foot with her hands in the air above her head. She’s reading an open magazine on the counter.

  “Um, Mom?” I call.

  “Oh, hi, Ethan!” She turns around and sees Coralee standing behind me, watching her with interest. She drops her foot down and laughs.

  “You didn’t tell me you had company,” she chides me. “You must be Coralee.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Coralee Jessup. Thank you for having me to your home.”

  She holds out her hand and smiles toothily up at Mom.

  “Jessup,” Mom says. “That sounds familiar. Was I at school with your mother?”

  Coralee shrugs. “It’s a small town.”

  “You’re right,” Mom says. “Way too small for a yoga studio, and I’ve got exterminators working upstairs, so you’ll have to excuse me. I don’t normally practice in the kitchen. Does your mom do yoga, Coralee?”

  Sometimes when Mom is caught off guard, she rambles. I roll my eyes, ready to pull Coralee into the living room, but she doesn’t seem to notice that anything embarrassing is happening.

  “I can’t speak for my mother,” she says. “But my guess is she wouldn’t know a vinyasa if it bit her in the butt.”

  Mom laughs again, and some of the lines around her mouth soften, so for an instant she looks much younger. I guess it’s probably been a while since she’s heard a joke. “That’s really funny,” she says unnecessarily.

  “Okay, well, we’re going to go work on our homework on the back porch,” I say.

  “That’s fine,” Mom says, nodding. “Should I bring out some sweet tea?”

  “None for me, ma’am,” Coralee says, patting her pockets. “I have some taffy that needs eating. Do you ever make saltwater taffy for Ethan?”

  “I can’t say that I ever have,” Mom replies, shooting me a bemused look.

  “I can share my recipe with you if you want,” Coralee says. “It was the blue ribbon winner at the county fair a few years back.”

  “I would love that,” Mom says. “I didn’t know we still had a county fair. When is it?”

  Coralee pauses thoughtfully. “They brought it back. I think it’s in the fall. Plenty of time for you to learn.”

  Mom laughs again. “We’ll have to have you back, then,” she says.

  “That would be lovely.”

  We don’t get much work done that afternoon. Instead, Coralee shoots questions at me, which I bat away with my own. From the way she fires them one after another, I get the feeling that she’s been waiting to interrogate me ever since she met me.

  “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
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  “Just Roddie, but we don’t get along very well. What about you?”

  “My brother, Calvin. He’s way older than me. He lives in California now. I’m supposed to go visit him this summer, when school lets out. He’s going to be a doctor. He got inspired after he saved my life when a copperhead bit me two summers ago. So why don’t you and your brother get along?”

  “It would be cool if you got to go to California.”

  “What do you usually do in the summer?”

  I usually go on camping trips with Kacey.

  “The usual stuff,” I say. “Are you gonna visit Atlanta, too? I bet you miss it.”

  “Not really. I didn’t make a lot of friends there. What about your friends back in Boston? What were they like? Do they miss you?”

  I lean down and start rummaging through all the papers in my backpack, hoping Coralee hasn’t seen my jaw tighten. “We really should start on this homework.”

  A New Normal

  BEFORE I KNOW IT, Coralee and I are spending most afternoons together after school.

  Mack sure doesn’t seem to mind having us over. Every day that we’ve come in for the past two weeks, she lets us pick from the jar of saltwater taffy (“It’s not as good as mine,” says Coralee, “but it’ll do”) and shoos us into the library like a mother hen. Sometimes she even brings soda, which Mom doesn’t let me have at home.

  Zora and Zelda usually slink into the library after us and jump up next to where Coralee sits on the couch, purring while she rubs their bellies.

  “They know I like animals,” she says. “Cats can sense that kind of thing.”

  Mom still makes me call her every day when I get to Mack’s so she knows I haven’t decided to hitchhike back to Massachusetts. She usually sends Grandpa Ike to pick me up.

  For the first few nights after he caught me outside his room, we drove in silence. I was starting to wonder if we were ever going to talk about anything again, or if he was going to start treating me like Roddie does instead.

  Then one night, he was waiting for me in the passenger seat of the truck. “You drive,” he said through the open window.

  I noticed that his eyes were kind of puffy and bloodshot, just like the night he yelled at me. But he didn’t seem angry. Just weary.

  I opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat.

  “Nice and easy,” he said as I released the clutch too early and the truck jerked forward. We stalled, but on my second attempt, we rolled smoothly toward the inlet bridge.

  “Thatta boy,” said Grandpa Ike.

  Ever since then, things have been normal again. Grandpa Ike lets me drive home almost every night now, and even after just two weeks, I’ve improved so much that I hardly ever stall out anymore. Sometimes we talk and sometimes we don’t, but he seems to have forgiven me for trespassing in his room.

  It feels nice. Being forgiven.

  A couple of days Coralee and I have gone to my house instead of Mack’s, but we never go to Coralee’s. She doesn’t offer, so I don’t ask. That’s okay, because she seems happy enough to hang out in my living room or on the porch. She likes to tease Grandpa Ike about his truck. “Is that thing still running? Bet my bike is faster.”

  Whenever Coralee comes over, Mom shows her what’s changed in the house, and Coralee oohs and aahs over the new additions. “Mrs. T, did you get this wallpaper from Buckingham Palace?” or “I could fall asleep on this couch and never wake up!” and “Your color scheme in the study is truly inspired, ma’am.” It makes Mom happy since she lives with all boys, and we don’t notice things like that. Except Grandpa Ike, who just complains.

  Sometimes I think Coralee doesn’t actually care about that stuff, that she just says those things to make Mom happy, the same way she asks Dad to explain his job to her and listens attentively while he talks her ear off about coding languages. But either way, I’m grateful.

  Only Roddie seems immune to Coralee’s charms. He just scoffs at her when she asks him if he knows whether the eggs in his omelette are free-range and rolls his eyes when she asks what song he’s been blasting in his room. Coralee doesn’t seem to mind, though. “Teenagers,” she mutters. “Always so moody. Did I ever tell you about the time my big brother got so mad he hopped a train all the way to Mobile . . .”

  I still don’t know much else about Coralee’s family besides the fact that she has a brother.

  Which is funny because she knows almost everything about mine.

  Almost.

  When she asks me why we moved here, I give her the same line Mom gives to everyone. “My grandpa Ike needed help around the house,” I say.

  “Your grandpa Ike seems fine to me. Did you know that he does the Daily Journal crossword every morning? And he doesn’t have any trouble getting around.”

  I lift my shoulders in a defensive shrug. “It’s lonely being an old man. Maybe he needs somebody, even if he doesn’t know it.”

  “That’s definitely true, Ethan,” Coralee says. “Everybody needs somebody.”

  What I Know about Coralee

  1. Coralee is twelve years and two months old. She’s young for seventh grade because she skipped kindergarten.

  2. Coralee has lived in Palm Knot her whole life, except when she went to the school in Atlanta.

  3. Coralee has a brother named Calvin, who is studying to be a doctor in California and who never comes home.

  4. When she was little, Coralee was bitten by a copperhead snake and had to have Calvin suck the poison out of her ankle before he took her to the hospital.

  5. Another time, Coralee’s life was saved by a rolling pin. I’m not exactly sure how.

  6. Coralee likes to play violin and make blue-ribbon–winning saltwater taffy.

  7. Coralee runs faster than anyone in our class, and she talks even faster than she runs.

  8. Coralee rides her bike everywhere.

  9. Coralee has gotten a perfect score on every spelling test she’s ever taken.

  10. Coralee insists the meat industry is inhumane. Which is not specifically about Coralee but is something she tells me a lot because she loves animals.

  Field Trip

  EVEN THOUGH I LISTEN to Coralee’s stories all the time, sometimes I feel like I still don’t know very much about her. I’ve never met her family or been to her house or heard her play the violin. I don’t know who she was friends with before she left to go to school in Atlanta or why Suzanne was so upset when she showed up again.

  One day at lunch, I catch Suzanne glaring at her from across the cafeteria. Coralee doesn’t see. She’s telling a story about accidentally setting her Halloween costume on fire, and miming how her hands flailed in the air trying to put out the flames. Behind her back, Suzanne and Maisie start doing the same thing, collapsing into laughter at their own impressions.

  Seeing my gaze over her shoulder, Coralee turns around and spots them.

  She lowers her arms and goes back to picking at her lunch.

  “Why does Suzanne dislike you so much?” I ask.

  Coralee seems to get along fine with everyone besides Suzanne’s gang. We sit with lots of the other kids at lunch, and she can find something to talk about with anyone, even Herman.

  She thinks about the question for a minute. “Suzanne wants everyone to be afraid of her. That way she has more power. That’s what being popular is all about. But I’m not afraid of her. Maybe she worries that if people see that, they won’t be afraid of her either, and she won’t be popular anymore.”

  “So did something happen before you left—”

  But Coralee has already turned to Herman, sitting next to her. “You know, Herman, those chips are full of preservatives,” she says. “Have you ever thought about trying apple chips? Or carrots and hummus?”

  Herman’s eyes widen.

  “Hey,” I say. “I thought maybe we could go to your house after school today. You could play your violin for me.”

  “We co-ould,” says Coralee, the corners of her mouth drawin
g down into a pensive frown. “But I had another idea in mind.”

  “What?” I say, pushing away the remainder of my chicken nuggets and okra.

  “A little field trip. There’s somewhere I want to go.”

  “What kind of field trip?”

  She grins. “You’ll find out.”

  The Blackwood House

  THAT AFTERNOON I BIKE behind Coralee all the way to the gravel road that leads up to my house. We stop at the mouth of the drive, where the trees on either side bow together to form a thatched roof of leaves over the road.

  “I thought we were going somewhere,” I say.

  “We are,” Coralee responds. She stops in front of the Blackwood house and points toward it. “We’re going there.”

  My skin begins to creep. Whenever I pass this place, with its blank face and broken windows, I look straight ahead, toward the Milsaps’ colorful house. I look there now and see a little boy making mud pies next to the pen where they keep their goats.

  If I can’t even look at the Blackwood house, how am I supposed to just walk in?

  On the other hand, this is kind of an adventure. If Kacey were here, she would tell me to stop being such a wuss.

  Come on, Ethan, she’d say. I dare you.

  So I say, “Okay.”

  Then I add, “But why?”

  “I just want to check something.”

  “Check something?”

  But Coralee has already dropped her bike in the weeds, so I do the same and follow her through the yard toward the front steps. There used to be an iron gate, but it’s lying beside the hedge. A set of rusty white chairs is strewn about the yard like skeletons. Years of branches and leaves and acorns from the oak trees above us have drifted into haphazard piles, smothering the brown, calf-high grass. Something rustles off the path in front of us, and Coralee shrieks.

  “Snake!” She sounds nothing like herself, and I realize this is the first time I’ve ever seen her scared of anything. I guess it’s because she’s been bitten by one before.