The Next Level

by Jackson Pearce

  “This one is a bit longer,” she said. “Four little lines on this tape measure longer.”

  “That’s one fourth of an inch,” Ellie said, then held her finger and thumb a teeny bit apart. “About this much! But that little bit makes a big difference in engineering, so we need to trim it shorter.”

  “I can get some scissors!” Mrs. Curran said, and now she sounded really truly excited. Kit grinned and gave Ellie a thumbs-up sign as Mrs. Curran zipped to the kitchen in her high heels to fetch the scissors. By the time she got back, they had nearly everything ready to go. They tied the ropes to the one on the pulley. Ellie duct-taped the hook where the rope would wrap up to the bottom of the stair banister. (She went with duct tape because she wasn’t sure how Mrs. Curran would feel about her using screws and her drill on the banister.)

  “Is it ready?” Mrs. Curran asked eagerly, looking at the ropes that ran from the foyer floor up, through the stairwell, to the second story of the house.

  “Yes! Well, almost—we need to test it first,” Ellie said. She looked around the room and saw the pillow on the chair Mrs. Curran had been sitting on. “Let’s use the pillow—that way, if it doesn’t work, nothing will get broken.”

  “I can’t believe we didn’t think of that with the first elevator,” Toby said.

  “What was that?” Mrs. Curran asked.

  “Nothing!” Toby said. “Never mind me! There was just a ghost in my brain.”

  Mrs. Curran frowned and was about to ask another question, but Ellie stepped in. “So, Mrs. Curran—the two pulleys make the boxes weigh half as much as they normally would. Just pull this rope and wrap it up on the hook as you go, and it’ll slowly lift the elevator. Way easier than carrying the box up the steps, right?”

  Mrs. Curran’s eyes were glittery. “Oh, I do hope this works! You know, it never once occurred to me to have someone build an elevator.”

  “You helped build it, Mrs. Curran! You’re an engineer too, now. Anyone can be an engineer—girls and boys and doll painters,” Ellie said very seriously, because this was the thing she wanted Mrs. Curran to understand more than anything else.

  “Oh! An engineer! Me!” Mrs. Curran said, and she still sounded like this was something very funny instead of something very true. Ellie was a little discouraged—but perhaps seeing the elevator in action would change Mrs. Curran’s mind.

  “Come on! Come take a look at the whole thing from the top!” Ellie said, and bounded upstairs. Mrs. Curran followed behind. She was, as always, wearing her high heels, but she was moving much faster than normal—she was hurrying up the steps, gripping the handrail tightly. Seeing her so eager to see the elevator made Ellie’s heart feel like a bouncy ball in her chest.

  Until the accident happened.

  First Mrs. Curran lifted her foot to climb the next stair—totally normal. But she put her foot down a little bit sideways. And then her foot twisted in a way that was very not normal. Mrs. Curran grabbed hold of the railing to keep from falling, but she cried out and still slipped a little. Her ankle bent to the step and her arm yanked against the railing and her left high-heel shoe went tumbling down the steps.

  Ellie yelped. Kit squealed. Toby covered his eyes.

  But then Ellie realized that yelping wasn’t going to help a single bit, so she dashed toward Mrs. Curran and grabbed hold of her arm, just in case she was going to tumble down the steps just like her shoe had. “Are you all right?” Ellie asked frantically.

  “Oh, dear, yes—oh!” Mrs. Curran said. Her voice was shaky and her face was all scrunched up. Something was hurting her, bad. “I lost my footing.”

  “I’ve got it!” Toby said, holding up her lost shoe. He bounded up the steps and offered the shoe to Mrs. Curran, but she didn’t take it, because her eyes were shut tight. Kit had joined them now, and the three of them stood on the stairs around Mrs. Curran, waiting for her to tell them what to do. She was the grown-up, after all—when things got serious, grown-ups were supposed to have the answers.

  “Would you like some ice, Mrs. Curran?” Ellie suggested—that’s what the gym teacher gave her once when she jammed her finger playing dodgeball.

  “No, no.” Mrs. Curran winced. “I think I just need a minute.”

  “I can make a tourniquet,” Toby said. “But those are more for when you’re bleeding or have snakebites.”

  “I can get some Band-Aids,” Kit suggested.

  Mrs. Curran didn’t answer. Ellie was starting to think this situation called for more than Band-Aids or tourniquets, which meant it was worse than bleeding or snakebites. Ellie didn’t have any experience with snakebites, but she knew they were no kind of good.

  “I think we need to call my parents for help,” Ellie said firmly. “Kit, Toby, you sit with Mrs. Curran, okay?” They nodded, and Ellie hurried to the phone and called her house. Her dad answered, and within a few minutes, he and Ellie’s mom had arrived. They decided to call for an ambulance, but Ellie felt a lot better once Mrs. Curran had been taken to the hospital—it was, after all, full of grown-ups who had answers.

  While they waited for Ellie’s mom and dad to talk to the people in the ambulance, Ellie, Kit, and Toby stood in the foyer, staring at the elevator platform.

  “Is it our fault?” Kit asked quietly, almost in a whisper.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But it feels like it is,” Ellie answered, fiddling with the tops of the tools in her belt (that’s what she did when she was nervous).

  They stopped talking when Ellie’s parents came back inside. The ambulance was driving away, but it didn’t have lights or sirens on. This seemed like a good thing to Ellie; they must not be in a big hurry, which must mean Mrs. Curran was mostly okay.

  Ellie’s mom knelt down beside the three of them, so she was eye level. She smiled, which she normally didn’t do when Ellie interrupted her workday, and in a lot of ways, that made Ellie even more scared, because it was so not normal.

  “Don’t worry,” Ellie’s mom said. She could tell how worried Ellie was—she was good at knowing what Ellie was feeling. “You three did the exact right thing, calling us. Mrs. Curran is going to be just fine. She just twisted her ankle a bit, I think. It’s always a good idea, though, to call for a doctor when an older person has a fall.”

  “Do you think it’s our fault?” Kit asked Ellie’s mom.

  Ellie’s mom shook her head quickly. “Not a single bit!”

  “But she was hurrying upstairs to try out the new elevator,” Ellie said, pointing. Ellie’s parents both looked over to where Ellie was pointing. They grimaced at the exact same time.

  “You built another elevator? Indoors?” Ellie’s mom asked.

  “We improved the design,” Ellie said.

  “I can see that,” Ellie’s dad said, looking impressed. He walked over to the elevator and inspected the pulley on the floor. “Very clever—oh, and look! A wheel to pull the platform up! Wait, are those my little pizza pans?”

  “We were showing Mrs. Curran that anyone can be an engineer,” Ellie said glumly. “She helped us with it. It was going so great!”

  “Accidents happen. But, just like the other elevator, this is a good reminder that you need to be careful when building things,” Ellie’s dad said, then shivered a little. He didn’t need to say it out loud for Ellie to know he was remembering all those pickles.

  Ellie also knew what her dad meant—that it was important to be careful and not get carried away and rush. But . . . ​she couldn’t help feeling that what he was really saying was this elevator was also a capital-“D” Disaster.

  “I was thinking that perhaps tomorrow, we can go visit Mrs. Curran at the hospital,” Ellie’s dad said at dinner that evening. They were eating macaroni with broccoli in it, which Ellie thought was a really sneaky way of making her eat broccoli since it was totally impossible to separate the macaroni from the broccoli.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Ellie said, staring at her macaroni-with-broccoli.

  El
lie’s mom frowned. “Why’s that?”

  Ellie sighed and pushed a lump of broccoli under some noodles. “I’m scared.”

  “Scared?” Ellie’s dad said, eyebrows lifting up so they almost touched his hair. “That’s not like you, Ellie.”

  Ellie didn’t say anything, but neither did her parents, which usually meant they were waiting for her to talk again. Finally, she did. “What if Mrs. Curran is mad at me because she got hurt?”

  “I don’t think she is. It was an accident.”

  “So were the pickles, but Kit’s mom was super mad.”

  “Ah,” Ellie’s mom and dad said at almost the same time, like they’d just solved something. Her dad went on. “Ellie, sometimes things go wrong when you’re engineering—just like how sometimes things go wrong when you’re drawing or singing or even just walking.”

  “It’s true,” Ellie’s mom said. “You know how often I trip!”

  She did trip an awful lot. “But that’s not the same as things going wrong when you’re engineering,” Ellie said. “If you trip, you only hurt yourself. If you mess up when you’re engineering, you hurt twenty-four jars of pickles and Toby gets in trouble and Kit’s mom hates your shelephant saddle and Mrs. Curran gets hurt.”

  “Those are all very different situations,” Ellie’s mom said.

  “And you’ll remember that the reason you got in trouble with the pickle situation is because you were rushing instead of being careful, and you took things without permission.”

  “That’s why Toby got in trouble too,” Ellie said, nodding.

  “Is that why Kit’s mom hated the—what was it, a sheepephant saddle?” her dad asked.

  “Shelephant. And no, I think all the legs on it just freaked her out,” Ellie answered, sighing.

  Ellie’s parents seemed to decide at once not to ask any more questions about the saddle. Her dad said, “Engineering is supposed to help people, Ellie, right? Mrs. Curran’s fall was an accident, and from the looks of things, you were trying very hard to help her. I think that new elevator looked top-notch.”

  Ellie smiled a little. She couldn’t help it. Her dad said things were “top-notch” only when he really meant it, after all.

  “Mrs. Curran must have been terribly excited about your elevator, to try to run up the stairs and to let you build it right there in her foyer. It sounds like you really proved to her that you—that anyone—can be an engineer. So I bet she would be really happy for you to go visit her,” Ellie’s mom said.

  “Okay,” Ellie said, trying to smush down all the old scared feelings underneath the new glow-y feelings in her chest.

  “Maybe we can bring her something nice. Does she like candies?” Ellie’s dad asked.

  “I don’t think so. Mostly she likes espresso. And hummus! We could take her some hummus, if you know where to buy some,” Ellie said.

  Ellie’s mom and dad looked at each other again.

  “I didn’t think people her age liked espresso or hummus,” Ellie’s dad mused, shaking his head.

  Ellie gave him a serious look. “You’re making assumptions, Dad. Espresso is for all types of people. So is hummus. There’s no such thing as old-people stuff and young-people stuff, only stuff.” She didn’t tell him that she had made lots of assumptions about Mrs. Curran in the beginning too—like that she would make cookies or need a lotion squeezer.

  Ellie’s dad laughed a little bit. “You’re right. We’ll go first thing in the morning, then, and we’ll pick up some espresso and hummus on the way. Sound good?”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  Ellie had only been to the hospital a few times in her entire life—once to visit Kit when she got her tonsils taken out, once when her aunt got really sick for a long time, and once when her dad thought Ellie had broken her arm, but it turned out she hadn’t. Ellie was glad she hadn’t but was sort of sad she didn’t get a cast for everyone in Mrs. Funderburk’s class to sign. She had already decided on a pink cast, and if they didn’t have pink, purple.

  Each time, she went to a totally different part of the hospital. To visit Mrs. Curran, they went to a section where the halls were painted oatmeal brown and the floors were mint green. She wondered why they didn’t put cartoon characters on the walls here or have games in the waiting room, since those were her favorite things in the part she’d visited not to get a cast. Even grandma-age people like Mrs. Curran probably liked cartoons and games when they were sick, didn’t they?

  Ellie’s dad talked to a man dressed all in blue at a desk, and they walked down the hall to room 503. Her dad balanced the espresso cup on the container of hummus in his right hand. Ellie was holding the pita chips they’d gotten to go with the hummus—she hoped she’d chosen the right kind of both. Her dad made sure the espresso was steady, then knocked on the door.

  Ellie’s stomach squiggled when Mrs. Curran’s voice said, “Come in! I’m decent!” from the other side. Her knees locked up and her feet glued down.

  “Ellie?” her dad said.

  “Hmm?”

  “You have to open the door to go in. That’s how doors work,” her dad said in a firm voice.

  Ellie ran her fingers across her tool belt. What if Mrs. Curran had decided everything was Ellie’s fault after all? What if she yelled at Ellie because now she was stuck in the section of the hospital with no cartoons or games or dolls to paint? Ellie wished she’d brought a doll—though, Mrs. Curran would probably have wanted one of her dolls to work on, and she’d have had to get back into Mrs. Curran’s house, but maybe if they went right now—­

  “Hey now—are you Ellie, Engineer, or Ellie, Scared?” her dad asked.

  “Engineer. Definitely engineer,” Ellie said as firmly as she could, and turned the knob.

  Mrs. Curran’s room was sunny, and there were big pink and white flowers on her bedside table. She looked . . . ​exactly the way she always looked. Her makeup was flawless! Her hair was curled. She wasn’t wearing her high heels, but there was a pair by the bed that someone must have brought for her. She was sitting up straight in her hospital bed, and if Ellie squinted so that the little machines and charts and hospital walls blurred away, she could pretend Mrs. Curran was sitting at her studio desk.

  “You look great!” Ellie said loudly. “You don’t look sick at all!”

  “Well, I’m not sick—I’m just a little delicate on my feet,” Mrs. Curran said, and smiled. “Oh! Is that an espresso?”

  “We brought you that and some hummus. Ellie chose them,” Ellie’s dad said, sounding a little wary—but Mrs. Curran looked delighted and reached for both. She opened up the pita chips and laid them out on the table, offering Ellie them and the hummus.

  “Oh, no thank you,” Ellie said politely. It still looked like mud in a bowl, in her opinion.

  “I’m going to step outside and return some calls, okay?” Ellie’s dad said, and smiled at her in a way that made her pretty certain he was actually going to go play games on his phone—he just wanted Ellie to have some time to talk to Mrs. Curran alone. She gave him a thumbs-up, and he ducked out. Ellie’s stomach was still a little squiggly. She sat down in a pink chair with metal arms and swung her legs back and forth.

  “I’m glad you’re okay, Mrs. Curran. We were really worried,” she said in a low voice.

  “I was worried too there, for a moment. You and your friends were perfect though—you called for help, and I’ll be right as rain in no time.” Mrs. Curran paused, swallowed the chip she was eating, then went on in a more serious voice, “There is one thing I’m rather upset about, though—that elevator.”

  Ellie’s teeth mashed together, and she held her breath. Her stomach went from squiggly to hurricane-y.

  “That was quite an ambitious project, wasn’t it, for someone who isn’t always very cautious when she gets excited?” Mrs. Curran said sternly.

  “Yes, Mrs. Curran,” Ellie said in a tiny voice. She swung her legs back and forth even harder.

  “And it was an ambitious project for
someone who hasn’t built a working elevator before.”

  Ellie nodded glumly.

  “And for someone who isn’t an engineer.”

  Ellie’s eyes sprang up—she couldn’t just nod at this! Her voice went high and loud and sad, and she shook her head frantically. “No! Mrs. Curran, I am an engineer! Anyone can be an engineer!”

  Mrs. Curran looked alarmed, and Ellie couldn’t blame her—she was practically shouting at an adult (not angry shouting, but shouting all the same). She smiled a little. “Ellie Bell, don’t be ridiculous. I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about me! I got too excited and hurried up the steps, and I haven’t built an elevator, and I certainly am no engineer.”

  Ellie blinked. “You were excited about the elevator?”

  Mrs. Curran rolled her eyes. Ellie had never seen a grandma-age person roll her eyes, but then again, Mrs. Curran wasn’t like most grandma-age people. “Of course I was! Something that helped me get the doll supplies upstairs? Why wouldn’t I be excited! And what’s more, I’ve never so much as built a birdhouse before—I never dreamed I would be able to help build an elevator.”

  Ellie grinned, though she was also still hurricane-y, and also her eyes were a little watery, because there were all sorts of feelings kapowing into one another in her chest. “So—you do know that I’m an engineer? That anyone can be an engineer?”

  “Well, I certainly do now. How could I deny it, after seeing you in action? I have to admit, I thought it must be Toby behind all the building at first,” Mrs. Curran said carefully. “I’ve just never met a little girl who loves engineering before you.”

  “I really do love it, Mrs. Curran. Toby likes engineering fine, but not the way I do. Though he does really like playing with dolls,” Ellie said.

  “Oh!” Mrs. Curran said, looking surprised and pleased. “Well, I should have given him one then! I just thought that ant farm looked so interesting! They’re clever creatures, you know. I would have loved to get that as a gift.”