One Mixed-Up Night

by Catherine Newman

  When Mrs. Williams, our second-grade teacher, finally took down those valentines from the window, I peeled the tape from their edges, and the color was still bright beneath it. I was thinking about that. Not about the construction paper and the tape, exactly. But about how to get the brightness back. I mean, it’s not like I thought that spending the night in Ikea would be a way to do that….

  Actually, that’s not true. That’s exactly what I was starting to think.

  Walter sighed then. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a sigh is worth at least a hundred. He sat up. He was pretty much done with this conversation. And yet for me, a random, crazy idea was starting to seem like the solution to everything—like the rope that would pull Walter up and out, back to me. I couldn’t let it go.

  “Couldn’t we get away with it if the parents didn’t actually know where we were?” I said, and Walter was quiet, slowly poking the end of one of his shoelaces into each of the shoelace holes in his sneakers, one at a time. Aglet. That’s what the plasticky end of a shoelace is called. The word floated into my head, and I practically grabbed the lace out of Walter’s hand. Knock knock, hello? Anybody home?

  But then, after maybe a full minute, he said, “The big sleepover switcheroo.” So I knew he knew what I was thinking. And when he smiled and opened his eyes? They were so dark they were almost black—and, finally, they were sparkling.

  I swallowed a marble when I was two, and I can remember the cold weight of it dropping into my stomach, like a smooth, heavy secret. (Apparently, it was only a secret until my mom found it in my diaper the next day.) I’m telling you this because it’s the single clear memory I have from before I met Walter. That’s how long we’ve known each other.

  Walter and I went to the same preschool, and there was a huge old pee-smelling pink couch wedged into one side of the room. It was called the “cozy corner,” and you could take a book or a stuffed animal and go hang out there if you were feeling sad or shy or lazy. Which, it turns out, Walter and I usually were—shy and lazy, at least.

  “I think I have a best friend,” I said to my parents one day at the dinner table. “A really, really good, nice friend,” I added, and my mom and dad smiled and asked me to tell them about my new nice friend. We were probably eating mac and cheese that my mom had snuck mashed sweet potato into. “Well,” I said—and this is the part of the story we’ve all told and retold a million times—“his name is Walter. He’s got curly, curly hair. We sit on the couch together. We haven’t talked to each other yet, but he’s really, really, really nice.”

  “That sounds like a really good, nice friend,” my mom said.

  Of course, what we didn’t know at the time was that Walter’s family was having almost the exact same conversation at their house—even down to the curly, curly hair. My mom’s confessed to me since then that at some point she and Alice met at a school auction committee meeting, and Mom said, “Wait, are you Walter’s mom? My daughter Frankie’s good-good-nice friend she’s never spoken to?” And they laughed and laughed.

  I totally see why it was funny. But also, we were completely right about each other. I don’t know how, but we were. The feeling I had sitting next to him on that gross old couch—the feeling that there was this warm, nice person beside me—has never really gone away. We even still sit together quietly sometimes, reading books on his couch or mine, like we did when we were three. We’re like a brother and sister, is what people tell us, only I think siblings annoy each other more. I mean, I wouldn’t know, since I don’t have one. But it’s not like we really ever drive each other crazy.

  The worst argument I can remember having was the year I read the Narnia books and wanted everyone to think—and say—that I was a lion. I wore my lion T-shirt every day, and studied Mr. Pockets and copied how he acted, and let my hair grow into a curly yellow mane. I purred and rolled on my back and rubbed the side of my face against everyone. “Do you?” I asked Walter once. “Do you believe that I am really a real lion?” He looked at me very directly and evenly, like he does, and he said, “I know that you love lions so much, Frankie, and I believe that you really feel like a real lion.” I crossed my arms and roared, and huffed out of the room in my lion T-shirt, and huffed back in to say, “Well, you’re wrong. I really am one.” And Walter nodded and patted the spot next to him on the couch so we could go back to looking at the Guinness World Records book together. So we could look for the millionth time at the man with the crazy spiraling fingernails.

  Which we did.

  He’s hard to describe, Walter, because he’s kind of bubbling over with energy, but then he’s also so chill. And some people assume he’s going to be good at sports because he’s black—or his mom is, so technically he’s mixed race—and he’s, um, not good at sports. One of our favorite things (it’s still magneted to Walter’s refrigerator) is this end-of-year report he got from our gym teacher when we were in first grade. We loved this teacher, who wrote on Walter’s report: “Walter is one of the finest students I have had the pleasure of teaching. He’s a model of sportsmanship, good nature, and serious effort. That said, his athletic skills will continue to develop as he works on the following:”—we especially love that colon—“Running. Jumping. Throwing balls. Catching balls. Passing. Receiving. Strength. Coordination. Balance.”

  Being Walter’s best friend feels like cheating, in a way, because he’s so incredibly easy to get along with. If you’re writing down the classmates you’d be happiest to sit next to on the field-trip bus, everyone in class writes down Walter as, at least, their second choice, if not their first. He’s not hyper, but he’s enthusiastic—the kind of person who says “Totally!” and “Let’s!” and “Oh my god, YES!” about everything.

  Or I should say said—because this faded Walter was more likely to shrug and say “Sure” or, worse, “Nah. I should probably think about going home pretty soon.” He had even, when I told him a story about a boy interrupting me in class to miscorrect me about a Civil War fact, said mildly, “Oh well.” “ ‘Oh well’?!” I said back to him, indignant. “Walter! This kid was confusing Union and Confederate and correcting me!” “That sounds super annoying,” Walter had said, studying the broken zipper on his hoodie, and I had let it go. I mean, he was technically saying the right things, doing the right things. But something was missing. Like his head-thrown-back laughter, which he was definitely not doing now.

  What I’m trying to tell you is that I’d lost something. And I was really counting on getting it back.

  If you’d have seen me that Friday, you would have thought that I was just this normal kid doing normal stuff in a normal way. You would not have known, from looking at me, that my brain was churning ideas around like a washing machine, all suds and froth and crazy agitation. You would not have known that I was completely faking it—pretending to be in my regular body at the regular table while my mind was doing a million other things.

  “Frankie, honey, can I interest you in some more salad?” This was another recipe my mom was testing: a holiday spinach-and-cranberry something that had some kind of sweet dressing and was completely delicious. “We might as well finish it. It’s not going to keep.”

  And I said, “Sure,” and thought about how weird it is that parents can know you so totally well but also not at all. I mean, my parents are pretty great by almost any reasonable standards. Yes, sometimes I’m embarrassed when my mom comes to volunteer at school and asks all the kids a million questions about their deepest thoughts and desires. “Well, what do you think love even means?” she might ask someone, even though all we’re doing is taping together doily-and-construction-paper valentines for our classmates. “Mom!” I say, and she says, “What? People like to be asked about themselves.” And this is, I have to admit, kind of true. Everybody tells her everything. Me too—I tell her everything. Or did. Almost. Not that I always wanted to.

  And now, in sixth grade? I was starting to realize that I didn’t have to. That I could have this private part of my
life inside my own head, and I could share it or not. And if I didn’t, nobody would even know about it. It was kind of strange—like discovering that there was a hole in the floor underneath your bed, filled with jewels and gold coins, and you could just go ahead and not mention it to anybody.

  Or like there was a secret door, and if I clicked it behind me, then it was just me alone, in my room. Oh, wait, I wouldn’t know about that because…the door to my room didn’t actually shut. Seriously. I mean, I had a door—“the nicest door in the whole house,” my mom liked to say, running her hand across it tenderly, and it really was. It’s made of a kind of wood called “heart pine,” which I love the sound of—I picture a red valentine in the middle of a gigantic tree—and it’s “original to the house,” the real estate agent told us, which means that it was part of the house when it was first built, over a hundred years ago. It’s gleaming and honey-colored and always seems like it’s practically lit from within—you’d totally think “magic portal” if you saw it. But it had no doorknob.

  “Someone must have thought the wood was too beautiful to mess up with hardware,” my dad said when we first moved into the house. Plus, my room is so small that we’re probably the first family to use it as an actual bedroom. It was probably mostly used as a storage area, even though it has the nicest window that looks out over the dogwoods and lilacs. Which was great, it really was, and it’s not like there was anything in particular I wanted to do behind a closed door, but still. Sometimes I wanted privacy, just for the sake of having privacy. And to close the door at all, I had to reach around the outside and kind of pull it toward myself, so I usually ended up closing my hand in it, or pinching one of my fingers.

  And even then it didn’t ever really matter because a minute later one of my parents would just pull it open and come in anyway. So, yes, I wanted a doorknob. A little thing, I know. But I always worried that asking for one would be a big thing. I worried that it would hurt my parents’ feelings, because it’s just the three of us. We’re such a small team, you know?

  You’re thinking, Just get a doorknob at Ikea! And that would have been a much simpler plan. I mean, it’s not like Walter and I needed to spend the night there for it. But somehow the two things got blurred together in my head—wanting the apartness of a closed door, of a secret plan.

  So I was there at the table, with my growing secret, and my mom was talking to my dad about the salad—“I feel like if I add poppy seeds to the dressing, it’s going to turn into a cliché”—and my dad was nodding but also looking out the open window at the lilacs that were starting to turn from purple to brown, so perfumy now that it was actually kind of too much.

  And I was thinking that if I didn’t talk about Ikea at all, that would be so unlike me that they’d get suspicious. Which is crazy, really. What would they suspect me of? Plotting to spend the night in a gigantic Swedish warehouse store? That really doesn’t seem like it would be high on their list of things to worry about. But I was still kind of paranoid, so I said, “I’m really excited about Ikea!” only it came out of my mouth so oddly—like I was a croaking frog crossed with an excited preschooler—that both of my parents turned to look at me.

  “You’re really excited about Ikea!” my dad said, the way you’d talk to a croaking-frog-preschooler, and I laughed.

  “I just am is all,” I said, lamely. And my mom smoothed my hair off my forehead and said, “We know you are, sweetie,” like I was four.

  Later, after we’d cleared the dinner dishes from the table, after we’d evaluated my mom’s pumpkin whoopee pies (tasty), after we’d watched a reality show about people looking to move into, yes, a tiny house (“I’m not watching this crap,” my mom always says, before she settles into the couch between Dad and me and watches with us), after we talked about how hilarious it is that the people are always appalled by how small the tiny houses are (“Isn’t that kind of the whole premise of the show?” my mom asked, and my dad said, imitating one of the house-hunters, “But where will I put my grand piano?”), and after I kissed my parents good night, I finally climbed into bed with Mr. Pockets and my own excitement.

  It felt like the night before Christmas—the way you keep telling yourself that if you just close your eyes and go to sleep, then it will feel like it’s morning the very next second. This worked about as well as it does on Christmas Eve—which is to say, not at all. And it was not visions of sugarplums. It was visions of doorknobs. A whole Ikea wall of them. It was visions of Walter, his eyes scrunched up with laughter, like they were supposed to be. It was visions of me, doing this crazy thing with him that would be ours and only ours.

  “What’s the thing you’re most scared of?” I had asked Walter at lunch earlier that day. We were sitting outside with our backs against the sun-warmed brick school building, sharing the end of a bag of vending-machine potato chips.

  “In general?” Walter said, and he looked alarmed. “You mean, like, snakes, heights, the infiniteness of the universe?”

  “No, silly. About Ikea.”

  “I don’t know,” Walter said quickly, squinting a little in the sunshine. “What about for you?”

  “Oh, I guess the obvious,” I said. “That my parents will find out and be angry. Or worse than angry. Disappointed in me.”

  “Then why are you even running away?” Walter said.

  I turned to look at him. Now I was confused. “I’m not,” I said. “We’re not running away. We’re running to Ikea! Because it’s going to be awesome!”

  Walter nodded.

  “So, what about you?” I said. “What are you scared of?”

  And he said, totally vaguely, “Same.”

  “Same what?”

  “Same as you, I guess,” he said, and before I could even look into his face to try to understand anything, he stood up, brushed the sour-cream-and-onion crumbs from his jeans, and headed for the door.

  After school, we’d gone to Walter’s house to make packing lists and rehearse the parent conversations, practicing for different scenarios, in case talking to them didn’t go as smoothly as we hoped it would. We’d even decided on a cancel-mission code phrase, to use in the event things were going badly. (It was, maybe ironically, “mixed-up files.”) When I was getting on my bike to go home, I’d blurted out, “What are you looking forward to the most?” Walter was standing in his doorway, and he furrowed his brow and shrugged, said, “Ikea.” I put my feet back on the ground and looked hard at him. “You’re in, right?” And he nodded, not smiling, and said, “I’m in.” Then he put his hand up in a wave and disappeared into the house.

  I was thinking about this now, in bed. We weren’t running from anywhere, were we? Walter and I? It was Ikea itself that had us so crazily excited. At least I thought it was. Even though I turned out to be wrong about this, like I turned out to be wrong about so many things.

  Shhh, I thought at my brain, because I was never going to get any sleep with it making so much noise. But there was no shushing it, and I lay on my back in the dark with Mr. Pockets on my chest, stroking his sleeping cheeks, listening to my heartbeat echoing up through the pillow, smelling the lilacs blowing in. I was wondering if Walter was lying awake at his house, and thinking that he probably was. Or at least hoping.

  “Wait, what’s that for?” my mom asked. It was, finally, Saturday afternoon. We were in the driveway, and I had my old blue Dora the Explorer backpack on—the one I used to love because it was so awesome, but that I loved now because it was so corny.

  “My overnight stuff.”

  “Wait,” my mom said. “Isn’t Walter coming here after?”

  “No, no,” I said, the lie catching in my throat. “I’m going there.”

  My mom shrugged, nodded. “Okay. Whatever you guys want, as long as it’s okay with Alice.”

  If everything was going according to plan, then right about now Walter was having the exact same conversation with his mom. I pictured Alice shrugging just like my mom had. I could practically hear her say, “As l
ong as it’s good with Frankie’s mom and dad.”

  I climbed into the back of the blue Subaru and buckled up, and my dad asked if I wanted to listen to an audiobook or a podcast or anything, and I said, “Nah, I’m good,” distracted. My mom had already started the engine, but she turned around to put her palm on my forehead. “What?” I said, and she said, “Oh, you know, you turned down the chance to listen to a book, so I’m just making sure you don’t have a fever.” “Ha-ha,” I said, and then rested my head against the cool window while the scenery scrolled past: first our neighborhood, with all its little houses; then the bigger houses; then our school, the town hall where the farmers’ market is, the shops and bakeries on Main Street; and, eventually, the boring highway. I was imagining being in Ikea with just Walter, and in my mind it was kind of like that scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where they get to the meadow and everything is made of candy: the daffodils, the toadstools, the chocolate river. Then I remembered how Augustus Gloop actually fell into that chocolate river and almost drowned. I think it’s safe to say that I was having what they call “mixed emotions.” Ikea’s just about an hour from our house, but it felt more like five minutes before the GPS was announcing, in its automated voice, “Turn left on Ikea Way.”