“Ugh,” Walter said. Apparently he did not feel the same way as me about the cute rooming option.
“What?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged, looked away. “My mom makes Zeke and me sleep in her room now. You know, since my dad died.” He wrinkled up his nose and touched a blue flag on the curtain.
“What do you mean she makes you?” I said. I couldn’t exactly picture Alice making Walter do anything.
“She doesn’t make us make us. But she’s always like, ‘Come cuddle with me,’ and then she falls asleep. Sometimes I try to wriggle out from under her arm, but then she wakes up and says something like, ‘Oh, am I driving you crazy? I am, aren’t I?’ And then I feel terrible. I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I know she’s lonely or freaked out or whatever.”
“Oh,” I said.
I knew Walter had been…I guess the word is depressed, since his dad died. But I had wanted to imagine that he was feeling better all the time, as if grief were a rocket zooming away in one direction, getting smaller and smaller as time passed. I was starting to understand that it wasn’t like that. Partly because Walter was getting more Walter-y at Ikea, and it made me realize how much I’d missed him. And partly because here, outside of our real lives, inside this pretend world, he was starting to seem less like a too-full glass that you have to carry really carefully so that you don’t spill it. Maybe because everything was starting to spill, so we could finally just relax now. I’m not sure.
“That sucks,” I said, and took an uncertain step toward him. Maybe he wanted to talk more?
But whatever Walter was wanting to say, he’d already said it. Now he was touching a mirror. “FRÄCK mirror,” he said. “That’s kind of an awkward name in English. ‘Ugh, I dropped the frack mirror!’ ‘This fracking mirror!’ ” He put an arm around my shoulders and we leaned in to look at ourselves. A REFLECTION OF GOOD VALUE! the sign said. I touched the glass where a tear sparkled in Walter’s reflection—then I turned and wiped it from his actual cheek. “Feelings,” he said, and laughed, shook his head. “Ugh.” Then he turned away.
Walter grabbed my hand again and dragged me, running, from room to room until we got to the couches. Oh, we loved the couches. We sat on wine-colored velvet couches and scratchy gray tweed ones, on smooth cotton couches in Easter-egg colors and shiny, slippery ones that Walter slid off, over and over, on-purpose-by-accident, saying “Whoops!” every time, like he was in a bad old comedy film.
If I were going to pick a single moment when our night started to shift, I might pick this one. Mostly what we’d thought we’d wanted to do at Ikea was enjoy the furniture, spend time with all the nice stuff. It wasn’t like we had a big list of wacky ideas. When we were little, we’d loved to play house. This was a lot like that. Only, you know, overnight in a giant empty store, illegally.
We never imagined that this activity—the activity of simply being there—would grow dull. And it didn’t, exactly. Or maybe it did. Because instead of sitting around quietly for the rest of the night, we started to get ourselves in trouble.
We were squashed into a pink love seat, and Walter was tapping his foot restlessly. He tipped his head back and pointed up. The way they’re displayed in the showroom, there are, like, a hundred couches on the floor, but then, to save space, there are, like, a hundred more attached to the wall, one on top of another, like shelves made of couches. Walter was pointing to a huge soft-looking brown one that was suspended about three feet below where the metal beams and ducts started, up near the ceiling. “Want to maybe sit up there?” he asked. “I’ll bet the view is great.” I shook my head.
I am not unafraid of heights.
“Hello?” I said. “Remember me? Your friend Frankie, the only kid in fifth grade who couldn’t do the high ropes course because she couldn’t get up to the high ropes course?” This was a field trip we’d taken to one of those terrifying outdoor adventure places, where you have to challenge yourself to climb and dangle from various treacherous balancing and trapeze situations strung between the trees. Let me just say: I’d done really well at what the instructors called the “low elements.”
Walter smiled. “You almost got up to it! You were amazing, and you know it.”
That made me laugh. I was not amazing, and I did know it. Although, after the ropes course fiasco, when I was feeling pretty low (no pun intended) on the bus back to school, Walter had split his granola bar, handed me half, and said, “Climbing those three rungs scared took way more courage than climbing to the top not scared.”
“You’re a very encouraging person,” I had said back, and then thought about the word courage inside the word encourage. When you encourage somebody, maybe what you do is try to put a little of your own courage inside them. It’s amazing how well it can work.
“Go for it,” I said. “I am totally here for you.”
Walter shrugged, leapt up, and started scrambling up the couches like they were rock-climbing ledges, sitting in each one briefly before climbing to a higher one. I walked over to stand below, offering up dumb nervous advice, like, “Be careful!”
“Wait,” Walter yelled down. “What? Do or don’t be careful?”
“Ha-ha,” I said. Then said again, annoyingly, “Seriously, Walter. Be careful.”
Walter stood and reached up to the highest couch, was stretching and leaning back to pull himself up to it, when a ringing started again, right near us. Walter lost his balance and grabbed at a brown cushion, which came away from the couch, so that he fell holding the cushion on top of him, like the world’s most useless safety apparatus. Like on an airplane, when you’re supposed to use your seat cushion as a flotation device, only there was no water, and Walter was falling back-first, the cushion clutched to his chest. “Falling!” he said, redundantly, as he fell, bouncing off one wider couch and then grazing the others while I stood with my hand over my mouth in terror. Walter landed with a gentle thud on the carpet next to me and said, “Oof,” then rose and shook himself off like a dog.
“Oh my god,” I said. “Walter. Are you okay?” And he was. I could see that he was.
The ringing started up again—or kept going. I wasn’t sure which.
“Kitchen timer?” I said, and Walter shook his head, pointed to a phone on the wall—an old-looking phone, with a cord and everything—that was still ringing.
“Should we get that, do you think?”
“No,” I said. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.
But he hopped over, lifted the receiver, and said jauntily, “Hello, Ikea couch department!” He looked puzzled for a second, then said “Hello?” again, shrugged, and put the phone back in its cradle. “I thought I heard someone breathing,” he said. “But then there was a click. Wrong number, probably. Maybe we shouldn’t answer if it rings again.”
I didn’t say, “Maybe we shouldn’t have answered it the first time either,” but the words were in my mouth.
And then I remembered this weird thing that happened for a while after Walter’s dad died. The phone would ring, and Zeke would say, “Maybe it’s Dad, right? I just mean maybe.” His eyebrows would be raised, the corners of his mouth turning up in a smile. Honestly, you just felt so bad for him. “No, honey,” Walter or his mom would say, scooping him into a cuddle. Or, “I don’t think so, Zekey-Deke.” But Walter confessed to me that he had the same feeling. The phone would ring, and he’d feel a kind of vague hopefulness somehow. Ringing phones can be like that. Or, in this case, the opposite of that, I guess.
Walter pointed to the brown couch and took my hand. “Come,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
And we did.
Or, I should say, we sort of did. Walter coached me up, couch to couch, offering me a hand from above, then scrambling down to boost me from below. “Gather up your courage,” he said to me, which is what he’d said when I was two rungs up at the ropes course. “Gather it up and use it like a muscle.” I was scared, and then more scared, and then—surprisingly—less scared. It
was actually higher than I thought, but I could feel the strength in my arms as I stretched up to grab each couch, and I felt safe because of, well, Walter. When we got to the top, Walter lurched up onto the seat of the couch, then turned around to grab me under my armpits, which made me scream and laugh it tickled so much. I almost fell, but didn’t. “Frankie. Frankie, my friend. Get ahold of yourself,” Walter said, laughing, and he hauled me up the rest of the way. We sat back, panting. We were just sitting there, relaxing, but, you know, way up in the air. We could see out over the tops of all the fake walls, across the whole entire floor.
“This is the life,” I said. And then, a minute later, “Is this the life or what?”
“This is the life,” Walter agreed. Then he kicked his legs a little, and the couch rocked.
“Don’t,” I said but he was kicking more, and the couch—which seemed to be attached with some kind of metal cable—swung out a little bit from the wall. “Oh my god, Walter, I’m serious. Don’t!” I said.
“Sorry,” he said mischievously, pumping his legs now like we were on a swing.
“I am officially killing you,” I said, but we heard the tearing even as my words were still hanging in the air, even as we were still hanging in the air, because the couch had torn away from the wall and dropped onto the couch below. Walter and I hung suspended for a second, like Wile E. Coyote over a cliff, before we dropped down on top of the cushions with a thwoomp. And then the weight was too much, and that second couch tore away and dropped, and the one below it, and the one below that—Walter and me bouncing along, bump, bump, bump, crash, crash, until we landed on a teetering tower of couches five couches high.
Someone was screaming—it was me, actually, I realized—and also laughing—this was also me—and we were perched still on our same brown couch, on top of all the other couches, with plaster dust from the wall in a cloud around our heads. I was laughing and laughing now, and Walter was too, and I said, “Oh my god, Walter,” just at the moment that the tower of couches leaned one way—“Woooooah!”—and then the other—“Wooooah!”—and then undramatically kind of stabilized itself. Which was when the phone rang again.
We didn’t answer the phone this time, although Walter jumped from the couch tower and darted over to it just as it stopped ringing. I had a bad feeling about that phone. Why would it be ringing in the night? It seemed like something from a scary movie—like you were going to answer it, and it was going to be someone calling you from the closet, where they were crouched with an ax. Not that I thought anyone was going to hurt us. But I was definitely starting to feel scared.
Which made this maybe not the best time to play hide-and-seek. Which is what I agreed to do anyway. “But wait,” I said to Walter. “What about this?” I swept my arm toward the mess of couches, the carpet bunched beneath them, the wall torn above, and he shrugged.
“I don’t know, Frankie.”
“I’m not leaving another note,” I said, and Walter nodded. “But I feel bad,” I said, and Walter smiled.
“Too bad to play?” he said. Then he put his hands over his eyes and started counting.
What could I do? I ran to hide.
Playing hide-and-seek when you’re already scared is fun, but also, well, terrifying. I’ve always loved and hated playing it with Walter. He is really good at being super quiet—and then scaring me half to death—and that’s true even in someone’s completely unscary house! In the dimly lit home-office showroom, it was a whole new level of creepy. When it was my turn to count to twenty, I didn’t even hear him scampering into a spot. I crept around, looking under computer desks and behind file cabinets, my heart pounding in my ears, until a desk chair suddenly spun toward me.
“Boo!” Walter yelled, making me jump a hundred feet into the air.
“You’re not supposed to jump out, you crazyhead!” I said, panting and laughing, my hand on my chest. “You’re supposed to stay hidden! Hello? Hide-and-seek? If I find you, I win.”
“Then you win!” Walter said, and he grinned annoyingly.
While Walter counted, I managed to get myself wedged inside a wooden filing cabinet. “Ready or not!” I heard Walter yelling. “I’m going to get you, Frankie!” I wished he would be quieter. I was freaking myself out—enough that I wanted to get back out, but then the drawer was stuck and I couldn’t open it from the inside. “Walter!” I yell-whispered. “Walter! I’m stuck! Get me out of here!” My knees were pressed up under my chin. “Walter!” But I heard him walking in the wrong direction, heard him rustling some curtains, his faint, faraway voice saying, “Aha!” and then, “Nope.”
I waited. I jiggled the drawer, called out again, waited some more. Only when I heard footsteps again, they were coming from the wrong direction. And they were heavy ones. Grown-up ones.
Then I saw a beam of light swing past the keyhole. “Hello?” a voice said. It was not Walter’s voice. “Hello? Is somebody in there?” The drawer handle rattled. I felt like I was going to faint. Luckily, my head was already between my knees. Isn’t that the position you were supposed to be in for fainting? If I’d had a paper bag, I would have been breathing into it. But quietly.
“Hello?” An eye appeared in the keyhole, then disappeared again. What would happen to us? I wondered. I suddenly couldn’t remember if they took kids to jail or not. I mean, I didn’t think they did, but did they? Not permanently, I knew. But is that where we would end up for the night? That would be, like, the total opposite of Ikea. Worse. Why did I hide in a drawer of all things? Why was I asking myself so many questions?
“Hello? Hello? Open up!”
The handle rattled one final time, and then the drawer flew open, with me in it, and a flashlight was shining right into my face.
Not a flashlight. A headlamp. Walter’s headlamp. With Walter’s crazy, laughing self beneath it.
“Oh my god!” he said. “Oh my god. I got you so bad. Frankie! You should have seen the look on your face!” He was bent over, laughing.
“As soon as I catch my breath,” I said, panting, “I am never speaking to you again.”
“I know,” he said, making his voice sound serious. But he was twinkling at me like a sky full of stars.
Next up was desk-chair races down the long hallway to the bathroom. “Each competing team is made up of a driver, who pushes the chair, and a rider who sits in the chair. Team A is you driving and me riding. Team B is the opposite.” Classic Walter. He’d grabbed a timer from the kitchen area. “The rider is in charge of running the timer. Okay, I’m riding first. Ready…go!” We pushed each other down and back, timing ourselves and laughing. As you might imagine, we both won and lost every race.
While we were catching our breath, I spotted a table with a big box of the famous Ikea pencils: little wooden stubs that we had loads of at home because I can’t help keeping a bunch every time we come—though even I admit they’re not really that useful to have around, unless you’re pretending to play mini golf, which we haven’t done in a while.
Walter’s dad, who had been all kinds of weird things in his life, like a puppeteer and a welder and a tofu maker, always had great ideas when it came to crazy contests. Pretend mini golf was a favorite when Walter and I were little, and it involved a rubber ball, a hockey stick, and various obstacles that Walter’s dad created for us out of toys and Tupperware and furniture and figurines. It drove Walter’s mom crazy. She’d come in, and we’d be crashing around with the stick, slamming into the coffee table and the fireplace, bunching up the rug and knocking books off the shelves, and she’d shake her head at us. “Alice, my darling!” he’d say, and grab her around the waist, dip her low to the ground, and kiss her. Then he’d hand her the hockey stick and bow, and she’d laugh and take a turn.
Walter’s dad reminisced about it when he was sick. “Remember?” he said, half-asleep on the couch while Walter and I lay stomach-down on the floor, taking turns adding rooms to the dream house we were drawing. He’d been talking about a lot of fun things that day
. Maybe he was kind of flipping through his mental catalog of the games he’d played with us, the experiments we’d done: the Lego build-a-thons and snow forts, the Mentos explosions and the light fixture we once made out of gummy bears, which glowed in a cool way before melting all over the place into gluey brown puddles. “Remember?” he said again. “Remember when we used to play mini groff? Groff. Mini groff?”
“Golf, Dad,” Walter said patiently. He looked up and smiled at his father. “Groff’s the park near our house. Groff Park. Although we did once play golf in Groff, if that helps!”
“It does,” Walter’s dad had said, and sighed. “It helps a lot.”
“Okay,” I said now, and grabbed a huge handful of pencils, counted them out. “Twenty for you, twenty for me. It’s the reality show called, uh, What Can You Make with the Pencils? and each contestant has one minute and twenty pencils. Got it? Contestants ready?” Walter and I were kneeling on a swirly gray carpet, our pencils in our hands. “Go!”
Did I mention that Walter’s mom is an engineer? She is. She even consulted on the gigantic waterslide at our local amusement park, which meant that we got to go for free for a whole summer. So, yeah, maybe it kind of runs in the family. Because in one minute, I had managed only to organize my pencils into a lopsided sunburst, while Walter had built a perfect little roofless log cabin. Next I spelled the word HELLO and still had five pencils left over, while Walter built something like a suspension bridge using every last pencil. He can be annoying like that.
“Hey,” he said, looking down at his creation, then looking up and tapping his chin. He waggled his eyebrows in what I was coming to know as his crazy-idea-at-Ikea expression. “Hey. Do you think we could rig up some sort of a zip line here?”
One Mixed-Up Night Page 7
