Where I'd Like to Be

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “You need a thimble,” Murphy said. “And maybe some sewing lessons.”

  I stuck my thumb in my mouth and sucked on it for a second. “I was in Girl Scouts for three weeks once, but I never did get my sewing badge.”

  “Did you get any badges?”

  “Nope. I was the world’s worst Girl Scout. All I ever wanted to do was go camping, but the whole time I was in it, all anybody ever talked about was cookies this and cookies that.”

  Murphy sprinkled some gold glitter over a rusty metal wastebasket Corinne had let her haul off from the dorm. She’d covered the whole thing with swirls of glue first, and now the glitter stuck to the twirly pattern.

  “My mother wasn’t the sort of person to sign me up for Girl Scouts,” she told me, shaking the wastebasket so that the extra glitter fell off in a sparkling shower. “She didn’t have much interest in organized activities of any kind. She thought life should be as spontaneous as possible.”

  She turned and fixed me with a serious look. “Do you miss your parents?”

  The question took me by surprise. I wasn’t too comfortable talking about my parents with anyone. You’d think the subject would come up more often with foster-care kids, but in my case it almost never did unless I was locked in conversation with a social worker. I didn’t have a real dramatic story like some kids I knew.

  “I never knew them to miss them,” I said. “I wish I remembered my mama. In my mind, she has silver-blonde hair, but Granny Lane says that’s not right, that Mama’s hair is just like mine, regular old brown. But her eyes are brown and mine are blue. Granny Lane says my eyes must be from my daddy’s side.”

  Murphy applied a few more squiggles of glue to her wastebasket, then leaned back on her heels. “If I tell you something, will you keep it to yourself?”

  “Sure,” I said nodding, excited that Murphy wanted to confide in me. “I’m real good at keeping secrets.”

  “There were a lot of bad things about my parents dying,” she said. “But one of the worst things was that right before the car accident, my mother was teaching me how to fly. Only she died before I learned everything I needed to know.”

  “Your mother could fly a plane?”

  Murphy looked at me for what seemed to be a long time. “No,” she said slowly. “She could fly. In the air.”

  My hands started to tremble. This was the most bold-faced, outrageous thing anyone had ever said to me. It almost scared me to hear it.

  “Well, it wasn’t like she was born knowing how to fly,” Murphy continued. “She learned it from some New Guinea tribesmen she and my father met when they were doing research. The entire tribe could fly like a flock of birds. The chief respected my parents, so he taught them how. Really, the most important thing is to have the special talisman.”

  “Talisman?”

  “Like a good-luck charm. That’s what my blue stone is. My mother gave it to me right before she died.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Once, almost. I jumped off of my porch, and suddenly it was like I was floating in the air. I put out my arms, and I ended up landing about five feet away from where I would have naturally hit the ground.”

  She paused to sprinkle a little more glitter. Without looking at me, she asked, “You believe me, don’t you?”

  If I’d been in fourth grade, I would have believed every word a hundred percent because in fourth grade you still believe in things even though you say you don’t. In fifth grade I would have called her a liar straight to her face. Nobody believes in anything in fifth grade, not even when you’re sitting by yourself in your own room.

  But in sixth grade—where nothing was magical, and nobody said anything anymore about hidden bedroom passageways that led to fairylands or being the long-lost daughter of a faraway king—to even whisper in secret that you could almost fly was opening yourself up to a lifetime of laughter and ridicule. It hardly seemed worth it. So for Murphy to make such a claim, well, I had to take it seriously.

  “Sure,” I said, doing my best to sound like I didn’t have a doubt in the world. “Of course I believe you.”

  Murphy smiled. She stood and rubbed glitter from her hands. “I knew you would. It’s nice to have someone to tell things to, isn’t it?”

  Then she came over and kneeled down beside me, picking up the edge of a curtain and running her finger over the crooked hem. “I think my mother would have taught me more, but she was sick a lot.”

  “What kind of sick?” I asked, picturing a pale woman lying in bed with a damp rag across her forehead. “Like the flu?”

  “No. Nobody knew what was wrong with her,” Murphy said, each word coming out careful, like she was weighing it in her mind before she spoke. “But some days she couldn’t take care of me very well. Flying lessons were out of the question.”

  “Couldn’t your daddy teach you?” I asked.

  “He was gone a lot, doing research. Fortunately, I’m a very independent person. I can take care of myself.”

  She dropped the curtain and hopped back up. “Did you know I know how to bake a ham?” Now her voice was light, carefree as a butterfly. “And I can make potatoes six different ways.”

  She went back to her glitter, chattering away about how to double-bake a potato with butter and cheddar cheese. I picked up my needle and started hemming again, humming under my breath. Murphy told me secrets. Murphy was happy to have me to talk to. I couldn’t help but smile, now that I knew for sure that me and Murphy were friends. Of course Murphy can fly, I told myself. Of course I believe her.

  Chapter 10

  One day, without saying a word to me about it, Murphy showed up at the fort with the Book of Houses and the Book of People in her backpack. “If it’s okay with Maddie, I think we should all work on the books together,” she told us. “It will help us think about the houses we might live in someday. We could also make up our own city and tell stories about it. That’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”

  Donita walked over and took the books from Murphy. She leafed through the Book of Houses. “These the scrapbooks you and Ricky Ray used to work on all the time?” she asked me. “They’re for pictures of houses?”

  “And people,” I told her, feeling nervous, worried she might make fun of them.

  “Well, y’all obviously been working hard,” she said. She sounded like she approved. “That’s the most houses I ever saw in one place.”

  She closed the book and looked at Murphy. “I don’t know about making up a city, though. We already built a fort. Ain’t that creative enough for you?”

  “That’s my point,” Murphy said. “The fort is built, and now we need something else to do. We don’t have to make up a city. That’s just one idea for what we could do with the books.”

  Donita handed them back to her. “I’ll cut out pictures of houses. Like I said, I don’t know about no city.”

  “We’ll be spontaneous about it,” Murphy said. “We’ll just do whatever comes to mind. If it’s okay with Maddie, that is.”

  I looked around the room at each and every one of them, face by face. Donita had her practical look on, a look that made it clear she thought the rest of us needed her to keep our feet on the ground. Logan’s expression went this way and that, like he wasn’t sure someone signed up for Algebra I next year should be playing cut-outs—but if Murphy wanted him to, did he really have a choice? Ricky Ray’s face was as eager as a puppy’s.

  Murphy was holding the books close to her chest. She looked at me solemnly, with the smallest of smiles, and I thought right then she knew how important those books were to me, and that she wouldn’t ever let anything happen to them.

  After a long minute I nodded my head. “It’s okay with me,” I said.

  Logan went to his house and came back with scissors and copies of Southern Living and Good Housekeeping. “This is the best I can do right now,” he said. “All the other stuff we have is Sports Illustrated and National Geographic.”

  That’s how it
became our routine, to meet at the fort and cut out pictures and put them in the books.

  Now I figured we’d spend most of our time making up a city, just like Murphy wanted. But the day Ricky Ray cut out a picture of a modular home from the newspaper and stuck it into the book, making Donita laugh and say, “That thing ain’t nothing but a gussied-up double-wide. Just a big hunk of junk by the side of the road.” I couldn’t help but tell the story of living with my Aunt Fonda, who was really one of Mr. Willis’s cousin’s daughters.

  “If you don’t count Granny Lane’s trailer as a house, then the first house I ever lived in was a modular home,” I said. I turned to Logan and Murphy and explained, “That’s the kind of house you buy at a dealership, and they ship it to your empty yard on a flatbed trailer. But it wasn’t a bad place to live at all.”

  I’d just turned eight when I moved down to Blountville to live with Fonda. Even back then I knew there were pluses and minuses to every situation. On the minus side of this one, I’d had to leave Granny Lane and Mr. Willis, the only family I’d ever known. On the plus side, I had my very own room for the first time in my life.

  “It was on the far left side of the house,” I told everyone, pointing to where my room would have been in Ricky Ray’s picture. “And right outside the window was a black walnut tree. You could sell those walnuts unshelled for ten cents a pound over at Blountville Herb and Metal.”

  “Was it a big room?” Ricky Ray asked. “Big as this fort?”

  I shook my head. “If you spit across it, you’d better watch out, because that spit would bounce right back in your eye.”

  Fonda’s girls, Peyton and Tiffany, had a bunk bed in the room across the hall from me. Ten-year-old twins, they were about the most glamorous girls I’d ever known. They liked giving their old things to me, torn dress-up clothes, junky tea party dishes, coloring books with almost all the pictures colored in. After only a month at Aunt Fonda’s, I had that room of mine so done up with odds and ends, including a play oven and a small but real refrigerator without a cord, that I could stay in it all day, playing house. I could barely turn around in that room, but in my mind it was the size of a mansion.

  Only problem was, I had that room done up a little too nice. When summer came around, Peyton and Tiffany started edging me out, telling me I could go sit on the top bunk all by myself, while they doodled and dawdled in my room, making up phony conversations like they were married and having dinner parties. “Oh, Justin is going to turn purple when he sees I burnt the roast,” I remember Peyton exclaiming during one game of Dinner Party. “I reckon he’ll want a divorce,” Tiffany agreed.

  “The kicker was,” I concluded, “they liked that room so much, they decided I was in the way. They got talking to their mama, and the day after Labor Day I met my first social worker walking down Aunt Fonda’s gravel drive.”

  “Social workers,” Ricky Ray said, sighing. Everyone but Logan nodded glumly. “But I’m glad you got kicked out of your Aunt Fonda’s so you could come over here.”

  “I had a lot of stops in between here and there,” I reminded him. Before I could tick all the places off on my fingers, Ricky Ray counted them out for me. “Three homes in one year,” he said. “The Grindstaffs, the Honey-cutts, and the Fulks. And then Mrs. Estep’s for a long stretch before coming to the Children’s Home.”

  I couldn’t help but think of my life at Mrs. Estep’s as I watched Ricky Ray a few days later kneeling over an old copy of Seventeen magazine, clipping out a picture of a girl with pink hair and a dragon tattoo on her shoulder. You could tell he was serious about cutting her out exactly right. Ricky Ray did not take his role as a contributor to the books lightly, no sir.

  “Now this girl, her name is Crystal, and once upon a time she had a little boy with blonde hair,” Ricky Ray said, taking one last snip. He held the paper girl at arm’s length and admired his handiwork.

  Rain tapped on the roof of the fort but didn’t come in, a fact we were real proud of. It was the first week of October and the sky had been sending down rain steadily since Thursday, but here it was Saturday and not a drop had made it inside. Donita and Logan had taken plastic wrap and a staple gun to close the windows against the nonstop drizzle.

  “What happened to the little boy?” Donita asked from where she was curled up in an old armchair with fluff coming out of its cushions. It was one of a bunch of chairs Logan had contributed from his parents’ garage. Three of them were folding chairs, two were chairs that went with a dining room table that Judge Parrish was using in his study, and one was the armchair where Donita sat. She had the Book of Houses in her lap and was pasting in a picture of a Williamsburg colonial.

  “He ran away,” Ricky Ray told her. “See, Crystal, his mama, was a princess, only she had been stolen by bad fairies when she was just a little girl. She missed her own folks real bad, but she didn’t know what had become of them or where their castle was or anything. She just cried and cried about it. So her little boy, when he got big enough, decided to go find the castle that was his mama’s true home.”

  “He was on a quest,” Logan said from where he sat on a folding chair in the corner, leafing through an old copy of Family Circle.

  Ricky Ray leaned back and considered this. “I guess that’s what you might call it. He went off looking for something. Is that a quest?”

  Logan nodded. “You got it.”

  “Then he was on a quest,” Ricky Ray agreed. He turned to me and grinned. “You know what the boy’s name was, Maddie?”

  I shook my head. “Was it Ricky Ray?”

  Ricky Ray looked at me like he couldn’t believe I didn’t know the right answer.

  “No way,” he said. “The boy’s name was Randy. Why, it was Randy Nidiffer.”

  Chapter 11

  Once, when Ricky Ray was four, his parents went to a party and didn’t come back for two weeks. Every day while they were gone, Ricky Ray ate a peanut-butter sandwich for breakfast, had another peanut-butter sandwich for lunch, and then ate two peanut-butter sandwiches for dinner.

  If he hadn’t run out of peanut butter and bread, he might have gone on living that way forever. It was when the manager of the Winn-Dixie store caught four-year-old Ricky Ray sitting in the middle of aisle five tearing into a loaf of Wonder bread, an open jar of Jif peanut butter by his side, that the Department of Social Services was called to investigate the situation. That’s when Ricky Ray got put into foster care. He’d been officially recognized as a neglected child.

  It meant something to Ricky Ray that Social Services took Randy Nidiffer away for the same reason they took him. When you’re a foster-care child, you’re always looking for kids whose stories are like your own. It makes you feel less lonely. Now, Randy’s mama didn’t leave him alone much, that’s true. He used to say that his mama was usually home but she was hardly ever there. I think he meant she drank a lot.

  “I got two little brothers, but they always stayed over at Mawmaw’s, so they didn’t get neglected so bad,” Randy had told me one afternoon when we were working on our books, cutting up the glossy inserts from Sunday’s newspaper. “The State thought Maw-maw ought to take me in too, but she disagreed with ’em.”

  “Why was that?” I asked, reaching over him to grab the Sears insert.

  Randy gave me what he called his charm school grin. “Said I was too wild. Said she done got the little boys trained up right, but my mama let me get out of hand.” He snipped around a picture of a lawn mower. “Just imagine. I was only six years old, and already I was purely ruined.”

  “You don’t seem ruined to me,” I told him. He didn’t, either. He was the best artist I knew, and his hair shined like the sun had set in it. How could a boy like Randy be ruined?

  “That’s because you look at folks for what’s good in their hearts. Mawmaw, mostly what she looks for is the black spots.”

  When I told this story in the fort, as a way of introducing the idea of Randy Nidiffer to everyone, Ricky Ray smiled. “You can’
t be ruined when you’re six,” he explained to Murphy, Logan, and Donita. “That’s way too little. Randy Nidiffer wasn’t ruined at all. His granny was wrong.

  “Randy Nidiffer had freckles everywhere you could see,” Ricky Ray told us, settling back into his story. “Which was a good thing, because freckles are nice. But it was a bad thing, too, because it made it easier for the bad fairies to see him.”

  “Were they glow-in-the-dark freckles?” Logan asked. I shot him a nasty look, and he rolled his eyes at me in return. But then he turned to Ricky Ray and said, “I mean, were they magic in any way?”

  Ricky Ray shook his head. “He wasn’t a magic boy. The fairies were magic, but Randy Nidiffer was just regular.”

  He walked over and took the Book of Houses from Donita, and then he walked to the middle of the room and knelt on the floor and began flipping through its pages.

  “Okay,” Ricky Ray said, turning one page, then another, pointing to different houses. “Randy Nidiffer passed by this house and this house, and then he passed by this one. But when he came to this house,” he said, pointing to a picture of an old-fashioned mansion in the style of a Halloween haunted house, “he stopped. There were spiders in the mailbox. That was a clue.”

  “What kind of clue was it, Ricky Ray?” Murphy asked from where she was sitting in the corner. She pulled her knees up to her chest and stared at him real hard.

  “Well,” Ricky Ray said, stretching out the word to give himself time to come up with an answer. “Well, Randy Nidiffer knew that bad fairies like spiders for pets. So there must have been some bad fairies who came to this house and left their spiders there when they went away. And this house was so big, it was the kind of house where a king and queen might live, too.”

  “Randy thought that’s where his grandparents stayed,” Donita said, pointing at the haunted house picture with her scissors.