by Andrew Smith
“Is something the matter, Karim?” Mom asked.
So, of course Karim answered with a spontaneous practicing-to-be-a-teenager lie. “No, Mrs. Abernathy. I’m fine. It’s just Tuesdays are my usual days for doing yoga, and since I skipped it today on account of reading and studying all day with Sam, I figured I’d do some during dinner. This is the Loser of the War of Jenkins’s Ear45 pose.”
And then Karim sunk his chin a bit lower, inhaled deeply, and added, “It’s reformist yoga.”
Dad perked up like a pressure cooker full of popping corn.
“Hey! I wonder if Kenny or James Jenkins are related to the ear?”
“No, Dad,” I said. “No.”
Karim stayed with his head down. If he kept this up, I figured he was probably about to start chanting or something in about ten seconds.
And Dad continued, “Everyone does yoga these days. Maybe after dinner you could show me some slick moves, Karim!”
I didn’t know where my dad got his ideas from. Half the time I questioned whether it was even possible that we were related.
I pointed out, “You can’t do yoga in a kilt, Dad. Not even reformist yoga.”
My father liked wearing the official kilt of Clan Abernathy.
“Heh-heh. I guess you’re right, Sam,” he said. Then Dad put his chin down just like Karim did, assuming the Loser of the War of Jenkins’s Ear pose from reformist yoga, and asked, “What am I supposed to feel?”
Embarrassment, I wanted to say.
“Besides, Karim and I promised we’d go visit Bahar after dinner. She’s babysitting, and we didn’t want her to be alone. She gets scared sometimes,” I said.
Karim suddenly broke out of his Loser of the War of Jenkins’s Ear pose. His head shot up and he stared at me with an expression that in reformist yoga would probably be called a You’re Crazy If You Think You’ll Ever Get Me Inside a Haunted House pose.
42. Let me be clear: not in the same way that Karim fell so easily into his very serious type of “like” that made me nervous to even think about because it involved such things as holding hands in public and voluntarily kissing people who are not your parents, like Hayley Garcia or Brenden Saltarello.
43. This meal was NOT my idea.
44. From a squeeze bottle, unfortunately.
45. This was an actual war, fought in the 1700s over someone’s actual severed ear.
IF IT MAKES YOU FEEL GOOD, BELIEVE IT
“Someone has obviously not been paying attention to all the homework we’ve been doing,” Karim said. “Are you out of your mind? Do you really think I’m going to go over to that house? Have you been brainwashed by Communists or something?”
“I have two words for you, Karim: ‘Jenkins’s Ear,’ ” I said.
Karim nodded like a scientist receiving a Nobel Prize. “That was some of my best work.”
I don’t know where he got all his ridiculous stories from.
The sun was down. Karim and I were cutting through the clearing in the woods by my house, past the pile of concrete and construction rubble that had been used to seal off the dangerous and abandoned “Sam’s Well,” which had become a kind of local landmark in this part of Texas.46
“I’ll walk there with you, but I will not go inside,” Karim said. “In fact, I may just stand outside my own house and watch or take pictures when you get swallowed up by the black beast that rises from the rooftop.”
I was doing my best to coax him into a walk to the Purdy House.
And Karim was not the most encouraging friend to have along when you’re going on the scariest mission you’ve ever been on.
But worse than Karim’s stubbornness and the fact that there was no moon this evening and it was getting dark quickly, was the fact that Bahar had not answered the last text I’d sent her (which I’d sent three times). And that text said this:
SAM: Is everything okay?
BAHAR:…
SAM: Is everything okay?
BAHAR:…
SAM: Bahar?
BAHAR:…
SAM: Is everything okay?
“Maybe her battery’s dead,” I said.
“If it makes you feel good, believe it,” Karim said.
“Maybe it’s on silent and she put her phone down somewhere so she could tuck Little Boris into bed.”
“Did you say ‘Little Charlie’?”
“No. Stop it. ‘Boris.’ Duh.”
“If it makes you feel good, believe it,” he repeated.
“Maybe there’s a solar flare and it’s causing spotty coverage at the house,” I said.
“If it makes you feel good, believe it.”
“You’re not being very helpful, Karim.”
“Throughout history, that’s what people have always said to realists, Sam.”
“A realist wouldn’t be afraid of going to the Purdy House. And a realist wouldn’t believe the exaggerated claims made by people in the Hill Country Yodeler. Because realists only ever think about things that are… uh… real.”
“If it makes you feel good, believe it.”
“Is that like a chant from your reformist yoga or something? Because it is definitely not making me feel good,” I said.
Then Karim said, “Hang on a second. Stand still. I want to capture the Sam Doing the Dumbest Thing He’s Ever Done in His Life reformist yoga pose.”
“Ha. Ha. Very funny.” I kept walking. Karim was about three steps behind me.
I said, “Maybe she dropped it and it broke.”
“If it makes you feel good, believe it.”
This could have easily gone on long enough for me and Karim to walk to Oklahoma, but we were coming up on the dirt road behind his place, and the roof of the Purdy House was already in sight, peeking through the gaps in the treetops.
And when we walked through the side of his yard, Karim said, “I’m going to go inside for a second and check in with my parents, and maybe get some more clothes.”
“You’re really going to leave me out here to go there alone?”
“What would my parents think if I didn’t come in?” Karim asked.
“They’d probably think it’s nice vacationing together in Mexico,” I said.
“Ha ha. Whatever, Sam. See you in a few. Maybe. If you make it back.”
And without even turning around, Karim trotted off and disappeared inside his front door.
So that was that, and I was stuck wanting to run back home and lock myself in, while desperately wondering what was going on with Bahar inside the Purdy House.
And I thought, Where is Princess Snugglewarm when you really need her?
46. Our second-most favorite local landmark was the giant T. rex hazard at Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Complex.
LITTLE CHARLIE HEARS MY CALL
One does not simply disregard the NO TRESPASSING signs that hang on the gates of the Purdy House.
I mean, in many ways the notices themselves looked more menacing than the two-word warning emblazoned across each of them. The signs had to have been a hundred years old, white, with peeling oxidized red uppercase letters painted on metal that oozed streaks of rust like blood, and here and there bubbling scabs where corrosion had been steadily decaying upward through their surfaces.
If the signs came to life, they would truly be monsters.
I had never been this close to the Purdy House in my entire life. Now here I was standing just inches from the gates. I did not touch them, however.
The lights were on in every window, except for the ones on the third floor and in the attic. Naturally, haunted houses never have lights on up there. The old orange Volvo was gone, and the porch stood, silent and cluttered with empty boxes.
I tried a text again:
Hey, Bahar, I’m outside the gates right now.
Then I thought to play off all the ridiculous things that I’d been imagining (or not), like it was just another Tuesday night in Blue Creek:
How’s it going with the babysitting?
<
br /> And:
How’s the dead raccoon?
Followed by:
What kind of food do they keep in their refrigerator?
You can always tell so much about people by the food they keep inside their refrigerator, just like you can tell a lot about people by the dead animals they use as lighting fixtures.
I waited. Crickets and cicadas seemed to be yelling at me from the dark. I imagined an entire insect kingdom arguing about whether or not the little kid they were watching should knock—or try to actually open the gates to the Purdy House. I looked up into the sky above the roofline of the house. No gigantic black-winged beast blotting out the stars. Then I got mad at myself for even thinking about a gigantic black-winged beast, because Bahar would have told me how irrational I was being.
But the thing was, Bahar was not telling me anything.
There was still no answer from her to any of the text messages I’d sent.
I reached up and made a fist, cocked it back like I was intending to knock. But if I knocked on the gate, nobody inside would hear it, and it would probably hurt my knuckles on top of everything else. So I formed an O around my mouth with my hands, aimed myself between a gap in the iron bars of the gate, and whisper-shouted, “Bahar!”
To be honest, I’ve been louder in libraries and nobody ever gave me a second look.
I tried it again. “Bahar?”
But I still couldn’t get much volume. My throat was just too tight.
So I braced myself for what I knew I had to do: I decided I would simply open the gates, step up to the front door of the Purdy House, and knock like someone inside owed me money or something; like I had a job to do.
Easy, right?
I lowered my hand to the latch.
“HEY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Karim shouted at me from across the gravel road in front of the Purdy House.
And I screamed louder than I had ever screamed in my life.
Then Karim screamed louder than he had ever screamed in his life.
And for just a fraction of a second, as Karim and I were both screaming and I was turning away from those old creepy gates to run for my life, I thought, This must be why they called it the Screaming House.
I caught a glimpse of Karim standing along the roadway as I darted from the gates. His eyes looked like headlights on a fire truck, and he was pointing a hand up toward the house behind me.
“He’s up there!” Karim shrieked.
I glanced back, and sure enough, up on the third floor47 one of the narrow windows had been illuminated, and standing there, perfectly still and ghostlike, looking down to precisely where Karim and I were experiencing sheer terror, was the figure of a pale little boy dressed in what looked like one of those old nightshirt things that people used to wear a century ago.
“It’s Little Charlie the cannibal!” Karim said.
I was so scared that there were literally tears leaking from my eyes.
And I thought, Me. I am the kind of food they keep in their refrigerator.
Karim was right behind me, which kind of made me feel like I was being chased, so I ran faster. And then everything got much, much worse when Karim began to yell, “There’s something crawling on me! There’s something crawling on me!”
Which made me run even faster, which made Karim run faster too.
We did not stop running until we had gotten back to the clearing near Sam’s Well. Then Karim and I both collapsed into the grass of the field, where we panted and gasped for several minutes before we finally calmed down enough to say anything.
What was crawling on Karim was a cicada as big as my hand. It had gotten inside his T-shirt, and Karim had the creature balled up in a twisted wad of shirt.
“Sam. Can you get this thing off me?”
I do not touch cicadas. Not ever. Karim knew that.
In fact, I am as afraid of cicadas as I am of any imaginary demons and ghouls that may or may not haunt the Purdy House. I can’t even look at a cicada without wanting to give up on life entirely.
“Karim, you’re my best friend, but no.”
And the trapped cicada inside Karim’s T-shirt made a soft and terrifying little hideous scream, which is what trapped cicadas do sometimes.
“Some friend you are,” said Karim, who’d been living in my room since last Sunday.
He got to his feet, and keeping the wadded-up cicada tangled inside his hand, he pulled his T-shirt off and threw it on top of the mountain of concrete and rebar plugging the opening to Sam’s Well.
And I said, “You were the one who left me to go to the Purdy House all alone.”
“You didn’t quite get there, did you?”
“You screamed at me. That’s why,” I said.
“I wouldn’t have screamed if I hadn’t seen Little Charlie getting ready to eat you. I saved your life,” Karim said.
“If it makes you feel good, believe it,” I said.
I stood up and shook out my clothes, just in case any other cicadas had decided to hitch a ride away from the Purdy House.
“You owe me a shirt,” Karim, who had already ruined a pair of my socks today, told me.
I just shook my head. Panting, exhausted, and terrified, we started back toward my house. I couldn’t really tell if we were mad at each other, but I’m pretty sure we were. Best friends get that way sometimes.
“So. Who’s going to be the one to do it?” Karim asked between gulps of air.
“Do what?” I said.
“Go tell Bahar’s mom and dad that Bahar is now a powerless thrall for the Monster People,” Karim answered.
“Well. It’s your aunt and uncle,” I said.
“But this is all your fault, Sam,” Karim argued. “You have to do it.”
As was so often the case, I couldn’t follow Karim’s logic that any of this48 was my fault.
“For all we know, Bahar’s probably got a lightbulb coming out of her head,” Karim said.
“She should have told them no as soon as she saw it was the Purdy House.”
And then Karim, always the devoted cousin, said, “Did you make anything for dessert? I’m kind of hungry again.”
47. Did I mention that attics in haunted houses are places where no lights are ever supposed to be turned on?
48. And by “this” I meant all the stuff that Karim and I had convinced ourselves was happening, while having no concrete proof to back up our wild assumptions.
CANNIBALS DON’T EAT NOODLES
No one told Bahar’s parents that their daughter had been transformed into a mindless thrall for the Monster People, because in the end, Karim and I decided that a “wait and see” approach would be the wisest strategy for us to pursue.
Anyway, we had no choice since we couldn’t agree on whose job it was to break the news to them. We argued about it for the rest of the walk home, but fell silent and grumpy through dessert.
It was chocolate-banana crepes, which I did make, by the way.
I was so mad at Karim for not being brave enough to go to Bahar’s house and warn her parents that I didn’t even tell him about the chocolate sauce he had on his face. I let him go to bed like that. And then he woke up that way too, stained with a dark brown slash across his cheek.
At breakfast, Dylan and Evie laughed at him.
And Mom, who would happily adopt any straggler that Dad or I brought into our home, just shook her head sadly and grabbed a damp dishcloth. And as she gently wiped the chocolate sauce49 from his face, she made big love-eyes at Karim and said, “Oh! You poor sweet thing! I bet you miss your mom!”
Then she combed his hair with her fingers, which kind of made me mad because hand-combing of a boy’s hair is something that I believed Mom was only allowed to do to Dylan, or possibly to me, but only if there were no other middle-school-aged boys around to witness it happening.
Karim shrugged and said, “Well. I’m not really missing Mom and Dad, Mrs. Abernathy. Um. They came home yesterday from the nudist retreat in Mexico, but Mom and
Dad were so sunburned, they asked me if I could stay away from home for a little bit longer. They can’t really move, and they look like the flag of Denmark.”50
Mom said, “Oh, sweetie! You can stay here as long as you’d like.”
It was a good thing breakfast was oatmeal, for two reasons: (1) I was near to choking from listening to Karim’s wild fabrications, and (2) Mom was acting like she was about one step away from actually chewing Karim’s food for him.
Luckily for all of us, Karim’s phone began buzzing inside his Teen Titans pajama pants pocket.
“That must be Denmark texting you,” I said.
Karim pulled out his phone and looked at the screen, then at me.
“It’s from Bahar,” he said.
“Oh my gosh! Is she okay?” I asked.
Then Mom got this super-concerned mom-bird look on her face.
“Did something happen to Bahar?” she asked.
“Um.” I glanced at Karim, but his perpetual-motion lie generator hadn’t kicked into first gear yet. Even he didn’t know what to say to Mom.
But Mom’s concern could only be sustained for a moment, because Dylan had climbed down from his booster seat and was foraging in the refrigerator for some mayonnaise, which he fully intended to put on top of his oatmeal.
I nudged Karim. “He’s probably possessed by the same mayonnaise demon as Brenden Saltarello,” I said.
So we got up from the table and went back to my room while Mom and Dylan got busily involved in a heated, endless-loop-with-a-three-year-old argument about whether or not mayonnaise was an acceptable topping for oatmeal.
Then Dylan started to cry.
And Evie started to cry too, because nobody was paying attention to her.
“Is it like this every morning?” Karim asked me.
I shut the door behind us. “Only for about the past year now,” I said. “What did she say?”
“Didn’t you hear her? She said, why did Dylan always get his way, and she wanted bacon on her oatmeal,” Karim answered.
“Not Evie. Bahar.”
“Oh.”
Karim dug his phone out and opened the group message Bahar had sent us. I turned mine on too. Normally I would feel a little dumb51 for group-texting with Karim if he was in the same room as me, but since I was kind of mad at him, and since he was wearing one of my T-shirts and what was most likely another pair of my socks, I decided that dumb52 was not exactly what I was feeling.
