by Wendy Mass
He keeps petting my head.
I can’t talk to tell him that things will be okay (and how do I know they will?), so I just give him a gentle nudge on the chin and hope he understands.
A shadow falls over us, and I look up. Dark clouds have rolled in, hiding the sun. Danny lets his hand fall from my head and stops crying. “Clouds,” he says, his voice full of wonder. Then he stands up and shouts. “Rain clouds!”
“Shhh!” I know chickens don’t shush people, but I can’t help it.
But it’s too late—Livy and the whole family are staring right at us.
Livy’s eyes dart wildly between me and Danny.
“Look at the clouds!” she shouts, stabbing her finger upward a bit too frantically. But it works. Everyone looks up, even the baby, which gives me a chance to escape. But I don’t. Something holds me there.
We hear thunder, and everyone cheers. Gran lifts the baby up to the sky and hops around and woo-hoos! She’s stronger than she looks! Livy’s mom throws her arms around Livy and squeezes. At this moment, I could take off the chicken suit and do a naked somersault, and not one of them would notice.
From behind her mom’s back, Livy waves for me to go to the house. Danny has run over to join the whooping and dancing, and I want more than anything to join in, too. But I do my best chicken walk toward the back door.
Giant blobs of water plonk onto my head, splash on my face, and roll down toward my mouth. Rain! It’s a little weird. Not bad necessarily, just different. Not sure what all the fuss is about, frankly. By the time I’ve made it to the door, the rain has stopped and the clouds are rolling away.
That was fast.
The cheering stops as if someone has thrown a switch. Everyone is quiet. Livy is frowning and that makes me sad. I hear her mom say that the baby needs to get into some dry clothes. I’d better get upstairs before they come in.
Also, I’m pretty sure there are some potato chips left in the bottom of the bag.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LIVY
“Open the door already! You’ve been in there for fifteen minutes.” It’s taken me ten minutes of talking through the closet door to convince Bob to take off his soaking-wet chicken suit and change into something dry, and now he won’t come out.
“No.”
“Come on.” I try to turn the knob, but he must be holding it on the other side.
“No.”
“Come on!”
Bob doesn’t answer at first. Then he says, “You do not say please very often, do you?” He sniffs. “Old Livy did not like to say please, either.”
He’s right. I don’t like to say please. I don’t mind the polite please, like when you want someone to pass you the mashed potatoes, but I don’t like the begging kind of please.
“Please?” I say.
“I am considering it.”
“Pretty please? How bad can it be?”
The door swings open, and there is Bob, arms crossed tightly over his narrow chest. He is wearing my old tutu. He looks smaller in the tutu than he did in the chicken suit.
“It’s not so bad. At least both your feet are still attached,” I say.
“It was this or a bathing suit,” he says.
I probably would have gone with the bathing suit. That tutu looks itchy.
“Maybe you could get me something else to wear? When you are in town tonight?” Bob’s eyes shine. “In Gran’s soap operas, someone is always going into town to shop.”
“I’ll try. But it might be hard to get my mom to buy me something in your size.”
He looks at me. One side of the tutu sticks up in a funny way, like it’s been pressed up against the closet wall for the last five years. That plus Bob’s dead-serious look makes me want to hug him. But I don’t.
Suddenly Bob smiles. “Do you have time for chess?”
“You play chess?”
He nods. “Your dad taught you, and you taught me.”
A little wiggle at the back of my head tells me he’s right.
“I’ll set up the board!” Bob says, running to his closet. “I’ve been practicing by myself. I mean, technically, it has always been me against Mr. Monkey, but I make all his moves for him.”
“Who usually wins?”
He scratches his head. “That’s the other thing. We only have the white chess pieces, so we share them. And I always forget whose pieces are whose. I wish I could find the black ones.”
“Black chess pieces?” I say. “I know where they are!”
“You do?” Bob does a little jump, which is really cute, because of the tutu. “Don’t just stand there. Get them!”
* * *
When I get to the kitchen, Gran is standing by the window, reading a letter and frowning. “You’ve been up in your room a lot,” she says, switching to a smile. “Everything all right? We’re still making that cake tomorrow, right?”
“Yes! Everything is great. But do you know where those chess pieces are? The black ones you showed me yesterday?”
“Of course.” She drops the letter on the kitchen table, next to a ripped-open white envelope, and I realize Gran is reading the letter that the neighbor was twisting in his hands this morning. He looked miserable when he was holding it, and now that Gran has it, she looks kind of miserable. Even though she’s still smiling at me.
When Gran turns away, I tilt my head and read the words at the top of the page: BANK OF AUSTRALIA.
Gran holds the net bag of chess pieces out to me. “Do you remember trying to take these home last time you came? You had them all packed away in your backpack! Cutest thing.”
“I did?”
She nods. “Your mom found them at the last minute, and they’ve been sitting in my kitchen drawer ever since. I’d challenge you to a game, but I can’t find the white ones.”
* * *
Upstairs, Bob is sitting cross-legged on the floor of my room, with the chessboard in front of him. All the white pieces are resting on their squares, the important pieces in the back row and the pawns lined up in front of them.
I start setting up my side of the board. Bob smiles at me and says, “Just like old times. You always have to be black.”
“It’s lucky,” I tell him.
“But chess is not about luck,” Bob says. “It’s about recognizing the strength of the little guy.”
“What are you talking about?”
He picks up a pawn and waves it at me. “Everyone underestimates the little guy. But the pawn is the key to the game.”
I laugh. “Where are you getting this stuff?”
His face grows serious. “The pawn protects every other piece on the board,” Bob says, “even though it can’t make as many different moves. And if you can get it to the other side of the board safely, it becomes a much more powerful piece, like a knight or a queen.” Then he smiles, slides his first pawn down the center of the board from e2 to e4, and says, “Let’s see what you’ve learned in five years.”
I move my own pawn out to c5 and watch his eyes get big when he realizes I’m doing the Sicilian Defense. I grin. “Game on, my not-zombie friend.”
He beams. “You are a much better opponent than Mr. Monkey.”
We’ve barely gotten started when I hear Mom calling up the stairs that it’s time to go into town.
Bob looks up. “Don’t forget I need something to wear.”
“I’ll try,” I say.
“Don’t forget about me,” he says.
“I won’t,” I tell him.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
He picks up a black pawn from the board and hands it to me. “Put this in your pocket,” he says.
“Why?”
“I don’t know why. But it’s important. It is what you always did before.”
“Bob, I was five before. I probably did things for no reason at all.”
“Please,” Bob says, “just do it.”
“Fine.” I lean over and swipe a different black pawn from the bo
ard.
“No,” Bob says. “It has to be this one. The one with the chip on the bottom.”
He actually looks kind of worried, so I take the “special” pawn from him and stick it in my front jeans pocket. And then I give him a quick hug.
Bob is a good hugger. His arms go around my middle and he looks up at me with these eyes that remind me of Joanie, our neighbor’s German shepherd back home. Sometimes when I’m sitting on my porch, Joanie comes over and puts her chin on my knee and looks at me just like Bob is doing now. Mom calls her “Lonely Joan.” But I don’t think Joan is lonely. I think she just has a way of knowing when a person needs cheering up.
I pat the pocket with the chess pawn in it. “I’ll be back soon, Bob. As soon as I can. Then I’ll finish beating you at chess.”
* * *
I thought “town” would be a big place like ours at home, with coffee shops, stores, restaurants, and maybe a movie theater, but Gran’s town turns out to be one street, with a stretch of stores on one side of the road and nothing but dirt and dead grass on the other. We start at one end and go slowly, stopping at each and every “shop,” where Gran introduces us to whoever is behind the cash register.
Beth Ann did her four-o’clock crying in the car, so she’s smiling now, and even willing to be passed over the counter and held by whoever is there.
“Do we have to go to every single place?” I whisper to Mom in the wool shop. Yarn is boring.
“Yes, we do,” she says. “Gran is showing us around to her people.”
Showing the baby around, more like.
I cheer up a little when the third store turns out to sell clothes. Because I wanted to go to a clothing store. I know I did, even though I can’t remember exactly why.
“Can I get something?” I ask Mom.
“Maybe,” she says. “Show me what you want.”
But I can’t remember what I want. I look around at all the stuff—it’s nothing fancy, just different kinds of t-shirts and a few handmade things in baskets—and I can’t even remember why I wanted to come here in the first place. It’s like I’m reaching for something in my brain that isn’t there anymore. And then Mom says the baby needs her diaper changed right now, and we’re leaving the store before I can figure it out.
I wait with Gran while Mom changes the baby in the back of the car. Gran keeps looking across the road at the field of brown grass. It’s cut very short. Back home, I love walking on cut grass with my bare feet, but this grass looks like it would hurt to walk on.
When Mom gets back with Beth Ann, we start moving faster because it turns out that a few of the stores have shut down. Gran stops in front of each one and tells Mom when it went out of business. The bookstore closed last summer. (“Ms. Penn, who used to run it, is living on next to nothing now. She always knew what book I needed to read.”) The antiques shop closed just a few weeks ago. (“Who has money for knickknacks these days?”)
I perk up when we walk into what Gran calls the “lolly shop.” There’s candy in big jugs all over the place. (“Thank goodness people can always find some change for something sweet!”) The lady behind the counter hugs Mom, holds her arms out for the baby, and calls to me that I can pick any three things I want.
I walk slowly from bin to bin, taking a square caramel in a clear wrapper because caramels are my favorite, then a sour cherry ball because they last a long time, and I’m still thinking about the third thing I should pick when the lady calls out—“Oh, I moved the licorice! It’s in the corner now.” And she points.
I hate licorice. Why is she telling me where the licorice is? I kind of smile at her and keep walking—chocolate? Gummy frog?
“Don’t be shy,” she calls. “I know it’s your favorite.”
Mom is smiling at me in a funny way, because she knows I hate licorice. We both know that the lady behind the counter must be mixing me up with someone else’s granddaughter who probably visited a long time ago, but now that Mom is looking I’ll have to do the polite thing and take one. Which means no chocolate and no gummy frog.
“No charge for those!” the lady says happily when I have all three pieces in my hand: the caramel, the sour cherry ball, and the dreaded licorice. But Gran Nicholas insists on paying for the candy.
“Put those in your pocket for later,” Mom tells me the second we step outside. “No candy until after dinner.”
We finally get to the town’s one restaurant, at the end of the street. It’s really just a square room full of square tables, each one covered with a white paper tablecloth that hangs down on the sides. There’s a little jar of loose crayons on each table. Mom gives a loud whoop and hugs the waitress hello for a long time, and then a girl about my age comes through a swinging door with a basket of bread, which she puts down on our table.
“I don’t suppose you two remember each other,” Gran says, smiling at the girl and then at me.
We both get shy.
The waitress says to me, “I’ve still got your drawing up, you know!”
My drawing?
Mom says, “Oh, how wonderful! Let’s see!” She rubs my back as we all walk toward one of the walls, which I now see is covered with crayon drawings on paper tablecloths.
“I hang only the best,” the waitress says. But now I’m wondering if maybe she’s not the waitress. Maybe this is her restaurant? And maybe the girl standing next to me is her daughter? She points to a rectangle of paper that’s pinned to the wall with four blue tacks. I glance at the other drawings on the wall—some of them are really good. This one, not so much.
It’s baby stuff, a picture of a farm and two stick-figure girls with curly lines for hair and bright pink and purple triangle dresses. Yellow sun and green grass. The usual.
“Look at that delicious green grass,” Gran says.
The waitress looks at Gran. “Dad told me that a letter came to our place by accident,” she says. “It was from the bank?”
That twisted envelope. These are Gran’s neighbors.
Gran says, “Never mind that letter. My family is here, and tonight is for celebrating. And nothing else. Livy, do you see who drew this gorgeous work of art?”
She points down near the bottom, where it says LIVY in big blue letters and SARAH in purple ones. I look at the girl again. She must be Sarah. She’s not looking at the picture. She’s looking at her feet.
“Remember the weekend you two spent together?” the waitress asks me. “Sarah spent the day with you at your gran’s, and the next day you both came here to help me out. Sarah asked about you for the longest time after you left—‘When’s Livy coming back? When’s Livy coming back?’”
I glance at Sarah and see that her face is all red. “Well, hi again,” I say.
“Hi,” she whispers. Gran and Mom walk over to our table and get the baby all set in her bundle-chair, which is her favorite place to sit, drool, and play with her fingers.
It feels better with Sarah as soon as the adults stop staring at us. “It’s weird we drew this,” I say. “I don’t remember doing it.”
“Me neither,” she says. “Even though I see it every day. It’s kind of cute.”
I look at the drawing again. It is cute, actually—colorful, with horses and pigs in the yard, and a chicken house.
“You must have drawn the horses,” I tell Sarah, “because I still can’t draw a horse.”
She laughs. “Maybe I did. I have no idea. And what the heck are those supposed to be?” She points to a clump of circles with stick feet.
“I think they’re chickens,” I say. “See the little red things on their heads?” And as I look more closely, I see that one chicken, unlike the others, has a carefully colored green face.
Weird.
I point to the drawing above ours, a black dog with a white chest, done in pencil. “That one is really good,” I say.
She nods. “My little brother drew that. He’s only seven, but he’s definitely the official artist of the family.”
“Danny?” That
little kid drew this? “Wow.”
“Yeah,” she says.
“Hey, do you like licorice?” I ask Sarah. I reach into my pocket and take out my loot.
Sarah laughs. “You carry chess pieces around?”
I look at the pawn in my hand, and it’s like a door swings open in my mind. Bob. Bob is that green chicken in our drawing. Bob is who I meant to buy clothes for! I promised him! And then I forgot him. Again.
I turn to Sarah. We were obviously friends when I was here last time. Maybe I told her something. It would be kind of great to have a partner. Because I can’t leave Bob alone here again, and I don’t actually have any idea how to get him home.
“Do you know … Bob?” I say.
“Who?”
“Um, Bob?” I wave one finger at the paper, in the general direction of the green-faced chicken.
“Was Bob a horse?” She frowns. “I hate to tell you this, but he might be gone now. Some people had to ship their horses off because of the drought.”
“Oh.”
“I’m really sorry,” she says. And then our moms call us to the table to decide what we want for dinner.
“Can I run back to that store with the clothes?” I ask Mom. “I just remembered what I wanted. I’ll be right back.”
“What? No, we’re eating now, Livy.”
“Please? I … I’m cold.”
“Sarah can lend you a jumper!” Sarah’s mom says. “She keeps an extra one in the back.”
Jumper is Australian for sweatshirt, and it’s hot in the restaurant, so I’m pretty miserable getting into Sarah’s red hoodie, wondering how I could have forgotten Bob again. I stick the pawn in one pocket, along with the candy Sarah and I didn’t have a chance to sneak.
Sarah takes the chair next to mine. She isn’t shy anymore. In fact, she talks a lot. We’re the only customers in the restaurant, except for one older couple at a table in the front window. I guess that means business isn’t too good.
Our moms start telling stories about the crazy stuff boys in their class used to do, and Sarah and I keep laughing. It cools off as it gets later, so that I’m happy for the sweatshirt.
