From Ant to Eagle

by Alex Lyttle

  The pastor’s name was Reverend Ramos and he had a funny way of talking. Whenever he’d say a word with an ‘R’ in it, he sounded like a pirate—or at least that’s what Sammy and I thought. Mom said it was because he was from Mexico but we preferred our pirate story. Whenever he said something funny, I’d turn to Sammy and repeat it.

  “I am R-r-r-reverend R-r-r-amos,” I’d say, and Sammy would laugh.

  But then Mom would tell us to be quiet and we’d have to sit for the rest of the sermon being bored.

  Yep, Sundays were the worst—every Sunday that is, until the Sunday I met Aleta.

  It started off like every other Sunday except that it was pouring rain.

  “Psst, Sammy, you awake?” I whispered from my top bunk.

  “Ugh…what?” he replied.

  The grogginess in his voice told me he hadn’t been.

  “Nothing, just seeing if you were awake. It’s raining.” I wanted him to be awake because I was awake.

  “Oh.”

  “At least it’s raining on a Sunday so we won’t be missing a good morning to play outside.”

  Our conversation ended there as footsteps in the hall told us Dad was coming to wake us up. On Sundays and school days it was always a game to see how long we could stay in bed.

  I heard the creaking of the door opening followed by a few seconds of silence where I did my best not to move a muscle. “Boys?” I heard Dad whisper. Then, after a few more moments of silence, “I’ve got great news. Church has been cancelled and we’re going to go to Disneyland instead.”

  I knew better than to believe anything Dad said but Sammy was as gullible as a crow.

  “Really?” he replied in a shrill cry.

  “A-ha, I knew you weren’t asleep,” Dad laughed.

  “That wasn’t nice of you, Harold,” I heard Mom say from somewhere behind the door.

  Dad left the serious side of parenting to Mom. He wrote a humour column for the London Free Press and I guess he had trouble living outside that column. Sammy was his biggest fan; I was a close second.

  “Good one, Dad,” I heard Sammy say laughing from the bunk below as he climbed out of bed.

  I continued pretending I was asleep.

  “Come on, Cal, I know you’re awake up there too, we can’t keep God waiting all day.” I heard Dad turn and walk out of the room.

  “He’s not asleep,” Sammy said, stepping up onto his bunk so he could peer over the railing into mine. He stuck his hand out and shook my shoulder.

  In one swift motion, I shot up in my bunk and caught him with a punch in his upper arm. He cried out and jumped back down to the ground. For a moment he stood looking up at me, rubbing his arm with a defiant look on his face. I could tell he had it in his mind to say something but instead he stuck out his tongue and walked out of the room.

  Church started out the same as it did every other Sunday. Reverend Ramos spoke in his funny voice about news from around town—of which there really was none—then droned on and on about something that might as well have been in Latin because nobody was listening.

  We had arrived late that day and had had to squeeze into the second-from-last pew. If the sermon hadn’t already started, I would have protested when I saw Tom and Joey in the pew in front of us.

  Joey took the first pause in the sermon to turn around. “Hey, Pudge,” he said, addressing Sammy, “you’re looking fatter than usual. Ever think about getting some exercise? I’d let you ride my new bike but you’d probably just break it if you sat on it.” He looked up at his older brother for approval.

  Joey was Sammy’s age and had tormented my brother endlessly in grade one. Sammy was a bit doughy, but I didn’t like someone else saying it. Especially not a Riley. They were known for being mean. Probably because their dad was mean.

  Sammy didn’t reply. He just looked down at his feet.

  Now it was Tom’s turn. He turned to me and took a less obvious approach to being a jerk. “You been practicing your basketball?” he asked.

  It wasn’t really a question; Tom was never interested in anyone but himself, so I didn’t answer.

  “I have,” he continued, “Pops paved part of the driveway so we can dribble.”

  “Yeah. Maybe you can fetch Tom’s water bottle when he’s thirsty next year,” Joey added.

  Sammy had been sitting silently trying to ignore their taunts but that was it. He was fine with them picking on him, but as soon as anyone had something to say about me, he was all fists.

  “Yeah, right,” he bellowed, way too loud for church, “Cal isn’t going to be fetching water bottles for anyone. He’s already got his Eagle Level. He’ll be the best basketballer at the school next year.” His big eyes narrowed into tiny slits as he glared at Joey with such hostility that I thought he would lash out and hit him right there in church.

  There was a collective shush from a few people and Mom glared down the pew at us. Tom and Joey quickly turned around when their dad looked at them. He was the only person they listened to.

  I didn’t mind getting in trouble. I was worked up and ready to add my own two cents. And I would have, had something else not caught my eye.

  Not something—someone.

  Three people had just walked into the church.

  Huxbury wasn’t a big town and the church community was even smaller. Everyone knew everyone. So when three newcomers turned up late that Sunday, everyone noticed. Even Reverend Ramos paused momentarily and smiled at them.

  There were two girls and a man who I guessed right away to be their father. The girls looked eerily alike and were wet from the rain. Their dark hair was tied up in matching green bows and their bangs lay matted to their foreheads. The man was tall with a greying beard and a stern look. He ushered the girls into the empty pew behind us and sat stiffly watching the reverend. The older of the two girls looked like she was already in high school and had a similar serious and unwavering look as her father. The younger girl looked to be about my age and didn’t for a second seem interested in the sermon. Instead her eyes danced around the church taking in everything. They stopped momentarily on me and I felt the thumping in my chest pick up.

  Gosh, she was pretty.

  Her crayon-green eyes stood out against her dark hair and I could see the reflection of the candles around the church in them. I looked away quickly with an awkward realization that I’d been staring.

  For the rest of the sermon, I managed to secretly watch her while pretending to pay attention to the reverend. She continued to glance around the church for a while before stopping to grab a hymnbook from the pew in front of her. She thumbed through the pages at a pace that made it obvious she wasn’t really reading.

  After a while, she lay the hymnbook open in her lap and slowly reached her hand inside her raincoat pocket. As she did so, she wore an expressionless look on her face and stared toward the front of the church. She worked slowly and carefully, withdrawing her hand in slight increments every few seconds so that it was almost unnoticeable. When her hand was finally free from her pocket, it was tightly wrapped around a small paperback.

  I recognized the book immediately. I couldn’t believe it! It was the latest R.L. Stine—The Barking Ghost. She carefully manoeuvered the book into the crease of her open hymnbook and held them both together in such a way that the smaller Goosebumps book disappeared inside.

  I guess I was pretty caught up staring because I nearly jumped from my seat when I felt Sammy’s elbow jab me in the side.

  “Ouccchhh,” I hissed, careful to keep my voice quiet.

  “Sorry,” Sammy replied. I looked down at him and for a second he looked ready to get up and run, but when he saw I wasn’t ready to wallop him, he turned his attention elsewhere. He glanced to where the newcomers were sitting then back to me again.

  “Who is she?” he asked.

  “I dunno,” I said, shrugging my shoulders and pretending not to care.

  “Does she go to our school?”

  “No. Now shush
up or you’ll get us in trouble again,” I said.

  But it was too late. Mom was already leaning forward glaring down the pew at us. Her finger was up to her mouth and her eyes looked like a bull’s, ready to charge.

  I glared angrily at Sammy and he shrank back into the pew and stopped talking.

  Throughout the sermon, I took every chance I had to look back. Each time we were called to sit or stand, I turned around and pretended to be looking around the church, then quickly stole a glance at the newcomer.

  She was never looking my way. Her eyes remained trained on the hymnbook in her hands.

  Sammy kept nudging me to say something but I pretended not to notice.

  Who was she? Where was she from? I had to think of a way to talk to her.

  As the sermon came to an end, I rushed to put on my jacket and appeared impatient to get going.

  “What’s the big hurry, honey?” Mom asked, staring inquisitively at me. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “I really have to go to the washroom. Do you think we can hurry and not talk to Reverend Ramos today?”

  I knew it was a long shot. Mom and Dad always stayed behind to chat with the reverend. I needed to get out before the girl left so I could think of a way to talk to her.

  Mom looked at Dad and he gave a nod.

  “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” he said.

  We started toward the back of the church and I realized my mistake immediately. She was walking toward the front. The aisle was packed with people going this way and that—some to the front, most to the back—and we were caught in the stream like salmon. At the back of the church, I turned for one last glance and as I looked, I saw her head swivel around. Her movement was deliberate. She had just been looking my way.

  But had she been looking at me? I wasn’t sure.

  The only sure thing was it wouldn’t take any persuasion to get me to church the next week.

  CHAPTER 4

  I SAT AT HOME WATCHING THE CLOCK AS THE SECONDS TURNED TO minutes, the minutes to hours, the hours to days—or so it felt. It was only one o’clock. I had been home from church a mere three hours.

  “Wanna play Crazy Eights?” Sammy asked, standing in the doorway of the living room, a deck of cards in his hand.

  I had been sitting on our old, brown sofa with a Goosebumps book closed in my lap staring absently across the backyard to the knee-high corn stalks standing like rows of soldiers beyond. It was still raining and the lawn looked like a giant puddle with hair.

  I always thought it was weird: we lived in the country but didn’t have a barn, or animals, and the fields all belonged to someone else. We were a small weed among endless stretches of actual farmland—it just didn’t make sense.

  Still, my parents worked hard to keep our weed as sightly as possible. I think it was a big part of why we moved to the country in the first place—more room to garden. Our whole house was lined with inconveniently placed rosebushes, hard-not-to-step-on daffodils and many more flowers I actively chose not to learn the names of. My parents called themselves hobby gardeners and said it was relaxing. Sammy could sometimes be lured into helping but I had a very different definition of relaxing and pulling weeds wasn’t a part of it.

  Outside our bedroom window, there were two Japanese cherry trees that in my eyes were the only good part of the garden. When we’d first moved to Huxbury, Dad had joked that there was one for each of Sammy and me—a big one and a small one—and he’d told us to name them. I’d decided on Big Tree, which you can imagine took me all of five seconds to come up with. Sammy had spent days thinking of a name for his tree. In the end, he’d gone with Sakura after Dad told him it was the Japanese word for cherry tree. He was excited to have his own tree and utterly disappointed when we learned the following spring that Sakura was a dud. At the end of April, Big Tree transformed into a radiant ball of white flowers that filled the whole house with a delicious smell while Sakura remained bald and ugly. I suggested to Sammy that maybe it was because he didn’t love his tree enough or look after it. Really, it was because Sammy was never lucky with anything.

  “Cal? You want to play Crazy Eights?” Sammy repeated.

  I’d forgotten that he was still standing in the doorway.

  “No. Leave me alone,” I said. “I’m reading.”

  I picked up my book to look occupied.

  “Can you read out loud?” he asked, starting to move into the room.

  “Not right now. Just go away.”

  Sammy could be so suffocating. All I wanted to do was sit and think. I had been trying to devise a plan to find out more about the mysterious girl from church and now he was interrupting my thoughts.

  He walked slowly across the living room watching me carefully, like I were some rabid dog that might jump up and bite him at any second. When he made it to the chair opposite me he sat down and pretended to look at a magazine from the table beside him. I knew as well as he did that he couldn’t read it and every so often I’d catch him casting stupid looks my way as if he wanted to tell me something.

  “Aleta Alvarado,” he finally said, his secret bursting from inside as he put the magazine down.

  “What?”

  “The girl at church today. Her name is Aleta Alvarado. And her sister’s name is Raquel. They just moved here.”

  Sometimes Sammy’s intuition amazed me. It was like he had a wire straight to my brain and could read my thoughts. How had he known I’d been thinking about her?

  “Uh…what…where did you hear that?” I asked.

  “Mom told me.”

  I thought for a moment.

  “How did Mom know?”

  “Someone in town told her. They moved into Mr. Wilson’s old house.”

  I knew the one he meant. It had been empty since Mr. Wilson died. We didn’t know him well but we had gone to his funeral. It was really boring and the only good part would’ve been to see the dead body but he had been cremated. The house was on Thornton Road, only a fifteen-minute bike ride away.

  In the end, I did play cards with Sammy. I thought maybe it would help pass the time as I waited for the rain to stop. I cheated and won, as always, but that never seemed to bother Sammy. He’d grown up losing and by now he was used to it. He just seemed happy enough identifying when he could and couldn’t play a card and when he remembered what each meant.

  “Two of spades,” he’d say. “Pick up two.”

  I’d put on a look of feigned disappointment, pick up two from the pile, then play the three other twos I’d swiped from the discard pile. “Pick up eight.”

  “Ah, darn,” he’d say, not really disheartened. “Lucky you had those.” It never occurred to him that all the twos had been played already and that there was no way I could’ve gotten them without cheating.

  Periodically, I’d look outside to see if the rain had let up, only to find the lawn still covered in ripples. As dusk set in, I forced myself to realize it wasn’t in the cards, so to speak, for me to make my way over to Thornton Road that night.

  Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I’ll go.

  During the summer, our bedtime was later and poorly enforced. It was easy to stay up late playing cards or games or whatever else we felt like. That night we were in bed and reading well before our usual time. I read a few chapters out loud from Say Cheese and Die! using my best scary-ghost voice at the parts I thought would be most likely to give Sammy nightmares. When Sammy was asleep I lay in bed, eyes closed, listening to his even breathing, wishing I was asleep too. I never was good at falling asleep, especially when I was excited about something.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE NEXT MORNING I WOKE TO SUN FLOODING THROUGH OUR bedroom window. I’d removed the quilt the night before; I’d wanted an early start on the day.

  “Hey, Sammy, you up?”

  “Yeah, it’s too bright in here. Why’d you take the blanket off the window?”

  “It’s not a blanket, it’s a quilt. And I dunno, thought maybe we could go for a bike ride
today.”

  “Can we go later? Dad said we could make chocolate chip cookies this morning.”

  Sammy and Dad loved to bake: cookies, muffins, pound cake, tortes, cupcakes—you name it, they made it. I didn’t share their sweet tooth. Which was probably why I was skinny and Sammy was, well, chubby.

  I glanced at the clock on the dresser—7:25. I was being too anxious. We’d probably ride by her house and she wouldn’t even be up yet. I rested my head back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling.

  “Yeah, okay, we’ll wait a little bit, I guess.”

  After breakfast, I went out front and shot the ball around while Sammy and Dad made their cookies.

  “Three seconds left on the clock, Huxbury is down by one, Calvin Sinclair has the ball. Three…two…” I hurled the ball into the air, flicking my wrist at the end with perfect form. “One…eeeehhhhhhh!” The ball caressed the nylon of the net and fell on the gravel of the driveway. I’d run through this situation countless times, sometimes ending well, sometimes with the depressing clang of the ball hitting the rim or backboard and bouncing away.

  “Yay!” Sammy cheered.

  I hadn’t noticed him standing in the front doorway of the house.

  “Thanks,” I said unenthusiastically, trying to make it seem like it was no big deal. “You ready to go?”

  “Yeah. Where are we going? Are we riding to meet the new people?”

  Again, Sammy’s intuition startled me.

  “Sure. If you want we could ride that way.”

  “Yeah, then I can bring them some cookies!”

  Perfect! A plan for stopping by and I could say it was Sammy’s idea!

  Just then, Mom popped through the door behind Sammy. Her hair looked messy as if she had just woken up. “What are you boys up to today?”

  “We’re going to bring the new people cookies,” Sammy chimed.

  I groaned inwardly. I’d have preferred to keep the trip to ourselves.

  “That’s a nice idea,” Mom said, rubbing Sammy’s shoulders from behind. She paused and looked at something on Sammy’s back. “Sammy, where did you get this bruise?” She lifted his sleeve to reveal a huge purple and black mark on the meaty part of his shoulder.