Cody stood, hand on the doorknob. “That’s not how the hat talks, Jemmie.”
While we waited for the hat to give Cody the go-ahead, Ben fished two flashlights out of his pack and handed one to Big.
“All right, Cody. What’s the word from the hat?” Ben asked.
Cass
Cody stood with his hand on the knob, looking really little under that big hat. Ben tapped the toe of his sneaker, impatient like always. “Don’t rush him,” I said.
Cody was thinking about saying no, I could tell. No, because his parents wouldn’t like us breaking in, and no, because of the sad, burned-up shoe.
“Cody? We’re waiting.” The hand on Cody’s shoulder squeezed.
“Don’t give me a yes-squeeze, Ben!” Cody complained. “The hat is thinking…and the hat says…” Cody tugged gently on the knob, but nothing happened. “Maybe…no.”
Ben slapped a hand over his brother’s. “You just have to yank it harder.”
The hinges let out a long skreak as the door swung open, but we couldn’t see much. It was awful dark in there.
“Smells like attic,” said the voice from under the hat. “Attic mixed with Dad’s garage, library books, and wet dog.”
Jemmie sneezed.
Justin aimed his flashlight and clicked it on.
Standing behind the others I couldn’t see much, but the beam of light looked cloudy, like the air was full of dust.
“Happy Halloween, people,” Justin said.
A scared whisper came from under the hat. “Ghosts?” Then louder, “Skeletons?”
Jemmie bumped him as she bent forward to look inside, and Cody yelped. But no one was paying attention to him—they were all straining to see what was behind the door. I leaned in close and whispered, “Take off the hat, Cody, it’s okay.”
“You sure?” He pushed the hat back and blinked.
Ben ran his flashlight beam up to the ceiling, then whistled between his teeth. “Talk about abandoned.” Spiderwebs clung to the rafters. “Come on, guys. Let’s see what we’ve got.” Jemmie and Justin followed him inside.
I hung back with Cody. Standing outside the door, I couldn’t see much. All the shutters were still nailed tight. “What’re you doing?” I asked as Jemmie dragged a finger across the top of a bookcase.
“Writing my name in the dust. J…E…M—“ She squinted at something, then forgot about writing the rest. “Hey, cool!”
She crossed in front of the open door, then disappeared. When she came back, she had something in her hand. As soon as she moved behind the other side of the door, something flew across the dark space. Thwack. “Bull’s-eye!” she yelled.
It didn’t seem right throwing darts, or writing in the dust—but it did seem as if no one had been there in a long time.
A dart in one hand, Jemmie walked up to the open door and leaned out. “Come on, you guys,” she said. “Take a look around. This place is so abandoned, nobody even remembers it.”
Cody stuck his head in the door. “For really?”
I stuck my head in too. It was pretty dark in there, dark and full of stuff, like it had been used as a storage shed or maybe a workshop.
Justin swung a broom, tearing down a spiderweb. The spider dropped to the floor.
“No!” Cody yelled, but it was too late.
Justin lifted his shoe and checked out the sole. “That was gross.”
“No killing spiders!” said Cody.
Ben grinned. “Yeah, forget killing spiders. That’s rule number one for our new clubhouse, right, Cody?” Now that we were in, Ben could afford to be nice to his brother.
“Good rule.” Justin dragged his shoe across the floor, wiping off dead spider. “It’s too messy.”
“And be respectful to the stuff in here,” I blurted out. “Because it isn’t ours.”
Ben pointed his flashlight up, skipping the circle of light across the ceiling. “The place seems tight and dry.”
Justin swept down another web. He looked at the spider wobbling on the broom, then at Cody and me. He walked to the door and tried to shake the spider off the bristles. When it hung on, he leaned out the door and banged the broom against the side of the building. “Go free, wild creature!”
“That’s a house spider!” Cody said.
One more bang, and the spider fell off the broom like a fluff of dog fur. It landed in the dirt near my foot. “Not anymore,” Justin said.
Hands on his knees, Cody leaned over the spider. “You sprained his legs, Justin!”
But Justin was already sweeping down the next web.
Ben came back out whistling and picked up the crowbar. I put a hand on his arm. “Ben?”
He shrugged my hand off. “Would you just relax?” Crowbar swinging, he went around the corner of the building. I tucked my hair behind my ears and started to follow him.
“Hey, Cass.” I felt Cody tug the leg of my jeans. “The spider’s limping!”
I knelt down with him and we watched. “Don’t they kind of always walk like that?”
Behind the building a nail squealed, then another one. The squeal came again and again.
As I looked through the door, a bar of light appeared. It got wider as Ben lifted the shutter. It disappeared for a second, then came back as Ben propped the window cover open with a branch. On the other side of the dusty screen Ben was just a gray shadow until he put his face up close. “Cody, Cass, go on in.”
Cody looked up from the limping spider. “You wanna, Cass?”
“Might as well.” I heard another nail squeal as Ben attacked the next window.
Cody grabbed my hand and jumped through the door, pulling me along.
Before I could look at anything, Cody was showing me the shovel he was going to “borrow” so he could dig up the dinosaur bones in his backyard faster.
“This isn’t our stuff, remember?”
He bumped the hat in his hand against his thigh. “I forgot.” He leaned the shovel up in the corner again, right where he’d found it.
Jemmie shoved a dart into his empty hand.
“Hey, bop-a-loo-bop,” he whispered. The dart missed the board and bounced off the wall.
“Try it with the hat on,” Justin suggested.
Cody looked at the hat in his hand, but didn’t put it on. “I don’t always want the hat telling me what to do.” He glanced toward the window Ben was prying open. “I get bossed around enough.”
Hinges creaked and light poured in a second window. Ben shaded his eyes on the other side of the screen. “Hey, are those games on that shelf over there?”
I walked over and read the names on the sides of the dusty old boxes. “Monopoly, Parcheesi, Candy Land. You like board games, Cody. Want to play one now?”
“No thanks. Spiders or something are living in them—I’ll bet Monopoly is someone’s home.”
I stepped back and bumped into something that bumped me back.
“Birdcage,” said Cody when he saw me jump. “No bird, though. That’s good. It would be a skeleton by now.”
The cage swung gently from its hook. The bars were knit together with dust and spiderwebs. Everything in that room was so furry with dust, Jemmie could’ve written her name anywhere.
Cody fanned his face with the hat. “Say, are you guys hot?”
We were all hot, but nobody said so.
Ben pried open another window, and light fell on a small table I hadn’t seen before. I took a step toward it. “Oh, look! A sewing machine!”
“A sewing machine from back in the day,” said Jemmie. “Like the one Betsy Ross sewed the flag on.”
It did look almost that old. Hanging on the back of the chair was a pattern piece pinned to a double layer of fabric. Like the patterns in the old box Mama had in her closet, it had solid lines for seams and dotted lines for darts. “Looks like someone was making a dress.” Careful not to lean against it, I sat, pulled out the edge of my T-shirt, and took a swipe at the sewing machine table. Beautiful gold leaves and flowe
rs appeared.
Mama used to make most of our clothes on her portable sewing machine, until my older sister, Lou Anne, complained that everything looked too homemade. But Mama’s machine, with its plastic case the color of a Band-Aid, wasn’t pretty like this one.
I lifted the piece of cloth that dangled over the edge of the table. The seam was sewn only halfway; the needle was still through it. It looked like a sleeve for the cut-out dress that hung on the chair back.
Jemmie stuck her head under the sewing machine table. “You think this treadle makes it go?” She rocked it with her hand. The needle lifted out of the fabric with a little click and bobbed down again. “This is great! It doesn’t even need electricity!”
I picked up the end of the unfinished sleeve and turned it inside out. Although the outside of the sleeve was dusty, the good side of the purple satin with tiny pink roses was like new.
“I wonder why this dress was never finished.” As I smoothed a finger across the fabric of some other girl’s dress, I shivered—then glanced over my shoulder, but it was just us and the spiders. Cody lifted his head and took a sniff. “You guys smell anything?”
“Yeah,” Justin said. “Dust and spiders.”
“No, I mean like smoke,” Cody said.
He was thinking about the house that had burned down—and that bothered me too—but looking at all the spiders and dust, it seemed as if Ben was right. The garage and everything in it had been forgotten a long, long time ago. And if that was true, maybe what we were doing wasn’t so bad.
The tissue pattern piece crinkled as I hugged the cut-out dress against myself. When it was sewn, this would be a dress for going to a dance. I glanced at Ben, who was up on a chair, dragging a box off a shelf.
Daddy finally agreed to let me go to the last dance in middle school, but he made Mama chaperone. A high school dance would be different…and Ben would have a lot of girls to choose from besides me. But what if I was wearing a satin dress with pink roses?
I looked at the thin paper pattern pinned to the cloth and jumped, like I’d stuck myself with one of the pins. “Jemmie, see the size? That’s my size.”
She stared at me wide-eyed. “It’s like it was meant for you.”
Ben
Sweat trickled down my back—it was hot all right, even working in the shade. Lucky thing this was the last window I had to uncover.
Between the heat and the bugs, it was going to be hard to keep everyone excited about this place. Jus didn’t like to sweat in front of Jemmie. And Jemmie’d have more fun doing something with a ball in her hands. Even with the sewing machine, Cass probably still thought that busting into this place was wrong, and I could tell Cody was kind of spooked.
I was the only one who thought this was a great idea—make that the only idea. We needed something to get us through what Cass kept calling “our last summer.”
I gave one more pull on the crowbar and the nails along the third side of the shutter jerked free. When I lifted it, light flooded the back of the garage. I peered down through the dusty screen at something big pushed up against the wall. It was covered with a cloth, but the shape was unmistakable. “Hey, Jus, over here.”
Justin turned and stared, then he got this big, goofy smile.
I jogged around the outside of the garage, grinning too. If the piano under that cloth still played, I wouldn’t have to convince Justin to come out here.
As I walked inside, he jerked the fabric back and said, “Merry Christmas, Justin Riggs!”
He dropped the cloth on the floor, then slowly lifted the lid that covered the keys. It hit the piano with a hollow boom as he folded it back. I would’ve tried it out right away, but he stood there and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“Bet it’s way out of tune,” said Jemmie.
“Maybe not too bad,” I said, walking over to Jus. The piano keys were yellow like dog teeth, except the ones that were the dingy gray of old glue. Some of the ivories had fallen off.
“It’s probably way bad,” Jus admitted. He ran a hand along the keys too lightly to make them play. “But it’s a piano!”
Jemmie put her hands on her hips. “Guess this means you don’t need to play my piano anymore.”
“Sure I do!” Justin said fast. “But this one is more…mine.” He put a hand on top of the piano. “I claim this piano in the name of Justin Riggs, aka Big.” He glanced over his shoulder at Jemmie. “To be played when the piano belonging to Jemmie Lewis is otherwise occupied.”
“Shouldn’t you see if it still plays before you go claiming it?” Jemmie asked.
Justin dragged a finger through the dust on the piano bench, shrugged, and then sat. He pushed one key down and held it. The note quivered.
“Sounds pretty good!” I said.
“One note?” said Jemmie. “Play something, Big.”
Justin began to play some piano-book thing. The notes were a little plinky, but inside that old garage they didn’t sound half bad.
“No C-sharp,” Justin mumbled. He stopped playing whatever he was playing and struck each key with a finger. “No G.” He winced when the next key clunked. So, it wasn’t perfect.
“But it’s a piano, right?” I said.
“Yeah.” Jus ran his hand lightly over the keys again and smiled. “Yeah, it is.” And I knew my best friend was in.
A sudden motion caught my eye—my little brother jumping back as he let out a girly squeal. “Snake!”
“Where?” Cass lifted her feet.
Cody pointed at a dark coil that looped out from behind a chest of drawers.
I pulled it out. “It’s just a hose.”
“Oh,” he said. “I knew that.”
Down on one knee, I spotted the toolbox shoved into a corner. “Well, look at this.” I dragged it out and opened the lid. “Great. Now I won’t have to borrow Dad’s tools.”
“Cool!” Cody said. “You gotta show him.”
The wrench I’d picked up clattered back into the box. This was the part I was afraid of. Cody the Mouth blowing everything. “Listen up.” I stood, spun a chair on one leg so it faced me, and straddled it. I gripped the chair back and looked at each one of them, hard. Cody the longest and hardest. “We tell no one about this place.”
“How about Leroy?” Jemmie asked.
“No.” Justin glanced at her over his shoulder, his fingers still on the piano keys. “Think about it.” Then he did a little Leroy rap. “We got the goods, found ’em in the woods, we broke right in, now gimme some skin.”
Jemmie frowned. “We have to tell him. He’s part of us.”
Jus stared at his fingers on the keys—I know he was trying to cut out the competition, but he was right about not telling Leroy. The fewer the people who knew, the less likely it was someone would leak. Tell Leroy, and Jahmal would know—and pretty soon everyone would know. Including Dad.
“He doesn’t need this place,” Justin mumbled. Then louder, “Leroy’s busy turning pro. And Anna’s in Brazil seeing the rain forest, and Clay’s in Indiana seeing…whatever’s in Indiana.” Plunk. He struck a sad chord. “We’re the left-outs…” Plunk. Another sad chord. “The losers…” Plunk. “Until Cody and the hat found this place, nothing was going to happen to us but a long”—plunk—“hot”—plunk—“summer. We deserve this place.”
I held up a finger. “So, rule number one.”
“Not killing spiders is rule number one!” Cody whined.
“Two, then.”
“Respect for stuff,” Cass said, fanning herself with an old LIFE magazine.
“Okay, rule number three—but this is the important one. We tell no one about this place.”
Cody looked anxious. “Except Mom and Dad?”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “We tell nobody, especially not parents.”
Cody opened his mouth to object, but I made my voice deep, like Dad’s. “Little bro, don’t even think about this place around them.”
He clenched his fists. “Why can’t we tell them
? We’re not going to hurt anything.”
I blew out—this was complicated. “We know being in here is okay. But they’re parents. It’s their job to worry about stuff that isn’t going to happen. They think we’re helpless.”
“And irresponsible,” Cody added.
“I’m responsible. Responsible enough to be in charge of you this summer, so if I say something is okay, it is. And I say being here is okay. Are you in, Cody?” I tipped the chair up on two legs and leaned toward him. “Or are you going to wreck it for everyone?”
He raked his sneaker across the floor, watching the lace drag. “The hat said not to open the door!”
“The hat was just messing with you. It brought us here in the first place. In or out, Cody?”
“I guess…in”.
“Good man!” I held up a hand and we slapped high five—his slap was kind of wimpy, but I’d work on his attitude. He’d be okay.
Jemmie bounced her heels against the side of the flowered armchair she’d fallen into. “We should give this place a name.”
Cody suggested Spider House. I could’ve gone along with that. But Justin played that fast run he calls an arpeggio. “How about Nowhere?” he asked. “That way when someone asks where we’re going, we won’t be lying.”
Cody took a couple of steps toward the center of the room and waved his arms. “Hey, guys, look at me! I’m in the middle of Nowhere.”
“Good one!” said Justin. He began banging out something that sounded like a march.
“What are you playing?” Jemmie asked.
“The Nowhere anthem.”
“I hope it’s easier to sing than the national one,” she said.
I hung my arms over the chair back and relaxed a little. At least for the moment, everybody was on board. And, at least for the moment, summer was showing some potential.
Cody was marching in time to our anthem when he suddenly stopped dead.
I figured he’d spotted another hose-snake, but he was staring at a dusty sleeping bag, crumpled in a corner with something that looked like the corner of a magazine sticking out the top.
His knees hit the floor, and he grabbed the magazine and pulled it out. “Guys, look! A Spiderman comic!” But there wasn’t just one. Someone had stashed a whole collection of comics in that bag. This was better than I could have hoped for. There was something here for everyone.
Some Kind of Magic Page 6
