Strays Like Us

by Richard Peck

  Richard Peck

  Strays Like Us

  1999, EN, Kids

  Molly Moberly knows she doesn’t belong in this small Missouri town with her great-aunt Fay. It’s just a temporary arrangement – until her mother gets out of the hospital. But then Molly meets Will, a fellow stray, and begins to realize she’s not the only one on the outside. In fact, it seems like the town’s full of strays – only some end up where they belong sooner than others. Richard Peck has created a rich, compassionate story that will go straight to the heart of every kid who’s ever felt like an outsider.

  Table of contents

  1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 10 · 11 · 12 · 13 · 14 · 15

  ∨ Strays Like Us ∧

  One

  I’d lived in this town for twelve days, and I was up in a tree. The fork of a tree seemed the place to be, as cool as anywhere, and private.

  But today a boy was up in another tree over there on the other side of the fence. It was leafy August, so he thought he could see me and I wouldn’t know he was there. Boys think they can see you and you can’t see them back. Boys think they do all the looking. But he got tired of me not noticing him.

  “Want to hear a song?” he said in this high, reedy voice. I was supposed to be so surprised to hear a tree talk that I’d fall off my perch. “I know most of ‘Achy, Breaky Heart’. Want to hear it?”

  No. But I didn’t say anything.

  “I know some jokes,” he said. “Want to hear one?”

  No. Really no.

  “Fella goes into a bar one day…”

  He tapered off because he wasn’t getting any encouragement from me. I wasn’t up here to talk tree-to-tree with anybody.

  “They say your name’s Molly.”

  They were right, but it was my business.

  “You got dropped off here. I don’t know who by.”

  It was a social worker who brought me. It was just temporary. A temporary arrangement.

  “They say your mama’s not doing too good.”

  My mother had to go into a hospital until she was better. Then she’d come for me and take me away. That was the way it was going to happen. Why even mention it?

  “I got dropped off too,” he said in a softer voice. “My daddy’s a traveling man. I been traveling with him, but now I can’t. He was going to get me a dirt bike, but that’s on hold right now. My mama died having me. My mama’s the one who died. Mama’s people wanted to raise me, but my dad said no way.”

  The big thunderheads drifted high over the trees. It looked cool up there, like August wouldn’t last forever. I wanted time to pass, but I didn’t want August over. You know how it is, not wanting summer to be over.

  “I’ll be in junior high here in a couple of weeks,” he said.

  We’d both been dropped off in this town, and we’d both be going into junior high. Too bad he was a boy. I could use a friend.

  “You been dumped on your aunt Fay Moberly,” he said.

  She was my great-aunt, but I let that pass.

  “Your aunt Fay hauls herself all over town in her ancient Dodge Dart. You can’t keep a secret from her.”

  You probably couldn’t. She was a practical nurse, which meant she had enough nurse’s training to take care of people in their homes. So I supposed she knew everything about everybody. Most of her patients were old, and Aunt Fay was no spring chicken herself.

  “Everything’s old here,” the boy said, picking up my thought. “These trees too. You better not eat these apples.”

  A hard little green apple hung in front of my face. I snapped it off its stem and took a big bite. It was no good, but it was crisp. He heard me chomp into it. I spit it out and held that part in one hand, the rest of the apple in the other, while he listened. It was so quiet you could hear bees.

  I’d given up on him when he spoke again, real quiet now. “I won’t know me a soul in junior high. Everybody will know everybody else. They’re from here.”

  I wouldn’t know a soul either. This had happened to me before, so I knew how bad it could be. That’s why I wanted my mother to come back and get me before school started. That’s why I was up this tree. I was counting off the days and trying to make each one of them long enough to bring my mother back.

  The screen door of his house flew open, and his grandma came out on the back porch. She was so old-fashioned that she’d fling a pan of used water out in the yard. She flung it on bald ground because she didn’t have any flowers to water. You could see where there used to be gardens in her backyard and Aunt Fay’s too.

  “Hooey, Willis Eugene!” she hollered out. She was a big old lady, big as Aunt Fay, with a hairnet on and a nightgown billowing around her. “Get in here for your dinner, and I’m talking about right now.” It was high noon, but people called it dinner here. She went back inside, and the screen door banged behind her.

  He’d have to drop down now and go up to the house, and he wasn’t ready for me to see him yet. Some leaves shook. Then he fell like an apple out of his tree.

  Though he wanted to drop down like a jungle fighter, he fell over sideways when he hit dirt. He jumped up real quick and went on up to the house, too proud to run. He could feel my eyes boring into his skinny back.

  §

  In the last week before school I slept late. It was one of my ways of holding back time. A lot of places where I’d lived with my mother, they made you get up and leave before seven o’clock.

  On one of the mornings, I smelled coffee and heard voices behind the kitchen door. Aunt Fay went off to work at all kinds of times. This morning she was in her kitchen talking to somebody – I never knew who. People came and went in her kitchen. Most of them wanted medical advice because she was cheaper than a doctor’s appointment. I stopped this side of the kitchen door.

  “They call it a hospital,” Aunt Fay was saying. “I don’t know.”

  She was talking about my mother, about Debbie. Aunt Fay didn’t say her name, but I knew. I was here because my mother had to be put away, but only till she got better.

  “Well, it’s rough on you,” the other voice said, an old down-home Missouri voice the way people talk here. “And there’s another case like it right next door.”

  “The McKinneys?” Aunt Fay said. “Oh, you mean they’ve got Fred’s boy back.”

  “Rough on them,” the other voice said.

  “If we don’t take them in,” Aunt Fay said, “where they going to go?”

  “Well, I guess it’s just temporary.”

  “Some things is more temporary than others,” Aunt Fay said. I walked backwards down the hall until I couldn’t hear any more.

  §

  The next morning Aunt Fay drove me to Marshalls in her Dodge Dart for my school clothes.

  I didn’t know what to get, but some girls milled around the mirror in the Back-to-School department. They were piling up tops and sweatshirts and jeans. They were checking out skirts too, real short, and scoop-necked tops. But I couldn’t see myself in those. They showed too much, and I didn’t have enough.

  None of it looked like school clothes to Aunt Fay, but she let me pick some things. I didn’t try on anything because of the other girls in the dressing room. Then we went over to School Supplies.

  “Was you in school at all last year?” Aunt Fay asked.

  “I was in three or four,” I said.

  When we came to the notebooks and paper and erasers in shapes, I didn’t know what kind to get, and neither did she, and there was nobody here buying anything. So I picked the first notebook I saw, and we left.

  After we got home, I said, “What about my hair?” I raked a hand over it like I didn’t care, but Aunt Fay saw through that. She dragged the kitchen stool out on the back porch and gav
e me a trim. It was like being in a barber shop with Aunt Fay looming over me and snipping around my ears with the kitchen scissors.

  I was shaggy because my mother had always cut my hair. It was the one thing she was good at – cutting hair. She could do her own, reaching around behind and evening it up. Most of the time her hands were all over the place, but when they were steady, she could have worked in a beauty parlor.

  “Well, I guess that looks all right.” Aunt Fay stepped back to see. “Go inside and look in the mirror.” But I didn’t. I guess I thought if I couldn’t see me, nobody else could either.

  §

  I moped to slow down the days. The town was still a mystery to me, even before I knew how many secrets it kept. I didn’t want to know this town too well, because that meant I’d be staying. But I walked the way to school to see how long it took to get there. I did that two or three times.

  Now it was the night before school, and I was up in Arlette’s room under the eaves. Arlette was somebody Aunt Fay had rented the room to for a few months way back when. Forever after that, it was always called Arlette’s room. Some of her bobby pins were still in the dresser drawers, and hangers hung at the back of the closet from her time. It wasn’t really my room. Aunt Fay’s bedroom was downstairs, though she slept some on the living-room couch in front of the TV.

  Arlette’s room was just the far end of the attic, walled in, with a window out over the slanting backporch roof. But I’d never had a room to myself. I pretended it was my apartment in some city. I imagined a kitchenette along one wall and a bathroom without having to go downstairs.

  I was on the bed, and my school clothes were hanging where I could see them. Had I been wearing a blindfold when I picked them? I didn’t know which to wear on the first day or what went with what. I didn’t care about clothes, but I didn’t want to stand out. I’d as soon wear my Six Flags T-shirt and the raggedy shorts I’d lived in all summer. But a voice inside me said I better not. I was twelve, so I was beginning to hear little voices inside me.

  I couldn’t decide, and I wouldn’t get undressed and go to sleep, because then the next thing you knew, it’d be morning.

  It was still summertime. Why do you have to go back to school when it’s still summertime? Nothing stirred. It was quiet as a tomb, until I heard the drain-pipe rattle. My heart stopped to listen. The leaves on the passionflower vine rustled as somebody grabbed hold and started climbing.

  If I’d had good sense, I’d have been down the stairs and all over Aunt Fay. But maybe I thought that if I didn’t move, nothing else would happen.

  Somebody was climbing the drainpipe. A shoe skidded. Then a ghost seemed to grunt as somebody pulled up onto the porch roof. The brittle old shingles crinkled, so now somebody was up there, crouching.

  I could move an arm. I reached over and shut off my beside lamp, like I’d be safer in the dark. I thought it might be all right to move my eyes but not my head. The window was screened because the bugs were terrible around here. I listened to a knee thump the shingles. Somebody was crawling up the slant of the roof toward my window. I wasn’t doing a thing now. My brain was frozen in my skull. Though I never cried no matter what, a tear came out of my eye and ran down into my ear.

  A shadow fell over the room. The screen wire sighed when a hand ran over it. Then a voice.

  “Molly?” A hoarse whisper.

  I sat straight up in the bed. Where did I get the notion that somebody who knew my name wouldn’t kill me?

  “Molly? it’s Will. Will McKinney from next door?”

  I wanted to wring his scrawny neck. What business did he have hanging on to my windowsill like a bat? We hadn’t had a word to say to each other since that day in the trees, and I hadn’t said anything then.

  “Why don’t you flip on your light and let me in?”

  A terrible need to be cool came over me, and I dug the tear out of my ear.

  “Come on,” he said, real quiet. “Unhook the screen before I roll off.”

  “Roll off,” I said.

  “Aw, Molly,” he said.

  I flipped on the lamp. In the light his face was pale as a spirit with the night behind him, and his nose was flat against the screen. That was a sight in itself. I took my sweet time swinging my legs off the bed. It was just a step or two to the window, but I made it last.

  “What do you think you’re doing, anyway?”

  “Let me in and I’ll say.”

  When I scooted up the screen, he ducked under and dropped into the room. He was always dropping down out of someplace. This time he lit light. “I better be quiet.” He pointed at the floor and meant Aunt Fay.

  “You better get out of here,” I said, whispering. “She’ll skin me alive if she finds out I’m letting boys in off the roof.” But you could hear her sleeping from here.

  I hadn’t seen Will up close. He wasn’t as tall as I was. He was thin armed and knobby kneed, and his summer haircut was grown out. In June it must have been a buzz cut. Now it was down in his eyes. He had some freckles and a smudge on his nose from the screen. I didn’t know what was keeping his shorts up.

  Now he was standing there like it was my turn.

  “You can sit on the bed a minute,” I said, because there wasn’t a chair. He plopped down, bouncing to try out the mattress. He looked around the room through the hair in his eyes, but there wasn’t much to see, and he wasn’t interested in my school clothes. His sneakered feet barely met the floor, but he worked his hands together like an old man.

  “Well, here’s the way it used to be,” he said. “They used to have eight grades of grade school, then four years at the high school. Then they did away with that system. They built a new grade school up through sixth grade. It looks like a brooder house, out on South Main? Now they’ve put the junior high in the old grade-school building.”

  “So what?”

  “I’m just putting you in the picture.” He was still working his hands together. Looked to me like he was trying to put himself in the picture. “Anyway, that’s where we’ll be going tomorrow.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just stood there with my hands sliding off my hips. I didn’t really have hips.

  “I’m enrolled,” he said. “You enrolled?”

  I shrugged. “I wasn’t figuring on being here.”

  “Where’d you figure on being?”

  I shrugged again.

  “I knew I’d be here,” he said.

  He looked worried, and I’d seen some worried kids. He looked as worried as I felt. I glanced around at my clothes, hanging up like flat scarecrows. I hadn’t taken the tags off because that felt too final. Then I read Will McKinney’s mind, clear as a bell.

  He was wishing I was a boy. I knew because I was wishing he was a girl. I didn’t even like girls much, and they weren’t that crazy about me, but I wished he was one.

  With a girl I could say, What am I supposed to wear tomorrow? A girl could have come in the front door. A girl wouldn’t be coming in off the roof. Oh, I might. But no other girl would.

  “Here’s what I was thinking,” Will said. “You want to walk to school together tomorrow? You know, just the first day. That way both of us would know two people.”

  ∨ Strays Like Us ∧

  Two

  Then the summer sun was pouring in the window like it didn’t know what this day meant. The whole house smelled like a truck stop.

  Down in the kitchen Aunt Fay was frying a pan of bacon and eggs. They were the first I’d seen here. Most days she’d be gone before I got up. Sometimes she stayed home and cooked all morning, making casseroles to freeze. I could have whatever I wanted out of the refrigerator, but we hadn’t sat down to a meal together. Sometimes she didn’t come in till nine at night, later even. She wasn’t used to having anybody around to answer to.

  She forked the bacon onto paper towels and turned off the gas. She was giving me a good send-off on my first day. I got my own juice out of the refrigerator, which she called the icebox.
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br />   Sliding the plate across the table, she settled in the other chair. Now for the first time we were face-to-face. She sat whenever she could, and she crossed her legs like a man, with the ankle of one on the knee of the other. On the ankle that didn’t swell she wore a gold ankle bracelet. There was the cuff of her white pants and the big shape of her white shoe and in between a gold ankle bracelet. It fascinated me, like she might have tattoos. The wide neck of her white blouse showed the rings in her neck.

  I forked into the egg, and she pointed at an envelope on the table. “It’s copy of your birth certificate. They may want to see that at school. The social worker brought it. Debbie give it to her. Your mother did.”

  So then I knew my mother never had planned to come back for me before school started. Maybe it was only in my mind that she’d said she would. Maybe I made that up. “You know anybody at that school?” I said to keep my eyes from filling up. They did that sometimes before I could stop them.

  “Teachers? I wouldn’t know them. That school you’re going to used to be the grade school. All my grade-school teachers are out in the cemetery, pushing up daisies.”

  “Did you go to high school?” I wasn’t sure.

  “Some,” she said. “I went to more high school than what Wilma McKinney did.” Aunt Fay nodded to next door, to Will’s grandma’s house. “And I went oftener.”

  Somehow I’d cleaned my plate. “That was a good breakfast,” I said, still visiting, still being polite.

  Aunt Fay shrugged. “Oh well, I like to cook. Used to be I had the best eating out of my garden you ever tasted. Squash, even. But I don’t have the time to mess with a garden now. I never was one for flowers. They put me in mind of the sickroom.”

  From here you could look up the hall through the house, if the kitchen door was open. Aunt Fay and I both saw Will out on the porch, just the slump of his shoulders and his flyaway hair. He was sitting on the top porch step like a potted plant, waiting for me. I slipped my birth certificate into my notebook and slid out of the chair.