Somehow I always ended up sitting next to my brother Jimi. My dad called him the Handy One, although I thought the Messy One was more accurate. He always smelled a little bit like grease, paint or melted plastic—it depended on his latest project. Maybe that’s why the chairs on either side of him were always the last ones taken.
I took a whiff of the air. Motor oil.
“Hey, Zed,” Jimi said, passing me a bowl of potato salad.
Before I could scoop some onto my plate, a pair of hands shot out and grabbed the bowl away from me.
I heard my sister Mary’s voice. “You gotta be fast to be fed,” she said as the salad zipped away down the table. She was always coming up with dinner ditties like that. We called them Mary Mottos.
Of course, I had my own Zedi mind tricks.
“Hey, Jimi,” I said, “look who just came through the door. Anais Rodriguez!”
He jerked his head around so quickly I thought he might injure himself. I reached over and switched his food-laden plate with my empty one.
It was a nasty trick. Jimi liked Anais—and had ever since they were in grade school—but there was zero chance she was ever walking through our door. She lived in a mansion in a fancy ’hood. The kind of place with seventeen bathrooms and a personal chef. In my imagination, he was French and named Antoine Fafardelle. Okay, maybe Italian.
Jimi turned back around, frowning. I think a single tear fell as he stared at his empty plate.
I almost felt bad, but my mouth was filled with a delicious vegan meatball, so I just muttered another Mary Motto: “A meatball in the mouth is worth two on the plate.”
It came out more like, “MMMbtalll fmlphedg hhjgjhs ghhhela.”
Finally, after about the twentieth trip from the kitchen with pizzas, salads and other treats in their arms, my parents sat down. Everyone else also seemed to have found a chair or clear spot on the floor.
“Well, good evening, everyone,” Mom said, smoothing her napkin across her lap.
There was a brief but loud and joyful chorus of “Hurray for the chefs!”
I’d once tried to get the crowd to replace “hurray” with “huzzah,” a cheer from The Monster’s Castle, but I was met with blank stares. Sometimes it’s hard to get people to appreciate culture.
The cheering died down.
“Thank you,” said Mom. “Before we start dinner”—she shot me a look, and I immediately stopped chewing—“we must take time to give thanks.”
This was my chance! Giving thanks at our house meant that each person at the table had to share a good thing that had happened that day. Mom always started.
“I settled a lawsuit today that allowed a young woman to keep her home,” she said, “and also allowed me to buy some real Parmesan cheese for dinner.”
This news got another cheer.
Dad was next.
“I got a lovely new book from the library today, all about the history of the union movement. It’s fascinating, actually. You see, the working conditions of most inner-city—oof!”
Mom must have kicked him under the table because he stopped suddenly.
“Next,” he said.
Now it was a race. With about a thousand people crammed into the house, this could take forever. The trick was to be as brief as possible so the food didn’t get too cold.
“Puppy hugged me,” Mary said quickly.
“Burrito for lunch,” somebody said.
I quickly lost track of who was saying what.
“Still a month of vacation left before school.”
“Got a date.”
“Adopted kitten.”
“Orchids.”
Jimi was next. I didn’t hear what he said because I had prepped my own speech and was ready to go.
As soon as he finished, I stood up. “My day was AWESOME because ICRACKED a CODE-about THE MONSTER’S CASTLE and I KNOW-where WE need to LOOK to find the CLUES so we can-REDISCOVER this AMAZING BOOK and we need to have a ROADTRIP can we PLEASE go on a ROADTRIP because I have the MAP all ready to go and all we need to do is GET IN THE CAR and we will be back in time FOR SCHOOL . . . So who’s in for a road trip?”
There was shocked silence as I finished.
Mary rolled her eyes. “Man, that was Zeddish even for you.”
Mom smiled her sweetest smile at me, though. “I love that you’ve broken this code, Zed. I know how much this means to you. And a road trip is an amazing idea, right, dear?” She turned to Dad.
He nodded. “Yes, Zed. But didn’t you hear what Jimi just said?”
I looked at Jimi, confused.
Jimi seemed sheepish. “Um, I said that I was thankful that Mom and Dad were letting me take the car apart this month so I could get better at understanding catalytic converters and radiator construction.” He shrugged.
The kid next to me resumed the thank-you chain, but I wasn’t listening anymore.
Just like that, my dream was dead. When Jimi dismantled our toaster, it took him two months to figure out how to put it back together again. Even then, it toasted only one side at a time. Mom called it Jimi’s Super Sandwich Solution because the outside was always toasty, but the inside was still soft enough to soak up mayo and mustard.
I called it a major screwup because who wants one-sided toast?
A car was way more complicated than a toaster, and I was pretty sure a car that worked on only one side was not a good idea.
We were car-less. For at least a decade, I figured. Maybe longer.
Even if, by some miracle, Jimi surprised everyone and got the whole car working again, that would still be weeks away.
There was no way Mom and Dad would let me go on a trip once school started up again.
I slumped into my chair.
“Sorry, Zed,” Jimi said. “About the car too.”
Too? I looked at my plate. Empty. Jimi had done a reverse switcheroo and grabbed his plate back while I was standing up.
My lips trembled as I slid my chair back and walked slowly out to the garden.
Chapter 6
In the Garden
The sun was setting behind the distant skyscrapers.
Usually I can stare at a beautiful sunset for hours. Watch the clouds turn from pink to orange to purple to gray.
But today, I just didn’t care.
I sat down on the porch stairs. There was a shuffling in the garden. Maybe a rabid raccoon was about to attack me. That would be fitting. Why not end the day by catching rabies?
“Hey, Zed.”
A talking raccoon?
The mop-headed kid from the library emerged from behind a big bush with blue flowers. The knees on his pants were muddy. So were his hands.
Gabe? Here?
“Gabe? Here?” I said.
“Um, I was sitting across from you at dinner.”
Oh. I hadn’t noticed that. “Why are you out here?” I asked. “All the bathrooms full, so you decided to pee in the bushes?”
Gabe looked around at the garden. “No.”
Now I remembered why our conversations had always been so short and unmemorable—they were short and unmemorable. Gabe also didn’t smile much. If conversation were a competition, he wasn’t even playing. But never let it be said that Zed Watson can’t, as my mom puts it, “cajole a conversation from a rock.”
Gabe was as rock-like as any person I knew.
I rolled my hand in the universal sign for “Please explain, and give more than one-word answers”—and I also said this out loud, which helped.
“Oh, yeah. Your mom and dad hired me to do some garden stuff. After your sister grabbed the last dumpling from my plate, I figured I’d come outside. It’s nice out here. That Hydrangea macrophylla is really quite lovely.” He motioned toward the big blue thing.
“That’s what it’s called?”
He nodded. “The scientific name anyway. It’s just called a blue hydrangea in English.”
“I’ll take your weird for it.”
He smiled for maybe the first ti
me ever.
“What are you smiling at?”
“You said you’d take my ‘weird’ for it. I kind of like that. It’s funny.”
“I did?”
He nodded again. The smile vanished. He walked over and started sniffing a rose. Or I think it was a rose.
“So why are you out here, Zed? Bathrooms all full?”
A joke? From Gabe? What was happening?
“No, haha. I just—” I stopped for a long sigh. “I figured out something today and I was just really excited, and then my stupid brother messed everything up.” I gave a quick explanation of Jimi’s tragic dream of becoming a mechanic. “And now I’ll never find this super-important book no one has ever heard of—”
“The Monster’s Castle,” Gabe said.
My jaw dropped. “How the heck do YOU know about that?”
“I love that book. Well, the parts we have, anyway. It’s got all this amazing stuff in there about flowers and botany and science.”
“It’s about monsters,” I said. “Monsters.”
“Yeah, I’m not so much into that stuff. I mean, it’s cool, but I like all the science in there.”
“But how did you even hear about it?”
“I was over for dinner about a year ago, and I think you had just found out about it and were telling everyone how cool the book was. So I checked out the fan site you mentioned—”
The truth hit me like a ton of bricks.
“You’re @FlorAida!” I said.
He looked sheepish. “It sounds weird when you say it like that.”
“Like what? It looks like someone tried to spell Florida but stumbled on the keyboard. What the heck does it even mean? It’s not anything from the book.”
“Well, it’s a mix of things I like. You know, flora . . . flowers. That’s all in the book.”
“And is Ida your mom?”
Gabe turned back to the flowers. “No.”
“A heavy metal band?”
He shook his head. “Um, no. Why would you think—”
“Never mind. So you were the one who posted the bit about the poem maybe being a map?!”
“Yeah. At first, I thought the ‘root’ thing was about flowers. But there’s no pattern I could see in the text. So I think it’s a—”
“Play on words.” We said this together.
“Yeah. The flowers are clues.”
“No,” I corrected him, “the monsters are the key to figuring out the clues.”
“No, I’m pretty sure it’s plants. Like, there’s this bit in the fragment of the weredog chapter that mentions this really rare flower that’s found only in the southwestern US.”
“It’s wereWOLF, not weredog.”
“Sorry.”
Gabe stared at his feet, and I stared at him. There was no way he could love this book as much as I did. Could he?
He had seen something in the text that I hadn’t seen, though.
But Gabe was clearly hopeless when it came to understanding monsters. I clearly wasn’t.
The sunset was now blazing orange. My mind began to blaze orange in full Zed mode.
“Gabe,” I said finally, “I have an idea.”
“Cool.” He was still staring at his shoes.
I could tell one thing for sure: Gabe wasn’t the go-go-go type.
He needed a dose of Zed-thusiasm.
“Darn right it’s cool! Maybe the plants tell you generally where stuff is. But by working with the monsters, I’ve found, like, specific place names.”
He looked up!
“And?”
“What if we combined them? What if knowing both those things will help us narrow it down? How are you with maps?”
I quickly filled him in on the mapping I’d done before dinner.
“The flower stuff might help,” I said. “I’m a monster expert, but maybe that’s not enough—incredible as that seems. Maybe if we work together, we can figure out the right route?”
“Wait, so you’re saying that you have a bunch of place names but don’t know which one is right? And you want me to look at them and see if the plants I’m talking about grow in those places so we can figure it out?” Gabe was smiling now. He was practically on fire!
“You got it, Flor-eye-whatever. Let’s go finish this map together!”
“Sure.”
I stood up, beaming.
Then my spirits fell, fast.
“ARRRRRRR! I forgot about Jimi and the stupid car.”
That’s when Gabe said some powerful magic words.
“My sister, Sam, has a car.”
My head shot up.
“And?”
“And she’s heading back to school in a few days.”
My fingers tingled. “Okay . . . where, exactly?”
“Arizona State University. She’s driving in what I think might be the right direction, at least based on the plant clues.”
“Maybe we can go with her?”
Gabe looked down at his shoes. “Zed, what’s more important—that the book is found, or that you find it first?”
What kind of question was that?
“I want the book found. I want the world to read it. I want to read it. I want to hold it in my hands.” But now that I’d answered the first part of Gabe’s question, I had to admit . . . “And yes, part of me does want to be the first person to find it.”
“Me too. I’ll ask Sam.”
I stood up quickly and hugged him. “Gabe! This might just be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
Chapter 7
A Beautiful Friendship
We made our way back through the sea of humanity, pizza crusts, pasta plates and dinner rolls up to the second floor.
My older brother Frank was gazing at the sign on my door.
He was laughing.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
Frank turned. He had a huge grin slapped on his face.
“Oh, hey, Gabe,” he said.
“Hey.”
“Frank, I asked you a question,” I said.
My brother rolled his eyes. “Zed, you can be so weird sometimes.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You might as well. It reminds me of the night you came out as nonbinary.” He started laughing so hard he couldn’t talk.
I gritted my teeth. I knew what was coming. This had become Watson family lore. My coming out wasn’t what he found funny. In fact, Frank often said it was only the third most interesting thing I’d done that night. (My family had been amazing.) But what had become legend was . . .
“Zed was wearing this incredibly ugly sweater. Gabe, it was hilarious.”
“It was supposed to be a rainbow flag,” I said, eyes narrowed.
“Except you washed it in hot water the night before and all the colors ran! You looked like a demented unicorn turd! Hahahahahaha!”
Gabe, I suddenly noticed, was frowning slightly.
“Yeah. I’ve done that too,” he said. “Easy mistake.”
Frank, seeing he was the only one laughing, stopped and actually looked kind of embarrassed.
I smiled. I was almost ten million percent sure Gabe was lying. As far as I could tell, everything he wore was black. Wow, though—he’d defended me.
“Thanks, Gabe,” I said, and I meant it.
“Sure.”
Frank shuffled his feet. He was weakened. It was time to banish him back to the shadow realm—that is, downstairs.
“Now what are you doing here, Frank?”
He held up a Tupperware container. “I just felt bad that you didn’t get much dinner, so I brought you some dessert.”
Now, when a brother arrives unbidden at your doorstep with a slab of your mom’s pecan pie, he quickly transforms from an enemy to your favorite brother. Still, he was standing between me and history. Well, me, Gabe and history.
“Thank you, Frank, my dearest,” I said. “Now leave the pie and go.”
He jerked a thumb back at the sign. �
�Anything to avoid being turned into a dead—and badly drawn—stick figure.” He put down the pie and walked away. “Unicorn poop,” he mumbled, desperate to fire off the last word.
I watched him go, then turned back to the door and bowed. “May the ancient ones who guard the Monster’s Castle—”
Gabe, to my surprise, finished the incantation: “Speed our safe passage through its halls.”
My jaw dropped, and I stared at him silently for a good minute.
“Gabe, you do know the book!”
He shrugged. “It’s awesome.”
I just nodded, impressed. “Lead the way, fellow member of the Taylor legion.”
We walked inside.
Gabe stopped and stared at the wall. The pushpin over Alaska had fallen out and that corner of the map had drooped, revealing the poster I’d drawn of my beloved vampire.
“Is that Lysander?”
My face went red. “Um, yeah. It needs work.” I jumped on the desk and quickly covered up the poster again.
“No, it’s pretty good. It’s just that he wouldn’t be holding that particular rose.”
My eyes narrowed. “Are you saying I don’t know my vampires?”
Gabe kicked at the ground. “No, it’s just . . . uh, the rose you drew is a modern hybrid, and the one in the book is a blue rose.”
My head swung around. “I know it’s a blue rose in the book. It’s called artistic license. Anyway, these blue roses . . . do they grow only in a specific location? Maybe Verona, New Jersey?”
“No. They don’t grow anywhere.”
“What?”
“The point about blue roses is that they don’t exist in nature, but they’re used all the time in poetry and operas and stuff. They represent unattainable or hidden love.”
“So Rosaceae isn’t a shortcut to finding a place name?”
“No. And it’s pronounced more like rose-ehshe-ah. It’s pretty basic Latin.”
I threw a pillow at him. “Oh, basic Latin.”
He just let the pillow hit him and slumped his shoulders. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I thought you might have been pronouncing it that way to test me. You know, like Cassandra does in chapter 2, when she questions Lysander’s motives.”
I was flabbergasted. I bowed to him, hand on my heart. “Gabe, thou hast out-referenced me. Now let’s put these two great brains together and figure this out. Then you talk to your sister, and I’ll convince my parents about the road trip.”
The Fabulous Zed Watson! Page 3
