Two Girls, a Clock, and a Crooked House

by Michael Poore

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Michael Poore

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2019 by Leire Salaberria

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Poore, Michael, author.

  Title: Two girls, a clock, and a crooked house / Michael Poore.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2019] | Summary: After Amy is struck by lightning, she and her silent friend, Moo, are able to communicate telepathically, travel through time, and face a child-eating witch.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018038823 | ISBN 978-0-525-64416-3 (trade) | ISBN 978-0-525-64417-0 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-0-525-64418-7 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Time travel—Fiction. | Telepathy—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Witches—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.P644 Two 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780525644187

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.4

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  FOR JIANNA!

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. The Crime Experiment

  2. The Big Red

  3. The Haunted Woods

  4. Moo

  5. Everything Is Fuzzy

  6. They Had Your School Picture on the Internet

  7. Deep Science

  8. She Hit Him with a Saucepan

  9. Lost

  10. A Clock from the George Washington DC Times

  11. Something Like a Rocking Garage Sale

  12. Did That Just Happen?

  13. [Several Words Unsuitable for Young People]

  14. The Possible Witch

  15. Officer Byrd

  16. The Imaginary, Terribly Busy, Grave-Digging Mom

  17. The Empty Desk

  18. Henry’s Probably Going to Beat You Up

  19. Some Kids Taste Better Than Other Kids

  20. Outlaws

  21. Something Bad Happens

  22. Ms. Goolagong

  23. Fugitives in the Sewer

  24. The Boy Who Was Eaten

  25. A Plan Takes Form

  26. Torches and Pitchforks

  27. The Story of the Cows

  28. An Increased Sensitivity to Light

  29. The Big Duke

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AMY WOOD WAS PLANNING to rob the Everything Store.

  You know the kind of store I mean. It’s where you go to get prescriptions, and they also have dog food and Christmas lights and…well, everything. Anyhow, at Halloween time they sold these hoodies that looked like butterflies, and Amy planned to steal one.

  One Friday afternoon, she hopped onto her bike after school and headed for the store.

  It wasn’t an impulse. No one had dared her to do it. She didn’t need a hoodie to keep warm. She didn’t have a disease where she couldn’t help stealing or didn’t know any better.

  It was an experiment. She simply wanted to see if she could do it without getting caught. She had an argument with herself as she rode down the street.

  “I think I can get away with it,” she said to herself (a parallel-dimension self, visible in her rearview mirror).

  “On the other hand,” Self said back, “there’s a strong probability that you will be arrested and sent to prison.”

  “I have planned carefully,” she reassured Self.

  Amy always planned her experiments carefully. Even last summer’s Ketchup Experiment—which had been a mess and a disaster—had been well planned. The ketchup wasn’t supposed to end up on her mother. But you couldn’t control everything, or it wouldn’t be an experiment, right? Right.

  She rolled across the Everything Store parking lot and parked her bike by the door.

  Inside, she said “Hi” to the clerk in an offhand, uninterested, ten-year-old kind of way and slipped off down the cosmetics aisle.

  “Rbblmmgh,” mumbled the clerk, barely looking up.

  Amy’s heart beat fast. She couldn’t decide whether she was thrilled or frightened. Was there a difference?

  Focus! she told herself.

  She glanced at the big round mirror up in the corner of the ceiling. The clerk, theoretically, could see down every aisle, from everywhere in the store. Fortunately, Amy had planned for this.

  She would create a diversion.

  The diversion was something she had prepared ahead of time: a plastic sandwich bag full of orange pop and crushed cereal. Now, at the store, she removed it from her pocket, pulled off the twist tie, and dumped the contents onto the floor between the sunglasses and the school supplies.

  Then she poked her head around the endcap, waved at the clerk, and politely shouted, “Sir? I think someone threw up in aisle three. It’s really repulsive.”

  The clerk—who looked like a stick with a beard—sighed and mumbled, “All right. Thanks, I guess.”

  Amy retreated into the painkiller/wound care aisle and waited until she heard the clerk get a mop and a bucket and head for the school supplies. Then she fast-walked halfway across the store to where the hoodies were kept stacked in a plastic tub.

  She checked the big round mirror. It was hard to tell what she was looking at, the way everything seemed to bend and recede down a black hole, but it kind of looked like the clerk was bent over, facing away. Good.

  Quickly Amy grabbed one of the hoodies and dove into it like you would a swimming pool (it was waaaaay too big), shooting her arms through the sleeves, popping her head out the top, and smoothing the whole thing until the bottom hem hung around her knees. Then she walked toward the door, between the shampoo and the greeting cards, just as casual as could be.

  Time seemed to slow down. Second by second, she was sure that NOW was the moment the clerk would call out, “Wait a second there, kid!” NOW was the moment his hand would come down on her lawbreaking, butterfly-winged shoulder; NOW was the moment her dark prison journey would begin….

  The Crime Experiment was a mistake, she realized (too late).

  And sure enough, here came the footsteps behind her.

  AMY’S HEART WENT TURBO.

  Should she run? Maybe she could just act like she’d tried the hoodie on and forgotten to take it off. Maybe—

  Behind her, a closet door opened—like a supply closet, where the mop lived.

  “Have a nice day,” called the clerk.

  “ ’Kay,” said Amy, and just like that she was out the door and safe.

  And on her bike, riding down the street with wings fluttering behind her, two antennae wobbling and bend
ing atop her head.

  She was a magical creature. Booyah!

  Her experiment was a success! Double booyah! Her conclusion? Diversion tactics were a highly effective way of getting away with stuff. Tomorrow she would bring the hoodie back. She wasn’t interested in being a real criminal, after all.

  Amy Wood, pseudo criminal and pseudo butterfly, headed for home.

  Now, ordinarily it would have taken Amy about twenty seconds to get home. She and her parents lived just five doors down from the Everything Store.

  The thing was, Amy wasn’t riding in the direction of the house.

  Why not?

  Because she and her parents were not living at their house.

  Where were they living?

  You’ll see.

  Amy rode her bike completely out of the neighborhood, onto a road that led into the country.

  About ten minutes later, she stopped beside an open field full of dirt.

  In the middle of the dirt, someone had painted a giant red X on the ground.

  In the middle of the X, a sort of camp had been set up. Some tents, a table, and an old Jeep. In the middle of the camp sat two people on folding chairs, sipping coffee.

  These were Amy’s mother and father, and this camp was where they had been living for the past two weeks.

  “Hi!” Amy said to them, and they looked glad to see her and said, “Hello, Offspring!”

  They didn’t mention the hoodie.

  Dad said, “School?”

  Amy reported that school had been fine, if unremarkable.

  “How was your day?” she asked.

  “It got warmer for a while,” said Mom. “We had lunch. Now it’s getting a little colder.”

  This was the kind of report you could expect if your parents sat on camp chairs all day long in the middle of a field.

  There was a reason they were living in tents, out in the middle of the dirt.

  You could see the reason if you peered across the field. At the edge of the field were some trees, and beyond the trees was a machine as big as a five-story building. It had decks like a ship, and tangles of pipes, and smokestacks and cables and wheels and engines. The machine had one enormous metal arm, like the arm of a crane, and at the end of this arm was a great iron claw.

  The machine was called the Big Duke.

  The Big Duke was famous because it was the biggest mining machine in the whole world. It was visible from space, they said. Certainly, it was visible from the highway, where people had begun pulling over to take pictures. You could even see tiny people on it, running around with wrenches and things.

  When the Big Duke reached the red X, according to the TV news, its claw would start tearing up the earth, digging up hyperzantiummetachondrite (a green substance used to make tennis balls). Scientists had discovered that there was a lot of hyperzantiummetachondrite in the ground all around Troy (the town where Amy and her parents lived).

  So why were Amy’s mom and dad camped out on the big red X?

  Because they were scientists, just like Amy. They worked at a fancy university in the city and did experiments for a living.

  That’s how they knew that when the Big Duke started digging up hyperzantiummetachondrite, it was going to do all kinds of toxic things to the ground.

  “The water in the ground will turn into something like poop,” Mom and Dad had told the TV people. “Kids who live around here will start getting all kinds of horrible mutant diseases.” But the TV people didn’t put them on TV.

  “They’ll put it on TV when it’s too late,” Dad often growled, “after people start growing extra heads and their livers come squirting out of their belly buttons.”

  Sometimes when Mom and Dad talked about the Big Duke, they got really mad and turned red in the face.

  “I’m sick and tired of seeing big companies with tons of money make life worse for people!” Dad had shouted once. “And people just let them do it!”

  “Not all people,” Mom had reminded him. If nothing else, she said, there were the people here in this little camp, the Wood family. If nothing else, there were three people who understood how important it was to stand up and fight when something was hurting people, even if that something was as big as a mountain.

  Two weeks ago, when the machine first loomed over the edge of town, Mom and Dad had decided to go live in the field. The Big Duke couldn’t dig, they reasoned, if there were people sitting right on top of the target.

  “A protest experiment,” Mom had explained.

  Sometimes people drove by and yelled jokes at her parents and called them names. Called them “hippies” and “freaks” and “eggheads” and “troublemakers.”

  Mom and Dad tried not to let this bother them.

  “Don’t let it bother you, either,” they advised Amy.

  It did not bother Amy, who thought having scientists for parents was just about the coolest thing in the world. It made them interesting. It made life one great big experiment.

  She parked her bike beside a folding camp table.

  Dad said, “It’s going to get pretty chilly tonight. Why don’t you put a sweater on while I boil dinner?”

  “Um,” said Amy, “I sort of am wearing a sweater already, sort of.”

  She waggled her head to make the antennae bounce.

  Dad blinked at her. “Ah,” he said. “Well, good, good.” Then he got up to go boil the water.

  It would probably not occur to Dad to wonder where the butterfly hoodie had come from. Dad was not a detail person.

  As usual, dinner conversation was about exciting things happening at the university.

  “Professor Peel is writing a paper,” Mom was saying. “He says there aren’t just black holes; there are orange and purple holes, too.”

  “I heard about that,” said Dad. “But I also heard that other labs have challenged his results. Just like Professor Ziz and his time particle.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Mom. “The guy who says time is like boiling water.”

  Dad frowned. “What do you think he means by that?” he asked. “ ‘Time is like boiling water’?”

  Mom shrugged. “He hypothesizes that it moves. He says you could move around in it, like a swimmer or a piece of potato, if you knew how.”

  Most nights Amy made an effort to contribute to the conversation. Not tonight, though.

  Amy’s father looked at her and asked, “Whatcha thinking?”

  “Maybe she’s not thinking anything,” said her mother. “Maybe she has died, right there in her chair, and hasn’t fallen over yet.”

  Amy’s parents had learned that the best way to get her to open up was to talk about her like she wasn’t there.

  “I doubt it,” replied her dad. “If she had died, she would start to smell.”

  Her mom gave the air a sniff.

  “She does smell,” said Mom. “Just the slightest. Well, that’s sad, isn’t it? We’ll have to go online and order a new child.”

  “In the meantime,” said Dad, “I may as well finish her freeze-dried macaroni.”

  Amy broke the silence, brandishing her fork, protecting her plate.

  “Not in this life!” she protested. “And if you really have to know, I was wondering how come you didn’t notice I’m dressed like a butterfly.”

  “Hmmm,” said her father. “Ah, yes.”

  “Where’d that come from?” asked Mom.

  Amy told them about the experiment, and they listened and chewed without interrupting.

  “Diversion tactics,” said Dad. “Smart.”

  Mom kicked him under the table. He grimaced and said “Mrrzzl!” through his teeth. That was his way of saying a bad word without causing a stir.

  “We’ll talk about this more later,” he said.

  This was one adva
ntage of having scientist parents. The regular, practical world sometimes puzzled them, and they needed time to sort things out. So you could come home with a stolen hoodie or a bad report card, and even though they knew these things were not good things, they didn’t always know right away what to do about them. Sometimes they didn’t get around to doing anything at all.

  “I wish you’d spend more time with the other kids,” said Mom, toying with a silver ring on her right pinkie finger. It had once belonged to Marie Curie and had been a graduation present from Grandma. The ring was the only piece of jewelry her parents owned, and Mom always fidgeted with it when something worried her.

  “I do spend time with other kids,” said Amy, talking with a mouthful of instant peas. “At school, every day.”

  “I mean, outside of school.”

  “Like who?” asked Dad. “She’s the only ten-year-old on Cornish Road. You have to go, like, ten blocks.”

  It was true. Amy and her parents lived on the very edge of the neighborhood, and all the kids on the neighboring blocks were either little tiny kids or high school kids who just grunted if she tried to speak to them.

  “I’m friends with Moo,” she said quietly.

  Her parents didn’t say anything for a while.

  Then her dad said, “I’m not really sure that counts.” Which wasn’t very nice of him. Sometimes parents can be that way.

  “Can I go over there?” Amy asked. “After we eat?”

  Mom and Dad thought things over in their slow, fuzzy-headed way.

  “Be back before darkish,” said Mom.

  Amy got up to make her escape before they thought to talk about the hoodie some more.

  “Darkish,” Amy called back over her shoulder. “Got it.”

  “Watch out for the witch,” said Dad.