Still keeping an eye out, he undid the little fasteners on the back of the frame and slid out the photo. From his new spot, the light was bright enough to make out details he hadn’t noticed before, like the fact that Pa was flashing his signature grin, the one he always made just before, or after, getting into trouble. Sam could also see that he was standing in front of a tree.
Sam thought it might be a maple tree since the leaves had three big blades at the top and two tiny ones at the bottom. The cat’s fuzzy tail wrapped around Pa’s back, and that was when Sam saw the hole gouged out of the center of the tree, looking just like an old, crinkly mouth. Sam held the photo closer, so it was nearly touching the tip of his nose. He traced each one of the branches with his eyes, taking in every crook and jag and, even though he couldn’t be sure, he thought it was the same tree where he’d first met the cat.
He turned the photo over and there, scrawled in Pa’s messy script, were the words, “One-Eye, summer of 1983.”
But how could he still be alive almost forty years later? Sam looked from the words to the cat, and he got the same feeling he had whenever Pa started telling one of his stories. Like the world was about to stop, and as soon as Pa started talking, he’d be transported someplace where all the boring rules of this world didn’t apply. His neck went tingly and he could almost taste the bittersweet smell of Pa’s chewing tobacco and hear the crisp pop as he opened a warm can of Orange Crush.
Sam closed his eyes, lost in memories of Pa, when two things happened all at once. The door to his room swung open, and One-Eye woke with a snarl, leaping out the second-story window. Sam didn’t know where to look first. He didn’t hear One-Eye land, but he did hear the doorknob bang against the wall and crunch into the plaster.
He stood up fast, hitting his head on the open window and then grabbing his forehead to rub away the black dots invading his vision. The photo fell from his hands and he readied himself to fight, but then Aunt Jo stepped into a slant of moonlight.
She was wearing a green flannel nightgown, and her eyes were big, like a little kid who’d just woken up from a nightmare. But that wasn’t what caught Sam’s attention. She was using short metal crutches to stay upright, and there was only one leg sticking out the bottom of her gown. He tried his best not to stare at the space where her other leg should have been, but it was hard to look away.
“Are you okay? I thought I heard something before,” she said, blinking the sleep from her eyes.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It was just some old cat.”
She came over to look out the window, frowning. “In the house?”
“Yup.” He trained his eyes on the ceiling, the wall, trying to look anywhere but at the leg.
“How’d it get in?”
Sam shrugged. “I opened the window.”
They stood all quiet for a minute, except that Sam’s heart was pounding about a million miles an hour in his chest. It was all so creepy and awkward, and how had that cat found him all the way up here anyway? They both looked out at the lawn with the square bushes and the white picket fence, but no cat.
“Sorry, I guess I was having a nightmare. For a minute, I forgot there was someone else in the house.” Aunt Jo followed his gaze down to her missing leg. Dang, he’d been staring again. She didn’t say anything, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
“Yeah, must’ve been a nightmare,” Sam said, but what he really wanted to say was that he wished she would forget about him so he could get out of this stuffy house and go back home. Where strangers didn’t break into his room in the middle of the night and, oh yeah, where he didn’t have to worry about visitations from weird, possibly dead cats.
“Well, now that we’re both up, how about pancakes? I make a mean chocolate-chip-peanut-butter batter. Your pa used to say it should win an award.”
Sam looked at the clock and the glowing propeller hands. It was 5:42 in the morning.
Aunt Jo must have noticed where he was looking, because her dried lips split into a smile. “That’s one thing you’ll learn about me. I’m an early riser. Why wait for the sun when there’s stuff to get done? You know what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“‘Rise and shine sleepy time,’ that’s my motto.” She looked Sam up and down, and the weight of her gaze made his skin itch. Why couldn’t she just leave him alone? “You look like you could use some pancakes. Wash your hands and follow me.”
He didn’t move an inch as she retreated down the hallway. His first thought was Who the heck eats pancakes at 5:42 in the morning? followed quickly by Who the heck did this lady think she was telling him to wash his hands? Pa hardly ever washed his hands, except when he got back from fishing and sometimes not even then. Was she saying that he was dirty, or that his pa was dirty? What made her so great and fancy? Just because she lived in an ugly old dollhouse with yellow plates in the middle of some creepy ghost town.
Sam went downstairs, but he didn’t wash his hands. He decided to think more on the ghost cat later, if that’s really what it was, when his brain wasn’t a huge bowl of mush.
By the time he sat down at the kitchen table, Aunt Jo had already whipped up the batter and was spooning it into a hot frying pan. He noticed that she was wearing her artificial leg again, a pair of stiff khakis riding high over her white orthopedic shoes. His chair squeaked when he pulled it out and then again when he sat down. He told himself that he wasn’t going to eat any pancakes because it was too early and no way they’d be as good as Pa’s. Pa made his pancakes with blueberries and cinnamon and his secret ingredient, beer. All the beer cooked off in the pan, so it wasn’t like you got drunk or anything, but they were still better than whatever Aunt Jo was about to make.
But then, when she heaped three fat pancakes on his plate and covered them in steamy maple syrup, he had to admit that they didn’t smell as terrible as he’d expected. Besides, Pa would probably tell him to be polite and eat up, since Aunt Jo was his baby sister, even if she had disappeared for the past four years and probably didn’t care whether Sam lived or died. Not really.
Sam ate his pancakes.
“Now, I’ll do the dishes this morning,” Aunt Jo said, standing up from the table with a grunt. “But starting tonight, that’ll be your job. School bus comes at seven-thirty sharp, so you’d better go upstairs and unpack. And I expect you to take a shower every day you’re in this house. I may not have any kids, but I know boys, and let me tell you, when he was your age your pa could clear out a room quicker than a hog on an all-burrito diet. We’ll have none of that stink in my house.”
If Aunt Jo had sprouted horns and turned into a green, blobby slime demon, Sam wouldn’t have been more surprised than he was right then. Any lingering thoughts about ghost cats and mysterious trees got zapped clean out of his head. What did she mean about school? He’d just gotten here. He’d barely even slept, and now he was supposed to get on a bus full of strangers in the wrong state with a belly full of the wrong pancakes and pretend like everything was normal? Who did this lady think she was? Not his pa, that’s for sure, and where did she get off saying Pa stank?
He stood up like a zombie and said nothing, because the words were zooming around so fast and sharp in his head he couldn’t catch hold of just one.
“You can have the first hot water,” she said, as if it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him. “But don’t use it all up. Some people need coffee to get going. Me, all I need is a big plate of pancakes and a nice hot shower.”
She looked at him like she was expecting him to answer, which was a total grape-soda move since she hadn’t even asked a question.
“Well, don’t just stand there. Time’s a ticking. Towels are in the closet where I showed you.”
Sam didn’t have to be told twice. He headed upstairs and he only tripped once, on the top step, which was okay since by then Aunt Jo couldn’t see him. He closed the door to his room harder than he intended and then sat down on the floor and stared at his shoes. They w
ere covered in dirt, and he could tell it was Oklahoma dirt because it looked red instead of brown like normal.
He sniffed under his armpit. Maybe he did stink, a little, but he knew one thing for certain: no way he was stepping foot in that shower unless maybe it was to turn on the hot water and let it all run out before Aunt Jo had a chance to use it. True, that was some serious blue-jay thinking, but the way he saw it, he was just acting in self-defense since he hadn’t asked to be kidnapped and dragged halfway across the country. He sat there for a while thinking of what he’d say if Aunt Jo came upstairs and asked why he wasn’t in the shower. Then he looked at the clock that said it was 7:08 a.m., which had to be a mistake, because the last time he’d checked it was 5:47.
“Better get dressed!” Aunt Jo called from downstairs. He waited, but she didn’t make any mention of the shower.
A gust of wind rattled through the open window, like maybe it knew just what he was thinking, and what he was thinking was that he had to escape. He slid his backpack full of clothes onto his shoulders and then changed his mind and dumped out a bunch of socks and underwear and shoved the De Havilland bomber in there instead. He raised up the window as high as it would go, trying not to squeak, but it did squeak, and it wouldn’t even go as high as he wanted.
He swung one leg over and bent forward so he could stick out his head. He looked down at the patchy grass and up at the leaves of the giant maple, bathed in sunlight. It would have been nice, lucky even, if the branches had been close enough to reach or if Aunt Jo had an awning or even a gutter he could use to break his fall.
Too bad his luck had run out.
Instead, it was a straight drop. Sam swung his other leg over so now he was sitting in the windowsill with just his butt and both hands to steady him. If he jumped, he would probably break a leg, which he imagined would feel a lot better than the time Pa got his foot run over by that lawn mower, but not by much. The wind picked up, like maybe it wanted him to fall. It lifted him just enough so he got a good sense of what falling might feel like, and then he scrambled back inside and shut the window, not even worrying about the shriek.
Footsteps pounded up the stairs, and Aunt Jo threw open the door like she owned the place, and maybe she did, but still. She looked at his backpack and his clothes, which were the same ones he’d slept in the night before. He expected her to say something about a shower, but instead she pulled him into a hug so tight it made his ribs hurt.
He had to admit that Aunt Jo smelled better than before, like soap, and flowery shampoo, and now that she’d decided to invade his personal space without asking maybe it was true that his underwear was starting to feel a little crusty, but still. Still. Who said he wanted a grape-soda hug?
“I know it’s hard,” she said, crushing his ribs, “but it’ll get easier. And the good thing is that we can get through it together.”
He stood still and didn’t struggle, even though it was a miracle he didn’t suffocate. Finally, she let him go, and his ribs expanded again inside his chest.
“Maybe you should stay home from school today, and I can help you unpack. That way we’ll have a chance to catch up.” She tried on a fake smile, but it crumpled. “I know . . . well . . . I know I haven’t been around the past few years, not like I wanted to be, but I’m here now. What do you say?”
“No, thanks. I’d rather go to school.”
“Okay, if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.” He stared down at the wooden floor, which was ugly and rough instead of smooth and polished. Maybe he was being kind of a blue jay, but who could blame him? Who?
“Got everything you need?”
He didn’t answer. Another blue-jay move, but those pancakes had started to work their way up the back of his throat. It was barf-bag time all over again.
“Bus’ll be here any minute.”
“Okay.”
He waited for her to say something else, like maybe where the bus stop was or even what the school was called, which she’d failed to mention the day before, but she just stood there and he just stood there, and then he heard the unmistakable whoosh of air brakes that meant the bus had just pulled to a stop outside.
“Bye, I guess.”
Maybe Aunt Jo finally said something, but he didn’t wait to find out. He ran down the stairs and through the hall and straight out the door. Even though the wind was dry and it stung his cheeks, a weight lifted off him the second he went outside.
He climbed onto the bus and slid into the seat right behind the driver. Nobody liked to sit right behind the driver, at least back home, so he figured this way everybody would leave him alone. They did. Except that he could still hear them talking. He dug around in his backpack, which was full of clothes and comics and half of everything he owned, not to mention the De Havilland Mosquito bomber.
His hoodie was wrapped around a jar of gator teeth that he and Pa had collected on the shore by their house, and he unraveled it and pulled it on, lowering the hood. At the very bottom of the bag, next to his field guide to Louisiana snakes, he found his earbuds tangled in a knot as big as his fist. Of course. It took three more stops before he finally freed up the wires. Once, a girl with faded purple hair almost sat down next to him, but he didn’t move his bag off the seat and she kept walking. That whole time he had to listen to people jabber about stuff that didn’t matter, like whether or not some kid named Ray had peed his pants and what some grape-soda YouTuber had eaten for breakfast and why the cafeteria had to serve Frito pie every Thursday even though everyone agreed it looked like barf.
Barf again. Great.
Finally, the wires came loose and he stuffed the earbuds in so hard he maybe burst an eardrum. Almost. Listening to music made everything better, because he could pretend that he wasn’t surrounded by blue jays and he didn’t even mind that the bus ride took a hundred years since maybe there was only one bus in the whole grape-soda town.
He looked out the window some, but everything was dry and dusty and boring, even the farm equipment and the fields of dead grass and sad-eyed cows. It turned out that Aunt Jo lived in the nicest part of town, and most other people lived in trailers or houses with droopy roofs or houses with dirty bedsheets draped like curtains around the front porch.
After a while, Sam got so used to the twang of the music, Clifton Chenier and His Red Hot Louisiana Band, and the hum of the window vibrating against his cheek, that he almost fell asleep, but then the bus started up a hill, and at the top of that hill Sam saw a tree.
Glass crunched under the bus’s tires, but it kept right on going, moving slow and steady, which gave Sam a chance to get a good, long look. It was a maple all right, because now he could see the dead leaves lying in broken pieces on the ground, and they had three points on top and two on the bottom. A sliver of sun peeked over the horizon and, in the orangey-gold light, he saw strange sparkles suddenly appear, dotting the patchy grass and the peeling bark, especially near the hollow.
Sam leaned closer, pressing his forehead against the glass. The hollow wasn’t only shimmering, it was moving. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but he swore he saw a writhing mass of something gathered around the opening, like a swarm of bees spilling out of that creepy, shriveled mouth. The bus bounced up to the top of the hill, where Sam had the best view.
Suddenly, he saw that it wasn’t bees spilling out of the hole but dragonflies, shimmering greens and iridescent blues, their translucent wings breaking up the sunlight so the entire blob of bodies seemed to twinkle.
The bus crested the hill and bumped on past, but Sam could still spot dragonflies resting here and there on the grass, like tiny shards of blue-and-green glass.
5
THE SCHOOL WAS CALLED HOLLER Junior High—so original—and it was a big gray building with three wings, the biggest one for the elementary and the other two for the junior high and high school. There were no headphones allowed in Holler Junior High, as some guy with an ugly white mustache informed him, so he shoved the earbuds down into
the bottom of his backpack and stood in the office like a total blue jay waiting for someone to notice him.
“Let me guess,” said the ugly mustache guy, who’d been watching him stand there like a blue jay for a while. “Samuel West. I have to say, son, we weren’t expecting you so soon, but I like your initiative. You’re a real self-starter, I take it. Tell me, when’d you get into town?”
Sam wanted to ask the guy why he was being such a stalker and if he could maybe get his crusty old mustache out of his face, but instead he looked down at his shoes and said, “Last night.”
The guy whistled, which made him look like the world’s biggest can of grape soda, because of the way his mustache flapped on the air like wings. “I knew your pa,” the old guy said, and then maybe he saw the disbelieving look on Sam’s face, because he laughed, the kind of laugh that’s mostly spit, and Sam was glad he still had on his hood because it blocked out the worst of it. “That’s right. Had your pa in class my first year teaching and wowee, that boy put me through the wringer. Did he ever tell you about the time he let a possum in the teacher’s lounge? Cutest thing you ever seen, until it started snapping.”
Sam didn’t know what to say to that, mostly because he was still stuck on the fact that Pa had gone to this same school.
“Name’s Mr. Redding.” He offered his old-guy hand, and Sam had no choice but to shake it. It was cold and wrinkly, like raw chicken. “Follow me, son, and I’ll get you sorted out. Goodness gracious, you sure don’t pack light. What’ve you got in that thing anyway?” He lifted the flap of Sam’s backpack and peeked inside. “Looks like a De Havilland bomber circa World War II? I see you know your planes, Mr. West.”
Sam didn’t say anything, since surely touching a stranger’s backpack was against some kind of school rule, and what did Mr. Redding know about anything anyway, apart from growing the world’s ugliest mustache?
“Well, on we go.” They went through a grape-soda door down a grape-soda hallway with linoleum tile that you could tell was supposed to be white but was really yellow. His locker was right across from a trophy case with a lot of dusty trophies and team pictures inside. The really annoying part was that the lockers didn’t have locks, even though lock was part of the name.
The Secret Life of Sam Page 4
