by Robin Yardi
How do you wake an owl up? she wondered.
“Psst . . .” she said.
The owl shivered, but nothing else happened.
“Hey,” she whispered, hoping nobody in the donut shop was looking up and that nobody in the parking lot was listening.
But the owl didn’t wake up.
Mattie knew what to do.
She hooted, deep and low, just like an owl.
The owl swiveled its head and popped its golden eyes open.
Mattie was so surprised she went flat on her stomach again.
Just breathe, she thought. Just breathe. This is why you came up.
She lifted her head over the pile of sticks. The owl hopped closer, crumping across its nest.
“Whoo . . .” it said, putting its beak inches from her face. The sound vibrated through Mattie and tickled the inside of her nose, but she didn’t flinch backward. She stared straight into those golden eyes.
“Hi . . . I’ve got some questions.”
The Blue Moon
A bright blueberry-infused cake donut dusted with fresh cinnamon and powdered sugar
Well, this was unexpected. Alfred knew he’d garnered Mattie’s attention, but climbing onto his roost was a bit much. He had to give the girl credit for boldness, though. It had been more than a blue moon since a human had invited themself up to his nest.
After a moment of hesitation, Alfred stepped through his tidy tangle of sticks toward a girl who apparently had questions for him.
Well, ask, he thought.
The girl still trembled from her climb. “I need to know what the little crooked lines mean. I need to know if those guys are coming back. I need a license number or . . .”
Her voice trailed off.
Alfred could hear her heart thumping loudly through her thin shirt. Wishing, Alfred was certain, for him to open his beak and do something other than hoot.
Absurd.
Alfred clacked his beak impatiently. Fluffed his feathers in a wave that traveled from his ear tufts down to his talons. The first conversation was always so tiresome, he huffed to himself.
“Let me start over,” the girl said. “I’m Mattie—Matilda, but nobody calls me that. Can you, um, wiggle your tufty things if you can understand me?”
Alfred obliged with the smallest of feathery flicks. Twitch-twitch-twitch.
The girl smiled.
Her eyes were hazel, Alfred noticed, not simply green as he’d first thought. Almost golden in places, like his own, and flecked with a deep brown. Pretty eyes alone meant next to nothing, Alfred knew, but he liked them anyway.
Mattie dug around in her pocket and pulled out a cracked black rectangle. An image of his message in the flowerbox shone from the glassy surface. “I need to know what this means.”
Alfred leaned forward, swiveling his head and adjusting his eyelids. His message had been exceedingly clear.
At least he had thought so.
“There were two gloopers in that truck,” Mattie said. “At first I thought that’s what the two lines meant. But that’d be silly. I already knew there were two gloopers. We saw them together. Then I thought maybe the lines meant how many times the gloop truck had dumped that stuff . . .”
Alfred clacked his beak, impatient for the girl, Mattie, to stumble toward something useful.
“Then I thought maybe you were telling me to keep a lookout at a special time . . .”
Alfred gave a soft but hopefully encouraging hoot. Finally she’d arrived at a relevant line of thinking. Time had everything to do with it.
The girl’s eyes went wide. “So maybe two in the morning? Or maybe in two more nights?”
Alfred hopped. Yes—she’d gotten it! His nest shuddered beneath him, and Alfred saw Mattie grip the edge of the platform.
“Just blink once for yes, okay?” she suggested.
Alfred blinked obligingly, glad to have that simple form of understanding between them. He couldn’t help but be intrigued by this brave creature. Still, he was determined to keep her at wing’s length. That was always best.
Then Mattie smiled at him.
And Alfred’s ear tufts rose to their full frilly height. It was absolutely involuntary. But a smile will bring a smile.
“So . . . I should be ready for that gloop truck in two more nights? On Tuesday? Do they have, like, a schedule?”
Alfred blinked again. Yes. At least by his best determinations. There had been a regular interval between every visit thus far. It was only logical that the interval would once again repeat.
“How many times have they been to the ditch?” Mattie asked. “Just, um, lift your tufty things, and I’ll count.”
Alfred lifted his feathered crest—once, twice, three times.
“Okay,” said Mattie, nodding. “What else? Is there any evidence I don’t know about? Any clues? I’ve got a list of suspects. I could describe them, and you could do the blinky thing for yes and the beak clacky thing for no.”
Alfred blinked, eager to hear Mattie’s descriptions.
The wooden platform under his nest gave a jerk. One that had most certainly not originated with him. Mattie grabbed at the edge of the platform again. Alfred swiveled his head to see two small hands grasping the planks. A moment later, a blond, helmeted head with pointy ears and shocked blue eyes peeped over as well.
“Sasha!” Mattie shouted, abandoning all sense of decorum.
In a flustered leap, Alfred hopped to the edge of his nest, swooping over Sasha’s head and away from his tree. The gust from his wings unsettled her frizzy blond hair. This was not entirely on accident.
Alfred was relieved that the other girl didn’t scream or fall. She was too serious for that. But her arrival meant it was time for an exit, and he disappeared silently into the forest.
Not all children were as understanding as Matilda Waters, Alfred thought. He regretted that this was the case. But he had been acquainted with children like that Sasha before, and it wasn’t his job to convince her of the truth.
It was Mattie’s.
The Big Sur Sunset
A doughy, yeasted donut iced with shimmery oranges and reds—glittering, glowing, gone!
Mattie hadn’t exactly expected to see Sasha fifty feet up a tree. But she collected herself quickly. This was her chance to prove that she was telling the truth.
The puckered look on Sasha’s face made Mattie pretty sure that Sasha had only come up all that way to prove she was lying. And when the owl went swooping over Sasha’s head, blowing those frizzy bangs aside, Sasha didn’t really look all that surprised. Or even impressed. Like owls flew right over her head every day. She still looked mad, though.
So Mattie had her work cut out for her.
“See,” Mattie said, pointing after the disappearing owl. “I told you!”
“So what? You found a bird in a tree—big deal. All this proves is that you are completely out of your mind. Who climbs into an owl nest?”
She scooted forward on her knees and then glared at the messy pile of sticks.
Mattie tried to explain about the hooting and the hopping and the blinking way that the owl had answered her questions. She swore by everything holey and sweet that the owl said the truck would be back in two more nights, so they had to set up another stakeout.
“Come on, Sasha. This is important. I’m not lying.”
Mattie couldn’t tell if Sasha was just pretending to be unconvinced or if she was so mad she couldn’t change her mind yet.
“Look, Mattie. Even if you think you’re telling the truth, all that owl did was scratch and hoot. Totally normal owl stuff. I’m not wasting another night of summer on your weird story and I’m not letting you get us in trouble.”
Right then, both girls heard the back door of the donut shop clang open. They scrunched themselves down on the platform, trying to hide from whoever was in the parking lot. Mattie snuck a look around the trunk. It was Aunt Molly, on her way to the trailer.
“I told you this would get
us in trouble,” Sasha hissed.
“Shhhhh . . .”
Mattie watched Aunt Molly cross the parking lot and disappear down the path to the trailer. “She’s probably making lunch. If we get down quick, she won’t even know we were up here.”
Mattie poked her head over the edge of the platform to check on Beanie. Her brain swirled like a drain. Beanie had two ropes slung over her shoulder. She gave an extra super serious thumbs-up.
“Beanie’s ready,” Mattie told Sasha. “You go first.”
She thought that Sasha might argue with her, because Sasha liked to be the one to tell people what to do. But instead, Sasha eased herself over the edge. The little pulley rasped as she went down, but that was the only sound in the forest. Sasha floated to the ground like a dry sycamore leaf.
When Beanie gave Mattie the next thumbs-up, Mattie tucked Aunt Molly’s cracked phone into her pocket. She wished she’d had a chance to tell the owl about her list of suspects, but she was looking down at a different problem.
So far up in the tree, her heart wasn’t acting in its normal thumpy-bumpy way. It was acting like a defective wind-up monkey, doing flips and not landing on its feet. Sure, maybe being up in a tree wasn’t as scary as being in a speeding car. But it wasn’t as cozy as being tucked in a booth at Owl’s either, and the open air didn’t make her feel so free anymore.
“Come on, Mattie,” she whispered to herself, easing her weight onto the rope and hoping Beanie was really ready to lower her.
The owl platform shrank in Mattie’s view as she floated downward through the trees. Her stomach filled with the emptiness of falling. The sounds of the highway and the ocean and her thumpy heart swirled together in her ears until . . .
Bump.
She fell onto her butt and let herself flop back onto the prickly needles covering the forest floor. She made it. She’d totally talked to the owl too. Sort of. And without getting into any trouble for climbing without a grown-up. But a second later, she knew they were in a bigger kind of trouble. That owl, just looking into its eyes, made Mattie sure that whatever was going on was important.
She’d been right.
That goo was no good, and the sneaky gloop dumpers would definitely be back.
“Is it my turn now?” Beanie said, hovering over Mattie still flopped onto her back.
“Absolutely not,” Sasha said, before Mattie could answer.
The girls got everything packed up and back into the locked shed without getting caught. It was kind of a miracle. But once everything was put away, Sasha stomped home. She slammed the cabin door so hard Mattie could feel the sound inside her ears for moments afterward, till it was clear Sasha wasn’t coming back out. It had been a while since Sasha was so seriously mad. In fact, if Sasha kept track of how angry she got, she might have set a new record after chasing Mattie up the redwood. But Mattie didn’t feel like she had had a choice.
She had needed to get to that owl.
Mattie turned to Beanie. “Two nights.”
“Two nights!” Beanie said, holding up two fingers on each hand, which Mattie couldn’t help but notice made four. Whatever. Beanie understood.
Aunt Molly must have walked back to the shop by the time Mattie got home. In the quiet of the empty trailer, Mattie marked the night of the next glooping on her calendar with a big black dot. Which made her eyes wander to the gold star on top of the first Tuesday in September. Seven more days until the start of school. That should be plenty of time to be ready to ride the bus, even if Mattie didn’t feel that way yet.
First she had to catch those gloopers in the act.
She’d figure out the school bus thing later.
That night, Aunt Molly made vegetable soup in her crockpot, and they ate it with fresh crispy French rolls from the Big Sur Bakery. Mattie slept with her window open and listened for hooting or tapping or squealing tires in case she’d been wrong about the owl’s messages. She heard a thump on the deck. Mattie flung her covers off, scampered outside, and came face to face with a super chubby raccoon. She panted, out of breath, while the raccoon sauntered down the steps and disappeared into the ferns.
Two hours after that false alarm, a squeal on the highway made Mattie reach for her window. She flicked her curtains open just in time to see a motor home with a flat tire shimmy onto the edge of Owl’s parking lot.
But there was no sign of the gloop truck or the owl.
That meant that the owl was right. Mattie was almost sure of it. The gloopers would be back, but not until Tuesday night. Still, part of Mattie wondered if she’d been wrong about the owl. Wrong to believe that she could really understand his wiggles and hops and hoots. She yawned and fell asleep without meaning to.
On Tuesday morning, Mattie checked the scraggly redwood tree for signs of the owl, but the bird wasn’t perched there. There was no owlish shadow in the nest or on the branch above. She’d have felt better if she could at least see a hint of him.
Sasha had calmed down a little. She hadn’t disappeared to the Riverside Inn to hang out with Christian again. She wasn’t glaring one-hundred-percent of the time either. But she wouldn’t even look at Mattie’s list of suspects, and she got crossing-her-arms mad all over again when Mattie asked if she was coming over for the stakeout that night.
But Mattie had to ask.
The queasy feeling that gloop gave Mattie wouldn’t go away. It could be toxic. It could get all the way down to the beaches or seep deep into the ground and into their well. No way could Aunt Molly afford to drill a new one that would keep the gloop out—she couldn’t even afford a new pump. Plus, Mattie wasn’t sure what the gloop would do to all the animals.
The turkeys and jays and banana slugs.
The sea otters and frogs and fish.
The owl.
If she could just prove that the white truck was up to something dangerous, she knew Sasha would understand. Sasha cared about the creek and the river and the campground and the donut shop just as much as Mattie. It was one of the reasons they were friends. Mattie held on to the hope that whatever she found on the second stakeout would fix things between them. By the time school started, Sasha wouldn’t be mad, and the donut shop and the campground would be safe. There were six days left. Which felt like plenty of time to prove to her best friend that she wasn’t a liar or losing her mind.
That Tuesday took forever.
It oozed like a slug across a rock. Barely moving, but then . . . it was gone. Disappeared into the ferns and redwoods. When Beanie banged on the door that evening, Mattie hopped up and headed to the deck without asking if Sasha was coming.
She knew Sasha wasn’t.
When Sasha Little was crossing-her-arms mad, she did not change her mind.
Mattie sighed and watched the sun sink into the Pacific Ocean. Beanie fidgeted next to Mattie outside the trailer, trying to get a jay to eat a peanut out of her hand, but she was never still enough. When Beanie got frustrated, Mattie handed over Aunt Molly’s cracked phone, telling her to plug it in and play a game, hoping she’d keep herself busy that way.
Mattie checked again for the outline of the owl in the evening shadows. It hadn’t come back.
The sky beyond the owl’s perch in the redwood glowed orange and pink like one of Aunt Molly’s sunset donuts, but it didn’t feel pretty or peaceful.
Not to Mattie.
The Sprinkle Emergency
A classic glazed cruller encrusted with jewel-toned sanding sugar stripes
Alfred had positioned himself in a pine tree near Mattie’s trailer with an optimal view of the highway. He stared up the winding road, and the golden reflectors studding it shone through the drifting fog like scales of a giant snake. His wings began to twitch as the first glimmer of headlights alerted him to the approaching vehicle half a mile up Highway One.
An insistent mosquito buzzed at the edge of his vision, but he did not swivel his head to glare at it. Then something below him let out a soft grumble.
The girl with the frizz
y blond hair. Sasha.
What was she doing out of bed?
He twitched his ear tufts. The girl was quietly complaining about another night of summer wasted on Mattie’s owl obsession. About how nothing was going to happen. Alfred clacked his beak at that.
Something was happening, and she was about to be in the way!
The big white truck crept around the bend. Squeaky and slow. The truck’s headlights flicked off before it pulled to the side of the road, but the glow of its red brakes stained the night fog pink.
As Alfred peered down, he saw Sasha sneak across the highway and hide herself behind a clump of rocks. In her hands she held a small box. One of those things that tourists carried around to point at children or slugs, shouting cheese and making strange snapping sounds. Alfred scoffed. That silly little thing wouldn’t work in the dark.
Sasha leaned over the rocks, pointing the camera at the truck.
Zip-zip-zip click!
Alfred flinched at the noise.
The two shadowed figures slunk out of the truck, and Sasha moved the camera along with them from behind her hiding spot. Zip-zip-zip click!
Alfred stretched his wings nervously, hoping the dumpers wouldn’t hear the noisy little camera over their banging doors.
Where was the hazel-eyed girl? Where was Mattie?
What a terrible muddle!
And just when he thought of her, Mattie appeared. Alfred hadn’t heard the trailer door fling open in all the kerfuffle. Seeing her barefoot in the donut shop parking lot squeezed at his nerves. She ran gingerly across the gravel, rushing toward trouble.
Mattie’s skin prickled against the cold under her mom’s old T-shirt. She darted along the edge of the parking lot, prancing over pebbles in her bare feet. She had snatched Aunt Molly’s old phone out of a sleeping Beanie’s hand before running out into the night.
That owl was right.
Those gloopers were back!
Mattie hid behind a tree trunk at the edge of the Owl’s parking lot. She lifted the phone and jabbed the button below the screen, impatient to get to the camera. The screen went white and then flashed a tiny empty-battery icon back at her. She pushed the button again, not wanting to believe it. But the phone was dead.
