The Lost Things Club

by J. S. Puller

  Uncle Toby took me down the hall to the study. It was a crowded room with a large computer desk, a sleeper sofa, and a coffee table, currently covered with pieces of drone.

  “He really isn’t talking,” I said, setting down my duffel bag by the sofa.

  “No.” Uncle Toby dropped the other duffel with a noisy rattle and took a seat on the sofa, sinking deep into the cushions with a sigh. “He just hasn’t been the same since… well. I probably shouldn’t talk about it.”

  He didn’t have to talk about it.

  I remembered the day of the shooting at TJ’s school. It was March 24. A beautiful spring day. It happened around eleven o’clock in the morning. I was in my social studies class and bored to tears—who cared about the Battle of Gettysburg anymore?—so I snuck a peek at my phone.

  As I scrolled around, a hashtag lit up social media: #ChancelorShooting.

  At first, I thought it was a movie. You know. “Shooting” a movie.

  But when I tapped on the hashtag, a horrifying headline popped up:

  Reports of a Shooting at Chancelor Elementary School in Chicago

  Chancelor Elementary School?

  My heart started to beat faster. And a sharp panic started to rise before I clamped it down, like I was slamming a door in its face.

  That was TJ’s school.

  The world was full of “oh, what a shame” and “not again” and “why does this keep happening?” when people heard the news. Or read it. Or tweeted it. Or texted it. It was all over the place, to the point where I had to put away my phone, turn off the TV, and hide in the bathroom just to get away from it.

  I frowned a little bit, sitting next to Uncle Toby on the couch. “I don’t get it. TJ’s fine. He wasn’t hurt.”

  That was a fact.

  “No,” Uncle Toby said. “He wasn’t. But things have been rough since then.”

  “Why?”

  He made a helpless gesture. “These things are tricky, Leah. I wish I had an answer, but I don’t know. Something like that changes you,” he said. “That’s what Ms. Weinstein says.”

  The famous Ms. Weinstein who didn’t like orange pop. “Who is Ms. Weinstein?” I asked.

  “TJ’s counselor.”

  “Counselor?”

  “Like a doctor,” Uncle Toby said. “But for your feelings.”

  “I know what a counselor is,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Is she making him better?”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t think he likes her very much.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing,” Uncle Toby said, “he ran away from her office a few weeks ago.”

  I let out a laugh and quickly covered my mouth with both hands. It wasn’t supposed to be funny. But the idea of TJ doing something like that was just ridiculous. He was so obedient. He was the sort of kid my mom wished I could be. Never argued. Never broke the rules. Never got sent to the principal’s office.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” Uncle Toby said, scrubbing his face with the heels of his palms. “Not kidding.”

  “Did he say why?”

  The words barely left my lips when I remembered:

  He isn’t talking.

  I winced at my mistake.

  “He won’t tell his story. We don’t know what happened. That day. To him.” Uncle Toby stared out into the hallway. “He’ll make a few noises here and there. Grunts and groans. But not much else. It’s like we’ve lost him completely.”

  I didn’t really know how to respond. How could I? “Oh,” I said.

  “I got this drone for him,” Uncle Toby said, picking up two of the pieces and fiddling with them a bit. “All the books say that after something like this, it’s important to try to keep a kid’s routine as normal as possible. I thought he might have fun putting it together with me but…”

  He tried to fit the pieces together, but they wouldn’t interlock. Gently, I reached over and turned his hand. The joint came together with a satisfying click. Uncle Toby smiled. “Ah, my magical girl,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “I hope you’re not going to be too bored with us while you’re here.”

  And that confirmed it. What I’d been afraid of the whole car ride down to the city. I was right. There weren’t going to be adventures. Not while TJ was lost.

  Nothing was helping him.

  But maybe… maybe I could?

  We were so close, after all. Almost like brother and sister instead of cousins. I still remembered holding him in the hospital the day he was born. And I’d only been four! I hadn’t seen him since the shooting, but maybe I could make the difference. I could be the missing piece. I liked the idea of helping. Because I loved him and because, well, maybe I really could be magical. Special.

  The more I thought of it, the more it made sense. After all, I was great at dealing with emotions.

  I didn’t feel like I could say it, though. That I thought I could succeed where his parents were failing. So I just gave Uncle Toby a small smile. “As long as I have the internet, I can’t get too bored.”

  He let out a hiccup of a laugh. “You find more ways to entertain yourself online than anyone I know.” He gave me a kiss on the side of the head. “And in the meanwhile, you can help me with this drone. I’m completely lost. They don’t make them like they used to, back in my FBI days.”

  “I thought it was the CIA.”

  “Well, I did a little side work for the FBI, on occasion.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  I hid another laugh behind my hand. “Uncle Toby…”

  Smirking, he turned to look down at all the drone pieces. “I think these thingies”—he pointed to two long, flat tongues of plastic that looked like propeller props—“are supposed to fit in this.” He picked up a small black cylinder with two slots on either side.

  I picked up the props and carefully started fitting them into place. I didn’t need directions. Technology was easy. Everything just belonged a certain way. It made sense. And after following a few basic steps, I had the propeller spinning on my finger.

  “Incredible,” Uncle Toby said.

  I liked the way he said that. As if I really was incredible. I mean, I wanted to be. Who didn’t want to be special?

  The real question was if I was special enough to find a way to get through to TJ. I had the whole world available at my fingertips. My phone answered most of my questions. A quick search on the internet and I knew how to catch fruit flies with apple cider vinegar, fix my hair in a French braid, or beat the final boss in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.

  But I wasn’t stupid. I knew that TJ was a little more complicated than all those things.

  There was a lot of searching in my future.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Word Fortune Predictor

  The First Three Words You Spot Will Tell Your Future!

  It was a grid of random letters, twenty-five by twenty-five. I let my focus go soft, staring at the letters, and within a few seconds, I’d found my three words. They just seemed to jump out of the picture at me.

  Journey

  Surprises

  Story

  How did three words like that fit together? My future was that I’d go on a journey full of surprises and live to tell the story? That seemed a little obvious. How could it be a journey if there weren’t surprises? It sounded just like life.

  Someone’s life, anyway.

  I wasn’t sure it was really mine. It sometimes felt like nobody ever noticed me at school. There was nothing special about me, just another brown-eyed girl, trudging down the hall, hunched under the weight of my backpack. One of hundreds. And I wanted to be special. The problem was, I didn’t know how to be. I was sure that there was some secret place where people went and they came back incredible. If only I could find a map; if only I could get there. No one knew I felt this way, except for Nicole.

  Nicole was my best friend. She was away at summer theatr
e camp in Wisconsin. It was always weird being apart from her, since we saw each other every day during the school year. It felt like a part of me was missing. And I knew she felt the same way. So every morning, we would send each other a text about what we were up to. Today, she sent me a picture of herself in the costume storage closet. Nicole was wearing a cone-shaped hat with a long, flowing veil falling over her shoulder. A princess in a storybook. After the picture, she wrote:

  Think I can get away with wearing this to homeroom?

  It made me laugh out loud.

  I went scrolling through my camera roll, trying to find a picture to send her, but I hit the photos I’d taken last summer instead—selfies of me and TJ eating a giant ice cream sundae at the Ghirardelli store, pictures of me and TJ making goofy faces in front of Sue the T. rex at the Field Museum, blurry shots of me and TJ running to home base at a baseball diamond, the wide ribbon of Lake Shore Drive stretching out in the background behind us.

  He isn’t talking.

  I sent Nicole the word fortune predictor instead.

  There were no new pictures.

  The change in TJ haunted me all night, as I lay awake on the lumpy sofa sleeper, listening to the air-conditioning unit sputter and shriek, thinking over my secret plan to try to help him come back to us. I wore down my phone battery searching for solutions.

  I searched “not talking” first, but nothing useful came up. I tried “stopped talking” and “silent,” too. I got some bands. A couple of books. A TV show. And a video game that my mom wouldn’t let me play because she said I wasn’t old enough. But nothing that seemed like TJ. After a while, I stumbled my way to a page about silent films… and I was lost along a trail of links again. I finally fell asleep with my face pressed up against the Wikipedia page about Singin’ in the Rain.

  Uncle Toby had already left for work by the time I was up and dressed, my poor, exhausted phone charging against the wall. Aunt Lisa was standing over the table in the living room, looking at a bunch of papers.

  “Morning, Leah,” she said, bouncing on the balls of her feet.

  “Morning.”

  I walked over to the table and noticed a three-ring binder on the corner. It was open. On top was a sheet of paper with bold black print. The font was so small, the words looked like ants crawling across the page. I leaned over to take a peek. Scrawled across the header was a logo for the American School Counselor Association. Beneath, it read:

  Helping kids after a school shooting

  There was a numbered list below. Just like Uncle Toby said, right at the top, “Keep routines as normal as possible.”

  I flipped the page and found another printout, this one from the American Psychological Association. Just as black-and-white and boring:

  Helping your children manage distress in the aftermath of a shooting

  Another list. This one longer than the first.

  Each page was another printout from another association of some kind. Most of them had impressively long titles. I paused to scan one from the office of Jenny Weinstein. “Use simple words,” it advised. “Children don’t understand phrases like ‘passed away’ or ‘lost’ or ‘in a better place.’”

  “Leah!”

  I looked up, feeling my eyes widen. Aunt Lisa didn’t raise her voice often.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I was just looking at—”

  “No, no,” she said, leaning over to close the binder with a heavy snap that nearly took a couple of my fingers off. “Don’t look at that. It’s not for you.”

  “Sorry.”

  Her lips pressed together, forming a tight line for a moment. At last, she sighed, shaking her head so that her curls bounced against one another. “It’s all right,” she said, her voice gentler but still kind of tense. She picked up the binder, like she didn’t trust me near it, and walked across the room, tucking it into a cabinet. Her eyes cut to one side, staring down the long, narrow hallway of the apartment. The door to TJ’s room was open. There were no sounds coming from inside.

  He isn’t talking.

  But he was in there. I could feel it.

  I reached over and touched Aunt Lisa’s elbow. “I’ll go see how he’s doing,” I told her softly.

  Aunt Lisa looked up at me, a whisper of a smile passing over her lips before it disappeared. “You’re a sweetheart, Leah. But no. Leave him be. He doesn’t want to talk.”

  “No, really,” I said. “I could go—”

  “Leave him be.”

  But how could I help him if I couldn’t get near him?

  “Why don’t you go outside?” She waved at the window. “There are plenty of kids in the neighborhood. Maybe you can make some friends. Just stay between Keating and Downey.”

  “I don’t know.…”

  “Go on. Go outside. It’s a beautiful day.”

  “Okay.”

  “The code to let yourself back into the building is—”

  “One-seven-zero-one,” I cut her off. The code hadn’t changed in years.

  Aunt Lisa nodded. “Just buzz yourself back in when you’re ready. You have fun.”

  Before I left, I went to the bathroom and attached two blond hair extensions to either side of my head. I wanted to dye my hair for real, but Mom wouldn’t let me. She said I was too young. But I’d managed to convince her to order a couple of fake curls that I could fix in my hair with pins. I guess I was kind of nervous. I mean, I didn’t know anyone in Oak Lake. At all. My summer visits were usually dedicated to TJ, and without him—or Nicole—I felt a little… lost.

  Aunt Lisa was right. There were a lot of kids on the block.

  It was like the first day of school!

  Cliques everywhere.

  There was a group just across the street, sitting around an inflatable swimming pool. They looked a lot younger than I was and were busy splashing one another, flailing around in the water, ripping up the grass as they slipped and tripped away from one another.

  I had a feeling we wouldn’t have much in common.

  A little bit farther up the block, where it opened to a stone alley between apartment buildings, a group of teenagers were kicking a soccer ball. They weren’t playing a game. Just messing around. But even messing around, they had a certain grace and skill that I knew I lacked. One girl kicked up the ball with the tips of her toes and then started bouncing it, again and again, on her forehead. She moved in time with it. Like a dance. The other kids were getting into it, counting out loud with each bounce.

  Not for me.

  Soccer was just something you were forced to do in gym class.

  I started to walk along the sidewalk, digging out my phone. I was desperate for a message from Nicole. I knew she was probably memorizing her lines or learning choreography or whatever it was that future superstars did, but I wished she was standing beside me. I needed someone to talk to. I sent her a text:

  I miss your face. What are you up to?

  But there was no reply.

  It seemed to be the theme of my summer so far.

  He isn’t talking.

  Okay, it was Wikipedia time.

  I opened the home page, choosing “Random article.”

  I got a page about some weird Olympic event called curling. Just my luck. A sports page.

  This really wasn’t my day.

  As I walked, I noticed a small gap between the parked cars. It was about big enough for another car. But instead, there was a girl with long brown hair, evenly divided into two braids, sitting in a lawn chair, leaning dangerously far away from the bumper of one of the cars. She was skinny. The kind of skinny that made her elbows and knees look like enormous knobs. One foot was crossed over the other, both heels propped up on the nearest car’s exhaust pipe, and on her lap, she had a notebook. She was scribbling notes with a ballpoint pen.

  The sight was just too bizarre. And in that moment, I figured I’d found my picture to send Nicole in the morning. But when I held out my phone, opening the camera app, I heard
a voice. “It’s rude to take pictures of people on the street without their permission.”

  It was the girl.

  Guiltily, I slipped my phone into my back pocket. “What are you writing?” I asked her as I approached.

  She looked up at me, and I was immediately struck by her eyes. They were an electric sort of blue, which I could best describe as the color of the computer screen of death. That moment right before a crash, when you still had hope that everything would be all right.

  “Lists,” she replied. There was a flash of silver in her mouth. The top row of her teeth had metal braces, with little purple rubber bands in front of each tooth. She had a stern voice. Matter-of-fact. Decisive. And, as I quickly learned, incredibly rapid. “The clubs I’m planning to join and the service projects I’m going to propose when school starts. You have to write to-do lists if you want to get anything done. Everyone says, ‘Oh, I’ll remember it later.’ But they never do. So it never gets done. And what’s the point of that?”

  “Oh, I get it,” I said. A pause. “I guess.”

  “And it’s going to be a long time before I can even get around to doing anything on my lists,” she continued. “School doesn’t start again for ages. And I don’t want to be that girl who gets left out of clubs because she doesn’t remember to fill out all the applications in the first week. You know?”

  Did I know? I auditioned for the school play last year, so I could be with Nicole, but my singing was about as beautiful as a car running over an aluminum can, so I wasn’t cast. I didn’t even bother trying out for any of the sports teams, either. I knew I wasn’t good enough. I went to Hebrew school twice a week, but that wasn’t by choice. My mom made me. In fact, the only club I had actually joined on my own was the quiz bowl. I was pretty good. I guess it was all the Wikipedia searches. No applications, though. The quiz bowl was probably just too desperate for members to bother.

  “Why are you sitting in the street?” I asked, figuring it was best to change the subject before she realized I was lost.

  “It’s my father’s spot,” she said. “He called dibs. I’m just saving it for him.”