by J. S. Puller
“Clubs?”
“No clubs. Not that I know of, anyway. Which is really going to be a problem when she applies to high school. They look for that kind of thing on your application.”
“Were you ever in class together?”
“Not that I can remember. But you have to understand, Chancelor is a very, very big school.”
I narrowed my eyes. “A girl goes around school wearing keys in her hair and there aren’t any stories about her? Nothing at all? Really?”
“Oh, the keys are new,” Violet said. “There’s no way I wouldn’t have noticed that.” She paused. “And I kind of like them.”
Violet’s lack of gossip was disappointing. But fine. I could figure out things for myself. Find my own way. And now that TJ knew he’d been followed, he agreed to go to Squeaky Green in the afternoon, with us, instead of leading us along at night. As long as we didn’t tell his parents.
“Promise me, Leah,” he said. “Promise me.”
I agreed.
Although I didn’t promise not to tell Nicole. So I did, in a long, thirteen-part text late that very night, when it should have been lights-out time in her cabin.
She replied anyway:
You’ll figure it out, Leah. You always do.
I was grateful for her confidence in me.
She knew me. She knew the harder the puzzle, the more I wanted to dig in.
And it was an upside-down puzzle, all right. With more than one hundred easy pieces.
Anyway, Uncle Toby looked about ready to burst into tears when I told him that I was going on a walk with TJ.
“That’s wonderful!” he said, pulling me into a strangling hug.
“Uncle Toby!” He was hot and sweaty.
He grabbed my face and planted kisses all over it.
“Ew! Stop slobbering on me!”
“Slobbering? This is nothing! Have I ever told you about the time I found a saber-toothed tiger frozen in a block of ice? We thawed her out and kept her as a pet at the CIA headquarters for a few weeks. Now, that girl really knew how to slobber. She was always licking my face, like…” He turned up his chin and started to lick the air with his tongue.
“Let’s go, TJ,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder and steering him out the door before it could get any grosser.
We helped Violet pile all the lawn furniture she could find in her parents’ storage locker into her dad’s parking space. And then the three of us walked down the same old path, back to Squeaky Green.
TJ made Violet leave her notebook behind.
The table had a big box on it, with the words “Lost and Found” written on one side, in permanent marker. After letting us in the back room, Michelle—who was wearing a long, pink sundress with mismatched socks, one peachy orange, one black with white polka dots—climbed up on top of the table and perched down beside it. “Hear ye, hear ye!” she cried, using her dragon-slaying movie accent, “gather ye around and see what there is to see!”
“What are you doing?” Violet said.
She went back to her normal voice again. “Just playing.”
“Playing?”
“Don’t you ever play?”
“I report,” Violet said.
“Oh. I’m so sorry.” Michelle actually looked very sad.
“What do we have today?” TJ asked, pointing to the box.
Michelle’s sadness melted away. “All this stuff has been here over three months,” she said, taking out a necklace strung with purple glass beads.
“Pretty!” I said.
“We have to go through it and decide what we can and can’t keep.”
“What can’t you keep?” Violet asked.
“Things people might miss,” Michelle said. She rattled the necklace, the beads clinking. “Like this.”
Violet nodded, looking thoughtful. “Well, then. We should come up with a plan of attack.”
TJ looked at her. “What kind of attack?”
“Not a real attack,” Michelle said. “She means a—”
“A system,” Violet said.
“I have an idea,” I said, walking over to peer inside the box. “We should sort through the box and divide everything into groups.” I took a quick peek at the things jumbled together. “Clothing. Jewelry. Broken jewelry. Buttons. Ribbons. Keys. Socks—I know they’re clothing, but they’re a special kind of clothing, I think.” There were just so many of them. “Office supplies. Pens. And miscellany.”
Both of Violet’s eyebrows went up. She looked impressed. “You came up with all those categories after looking at the box for two seconds?”
I shrugged. “Yes?”
Had I really managed to impress her? Didn’t seem like a big deal to me. Nothing special. All you had to do was look and see.
“What’s miscellany?” TJ asked.
“Stuff that doesn’t fit into the other categories,” I said, trying to hide a little amazement. I never got to teach TJ new words! “The really, really lost stuff. We’ll figure out what to do with that pile last.” I paused, looking over at Michelle. “If that’s okay with you.” It seemed reasonable to ask. This was Michelle’s territory, after all.
But Michelle nodded. “That sounds perfect. I’ve never tried having a plan before. It’ll be fun!”
“Okay!” TJ said, planting his hands on the table. He tried to jump up and hoist himself on top, but didn’t quite have the lift for it. Michelle grabbed him by the wrists and gave a pull. For a moment, his legs dangled over the ground, peddling like he was on a bike, but then he managed to hitch his knee up on the table and pull himself over the edge. At once, he threw himself halfway into the box, his butt pointed straight up, wiggling as he started digging through the things.
Violet chuckled. “What are you doing there, TJ?”
“Looking all the way to the bottom!” he said.
“Meanwhile, we’re just looking at a bottom,” Violet said.
Michelle let out an abrupt squeal of laughter that seemed to come from nowhere and disappear as quickly as it arrived.
TJ jerked his head up and looked at her for a second, frozen. I guess her squeal was just a little too sudden. But he saw it was just Michelle and went back to digging.
Good boy, I thought. Keeping himself calm.
I still didn’t know what to make of the scene at dinner, with the car backfiring. But so far, he hadn’t repeated it. Not with Michelle around, anyway.
We started to divide the lost and found into piles, the categories that I came up with. I was surprised by the sheer amount of stuff that had been lost and left behind. Some of it, like the purple necklace, was really cool. We found a silky scarf, white with purple and black flowers printed across it. A loose button, shaped like a daisy with a pink stone in the middle of the petals. And two CTA cards.
Other things were just disgusting. We found a nearly empty notebook, its pages crinkled by a dried coffee stain along the bottom edge, which TJ slid as far away from Violet as possible. A pocket-sized teddy bear, half of its fur washed off. A Styrofoam cup filled with sunflower seed shells. And a smooth white stone, which was either a broken piece of a button or a tooth. We couldn’t tell for sure.
We decided not to look too closely. Because. Ew.
Those went in the miscellany pile. Although Violet suggested they immediately go into the trash instead.
Michelle, Violet, and I didn’t have much to say. We worked carefully, trying not to gag at some of the grosser stuff.
It was TJ who did most of the talking.
“And then, after we finished at the Coca-Cola museum, we went to the aquarium and saw a whole lot of fishes. Then we went to this really, really big building that’s also a studio and it’s where a news channel called CNN lives.”
He was talking about a trip to Atlanta he took with Uncle Toby and Aunt Lisa, about a year ago.
He was talking.
Violet looked up sharply. “You went on a tour of CNN?” she asked. And she definitely sounded kind of jealous.
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br /> “Yeah,” he said, shrugging one shoulder. “And after we visited CNN, we went to a restaurant that was a tearoom that Mommy said was famous. And I had something called cheese grits, which was really, really good.”
“Sounds like all you did on that trip was eat, buddy,” Michelle said. “If I ever went on a vacation, I’d want to do more than that.”
“If?” Violet said. “You don’t go on vacations?”
“Well, not real ones,” Michelle replied. “We don’t really have enough money. We have to pay for Willy’s basketball equipment and Jamal’s therapy. But I do like to go on vacations in my head.”
“What?”
“Sometimes I close my eyes and I go for a quick trip to ancient Greece.” To demonstrate, she closed her eyes, her long eyelashes jet-black and shining in the light.
Violet just stared at her.
“It’s really quite lovely this time of year. The water of the Mediterranean Sea is a perfect blue, and the sea nymphs are out all day, sunning themselves on the rocks.” She opened her eyes and turned back to TJ. “But keep going about Atlanta. Besides the food, I mean. So far, you’ve told me about the peach cobbler, the fried chicken, the dumplings, the Coca-Cola, and now the cheese grits.”
He’d also, I noticed, gone through three of Michelle’s protein bars.
“Mommy says that the best part of growing up in Atlanta was the food, but she also says Chicago food is better, especially the pizza.”
“What do you think?”
“I think Mommy’s right,” TJ said. “Chicago food is better. I really, really like our pizza.”
“Me too,” Michelle said.
“Me three,” I added.
“Who doesn’t like pizza?” Violet asked.
TJ was talking about pizza. It was such a little thing. But it suddenly felt bigger, coming from him. I was replaying every word he said, again and again, trying to figure out what it all meant. But it didn’t seem to mean anything. He was just talking.
About anything.
This, that, and the other thing.
Mostly food.
Like a normal kid.
And Michelle wasn’t doing anything special to get it out of him. Well, she listened, I guess. I remembered the brief glimpse I’d gotten of Aunt Lisa’s lists. At the top of all of them was “Listen to your child.” But there was nothing supersecret or hidden about the way Michelle listened. Nothing I could figure out on my own.
I didn’t get it.
Once we’d sorted the whole lost-and-found box, I had us further divide things up. Michelle had a shoebox for every possible find. Beads. Erasers. Lip balms. Business cards, some of them so thoroughly washed that you couldn’t really read the print anymore.
A place for everything.
We put it all away, and I was amazed by how exhausted I felt.
Lost things were surprisingly hard work.
We sat down in the mismatched chairs around the table to take a break. There were still the socks to deal with, but our tired feet needed a rest. “Jamal used to always help me with the socks,” Michelle murmured, looking wistful, as if she were staring into a past she missed terribly.
I remembered the name. Michelle’s little brother. The one who was apparently freakishly smart, according to Violet. The one in middle school math, even though he was TJ’s age.
The one in therapy.
“Where is he?” Violet asked, glancing from side to side, as if she expected him to appear suddenly.
“He doesn’t come to Squeaky Green anymore,” Michelle said. She sighed heavily. “Says all our games are just kid stuff.”
“Kid stuff?”
“Yeah. He’s too big for it all now and doesn’t need them and doesn’t need me.”
“Ouch.”
Michelle looked over at Violet, her lips parting just slightly. “Thank you,” she said.
Violet blinked. “Huh?”
“For saying that.”
“What?”
“It does… hurt.”
“Oh.” Violet squirmed a little bit. “I’m sorry, I guess.”
“Where’s Jamal now?” I asked.
Michelle shrugged. “He just spends all his time locked in his room, playing games on his computer.”
Violet snorted. “And that’s not kid stuff?”
“I don’t know.” Michelle was silent for a moment. More than a moment. And when she started speaking again, it was more like she was talking to herself. “He thinks that being a big kid is what saved his…”
His what? I leaned forward, waiting for Michelle to finish the thought, but she shook her head.
“Do either of you have brothers?” she asked, like she’d suddenly realized we were in the room with her.
“No,” Violet said.
I shook my head. No brothers. Just stepbrothers. And I never saw them, anyway.
I had TJ, of course. At least, he used to be like a brother.
Sweetly, he reached over to put a hand on Michelle’s shoulder. Like he was trying to comfort her. She looked down at him and smiled.
She was holding a long yellow-and-black-striped sock by the toes, running it between her fingers. The fabric kept getting caught on the sharp corner of one of her rings, one shaped like a hockey stick. For a moment, she looked at it thoughtfully, tilting her head from side to side, before she suddenly stood up and walked over to Violet. “Put this on your hand,” she said, holding out the sock.
Violet looked up, both eyebrows shooting to her hairline. “Excuse me?”
“I have an idea.”
“What kind of an idea?”
“Just trust me! It’ll be fun! Jamal and I used to do this all the time!”
I could tell Violet wasn’t too sure about Michelle’s idea of fun. Neither was I. But after a moment, she sighed.
“Okay,” she said. And Violet slipped the sock on her arm like it was a fancy evening glove.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Michelle didn’t answer. But she pressed the bend between Violet’s thumb and fingers, forcing some of the sock fabric inside. Gently, she folded Violet’s fingers together. She’d turned the sock into a little puppet with a mouth. “It’s a bee,” she said. “A magical bee from a faraway land.”
TJ looked over at Violet, intrigued.
I expected Violet to snort. I could see what Jamal meant about kid stuff. And he was a kid. If anyone was going to complain about that sort of thing, it would be Violet. But she surprised me. She sort of smiled. And opened and closed the sock’s mouth a few times. “Bzzzz,” she said, moving her arm from side to side, the bee hovering in midair. “Bzzzz. My name is…” She faltered. “What’s my name?”
“Queenie!” TJ said.
“Queenie.” Violet raised her voice into a high-pitched squeak, opening and closing her hand to make the sock talk. “I’m the queen of the bees. Bzzzz.”
I started to roll my eyes, but TJ’s laughter stopped me.
He sat up in his chair—the wooden one with the cracked seat—tucking his heels under his butt, leaning forward across the table so he could watch Violet fly her hand around.
Violet turned her hand to TJ. She opened the mouth wide, letting out a gasp. “What’s this? Is this a human boy?”
“Yeah,” TJ said.
“Bzzzz, don’t hurt me, giant human boy,” Violet said.
“I’m not a giant,” TJ said.
“You are to me!”
“You’re the biggest bee I ever saw.”
“Really? Well, that’s very kind of you, giant human boy.” She tilted her hand just slightly, and it gave the impression that her bee was tossing back invisible curls, like she was admiring herself in front of a mirror.
I laughed. Violet was cut out to be a queen bee.
Michelle, though, pursed her lips to one side, looking thoughtful. “A bee needs eyes to see the giant human boy,” she muttered.
“What?” I said.
But Michelle was already off and running. She cross
ed over to the box of buttons and started sifting through them. They clattered as the box shook, like a giant maraca. She pulled two black buttons out of the mix, one a round, flat button with four holes in the middle, the other smaller and diamond-shaped, with two holes and a squiggle of thread still caught in between. She opened a drawer and grabbed a bottle of glue, bringing it all back to the table.
“Hold still,” Michelle said, not to Violet but to Violet’s hand. “I’m an expert. Jamal always put me in charge of the eyes. They’re the most important part, you know. The eyes tell you everything.”
“What was he in charge of?” I asked.
“Coming up with good names.”
Violet held Queenie perfectly still as Michelle dabbed glue over her knuckles and pressed the buttons into place. “Ahh,” Violet said in the Queenie voice. “That’s much better. I can see so clearly now. Thank you, giant human girl.”
Michelle giggled, and the keys in her hair chimed.
“Yes,” Violet continued, reaching Queenie closer to TJ. “Yes, I can see, you aren’t such a giant human boy after all. But you are a human boy. I hope we can beeeeee friends. I know that we bees have such a terrible reputation. But I promise, I won’t sting you at all.”
Michelle clucked her tongue. “No. Something’s still missing.”
“What?” Violet asked, in her regular voice.
“A queen bee needs a crown!” Michelle clapped her hands together. “That’s it! All the kings and queens in olden times had them. It was all the rage!”
Boxes flew, and soon Michelle had scissors and tape. The one box I thought was most useless, the one filled with candy-bar wrappers, produced the beginnings of a crown. When Michelle turned a wrapper inside out, it was a sheet of solid, silver paper. She cut a jagged line of teeth across one edge, then looped it together and taped it in place, on top of Queenie’s head.
“Oh yes, very good, very good,” Violet said in the Queenie voice.
“But, of course,” Michelle said, “there’s something a queen needs even more than a crown.”
“What’s that?” TJ asked.
