by J. S. Puller
I wouldn’t say it made TJ happy. But he nodded. He seemed to accept that.
“But tell me,” Aunt Lisa continued. Uncle Toby shot her a warning glance, but she kept going. “Where did you learn about the… Land of Lost Things?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” TJ said.
“But we’d like to know—”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Now, don’t get upset with—”
“No!” TJ said.
With that, he whipped around and marched out of the room. Aunt Lisa tried to grasp at him, but he was too fast, and he closed the door behind him when she was only halfway there. I thought she might throw it open and chase after him, but she froze. And when we heard the door to his bedroom slam, she slowly turned to look at Uncle Toby.
He was there in a heartbeat, crossing to her in three strides and wrapping his arms around her. She buried her face in his shoulder and started to sob.
“Sh, sh, sh,” he said, smoothing down her hair. “It’s all right, bubbeleh. Small steps. That’s what Ms. Weinstein said, remember? Small steps.”
“Small steps,” she said, her voice muffled by his shoulder.
“Baby steps.”
“Baby steps.”
“Our boy is talking,” he continued. “That’s a good step, right?”
“It’s a good step.”
“Right.”
But if it was so good, why was it making Aunt Lisa cry like that?
I’d seen grown-ups cry before. In the movies. Professional actors who were paid to cry on cue and always managed to do it while still being glamorous. This was different somehow. Aunt Lisa looked so fragile, so small, wrapped up in Uncle Toby’s arms. And Uncle Toby, well, he kind of looked like he wanted to cry, too. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t let himself. He just stood there, sturdy and proud and strong.
I guess he had to be the sturdy and proud and strong one.
Where would they be if both of them collapsed?
I needed to do something.
It was all my fault. The good and the bad of it. Probably the bad. Michelle was the only real force of good right now.
“I’ll go talk to him,” I said softly.
Uncle Toby looked at me. He tried to summon up the ghost of a smile. But it didn’t quite reach his eyes, didn’t flush his nose. “Thank you, Leah.”
I didn’t want to be thanked.
Not when I hadn’t done anything worth thanking.
But I gave him a little nod. “It’s… it’s going to be okay. It’s just. I don’t know.” And I quietly slipped out of the room, turning the doorknob so that it wouldn’t click or snap when I closed the door.
I’m not sure it really mattered, though.
Aunt Lisa wouldn’t have heard it.
The second I was out of the room, I think something inside her broke. She started crying in a big way, sobbing so loudly that I could hear her through the door. Uncle Toby was muttering something under his breath, comforting words, I guess. I couldn’t tell exactly what he was saying, but I understood the way he was saying it. It didn’t seem to work.
Her crying just got louder and louder.
I felt tears start stinging the backs of my eyes.
Was I about to cry?
No. No, I didn’t cry. That wasn’t me.
I refused.
Swallowing hard, I turned to face the stretch of hall in front of me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Even though I knocked, I didn’t wait for TJ to tell me that I could come in. I just opened the door. He was sitting on his bed, in the same position where he spent most of my first few days in the apartment. It was so startling to see him back that way that I heard my mom’s voice in my ear all over again:
He isn’t talking.
But unlike a week ago, he actually turned and looked at me. His eyes landed on me. And I knew for sure that he saw me there.
Yes.
He was talking.
And I wouldn’t forget it.
I wasn’t quite sure what to say, though, because I still didn’t really understand what had happened, why he’d blown up the way he had.
But I knew that the last thing I wanted to do was repeat Aunt Lisa’s mistakes.
So I started by taking a seat on his bed. Leaving a lot of room between us. We weren’t touching, and I wasn’t crowding him.
So he didn’t squirm and try to escape.
For a little while, we sat there quietly. I tried to strain, to hear Aunt Lisa crying, but she was too far away. It didn’t matter if I could hear it for real or not. I still heard it inside my head.
Poor Aunt Lisa.
The air-conditioning unit kicked on, and the curtains blew, billowing into the room. TJ and I both turned to watch them dance for a while.
I was the one who finally broke the silence. “Hey,” I said to him.
Maybe it wasn’t the most original conversation starter, but it seemed to do the trick.
“Hey,” TJ said back.
Carefully, I scooted a little closer to him on the bed. Still not touching. But we were in each other’s space now, a little bit.
He didn’t pull away.
I waited again. Partly to let him adjust to the new circumstances. And partly because I was still trying to figure out what to say. “Do you want to talk about it?” I finally asked.
“Not really,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
TJ was the champion of sitting in silence.
I definitely wasn’t.
I tried to wait it out as long as I could, but that wasn’t very long at all. “Can I ask you something?”
“I guess,” he replied.
“It’s about Michelle.”
He turned to look at me.
“I’m just wondering…” My tongue felt heavy and clumsy. “Well, this is going to sound kind of weird.”
“What?”
“Do you not like sharing her?”
“Sharing her?”
“With Violet and me.”
He shrugged.
“It’s just that you got very upset with your parents when they called the Land of Lost Things a ‘story.’”
“It’s not a story!”
“I know!” I said quickly, holding up both hands. I didn’t actually know, but I knew what I needed to do to continue the conversation. “I know.”
He narrowed his eyes at me, but didn’t look away.
“What I mean is: the Land of Lost Things means a lot to you.”
“Yeah.”
“And I’m wondering if you would be happier keeping it between Michelle and you, instead of sharing it with everyone.”
“Our club’s charter—”
“Is to share it,” I said. “I know that.”
“We have to share it.”
“But it’s making you unhappy.” I dared to reach out, to put a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t have to keep posting the videos, Hedgehog.”
“I don’t care about the videos,” he said, looking down, off to the side.
That hurt. Unexpectedly so.
I realized in that moment that even if he didn’t care about the videos, I did. I looked forward to working on them so much. We’d already filmed our third and were planning out the fourth. Each time, I thought, I was getting a little better at it. And it wasn’t like school. I could practice multiplication and fractions every day. It was just automatic. A formula. With the videos, I felt like I was really doing something. Building something.
But it wasn’t about me.
Even if it hurt a little.
“Okay.” I kept my hand where it was. “What do you care about?”
“I just want to keep doing what we’re doing. I want to keep visiting Michelle and Squeaky Green.”
“We can do that.”
“I want to learn everything I can about the Land of Lost Things.”
“Everything you can?”
“Everything Michelle knows,” he said. “And you
and Violet,” he added, as an afterthought.
“Of course.”
“That’s what matters,” he said.
But that wasn’t what mattered. Not all of it, anyway. There was so much more to his unhappiness. I could almost reach out and touch it. Except that I couldn’t. It slipped away, out of my grasp.
Uncle Toby and Aunt Lisa kept thanking me, but they shouldn’t have thanked me at all. I didn’t know what I was doing.
Suddenly, I wanted to throw myself into Uncle Toby’s arms and sob.
Which was ridiculous.
TJ scooted a little closer to me. To my surprise, he lay down, resting his head on my knee. We used to sit like this all the time. Every summer before, after our adventures and photos. “Leah?” he said.
“Yeah, Hedgehog?”
“Will you tell me a story? Like you used to.”
“Sure,” I said. I looked over at his shelves of books. “What do you want?”
“No. Not one of those stories. A real one. Will you tell me more about the Land of Lost Things?”
“I…”
“Please?”
I touched the curls falling against the side of his face. They were so soft. Gently, I leaned over and kissed his temple. “Okay,” I said. I’m pretty sure I would have said yes to anything if only to keep us this way a little while longer. “What do you want to hear?”
“I want to hear about the people there.”
“The people?”
“Yeah.”
“Well.” Oh boy. “You already know about Amelia Earhart.”
“The aviator.”
“Good memory, Hedgehog. Actually, I was reading about her last night,” I said. I slipped my phone out of my pocket and opened the browser. The Wikipedia page was still open, but I had to click back and back and back (from volcanic islands to American Samoa to Spanish flu) until I returned to Amelia and her black-and-white picture smiling at me.
“Here, take a look.” I turned the phone so he could see. “It says here that she had an endorsement deal for luggage. I guess this was before luggage got lost at airports all the time, huh?”
TJ barely even glanced at the picture. “Who else?” he asked.
“Who else?”
“Yeah. Besides her. Who else lives in the Land of Lost Things?”
“Well, let me see.” I thumbed down to the bottom of the page. There was a link to a category called “1930s missing person cases” and I tapped it. I was hoping for a bit of inspiration, but I was surprised by the huge list of names. A lot of people disappeared. A lot of people were lost.
How did that even happen?
At the bottom of the page, I clicked “missing person cases by decade.” It went back centuries. How could I even pick one?
I clicked “1590s missing person cases” at random and picked the first one that looked interesting.
“Virginia Dare,” I said.
There was something familiar about the name, but I couldn’t place it.
“Who’s that?” TJ asked.
I scanned the new page, and started to remember something about this from a social studies class. “Have you ever heard of the colony of Roanoke?” I asked.
“No.”
“It was one of the first English colonies in the country.”
“So?”
“So, a group of settlers came to the colony. Men and women and even kids. Including a baby named Virginia Dare. But then, nobody knows how or why, the whole colony just disappeared.”
“The whole colony?”
“The man who founded it went off to England for a little while, and when he came back, it was just gone.”
“All of them?”
“One day it was there. The next it was gone. No sign of any of the people. They were never heard from again. Look, here. There’s a picture.” Sort of. “They put Virginia Dare and her family on a stamp, see?”
I turned the picture for him to see, but TJ batted my hand away. “They disappeared because they went to the Land of Lost Things?”
“Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Virginia Dare was very famous for a while,” I said.
“Who else?”
“Who else?”
“Yes. Who else lives in the Land of Lost Things?”
Everyone else on the “1590s missing person cases” page was connected to Virginia Dare, I figured, since their last names were all “Dare,” so I went back to the page on “missing person cases by decade” and picked the 1970s. There were a lot of names to choose from. “Well,” I said, settling on the first name I saw. “There was Juanita Nielsen.…”
“Who’s she?”
I loaded the page. “She was a famous journalist who—”
“I don’t want to hear about more famous people,” TJ said.
I looked down at him. “What do you mean?”
“Amelia Earhart,” he said, “was famous, and Virginia Dare was famous, and this journalist was famous.”
“Yeah.”
“But what about normal people?”
“Normal people?”
“Yeah. Just normal people. Regular people. Famous people aren’t the only ones who get lost,” he said.
“I guess.”
“Morgan isn’t famous.”
“No, not really.” Except for the part where he was becoming a local internet sensation. But I didn’t want to talk about the videos right now.
“There must be a lot more people in the Land of Lost Things than just famous people,” TJ said.
“Of course there are,” I said.
“Then why don’t you tell me about them?”
“Well…” I wasn’t nearly as good at this without Michelle and Violet. “We talk about the famous people in the Land of Lost Things just because of that. Because they are famous. Because we’ve heard of them.”
“But what about the normal people?”
“Think about it,” I said. “If I knew about the normal people, wouldn’t that make them famous people, instead of normal?”
TJ frowned a little. I could see him trying to weigh the thought out. I held my breath until he finally nodded. “I guess that makes sense.”
I was so glad it did.
What else could I say?
“But there are normal people there, right?” he asked.
“Of course. There are more normal people than famous people everywhere. Plenty of people in the Land of Lost Things are just as unspecial as me.”
“You’re special,” TJ said.
What?
I stared at him for a long moment. TJ wasn’t looking at me. I wondered if he understood what he was saying. What “special” actually meant. “You think so?”
He nodded against my leg. I wanted to ask him more, to ask him why he thought that when I didn’t even believe it about myself, but he kept going. “And kids, too. Lots of kids in the Land of Lost Things, right?”
“Well, not a lot of kids get lost, I hope.”
“But some do?”
I nodded. “Some do. Like Peter Pan. You know? Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. I’ll bet they’re there.”
“I think so,” TJ said. “But they’re famous.”
“Right.”
“And they’re not normal.”
“No,” I said. “I guess not.” What with the flying and the fighting pirates and all.
“There are other boys there, too.”
It wasn’t a question.
TJ’s breathing was starting to get heavy. He pulled his knees up against his chest. And only moments after that, he fell asleep, right on top of me. The wrinkles in his forehead smoothed out. He was my little Hedgehog, curled up against me.
If only he could always look this peaceful.
I waited for a while. Maybe half an hour or so. And then, very carefully, I slid out from under him, slipping a pillow in my place. He let out a soft grunt but didn’t wake up. I pulled a sheet over him, even though he was sleeping facing the wrong way. With a kiss on
his head, I left him in his room and crossed the hall.
The hallway was empty. And the living room, too. The door to Uncle Toby and Aunt Lisa’s room was still shut.
I closed my own door and sat down on the sleeper sofa.
And I started to cry.
The problem was, I didn’t know why.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
No one talked about what happened.
Aunt Lisa stuck to the weather and the crafts fair.
Uncle Toby told more CIA and saber-toothed tiger stories.
I wasn’t about to let it slip that I’d broken a four-year record of not crying.
And TJ? Well, TJ didn’t say anything at all. Except when we were in Squeaky Green, of course. So we kept going back. Day after day. How could we not? I needed to hear his voice. And for some reason, TJ needed Squeaky Green.
Michelle started making dresses for Queenie. Royal gowns out of old scarves and fabric hats, modeled off pictures from her social studies textbook. They were in shades of blue and purple. Always trimmed in some kind of precious metal, made out of broken necklace chains and bracelets from the lost and found. Eventually, I decided we should do a series of fashion shoots for Queenie, including a video of her walking down the catwalk. Or, rather, buzzing down the catwalk. Beewalk? Something like that, anyway. I spent several nights watching fashion show clips—mostly to keep myself from crying again—so I knew all the right moves to teach Violet. Francis gave a running commentary, discussing each gown’s designer, usually a famous historical figure, like Cleopatra or Billie Holiday. And Staples served as the very enthusiastic audience.
The next video had Staples and Francis engaged in a joust, using lances made out of rolled-up newspapers, tightly bound together with cut wristbands from water parks and clubs in the area. I looked up the rules online. Staples, of course, won every bout (that’s what you call a round in jousting). He was Sir Staples, after all. He couldn’t very well lose. But Francis found increasingly hilarious and ridiculous ways to excuse his poor performance. Everything from hangnails to the dog eating his jousting homework. Queen Queenie awarded Staples with a handkerchief, as a favor and token of her appreciation. Michelle said that’s how they did things back in the olden days. He was declared Sir Staples the Brave, the bravest of the brave, at TJ’s request.
