A Little Bit of Spectacular (7 page)

There was more purple writing than there used to be.

There were the first couple of lines in purple, then my colored-in block letters finishing the verses. And then, where I'd stopped, more purple writing had been marked—heavily—over the other comments that had been on the wall. Now I read:

We are Plantagenet. We are chosen.

WE WILL NEVER GROW OLD.

WE ARE PLANTAGENET.

WE WALK NEXT TO YOU.

BUT WE ARE NOT ONE OF YOU.

WE ARE PLANTAGENET.

OUR HOME IS IN THE STARS.

We are Plantagenet.

You could be, too.

I forgot about everything—Amelia, coffee, the soap on my hands, Gram and Mom expecting me home soon. I kept rereading one word over and over:
you
. This wasn't just a message. It was a message to me. An invitation.

The Plantagenets wanted to meet me.

RSVP

Amelia and I sat in my room. Well, I sat. She stood by Gram's old sewing machine, pushing buttons and pulling levers. She'd lined up at least a dozen spools of threads and was trying to fit a bright red one onto the machine.

“This thing is so cool,” she said. “Can you sew?”

“No,” I said. “But Gram can make anything.”

Amelia gave up on the thread. She took a step back and strained to reach her foot under the sewing table, pumping at the machine's pedal like she was keeping time to music. I thought about telling her you had to plug it in to make it work, but I was afraid she'd sew herself to the table.

“I can't believe you wanted to go to my house again,” she said. “I love your room. Look at all this stuff!”

She swept her arm around, past the odds and ends of useless things Gram kept in my bedroom: an old treadmill, a tiny rocking chair Mom had as a kid, an iron birdcage, an old-fashioned hair dryer that looked like it would melt your brain, a recliner, an ironing board, high-heeled boots that Catwoman might wear, a deflated basketball.

I shrugged. I was used to Gram's junk.

“So how do I find them?” I asked.

Two days after I'd found the invitation scrawled on the wall, my giddiness had faded a little. Because meeting whoever was writing those messages was a lot more complicated than it sounded. First I had to find her/him/them/it. And I had no idea where to look.

Amelia shook her head, tossing black thread into the air. “You've got me. It's easier with frogs. You just need a net.”

“Not helpful,” I said. “You're the scientist. Be logical. Think of a plan.”

“I dunno,” said Amelia. “Maybe you should write her back.”

“Write her what?”

“Your phone number? Tell them to give you a call. Them, her, whatever.”

We'd spent two days trying to figure out what to call whomever was leaving the messages. I mean, the messages said “We are Plantagenet.” Plural. But the handwriting was girlie, and it was all done by one person. It didn't make sense.

“Let's just stick with ‘her' for now,” I said. “And I am not leaving my number on a bathroom wall!”

Amelia tossed the black thread back on the sewing table and flopped onto my bed, her elbows landing next to my knees.

“Okay, now we're getting somewhere,” she said. “This is better. We've narrowed it down. So you don't want to leave your phone number on the bathroom wall. What do you want to leave?”

That was one thing I liked about Amelia. She occasionally got distracted by spools of thread or Eastern spadefoots, but she had a way of simplifying things. She could take the hundreds of thoughts flitting through my head and pluck out the one I needed to focus on. And once she'd plucked out a thought, we could deal with it. Problems were easier to solve when you broke them down into smaller pieces.

So what did I want to tell the Plantagenets? If I left a message, what would it say?

“She needs to know I'm interested,” I said. “That I want to meet her.”

“Good,” said Amelia. “That's part one. You accept her invitation.”

I leaned back against my headboard.

“And she needs to know how to find me,” I said. “She has to be able to reach me so that we can meet.”

“She already knows,” Amelia said. “If you answer her, she'll know she can reach you on the wall at Trattoria.”

I nodded. “True.”

So what did that leave? I thought of all the swoops and swirls of writing on the bathroom walls. I thought of all the messages—the bizarre ones, the funny ones, the sweet ones, the poetic ones.

“I need to impress her,” I said. “I can't just say, ‘Let's meet.' She needs to know that I'm worth meeting. If I'm boring, she might change her mind.”

“Well, you're not boring.”

“Thank you. But how do I prove it?”

We spent the next couple of afternoons coming up with messages that would prove I was not boring. The right message needed to be fairly short—I did have to fit it on a wall. And it needed to be attention grabbing. We took a stack of paper and a couple of markers and let our imaginations run loose. We'd jot down a message, discuss it, and either throw it in the trash or keep it in the
maybe
pile. We tried being funny, being clever, being intelligent, being flattering. Some of our first attempts were pretty good. Some were not. . . .

Knock Knock.

Who's there?

Plantagenet.

Seriously? I love Plantagenets
!

To You Know Who—

I'd like to meet you.

I'd be an idiot not to want to.

I'll go anywhere.

As long as you're there.

Do you have blue eyes and silver hair?

Roses are red.

Plantagenets are chosen.

I would like to meet one.

At room temperature not frozen
.

Thank you for the invitation.

It would be a nice situation

To join you at a restaurant or even a gas

station.

If we met, I think I would like you.

I like how you write and

Paint pictures with words and

How you keep secrets

I can keep secrets, too.

Then, like I was a lamp and someone had plugged in my cord, the right words just lit up inside me. I knew what I was going to write.

IF I COULD WISH UPON A STAR

I WOULD WISH TO MEET YOU,

PLANTAGENET.

WE COULD MEET IN THE SKY

AND CATCH A RIDE ON A COMET.

OR SPIN AROUND SATURN.

OR WE COULD HAVE COFFEE.

“Perfect,” said Amelia, when I showed her the piece of paper. “I wouldn't change a thing.”

I didn't want to waste another second. It had been four days since we'd first seen the message. I didn't want the Plantagenets to think I wasn't interested.

“You want to go down with me now and write it?” I asked Amelia.

“Sure.”

I stuck a black marker in my jeans pocket, then I folded up my paper and stuck it in my other pocket, just to make sure I would get the message right, word for word.

“I wonder how long it'll take for her to write me back?” I asked. “I wonder where she'll want to meet. I wonder how many of them will come with her. I wonder how many of them there are. I wonder if they'll have to vote on whether or not to let me into the group.”

And for the first time in a while, I thought of a question about the Plantagenets that I hadn't considered.

“I wonder if they'll let you in, too?” I said to Amelia.

“I'd like to be,” she said. “I'd really, really like to be a member of . . . whatever.”

“I'd like that, too,” I said. “That's it then. They have to let us both in.”

“So I'll come with you when you meet them?” she asked.

She had nothing but excitement on her face. No nervousness at all. I felt sure aliens would love her.

“Definitely,” I said as we stepped into the elevator.

• • •

That night, my fingers still remembering the satisfying feel of pressing my marker against the bathroom wall, I could hardly sleep. I was so sure I'd hear back soon, that the Plantagenets would be moved by my message and want to meet me as soon as possible.

I was wrong.

There was no answer on the wall the next day. But that night, downtown Birmingham lost power for six minutes. Some sort of surge in the system, the newspaper headline said. The next night, our lights blinked off at 9:00 p.m. and didn't come back on until nearly 9:30.

I couldn't help thinking back to what I'd read. Those classic signs of alien invasion—what were they? Something like lights in the sky, flying discs, and electrical disturbances. I wasn't sure what electrical disturbances were, but I thought power outages might count. Something was blacking out entire sections of downtown. That something must be pretty powerful.

There was a third night of flickering power, and a fourth night where the power was out all night long. Gram bought a pack of a dozen candles since they were cheaper than flashlights. Well, she bought new batteries for the one rusty flashlight we'd managed to find buried in the closet in my room. She said a little dark wouldn't hurt us, and there was no reason to make a fuss.

After a week of electricity problems—and a week of me not hearing from the Plantagenets—the newspapers and the teachers at school seemed to think there was a definite reason to make a fuss. I read headlines like “Serious Investigations Ahead for Power Company?” and “City Shudders to Stop with Repeated Outages.” And one day in class, while we were taking a spelling quiz, Mrs. Snellhawk was closing the door when she saw someone in the hallway. There were some words I couldn't hear, and then Mrs. Snellhawk said that there was bound to be more crime if the whole city stayed in the dark every night.

I heard high heels click toward our class. There was a woman's voice speaking softly.

“It's absurd that electricity is this unreliable in the twenty-first century,” Mrs. Snellhawk said. She was whispering very loudly. Maybe some people were actually working on their spelling quiz, but I'd finished mine and had nothing to do but listen.

“There must be some ugly secret the city wants to hide,” said the other teacher, whom I couldn't see. “Some flaw in the power company's technology. The entire power system might crash permanently. The power would just go out and never come back on. Ever. You wait and see. I'd buy up lots of bottled water if I were you.”

Then the high heels clicked again, and as the other teacher moved, I saw long red hair swing past the door. Ah, it was Mrs. Leekdurst, the drama teacher. I thought she was overreacting a bit, but I supposed that was her job.

I felt Rachel tap me on the shoulder.

“Do you believe her?” she asked.

“Not really,” I whispered. I was a much quieter whisperer than Mrs. Snellhawk.

“My grandfather thinks that the government is hiding secrets,” she said. “He believes that we have spy gadgets disguised as mosquitoes, and the fake mosquitoes draw your blood and take it back to labs so the government has it on file.”

I didn't have a good answer for that.

“That sounds almost cool,” I said finally.

“Of course, my grandfather also calls me Erica sometimes,” she whispered back.

“Who's Erica?”

“The neighbor's guinea pig.”

Mrs. Snellhawk shushed us, so I had to swallow my laugh.

• • •

At home, Mom seemed almost excited about the whole power outage thing—she said it'd be good for us to stop watching television at night. She said we'd use it as an excuse to tell ghost stories and make up limericks and play board games by candlelight.

We didn't have real board games, though. We had LEGOs and Candyland and Hungry Hippo, which Gram had bought as surprises for us before we showed up here. And, I mean, I liked all of those things when I was six years old, but the thrill had sort of worn off.

At least that's what I thought until Mom and I got to work on a five-foot LEGO tower complete with doorways and balconies. We sat crouched in the living room for hours on Friday night, candles lit. Gram watched from the sofa and eventually brought us some broccoli to use for trees and bushes—“You can't tell anything about a building without some landscaping,” she said.

It turns out that if you cut the stalk of a piece of broccoli really evenly, you can make it stand up on a hardwood floor.

By ten p.m., Gram had kissed us good night and headed to bed. I heard her bedroom door click. I waited a few seconds before I said anything.

“I didn't see the landscaping thing coming,” I whispered to Mom. “I would have thought she'd think it was a waste of food.”

She laughed.

“Talk to her, Mario,” she said. “She's not that bad. She and I have had our issues, but she can be fun. She raised me, didn't she?”

“I guess,” I said. “Hey, you want to add a wall around the broccoli? Then it'd be more like a garden.”

A few more quiet minutes passed. We each sorted through the remaining LEGOs to find the ones we needed.

“You have any singles?” Mom asked. “I'd really like a yellow.”

“No yellows,” I said, feeling around in the shadows under my legs. “But, oh, here's a red.”

I started thinking about a drawbridge. I wasn't sure how to manage the moving parts. I was also pretty sure a piece of broccoli had worked its way into my pajama pants.

“I don't want to go to bed,” said Mom. “I'm tired of being in bed.”

“You do need your sleep.”

She rolled her eyes at me. Even in the almost-dark, I could tell she had a LEGO balanced on each knee.

“But let's stay up anyway,” I said, and her teeth flashed in the dark.

You know how when you sit in the dark, with just a tiny candle or beam of a flashlight flickering around the room, everything seems different? You can't see much, but suddenly you can hear everything better—the wind outside and the creak of the floors and the rustle of flannel pants. The same room that seems boring and familiar in the light suddenly seems full of possibilities when you're crouched around a tiny light, watching the shadows. It can be uncomfortable or scary, but it can also be thrilling. Like the top of a roller coaster, when you know you're about to get to the best part of the ride.

“It's exciting, isn't it?” Mom said, like she was reading my mind.

“What?”

“The dark. The candles. It makes you think you feel like things are different. Like there's something out there. In a good way.”