Drizzle (7 page)

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Authors: Kathleen Van Cleve

BOOK: Drizzle
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“I’m sure it isn’t that bad,” she said sweetly. “Let me see.” I straightened up and extended my hand, palm up. She leaned forward and inspected it, like she was a scientist. She smiled, and I smiled back, relieved.
Jongy turned my hand around so that my palm faced down. She still smiled, but now she closed her lips. She traced the curve with her own straight, manicured finger. Then, in a flash, she let go of my hand and turned to Max and the other thousand classmates I suddenly seemed to have.
“I knew it,” Jongy said. She glanced over at me and then twirled back around to the crowd. “She’s a witch.” She said it as matter-of-factly as if she was saying the sky was blue.
“What?” I said.
Jongy’s mouth opened wide in a big, glaringly bright white smile. “There’s something weird on that farm. It rains every week! At the same time! Come on! We live in one of the driest states
in the country.
Daddy always says he doesn’t know why it isn’t being investigated.” She said “investigated” as if it had about twenty syllables. “I think the police are scared that they’ll end up burned at the stake or whatever it is witches do.”
I stood there, wishing I really
was
a witch so that I could disappear. My whole body felt hot, embarrassment pouring into my blood, and I’m sure I turned as red as our most thriving rhubarb.
“No!” I said. “No, I’m not—” But I looked around at all my classmates—they seemed to have tripled, quadrupled—and I stopped. “I’m—”
Tears flooded my eyes. I tucked my head down and picked up my bag. I could feel myself start to cry and I
really
didn’t want Jongy to see that. Aunt Edith
hates
girls who cry. So I pushed by her and walked as fast as I could into the school, into the locker room, and hid in the bottom of the sports equipment closet. I didn’t leave for the rest of the day.
After that, every time I walked by Jennifer Jong, she and her friends hissed
“Witch!”
Sometimes they wore garlic around their necks as if I were a vampire. I couldn’t wait to get out of that school and away from Jongy and her friends. But now I
have
gotten away, and I get to start at a whole new school.
I study the material from St. Xavier’s, and before I know it, I’m falling asleep. I dream of crickets and dragonflies, leaping and flying over Basford and a group of smiling girls and boys—all of them surrounding me, Polly Peabody, who no one thinks is weird at all.
It is a very good dream.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 24
 
The Organic Psychic
 
I love Sunday mornings—the last day of peace and quiet before the tourists swarm on Monday—and this one is especially warm and sunny and perfect. Basford and I are about to go swimming in the lake when Ophelia Baird’s red, white, and blue minivan screeches into the driveway, jerking to a stop.
“Polly!” Ophelia jumps out.
“Oh boy,” I mutter.
“Who’s that?” asks Basford.
I don’t even know how to answer him. Not because I don’t know Ophelia. Because she’s hard to explain.
Ophelia’s an Organic Psychic.
Yep. An Organic Psychic.
An Organic Psychic is someone who can talk to the spirits of the natural world that have not been messed up by people, chemicals, or gossip. (That’s what Ophelia says, anyway.) Mom doesn’t really believe her, but she enjoys Ophelia’s company.
She’s supertall, like over six feet. When she gets out of the car, she lifts her head, looking like a giant, and gazes around the farm. For a couple of seconds, she closes her eyes and touches the middle of her forehead with her right hand, almost like beginning the sign of the cross. When she opens her eyes, she snaps a smile firmly into place.
“This is Basford,” I tell her.
“Of course it is!” she says, as if she’s met him twenty times before. “You sweet boy. You did the right thing, coming here, you know. Just like your father said.”
Basford raises his eyebrows but I just shrug. Ophelia’s always like this. She’s the looniest person I know. “Is your mother inside?” she asks me.
“I think so.”
“Good. I’ve brought some new pesticides.” I watch her as she grabs a big paper bag out of her van. She holds the bag to her chest, about to walk, but then she stops, closing her eyes. She sniffs. “Now that’s a new one.” She frowns. “Distress.” She sniffs again.
“What are you doing?”
“Hmm. Perhaps it’s the larvae. I’ll talk to your mother.”
“Larvae?”
“Or the curlicues. I’m not sure. I’m feeling gray. And red. And perhaps some brown. Definitely brown. The auras, you know. Yours is wonderful, by the way. Yellow and green and blue. Just superb.Yours is lovely too, young man.”
She smiles briskly before she walks into the castle through the side door.
“How did she know what my dad said?” Basford asks.
“She’s a good guesser,” I tell him truthfully. “She once told me she could predict the future by looking at the shape of a zucchini.”
Basford’s eyes widen. “Can she?”
“What do you think?” I ask. We’ve reached the edge of the lake. “She’s really nice, so it’s okay she’s kind of a kook.”
I swing my foot in the lake, gauging the temperature. “Ready?”
Basford grins, and I jump in the water. He cannon-balls in after me. Yesterday I showed him all around our property—that is, when he wasn’t playing soccer with Freddy or listening to my father explain his rhubarb research. He’s so patient he even listened to Patricia talk about her latest shopping trip. Still, I have to admit—it’s pretty fun having someone my age on the farm.
“Race ya!” Basford says as he takes off for the other shore.
“Cheater!” I yell, swimming after him. I go as fast as I can, but it’s a little weird because with every stroke, I feel a strange tingle in my finger. When I finally reach him, I hold my hands up out of the water, examining them. It must be what my health teacher calls growing pains, or “the passage into adolescence.” I’ll be twelve in December. It doesn’t really matter; they don’t hurt that much.
“Watch this!” Basford calls as he plunges his head below the water line. As the minutes pass, I figure out that he’s testing out our non-drownable enchanted lake.
Just when I’m starting to get bored, Basford swims up, breaking the water’s surface. “I can’t believe it! Four minutes and I’m not even dizzy!”
“One of Freddy’s friends made it for an hour once,” I tell him. “Mom said he was an overachiever.”
Basford smiles widely, looking like a little kid. He dives back under and I see him examining all the sparkling rocks and colored fish. There’s something about our water that magnifies everything, almost like you’re scuba diving with high definition goggles.The seaweed on the bottom, the random fish, and the stones in the sand—everything is as clear as if you saw it through a sparkling clean window.
He pops up and splashes me. “Marco!” he yells.
“Polo!” I yell back.
We swim and play games for the next two hours. Even Patricia joins us for a while, though she just swims boring laps, touching one side of the lake and then the other, over and over again.
When Beatrice comes outside to tell us that lunch is ready, Basford and I paddle over to the edge next to Patricia. But before we climb out, my sister scrunches up her face. “Did you pee?”
“What?”
“Did you pee in the water?”
“No!” I’m insulted.
“Then why is the water so warm near you?”
“I’m hot-blooded,” I say. The water right around me suddenly
does
feel really warm. But it’s positively
not
because I peed.
“Yeah, right,” says Patricia. I check to make sure Basford isn’t listening; it’s so typical for Patricia to want to embarrass me.
“Could you just quit it?” I hiss.
She holds her nose.“Sure. I won’t tell anyone THAT I’M GOING TO SCRUB MYSELF BEFORE DINNER.”
On cue, Basford turns. Patricia smiles sweetly.
“Never can be too clean,” she burbles as she pulls herself out of the lake.
I’m positive that Basford is going to ignore me after that, so I’m surprised when we get out of the water and he tells me that Ophelia was right.
“I didn’t think anything would change, but I was wrong.”
“What did you want to change?”
A sad expression shoots over his face for just a second. Then his face brightens up. “It’s a long story. Besides,” he says as he looks around the farm, “this is the kind of place where nothing bad happens. Right?”
I decide not to bring up Patricia. Or the mist. “Right,” I tell him, just as Mom opens up the castle door. “It’s the best place in the world.”
After lunch—and after Ophelia told us that there really are such things as giant beanstalks—I leave Basford with Freddy so I can go talk to Harry. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since I’ve been in Enid’s turret.
He’s happy to see me, waving his leaves all around when I stroll up the row and sit down next to him. As I tell him about Ophelia and everything that happened in the turret with the Monster cricket, and the ivy, and Aunt Edith, Harry flicks his leaves a little, but not enough for me to understand what he’s saying.
“No, really. What do you think?”
I expect a real answer from him, so I’m annoyed when I see he’s doing the bouquet maneuver, pulling his stalks together like he is a bunch of celery.
I roll my eyes. “I don’t know what that means.”
But he does it again.
“You don’t have anything to say about a cricket so big it could almost drive a car?”
Harry hesitates, but then repeats the gesture. I stand up. “If you’re not going to talk to me, I’m leaving,” I tell him.
I wait for him to say good-bye or at least say
something
, and when he doesn’t I spin around and start to stomp off. But as soon as I take a step, I feel guilty. I’m not very good at being mad. I’d much rather be friends with Harry than fight with him. Plus, I want to talk to him about Basford. I want to tell Harry that I may actually have a human friend.
So I turn back around, ready to apologize. But what I see stops me in my tracks.
Every single plant
is spread out flat, stretching out its leaves to touch the edges of their neighboring plants.
“Hey! What’s going on?”
As soon as my words hit the air, the leaves spring back to position and the field goes back to normal.
I step closer to Harry, suddenly panicked. “What were you doing?”
Harry reaches out and touches the tip of his leaf to my cheek.
Pay attention
.
“I
am
paying attention. You’re not telling me anything.”
Harry waits a second, and then tosses one of his leaves around, twirling the end of it. This means
tomorrow.
“Tomorrow?” I glance around at the other plants. I know they’re listening. “What’s tomorrow?”
Harry pulls his leaves up in that bouquet position. I glare at him.
“You’re driving me insane, you know that?”
He doesn’t even crack a smile (by bending his leaf) when he answers.
Yes. Sorry.
For a second, I wonder if Harry’s jealous I may have a human friend. He’s never acted this strangely before.
“Is everything okay?” I ask him.
It takes him a long time to answer. And when he does, I’m surprised.
No
.
MONDAY, AUGUST 25
 
Spark
 
Last night, I heard the haunted noises from the Dark House again. I’m not crazy. The sounds are as real as Patricia’s annoying voice, but much scarier. Usually when I hear them, I run to Freddy’s room. I know he can hear the noises too—noises sounding like the mangled screams of a ghost going through a shredder. But he always says they’re nothing but the normal farm sounds that bugs and animals make. (There’s nothing normal about those sounds. And we don’t even have animals on our farm.)
For once I didn’t run to Freddy’s room last night, though. Instead, I just jumped to my window seat and stared at the farm, scared out of my mind. All I could think about was how Harry said something was wrong. I thought I’d stay awake all night, but I fell asleep, right there on the window seat, sometime after 3:00 in the morning.
Now I have a crick in my neck. From my window, I can see the orange blockade of tour buses near the White House, with people spilling out of the White House porch. I check my watch. It’s almost time for the rain; I can’t believe I’ve slept this long. I get dressed as fast as I can and pull my hair back into a loose ponytail. I speed outside, sprinting by the truly weeping cherry blossom tree. I glance quickly over to see if the mist is still there. I almost stop running: The mist is not only there, it’s bigger—what was the size of a tiny cloud now looks like a wet, green down comforter, filling up most of the space under the tree limbs. As I run, I have a sudden vision of the mist leaking through the cherry blossoms, oozing out like some kind of gas attack over our farm.

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