Jake and Lily (17 page)

S
ydney slept over last night. She was everything Anna Matuzak was not. No makeup. No adoring herself in the mirror. No hogging the pizza or the bed space. No complaining.

But lots of burping. We had a contest. She won. I was laughing too hard to care about losing.

We spent a couple hours in the Cool-It Room. Armed with markers. There’s no empty space left on the walls.

She saw every nook and cranny of the house except the basement. A couple days ago my dad installed a lock on the basement door. He won’t tell me why, only that if I’m dumb enough to break through and go down, I do so on pain of death. I told him I better not be locked out for long because
my train stuff is down there.

We wound up watching TV from the bed and eating M&M’s. The last time I looked at the clock it said 1:30 a.m. I guess we scared Jake away. He spent the night at Poppy’s.

We were zombies heading over to Sydney’s house this morning to pick up Devon for the day. He usually wants to head straight for the playground. Not today. He wanted to hang out at my house. Jealous about Sydney’s overnight, I guess.

One thing happened that drained some of the juice out of our super-great overnight.

Devon hid in the mudroom closet. No big deal, except we thought he was lost. Maybe unconscious. Maybe wandering down the street. Maybe whatever. We called and called. No answer. Sydney was frantic, ready to cry, when we found him all grinny in the closet.

The whole thing made me a little sad. It reminded me of the times when Jake and I couldn’t play hide-and-seek because we always knew where each other was.

I
slept over at Poppy’s last night. Lily was having her new best pal overnight, so I escaped.

Or at least I thought I escaped. Until I had the dream. I’m standing in the open, just me and an empty blue sky, and I look up and I see Lily falling. She’s coming from really high, like above the blue, but I know instantly that she’s coming right down on me, and I hold out my arms and I catch her and she laughs and laughs. She won’t stop laughing.

S
ydney and Devon got shipped off to her uncle Bob’s for a couple days, so this morning I biked over to Poppy’s. I love having keys to two houses. We’re having a heat wave, but Poppy’s house is always cool.

At times like this I wish he didn’t work all day, but at least he’s got Wii now. I talked him into it. We do sword fights and Ping-Pong and stuff. It’s not as much fun by myself, but it’s okay. The only thing I don’t like is that it’s hard to cheat with Wii. I did some bowling for a while, then beat myself in tennis.

I made a sardine sandwich with onion and mustard. Poppy says it’s a big world, I need to try new stuff. Then I headed to the basement to play
darts. It occurred to me to go out back and weed Poppy’s flower garden. It’s his least favorite job. I was torn, because I wanted to do it and surprise him, but I’m terrified of that big black devil dog in the next yard.

I looked out the back window. I didn’t see the dog. I opened the back door and peeked. No dog. I slunk into the yard, ready to bolt back in. No dog. I pulled as many weeds as I could hold in two hands and ran back inside.

TV was boring. Every channel. I was starting to talk to myself. I kept thinking about Jake telling me I should come over to the orange clubhouse. On the TV a cartoon dog was chasing a cartoon squirrel around a cartoon tree. “That’s it,” I said out loud. I clicked off the TV. I missed Sydney. I was so bored I was ready to look up Anna Matuzak.

I must have backed out the front door, because when I pulled it shut and turned around, I found myself staring at the devil dog. He was sitting at the foot of the porch steps, right next to my bike. A bird was chirping somewhere and the street was all sunny and nice, but my world stopped at the beast. Then I heard something that wasn’t the bird
chirping. It was so low I didn’t realize at first what it was. Then I did. It was the dog. Growling. It’s hard to explain, but a low, soft growl is more terrifying than a roar. I never got so much attention in my life as I did from those two little brown eyes. They didn’t blink, only stared. The big black head never moved. And neither did I. I froze. Suddenly I had to pee. I clenched up. Poppy’s front door locks automatically when you close it. The key was in my pocket. But I knew that if I so much as twitched a finger, the monster would be leaping at my throat.

A
nother scorcher. It was probably hotter in the clubhouse than outside, but we didn’t want to leave. Besides lemonade, Mrs. L was bringing us homemade ice-cube Popsicles—grape and orange.

We had our shirts off, except for Ernie. He’s no scrawnier than the rest of us. Just more modest, I guess.

We were talking about school starting soon and all the usual junk, but my mind was on a different track from my mouth. I kept looking at Ernie, with his Daffy Duck T-shirt and his white smear of sunblock on his sunburned nose and his clumsiness and his never-ending cheeriness, and I realized he was the same as always. He fit the definition of a goober as perfectly as ever. He hadn’t
changed at all.
I
had.
We
had. Forget what I said a couple pages ago: goobers
do
exist. They are what they are, which is pretty much what I thought they were. What Bump thinks they are. But Bump is missing the point: it’s
okay
to be a goober. Beneath every goober is a kid. A person. Maybe he’s not what you would call “regular.” But so what? Is that a bad thing? Turns out goobers—this goober, anyway—make great friends. I’ll take a goober over a Death Ray any day.

The guys were talking about school activities, and Ernie was saying he wanted to join the band and learn to play the trombone. As he was demonstrating trombone playing he knocked his lemonade off the TV tray. As he dove for his falling glass he knocked over the others. We all laughed and got down on our knees, and as I was picking an ice cube off the new hardwood floor I had a sudden feeling. It had nothing to do with ice cubes or lemonade or friends or clubhouses. It had to do with my sister. Lily. I can’t describe it except to say that for the first time in a long time that special sense was back, what we used to call goombla. If the wordless feeling could speak, it would have
whispered,
She needs you.

Next thing I knew, I was flying down the streets on my bike and busting into Poppy’s driveway. The big black dog from next door was blocking the front steps. Just sitting there. Lily was on the porch. She looked like a statue, like some alien paralyzer ray had zapped her.

The dog didn’t bother to get up when he saw me. He just swung his big black head. I knew he lived next door, and I knew Lily was terrified of him, even though Poppy keeps telling her he’s just “a big baby.” The dog barked at me. I have to admit it didn’t sound like a friendly bark. More like a don’t-come-one-inch-closer bark. Then the dog got up on all fours. He barked at me some more. His head bounced with every bark like a recoiling pistol.
This dog wants to kill me
, I thought. I don’t know how long I stood there, staring back and forth from the dog to Lily. Then I was aware of two things: I was moving, and I was thinking,
I’m gonna die
. And then the dog was coming at me and its bark was different and it was jumping up at me and licking my face and I knew Poppy was right, it
was
just a big baby.

Lily was still on the porch, still frozen. I went to her. Her eyes were horror-movie wide. I cupped her shoulders. “It’s okay,” I said. She flinched—the dog was licking her hand. Then I felt her relax. Tears came. She sagged into me.

Her voice was muffled against my shirt. “You
knew
, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I knew.”

D
evon Park is going public!

Devon finally got tired of having a playground all to himself. He whined to Mrs. Addison: “I want playmates!”

The Addisons are giving him more than playmates. They’ve added a sandbox and sliding board to the playground.

We made a sign:

GRAND OPENING SATURDAY!

DEVON PARK PLAYGROUND

(little kids only)

I went to tell Poppy all about it today. There was a monster in the kitchen. The cantaloupe. Right where it’s been for half the summer.

Is there a word for worse-than-rotten? It was soft and moldy. Poppy pressed a finger into it. It made a glurpy sound. I hung back by the fridge. My stomach was looking for a way out.

“I told you,” said Poppy. “You can turn your back on it. Ignore it. Forget it. But it’s still here. Right where you left it. Just like your goombla.”

“My goombla isn’t sickening,” I pointed out.

Before I could stop him, he pulled his new long knife from the drawer and sliced the cantaloupe in half. One look at the smelly orange mush, one whiff, and I was outta there. Let somebody else tell him about Devon Park.

“Hey!” he called. “How about some ice cream? Fudge ripple!”

I charged out the front door. “No thanks,” I called. “Not hungry.”

M
om and Dad took me to the grand opening of Lily’s friend’s little brother’s new playground. They wouldn’t tell me why. Nacho and Burke and Ernie were there too. Everybody was staring at a big humpy something under a tarp. When Mom and Dad whipped off the tarp, I suddenly knew why I was there and what Dad had been working on in the basement. It was a wooden locomotive. Red and blue and silver. Letters running from headlamp to engineer’s cab said
CALIFORNIA ZEPHYR
.

My parents held off the swarming little kids so my sister and I could sit in the cab first. Lily was crying. I might have too, if I was a girl.

“It’s our dream train,” she said.

“Our birthday train,” I said.

I closed my eyes. I was back in the Moffat Tunnel. I could hear the click of train wheels.

Lily poked me. She was grinning. “Smell anything?”

I sniffed. “Pickles!”

We laughed.

I told her I was sorry I missed our birthday sleepwalk at the train station. I told her if it would make her feel better she could punch me one time to make up for it. She did.

I invited her to come to the new clubhouse. She said she has better things to do. I told her Bump is gone. I told her we’re not the Death Rays anymore. She could bring Sydney and Devon. She said why would she want to hang out with a bunch of boys. I reminded her that a couple months ago she said she wasn’t a girl. She punched me again.

The next day we tried to play hide-and-seek. We couldn’t.

Lily said “I ate them” before I could say “Where are my pumpkin seeds?”

It looks like we’re back on track.

And it feels like the end of this book, so

N
ot so fast, buster.

Before we wrap this thing up, one thing’s gonna change. I don’t want to hear you tell me one more time—ever!—that you’re older than me.

I
t’s only eleven minutes.

F
eels like eleven years. As long as you have a death grip on the Big Eleven, I’m never going to feel really equal. So give them up. All eleven minutes.
Now.

O
kay. But only if you stop stealing my pumpkin seeds. Deal?

D
eal.

Okay…so let’s do the last chapter together, since now we’re finally, really, truly, totally equal

s
ister-approved

t
wins!