Nekomah Creek (13 page)

I was still feeling kind of bummed out when I walked into the cafeteria that night for the party, but I started to cheer up when I saw my costume was a hit.

“How’d he
do
that?” I heard West Feikart whisper.

I was wearing a robot suit of toy Construx pieces. Dad had helped me rig up the lights on it with batteries so I not only glowed in the dark, I flashed!

For a minute I checked out everybody else’s costumes while they checked out mine. All West had done was add greasy green camouflage makeup to the clothes he always wore. Also a helmet with ferns stuck in it. Ben was a mummy. Willow Daley had turned her hair punk-rocker purple. Monica
Sturdivant looked totally silly as a kitty, of course, tiptoeing around, meowing at everybody. She sounded like that puppet on Mr. Rogers. “Meow, like your meow costume meow.”

Freddie and Lucy—or maybe I should say Mickey and Minnie Mouse—were bug-eyed at all this. They clung to Mom’s legs when somebody in a rubber gorilla mask stuck his face down at them and made scary noises.

“Knock it off, Orin,” West said.

So that was Orin. Should have known.

“It’s just pretend,” Mom said soothingly, glancing at Orin. “Look. See, there’s Daddy, over by the cornstalks.”

Dad had come early to fill up the washtub for apple bobbing. Spotting us, he gave the little two-fingered oink-oink salute he’d been practicing ever since he put on his rubber pig snout. Then he turned around and wagged his curly pink pipe-cleaner tail.

I rolled my eyes. What a nut.

“Daddee! Daddee!” The twins let go of Mom and headed toward him. Mom followed.

By now I didn’t feel so worried about Dad’s nuttiness. For one thing, Mrs. Van Gent was nowhere in sight. Also, lots of people had crazy costumes. Even some of the teachers.

But not Mrs. Perkins. She was selling tickets for the game booths. Looked like her idea of getting
wild and crazy was to wear pants instead of a dress.

The refreshment table was loaded. I’d start with a pumpkin-shaped sugar cookie and go on from there. Carameled apples, doughnuts, popcorn balls …

“Robby, you look terrific!” It was Mrs. Kassel, my teacher from last year. She was ladling punch, wearing a headband with two bobbly eyeballs boinging from wires. She gave me a big silver grin.

I don’t know why, but I loved those braces of hers. Or maybe it was just her smile I liked, with or without braces. She had a neat voice, too, a little husky, like she was coming down with laryngitis.

“Say,” she said, “did you see ‘The Far Side’ this morning?”

I grinned. “Yeah, that was a good one.”

We both liked that comic strip. She always said I had a weird sense of humor for a kid. Sometimes last year when she didn’t get the joke, she’d ask me to explain it.

“How’s fourth grade going for you?”

“Oh, pretty good.” At the moment that seemed true enough. Nobody made fun of me for not being a champion foursquare player at recess, my diorama project was turning out neat, and everybody liked my costume.

“Is that your little brother and sister out there? What a riot!”

The twins had joined the big kids on the dance floor. It wasn’t the polka or Zydeco music but it had a beat—that’s all Freddie and Lucy cared about.

Mom had made Lucy a red-and-white polka-dot dress out of some curtains she got at the thrift shop, and Lucy was real excited about twirling her stiff petticoats. Freddie had red shorts with two big buttons. He was more into stomping.

Mrs. Kassel watched them, her ladle poised in mid-air. “How did you do those noses? They look so cute!”

“Stove black. That was my idea.”

She shook her head, half ready to run out and scoop them up for hugs. I wasn’t jealous, though. I already knew she liked me. Maybe that makes all the difference.

See, sometimes I
do
hate it when people carry on over the twins. When we first started taking them out to the store and stuff, it was shocking, how much attention they got. Ladies we didn’t even know would come up and gush on and on … “How cute! How darling! And
two
of them!” Then they’d push their grocery carts past without ever once even looking at me. What
was
I all of a sudden, the invisible kid?

If Mom tried to kind of draw me into the picture, point out that actually she had
three
children, the other lady would always say to me, “My, I bet you’re a big help to your mother.” I got so sick of
that! Sometimes I felt like saying, “No, I’m no help at all. Actually I’m a big pain, okay?”

There was only one thing worse—the people who paid no attention to Freddie and Lucy at all …

“Hey, Robby.” It was Jason, dressed as a football player. “Let’s go do the darts and stuff. Ask your dad for some money.”

I robot-walked over to the apple-bobbing corner. Dad was oink-oinking all over the place, adding apples to the washtub while the kindergarteners laughed and splashed and held their stomachs like they ached with giggling.

“Dad, I need money for the game booths.”

“Oink, oink!”

Another burst of giggling.

“It’s for a good cause,” I reminded him as he pulled out his wallet. After the party was paid for, the extra money would go to the school’s Thanksgiving Basket fund. One of the sawmills in Douglas Bay had closed, and this year we wanted to help the families of the people who’d been laid off.

After Jason and Ben and I had done all the different booths, we decided to get in line for the haunted house. But first I detoured by the refreshment table so I’d have something while I waited. I was snagging a popcorn ball when Rose came up to me.

“Your costume looks great,” she said.

“Uh, yours too.”

She was Princess Leia, with a sheet gathered into a flowy dress and her hair in coils over her ears.

“Where you going?” she asked as I turned to leave.

“The haunted house.”

“I’ll go with you.” She took a popcorn ball for herself and followed. “Um, Robby? Thanks for … you know, what you did on the playground today.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

She smiled. “Yes you did. That’s the first time anybody’s ever taken my side in front of Orin Downard.”

“Oh.” Jason and Ben were already farther ahead in line. Rose and I got stuck behind this eighth-grade alien who kept bugging the ballerina in front of him.

“Hey, Rose,” I said, hoping to change the subject. “Have you ever heard of this huge bookstore in Portland called Powell’s?”

She shook her head no.

“Well, it’s supposed to be great. A whole block of books. Anyway, my parents promised to take me up there Saturday and I was wondering if … well, do you want to go too?”

“Go with
you
?”

“Well, yeah.” For crying out loud, it wasn’t supposed to be a date. It’s just that Dad said I could bring a friend, and I knew Rose would appreciate
it. I mean, it’d be wasted on Jason. All he reads is comic books.

“I’ll ask my mom,” Rose said. “But I’m sure it’ll be okay.” She bit into her popcorn ball. I could tell she was excited. But then a shadow went over her face. “I wouldn’t be able to buy much, though.”

“Well, we’ll probably go to the zoo and the science museum, too.”

“Really? Wow! And even if I couldn’t buy any, just seeing all those books …”

As the line inched forward, we watched the eighth graders dancing and finished our popcorn balls. Getting closer, we could hear the spooky sounds coming out of the haunted house.

Just as we reached the entrance, Rose tipped her head toward mine. “Did you hear about Amber Hixon?”

My scalp prickled. “Hear what?”

“They took her away from her parents.”

“What?”

“My mom heard these social workers came and got her right after school today. Now she’s probably going to a foster home.”

She might as well have socked me in the gut. “But how could they just take her away from her family?”

“I don’t know. My mom thinks it was the school counselor’s idea.”

A hand reached out from the cardboard door of the haunted house and pulled me into the darkness.
It was hot and stinky and I could hardly breathe.

Somebody stuck my hand into a bowl of what was probably spaghetti. “Heeeeerrrreee … feel some nice guts!” Then a werewolf popped up in front of me. “Aarrrggghh!”

I wasn’t a very good customer, though. All of a sudden I was too busy being scared about real things to sweat the pretend stuff. I was just stumbling along, thinking of Amber’s trying-not-to-cry face, the words she’d muttered to me after she came back from Mrs. Van Gent’s office the other day. “I swear, Robby,” she’d said, “families don’t mean nothing to that woman.”

A foster home. I’d read about those. That’s where kids go if things aren’t right at their house. In one book a boy got taken away because his father accidentally ran over his legs with a car. But Amber didn’t have broken legs or anything. Her parents had bought her a pony, for crying out loud.

Ahead of us, the ballerina squealed.
I have to get out of here
, I thought, my Construx suit banging against the cardboard walls.
I have to hear the rest of this
.

“Rose?” I said into the darkness. “Rose, are you there?”

I felt a hand take mine. Spaghetti sauce gooshed between our fingers.

“I’m right here. Isn’t this scary?”

“Rose,” I whispered, “how could Mrs. Van Gent get Amber taken away?”

“What? Oh, well, I guess they just thought her family was too weird.”

“Eeeeekkk!” A vampire with a flash-lit face loomed in front of us.

This was impossible. I concentrated on pulling Rose through the maze as fast as I could. Finally we broke into the cooler air of the gym.

“That was fun!” Rose said, her cheeks pink.

Suddenly I realized we were still holding hands. I dropped hers and wiped spaghetti gunk on my jeans.

“But Rose, who’s they?”

“Who’s they who?”

“Amber Hixon,” I said impatiently. “Who thought her family was weird?”

Rose blinked like she’d already forgotten about it. “Oh. Well, maybe it started with Mrs. Perkins and the counselor. My mom says teachers have to report it if they think a kid’s in trouble. It’s the law. And then there’s something called Children’s Services. That’s the government.”

“The
government
? Can they do that? Just take a kid away from his—” I caught myself. “I mean
her
family?”

Rose peered at me. “Robby? How come you’re so upset about this?”

“I’m not upset.”

“You act upset.” She gave me a Concerned Look. “Was Amber your girlfriend?”

“No!” It came out meaner sounding than I meant it to. “I just—it doesn’t seem fair, that’s all.”

She nodded. “My mom doesn’t think it is, either. It’s supposed to be for the kid’s own good, but sometimes … Well, she had a friend whose kids were taken away and my mom said it was just because they didn’t like her lifestyle.”

“What do you mean, her lifestyle?”

“You know, the way they lived. This social worker was always coming around, criticizing her housekeeping, saying the kids would get sick if she didn’t keep things cleaner. Stuff like that.”

“Jeepers.” The teachers, the counselors, and social workers from the government. I never realized they had so much power.

Too bad I didn’t have Mrs. Kassel anymore. She thought my family was okay. But maybe Mrs. Perkins figured we were hippies. Maybe she hated hippies as much as Orin’s family did.

Suddenly I had an awful thought. I’ll bet she suspected my folks had some terrible secret to hide, Dad marching into the school like that and telling her they didn’t want me talking to the counselor …

“I didn’t mean to spoil the party for you,” I heard Rose say. “I’ll go find my mom and ask about going to Portland, okay?”

“Yeah, sure.” Suddenly I just wanted to be near
my parents. I headed for the apple bobbing as fast as my robot suit would let me.

“Oink, oink,” Dad said. “How was the haunted house?”

“Okay.”

“Must have been scary. You’re shaking.”

Lucy and Freddie were hanging over the edge of the washtub, poking the apples down with their fingers, giggling as they bobbed back up.

A second grader pushed her face through the water, trying to corner an apple. Her braids were getting wet.

“Brrr! Looks awfully cold.”

I turned around. It was Mrs. Perkins, watching us.

Dad grinned. “Doesn’t seem to faze them, does it?”

She shook her head. “At my last school, Beaverdale, we always hung the apples from strings. More sanitary, the principal said.”

“Mr. Hummer!” Another kid tugged at Dad’s shirt. “Is it my turn yet?”

“Hang on!” Dad gave him the little oink-oink salute and turned back to Mrs. Perkins. “Actually, I never thought of that. Maybe next year we—”

“Dad, look out!”

Splash
.

“Lucy!”

In a flash Dad scooped her from the tub. “For
cryin’ out loud!” he said, standing her to drip on the wood floor.