When Friendship Followed Me Home (11 page)

31

GINGER

Flip started shaking when we were two blocks away, and then I heard them—Jeanie and Leo—from two houses up the block. I didn't even go inside. I sat on the stoop. Flip burrowed into my hoodie pocket.

“You think the poor kid wants to be here either?” Aunt Jeanie said. “Nobody wanted it to be this way. He's my sister's kid.”

“Ex
actly,
” Leo said. “He was Tess's, not yours.”

“He is, though. He's my responsibility. I promised.”

“He thinks I'm a loser. He looks down on me. It's enough to make me want to start drinking again.”

“No way, Leo. Uh-uh. You're not going to get away with that.”

“With what?”

“Blaming Ben for your lack of self-control.”

“It's
not
a lack of self-control. I can't help myself. It's a disease.”

“Whatever it is, it isn't Ben's fault.”

“The dog too. It's all too much. Too many moving parts. I like it simple.”

“Everybody does, Leo. It just isn't, okay? When are you going to grow up?”

“We never used to be like this, babe. We never used to fight.”

“Sure we did.”

“Not like this, honey. Not like this.”

I texted Aunt Jeanie.

BC: My friend and I have a huge science project due tomorrow. Can I stay over at his house tonight to finish it up?

A second later Aunt Jeanie and Leo stopped arguing. She told him about my text. “Do you think Tess would let him sleep over at a friend's on a school night?”

“Are you kidding?” Leo said. “A night off. This is a gift.”

Flip stopped shaking the second we turned the corner. My phone pinged with a text from Aunt Jeanie.

JC: No problem. Good luck.

• • •

“I lost my key,” I said.

“Where's your aunt?” Mrs. Mold said, pulling me inside the house. Flip trotted up to Ginger the cat and let her lick his ears. One of the girls fed him ice cream from her spoon.

“Mexico,” I said. “They're on vacation.”

“Coffin, I'm the mother of seven children. I can tell when
I'm not getting the truth. Eight children. When are they coming back from Mexico?”

“They'll be home late tonight, Mrs. Mold, I swear.”

Chucky and I settled in to watch
Spider-Man
. One of the older girls ran in with a laptop and showed me a deodorant commercial from probably twenty years ago. The pretty woman sniffs her pits and dances around the kitchen and rose petals fall and birds sing. “It's Mommy,” the girl said. “Wasn't she an awesome actress? You totally believe she smells terrific, right?”

“Charice, get out,” Chucky said.

“I'm Charmaine.”

“Whatever. Coffin, did you hear the latest about Rayburn?”

“Do I want to?”

“His mom threw him out. He's living at his cousin's, and the cousin's in the Mafia and he's killed like a thousand people and he's been to jail. You know that completely trashed house by the train station? That's where his cousin is. I give Rayburn a week before he gets locked up too.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I like gossip and Angelina likes people to feel sorry for her, like woe is me, my idiot boyfriend's in trouble again, isn't life so unfair? Dude, I can't believe you feel bad for him.”

“I didn't say that.”

“You didn't have to.”

“I better get to bed.”

“We're not even halfway into the movie,” Chucky said.

“I already saw it like ten times.”

“So?”

Mrs. Mold gave me a Benadryl—a second one—and set me up on the couch in the basement. It was nice and quiet down there. I wondered if I could make myself like Leo. He wasn't that bad. Yes, I could do it. I would. I just needed to catch my breath first, to get a good stress-free night's sleep, to dream about an awesome future: Halley and me and Flip and Read to Rufus and
The Magic Box
and how even if it was only in a made-up story I was on my way to see my mom again, the Contessa of Starlight, and it all started to feel so real.

• • •

This really loud wheezy sound woke me just before sunrise. Both dogs were with me on the couch now. So was the cat. Good old Ginger was curled up practically on top of my head. The wheezy sound was me. I fumbled through the dark to find my jeans and my inhaler. It was empty.

32

HOW WAS MEXICO?

The emergency room wasn't too crowded. I heard Aunt Jeanie before I saw her. The clicks from her high heels echoed in the hallway. “I can't possibly thank you enough,” she said.

Mrs. Mold waved her off. “Coffin's an angel. How was Mexico?”

Aunt Jeanie cocked her head, and I read her mind: Why are you asking me about a trip I took a year ago? “Bliss,” she said. “Have you been?”

“Can't say I have.” Mrs. Mold gave me a hard look, then she pecked my forehead. “Well, I'd better get a move on. The Nightgown Nightmares run roughshod over Charles. That's the name of their karaoke band.”

Aunt Jeanie filled out the paperwork while I finished inhaling the medicine from the nebulizer. “Stay home and rest,” the doctor said. That's the last thing I wanted to do. The medicine made me jumpy. Half an hour later we were in the car. “Can we swing by Chucky's to pick up Flip?”

“I'm prepared,” Aunt Jeanie said. The backseat was wrapped in a gray blanket. “Ben, how are you feeling?”

“Better. The medicine always helps.”

“No, I mean about everything. You know, living with Leo and me.”

“Good.”

She looked at me and then back at the road. “I think that was the most unconvincing ‘good' imaginable. Come on now. It's just us here. How are you feeling?”

“Like I'm messing you guys up,” I said.

She pulled the car over and held my hand for a little bit. “I can't have you feel that way, okay?”

“Okay.”

“It's going to take some time.”

“I know.”

“I feel awful for you.”

“I don't want you to, though.”

“I want to help you. Leo does too. We're all adjusting. It's a learning curve, right? I'm completely thrown, Ben. Tess was so easy about everything. The worst things could happen, and she smiled right through them. I miss her so much, you know?”

“I know.”

“I looked up to her. I wanted to be her. But I couldn't. She was always so pie in the sky, and for me it was always, I better have the raincoat handy. I don't want that to be true, but it is.
I'm
messing
you
up.”

“No. You got stuck with me.”

“Will you stop
saying
that? Please, all right? I'm going to be better. I promise. We'll keep each other's spirits up, okay? You and me. And Leo too. We're all still reeling, right? Things will get better. We just need time to pass. It'll work out fine. I really think it will.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. It'll work out.”

“Yes.” She wiped her eyes and got herself together. “We'll get the dog now, and then I'll make you some homemade soup. I'd very much like to do that for you. Now, connect your phone to the stereo and play me your favorite music.”

I played her this rap ballad Mom loved, full of banjos and trumpets that got her singing along and up out of her chair and dancing, and she'd get me going too, and we swung each other around. The chorus went:

What's your worry, what's your hurry,

where you running off to?

Stay a while, dance up a smile,

remember we're free to be true.

We're free. We're always. We're you and me.

I was so happy remembering her, the way Mom laughed loud when she danced like that, and then I looked over to Jeanie and she was crying again.

33

THE MYSTICAL MANHATTAN BOOKSTORE TOUR

Leo was still asleep when Aunt Jeanie and I got back to Cypress Hills. “Poor guy was up all night packing boxes for an early UPS pickup,” Aunt Jeanie said.

“Mine are ready to go too,” I said. “My books, I mean.”

“Fabulous. We'll drive them to Strand as soon as you're feeling better.”

“I feel terrific, really,” I said.

“No, rest. Soup's on the way.”

I sat out on the back porch with Flip. The fake marble angel had arrived. Its face was—shocker alert—weepy. I called Halley.
“Why are you home on a school day?”
she said.

I told her, and she wanted to bring me chocolate-covered pretzels. “I can't sit still,” I said. “Let's go into the city.”

• • •

The Mercurious-mobile pulled up to the house. We loaded the book boxes into it. “Ben, are you sure you're up for all this activity?” Aunt Jeanie said.

I felt like dancing. Halley's wig that day was gold with pink leopard spots. Leo came outside with some serious bed head. Mercurious put out his hand. “Mike Lorentz.”

“Right, right. Leo Petit.” He wiped his hand on his sweat shorts and shook. “I would have done this. Driven Ben, I mean, to the bookstore. I feel bad now. Can I get you a beer? Actually, I, we're out of beer. We have plenty of coffee, though.”

“I think the sellback desk closes at one,” I said. I had no idea when the sellback desk closed.

“I see,” Leo said. “I see. Well, thanks, Mark. Thanks for helping out champ here, I guess.”

“I'd love to take you up on that drink another time, Leo,” Mercurious said. “We all should get together for dinner.”

“That sounds nice,” Aunt Jeanie said.

• • •

Mercurious helped us load the books into Strand, and then he was off to the Museum of Natural History to talk with the parents of this kid who was having his bar mitzvah party there the next week. The clerk opened the boxes. “You took good care of these,” he said. “We'll have an estimate for you by five or so.”

We went to Mickey D's and got shakes and a burger for Flip. Halley only had two sips and gave me the rest of her shake, and I was completely messed up with a sugar rush. “Okay, so how's this for the next installment of
The Magic Box
?” I said. “Flip pilots the golden blimp toward the moon Libris without incident.”

“He's an expert guide dog, duh.” She took back her milk shake and gave some to Flip. His head disappeared into the cup.

“Flip docks the blimp to the antenna on top of the Branch for Interstellar Travel, where Penny is waiting with a dish of Chips Ahoy! of course.”

“How much do you love my mom? She's the total Queen of Cookies.”

“She whisks Helen, Bruce, and Flip into the star map room and rolls out a chart that goes from one end of the library to the other. Flip trots over it, sniffing one route and then another, until he finds the one he wants and marks it off with two scratches that make an X. Penny looks really worried. ‘Flip has chosen the fastest route, but also the most dangerous,' Penny says. Turns out the route goes smack-dab through the Rayburn Belt.”

“It has to be done,” Halley said. “‘However,' Penny says, ‘I'm less worried about the nefarious warlock zombie overlord Rayburn than I am the danger you present to yourselves. Promise me you won't peek into the magic box until you get to Mundum Nostrum.'”

“It's that scary, what's inside?” I said.

“That
powerful.
”

“Wow.”

“Totally.”

The manager came over. “Excuse me, kids, but you can't have the dog in here.”

“He's a therapy dog,” Halley said.

“It's okay,” I said. “We'll go.”

We went out. “You need to stand up for your rights,” Halley said, “not to mention Flip's.”

“Let's do a bookstore tour,” I said. “Book people love dogs.”

“We're selling back all your books and now you want to buy new ones. This makes perfect sense.”

“Me and my mom used to do like four a Saturday.”

“Let's start at McNally Jackson,” Halley said. “It's mystical in there.”

“Mystical?”

“The air's buzzy, like when you're watching a lightning storm that's far away and can't hurt you but it lights up the whole sky pink with violet curls.” We went to the sci-fi section and sat on the floor, back-to-back, and read while this little boy pet Flip.

“Ha, I got you to like
I, Robot,
” I said.

“It's purely research for
The Magic Box,
” Halley said. “This is the price I pay for having a writing partner with spectacularly undeveloped reading tastes.”

Next we went to Broadway, to the Scholastic bookstore. There was a huge painting of Clifford the Big Red Dog. Flip whined to climb out of the backpack. At Books of Wonder, Peter, the guy who ran it, knew both of us. “And I often thought you should know each other,” he said. “When it comes to book lovers, destiny is reality.” He treated us to snacks at the Birdbath Bakery. Halley had two bites of chocolate muffin and gave me the rest. At Barnes & Noble Union Square she bought her dad sparkly purple reading glasses. The last stop was Housing Works. “Everybody who works here's a volunteer,” Halley said. “They give all the money to people who are HIV positive or have AIDS, and especially to those who're homeless. Ben, we're so lucky.”

“That's what Mom used to say. This was her favorite.” We went to the checkout desk. “Coffin for a pickup,” I said to the clerk. I'd called it in the week before.

“Let me guess,” Halley said. “
Star Wars IV, A New Hope,
to replace the
three
copies we just dropped off at Strand.”

The clerk handed me
Feathers.
I handed it to Halley. Her eyes widened on the yellow sticker on the cover:
SIGNED COPY
.

Halley Lorentz screamed so loud the store went quiet. “OMG!
She
held this book.
I'm
holding this book. It's like I'm holding Jacqueline Woodson's hand! Flip, total knuckle bump! Ben Coffin, you are the most seriously amazing human being ever!” We went to the café and took turns
reading parts we liked, and then she got to the line about the special moments. “
‘Moments that stay with us forever and ever.' And there's that face again,” she said.

“That's the one line I don't like,” I said.

“Of course you do.”

“It's a lie. You can't go back.”

“But
The Magic Box,
the time travel to the past—”

“Is a story, fantasy. I'm talking about science now. Everything vanishes. It has to. That's how time works. My mom's gone, okay? The sooner I accept that, the fact I'll never see her again, the sooner I can move on.”

“You can see her every time you close your eyes and think about her.”

“But she's not
there.
Not
here.
She's ashes under a fake marble angel in a little yard in Cyprus Hills. That's it. That's all that's left of her.”

“No. Please. I can't think that way. I can't have
you
think that way. I really,
really
need you to believe that we're forever.” Her face was scrunched and red and wet.

She was freaking me out. One minute she's laughing and the next she's crying like somebody died. That's when it hit me. You don't tell a friend who's between chemotherapy treatments that you don't believe life goes on forever somehow, some impossible, non-scientific way. No, you be a good friend, and you lie. “Look, I wasn't thinking right,” I said. “I
was feeling sorry for myself and got messed up there for a second. Truth told, I
do
believe. Halley, seriously, I do.”

“You don't, though. You don't.” She held Flip close, and he licked her eyes. She put him in my lap and got up. “I better head on home.”

“Sure, no problem. Let's go.”

“Alone, Ben. I need to think, okay?”

“Halley—”

“No.” She put her hands on my chest to stop me from following her. An old guy said to her, “Is he bothering you?”

She got on the bus and pushed into the crowd and I couldn't see her anymore.