When Friendship Followed Me Home (4 page)

“Yeah?”

“A hundred and eleven! That's how many books I'm going to write! That's how many years I'm going to live! Bye Flip!”

I texted Chucky.

BC: Who told you the wink means profound admiration and respect?

CM: Rayburn, why?

10

DESTINED FOR AMAZINGNESS

“He's going to be amazing with the kids,” the lady at the Read to Rufus office said.

Mom elbowed me and got back to signing the paper that said she would sponsor my training to become a Read to Rufus facilitator because I was underage.

“This girl, my friend, we'd like to start a program at my library,” I said.

“Sounds fantastic,” the lady said. “You and Flip will need to attend some classes to get him certified. There's a bunch of homework too. Can you commit to that?”

“A hundred and eleven percent,” I said.

“He's absolutely devoted to you, Ben,” the lady said. “Go ahead, do it again. I'd like to take a picture and post it on the website, if you're cool with that.”

I read to Flip from
The Memory Door
, by N. T. Castillo-Cormier. His little ears perked up and he cocked his head, his
big gold eyes on me. When I winked at him he dove at my mouth and stuck his peanut-butter-stinking tongue in there.

“Check your training books about how to teach him not to fly at the reader's face,” the lady said. Her phone camera clicked. “Keep going, Ben.”

The book was about this guy who finds a doorway that'll let him travel a hundred and forty million years into the future. “‘He opened the door and the whole Earth was ice. The sky was black even though the sun was shining. The sun itself was ten times bigger, but the future was all cold wind. He turned around to go back home, but the door had disappeared, and now it and everything and everyone he'd ever known and loved existed only in his memory.'”

• • •

The subway car was crowded on the way home. I left the backpack open, and Flip stuck his little head out to look around. This girl in the next seat said, “I want to cuddle him till I crush him.” I held the backpack a little closer to me. The train stopped and the girl got off and actually said bye to me.

“Wield your newfound power gently, Traveler,” Mom said. “Who's this friend you were talking about? The one who's going to help you set up a Read to Rufus clinic at the library?”

“You know, just this girl I met.”

“Okay,” Mom said. “How long have you known her?”

“Like, since last winter? Mom, she's a
library
girl, for cripe's sake. Relax.”

She put me into a sort of headlock and kissed my forehead and then she went back to her book, some nonfiction thing about getting traumatized kids to talk again. That's what she did for work. That was how we met.

I didn't want to think about it anymore, the time before I went to live with Mom.

I put on my headphones and listened to the
Transformers
soundtrack and dreamed about the future, about all of us hanging out at the library: Flip and me and the Read to Rufus kids and Halley Like the Comet.

11

I WRITE, THEREFORE I AM

Wednesday was Rayburn-free. Word was getting around school that he cut out to do something illegal, not to mention profitable. Angelina started the rumor, and the way she said it, I was pretty sure she thought Rayburn was the most fascinating humanoid on the planet. “He's gonna be so rich someday!” Big deal. A rich moron, some prize.

Chucky and I were going to eat in the cafeteria, but the urge for half-decent slices overwhelmed us and we went out to Nice Guy Eddie's. “Does she have a nice butt at least, the library chick?”

“Mold?”

“Cof
fin?”

“Do I need to smack the snot out of you?”

“Sure, pick on the short kid.
Now
you're a tough guy. My hero. Are you going to eat the rest of that?”

“What, you want to lick the plate?” I said. He did, too.

After school I picked up Flip and we went to the library. I looked through the window and saw the place was packed. Somebody was bound to hiss, “No dogs allowed!” I rapped on the glass until Mrs. Lorentz came out.

“I did what Halley said. I started getting Flip certified as a therapy dog.”

“Totally awesome,” Mrs. Lorentz said. “Coincidentally, she started looking into setting up the reading clinic here. She was just talking about you, in fact. She said, ‘I bet sci-fi boy shows up in ten minutes.' That was—”

“Ten minutes ago,” Halley said as she came outside. She wore a red beret and a black hoodie with white writing on the front that said:
I WRITE, THEREFORE I AM
. She scooped up Flip and slung her backpack over her shoulder. “Let's go.”

“Where?”

“You know on the back wall inside, the picture
Dreamland at Night
?” she said.

“It's my favorite.”

“It's everybody's.” She grabbed my hand and led me toward the water.

I'd never held hands with anybody before, especially in front of their mom.

“I'm not crushing on you,” she said.

“No, I know,” I said. “Just friends, totally.”

“Just?
What's better than friends? Sorry my hands are freezing.”

“I don't mind,” I said.

She double squeezed my hand and we didn't say anything for a while and just walked sort of fast. We both breathed hard. Then she said, “So?”

“So.”

“What's your dad do?”

“Who knows?” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “Sorry.”

I shrugged. “My mom's a speech pathologist, though.”

“That's awesome.”

“What's your dad do?” I said.

“He's a magician. What's with the face?”

“No, that's cool.”

“It
is,
at least that's what everybody says except you.”

“They're sneaky,” I said. “Their purpose in life is to trick you.”

“To make you
believe,”
she said.

“In what?”

“A hundred and eleven.” She showed me her palm. She'd retraced the backward imprint from Monday with a sparkly purple marker.

“The magic box,” she said.

The magic box.
I blinked it away. “It's actually called a magic square,” I said. “Besides, that's math, not magic.”

“They're the same thing,” she said.

“I kind of had a bad experience with a magician this one time.” I blinked harder to push it back.

“Tell me,” she said.

“What's your book about?” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “Okay, I'll show you.”

We went to the new Luna Park. It was closed that day, but we looked through the fence. The golden tower from 1905 was gone. Flip begged me to pick him up. This seagull was giving him bad eyes, like he'd make a nice snack. The roller-coaster track was one of those high-tech ones, just one long mean rail slicing up the gray sky. “I like the old one better,” I said.

“I love 'em both,” Halley said.

“The 1905 one was all silvery and soft gold.”

“Because it's a black-and-white
picture,
hello? The new one's
bright.
Look at all that pink paint. Anyway, you'd be able to go back and visit the old one if I let you read my novella. Which of course I totally won't, not ever, which is a shame since the most pivotal scene in the whole entire story is set in Luna Park, 1905.”

“I understand. I won't push you—”

“Okay, o
kay
already, if you insist. But for all my bravado
I'm actually spectacularly fragile when it comes to my art, so even if you hate it, tell me you love it. I'm perfectly okay with being lied to on that score.”

“Deal.”

She huffed. “So there's this girl.”

“There always is,” I said.

“She runs away to Luna Park.”

“The new one or the old one?”

“Both.”

“Interesting,” I said. “Why's she run away? Crummy parents?”

“They died instantly in a car crash.”

“They always do.”

“Well, you have to get rid of them somehow, and that seemed the most merciful yet expeditious way. Otherwise how do you turn her into an orphan? This is a middle grade story, like for ages ten to fourteen, and the rule is you need an orphan.”

“I hear you.”

“The girl, she has these flying dreams all the time. She thinks they mean she's supposed to be a trapeze artist, so she starts training to do that. You know the ride where you can do the trapeze, and you're connected to safety cables in case you fall? Well, she's the one who hooks you up to the wires.”

“The ride attendant.”

“At night, when the park closes, she practices. Problem is,
she's not very good. She doesn't have the confidence, you know? She needs somebody to cheer her on.”

“This is where the boy comes in. Let me guess: He's the guy who keeps the lights on for her after the park shuts down. The park electrician or whatever, right?”

“No, but I like that. I may steal it.”

“All yours. Everybody's always stealing from me anyway.”

“What do they steal?” she said. “Are you rich? I'm both suspicious of and fascinated by rich people.”

“For a twelve-year-old I do okay. I have probably like the third-biggest coupon delivery route in my whole district.”

“Golly.”

“Thanks. Yeah. So how do they meet in the first place, the girl and the boy?”

“Through the girl's friend, this magician who works at the park,” she said, “and I'm going to stop right there for now. You'll have to meet my dad before I can continue.”

“Why?”

“Because you have to believe in magic for this story to work, and Mercurious Raines is the best person to get you there.”

“Mercurious
Raines?”

“Yup. Okay, so from what you've heard so far, the setup, what do you think?”

“I love it.”

“You're lying again.” She pecked my cheek and grabbed Flip and they went down to the water. She cheered Flip on as he chased the wave froth. The sun came through here and there and it was like spotlights. One of them passed over Halley and she was gold for around ten or eleven seconds.

• • •

All I could think about on the way home was that I didn't want to move to Florida now. Flip started whimpering as we came to my apartment building, probably because the rain was starting, I figured. Nope.

I stepped into the apartment and saw an old lady sitting at the kitchen table with Mom. Flip jumped into the woman's lap. She smothered him with kisses and said, “Darling, how Mommy missed you!”

12

THE TRAVELER FROM THE PAST

Flip licked the tears out of the old lady's eyes. Her clothes were dirty, her sneakers worn thin. She showed me a grimy picture, her and Flip all cuddled up in front of a pine tree lit silver and red. In the picture the woman looked nice, pretty clothes, sweet smile. The dog's tail wasn't bent and chomped. It was all fluffed up like somebody went at it with a blow dryer for an hour and a half. “Spencer's first Christmas,” she said.

“We've been calling him Flip,” I said. When the dog heard the name Halley gave him he squirmed out of the woman's arms and hopped up into my lap. He was shivering.

“Where do you live?” Mom said. She poured the woman coffee.

The woman called out,
“Spen
cer. Here now, my angel.”

I set him down. He hesitated. He went to her, licked her hand once and came right back to me.

The woman nodded. “I see,” she said. She looked around our nice comfy kitchen. She stopped on the picture of Laura. She looked at Flip in my arms. “Spencer seems to have found a fine, safe home here,” the woman said. “Flip, I mean. He seems to have found himself a family.”

I wasn't going to say anything to that, but Mom was halfway into “Well, now, let's talk about this,” when the woman just up and ran out of our apartment.

“Ben, get the umbrella and come with me,” Mom said. “Leave Flip here.”

The elevator doors closed just as we got to them. By the time the next one came and we got to the lobby, the woman was gone. We went outside. Here it was September, and the air was cold with all the rain. It tore the leaves from the trees. Then I saw her at the end of the street, sitting on the curb.

“Come back inside,” Mom said. “We'll have some nice hot soup.”

“Forty dollars,” the woman said. “I got sick and had to go into the hospital. I couldn't pay my doctor's bills. I lost my apartment. They don't let animals into the homeless shelters. We slept in the waiting rooms at the airport terminals, traipsing from one to the other when the security guards made us move. When I fell asleep, a man tried to take Spencer. After that we slept in the ATM lobbies. I was begging out in front of the bank one night, holding the door for people on
their way to the cash machine. A woman said she would give me forty dollars for Spencer. She seemed like a nice woman. I thought Spencer would be safer with her.”

“You were going to sell him again, if we gave him to you just now, right?” I said.

“Ben,” Mom said. “I won't have you talking that way to our fellow traveler.”

“She's not my fellow anything.”

“I could never do that to him again,” the old woman said. “I still can't believe I did it. I couldn't feed him anymore. I couldn't feed
me.
I was starving.”

“Do you see how messed up his tail is?”

“Not another word, son,” Mom said. “Come with us,” she said to the lady. “I can help you find the help you need.”

“What I need is money.”

Mom took all the money out of her wallet and gave it to the woman. “Ben, give our friend here whatever you have.”

I reached into my pocket. “I only have a dollar,” I lied. All year round I delivered those coupons before school, rain, sleet, heat, snow. In winter I shoveled sidewalks and driveways on the block where the people owned one-family houses. In summer I washed their cars and weeded their gardens. First Rayburn and now this lady. Why should I hand over my money to somebody who sold Flip to a stranger? I was so mad I didn't even want to let her have the crumpled dollar.

“Give it to her,” Mom said.

I put the bill into the woman's hand, and she took off.

Mom nudged me to follow her. “Here, go, give her the umbrella.”

The lady wouldn't take it. She kept going.

“Thank you, Ben,” Mom said.

“It was just a stupid dollar.”

“It was everything.”

• • •

That night Flip did great at his training session for the therapy dog certification. He already knew lots of tricks, roll over and play dead and even this one called the fighter. The guy running the class said, “Flip, box.” That little dog stood on his hind legs and jabbed the air with his front paws. I couldn't stop thinking about the old lady and how many hours she must have spent teaching him that one.

It took a long time to get home. The rain made the trains run slow. Mom nudged me. “Cheer up.”

I took Flip out of the backpack and he snored in my lap and I cheered up.