by Jon Scieszka
To kill time, he decided to look for secret doors. He went around the room, knocking quietly on the walls to see if any of them were hollow.
He stopped that when he heard Louise, from the other side of the wall, say, “I hear knocking! Knocking! I’m here, Sharon! She has a bow in her hair! Knock again! Come on, honey! You can do it!”
He sat down behind the table and hid his head with the ugly green planter and the plastic flowers. He opened his book of world records and tried to read.
The house was silent. There was a distant ticking, that was all. He flipped a few pages.
Boring. Exciting at other times, but boring right now, when there was a fortune to find.
He poked his head up.
And found everything had changed.
The world outside the window was black, not gray. The ugly floral wallpaper was gone. The eighties furniture was gone. The room was restored to its old look, with ancient, stuffed chairs and a fireplace in the wall. There was no fire in the fireplace, though, despite the cold. Instead, the wood was sheeted with ice, and something black dripped from the chimney. The flowers in the ugly green plant holder were dead.
Paul got a very bad feeling.
He crept to the door and opened it.
The hall with the staircase was bleary, as if his eyes wouldn’t focus. He saw shadows flicking back and forth on the landing above him.
He didn’t know what had happened. He wondered if he was dreaming. Or if this was a special kind of haunting, and he was walking into some ghostly trap.
He creaked down the hallway. And then, finally, he found himself in the dining room.
Once again, Mrs. Giovetti’s awful wallpaper was gone. Instead, there was different awful wallpaper. The table and chairs were now new. There were portraits on the walls. The table was set for a meal with fine china and knives and forks and candles.
The candles were out. All of the plates had been smashed, and were in pieces at their place settings.
All except for one plate. At the head of the table. And sitting at the head of the table, facing away from Paul, was an old man with white, white hair.
Paul stared at the old man’s back. It rose and fell with ragged breathing. That was the only sound in the room, other than the ticking of the clock.
The man’s head began to turn.
Paul panicked. He backed up.
The man was rising from his seat.
Paul scrambled to get back to the hallway—but he remembered the flickering shapes there, too.
The man turned. It was, apparently, Josiah Smitch. His face was square and sad, with heavy lines around the mouth.
“Young sir,” hissed the ghost. “Your mediums are pelting me.”
Paul had no idea what the ghost was talking about.
“The women who are trying to communicate. They are an irritation. Like someone ringing a servant’s bell without cease. I do not come when called.”
Paul shook his head a little. He didn’t want the ghost to get mad.
But a thought struck him: this would be a really, really good time to talk to the dead guy about his fortune.
Carefully, he said, “Josiah . . . Smitch?”
“Yes, boy.”
“It’s, uh, great to meet you. We’re making a whole show about you.”
“A show? I pray there are no musical numbers.”
“It’s not that kind of show.”
“Hallelujah. I cannot abide dancing girls.”
“It’s a show about you and your sons, and how they carved ‘The Old Nuisance’ on your tombstone and everything. And then, you know, you hid your treasure.”
Josiah Smitch wobbled for a second. He turned back to the table and surveyed the smashed porcelain. “That’s what they’re saying, is it?” he whispered.
“Yeah,” said Paul. “That’s what I heard.”
The old man turned back to Paul. He sniffed, long and hard. Paul realized that the dead man was trying not to cry.
Smitch raised his hand, and the walls faded. Somehow, Paul could see into the bedroom, even though it was upstairs. And old Smitch was not just standing by Paul; he was also lying on the bed, dying, while his sons were gathered around him.
The old man, lying in his nightgown, croaked and coughed to his sons, “I have tried to make you better men. I have sought to teach you of industry and work and generosity. Until I know that you shall not squander my fortune, I shall not tell you where I have hidden it. I do this only . . . only because you are my own dear sons. . . . You are, you know, my own dear sons . . . and when I am gone, you are the only ones who will remember me.” His voice got very wet and fond, and he began choking on tears. He reached out to his sons with one clawlike hand—but none of them took it.
One son rolled his eyes.
Another whispered, “Let the old nuisance talk on. In a few hours, it’ll all be ours anyway.”
Then Paul saw the eyes of the old man on the bed. They were fixed on the son who’d spoken. He had heard. Paul could almost feel the old man’s sorrow and anger, here in his last minutes.
Suddenly, the walls appeared again. The old man was standing by Paul’s side. “A few hours later,” the ghost whispered, “I called upon my lawyer to change my burial arrangements. My sons were not the ones who put ‘The Old Nuisance’ upon my gravestone. I ordered it put there myself. Imagine how they gasped when it was unveiled.” He smiled. “And when they realized they would have to work for their money.”
“So, um, where did you hide it? The money. Who finally got it?”
“Oh, nobody got it. It’s still in the house.”
“You know, where?” asked Paul, kind of offhandedly.
“I can’t tell you,” said the man. “Because of them.”
And now Paul saw more spirits, growing thicker like mist, each one sitting in a seat at the table, slumped over, facedown upon the broken plates.
As they clarified in the air, one by one they lifted their heads up and stared at him.
Paul was getting scared. Their eyes were large and their mouths unfriendly and they rose to trap him there at their feast.
Old Josiah Smitch said to Paul, “The answer was right in front of your face.”
But his sons were swiping at the old man, disturbing him as if he were smoke. He billowed out to the side, closing his eyes sadly. The ghosts clawed their way toward Paul.
Paul scampered to the side, toward the door into the kitchen—no, the way was blocked by brothers.
He ran to the other side of the table. They drifted through the furniture toward him. He bolted out the door into the hallway.
The hallway was like it had been in the nineteenth century. Chinese lacquer paintings of beautiful women with tiny feet hung on the walls. Ghost sons and brothers were mobbing all the stairs and doors, their eyes dead set on Paul, their hands outstretched.
He tumbled into the room where he’d been hiding. There he was—in the same room he’d squatted in, but different, with different, old furniture, except—
No time to think . . . The ghosts were stepping in behind him.
But I know, he suddenly realized, and said out loud, “I know where the fortune is hidden! I know where he hid it!”
The ghosts stopped for a second, astounded.
Paul hurled himself into the middle of them.
As he passed through them, he caught the chill rush of centuries moving all around him. He saw his father and the psychics as if they were ghosts. He saw the camera and the modern furniture. He saw the nineteenth century passing away.
And then he was wobbling in the center of the floor by the foot of the stairs, looking into the living room, where he’d hidden earlier. The two psychics were standing in there, screaming at each other.
Phyllis was yelling, “There was no girl named Sharon!”
Louise was yelling, “Says who?”
“Says me!”
“Well, I heard her knock on the wall!”
“Hey,” Paul interjected. “I t
hink I know where the fortune is!”
Phyllis screamed at Louise, “You have no psychic powers!”
“Oh, yeah?”
“You heard me!”
“Once I contacted King Richard the Lionhearted!”
“I wouldn’t trust you to phone for a pizza!”
And hearing that insult, Louise snapped. She let out a weird, animal yowl.
“Excuse me,” said Paul, “but I just figured out that the ugly, three-legged—”
Louise picked up the ugly, three-legged flowerpot with the plastic flowers in it—“No!” said Paul—and smashed it over Phyllis’s head.
The pieces went everywhere.
There were plastic peonies all over the rug.
The two psychics breathed heavily and stared at each other.
“Okay, Louise,” Phyllis growled, tapping her forehead. “Can you tell what I’m thinking right now?”
Paul fell to his knees. He was surrounded by shards of pottery.
“It—it was the fortune!” he said. “The ghost told me that the fortune had been right in front of my face. And then, I saw that this flowerpot was here, even in old times. Josiah Smitch was in the China trade. I bet that this was some . . . some expensive Chinese piece of pottery.”
Paul’s father picked up a piece of heavy, green clay. “Like a Ming vase?”
“Not Ming. Shang,” whispered a voice. It was the ghost of Josiah Smitch. He was sitting next to Paul, apparently invisible to everyone else. He looked glum. “Much older than Ming,” he said. “Priceless.”
“Are you sure it’s Ming?” Dennis asked Paul. “It looks kind of ugly.”
Mrs. Giovetti explained, somewhat unhelpfully, “I used it to hold fake flowers.”
“Not Ming,” Paul muttered. “Shang.”
They all turned in surprise to look at him.
Josiah Smitch, invisibly, nodded.
The psychics looked ready to argue.
But then again, now Paul, apparently, was a psychic too.
The ghost sighed. He quoted, “‘He heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.’” Then he shrugged and walked through a wall.
Paul, young psychic, turned to the others. They were all staring at him. He had to say something.
Shang. Ming. Whatever. It was going to be a long day.
Believing in Brooklyn
by Matt de la Peña
“Or what if there was a wish machine on your wall?” Ray said, snatching the bag of generic-brand chips off Benny’s mattress and pushing a grubby hand inside.
Benny frowned at his friend. “What are you talking about, ‘a wish machine’?”
“Like, imagine that rig was built right into the house, B. And only kids knew how to use it. Be sick, right?”
Benny rolled his eyes and shrugged. He was over the stupid invention game Ray always wanted to play. What was the point? It wasn’t like any of Ray’s schizo ideas could actually come true.
A wish machine . . .
In somebody’s wall . . .
No wonder the guy was barely passing seventh grade.
Ray wasn’t done, though. “Wouldn’t even have buttons, man. You’d just walk up to it and—”
“Dude, could we talk about something else?” Benny interrupted.
“I’m saying, though,” Ray said. “You’d just walk up to it and whatever you thought in your head would come sliding out the slot. Like a Coke machine. Only nobody would think Coke, man, ’cause that’s lame compared to other things you could think up.”
Benny waved Ray off and snatched back the bag of chips. He poured the last few salty crumbs onto his tongue and swallowed. “Good luck with that,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I guess you still put cookies out for Santa, too, right?”
They were both sort of laughing now, Benny play-punching Ray in the ribs and Ray fending him off.
Soon they were talking about Ray’s other favorite subject. Girls. More specifically, Sylvia Lawson, a neighborhood basketball star’s little sister. Ray had been passing notes back and forth with Sylvia every afternoon during history. According to Ray, they were now talking face-to-face a little, too. Between classes.
“Yo, she wants to meet at the movies on Sunday,” Ray said, giving himself a couple congratulatory thumps on the chest with the heel of his hand.
“Ronny know about this?” Benny said.
“Like I care.”
Benny shook his head. “Bet you start caring when he’s all up in your face. Dude’s twice your size.”
“Why’s it gotta be anybody’s business, B? We’re talking about a PG movie.”
Benny waved off his friend and peeped the clock. Almost eight.
Ray looked, too, and rolled his eyes. “I’m too grown to have some stupid curfew anymore.” Still, he zipped open his backpack and shoved his remedial math book inside and zipped it back up.
Benny stood. “Hang on a sec and I’ll walk you out.”
When he came back from the bathroom he found Ray taping a piece of notebook paper to his bedroom wall, right above the hollowed-out fireplace. “Come on, man,” Benny said, “you know my grandma trips about the wallpaper.”
“It’s just Scotch tape,” Ray said. “It barely even sticks.”
Benny stared at Ray’s stick-figure drawing of a machine. The crooked caption read: MAGICAL WISH MACHINE. He laughed a little and shook his head, told Ray he had emotional problems.
They walked out into the living room, both waving to Benny’s sick grandma, who was slumped into the old couch, all bones and perm, watching the news on their tiny TV.
“All right, Mrs. Garcia,” Ray said.
“Pull up them pants, Raymond,” she snapped. “At least try and look like a human being.”
She turned to Benny and Ray, coughing a little, and smiled her old lady smile. Benny watched Ray smile back, uncomfortably, and pull up his sagging jeans.
“Wait till I mention about the wallpaper,” he told Ray under his breath.
They gave a quick fist bump, then Ray was out the door and Benny went over and sat next to his grandma, even though he hated watching news.
That night Benny couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned, thinking too hard. About the standardized test he’d have to take to get into a decent high school. About the Brooklyn hoop tournament he didn’t sign up for this season. About Sylvia’s friend Julie, who he still hadn’t talked to, even though she was only three lockers down and occasionally shot him flirty looks.
But mostly Benny thought about his sick grandma, asleep in the next room. He imagined her chronic lung problem as a street gang of microscopic bugs that had crawled in through her ear one morning while she sat on the stoop sipping her sweet coffee. After a long march through his grandma’s larynx and windpipe the bugs had settled in her lungs, where they continually tagged her organ lining with miniature cans of spray paint, making it impossible for her to breathe regular.
On cue, he heard his grandmother start coughing again in the next room.
What would he do if something happened to his grandma? He couldn’t even think about it without feeling a hole opening in his stomach.
Benny sat up and rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock. Past midnight. He counted how many hours until he had to be up for school. Then he pulled off his blanket and went for his Game Boy.
On his way to the closet, though, he found himself standing in front of the lopsided drawing Ray had taped above the fireplace. He grinned a little thinking how people who were crappy at one thing, like Ray with school, were supposed to be decent at something else. For Ray, though, that “something else” definitely wasn’t art.
Man, Benny thought. Was Ray good at anything? Girls maybe. But it wasn’t like you had to do anything to be good at girls, right? Some people just had it like that.
Then Benny did something out of character.
He leaned toward the schizo drawing and thought, My wish is for earplugs I could wear at night. So no microscopic bug
s could sneak in with their spray-paint cans.
Just thinking it, though, didn’t seem official enough so Benny said it, too. “I wish for earplugs I could sleep with. Got that, Mr. Santa Claus? Earplugs.”
He cracked up at himself and grabbed the Game Boy from the closet and played his outdated war game on mute. After two or three games he paused it for a sec to rest his eyes and fell asleep sitting up.
Benny woke up the next morning with a stiff neck. He climbed out of bed bleary-eyed and dragged himself to the bathroom to shower. As he walked back into his room he spotted something odd and stopped in his tracks.
The cracked stool he kept stored in his closet was now shoved inside the fake fireplace, right beneath Ray’s wish machine drawing. On top of the stool was a pair of headphones he’d never seen before.
Benny picked up the phones and looked them over. Sonys that covered the entire ear. The initials JB etched into the right side. They weren’t earplugs, but they were definitely in the same ballpark. Which was really weird. He glanced at Ray’s drawing, then back at the headphones, then he spun around expecting to see Ray at the door, laughing. But there was nobody.
Benny dressed and got his book bag together and went into the living room, where his grandma was cackling at something on The Today Show.
“Hey, Grams,” he said. “Did Ray stop by when I was in the shower?”
She turned to him, frowning. “You think I’d let that little hoodlum in here unsupervised?”
“Was anybody here? Did Auntie Rosa bring groceries early?”
“Nobody was here, Benny.” She covered her mouth as she coughed. “At least nobody who still walks among us.”
The sicker his grandma became, the more she spoke about ghosts. Sometimes she even talked to Benny’s grandpa in her room. With the door closed. Even though he’d been gone over twenty-five years. Just a week ago he’d heard her sniffling through the door, explaining to her dead husband that she’d lost the silver chain he’d given her on their last anniversary together.
Benny considered that.
Maybe the ghost of the grandpa he’d never met was messing with him. Then Benny remembered a very important fact: he didn’t believe in ghosts, or wish machines.