Vita thought hard for a moment, then ran toward the spinning stools and hopped onto one a stool away from Rosie.
“What are you doing?” Wile yelled.
She ignored him and focused all her energy on three pursuits: Holding onto this stool for dear life; grinning the widest, most genuine grin she could muster; and not vomiting. The first and second weren’t so hard—fighting to stay on the spinning stool was actually kind of fun now that she’d gotten a better grip. The third pursuit proved more challenging.
“Bet I can stay on the stool longer than you, kid,” she told Rosie, and congratulated herself on her steady tone of voice.
Rosie met her eyes then a small smile began to form on her face. “Is that a challenge?” she asked. As she did, the sound of glass cracking ceased, and Vita could hear the bubbling saxophone and trumpets once again. The stools also began to slow down a bit. They still went pretty fast, but their pace was no longer terrifying or nauseating.
“You bet it is,” Vita replied. “How about you, Wile?” she called over to the boy, who still stood beside the jukebox. “You think you can beat the girls?”
“Yeah, how about it?” Rosie asked. Now she sounded practically back to her old self.
At that the boy bounded over and onto the stool beside Vita. He smiled over at her as he clung to the spinning stool with both hands, and it didn’t have anything to do with mocking Vita for mistakes in her building or the idea of Vita setting herself aflame. Finally the stools slowed to a stop and the children all leaned on the counter, reorienting themselves.
“Maybe you could make a switch for that,” Vita observed once the stools had stopped. “To make the stools spin, I mean. It could be like a bucking bronco, or something like that.”
“What a good idea,” Rosie remarked, and Vita got that glowing feeling the little girl was so good at sparking in people. No wonder even the most terrifying of the monsters at Moorhouse seemed fond of her.
Wile and Vita helped Rosie spread the spare Base from her backpack over the cracked windows and by the time they left, the glass was good as new. Back in the wood Vita collected Melina from the elm tree where Jasmine lived.
Melina took her place around Vita’s shoulders and curled around her to catch her gaze. “We’ll have plenty to discuss back at Brickingham, I see,” the caterpillar observed in her knowing way. Then she cuddled closer around Vita’s neck and her breathing settled into the constant, rumbling purr of sleep.
After saying goodbye to Rosie and the winged horses, Vita looked between floral walls of fuchsia, coral, and deep violet with a frown. “Do you know where to go from here?” she asked Wile. He nodded, took a right, and beckoned her to follow. “I guess you really know your way around,” she observed after they made a second turn to the left.
“Rosie and I go way back,” Wile replied. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “You, uh, you were good with her in there. You got younger brothers and sisters or something?”
Vita shook her head and adjusted Melina on her shoulders. “No—I always wanted one though.”
“I thought kids wished for older siblings, not younger.”
“I’ve got an older brother and sister,” she said with a chuckle. “They’re … they’re just a lot older than me. It would’ve been nice to have someone else around my age.” Someone who would have looked up to her rather than down at her like Michelle, or through her like Bryan.
Vita cleared her throat after a silence. “So what happened to Rosie in there? Was she the one who broke the windows, and made the stools spin?” He nodded gravely. “Why couldn’t she just stop?”
“She got sad. Rosie’s a happy kid, usually, but her family didn’t have it easy. And if you get sad while you’re building, it can … go wrong.”
Vita thought of Rosie’s story about her father’s soda fountain, how he’d had to close it after some kind of “riots.” What exactly had Rosie’s life been before she’d come to Moorhouse? “Why wouldn’t the teachers tell us that could happen?”
Wile gave her a look that was equal parts pitying and superior. “Oh, V,” he said. “When are you going to stop thinking these monsters are your friends? They’re monsters, and if you ask me, they don’t want to fix their world at all.”
Vita took in a quick breath. They had reached the entrance to Rosie’s Dream Chamber and Wile led her through one of the heavy doors. The girl blinked, her eyes adjusting to the much dimmer hallway. She looked over toward the entrance to her own Dream Chamber a few feet away then back at the boy.
“If the monsters don’t want to make their world better,” she asked him, searching his nearly black eyes, “then what do they want?”
Wile met her gaze for a long moment and all mirth left his face. “To trap us here forever,” he replied. “That’s all I’ve got so far. I’ll let you know if I get any further.”
Then he crossed the hallway, opened the wooden door to the Mess Hall, and was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ANSWERS
With a whoop Vita went zipping across the line to her treehouse from one of Brickingham’s towers. With a slightly less enthusiastic whoop she zipped back to the tower. When she stepped onto the treehouse’s wraparound porch after her third trip across, Melina gave Vita a roll of the eyes from her perch around the girl’s shoulders.
“If you’re going across again, do you mind if I sit the next few out?” the caterpillar asked.
“Naw,” Vita said. She crouched down and sat Melina on the nearest branch to let her climb. “I was getting bored with that anyway. Maybe I’ll just run to Landora real quick and put a few finishing touches on Mr. Chauncey’s bakery—”
“No,” Melina interrupted with an emphatic growl. “No more building until you’ve had a chance to rest.” Vita hadn’t done the greatest job following Mazkin’s warning to pace herself, so Melina had taken to holding the girl prisoner in Brickingham and forcing her to relax.
Instead of zipping across the zip line again, Vita walked across the porch and opened the front door to her treehouse. Once inside her eyes combed over the book-lined walls. She got up the courage to finally check Little Women and frowned to find it as blank inside as all the others. She pulled The Giver by Lois Lowry off the shelf and stared at the bearded old man on the cover. She wished the words of the book could flow from her fingers and onto the pages, just as the Giver’s memories flowed from him and into Jonas in the story.
She looked around the room once more then fell against her bed with heavy sigh and let her eyes drift closed. She thought of the towering bookshelf at the foot of her parents’ bed at home, which was really just several long slabs of pine propped up on cinderblocks. On one side was her father’s vast collection of DVDs and on the other stood her mother’s library. There were a few hardcovers here and there, all having long since shed their paper coats, and the advanced reader copies her mother sometimes received in the mail to review. There were long-adored novels that had traveled with Alison since she’d graduated high school, and others she’d come to love later but every bit as much.
Vita’s mother owned hundreds of books and had read each and every one. When she didn’t have notes to look over or interview questions to think up on her way to an event, she read. Even with her hectic schedule as a reporter a book couldn’t remain in her mother’s possession for long before she’d gone tearing through its pages. Now she spent her days in the hospital doing little besides reading.
Vita knew she would trade each and every wall of her beautiful library for a chance to peruse her parents’ homemade bookshelf once more. Perhaps it wasn’t as fancy as Vita’s robin’s egg blue walls or up in a treehouse, but her mother’s library promised something new—wonders Vita never would have thought of on her own. Whereas the books in her Dream Chamber were nothing but faded memories wrapped in pretty packaging.
As she thought back on her parents’ bedroom, she couldn’t focus on the bookshelf for long. Her mental eyes wandered to her mother’s v
anity, to her collection of flats in the closet, to her father’s leather jacket slung over the back of a chair. She could hear her father singing in the shower, like he used to before her mother had gotten sick…
Vita opened her eyes and worked to swallow around the lump in her throat. She hadn’t thought much of her parents since she’d arrived at Moorhouse and was surprised to find how fiercely she suddenly missed them both. Her father’s tickly beard, the little wrinkles by her mother’s mouth that showed her life had been one of laughter. Was her mother all right, had her condition worsened? What Jen had done when Vita hadn’t shown up at school? Was school even in session anymore, or was it already summer?
The girl’s eyes opened and she sat straight up on the bed. She got a slithering feeling in her stomach as she tried to count exactly how many days she’d been at Moorhouse. Who knew if the days in Whirlyton were really as long or short as they were supposed to be? And the complete and utter lack of culinary options in the Mess Hall made it tough to remember which was breakfast and which was dinner.
If only there were some windows … but the only windows Vita had seen on this side of Moorhouse were the ones in the headmonsters’ office, and those faced Drozlin.
As she considered the headmonsters’ office, she remembered it had been nearly the twin of the school’s front hall in the North Wing. Those were the windows that faced the human world—the ones through which Vita had first seen Fironella, who had seemed so perfect at a distance. She longed for just one glimpse through those windows, just so she could be sure how long she’d been at Moorhouse.
Vita rose, put her flats back on, and walked out onto the porch. “Melina!” she called, “I’m gonna head to the Mess!”
“Do you want me to come with you?” the caterpillar’s voice called from halfway down the tree.
“Naw, you can stay and keep climbing,” she replied as she wrapped her set of handles around the zip line. She knew if she told Melina what she was thinking of doing, Melina would tell her she shouldn’t. The caterpillar had always been far more sensible than Vita, and sensible wasn’t what the girl needed right now.
She needed answers.
• • •
Vita felt sure she had ventured to the darkened end of the girls’ hall before, in the opposite direction of the headmonsters’ office past the doors to the Mess Hall and washroom. But she also felt sure she would have remembered the hallway ended in merely a blank wall—a dead end.
There was the wooden door in the Mess Hall that led to that long hallway between the front hall and the Mess Hall, the one Fironella and the other monsters had shepherded Vita and Melina across when they’d first arrived. But then Fironella had locked that door behind her with the key on a chain around her neck.
The girl turned away from the dead end of the hallway and crossed its length to the headmonsters’ office at the other end. A brass knocker on the door silently howled at her with the face of one of the gargoyles that hung on the school’s exterior walls. With a deep breath for courage she rapped on the door.
She had hoped for Mazkin, but instead Ruckles’ shining silver face and spinning, blade-propeller eyes greeted her. She yelped at the sight of him, having grown used to the company of comparatively less horrifying monsters like Peebles and Dotted-Line Jack.
The robot monster grinned widely at her, though it was really more a baring of sharp metal teeth. “Well, hey there, baby doll,” he greeted her. “Long time no see.” He used his hedge-clipper arm to pull the door open wider so she could come inside, which she did after a wistful look back toward her Dream Chamber. She mentally kicked herself for not bringing Melina with her.
There were score marks on either side of the door when Ruckles let it go and pushed it shut behind her. Before Vita could take a look around, Ruckles stepped close in front of her on his stilted legs and brought his propeller eyes alarmingly close to her face. “Here, let me get a better look at you.”
She leaned as far away from him as she could, her back hitting the closed door behind her. “I—is Mazkin here?” she asked in a squeaky voice.
“Nope, I’m afraid old Fuzz is out and you’re stuck with us,” Ruckles replied. He finally stepped away from Vita and she released the breath she’d been holding.
Skrillus occupied himself beside Mazkin’s empty, tidy desk by repeatedly ramming his car body into Mazkin’s chair. Vita hoped Mazkin had another chair somewhere, as one of the legs of this one was about to break in half. The car monster noticed her looking and shone his red headlight eyes into hers, making her eyes tear.
At her desk Fironella sat with her back to Vita. She still wore that same fraying bubblegum pink dress and it seemed even filthier than when Vita had last seen it. The doll monster ate from a plate of pastel-iced cupcakes, inhaling them two or three at once. She swiveled on her chair and Vita couldn’t help but recoil at the sight of her. The cracks in her face had become even more pronounced since the girl had last seen her. When Fironella’s pink bow lips stretched to grin her flawless white grin at Vita, a tiny spider ran out of the crack in her left cheek, across her icing-stained face, and into a small hole at the inner corner of one of her unevenly blinking lavender eyes.
“Hello there, dear,” Fironella said in her spun sugar voice. “Please, have a seat.”
Vita considered running right back out the door, but she was afraid of what Ruckles and Skrillus might do if she did. Besides, she’d come for answers, hadn’t she? She made her way to the only seat in the room that wasn’t currently occupied or being rammed by Skrillus—the armchair in the corner—and sank into the charcoal velvet cushion.
“I trust you’ve been settling in well,” Fironella said from her desk on the other side of the room.
“Yes, Fironella, thank you.”
Before the girl could blink, Fironella had whizzed past Skrillus on her swivel chair and right up to Vita. “That’s Miss Fironella, dear,” she said, one eyelid blinking rapidly up and down while the other remained still. “It’s important to show respect for authority.”
“Yes, Miss Fironella,” Vita mumbled.
“Now, what brings you in today? Problems with your model?”
“No, nothing like that … I was just, uh, wondering…” she trailed off. These questions had seemed much easier to ask when she’d imagined asking Mazkin. “Well, I was wondering why the door to the North Wing is always locked. You know, just because it’s weird that there’s this whole other half of the building that the other kids and I never—”
“The North Wing is for faculty only,” Fironella cut in with a stern tone. Then she gave Vita another smile, and the girl could smell a mix of dying flowers and refuse on the air as the headmonstress leaned forward. “You’ll be allowed into the North Wing once you or one of your classmates creates New Drozlin, and not a moment before. All right? Now you have a good day, dear.”
The headmonstress turned in her chair and whizzed back over to her desk. Skrillus directed his headlights in Vita’s direction once more and Ruckles crossed over to her armchair on creaky legs. “Time to go, baby doll,” he said with a few emphatic snaps of one of his hedge-clipper arms.
She looked between the two mechanical monsters then back at Fironella’s hunched back. It seemed she wouldn’t be getting any more information here.
On Vita’s way out of the office, she spied a detail she had forgotten in the corner opposite the armchair—a spiral wooden staircase. She remembered that one just like it stood in the corner of the front hall in the North Wing as well. Because of course! There hadn’t been one level of windows outside Moorhouse on the North or South side—there had been three. That meant the school had at least two other floors, and possibly an attic as well.
“Move it or lose it, Blondie,” Ruckles said. He tapped her shoulder as if to move her along and the blade of one of his hedge-clippers nicked Vita’s upper arm.
“Ow!” the girl exclaimed as a pinprick of blood welled up on her arm.
“Sorry ‘bout that,�
� the robot monster said. His grinning face betrayed the insincerity of the apology. He took a few steps forward and crowded her toward the door. “It’s just, I got so many sharp parts that accidents are bound to happen from time to time.” He leaned over her and his lethal, spinning eyes should have terrified Vita as they had before.
But instead she looked around Ruckles’ head at the spiral staircase once more then waved goodbye to everyone and slammed the door in Ruckles’ face before he could get any closer. Then she skipped back to her Dream Chamber as if she hadn’t just been threatened by a rusty robot psycho, a plan percolating in her head.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE NORTH WING
Vita hadn’t set foot in the headmonsters’ office since she’d first arrived at Moorhouse, but now she’d become a regular visitor. She’d asked every question she could think to ask about her model, and most importantly she’d asked each of them at a different time of day. When the sun rose in her Dream Chamber, she came down with a sudden need to know what she might do if she ever ran out of Base. At mid-morning the next day she visited the office again, this time bursting with questions about the dimensions of her Dream Chamber—were the north and south walls the longest, or the east and west? And the evening the day after that, it became imperative that she know if her Dream Chamber had any windows.
Luckily for Vita, Fironella and her cronies had only been in the office for a handful of these visits. Usually Mazkin occupied the office alone, sitting in his damaged chair and writing with his feather quill. By now Vita had pinpointed a pocket of time—from late evening to the wee hours of the morning—when she was ninety percent sure Mazkin would be in and Fironella would be out.
Now all she needed was some help.
A card game was going on at one of the back tables in the Mess Hall. Eerla sat on one side of the table, her considerable bulk taking up the space four or five Vitas would have. A cloud of gray smoke surrounded the monsters and became thicker as Faylonique took deep breaths while she decided which move to make next. She looked like a classy French girl of about sixteen at a distance, but there were cracks in her skin not unlike Fironella’s and she breathed smoke.
Vita and the Monsters of Moorhouse Page 13