by Keir Graff
She was obviously mad, but she tried to make a game out of it, quizzing me and Santi about what we could eat fresh (overripe fruit, limp lettuce) and what would have to be cooked (there was no way I was eating those soggy mushrooms unless they were sautéed). I wished Trent was doing the cooking—he never, ever uses bulgur, quinoa, or spelt—but I can eat almost anything as long as I have sour cream on top. So I played along, because after all, the whole food thing was my fault.
“Dagmar, is something wrong?” Leya asked while we were eating. “You seem awfully quiet.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“What did you do while we were gone?” asked Trent.
“Not much,” I lied. “Just hung around and read a little bit.”
Just had a fight with my frenemy, got caught in a deadly trap, and talked about technology with a Not Lumberjack in his overgrown playhouse, I could have said.
Would Trent and Leya have been more likely to turn around and head back to the city if they knew about the dangers in the forest? Somehow I doubted it. Even though Lyndon was glum and Trent was cheerful, I could imagine them hitting it off. Before I knew it, they’d be building stuff together.
So all I could really do was continue making life difficult for the people I cared about until they got fed up and took us all back home.
After dinner, we played charades. The definition of the word charade is an empty or deceptive act, which was something I was pretty familiar with. The definition of charades the game is getting someone to guess something without using words. Basically, you pick a clue written on a piece of paper out of a hat (in our case, it was Trent’s sweaty baseball cap) and then act it out until everyone else guesses what it is.
Yes, it’s a corny old game from a hundred years ago.
But no, we still didn’t have internet or TV.
So it was actually really fun. Leya is absolutely the best at getting people to guess her clues—she never loses. Even when the clue she draws is something impossible like an idea or air, somehow we guess it right away because her expressions and gestures are always perfect.
You might think that Santi would be the worst at charades, but it’s actually Trent. He drew one of the easiest clues, falling down, and we were guessing things like clumsy and going downstairs and chopping down a tree.
After time ran out, he accused us of guessing wrong on purpose, just so he would have to fall down over and over again. Santi and I were trying our best, but from the sly smile on Leya’s face, he might have been right about her.
Santi was almost as bad as Trent, though, because he would get so stuck on how to act it out that he could never get started. We would start laughing, and then he would start laughing, and then there would be this chain reaction of laughter.
When Trent guessed, “Laughing?” that only made Santi laugh harder. In fact, he laughed so hard that tears started running down his cheeks, so I guessed, as a joke, “Crying?”—which turned out to be the right answer!
When it was my turn, I drew one big happy family. But we had a rule that you could exchange one prompt if you wanted, so I put that one back. I got being bored instead, which seemed easier, except my pantomime of being bored just confused everyone into thinking I hadn’t started.
I kept gesturing to let them know I had actually started, and then I sat there looking absolutely, 100 percent bored out of my skull. I thought it would be a slam dunk.
But they never got it.
* * *
■ ■ ■
THE NEXT MORNING, after Trent drove off to the hardware store to see if the new spark plug had arrived, I went for a long walk down the road. At first, it felt funny because there wasn’t a sidewalk, and back home in the city, I definitely wouldn’t have walked in the street because if I had, a car would have come along in nothing flat and creamed me.
But here, there was no choice: if I didn’t walk in the road, I would have had to wade through weeds and bushes. Fortunately, there was hardly any traffic. The two times cars passed me, I heard them long before they showed up and moved over to the edge of the gravel. The driver of the first car gave me a friendly wave, but the driver of the second car held the wheel and squinted straight ahead like she didn’t even see me.
Every few minutes, I checked the bars on my phone. I had charged it before I sabotaged the generator, and the battery was still at 85 percent. It said NO SERVICE for what seemed like a couple of miles, but then finally I saw one bar.
I got so excited I practically ran the next hundred yards, but then it said NO SERVICE again. I was in a little canyon, which I thought might have been the problem, so I kept walking until I came out of it.
Finally, a half mile or so later, I suddenly had three bars. Right away I started getting notifications from my friends. I left the road, found a shady spot under a tree, and sat down and started reading. Every single message was about Imani’s birthday party, which had been the day before. It looked so fun. They watched a movie, went swimming, and then had a cookout on a patio with an amazing view of San Francisco Bay. Olivia’s grandfather had a really nice house.
From a video Nevaeh sent, it looked like it was too windy to light the birthday candles on the cake, but everyone laughed about it, and Imani pretended to blow them out anyway. There were even boys there! Imani had invited her cousin and two of his friends, but they looked awkward and uncomfortable. Olivia and Hailey sent some funny pictures of the boys sitting by themselves without talking and wrote, The life of the party!
The pictures and texts made me smile even though I felt super sad and lonely. I had to let them know I was still around.
First, I wrote, Happy birthday again, Imani! Sorry I missed your party!! Nice job, Olivia!!!
Then I took a picture of my view so they could see where I was sitting and wrote, Sorry I haven’t been texting more! Still trapped in the boonies. I miss you guys.
I stared at my phone, hoping to see somebody writing back, but there was no answer. That was weird, because my friends didn’t have problems with electricity or cell service, and they pretty much had their phones attached to their bodies 24/7.
A minute passed. Then five. Then, finally, after what seemed like eternity, Imani wrote back!
It’s so crazy that you’re gone, she wrote. When are you coming back?
I don’t know, I answered.
Will you be at school next year?
I hope so! I’m working on it . . .
Olivia, Hailey, and Nevaeh joined in with their own questions. Most of them I couldn’t answer because I had no idea how long we would actually be here.
Instead, I told them how messed up everything was, and how we got our electricity from a generator (I didn’t tell them I sabotaged it), and our water from a pump (I didn’t mention that we “showered” there, too), and that Leya had planted a garden (I didn’t add that I was killing it). I told them there was a forest with giant redwood trees and a mansion in the forest and that I had met the boy who lived inside.
WHO IS HE? everyone wanted to know.
My thumbs paused over the letters. I knew if I told them he was the son of someone famous, they’d get all excited and want to know more details about him, just like Kristen would have. And in a way, that would have made my disappearance more interesting and mysterious to them. But it also felt dumb to try to make myself sound cooler just because I knew someone rich and famous. Trent and Leya always said that was a cheap way to try to make yourself more interesting, and I suppose I thought they were right about that.
So even though I really wanted to, I didn’t tell my friends.
Just some kid, I texted. He can be kind of a jerk sometimes.
Sounds lame, Olivia texted back.
Super lame, I agreed.
We ran out of stuff to say after that. I told them I’d keep in touch as much as I could but that I never knew when I’d have cell s
ervice.
Then Imani sent a text just to me. I miss you, girl.
Miss you, too, I told her. Don’t forget about me.
Never!!! she answered, which I admit made me cry a little.
A pesky horsefly was dive-bombing my head, so finally I got up and moved away. Now what? My friends all had each other to hang out with, and I had . . . Blake.
I did have his number in my phone. He wouldn’t text me, because even though I knew they would have Wi-Fi and probably a cell hotspot at the smart mansion, he knew we didn’t have cell service at the compound. And I didn’t really want to text him, because he wasn’t just lame, he was a jerk. But who knew, maybe he acted like a jerk because everyone in his family was so miserable.
Hey, I texted.
Hey, he texted back right away. Where are you?
I walked down the road until I got service, I answered.
Oh.
I wasn’t really sure what to write next, but a minute later he wrote, We could hang out if you want.
What would we do? I replied.
I don’t know. Probably nothing.
OK, I answered, because doing nothing with someone else was better than doing it alone.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Human Pretzel
We met at the creek. Before Blake arrived, I practiced crossing on the rocks and did it five times in a row perfectly, without getting even a fleck of mud on my shoes. But when I challenged him to cross to my side using the rocks instead of the plank, he just shrugged.
“Why don’t you come over to this side?” he asked.
“Because I want to see if you can make it across again without getting your shoes wet,” I said.
“You already know I can,” he said.
“You only did it once.”
“And I won,” he reminded me.
Behind him, Alpha and Beta sat on their haunches and looked at me like they’d decided they wouldn’t cross the creek, either.
“Fine,” I said, and instead of using the plank, I crossed on the wet, slimy rocks, hopping from one to another like it was no big deal and I did it all the time. Everything was going perfectly until I took the very last step. My foot started sliding off the rock toward the mud, so I was off balance when I launched myself at the other side—and my left shoe, the one that was still sort of clean, sank into the goo by the bank.
“Fail,” said Blake.
As I wiped my shoe on the dry grass, I tried to remember why, exactly, I agreed to hang out with him again.
“I met Lyndon,” I said as we went through the pasture toward the forest gate.
“How did that happen?” asked Blake.
“After you ran away, I got caught in one of his traps.”
“I didn’t run away,” he objected.
“You did too. You lost at arm wrestling, and you couldn’t stand losing, so you took off and left me.”
Blake didn’t say anything to that. He punched in the code to unlock the gate, held it open for the dogs, and asked, “What kind of trap?”
“A rope tightened around my ankles and turned me upside down. I just hung there until he came and found me.”
Blake snickered.
“Well, don’t tell me you’ve never been caught in one of his traps,” I said as we moved into the forest.
“Well, I haven’t,” he said. But he said it so quickly and so differently from the way he usually talked that I knew he wasn’t telling the truth.
“Liar,” I said.
“Am not,” he insisted, blushing beet red and absolutely proving he was lying.
“What kind was it?” I needled him. “It couldn’t have been one of those big log falls, because you would have gotten squashed flat. Was it a rope trap like mine?”
Angry, Blake swatted some fern fronds out of the way and marched down the path.
“You can tell me,” I said, hurrying to keep up.
“It was a pit,” he muttered, so quietly I could barely hear him. “He had covered it with a blanket and dirt and pine needles and leaves so it looked just like the forest floor. One minute I was walking along, and then all of a sudden, I was underground. The walls of the pit were too high and too smooth for me to climb out. I just had to wait until he showed up a couple hours later.”
“That’s quite a soliloquy,” I said.
SOLILOQUY: a speech (usually in a play) where a character talks to herself.
“I twisted my ankle, too,” said Blake bitterly.
He had stopped walking.
I sat down on a fallen log and looked at him, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Alpha, or maybe it was Beta, nuzzled my ankles with a wet nose while Beta, or possibly Alpha, roamed off in the trees.
“So Lyndon sets traps in his part of the forest to keep everyone out, and you go there anyway?” I asked.
“They used to just be on his land, but now he sets them everywhere. He really hates my dad.”
“What about your aunt Penelope? Does he hate her, too?”
“No, he likes her. I’ve never found any traps around her house. They’re both allies against my dad.”
Still not looking at me, Blake came over and sat down near me on the log.
“Do you think this is normal—a family all living on the same land and hating each other’s guts?” I asked.
“How should I know what’s normal? Your family isn’t exactly perfect, either.”
I decided to ignore that for now. “Have you ever tried to help your dad, your aunt, and your uncle get along again?”
He picked some old bark off the tree and flicked it away. “How exactly would I do that?”
I slid off the log.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Do you want to meet my aunt?”
* * *
■ ■ ■
WE HEARD HER house before we saw it. Through the trees came weird moaning sounds that got higher at the end like questions.
At first I thought it was the dogs whining, but they were right next to us, and the sounds were coming from farther away. Then I thought it was someone making random sounds on a cello, like a string quartet was warming up in the woods—but why would a string quartet be warming up in the woods?
We were walking in a new direction, away from both Lyndon’s and Blake’s, and the sounds were getting louder and downright creepy. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I started to wonder if there was something supernatural living in the woods.
“Whale songs,” said Blake.
“Whale songs? We’re a long way from the ocean,” I said.
Then I heard tinkling, delicate chimes all around, like an army of fairies playing miniature triangles. As if to confirm my thoughts about fairies, fragments of rainbows floated and spun, flickering across the tree trunks and occasionally flaring in my eye.
Was Penelope a witch or a fairy godmother?
Finally, I realized the lights were coming from crystals hung in the trees. Suspended by thread and turning in weak currents of air, they caught rays of sunshine and refracted them into little rainbows that scattered and disappeared as fast as dandelion seeds on a puff of wind. It was like the daytime version of my star lantern.
Ahead of us, a little bird landed on a piece of string that had several different crystals hanging from it—then it took off again, making the crystals and their refractions dance.
“Aunt Penelope is very New Age,” Blake told me.
A new path, paved with tightly fitted stones, branched off, and we followed it through a constellation of kaleidoscopic light and increasingly loud whale songs to a house that looked like a cottage right out of a storybook. It had a steeply sloping roof, whitewashed walls, and little windows poking out from under the eaves on the second floor. All that was missing was a trail of bread crumbs leading to the front steps.
Blake walked right up to the red-painted door and knocked, but the sound was barely audible over the moans of ocean mammals blasting out the open windows. When nobody answered, he opened the door, and we both went in.
It was bright and cozy inside, nothing like Blake’s mansion or Lyndon’s plank house. Narrow stairs led up to the second floor, and a small hallway went past them to the back of the cottage. To our right was an open doorway into the living room, where we saw Penelope wearing yoga pants and twisted into a pretzel so complicated it made me wonder if her body was made out of rubber.
Her eyes were closed, and there was a look of absolute serenity on her face. I would have given anything to feel like that myself, as long as it didn’t mean contorting my body and cranking whale songs.
“Aunt Penelope!” called Blake, but she didn’t hear him.
In fact, I couldn’t hear him, either. I could see his mouth form the words, and I knew what he was saying, but the whales on the recording must have been having a whale of a time, because he was drowned out by a deafening cacophony of OOOOOOOOO and AROOOOOOOO and EYAAAAAAAAHHHHHH.
“AUNT PENELOPE!” yelled Blake, but he may as well have been in outer space because not a single word got through.
Then the whale music suddenly stopped—it must have been the end of the recording—just as Blake bellowed, as loud as he could, “AUNT PENELOPE!!!”
Her eyes popped open in surprise, and she tipped over, her limbs still tied in a knot.
“Ow!” she yelped. “Blake, what are you doing here? Ow! Ow! And who—ow!—is this?”
We rushed forward and helped her untie herself. Grimacing, she stood up.
“Why did you barge in on me like that?” she asked, rubbing her right leg. “I think I pulled a muscle.”
“We knocked, but you couldn’t hear us,” I explained. “I’m Dagmar, Blake’s . . .” I stopped before I said friend.
“Nice to meet you, Dagmar,” she said, stepping forward to shake my hand and wincing like something hurt. “I’m Blake’s aunt Penelope, although I guess you already know that. I was just doing my midday meditation.”