“Sometimes,” she continued, “getting all those ideas out is a challenge, because there are so darn many of them.” She opened his journal to a clean page and swiped open her smartphone to a dictionary app. “I want you to ignore the journal assignment I gave the class for tonight. Instead, I want you to write five words.”
“Five words?” That sounded easy, but Cooper wondered if he should feel insulted.
“That’s right! But they have to be five delicious words.” She wrote this heading at the top of the page in bright orange Sharpie.
“What’s a delicious word?”
“It’s a word that you didn’t previously know, and one that you find particularly descriptive, or fun to say or write.”
“Like what?”
“Like festoon!” she said with a flourish, and wrote the word at the top of the list.
Cooper’s stern demeanor cracked slightly. He liked the sound of the word, though he had no idea what it meant.
“It means to decorate something with many small objects.” She pointed across the room. “As you can see, I have festooned the bulletin board with interesting facts and trivia.” She typed the word into the dictionary app and scrolled to the bottom. “And here are tons of other delicious words that are similar: adorn, bedeck, fancify. Those are synonyms, or words that mean the same thing. But I want your words to have five different meanings, okay? And hey, look, I already did one for you! So all you have to do is write down four more delicious words, what they mean, and then read their synonyms.”
“Okay . . . but why?”
“Because it’s hard to say deep, complex things without deep, complex words to capture them, don’t you think?”
Though Cooper initially thought the whole assignment was lame, he did as he was asked. His first list was: gild (to cover with a thin layer of gold), dawdle (to move or act slowly), gangly (tall, thin, and awkward), and malicious (showing a desire to cause harm to another person).
Mrs. Wishingrad continued to assign Cooper similar lists for the next few weeks. When Cooper forgot to erase a doodle of an angry little alien from the margins of his notebook, he worried his teacher would think he was wasting time; instead she encouraged him to draw more. So he did. His illustrations consumed as much time and paper as his words. When the unit ended, most of his classmates’ journals landed in the recycling bin, but Cooper’s stayed tucked away in his bag.
He had filled many notebooks since. He wrote and drew, using the dictionary app to find words and definitions that read like they had been invented for him. Livid. Seething. Alienated. If such words existed, surely he wasn’t alone in feeling them. Maybe he wasn’t the only one whose father was a duplicitous, unconscionable, indefensible scoundrel.
Here, alone at the breakfast table, the familiar chaotic mix of words and drawings sprang from his pencil, a barely coherent, jumbled mishmash. He sketched a trail of tears swirling into a void, a young child begging a pitiless man to turn around, a disconsolate girl staring at an empty picture frame. This was all surrounded by flying springs, cogs, and watch shards. At one point, the tip of his pencil tore the paper as it practically sparked from the speed and pressure he lent the task. When, finally, his tap ran dry, he was able to put his pencil down.
Though the desire to break things always came first these days, it never calmed Cooper the way journaling and sketching did. At least for a little while, he would feel better.
He checked the clock and saw that he should already be on his way to the bus stop. He shoved the last bite of cereal into his mouth and dropped both the bowl and spoon into the sink with a clatter.
And there she was. Sitting in her backyard, uniform on, the girl looked at him through his kitchen window, the sun gleaming off the red stitching of the bird’s eye on her jacket. Cooper decided to outstare her this time, to not so much as blink. His eyes started to burn, and he was sure he was going to win this battle of wills before the squeal of school bus brakes sent him running. He snatched his backpack, journal, and coat and flew out the front door.
Cooper scrambled aboard the bus with only one thought in mind: He was going to talk to her after school, no matter how strange she was. He was going to find out what that crest symbolized and where it came from.
8
For the first time in what seemed like forever, Cooper actually had plans after school. So, of course, every class dragged on forever. By the time Cooper walked into his house at the end of the day, he felt a little nauseated from both anticipation and fatigue.
He shouted for Jess and his mom as he came in the door and dropped his backpack, but there was no response. Though talking to the girl would be easier with no one else around, it worried him a bit that neither of them answered. That was when a buzzing sound against the hardwood floor prompted him to fish his phone out of his bag.
It was a text from his mother that read:
We are out running errands and grabbing groceries.
Home in a couple hours. Love you.
Perfect.
Cooper grabbed an apple from the bowl on the kitchen counter and went to the sink to rinse it off. As the icy water trickled over his fingers, he looked out across the alley.
There she was. On her swing. In a refreshing twist, she wasn’t staring at him, but rather staring straight ahead, motionless.
He should have been happy. It was the perfect opportunity to go over and talk to her. Instead, Cooper felt as chilled as his fingers.
There was something very wrong about her.
Appetite now gone, he put the apple back in the fruit bowl, wiped his hands on his pants, and slowly crossed to the back door. He took multiple deep breaths and swung the door open. It seemed colder outside than it had been moments before. Cooper moved onto the step and had to catch the knob as a gust of wind blew the door inward. He tugged it shut, crossed his arms against the chill, and walked across the alley toward the white picket fence. Squinting against the breeze, he yelled, “Hey!” over the creaking of branches overhead. The word sounded wobbly leaving his throat.
The girl, who could have been mistaken for a statue, came to life. She pushed her heels into the earth and began swinging slightly, back and forth. Her thin, ungloved fingers wrapped gently around the braided rope that creaked and stretched with each pass.
“Kinda cold for swinging, huh?” Cooper said.
She slowly turned to look at him and shrugged.
“I’m Cooper.”
He waited. This, traditionally, is when you tell me your name, he thought.
Nothing.
There, on her left breast pocket was the crest. Cooper could see the banner clutched in the talons of the bird with greater detail than he could last night, but he still couldn’t make out the words from where he was standing.
He took one step closer and decided to wait out the awkward silence. Her shrug at least told Cooper that she could hear him; surely she would have to say something, eventually. He jammed his hands into his pockets, rocked on his heels, stared into her blue eyes, and nodded slowly. He waited.
And waited.
He soon realized he was the only one who seemed uncomfortable.
“And you are . . . ?” he finally blurted.
She tipped her head to the side, considering, before saying, “I’m Elena.”
Her voice was a surprise, both in that she had one and in how warm it sounded. He had expected something thin and cold, like the rest of her.
“Oh! You can talk!” he said with a dramatic display of surprise.
“Of course I can.” She stared so intently at Cooper that he had to turn away.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, I’ve said hi to you before, and you’ve never said anything back.”
She again responded with nothing but a stare.
He had never in his life spoken to anyone so uninterested in conversation. “Well, it’s nice to finally meet you,” he stuttered, sounding more like a dopey adult than himself. She was definitely strange, but she didn’t seem
as ominous or frightening now that they were talking. He shifted his feet and cleared his throat to try to reset his brain. “Hey, so . . . I wanted to ask you something.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I was curious. What school do you go to?”
For a millisecond, the air about her wavered. She cocked her head slightly to the other side, and there was a momentary crinkle around her eyes. But it passed quickly, and her placid expression returned. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, it’s just that I haven’t seen you at Eisenhower.” He wanted to step forward again—to get a closer look at the words on the banner—but peering at that particular location of her body felt uniquely uncomfortable.
“That’s because I don’t go to Eisenhower,” she said.
Cooper, again, waited for more, but it didn’t come. “So . . .”
“I go to a small private school. I’m sure you’ve never heard of it.”
“Oh, yeah? Which one?” He inched closer; squinting, he could read the entire banner. Vigilantes Unum. Was that Spanish? French? Did she go to some language immersion school? He averted his gaze and repeated the phrase in his mind to try to memorize it.
“Hey, Cooper!”
Cooper turned into the wind at the voice coming up the alley. It was Gus. He was walking toward them, shoulders hunched against the cold, a smile on his face.
“Gus!” Cooper said. It was good to see him again, but this wasn’t the best timing.
“Whatcha doing?” Gus asked.
“Just talking,” he said, tipping his head toward the swing. “Elena, this is Gus.”
“I picked up on that,” she said. Her voice had taken a distinctly cool turn.
“Hey,” Gus said. He raised his hand in a friendly little wave that was not returned.
Cooper half hoped Gus had someplace to be and would simply walk on past, but instead he stopped expectantly. The three of them formed the points of an awkward triangle. Elena glared at Gus, as if he had interrupted something important, which might have made sense to Cooper if Gus had walked into an actual conversation, but Elena hardly seem interested in chatting anyway.
“So . . . what’s up?” Cooper asked Gus.
“Going for a walk. My grandma says I need to get some exercise. I let her believe that’s what I’m doing, but I really just like getting out of that house.” He looked back and forth between Cooper and Elena. “You guys wanna do something?”
“Um . . .” Cooper looked at Elena and back at Gus. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. We could play Low Budget?”
“What’s that?” Cooper asked.
“It’s a game where I make up an adventure, and you guys are the explorers. You tell me what you want to try to do, and I roll a die.” He pulled a red piece of plastic from his pocket that appeared more like a ball than a cube. “One through twenty. If you get a high number, you succeed. A low number, you fail. In the end, it becomes, like, a whole story. It’s basically a low-budget version of D&D. Hence the name.”
“Maybe?” Cooper looked at Elena again, to see what she was thinking. This was not how he had expected this conversation to go, but he could find out more about her if they all hung out.
“I can’t,” Elena said.
Because you have a more pressing engagement with your swing? Cooper wondered. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“Quite. I’m not allowed to hang out with people I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not safe.”
Safe? Sure, none of them really knew each other that well, but he couldn’t imagine anyone thinking he or Gus was dangerous. In fact, if there was anyone Cooper felt wary of, it was Elena.
“Maybe next time?” Gus said with a shrug, oblivious to the dark cloud hanging over Elena. He turned to Cooper. “The game doesn’t really work with only one explorer. Do you want to hang out anyway? We could do something else.”
Cooper wanted to talk more with Elena, given that he’d managed to extract exactly zero information from her other than her first name, which wasn’t much help, and the fact that she went to a private school, which they pretty much already knew. But he still felt bad about what had happened with Gus at lunch the other day.
Cooper looked at Elena. She was staring at him with a steely gaze.
“Are you okay?” Cooper asked her.
She didn’t respond. He didn’t understand much about her, but it was very clear he wasn’t going to get any more information from her today.
Cooper still staring at Elena, said, “Sure, Gus. Let’s do something.” He tried to take one last mental snapshot of the words on Elena’s jacket. At the very least, he could Google them later. “Come on,” he said, tipping his head toward his house. “This is my place.”
“Oh, good,” Gus said with a relieved grin. “It’s cold out here.”
“I’ll see you later,” Cooper said to Elena.
“Nice meeting you,” Gus said.
Elena said nothing but got up and walked into her own home.
The warmth of the kitchen was a welcome reprieve from both the outdoors and Elena’s chilly dismissal. Cooper jiggled his arms as if to shake off both. He slipped off his shoes and headed for the junk drawer, fishing out a small pad of paper and a pen. He scribbled down Vigilantes Unum, tore the page free, and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he moved to the snack drawer—something more than an apple was in order.
“So were you guys, like, breaking up or something?” Gus asked, peering over the lip of the drawer as well.
Cooper laughed. “What?”
“It was pretty tense out there. What’s up with you two?”
“Nothing is up between us. Absolutely nothing.” The only offerings left were his sister’s gross Glucerna bars, which Cooper wasn’t allowed to touch given how expensive they were, and a bag of corn chips. He grabbed the chips and some salsa from the fridge. It was no Snickers, but it was the best he had to offer. Gus smiled, and they both dug in.
“It was only tense,” Cooper continued through a mouthful of chip, “because she’s super weird. She moved in a few months ago, and that was actually the first time she’s ever talked to me.” He almost started to tell Gus about the mystery, but he thought better of it. Detailing the theory that Elena was wearing the mark of a long-dead kid was a bit much.
“Her place sure is . . .” It seemed like Gus was searching for the right word. “Nice? Like, way nicer than my grandma’s house. But she seems kinda stuffy.”
Cooper glanced through the window at the house and thought of Elena in her crisp pressed uniform. Then he looked at Gus’s baggy sweatshirt and khakis with grass stains on the knees. “Yeah,” Cooper said with a grin. “She does seem kinda stuffy.”
They both stood by the counter, chewing. Cooper offered Gus something to drink, and then got him a glass of water. He vaguely recalled that he should offer something to do when a friend was over. It had been so long. “So, whatcha want to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Is anyone else home?”
“No. My mom and sister are running errands.”
Gus peered around the room, seeming to search for inspiration. “Do you have any comic books?”
“A couple.” Cooper thought of the three partially ripped, ancient comics he might have under his bed. “I’ve also got the Marvel Encyclopedia. And a bunch of Far Side books.” He kept quiet about his hoard of Garfield compilations. They were probably too old for that.
“I love The Far Side!”
“You do?” None of Cooper’s friends thought those cartoons were funny. The Far Side was downright strange half the time, but Cooper had apparently inherited his father’s sense of humor in addition to the books. “They’re upstairs,” Cooper said, and led the way up to his room.
“Cool,” Gus said behind him. “I can’t stay too long, or my grandma will think I got hit by a car.”
Once they were in his room, Cooper handed Gus his favorite of the three massive tomes and grabbed his second favorite. They both plopped down on t
he floor and read, side by side. After a moment, Gus howled with laughter.
“Which one?” Cooper looked over.
“This one!”
Cooper knew it well. The picture showed three sad-faced cavemen in a circle, all showing “rock” with their fists in front of them. Below was the caption “Before scissors and paper.”
“Dude is so weird, right?” Cooper said.
He scooted closer to Gus, and for half an hour, they both read the book in Gus’s lap, cracking up and pointing at their favorites. They took turns explaining the cartoons that the other didn’t get. They shrugged and skipped the ones neither of them understood.
“My dad said those’ll make more sense when I get older,” Cooper said.
“Sounds like my dad.” Gus’s voice dropped to a deep bass, and he said, “‘Son, there are things you’re too young to understand,’ like I’m three years old or something. I get way more than he or my mom thinks.”
Cooper nodded. “It’s crazy what parents think we don’t understand, right? Like, when my parents told us they were getting divorced, they started by saying, ‘We know this is going to come as a surprise.’ I had a lot of feelings about it, but by that point surprise was not one of them.” Cooper’s eyes burned at the memory, and he clenched his jaw as he finished speaking. He hated the memory of that day because he had still been slightly hopeful, still innocent of all that was yet to come. He reached over and flipped to the next page of his Far Side book, but he did it too hard and tore the bottom edge.
Gus fell quiet. He stared intently at the cartoons, his own eyes a little shinier than they had been a moment earlier. Cooper’s anger fell away, and he felt like kicking himself. Why had he brought up divorce? He’d had years to deal with the disintegration of his parents’ marriage, but Gus was only at the beginning of that particular terrible roller-coaster ride.
Cooper managed a slight “I didn’t mean to . . .”
“It’s okay,” Gus murmured. “It’s just . . . I don’t know. My parents have separated before but always managed to work things out. But they’ve never sent me away. I keep hoping, but the longer I’m here, the less I think it’s going to be okay.”
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