Shout Out for the Fitzgerald-Trouts
Page 5
Kimo had the cooler of dishes floating beside him. Standing up to his waist in water, he scrubbed the dirty dishes with the dark mud and grit at the edge of the pond. He was careful to clean the dishes downstream from the others so that the water washed the debris away.
When both the dishes and the Fitzgerald-Trouts were clean, the children drifted into the middle of the pond, staring up at the stars. The roar of the waterfall now seemed to be coming from the sky itself, almost as if all of the stars were in motion, thundering toward them.
Inspired by the noise, Kimo hollered, “Give a loud shout ’cause we’re Fitzgerald-Trouts. We don’t give up and we don’t give in…”
Before he could try a verse, Kim triumphantly sang, “We live in a castle on a mountain!”
“We find a pond and start to swim,” Pippa offered.
“We get a house and we name it Tim!” proclaimed Toby. Everyone looked at him. He’d made possibly the most ridiculous rhyme ever.
Kimo laughed and continued the song. “And now we start all over again…”
They went on chanting and making up verses as they waded out of the pool and started toward their new home.
* * *
—
After a long day spent making roofs and cooking and swimming, the children quickly fell asleep in a large heap beside the kitchen fireplace. With the moss under them and the sail-roof high above, they felt sheltered and safe. So it was completely unexpected when, several hours later, they heard a strange and sinister noise that shook the branches of the trees. They all sat bolt upright, terrified.
“What was that?” Kimo whispered.
“No idea.” This was Pippa, who was holding onto the baby (the only one still asleep). “Something rustling,” she said. Then she added, “And slurping.” Even as she said the word slurping, she felt a chill up her spine. How could something living on a mountain slurp?
“Slurping,” said Kimo. “What could be slurping?” He looked at Kim, but Kim was looking away. She couldn’t face Kimo. She was thinking of the page she’d burned from the textbook, and the secret she was keeping.
“I think it’s…” Toby trailed off. What he was thinking was so awful that he couldn’t say it unless he knew for sure. He lifted up Goldie’s jar in the moonlight. Goldie’s eyes told him that Goldie was thinking the same thing. “Ghost,” Toby said in the quietest whisper.
Kim shuddered at the mention of a ghost, but then she reasoned with herself and said, “It must have been the trees.”
“Trees rustle,” said Pippa. “But they don’t slurp or squelch or whatever that sound is.”
“Shh,” Kimo said. “I think I hear it again…” They all huddled closer together with their arms around each other and listened with all of their might.
Sqq-sqq, tss-tss. Sqq-sqq, tss-tss. There it was. The rustle and the slurp—only this time it sounded even closer, a few yards beyond the Castle’s walls.
“See…” said Toby. “Ghost.”
“Maybe not,” said Kimo.
“What, then?” hissed Pippa, who had drawn the same conclusion as Toby.
“A monster,” Kimo offered, comforting no one.
“Should we run?” This was Toby.
Kim squeezed closer to her brothers and sisters. “Better stay still. Maybe it doesn’t know we’re here.”
“What if it does?” Toby asked.
“Shhh…” They crouched together in silence, thankful that the baby was asleep, and waited with wildly beating hearts. The rustle and the slurp got closer and closer till it seemed the ghost or monster or whatever it was was just on the other side of the Castle’s wall.
For Kim, each of these long seconds was like a pain in her heart because she knew she was holding on to the terrible secret of Captain Baker’s ghost.
But there it was, the sound: Tss-tss. Tss-tss. Tss-tss. Tss-tss.
They all realized at the same moment that they were only hearing the rustling now. The slurping had stopped. They looked at each other, exchanging this knowledge and the added information that the rustling came from up high, near the top of the tree that branched through the open window.
It’s above us, Toby thought. And this was more than he could contain. He opened his mouth, letting out a howl of terror. “Aaaaaaaaaah!”
“Quiet, Toby!” Pippa shouted at the same moment that Kimo barked, “Stop yelling.” They all screamed at each other for several minutes, anticipating that the ghost or monster or whatever it was would swoop down through the window and eat them up or do whatever it is that ghosts and monsters do.
Only nothing happened.
They fell silent. The baby, who’d been woken up by the screaming, cried out and reached for her octopus while the older children waited nervously for the next sound. But the rustling had stopped. The trees beyond the Castle were quiet. Whatever had been there was gone, chased away by their noise. They lay back down and moved in closer together, shutting their eyes and trying to forget what had happened. Kim lay awake the longest, arguing with herself. Should she keep the secret of Captain Baker’s ghost? It seemed deceitful not to tell the others now that they had heard such frightening noises, and yet if she told her siblings, they might force her to abandon the Castle—something she was not willing to do. No ghost is going to scare us away from our home, she thought. Besides, it can’t be a ghost. There’s no such thing as ghosts.
But something had made the terrifying sounds. And if it wasn’t a ghost, what was it?
CHAPTER
6
When they woke up on Sunday morning, they were surprisingly well rested. Thanks to the comfortable moss and the relative darkness of the Castle (with its high walls and thick canopy of trees), the sun didn’t wake them until much later than usual, so they’d all managed to get a good night’s sleep. One by one they stood up and stretched, talking in quiet voices as they rekindled the cooking fire. “I feel like a million bucks,” Kimo said. “If only Ms. Bonicle were around today, I bet I’d break that record.”
By the time they were sitting around the fireplace drinking hot chocolate, they all agreed that they loved their new home so much they would not let whatever had made the terrible noise frighten them away.
“But we need to protect ourselves,” said Pippa.
“How?” asked Kimo.
“I bet Goldie knows,” said Toby, who was staring into the fish’s jar.
“Why would a fish know?” This was Pippa again.
“Animals know things,” said Toby. “Remember how before a volcano erupts all the birds fly out of the trees?”
“The noise did sound like it came from an animal,” offered Kim, who didn’t think it had sounded like that at all. But it can’t be a ghost, she thought. I don’t believe in ghosts.
“We all agree that we shouldn’t be frightened,” said Kimo. “We like this house too much to leave. And besides, whatever it is, it left us alone.”
They all nodded and took sips of their hot chocolate. Then Pippa floated a question. “What if it wasn’t one thing making that noise…what if it was two things?”
“Two?!” Toby shouted.
“We just agreed we wouldn’t be scared.” Kimo glared at Pippa. “Now you’re scaring everyone.”
“I’m just saying,” Pippa mused, “there was a rustling sound and a slurping sound, but the slurping sound stopped before the rustling sound, so maybe they were made by two different things.”
“I get it,” Kim said. “In that case we can take care of them separately. For the rustle, well, we already know what to do. We make a lot of noise. That’s what scared it off last night.”
“So maybe we make a bunch of alarms,” Pippa said. “Like we fill soda pop cans with rocks and hang them in all the windows and in the doorway. That way if the rustling thing tries to come into the house, it bumps into one of the cans and gets scared off.”
“The slurping sound came from down low,” Pippa continued. “So for the slurp, we need to avoid being close to the ground.”
“Hammocks,” said Kim. “We use the rest of the old sails to make hammocks.”
“Great idea.” Kimo surveyed the space. “There are enough tree branches coming through the windows that there’ll be plenty of places to hang them.”
“And they’re comfy. Maybe even comfier than sleeping on moss,” Kim said.
“I told you fish know things,” said Toby, who had been staring at Goldie.
“What are you talking about?” Pippa yanked on Toby’s ear. “I’m the one who solved the problem.”
Toby shoved Pippa in return. “Quit it! You’re always so mean.”
“And you’re always making stuff up!”
“I’m not making stuff up,” said Toby. “Just because you can’t tell what Goldie’s thinking doesn’t mean that I can’t.”
“Oh, please!”
“I’m staying as far away from you as I can!” the boy shouted, shoving Goldie’s jar into Kim’s hands and racing off.
Kim and Kimo shared a look, then Kim turned to Pippa. “Why can’t you be nice?”
“Because I tell the truth,” Pippa said defensively. “And the truth isn’t always nice.” She wasn’t going to admit it, but she always felt rotten after she’d fought with her little brother.
“Can’t you think the truth but not say it out loud?” Kim lifted up the goldfish jar and peered into it, talking to the fish. “Should we follow him?” She was kidding; she didn’t really think the fish could tell her whether to follow Toby.
“He isn’t going far,” said Kimo. “If he was, he would have taken Goldie with him.”
Kimo was right. A minute later Toby climbed back through the window. He was holding an armful of sticks.
“What ya doing, Tobes?” Kimo asked in a syrupy voice.
“These sticks mark my room.” Toby started laying out the sticks on the ground to mark a corner of the Castle. “They’re like a wall. Kim, Kimo, you can come in any time you want. But you,” he turned to stare daggers at Pippa, “can’t ever come in.”
“Fine,” said Pippa. “I’ll make a room of my own.”
“Whatever,” said Toby. “Just don’t come into mine!”
A few minutes later, they had all chosen a room and marked it with a line of sticks. Kim had decided to make hers near the kitchen fireplace so she could practice baking without disturbing the others.
Once Toby had chosen his corner of the room and built his line of sticks, the baby reached her arms up to him, making clear that she wanted to go wherever he was. Pippa felt a sharp pain in her heart. She’d always been the one who took the most care of Penny, and it hurt now to see the baby so fond of Toby instead. She took her hurt feelings off to the woods, saying that she would gather small rocks to make the soda can alarms. As soon as she’d left, Toby rigged Penny a small hammock beside his own. Kim and Kimo set off down the mountain to get more sailcloth at the wharf. Toby was left alone with the baby.
Later, the Fitzgerald-Trout children would say that this was the moment that things began to change between them. They would tell me that because the Castle and the mountain allowed them more freedom, they each began to pay less attention to what the whole group needed and more attention to what each of them, alone, wanted.
“The terrible thing that happened to us didn’t happen for weeks, but that day was important,” Kim said. “With Kimo and me down at the wharf, Toby and Penny back at the Castle, and Pippa searching for rocks to make the soda pop alarms.”
In fact, Pippa wasn’t searching for rocks. That was what she’d said she was going to do, but instead she was eating the guavas from the trees that grew near the pond and listening to the waterfall roaring beside her. It was a noise that appealed to her, in the same way the sound of the saw biting down into wood appealed to her. Both sounds reminded her of how she felt on the inside a lot of time. Angry.
She opened her mouth and let out a giant roar, a sound to compete with the waterfall. But what am I mad about? she wondered. Then she thought: maybe I’m not mad, maybe I’m hurt. Even as this occurred to her, the waterfall unleashed a log that flew past her and knocked one of the larger rocks beside her into the water. Her heart hammered in her chest. It was such a close call; another couple of inches and the log would have hit her in the head.
She looked down at the rock that had fallen in the water. It was as big as a coconut, and it had been knocked loose from its spot on the shore. She lifted it up, thinking that she would set it back into place, but as she did, she caught a glimpse of something bright and white. Setting the rock back down, she picked up the white object and inspected it.
It was a polished bone the size of her hand. One side was blank, but on the other side someone had used a thin knife to carve the image of a three-masted sailing ship. In her years of searching the beach for glass and shells, she had found many interesting things, but she had never found anything so special and so rare. She had never found a piece of art. And I found it by accident, she thought. I wasn’t even looking. Even stranger, she realized that it didn’t belong to anyone, which meant that it now belonged to her.
She tried to remember the last time that she had owned anything special. Anything that was hers alone. Sure, she had a sleeping bag and she had clothes. She had a school backpack, and she had binders filled with lined paper, and she had notebooks. But those weren’t special things. The last special thing that she’d had was her doll, Lani. But as soon as Penny had come along, the doll had become the baby’s.
This is mine, Pippa thought. And not only is it the most beautiful thing I’ve ever owned, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world. Then she thought about her knickknack shelf. As soon as she finished building it, she would find a way to hang it from the wall of her room—her own special and separate space in the Castle—and she would set the piece of bone on it.
When she returned from the pond with a backpack full of pebbles and the piece of bone in her pocket, Kimo and Kim were there, back from their trip to the wharf and the grocery store. They were sitting on the moss in the middle of Kim’s part of the Castle, turning the old sails into hammocks and drinking cans of Uncle Ozo’s soda pop. Toby smiled apologetically at Pippa and held out a can. “Here,” he said. “We have to drink it to make the—” But before Toby could finish saying that they needed to drink the soda pop so that the cans would be empty to make the rock alarms, he let out a long, loud burp. Kim and Kimo opened their mouths to laugh at Toby’s burp, but burps came out of them too. Uncle Ozo’s had twice the bubbles of other soda pops, which meant that it made anyone who drank it burp. Not wanting to be left out of the fun, Pippa grabbed a can, cracked it open, and swallowed half of the doubly bubbly stuff in one gulp.
Soon all the older Fitzgerald-Trouts were burping, which made them laugh, which made them burp more, which made them laugh more. It was a terribly wonderful cycle—or a wonderfully terrible cycle, depending on how you looked at it. They rolled around on the ground, clutching their bellies, sore from all the burping and all the laughter. The baby, who was too young to drink soda pop, sat at a distance, holding onto her octopus and staring at her older siblings with unblinking eyes. If anyone had happened to stumble upon the Fitzgerald-Trouts, they would have thought them a joyful and carefree bunch. They would not have seen the tiny cracks that were starting to grow between them. But the cracks were there.
CHAPTER
7
The children woke early on Monday morning while it was still dark in the Castle. They ate a quick breakfast, packed their backpacks, and headed single file down the hill, with Kimo carrying Penny. They sang as they went, “Give a loud shout ’cause we’re Fitzgerald-Trouts…” And fifteen minutes later, they were
in the parking lot at the base of Mount Muldoon.
The sun glared off the windshield, blinding Kim as she climbed into the driver’s seat. Someday I’ll find a pair of sunglasses, she thought, and then she had the completely unrelated thought that it had been so dark when they’d left the Castle that she’d gathered her things without being able to see them and had left her history book lying in the moss beneath her hammock. It was strange to realize that now that they had a house, they could forget things. That had certainly never happened when they’d lived in the car and carried all their possessions with them wherever they went. Oh well, thought Kim. It’s worth it. I’d rather have a house and forget things every once in a while then live in a car. But then she realized that not only had she forgotten the book, she had forgotten to study for her history test, the test on chapters five and six that was the first thing on her schedule that morning.
“Do I have time to run back up to the Castle?”
“No,” the others chorused. “We’ll be late.”
“I didn’t study history.” Kim’s voice wavered with emotion. “It’s an oral test. I’m going to have to say my answers out loud.”
“You’ll do fine,” said Kimo, patting Kim on the shoulder. “You always do.” Kim took a deep breath and forced herself to smile. Kimo was right. She usually did do fine. She’d never gotten a grade lower than a B-plus. So what if she got a B or a B-minus? It wouldn’t be the end of the world.
“Okay,” she said. “Everybody buckled up? Let’s go.”
* * *
—
F. That was the letter on the grade sheet for Kim’s history test. F.
“F is for failure,” Kim said, fighting the feeling that she was going to cry. Around them the other schoolchildren were running and laughing, enjoying their recess. But not the Fitzgerald-Trouts—they were trying to comfort Kim.