Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

by Wendy Mass

  She lets out a big sigh. “I don’t know. I think some people have a greater sense of their mortality than others. He knew the number of years that were allotted to him.”

  Neither of us speaks for a minute. Then I whisper, “I’m sorry I opened the package.” If I were a little bit younger, I would have blamed it on Lizzy.

  Surprisingly, she smiles. “Your dad would have opened it, too. He was curious about everything. That’s why he loved flea markets and collecting so much. He was fascinated by what objects people kept, and what they threw away. Remember those stories he used to make up about each thing he found?”

  I sit down across from her and nod. I do remember, but the memories are very foggy. After Dad died, it was like all the furniture was talking to me (but in Dad’s voice), and I had to make a conscious effort to remember that the hall table was just a table, not the very table on which the Declaration of Independence was signed. Which of course it wasn’t really.

  She runs her hand over the scratches that burrow deep into the kitchen table. “Remember what he said about this broken table when we found it?”

  I shake my head.

  “When we found this at a tag sale, your dad said it belonged to an old woman who was very overweight. She was sitting at the table when she saw in the newspaper that her lottery numbers had come in. In her excitement she fainted and fell forward onto the table, breaking one of the legs underneath her weight.” Mom gestures to the box and says, “He was so excited the day he got this box. He said it was the most unique one he’d ever seen, with all those keyholes. You were six at the time, and he starting filling it for you that very night. He didn’t engrave it until a few months later.”

  My eyes begin to sting with the onset of tears, but I blink them away. “So you know what’s in it?”

  She shakes her head. “He was very secretive about it. He kept it at the comic store in the vault.”

  So that’s why I never saw it around the apartment! “Do you have an extra set of keys?” I hold my breath until she answers.

  She shakes her head. “There was only one set. It takes four different keys to open it, and I mailed them to Harold. I can’t imagine what he did with them.”

  “Maybe Dad made an extra set and kept them at the store. I can ask Uncle Arthur if—”

  She just shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Jeremy. I cleaned out all your father’s things from the store. There’s no other set.”

  I pull hard on the top of the box, not really expecting anything to happen. It is sealed up tight. “How am I going to open it, then?” I ask.

  “I honestly don’t know.” She stands up and takes the pitcher of iced tea out of the fridge. As she reaches for two glasses she says, “Lizzy’s dad has some tools. We can ask him to saw through it if you haven’t found a way to open it before your birthday comes.”

  I jump out of my chair, nearly knocking it over. Snatching the box from the table, I hug it to my chest.

  “I’ll take that as a no, then?” she says, sounding slightly amused.

  “Yes, that’s a no,” I say firmly, tightening my grip. I can’t let Dad’s box get sawed in half after hearing how much he loved it. After five years, he has sent me a message with one instruction, to open this box on my thirteenth birthday. Somehow, no matter how impossible it might seem, I am going to do exactly that.

  Chapter 3: The Keys

  I send Lizzy a note telling her that Mom doesn’t have the keys and that, miraculously, I’m not being punished. Hours later, as the grandfather clock strikes eleven, I finally get a response.

  I have a plan. Come over at 10 am. Bring the letter and the box. Sorry it took so long to get back to you, what with the whole Friday Night Is Family Movie Night thing. Field of Dreams again. AGAIN!!

  Don’t be late!

  Lizzy

  Lizzy’s plans always make me nervous, but in this case I have nothing to lose. Between dinnertime and now, I exhausted my own methods for opening the box. To see if extreme temperatures might loosen the locks, I put the box in the freezer for an hour. No change. Then I put it in the microwave. But before I hit start, I took it out, because what if the meaning of life is actually some tiny alien baby that my father rescued from certain persecution? I didn’t want to microwave the little guy to death.

  My final attempt was to wedge a butter knife under the lid, but instead of sliding inside the box, it only hit another layer of wood and wouldn’t budge.

  I do not like surprises. I won’t watch scary movies. I won’t answer the phone unless I can see who is calling on caller ID. I don’t even like it when someone says “Guess what?” and then waits for you to guess. Surprises make me nervous. Once you’ve had a real surprise, one that knocks the wind out of you and changes your life, all the little surprises remind you of that big one.

  This box is a little like that.

  It is now sitting on the center of my desk, mocking me. Only the size of a shoe box, it somehow overshadows everything else in my room, including the life-sized cardboard cutouts of the hobbits from The Lord of the Rings. And they’re not easy to overshadow.

  I write Lizzy back and ask for details of her plan, but she doesn’t take the note from the wall. After a few minutes I pull it back out and stick my ear to the hole. The poster covering her end of the hole blocks any light from coming through, but I can still hear her cat, Zilla, purring loudly. Actually, he roars rather than purrs. Zilla (short for Godzilla, since he destroys everything in his path) is fiercely protective of Lizzy and will lunge at anyone who goes near her room. I haven’t been more than one foot inside her bedroom in two years. I think Zilla believes he’s a pit bull. I knock a few times on the wall, but not too loudly.

  Mom taps on the door and brings me a peanut butter sandwich on a napkin. She gives the box on my desk a long look and starts closing the door behind her. Then she stops and says, “Oh, wait, I have something for you.” A few seconds later she’s back.

  “In all the excitement, I forgot to give you this.” She holds out what looks like an ordinary yellow Starburst candy. But as I examine it more closely, I realize the bottom half is actually orange. It’s a mutant Starburst!

  “Thanks, Mom!” I jump up from the bed and deposit the Starburst in the airtight Tupperware dish along with the other candy in my collection. It’s been a few months since I’ve added anything new. Airtight or no, the peanut M&M is starting to look a little green in spots. It was yellow to begin with.

  “You’ve had a big day,” Mom says. “Make sure you don’t go to sleep too late.” She makes a move like she’s going to kiss me on the forehead like she used to when I was little. But then she just tousles my hair and gives the box one more glance before closing the door for good. I have named the hour between eleven and midnight the Hour of Jeremy (H.O.J. for short). The city is so quiet and peaceful except for the police and ambulance sirens, the beeping of the car alarms, and the rushing of the water in the pipes. But when you grow up in the city, that stuff feels like background noise, and you don’t notice it. I feel like I’m the only person alive on the earth.

  Because of all my H.O.J. reading, I know a little about a lot. I always win when I play Trivial Pursuit. I would make an excellent Jeopardy contestant. Last night I learned that for everyone alive on earth today, there are thirty ghosts lined up behind them. Not literally lined up, of course, but that’s how many dead people there are compared to living people. In all, around a hundred billion people have walked on this planet, which, interestingly enough, is the same number of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Science is my favorite class in school. I have a healthy fascination with the Milky Way, and not just because it has the same name as a chocolate bar.

  Usually my H.O.J reading is a mix of any of the books on my shelf (along with at least fifteen minutes on time travel). But tonight’s H.O.J. will be spent only learning about keys. This is what the Internet tells me:

  1. The first keys were used four thousand years ago by the ancient Egyptians to protect thei
r caves.

  2. Locks were initially made of interlocking wooden pegs, with a wooden key that raised one section of pegs out of their grooves so the lock slid open.

  3. The Romans later began making keys and locks out of metal, mostly bronze and iron, and began using springs inside the locks. The keys were called warders, and most had an oval shape at the top and a long straight middle section, with one or two square portions sticking out near the end.

  4. Next came the pin tumbler locks from England and America, followed by time-release locks. These have a clock inside that turns a wheel with a ridge in it, and when that ridge lines up with the keyhole, the box springs open. (As soon as I read this I put the box up next to my ear. No ticking. I knew that was too good to be true.)

  5. They now make bendable keys so that no one can pick the lock with a regular hard piece of metal, like a hairpin.

  6. I do not know what a hairpin is.

  The Hour of Jeremy is almost up. I have time for one more quick search. I type in the words “the meaning of life” and hold my breath.

  Two seconds later I receive 2,560,000 hits. TWO MILLION FIVE HUNDRED SIXTY THOUSAND HITS. I click on what seems like the most obvious place to start, a definition of the word life.

  life: noun 1. a state that is not death

  That’s it. The definition of life is not death.

  I shut down my computer, climb into bed, and throw the covers over my head.

  I wish I could say things look clearer in the fresh light of a new day, but so far a new day means only that I have one less day to figure out how to open the box. Lizzy opens her apartment door with one hand while shoving a blueberry Vitamuffin down her throat with the other. Her dad makes her eat all this healthy food, and she actually eats it! My theory is that he doesn’t want Lizzy to take after him in the girth department. A small man he is not.

  I follow her into the kitchen, where she hands me my daily chocolate Vitamuffin, the only flavor I will eat. I put the box and the letter on the counter and try to ignore the high vitamin and mineral content while concentrating on the chocolaty goodness of my muffin. Nothing like chocolate (even healthy, non-fat, good-for-you chocolate) to start the day off right.

  “So what’s your plan?” I ask, reaching into the fridge for the container of milk. “And will it get us arrested?”

  “Have we ever gotten arrested?” Lizzy replies, giving me a dirty look as I guzzle the milk straight from the carton.

  “We’ve come close,” I remind her. “There was the time you convinced me to sneak into the pool at the Senior Center, and the guard chased us for seven blocks. Or the time you made me be the lookout while you stole a menu from that outdoor restaurant, and the waiter threw water on us. I’d say those were pretty close calls.”

  “For the record,” Lizzy says, “it was over a hundred degrees when we snuck into that pool. It was totally worth it.” Under her breath she mumbles, “And it was iced tea he threw at us, not water.”

  Lizzy leaves the kitchen to get her chart. Every plan has a chart. Some are even color-coded. I place the box on the table and sit down to wait. Lizzy must have been going through her playing cards collection before I arrived, because they’re spread out on the table. I have my mutant candy collection, and Lizzy has her playing cards. But while I’ll happily accept a mutant piece of candy from anyone who finds it, she will only add a playing card to her collection if she finds it herself, in a public place. No duplicates either, and she won’t look anywhere obvious, like the sidewalk outside the 33rd Street Bridge Club. She prefers to find her cards on subways or park benches, or sticking out of sewer grates. She is only missing three now—the two of clubs, the eight of hearts, and the jack of diamonds.

  I remember how proud my dad was when Lizzy started her collection. He thought it was very creative. I mean, sure, putting together a full deck of cards by finding them one by one is certainly different, but it’s not like you can eat it afterward, like my collection. In fact, some of her cards are so dirty you can barely read the number and suit. As much as he encouraged us to have a collection, Dad could never land on one himself. He collected baseball cards for a while, but only of players who played for just one year. Then he was big on finding foreign stamps from countries that no longer existed. One stamp became his holy grail, and he would look for it everywhere he went. It was printed in Hawaii in 1851, over a hundred years before Hawaii became a state. The stamp came in denominations of two cents, five cents, and thirteen cents. Dad drew pictures of it so Mom and I would recognize it if we were out on our own. I still look for that stamp, but I’m beginning to think he made it up. Before he died, he had moved on to fast food restaurant giveaways, which was great for me because he needed a kid in order to get the toys. Now I can’t go into a fast food place without feeling sad.

  Lizzy returns with a piece of construction paper rolled up under her arm. Zilla follows behind her and growls up at me. Always one for the dramatics, Lizzy unfurls the paper with a snap of her wrist and lays it out in front of us, right on top of the playing cards. The first things I notice are the two pencil drawings of the box. She didn’t get all the keyholes positioned exactly right, but it’s a pretty good rendering.

  “Sorry for the rough sketch,” she says modestly. “As you can see, I have numbered our options. The list goes from easiest to most difficult. Plan A—”

  “You can cross that one off,” I instruct after reading it ahead of her. “I already tried that.”

  “You stuck the box in the freezer?” she asks, surprised.

  I nod. “And the microwave.”

  She gives me a long look, and then crosses off Plans A and B.

  “You can cross off Plan C while you’re at it. I already tried sticking a knife under the lid and it won’t budge.”

  With a loud sigh, she draws a line through the next entry.

  “May I continue?” she asks.

  “By all means.”

  “Plan D: We take the box to Larry’s Locks and Clocks to see if he can do anything.”

  I nod in agreement. “That’s a good one.”

  She continues, “And if that doesn’t work, Plan E is take the subway to the 26th Street Flea Market this afternoon. We might get lucky there. Some of those vendors have got to have old keys for sale.”

  I squirm a little at that one. “I’ve never seen keys there.”

  “That’s because you’ve never had a reason to look.”

  “Maybe. But still… it’s all the way across town.”

  “You just don’t want to take the subway without an adult,” she says accusingly.

  As my mother says, we all grow at our own pace. Crossing my arms in front of my chest defiantly, I say, “You know I don’t take the subway alone.”

  “You wouldn’t be alone.” Two red blotches appear on Lizzy’s cheeks whenever she gets irritated. I can see them beginning to creep across her face. “Come on,” she says. “We’re almost thirteen. It’s about time we got around the city on our own. Maybe you didn’t have a good reason to do it before, but what better reason is there than to get this box open?”

  She has a point. Resistance is clearly futile. “Okay,” I say flatly. “If the locksmith can’t help us, and we have to go to the flea market, I’ll go.”

  “Good!” she says.

  “As long as my mother says it’s all right,” I add. “I have to stay on her good side after yesterday.”

  Lizzy rolls her eyes. “Fine, whatever, let’s just get going.” She turns the paper over so I can’t read the last item on the list and grabs the box.

  “Wait,” I say as she heads toward the front door. “Aren’t you going to tell me what Plan F is in case the locksmith and the flea market don’t work out?”

  She pauses for a second, and then shakes her head. “Let’s hope you never need to know.”

  I don’t like the sound of that. We stop at my apartment to grab my backpack. While I’m stuffing the box inside, Lizzy grabs a handful of subway tokens from the dish
on the kitchen counter.

  “You might as well call your mom now, just in case Larry can’t help us.”

  I grumble, but I do it anyway. Mom says it’s fine to take the subway as long as we’re careful. Is it wrong of me that I had sort of been hoping she would say no?

  In all of my nearly thirteen years of living two blocks away, I have only been inside Larry’s Locks and Clocks once. When my dad found our grandfather clock, he was obsessed with making it work. He dragged it straight to this store from its previous home in some stranger’s bulk garbage pile. When Dad was alive, Mom always threatened to break the clock again because the chimes drove her crazy. But after he died, she stopped complaining about it.

  The sign on the window says the store is open only until noon on Saturdays, so we made it just in time. Lizzy pushes open the door, and a little bell rings above our heads. No one else is in the shop. Shelves of clocks in various states of repair surround us. Other than my dad, I hadn’t thought anyone repaired clocks anymore instead of buying new ones. I look closer and see a thick coating of dust on most of them, like people dropped them off a decade ago and couldn’t be bothered to come get them. My nose tickles, so I quickly move away from the shelf before I sneeze on everything. When I sneeze, I sneeze big. It runs in the family. Dad once sneezed so hard on the guy in front of us at the movies that the guy turned around and dumped his popcorn on Dad’s lap.

  Lizzy and I approach the narrow counter that runs along the back of the store. Keys of all kinds hang from hooks behind it. A thin man in overalls wanders in from the back room, wiping his hands on a napkin.

  “What can I do for you today?” he asks, flicking a crumpled McDonald’s wrapper off the counter. It lands directly in the garbage can to the left of him.

  “You Larry?” Lizzy asks.

  The man shakes his head. “Larry Junior.”

  Lizzy looks at me, and I shrug. I can’t see that it matters which Larry helps us. She turns me around and unzips my backpack, pulling out the box.