Santa Claus magic. Tooth Fairy magic. Hobbit magic. I’d known that there was no such thing, right from the start. But we needed it back. We had to believe. I was convinced the only way to make any of this okay again was to figure out a way to get Wonder Roo back.
I looked around the room, hoping for some kind of inspiration. My eyes landed on the hairbrush sitting on Roona’s dresser—on top of a pile of books, next to a collection of tiny little ceramic animals, all lined up on parade. I picked it up. It had ponytail holders wrapped around the handle. Perfect.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I almost put it back down again. This was awkward and I was the worst at awkward. “My mom taught me how to braid Harper’s hair.”
“Okay…” She scooted a little farther away from me.
I sat next to her on the bed. “Just hold still.”
“Gideon.”
I took a handful of her hair and started to brush it, from the bottom up. I didn’t have a ton of time. Mom and Harper could be back from the grocery store at any moment. In fact, my entire body was on edge, waiting to hear a knock on the door and Gideon Douglas get your endangered rear end out here called from the living room.
“Just hold still,” I said again.
I didn’t go for perfect. I just smoothed the tangles well enough so that I could put her hair into two braids, the way I did sometimes with Harper. The way her hair was the first time I’d seen her on her porch, in her Wonder Roo getup.
After I snapped the second ponytail holder in place, she brushed her palms over the braids. She already looked better, anyway. “Thank you.”
“You look more like yourself,” I said. I stopped myself from adding sort of. She needed a shower and clean clothes. And a nap. A good, long nap. But it was a start. I picked up the blanket from where I’d set it beside me on the bed and held it out to her.
“I told you,” she said. “Wonder Roo isn’t real.”
“It’s worth a try.” Her mouth narrowed to a tight line and she stared at me. “Please, Roona. I have to get home before my mom does. Just try.”
She rubbed her hands over her knees, then reached up and took it. She just held on to the blanket and I didn’t push harder. It was a start, I told myself again. It was something.
“We have to figure out how to stop my mom from giving your family that pie,” she said. “Trust me, you guys don’t want to eat it.”
“Come with your mom when she brings the pie over.”
“You want the pie?”
“Yep.”
* * *
Step #2: convince Roona to go along with my plan.
I beat Mom and Harper home, but only by minutes. My heart pounded in my throat when I heard the car pull up before I’d even made it back to my bedroom.
I had a plan.
I didn’t know how good it was, but it was something. And it was about a million times better than the idea of Roona trying to break her father out of prison.
I needed Roona to get on board with it, though. Otherwise, it was useless.
“What’s for dinner tonight?” I asked as I helped bring bags in from the car. “I’m just curious.”
“Curious?” Mom pushed open the screen door with her hip and looked back at me. “Salad. And I’m going to see if I can get Daddy to grill some chicken. I can’t stand to turn the oven on today.”
“Perfect.”
Mom turned to put her bags down. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing.” Salad and chicken would work. It wouldn’t be hard to make it stretch to feed two more. I helped put the groceries away without being asked. Mom was onto me, I could tell by the way she kept looking sideways, but she didn’t guess my plan and she didn’t ask.
“Can I go outside?”
“Just in the backyard,” she said.
“We should get one of those little pools, like Roona has. Harper would love it. It’s so hot here.”
Mom leaned back against the kitchen sink. “It certainly is. I’m not sure it’s fit for human habitation. Take a water bottle with you. I don’t want you to get dehydrated.”
“Okay.” I opened the fridge and took two. I tucked one under my arm and hoped she wouldn’t notice.
“You should put some sunscreen on, too.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it, Gideon.”
“I already did.” I went out the kitchen door, into the backyard.
I was planning on throwing something at Roona’s bedroom window to get her to come outside, but she was already sitting on her chair beside her pool, with her feet in the water.
My heart did something funny when I saw her. Kind of flipped over and then felt about a thousand pounds lighter.
She was wearing cutoff jeans and a yellow T-shirt, with her orange swimsuit with the green flower pulled over it. Her striped socks sat in her lap, folded on top of my old baby blanket.
Her hair was still in braids and she looked better than she had since our adventure in Las Vegas. I called out, “Is it working?”
She looked up at me and shrugged. “Hard to tell.”
“I know how we can tell.”
Her one eyebrow shot up. “How?”
I tipped my head toward the shade of the cottonwood tree at the back of our yards. She stood up and walked toward it.
It was cooler in the shade, but the difference between 112 degrees and 105? Not much. Having the sun off my skin, which was not covered in sunblock, was good, though.
“So?” she asked.
“We need to get my parents to invite you guys to stay for dinner tonight, when you bring over the pie.”
“What?”
“We need to let everyone eat it.” I took a breath. “Except us. You and me, I mean.”
She looked at me like I’d just suggested we poison both of our families. “Are you serious?”
“Yes. But I’m glad you’re worried.”
“What?”
“It means you still believe.”
“You are crazy.”
“If everyone eats the pie, then my parents will see—”
“See what? That my mom is…”
“That you need help.”
She shook her head. “Forget it, Gideon.”
“No, I’m serious. I think we can talk them into letting you stay with us while your mom is getting better.”
* * *
Step #3: show Mom and Dad that Roona’s mom needs help.
It was going to take some doing. Because Quintons minded their own business. They didn’t get into other people’s problems.
The idea of letting the girl next door stay with us because her mom needed to be in a hospital—a mental hospital—to get better wasn’t going to be an easy sell, no matter what.
It was going to be especially hard because of the whole could-have-been-kidnapped-in-Las-Vegas thing.
It would help if my parents could see for themselves. And it would really help if they could feel for themselves. That’s why they needed to eat the cherry pie.
“There is no way your parents are going to let me stay with you,” Roona said. “I’ll have to go back to Idaho.”
“Even if that’s what happens, it needs to happen,” I said. “Right? I mean, we agree on that. Your mom needs help. Pronto.”
Roona looked back at her house. Music was blaring out of it. Some kind of hard-driving old rock and roll. The stuff my dad sometimes listened to when he used his treadmill.
“I don’t want to go to Idaho,” Roona said.
“I know.”
“I can’t go to Idaho.”
There was more to her story. Something she hadn’t told me. I was tempted to call for a game of Truth. Make her spill her guts. She would, if I asked that way. Somehow, though, I knew that it wasn’t the right thing to do.
Roona needed to be able to keep that one secret until she was ready to share it.
“So,” I said. “Operation Cherry Pie.”
Roona rubbed the edge of my old baby bla
nket between her fingers, then looked up at me. “Operation Cherry Pie.”
“Um…” I bit my bottom lip, screwing up my courage to ask the next question. “If blue makes people extra sad, what does red do?”
Roona inhaled slowly. “Did I ever tell you about the time my mom made a red velvet cake for the bunco ladies?”
Oh no. “No.”
Roona sat down with her back against the trunk of the cottonwood tree. “Oh boy.”
I sat down, too, as close as I could with the fence between us.
“So the bunco ladies play once a month. And usually, they take turns baking something to bring. As a snack, you know?”
“Right.”
“Well, about two years ago, Mrs. Neilson’s daughter had a baby and she just couldn’t bake her own cake. She hired my mom to do it.”
“Oh God.” I felt my insides clench. Like that time I snuck into the kitchen and peeked around the corner to our living room while my parents were watching a horror movie and saw someone on the screen being stabbed about a thousand times.
“She wanted red velvet. It was a mistake, of course.”
“Of course it was.”
“A nice vanilla or lemon cake would have been better.”
“What happened? Did everyone get really mad at each other or something? Red is an angry color, right? Like blue is a sad color.”
Roona shook her head. “Not angry. Mom had the Mean Reds.”
“Mean Reds?”
“It’s from an old movie. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s Mom’s favorite. The girl in it gets the Mean Reds when she’s scared, but she doesn’t know what she’s scared of.”
“I don’t get it.”
“When she just wants to be someone else. Somewhere else. But she doesn’t know why. Don’t you ever feel that way?”
I still didn’t quite understand, but I nodded anyway.
“One of the bunco ladies just drove off after the meeting. She left her kids at the sitter’s and never went home.”
My eyebrows shot up. I really wished I could do that one-eyebrow thing. “She ran away from home?”
“Yes. The cake gave her the Mean Reds and she just left.”
“Maybe she would have left anyway,” I said. “Maybe it wasn’t the cake.”
Roona went back to fiddling with the edge of my old baby blanket. “Maybe.”
“Cherry pie isn’t going to make one of my parents run away from home.” I wanted to believe that, 100 percent, but I couldn’t stop talking. “Is it?”
“My mom gets the Mean Reds all the time. She’s never run away from home.”
“What happens when she gets them?”
Roona tipped her chin toward the house. Music still blared out. It was probably making my mom crazy.
“She gets lost.” Roona wrinkled her face, like she was looking for the right words. “She loses herself. Like she doesn’t know who she is anymore.”
“She looked fine earlier.”
“She didn’t look like herself. She looked like a mom from an old TV show.” Roona took off one flip-flop and pulled a striped sock over her foot and up her calf to her knee. She shoved her foot back in the shoe, so that the part that went between her toes pushed against the sock. “She’s not fine.”
“She has the Mean Reds?”
“She definitely does.”
“She had them that day?” I hoped Roona wouldn’t make me say which day. I didn’t want to say it out loud. “You know. That day when you were in the third grade?”
“She had them bad that day.”
“As bad as now?”
Roona took a deep breath, then put on her other sock. “No. Not as bad as now. I’ve never seen her like this.”
“Roona?”
She looked up at me.
“I want to ask something, but not a Truth. It’s okay if you don’t want to answer.”
She smoothed her braids back and shifted her shoulders. “You want to know what happened in Idaho.”
“I get it’s none of my business. Not really. But if someone knew, if we told my parents, it might make them let you—”
“You can’t tell your parents.”
“Roona.”
“You have to promise, or I won’t tell you.”
I didn’t like it. She was about to tell me something that a parent probably needed to know. If not hers, then mine.
I promised anyway. Because I needed to know. And because she needed to tell someone. “Okay.”
“Promise?”
“Yes. I promise.” She looked at me until I held up my hands and waggled my fingers to prove they weren’t crossed.
She spit in her palm and held it out to me. Another spit swear. I hesitated, but only a few seconds, before spitting in my own hand and shaking with her.
“I have a cousin, Tucker,” she said.
Suddenly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what she was going to tell me.
“He locked me in the attic closet,” Roona said. “He told me that he wanted to show me something up there.”
She bent her knees and pressed her cheek into my blanket, resting on them.
I wasn’t sure what to say. I expected something more. Something horrible. Being locked in a closet was bad, I guessed. Maybe bad enough. “How old is he?”
“He was fourteen when I was eight.” Roona tapped her fingers on her leg, then said, “So he must be eighteen now.”
“Maybe he won’t be so bad this time. Maybe he doesn’t even live at home anymore?”
Just like when her mother mentioned the cherry pie, the color drained from her face. I tensed, ready to call for help if she fainted. “Put your head between your knees or something.”
She sat up straighter. “I’m fine.”
“How long were you in the closet?”
“Until the next day.”
“No one came to find you?”
She shook her head. “They didn’t even realize I was gone. I mean, I was the ninth kid.”
My aunt Jane has eight kids. Gertie, Amaleah, Tucker, Lola, Everett and Morgan, Harvest, and baby Joe. So many kids, she’d said the day we met, they ran out of names. “Did your cousin get in trouble?”
Her bottom lip trembled. “He didn’t.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
She nodded this time.
“What kind of trouble?”
“Promise you won’t tell,” she said again.
“I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t promise that.”
She stood up, wobbled a little, and put her hand on the tree trunk to steady herself. “Then never mind.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Promise.”
She stared at me and then started to walk away. I threaded my fingers through the heated fence links. If she walked away without telling me, I would be the worst friend there ever was. “Okay. Okay, I promise, I won’t tell my parents.”
She stopped, then bent and put the blanket on the ground without turning back to me. She pulled the straps off her shoulders and tugged the top of her swimsuit to her waist, then lifted the bottom of her T-shirt to her rib cage.
She was only a few steps away from me, out of the shade so she was in full sun. I saw the knobs of her spine, the shadows of her ribs.
And I saw two raised scars, long and narrow, running across her lower back.
For a second, I was pretty sure I was going to be sick.
When I caught my breath, I asked, “What is that?”
“She used a stick she keeps under her bed.”
“Who did?”
“My aunt.”
“Your mom doesn’t know about that?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want her to know. It will only make things worse.”
She let her shirt fall, then turned to look at me. “I can’t go back there.”
There was more. I felt it bubbling between us. I didn’t ask, though. I felt like a coward, but I couldn’t take any more.
“We need to help your
mom,” I said.
Roona picked the blanket back up and went to her house. The music blared louder when she opened the door, then a few seconds later, it went away altogether.
“We need Wonder Roo back,” I said to no one.
Thirteen
My plan was to make my parents decide to let Roona stay with us while Mrs. Mulroney got help.
Step #1 was in progress. At least Roona had a new blanket. Step #2 was done.
Step #3 wouldn’t be hard. My parents knew that Mrs. Mulroney wasn’t well. They just needed a little push to see how unwell she really was.
Step #4: convince my parents to let Roona live with us while her mom was getting help.
It felt like an impossible task. Like a little hobbit from Bag-End helping a band of dwarves steal their treasure back from a dragon. I didn’t even want to think about it yet.
I saw the marks across Roona’s back every time I closed my eyes. I really wanted to spill the beans and tell my parents, but I knew what they’d do.
They’d call the police. The problem was that I didn’t know what would happen next. Would adults believe Roona’s story? If she couldn’t go to Idaho, where would she go? A foster home?
No. Roona might end up in Idaho anyway. Or someplace even worse. I had to make step #4 happen. I had to. I needed my parents to let Roona stay with us. And to do that, I needed it to be their idea.
I was helping Mom make the salad when there was a knock on the door. Mom put her knife down and wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Who in the world…?”
“I’ll get it,” I said.
I pushed around her and went for the front door.
“Hey,” she said. “Gideon, wait a minute.”
I threw the door open and saw Roona, still in her Wonder Roo getup—only this time with my blanket tied around her neck like a cape—and her mother standing on the stoop.
Mrs. Mulroney held the cherry pie in both hands.
“I made this for you, Daria. I just had to do something—something. I feel so terrible about Roona convincing Gideon to go off with her like that. I’m so embarrassed, and trust me, she’s heard it from me. She’ll be grounded until prom at least.” She shoved the pie at my mom, who put her hands out to catch it before it fell to the floor. “I got a great deal on cherries at the farmers’ market this morning. They’re extra sweet. I think—”
The Astonishing Maybe Page 10