“Oh, Dare,” she whispered. “I’ve been so stupid. He’s been trying to tell me all along.”
The focus on the team, whether it was Independence Youth Hockey or the Avengers or the 1980 Miracle on Ice team—her dad had drilled it into her. Some people got the glory, but you couldn’t do it without your team. She thought about what Uncle Donny had said earlier that day—if a teammate messes up, they didn’t blow the game. The team blew the game. Her dad had stressed that, too.
And who was her number one teammate? Lewis. Lewis who had asked for her help with Melanie’s quest, even though he hadn’t really understood it. She had rejected them. She had tried to do it all herself.
She hung her head.
That’s when she saw it.
It was at the very bottom of the box, peeking out from under an old piece of newsprint: The Story Web.
Carefully she took the book out of the box. There was a spine label, and inside was stamped: Property of Independence Community School Library. Her dad had stolen a library book!
The pages were yellowed around the edges, and when she opened it, it had that old-book smell: not bad, but like the stories had been locked inside for ages and straining to get out. She flipped through, looking at the pictures without reading any words. On the inside back cover was a pocket with an old-fashioned library checkout card. Alice pulled it out. People had written their names in neat cursive or crooked letters.
Nadine Alegernon
Sam Pelletier
Emily Zelonis
Abby Clark
Andrew Dingwell
Henry Green
Alice ran her finger over her father’s name. He had written in shaky cursive, carefully forming each letter of his full name. He had checked out this book. This very book. She went back through it. All those old stories, the kinds told over and over again so everyone knew them. Stories of great floods, like Noah’s ark, but also the Gilgamesh tale and another from the Hopi Indians, and one from China. There were stories of epic heroes, of great battles. There were princesses and knights, and sometimes the princesses were knights. Then she found herself back at the beginning. There was more to the prologue than she’d remembered. It explained what would happen if the Story Web broke. The picture showed the world covered in ice. The Freezing.
She had the book, now she needed the team. But they were lost in the wilderness. Lewis was lost in the woods. A sick, bitter taste filled her mouth as her throat tightened. She rocked back on the bed and curled into a ball.
Outside, the ice pelted.
There was only one thing Alice could do. “I’ll be back, Dare,” she said to the bird, and went downstairs to put on her boots.
Melanie wraps her cloak around her tightly. Her purple gloves are frozen and stiff. Each drop feels like a tiny knife, poking, poking, poking.
She remembers that the night of the car crash it rained, too. The story her aunt told wasn’t completely true.
They weren’t a king and queen to anyone but her.
They didn’t send her away. They would never have made that choice, even to save the whole wide world. The story still makes her feel better.
She tells herself the ice hitting her face is stars. She is traveling at warp speed. She has shot through the stratosphere, the mesosphere, the thermosphere. Up and up and up. She will keep going until she reaches them.
What will she say when she gets there? That she failed? She found the web, but she couldn’t save it. That she couldn’t stop the Freezing.
“Just a little farther,” Lewis says to her.
But he is wrong. Neither of them knows where they are.
No one knows where they are.
Her pendant is against her chest, cold as the sky. Maratus volans. Maratus volans. Maratus volans. The spider’s name is her mantra. It was her mother’s favorite spider, the peacock jumping spider, because people are usually scared of spiders, but this one was so beautiful. “You have to find the beauty in every little thing, Melanie.”
“Just a little farther,” Lewis says.
They walk and walk and walk.
Her parents would have to understand that she tried, wouldn’t they?
Their feet crunch over dried and frozen leaves. Maple, elm, birch, oak. The icy rain pelts them over and over. They walk and walk.
Nothing. No one. Nowhere.
Living as she did in a world between the humans and the animals, Emu felt she had much to prove. Emus were very proud to begin with, of course, and, at the same time, a trifle self-conscious about their inability to fly. Not merely the inability to fly but the fact that they were so often overlooked. Say “flightless bird” and people think of ostriches and penguins. They may also think of turkeys, which isn’t quite true. Turkeys can fly, just not very well. The point being that people think of turkeys before they think of emus, and that made Emu defensive. Taken altogether this meant that Emu was always trying to prove herself. Sometimes it came across as showy—the stiff-legged walk, the long neck curved just so—but it all stemmed from a deep need to be seen.
The cold gray sky had sent Emu into the shed, so she saw her girl and the boy walk into the woods. She watched their footprints fill with ice as they disappeared among the trees.
Not so strange those humans going into the forest.
But the sky turned darker and darker, and the night crept in.
Emu paced back and forth in the shed. She wished the woman would return. If the woman came back, Emu would tell her—somehow, some way—that the children were in the woods.
Then the other girl came crashing through the forest, the one all the animals were so concerned about.
Emu nodded one time, her long neck bending in that graceful way the other birds so admired, though they’d never admit it. She kicked one leg out in front of her and began her walk into the forest. She had to catch that girl in order to save her own girl.
Getting across town was the first challenge. Alice slipped over the ice, twice falling right to her knees. She didn’t give up, though. She stepped into the woods by the Bird House. The emu sidled up beside her and made a strange grunting sound. “You know where they are?” Alice asked.
The emu nodded.
“Then show me.”
Her backpack was heavy. She had two blankets, a thermos of hot chocolate, and the book. Its edges dug into her back as she walked.
“Is it far?” she asked.
The emu didn’t respond. Deeper and deeper, they went into the woods. Alice had her warmest mittens on, but still her fingers started to burn. How much longer could she stand being out here? How much longer could Lewis and Melanie?
She searched the ground for any sign of the web but saw nothing, only ice crystals forming over the leaves and pine needles on the forest floor. The emu kept swiveling its long neck to look back at her, making sure she was still there.
Finally, the emu stopped. Alice wasn’t sure why at first, and then she saw them: Lewis and Melanie, curled together under a tree. “Lewis!” she cried.
He looked up at her, blinking ice from his lashes. “You came,” he said.
“Of course,” she replied, and forced a smile.
She dug out the blankets and wrapped them around Lewis and Melanie. “Do you know how to get back?” Lewis asked.
“I think the emu does,” Alice said. “But I have it. I have the book.”
Melanie finally looked up then. “The Story Web?”
“Yes!” Alice replied.
Melanie and Lewis looked at each other. “We can’t,” he said. “We already tried.”
“We have the book now,” Alice said. “Don’t you see? You couldn’t do it alone, and I couldn’t do it alone.” She was talking so quickly she could barely catch her breath, but she had to get it all out. “I know what we have to do. At least I think so. Remember in the movie Dad always made us watch? The one about the 1980 hockey team? How they had all been on different teams, all rivals, and they had to come together into one team? That’s how they won?”<
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Melanie looked a little confused, but Lewis nodded.
“And, like, the Avengers and the Justice League.”
“Sure,” Lewis said. “But—”
“That’s the message,” Alice said. “Ms. Zee keeps talking about the hero. But there’s never just one.”
“That makes sense,” Melanie said.
Lewis pursed his lips, which Alice knew meant he was trying to get his head around something.
“Henrietta told me about how when she was in World War II, she was part of a team of translators. A lot of it was just work. It wasn’t one person finding this one important document and, like, ending the war. It was all of them just doing their jobs that saved things. My dad said that, too. That most of the time being a soldier isn’t big movie-style heroics. It’s showing up, doing your job—that’s what makes a hero.”
“Like Cal Ripken?” Lewis asked. Cal Ripken, Alice knew, was Lewis’s favorite non-hockey athlete. He set a record for the most baseball games played in a row: 2,632 games! He always said his job was baseball, and he was just doing his job.
“Yes. But not one person. All of us.” Alice wrapped her arms around herself. “I was trying to do it alone, but I can’t. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”
Lewis stood up. He still had the blanket over his shoulders, which almost looked like a cape. “So what do we have to do?” he asked.
“We have the book, and we have our team.” Alice said. “Now we just need to go out to the web and read the stories and—”
“We’re freezing, Alice,” Lewis said. “Let’s go home and warm up, and we can come back tomorrow—”
“No!” Melanie interrupted. “Look around you, Lewis. It’s happening. The Freezing. It’s happening now, and we need to stop it.”
“It’s just an ice storm,” he said.
Alice and Melanie shook their heads. “We have to go,” Alice said. “And I need you.”
“Fine,” Lewis said. He tightened the blanket over his shoulders. “Let’s do this.”
4
Emu led the way back to the web. It was just up and around the bend.
“We must have been walking in circles,” Lewis said. “Everything looked so different with the ice on it—we couldn’t find our way.”
“My dad once told me about a windstorm that came through his camp. He said he didn’t know which way was which. Places he’d gone a thousand times, he couldn’t find them.” They approached the willow tree. Alice lifted the branch so Melanie and Lewis could crawl under. “He said when it was over, he honestly wasn’t sure if it was the same place. There was part of him that wondered if he’d been picked up in the storm, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and dropped down someplace new.”
Alice remembered how he’d said it: It certainly wasn’t Kansas, and it sure as heck wasn’t Oz.
When he’d told the story to her, he’d always left out the part about the soldiers attacking, the part she’d heard in his phone call to her mom. She took a deep breath. “During the storm, insurgents came. That’s how my dad lost his friends. That’s how—” She paused. Melanie put her hand on her arm. Alice looked at the long fingers, wrapped in soft purple gloves. “I mean I don’t know for sure, but I think that’s part of what happened with him.”
She felt Lewis looking at her.
“I think being so confused, losing his friends like that. On the day it happened—I mean, the day of the social. When he—” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say what he had done. “He was protecting me. I knew that the whole time.”
“Look!” Melanie exclaimed.
On the web were three spiders, busily weaving even as the icy rain fell around them.
Alice’s heart rate quickened. She pulled the book from her backpack. “It says we have to tell the stories,” she said. She flipped through the book to get to one of her favorites and began reading. “Once upon a time . . .”
She read clearly, loudly, with great feeling. She was trying to sound just like Ms. Engle who was so wonderful at reading aloud. But, as she read, no more spiders appeared. In fact, the three on the web slowed down, lazily spinning out their lines and loosely connecting them. The rain was strong enough to break the threads, so any work they did was immediately undone.
Melanie took the book from her and read a story. She read with her voice filled with emotion. Nothing. Alice crawled up the web, the mud seeping in at her knees. “Weave,” she begged the spiders. “Please, just weave.”
Lewis took the book next but with the same results. He slammed it shut.
“What’s going on?” Alice cried. “Why isn’t it working?” She’d been so certain they were going to solve this. She’d found the book. She’d had the big realization about working together. What more did this stupid web want from her?
“Maybe it already has these stories,” Lewis said. “Maybe—”
“The book says to read them! To keep telling them!” Alice’s voice cracked. She blinked away hot tears. How could the book be wrong? “We’re doing what it tells us to do, so why isn’t it working?”
“I don’t know,” Melanie said. Her voice was so soft and broken, Alice barely heard her. “I just figured if we had the book, if we did what it said . . .” Her voice trailed off.
The spiders slowed even more. One of them let a strand fly out into the wind.
“You see that strand right there?” Alice asked. “The one just flopping around?”
All three looked at it.
“See that little spruce needle caught in it?”
The spruce needle was not even half an inch long, dead and orange brown. It flopped up and down, tugged about by the wind and battered by the rain.
“Ever since my dad left, that’s how I feel.”
Melanie and Lewis nodded.
“Like any minute, I might disconnect and fly off and never be seen again.” She snapped the book closed. “I thought if I could figure this out, if I could save this stupid web—” She shook her head.
“I know,” Melanie said.
“I’m not even sure if this story is true, if this web is holding our whole world together. I just thought I could save it because that’s what my dad would do if he were here. But he’s not. Because of me.”
Alice dropped to the ground and hugged her knees to her chest. She’d failed. The icy rain fell harder. It pelted her face and drenched her hair. Her clothes were soaked through. She shivered, cold to the bone. “It’s going to come,” she whispered. “The Freezing.”
Melanie shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “It’s already here.”
Waxwing, who had come to love the name Dare, hopped from the bed and jumped, flapping her useless wing the whole way. It took a while longer to cross the room, and there was a struggle to climb the curtain. Once in the window, she tapped the glass two times, then three, then two again.
Maybe she hadn’t been able to get her message to the girl. Maybe she had a broken wing. But the girl needed her. The girl was out in those woods, along with the other two children. Dare couldn’t go find them, but she could send help.
BZEEP! BZEEP! She tapped on the window as she cried.
A moment later, Owl appeared. Dare told him about the other children, lost in the woods, and how the girl had gone to find them.
Owl nodded and took off, filling the air with his low hoot. The night creatures heard the sound and set off looking.
Owl circled over the forest. Listening, listening, listening. Humans were so very loud, he thought certainly he would hear them. The storm, though, muffled sounds.
Below, the other animals searched as well. Raccoon and Skunk sniffed the earth. Porcupine climbed trees and peered through the falling ice. Owl kept track of them as well. On and on they searched until the sky began to lighten.
Crunch!
Owl’s attention quickened. He dove down, down, down and landed right at the feet of the three children who sat, defeated, in front of the web.
Whooo! he called.
“You have given me the scare of my life, Lewis Marble.”
His mom squeezed him so tightly he thought he might stop breathing. Part of him thought that might be her plan. He sat on the exam table in the emergency room wrapped in a blanket and wearing his dad’s old college sweatshirt. He didn’t need to be here. He was fine. The owl had rescued them.
The owl.
Maybe he wasn’t all right after all.
“Are you okay? Are you going to faint?” his mom asked. It was strange to see her so high-strung.
“I’m fine,” he told her.
After the stories hadn’t worked, they had just stayed at the web. What else could they do? They just sat there, still as rocks.
All of a sudden, there was the owl. It hooted at them, and they had followed. It flew low so they could see it, and soon they were joined by an army of nighttime animals, all leading them home.
He rubbed his forehead.
That’s how he remembered it, so that’s how it was. The animals had led them to the Bird House. Melanie’s aunt ran out the back door. She wrapped them in cloaks that smelled of mint and lavender and hurried them inside. She put them in front of the fire where they had thawed out like old mittens after a snow day.
The ambulance came, and everyone was all over the house. They tramped their wet feet on the antique rugs and left angry, muddy bootprints. Nocturne, the owl, had dashed down at one of the EMTs and been brushed off.
They hurried Lewis and Alice into the ambulance. Melanie stayed behind with her aunt. He saw her in the window before they closed the doors of the ambulance. She waved and he tried to wave back, but an EMT pressed his hand and said, “Shh, you’re okay now. We got you out of there.”
In the window, one last glimpse, Melanie’s aunt placed both hands on Melanie’s shoulders and pulled her close.
The doors shut, and Lewis realized he had been wrong about everything.
Beside him, Alice sobbed. He wanted to reach out to her, but his arms were under a heavy blanket.
The Story Web Page 17