Odds Are Good

by Bruce Coville

  What she did not find was any sign of who had done this terrible thing to her.

  She sat on the edge of her bed for a long time, stroking Mr. Bumpo and listening to him purr. Finally she decided to go back to her clay working. Remembering a sketch for a new project she had made during math class, she overturned her pack and emptied it on the bed. Out tumbled a mixture of books, crumpled papers, pens and pencils in various stages of usefulness, candy wrappers, rubber bands, sparkly rocks she had picked up on the way to and from school, three crayons stuck together with a piece of used chewing gum, and a moldy sandwich.

  Jamie dug her way through the mound of stuff until she found the sketch. She carried it to her desk and smoothed it out, then picked up the ball of clay and began to work. After about half an hour she decided to go get a snack.

  When she got up from her desk and turned around she let out a yelp of astonishment.

  Her bed was perfectly clean! The mess she had dumped onto it had been organized and tidied into meek submission. The crumpled papers had vanished, the pencils were lined up in a tidy row, the crayons unstuck, the gum that held them together mysteriously gone. Even the backpack’s straps had been neatly folded beneath it.

  “What is going on here?” she cried.

  The only answer was a yawn from Mr. Bumpo.

  Goose bumps prickling over her arms, Jamie wondered if she should run for her life. But nothing about what was happening was threatening. It was just . . . weird.

  She stared at her bed for a while, then made a decision. Stomping over to it, she snatched up the neat piles and tossed them into the air. Mr. Bumpo yowled in alarm, bolted from the bed, and ran out of the room. Jamie stirred the mess around a bit more, rumpled the bedcovers for good measure, then went back to her desk and picked up her tools. She pretended to work. What she was really doing was trying to look over her shoulder while bending her neck as little as possible.

  For several minutes nothing happened except that her neck got sore. In a way, she was glad nothing happened; part of her had been afraid of what she might see. Eventually the pain in her neck got to be too much, and she was forced to straighten her head. When she turned back she saw a brown blur out of the corner of her eye.

  “Gotcha!” she cried, leaping to her feet.

  But whatever it was had disappeared.

  Jamie stood still for a moment, wondering what had happened. Under the bed! she thought suddenly.

  Dropping to her knees, she crept to the bed and lifted the edge of the spread. All she saw was clean floor, and a ripple of movement at the other side of the spread. Whatever had been there had escaped.

  “That little stinker is fast,” Jamie muttered, getting to her feet. She stared at the bed, which was still a mess, and made a decision. Leaving the room, she headed for the kitchen.

  When Jamie returned to her room the bed had been remade and the things from her pack were in perfect order. This did not surprise her.

  She went to the far side of the bed, the side from which whatever-it-was had disappeared. She opened the bottle of molasses she had taken from the kitchen, then poured a thick line of the sticky goo the length of the bed, about a foot from the edge. Replacing the lid, she once again messed up everything on top of the bed. Then she returned to her desk.

  It wasn’t long before she heard a tiny voice cry, “What have you done, what have you done?”

  Turning, she saw a manlike creature about a foot-and-a-half tall. He was jumping up and down beside her bed. Covered with brown fur, he looked like a tiny, potbellied version of Bigfoot. The main differences were a long tail and a generally more human face.

  “Wretched girl!” cried the creature, shaking a hazelnut-sized fist at her. “What’s the matter wi’ you?”

  “What’s the matter with you?” she replied. “Sneaking into a person’s room and cleaning it up when you’re not invited is perverted.”

  “I was too invited,” snapped the creature. Sitting down, he flicked his tail out of the way and began licking molasses from the bottom of his right foot.

  “What a liar you are!” said Jamie.

  “What a Messy Carruthers you are!” replied the creature. “And you don’t know everything, miss. I was sent here by one of your blood. That counts as invitation if she is close enough—which she is.”

  Jamie scowled, then her eyes opened wide. “My grandmother!” she exclaimed. “She sent you, didn’t she?”

  “That she did, and I can see why, too. Really, this place is quite pathetic. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t welcome having someone clean it up. I should think you’d be grateful.”

  “This is my room, and I liked it the way it was,” said Jamie.

  This was not entirely true. Jamie did sometimes wish that the place was clean. But she felt that she couldn’t admit that without losing the argument altogether. Besides, she mostly did like it her way; and she most certainly did not like having someone clean it without her permission. She felt as if she had been robbed or something. “What are you, anyway?” she asked, by way of changing the topic.

  The creature rolled his eyes, as if he couldn’t believe her stupidity. “I’m a brownie,” he said. “As any fool can plainly see.”

  “Brownies don’t exist.”

  “Rude!” cried the creature. “Rude, rude, rude! Your grandmother warned me about that. ‘She’s a rude girl,’ she said. And she was right.”

  “I think it was rude of my grandmother to talk about me like that in front of a complete stranger,” replied Jamie.

  “I’m not a complete stranger. I’ve been the MacDougal family brownie for nearly three hundred years.”

  “That shows what you know!” said Jamie. “I’m not a MacDougal, I’m a Carhart.”

  “Aye, and what was your mother’s name before she was married?”

  “Chase,” said Jamie smugly.

  “And her mother’s name?”

  Jamie’s sense of certainty began to fade. “I don’t have the slightest idea,” she said irritably.

  “Rude, and irreverent as well! No sense of family, have you girl? Well I’ll tell you what you should have known all along. Your grandmother’s maiden name was MacDougal—Harriet Hortense MacDougal, to be precise.”

  “What has that got to do with me?” asked Jamie.

  “Everything,” said the brownie. Having finished licking the molasses from his feet, he scooted over to her desk. Moving so fast she barely had time to flinch, he climbed the desk leg and positioned himself in front of her, which made them face-to-face (though his face was barely the size of her fist). “The last of your family in the old country died last year, leaving me without a family to tend to. Your grandmother, bless her heart, came to close up the house. There she found me, moaning and mournful. ‘Why brownie,’ she says (she being smart enough to know what I am, unlike some I could mention), ‘Why brownie, whatever is the matter with you?’

  “‘My family is all gone,’ I told her. ‘And now I’ve naught to care for, so I shall soon fade away.’

  “Well, right off your grandmother says, ‘Oh, the family is not all gone. I’ve a daughter in the States, and she has a daughter who could more than use your services.”’

  “Thanks, Gramma,” muttered Jamie.

  “I wasn’t much interested in coming to this barbarian wilderness,” said the brownie, ignoring the interruption. “But things being what they were, I didn’t have much choice. So here I am, much to your good fortune.”

  Jamie wondered for a moment why Gramma Hattie had sent the brownie to her instead of to her mother. It didn’t take her long to figure out the answer. Jamie’s mother would have been as happy to have someone clean her house as Jamie was annoyed by having her room invaded. Gramma Hattie would never have wanted to do anything that pleasant.

  “What will it take to get you to leave me alone?” she asked.

  The brownie began to laugh. “What a silly girl you are!” he cried. “You won’t ever be alone again!”

  Gre
at, thought Jamie, rolling her eyes. My grandmother has sent me an eighteen-inch-high stalker. Aloud, she asked, “Are you saying I don’t have any choice in this?”

  “It’s a family matter,” replied the brownie. “No one gets to choose when it comes to things like that.”

  “But I don’t want you here!”

  The brownie’s lower lip began to quiver and his homely little face puckered into what Jamie’s mother called “a booper.”

  “You really don’t want me?” he asked, sniffing just a bit.

  Jamie felt her annoyance begin to melt, until she realized what the brownie was trying to do to her. (It wasn’t hard to figure it out, since she tried the same thing on her parents often enough.) “Oh, stop it,” she snapped.

  Instantly the brownie’s expression changed. Crossing his arms, he sat down on her desk and said, “I’m staying, and that’s final.”

  “You’re going, and I mean it,” replied Jamie. But she realized even as she said it that she had no way to make the threat stick. The smug look on the brownie’s face told her that he was well aware of this.

  Now what was she going to do? Totally frustrated, she said, “I’m going to tell my mother about you.” She hated talking like that; it made her feel like a little kid. But she couldn’t think of anything else.

  It didn’t make any difference. “She won’t believe you,” said the brownie, looking even smugger.

  “Wouldn’t you like to go to work for her?” pleaded Jamie. “She’d be more than happy to have you.”

  The brownie looked wistful. “I would be delighted,” he replied. “But the oldest female in the family has assigned me to you. I have no choice in the matter.”

  For a day or two Jamie thought she might be able to live with the situation—though with the brownie taking up residence in her closet she made it a point to do her dressing and undressing in the bathroom.

  The worst thing was the way her mother smiled whenever she passed the room. Jamie ground her teeth, but said nothing.

  By the third day she was getting used to having the room neat and clean. And though she hated to admit it, it was easier to get things done when she didn’t have to spend half an hour looking for whatever she needed to start. But just when she was beginning to think that things might work out, the brownie did something unforgivable.

  He began to nag.

  “Can’t you do anything for yourself?” he asked petulantly when she tossed her books on the bed one afternoon after she arrived home from school. “Am I expected to take care of everything around here?”

  Jamie looked at him in astonishment. “I didn’t ask you to come here!” she exploded. “And I certainly didn’t ask you to be messing around with my stuff all the time!”

  “I am not messing,” said the brownie primly. “I am unmessing.”

  “I don’t care!” she screamed. “I want you to go away. I don’t like having you here all the time. I don’t like knowing you’re in my closet. I don’t like having my room look the way you and my grandmother think it should look instead of the way I think it should look.”

  “Messy Carruthers,” muttered the brownie.

  “Nosey Parker!” snapped Jamie, accidentally using one of her grandmother’s favorite phrases.

  She stomped to her desk. The brownie disappeared into the closet. A heavy silence descended on the room, broken only when Jamie crumpled a sketch she didn’t like and tossed it on the floor.

  “You pick that up right now!” called the brownie.

  Not only did she not pick up the paper, she crumpled another and threw it on the floor just to spite the creature.

  That was the beginning of what Jamie later thought of as “The Great Slob War.”

  Immediately the brownie came dashing from the closet, snatched up the offending papers, and tossed them into the wastebasket. Muttering angrily, he stomped back to the closet (not very effective for someone only a foot and a half tall) and slammed the door behind him.

  Jamie immediately wadded up another paper and threw it on the floor. The brownie dashed out to pick it up. Seized by inspiration, Jamie overturned her wastebasket and shook it out. As the brownie began scurrying around to pick up the papers, she plunked the wastebasket down and sat on it. “Now where will you put the papers?” she asked triumphantly.

  Her sense of victory dissolved when the brownie gathered the trash in a pile and began to race around it. With a sudden snap, the pile vanished into nothingness. Wiping his hands, the brownie gave her the smuggest look yet. Then he returned to the closet, slamming the door behind him.

  “How did you do that?” cried Jamie. He didn’t answer. She threw the wastebasket at the door and began to plan her next attack.

  She smeared clay on the wall.

  She emptied the contents of her dresser onto her floor, tossing out socks, underwear, blouses, and jeans with wild abandon. She tracked all over them with muddy boots and crushed cracker crumbs on top. The brownie simply waited until she left for school. By the time she got home everything had been cleaned, folded, and replaced, neater than before.

  Furious, she opened her pencil sharpener and sprinkled its contents all over her bed, topped them off with pancake syrup, a tangled mass of string, and the collection of paper-punch holes she had been saving all year.

  The brownie, equally furious, managed to lick and pluck every one of the shavings from the thick weave of the spread with his tiny fingers. The entire time that he was doing this he muttered and cursed, telling Jamie in no uncertain terms what he thought of her, what a disgrace she was to her family, and to what a bad end she was likely to come.

  Jamie tipped back her chair on two legs, lounging unrepentantly. “You missed one,” she said when the brownie had finished and was heading back to the closet. He raced back to the bed, but after an intense examination discovered that she had been lying.

  “What a wicked girl!” he cried. “Trying to fool a poor brownie that way.”

  “You’re not a poor brownie!” she screamed. “You’re a menace!” Suddenly days of frustration began to bubble within her. “I can’t stand it!” she cried. “I can’t take any more of this. I want you to leave me alone!”

  “I can’t leave you alone!” shouted the brownie, jumping up and down and waving his tiny fists in the air. “We are bound to each other by ancient ties, by words and deeds, by promises written in blood spilled on your family’s land.”

  “Get out!” cried Jamie. In a frenzy she snatched up an old pillow that had come from her grandmother’s house and began smacking it against her bed. The pillow burst open, exploding into a cloud of feathers. “Get out, get out, get out!”

  Shrieking with rage, the brownie began trying to pick up the feathers. But the faster he moved the more he sent them drifting away from him. When Jamie saw what was happening she began waving her arms to keep the feathers afloat. The brownie leaped and turned, trying to pluck them from the air. He moved faster and faster, wild, frenzied. Finally he began racing in a circle. He went faster still, until he was little more than a blur to Jamie’s eyes. Then, with a sudden snap! he vanished, just as the papers had the day before.

  Jamie blinked, then began to laugh. She had done it. She had gotten rid of him!

  And that should have been that.

  But a strange thing happened. As the days went on she began to miss the little creature. Infuriating as he had been, he had also been rather cute. Moreover, the condition of her room began to irritate her.

  A week after the brownie vanished she was rooting around in the disarray on her floor, trying to find her clay-working tools, which had been missing for three days. Forty-five minutes of searching had so far failed to turn them up.

  “Sometimes I actually wish that brownie had stayed around,” she muttered.

  From the closet a tiny voice said, “A-hoo.”

  Jamie stood up. “Is that you, brownie?”

  “A-hoo,” repeated the voice; it sounded pathetically weak.

  Feeling sligh
tly nervous—ever since this started she had not been entirely comfortable with her closet—Jamie went to the door and asked, “Are you in there?”

  “A-hoo,” said the voice a third time. It seemed to come from the upper shelf.

  “Brownie, is that you?”

  No answer at all this time.

  She ran to her desk. Kicking aside the intervening clutter, she dragged the chair back to the closet. By standing on it, she could reach the upper shelf.

  “Brownie?” she called. “Are you there?”

  “A-hoo.”

  The voice was coming from a shoe box. She pulled it from the shelf and looked in. The brownie lay inside. He looked wan and thin, and after a moment she realized to her horror that she could see right through him.

  “I thought you had left,” she said, her voice thick with guilt.

  “I had no place to go.” His voice seemed to come from a far-off place. “I am bound to you, and to this house. All I could do was wait to fade away.”

  An icy fear clenched her heart. “Are you going to die?”

  “A-hoo,” said the brownie. Then he closed his eyes and turned his head away.

  She scrambled from the chair and placed the shoe box on her bed. I’ve killed him! she thought in horror. Reaching into the box, she lifted his tiny form. It was no heavier than the feathers he had been chasing when he had disappeared. She could see her fingers right through his body.

  “Don’t die,” she pleaded. “Don’t. Stay with me, brownie. We can work something out.”

  The brownie’s eyelids fluttered.

  “I mean it!” said Jamie. “I was actually starting to miss you.”

  “A-hoo,” said the brownie. Opening his eyes, he gazed at her uncomprehendingly. “Oh, it’s you,” he said at last. Then he lifted his head and looked at her room. He moaned tragically at the disarray and closed his eyes again.