Eventown

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “I’ve heard about this room,” she says. She touches a few things that maybe she’s read about in Eventown textbooks—the couch, the chair, a blanket, a pillow. I look for something else, for some trunk or closet or drawer where they put stories. Nothing in the desk. Nothing in the closet except for a coat and a broom. Nothing in the bookcase but more blank-paged books. I even push at the wood carving of the rose on the wall. It’s smooth in some places and rough in others. It looks like it’s been here forever, and I love the way it looks like a promise. I imagine Jasper Plimmswood himself carving it, imagining his fresh start.

  Walking from the bookcase back to the couch, however, I notice a creak in the floor. It’s a sort of shudder, an almost-lump under my foot that could be a wrinkle in the rug, except in Eventown it seems like rugs don’t wrinkle and floors don’t creak.

  “Veena,” I say. “Come here.” I kneel on the ground and pull up the lavender rug. Veena gets distracted for a moment with how soft it is to the touch, but she helps me lift it up. Underneath is a brass panel, big enough for a person to fit through. The panel is textured, but when I lean in close—very close—I see that the texture is actually tiny engravings of names. Hundreds of them, too small to read many of them, but I see an Arthur and a Maria and a Nancy and a Jamal.

  There’s a tiny knob in the right-hand corner of the panel. I try to twist it this way and that, but it doesn’t budge. Veena hovers over it and grabs the knob, giving it a pull up and out instead of a twist.

  The panel comes all the way off, and we teeter over what is now a big open hole in the floor.

  “Wow,” Veena says, her voice mostly breath.

  I peer down the hole. There’s soft lighting coming up from wherever the hole leads. A ladder made of Eventown vines swings below us, begging us to climb down it.

  Except we have no idea what we’d be climbing down to.

  “What do you think?” Veena asks. She lies on her stomach and brings her face over the hole in the ground, as if the extra few feet will let her see what’s down there.

  “The stories could be at the bottom of the ladder,” I say.

  “What else could it be?”

  “I have no idea,” I say, because it feels like I know nothing about this place anymore.

  It’s Veena who knows how to be brave right now. It’s Veena who takes the first step onto the vine ladder. And it’s Veena who says, “It’s okay, Elodee. We can do this.”

  Her necklaces make their ghostly wind-chime sound, and I follow that noise and my friend down the vine.

  It’s a long climb. The ladder swings back and forth with every step, and my hands start to hurt from gripping the leaves and branches. But I’m grateful for the pool of light below us and the storytelling room still visible above us.

  After minutes that feel like hours, we reach the bottom. Except the bottom is nothing but a hallway of doors. The doors come in every possible color and material. Stained glass. Bright-red rubber. Shiny gold. Doors made of sheer silk and paper and brick and thick wool. The doorknobs are different too—shapes of different flowers. Not Eventown flowers. Not roses. The doorknobs are shaped like flowers that only started appearing after things got strange here. Daisies and tulips and lilies. Sunflower doorknobs and pansy ones too. All the flowers Dad’s shown me over the years. All the doors, in fact, seem to be made of things that I haven’t seen in Eventown. There are beautiful paintings on the doors, and there was no art in Eventown that I can think of. One door looks like it’s made of the pages of a book—one with actual words in it.

  “Look,” Veena says, and I look above us. Hanging from the ceiling are all kinds of objects, things that look like they came from other lives, from faraway places where things go wrong and things hurt and people make mistakes. There are diamond rings and old keys and baseball mitts and china plates and locked diaries. There are ties and wedding gowns and graduation caps and maps of places I’ve never been before. And there are books. So many books. “What in the world is all this stuff?” Veena says. We are both spinning around with our faces turned up, trying to take in every last detail.

  “They’re sparks,” I say, suddenly sure. “They are sparks of stories, little tiny bits and pieces of memories.”

  I want to see something that I recognize, something from Juniper, but I don’t see anything familiar. It’s probably where Dad was supposed to bring his rosebush. And maybe the photograph of him that’s hidden in my bedside table drawer. Anything that could remind us of something else.

  These objects all belong to other people, though. Maybe people who have stood on the sidewalk by our house and looked at us like we don’t belong. Maybe people who have suggested that we might want to leave.

  We try all the doors, but each one is sealed shut, as if it was never meant to be opened ever again. I feel a rush of sadness at what could be locked inside there. Doors lead somewhere, and locked doors with no keys seem wrong. I have a feeling that there are more objects like the ones hanging from the ceiling inside, more sparks, more bits and pieces of the world outside Eventown.

  The hallway seems to stretch in front of us forever.

  “Maybe we’re in the wrong place,” Veena says. But I feel sure we are in the right place. There are sparks of stories all around us. Some out in the hallway, some locked behind those doors. Now we just need to find the stories themselves.

  “I don’t know what we’re looking for,” Veena says. She sounds frightened, like her former bravery has flickered out along with the candles upstairs. It’s my turn to be brave.

  “I think we’ll know when we see it,” I say. None of the doors seem right. The flowers on the knobs, the shape and size of them don’t look like they hold stories.

  Until we reach the last door. It is a dark, unfinished wood. And etched into the wood is the same beautiful rose carving that hangs on the wall in the storytelling room. I’d know it anywhere. “This one,” I say. “This is what we’ve been looking for.”

  Veena leans in close. She tries to open the door, but it doesn’t budge. Her eyes search the surface for some hidden button or latch. Instead she runs her finger over the center of the wooden bloom. “There’s words,” she says. She brings her face so close to the carving that her nose is almost touching it.

  “Wow,” I say. “It just looked like scratches to me.”

  Veena shakes her head. She squints. “‘The Hallway of Past Heartaches,’” she reads, before letting out an enormous exhale from the effort.

  “Oh,” I say. “Well.” Because words aren’t enough to respond to the pain of that title. A whole hallway of everything that hurts. It sounds like the kind of place most people would try to avoid. But Veena and I push and pull at the doorknob. Following Veena’s lead, I lean in close to it, looking for clues. There’s a very small keyhole. But we don’t have the key.

  “Shoot,” Veena says. “I wish I knew how to pick a lock.”

  “I know how,” my mouth says before I have a chance to catch up. But once the words come out I know they’re true. Someone taught me. I focus hard on the image coming up in my mind. A pair of familiar hands. The same hands that taught me how to cook taught me how to pick a lock.

  “I need a bobby pin,” I say. “Or something small and narrow like that.”

  Veena runs a hand through her hair, but neither of us has any bobby pins or barrettes today. It’s too bad Betsy and Naomi aren’t with us. They always have their barrettes.

  “Oh!” Veena says after a moment. Her hand moves to her neck. Of course. With dozens of necklaces on, there must be one that is the right size and shape for this lock. I help her look, pulling the chains apart, inspecting each charm. A horse. A half heart. A leaf. A raindrop.

  Then there it is. The last charm, the one closest to her skin. A tiny sword.

  I’m dying to know the story behind it. I want to know what spark it holds, what it means. But right now it has a more important use. She unclasps it from her neck and hands it to me. I stick the tiny point into the ho
le and move it around in circles and jabs. It’s familiar. I’ve done it so many times I don’t have to think about it. I just wish I knew when and why and with who.

  It doesn’t take long for the lock to unhitch, for the knob to turn, for the door to open.

  “How did you—” Veena starts, but she knows I don’t know the answer.

  “Before,” I say, because it’s the only answer that makes any sense.

  The room that’s revealed is pretty dark, but I rush inside. Veena moves slowly.

  “Do you hear that?” she asks. I don’t want to be quiet and listen for something. I want to look around. But her voice shakes, so I still.

  “No, what?”

  “That,” Veena says, rolling her eyes to the ceiling, to the town above.

  The sound is quiet but distinct. Bells. Loud ones. The kind that usually hang in enormous churches and only call out on Sundays.

  “Pretty,” I say.

  “No,” Veena says. “I mean, yes. But no. It’s the alarm.”

  “The alarm?” The bells get a little louder. They don’t sing out a song. Of course they don’t. There’s only the one song.

  “I don’t know what it’s for,” Veena says. “It’s never gone off before. Only for drills. But when we hear the alarm, we’re all supposed to meet up in the pre-designated location.”

  “And where’s the location?” I ask.

  Veena bites her lip. She closes her eyes. She keeps hugging herself, like she might fall to pieces otherwise. “Here,” she says at last. “If the bell goes off, we are all supposed to meet right here. At the Welcoming Center.”

  36

  Half Orange, Half Peanut Butter

  It takes a long minute to take in what Veena’s said. The whole town is coming here. Quickly. The scared part of me wants to climb up the ladder and join them. That part of me wants to pretend we’ve done nothing out of the ordinary today.

  But the other, bigger part of me takes over. “Well then,” I say. “We better move quickly.”

  It turns out it’s hard to move quickly here. Because inside the room is another collection of doors. These doors all look like the door we just entered, though. Except for their sizes and shapes. There are small circles and huge triangles and every possible size of rectangle. Every single one of them made from the same unfinished wood, roses carved into the surface.

  This time all the doors open. And inside each new, smaller room, we find what we are looking for. Shelves. Shelves that, I’m sure now, are piled high with stories. On each shelf are dozens of wooden boxes, carved with roses just like the doors themselves, with names engraved on their outer edges. There are hundreds of boxes, and a quick glance tells us they’re in alphabetical order. And that each little room is for a different letter of the alphabet. We count the doors. Twenty-six of them.

  “Oh,” Veena says. “Oh, wow. It’s really here. Stories. The whole past. Right here.”

  “Right here in the middle of Eventown,” I say. Veena runs her hands over the boxes, mumbling names to herself. “Randall. Renson. Rodriguez. Rogers. Ryan.”

  I duck into another room, with a zigzag-shaped door. “Farrell. Faul. Feingold. Fence. Fenton. Flint. Forrest. Nope, this isn’t the right room,” I read out, loud enough for Veena to hear even over the sounds of the bells.

  “Try the next one!” Veena says. She sounds frantic. I run into another room, a circular-doored one. She follows me. “Aaronson. Abrams. Applebet,” I read.

  “Applebet?” Veena says.

  We both pause. Only for a moment, though. The bells are insisting we move faster.

  “I’ll leave it out,” I say. “In case she wants to listen.”

  Veena’s eyes widen, but she nods.

  The B’s are right next door, and we find Veena’s family’s boxes, one for each of her parents. We pull them out too. We don’t know what to do with them, but we know they belong to us. Those stories belong to Veena’s family.

  Finally, we find my room. It is a room with the smallest square door, and we have to crawl inside. “Lenox. Lester. Lilith. Lively. Here we are,” I say. “Lively.”

  “It’s a good last name for you,” Veena says, like she’s really thinking about it for the first time. The bells ring out louder still. I can’t imagine how loud they must be out on the streets.

  I take Naomi’s box instead of my own. I need to know which memories Naomi treasured most, so that we can remind her. Then I’ll listen to my own. When I’m a little less nervous.

  The box is feather-light when I pick it up from the shelf. And when I open it I can see why. All that’s inside are six tiny speakers with six little gold buttons on top.

  “Do I press one of them?” I ask Veena. She makes herself even smaller.

  “Okay,” she says.

  I don’t know what else to do. So I press the gold button marked Joy. Then I wait for whatever’s going to happen to happen.

  There’s a scratchy pause.

  Veena reaches over and presses the button again. The scratching stops.

  “They’re almost here,” Veena says. “We can stop now. Maybe we should stop now. Before we change everything.”

  “I thought you wanted to be here,” I say. I swear I can hear voices entering the Welcoming Center. Footsteps maybe. Only a few, but they’re coming.

  “Maybe we’re better off not knowing anything,” Veena says. Her voice shakes. She has to speak loudly to be heard over the bells. “So much has changed already. Maybe everything that’s happening outside is a sign of something terrible and dangerous and wrong.”

  I close my eyes to help me think. Sometimes I think better when I can’t look around a room or look at someone else’s face.

  Finally I shake my head.

  “Everyone’s so scared of the rain and the growing flowers here,” I say. “It doesn’t make any sense. Things are growing. More colors are showing up. More seasons are coming. There’s more here now, not less. So why is everyone so scared?”

  “It’s different,” Veena says, but she doesn’t sound so sure.

  “I like how the flowers look,” I say. “Even the weeds. I like them. They seem like someone finally set them free.”

  “That’s what my mom said they were trying to do,” Veena says. “I heard her talking to her friends about it. About interrupting your stories. She said if they timed it just right, maybe they could set you free. She said if you were set free, maybe things would change here.”

  “She said that?”

  Veena considers. I can tell she wants to say it just right, but there isn’t time. “They like to pretend it’s very solid here,” she says. “But it’s not. It’s fragile. Even my necklaces scare people. Mom’s jalebi too. And the butterfly house. If we remember the wrong thing . . . well. I guess this happens.”

  She says this and I know she means the rain and the flowers and even her own heart shifting and shaking and growing more wild inside of her.

  “How do you know?” I ask.

  She pauses. There’s a secret no one’s told me, and I can see it on her face and even in her fingers. “It happened before,” she says. “Not like this. Never like this. But a family came, and they brought along this wagon. This red wagon. And their Welcoming got stalled, because one of them got scared. And it didn’t rain or anything, but it got hot. And that other thing. The sticky, wet feeling?”

  “Humid?” I say.

  “Humid,” Veena says. “It got hot and humid until they finally agreed to finish their Welcoming and tell all their stories. Christine and Josiah said we fixed it just in time. That’s what I’ve heard, at least.”

  “What family was it?” I ask.

  Veena pulls me past more of the L’s. She pulls out a box. “Ludlow,” she says. “Betsy’s moms.”

  We pull the box out, but we don’t listen. I hope, though, that maybe they will. Maybe they’ll let me listen, even. Maybe I’d understand them better if I could.

  The bells ring louder. We need to listen to a story. One story.
The right story.

  A story to help us remember what we are here for. A story to help us remember why Eventown might not be so perfect after all.

  I go back to Naomi’s box and the six gold buttons inside.

  I press the one marked Joy.

  “Once upon a time”—Naomi’s voice rings out as if she’s right here with us—“there was a boy named Lawrence.”

  Veena pauses the recording, just as my heart is pounding at the name Lawrence. “Why is she talking like that?” she says. “We need stories from her life, not from a book or something.”

  “That’s how they had us tell hard stories,” I say. “Like they belong to someone else.”

  Veena looks sad at the answer, but she nods and presses the button again. Naomi’s voice continues. It’s shaky. I wish I could hug this Naomi, the one telling the story.

  Upstairs, there are definitely voices now. And a pounding of footsteps. A town’s worth of them. They haven’t found us yet, though. “Lawrence was cute. Nice-looking. Everyone said so. He looked a little like Naomi and Elodee and a little like Mom and Dad. He was—I’m sorry, do you need all of this? I can just get to the point.”

  Josiah’s voice interrupts the recording to answer her. “You can tell us everything you remember. The more the better. We have all the time in the world.”

  There’s a pause and I can almost see Naomi nod. “Okay,” she continues. “Well. Let’s see. Lawrence liked to do a lot of things. He liked to garden. He liked to sing. He liked to bake.”

  The voices and footsteps draw closer, so I can’t stop the recording again, but my mind swims and my heart pounds and I say the name Lawrence in my head a hundred times in one single second. A little piece of my heart breaks open. I know that name. I know a boy named Lawrence who loved to bake.

  Just like me. I turn the volume up on the recording. I beg the people upstairs to stay away long enough for us to finish.

  “When Elodee and Naomi turned eight,” Naomi’s voice says, growing a little less shaky, “Lawrence made a cake for the first time. Lawrence was fourteen, which was a pretty good age to make a first cake. He wanted the cake to be half orange for Naomi, who loved oranges, and half peanut butter for Elodee, who loved anything peanut butter.