Kennedy grabs my hand and whispers, “What deal? Finley, this is not cool.”
“It’s okay,” Cole says quickly. “We’re not messing with you, promise.” He pauses. “Kennedy, right?”
Kennedy puts her hands on her hips. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen you at school.” He smiles a little. “Hi.”
“Great. Hi. Somebody tell me what’s going on before I get Grandpa.”
We tell Kennedy about the Wasteland, the Bone House and its graves. How the Bailey boys stole our dues, and the deal we made to get them back.
“Uh-huh. I see. One sec.” Kennedy pulls me aside. “Okay, this is so not allowed. We’re not supposed to leave the pit, and we’re definitely not supposed to go back into the woods that far. And you made a deal with the Baileys?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just . . . we had to get our stuff back, and then the Everwood said—”
“The Everwood said?” Kennedy blows hair out of her face. “Finley, listen. I know you’ve got this great imagination, and that’s awesome, and I know we’re supposed to let you do your thing and be super nice to you, but—”
Suddenly I feel about five inches tall. “Who told you to be nice to me?”
“It’s no big deal. Grandma just told me . . . Don’t be mad, okay? She just said you’re kind of sensitive, and to try not to upset you.” Kennedy pauses, biting her lip. “You know, because of the stuff with your parents.”
I cross my arms over my chest. Kennedy’s eyes are so sweet and blue, looking at me like a worried mom, like Aunt Dee did that first night at dinner, when she seemed like she was afraid I would start crying any second.
I want to melt into the dirt.
“There’s nothing wrong with my parents,” I say quietly.
Kennedy puts a soft hand on my arm. “Sure. I know that. Grandma doesn’t know what she’s talking about, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Hey.” Kennedy’s fingers pry mine loose. Her hand squeezes mine. “You’re all right?”
I squeeze her hand back, and she smiles at me.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Jack says loudly, interrupting us, “we’ve brought a few things to prove you can trust us.”
Cole opens his backpack and nods at Bennett, who is bouncing on his toes. Bennett pulls out a handheld telescope, a bag of cookies, two flashlights, and a cloth banner decorated with painted vines and leaves and huge letters that say WELCOME TO THE EVERWOOD.
Everyone gasps. Kennedy lets go of me to run her fingers along the banner’s edge. I almost grab her hand back, and then remind myself I am eleven years old and am not sensitive. I can stand here by myself like a normal person.
I clench my hands into fists at my sides.
“Who made this?” Kennedy asks. “It’s beautiful.”
Cole clears his throat and looks at the ground. “I did. It took me two whole nights.”
Kennedy drops her hand. Her cheeks are red.
“And one more thing.” Jack reaches into his own backpack and draws out a small, rusted mailbox painted with vines like the banner. A tiny flag sticks up from the top—yellow, with a green leaf painted in the center.
“That’s the Everwood flag,” Jack says proudly.
Gretchen looks ready to explode. “You can’t just make the flag for everyone. This is our thing.”
“Fine. We’ll vote on it. And if you don’t like it, I’ll make another one. I figure we can put it by the river, between our houses, by that group of trees.” Jack points down the river. “It’ll be good for planning things, like when to meet at the Bone House to hang out. This way your grandparents don’t have to see you talking to us.”
Gretchen snatches up the cookies.
I try to ignore how wonderful this mailbox is. “Why do you want to be our friends? Our families don’t like each other.”
Jack shrugs and shoves his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know. Nobody’ll tell me why our families don’t like each other, so I figure it’s a dumb reason. And you seem fun. And it’s summer. And like I said, we’re bored.”
Bennett wipes his nose on the back of his hand and grins up at me.
“So, orphan girl,” Jack says, “what do you think? Do we have a deal?”
When I don’t answer right away, Cole asks, “Do you always do what your grandparents tell you to do?”
I am not sure how to respond. “What about your parents? Do they care if you talk to us?”
Jack puts a hand to his heart. “Alas, we have no parents. We are in the custody of a gargantuan, poisonous troll!”
With each word he takes a step closer to the Tower and then lunges at Dex and Ruth with his finger crooked like a pirate’s hook. Dex screams; Ruth growls.
Bennett stares at Ruth’s mask and tugs on Jack’s shirt. “Jack,” he whispers, “I want a mask too.”
Gretchen remains unimpressed. “You are not in the custody of a troll.”
“What kind of troll?” I say.
Jack pauses. “What kinds of trolls live in the Everwood?”
I think fast; I haven’t thought about there being trolls in the Everwood before. “Well, there are the Fellfolk, who have scaly hides like alligators and can swallow a deer whole. Their breath smells like a thousand rotting corpses.”
Kennedy shudders. “That’s so gross, Fin.”
“Oh, yeah,” says Jack, “the troll guarding us is definitely one of those. But we can pretty much do whatever we want—as long as we don’t wake him up. So.” Jack puts out his hand. “Do we have a deal?”
I gather my cousins together for a conference. Gretchen is digging into the cookies and seems much happier about life in general.
“Finley, I don’t know.” Kennedy keeps looking over at the Baileys. I can’t tell if she’s worried or curious. “How can we trust them?”
“We just can.”
“Why? Because the Everwood said so?”
I will not feel embarrassed. “Yes.”
She shakes her head sadly.
“Kennedy, please. Don’t you want to see the Bone House?”
“It’s so cool,” Gretchen says, her mouth full of cookie. “Like haunted-house-in-the-movies cool. Like if-a-tiger-and-a-dragon-had-a-baby cool.”
I grab Kennedy’s hands. “Please, Kennedy.”
Kennedy sighs and rolls her eyes. “Fine. Fine.” She marches over to shake Jack Bailey’s hand. “We have an accord,” she says in an official tone of voice.
And just like that, an alliance is born.
16
IT IS SATURDAY AFTER DINNER, and Avery has retreated to her bedroom like usual. Her door swings open before I can knock.
“I thought I heard you fidgeting out here,” Avery says, half smiling. “What do you want?”
I glance past her and see sheets of paper strewn across her bed. Her hands are covered with charcoal smudges.
“So.” I can totally be casual. “Drawing?”
“Nah. Cooking.”
I blush. “Yeah. I mean . . . sorry.”
“Seriously, kid, you need to chill. What’s up?”
I take a deep breath. “Well. Okay. So, we’re all going outside to play for a while.”
“What else is new?”
“And Grandpa and Grandma are downstairs, and the other adults are too.”
“Okay . . .”
“So . . . if they ask you where we are, can you say we’re just playing outside? Don’t let them come looking for us.”
Avery raises an eyebrow. “You want me to lie for you?”
“It’s not lying,” I say quickly.
(Not really, anyway. We will be playing outside. We will just be farther away than usual.)
(And with the Baileys.)
(And we will not be playing so much as we will be exploring a certainly condemned house.)
“We don’t want them to worry. Not that there’s any reason for them to worry. It’s just we don’t want them bothering us. Please, Avery. I promise we’ll be safe. I promis
e.”
Five seconds pass. Avery sighs and goes back into her bedroom. “Fine. Don’t die, okay?”
I hurry downstairs before she can change her mind.
• • •
The five of us—me, Gretchen, Kennedy, Jack, and Cole—meet by the mailbox and trek through the Everwood. The fading sunlight is the color of Grandma’s pale pink azaleas, and our pockets are full of flashlights. Kennedy carries a bucket of cleaning supplies, and Gretchen has a box of trash bags.
I hope we get them back before Grandma notices they’re missing. This was my idea, and if we are caught, it will be my fault.
We made the little ones stay behind this time. First we must scout the area. Ruth would only agree to silence once we snuck her an extra scoop of ice cream after dinner.
Kennedy keeps taking out her phone and checking to make sure we still have a signal. “I don’t know about this. . . .”
Cole moves closer to her. “It’s okay. We’ve come out here for a while now. It’s safe enough.”
Ahead of me Gretchen slices through the undergrowth with her stick. When the grass turns dry and scratchy, I look up.
There it is—the Bone House.
Jack whoops and runs ahead. We follow him inside to the kitchen, where a folding card table is covered with boxes of cereal, three apples, decks of cards, empty root beer bottles, a ratty baseball cap, and a worn-out copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
“For school,” Jack explains. “Summer reading. It’s not half bad, though.” He sits in one of the folding chairs and thunks his heels right on top of Tom Sawyer. “Welcome to the Bone House. First-time visitors must pay a fee.”
Gretchen frowns. “What kind of fee?”
“You have to talk in English accents for the rest of the night,” Cole suggests.
“Even after we go home?”
Jack’s eyes light up. “Yes, definitely. For the rest of the weekend.”
Kennedy giggles. “Everyone will think we’re so weird.”
“That’s the point!”
I halfway listen to them while I walk around the kitchen. It is scattered with signs that someone once lived here—shattered coffee mugs, pots and pans piled in a corner. A framed piece of cloth embroidered with the words Welcome Home hangs in the corner by one nail. The refrigerator, oven, and sink are all full of charred trash, rotting cabinets, pieces of wall and ceiling.
Everything is black and warped, like the bicycle Gretchen and I found.
Gretchen and Cole gather a deck of cards and start a game of War while Kennedy puts on a pair of pink rubber gloves and starts bagging up trash like she was born to do it.
I cannot imagine what Grandma would think if she saw this place. She would probably not be able to sleep until it was as good as new.
“Weird, huh?” Jack comes up beside me. “Everything looks normal but completely messed up at the same time. Once I tried looking through some of their stuff, just to see, but it freaked me out too bad. Never did it again. We try to only touch whatever we bring from home.”
“Why?”
“Cole’s idea. Bad luck, he says. The curse thing.”
I stare up at the ruined ceiling. “I wonder how long it’s been abandoned. Is the whole house like this?”
“Yeah. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Jack leads me through the first floor. What used to be the living room has no roof, but the brick chimney is still mostly standing. There is a flower-patterned love seat stained gray and yellow, stuffing spilling out of the cushions. A tiny bookshelf still holds a few books, but most are on the floor, burned black and crisp, scattered in piles. There are heaps of trash, charred planks of wood, a ceiling fan with two blades missing and the lightbulbs shattered.
Except for the chimney, that far wall of the house is completely gone.
“Upstairs is worse,” Jack says quietly. We walk back through the living room and up the stairs. Jack puts a hand on my arm when we get to the landing, and I jump.
“Careful.” He points to a missing part of the floor. “Don’t step there.”
We scoot around the hole and into the only remaining bedroom. It’s dark up here, and Jack turns on a flashlight. Piles of trash sit along the walls. They remind me of shadow monsters you might see in a junkyard, full of torn clothes, melted plastic toys, pieces of wall, pieces of doors, pieces and pieces and pieces of someone else’s life.
The beam from Jack’s flashlight hits a shard of glass, mostly hidden beneath a mound of clothes and a graveyard of stuffed animals stained with ash.
“Wait, over here.” I crouch by the window, where Cole dangled Kennedy’s MVP medal out for me and Gretchen to see. Jack follows me with his light, and I dig until I find what I’m looking for.
“It’s a picture,” Jack says, looking over my shoulder.
“A family picture?” The glass is cracked, and the photograph is stained from water or fire or maybe something else. I try to wipe some of it away, and through the smoky stains I see a man with blue eyes, a woman’s smile, a kid’s feet in two pale pink shoes.
(Child’s size 11. For the left foot.)
I squint hard. “It’s a man, a woman, and a kid. She’s little.”
“Three people,” Jack says. “Three graves?”
We look at each other for two seconds before hurrying downstairs and out the back door. On our way out, I grab a towel, an ice scraper, and a bottle of water from our bucket.
“Where are y’all going?” Gretchen asks. “Come watch me kick Cole’s butt at War!”
“Don’t you dare wander off, Finley Hart,” Kennedy calls out. “You swore you wouldn’t!”
Jack and I ignore them, picking our way through the trash-filled backyard to the sound of cicadas pulsing in the trees. A train horn wails in the distance.
Once we’re under the big oak tree, we find the gravestones and get to work, yanking off weeds and scraping away moss. Jack doesn’t speak, and neither do I. He looks serious in the flashlight’s glow. A grasshopper flits against my leg, but I don’t even scream.
We scrub at the layers of caked-on mud until the towel is ruined and we run out of water. My fingers and leg muscles ache, and I am getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, but I don’t much care.
“Finley?” Flashlights bob through the leaves, and the others join us. I hear the buzz of another grasshopper, and Kennedy shrieks.
Jack tells them all to hush. “Don’t make so much noise. We don’t want to disturb them.”
“Who?” Gretchen peers around us to see the work we’ve done.
“The Travers family,” I answer quietly, and point at the gravestones. Some of the engraved letters are hard to make out, and we could not clean everything completely, at least not tonight, but we can see enough to read their names:
CYNTHIA TRAVERS, born March 24, 1986 | died April 17, 1994
JOY TRAVERS, born September 3, 1958 | died April 17, 1994
FRANK TRAVERS, born March 1, 1954 | died April 20, 1994
“Holy God,” Gretchen whispers, creeping closer. “One of them was a kid?”
“Seriously, guys, this is messed up,” Cole says. “I told you not to touch these things.”
“It’s fine, Cole.” Jack shows him the framed picture we found. “Look, it’s them.”
“Oh. Great. So you found a creepy picture of dead people. Is this supposed to make me feel better?”
“Come on, don’t you get it? Now we know the names of the people who used to live here!”
Cole grabs Jack’s shoulders. “I did not want to know this. It’s freaky.”
“The dad died a few days after the mom and daughter,” Kennedy points out, trailing her fingers across Frank Travers’s gravestone. “Why do you think that is?”
Gretchen stares at the graves. “Mom said my dad never wanted to be buried. They burned him and sprinkled his ashes across the farm where he grew up.”
Everyone grows quiet.
“Your dad’s dead?” Cole asks.
“Yeah, but
I was really little. I don’t remember him. Can you imagine? Being buried? I wouldn’t want to be stuck underground for all eternity.”
“You’d be dead,” Jack points out.
“Yeah, but I’d still know.”
“How?”
She glares at him. “I’d just know, okay?”
“I don’t like this.” Cole edges back toward the tree’s outer branches. “Maybe we should go home.”
“Wuss,” Jack declares.
Cole cusses at him, but I am thinking about what Gretchen said and not really listening.
Being buried—the weight of all that dirt and rock on top of you, and you yourself sealed into a coffin. No air, no breeze, no sounds.
I am not sure I have ever imagined anything so terrible.
I want to leave.
I must leave. Now.
I cannot breathe.
No matter how hard I try to force down the feeling, my chest is shifting and sliding away from me.
It is a cascade of things:
Being spooked by my surroundings.
Imagining the body of Gretchen’s dad being burned, and wondering if part of you, even if you are dead, can still feel things like that.
Wondering why Frank Travers died a few days after his family, and what kinds of horrible things he must have been thinking during that time, all alone, with no one around to ask him if he was okay.
Any sadness I may feel is nothing compared to what he must have been feeling, or what Stick must have felt when her husband died.
I have no right to my sadness when there are dead families and burned houses.
The memories of all the sadness I have ever experienced come rushing back to me in a stream. Days when I could not smile, when I felt heavy and pushed down. Nights when I could not sleep. Mornings when I could not wake up.
These moments of sadness seem so small, now. They seem pathetic.
“Finley?” Jack nudges me.
I jerk away. In these moments, when I am close to losing myself, one of the worst things that can happen is for someone to unexpectedly touch me.
When I am like this, my body feels stretched tight. Like it is working extra hard to keep me together, and the slightest touch might send me cracking open.
“Are you okay?” Jack says. “You look funny.”
Some Kind of Happiness Page 9