by B. B. Wurge
Suddenly, around seven o’clock, someone knocked on the door. It was not a loud knock, but it was so unexpected that I jumped up from my seat on the stairs and goggled at the door in a fright, my heart pounding. Should I open it? She had told me specifically not to. But what if there was an emergency?
The knocking came again, louder. I could hear a voice, and I didn’t think it was my grandmother’s voice. It sounded like two men talking to each other, although I couldn’t hear what they were saying. They knocked again, very loudly, but I still didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to do. I stood in the gloom of the hallway at the foot of the stairs and waited for them to go away.
They started to pound on the door so hard that I could see it rattling in its frame. They were shouting through the door. Now I could tell that there were three voices, two men and one woman, and none of them sounded anything like my grandmother. “Bobby!” they shouted. “Benji! Buddy! Open up, there, Kid! Let us in!” They couldn’t seem to agree on what my name was. I heard them arguing about it, and then one of the men said, “I don’t care what the little pimple’s name is, let’s just go in and get it over with. This is taking too long.”
Then I heard a very scary sound, the scraping sound of a key going into the lock and turning. They were going to come in, whether I wanted them to or not.
The door swung open, and I saw the three of them standing on the cement doorstep with the light from the streetlamps behind them. A rectangle of light fell into the open doorway, across the wooden floor, and directly onto me, so that they could see me clearly. We were all silent. Then the woman said:
“Bobby, is that you? Don’t be afraid. We’ve come to help you.”
Chapter 8
Miss Pointy Teaches Me Manners
I had not seen any other people up close for a long time. Maybe this was partly why the three people looked so strange to me. But I think they might have looked strange to anyone. They were all wearing identical dark suits with very thin vertical stripes. I think it is called pinstripe. But the people were all different sizes. One man was very short, so short that he looked almost like an elf. He was skinny and wiry, and his face was all shriveled up and his neck and cheeks had vertical creases in them, almost as if they were a direct extension of the stripes on the suit. He was bouncing up and down on his feet impatiently, and as soon as he saw me, he said, in a rapid, high-pitched but raspy voice, “That’s him, that’s the one?”
The second man was tall and puffy, and had a round womanish face. He was peering into the gloom of the house with his forehead wrinkled up. The wrinkles of fat ran horizontally from one side of his forehead to the other, so that he looked a little bit like the opposite of the small elf. “Who else could it be,” he said, in a slow, dull, and slightly sad-sounding voice.
The woman was very skinny and her suit coat was buttoned in the center so tightly it looked like she must be holding her breath to keep her stomach pulled in so far. Maybe that was why she had such a sour expression on her face. “Of course it’s him,” she snapped. “Bobby,” she repeated, “Don’t be afraid. We’ve come to help you.” From the expression on her face and her tone of voice, which was rough and cigaretty, I decided that they had come for some very unpleasant reason that would do me no good at all. They had definitely not come to help me.
All three of them came in the door. The tall man found the light switch and turned it on, while the lady closed the door behind her.
“Who . . . who are you?” I stammered, but they ignored me. They were looking around the vestibule.
The little elf-like man bounded toward the door of the living room and said, “We can sit in here. It’s not as much of a dump as I thought. They got chairs, anyway. Come on, sit him down, let’s get this over with! This is taking too long!”
“Bobby,” the lady said.
“My name’s Billy,” I said, but she ignored me.
“Bobby, come sit down. We have something to tell you.”
I felt very frightened, and went into the living room. I sat down on the couch and the lady sat down on the chair on the other side of the room, crossed her legs, and glared at me. The tall, fat man stood in the doorway and stared around the room with a gloomy expression. The little elf-like man didn’t stay still. He bounced around the room, looking at things, and then bounded out the door into the kitchen to look some more.
“Do you know who I am, Bobby?” the lady said.
I felt a sudden flush of anger and wanted to say, “Do you know who I am? Because I’m not Bobby. I’m Billy.”
But my grandmother had always told me to be polite when talking to people. My grandmother wasn’t very polite herself, but she said it was a failing of hers and I should do better. “Most people,” she had told me, “are idiots. Rule number one with idiots is, be polite. Remember that.” I didn’t know if these people were idiots, but I tried to keep rule number one in my head. I didn’t say anything; I just shook my head and stared back at her, waiting.
“I’m from the Social Services department. My name is Amelia Pointy. How are you, Bobby?”
I stared back at her.
“The correct reply, Bobby, is ‘How are you, Miss Pointy.’” She looked at me sternly.
“Um,” I said, “How are you, Miss Pointy?”
“Very good,” she said, smiling at me. When she smiled, her gash of a mouth twisted up to one side and she looked positively angry. It made my heart skip a beat, it was so unexpected. She looked a lot safer again as soon as the smile faded.
“Bobby, this nice man standing here is named Mr. Jubber.”
She paused and glared at me dangerously, so I made sure to say, “How are you, Mr. Jubber.” I glanced up at him, and saw him goggling down at me with his mouth open. He didn’t say anything. He looked very confused.
“And the nice man in the other room,” Amelia Pointy continued, “his name is Mr. Earpicker.”
“Waldo Earpicker?” I blurted out.
“That’s Mr. Earpicker to you,” she said, glaring at me again. “Or Mr. Commissioner Earpicker.”
Suddenly Mr. Earpicker’s voice rang out from the kitchen. “Oh my God!” he shouted. “Oh, wow! Oh this is fabulous! This is tremendous! I never seen anything like it! Hey Pointy! Jubber! You gotta look at this, when you’re done with the kid. She’s cooked up a pot of tennis balls! She’s crazy as a coot! She’s out of her head!”
“Mr. Earpicker!” the lady shouted, her face screwed up in fury. These people didn’t seem to like each other very much. “Don’t interrupt me! I am counseling a young boy in a highly delicate situation!”
“Oh! Right!” Mr. Earpicker shouted back. “Carry on! But when you’re done, get a look at the tennis balls! They’re fantastic!”
Miss Pointy looked at me again and smoothed the fury out of her face. “I apologize,” she said. “He’s always tactless. He never learns. Now Bobby, I want you to pay attention carefully because what I have to tell you is extremely sensitive. It’s an extremely delicate subject. Your grandmother was very old, and very frail, and she was run over by a steam roller. Actually, by three steam rollers. They were being driven to a construction site. I’m afraid there’s nothing left of her. She was pretty well spread around. Like jelly on too much toast. Raspberry jelly. Or it might be cranberry jelly. You can use your own imagination there. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
I could hardly understand it. As I stared at her, I felt like I couldn’t breathe and my heart had stopped beating. After a while I managed to say in a gasping whisper, “Do you mean, she’s . . . she’s . . . dead?”
Miss Pointy rolled her eyes. “Obviously,” she said. “She wouldn’t still be alive after that.”
Mr. Jubber, who was standing in the doorway of the living room, started to laugh, but then stopped suddenly at a sharp look from Miss Pointy.
“Grandma is dead?” I repeated.
“I see you’ve grasped the key point,” she said dryly. “We’ve come to take you to a new home. It’ll be better for you, of course, given what she’s put you through. Terrible woman. Mr. Jubber, who is an especially good friend of Mr. Earpicker’s, has generously agreed to live in the house. He’ll attempt to fix it up. I’m sure it has extensive damage done to it by neglect.”
“Mr. Jubber is going to live in our house?”
“It isn’t your house anymore,” she said, testily. “It’s Mr. Jubber’s. Now let’s get to business. You will be pleased to know that a family has already agreed to take you in, on a trial basis. If you have any belongings, you are welcome to pack them up immediately, since we will be leaving in five minutes. You are limited to the following:” (she took a list out of her purse and read it) “One toy made of hard nontoxic polyethylene plastic no more than nine ounces in weight. No stuffed animals allowed. Fire hazard. You are allowed a maximum of ten clothing items inclusive of those that you are wearing at the moment, selected from the following list of approved items: shoes, shoe laces, socks, stockings, underpants, pants, belt, shorts, skirt, slip, dress, shirt, undershirt, bra, hair band, turban, medically required eye patch, neck brace, or band-aid. You are allowed to place your selections, those that you are not already wearing, in a paper bag no larger than an ordinary grocery bag. After you have arrived at your destination, you will remove your belongings from the paper bag. The bag will then be remanded to the city. Well, Boy, what are you waiting for?”
I couldn’t focus well enough to count how many items of clothing I was wearing. I decided that it must be close to ten, if it had to include my two shoelaces, so there was no point in packing anything else. I sat still and didn’t say anything.
“Are you ready to come with us?” she snapped.
I nodded. I didn’t know what else to do. I was stunned by the news she had brought me. I let her lead me by the hand out the door, and didn’t even look around at the autumn leaves on the ground, or up at the dark evening sky, although it was my first time outside in years. I didn’t feel like I was really standing on the sidewalk in the cold air. Nothing seemed real; it all looked far away, like I was watching it on TV, and I couldn’t hear right except for a sort of ringing in my ears.
“Come on, Mr. Jubber,” Miss Pointy said. “You’ll have time to look around your new house later. Mr. Earpicker!” she shouted angrily in the door, “That’s enough!”
“Right!” Mr. Earpicker shouted, running out the door after us and slamming it closed. “Let’s get this over with! This is taking too long! Man, you should have seen those tennis balls! I gotta tell you!”
Chapter 9
I Am Assigned to the Whingles
While I was still in shock and the world seemed unreal around me, I was put into the back seat of a car and driven somewhere into the city. I thought maybe we would go to City Hall, because that’s where my grandmother said she had been summoned to. Ordinarily I would have been excited to see City Hall, but I didn’t care much about it now. I wasn’t paying attention. I was led by the hand out of the car, into a building, and into a large office. The room had a big wooden desk that was shiny and polished, and bookshelves lining the walls. The books were all exactly the same height and thickness, bound in leather and glittering with gold titles.
Amelia Pointy held my hand firmly, and Mr. Earpicker and Mr. Jubber followed us into the room and closed the door.
It must have been Mr. Earpicker’s office. He ran behind the desk and flounced down into the chair. He was so short that when he sat down his chin came very far down and banged against the shiny top of the desk. “Blast!” he shouted, grabbing his chin with both hands. “I always do that! Now let’s get this over with.”
“Bobby,” Miss Pointy said, grasping my shoulder with a firm grip, like a pair of pliers, and turning me around. “Don’t be rude. Say hello to your new family. These are the Whingles, and they have generously agreed to take you in, on a trial basis.”
I hadn’t seen them when we first walked in, because they were sitting against the wall in a place that had been blocked by the open door. There were four of them: a mother, a father, a daughter, and a son. They all had short blonde hair, about an inch long, sticking straight out of their heads in all directions so that they looked collectively surprised. Or electrocuted. The mother was smiling at me anxiously. She seemed young and was very skinny, and looked nice if only she wouldn’t smile so hard with all her teeth showing, almost like she was making a grimace. I think she was nervous. She kept her hands tightly folded together in her lap and her skinny fingers were very white.
The girl was about a year older than me and the boy was younger. He looked about six. They stared at me curiously and then glanced at each other and started to giggle. But then they looked at Miss Pointy, stopped giggling right away, and sat up straight in their chairs.
The father was slouching in his chair with his long spidery legs crossed. He was inspecting his fingernails and picking at them. Now and then he put a piece of picked-off fingernail in his mouth and chewed on it. He nodded without looking up at me, muttered, “Glad to meet you,” and kept on picking at his fingernails.
“Bobby,” Miss Pointy said in a dangerous voice, giving me a shake through her grip on my shoulder, “Aren’t you going to greet your new family?”
“Um,” I said, “How are you?”
“Bobby,” Miss Pointy said, pinching my shoulder even harder so that I wondered if her fingers would come together in the middle, “These are the Whingles. Are you going to greet them politely?”
“Um,” I said, looking desperately at Mrs. Whingle’s teeth because she was the only one smiling at me, “Um, how are you, Whingles?”
The boy and girl both started to giggle again. They were trying so hard not to laugh that they almost choked.
“Bobby,” Miss Pointy said, gritting her teeth, but at that moment Mr. Earpicker interrupted.
“Right!” he shouted. “That’s enough! Look at how well they get along! Amazing! Pulls the old heart strings clean out of my chest! Rips ’em right out! Let’s sign the forms and get out of here.” He banged his fist on his desk. “We have a one-month return policy if the boy turns out to be defective. In that case, we’ll remediate him and send him off to another family.”
I didn’t know what “remediate” meant, but when he said it, Miss Pointy glared at me so fiercely that I knew it was something awful, and nobody would ever want it done to them, and I had better behave with the Whingles and not turn out to be defective.
The rest of what happened in Mr. Earpicker’s office was confusing to me because it involved a lot of legal terms that I didn’t know. We all gathered around the desk. First Mr. and Mrs. Whingle signed something, then I signed something, then everybody signed something. Then Mr. Earpicker got some more papers out of his desk and we signed those. Then he got even more papers out of another drawer and we signed those too. Then he jumped up and shook Mr. Whingle’s hand. Mr. Whingle, who was tall and skinny, had to bend down very far.
“Great!” Mr. Earpicker said, pumping Mr. Whingle’s hand up and down. “I’m so stoked! I really am! You have no idea what this means! Jubber thanks you! I thank you!”
Mr. Whingle didn’t say anything. He seemed surprised that his hand was being yanked up and down.
Mrs. Whingle bent down so that she was closer to Mr. Earpicker’s height and said, “We’re so happy.” She was smiling even harder than before. “We told you last week, we were ready to do anything to help him. Oh it was awful, what you told us. We’re so glad we rescued him.”
“You sure did,” Mr. Earpicker said. “You rescued him all right. Do you know, the old bat was cooking tennis balls for him? Ha ha! Tennis balls! Oh my God! We’re done, aren’t we? It’s all over now?” He flung away Mr.
Whingle’s hand and ran back around his desk. Then he flounced down in his chair and banged his chin very hard on the top of the desk.
“Blast!” he shouted, grabbing his chin in both hands. “I hate that! Get them out of here, Pointy! We’re done with them! You can stay, Jubber. We have to talk about the next step.”
Chapter 10
The Whingles Don’t Believe Me
I still felt dazed and in a dream as we walked through the dim oily parking garage to the Whingles’ car. I couldn’t feel my feet walking. Mrs. Whingle was holding my hand, but I couldn’t feel that either. I could feel the dent in my shoulder where Miss Amelia Pointy had been grasping me, though. I was also shivering. I wasn’t dressed very warmly, and it was a cold fall evening.
We got into the car. I climbed into the back seat with the girl and the boy. Mr. Whingle drove, looking very irritated about the traffic, and Mrs. Whingle sat in the front seat beside him. I didn’t say anything for a long time, and the little boy started to giggle. He whispered to the girl, “I think he’s, like, stupid, or something. What do you think?”
I stared out of the window and looked at the streets as we passed. My grandmother would have been horrified to know that I was outside the house and unprotected. Those streets could be full of birdfrogs. They were certainly full of people. I wasn’t used to the sight of so many people standing on street corners waiting to cross, cutting through the traffic on foot or on bicycles or on roller blades, walking fast everywhere in the cold air with their hands dug down into their pockets, or stopping to look at the great brightly lit window displays. Lights fluttered and loomed at me from everywhere; red tail lights, white headlights, yellow-orange streetlights that weren’t working right and were blinking on and off, traffic lights swinging overhead, three blazing spotlights where some workmen were fixing a part of the street. It was very confusing and began to give me a headache. Steam rose up from the gutters and the sidewalks. I could smell Chinese food as we drove past a block of Chinese restaurants, and a kind of old manky vegetable smell as we passed an open air market with wooden crates of fruits and vegetables, and a horrible gutter stink when we passed a row of blackened iron garbage dumpsters, and then the sweet, rich smell of roasted peanuts from a stand on the corner. The man who worked the stand was wearing knitted gloves with holes cut out for his fingers. None of these people knew about birdfrogs. They were all in danger. Maybe some of them even knew people who had disappeared and been eaten. But nobody cared. My grandmother had tried to tell them, but it hadn’t done any good.