Our last night at home, my parents took Charlie and me to dinner at Katz’s on Houston Street. Number one hot dogs on the planet. And unlike Barney’s, it’s about as far from the Upper West Side as you can get and still be in Manhattan, so going there was a big deal.
In the car on the way downtown, Charlie and I made bets on how many hot dogs we’d put away. Six is my record. I did eat seven one time, but I don’t count it because I had to use one of Zoe’s buckets on the way home.
Charlie beat me that night by a good three dogs. I had to stop halfway through my second. It didn’t taste right. Nothing tasted right. Not even the Dr. Brown’s cream soda. I guess goodbyes, the everything-is-different-now, I-won’t-be-around-next-time-you-almost-commit-murder-at-the-water-table kind of goodbyes, mess with your taste buds.
Next time I have a goodbye dinner, I’m going to pick some place I don’t love the food.
We didn’t get to Petersville till late that first night because Zoe had handcuffed herself to the refrigerator in our apartment. They were only toy cuffs, but she’d flushed the key down the toilet, and none of us could remember the secret to getting them open. Dad called the toy company’s helpline, but even that took forever because the cuffs were really old, and the new ones had a different trick. Anyway, by the time he was transferred to somebody who knew how to open these handcuffs, he’d been on the phone for almost two hours.
Then, when we finally got to the house, it turned out that my mother had packed the house key in a box on the moving truck that wasn’t coming till the morning. Zoe eventually got us in by squeezing through a cat door we found after stumbling around the porch in the dark looking for doors or windows that had been left unlocked.
Usually, I’m not into stuff about the universe speaking to you and all that, but sometimes when things happen in a certain way, it makes you think about why and what it means. You understand, right? If we’d all been dying to get into that house, wouldn’t someone have remembered to take the key? Wouldn’t one of us have remembered the trick to opening Zoe’s handcuffs?
4
It doesn’t bother me that my parents made me take the attic bedroom, even though it’s pretty obvious from the rope ladder that before we got here the “attic bedroom” was actually just the “attic,” the place people put things they wanted to forget but felt weird throwing away. What does bother me is that they think I’m stupid enough to believe that I got it because I’m the oldest and that it’s some great privilege to sleep in a room where the ceiling slopes so badly it feels like an airplane. I may be a nuddy, but I’m not completely clueless. I’m the one sleeping in the attic because Zoe’s too scared and Jeanine’s too Jeanine.
On my way to the bathroom in the dark that first night, I missed the bottom two rungs of the ladder and landed hard on the hallway floor.
“Tris?”
It was Jeanine. I felt my way along the hall to her door. She was in bed reading The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, a flashlight balanced on her shoulder and Paws, her bear, tucked under her arm like he was reading too.
“Don’t you have that book memorized by now?”
“It makes me feel better. And I can’t sleep.”
“Yeah, me too. The attic’s got this really bad smell, and it’s coming from this one spot on the wall right next to my bed.”
“Your wall smells?”
“I don’t think it’s the wall itself. I think it’s something dead trapped inside the wall.”
“Uch. That’s so disgusting. What made you even think that?”
“Probably the sound of all the not-dead mice running around in there.”
“Ew!” She shivered.
“Hey, how long do you think it takes a dead mouse to stop stinking? I mean, eventually it has to run out of stink, right?”
“I guess it depends how long he’s been there.”
“Something tells me Mom and Dad aren’t going to let me call Iris and ask her how long the attic has stunk of dead mouse.”
“You can stay here if you want.” Jeanine scooched over and shined the flashlight on the space she’d just made in the bed.
“Oh, okay. Thanks. One sec.”
When I got back from the bathroom, I climbed into bed next to Jeanine. Then I just lay there listening to her breathe. She makes this tiny whistle when she inhales because she’s got a little asthma, or severe reactive airway disease if you ask her. Anyway, I guess I’d kind of been missing it up in the attic all by myself. Don’t get me wrong. I love not having to share a bedroom anymore, but I’d slept with that whistle my whole life or at least as long as I could remember, and now, even though it was gone, I couldn’t get myself to stop listening for it.
I must have gotten bored just listening though because I found myself reading over her shoulder. “What’s this about anyway?”
“What?”
“The Wolves of Willoughby Chase?”
She turned the flashlight around so it was shining right in my face. “You really want to know?”
I covered my eyes. “Yeah.”
“Yeah? Yeah like ‘whatever’?”
“No, yeah like yeah. I want to know what makes you read it over and over. Also, this part where the wolves attack the train actually seems good, you know, for a book.”
“It is. So good,” she said, shining the flashlight back on the book. “So you really want to know?”
“Are you kidding me? How many times are you going to make me say it?”
“Okay, okay.” She turned off the flashlight. “So, it’s about these girls. And they’re left alone with this woman, who is supposed to take care of them while one girl’s parents go on a trip. Anyway, the woman turns out to be evil and wants to steal the parents’ money, and she locks the girls up in this horrible orphanage. Oh, and then there’s a shipwreck and everyone thinks the parents are dead, but they’re not and—”
“Wait, what about the other girl’s parents? Where are they?”
“Oh, right, those parents are actually dead, and the aunt is super old and is getting really sick while the girls are locked up and starved and tortured in the orphanage.”
“This is the book you love so much you’ve read it like a million times? It’s like a horror movie.”
“I guess it is kind of like one terrible thing after another, but then the girls fight back and eventually they save the old woman, and everything turns out okay. But it’s the horrible stuff that really sucks you in.”
Neither of us said anything for a pretty long time after that, and I actually thought maybe Jeanine had fallen asleep, but then she whispered, “Do you think we’ll get to go back if it’s really bad?”
“Home?”
“Yeah. You know, like if we show that we’re trying, really trying, but we’re still not happy here.” Her voice was all shaky now, not at all like it had been when she was telling me about the book. “Do you think they’ll let us move back?”
“I don’t know.” I guess unlike me, Jeanine hadn’t been pretending to believe my parents wanted to move just because they wanted something different. She actually believed it.
“I know you don’t know if they’d move back. But what do you think? If we’re really not happy?”
What I thought was that even if my parents wanted to move back, they wouldn’t have the money to. What I thought was that this, Petersville, was it for good. But what I knew was that Jeanine wasn’t really asking me to tell her what I thought, even if she didn’t realize it. Jeanine was asking me to tell her what she needed to hear to fall asleep on our first night in a place that was not and might never feel like home. So I did. “Maybe they’d let us move back. Definitely maybe.”
“Do you think we should ask them?”
“Definitely not.”
“Why? I’d feel better if I knew for sure we could go back if things weren’t…working out here.”
/> “If Mom and Dad know you’re thinking we might move back, they’re never going to believe you’re really trying here.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said and then took a big breath that caught a couple of times on the way in.
“Look on the bright side, we’re not trapped in an orphanage starving while some evil woman tries to kill our parents and steal the family fortune, right?”
“Right,” she said sadly and let her head fall onto my shoulder.
“You can read more if you want. I don’t mind.”
“Thanks. It helps.” She turned the flashlight back on and leaned the open book against her bent legs. After a few minutes, I found myself reading over her shoulder again. She was right. All the horrible stuff did suck you in. One of the wolves had jumped through a train window and a passenger was fighting it off with a knife.
Jeanine must have known I was reading because when I got to the end of the page, she said, “We can start back at the beginning if you want.”
“Okay,” I said. I’d thought she’d meant we’d go on reading to ourselves, but when she flipped back to the first page, she began reading out loud, which was actually kind of nice because I could close my eyes and just listen and picture what was happening.
I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I remember is waking up to Jeanine drooling on my shoulder. She must have conked out while reading because the flashlight was still on and the book was crushed between us. Her room did smell better than mine, but she was hogging the one pillow so I turned off the flashlight and went back up to the attic.
5
When I woke up that first morning, it was still dark and my bed was wet. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t wet the bed since I was two. It had to be just one more sign from the universe that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be.
Then something dripped onto my nose and I realized that my wet bed was actually a sign that it was raining and that there was a hole in the ceiling.
Welcome to Petersville!
Since it was still early, I tried to sleep some more but it was too quiet, and I couldn’t find a comfortable position out of the wet spot. So when the sky finally started to pink up, I decided to bike into town. Just because there wasn’t a restaurant in Petersville didn’t mean there was no bakery or bagel place.
Somehow, I made it down the rope ladder in the dark without breaking my neck or waking anybody. I wasn’t interested in company or being told I couldn’t go because it was too dark or too rainy or too whatever else my parents could come up with.
The rain had almost stopped by the time I got outside, but there were puddles everywhere, and I really regretted my decision not to wear socks since they would have been useful to soak up the mud seeping into my sneakers.
I ran across the lawn and around the back of the car.
Ugh. Dad had loaded my bike on the rack first. I was going to have to undo all the straps on each bike and drag everybody else’s off to get to mine. If I’d known what it was going to take, I probably would have stayed in bed, but it was too late now. My shoes were already soaked. I might as well have something to show for it, something like breakfast.
Because I don’t have a death wish, I walked my bike down Terror Mountain, my pet name for our driveway. Even walking though, I had a hard time keeping control of the bike, and by the time I got to the bottom, my shins were sore from banging them so many times with the pedals.
I walked the bike onto the main road, then climbed on and wobbled off. I hadn’t ridden with cars before, and I kept turning around to check if one was behind me. My parents thought it was too dangerous to bike in city traffic, so I’d only ever ridden in Central Park on weekends when cars aren’t allowed. Even though I didn’t see any cars as I set out for town that morning, I was sure one was bound to whizz by any second, knocking me into some ditch too deep to climb out of.
But the cars never came, and the longer I rode without seeing any, the more I relaxed. It was actually easier than biking in Central Park. The road was smoother, and there were no people or strollers or other bikers. It was just me and the road and the woods all around. Flying downhill, I opened my mouth and whooped without knowing why, except that I wanted to, and nobody was around to tell me to stop.
I don’t know how long I’d been riding when I started up a monster hill, but it must have been a while because when I finally came over the top, there was the sign for Petersville. That’s when I noticed the train tracks headed like me toward the traffic light and a cluster of low buildings. They couldn’t have carried a train in a long time because some sections were missing and others had been tarred over.
I got off my bike at the traffic light, even though there wasn’t any actual traffic, car or people. Petersville was as dead as County Road 21B had been, so dead the place didn’t even look real. It was more like one of those pretend towns they build for movies, and in this movie, something really bad had happened, and everybody had moved away.
The first three buildings in town were boarded up with plywood and had FOR SALE signs out front. Though Renny’s Gas Mart, a convenience store with two filling stations, showed signs of life, I crossed the street to check out some place called Turnby’s, hoping to find something better there than packaged coffee cake that had probably been sitting on a shelf since before Zoe was born.
Unfortunately, Turnby’s wasn’t a market or a bagel place or a bakery. I’m still not sure exactly what Turnby’s is. Here’s what was in the window that day: wool camping blankets, Silly Putty, fishing rods, socks, electric nose-hair clippers, a space heater, pipe cleaners, and candy necklaces. It was as if Mr. Turnby woke up one morning and said, “I’m going to open a store, and I’m going to sell whatever I feel like.”
Next to Turnby’s was the General Store, and the first and only thing I noticed about it was the large, handwritten sign in the window:
Yes, we do have chocolate cream doughnuts!
Those have to be the best seven words you can read when you’re starving and you’ve just moved to a town that it’s pretty clear anyone who can has moved away from. Don’t get me wrong. The strangeness of the sign wasn’t lost on me. I mean, was that all they had? And if so, what about the store was general? But I was willing to focus on the positive: chocolate cream doughnuts!
All I had to do was wait till the store opened.
The General Store was the last building on that side of Main Street so I crossed back over to check out the largest building in town, a two-story brick house with a bright red door.
“Petersville Free Library,” I read sadly on the sign over the door.
Books are okay, but you can’t eat them.
Next to the library were two houses that must have been identical at one point but now looked like Before and After in one of those TV shows where people get strangers to come fix up their house. Before was covered in peeling, dirty paint and had broken windows and a mud pit front yard. Beside it, After exploded in blinding yellow with electric blue trim. A Gatorade-green lawn rolled out in front of the house, and a sign on the porch read: DR. CHARNEY, FAMILY CLINIC. After looked like it had been dropped on Main Street from another world, a happier, better world. Like me.
The last building in town—that’s right, that was it!—was all by itself, far from the others, and if the General Store windows hadn’t still been dark, I wouldn’t have gone to see it.
Just past the clinic, the train tracks popped up again, and like last time, they and I were headed to the same place, the one-story cottage with wavy trim like Mom puts on gingerbread houses.
When we got there, the tracks set off for the back of the building, and I stopped out front. A Petersville sign hung over the front door, and long benches lined the wide porch. I leaned my bike against the porch steps and looked through one of the broken windows.
Inside were a barred ticket window, more benches, and a tree about my
size growing out of a crack in the middle of the floor. Soda cans, candy wrappers, and paper bags filled the corners of the room.
It didn’t surprise me that the train didn’t stop in Petersville anymore. Why would it bother? Who wanted to come here? Besides, you wouldn’t want to make it too easy for the few people left to leave.
When I turned around, a light had come on in the General Store, so even though it was raining again, I hopped back on my bike.
I was soaked by the time I reached the store, but who cared about a little water when there were chocolate cream doughnuts to be had.
“I’ll take a dozen!” I called out, barely through the door.
“Eggs are in the cooler,” said a small, wrinkled woman sitting at a counter at the back of the store. She had long, yellow-white hair and was studying a book of sudoku puzzles.
“Not eggs. Chocolate cream doughnuts.” I pointed to the sign. Just saying the words made my stomach rumble so loudly the woman’s head shot up, eyebrows raised.
After giving me a quick once-over, she went back to her puzzles. “No doughnuts.”
“Are they not ready yet? I can wait.”
“We don’t make doughnuts anymore.”
“Not ever?” The disappointment was crushing.
“Not ever.”
“But the sign?” I pointed at it again with both hands.
The woman sighed, then closed her book. “Yeah, well, most people know better than to ask. Besides, I like ’em to remember,” she said and grinned showing a mouthful of teeth that perfectly matched the color of her hair.
Now I knew why everyone had moved away. It was this woman. She was evil. First, she had taken away the town’s doughnuts. Now she was shoving the memory of them down everybody’s throat with that sign.
“I don’t understand. Were they bad?”
“Were they bad?” She snorted and pointed to a frame on the counter.
I picked it up and wiped the glass. There was a newspaper clipping in it with the headline, “Small Town Store Hits It Big with Chocolate Cream Heaven.”
The Doughnut Fix Series, Book 1 Page 3