All the Montgomerys needed was someone to show them they were being superstitious and silly. Tumble could help them without doing anything risky. Even her parents couldn’t object.
Not that she gave them the opportunity to try. She led them to believe that the neighbors were absolutely ordinary, and that her new friend was the ordinariest of them all.
“Blue’s really nice,” she told her mother the next morning over breakfast. “He’s got a broken arm, though, so I’m going to take some board games with me to cheer him up.”
Her mother hesitated, coffee mug hovering in front of her lips. “Is Blue a Maximal Star fan, too?”
“No,” said Tumble. “But give me time.”
They found Eve Montgomery’s number in an old phone book in the living room, and her mother called to be sure that Tumble was invited. Tumble leaned over the back of the sofa, crossing her fingers and hoping that none of the weirder Montgomerys picked up.
“What a pleasant lady,” Tumble’s mother said, plunking the phone back into its cradle. “Blue’s grandmother says you should feel free to come over any time. Mrs. Eve is going to send you home with some zucchini from her garden.”
So Blue did have some normal relatives. Tumble would have to incorporate them into her heroic action plan. She might need allies to convince the more stubborn members of the family to see reason.
But first—Blue.
She was so excited she would have skipped the whole way over if her arms weren’t loaded with board games. After questioning a few people, she found Eve Montgomery in the kitchen. She was thick around the middle, with curly gray hair, and when Tumble met her, she was staring into a refrigerator that was bare of everything but a jar of pickle juice.
“I’m here to see Blue,” said Tumble. “My mom called.”
“You two are friends?” Eve asked, shutting the fridge.
“Yes,” said Tumble. “I brought games.”
She gestured with the boxes in her arms. Parcheesi almost slipped off the top, and Eve reached over to shove it back in place.
“Well, I’m not sure he’ll take to that idea,” she said. “But I’m glad he’s got a friend. He’s been a little down. Wasn’t expecting to spend his summer here, and his daddy . . . well . . . if the games don’t work out, you can always come and help me in the garden.”
She gave Tumble directions to the attic and promised to send up lunch if she could find any food.
Tumble wended her way through the house to a narrow door at the top of the third floor landing. It opened onto a steep, musty-smelling staircase. Tumble paused to review her plan.
She figured as long as she spoke reasonably and didn’t laugh at Blue for his superstitions, she’d be marking off another x that afternoon.
All right. I’ve got this.
“Hello!” she called. “It’s Tumble Wilson! I’ve had an idea about your problem.” She adjusted her grip on the games and teetered up the stairs.
When Blue finally said, “Come in,” she had almost reached the top.
The last step into the attic was the steepest, and Tumble stumbled her way up it. The floorboards were bare wood, and the rafters sloped so that you couldn’t stand straight up at the edges of the room. It was a large but gloomy space. The only spots of brightness were a pull-chain bulb overhead and a poster covered in paint splotches that had been taped to a tower of plastic storage containers.
A half-circle window set in the wall opposite Tumble would have let in light, but it was mostly covered by boxes. She thought the view might be good from so high up if someone moved all of the junk out of the way.
Blue was sitting on top of an air mattress in the middle of the floor, staring at his cell phone. A lumpy duffel bag was behind him, its zipper gaping open to reveal piles of rumpled clothes.
“Is it the cell service?” Tumble asked. “We don’t get it at our house, either. We barely get Internet.”
It had taken her an hour to log on to Maximal Star’s website and update her fan club profile with the new house’s address.
“Yeah,” said Blue. “It’s like that here. I was just checking.”
He dropped the phone back into his duffel and waved an arm around at the attic. “Welcome to my room.”
“It’s . . . interesting.”
Blue sighed. “The house is really crowded.”
“I’ll bring you a blanket or something the next time I come,” Tumble promised, eyeing the air mattress. “I’ve been thinking about your issue.”
“My issue?”
“Right,” she said, setting the games down on the floor. “Your losing issue.”
“It’s not an issue,” he said bluntly. “It’s a curse.”
“Can I sit down?”
He shrugged, and she stepped over to his mattress. She plopped down beside him.
“Curses,” she said, hoping Blue wouldn’t notice that she’d rehearsed. “Sometimes everyone feels like they’re cursed. I’ve felt that way myself lately.”
She bounced a couple of times on the mattress. “I mean, I got expelled from my last school for saving a kid’s life. How unfair is that? And a few months ago I was in this convenience store, and I saw this man slipping a bottle of organic lemonade into his jacket—”
“It’s not the same.”
Tumble decided to ignore the interruption. “The thing about your particular problem,” she said, “is that it’s very easy to test.”
“What?”
“I’m going to prove that you’re not a loser. You can win anything if you want.”
“How are you going to prove something like that?”
Tumble stood. “I’m glad you asked!”
She sprang over to the board games and started holding them up one by one. “These are some of my favorites,” she said. “I’ve got Scrabble! Monopoly! Tiddlywinks!”
“Okay?” said Blue.
“Seriously,” said Tumble. “If we play enough games, I swear, you will eventually win one. Nobody loses every time. Nobody.”
She was going to make Blue believe her. It wasn’t just that she didn’t think alligators hid in the swamp waiting to jinx people. It was that the idea of a world where a person could literally be cursed, no matter what he did or how hard he tried, offended every last bit of her.
Not everything was fair. Tumble knew that better than most people. But the world had to be fairer than that.
“Listen,” said Blue, “this is really nice of you, but you don’t—”
“Oh, come on . . .” Tumble pleaded. “We’ve got all day. And if you don’t win a game then I’ll know you’re right. And I’ll help you uncurse yourself! This time you’ve got nothing to lose.”
“Uncurse myself?” Blue asked.
“Well, if curses were real—which they’re not!—but if curses were real they could obviously be broken. It’s in all the books and movies, right? If you don’t win something today, I’ll just figure out how to uncurse you. That’s a much better idea than trying to make Ma Myrtle pick you over all of the others before this moon deadline thing comes up.”
Tumble was proud of this argument. It was her backup-backup plan. If Blue believed in cursedness, he had to believe in uncursedness, too. So if all else failed, Tumble would still have a way to move forward.
“I don’t . . . I’m not trying to . . .” Blue frowned. “I’m not like the rest of them, okay? I’m actually trying to help Howard, Jenna, and Ida save Granny Eve from her fate.”
“What’s her fate?”
Blue went quiet.
Tumble wondered if that was considered a rude question in his family.
“Her husbands die,” he said finally.
Tumble felt her eyebrows trying to climb her forehead. She forced them to stay in place.
“I’m only telling you so that you won’t mention it to her
. Let’s just play some games and when I lose—”
“When you win,” Tumble said firmly, “you’ll agree to read How to Hero Every Day. I put a copy in with the Monopoly board. Deal?”
Blue shrugged.
Tumble pulled Scrabble out of the stack and settled cross-legged onto the floor in front of him. She set up the board and then held the bag full of tiles out to Blue. He looked at it like it might hold live tarantulas.
Tumble gave the bag a little shake. “Come on,” she said. “If you don’t like Scrabble, we can try something else next. We can even race if you want. You like to run, right? And I think I saw a dartboard in one of Mr. Patty’s closets.”
“No!” said Blue, his hand diving into the bag of tiles. “Scrabble’s great. The best. Just . . . no darts.”
“Why not?”
He stared down at the letters in his hand. “You’ll see.”
THIRTEEN
A WINK AND A NOD
“Scrabble was fine!” Tumble tried to explain to Blue’s frantic, rainbow-haired cousin Ida. Eve Montgomery was loading Blue into her Thunderbird for a trip to the emergency room. Tumble couldn’t believe things had gone so wrong.
“Scrabble!” shouted Ida, like it was a kind of deadly weapon.
The two of them were arguing in the front yard instead of helping Jenna move the twins’ car like they were supposed to. The Civic had been penned in between a van and a motorcycle, and Jenna was trying to maneuver it out of the way so that Eve’s Thunderbird could escape from its own tight spot.
“Yes, Scrabble!” said Tumble. “Scrabble was totally boring.”
She waved Jenna to the left just in time to keep her from running into the motorcycle.
“Boring doesn’t mean safe! He could have lost an eye!”
Ida was waving, too. The wrong way. Jenna honked the horn at them.
Tumble had had a good plan for Scrabble. But Blue was sharper than she had anticipated. “You can’t lose on purpose,” he’d told her when she tried to misspell query. “It doesn’t count if you lose on purpose.”
So they had switched to Monopoly. Tumble was unfortunately great at Monopoly.
Finally, when they settled on tiddlywinks, it started working. Tumble was good, but even playing with his left hand, Blue was some kind of tiddlywinks prodigy. She was losing, and as the game went on, she could tell Blue was getting more and more hopeful.
He’d laughed and joked around and told her more about his family and how their lives were all controlled by great and terrible fates. He admitted that he’d lost a fight with a boy at school and that was part of the reason why his dad had left him in Murky Branch.
“It’s not fair,” he’d said, “because he was the one who told me I had to stand up for myself, and then when I do, he gets mad. Or upset. Or something. And leaves me here.”
He had glared at a green wink. “And I’m the one who should be mad. I mean, I have the broken arm.”
“So what’s your dad’s fate?” Tumble had asked in order to change the subject.
“The opposite of mine. He wins. Not like the lottery or coin tosses, but anything that takes skill. He was a race car driver. He won all the time . . . unless he threw the race on purpose. He had to do that every now and then to deflect suspicion, you know?”
Tumble knew it sounded fishy. How could Blue be sure his dad had lost those races on purpose? Maybe it was all a ploy. And if he was such a hotshot racer, why had he quit?
But when she asked, Blue said, “Maybe because of the wrecks. There were some bad ones right before he quit. He wasn’t involved in any of them, but it must have soured things a little.” He shrugged. “His last girlfriend said it was just because he’s such a free spirit.”
Tumble bit her tongue. She had tried to point out inconsistencies with the other family members’ alleged curses, only to have Blue neatly poke holes in each theory. He had an explanation for everything.
Until he started to win at tiddlywinks.
He was popping the plastic winks into the cup. Plock, plock, plock. And he was getting more and more excited, and so was Tumble because she was going to be the one who saved Blue from his imaginary fate, and then . . .
Blue’s grandmother said he would be fine.
“Nobody ever went blind from getting hit in the eye with a tiddlywink,” she said when Tumble dashed downstairs to get help. “Not even in this house.”
Jenna honked the horn again, and Tumble’s brain snapped back to the present. She hurried out of the way.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Ida called as Eve finally pulled the Thunderbird forward.
“We’ll be fine,” Eve said through her open window. “Just keep an eye on this bunch until I get back. Especially Ma Myrtle.”
Ida nodded.
Tumble waved as the Thunderbird passed. Blue waved back. He was squinting at her through his uninjured eye, his face thoughtful.
“You almost won!” she shouted.
And he nodded.
Tumble’s heart lifted. She was betting a lot on that nod. She was betting that he would keep trying, at least, even if she did have to change tactics a little. What better way to uncurse yourself than to win something? she would say.
She waved until Eve Montgomery’s car was out of sight, then she turned her steps toward home. It was time for a different kind of competition, one that Blue couldn’t—not in a million years—lose.
FOURTEEN
A TARNISHED CENT
The ER nurse said Blue’s eyeball would heal. It had only been scratched by an unidentified flying object. Granny Eve had very kindly not told the nurse that the UFO in question was a tiddlywink.
They left the hospital with a bottle of eyedrops and instructions to come back later in the week to see about removing Blue’s cast.
On the way home, he took advantage of the long car ride and the distance from Murky Branch to call his dad from his cell phone. It took three tries, but he finally picked up.
“Hey there, Skeeter. How are things?” He sounded like himself. Easygoing, relaxed.
“Dad!” said Blue, surprised despite himself. “Hi! I’m in the car with Granny Eve right now, so we can talk.”
“Tell him I said hello,” Granny Eve said.
“Granny Eve says hello,” Blue repeated. “How are you? Did you get my messages about how many relatives have moved in? I’m sleeping in the attic now.”
Blue hadn’t, necessarily, expected his dad to react to this news with shock and horror. He had never been an overly protective parent. He’d taught Blue to swim by tying parachute cord around his waist and then dangling him in the deep end of a hotel pool until he started to paddle. But Blue had thought he might get a little sympathy.
“That’s good,” his dad said. “Gives you a chance to get away from them all. And you’ll have a space to yourself.”
This struck Blue as a strange take on the situation. Blue had always had a space to himself. He’d always had his own room when they lived in apartments, and he’d had his own room when they lived in hotels.
“Well . . . it’s kind of dirty up there.”
“I’m sure your granny can help you fix it up nice.”
It was true that Granny Eve was trying. She’d stopped by a store on the way back from the hospital and bought Blue a lamp and a new pillow and a set of sheets. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Blue was living in an attic. And not even a clean one.
“Where are you staying?” Blue asked. At a hotel, he knew. A fancy one.
“I’ll send your granny some money to buy stuff for you. Ask her how much she needs.”
“I don’t want her to have to buy stuff for me,” said Blue. “I want you to come get me early.”
His dad didn’t answer. Then, in a gruff voice, he said, “We talked about this. I’m making some
decisions right now, and it’s best if you’re with your granny. And with Ma Myrtle dying . . . you should spend time with your great-grandma, too.”
Blue’s insides clenched. They hadn’t known Ma Myrtle was dying when his dad left. And if his dad knew now . . . that meant he had been getting Blue’s messages.
“Dad—”
“Ask your granny how much money she needs.”
Blue didn’t want to do that. But then he thought about the sheets and the lamp and the fact that his grandmother was putting up with a whole houseful of people who weren’t helping her with the bills.
“Granny Eve?” he said stiffly. “He wants to know how much money you need. To watch me. Just until the end of summer.”
Granny Eve raised her eyebrows. Blue saw her grip on the steering wheel tighten. “Not a tarnished cent,” she said. “I’ve got more than enough to take care of you.”
Maybe that was true, but Blue had begun to understand that his grandmother didn’t tell people when she needed help. She was always the one who did the helping, whether that meant holding her tongue while Ma Myrtle had fun ordering the relatives around or taking in a grandson she hadn’t seen in years.
“She says a few hundred dollars should cover it,” Blue told his dad.
Granny Eve shot him a look.
“Good,” his dad said. “I’ll have it to her soon.”
He sounded relieved.
“We’re getting close to Murky Branch,” said Blue. “I guess the phone will die.”
“Okay. Take care.”
“Remember to check your messages,” said Blue. Maybe he’d heard about Ma Myrtle from someone else. “I’ve left you a few.”
His dad didn’t answer. The call had dropped.
Granny Eve shook her head. “I wish you hadn’t done that. I really don’t need your daddy’s money.”
“It’s fair,” said Blue. “He didn’t even tell you he was going to bring me here. And with all the other relatives eating everything in the house—”
Tumble & Blue Page 6