“Well, Skeeter, that’s not the plan,” his dad said flippantly. “You don’t understand—”
He doesn’t think I’m serious.
“I understand better than you ever will!” Blue shouted. “You don’t have to compete. You just like it. And it’s not fair to anyone else, and you know you’re doing something wrong, and that’s why you left me here, isn’t it?”
“That’s not . . . it’s not true.” For the first time, his dad sounded uncertain. “I gave you some bad advice about that boy at school. I know that. I didn’t mean for you to be hurt. Once I have my next steps all figured out, I’ll come back for you. It’ll be like before.”
That was when Blue knew. His dad didn’t get it. Maybe he didn’t want to get it. He wanted this to be about a fistfight and a broken arm.
That wasn’t what it was about at all.
“It can’t be like before,” Blue tried to explain. “You can’t be a racer. You can’t keep making other people lose.”
Now that Blue knew, he wouldn’t be able to stand it.
“Well, what can I be if you’re making all the rules?”
He was mad. Of course he was mad. Blue leaned against the tree for support.
“You can be my dad,” he said. “You can be someone who . . . does the right thing.”
“I don’t know where the heck you’re getting this idea that I’m some horrible person!”
“You don’t know what it’s like,” said Blue. “You don’t know what it’s like to lose.”
“This conversation is over,” his dad said. “Don’t call again unless you feel like apologizing. I’ll be back for you at the end of the summer. We’ll talk about it then.”
Blue took a deep breath. “If you’re not going to give up racing and come for me right now,” he said, “then I think you shouldn’t bother coming back at all.”
THIRTY-TWO
NO PLACE FOR WINNERS
It was over. It was done. Blue’s dad wasn’t going to change for him, and he wasn’t going to come for him.
When he finally passed the Murky Branch sign again, Blue didn’t remind it that he wasn’t planning on staying. He just thought of his thirteen minutes and his nine seconds and wondered how the walk back to his grandmother’s house could feel so much longer.
You shouldn’t bother coming back at all, he’d said.
He couldn’t believe he’d said that. He couldn’t believe he’d meant it.
He saw the Wilsons’ RV as he stumbled past their house, and he wanted with an aching kind of want to go up to the door and knock. He knew Tumble would be in there.
But he’d told her to go away.
Blue watched his borrowed shoes fall one in front of the other all the way back to the Montgomery house.
He had to do something to fight back against this horrible shredding inside of him. He needed someone to talk to. Or something to break.
But when he made it to the house, nobody was awake. And nothing in this place was his to break.
The only thing he could do was escape to his attic. Because it was his now. And maybe . . .
He tried to stop the thought but couldn’t. Not this time. Maybe this had always been permanent, and he hadn’t been able to let himself realize it.
He reached up to pull the chain on the light and looked around. There was nothing in here that was his own except for his clothes. Not the air mattress. Not the poster. And not, not ever, the boxes.
He went to the nearest one and opened it. Gold gleamed up at him from the pointed tip of a trophy with a ballerina on top.
Blue bent to pick it up. He tried to read the name on the bottom, but it was in elegant cursive, and he wasn’t seeing right. Something was blurring his vision.
It doesn’t matter, Blue thought. No one cares about the ballerina. They left her in the attic.
He shoved the box closer to the window. The trophies inside—all of those forgotten victories—rattled and clinked as if they knew what Blue was going to do.
He fumbled with the latch on the window and forced it open. Granny Eve’s huge garden was below him in the half-light of approaching dawn. Blue looked down.
Some of us don’t get to stand in spotlights on stages, he thought, gripping the ballerina so that the edges of her plastic tutu cut into his fingers. Some of us don’t get anything but dirt.
He threw her away from him, as far as he could. She twinkled as she plunged toward the ground, but Blue didn’t see. He was already bending over, ripping at the nearest box. Medals and ribbons, trophies and tiaras—he didn’t care what or whose or why. He would get rid of them all.
The attic was his now.
And it wasn’t a place for winners.
THIRTY-THREE
THE DAMSEL
Tumble hadn’t seen Blue in almost three days.
She lay facedown on Mr. Patty’s dusty-smelling sofa and listened to the stomping and banging coming from overhead. The roofers had finally come to patch the leaks.
She breathed in more dust, and covered the back of her head with her arms to drown out the sound. Lying here, it had occurred to her that you did not pay to fix the roof of a house you were only renting for a few months. You didn’t start talking about hardwood floors and new light fixtures if you were planning on leaving in just a little while.
Tumble didn’t know why she had never realized that every broken thing her mother repaired was one more sign they would be in Murky Branch for a long, long time. She was starting to wonder if they had actually bought the house from Mr. Patty, and they hadn’t wanted to tell her in case her poor fragile brain couldn’t handle it.
And obviously her brain couldn’t handle it, because if they told her they were moving here for good, Tumble thought she would scream and scream. And if they ever tried to get rid of the RV, she thought she would die.
I don’t even have a friend here. Not anymore.
She had reread How to Hero Every Day again, but there was nothing at all on how to make your friends not hate you when your heroing efforts were a disaster. It was like Maximal Star had never made a mistake in his whole career.
Which was more proof that Tumble was cursed. She tried to think back, on every good thing she’d done and every x she’d gotten rid of. Even though she’d helped people, she’d always, always managed to put herself in danger doing it.
Someone else had had to rescue her. Every single time.
She didn’t have any hope of getting rid of the marks against her. Especially not now that she had had to add x’s for Ida and Howard and the Gerbellion and Millie and on and on. . . .
If she tried again, she would only mess up, and make more mistakes she couldn’t erase.
She felt the sofa dip at her feet. Someone had sat down. She clenched her arms tighter over her head. Maybe whichever parent it was would decide she wasn’t worth the trouble.
Her mother’s voice said, “Is it really so terrible here?”
The strange thing was, it hadn’t been. The house, of course, was a ruin. And the weather was too hot and sticky. But it had been okay. Tumble had found Blue.
Of course, that was before Tumble knew that her parents meant for this to be a long-term arrangement. It was before she realized that they weren’t just thinking she needed a change of pace or a house without wheels. It was before she discovered that they were right to worry—there actually was something wrong with her.
She couldn’t say any of that out loud, though.
Instead, she mumbled, “Blue’s mad at me,” into the sofa cushions. It came out so muffled that her mother couldn’t possibly have heard her.
Tumble sat up. “Blue’s mad at me,” she said again.
Her mother frowned. “What did you do?”
Tumble hated that she just assumed Tumble had done something wrong. “What makes you think it’s my fault! Is everything always my
fault? Just because you think I can’t do anything right—”
“Lily, I didn’t mean it like that,” her mother said, leaning back onto the sofa. She sounded tired. “I don’t think everything is your fault. I meant to say, ‘What happened?’”
Tumble, thought Tumble. Tumble, Tumble, Tumble. Maybe if her mother had ever believed in her enough to use her hero name. Maybe if she had given Tumble a little more support.
But Tumble didn’t even think that herself anymore. Her parents had been right all along, hadn’t they? She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “It was my fault, though,” she said. “His cousin Ida . . . she’s really scared of animals, and we were trying to help her get over her fear.”
Tumble tried to think of what to say next. Her mother didn’t know about the fates, and Tumble didn’t want to tell her. It would only confirm everything she thought about Tumble, and then her parents would probably keep her trapped in this house until she was older than Ma Myrtle.
“So we were training her to hold gerbils,” said Tumble.
“Gerbils?” Her mother looked confused.
“Right,” said Tumble, “because gerbils are small and friendly. Only Ida backed out at the last minute, and she didn’t want to go along with the plan, and I kind of . . . made her do it anyway.”
Tumble could get away with this watered-down version of the truth because nobody from the Montgomery house had thought to tell her parents that Tumble had released a pack of crazed rodents and almost burned herself to death with a road flare.
Tumble had thought for sure someone would call them, and she hadn’t gotten any sleep that first night, waiting for the inevitable consequences. After all, you couldn’t go around catching yourself on fire and expect to get away with it.
Especially not when that was how your brother . . .
Tumble shoved the thought away.
It hadn’t happened. No phone call had come, no knock on the front door. And Tumble had decided that maybe the Montgomerys didn’t know how normal families worked. Or maybe they did, but they were all too busy with their own problems to bother tattling on her.
“Isn’t Ida a lot older than you?” her mother asked. “I’m not sure how you could make a teenager do something she didn’t want to do.”
“Well,” said Tumble, “Blue didn’t want me to do anything to scare her. But I didn’t agree, and I maybe freed some of the gerbils.”
“Oh, Lily.” She was massaging a spot on the center of her forehead. “Why would—”
“I thought it would be fine!” said Tumble. “I thought she needed some help was all.”
“‘Needed some help,’” her mother said. “So it’s that again.”
Tumble stared at the floor. It was funny how you could have an awkward silence even with people hammering on the roof right over your head.
“I just don’t understand,” her mother said, “why everything has to be Maximal Star all the time. When did you decide that the whole world needed saving and you were the only one who could do it?”
She didn’t sound angry. Only frustrated.
“Helping people is important, though,” said Tumble.
“Of course it is,” her mother said. “And when you see someone you can help, you should. I’m so proud of you for always worrying so much about others.”
“Then why—”
“Some people need help, but they don’t need your help, Lily. At least not directly. They need help from their parents or their teachers or, heaven forbid, the authorities. When you see someone robbing a 7-Eleven, you call the police, you don’t dash in yourself!”
“But . . .” Tumble could feel the pencil in her pocket, the eraser, and the picture with its dozens and dozens of new x’s.
“You never used to worry so much about all of the world’s wrongs,” her mother said. “It’s something your father and I talk about a lot. We came here because we think you need time to be a kid. We don’t want you to be miserable. We just want you to have a safe place to grow up. We want you to have friends you don’t have to leave behind every couple of months.”
“That’s not working out,” Tumble said glumly to her kneecaps.
Her mother leaned over and wrapped her arm around Tumble’s shoulders. “You know,” she said, “we all mess up and hurt our friends once in awhile. The solution is the same no matter how old you are.”
“I already tried apologizing,” said Tumble. “Right after it happened.”
“Hmm . . .” her mother said. “Sometimes apologies work better after you’ve given people time and space to grow.”
THIRTY-FOUR
GARDENING
Trophies had speared the watermelons. They had dented the tomato cages. The corn was decorated with glittering medals, and tiaras winked at Blue from between rows of okra and butter beans.
He had been cleaning the garden up since sunrise, and he wasn’t even half finished. The energy that had driven him while he was throwing everything out the attic window had left him now that he was trying to undo the damage.
“All right,” said a voice behind him. “What’s this about?”
Dread dragged Blue’s shoulders down like a weight. He turned to see his grandmother standing there in her housedress and gardening shoes. Her hands were on her hips as she took in the sight of pierced melons and crushed leaves.
“I’m so sorry,” said Blue, dropping the muddy ballerina trophy into one of the boxes he’d brought down with him. “I didn’t mean to ruin your garden. I was mad at Dad, and I wasn’t thinking, and . . .”
He waited for her to yell at him. He knew he deserved it. She worked so hard on her garden, and with everything else going on, Blue should have been trying to make her life easier.
Instead he’d ruined something special.
Eve stooped to pluck a track medal off a squash plant. She turned it over in her hands and brushed a clump of soil from the ribbon.
“Oh, Blue, what are we going to do with you?”
■ ■ ■
“Is he right?” Blue asked. “Is Howard right about my dad?”
He and his grandmother were sitting on top of overturned plastic buckets in the middle of the wrecked garden. Blue had explained what Howard had said, and he’d told her about the phone call. His grandmother hadn’t interrupted the whole time he spoke.
Now she rubbed her hands together and said, “Your daddy shouldn’t be out racing. He must know it deep down. He does cause more harm than he ought to, though I’m sure he doesn’t mean it.”
“Oh,” said Blue, his voice small. He’d known, but when she said it, the last tiny hope inside of him shriveled into nothing.
“But Howard’s not right about everything. At least I don’t think so,” his grandmother continued. “It’s never easy to get inside another person’s head, but I think your daddy meant to do right by you when he left you here.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Blue. “It’s over. I told him to come back for me right away or not to come back at all.”
Eve shook her head. “Why people do what they do always matters,” she said. “In your daddy’s case, he’s finally starting to understand that he might not be able to be what you need. Bouncing around from hotel to hotel and city to city isn’t how a boy is supposed to grow up.”
“But I never minded that.”
“And there’s also the fact that Alan’s been treating you like you’re a copy of him, when you’re your own person with your own problems.”
“He wanted me to fight back. Like he would have. Only I can’t be that way.”
His grandmother leaned forward and patted his knee. “I think that’s what he’s realizing. That you two are different, and he doesn’t know how to handle you. He barely knows how to handle himself.”
Blue didn’t see how he was hard to handle. It wasn’t like
he was some exotic flower that had to be pruned with care.
“Alan was awfully young when you were born, Blue. And on top of that, he’s never had to struggle for anything in his life. With that talent of his . . . well, I’ve never been sure Alan got one of the good fates. It’s just as much a curse to my way of thinking. If things have always come easily to you, you don’t know how to deal with trouble when it finally catches up.”
Blue pondered that. What if he had never lost at anything? Would he even understand how hard losing was?
“Howard said Dad was just selfish.”
Eve was silent for a moment. “Blue,” she said, “I don’t think it’s right to lie to you, but I want you to listen close. Your daddy has always loved being the best, and he’s never cared enough about the people he passed by on his way to first place. That’s true.”
That’s selfish, thought Blue.
“But,” said his grandmother, “nobody is all one way or the other. There is good in Alan, too. And I think when he brought you to me, he was trying to be good. He knows I don’t approve of what he’s been up to, and he knows I don’t agree with the way he’s raised you, and he brought you here anyway.”
“Why would he bring me to you if he felt that way?”
“Maybe it means that some part of him realized he was going in the wrong direction, and he loved you enough to leave you behind.”
“It would have been better if he stayed here, too.”
“No doubt. But maybe, if we give him enough time, he’ll figure that out for himself.”
Blue stared at the ground. The morning was bright and growing hot, and the steady tick-ticking of the few remaining pinwheels in the garden competed with the birdsong.
Blue didn’t know what to think anymore.
He was startled by the sound of Eve’s hands clapping together just beside his ear.
“Time to get a move on,” she said. “You’re going to have to work faster than this if you want to set my garden back to rights, not to mention everything else you’ve got to repair today.”
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