The Door in the Alley

by Adrienne Kress

  The woman, who had brought her teacup toward her lips, froze for a moment and thought. Then she replaced the teacup on its saucer and abruptly stood, giving a sharp nod.

  “Very well, come with me.”

  And with that Sebastian was following her again, sneaking his half-eaten cookie into his pocket as he rose. Down the rope ladder they went, across the freaky glass floor, onto the cobblestone path, and through the door. David Copperfield was at his side once again, a vigilant companion. Or, now that Sebastian thought about it, possibly more like a security guard. Maybe instead of a teeny helmet he needed a teeny headset: “The intruder is now making his way back down the stairs, over.”

  He walked back through the door-painting, and followed the woman onto the elevator. This time they only went down a few floors before it stopped and the woman exited. Sebastian followed her to the right and down the hall until she came to a door and turned to look at him.

  “Now, this is going to be fun, but remember, we still have serious business to deal with.”

  “…Okay?”

  “No, really, this is going to be a blast.” She sounded so serious that Sebastian seriously doubted the veracity of the statement.

  The woman opened the door and Sebastian looked around her to see what was beyond it. What he saw was surprising, yet surprisingly not totally out of place. It was the mouth of a slide, orange in color, and very much like the slide that was part of the jungle gym at his old school. He stepped in closer to get a better look, but the slide curved out of sight.

  “I’ll go first,” the woman announced. She gently pushed Sebastian to the side and sat down at the mouth of the slide. Then, after a moment of stillness, she pushed herself into the orange tube and was gone, an ecstatic “Wheee!” drifting up from below.

  Sebastian briefly considered turning around and going to the elevator and getting the heck out of there. But he had no idea if he could evade the woman by doing so. And besides…the slide did look like fun. He cautiously sat down, extending his legs out in front of him. He glanced at David Copperfield, who returned his look with an expression of “Oh, I’m not going down that thing,” and then, after one final gaze down into the darkness, Sebastian pushed himself off the edge.

  Whoosh, and he was sliding fast and furiously. It was almost scary, but really more like thrilling and all kinds of amazing. The slide curved and turned and twisted. Sebastian had absolutely no sense of where he was or which direction he was going. There was a moment when he sensed his hair sticking up on end and realized he was probably upside down. He didn’t bother to contemplate the physics of the situation.

  Suddenly he was thrown out of the tube and onto a pile of foam blocks. Actually more like a pit of foam blocks. He glanced around: the space was cavernous and the pit as large as a swimming pool. He looked up and saw the woman staring down at him at one end near an arched doorway, her hands on her hips, waiting expectantly.

  “Well?” she asked.

  Sebastian stared at her for a moment, and then understood. “Oh, a blast, a total blast.”

  “Told you so.” She extended her hand to help Sebastian and he slowly made his way over to the side, pushing tediously through the never-ending foam blocks as he did, until finally he was able to grab it and, with her help, climb out of the pit. Once he was standing at her side, she gave that efficient nod of hers again. “But now it’s time to get serious.”

  “Of course,” he answered. She had, after all, warned him.

  Sebastian followed her down a high-ceilinged hall, much brighter than the previous ones from upstairs and painted with pastel murals of some fantastical-looking place with centaurs and fairies. The woman stopped abruptly, turned to her right, opened a door that looked like part of the wall, and they entered a very small but extremely tall room, so tall that there was a skylight right at the top, which had to mean that the room was as tall as the building was.

  Sebastian looked around in the dim light. The space was completely empty except for an old-fashioned wooden school desk with its chair attached. It even had a hole in the top of the desk where an inkpot would have gone once upon a time. Lying on the desk was a thick leather-bound book. The woman went to sit behind the desk and Sebastian followed, stopping in front of it. He looked down at the tome at its center, trying to make out what it said under the thick layer of dust that covered it.

  On it was one word: Rules.

  “I’d stand back if I were you,” said the woman, and Sebastian stepped back obediently.

  The woman took in a deep breath and then blew the dust off the cover of the book. It flew toward Sebastian in a cloud, and he backed himself right up against the wall. But it stopped short of him and, changing its mind, slowly spiraled upward, dancing in the light of the skylight.

  The woman opened the book and after several moments of page turning exclaimed, “Aha!” She looked at Sebastian with a victorious expression. “Come here, boy.”

  Once again he did precisely what she told him to do, and once again he marveled at how awfully compliant he was being. There was something about the woman that commanded respect. He hoped maybe someday he would have the same effect on people.

  She turned the book around so that he could look at it, her finger still marking the spot, and Sebastian learned forward and squinted at the tiny print.

  “ ‘Article 54, Section Q,’ ” the woman read. “ ‘Anyone caught trespassing, encroaching, or invading shall be handed over with haste and suspicion to the authorities.’ ”

  Sebastian looked up and let out a frustrated huff. “But I was invited inside. I wasn’t…encroaching,” he said, his voice rising slightly.

  The woman read on: “ ‘The definition of these terms is left to the discretion of the society members.’ ”

  Oh. Well. Still didn’t seem fair, though.

  But rules are rules.

  Except.

  “Wait, what’s that?” asked Sebastian.

  “What’s what?” asked the woman.

  “That.” Sebastian pointed to a tiny 15 beside the sentence.

  “Hmm.” The woman leaned closer to the book and so did Sebastian. They were so close that he could feel one of her gray curls tickling his forehead. Down at the bottom of the page, below a line, was a series of footnotes*1 written in an even smaller print. “Do you see 15?”

  Sebastian squinted even more, not entirely certain there was any positive effect in doing so. He found the tiny 15 and read the words beside it out loud slowly: “ ‘Unless of course an alternate suitable punishment can be agreed upon by the members, or if the members just don’t feel like punishing anyone in the first place.’ ”

  The woman sat up and leaned back in her seat. She tented her fingers together and brought them to her lips, contemplating what Sebastian had just read.

  “Well, I mean, that’s good, isn’t it? We don’t have to bother the police, who I’m sure have much more important things to deal with,*2 and it was all a misunderstanding, after all. I mean…it’s obvious how harmless I am.”

  The woman said “Hmm” again and continued to tap her lips with her fingers.

  “I’m not the sort of person who does wrong things. I’m really not,” continued Sebastian, feeling the panic rise. “I wouldn’t so much as move a piece of dust out of place without permission. I have no interest in upsetting the order of things. I don’t like change, you see, and I am certain that however the members have decided to run this society must be good and I would never ever consider disrupting its day-to-day functioning. Ever.” He was beginning to sound a little desperate, even to himself, but it was all true. Of all the threats in the world, he was the least. He was the antithreat.

  The woman stopped tapping and stared at him hard. “Say that again?”

  “I’m not a rule-breaker. I never would have willingly broken the rules. I believe in order. In logic. In following the correct path.” Oh, the correct path, the beautiful, happy, appropriate, correct path. The one that when you veere
d off it, you landed in stupid, thrilling society buildings with stupid, thrilling names.

  With that now-familiar nod of hers, the woman stood up. “Well then. That settles it. You absolutely need to be punished.”

  Okay, that wasn’t how he thought this encounter would end.

  The woman came around to Sebastian’s side of the desk and put a warm but firm hand on his shoulder. “Because quite frankly, I know no one in need of an attitude adjustment more than you.”

  * * *

  *1 I just felt obligated to write a footnote for the word “footnotes.” I actually don’t have anything to say in particular.

  *2 Though as it turned out, the chief of police was at that moment watching his clock ticking ambivalently, and really wouldn’t have minded the distraction.

  Pathetic.

  There was no better word for it.

  Evie sat on the small ledge, staring out her small window, and imagined someone down in the street looking up, seeing her through the dusty pane of glass, her sad expression, her knees hugged to her chest. Would they have felt pity for the girl in the window? Even Evie knew it was all a bit too much, really. There was no way anyone could look that particularly miserable. Maybe they’re shooting a movie, the person on the street might think. But if so, where are the cameras?

  They couldn’t see into the room, of course, but if they could, they would certainly have concluded that this girl lived one of the most pathetic lives imaginable. Such a small gray little place. One desk. One chair. One bed. One set of drawers. And so few personal items that even if it had been possible to cheer up the space, she wouldn’t have been able to.

  But worse than her pathetic appearance and pathetic room was that she was, pathetically, at the moment, overwhelmingly full of self-pity.

  “Buck up, Buttercup!” she said to herself, but as much as she pretended, it was her voice that she heard, not her mother’s.

  It had been two years. Two whole years.

  Why did it still feel like this?

  There was a knock on the door. Evie stared at it for a moment. No one at school ever knocked on her door.

  “Yes?” she said.

  The door opened, and Daisy’s angular features materialized from behind it. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “Wrong room.” The girl smiled brightly and then closed the door.

  Evie sat there seething with rage. Daisy knew this was her room; there was no mistaking it. She’d done that on purpose, just to rub it in that no one wanted to hang out with her. Just to make it explicitly clear. But Evie was well aware of that. She wasn’t a fool. What she didn’t know was why. Why she didn’t fit in here? What was it that made the other girls avoid her? She had thought maybe they were jealous that she lived here year-round, that the state had brought her to the Wayward School and it was her home now. But who would be jealous of living at a school? Especially a school as uninteresting and uninspiring as Wayward?

  Oh, it wasn’t fair! She was so sick and tired of things being unfair! Without thinking, Evie grabbed the small cup of water on the bedside table and threw it against the door. That felt good! She stood up and tore the blanket off her small bed, and then grabbed the pencils on the desk and flung those. Then she pulled open her drawers and ripped the clothes out, tossing them everywhere. She grabbed her parents’ picture and hurled it at the wall….

  Another knock on the door, but more like a heavy banging.

  “What is going on in there?” demanded Mrs. Pomeranian, shoving the door open.

  Evie stood still and wondered the same thing. She gazed, astonished, at the mess around her, felt the tears on her cheeks and stared wide-eyed at Mrs. Pomeranian, who glowered back at her down her long pointy nose.

  “I’m…sorry….”

  “This is unacceptable!” Mrs. Pomeranian walked slowly into the room, shaking her head at the destruction. Her voice was high and plummy and full of disdain. Evie knew it well; she’d never heard anything else from Mrs. Pomeranian. At least, not when her house mistress spoke with her in particular. “When we agreed to take you on as your full-time guardians, we laid out very strict rules of behavior. We were guaranteed that you would abide by them. But you, little Miss Evie, have done nothing to integrate yourself into our community here. You make no friends. You sulk in your room.”

  But it wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried. “I’m sorry,” Evie said quietly.

  “And you were chosen by the Andersons to be their guest at their home once a week. For two years in a row now. Something quite unusual.” She sniffed the air after saying that, as if the unusualness of the situation came with a particularly bad smell. “You keep up your pouting and they might just revoke the privilege.”

  Evie scoffed inwardly. She wouldn’t mind at all if they took back the invitation. Her weekly Wednesday dinner at the Andersons’ was one of the most boring experiences that could be experienced. It couldn’t even really be called an “experience.” It just simply was.

  No, she chastised herself instantly. It was the one time a week she got to escape this prison. She shouldn’t be so ungrateful.

  Mrs. Pomeranian approached and squinted down at her.

  “Why can’t you just be happy, Evie?”

  “I want to,” Evie replied, forcing the tears to stay buried and causing her throat to constrict so much she thought she might choke.

  Mrs. Pomeranian looked at the bed, gave it a pat, and sat down on the edge.

  “I’m not trying to be mean to you,” she said, her expression softening a bit so that the deep creases across her forehead were slightly shallower. “I know you’ve gone through a lot. But this is your life, Evie. And the only thing you can do is accept it.”

  Evie tried to swallow, but it was impossible. Why couldn’t Mrs. Pomeranian just leave her alone? “I…can’t do that.”

  “Well, then,” said Mrs. Pomeranian, standing, “you’re never going to be happy.”

  Evie didn’t know what to say to that. What a thought. And it didn’t make any sense. After all, if she accepted that she was totally and completely alone in the world—no family, no one who loved her—then she would be very sad indeed. But if she didn’t accept that, then she would also be sad? No, no, that couldn’t be true.

  “The moment you understand that this is it is the moment you can start living your life.” Mrs. Pomeranian looked around the room and shook her head. “Now clean up this mess.”

  Evie nodded as Mrs. Pomeranian swept out of the room, closing the door behind her. A peal of giggles could be heard out in the hall, and Evie was pretty sure Daisy and her friends had been listening to their conversation. But she wasn’t angry anymore. She was just…defeated.

  One by one, she started picking up the pieces of her room. She bent over and picked up the framed picture of her parents. There was a crack across the glass now, and Evie felt a pang in her gut.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, touching the glass with her finger. She placed the picture gingerly on the small table by her bed and sat down and stared at it. It was a picture from before Evie was born, one she had always kept by her bed at home, which she’d stolen out of the family album because she loved it so much. Her parents were having a picnic on the side of a mountain, with a winding river far below them and snowcapped peaks in the distance. They looked so happy and free. On an adventure. Like the adventures they used to go on, all three of them, as a family. Hiking, or skiing, or taking a boat far out to sea.

  “Life’s an adventure,” her mom used to say.

  “No it’s not,” Evie said aloud now. “It’s four gray walls and a dusty window.”

  Then she rolled her eyes and sighed, and flopped herself down on her mattress, still staring at the photograph.

  Yup.

  Pathetic.

  Sebastian’s punishment was not going to jail or even paying a fine. It turned out that the woman had something else in mind for him. He was to come to society headquarters every day after school and help keep the place in order. Or out of order, depending on what
was needed at the time. He was given a special key and instructed that no visitors were allowed inside unless they were allowed inside. He was to sweep and dust and vacuum, reshelve books, or pull books off the shelf and throw them on the floor. He was to change David Copperfield’s litter box and feed Hubert’s pig in a teeny hat, his gerbils, his rats, and his budgies. Additionally he was assigned the task of doing anything else that was required. He was what the woman called a jack-of-all-trades. Sebastian considered it more like a personal servant…but whatever.

  The fact was that it hardly felt like a punishment. And his parents approved of it, as they believed it would teach him some new skills. And so Sebastian came to know the wondrous, strange, sometimes itchy Explorers Society.

  He also came to know the woman’s name: Myrtle Algens. She was the current president of The Explorers Society. Myrtle had become a member of the society at the young age of nineteen after she had accompanied her father and mother on an expedition to the North Pole to ascertain, in no uncertain terms, that there were no penguins there. “It had always seemed to my father that there ought to be penguins there. It was just as cold and brutal as the South Pole. Why wouldn’t they want to live there, too? Of course, there were no penguins there. Not one. But I do believe to his dying day he really thought they were there. Somewhere.” After that she had returned to the North Pole half a dozen times, leading a couple of expeditions herself. “The expeditions were a little dull. People just want to see if they can do it, can handle the cold, the bleak whiteness. And, as it turns out, they always can. It doesn’t hurt that they have expensive snowsuits and state-of-the-art winter camping gear.” She had been given the nickname of Ice Queen at the society, but a kind of warmth always glowed from beneath her pragmatic shell. Sebastian determined quite quickly that he liked her a lot.

  Now, Sebastian had always known he’d eventually have to get a job. That was an inevitability of growing up. It was drilled home hard at school, with essay assignments at least once a year about plans for the future. He had just never thought that he would have a job quite so soon, and that it would involve such a random collection of tasks. But here he was dusting every inch of The Explorers Society, doing cartwheels, washing windows, reciting Shakespeare’s thirty-third sonnet. All the while being followed and kept close tabs on by a pig in a teeny hat.