The Bottle Imp of Bright House

by Tom Llewellyn

  “Nothing, hmm? When they say it’s nothing, it’s always something. Mr. Appleyard used to get tummy aches. Right in his tummy-tum-tum. I could tell when he had one, cause he’d walk more bent over than usual. So I’d say, ‘What’s wrong, dear?’ He always said, ‘Nothing.’ And then one day, nothing turned into something.”

  “Turned into what?”

  “Into something that killed him, that’s what. Turns out he’d eaten a fish he’d caught. A little bullhead. Swallowed it whole. That bullhead was so fresh that it came back alive in his gut. It swam around in Mr. Appleyard’s stomach, eating all his food. While the fish got bigger, Mr. Appleyard starved right to death. Next thing you know, he’s taking his final fishing trip in the back of a hearse.” She wiped her eyes on the cuff of her bathrobe. “Now I keep his ashes on a bookshelf. And he never made it to Mexico.”

  “He wanted to visit Mexico?”

  “Wanted to move there. To a little fishing village called El Pescadero. That was his dream, Ten Cents. To own a boat and go fishing every day. Instead, he ended up on a bookshelf.”

  “Why do you keep calling me that?”

  “What? Ten Cents? Because you’re like a dime, that’s why.”

  “Like a dime?”

  “Sure. You’re a little Silver.”

  I went upstairs. In the living room, the carpet was mostly dry and the bucket was gone, but now there was a huge hole torn in the ceiling, exposing the pipes that Alejandro must have repaired.

  Mom yelled at me for not bringing home her mizithra, even though I told her it wasn’t my fault. I went into my bedroom and lay down on my bed, still holding the bottle in my hand. I wondered how many hands had held it the same way, how many owners had wondered if it was real or not.

  About an hour later, I heard Dad come home. I left my room, hoping he’d brought pizza for dinner.

  “Why are you here?” said Mom. “I thought you were working a long shift.”

  “I quit, my dear,” said Dad. He took the Hasty’s hat from his head and put it on Mom.

  “Oh, Johann.”

  “Oh, Johann? Would you believe Oh Johann got his job back?”

  “Got his what?”

  “His job. His teaching job. Associate professor. And tenure track at that.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Billingsly called me. Said the dean was reading my evaluations and didn’t understand how they could have ever let me go. Told Billingsly to track me down. That’s what he said. That he was told to track me down.” Dad grabbed Mom around the waist. “No more pizza, señora. Tonight, we’re going out—for tacos!”

  “Tacos? Oh, but I made spaghetti. Without mizithra.”

  “Put it in Tupperware, baby. It’s taco night.”

  They all ran down the stairs together. Mom and the girls laughed and shouted. Dad sang in Spanish. I followed after, one step at a time. I could swear the weight of the bottle pulled me down the stairs. I wondered if I’d be able to eat a taco, because my stomach felt like a whole troupe of acrobats was warming up down there.

  I’d made my first wish and it had already come true. I should be happy, right? I should be ecstatic. Then why did I feel like I was gonna barf?

  We jammed into Dad’s car. The worn seats still smelled like Hasty’s Pizza. Dad turned the key and black smoke puffed out the back.

  “Maybe since I got the job, it’s time to think about a better car,” said Dad.

  “We need to get out of this apartment first,” said Mom.

  “What?” said Georgina. “We’re not moving, are we?”

  “Yeah,” said Meg. “We love it here.”

  Dad sighed. “No one is moving.”

  I said, “Dad, you know what car I saw today? A Ferrari 430.”

  “Nice. A new one?”

  “A Ferrari 430, Dad. There are no new ones. They stopped making them in 2009. I saw one. Right here in Tacoma. That’s what you should get. You could drive me to school in it. Can you imagine?”

  “I was thinking more like a Honda that didn’t smoke so much.”

  “Make sure you get one that still smells like pizza,” said Meg. She took a big sniff.

  “No one is getting a car,” said Mom. “What we need is a house.”

  “I thought you said we weren’t moving,” said Georgina.

  “He said that. Not me.”

  “We’re not moving,” said Dad. “We have too many bills we still need to pay off before we can even think about a house. Besides. I signed a one-year lease.”

  “A Ferrari 430, Dad. That’s what you need.”

  “What I need right now is a taco.”

  I reached into my pocket, touching the smooth surface of the bottle. I whispered, “I wish my dad had a Ferrari 430.”

  WHEN I OPENED MY EYES THE NEXT MORNING, the first thing I saw was my poster. The Ferrari. I looked out my window, half expecting to see a real one in front of our building, but Dad’s old Honda still sat down there, slowly disintegrating by the curb. Right behind it was a black Volkswagen Beetle. No Ferrari in sight.

  When Dad dropped me off at school, the same black VW Beetle pulled up behind us. Out stepped the new girl. Joanna Something. She glared at me. I glared back, then noticed the car’s driver—the pale, thin woman with dark eyes and a scarf tied around her head whom I’d seen in the window.

  Dad nodded toward the Beetle. “Don’t they live in our building?”

  “Yes.”

  “A new friend for you, then,” Dad said. “I’m going to ask the mom if she’d like us to drive her daughter to school. We could carpool.”

  “What? No!” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because—because she’s weird, Dad. Don’t—”

  “Oh, come on, Gabe. Give the girl a chance. She’s just a bit goth. My understanding is that goth girls are cool. And you could use some cool friends. Not that Henry isn’t—you know—cool.”

  Dad walked toward the Volkswagen. I hurried to the school building. When I stepped inside, someone shoved me from behind. I stumbled forward and fell.

  Joanna stood over me. “Why’s your dad talking to my mom?” I tried to stand up, but she pushed me down with a black boot. “Why’s he talking to her?”

  “I don’t know. He wants to start a car pool or something.”

  “No!”

  “It’s not my idea.”

  “Stay out. Stay out of my life!” She stomped away.

  I got up and noticed Henry leaning against his locker, watching the whole thing. Without a word, he turned and disappeared down the hall.

  I managed to avoid Joanna throughout the day. I’d brought my own lunch—I wanted nothing to do with trays—and I sat in the corner of the cafeteria with my back against the wall. That way Joanna couldn’t sneak up on me. Henry sat by himself at our old table, poking at his Jell-O with his plastic fork.

  After lunch, Henry and Joanna were both in my language arts class, and my assigned seat was right next to Henry. I was still mad at him for throwing away my bottle. I guess he was mad at me, too, because we both turned our desks away from each other.

  Our language arts teacher, Miss Kratz, asked Joanna to come to the whiteboard and write a prepositional phrase. Joanna didn’t move.

  “Joanna, I know you heard me. Can you please come on up?” Miss Kratz was about fifty years old, I guess, but she dressed in the same brands of clothes as some of my classmates.

  Joanna said, “Why?”

  “Why what, dear?”

  “Why do I have to come forward? Can’t you just write one?”

  “It would certainly be easier. I could do the whole class that way and all of you could just stay home. Unfortunately, that’s not the way this whole teaching thing works. You actually have to learn something.”

  Joanna sighed, then shuffled up to the front. She picked up a marker and wrote out the do
or on the board.

  “Good,” said Miss Kratz. “Out is the preposition, and door is the object, so out the door is a prepositional phrase. Now can you make it into a sentence?”

  Joanna added four words to the front. The new sentence read I want to run out the door.

  “You and me both, honey,” said Miss Kratz. “But there’s still more than a month until summer. We’ll both try to make it. Now go back to your seat.”

  At the end of the school day, I started walking home by myself. Before I turned the corner at the end of the block, I looked back. I could see Henry watching me from the school steps. When he saw me, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the bottle to show him he hadn’t won. He turned away.

  Who needed Henry? So what if we’d known each other since first grade? So what if we hung out seven days a week? Half the time we were together he drove me nuts. And if I wanted a new friend, I could get one.

  I reached into my pocket and touched the bottle. “I wish I had a new friend.”

  When I got to the Bright House, Mrs. Appleyard was sitting out front in a rusty lawn chair, smoking a cigarette. “All alone, Ten Cents? You a lone wolf?”

  “A what?”

  “You a loner? You like to go it on your own?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, not really. I like hanging out with friends.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Who? My—my friends? I don’t know. I’m kind of, you know, in between right now.”

  “A lone wolf.” She howled, but ended it with a coughing fit. “I’m the same way, since Mr. Appleyard left me.” She laughed. “We always end up alone. You know why?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Because people always leave you. Always. Says so right in our wedding vows: ‘Till death do us part.’ They get you ready for the parting right when they do the connecting. And that till death bit—that’s a best-case scenario.”

  Mrs. Appleyard flicked her cigarette butt into the weeds. It smoldered there. I wondered for a second if it might catch the weeds on fire, until Mrs. Appleyard reached with a foot and ground it out. She lifted her foot, then ground it out some more. She said, “Don’t want to start any fires. Least not yet. Hey, I almost forgot. Tell your dad there was some guy here earlier looking for him. A lawyer type. Had some fat envelope with him, but he wouldn’t leave it. I asked.”

  I went inside. Upstairs, I was fishing for the key to our apartment when the door across the hall opened up. The Brackley kid—Lancaster—stepped out. He wore a pair of huge headphones.

  I pointed to my ear and said, “What are you listening to?”

  “Huh?”

  I repeated the question. He pulled off the headphones and named a band I’d never heard of. I wondered if Lancaster was the answer to my wish for a new friend. “Wanna play some video games?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Your place or mine?”

  “How big’s your TV?”

  I held my hands apart. “About this big.”

  “Then let’s use mine.”

  I followed Lancaster into his apartment, but could only step inside a few feet before a chair blocked my path. The apartment was jammed from one wall to another with furniture—carved wooden tables, rich leather chairs, and sofas. The tiny living room must have had enough seating for twenty people, but no room to walk.

  Gold-framed paintings covered the walls. I mean they were covered. The paintings fitted together on the walls like a jigsaw puzzle, with only an occasional smoke detector added into the mix. Extra paintings sat on the floor, jammed between the chairs and couches.

  “Watch that wall,” Lancaster said. He clicked on a remote. A projector mounted to the ceiling hummed to life. A screen rolled down from the top of the wall. Lancaster passed me a game controller and climbed over one couch in order to reach another. “Sit anywhere you want,” he said. I climbed my way over two sofas and a chair—my feet never touching the ground—until I reached a big leather recliner. “Good choice,” said Lancaster. “If you want to recline, just use the buttons.”

  I settled into the chair and hit a button. The chair hummed and started to lean back, then stopped against another chair. There was no room to recline. Lancaster shrugged. “Trust me. It’s cool when it works.”

  A zombie game I wasn’t allowed to play at home was projected onto the giant screen. Lancaster turned up the volume so loud it rattled the whole apartment.

  “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “It’s awesome.” I put my feet on the arm of the chair in front of mine.

  The bedroom door opened and a woman stumbled out. I didn’t recognize her at first. Her hair was messy, her face pale, and her eyes looked tired and small. She wore a bathrobe over her pajamas. “Lanny, turn that garbage down, would you? Mama is trying to sleep.”

  “It’s three in the afternoon,” said Lancaster. “It’s about time Mama got up.”

  “Mama had a late night last night and still needs a little nappy. Turn it off before I—” She spotted me. “Lanny, you could have told me you had company. Is this—are you the boy from the building? Lanny, what’s your friend’s name?”

  Lancaster kept playing. “I don’t know. Ask him.”

  “Gabe,” I said.

  She tightened her bathrobe and smoothed down her hair. “Nice to see you again, Gabe. I must look a fright. Lanny, can you please turn down the volume? Just a little for Mama? Show your new friend that you can be a nice boy.”

  Lancaster rolled his eyes and hit the pause button. “Fine,” he said. He clicked the volume down a few levels, then looked at his mother. “Happy now?”

  “Thank you, dear.” She disappeared back into the bedroom.

  Lancaster clicked the volume back up. “Watch out. You’re about to get fragged.” Lancaster’s avatar shot mine as Mrs. Brackley’s words echoed through my head. “Your new friend,” she’d said.

  This could be awesome. I’d get access to his giant TV. Then I remembered: I could wish for my own giant TV. I could wish for anything.

  I peppered Lancaster with questions while we played. He was a year ahead of me in school. He went to Charles Wright Academy. His dad ran something called a hedge fund. I asked Lancaster what it was. Lancaster said, “Volatile.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means sometimes we’re rich and sometimes we’re less rich. That’s what Goody says.”

  “Who’s Goody?”

  Lancaster nodded toward the bedroom door. “Stepmom. She’s volatile, too.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “This time? About two months. But this is our third time in this dump. Before this we lived in Old Town. With a pool. And a pool house. I had the pool house all to myself.”

  “Yeah. I miss our old place, too.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Twelfth and Holly.”

  “Twelfth, huh?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Just that my dad says nothing counts on the south side of twenty-first.”

  Our conversation stopped because Lancaster didn’t ask anything else about me. We shot zombies for a while, then I said I should probably get going. I mean, I like shooting zombies as much as the next guy. And I guess it was good to be doing it with someone. But it wasn’t the same as hanging out with Henry. No jokes. No laughing. Just shooting.

  Lancaster mumbled goodbye and kept playing. I climbed to the edge of the furniture and let myself out.

  I walked to the window at the end of the hallway and looked down to the street below. I saw a gray sedan parked there, then saw Dad’s old Honda sputter to a stop behind it. I went down to meet him.

  As I stepped outside, a bald man in a suit slid out of the sedan. He approached Dad. “Johann Silver?”

  “That’s me,” said Dad.

  “To clarify, you are Johann Silver, of 601 North K Street,
Unit 202, Tacoma, Washington.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And your birth date is November 13?”

  “Umm, yes.”

  “Then this is for you.” The bald man held out a thick envelope.

  Dad’s hands stayed at his sides. “I’d like to know what this is about.”

  “It’s about your welfare. Trust me. No bad news here. I’m an attorney. I represent a Mr. Shoreby. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “Shoreby? Never heard of him.”

  “Well, it doesn’t really matter. His will very specifically named you.”

  “His will?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately, Mr. Shoreby died yesterday. Unfortunately for him, at least.” The bald man reached into the envelope and pulled out a stack of paper. “For you, I’d say the right word is fortunately. You just need to sign right here.”

  Dad crossed his arms. “I—I still want to know what I’m signing.”

  The bald man sighed. “A car. Shoreby left you a car. Nothing scary. Nothing complicated. Just sign the paper and I’ll give you the keys. Car will be delivered tomorrow.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “If you don’t sign the paper, you’ll never know.”

  Dad frowned, but grabbed the pen, glanced over a few pages, and signed. The bald man took the signed paper, then handed Dad the rest of the envelope. “Keys are inside. Might want to find a garage to store it in. This ain’t the type of car you park on the street.” The bald man walked a few steps, then stopped and turned. “There is one more thing. A small stipulation. Shoreby’s will requires you to attend his service.”

  “You mean his funeral? But I’ve never met the man.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Page three, paragraph two. You and your eldest child. Tomorrow at three-thirty. Peat Funeral Home on Sixth.” The man left.

  Dad and I walked back inside. “You need to go with me tomorrow,” said Dad. “You’re my oldest kid.”

  “Fine. But what kind of a car is it?”

  Dad began sorting through the papers as he climbed the stairs. “I don’t know. All this legal mumbo jumbo. I’ve never even heard of anyone named Shoreby. I mean, does that sound even slightly familiar to you?”