Oddity

by Sarah Cannon

  Mr. Whanslaw steps toward us, clicking as he comes. The long, red brocade overcoat he wears can’t completely conceal the unnatural rhythm of his movements—as if the brilliant blue hue of his face and hands weren’t enough of a clue. Strings brush and part in the air above his white hair as he walks, and above those is the wooden control bar, held in gloved hands by the dark-suited, sunglasses-wearing puppeteer behind him.

  The puppeteers are like cardboard cutouts of real people: all the same in some indefinable way, and all supremely uninteresting. I barely spare a glance for this one. He just works the control bar, staring straight ahead. Or at least I assume he is, behind his mirrored shades.

  In contrast, the puppets are in full, blazing color, and their presence is larger than their actual selves. They laugh scornfully in the face of danger, and we’re lucky they do. For as long as I’ve been alive, they’ve led Oddiputians in protecting our town from any number of disasters, and kept strange things that lurk around the edges of town at bay.

  Whanslaw turns his head with a creak and looks at me as he goes by. Under his white, fluffy hair, his blue face wears a faint smile, grandfatherly and mild, but also creepily fixed.

  Me and Raymond, we’re the top two fifth graders. Everyone knows it, even the Protection Committee. I thrill at Mr. Whanslaw’s attention.

  Cayden doesn’t. He’s still twitching half a block later.

  “I don’t see what the big deal is,” says Raymond.

  Cayden shoves his hair back out of his face and stares.

  “Are you serious? Where I come from, puppets aren’t alive. They’re inanimate, and the puppeteers control them. And puppets definitely do not run towns.”

  “Um, yeah,” I say. “Because where you come from is boring.”

  He continues to shiver, in spite of the afternoon heat. The puppets are that scary.

  THAT is how it’s done.

  We climb Grackle Street, and I unlock my door with the key I wear around my neck, under my shirt with my locket.

  We’ve got almost two hours before everyone else comes home.

  This is when Pearl and I would have taken the opportunity to make the biggest, most disgusting snack we could come up with, but things have changed. These boys and I have something better to do.

  We troop downstairs to the basement, and I start flipping on lights. Cayden cautiously drags the beanbag chairs out of the corner, shaking each one. I grab the old laptop off my dad’s desk and collapse onto one of the beanbags, opening the browser and typing in our destination before the Wi-Fi even kicks in.

  The shadowy splash page of Nopes.com comes up on my screen.

  Chapter 3

  Tagalong

  “Whose turn is it to pick?” asks Raymond.

  “Ada’s.” Cayden glances at me, then quickly looks away. His relationship with Nopes is complicated.

  Nopes is a crowdsourced wiki of stuff Oddiputians should avoid. People being people, everyone nopes out of different things, so the site has a post for basically anything about Oddity, past, present, or future. If you focus on one post at a time, it’s wildly inaccurate (and posts vanish constantly, courtesy of the Protection Committee). But the tsunami of conspiracy theories, viewed from a distance, has pointed me in the right direction over and over.

  We were using Nopes to pound home truths into Cayden’s thick head when it hit me: Nopes is an excellent resource for planning an expedition to check out the exact thing it’s warning you away from. It was just what I needed.

  The thing is, a vanishing twin is not unlike a vanishing arm. There were two of them for a reason. Losing Pearl? I never saw it coming. As far as we knew, kids couldn’t win the Sweepstakes. It had never happened before.

  It’s been a long time since anything successfully snuck up on me. To say I did not like it is an understatement.

  So now, with help from Nopes, I’m poking around in every corner, learning all Oddity’s secrets. If I happen to find out where Sweepstakes winners go? So much the better. It beats hanging out in Pearl’s room pretending to be her, which I can’t do anymore anyway because it was making Mama cry.

  “What’s next, Ada?” Raymond asks.

  “I’ve got a good one today. Give me a minute. It’s taking forever to load.”

  Cayden sighs. His parents work for Splint, the local cellular and Internet provider (We’ll Patch You Through). Splint’s signal is pretty spotty, and me and Raymond never miss a chance to wind him up about it.

  Raymond picked our last expedition. Our search for cursed gold led us to a corner of the junkyard. When we moved the mattresses and dresser a Nopeser described, we found a half-rotten cardboard box with three gold bars inside. No one took one. We all know better, ever since that fog came and carried off Henry Atchison from Atchison Motors. But Nopes’s intel was good. I scratched a bar with my fingernail, and it left a mark.

  Finally, the page loads.

  Raymond’s eyebrows go up. He’s impressed. “Whoa. The Sunset Six.”

  Cayden’s gray eyes darken with confusion. “Ada, there are hundreds of posts here. How could anybody find anything useful?”

  I start pointing out the trends I’ve spotted, and Raymond grabs a notebook to jot them down. We don’t usually bother loading Nopes on our phones, partly because of the signal issues, and partly because paper is easier to destroy. I bragged quite a bit on Nopes the first few times we found something cool, and lately other kids from our class have been mounting expeditions of their own. I don’t mind a little friendly competition, but there’s no reason to make it easy for people.

  Cayden’s reading over my shoulder. “This is about missing kids? You think you figured out what happened to them?”

  “Neighbor boy, I think I know where they are.” I pull up my crown jewel, a screenshot I grabbed just before the original post got deleted.

  Raymond lets out a long breath and turns to me. “So this isn’t a planning day. You want to go out there.”

  I’m already on my feet. “You know I do. Let’s go!”

  “Right now?” asks Cayden. “It’ll be dark soon!”

  I roll my eyes, even though I know I look just like Pearl when I do it. “How often do I have a whole afternoon without Mason? We’ve got at least two hours before dark. We need to go.”

  Cayden looks at Raymond, and I open my mouth again to tell him off. Luckily, Raymond’s on my side.

  “It’ll be tight, but we can make it.” He’s a ball of coiled energy. Ready to go on campaign.

  We dump our school stuff out of our backpacks, and I run upstairs to grab a hat off one of the hooks in the front hall and fill water bottles from the kitchen sink.

  Just as I’m screwing the top on the last one, the front door bangs. I freeze. If it’s Mama, there’s still a chance.

  A book bag thumps down in the front hall, and I turn to see Mason headed for the refrigerator, one shoelace dragging. I canNOT convince that kid to keep his laces double-knotted. He’s going to trip and get eaten one of these days.

  “Is there pudding?” he asks by way of greeting, rummaging for snack cups until all I can see of him is his dark, curly hair. If I were Mason, I’d be careful. Nobody believes me about Scoby putting powdered cheese sauce in that butterscotch pudding Bets brought me, but it happened. Right now, though, I’ve got bigger problems.

  “What are you doing home? I thought you went to the Murphys’!”

  “I did, but those big bumps they all got last week turned out to be spider nests. Everybody was screaming and stuff, so I walked home.”

  “Alone?” I ask sharply.

  “No, they got the neighbor to bring me.” He starts crunching an apple.

  I mentally review the list of Murphy neighbors: flesh-eating-virus guy, blind lady who can see if someone’s lying, and … well, he’s home now. Which is actually kind of a problem.

  “Hey, you ready to go?” asks Cayden, appearing in the kitchen.

  Mason perks up, craning his head around the fridge door. “Go w
here?”

  Darn it. Cayden has the worst timing on earth. The way he flinched, he knows it, too.

  “Uh. We were going to go to … the park!”

  I gently rest my forehead on the counter.

  “What? Kids aren’t allowed in the park!”

  Great, now we scared him. I shut the fridge, which has been open for an age now.

  “He was kidding. Of course we’re not going to the park.” Mama will be home from work any minute. I can’t leave him here with her, though.

  Raymond must have heard the noise, because he comes upstairs, assessing the situation like he always does. “Hey, Mason, do you still have my Commander Amazing comic upstairs? Can I have it back?”

  “Oh. Yeah, I guess so. Hang on.” He pounds upstairs to get it.

  “We can take him,” says Raymond.

  “No way. Aunt Bets will pull my hair out,” I say.

  “It’s not actually that far,” he says, in that super-calm tone of his. “We’ll be back by dinner, and she’ll figure he’s still at the Murphys’.… Why isn’t he?”

  “The bumps were spider nests.”

  “Figures.” He shakes his head in disgust.

  I fiddle with my braids, pondering. “Okay. We’ll do it. But we’ve got to go now. Mason!” I call, to hurry him. The way he’s trashed the guest-room-turned-his-room, he could search for that comic for hours.

  There’s thumping and a muffled, shouted reply, from which I gather that he’s on his way, but arguing.

  The front door opens and shuts again, but it’s just Mama. She puts her purse on the hall table, all elegant in her skirt and heels with her hair pinned up.

  “Hi, Mama!” I say, but it’s like tapping on the side of a terrarium to make the lizard move. She doesn’t look at me, or speak to Mason when he barrels past her. She just goes upstairs. The floor creaks as she gets to her bedroom, then the bedsprings creak as she lies down, fully clothed, on the bed, like she’s done every day since Pearl’s been gone. At least now she gets up for work, but I’m starting to suspect that’s as good as it’s ever going to get.

  For a second, I think about going and shaking her. But at least today there’s something to distract me.

  “We’re going for a bike ride, then a hike,” I say to Mason. “You can come with us, but you have to keep up! And you can’t tell anyone. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he says, eyes wide with excitement at being included.

  “Now put your foot on this chair, and I’ll tie your shoe.”

  Chapter 4

  The Sunset Six

  Raymond’s right: it’s not far from town. Which makes sense, when I think about it. Six kids, the oldest our age, the youngest littler than Mason.… I mean, how far were they going to go on their own steam? On the other hand, the way the story’s told, search parties combed every inch of territory within a mile of town, and it was summer, so they had plenty of daylight. But some stories get bigger with time.

  We’re behind the Sunset Ridge housing development, but not that far. Close enough to be called in for dinner if you’re listening for it. It’s the kind of place only kids would find, because only kids would bother. There’s a trace of a path on the ground, like a deer trail, but I can tell kids made it, because in places it’s lined with colored glass and interesting rocks. They probably played out here all the time, created a whole world like kids do, with made-up names and houses and stories that picked right back up every time they returned. Until one night, they never came home. Six kids from four families. Gone.

  It was the worst scandal to hit Oddity since the late 1800s, when both the mayor and the sheriff got ridden out on a rail for arson and something called collusion, which as near as I can tell means being deluded with a friend. Thankfully, the puppets and the original Greeley were already here by then. They stepped in and replaced Oddity’s former leaders, and the Protection Committee was born.

  In the case of the Sunset Six, the culprit turned out to be Mike Hannagan, the owner of Mikey’s Market. Daddy said he seemed like a fine, upstanding guy, but maybe not the brightest bulb in the sign. He served alongside Greeley—I don’t know if it was the current one or his predecessor; everybody lost count a while ago—on the Committee for Wisdom, Understanding, and Trust, which Greeley created to explain the puppets’ point of view to Oddiputians who experience confusion.

  The PC told the WUT (and the WUT told everyone else) that Mike murdered the Sunset Six. But he never told anyone where he hid the bodies. Now we’re about to find out.

  The path winds between tall, spiny black ocotillo bushes and around boulders, following along the back of Sunset Ridge at a distance. If this is where the Sunset Six are, I’m starting to ask myself how these kids never got found until now. Maybe there’s a cave? An old mine shaft?

  “You stay between me and Raymond,” I tell Mason. “Don’t you go running off.”

  In my head, I hear Pearl telling me I’m not his mom. Easy for her to say. Daredevil-may-care, that’s what Mama called her. She’d be skipping from boulder to boulder, trying to get Raymond up there with her. He’d probably go, for Pearl. She always could loosen him up.

  I bet she’s cackling at me someplace right now, because even though she’s gone, I still argue with her. You want to know the truth? Sometimes, even when I argue, I don’t really disagree.

  The thing about Oddity that kids know, but grown-ups forget, is that there’s no point in allowing or forbidding us to do pretty much anything. We never know where the danger is. It could come out of the desert, or out of the faucet. Every place is dangerous at least some of the time, which means no one place is really safer than another. It’s like rock-paper-scissors. If the other player’s good enough, you can’t guess their move. You just have to shoot.

  But there’s a difference between being a smother and being worried about my cousin falling down an actual, factual hole. So he can stay where I tell him to, and the Pearl in my head can hush.

  * * *

  “What now?” asks Raymond, looking back at Cayden even though he’s got a memory like a steel trap. This is where he’s nicer than me. He gives Cayden something to do, where I’d just shove him around.

  “There’s a cross path up here,” Cayden says. “We need to go left.”

  We do, and after passing between two more huge boulders, we find ourselves facing a ridge lined with bushy piñon pines. And there, our directions run out.

  I’ll admit I’m feeling a little foolish. I was the one who insisted we had to come out here, and now what?

  “Maybe there’s a cave entrance behind these trees,” says Raymond. It’s not a bad suggestion.

  “We can’t just go into a cave,” says Cayden.

  “What the heck do you think we’re going to do if we find one?” I ask. “Not go in?”

  “Of course not!” Cayden says. “There could be snakes in there, or sudden drops, or … I don’t know, poisonous gas.”

  “That’s only happened to me once,” says Raymond. I never know if he’s kidding now that Pearl’s not here to laugh at him. Maybe he doesn’t, either.

  “Look,” I say, “cave or no cave, there’s got to be something here somewhere. If we don’t find the Sunset Six now, someone’s going to beat us to them.” I’ve got my cell in my pocket, and I am going to be the first person who puts a picture up where people can see it. Though the light’s not great for a photo right now. Because … the sun is going down. Aunt Bets is going to kill me, and if I don’t get a picture, I’m gonna die for no reason at all.

  So I look harder.

  “I can’t see anything behind all the trees,” I say. I feel kind of silly, but I get down on the ground and start crawling along the tree line, looking under the branches. I go all the way along the ridge. After a while, Mason starts helping me.

  “Are you ever going to tell me what we’re looking for?” he asks. He’s been pestering me since we left the house, but I made him shut up when we stepped out into the desert. Maybe if I warn him and
it turns out to be gruesome, he won’t look. Right. Still …

  “We’re looking for some kids who disappeared,” I say. He was real little when it happened. I don’t actually know if the smaller kids talk about it.

  “The Sunset Six? We’re looking for the Sunset Six?” he squeaks. I should have known. Some jerk big sister or brother always talks.

  “Yeah, we are. We’re following some clues that … turned up. And we want to find them first. So you just help me look. See if you see a hole or something, along the base of this ridge, behind the trees.”

  “I saw a drawing. Could that be another clue?”

  I sit back on my heels and stare at him. “What, down along the path?”

  “No, look!” Pleased to have found something, he pulls me back the way we came. I could have sworn I looked carefully, but sometimes little kids see things no one else does. So I dutifully crawl back along the ridge. Halfway there, I notice two pairs of legs in denim and look up at my … friends. Sigh.

  “Are you two enjoying this? You wanna get down here and help a girl out?”

  “Somebody’s got to keep a lookout,” says Raymond.

  Mason is lying flat on his stomach, pointing. “It’s right there.”

  Forgetting how undignified it is, I lie down flat like him. I do see something, but … “I think it’s just different colors in the rock, Mase,” I say, disappointed.

  “No! I see shoes.”

  I look harder. Then it occurs to me that what I need to do is look less hard. I unfocus my eyes a little, stop studying the rock, and just see.

  He’s right. There, in a gap between two branches that’s still letting sunlight through, I see the edge of a high-top, clear and perfect on the ridge.

  “I can even see the eyelets where the laces go through,” I say, amazed. But—

  “Painted on the stone? If this is all some kind of prank…,” begins Raymond, coming to see.

  But I don’t think it’s a prank. I stand up and grab the nearest dense, prickly tree limb. “Help me bend these branches, so I can see!”

  We all jump to do it, and I can see their heads are buzzing with excitement like mine, even Cayden’s.