by Sarah Cannon
She’s got her back to me when I spot her. She’s wearing a blue dress with pink sunglasses printed all over it, and her shiny black ponytail is set in curls and spills over one shoulder. She’s plugging quarters into the jukebox, and I know we’ll be listening to Elvis all night. Song loves Elvis. She waves wildly when she sees us.
I’m still fretting about Mike Hannagan, who died in jail. Doesn’t seem fair, him getting punished for something he couldn’t have done. I need to relax about the Sunset Six, though. Cayden’s right. We’ve got the photo, and we got away clean. No way anyone else is bold enough to go up there tonight, but to be on the safe side, I look over my shoulder at Cayden. He waggles his hand sideways at me.
“Two bars,” he says.
“Try it,” I say.
He’s got his phone in his hand, and as he hits send on the photo, he flashes me a covert thumbs-up. Let’s see how Nopes likes them dragon fruits. I still feel a twinge of guilt, though.
The booth under the saucer is open. Grown-ups don’t like it for some reason, but I figured the high school kids would have it staked out already. Our good luck continues! I slide all the way into the back corner and don’t even bother to open the menu. Our waiter, a black-haired, skinny-jeaned teenager named Duke, of all things, is already writing before he asks, “You all here for the Frito pie?” I point a finger gun of approval at him as I pull my wallet from my pocket with my other hand. I put a ten and two fives down on the table to cover everyone. I’m going to need to do some work for Song soon. I’m officially low on funds.
“I don’t understand this town at all,” says Cayden. “Why don’t they call the state to come deal with the Blurmonster, or the National Guard, or something?”
Raymond shrugs. “They’ve been here before,” he says. “Mostly they get eaten. Not everyone’s cut out for Oddity.”
“No point having a bunch of nosey parkers around when there are so many things here with an appetite for noses,” I agree. “Besides, a lot of the stuff Daddy uses at animal control is not exactly state-issued.”
“Like what?”
“The rocket launcher, the flash grenades, the arcane spells he put on the nets—ooh, dinner!”
I love Frito pie. Aunt Bets says it’s trash, so call me the Ada Can, because I can eat a whole plate of it. When Duke brings all five plates over at once, laddered up his arms, I take mine and start scooping chili and cheese into my mouth right away, before my Fritos get soggy. Badri carries his plate over to the counter to get the latest gossip from Patsy—she’s the one thing here that hasn’t changed. She still has the kind of white hair that’s almost blue, and knows everything.
“Out where?” I hear her ask Badri. “You got to be careful out by Sunset Ridge. Blurmonster dens up out there pretty regular.”
Badri says something I can’t quite hear.
“Oh no, it never comes right into town. That is to say, it did once, the way I heard, but the puppets sent it packing. My Gammar said that first Blurmonster attack, way back at the end of the Gold Rush, was when the town realized the puppets were something special.”
Patsy’s eyes glow with nostalgia behind her rhinestone glasses.
“It was a plain miracle, that’s what she said. The Blurmonster always prowled around the edges of things, but it had never come into town. But the morning after Greeley’s Medicine Show came to Oddity, and put on the best puppet show anyone ever saw, I might add, here came the Blurmonster, bold as brass and full of wrath. It’s not easy to rally a defense against an invisible monster, I can tell you that! The way my old Gammar told it, the Blurmonster seemed likely to knock the whole town down before it was through, and folks were scattering. Then wham! goes the door of Greeley’s caravan, and out come the puppets, thundering orders and rallying the town.
“Living puppets! Nobody had ever seen such a thing! It took some doing, but they ran that hazy critter right out of Oddity. Nowadays, the Protection Committee keeps it past the city limits. But you go into outlying neighborhoods, you’ve got to be careful. It still likes to test our boundaries.”
I’ve heard the story a million times, of course. It’s nice for Patsy to have fresh listeners now and then. Badri grunts, focused more on his dinner than Patsy, but that’s how she likes things anyway, so she smiles down at him like he’s her favorite grandkid.
Song slides into my side of the booth to sit by me, tugging one of my braids.
“You kids hear about the spiderface thing?” she asks.
I push my plate between us so she’ll know she can help. She takes a chip, much neater than me, and I see that her pink-painted fingernails have blue sunglasses decals on them. “Firsthand,” I say.
“You got any new swag for me?”
“Not yet. But I’ve got the weekend, and some ideas. I’ll come see you.”
“Good. I’m running low.”
This is not true. That store is stuffed to the gills. But she tries to always have something new in the windows to tempt people. Last week they were totally covered with a rainbow array of high-heeled shoes, like butterflies under glass. You couldn’t even see inside the store. Song’s a wizard with window displays.
“Try to find something blue,” she says. “I have a Sweepstakes poster to put up.”
The Sweepstakes. I sigh, my last Frito dangling halfway between my plate and my mouth. On the jukebox, Elvis is singing about blue Hawaii, but our booth is quiet as my friends side-eye me. It’s hard to get excited about the Sweepstakes this year. As far as I know, there’ve never been two winners from the same generation of the same family. Of course, I’ve never seen them choose a kid, like Pearl, either, but it’s better not to get my hopes up.
“Hey, Song, you ever seen an armaduino with a flamethrower on it?” asks Raymond. He’s a good soldier even when it means chatting with a pretty grown-up, which makes his brown cheeks red like bricks.
I put my fingers to my locket and finger its raised design. It’s all wrapped up in my head with scavenging for Song, because it was my first real find, taken from our house before it was ever ours. Sometimes I think wearing it drew our family to that house from the day I put it on, way back when Pearl and I were little and sending Mama into a panic by exploring where we weren’t supposed to be.
Me and Pearl were as sneaky and fast as those new little critters in our yard, the ones I call zombie rabbits. We went straight for every little gap, every untended door—and those grand, deserted houses at one end of our street were way too tempting to avoid.
I remember creeping down the hallway with her, thinking that this must be what forests were like, because of how still it was, and the way the sunlight slanted across the woodwork. The cabinets were so weathered that the green paint was fuzzy like moss. When I stand in our cheery yellow kitchen now, I can still see the cream wallpaper with little red flowers, glue coming loose, rumpling like a sheet across the wall.
But the locket, that was the best thing. Even better than picking flowers in the upstairs bathroom with the caved-in roof and leaking pipes.
It was where only a kid would find it. I bet it had been there forever, because the bed, the same one I sleep in now, is so massive and heavy that it’s like it was built in that room. At the time, I was sure it had grown there.
While Pearl was dancing in the empty rooms, I was kneeling in front of the footboard, tracing my fingers over its carvings. My fingernail fit under the edge of one of the flowers. I wiggled it, and it began to lever its way out of its socket. Tucked into the space behind it was the locket. I held it in my hand and admired the smooth, heavy gold rim, the turquoise enameled scallops along the edge, the matching eleven-petaled flower in the center. The frames inside were empty, but I couldn’t muster any disappointment, not when it was so old and heavy and lovely.
If we’d been a little older, we might have worried that it was cursed. Instead, it was a gift left just for me. Not even the ghost that banged the closet door and made us scream could spoil my find.
“Ada?”
I jump, banging my head on the rim of the flying saucer. “What?”
It’s Badri, who’s dropping a tip on the table in a way that says my time is up. I squeeze Song’s sunglasses-covered fingertips as she stands to let me slide out of the booth. Time to face the dragon lady.
Chapter 6
Close Shaves
We drop Raymond at his place, a little one-story adobe, its courtyard festooned with party lights, and head home.
When Badri’s truck rolls to a stop in front of our house, Aunt Bets is sitting on the front stoop in her red wheelchair, arms folded, the hall light blazing behind her and making a halo of her hair. She quit braiding on the grounds that she’s got enough to do since the accident set her back. She wears a bandanna headband to keep it out of her face while she’s baking.
The accident happened not long before Cayden moved in. She was up on a ladder, patching the awning of the bakery, and one of the dumpsters snuck up and got her. Most people lose arms in a dumpster attack, but Bets lost both legs below the thigh.
Cayden says that everywhere he’s ever lived, Aunt Bets would have been fitted for prosthetics by now. I’ve never heard of such a thing! No wonder he’s a baby. I told him, around here, making your own prosthetics is part of your rehab.
He didn’t know what to make of that. Unfortunately, Aunt Bets doesn’t, either. There are about a dozen wooden legs in a box in the hall closet, but so far she can’t get the fit right. I guess no one is good at everything. She bakes better than anyone. She must have used up all her DIY points, or something. In the meantime, she picked out the fastest wheelchair she could find, the kind where the wheels tilt in. She and Mason moved into our house so we could all help one another, and here we are.
When I see Aunt Bets waiting at the top of the ramp that now leads to our stoop, I’m reminded of a story we heard in school about a queen in Africa. A bunch of Europeans were trying to swindle her out of her kingdom. To make the queen feel foolish and inferior when they met with her, they provided chairs for themselves but none for her. She made one of her attendants get down on hands and knees, and sat on her own personal human chair while she conducted negotiations. Aunt Bets is like that. She might not have full-on legs anymore, but she’s got a baker’s arms and serious wheels, and she will chase you down. She makes that red wheelchair one of the scariest things you’ve ever seen.
Badri sizes her up from the front seat of his truck before getting out, and when he reaches his conclusion, my opinion of him goes up another notch. Her physical size is not the important thing about her, and he gets it, I can tell. He squares his shoulders and puts his chin up a little, not like he’s ready for a fight, but like he’s straightening his tie before a business meeting. Even though I know I’m a dead girl walking, I’m proud to have such a scary aunt. I wish Mama was half as dangerous as Aunt Bets.… But I feel awful for thinking it.
Mason’s already running for the house with a big grin, telling how I bought him dinner. Hopefully Aunt Bets won’t ask where the money came from, because she does not approve of me creeping around abandoned houses. I’ve got a few lies that might pass, but I don’t really want to talk about it. Bets pulls Mase down for a hug, then sends him in to bed so she can chew me up and spit me out without interruption. Cayden says a hurried good-night and heads for his house as fast as he can go without running. Coward.
I can see the stairwell through the doorway. Salvation is ten feet and a million miles away. I need a piratical diversion.
“Aunt Bets, meet Badri Hassan Khalid. Badri, this is my aunt, Elizabeth Weathers.”
Lucky for Badri, he’s not one of those awkward types who act like Aunt Bets lost her hands as well as her feet. He shakes, good and firm, right away.
“You run Fair Weather Bakery.”
“That’s right. And I’d like to know what a grown man is doing running around with a bunch of kids in the dark of night.”
“I was doing some salvage work”—I manage not to snort—“and was on my way back into town when I came across your son and niece and their friends. There had been brushfires in the area, and emergency vehicles were moving through, so I told them they should ride back with me.”
“What sort of things do you salvage, Mr. Khalid?” Our aunt’s expression is darkly skeptical. He wouldn’t be the first person to come back from the desert loaded down with “salvage” not fit for human eyes.
“Scrap metal, mostly. I do a lot of mechanical work, welding, patching.”
They keep talking, but I’m hardly listening. It doesn’t matter what they say; it matters what Aunt Bets’s body language says. Her eyes are on Badri, but she’s still got about half her attention on me, and that’s at least 30 percent too much. Why can’t a pirate say something really attention-grabbing when you need him to?
Then her voice sharpens. He has said something interesting, though I’m not sure exactly what. She’s talking about her big stand mixer, and she’s not touching her wheels. I ought to be able to get through on the right side, the side closest to the stairs. This is my chance. I make a run for it.
She starts at my sudden movement, and swivels to grab me. I’ve got no chance at all if she succeeds. I leap like a deer, and I’m over her right wheel and scooting up the stairs before she’s turned all the way toward me.
“Night, Badri!” I yell, loud as I can.
“You call him Mr. Khalid!” Aunt Bets says, which, as parting shots go in our family, is W-E-A-K. I race to the bathroom and then back to my room, listening all the time for the slam of the front door. Aunt Bets’s bedroom is on the first floor, but if she’s mad enough, she will army crawl up those stairs to get to me. As I shut my door, though, I see through the railings that they’re still down there talking. I lock myself in anyway. Bets made Daddy disable my door lock after I snuck into the co-op and put the fair-trade peyote in the green smoothies, but half an hour of playing around with the knob and a screwdriver took care of that. I drag a chair in front of the door for good measure. I might be leaving for school out the window tomorrow. It’s no fun, but it can be done—though all my schoolbooks are downstairs, where I dumped them to make room in my backpack.
I contemplate trying to sneak down and get them. Cayden’s been loaning me some of his books to read, and one of them’s in that stack. They’re so weird they’re addictive. This one kid rafts down the Mississippi River completely unmolested by monster catfish, and people keep letting him stay at their houses without checking to see if he’s a clone or anything. The series about kids at wizarding school is better, but I’m on book three and no one has died yet. I’m starting to get skeptical.
Not worth it, I decide. Aunt Bets is not above running me down.
I reach behind my neck and unhook the locket.
My closet door bangs open just like the day I found the locket, and there’s Stella the ghost, all gray and silent, watching me.
I wonder what Pearl would think of Stella now that she actually shows herself. I don’t know why she started. Maybe she got bored of clattering the hangers and slamming the door. Maybe the extra attention I gave her after Pearl left helped her focus. We picked the right name for her, though. Visible or in-, day after day, she’s Stella-in-the-closet, though she likes to put the toes of her Mary Janes right up to the line of the doorway. Her fat, spiral curls blow my mind. I bet she had to mess with those things all day long to keep them neat, and they’re way too easy to grab. I will keep my nice short braids, please and thank you. She’s staring at the locket, like she always does, so I hold it up where she can see that I’m taking good care of it before setting it on the dresser. She blinks at me, and says something.
“Girl, I am not a lip-reader,” I say, then shut the closet door before changing into one of Daddy’s oversize T-shirts. Maybe she can still see me through the door with spectral vision or whatever, but at least I don’t have to see her do it. I try to lie awake for a few more minutes, listening for Bets, but I’m ten kinds of bushed.
* *
*
I’m in a foul mood when I wake up, not because I’m in trouble, but because I actually might not be. Daddy didn’t come in to tell me off. According to my phone, Mama left for work an hour ago. Basically, both my parents are falling down on the job. If it weren’t for Aunt Bets, I could never come home at all, I bet, and nobody would even notice. I lie there all sorry for myself.
Bets is the only person who might punish me, and she’s busy talking Mason through making breakfast. Their cheerful chatter drifts upstairs, but I can’t join them. After the way I worried her, I have no business expecting pancakes the next morning. Besides, I’m embarrassed. A year ago we were just an aunt and a niece, and she didn’t have to tell me what to do.
By the time I’m tired of staring up at the curlicue pattern of water stains on my ceiling and thinking about this stuff, my stomach is as heavy as if I ate a rock last night, instead of Frito pie. I roll onto my side.
The pillowcase feels weird against my head. Or maybe my head feels weird against the pillowcase. I’m not sure. I reach up to touch my braids.
They’re not there.
I sit straight up in bed, running my hands over my head and finding nothing but bare skin.
She did it. I can’t believe she really did it.
I look wildly at the door. The chair is still wedged under the handle. I turn to my windows. Shut and locked.
Stella is laughing and pointing at me from the closet, and she’s totally right. I lost. My legless aunt pwned me and committed a locked room mystery at the same time. I feel my head all over, hoping against hope that my hair will be there.