by Sandra Evans
I can’t help it. I laugh so hard I forget my wolf worries.
Nobody’s eating anymore, everyone’s laughing, and the story starts flying around the room. By the time it gets to the little kids’ table, it’s turned into Vincent’s dad went pee in his pants. That’s enough of a story for the Cubs, and half of them laugh so hard they fall out of their chairs and roll around on the floor. Little John ends up with nacho cheese mashed into his hair. Three peas get jammed up Peter’s nose.
After dinner I realize it’s no joke. Vincent has changed everything in less than a week.
Normally during TV time I sit in a ratty old armchair off to one side. All the other kids sit on the floor or the sofa. Nobody makes me sit where I sit. But nobody ever sits in my chair either.
Tonight, when Vincent walks into the TV room, everyone shifts around a little. Mary Anne scoots closer to Jenny to make a space for him next to her on the carpet. Mean Jack punches Little John in the shoulder to get him to slide down from the sofa to the floor.
Vincent doesn’t notice them. He scans the room. When he sees me, he walks over and perches on the arm of my chair.
“Hey,” he says. “I almost forgot. I told my mom about you this weekend. She wants you to spend spring break with us.”
I can feel everyone’s ears stretch toward us.
“Will your dad be cool with that?”
I nod. I can see the other kids look at me like they’ve never seen me before. Vincent has cool. It’s contagious. Now I have it too.
All the chairs are turned toward the TV as usual, but the kids sitting in them are turned toward Vincent. He has a million and one jokes and stories. My armchair is the center of the room. Once or twice I start to open my mouth. I don’t say anything. But I could have. I think they would have listened.
Later in bed I turn on my LED flashlight from the cereal box.
I hate the dark. It was hardest when I first got here. The sound of the madrona’s branches scraping the window made me think of monsters. Even now I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, and at first I’m half asleep and I forget that White Wolf found me. It’s a feeling like night is inside of me.
Let’s not talk about it.
Tonight I think I have a friend. It’s a light inside me. But it scares me a little. I wonder how I can make him keep liking me. I wonder if he’ll get tired of me.
There’s no answer to that. I take out the code-cracking book Cook Patsy gave me. Last week I thought I’d need it to start up a conversation with Vincent. Like making friends was an uncrackable code.
I must fall asleep, because I wake up in the dark. The flashlight is on the floor. I hear footsteps in the hall outside my room. My heart bumps. A voice mumbles. My mind wants me to run, but my legs aren’t listening.
A monster or a murderer jiggles the doorknob to the utility closet next to my room.
The next doorknob in the hall is mine.
Did I lock my door?
In my mind I see Tuffman’s glowing eyes. I hear him saying my name. I can’t move.
I wonder if they will find my last will and testament in my sock drawer. A cold sweat covers my body. I go over the distribution of my earthly possessions.
Sparrow will get my clothes and my books.
Cook Patsy gets my mom’s box full of recipes. I’ve never opened it, so they will be good as new.
Dean Swift will get my shark-tooth necklace for his science cabinet.
My dad—if he’s not too busy to come and pick it up—will get the shoebox where I keep things that remind me of my mom: her velvet headband that used to smell like her, her gold bracelet with her name engraved on the inside and flowers and vines on the outside, a CD she used to play when she rocked me, one of her gloves that for a long time I put my hand inside whenever I slept.
Keys jangle. The utility closet door opens. I hear feet on steps. Whoever heard of a closet with stairs?
I scrabble my hand across the floor until I find the flashlight. When I flip its beam at the clock, I see it’s midnight. This is a strange time for someone to be concerned about utilities.
I lie there for a long time. It feels like five hours, but the clock says it’s only been two minutes. I tiptoe to the door and stand there with my ear to it for another five hours that turns out to be one minute. Slowly I open my door.
I look to the right. The door to the closet is ajar. I peek in and see a staircase. The stairs must lead up into the north turret, overlooking White Deer Woods. From the outside of the building it’s obvious my room is just beside and below it. But from the inside I never thought of it as anything but a utility closet. Maybe because the sign on the door says UTILITY CLOSET.
I creep up the stairs. Somehow I know exactly where to put my feet on each step so that it won’t creak.
Except on the third to the last one when I step dead center and the stair groans like a bull.
I stand very still. I get ready to bolt back down.
When my thoughts stop crashing around, I hear a scratching sound and the rustle of papers. Someone’s writing up there.
Do assassins have diaries?
My nose twitches. I don’t think that’s Tuffman.
“Eureka,” a man’s voice says. “Perhaps the cougar saw the light.”
The voice belongs to Dean Swift.
I hear a click like a button being pushed.
“Midnight. March seventeenth.” He must be speaking into a recorder. “After years of searching, I have found Fresnel’s secret treatise. It is titled most tantalizingly On the Generative Power of Light. My hunch was correct. Numerous prisms on the old lighthouse lens were never correctly installed. Using Fresnel’s measurements, I have exponentially increased the power of the light beam. Is it mere coincidence that there are reports of cougar activity south of White Deer Woods? My investigation of its den on the fort grounds indicates it has been in the area for approximately one month. The timing corresponds with my first lighting of the lens since I applied Fresnel’s secret calculations. Questions: Is this simply a predator displaced by the new housing development? Or, as per Fresnel’s theories, did the light from the lens draw him to us?” A button clicks.
My mind is scratching around. Its den on the fort grounds? That was no coyote den in the Blackout Tunnel. It’s the cougar’s.
I stretch out and peer around the low wall that keeps people in the room from tumbling down the stairs. I’m looking at Dean Swift’s back as he sits at a messy desk. Every once in a while he looks up at something in front of him. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust to the low light, but when they do, I almost somersault backward down the stairs.
It’s an enormous lighthouse lens. And when I say enormous, I mean it’s ten feet high and five feet wide. It fills most of the room beyond Dean Swift’s desk.
Even though I’ve never seen it before, I recognize it.
I sneak back down the stairs to my room, my blood hot and my skin alive. I need to be sure.
I lie belly down on my bed and slide the books out one at a time. There are about twenty. It’s my personal library on lighthouses.
I pull out my favorite, Lighthouses of the Pacific Coast. There it is, on page 127. A photo of the Point Reyes’ first-order Fresnel lens, manufactured in 1867. First-order means it’s the biggest kind. It has 1,032 pieces of glass. Twenty-four of those pieces are bull’s-eye lenses so powerful they could start a fire if they’re not exposed to direct sunlight.
That’s a first-order Fresnel lens upstairs. Everything tingles. My skin, my hair, inside my belly, my brain and my heart.
Is it mine? The question burns in me. I’ve always wondered what happened to my light. The books all say that the first lighthouse on the island, named Red Bluff, was lit in 1861. Forty years later it was destroyed, and a new one was built a few miles away with a brand-new lens. I’ve figured out that the books are wrong about one thing. Red Bluff never got torn down. It’s where it always was, at the edge of the cliff deep in White Deer Woods, where the
meadow meets the cedars and the cedars meet the sea. I don’t know why I’m the only one who knows about it. And I don’t know why its lantern room is empty.
Because none of the books say what happened to Red Bluff’s first-order Fresnel lens. You can’t lose one of them. Those suckers cast a beam for thirty miles!
I’d bet my wolf skin that’s my light in the turret.
But how did it get there? No way you could fit it up the staircase, or in through one of the little square windows.
There’s only one way, and it makes me dizzy to think about it.
The school must have been built around the lens.
You know how an earthquake happens when two plates of the earth’s crust slam into each other? My school-world and my woods-world just smashed together. It’s all connected, but I don’t know how. White Deer told me the lighthouse is my place between places. It’s the door I walk through to find my other self.
But this school where I live was built to hold its light long before I was ever born.
Chapter 11
A RECIPE FOR A HERO
Monday morning.
I wake up to the sound of the madrona branch scraping back and forth across the window. Rain spatters. The wind howls.
My first thoughts are wolf worries. I hope White Wolf is dry and warm under our ledge. I hope she ate the rabbit. I hope the wound in her side is better and that the rain has washed the rest of the dried blood out of her pretty fur. Then I remember the lens and my lighthouse and Dean Swift’s eureka.
The wind slaps the branch against the glass. The books are still spread across the floor. The dean said the light brought the cougar. I sit up. I finally scratched that brain itch I got last night at supper when Dean Swift first mentioned the cougar.
The cougar gave White Wolf that scrape. For a minute I can’t move again, like last night when I thought Tuffman was lurking outside my door. This is worse, and it’s true. A cougar attacked my mother.
I can’t lose White Wolf.
I can’t lose her and I can’t help her. I sit on the edge of my bed in my underwear. My back hunches so my elbows touch my knees, and my hands cover my face. My skin is cold and my hands feel like ice.
The feeling is called Despair.
Nobody can help us.
In the dining hall I grab three boxes of cereal. Raisin bran, granola, and Lucky Charms cover the three major food groups—fruit, fiber, and marshmallows.
I need sustenance. I need a plan. I need to think this through.
I have to push past about ten kids to get to my usual seat. Vincent is on the stool next to it, and as I set my tray down, he lifts his jacket off of my stool without even looking at me.
Nobody has ever wanted to sit by me enough to save me a seat.
I’m so surprised that it takes me a minute or two to notice that the weirdo counter is really weird today. Kids from all the groups are hanging around, holding trays filled with their dirty dishes, listening to Vincent tell a story. Their fingers are white and blue from gripping the trays, and I can tell by how they shift from one foot to the other that they’re tired of standing, but they don’t want to miss a word.
After Vincent finishes talking and while everyone is repeating the punch line, he turns to me. Without saying a word, he pulls a plate from his tray and puts it on mine. Then he turns back around to answer some dumb question.
It’s a plate full of bacon and sausage and ham. I haven’t had hot food for breakfast in forever. It’s cold by now, sure, but it was hot once, and that’s good enough.
I don’t say much. Vincent doesn’t seem to mind. Everyone’s listening, but after a while I get the feeling he’s telling his jokes for me.
“Yeah,” he says when I finally crack a grin. “I knew you’d be the only one to get it. We got the same sense of humor.”
All this time I thought it was my fault that I couldn’t figure out how to fit in. But now I see. You can’t ever fit in like a number or a letter, because friendship’s not a puzzle or a cipher. There’s no answer that you get right or wrong. You don’t “get” friends. You are one.
You have one.
I stare out the window.
Vincent keeps yakking away next to me, drawing a diagram on a napkin, making the weirdos laugh until they almost puke. You can’t be a dummy and be that funny. He’s got street smarts is what my dad would say—the kind of smarts that keep you alive.
“Are you done?” he asked as he scoots his stool back. When I nod he grabs my tray and stacks it on top of his.
“Save my place at lunch,” he says, picking up our trays and heading off.
Maybe Vincent can help me protect my mom. I don’t know how. But I think he would if he could.
How much would I have to tell him?
I’ve got kitchen duty, so when I’m done I put my plate on top of the other dirty dishes in the bus tub, pick it up, and head back to the kitchen.
“You like the meat plate special?” Cook Patsy asks when I swing open the doors.
“Thank you,” I say.
She looks at me for a second and then taps her head, like she’s just got an idea. She pulls a cookbook from the shelf. “You choose what we make for lunch. Anything you want. And then if we have time, why don’t you let me teach you some wrestling? I was state champ in high school.”
I stare at her, totally confused. Now Cook Patsy wants to wrestle me? Maybe it’s a virus, a terrible pandemic, a contagion spreading through the teachers.
ChokeHoldococcus. PinaStudentitis.
“I cleaned the rubber mats and everything,” she says.
I look down at the black mats that cover the kitchen floor. All the little wet bits of food and slime are gone. It reeks of bleach. So that’s good to know. When my face gets pushed into it, it will be very sanitary.
“I thought about it all weekend,” she says. She looks worried. There are circles under her eyes.
Then I understand. She doesn’t want to squish my face into the mat. She wants to teach me to squish Tuffman’s face into the mat.
“I can’t let you get pushed around,” she says. “I can’t let Tuffman bully you. But I respect that you want to solve your own problems.”
She lifts up the cookbook. “It’s the kitchen code. Follow the recipe. And my recipe always calls for a fair fight. So I’m going to teach you to defend yourself. But let me tell you, I don’t think a fight between a teacher and a student can ever really be fair. So if I hear one more whisper of him picking on you, I’m going to the dean.”
She hands me the cookbook. “You choose.”
I look down at it for a long time without opening it. She turns around and punches the button to start the dishwasher. Cook Patsy is trying to look out for me. I bet my mom would’ve talked to me like that too. A little sharp, so it sounds like she’s mad, but she’s not mad, she’s worried. About me.
I open the cookbook. Whatever we make for lunch, I’m not chopping onions. My eyes are already watery. It’s allergy season, I guess.
I get a good idea. It must be all the protein. “Wait,” I say.
I race out of the kitchen and up to my room. I come back down with the recipe box.
I mean, what if I don’t die? She’d never know I wanted her to have them.
“Hmm.” She thumbs through the cards. “Tuna Surprise?”
I shake my head.
“Beef Stew?”
I shake my head. She holds the box back out to me. “What, then?”
I’ve never really read the cards before. The sight of my mom’s handwriting makes me smile and feel sad at the same time. I pick one card up just so I can touch it where she probably touched it. All that’s between her hand and mine is seven years.
Cook Patsy watches me for a minute. Then she pats my shoulder and lifts the door on the huge dishwasher. Steam pours out. I feel her glance over at me.
I look at each card. There’s no order to the recipes. It’s not alphabetical like Apple Pie to Yam Surprise, and it’s not in the or
der that you eat them, like appetizers to desserts. Meringues is the first recipe, and the one after is Ham with Pineapple. But I keep them like she left them. I want to read them the way she wrote them.
“They were my mom’s,” I say.
Cook Patsy reaches up and hangs a pot on the hook above the stove. “I figured as much. Let’s make lunch a feast in her honor, how about that?”
I nod. My throat is tight.
I take the next two cards without looking at them and hand them to Cook Patsy.
“Bacon and Cheddar Omelet. Now that’s a good lunch for a Monday,” she says. “And Island Cobbler for dessert.” She sets the cards down on the counter and opens the fridge. She goes back to read the cards. She looks up at me. A long line appears between her eyes.
I can tell she’s really thinking about what she wants to say.
“Raul, was your mom a good cook?” she asks. “I mean, do you remember actually eating the food she made for you?”
I shrug.
“ ’Cause I want you to take a look at this and tell me if it sounds right. Maybe it’s her handwriting.”
I look at the recipe for Island Cobbler.
3 pineapple
2 sprigs mint
4 oranges
1 egg
3 cups milk
2 tsp cinnamon
3 oz liver
7 cps blackberry
1 cp sugar
7 pats Butter?”
When I get to the three ounces of liver I make a face.
“Yeah, right? You don’t often see liver show up in a dessert recipe. Or a question mark, either.” Cook Patsy looks like she doesn’t know what to say. “I’m sure she was really good at lots of other stuff,” she says after a minute.
I close the box.
She was good at being my mom.
In honor of my mom we decide to make grilled cheese sandwiches and canned tomato soup for lunch. Then Cook Patsy teaches me a couple of really good moves.
“The main thing,” she says, “is to be aggressive. Don’t let him choose what’s gonna happen next. You choose.”
After kitchen duty I go to my room. My mom was a rotten cook. Maybe it’s weird, but this makes me happy. I know something about her now—something only her kid would know about her, something only I could tease her about. It’s like Sparrow and his grandma’s Dutch soup. I’ve got a joke with my mom now too.