Fool's Gold

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  Then the M and M’s got home and he gave up on Conquering Your Fears at least for the time being. He knew the two of them too well to clue them in on phobias. He could just imagine what Moira, in particular, could do with that kind of information. Like coming down with a bad case of dustaphobia (fear of cleaning up your room) or vegaphobia (fear of eating your carrots and peas). So the reading material for the afternoon turned out to be “Cinderella” and “Lady and the Tramp.” Talk about Yawn City.

  He’d probably read “Cinderella” to the M and M’s several hundred times, but this time it turned out to be a little more entertaining. Somehow, maybe because he was in a hopeful frame of mind, he started putting a little more into it, and he wound up acting out some of the parts. He set up a stage in the bay window, and made little costumes with pillows and doilies and scarfs when he was being the evil stepsisters. The part the M and M’s particularly liked was when he emerged from behind the drapes as the fairy godmother wearing one of Natasha’s tutus and waving a plumber’s friend for a magic wand.

  Later when he was in the kitchen getting the cookies and milk ready he overheard Moira saying, “Rudy is the best story reader in the whole world.” And the amazing part was that Margot agreed with her, which was probably one of the few things they’d agreed on since they’d learned to talk.

  After dinner that night he tried to get into the phobia book again, but he’d no more than gotten settled in the living room when Natasha came in. Rudy shoved the book under the couch pillow.

  He didn’t know why, exactly, except that he wasn’t ready to talk to her about the phobia thing. As far as he knew, Natasha didn’t even know about his screaming meemies problem. She hadn’t been around when the worst attacks had happened, except for the time Moira had locked him in the storage closet. And even then she’d only gotten home in time to get in on the end of it, and she’d apparently thought it was just an extradramatic temper tantrum. And he’d never even tried to tell her what it had really been like. He didn’t know why exactly, except that Natasha had to depend on him for a lot of things since old Art bailed out, and she’d had a hard enough time without having to worry that he was about to crack up and fink out on her too.

  So the book stayed under the pillow and Natasha settled down on the other end of the couch. She’d finished getting the M and M’s to bed and seemed to be in a talkative mood.

  At first she told him about her day at work and then they got into the subject of the riding lessons and Heather Hanrahan and Heather’s inheritance.

  “I think it’s so great,” Natasha said. “No one could deserve it more. I just hope that great uncle of hers is getting all sorts of brownie points in heaven for leaving that money to Heather. You know, the Hanrahans were totally surprised when they found out about it. Heather came over to tell me about it the day she found out and she was so thrilled and excited. It’s great that she’s going to be able to go away to college. Of course, we’re all going to miss her around here.”

  “Tell me about it,” Rudy said. “All the professional girl watchers in Pyramid Hill are going to go into mourning. Not to mention a lot of other people. Everyone’s going to miss her.”

  Natasha was certainly one of the people who would miss Heather. They’d been good friends ever since Rudy was just a little kid and Heather used to take him and some other little kids in the neighborhood over to her house to play school. She was a good teacher, too, even when she was only a kid herself. Natasha always said it was probably because of the good start Rudy had gotten with Heather that he’d always been at the top of his class in reading.

  “You’re right,” Natasha said. “Everyone’s crazy about Heather.”

  “Right!” Rudy said. “And you know who especially? Barney Crookshank. Barney really has it bad for Heather. I mean, it seems kind of pointless. A guy like Barney who has every girl his age in the whole town drooling over him, and he never even notices. And then he goes into a major seizure over someone who’s terminally unavailable. Like four years older, for one thing.”

  “Really,” Natasha said. “Is it that serious?” And then she sighed and added, “Poor little Barney.”

  Rudy snorted. “Poor?” he said. “What’s poor about Barney? Or little, for that matter?” He could think of a lot of adjectives to describe Barney Crookshank, but “poor” had certainly never been one of them.

  “Well…” Natasha said. Then she shook her head and looked away, as if she’d decided against what she’d been about to say.

  “Poor?” Rudy insisted.

  “Everybody has problems,” Natasha said. “Even Barney.”

  “Sure,” Rudy said. “Big problems. Like being great-looking and a world-class athlete—and having parents who are practically famous and have lots of money, and who let you do anything you want. And living in a great place like the Crooked Bar Ranch. Sure wish I had some of Barney’s problems.”

  He’d not meant to sound bitter or jealous or anything, but maybe he did, because when he finally ran down Natasha was staring at him in a funny way as if what he’d said had made her angry or maybe just depressed. Then she sighed and picked up the paper and started to read, and when Rudy said “Mom?” she just said “shh” with her finger to her lips.

  “Shh, Rudy. No more about problems tonight, please. I’m just too tired.”

  And since having a serious phobia in the family would probably be considered in the problem category, the book by Dr. Grosser stayed right where it was, under the couch pillow.

  It wasn’t until Rudy was in bed that night that he was able to get back into phobia research. After skimming over the chapter headings he picked out the section about recent experimental treatments as being the most interesting and started reading there.

  Some of it was so full of technical and scientific language that it didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but there was one part that seemed like it might be useful. It was about some psychologists who had worked out a method of treatment called “implosion.” What they did was to get their patients to imagine the worst. Like a lady who was so afraid of spiders that she couldn’t go anywhere or do anything for fear she might meet one was treated by having her imagine over and over again that spiders were everywhere, even all over her clothes and hands and face. The treatment really freaked her out at first, but after a while she began to get over it and finally she wasn’t overly afraid of spiders at all anymore.

  Okay, he thought. The implosion method. According to Dr. Grosser all you had to do was “Picture as realistically as possible whatever it is you are most afraid of.” It sounded simple enough. All you had to do was imagine—something that Rudy had always been good at. He closed his eyes and lay back on the pillows.

  Imagine… darkness and enclosing walls. The darkness came quickly, reaching out around him. And then the walls were there, shutting him in. The dark was hard and heavy and it covered his face and stopped his breathing. Crushing, smothering, endless darkness that…

  He was out of bed then, without even knowing how he’d gotten there. Out of bed and pacing up and down, up and down, willing his heart to stop racing, and fighting to keep down the sound that ached in his throat. Seven steps to the dresser and seven back to the bed. Count the steps. One, two, three, four… Don’t think about anything else. Only the counting and walking and breathing. Deep breathing, deep, deep breaths of good, clean air.

  After what seemed like a very long time his heartbeat slowed and his breathing began to be easier, and by the time he climbed back into bed he was pretty much back to normal except for slightly shaky hands and an occasional shudder or two.

  Okay, Rudy, old buddy, he told himself. So much for the implosion method.

  Chapter 11

  WHEN RUDY GOT back into bed after the implosion disaster the first thing he did was throw the book by Dr. Grosser across the room. Then he turned out the light and pulled the covers up to his chin, keeping his eyes wide open. If he kept his mind firmly on what he could really see he wouldn’t be able
to picture anything “as realistically as possible.” Particularly not “whatever it is you are most afraid of.”

  He could see the foot of the bed quite clearly in the bright moonlight, and beyond it the old oak dresser that, according to Natasha, had been in the same spot even way back when she was a little girl and the room had been hers. He stared at the dresser, concentrating on the details of the old-fashioned golden oak mirror frame and trying to make out all the photos and souvenirs that he’d stuck in under the edge. When that got boring he switched to trying to picture how it might have looked when it was Natasha’s—covered with girl stuff and with maybe a tutu hanging from one of the mirror’s support poles.

  Yes, a tutu for sure. Natasha, or Linda as she had been called then, had told him that she’d known she wanted to be a ballet dancer when she was only four or five years old, just as he had always known he wanted to be an actor and comedian. When he concentrated he could almost see her, a little girl with long, fat pigtails, spinning around the room in a tutu.

  It was something he hadn’t really thought much about before—Natasha as a kid planning her future. And now, thinking about how her life had turned out made him feel a little angry at fate, or maybe at people. People like old Art Mumford, and his own father for that matter. Or whoever’s fault it was that Natasha didn’t get to make her dream come true. He thought about it for quite a while and the good news was that feeling angry for Natasha turned out to be a great way to keep his mind off other things. He went on working at feeling angry about the way fate had treated Natasha until he fell asleep.

  It wasn’t until midmorning the next day that Rudy managed to talk himself into fishing the phobia book out from under his desk. After all, he told himself as he kicked back on the bed in a comfortable reading position, he hadn’t finished reading about all the other methods of treating phobia patients. There was no reason to give up just because the implosion method had been such a complete wipeout.

  The next method of treatment that Dr. Grosser went into was something that he called “progressive challenges.” The idea seemed to be that the patients were to take small gradual steps toward conquering their fear. It gave as an example the case of a woman who had agoraphobia—the same problem that Murph’s mother had. At first the patient was asked to stand in the open doorway of her home. Only for a minute or two at first, but gradually increasing the time. Then she sat in a chair on the veranda, and next out on the lawn. She was supposed to concentrate on pushing herself to go a little longer and a little farther, but at the same time reminding herself that she was free to go back inside any time she felt she had to.

  Rudy liked that part. The being free to back out at any time. It seemed like a person could stand almost anything if he felt sure he could stop it anytime he wanted to. But on further consideration it occurred to him that there was a major difference in the two situations. In the case of the woman with agoraphobia, what she was gradually moving toward was something pleasant, like going downtown and shopping and meeting people. And in his case what he would be moving toward would be doing something not only terrifying but also dangerous and illegal—going down into an abandoned mine. Down into a dark, airless…

  No! He was getting ahead of himself. The point was that you had to move slowly and gradually. Gradually. That was the key word. But in the meantime he went on to read about a third method of treatment that turned out to be something called “attitude readjustment.”

  Attitude readjustment, it seemed, was changing how you felt about whatever you were afraid of by having things you particularly like happen to you when you were in the scary situation. Like the woman with agoraphobia was treated especially nice by her family and served things she particularly liked to eat while she was sitting outside the house. And a girl who had acrophobia so bad that she couldn’t even go near a window in a tall building, had her boyfriend go with her as she went up in a skyscraper. Then the boyfriend was supposed to do what the book called “offer expressions of affection” whenever they were near stairwells or open windows.

  Now, that was a treatment Rudy could definitely relate to. He could really see how it might work for him, especially if someone like Stephanie Freeman would do the “expressions of affection” bit. Realistically, however, he had to admit that he’d probably never get Stephanie to make out with him in an abandoned gold mine. Stephanie just wasn’t the type to fool around in a place like that. Particularly not with someone she’d already turned down in perfectly normal places, like out behind the multipurpose room during school dances.

  But, on second thought, there was the storage closet. There was just a chance that she might agree to the closet, if he could come up with the right approach. Maybe if he made it into a kind of scientific experiment. Stephanie was really into science, entering exhibits in all the science fairs and that sort of thing. What he could do was explain the claustrophobia problem and the “attitude readjustment” thing and ask her if she’d like to be part of a scientific experiment to see how well the treatment worked. She might really go for that kind of an approach, especially if he could think of some way to make it into a science fair exhibit.

  It was, he decided, worth a try. But in the meantime it might be a good idea for him to practice a little, just to be sure he could pull it off, without completely freaking out. It would be all right if he were a little nervous about crawling into the closet with Stephanie. Perfect, in fact. She’d expect that. But a serious case of the screaming meemies would probably be more than she would bargain for. So he’d just have to do a preliminary experiment or two. Marking his place in Conquering Your Fears, he hid it under the mattress before he left the room.

  In the front hall Rudy stood for a moment breathing deeply and trying to center his mind on Stephanie before he pulled back the latch on the closet door, swung it open, and peered in. The storage closet, situated as it was under the stairs, was really more of a cupboard than a real closet. It was only about four feet tall at the highest point and from there it tapered back to nothing at the small end.

  The light was dim, but as his eyes adjusted he was able to make out a bunch of winter boots in one corner, the M and M’s roller skates in another, and a stack of boxes and foot lockers against the back wall. It all looked very familiar, which wasn’t surprising, since in the past he’d used the closet a lot. For years he’d kept his skateboard and baseball stuff there, and before that when he was a real little kid he’d even used it as a place to play. He could vaguely remember some game about a dragon’s lair.

  And that, now that he thought about it, was pretty strange—that when he was really little he’d crawled around in the closet, and curled up way down at the small end, and it hadn’t bothered him at all. And right up until last year he’d been able to keep his stuff there without any problems. But then, ever since last Christmas when Moira locked him in, he had not so much as opened the door until now.

  There was no light switch in the closet, and no window. Fighting back an urge to slam the door and walk away, Rudy reminded himself of what he was intending to do—to sit in the closet and imagine making out with Stephanie. He was going to crawl way back beyond the boxes and… but gradually. It was important not to forget about gradually. Sitting down in the hallway, he put his feet inside the closet up to his ankles, closed his eyes, and began to imagine. Once or twice he opened his eyes and scooted an inch or so forward, but half an hour later when the M and M’s pounded up onto the front veranda, he hadn’t gotten very far. At least he hadn’t gotten very far into the closet. He’d made all sorts of progress with Stephanie. Too bad it was all in his imagination.

  As it turned out, that was the last phobia treatment Rudy tried for several days—not that he’d given up on the whole experiment. Even though his lack of progress had been a disappointment, he really did intend to go on trying. It was just that he seemed to be extra busy for a while.

  For one thing, he was spending a lot of time at Murph’s helping him learn to use his new word processor
. There had been a computer club at school and Rudy had found out that he was just naturally computer friendly. So when Murph finally got a word processor—he’d been talking about it for years—Rudy was able to help him out. The problem seemed to be that Murph hated his computer. At least he did at first.

  “It never does what I want it to,” he told Rudy over the back fence. “I give it a perfectly reasonable command and it just says ‘invalid entry’ and then sits there smirking at me. I came dangerously close to using an ax on it several times yesterday.”

  So Rudy went over to see if he could help. The computer was another Apple, like the ones at school, but a newer model. It wasn’t all that different, however, and that first morning it didn’t take Rudy very long to find out what Murph had been doing wrong. But for the next few days other problems kept coming up, so Rudy kept having to go back, reread the instruction books, and try things out until he came up with another solution.

  In between word processor discussions, Rudy and Murph managed to get in quite a bit of general conversation on other topics as well—like the whole phobia thing. Without mentioning why he had any particular reason to be interested, Rudy simply told Murph that his story about his mother’s agoraphobia had gotten him interested and he’d started a research project on the general subject.

  “I was really surprised how many different kinds of phobias there are,” he told Murph. “A person can hit the panic button about just about anything, I guess. Cats, rats, spiders, snakes, germs, high places, escalators, doctors, people in uniforms. I mean, you name it, there’s somebody who’s scared to death of it. In fact, I’m thinking of working up a stand-up comedian routine about people with phobias. You know, like one about a guy who has this deathly fear of anchovy pizzas, or something.”