A Little Bit of Spectacular

by Gin Phillips

  Knock Knock.

  Who’s there?

  Plantagenet.

  Seriously? I love Plantagenets!

  To You Know Who—

  I’d like to meet you.

  I’d be an idiot not to want to.

  I’ll go anywhere.

  As long as you’re there.

  Do you have blue eyes and silver hair?

  Roses are red.

  Plantagenets are chosen.

  I would like to meet one.

  At room temperature not frozen.

  Thank you for the invitation.

  It would be a nice situation

  To join you at a restaurant or even a gas

  station.

  If we met, I think I would like you.

  I like how you write and

  Paint pictures with words and

  How you keep secrets

  I can keep secrets, too.

  Then, like I was a lamp and someone had plugged in my cord, the right words just lit up inside me. I knew what I was going to write.

  IF I COULD WISH UPON A STAR

  I WOULD WISH TO MEET YOU,

  PLANTAGENET.

  WE COULD MEET IN THE SKY

  AND CATCH A RIDE ON A COMET.

  OR SPIN AROUND SATURN.

  OR WE COULD HAVE COFFEE.

  “Perfect,” said Amelia, when I showed her the piece of paper. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  I didn’t want to waste another second. It had been four days since we’d first seen the message. I didn’t want the Plantagenets to think I wasn’t interested.

  “You want to go down with me now and write it?” I asked Amelia.

  “Sure.”

  I stuck a black marker in my jeans pocket, then I folded up my paper and stuck it in my other pocket, just to make sure I would get the message right, word for word.

  “I wonder how long it’ll take for her to write me back?” I asked. “I wonder where she’ll want to meet. I wonder how many of them will come with her. I wonder how many of them there are. I wonder if they’ll have to vote on whether or not to let me into the group.”

  And for the first time in a while, I thought of a question about the Plantagenets that I hadn’t considered.

  “I wonder if they’ll let you in, too?” I said to Amelia.

  “I’d like to be,” she said. “I’d really, really like to be a member of . . . whatever.”

  “I’d like that, too,” I said. “That’s it then. They have to let us both in.”

  “So I’ll come with you when you meet them?” she asked.

  She had nothing but excitement on her face. No nervousness at all. I felt sure aliens would love her.

  “Definitely,” I said as we stepped into the elevator.

  • • •

  That night, my fingers still remembering the satisfying feel of pressing my marker against the bathroom wall, I could hardly sleep. I was so sure I’d hear back soon, that the Plantagenets would be moved by my message and want to meet me as soon as possible.

  I was wrong.

  There was no answer on the wall the next day. But that night, downtown Birmingham lost power for six minutes. Some sort of surge in the system, the newspaper headline said. The next night, our lights blinked off at 9:00 p.m. and didn’t come back on until nearly 9:30.

  I couldn’t help thinking back to what I’d read. Those classic signs of alien invasion—what were they? Something like lights in the sky, flying discs, and electrical disturbances. I wasn’t sure what electrical disturbances were, but I thought power outages might count. Something was blacking out entire sections of downtown. That something must be pretty powerful.

  There was a third night of flickering power, and a fourth night where the power was out all night long. Gram bought a pack of a dozen candles since they were cheaper than flashlights. Well, she bought new batteries for the one rusty flashlight we’d managed to find buried in the closet in my room. She said a little dark wouldn’t hurt us, and there was no reason to make a fuss.

  After a week of electricity problems—and a week of me not hearing from the Plantagenets—the newspapers and the teachers at school seemed to think there was a definite reason to make a fuss. I read headlines like “Serious Investigations Ahead for Power Company?” and “City Shudders to Stop with Repeated Outages.” And one day in class, while we were taking a spelling quiz, Mrs. Snellhawk was closing the door when she saw someone in the hallway. There were some words I couldn’t hear, and then Mrs. Snellhawk said that there was bound to be more crime if the whole city stayed in the dark every night.

  I heard high heels click toward our class. There was a woman’s voice speaking softly.

  “It’s absurd that electricity is this unreliable in the twenty-first century,” Mrs. Snellhawk said. She was whispering very loudly. Maybe some people were actually working on their spelling quiz, but I’d finished mine and had nothing to do but listen.

  “There must be some ugly secret the city wants to hide,” said the other teacher, whom I couldn’t see. “Some flaw in the power company’s technology. The entire power system might crash permanently. The power would just go out and never come back on. Ever. You wait and see. I’d buy up lots of bottled water if I were you.”

  Then the high heels clicked again, and as the other teacher moved, I saw long red hair swing past the door. Ah, it was Mrs. Leekdurst, the drama teacher. I thought she was overreacting a bit, but I supposed that was her job.

  I felt Rachel tap me on the shoulder.

  “Do you believe her?” she asked.

  “Not really,” I whispered. I was a much quieter whisperer than Mrs. Snellhawk.

  “My grandfather thinks that the government is hiding secrets,” she said. “He believes that we have spy gadgets disguised as mosquitoes, and the fake mosquitoes draw your blood and take it back to labs so the government has it on file.”

  I didn’t have a good answer for that.

  “That sounds almost cool,” I said finally.

  “Of course, my grandfather also calls me Erica sometimes,” she whispered back.

  “Who’s Erica?”

  “The neighbor’s guinea pig.”

  Mrs. Snellhawk shushed us, so I had to swallow my laugh.

  • • •

  At home, Mom seemed almost excited about the whole power outage thing—she said it’d be good for us to stop watching television at night. She said we’d use it as an excuse to tell ghost stories and make up limericks and play board games by candlelight.

  We didn’t have real board games, though. We had LEGOs and Candyland and Hungry Hippo, which Gram had bought as surprises for us before we showed up here. And, I mean, I liked all of those things when I was six years old, but the thrill had sort of worn off.

  At least that’s what I thought until Mom and I got to work on a five-foot LEGO tower complete with doorways and balconies. We sat crouched in the living room for hours on Friday night, candles lit. Gram watched from the sofa and eventually brought us some broccoli to use for trees and bushes—“You can’t tell anything about a building without some landscaping,” she said.

  It turns out that if you cut the stalk of a piece of broccoli really evenly, you can make it stand up on a hardwood floor.

  By ten p.m., Gram had kissed us good night and headed to bed. I heard her bedroom door click. I waited a few seconds before I said anything.

  “I didn’t see the landscaping thing coming,” I whispered to Mom. “I would have thought she’d think it was a waste of food.”

  She laughed.

  “Talk to her, Mario,” she said. “She’s not that bad. She and I have had our issues, but she can be fun. She raised me, didn’t she?”

  “I guess,” I said. “Hey, you want to add a wall around the broccoli? Then it’d be more like a
garden.”

  A few more quiet minutes passed. We each sorted through the remaining LEGOs to find the ones we needed.

  “You have any singles?” Mom asked. “I’d really like a yellow.”

  “No yellows,” I said, feeling around in the shadows under my legs. “But, oh, here’s a red.”

  I started thinking about a drawbridge. I wasn’t sure how to manage the moving parts. I was also pretty sure a piece of broccoli had worked its way into my pajama pants.

  “I don’t want to go to bed,” said Mom. “I’m tired of being in bed.”

  “You do need your sleep.”

  She rolled her eyes at me. Even in the almost-dark, I could tell she had a LEGO balanced on each knee.

  “But let’s stay up anyway,” I said, and her teeth flashed in the dark.

  You know how when you sit in the dark, with just a tiny candle or beam of a flashlight flickering around the room, everything seems different? You can’t see much, but suddenly you can hear everything better—the wind outside and the creak of the floors and the rustle of flannel pants. The same room that seems boring and familiar in the light suddenly seems full of possibilities when you’re crouched around a tiny light, watching the shadows. It can be uncomfortable or scary, but it can also be thrilling. Like the top of a roller coaster, when you know you’re about to get to the best part of the ride.

  “It’s exciting, isn’t it?” Mom said, like she was reading my mind.

  “What?”

  “The dark. The candles. It makes you think you feel like things are different. Like there’s something out there. In a good way.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

  That was it exactly. The darkness made me feel like something was about to happen.

  • • •

  Still, I got no response from my message. Two weeks went by. I was beginning to feel desperate. Had the Plantagenets seen my response? Had they seen it and decided they didn’t want to get to know me after all?

  There was no way to know. Every morning I walked out the door, dragged myself to school, picked up my books, handed in my assignments, and did all the other hundreds of things I had to do to get me through the day, thinking of nothing but getting to Trattoria to check for any new writing on the wall. And every day I stepped into the bathroom and felt the disappointment hit me in the rib cage.

  One morning, after the bell rang for changing classes, I heard my name as I was headed out the door. It was Rachel, holding out a small white rectangle.

  “I don’t know if you’ve got plans,” she said, “but I’m having a birthday party in a couple of weeks. The invitation’s got my address and everything. It’s no big deal—just a few people and some cake and stuff.”

  I took the envelope from her hand. It seemed like it should have felt heavier, seeing as how it held everything I’d hoped for in those first days of sitting lonely and quiet at my desk. Now it wasn’t quite the invitation I’d been hoping for.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That sounds great.”

  “Sure,” said Rachel, swinging her bag over her shoulder. “Hope you can come.”

  I opened the envelope as I walked to social studies, in the middle of lockers clanging, tennis shoes squeaking, high-pitched giggling from clumps of girls, people bumping against me as we all rounded corners and pushed through doorways. I unfolded the invitation, which was made of thick black paper and designed like a chalkboard, with the details of Rachel’s party done in pastel colors like chalk. In pinks and purples and greens, chalky handwriting told me where to go and who to call.

  I fingered the paper, which felt rough between my fingers, not smooth like a real chalkboard at all. All the background noise faded away. I looked at the palm of my hand, half expecting to see streak of colors. The chalk hadn’t rubbed off, of course. At least, it hadn’t rubbed off on my hands. But the invitation was all over my thoughts.

  The next morning, exactly seventeen days after I’d written my message on the bathroom wall, I woke up early. A little before five a.m., actually. Early enough that it felt like every time I blinked, my eyes might just stay closed. But I dressed quickly—a little afraid I might put my shirt on inside out since I didn’t want to turn on a lamp—and got my stuff together, including a little plastic bag I’d bought at the art store. I left a note for Gram, who would be up around six a.m., saying that I couldn’t sleep and had left for school early. I made it into the hallway without the door even squeaking behind me.

  From there it was easy. I’d thought it all through while I tossed and turned in bed the night before. The streets were mostly empty—a few workers from Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s hustling down the sidewalk, a bus or two, the occasional car going by. But mostly I had the sidewalk to myself as night turned into day, grayer and cooler than the spring days had been lately. I could hear my own feet on the concrete, pounding a soft, fast rhythm as I walked. I wanted to get where I was going before the streets got any more crowded.

  Across from Trattoria, there was an old brick storefront. There was a sign on the double glass doors saying the one-story building was going to be converted to a wine shop next year but there wasn’t any sign of construction. The windows were covered in cardboard, and the doors were padlocked. There were cigarette butts along the window ledges, and spiderwebs hung from the edge of the roof.

  Not a particularly impressive building. But at some point, someone had decided not to let it slide totally downhill. The white bricks were as gleaming as they must have been on the day the store opened. Sometime recently, they’d been cleaned or maybe repainted. But they made a giant white wall. Good as a chalkboard or a clean bathroom stall.

  I opened my small bag and pulled out the box of chalk I’d bought. They weren’t tiny little white pencils of chalk—these were huge round cylinders, the size of dynamite. I had a handful of colors that left a powdery rainbow on my palm. I looked both ways down the street—no one coming—and pulled out a blue the color of the sky.

  I worked fast. When I was done, the letters were bigger around than my head. They took up the entire wall.

  PLANTAGENET

  I STILL WANT TO MEET YOU ANYWHERE

  I’LL GO TO THE STARS

  IF YOU NAME THE CONSTELLATION PLEASE RSVP WITH A DESTINATION.

  Around the words, I’d drawn a rectangle with little curlicues at the edges. It looked a little like a party invitation.

  Definitely not boring, I thought.

  Chapter 9

  MY HEART’S DESIRE

  I waited and waited some more. Plantagenets, whoever they were, didn’t rush.

  Mom was starting to move around more, and it made me nervous. She climbed up and down the stairs without me, saying she needed to get her strength back. She went for walks around the block and started cooking dinner for me and Gram. She was standing and smiling and joking around, and I kept expecting her to fall to the floor and collapse. Poof. She would be lying there on the floor, and all the smiling and cooking would have been like a dream. The tumors would be back.

  So I was tense, waiting to wake up. Waiting for real life to start again. It’s a terrible thing when you’re in the middle of a beautiful dream, where you can fly and soar through the clouds and you’re fast and light and it’s all amazing, and then you wake up. And you can’t fly after all. The disappointment makes you not even want to get out of bed.

  Don’t worry, Mom said. Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry. She and Gram said it over and over, like when someone gets a song stuck in their head and just keeps singing the same line until you think your head will explode.

  One night, the power had been out for a couple of hours. The power company kept saying they didn’t know what was causing the problems and that the issue would be fixed soon. But night after night, everything went black. We were starting to get used to it. Mom and I sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to roas
t marshmallows over a fat red candle. It was going pretty slowly.

  “Let’s go swimming next week,” she said.

  “Next week? That soon? It’s still a little chilly.”

  “It won’t be chilly at the indoor pool,” she said, popping her barely tan marshmallow into her mouth. “Come on, I’m dying to get back in the water.”

  It wasn’t the best choice of words.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I thought you’d be glad that I’m back to normal,” she said, running her hand through her hair, which was shiny and bouncy in the candlelight. Her face wasn’t washed out and grayish anymore—her eyes were bright and her skin was smooth. She did look normal. She looked better than normal. She looked beautiful.

  That was part of the problem. It would be so easy to believe she was okay. It would be easy to fall into the dream. And if I stopped waiting and watching, I wouldn’t be prepared. I couldn’t let my guard down.

  “Come with me,” she said. “Swim with me. I’ll get some of those rings we used to throw to the bottom of the pool. You love diving down to the bottom.”

  I didn’t think I could do it. It almost hurt to think about being in the water with her. Why was that? Why did the thought of something so good and normal hurt worse than thinking of her in a hospital bed again?

  “Maybe,” I told her, but I stood up and walked to the window. I needed a little space to think.

  As I looked out over the city, I frowned. Lately, I’d seen one of two things out of my window: the usual city lights flashing at me from all over town, or the complete darkness of a blackout. Now I saw neither. Most of the city was black, all right. But off in the distance, I could see a silvery glow. It spread over the treetops and lightened the sky. I would have thought it was the airport, maybe, except it was coming from the wrong direction. And this light was too white, too bright to be runway lights. The glow was fuzzy and pretty, more like the lights from a circus or a fair. And it was the only light in the middle of the darkness, like someone had plugged in a night-light for the city.