What Goes Up

by Wen Jane Baragrey

  Mrs. Gilbert covered her mouth to hold in a giggle. Mom looked up, her eyes barely open. “Ten toddlers. Ten.”

  Someone knocked on the front door, and I ran to answer it. A lady who looked almost as frazzled as the mothers in the theater hurried inside. “Flat tire. Out of gas. I’m so, so sorry.” She bustled past me into the fairy room. “My poor little darlings. Mommy missed you.”

  “Num num,” said the little girl. The other one kept snoring.

  Mrs. Gilbert helped the mother carry the sleeping boy out to their car. I followed with his pants and little sister. “Num num,” the sticky, chubby little thing said as I passed her to her mom.

  When we got back inside, Grandma staggered into the Fairy Wonderland with an armful of misplaced clothes. “I was supposed to pick you up, wasn’t I?” she asked, groaning. “Oh, man. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Mrs. Gilbert drove me home.”

  “Thank you. Things have been a bit…Do you have any idea how many places ten kids can hide?” Mom asked.

  Mrs. Gilbert nodded sympathetically. A woman who had Dameon Swenson in her class would understand better than anyone the sort of trouble kids could be.

  Mom glanced at the floor with shifty eyes. “How was the play?”

  “It went well, I think,” said Mrs. Gilbert. “At least our kids weren’t the worst behaved in the theater.”

  Grandma plopped the clothes onto the party table to add to the lost-and-found box if no one came back for them. “Why don’t you give Mrs. Gilbert the grand tour, Robyn? The fire department is on their way, and I have to go outside to defend my roses. There’s another cat on the roof.”

  Calliope’s cats spent a lot of time on our roof, even though the house was three floors high if you included the attic. No one knew how they got up there, but they did it often enough for the fire department to develop a standard Goodfellow Cat Rescue Plan, or GCRP.

  Mrs. Gilbert clasped her hands. “A tour?”

  “Okay, then. I guess.” I waved my arms a bit, making vague pointing motions at various things in the room. “There’s not much to show. Only this.”

  Mrs. Gilbert smiled. “It’s magical.”

  I realized it had been ages since I’d let myself really look at that room. I thought of the hours Mom had spent sitting cross-legged on the floor, painting the shadows and highlights on the bark until it looked like you could graze your knuckles on it.

  I wrapped my arms around the warm feeling in my middle. “It kind of is magical.”

  * * *

  • • •

  As soon as I closed the front door behind Mrs. Gilbert, I ran out back, clambered up the rope ladder, and spread the smeared note on the floor of my headquarters.

  Family get-together next Saturday afternoon at the Densdale Lagoon. We’ll talk about my brother, Benjamin. Hope to see you then.

  Alyssa

  Every single word burned itself into my brain. I folded the note neatly and hid it under a big stone in the farthest corner of my headquarters. My heart flipped around with excitement until it made my head go all swimmy. Benjamin? Was that my dad’s name? Benjamin O’Malley?

  One week, and I would know about my father. Even if he didn’t want me, even if all I could get out of him was a signature on a name-change form, it would be enough. Maybe.

  Focus Pocus had taught me to concentrate on things I could do instead of things that might go wrong. Planning. That was what I needed. I hurried inside and emailed the note contents to Nickel so we’d have two brains working on the problem.

  Mom had promised me a million times she would take me to the Densdale Lagoon. It wasn’t a real lagoon, although someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like one. It was a water park with rides and slides and lazy rivers and real waves you could surf on if you were brave enough.

  Whenever we made plans, someone would book a last-minute party, or some long-lost college friend would come to town.

  “Sorry, Bob,” Mom would say. “Next time, maybe. There’s nothing that special there, anyway. We’re better off safe at home.”

  So we never actually went. Nothing in Densdale that Mom promised ever happened. And now I was back where I’d started—needing to find a way to get there. Again.

  * * *

  • • •

  On Sunday evening, Grandma and I sat together on the sofa to watch the news. She’d won the coin toss and got to sit on the comfortable end. I wriggled around, trying to avoid the poky spring.

  The news anchor gave us the latest satellite report while wearing a grim expression.

  “I’d feel a lot better if they knew exactly where it would land.” I shivered, as if it were the middle of winter instead of the end of spring. Grandma pulled me closer, and I snuggled under her arm.

  “Oh, Sparkles, don’t panic. The chances of it landing on our house are teeny. Maybe even smaller than that. It’s okay to be scared, but you do know your mom and I will keep you safe, right? I promise.”

  She tweaked my ponytail, but it did nothing to cheer me up. I knew all about chances and statistics. Like: The chances of Angus Pfeffer’s Tiger Moth model airplane’s ending up on our roof had been a million to one—maybe more, since he’d launched it in Towne Park, on the other side of town. But that plane was still up there somewhere, getting all crumbly in the bright spring sunlight.

  Nickel had gone to the movies on Sunday afternoon without me. I was okay with that, since we had spent all morning analyzing the note and failing to come up with a plan to get to the lagoon.

  By the time we finished lunch on Monday, he had told me the entire movie plot and given me a blow-by-blow description of every scene.

  “If we practiced, we could adapt some of the acrobatic moves for Focus Pocus. The guy in Dragon Claw did this one where he ran up the side of a building and bam!” Nickel slapped his hand down on his cafeteria lunch tray. I jumped at least two inches out of my chair, whacking my knees on the underside of the table.

  “He did a somersault straight off the wall.” Nickel took a deep breath and rested back in his chair. “I’m pretty sure we could do that.”

  That wasn’t the first time Nickel had lost his mind, so I knew how to handle him. “One of us will break an arm if we try.”

  His mouth puckered. “Scratch that. I’m sure I could do it. You could pretend to be interested, you know.”

  “How many times have you broken your arm, Nickel Bugden?”

  “Four. Five if you count the wrist fracture,” he said, shrugging, as if he hadn’t cried like a baby every single time.

  “And how many times have I broken mine?” I asked.

  “None. But that’s because I’m more willing to sacrifice my body for the sake of improving Focus Pocus.” He lifted one eyebrow. I think it was supposed to make him look confident, but he kind of looked like he was asking a question.

  I sighed. “Or because you keep doing things even when I say you’re going to get hurt.”

  Nickel squinted. “Maybe I can make decisions for myself. Maybe I don’t need you to tell me what to do.”

  “Five broken arms says you do need to be told.” I closed my lunch box and slipped it into my backpack. The slower and calmer I moved, the redder Nickel’s ears got.

  “Four broken arms and one wrist fracture, and one of the arms was from riding my bike, and you didn’t even tell me not to do that.”

  I pushed back the sleeves of my sweater and held out my arms in front of me like a surgeon. “No broken arms. I win. Now can I talk? Because I have something actually important to say.”

  Growling through white lips, Nickel said, “Actually important? We talked about your dad all day yesterday. Why is it that only your stuff matters and mine is wasting time?”

  “Because we still haven’t found a way to get to the Densdale Lagoon next weeke
nd.”

  “We will. We always do.” Nickel tapped his fingers on his food tray, hard enough to make his knife rattle on his plate. “I get that it’s a big deal, but all we ever talk about anymore is your pretend father.”

  The word “pretend” stung like a wasp. I Doom Glared at him hard enough that he wriggled around in his chair like my eyeballs could shoot spikes at him.

  “ ‘Pretend father’? He’s not pretend. He’s real and the most important thing ever. Much more important than some stupid movie.”

  Nickel folded his arms over his chest and scowled. “More important than Focus Pocus?”

  “Much.”

  He jerked back like my words were a slap. I wanted to take them back, sort of, but words stuck around once you said them.

  “Well, maybe he’s a waste of time. Maybe…I don’t know. Maybe he’s not even worth finding, since he’s the one that left you.”

  I swallowed hard, trying to get past a lump in my throat. When my voice finally came back, it sounded a bit strangled. “Because of a whole bunch of maybes, I can only talk about some ridiculous superhero club you made up when we were five?”

  “Ridiculous? You don’t think it’s ridiculous when you need me to do stuff for you.”

  I didn’t answer, even though I knew I should. The trouble with not speaking was that sometimes it was worse than saying something stupid.

  Nickel’s ears turned redder than his hair. Shoving his chair backward so hard it nearly fell over, he snatched up his tray and stalked off. And because I was more worried that he might be right about me using him than I was worried that I might lose my best friend and future husband, I didn’t follow him.

  * * *

  • • •

  Every kid should have their own superpower/mind-control club. In the beginning, Focus Pocus was known as the Nickels and Robyns Only Club, or N.A.R.O. We even made badges on a little machine I got for Christmas that year. Except people kept asking what the letters stood for, and this one girl called Robin tried to force us to let her in.

  Mrs. Bugden hired a magician for Nickel’s birthday who called himself the Master of Hocus Pocus, and our club name came from there. Unfortunately, I’d broken my badge maker by then.

  During breaks at school, we’d plan and train and come up with fantastical solutions to all our day-to-day problems. Like one day in third grade when I turned up for lunch with my face red from crying.

  “Kimber McLean did what?” Nickel asked.

  “She told everyone that my hair’s a wig! They all believed it. People keep tugging on it to see if it comes off.”

  “A wig?”

  “Yeah. Gia said I should have gotten a pretty wig if I wanted to wear one at all. I don’t even want to! My hair’s just fine the way it is. Well, maybe if it weren’t so curly, but that’s all. It’s the worst thing that ever happened to anyone, ever.” I rubbed the heel of my hand into my eye to keep it from letting any more tears out.

  “Ever? Like even worse than the Titanic?”

  We’d just learned about that in history, and though no one would drown because of a fake-hair rumor, it felt at least that bad to me.

  I nodded.

  Nickel whistled. “Anyone can have boring hair, but yours is different. It’s way cooler. Forget about them. We’ll just have to prove we’re not to be messed with. Watch this. Dime taught me a cool trick.” He glanced around and settled on Gia Martelli’s group of friends nearby. “Never fails.”

  He began to stare at the back of Gia’s ponytailed head.

  “Her hair’s not gonna fall out from being stared at,” I said.

  Nickel ignored me and kept right on staring and staring and staring. It didn’t take long before I got bored and nibbled at my lunch in between leftover sniffles from all the tears. A sandwich or so later, things got interesting.

  Gia scratched at the back of her neck.

  I took a bite of my apple.

  Gia reached up to adjust her ponytail, and her shoulders twitched.

  Nickel stared, and I ate a cookie.

  One of Gia’s friends looked around a bit. Then Gia did too. Soon everyone in her group was trying to figure out what was going on. Eventually, every one of them looked right at Nickel—who stared straight back at them.

  “Ew! Don’t stare!” Gia yelled at him.

  I nudged his arm. “Quit it!”

  He turned to me with a wide grin. “See how I did that?”

  “Creeped Gia out?”

  “Exactly. But think about it. I did it with nothing but my own eyeballs. That’s it. That’s power, if you ask me. Now all we have to do is try that on Kimber. Pretty soon people will wonder what we’re staring at. She’ll have the wibblies so bad she won’t bug you again. You’ll see.”

  And I did see.

  Word got around, and Kimber never even glanced at either of us ever again, in case it set us off staring.

  Over time we perfected several other powerful glares, but that was our first superpower and mind-control technique. I knew that if I had Nickel, we could solve any problem together.

  So long as I had Nickel.

  * * *

  • • •

  Mom would never let me go to Densdale alone, and Nickel wasn’t talking to me. That left me very few options. Either I raised enough money to hire a cab, or Mr. Bones and his rickshaw would be my only ride.

  I pulled the ancient tin lunch box I used for my most important treasures out from under my bed. Some of my treasures had been in there for years. I couldn’t remember what had made most of them treasures in the first place, but it seemed wrong to throw them out. I fished out a grand total of fourteen dollars between bits of paper and glittery birthday cards.

  I’d never hired a cab in all my life, but even I knew that fourteen dollars wouldn’t get me there, much less pay the entry into Densdale Lagoon. I would need at least thirty dollars, I figured. Mom would pay me my allowance on Thursday, but it was only ten dollars.

  There was one surefire way to make the remaining six dollars in a week—the toys on the magnet roof—and there was only one way to get there: through Grandma’s window. That couldn’t be done while she was at home, and she wouldn’t be out for long enough until her salsa dance class the next week, which would be way too late. I needed to get her out of the house.

  For two whole days, I waited for a miracle. If nothing happened soon, I’d have to borrow Mom’s wand or sprinkle myself with fairy dust. It probably wouldn’t help, but at least I’d look adorable.

  Lucky for me, an extra last-minute party booking meant Mom and Grandma had to go shop for groceries, and I got my chance.

  Grandma’s room had nothing fairylike in it. Not a single sparkle. The wallpaper was printed with faded roses that ran wild, and she had a quilt with lacy edges draped over her bed.

  I stood for a while in the middle of the room, trying not to walk right back out again. Grandma always thought the best of me, and that made sneaking around her room feel like the worst thing of all. Part of me hoped Mom and Grandma would get home early and I’d have no choice but to give up.

  But they didn’t come home. In fact, the window sat open a little, waiting for me. And right in the middle of the sill stood something I never thought I’d see again: the big decorated mason jar from Mom’s room. What was it doing in here?

  My heart fluttered and my hands shook as I picked up the jar. Even from the outside I could see it was stuffed to the brim with lots of different, obviously precious, somethings. But I’d seen Mom’s treasures plenty of times. Glittery cards I had made for her birthdays, Mother’s Days, and Christmases, all kept in a little tin box just like mine. The only difference between our boxes was that in Mom’s, I was the treasure.

  The jar didn’t look like it had anything to do with me.

  I knelt beside it on the flo
or. Its cap was scuffed, and rust filled every dent and scratch in the tin. Drawings and cutouts from magazines, mostly fairies and flowers and rabbits, were glued to the outside of the jar. Whatever Mom kept in there, she had never shared it with me, and she probably wouldn’t want to now.

  I bit my lip and gripped the jar in both hands. The lid didn’t catch at all when I twisted it off, as if it wanted me to see inside. “I’m sorry, Mom,” I whispered. “I won’t steal anything. I promise.”

  I laid the lid on the floor beside me and carefully lifted out one item at a time.

  Tickets to the theater. Some notes. A couple of folded envelopes and a Valentine’s Day card. I stared, afraid to open it. Mom had never had boyfriends. Not a single one in my entire life, and before then, only my nameless father.

  I peeked inside the card. It felt soft and worn, like it had been handled lots of times. On one half, a rose was pressed, flat and brown, stuck down with a bit of tape so that it covered the corny poem. Someone had written on the other side in wide, jerky letters.

  Dear M.

  Love you more than ever.

  Can’t wait to meet our baby.

  Yours forever, B

  B?

  B!

  Benjamin O’Malley! It had to be. That meant he knew about me, and he loved my mother and wanted to meet me. At least, he had when he’d written that note. I stared at the writing. Dad touched this valentine. I lifted it to my nose and breathed in deep, but I couldn’t smell anything except the moldy scent of the rose.

  I closed the card, tucked it in its place inside the jar, and carefully layered the other treasures back around it. Everything I knew of my dad existed only inside that jar, but I couldn’t look at anything else in it. I’d already done enough. Guilt made my stomach squirm as I screwed the lid back on and left the jar on the floor behind the curtains so it wouldn’t fall out when I climbed through the window.