Two Girls, a Clock, and a Crooked House

by Michael Poore

  The board said it was THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1989.

  Amy did some quick subtracting in her head.

  Then she said, “Holy crap!” out loud.

  Mrs. Barch and the other kids looked at her for a moment.

  “Thirty years,” said Amy absently. Her head spun.

  Way to be subtle, said Moo. Way to not draw attention to yourself and, I might add, myself.

  The speaker on the wall came to life, and Mrs. Nyday’s voice said, “Office.”

  “Hi, office,” said Mrs. Barch, sounding breezy, but in a sarcastic kind of way. “I have three children in my classroom who think they don’t need to do what they’re told. Please send the police.”

  The whole classroom took a sharp breath.

  “How about the principal?” asked the office. “Will he do?”

  “I suppose,” said Mrs. Barch. “But I was hoping for the police; I really was.”

  The speaker went POP and went silent.

  Thirty years, thought Amy. Three times as old as she was now.

  Who was the president? Was there a terrible war going on, or people landing on the moon?

  The classroom door opened, and a large man in a suit and glasses stuck most of his big self through the door. He looked like a mayor of some kind. An unhappy mayor. This, presumably, was the principal.

  “Hello, Mr. MacAfferty,” said Mrs. Barch.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Barch,” he said. He nodded around at the kids, saying, “Kids,” and the kids all said, “Hi, Mr. MacAfferty,” more or less in unison.

  “Who…?” asked Mr. MacAfferty.

  “Take a wild guess,” said Mrs. Barch dryly.

  “I’d hate to guess wrong.”

  “Mr. Zane,” said Mrs. Barch. “Naturally. And Mr. and Miss Rue.”

  Mr. MacAfferty invited these three to accompany him into the hall. The redheads left their seats and filed frowningly out of the room.

  “Henry,” said Mr. MacAfferty.

  “I didn’t do anything,” murmured Henry, his one visible eye slowly burning.

  Over by the door, the small girl with the shining black hair whispered, “Henry said the witch was eating Oliver’s head.”

  Henry made an angry noise and glared over his shoulder.

  “[Unsuitable word],” he growled, and the little girl cringed.

  Mr. MacAfferty must have decided that was enough. He came the rest of the way through the door and, moving nimbly for a big man, strode between two rows of desks and took Henry Zane by the arm.

  “You can get up and walk,” he said, “or I can pick you up like a little baby right here in front of everybody. Which is it, Henry: the easy way or the hard way?”

  Henry got to his feet, still murmuring, and shuffled balefully out of the room.

  “I’m telling my dad,” he was heard to say as he left. And Mr. MacAfferty was heard to reply, “Your dad knows right where to find me, Henry.” He sounded tired when he said it.

  The door closed.

  Mrs. Barch looked tired, too.

  She waved her hand at Dinosaur Boy and Sparkly Girl, saying, “Sit down, sit down. I know you mean well.”

  Sparkly and Dinosaur sat down.

  “I’d like to apologize to our new friends,” said Mrs. Barch, raising a hand to indicate Moo and Amy. Speaking directly to them, she said, “We’ve had some worrisome times lately. It hasn’t been easy for any of us. We all handle it in different ways.”

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” said Amy.

  “He’ll be back,” insisted Shining Black Hair. (Heather, Mrs. Barch had called her.)

  Remembering what her dad had said—some kids had disappeared, some kids had been eaten—Amy was pretty sure Oliver would not be back and that things were going to get worse.

  Don’t say anything! said Moo.

  Amy was going to ask Moo if maybe they shouldn’t try to warn people, but just then the speaker crackled and made a loud BOOOOO­OOOOO­OOOOO­OOP! noise.

  Mrs. Barch looked relieved. She rolled her eyes and said, “Hallelujah.” Then, to the whole class, she said, “Recess. Don’t bother lining up. Just go.”

  AMY AND MOO JOINED the flood of fifth graders pouring through the double doors and huddled together at the edge of the wide, crowded playground.

  Thirty years, they both thought together.

  Then Amy said, “The witch.”

  I know.

  “We can’t just say nothing! My dad wasn’t kidding when he told me about this stuff. It’s not a story or a game, Moo.”

  I know. Moo appeared deep in thought.

  “What?” asked Amy.

  There’s the history thing, said Moo. We could mess up history.

  “It’s called a paradox,” said Amy. “I know. I don’t care. If the future depends on us letting witches eat kids, maybe it’s not much of a future. Besides…”

  Amy stopped talking.

  About twenty thousand kids were standing around listening to them.

  “Hi,” said some of the kids, and to these kids Amy said “Hi” back.

  “What are you TALKING about?” asked the kids.

  Tell them we’re doing a puzzle together. Like a science thing or a story problem, except without the math.

  Amy repeated this aloud. Instantly most of the kids’ eyes glazed over. They wandered off to play kickball or step on bugs.

  A few kids stayed to ask, “How come your hair is like that?”

  Amy and Moo had straight hair, more or less. Moo’s looked like a helmet. The kids of 1989 had big, curly, foofy hair. There was a girl with enormous, EXTRA-foofy hair, and another girl wearing huge green plastic earrings, and another girl with a black eye. There was a boy with an eye patch, and another boy wearing a Taco Bell T-shirt.

  “We’re trendsetters,” Amy told them.

  “Just so you know,” said Enormous Foofy Hair, “Henry’s probably going to beat you up. Both of you.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” added Black Eye.

  “Henry?” said Amy. “The kid in the suit? Isn’t he busy getting expelled?”

  The kids all shook their heads.

  “They don’t expel Henry,” said Taco Bell. “His dad’s on the school board.”

  “Mrrzzl,” said Amy. “Why would he want to beat me up?” (Amy had never been beaten up. She was hoping to avoid it.)

  Enormous Foofy Hair shrugged. “Because you’re new. And because you started the whole thing about Oliver. And possibly because you’re wearing costumes.”

  “Started it HOW?” asked Amy, ignoring the costume remark.

  “By walking in the room, basically,” said Black Eye. “Anyway, even if they DO expel him, which they won’t, his dad’ll say it was the teacher’s fault, and won’t ground him or anything. Henry’s dad thinks Henry is a miniature Henry’s dad and he can do no wrong. He could squirt paint thinner in the principal’s eye, and Henry’s dad would say it was the principal’s eye’s fault.”

  “They’re rich,” said Taco Bell, as if that explained it all. “They’ve been rich for, like, ten generations.”

  Amy was about to say something else, but her supersenses told her that recess was about to end.

  Boop, said Moo.

  BOOOOO­OOOOO­OOOOO­OOOOO­OOOOO­OOP! went the official booper, and the playground emptied like a giant toilet flushing.

  * * *

  —

  “OPEN YOUR SOCIAL STUDIES books,” said Mrs. Barch.

  We don’t have social studies books, said Moo, over on the beanbag chair.

  I don’t really care, said Amy, who was feeling worn out. She felt like if everyone didn’t leave her alone for a while, she was going to bite someone’s face off.

  Mrs. Barch was feeling worn out, too, you could tel
l. She told the class to go to page 60 and read about Mesopotamia.

  A boy in baggy jeans raised his hand and said, “We already—”

  “READ ABOUT MESOPOTAMIA!” snapped Mrs. Barch, and so they did.

  She quietly brought a book to Amy and a book to Moo.

  “Read about Mesopotamia,” she whispered. She drifted over by the air-conditioning unit and stood gazing out the window.

  And that’s how school went for the rest of the day. They read or pretended to read. Amy learned about polytheism, in which people worshipped more than one god. For a while, she battled sleep, and her head bobbed up and down. She spent some time being nervous about being thirty years in the past.

  What if they never made it back? The school secretary and Officer Byrd and other grown-ups would see to it that they were adopted or something, she was sure. This made her almost start crying.

  What’s the matter? asked Moo.

  Nothing.

  Lies! You’re sad and upset, I can feel it.

  Fine. What if we never get back?

  We will. We just need another old clock. I think.

  Amy caught herself rolling her eyes and throwing her hands up in the air. Enormous Foofy Hair saw her doing this and gave her a weird look.

  Sure! she thought. Easy! Do YOU know where to find a replacement antique clock before grown-ups find out we’re two kids running around with no parents and no home? Do YOU know how to get an antique clock with no money?

  Moo did a mental version of clearing her throat, and Amy looked up to discover Mrs. Barch standing over her, looking peevish.

  “You’re not reading about Mesopotamia,” she rasped.

  AT PRECISELY THREE O’CLOCK, the booper went BOOOOO­OOOOO­OOOOO­OOOOO­P! and school came to an end.

  Amy and Moo had, by that time, planned a stealthy escape.

  We can’t let them corner us and get us in the office, Amy had pointed out. They’ll—

  I know, Moo had said. They’ll put us in THE SYSTEM.

  The trick, of course, was to get out of the classroom and the school quickly, but without garnering suspicion or attention. Grown-ups were like animals in the wilderness; nothing captured their eye and triggered their reflexes faster than a running child.

  Amy spent the last thirty minutes of the school day worrying that Mrs. Nyday was going to come to the door and ask to see them, and then take them down to the office and make them wait until their mother materialized.

  But this did not happen.

  The booper booped.

  Amy and Moo crossed the room and stepped casually out the door.

  “Bye, Amy,” said Black Eye, zooming past in the hallway. “Bye, Gertrude!”

  It was just like any other day when the last bell rang: a stream of kids like the Mississippi River, yammering and calling out, some running and being yelled at not to run.

  “Bye, Gertrude!” hollered Enormous Foofy Hair, headed in the opposite direction. “Bye, Amy!”

  “Bye!” Amy hollered back.

  The Mississippi River surged, momentarily, down the hall in the direction of the office, bearing Amy and Moo with it.

  “Don’t stop,” Amy whispered in Moo’s ear. “No matter what!”

  I know! answered Moo. You think I’m stupid?

  The river turned the corner by the library and burst through the open doors, shouting, muttering, yelling, singing—

  “Amy Wood! Gertrude Kopernikus!” called a voice just as the girls were about to reach freedom.

  Amy looked behind them. She couldn’t help it. There was Mrs. Nyday, naturally, holding a clipboard, waving a pencil in the air.

  Go, gogogogogogogo! hissed Moo. Keep going, keep going, goinggoinggoing!

  But then they stopped.

  Why? Because of something they saw. Both of them, at the exact same time.

  Beyond the broad sidewalk at the front of the school, across the street, standing beside an old maple tree, stood the tall stranger from the woods. The Possible Witch.

  She was looking right at them where they stood in the open door. Still wearing her big hat and hood. The hearsay bird squatted at her feet, probing the earth with its long beak.

  As the girls watched, gripping each other’s hands, the stranger waved a long, willowy hand at them.

  “Girls!” they heard her call. “Oh, girls!”

  Her fingers traced shadows in the air.

  Amy and Moo said the same exact unsuitable word in a hoarse, terrified whisper and plunged back inside the school.

  They managed, somehow, to swim against the irresistible current of kids. It was as if superpowers kicked in and carried them along, past a flustered Mrs. Nyday, and pelted them up the hall the way they’d come. Past the library again, past Mrs. Barch’s room—

  “Slow down there, Indy Five Hundred,” said Mrs. Barch, leaning in her doorway. Her voice had kind of an automatic sound to it.

  “Girls!” the secretary called after them. “GIRLS!”

  Light speed!

  Outside again, onto the playground with a hundred other kids all around them, and onto the grass beyond.

  The school receded behind them.

  Outside, the flood of schoolkids quickly spread out and dissolved in various directions, trickling off into the neighborhood, down sidewalks, across the grass….

  Amy and Moo kept running, straight into the woods on the far side of the playground.

  Trees and weeds and underbrush surrounded them and enclosed them.

  They stopped, catching their breath, leaning against a pair of elm trees.

  “This sucks,” said Amy. “They’re going to look for us. They’ll send the cops.”

  Moo nodded, breathing heavily. We can make ourselves hard to find, though, she said. They can’t look everywhere.

  “Yes, they can, practically!” Amy argued. “They can do a robocall to, like, everyone in the neighborhood, and send out texts and et cetera, and have everybody keeping an eye out. It won’t be just cops looking, it’ll be everyone, everywhere!”

  You’re forgetting something.

  “What?”

  It’s 1989. It’s old-fashioned times. They don’t have robocalls and text messages. I don’t know if they even have TV.

  Hope!

  “ ’Kay,” said Amy. “But that’s just part of the problem. Why was she waiting for us?”

  Who?

  “Don’t play dumb just because you’re scared to talk about it. The woman with the hat. The one who touched my face and saw the green stuff. Maybe the same, you know, person we saw back in the big woods, just before we took off in the chair.”

  Moo covered her face. She obviously didn’t want to talk about it.

  There’s no such things as witches, she said. Not in real life.

  “Yeah, well, there’s also no such thing as going back in time, or being able to see spirits in macaroni and cheese.”

  Maybe she was trying to help us, said Moo, sounding uncertain.

  Amy kept trying to think scientifically, looking for logical explanations for everything that was happening.

  The other Possible Witch, said Moo, is thirty years from now.

  Amy steadied herself.

  “It’s a mystery,” she said. “A scientific mystery. For now maybe it just has to keep on being a mystery. In the meantime, we’ll be careful. We’ll be alert, and—”

  Someone screamed.

  Off through the woods, not far away. A kid, screaming. Amy and Moo both jumped a little and looked at each other.

  There were several different kinds of screams in the Kid World. Amy had categorized them once, when she was bored at her grandmother’s house. The categories were like this:

  The way kids scream when they are having fun or when they get an excellent present
or something.

  The way kids scream when something scares them.

  The way kids scream when they are having a frustrated meltdown.

  The way kids scream when they are hurt.

  “Number four,” said Amy.

  Huh?

  “Never mind!” And they both ran through the trees, going where the scream was. Like all kids, they were curious. If something horrible or exciting was happening, they didn’t want to miss it.

  Another scream. This one came in the form of a word.

  “STOP!” said the scream, in the voice of a little girl.

  Amy and Moo jogged up a tiny hill, and the source of the screaming became visible.

  It was the small girl from Mrs. Barch’s class. The girl with shining black hair. (Heather, thought Amy.)

  Heather was getting beaten up by an adult.

  No, wait. It looked like an adult at first glance. It wore a suit and tie, and was big, but it wasn’t an adult, it was Henry Zane. And not just Henry Zane; the redheaded boy and girl were with him.

  Henry Zane had Heather in some kind of wrestling move, with her arm twisted up behind her. As Amy and Moo watched, he gave her arm a sharp yank.

  Heather screamed the way you would scream if a fire started in your stomach.

  The redheaded boy gave her a kick in the knee.

  Heather kicked him back somehow. He looked surprised.

  “Say you’re sorry!” Henry Zane was growling in her ear. “Say ‘I’m sorry I pushed the button to call the office and got you suspended, Henry!’ ”

  Henry Zane looked REALLY mad. His hair was all wild, and flipped back so you could see both eyes. Both eyes were like ice caves, but also like knives.

  “I’m SORRY!” cried Heather in a choking voice.

  “SusPENDED!” snarled Henry Zane. “I don’t GET suspended, you [a whole string of unsuitable words that would turn you into a salamander if you actually heard them out loud]!”

  Heather sobbed. She was crying so hard she was drooling.

  “I’m feeding you to the witch,” said Henry Zane matter-of-factly. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. Some kids taste better than other kids, you know. I’d probably taste sour, but I bet you’d taste pretty good. Mmmmmm-mmm!”