Two Girls, a Clock, and a Crooked House

by Michael Poore

  Heather would have screamed again, except Henry Zane smashed a big hand over her mouth.

  “All I have to do is tie you to a tree and leave you,” he added.

  “LET HER GO!” Amy shouted.

  Amy hadn’t really known she was going to shout. It surprised her. She remembered that one of her goals in life was to NOT get beaten up by Henry Zane.

  But you were supposed to stand up for people. She knew that. She had been taught that in school, and by her parents.

  Mostly, though, it just made her so MAD, seeing Henry Zane doing what he was doing. Heather was less than HALF his size, plus he had two people helping him.

  While Amy was thinking these thoughts, Moo stomped down the hill and gave Henry Zane a powerful, angry shove.

  Wow! She caught him by surprise! He fell back and landed on his butt with a huge THUMP! and made a hurt face.

  Moo, Amy noticed, had her hood up and appeared to be glaring at Henry Zane with enormous plastic cow eyes.

  Heather, suddenly released, stumbled off to one side, grabbing at her arm.

  The redheads looked surprised. Their mouths hung open. They looked momentarily brain damaged.

  Holy cow! thought Amy, running down to stand beside Moo (raising her hood as she went, feeling her antennae bend and bounce). That was the bravest thing I ever saw in my whole entire life. (Why wasn’t she that brave? There were probably soldiers in the marines who weren’t that brave.)

  Moo started to answer, but just then Henry Zane’s eyes went supernova, and he scrambled up off the ground, big dirty hands grabbing for Moo’s throat.

  Amy squinched her eyes shut, stepped right in front of Moo, and got ready to hit Henry Zane SO HARD right in the…

  Except Amy didn’t have the first idea how to hit anything. Henry Zane just sort of ran into her and tripped over her, and they all went down sprawling in the dirt.

  Amy opened her eyes just in time to see the redheads running away.

  And also to see Henry Zane jumping up again, cursing so hard it didn’t even sound like a language at all, but more like he was trying to go to the bathroom with his mouth, and getting ready to jump on Moo and land on her stomach with both feet.

  Amy had time to think that this was going to hurt Moo really, really badly. Raw fear knifed straight down through her whole body, and she felt sick.

  Which was when a couple of voices screamed, “NO, HENRY!”

  The voices were kid voices, but they were big, too, somehow. They were the voice version of Moo’s mighty shove.

  On top of the little hill stood the brave boy and girl from class, the ones who had stood up to Henry Zane. They looked mad. They had also changed clothes. The dinosaur shirt and the sparkly dress were gone, replaced with matching T-shirts.

  Her shirt said KUNG. His shirt said FOO.

  Really? thought Amy. Who were these kids? The original anti-bullies? The original frickin’ superheroes? Did they actually know kung fu or—

  Henry Zane stopped getting ready to jump on Moo’s stomach. He curled his lip, bared his teeth, and said, “This is none of your business.”

  Kung and Foo struck very convincing ninja poses.

  Henry Zane looked like he wanted to run uphill and punch the two of them in the face, but he also looked uneasy.

  “Your turn’s coming,” he growled at Kung and Foo, and his raging eyes looked like they were having dreams about where he was going to kick them and twist them, but for now he seemed to decide that he was outnumbered.

  He didn’t run. He just walked away, looking strange and out of place in his suit, with twigs and leaves all over him.

  “Thanks,” Amy said to the boy and girl on the hill, getting up off the ground, brushing dirt from her borrowed clothes.

  But the superheroes were gone.

  She galloped up the hill in time to see them walking off together through the trees.

  Hmmmm.

  Okay.

  Moo climbed the hill and stood beside her.

  That’s when Amy heard a low, terrible-sounding growl. The hair stood up on her arms.

  Moo looked embarrassed. She grasped her stomach with both hands and said, Shhhhh!

  “Oh, wow,” said Amy.

  Her stomach started growling, too.

  If we don’t find something to eat, said Moo, we’re going to digest our own bodies from the inside out.

  Amy shook her head and said, “How do you even think of something like that?”

  THEY DECIDED TO STEAL some food.

  Seriously, what else were they going to do? If they knocked on someone’s door and asked to be given dinner, chances were that they would get dinner. And get the police called, plus social workers. A whole army of responsible grown-ups would come rampaging in and scoop them up.

  They couldn’t buy dinner. They had no money. Amy wasn’t even sure if they used the same money anyway, back thirty years ago. They probably still used gold coins or polished stones.

  So before leaving the woods, Amy and Moo decided that they would go to the grocery store and smuggle some food out.

  “You’re an expert lie teller,” Amy told Moo. “Well, I’m an expert shoplifter.”

  You shoplifted a hoodie, said Moo. One time.

  “But I did it expertly. I used diversion tactics.”

  Moo looked impressed.

  Fine, she said. Lead the way, Miss Expert Person.

  Off they went to get dinner.

  * * *

  —

  THIRTY YEARS IN THE future, Amy was used to shopping at a grocery store called Kroger.

  Kroger was like a city. It was a supermarket on one end, and all through the rest of the store they had everything else. Garden hoses. Gum. School supplies. Headphones.

  Kroger was not too far away. Down one street, across a soccer field, down another street, and then across a giant parking lot with a Walgreens, a Big Boy restaurant, and a vitamin store.

  Amy knew how to get there, but just to be safe, the girls tried to walk on streets that were sort of out of the way, keeping an eye peeled for the Possible Witch. Amy kept expecting her to drop down out of a tree, or come whizzing down the street on a bicycle, but she didn’t.

  It took about twenty minutes to get there. Long enough for Amy’s stomach to actually start hurting, she was so hungry.

  Then, when they got to the big shopping area, it was different.

  It was still a shopping area, but the Walgreens wasn’t a Walgreens. It was called Harper Drug, with an old-fashioned sign. The Big Boy restaurant was a place called the Empire.

  And no Kroger.

  Instead of the great big city-store, there was a much smaller, old-time grocery called Pangles.

  Pangles didn’t look like the kind of place where you could buy garden hoses or phones or vacuum cleaners or hats. It looked like you could buy food there, and that was about it.

  They went inside (casually, like all good thieves) and disappeared down the dairy aisle.

  “Cheese and crackers,” said Amy. “It’s best to keep it simple, if you’re going to shoplift stuff.”

  Whatever. We can get shampoo, for all I care, as long as it’s the kind you can eat.

  They found the cheese. Just like thirty years from now, they had packages of cheese slices, so Moo picked up one of those—

  “No,” said Amy. “It’s bulky. We need something we can slip into a waistband or in our pocket.”

  She picked up a package of Colby cheese shaped like a domino.

  “We need to go down an aisle where you can’t see the big, round mirror,” she said.

  Pangles had a couple of big, round mirrors, hung up by the ceiling, over here, and over there.

  So they walked super casually down the aisle with the orange juice and apple juice, and Amy stu
ffed the cheese into her pocket.

  How nice of the school to lend them pants with big pockets! Was that a 1989 thing? Big pockets? A lot of the pants in the future didn’t even have pockets. So much for progress. It was a wonder that people in the future could shoplift at all.

  Crackers. Crackers were more difficult.

  They stood in the cracker aisle, looking at the boxes.

  A woman with a toddler in her cart went wheeling by. Down at the end of the aisle, an old man stood poking at loaves of Wonder bread.

  The whole time they’d been in the store—about five minutes—Amy hadn’t seen a manager. This was a bad thing. Her one experiment in crime had taught her that it was good to know where the managers were. She had a plan, and it depended on finding a manager.

  It also depended on the woman with the kid and the old man moving on to other parts of the store, which they soon did.

  Open one of the boxes, Amy told Moo.

  Okaaaaaaay…Moo acted like she was reading the back of a box of Ritz crackers and smoothly tore the box across the top.

  Inside the box were four long packages, in wax paper.

  So, said Moo, now what?

  Amy told Moo the plan that had taken shape in her head, and Moo exclaimed, I don’t THINK so!

  Well, do you have any better ideas?

  Moo didn’t. And she was sooooooo hungry. Her stomach made a noise like a mastodon gargling mushroom soup.

  Fine, she said, and stuffed a package of crackers into her waistband.

  * * *

  —

  A MINUTE LATER, THE store manager—a tall, thin, slightly greasy-looking man with a name tag that said SCOTT—was carrying a twenty-four-roll package of toilet paper past the cash registers when a young girl with glasses and long, messy hair came blasting down the frozen pizza aisle and jumped up and down in front of him.

  “There’s a RAT!” she shrieked. “Oh my God, a big, huge RAT stuck in the freezer thingy back there! A RAT with RED EYES and—”

  Scott went into full panic mode. His eyes popped, and he made desperate shushing motions at the girl. Then he sprinted down the pizza aisle, loudly whispering, “Where? Show me! Where?”

  The girl trotted after him, saying, “Over there! Over there, I think! I think it was a rat. It might have been a possum. OMG! Possums are even worse! Yes, I’m SURE it was a possum!”

  Customers followed Scott with their eyes, looking disgusted. No one noticed another girl, with curious eyes and bulging pockets, walking out the front door as casual as could be.

  Scott came to a stop in front of the freezers, looking this way and that.

  “I don’t see it!” he said. “Point out where it was! Point…”

  The girl with the wild hair was gone, probably frightened out of her mind.

  Wouldn’t you be, if you had seen a possum among the pizzas? I sure would.

  * * *

  —

  AMY FAST-WALKED ACROSS THE parking lot, past the restaurant and the Harper Drug, and waited for Moo on the far side of a busy street, in front of a church with a green steeple.

  Moo was laughing, Amy could tell, the whole way across the lot. She was still laughing by the time she arrived at the church.

  She looked at Amy and said, Possum!

  Amy laughed, too.

  Did you see him? The manager? He’s scarred for life, I bet.

  “Well, I hope not.”

  Well, me too, but still. Where are we going? I’m going to eat this church if I don’t get some food. I’m THIS CLOSE to being like a pure animal.

  “The woods by the school,” said Amy, who had thought this through.

  That’s FIVE HOURS AWAY!

  “It’s not. Calm down. It’s maybe—stop that!”

  Moo kept reaching for the cheese, which was threatening to fall out of Amy’s pocket.

  “It’s maybe twenty minutes. But we have to get out of sight. Then we can sit down and eat in peace, and think what to do next.”

  Fine, said Moo, but she said it darkly.

  And they started walking. Away from the shopping center, back through the neighborhood. All around them, they could feel people sitting down to normal family dinners. Meat loaf. Macaroni and cheese. Salmon casserole. Spaghetti. Italian sausage and green peppers. Pork chops.

  Amy found herself thinking about her mom and dad, naturally. At first, thinking about home made her smile a little bit. But the smile quickly vanished, replaced by a cloud of worry (an actual cloud).

  What’s wrong? asked Moo, who, of course, could see the cloud.

  “We have to get back,” said Amy.

  Back to the woods? asked Moo.

  “Back home.”

  Well, sure.

  “No!” Amy said urgently. Her cloud darkened. “Nothing’s for sure! The chair and the clock and everything are in pieces, and we don’t know how we’re going to fix any of it. If we make the wrong move, we’ll get scooped up by helpful people and sent somewhere. Plus, we still don’t know what that tall woman was all about.”

  But, said Moo, we do know we’re going to get home. We saw ourselves get home.

  “Oh yeah! Bloody and unconscious! You’re not helping. In fact, that’s a big fat reminder that things at home, in the future, are just as dangerous as—”

  Dangerous?

  Amy’s cloud began to rain. “Something bad’s going to happen!” she said, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. “Back home, back where—I mean, when we came from. I don’t know what, but something. I can feel it. Plus, that strange man who talked to Mom and Dad said it was really unlikely that everything would be okay. I don’t even know what I can do about any of it, but maybe something, because we can see things and do things, you know? I don’t know for sure about any of it, except I know we have to get back! We have to, Moo!”

  She was crying now. Her shoulders shook. The little cloud turned black.

  Moo stepped up and put her arms around her and squeezed.

  Didn’t say anything. Just squeezed.

  Which was nice.

  After a minute, Amy stopped shaking. She didn’t feel better, necessarily. Everything that was wrong was still wrong. But she felt stronger, and that helped.

  “I thought you weren’t a hugger,” she said, sniffling.

  I’m not, said Moo, letting go. But you are sometimes.

  Moo, thought Amy, knew how to be a friend.

  Thanks, said Moo. Looking around, she added, We should keep moving.

  Amy nodded. Then she stooped to pick up a couple of pebbles. Handing one to Moo, she said, “More fuel. We need all the help we can get.”

  I never, said Moo, heard anything more true in my life.

  They added the stones to the collection in their hoodie pockets and walked the rest of the way in silence.

  In the woods, they found a nice spot where the sun shone down and was warm, and there were soft, dry leaves all around, almost like a carpet. Two gray boulders cropped up out of the earth and made nice places to sit. Some birds fluttered around and sang now and then.

  Amy thought they were going to have a rough time getting the cheese open, but she must have underestimated how hungry Moo was.

  Gimme that, Moo said, and bit one whole corner off, plastic and all. Amy wasn’t sure if she actually chewed and swallowed the plastic, and she didn’t ask.

  They broke the cheese into blobs with their fingers the best they could, and made little cheese sandwiches. The sandwiches had little spirit-clouds around them. Like buttery halos.

  The woods, too, like all woods, Amy supposed, were crowded with spirit-forms and meanings. The trees had parts of the earth and sky running through them…water and soil and nutritious nature stuff. The rocks were like bubbles from down underneath, where the planet was hot and boiling.

&n
bsp; There was a soft breeze, with the soul of a grazing horse.

  I have to figure something out, said Moo. (Her voice, in Amy’s head, had a faraway quality that Amy recognized as meaning that Moo’s thoughts were someplace else. It was a voice Amy recognized from her own thoughts. It was something the two of them had in common: they both often went places inside their own heads.)

  “Figure out what?” asked Amy.

  Moo took a deep breath. How to talk to my mom, she said. It’s gone on too long, all this silence. Her blaming herself for everything. Until we learn how to hear each other, nothing will ever change or get better.

  She sounded so sad. It made Amy sad, too.

  “We can both think about it,” she said. “It’ll be sort of a thought experiment.”

  Moo nodded. She didn’t say anything else.

  But the breeze was an evening breeze, the kind that kicks up when the day world changes places with the night world.

  It’s going to get cold, said Moo.

  Amy nodded. Man, she missed her house. Or even the camp in the middle of the field. She missed so many things she didn’t normally have to worry about, like what she was going to eat, and what to say to people so they didn’t put you in a foster home, and how to stay clean, and where to pee so she didn’t get arrested. And how she was going to get through the night without freezing.

  A blanket was a simple thing until you wanted one and probably couldn’t get one.

  They needed friends.

  Amy wished they had done a better job of making friends that day during school. Of course, it was hard to know who to trust when you had only a couple of hours—

  Before she could think about that very much, something bad happened.

  IT HAPPENED FAST.

  Something slammed into Amy and was squashing her from both sides and pinning her arms down.

  She started to yell but didn’t get much yelling done before a couple of hands covered her mouth. At the same exact time, she saw Henry Zane loom up out of nowhere and wrap one big arm around Moo. With his other hand, he wrapped duct tape around her.