by Abby Cooper
“Go to the bathroom,” Mr. Kremen said. Now her face was really green-ish. “Quickly! And someone go with her.”
I jumped up and chased Zoe out the door. Whatever invisible force was holding me in my seat felt like it had suddenly broken. It wasn’t good that she felt sick, but this was a great excuse to get out.
The weird thing was, after I was all the way down the hall and into the bathroom and holding Zoe’s hair as the chopped liver came back out, I could still hear Mr. Kremen’s voice in my head. Liver alone! Liver! Liver liver liver.
It was one thing to cover your ears so you wouldn’t hear what someone else said out loud. But how could you stop hearing the words in your mind?
“Thanks again.” Zoe swished a third gulp of water around in her mouth and spit it out in the bathroom sink. “That was really nice of you to hold my hair.”
“It’s what best friends do,” I said. “Anyway, you helped me too. It was the least I could do.”
“Best friends are there for good stuff and bad stuff,” she agreed.
“And dumb liver stuff,” I said.
“And holding-your-hair-while-you-puke stuff,” she added, and we both giggled. “How exactly did I help you?”
“Well, you know I used to write about you,” I said. “And earlier I discovered that I still can. I mean, obviously I can. But the things I write actually happen. Like when you sang ‘Twinkle, Twinkle,’ that was because of me.”
The words sounded weird coming out of my mouth. They felt pretend. Like I was Bo, telling some story about my made-up, gray, cylindrical bad guy with a crown. But I wasn’t. This was real.
I gulped as it really, truly, deeply sunk in. This was real. Zoe was alive. And when I wrote things about her, they actually came true.
It was cool. No, it was amazing. So why was a whole bunch of sweat suddenly clinging to my forehead?
Zoe’s eyes got huge. “That’s so awesome,” she said. “I was wondering why I suddenly sang that song.”
I giggled, but it came out strained. “Good,” I said. “I’m glad you thought so. I mean, I knew you’d think so. Oh, and I’m really sorry about the liver. I feel kind of bad. But I didn’t make you eat it. I just wrote that you distracted Mr. Kremen from talking about me and that you basically saved the day. The eating thing was all you!”
Zoe pretended to gag. “Obviously I have no idea what I’m doing in this weird world of yours. You should probably be super specific when you write about me.”
“Sure thing,” I said as I wiped a little sweat off my forehead with a paper towel.
What was I so worried about? I knew Zoe better than I knew anyone. I knew what she’d like and what she wouldn’t. Sure, I had a lot of control over her, but as long as I wrote stories about things that made her happy, there was nothing to be nervous about. If Clue really did make this happen, I couldn’t be mad at him for all the kinks that would need to be worked out. I mean, Zoe was still standing before me. The Zoe I created.
“I’m here for you,” I told her. And then I started singing. “Twinkle, twinkle…” I shot Zoe a look.
“Little star,” she chimed in.
And we sang all the way back to class.
12
The Funny Stuff
When school got out at three, Zoe and I skipped next door to Tiveda Elementary and picked up Bo. I stood up extra straight as I took his hand in mine. I felt different this afternoon. Good different. Important different.
The kind of different you feel when you have a best friend who is a living, breathing, perfect human being, who has come with you to pick up your brother, because why wouldn’t she?
“We’re going to walk home with my friend Zoe,” I told Bo. “She just moved in across the street.”
“Zoe!” he repeated. “That’s the same name as your imaginary friend.”
I froze.
“Yeah,” I said, “but lots of kids have the same name.”
“Not me. I’m the only Bo in my whole class.”
“Well, you’re special. Now come on.”
“Can you hold my other hand, Zoe?” Bo asked.
I laughed, even though a weird surge of something—sadness? Jealousy?—zipped through me. Bo had everything so easy. If he wanted a new friend, he just asked, and bam, he had one.
Zoe glanced at me, and I nodded.
Bo asked, “Can you swing me back and forth?”
Zoe glanced at me again, and again, I nodded. This was pretty weird, being in charge of someone else’s decisions. But at the same time (Oppservation!), it was also really cool to be needed.
“One, two, three, swing!” I shouted. Our hands lurched forward, and so did Bo. His little body flung up, up, up, and he landed in a fit of contagious laughs.
“One, two, three, swing!” Zoe shouted, and up he went again.
“This is fun,” Bo said.
I smiled at the two of them so hard my cheeks hurt.
“Yeah,” I said. “It really is.”
* * *
Mom and Dad’s truck pulled into the driveway a couple minutes after we got home and said goodbye to Zoe. Dad had some follow-up doctor appointment, and he looked sleepy, but that didn’t stop him from asking his typical end-of-the-day questions only a second after they’d come inside.
“How was school today?” he asked. “What’s new with Zoe? Who defeated the bad guy?”
I thought I’d have more time to figure out what I was going to say, but now it was too late. It was one thing to make up a story on the spot when I didn’t want him to worry about my stolen notebook. It was something else completely to skip over the little detail that new Zoe was notebook Zoe—a real person who lived across the street, went to my school, and was even more amazing in real life than she was on paper.
I stood on my tiptoes and stared out the front window as Bo started to talk. Zoe waved to me from her window across the street. As much as I wanted to hang out with her every second of every day for the rest of forever, I had to come up with a plan before I brought her around Mom and Dad. Dad especially. He’d heard every single story about her I’d ever written. He knew exactly who she was and what she looked like. If he knew she was real, Dad would be big-time confused, and who knew what being confused could do to his liver and his body. Sure, he was done with chemo for now, but he was also done with chemo toward the end of fifth grade, only then the cancer came back again. So it turned out that he wasn’t really done at all. He had to be done for real this time, though. I needed him to be done for real. Which meant, for now, I had to keep Zoe away.
Bo finished describing how the bad guy came for his library teacher but she defeated him, because everybody always defeated that bad, bad cylinder thingy with a crown.
“That’s great, Bo,” Dad said. He scratched the brim of his tall Cat in the Hat hat. “Jade?”
“Um.” The question played over and over in my head. What was new with Zoe? Oh, you know. Not much. She tried chopped liver. Wasn’t a big fan.
But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything, because my mouth got way too dry and scratchy to even swallow, let alone make words come out. It felt like a desert in there, cacti and all.
Luckily Mom burst into the living room. Her long hair was up in a messy bun with big strands escaping and going every which way. She brushed a big piece out of her face with a rubber-glove-covered hand. “Has anyone seen the dustbuster?”
“She decided it’s cleaning night,” Dad told us.
“Hi to you too,” I said.
“Sorry,” Mom said, and leaned over to kiss both of us on the tops of our heads. “Hi. Love you. Sorry,” she repeated. “You know how I get. It’s hard to stop. Hi.”
“You’ve barely started,” I told her. “But hi.”
Mom and Bo were both like that. Besides their hot-fudge colored hair and their love of monster movies, neither
one liked to stop once they’d started a project.
Mom jogged in place, like standing was too boring for her so she had to spice it up. “So, dustbuster? Anyone? No? If you were a dustbuster, where would you be?”
“Lego Land,” said Bo.
“A bookstore,” I said.
“My doctor’s office, no contest,” said Dad.
We all looked at each other and totally cracked up. My family was so weird. Lego Land. A bookstore. Dad’s doctor’s office. Yeah, right. We hadn’t left Colorado in two years—and we definitely weren’t going anywhere anytime soon—so how the heck would our dustbuster go clean any of those places? Except Dad did live at the doctor’s. So that one was actually realistic.
OPPSERVATION: My family laughs at things that shouldn’t be funny, once you think about it.
Questions for further research: Why doesn’t anything ever happen to us that’s really funny?
“Okay, new plan,” Mom said, flicking some dust off her face. “Dance party.”
She tapped something on her phone and soon the whole room was thumping with some funny kid song. Dad clapped his hands as Mom spun Bo and me around. We shouted and squealed and twirled in big circles, our arms waving and our feet flailing. We flew around the room. I closed my eyes, soaking it in. It had been a weird day. But a pretty good one too. Maybe my family could laugh for normal reasons sometimes after all.
* * *
After the dance party I raced up to my room and went straight to the window. I should’ve been tired, but I had more energy than ever. My window faced the same direction as the one in the living room, so I could still see Zoe sitting by her front window. She waved to me right away with both arms, like she’d been watching my window all night, waiting for me to appear behind it.
I mouthed “what’s” and then pointed up at the ceiling.
Zoe pointed up at her ceiling, too, like she was answering, “the ceiling.”
The whole thing felt kind of familiar, like it had happened before. As I held up a finger almost automatically, I realized—it had! This was a story I’d written over the summer. We were both bored but we couldn’t hang out for some reason, and since neither of us had cell phones, we were stuck watching each other through our windows like people in the olden days. I’d said, “What’s up?” and she’d said, “The ceiling,” just like this. Now we were going to play charades, which was going to be hilarious because we couldn’t actually guess each other’s words unless we somehow magically became master lip readers. I’d held up one finger because I was going to act out one word—monkey. Next Zoe would hold up two fingers and pretend to be a vampire chicken. (That’s what I thought she was, anyway. I never really found out for sure.) This would go on pretty much forever, with little breaks here and there for snacks and hysterical giggling.
We played until it was so dark that we could barely see each other’s windows, just like in the story. When the game ended and the world became pitch black, I stayed calm and happy.
Even though I couldn’t see her anymore, I knew she was still there. And alive.
I fell asleep with a smile on my face.
13
The Window Seat
I practically flew out of bed the next morning, just like I had the day before, but for a slightly different reason. I didn’t need to chase Clue down for my notebook, but I did need the fun to start as soon as possible. For the second time this week—and possibly for the second time forever—I didn’t want to press the snooze alarm a thousand times and then drag myself through the motions of getting ready for school. I wanted to speed through them—while twirling, maybe—like a famous award-winning author.
School, I thought to myself as I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and got dressed. School! With a real best friend. With the best best friend.
While I was getting ready, Bo had finished his picture of a lamp defeating the bad guy. We hugged Mom and Dad goodbye, and then we were off.
I grabbed his hand and pulled him up Zoe’s front walk. She opened the door before we even knocked. This day was already amazing, and it had barely begun.
“Good morning!” Zoe shouted.
We laughed. “Good morning back,” I said as she closed the door behind her.
“Don’t you have to say bye to your mom and dad?” Bo asked.
Zoe tilted her head. “No, not really.”
“Why?” he asked.
Her head stayed where it was. “I’m not sure.”
“Why?” he asked again.
“I don’t think I have them.”
“Why?” yet again.
Tomorrow I was so asking Mom to take Bo to school.
“I live by myself,” Zoe answered.
“Okay, enough about that,” I said, trying to change the subject. “It’s sunny outside. Who likes the sun? Yay, weather!”
Zoe and Bo laughed and started talking about how great spring was. I hung back and peered at Zoe’s little house over my shoulder. It looked so much like ours. Same brick exterior and bright red door. But instead of four people crammed inside of it, there was just her. I never really wrote about her family, or even mine all that much. So it made sense that she didn’t have parents to live with. I never wrote them into life. She had no one telling her when to go to bed, what to eat, what chores to do. No one making her walk her annoying little brother to school. She could do anything she wanted, anytime.
I didn’t want to admit that I’d been a little worried about having so much control over Zoe. But when she was home, the power was totally hers. I took a big breath, grinned, and hurried to catch up.
* * *
“Hey, can we talk?” A familiar voice stopped me by my locker.
“What’s up?” I asked Clue.
“Well, I went to the pond last night and tried to get the magic to work for me, with my notebook, but it didn’t happen. I think it might only work for one person at a time.”
“Your notebook?” I’d seen him holding the same green one before, but I just figured it was for school stuff.
“Yeah.” He held it up. “You’re not the only one who writes, you know.”
“What do you write about?”
I didn’t know why I was curious. Could be a writer thing. Mrs. Yang says writing isn’t just putting pen to paper: it’s thinking, and planning, and talking about it with others too. Besides, he knew what I wrote about, so it was only fair that I got to know what he was writing about.
Clue looked at his shoes. “Oh…a person. Sort of like what you do. Anyway,” he snapped back to attention, “it’s okay that it didn’t work yet, I guess. I should probably observe Zoe more and see how everything plays out before I try to bring my person into the world.”
I raised my eyebrows at him. There were a lot of weird things about what he just said. See how everything plays out? Before he brings his person into the world? Did that mean he was going to swap Zoe out for somebody else? What?
I must have had a super stressed look on my face, because Clue shot me a reassuring smile.
“Look, I’m going to do my best to make this work out for both of us. I won’t make Zoe disappear without talking to you first. Try to trust me, okay?”
Even with that smile, trusting him did not sound like the most possible thing in the world.
“Trust you? You stole my notebook!”
“But for a good reason! Besides, you didn’t like me even before that,” Clue said. “You’re always glaring at me, even when I try to help you out. What did I ever do to you before now?” Clue looked seriously upset, and for a second I almost felt bad for him. But only for a second, and only the littlest bad feeling humanly possible.
“Yeah, you did something other than take my notebook,” I told Clue. “Zoe is a better friend than you’ll ever be, even if you do know all the answers to everything. And even if you somehow brought her to life.” T
hen I slammed my locker shut and went to go find her. He obviously didn’t remember that stealing my notebook wasn’t the first bad thing he’d ever done.
At one of our first hospital visits, during the winter Dad started treatments, the nurse took all of us to this teeny chemo room with boring white walls and no windows. The staff had given Bo and me lollipops and told us how brave we were for going to chemo with Dad (which was pretty silly—we just had to sit there; he was the one who had to get poked and prodded and have all those tubey things sticking out of him).
“I don’t want to be a bother,” Mom had said to the nurse, “but last time we were here, we were in a room with a window. He likes looking out at the trees and the birds. It makes the time go a lot faster.”
“Lila,” Dad said softly, gently grabbing her wrist. “It’s fine. Other people like the window seat too. It’s not only us in here.”
“I know.” Mom said. “Every single person here deserves a freakin’ window. When cancer is trying to get you, you should get a freakin’ window.”
She didn’t exactly say freakin’, though.
I looked at the floor and pretended to be invisible. Bo clutched Giraffe and listened to Mom like she was telling the most suspenseful bedtime story of all time.
The vibe in that room got super weird then. The air seemed really heavy and it made my stomach feel so twisted and my brain so jumbly that I could hardly catch my breath. The walls hadn’t seemed so bad to me at first, but suddenly it was like they were closing in and squishing me whole.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” I croaked. I grabbed my notebook and rushed out of there as fast as I could.
That was when I saw him. Gresham Gorham, the kid at school with all the answers who’d been in Tiveda even longer than me. He was standing in front of a room on the other side of the hallway. A room that had a window.
And not just any window. A big one. With lots of birds and trees on the other side.