Double the Danger and Zero Zucchini

by Betsy Uhrig

  Okay, done, I texted Marta and Javier. How do we get him off the roof?

  What about a tree limb? Marta wrote. He could grab a tree branch and swing to the ground like a monkey.

  Too predictable, Javier texted back immediately.

  Plus, Grampa is a gardener, I wrote. He wouldn’t let a tree branch grow so near the house. My dad was a total nut about trees near the house, so I knew what I was talking about.

  Geez, said Marta. Okay, what about a drainpipe? He could slide down a drainpipe.

  Not sure he could really do that, Javier texted. They are attached to the side of the house.

  How do people do it in movies? Marta asked.

  How do people do anything in movies? said Javier.

  How do people do anything in books? I asked.

  I thought this was a good point, but both of them ignored it.

  Trellis? said Javier after a few moments of standoff. We have a trellis on the side of our screen porch. Maybe he could climb down it like a ladder.

  That wasn’t a bad idea. But Gerald was a boy now, not a frog. He was a lot heavier than he used to be.

  Would a trellis hold him? I asked.

  Naturally, it was Marta who replied: Only one way to find out!

  19

  SO THERE I WAS THE NEXT afternoon, sitting on the roof of Javier’s porch, staring at the top of the trellis and thinking about gravity. The trellis looked downright flimsy. And how was it anchored in the ground? I couldn’t tell from this angle, and we hadn’t checked before I got out here.

  Javier and Marta were in Great-Aunt Rosa’s room, which had a window over the porch roof. The window I’d crawled out of. Great-Aunt Rosa wasn’t home, conveniently for us.

  Javier was filming me.

  Marta was coaching me.

  “It’s easy,” she said. “Just inch yourself down the slope on your butt. No need to stand up.”

  There was no way I was standing up on the roof, and I think that should have been clear to everyone already.

  It turns out that roofs that don’t seem steeply pitched or high up when you look at them from the ground are completely different when you’re on top of them. When you’re on top of them, they feel like a waterslide and a high dive combined. Except without any water to land in. And that was a crucial difference, now that I thought about it.

  When Marta had suggested a human trial for the trellis question, she had been thinking of herself as the stunt person, of course. But when we got to Javier’s house, she had to admit that even she couldn’t crawl out the window and then climb down the trellis with her arm in a sling.

  So it was up to me.

  I sat there on the porch roof, trying to take in as much sensory detail as possible while I had the chance. The late-afternoon sun on my face. The gritty shingles under my hands. The icy trickle of fear pooling in my knee and stomach areas. Part of this pause was for the book, but most of it was plain stalling.

  “Alex, it’s going to be dark soon,” said Marta. “Get a move on!”

  “All right, all right,” I said.

  I hitched my way down the roof on my butt as Marta had suggested. When I got to the edge, where the trellis leaned against the house, I tapped the trellis with one foot, trying to test how sturdy it was. It felt solid—it wasn’t one of those plastic ones. So that was good. What wasn’t good was what Javier said next.

  “Wait there!” he called. “I’ve got to run downstairs and film from below for the rest.”

  Which left me in an almost literal cliff-hanger situation.

  20

  I WAITED ON THE EDGE OF the roof for Javier and Marta to get into place on the grass below me. I was starting to think they’d stopped for a snack when I heard the back door bang shut.

  “And… action!” said Javier when he was ready, and he and Marta chuckled.

  I needed to face the house as I climbed down the trellis. This meant that I had to roll over onto my stomach on the roof and feel around for places to put my feet in the trellis. None of this was flattering when I saw the recording later. Javier certainly wasn’t trying for any glamour shots from down there, and I certainly wasn’t providing them from up here.

  Once I found my first footholds, I shimmied down the roof on my stomach until I could find two lower footholds. And so it went until I was almost off the roof and ready to grab hold of the trellis with my hands.

  “How is this thing anchored?” I called.

  “Anchored?” said Marta, which wasn’t encouraging.

  “I want to make sure it’s not going to tip over when I put all my weight on it,” I said.

  “I’ll hold it,” Marta offered.

  Marta didn’t weigh as much as I did, even before you factored in the weight of the trellis, so this didn’t reassure me in any way.

  “Don’t lean back,” said Javier. “Keep your center of gravity forward.”

  Now I was basically clinging to the trellis like Spider-Man, except without the sticky hands and feet. Or the self-confidence.

  “You got this,” said Marta from her position below me.

  And I did. Sort of. For a while, anyway.

  I clambered slowly down the trellis, trying to keep my center of gravity forward, whatever that meant. I was just relaxing enough to think about sensory detail when one sound in particular got my attention.

  It was the sound of the trellis cracking beneath my left foot.

  21

  FORTUNATELY, I WAS MORE THAN HALFWAY down when I fell. Unfortunately, I fell awkwardly and landed funny on my hand. It didn’t hurt that much until I got a look at it. The index finger was bent way farther back than any finger should ever be. As soon as I saw that, it started to hurt a lot.

  Marta noticed it and screamed. Which was strange, because Marta could basically see her own blood jetting out of her in pulsing spurts and laugh. But faced with an injury not her own, she fell apart. So on her list of career options: stuntwoman yes, doctor no.

  I was lying on the grass, cradling my injured hand and fighting the urge to puke, when a shadow loomed over me. It was a long shadow because it was late in the day, not because the shadow’s owner was tall. Which she wasn’t.

  “What seems to be the problem here?” Great-Aunt Rosa asked.

  “Alex broke his finger off,” said Marta.

  “And where is it now?” asked Great-Aunt Rosa.

  “Where is what?” asked Marta.

  “The finger.”

  “On my hand,” I said.

  “So you didn’t break it all the way off.”

  “It might be dangling by a thread,” said Marta. “Or a tendon or something,” she added, to make it sound more medical, I guess.

  Great-Aunt Rosa knelt down on the grass next to me, being careful not to kneel on the hem of her skirt. She took my injured hand in both of hers. “The finger is completely attached,” she said, turning my hand over gently. “But it is sprained. Wait here.” She got up and headed for the house.

  “Is she going to call an ambulance?” asked Marta. Marta was familiar with most of the EMTs in the area and had certain favorites.

  My stomach—already queasy, to use Lulu’s word—lurched. I had a horror of calling 911. I could have been lying squashed under the wheels of a tractor trailer and still be croaking, No 911. But that’s another story.

  “No one needs to call an ambulance,” I said. “I’m feeling better already.”

  “She’s getting the first-aid kit,” said Javier.

  “I hope it’s the Deluxe First Responders’ Kit,” said Marta, who apparently had favorites among first-aid kits as well. “The Standard isn’t going to do it with something as ghastly as this.”

  22

  GREAT-AUNT ROSA MADE DO WITH THE Standard first-aid kit, in spite of Marta’s grumbling. She did a really good job of bandaging my finger into a normal position, as a matter of fact.

  When she was done, she gave me back my hand and asked, “Better now?”

  “Much,” I said. I was sitt
ing up and feeling less nauseated. Especially since 911 was off the table.

  She nodded.

  “Thanks!” I remembered to add as Great-Aunt Rosa walked back toward the house. She waved without turning around.

  She hadn’t asked what had happened, though maybe she had seen the broken trellis and figured it out. But she hadn’t asked why it had happened either, which most grown-ups usually did.

  “How is she so good at bandaging?” I asked Javier.

  “She used to be a nurse in, like, the Crimean War,” he said.

  “The Crimean War?” I repeated. “Wasn’t that Florence Nightingale’s war?”

  “I was jok—” Javier began, at the same time that Marta said, “Did your great-aunt meet Florence Nightingale?”

  And again I asked myself how it was that we all went to the same school and had such different levels of information.

  “So did you record all that?” I asked Javier.

  “Right up until you fell,” he said. “I’m not that cold.”

  “I guess Gerald could use a trellis to get off the roof,” I said.

  “Part of the way, at least,” said Marta.

  “So that problem’s solved,” I said. “I’ll let Caroline know.”

  I stood up and decided I was okay to walk home, even though my finger was still throbbing under the bandage and my whole hand felt eight times bigger than usual.

  I’d made it partway down Javier’s front walk when he yelled after me, “We need to get you into better shape if you’re going to find your grampa.”

  And Marta added, “You can do it. You just need to push past the pain.”

  23

  IT FELT WRONG WALKING INSTEAD OF running home from Javier’s, but I couldn’t bring myself even to jog with that gigantic, throbbing Disney-character hand hanging from my arm.

  It took way longer to walk home than it did to run. When I finally got there, I explained the injury to my mother as the result of a freak pogo-stick accident. This wasn’t a complete lie, but that accident had happened two years ago, and I wasn’t that badly hurt at the time. Neither Javier nor I had even looked at his pogo stick since then. They aren’t as fun as they appear to be.

  After dinner that evening, typing with most of my fingers, I wrote Caroline an e-mail describing the trellis and how Gerald could use it to get off the roof. I didn’t mention any falling or spraining. I made Gerald seem pretty graceful and athletic.

  She wrote back almost immediately.

  Great solution! Of course Grampa would have a trellis. I have an idea, though. To make it more exciting, I’ll have Gerald get partway down and then fall. It would be more interesting to make him a bit of a klutz in the beginning, right? Then readers will be rooting for him as he gets more coordinated later on.

  A bit of a klutz? Really? Obviously, I’d made the whole thing sound way easier than it had been. But I comforted myself with the idea that Grampa’s trellis would have to be extra strong to support his magic vines or whatever, so it wouldn’t just snap under Gerald as he made his way down. Gerald, unlike me, would have to be a bit of a klutz to fall from Grampa’s sturdy trellis.

  About an hour later, a new version of the book came from Caroline. She was a fast writer, that was for sure. She’d added the scene with the trellis and the fall. All good. But there was a new cry for help at the bottom:

  “Where do I go from here? How on earth is Gerald going to find out about the vortex, let alone rescue Grampa from it???”

  I didn’t have an answer for that one.

  * * *

  Neither, it turned out, did Javier or Marta at lunch the next day. Getting a person off a roof is one thing. That was something we could try out ourselves and record and describe. Okay, there’d been a minor accident, but my finger was already almost fine. Getting Gerald from the bottom of a trellis all the way to a warlock’s vortex was way harder.

  “This is a whole plot turning point,” Javier said, picking the raisins out of his oatmeal-raisin cookie. “Isn’t that the writer’s job? To come up with plot turning points?”

  We agreed that it was. Ordinarily.

  “But,” I said, “we’re the ones who sent Caroline off on the whole vortex thing—she was thinking gardening and county fairs.”

  “Don’t remind me,” said Javier.

  “Wait a minute,” said Marta, after we’d sat there thinking about the boringness of prize zucchinis for a while. She threw a handful of Javier’s raisins into her mouth. “Washn’t it the ghosht who came up with the vortexsh idea?” She gulped down her raisin clump and chased it with a swallow of milk. “And that was a huge plot turning point, right?”

  She was right. The last big plot turning point had been the ghost’s idea.

  “So?” said Marta, way too eagerly.

  “So what?” Javier and I said at the same time.

  “So let’s ask the ghost what happens next!”

  24

  I STILL HAD THE KEY TO the Old Weintraub Place, so it wasn’t impossible to “ask the ghost” what should happen next. And since it wasn’t impossible, for Marta it was merely a matter of badgering before Javier and I agreed to try.

  We decided we would go over that afternoon and casually drop off the new printout. Leave it there on the kitchen table and go home, and come back the next day to see what had happened. If the ghostwriter (which is what we were calling it now) wanted to contribute, it could.

  We met at Javier’s house. I had the key and the book. Javier had his camera. Marta had a suspiciously full-looking backpack.

  “What is in that thing?” Javier asked her.

  “Ghost-hunting supplies,” she said. “As promised.”

  “We aren’t trying to hunt any ghosts,” I said. “We’re just dropping off this stack of paper and leaving. Right?”

  “Right,” Javier said.

  “Sure, whatever,” said Marta.

  When we got inside the house, Marta put the backpack down and started rummaging around in it like Mary Poppins. She pulled out an ancient TV antenna thingy that she’d obviously scrounged from her basement and stuck foil balls on the tips of. She looked proud of it—much prouder than she should have.

  “This will tune in to any ghostly activity,” she claimed as she lengthened the prongs as far as they would go.

  “It’s not even going to tune in to any TV activity,” Javier said. “Unless you want a show from the seventies.”

  “What’s it supposed to do if it tunes in to a ghost?” I asked Marta.

  “Vibrate, maybe,” said Marta. “Or hum. Possibly dip.” The antenna dipped as she said this. “I did that on purpose,” she added quickly. As if Javier and I would have thought otherwise for even one second. “But it will probably do something like that if it detects anything. It’s never been tested in the field before, so we won’t know for sure until it happens.”

  Nothing happened, of course. We made it into the kitchen without detecting even the ghost of a centipede.

  I set the stack of paper on the kitchen table. There was a Post-it sticking out of the last page, where Caroline’s question was. I had put it there myself. It had a red question mark on it, so the ghostwriter would know where to look.

  Javier and I were ready to leave. But Marta had gone to visit her backpack in the front hall and returned with some kind of makeshift miner’s hat on her head. On closer inspection, it was a plastic souvenir batting helmet with a flashlight duct-taped to it. What was left of her curly hair was sticking out around the helmet, making her look like the deranged clown from every kid’s nightmares.

  “This’ll take a few minutes,” she announced, swishing her antenna like a sword in front of her.

  “What will?” Javier asked.

  “Our exploration of the basement,” said Marta, yanking open the nearest door. “Come on.”

  25

  MARTA WAS HALFWAY DOWN THE BASEMENT stairs when she noticed that neither Javier nor I was following her.

  “Get over here!” she yelled.


  “We’ll wait until you’re done,” said Javier, pulling out a kitchen chair and getting ready to take a seat.

  “Don’t be such a dud,” said Marta. “I need you to film in case something goes down.”

  Javier sent me a look that suggested the only thing going down was his opinion of Marta’s grip on her marbles. But he picked up his camera.

  “Let’s go,” he said to me.

  “You don’t really need me to—” I began, but he cut me off.

  “You first. I’ll film you both, just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”

  He didn’t reply.

  Marta was well into the basement by the time Javier and I joined her there. I wasn’t even thinking about the sensory detail. Grampa’s house was all void inside now, so there was no basement for Gerald to explore. Still, I couldn’t help but notice that this was a basement-basement, rather than a rec-room-basement: dim, musty, and chilly.

  I stood near the bottom of the stairs, and Javier filmed halfheartedly while Marta scurried around with her ridiculous hat and antenna, looking for who knows what.

  Then she found it.

  “Guys,” she said, “come here. I think we know who our ghost is.”

  “We” didn’t have a ghost as far as Javier and I were concerned. But the two of us wandered over anyway, because we knew we weren’t getting out of the basement until we had.

  “Check this out,” said Marta triumphantly. She kept blinding us in turn with her headlight as she looked from me to Javier and back again.

  “It looks like a bunch of cardboard boxes,” said Javier, shading his eyes with his hand.

  Marta had one of them open.

  “Hey,” I said, “there’s trespassing and then there’s… opening people’s boxes of private stuff.”

  “We’re not being nosy,” said Marta. “This is an important clue. The boxes say ‘Rob’s Books’ on them, and look what’s in this one.”