by J. S. Puller
“A loyal knight, willing to serve her.”
“Why a knight?”
“What else? Part soldier, part jock,” she said. “In the old days, they were the greatest heroes of them all. Every king and queen wanted one.”
“I could be that,” TJ said.
“A human boy, in my court?” Violet snorted. “Certainly not.”
“How about another animal?” Michelle asked, eyeing the pile of socks.
“I suppose that would be okay.”
It just came out. I couldn’t stop myself. “A hedgehog?” I said.
“Oh! Yes!” Violet made Queenie’s mouth open wide. “Yes. A hedgehog. I’d like that very much!”
Michelle pulled a plain white sock out of the pile. “Hold out your arm, buddy,” she said to TJ. He obeyed at once, letting her slip the sock over his hand.
“I’m pretty sure that’s not what a hedgehog looks like,” Violet said, in her normal voice.
But I was already three steps ahead of her. Phone out, I pulled up the Wikipedia page on hedgehogs and turned the screen so they could see the picture at the top.
“Oh, he’s so cute!” Michelle said.
He really was.
“Needs quills,” Violet said, looking at the sock on TJ’s hand.
“I’ve got just the thing,” Michelle replied. Another box came out of the cabinets. It was labeled “Pens.” “Help me, Violet.”
The two of them started to take pens out of the box. Carefully, they forced the little tab that people use to hang pens off their shirt pockets through the fabric of TJ’s white sock. They laid them out in layers, starting low on his hand and working up higher and higher. Before our eyes, a sock became a hedgehog with pen quills in a variety of colors and sizes. They overlapped one another, making his hand look rounder.
I scanned the Wikipedia page while they worked. “Did you know that hedgehogs are nocturnal?” I said.
“What’s nocturnal?” Michelle asked.
“It means they mostly sleep during the day,” TJ said. “And they’re most awake at night.”
“Exactly!” I said. Kind of like TJ himself, who had been sleepwalking through the days and only showing a spark of life at night, inside Squeaky Green.
Once Michelle and Violet were finished with the quills, Michelle fished out two blue buttons, one big and one sort of small, and glued them over TJ’s knuckles, giving the hedgehog eyes. “There we go,” she said. “A hedgehog to serve the queen.”
TJ worked his puppet’s mouth open and closed. The pens shivered and clacked against one another, but they stayed in place, more or less. “What’s his name?” he asked, looking up at Michelle.
“Well, don’t ask me. You have to take a look at him. What’s he look like?” Michelle said.
TJ examined the lines of pens a moment, then nodded slightly. “I think his name is Staples.”
“Staples the hedgehog it is,” Violet said.
“He’s Sir Staples,” Michelle said.
“Even better!”
“Hurray!” TJ said, making his reedy little voice squeak even higher than before. He bounced his hand up and down and started to open and close the hedgehog’s mouth in time to his words. “I’m your loyal knight, Queen Queenie,” he said to Violet’s hand.
“Oh, good,” Violet replied.
TJ went back to his regular voice. “But a queen needs people to rule over, doesn’t she?” he asked Michelle.
“You’re absolutely right!” Michelle grabbed a pink sock that was long and clingy, like it was supposed to go all the way up to the knee. Shucking off her plastic rings, she slipped it over her hand and halfway up her arm. “Find me two white buttons,” she said to me.
I went over to the box and shifted through the supply. I wasn’t quite sure what she was going for, but I picked out two as close to the same size as possible, big and round, each with four holes. Following her directions, I glued them to the sock, not so much on top, like the others, but on the sides. Michelle shaped the mouth with her fingers.
As I worked, I snuck a peek at TJ out of the corner of my eye. He was practicing making the hedgehog’s mouth move, silently forming words and trying to re-create the shape of them with his fingers. A line formed between his eyes as he concentrated, but it wasn’t a bad sort of look. He was extremely focused.
At least until Violet had Queenie exclaim, “Sir Staples! What a rude thing to say in front of your queen!”
TJ let out a peal of laughter.
“There we go,” Michelle said, once her puppet had eyes. She dug into a box of markers and pulled out a black one, shading in the tips of its lips.
“And who is this new member of our court?” Violet asked in Queenie’s voice.
Michelle turned the puppet to look at Queenie. And it suddenly came alive. “Huzzah and good morrow to you, my queen,” Michelle said, using another over-the-top English accent. “I be-eth your loyal flamingo servant.”
And yes. Somehow, it was a flamingo. The sock seemed to transform. I could see it.
“What’s your name?” Queenie asked.
Michelle turned to TJ. “What do think, buddy? What’s a good flamingo name?”
TJ scrunched up his face thoughtfully a moment, then nodded. “Francis,” he said. “That’s a good flamingo name.”
“And what role do you serve in my court?” Violet asked.
“Why, the royal hairdresser, of course!” Francis turned to look at Staples. “And my goodness! Not a moment too soon! Sir Staples, your hair is looking very stiff. You need conditioner, right away!”
“No baths!” Staples cried.
Violet snorted. Michelle giggled.
And TJ?
TJ just looked so happy that he’d been able to make them laugh. He looked proud of himself.
“Hedgehogs never take baths!” he said. “We roll around in the dirt and the mud and that’s how we get clean!”
“You clean with mud?” Francis asked.
“It’s magical mud,” Staples replied.
“Ooooooh, I see.”
“Well, I don’t see,” Queenie said. “Francis! I demand, by royal decree, that you give my loyal knight a bath! I won’t have him stinking up the palace!”
“Yes, my lady,” Francis said. “Happy to serve you in all manner of matters related to filthy hair!”
“You’ll have to catch me first!” cried Staples.
TJ got up and started to race to the far corner of the room. Michelle chased after him—careful to always let him stay two steps ahead of her—waving Francis about wildly and shouting out nonsense. “Fiddlesticks and puddle ducks!” she cried. “Tea and crumpets, you fiend!”
“We will have order!” Queenie said. “I demand order! This is a royal court, not a circus!”
“Oh, but, Your Majesty,” Francis replied. “Don’t forget you have elephants in the kitchen, preparing a great feast. And the lions and tigers will be dancing in the ballroom until all hours of the night!”
“I guess it is a circus!” Queenie said.
“Leah needs someone, too!” TJ said, running over to me. He grabbed my hand and pulled me over to the table, where he started searching the socks. “What kind of animal should she be?”
“Nah.” I smiled, leaning over to kiss him on the side of the head.
“Ew!” he said, wiping it off with one hand.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I have my favorite Hedgehog right here.” I threw my arm around his shoulders, pulling him up against my side. I didn’t need to play make-believe games.
I guess it was kind of an excuse, though. I didn’t think I would make a very good puppeteer. And I couldn’t think of an animal that I’d want to be, anyway.
I just knew I needed to be around.
I could only wonder… what was my role here?
If I was going to hang around, I needed to find a purpose.
CHAPTER NINE
We left Squeaky Green when it was time for dinner. Me, TJ, and Violet. But we left Queen
ie and Staples behind, so they could have a sleepover with Francis, Michelle said. She didn’t want him to get lonely, without his friends.
“There’s nothing worse than being lonely,” she said.
I didn’t think twice about it, at first. If Aunt Lisa found out that the puppets were made out of castoffs from a laundromat, she would absolutely refuse to let them into her nice and clean apartment.
But leaving them behind had an effect I didn’t anticipate. The farther away TJ walked from Staples, the quieter he got. He walked between me and Violet, but he didn’t look up; he let us talk over his head. And when Violet asked him a question, the most she got was a nod or a grunt or a shrug of one shoulder. Until we turned back onto Uncle Toby and Aunt Lisa’s street.
And then he said nothing at all.
“Did you hear me, TJ?” she said. “I asked if you knew Jamal.”
Nothing.
“Michelle’s little brother?”
Silence.
I knew I wasn’t imagining what the last few hours had been.
But it was like they had never happened.
TJ was right back where he started. And I could hear my mom’s warning echoing through my head again:
He isn’t talking.
I didn’t understand. It wasn’t fair.
Violet frowned at me. I could tell she was wondering the same things I was wondering but didn’t really know how to say it. We’d have to talk later.
For the time being, we said goodbye in front of the apartment’s main entrance, and then TJ and I walked back up the cement stairs, as I programmed Violet’s number into my phone.
“We had fun today, didn’t we, Hedgehog?” I asked him.
TJ just kept walking, his eyes staring straight ahead.
That evening, Uncle Toby decided to barbecue. He was out on the small balcony of the apartment, standing over the grill, when we walked in. He waved at us with his tongs through the window. “Look who’s back!” I could see yet another bottle of orange pop, this time hidden behind the grill, on the far side of the balcony.
“There you two are,” Aunt Lisa said. She was sitting on the couch, with a book open in her lap. She was always reading something interesting, between her projects.
I tried to get a good look at the spine of her book, but all I could see was the word “psychological.”
“Where have you been?”
“Why don’t you tell her what we did today, Hedgehog?” I said, looking down at TJ with a little smile.
It was as if he’d turned to stone. He stood at my side, but he wasn’t really there. His eyes—the color of granite—were fixed at some point in the middle of the room, halfway between me and Aunt Lisa. Aunt Lisa stood up, setting her book aside, and walked over, bending down with her hands on her knees. “TJ?” she asked. “Where did you go with your cousin?”
He didn’t respond.
Aunt Lisa sighed, straightening out again. “Well, go wash your hands. Dinner should be ready soon. Assuming your daddy doesn’t burn down the building.”
“I heard that,” Uncle Toby called from the balcony.
TJ turned around and silently walked down the hall to the bathroom.
I stood there, staring after him. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t understand what, sweetheart?” Aunt Lisa asked. She caught me eyeing her book and snatched it up, just as I got a glimpse of the cover. It was a picture of a little boy, probably about TJ’s age, with the title Psychological Trauma and Recovery across the top in big black letters. Aunt Lisa tucked it into the same cabinet as her binder, before walking over to the table, where her papers were still lying around.
The cabinet called out to me again.
I had to fight it.
But I was sure there were answers hidden in there.
“TJ,” I said, stumbling along after her. “He was… he was talking.”
“Talking?”
“I swear it.”
She looked at me. There was a kind of resignation in her eyes. Like she didn’t really believe me. Or couldn’t believe me. One of the two. “He isn’t completely silent,” she said. “We can sometimes get a noise or—”
“It wasn’t a noise,” I said. “He was talking. He was talking.”
She stood there for a moment, eerily quiet. I was almost afraid she was going to call me a liar. Tell me not to make up stories. But she didn’t. Instead, her eyes softened. I saw a gleam in them. A light that I might even call hope. “Really?” she asked.
“Really.”
“Leah, you don’t know how hard it’s been to—”
“Really. He was talking. You’ll see!”
But we didn’t see. Not even a little bit. Dinner was a total bust. TJ didn’t talk and, of course, he didn’t eat a bite. I was a little less worried about that, now that I knew he was eating Michelle’s protein bars. But Uncle Toby and Aunt Lisa didn’t know that.
And I wasn’t sure I could tell them.
Not without unraveling the whole thing.
But as I ate, I watched Aunt Lisa. I watched the hope drain out of her.
And I felt bad. Because I’d given her that hope.
It was my fault.
“Come on, TJ,” Uncle Toby said. “I went out and hunted that brontosaurus just for you. Everyone knows a bronto is the tastiest meat.”
“Not now, Toby,” Aunt Lisa said.
“But it’s true, bubbeleh.”
“No more stories.”
Uncle Toby sighed, and he turned his attention back to his plate for a moment. It wasn’t really brontosaurus meat. Just turkey burgers and skinless chicken breasts. The healthy foods Ms. Weinstein demanded.
I would have to get my hands on that binder again.
For one thing, I still wasn’t sure what healthy foods had to do with anything.
For another, I needed those answers.
The silence was powerful. The only sound was the clink of our forks and knives. And, for me, the echo of memory, of TJ and the way he’d laughed while Michelle chased him around the back room of the laundromat with Francis the flamingo.
If only Uncle Toby and Aunt Lisa could have heard it.
My phone vibrated. Probably Nicole, looking for an update on the whole situation.
And suddenly, I felt so dumb.
My phone! I should have taken it out, when I had the chance. I should have recorded the way TJ was laughing and playing like a normal kid. Like our old Hedgehog. I felt guilty. I owed Uncle Toby and Aunt Lisa the sound of his voice.
It was Violet’s fault. She was the one who told me it was rude to take pictures of people without their permission.
She’d made me forget.
Or, at least, that’s what I decided to tell myself. Not that I was really mad at her.
I didn’t get mad. Especially not about little things like that.
“Well,” Uncle Toby said, “how’s the crafts fair coming, bubbeleh?”
As it turned out, Aunt Lisa’s summer project was helping to organize the Oak Lake crafts fair. The papers sprawled across the table were applications, vendor information, and maps of Frank Street, divided up into little squares to represent booths for artists. She groaned, letting her head tip back slightly. “Oh, it’s such a mess, Toby. I don’t know why I volunteered for it.”
“You love doing things for the neighborhood.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “The neighborhood means the world to me. But it’s a lot more work than I thought it would be.” To say nothing of all the hard work she was putting into trying to get TJ to talk to her. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was a miracle that Aunt Lisa was still standing. “And I’m just terrified that we’re going to go through all of this rigmarole and no one’s going to come, anyway.”
“What’s rigmarole?” I asked.
Aunt Lisa looked over at TJ. “Sweetie, do you want to tell her? Remember? We read that word in the book about the tigers?”
He didn’t say a word.
&nbs
p; She sighed. “It means ‘hassle.’ I’m worried that we’re going to go through all the trouble and not get a lot of visitors.”
“Why wouldn’t they come?” I asked.
“Oak Lake is only one neighborhood,” she said. “And a pretty small one at that. And while I personally believe there isn’t a better place in the world, Chicago in the summer has a million different fairs and festivals and concerts and, well, you name it, we’ve got it. Our little shindig might very well get lost in the shuffle.”
“I’m sure that won’t happen, bubbeleh,” Uncle Toby said.
“Well, I wish I had your confidence.”
“What have you done to advertise the crafts fair?” I asked.
Aunt Lisa looked over at me, as if I’d started speaking another language. “Well, of course, there’s an announcement in the Oak Lake Sentinel,” she said.
“The what?”
Uncle Toby chuckled. “It’s this little newsletter that goes out to everyone in the neighborhood,” he said.
“Don’t call it ‘little,’ Toby.”
He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “What do you want me to say? It goes to five hundred people. Tops. In a city that has a population of…”
He faltered.
In a flash, I pulled out my phone and looked it up. “It says here Chicago has a population of almost three million,” I said.
“No phones at the dinner table, Leah,” Aunt Lisa said.
Uncle Toby chuckled. “It’s what she does.”
I put away my phone. “Do you want people from outside of Oak Lake to come to the fair?” I asked.
“Well, of course,” Aunt Lisa said.
“Have you done any social media?”
“A bit,” she said. “We’ve got ads on Facebook and Twitter.”
“What about Instagram? Tumblr? Plurk? Slack? Discord? And YouTube? Oh, and it’s an art fair, so you could also go up on DeviantArt.”
“Exactly how many of these platforms do you have?” Aunt Lisa asked.
I shrugged. “None of those yet. Not old enough. But I’m getting them all when I turn thirteen. Maybe you could start a blog about the crafts fair. Get people interested. Coming attractions and stuff. A different artist could write each post. With pictures of their art that’ll get people excited to see it. Less work for you that way, too.”