Now I play hide-and-seek with him every day. Mr. Shocky and I put on little plays and draw pictures and crawl around on monkey bars, and as long as I keep doing what he wants, then he’s happy. Unfortunately, I lost all my real friends. I can’t keep a job, or a relationship. Everyone thinks I’ve lost my mind, a thirty-two-year-old man who spends half his day talking to someone who isn’t there. But that’s probably for the best. People should keep their distance from me. I don’t want anyone getting hurt.
Chad checks in from time to time, though I haven’t heard from Nicholas in a while. Last time we spoke, he said he was finally going to tell Davenport to go away. I went by his house once, but there was no one there.
Dr. Rosen calls every couple days, but he’s getting on in years. He’s worried about me. He says that he’s had patients who were hurt when their imaginary friends got bored with them, when they got too old to climb trees and run races and pretend to be pirates in rickety tree houses. He worries that someday Mr. Shocky will hurt me when I’m too old for his games.
Esmeralda is helping me prepare. She comes to me sometimes, still the washed-out twelve-year-old girl I met at the clinic. She’s been teaching me to embrace my imagination. It’s slowly starting to work. Last night I dragged a penny out of a daydream and into the real world. It’s small but it’s a start, and who knows? With more practice I might be able to make a sword, or even my own Davenport to rip Mr. Shocky limb from limb.
But, for now, I have to get to the park. My imaginary friend wants me to push him on the swings.
LICORICE NEEDLES
BY NIKKI LOFTIN
My mouth is full of tarry black candy. Licorice needles, Mrs. Carlson calls them. She gave me a few long pieces, said I could have the whole jar if I didn’t mess up reading today. It’s strange-tasting stuff, and it separates into lots of little strands as I chew, sticking in between my teeth. She’s fallen asleep at the kitchen table, and I wonder if there’s anywhere I can spit it out. But it’s my first time at her house, and I want to make a good impression on the old lady. Mom’s decided I’m going to go read to her every day after school until I start passing seventh grade English, or until Mrs. Carlson tells her I’ve improved enough. If she likes me, maybe she’ll let me go early today.
“You forgot to say thank you.” Her voice makes me jump.
There goes the good impression. “Sorry. I thought you fell asleep.” It’s hard to tell. She wears these big dark glasses because of her weak eyes. “She’s mostly blind,” my mom said this morning. “And she agreed to tutor you for free. It’s a win-win! Your reading will get better, and she’ll be able to enjoy her books again.” Then she raced off to work.
“Start reading.” Mrs. Carlson lays a cold hand on my wrist. Her skin is crinkly and weird, with blue veins roping all across the tops of her fingers. Fragile looking. If anyone shook her hand too hard, I think, the veins might pop and she could bleed to death. Old people are gross. I open the book she set down in front of me.
“It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee.”
It’s by this guy Edgar Allen Poe. It’s long and boring, but at least there aren’t any hard words. I pause anyway. There’s a girl who lives down the street with the same name, Annabel Lee. She’s about three years younger than me, and I saw her over at Mrs. Carlson’s the day before, picking some big flowers out of the yard. It left a sort of bare patch in the front garden. I wonder if the old lady saw her, too.
“Don’t stop,” Mrs. Carlson whispers hoarsely. “Third stanza, first four lines.”
“And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee.”
“Stealing my flowers,” Mrs. Carlson mutters as I finish. “Hmph.” She smiles, then pulls the book out of my hands and slips me a different paper. “Now, quickly, this one,” she says. “The whole thing. Exactly as it’s written.”
This one’s harder. It’s in old-fashioned cursive writing, with lots of curlicues. Her handwriting? I’m not sure. The words are hard—I don’t even know what most of them mean—and I stumble a bit, but not too bad.
“Purloin, pillage, pilfer, plunder,
hand that takes must suffer thunder
feel the pinch of consequence
thieving part be severed hence.”
Before I even get the last word out, she shoves a scrap of newspaper toward me. “Read the weather report, quickly, quickly!”
I shake my head, wondering how Mom could have thought this lady was going to help me get better at reading. I’m pretty certain she thought I’d be reading real books. “Quickly, now!” She sounds really upset I’ve stopped, so I read as fast as I can. “Tomorrow’s high, fifty-two degrees. Thunderstorms expected by late afternoon, with possible hail and high winds.”
I don’t see any date on the paper, but I know it’s not today’s. It never gets that cold in September. Should I tell her? I decide not to. I guess old ladies collect old newspapers. Sad.
“Are we done?” I ask Mrs. Carlson, but she doesn’t hear me. She’s doing something with the papers I read, moving her hands over them like she’s feeling for Braille bumps or something. Her hands are all shaky.
It must stink, being old. I’m going to start skydiving when I’m sixty, or base jumping off volcanoes. Something dangerous and cool that probably also means I won’t live to see nursing home age. “You did very well, Jeremiah. Time for a treat,” Mrs. Carlson says, and crosses the kitchen to cut me a piece of homemade spice cake. I eat it fast to get the licorice taste out of my mouth. It’s way better than those needles. At least the old lady can bake.
The next day, Mrs. Carlson has me reading from a book, a hard one about Russian legends, when I hear a giant thunderclap. It actually shakes the table, the whole house. “Whoa!” I yell. Car alarms are ringing down the street. “Just a sec, Mrs. C.” I run for the door.
It’s so strange. The sky on one side of the neighborhood is blue and clear, but behind Mrs. Carlson’s house, and stretching back into the neighborhood, it’s all black clouds and . . .
“Hail?” The cold wind whips past me, and I watch for a few minutes as trees bend crazily all around. Is it a tornado? “Where did this come from?”
I feel Mrs. Carlson’s hand on my shoulder. “Listen,” she whispers. I hear it, too. Over the sounds of the car alarms, there’s something else . . . a siren. An ambulance.
“Good,” Mrs. Carlson murmurs.
Good? I wonder if I should tell Mom how nutso this old lady is, as I help her back into the house. But then I smell the pumpkin pie she has waiting for the end of the lesson, and I know I’m not going to tell Mom anything. Reading stupid stuff to a crazy lady who bakes all the time? It could be worse.
Wednesday at lunchtime all anyone can talk about is the storm. “My dad said the wind knocked the power pole down three streets over from your house, Jeremiah,” my friend Pedro says.
“Yeah, and when it did,” Max interrupts, “it made the power go on and off, and this girl who lives at the end of my cul-de-sac had just dropped a spoon down the garbage disposal, and she reached in to get it, and then the power came back on with her hand in it and—clakglukclakglukclakgluk! he yells, swinging his arm back and forth like it’s being torn apart, and spraying us all with tiny flecks of cheeseburger as he shouts.
After that, Pedro and I take turns knuckle thumping him on the head for being gross, and it isn’t until the end of lunch that I think to ask who the girl was.
“You know her,” Max says. “Annabel Lee Lindstrom.”
“Annabel Lee?” I know it’s a coincidence—me reading that poem, then the stuff about severed hands to Mrs. Carlson, and now this—but I feel sick all of a sudden, like I’ve been caught cheating on a test. “It can’t be.”
“What?” Max
says, shaking me out of my crazy thoughts. “Did you like her or something?” He laughs. “Too bad you’ll never be able to hold her hand now.”
“You idiot!” I chase him around the table, trying to thump his head again, until the bell rings.
Annabel will be all right, I tell myself on my way to class. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Max said she lost all her fingers, her whole hand practically, but he likes to exaggerate.
That afternoon, on my way to Mrs. Carlson’s, I pass a couple of guys I know. They’re walking around with giant bags of pick-a-mix candies, laughing, having fun like I used to after school. They keep tossing their candy wrappers on the ground, and it makes me mad . . . mainly because it reminds me of how trashed my life is.
I’ve got to get out of these dumb lessons.
For the next hour and a half, Mrs. Carlson has me read the first chapters of a book called Great Expectations. It’s possibly the most boring book I’ve ever tried to read. By the time I struggle to the end of the second chapter, even Mrs. Carlson looks like she wants to throw the book across the room. I wonder if I can figure some way to leave early. Maybe I can fake being sick?
But something about Mrs. Carlson tells me lying to her wouldn’t be a good idea. Probably some leftover meanness from being an English teacher for fifty years.
At dinner, I ask Mom when I can stop the lessons.
“When you’re making a B in English, Jeremiah Denton,” she says, and shakes her head. “I’m just glad Mrs. Carlson moved in three months ago. If she hadn’t agreed to do this . . . well, let’s just say your birthday present money would all be going to the House of Tutors.”
She looks tired but tries to smile, so I suck it up and don’t say anything else about Mrs. Carlson’s shaky hands, her crazy lessons . . . or what happened to Annabel Lee.
The next day, I’m on the bus to Mrs. Carlson’s, all set to try to talk her out of Great Expectations. But I completely forget about that when we pull up, and she’s in her front yard, on her hand and knees, feeling around for . . . candy wrappers? Yes. There are candy wrappers and plastic grocery bags all over her yard. The wind is blowing, and I wonder if the wrappers are the same ones the guys I saw were tossing around.
“Mrs. C? Are you okay?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “Some delinquent children decided to suffocate my grass with their plastic filth.” Grabbing onto my arm, she gets to her feet slowly, the plastic bags dangling from her free hand. Suffocating her grass? It’s a weird way to think of it, but when I take the bags to throw in her trash can, I see one of them—a pick-a-mix candy one, sure enough—has that warning printed on it about keeping kids from sticking plastic bags over their heads or whatever. I always wondered what kid would be stupid enough to do that.
At the kitchen table, I reach for Great Expectations, but she stops me. “I think we’ll read something else today.” She shuffles across the room to a stack of shoeboxes and feels around for the right one—although I don’t think there’s any Braille on them. “Aha!” She smiles, her tongue clacking as she sucks on her yellowed teeth. I can’t see her eyes, but her whole face sort of disappears into a mass of wrinkles. She holds up a small pamphlet and another newspaper clipping. “Read this.” She looks happy and excited, but I’m not. I’m thinking of Annabel Lee, and what happened to her.
“Can we keep going on Great Expectations? I was really getting into Pip’s story,” I lie.
“Read,” she insists, and I can hear all those years of being a teacher in her voice. She’s still fumbling around for something else in the box, but she shoves the pamphlet into my hand, open to a page that has a picture of the Statue of Liberty on top. I read the words that are circled at the bottom of the page out loud.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me . . .”
“Yes.” Mrs. Carlson pulls the booklet away. “Now this.”
Another page, torn from a dictionary. I can’t pronounce the first word, and she sounds it out. “As-fix-ee-a. Now start again, from the beginning.”
She hands me back the pamphlet. I want to ask if there’s some reason I have to read it again—I didn’t mess that part up, I don’t think. But she’s scribbling something on a piece of dirty blue paper and suddenly all I want to do is get out of there. I’ll read this stuff and go. I’ll tell her I’m sick.
I read the first poem again, then the definition: “Asphyxia, from the ancient Greek a—meaning ‘without,’ and sphyxis, meaning ‘heartbeat.’” The definition is long, and it ends with “an example of asphyxia would be choking.”
Not a second later, she presses the handwritten blue paper into my palm. I read fast.
“Hanging, strangling, drowned or worse,
afflict these ones with Ondine’s curse.
Choke the lung and chill the blood
to nip the vandal’s strangling bud.”
As soon as I finish reading, I drop the paper and grab my backpack.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Mrs. Carlson’s black glasses reflect back two smaller versions of me, ones that look like they just witnessed something horrible. Even though nothing happened. Nothing real, anyway.
“Home,” I manage. “My stomach hurts.”
“Oh, really?” she says. “What sort of pain would you call it, my dear? A dull ache, or a sharp pain?” She shuffles over to her kitchen cabinet. “I have some Tums here if it’s indigestion. Dull pain is usually just gas, you know. Maybe you shouldn’t have the pineapple cake today.”
“No,” I say. “It’s a sharp pain. Not gas. I think I’d better go home.”
“Come back tomorrow,” she calls out as I race down the street.
I spend the rest of the afternoon in bed, wondering if I’m going crazy. When I think of it, nothing Mrs. Carlson is doing should cause my heart to race, and for me to feel like . . . like she’s dangerous. She’s just an ex–English teacher. A widow. Her house is full of shoeboxes and newspapers, and she spends all day clipping stories out. That’s all.
I get up when I hear Mom come in. By dinnertime, I can’t believe the thoughts I had. Crazy stuff. Mom would probably say I’d been watching too many scary movies. Still, I feel like I should tell her something.
“I’m so glad you’re spending this time with Mrs. Carlson,” Mom says before I can decide how much to share. “She’s all alone over there. You know, you may need help with your reading, but I have a feeling she needs you even more. I’m so proud of you.”
Ugh. I definitely can’t say anything now.
The next morning, Mom has the local news on while we’re getting ready, and I can hear the announcer all the way in the bathroom.
“Last night around seven p.m., according to local police, two boys, residents of Round Rock, came close to dying from asphyxiation when a faulty heating unit released carbon monoxide into the living areas of the house. The boys, still in critical condition at Round Rock Hospital, are both members of the Valley View middle school football team . . .”
Valley View. My school. Max and Pedro are both on the team, and they both have brothers.
The word I learned the day before keeps swimming through my thoughts. Asphyxia. And other words, the ones I read out loud . . . yearning to breathe free . . . choke the lung and chill the blood . . .
I begin to feel like somehow I’m connected to what happened. And I start to freak out about Max and Pedro, too. Are they okay? I’m so upset, Mom drives me to school instead of making me take the bus. The principal is outside, talking to a group of parents and crying kids. I see Max and Pedro in the parking lot, and I let out the breath it feels like I’ve been holding since breakfast.
It’s all in my imagination, I tell myself. It has nothing to do with me. It’s all a coincidence.
For three days, I go back to Mrs. Carlson’s, and it’s Great Expectations for two and a h
alf eternal hours.
By the next Monday, it’s like all the stuff that happened the week before is just a bad dream. The teachers at school still cry sometimes. But Max and Pedro and I do our best not to think about it. Honestly, we’re more excited about the Formula One race that’s coming to Austin the next weekend. Pedro’s dad is a big shot at Apple, and he’s got tickets for their whole family. I try not to act jealous, even though I am.
“Hey,” Pedro says. “Can you two come over today? We’re going to watch the last race Dad recorded. Popcorn, pizza, ice cream. What do you say?”
“I say yes!” yells Max. They both look at me, waiting.
“I wish. I’ve got that stupid tutoring thing after school.”
“Can you sneak away?” Pedro asks. “You can ride your bike to my house in two minutes. Stay till six thirty. Your mom doesn’t even have to know.”
“Right,” I say. “Mom thinks Mrs. Carlson ‘needs me.’”
“What does she need you for?” Pedro asks. “To gather up all the dust bunnies in her house so she can knit a granny sweater?”
“Does she need you to help her put on her adult diapers?” Max says. “You’re such a dear, sweet boy. Now help an old lady put in her dentures.”
He comes running at me, smacking his gums. I almost smack him in the gums with my fist.
“Don’t be jerks. I hate going there.” The guys must see I’m seriously bummed, because they both stop teasing me.
“Max, I think we’d better go rescue our friend today,” Pedro says.
“What do you mean?” I ask, but the bell rings, and they both sprint off, and I don’t see them again.
That afternoon, I’m halfway through Great Expectations, dying of boredom, when Mrs. Carlson puts her icy hand over mine and says, “Stop.”
“What?” I’m pretty sure I didn’t mess up. I’m actually reading a lot better these days. Maybe because Mrs. Carlson’s black glasses make me feel like she’s glaring at me whenever I miss a word, and I can never tell what she’s thinking.