Boys Rock!, Page 3

  “Oh! You’re looking at pictures of me and my sister,” Ms. Crane said, coming back into the room with the tea, the ice clinking softly in the glasses. She gave Caroline a wink as she handed her the tea. “Pretty, isn’t she?”

  Caroline nodded and opened her notebook. A half hour later, she was still writing, and Ms. Crane was still talking.

  “To tell the truth, she was a bit conceited,” Ms. Crane went on. “Stuck on herself, you know. She had a beautiful party dress, and I asked once if I could wear it, but she wouldn’t let me. Afraid I might be prettier in it than she was. Oh, and did she ever have a temper! I never told anyone before, but we used to fight like cats and dogs, and it was her who started it more often than not.”

  She stopped while Caroline finished writing a sentence, then continued: “I know you should speak well of the dead, and don’t get me wrong—I loved my sister. But she was what she was, and she’d say the same of me. We had a lot of fun together, but she was a pill at times, and a nag as well, and grumpy as all get-out if she didn’t get her way. Because we lived together our whole lives, people must have thought we got along like two peas in a pod, but let me tell you, it’s hard sometimes to have your own identity when you’ve always lived with your sister.”

  Caroline was not about to ask Ms. Crane about ghosts here, because the house seemed creepy enough as it was, and the dead sister was all around them. So when the interview was over, she said simply, “Thank you for talking with me. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Well, don’t be,” said Ms. Crane, “because I’m getting along just fine by myself, if anyone wants to know.”

  As Caroline walked home, she decided she wouldn’t want to live her whole life with her sisters. She certainly intended to have an identity of her own, because her name would be in lights on Broadway: Caroline Lenore Malloy, and it would be Beth and Eddie in the audience, admiring her.

  “I don’t think I’d want to live my whole life with you,” she said to Eddie when she got home. Eddie was in the dining room working on a layout for the first issue.

  Eddie placed one hand on her heart. “Oh, what a blow, Caroline!” she said. “I’m grief-stricken.”

  Caroline had started to tell her about Tessie and Bessie when they heard the clunk of the bike against the front steps and Beth burst through the front door.

  “Eddie, do we have a name for our newspaper?” she panted.

  “Not yet,” said Eddie. “Why?”

  “Because there are posters all over town, and you know what they say? The Hatford Herald, Coming July Sixteenth, Eddie Malloy, Editor in Chief!”

  Five

  The Secret

  Ever since Wally’s trip to Oldakers’ Bookstore, he couldn’t get those noisy bones off his mind.

  You can’t tell anyone, not even your brothers, Mike Oldaker had said. And Wally had nodded. He had said okay. It was the secret as much as the bones that worried him.

  If he could keep a secret, Mike had promised, he would give the story to the Hatford Herald even before he told it to the Buckman Bugle, the city newspaper.

  This was big, Wally thought. This was a scoop! This was absolutely, positively huge! Fantastic! All he had to do was not tell anybody, not even his parents.

  He had always liked Mike because he seemed like a man who understood sitting on a porch and counting raindrops. Sitting on the steps studying an anthill. Floating bottles down a river or even spitting in the water from the footbridge. The kind of man who understood about lying in bed in the mornings trying to figure out where a spiderweb began.

  But what was that scratching, scraping, clawing sound beneath the bookstore’s floorboards? And why didn’t Mike want anyone else to know? Was this about a murder? Wally wondered. Had the cellar been the scene of a crime, maybe, and somebody was down there covering up evidence? Or maybe those bones were alive! Maybe they were bones, all right, but they were covered by muscle and skin and hair! What if something, or someone, was being held prisoner down there? What if the bones got loose?

  Okay, he said to himself, beginning to shiver. What did he really know about Mike Oldaker’s cellar?

  There were bones, Mike had said.

  What had Wally seen?.

  Nothing.

  What had he heard?

  Scratching, clawing, scraping.

  What did he really know about Mike Oldaker?

  He owned the bookstore. He’d always seemed nice.

  Nothing more.

  The secret inside Wally Hatford was like a rock in his shoe. It was the first thing on his mind when he got up in the morning, the last thing he thought about before he went to sleep. The secret seemed to be growing bigger and bigger inside him, but he didn’t tell a soul.

  He tried to think of happy things instead. Christmas.Birthdays. Then he’d find himself thinking about that scrape, scrape, claw, claw sound underneath the floorboards in the bookstore. That store didn’t seem to be such a comforting place anymore. Wally’s own house didn’t seem so comforting. Even his grandfather’s portrait at the top of the stairs seemed to glower at him when he went to bed.

  One night, Wally closed his eyes in the darkness and pulled the sheet up over his head. He tried to think of Christmas again, but his mind seemed to prefer Halloween. And then he was climbing down a ladder into a dark hole. Down … down … down … Colder, darker, spookier, creepier …

  He found himself walking through a long dark tunnel, and there was a noise like hockey sticks clacking together. Up ahead he could see a far-off light, and with every step he took, the clacking sound grew louder.

  Step by step … step by step …

  Wally’s heart began to pound. His pulse beat a little faster. His lips felt dry, and his palms began to sweat.

  And suddenly he was in the room with the light, and there was a bucket of bones in the middle of the floor. The bones were moving! All at once they rose up out of the bucket and into the air. The knee bone connected to the thighbone, the thighbone connected to the hip bone, the hip bone connected to the backbone, the backbone connected to the neck bone, and—

  “Arrrrggggghhhhh!” Wally yelled as something touched his forehead.

  “Wally!” said his dad. “Wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”

  “Whooooh!” gasped Wally.

  “Are you awake? You okay?” asked Mr. Hatford.

  “Whoooaaaah!” Wally bellowed.

  “Wally, open your eyes. Sit up. Drink some water,” said his dad.

  Wally opened his eyes. He sat up. He was in his own room. There was a light on in the hall.

  “You were yelling loudly enough to wake the dead,” said Mr. Hatford.

  Dead? “Whoooooh!” Wally yelped again.

  This time Mr. Hatford shook his shoulder. “Do you want to sleep with Peter for the rest of the night?” he asked.

  “No,” said Wally, his heart still racing.

  “Count to five,” said his father.

  “One, two, three, four, five,” said Wally.

  “Where are you?”

  “In the cellar,” said Wally.

  “No, you are right here in your own room, and I’m waiting for you to really wake up so I can go back to bed,” said his dad.

  “Good night,” said Wally. “I’m okay”

  Mr. Hatford went back to his own room, and Wally lay as still as a stone until his pulse returned to normal. This secret was too big to keep. This secret was going to drive him nuts.

  And then he had a thought. Mike Oldaker had said that as soon as they found out who the bones belonged to, he’d tell Wally even before he called the Buckman Bugle.

  If it had been a bad secret, an awful secret, Mike Oldaker would not have told Wally, and he certainly would not have been willing to tell the Buckman newspaper. Unless he was lying, of course.

  Mike Oldaker had promised Wally a scoop, though, so for now, anyway, Wally was going to keep his mouth shut and see what happened.

  Six

  Psychic Energy

/>   Eddie was spitting bullets. She leaped up from the table, scattering pencils and papers all over the floor. How dare the boys name the newspaper the Hatford Herald?

  “I’m the editor in chief, and no one asked me!” she bellowed when Beth brought the news. “I never gave my okay!”

  The posters were all around Buckman, Beth told her. The guys must have designed them on their computer, printed them up, and gone to every store downtown to put them in the shop windows.

  “So what would you have named the paper?” Caroline asked, somewhat surprised at the uproar. What could you expect from a Hatford, after all?

  “I don’t know, but it wouldn’t have Hatford in the title, you can be sure of that!” Eddie fumed. “The Malloy Messenger! The Girls’ Dispatch! The Buckman Bulletin! The West Virginia Word! Anything except the Hatford Herald. I wouldn’t name it anything that even smelled of a boy!”

  Caroline tried to figure that one out. She wondered if the Hatfords had an aura that she couldn’t detect.

  “Well, we can’t do anything about it now,” Beth said. “If you went around changing the posters, crossing out Hatford Herald and making it the Malloy Messenger or something, it would look like you’re not really in charge, Eddie. Or that if you were, no one was paying attention.”

  Eddie growled in disgust.

  “You’ll just have to go along with it,” Beth told her. “You’ll have to pretend it was your idea too.”

  “What it means is we’ll have to watch those guys like hawks to see what else they’re up to,” said Eddie, pacing back and forth like a tiger in a cage. “Why didn’t I name the newspaper first? How could I have been so stupid?”

  Caroline, however, was only half listening, because she saw the mail truck stop at the bottom of the driveway. She watched Mr. Hatford reach out and open the Malloys’ box, put some mail inside, and turn up the red metal flag to show that there was mail.

  Instantly, she was out the door and down the steps and was running down the long driveway toward the road. Mr. Hatford gave a soft toot of his horn as he drove away. When Caroline opened the box and found the envelope she had been waiting for, addressed to Caroline Lenore Malloy, she took it up to her room before her sisters could see it.

  Eddie and Beth were all wrapped up in making the newspaper, their father was in Ohio seeing about taking his old job again, and their mother was preoccupied with the possibility of moving. No one else in the family could ever understand the youngest Malloy daughter—her—she was sure of it. And of course Caroline didn’t expect them to. No one else in the family wanted to go onstage, so this burden of being a misunderstood and unappreciated actress-in-the-making would be hers alone.

  Caroline closed her bedroom door and eagerly tore open the envelope. There was the booklet she had seen advertised on the back of a movie magazine, a booklet for which she had paid two dollars and ninety-five cents plus postage: Your Aura: Making It Work for You.

  What her family did not understand, Caroline told herself as she settled down in her chair by the window, was that actresses have to spend their whole lives getting people to pay attention to them. Once people stop paying attention, all the good roles in plays and movies go to someone else, and soon that actress is only a has-been. If Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn and Helen Hayes had an aura, there was no reason why Caroline Lenore Malloy shouldn’t have one too. She believed in working hard for what she wanted, and an aura just might help.

  Caroline opened the booklet to the first page: An aura is psychic energy drawn from the soul, whichradiates out to other people and alerts them to your presence, she read.

  Caroline reached for the package of corn chips she kept in a drawer and popped one into her mouth. Then another and another as she read on:

  An aura broadcasts a woman’s intelligence, beauty, sensitivity, and passion. A light scarf worn over the head will contain the aura until the desired moment is at hand. Once the scarf is removed and the aura is released, replace the head scarf and repeat the following exercises.….

  Caroline read about the position in which she should be sitting, the manner in which her fingertips should be touching, the thoughts she should be thinking, and whether her eyes were to be open or closed. The hum, of course, was her own idea.

  Half an hour later, Eddie peeped into the room and found Caroline sitting cross-legged on her bed with a thin white curtain draped over her head. She was humming one long, low note.

  “Caroline, what the heck?” Eddie said.

  When Caroline didn’t answer, didn’t even open her eyes, Eddie went over to the bed and picked up the booklet in her sister’s lap: “ ‘…; psychic energy drawn from the soul, which radiates out to other people …;’,” she read aloud. “Caroline, where do you get this stuff? It’s unscientific! Utter nonsense!”

  “Well, it’s true, Eddie, or it wouldn’t be in print,” Caroline said, peeping out from under the curtain.

  “Just because something’s in print doesn’t make it true,” Eddie told her. “I could write that the Hatford boys were the smartest people on the planet, but that wouldn’t make it true.”

  “Then why would someone bother to print up this booklet?” asked Caroline.

  “Because you and a thousand others were willing to send them two dollars and ninety-five cents,” said Eddie.

  But Caroline wanted to believe she had an aura, and when Eddie went back downstairs, Caroline went right on humming.

  She took a break for lunch, then seated herself on the living room rug, this time using the short plastic “psychic stick” that had come with the booklet. While she hummed, she traced a line all the way up one side of her body, from her ankle to her armpit. First the right side, then the left, just as the booklet instructed.

  “Will you stop?” Beth cried out as she stumbled over Caroline again. “Take your aura and your Oreos or whatever, and go someplace else, Caroline!”

  All right, Caroline thought. She knew when she wasn’t wanted. She put the booklet away till after dinner, and then, because she knew she might be asked to wash the dishes if she stuck around, she took her booklet, her psychic stick, and her curtain down to the big rock on the Malloys’ side of the river so that she could practice undisturbed. If her father did move the family back to Ohio, wouldn’t it be great to return to school with an aura? To have everyone notice her and wonder how she got to be so special?

  Caroline climbed up on the rock. Lights were beginning to come on in houses across the river, and fireflies flickered in the dark trees. Caroline sat perfectly straight on the rock, her fingertips touching. She had slipped off her sandals and tried to sit so that the soles of her feet were touching. Then, with the curtain draped over her head, she closed her eyes and hummed a long, low note. Whenever she ran out of breath, she took a quick gulp of air and went on humming, helping her psychic energy to escape her scalp but trapping it under the curtain until she could go back to the house, remove the curtain, and see whether her family turned around to look before they even heard her coming.

  A twig snapped.

  Caroline opened her eyes and tried to see through the curtain, but she did not move her head.

  There was rustling in the bushes.

  Silence.

  And then, a few moments later, the sound of feet pounding down the path to the river and the bouncing and creaking of the swinging bridge.

  Seven

  Gone

  Wally was making himself a milk shake. A super-thick chocolate milk shake, one so thick that a straw would stand straight up in it. A spoon could stand up in it, in fact. A milk shake so chocolatey that it was as dark as the brown shoes he wore on Sundays.

  He poured one-fourth cup of milk into the blender. He added one-fourth cup of cream. Three scoops of chocolate ice cream. Two tablespoons of chocolate syrup.

  What else? Wally wandered around the kitchen. He found two packages of cocoa mix and dumped those in the blender.

  What else? A banana. A teaspoon of vanilla. A teaspoon of ho
ney. His eye fell on the peanut butter jar, and he scooped up a huge spoonful and held it over the blender.

  The phone rang, and Wally picked it up with his other hand.

  “Wally,” said his mother, who worked at the hardware store. “This is my night to work late, so I’m going to dash home around five-thirty and make a quick supper before I go back. I want you boys to stick to fruit for snacks this afternoon so you’ll be hungry for an early dinner, okay?”

  Plop!The glob of peanut butter left the spoon and landed in the blender, splattering the countertop.

  “Okay,” said Wally.

  After he hung up, he put the lid back on the blender and turned the appliance on. The blades got stuck in the peanut butter. He took the lid off, poked around to mix it up, then turned the blender on again. One minute … two minutes … three minutes. When he was done, his straw stuck straight up in the mixture, and a spoon leaned only a little to one side.

  Wally poured the milk shake into a glass and sat down at the kitchen table. This was paradise. This was what summer was all about. This milk shake was so good, thought Wally, it could be sold for five dollars in New York City! Ten, even! Why, he could go into business! If he couldn’t think of any other job to do when he grew up, he would move to New York and start a chocolate-peanut-butter-banana milk shake business for all the people who worked in the Empire State Building.

  “Wall-ly!” yelled Jake from upstairs. “How do you spell judgment? Is there an e after the g?”

  “No,” Wally called back, and hunkered down a little farther in his chair. Slurp. He took a long swallow, filling his mouth with the chocolate stuff. One taste of this was almost better than Christmas and birthdays and Halloween put together!

  “What about cancellation?” Jake yelled. “One I or two?”

  Wally sighed. “Two,” he called. Each word popped up on a billboard in his brain. He never forgot.