A Walk Through a Window (4 page)

She remembered again what Nan had said.
“Behave like
I’m watching you.”
Darby sighed, and stepped off her skateboard to walk a bit. A whole summer of cautious old-lady sayings like that to look forward to.
I bet she used to say that to my dad and his brothers
, Darby thought bitterly.

She hopped back on her board and thought about practising her grind on the sidewalk. Except there was no sidewalk. In Toronto there were sidewalks along both sides of every street in her neighbourhood.

Yet another way that Charlottetown failed to measure up to home.

Darby pushed off with one foot, heading toward a shady sort of park near the end of the street. She stared at the houses as she passed them, thinking again how different they looked from the houses in Toronto. Hardly any brick, for one thing. They all looked like stupid cracker boxes standing on end. Most of them had little tiny windows and some were built right up against the street without any front yard at all. One of them even had a rusty old anchor out front.

She hadn’t seen many kids around either, apart from the tourists. It seemed like an old town filled with mostly old people.

Thrilling place to spend the summer.

Darby found herself down by the old blue house at the end of the street. It definitely had an abandoned look to it. Weird to think Gramps had grown up here. Unlike most of the other places on Forsyth, this one had a pretty big front yard.

As she glided into the shady side of the street, the air chilled down almost immediately—so fast that goose
bumps arose on the skin of her arms. She had a sudden sense that someone was watching. But the front door was tightly shut and the curtains were drawn against the heat of the day. And there certainly didn’t seem to be anyone close by. An old rusty gate stood gaping open at the end of the front walk like an invitation. She flipped her board up with one toe and walked in.

The house itself looked pretty creepy up close. Peeling paint, broken windows—the whole haunted/possessed/scene-of-the-crime thing that reminded her of every scary movie she’d seen. Nobody had been looking after the garden, either. Compared to all the neat gardens along the street, this yard had been allowed to run wild. There were still lots of flowers, but they were spilling out of the beds and were all through the lawn, maybe seeded into the grass by the wind.

She walked around the back, her thoughts on those crab apple trees. Near the back of the lot was the old stone building that Nan had mentioned. It was in even worse shape than the main house, and Darby could see where most of the roof had caved in. Something moved in the shadows and she nearly jumped out of her skin. But when Maurice, Nan’s cat, padded past, she had to laugh out loud. The cat hopped up onto the stone windowsill of the old building and Darby promised herself she’d quit watching scary movies in the future.

Besides, behind the house it was beautiful—kind of like a secret garden. Blackberries were growing wild all over the back area behind the trees. And the trees themselves were loaded with apples, all smaller than her fist. It
smelled great, too. Not like dead stuff or the decay of a really old place. Just fresh and flowery and—

Almost sweet.

Darby shivered. Too much like an old witch’s candy house in the fairy-tale woods. She clutched her skateboard a little tighter and retraced her steps around the house.

By the time she got to the front, she began to feel a little foolish for being so easily creeped out. Here it was a hot, otherwise boring, beautiful day. And this old house might be a good place to escape to if Gramps kept up the weird behaviour. Sheesh. Half the time he acted more like a kid than a grandfather.

Darby stopped in her tracks, and realized she had been wrong about there being no one else her age nearby.

The boy was wandering along the street in front of the house. He was wearing a red T-shirt and kicking something back and forth on the road. He had a kind of pattern going—two kicks left foot, kick right. Switch feet.

She stepped back into the shadow of the big tree at the front of the old house to watch him. She couldn’t quite see what he was kicking. Was it a rock? Rubber ball? No—something the same size as a rock, but different.

The pattern shifted again, this time with a little twist. Three kicks left foot, two kicks right, toe flip. It was the toe flip that gave it away. Not a rock—a chestnut. Spiny as a sea urchin and still green with early summer.

This is supposed to be fun?
The thought of having to stay in a place so boring for the whole summer made Darby groan aloud.

Red T-shirt looked a bit startled for a moment, then
he kicked the chestnut high so it sailed over the hedge at the side of the house.

“What’s your problem?” he said.

Darby shrugged and stepped onto the road. She dropped her board and rolled it back and forth under one foot. “So this is what kids around here do with their time, eh? Kick chestnuts around all day? Not my idea of fun.”

Red T-shirt scuffed his foot in the rusty soil along the side of the road. “I usually do it with a soccer ball,” he said loftily, “but mine’s flat today.”

He started to walk away again but stopped abruptly and spun on one heel to look at her.

“You must be the kid staying at the Christophers’ place,” he said.

“How’d you know that?” It wasn’t like she was hanging out in front of the house. They had to be more than a block away from her grandparents’ place.

He grinned. “Oh y’know—word gets around.”

Great. This was some lame small town, all right. Everybody seemed to make a hobby of sticking his or her nose into everybody else’s business.

He glanced pointedly at the board under Darby’s foot. “Skateboarder, eh?”

She nodded. “But I’m only here for a few weeks,” she said. “Don’t expect me to teach you any tricks or anything.”

“Whatever.” He turned to walk away and the rest of his words were cut off by the rising breeze.

Darby shivered a little. She realized it was getting a bit late and suddenly she didn’t really want the conversation to end. After all, apart from Shawnie, this was the
first person under sixty she’d spoken to since she had been here. And maybe talking to him would take her mind off the crushing boredom of an afternoon in this stupid little town.

“Hey—what did you say?” she yelled after him.

He kept walking with his shoulders hunched like he wasn’t going to answer, but when he got to the corner, he stopped and turned. “I said, maybe when you’ve been here a while you’ll learn to be a little friendlier.”

Darby leaned onto her board and rolled forward a few feet. “What?”

But he just flashed her a grin and walked off along the laneway.

“Stupid kid,” she said loudly, hoping he would hear and come back to take her up on it. Even an argument would be better than the boredom. But if he had heard, he didn’t come back. Like
she
was the unfriendly one. Darby sighed a little. Even the other kids around here were stupid and boring. She gave the ground a vicious kick and shot off on her board, right down the middle of the street.

She’d glided nearly a whole block when a car came around the corner and paused to let her move to the side of the road. Darby flipped up her board to watch the car crawl safely by. At home in Toronto, a car going by meant she and her skateboard might have ended as a splintery smear on the road. But here even the cars moved slowly.

Her heart sank, but she tried to shake it off. How stupid was that? Not being mowed down by a car actually made her feel homesick? She shook her head a little and dropped her board back on the road with a clatter.

From her spot on the road, she could see the sun as it dipped slowly behind the old blue house, lighting up the gingerbread trim in a brilliant golden glow.

The sky was pink and serene, and a bird somewhere nearby twittered its evening song. The scene couldn’t be tamer if it came from an oil painting on Nan’s wall. She kicked off again.

Darby wasn’t about to admit it, but the truth was that she couldn’t actually skateboard very well.
I might be a total amateur
, she thought,
but nobody around here needs to know that, least of all some lame local kid who can’t even conduct a decent conversation
.

At least she’d get a chance to work on her boarding. A single bright spot in a dismal summer forecast. Nan and Gramps’s house came into sight and Darby zipped back toward it. She passed the yellow house next door—Shawnie’s place, obviously. The day was shifting into twilight, clear and calm, with no sign of the earlier breeze. Lights were starting to come on up and down the street as people got home from work. She could smell a barbecue in someone’s yard and her stomach rumbled a bit.

As far as Darby could tell, everything was perfectly normal on the start of another quiet evening in Charlottetown.

So why couldn’t she shake the feeling that no matter how fast she rolled along, someone was following her?

I
t took Darby until the next day to finally make it to the park she’d seen just up the street from her grandparents’ house. It turned out to be—big surprise—pretty old. It was mostly filled with huge overgrown trees shading an old slide that was tilting at a dangerous angle. She found a single wooden swing suspended from the branch of a giant old chestnut tree. The ground was littered with spiky little chestnut burls like the one Red T-shirt had been kicking down the street the day before.

After breakfast, Nan had told Darby that she had a job for her to do, and that she was expected home at eleven. That gave Darby a couple of hours to practise skateboarding, which was fine by her. In fact, it fit right into Darby’s new survival plan.

She might be stuck in a dead-end town for the summer, but at least she had her board. And by the time she got back to Toronto, Darby decided, she was going to have mastered all the tricks on her Tony Hawk DVD.

She flew back and forth along the street, thinking about staying on her skateboard and gliding all the way home to Toronto. Problem was, Charlottetown was on an island. Darby smiled a little, picturing herself with super-boarding powers skating across the waters of Northumberland Strait toward her home in Toronto.

Of course, she wouldn’t even need superpowers. There was a bridge—the Confederation Bridge—running from Borden across the water to New Brunswick.

That had to be one big bridge. Gramps had said it was thirteen kilometres long. Darby hadn’t known there was a bridge that long in the whole world.

It would make an awesome skateboard ride.

Deep in thought, she didn’t notice a change in the road surface until it was too late. Her front wheel hit a rock, and the board stopped short. Darby managed to stay on her feet, but she wrenched her ankle just a little on the landing. She walked back, picked up her board and limped over to the swing, swaying gently under the big shady trees.

She sat on the swing, one toe on the skateboard at her feet. A minute’s rest wouldn’t hurt. Her ankle had stopped stinging already. She couldn’t move much and still keep her foot on the board, but that was okay since she didn’t feel like swinging anyway. If she made time to practise like this every day, she’d be an expert by the time she got home. As long as she didn’t hit any more rocks.

She remembered getting the skateboard for her last birthday. There had been only a week or so left before the snow arrived, so she didn’t really get any good practice time in. But as soon as spring arrived, she worked on
mastering a long stretch of pavement at school, and then it was time to hit the road.

Yonge Street.

The longest street in Canada. It ran north from her house near Lawrence Avenue up through Thornhill and Richmond Hill and Aurora. Who knew how far it actually went? It was way longer than the Confederation Bridge. And one day Darby planned to skate the whole thing, hills and all. But first things first. When she got her board, her primary goal was to master the Eaton Centre. And that meant travelling Yonge Street the other way—down toward the lake.

All Darby’s friends at school had done it. The good boarders said they had, anyway. Apparently the key is in the speed, though of course route planning is also essential. Darby’s friend Sarah has been skateboarding since before she could walk. At least, that’s what she tells everybody. Sarah said the Eaton Centre was just a matter of watching for the security guards and skating right on their tails. They’d never even know Darby was there.

Easy. According to Sarah.

Darby leaned back on the swing and looked up at the clear blue sky dappled with shadows from the leaves of the huge tree. Everything had been going according to plan for conquering the Eaton Centre, until her parents started to whisper.

She first noticed it at the dinner table. It had been some ordinary discussion about her day at school and how much homework her lame science teacher had loaded on—but somehow it ended up as a heated whispering
match between the parental units. Soon the whispering progressed into an exchange of furious glares and even worse—silences. And it wasn’t just at one dinner—oh, no. Once Darby had clued in, she could see the signs everywhere. Her parents would stop talking when she entered the room. Or they’d change the subject, and Darby began hearing undertones in every conversation.