My Diary from the Edge of the World (5 page)

This morning when I got up, my face was even crookeder than usual. I guess it's because I cried a little before falling asleep. My features always take a few minutes to settle into themselves in the morning anyway—at first my face looks pretty much uglyish, but then it smoothes itself out into being halfway presentable by the time I leave for school.

Mom kept Sam home today. I brushed my teeth and prepared myself to tell everyone in my class the news about moving, knowing there'd be crying and some squealing over me and generally everyone would be thinking about me the whole day, leading up to several
presents this week, and of course going-away-party planning. Millie says I'm a “sociopath” for even caring about that stuff right now, but I can't help it.

I sat through history and Monsters of the Sea trying to think of the most dramatic moment to share the news. I was still working up to it when there was an announcement over the loudspeaker about Oliver.

“Attention please, students. As you may know, Oliver Wigley went missing from his home several days ago.” Everyone murmured nervously. “We are confident Oliver will be found safe, but we ask that anyone who spoke with him before his disappearance or who might have any information leading to his whereabouts contact the school office immediately. Thank you.”

So Oliver really
is
missing. We all whispered about it after class and basically the class broke down into two camps: the doom-and-gloomers who think he's definitely been eaten by the same sasquatches who killed his parents (that's the Arin Roland camp), and the more hopeful ones who think that he might have run away.

By the time I got around to telling everyone my news about moving, it got lost in the discussion about
Oliver, and only Arin pretended to cry a little.

It's actually a relief that people are distracted, because nobody's asked why we're moving, so I don't have to tell them about Sam . . . and where we're trying to go.

Anyway, I've started to feel guilty about ignoring Oliver so completely. I have to admit that when I think about that strange boy who is so quiet that he might disappear, out in this chilly, wet evening, it makes me feel glad that I have my family and a warm place to call home (at least for now).

I'd like to sit against my church stone in the backyard with binoculars to scan the town for him—a little lonesome speck on one of the streets below—but I don't want to go back there because of the Cloud. I'm sitting in the front instead. I have a thorn in my toe from walking barefoot around my mom's rosebushes, pretending to be Saint Francis and trying to talk to the butterflies. I was trying to talk them into saving us somehow, because it seems animals must have special powers we don't understand. But I guess you can't just make up a butterfly language and expect it to work.

So here I am, bundled up in my orange rain jacket in the shelter of the stoop, propping my cast against
a railing, looking at the Winnebago in the driveway.

We haven't had a single person interested in the house yet. But Mom and Dad have started packing anyway. They say no matter what, whether we sell or not, we'll leave on Wednesday.

Our life is in boxes
. Most of it's going to Bernard's Self Storage on Witches' Pike. The rest will be squeezed into the Winnebago (which Dad has christened the Trinidad after Ferdinand Magellan's ship—so dorky), though how we're going to squeeze anything besides ourselves into that old banana on wheels is anyone's guess. So far Millie and I have refused to set foot inside the awful thing. Mom keeps telling us how nice and homey it is inside, but even
we
can see she's stretching the truth by the way her nose wrinkles whenever she looks at it parked out there in all its lumpy, yellowing glory. Only Sam scrambles in and out of it, because he's the peacemaker and he wants Dad to be happy. He's been hiding in there for hours at a time. Dad attached
a small pod trailer to the back for extra luggage, with a tiny screened window on each of its four sides. Millie asked if that could be her room, because it's the farthest away from everyone else. Mom laughed, but I don't think she was joking.

Sam is blissfully ignorant that all of this is for him. He's convinced we're going on some kind of adventure, and he seems to be feeling a little better because of it. He even asked me last night why everyone keeps staring at the Cloud out back. I played dumb and said, “Cloud? I didn't notice.”

His answer chilled me. He said, “You know, the one that looks like a face smiling at me? The smiling man.”

Sam is too innocent to know what he's supposed to be afraid of.

My cast comes off Wednesday. That's all.

I found Oliver! It's a
secret I can only write here . . . when I have more time, after dinner.

Okay. So today I skipped school. I needed some time to walk the streets of Cliffden and say good-bye to some favorite things. I pretended to be on my way to class when I parted with the others, but really I went down past the angel statue and out the underground exit. When I got aboveground again, I wandered in the direction of the zoo.

The Cliffden Zoo is tiny but impressive. I love to watch the monkeys, and when something's on my mind I can stay all day. You can tell how intelligent monkeys are and that they have senses of humor. It's nice they
don't hold it against us that we've taken them out of the thrilling jungle and stuck them in what is pretty much a big glass box.

Well, to get to the monkeys you have to go past the banshees, who give me the willies, and also the aquarium, which I'm not fond of because of the giant sea snakes and cryptids. (They stare out through the glass like they want to devour you, because they
do
want to devour you.) As I was rushing along my way, I saw a boy who looked like Oliver on the other side of a big pane of glass, gazing into the beluga whale tank while slipping Skittles into his pocket. I skidded to a halt.

I followed him past the seahorses, which are even weirder looking than the cryptids, moving very stealthily until I was sure it was him. He walked so slowly it was hard to be patient. At the octopus exhibit I finally stepped out of the shadows in front of him triumphantly. Oliver didn't seem shocked in the least.

“Aren't you surprised I'm here?” I asked.

“You're too loud to be a good spy.”

“I didn't say anything the whole time I was following you.”

“You even look loud,” he replied.

I decided not to dwell on this. Oliver stood with his hair even messier than usual; it tilted to one side so much
that it looked like his whole skinny body would tip over. His scar had gotten a little less pink and was less noticeable than it had been the last time I'd seen him. He was looking at me with a mixture of suspicion and concentration, like he was measuring me in his head.

A little crunching sound was issuing from the pocket of his jeans. We both looked down: A pair of big black eyes were peering at me from a tiny crooked face that had just poked out. The creature—about the size of a dragonfly—was bald except for a red patch of hair right above its eyes, and its ears were twice the size of its little head.

“Is that a faerie?” I asked, surprised. It's illegal to own faeries as pets in the United States unless they go through a very expensive quarantine process. Usually only celebrities and really rich people own them—Meryl Streep has one that she always brings to the Oscars.

“My mom was from Ireland,” Oliver said. “Everyone has faeries over there. So when she immigrated, she had a license for them. She made them little habitats in these big aquariums in our house. This one's called Tweep. I inherited her when . . .” He trailed off. He rubbed Tweep's head and the faerie purred and cooed. She was an ugly little thing, and I wondered how Oliver could
care for her so tenderly. “None of the pet stores carry faerie food around here, but she eats flies and Skittles.”

“I'm sorry . . . about your family,” I muttered.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I guess you ran away from your foster family.” Oliver frowned, and nodded.

“Everyone's worried about you.”

He thought on this, seemingly torn. “I don't want people to worry. But I also don't want new parents.” There was an edge of anger in his voice, but I suppose if I'd been through what Oliver has been through, I'd be pretty angry too.

“Where are you staying now?” I asked, ignoring Tweep, who'd disappeared into Oliver's pocket and begun to chirp.

He looked at me forlornly. There were circles under his green eyes. “I've been living at the fairgrounds; I sleep in a Ferris wheel car that was taken down. I still have twenty dollars left from my allowance. I've been eating McDonald's.”

I nodded, trying to look knowledgeable about what it's like to run away. “We're moving,” I offered, thinking moving to escape a Dark Cloud might be almost as bad as losing your whole family to bloodthirsty
monsters. I wanted him to know I was on his level.

“Where?”

“I'm not sure. We're going to my grandma's.” I hesitated, then went on. “But I think my dad really wants to try to get to the Extraordinary World.” I don't know why, but talking to Oliver made me feel like it was okay to be honest.

The silence stretched on and on. Most people don't like long silences, but Oliver seemed completely content to let the empty seconds stretch between us. “When are you leaving?” he finally asked politely.

“Wednesday afternoon, I guess.” I was still hoping, counting on, a miracle that would let us stay.

“I'm sorry you have to go,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, and looked at the ground.

“You can't tell anyone you saw me,” Oliver went on. “They'll try to bring me back to my foster parents.”

I promised, but I wasn't sure it was the right thing.

Before I left, Oliver looked at my cast, pulled out a marker from his backpack, and wrote on it, on the underside where I couldn't see.

*  *  *

My mom says that one of the reasons she loves paintings and poetry and things like that (which I mostly find
extremely boring) is that they focus not only on what
is
but what
could be
. She says that it's very important to accept what is but also to never stop dreaming about what could be. Sometimes we play this imagination game where we come up with ideas of what life would be like if there were no sun but only a moon, or if we spoke in music instead of words. . . .

Anyway, walking home I tried to imagine the world without sasquatches and Dark Clouds—how Oliver's parents would still be alive, and how Sam would be safe and we'd get to stay in Cliffden. It cheered me up for a few minutes.

I debated whether to tell my parents about Oliver, and I couldn't decide. So far I'm only writing it down here. Now I'm on the couch, and Mom has lit a fire in the fireplace and closed all the curtains that look out on the backyard. Everything is cozy and warm, and seeing Oliver feels like something I only imagined. Except that, just before I started writing this entry, I remembered to look in the mirror to see what he'd written on my cast. It said
I was never here.

It's hard to write because
my hands are shaking. We're all packed. The Winnebago is stuffed to the gills. The Cloud is hovering above the back deck this morning, just a couple of feet from the door, as if waiting to be let in. We're leaving and I'm writing as fast as I can.

Yesterday Arin Roland surprised me by showing up at my door with her mom to give me a big hug and also a present. It's a tiny silver suitcase with the words
Home Again
engraved on one side. It's sort of a dumb little knickknack, but I've decided to make it into a lucky object that'll bring us back here someday.

I want to record the curve of our driveway and the missing tiles of our gingerbread roof. I want to keep in my mind forever the paint smudges along the trim of
my bedroom window and the tree stump I tripped over once while we were playing ghost in the graveyard, the church stone just peeking out over the top of the hill and the blinking eye of my house. I've picked up several rocks from the yard to take with me. I smelled each and every flower left in my mom's garden. I touched the grass in several spots and buried all my pennies, and then I took my favorite glass prism from my room and buried that, too. I've also resolved to bury this diary. It seems like I should leave it here as a reminder of me. Sam is curled on my mom's lap on the front stairs, crying into her chest, and Millie is already in the Winnebago waiting, but I just want these seconds to last forever. Good-bye to the—

*  *  *

I'm writing from my seat in the camper. Something big has happened.

A few minutes ago Mom got in the driver's seat and called us all to get in. There wasn't time to bury this diary in the yard after all. We were pulling out of the driveway when suddenly Dad looked in the rearview mirror and said, “What the heck is that?” Millie and Sam and I smushed our faces against the back window to see what he was talking about.

There was a tall wiggly blob running after us down the road, nearly falling over, carrying a big sack of stuff up near its head so that it looked not like a person but a giant hopping worm, like a sleeping bag come to life. My mom stopped the Winnebago and the side door whooshed open, and climbing up the stairs was . . . Oliver.

He dropped his stuff down at his feet, the scar down his cheek extra bright on his flushed face, looked around at us as he tried to catch his breath, and asked, “Can I come with you to the Extraordinary World?”

Millie helped him in with both hands and explained his story to my parents, as much as we know of it. There was a kerfuffle and arguing and pros and cons and Millie kept hugging him like she was this sweet mama bird, which was annoying because she's nothing like that in real life, and it only made Oliver look shy and uncomfortable. He pulled out of her arms as quickly as he could, rubbed his scar, and patted his pocket to calm his faerie, who'd begun to squeak and rumble.