Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things (18 page)

TWENTY

Gary's truck took a few tries to fire up, and when it did, it made a tough rumbling sound that was
loud
.

“Sorry!” he said over his shoulder to Casey and me. “Exhaust manifold leak. They want three hundred and fifty bucks to fix it!”

Casey and I were crammed in the small back compartment, sitting in little fold-down jump seats that faced each other. It felt like we were on some sort of military mission as we thundered down the road.

After a minute, Casey leaned forward to talk to me, and I did the same so I could hear him over the racket.

“I've been trying to figure out why you hung up on me.”

I'd kinda shoved that little incident out of my mind, but now there I was, trapped in the back of a bomber on wheels having to face him. Face
it
.

I looked away and mumbled, “Sorry.”

“But there's got to be a
reason
you freaked out. I don't get what the big deal is.”

I pulled a face. “Can we just forget about it?”

He leaned a little closer. “It's like you and this condor thing—I just want to figure it out.”

My eyes got wide as it hit me that this was Cosmic Payback Phase Two.

Why was this happening?

How many phases were there going to be?

Was being around me really this much torture?

Casey laughed. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

I shook my head a little. “It's like everything I do to other people is coming back around to me!”

He laughed again. “That's called karma.”

“I must have terrible karma!”

“No, you don't. I think you're just paranoid about something you don't need to be paranoid about.”

“Like . . . ?”

His mouth scrunched to one side, then the other. His eyebrow went up, then down, and finally he said, “Like the fact that the phone number I have for you is not the same as the phone number my dad has for your mom.”

“He has her
phone
number?”

Casey nodded. “And even if it's her cell, it's a different area code.”

I slumped back against the hard plastic of my little jump seat. “What an airhead she is! What a complete moron!”

“But what's the big deal? So you live with . . . your dad? Your grandparents? Your aunt? So what? Why all the secrecy?”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and for the first time since I moved into the Senior Highrise, I wondered exactly why I
was
so uptight about it. Why wasn't I just, you know,
casually
secretive? Why was I always on high alert? Why didn't I just tell people I lived with Grams? I didn't have to say
where,
just that I lived with her. It's not like it's a
crime
to live with your grandmother. Who cares?

Maybe it's because when this all started, I was in elementary school and Grams was super-worried that I would spill the beans to someone who shouldn't know. But now I was going into the eighth grade—I wasn't a little kid anymore! Even if I got busted, I could just leave the apartment. I was old enough to live with Holly or Marissa or even Hudson for a while. Grams
probably
wouldn't be evicted. Everything would be fine!

All of a sudden I felt suffocated by the huge tangled web of lies. I wanted to bust out. To break free. To tell Casey everything!

So I leaned forward, looked him right in the eye, and said, “I live with my grandmother in that seniors building on Broadway. Kids are not supposed to even be
in
the building, let alone live there. And since the apartments are government-subsidized for low-income seniors and there's a waiting list to get in, my grams will get evicted if people find out. And since she can't exactly afford to live anywhere else, it's a big deal that I don't blow it. I use the fire escape to sneak in and out of the apartment without being seen. I sleep on the couch, and everything I own fits in my grams' bottom dresser drawer. It's not easy, but my grandmother is great and my mom's a ditz, so I'd rather live this way than move to Hollywood.” I took a deep breath and said, “There. Now you know.”

He let out a low, kind of airy whistle. “Now
that
makes total sense.”

“And besides you, only Marissa, Dot, and Holly know.” “I promise—I swear—I won't tell a soul.”

I nodded. “Thanks.” Then I added, “Your dad's the one I'm worried about.”

“I'll make sure it's cool.” Then he asked, “So where's your dad in all this?”

I rolled my eyes. “Who knows? For some reason my mom is embarrassed by him. I don't even know who he is.” His eyebrows went up. “She won't tell you?”

I shook my head. “And believe me, I've asked.”

He frowned. “I wouldn't put up with that.”

“I know. And I am planning to figure it out. Eventually. Right now I'm just taking things one little crisis at a time.”

We just sat there for a minute, surrounded by the thunder of Gary's truck. Then Casey leaned forward again and said, “Don't stress. Your secret's safe with me.”

I nodded, and deep down inside I believed that it was.

The address on Blosser Road turned out to be an old clapboard house set back about fifty feet from the street. A short, dilapidated picket fence marked off the property from farm fields on the right and a big electrical supply stockyard on the left. It was like the house had been uprooted from a West Side neighborhood and wedged there as a buffer between industry and agriculture.

Gary pulled into the dirt driveway and cut the motor. And for a minute we all sort of looked at the house, wondering what it was
doing
there. Then we piled out and stood around wondering what
we
were doing there.

“So?” Gary asked me. “What's the plan?”

I shrugged and started for the front door. “See what we see?”

“But . . . are we looking for a condor?” Cricket asked. “Are we splitting into teams? Do we have some sort of escape strategy?”

I grinned. “Sorry, troops. We're just wingin' it.”

We went up the creaky steps, rang the bell, and then knocked, but no one answered.

I checked inside the little flip-up mailbox that was mounted near the front door.

Empty.

The curtains were open, so we shielded the light from our eyes and looked inside. There was one overstuffed chair in front of a television and one chair by a table in the kitchen, but the whole rest of the house was taken up by workbenches that were loaded with junk. Newspapers, cardboard boxes, big spools of string, scissors and hammers and knives, metal tubs in a bunch of different sizes, cans of turpentine, jugs of rubbing alcohol and ammonia . . .

There were also hooks and bars with deflated animal heads hanging upside down from the ceiling. A deer. A lynx. A coyote. A ram. The eyes were missing in all of them. They were like the creepiest Halloween masks ever.

“May I help you?”

We all jumped about ten feet in the air, then turned and saw a man with slicked-back hair. He was wearing a dirty white apron and had his left hand inside a mallard duck. It looked like he was ready to put on a puppet show, but the duck's head was all dangly, and it didn't have eyes.

The man himself was pretty normal-looking, except for
his
eyes. One went to the left, one went to the right. It seemed like he was looking behind the house and out to the street at the same time. He cleared his throat. “I
said,
may I help you?”

Cricket, Casey, and Gary all turned to me.

“Uh, yeah. Hi. Are you Lester Blunt?”

“That I am.”

“The Natural History Museum told us—”

“Oh, you're here to pick up the bird?” We all sorta looked at each other and nodded, which I guess was good enough for him. He beat his dead ducky puppet with his free hand, sending up a dusty white cloud. “Well, come on back.”

We followed him around to the back of the house. “So I guess you've been doing this a long time, huh?” I asked, catching up to him.

He looked at me.

I think.

“My whole life,” he said. “Passed down from my dad. And his dad before him.” He beat the duck some more, making a white dust cloud around his hand. “Takes years to master the art, which is why I'm the only taximan left in the area. Could take shortcuts, but I believe in a quality job. I don't even buy them prefab bodies. I can always spot a prefab body. They're unnatural lookin'. I make mine from scratch.”

“Prefab bodies? What happens to their real bodies?”

“We don't embalm them, if that's what you thought. We just save the skins, then build a body to stretch them over.”

“Really? I didn't know that. . . .”

“Mm-hmm.”

“So there's no bones or eyeballs or guts?”

He laughed. “Nah. Just skins.”

“And feathers?”

“Oh, yeah. Nothing fake about the feathers.”

We were at the back steps now. There was a giant freezer purring away off to the side. It had a heavy chain padlocked around it.

“So, uh, what happens to the bodies?”

“Well, for the trophy heads, the hunters usually keep the meat.” He opened the back screen door. “For the rest?” He grinned. “It's one of the perks of the job.”

“So that duck you've got there . . . ?”

He shrugged. “If it's good meat, why waste it?”

We followed him inside, zigzagging through small rooms with decaying cardboard boxes and dusty animal heads everywhere. It smelled like mothballs and ammonia and turpentine and . . . dust. I looked around for oversized black feathers but didn't see a thing.

“What's the biggest bird you've ever done?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation going.

“Oh, that con—” He stopped, then peered at me with his right eye before turning it on Gary. “You're not the one that called about doing a condor, are you? Because if you are, I told you—you have to have legal papers. I don't do black market.”

“Someone called about doing a condor?” I asked. This was not good. “When?”

“Yesterday.” His eye focused back on me. “So it wasn't you people?”

“No!” Gary said. “We're just here to, uh, to deliver that bird to the museum.”

He gave a little snort and shook his head. “Of course. I'm sorry.” Then he muttered to himself, “You're losing touch, Lester. What would kids want with a condor?”

He put down the duck puppet and handed Gary a tiny sandpiper that was mounted on a driftwood base. “Here she is. Beaut, isn't she?”

Gary turned it from side to side, showing it to the rest of us.

“It looks so real,” Cricket said.

“Thanks, miss.”

Now, for a guy who skinned and stuffed animals, who lived in a no-man's-land between farm fields and spools of electrical wire and had eyes that shot off like billiard balls on a split, I thought Lester Blunt was pretty nice. Pretty
normal.

But the minute we're piled back into Gary's truck, Cricket turns to face me from the front seat and says, “
That's
why you would wear sunglasses and a cowboy hat!”

I look at her. “Huh?”

“To cover those eyes!” She shivers. “Ooooh. He is so freaky!”

“He seemed pretty normal to me. . . .”

They all three turn to stare at me.
“Normal?”

I shrug. “Well, you know—in a freaky sort of taxidermy way . . .”

They all snigger and then Casey says, “I think a condor could fit in that freezer, easy.”

“And did you see how it was locked?” Cricket whispers. “It's chained up like a vault!”

I shake my head. “But somebody
did
call about a condor yesterday. He wouldn't admit that if he actually had one.”

Gary says, “Maybe he was just trying to throw us off?” He fires up the truck and grinds it into reverse. “So where to?” He eyes the sandpiper and says, “I take it I'm on the hook to deliver that wannabe condor to the museum?”

I pull a face. “Do you mind?”

“No problem,” he says, backing into the street. And the funny thing is, from the grin on his face I can tell that he's having fun.

More fun than he's had in a long, long time.

TWENTY-ONE

The Natural History Museum charges five bucks for parking, if you can believe that. And they charge seven more to get inside. And I don't care how much they try to describe it as something interesting—a “still-life zoo,” “nature's landscape,” a “tour of habitats”—the fact is, it's still seven bucks to see a bunch of stuffed dead stuff.

Anyway, all of us voted to walk instead of pay for parking, so we circled around the block.

No parking.

We went a street farther out, keeping our eyes peeled for a place to pull in.

No parking.

So I asked, “Did you guys
want
to go inside? Because I can just run the bird in myself.”

Gary looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Aren't we still snooping around?”

I laughed. “Yeah. But I don't really know what we're expecting to find.”

“Well, I want to go,” he said.

I looked out the window again. “Okay, then we've got to find parking.”

All of a sudden Cricket cries, “Look!” but it's not a parking place that she's pointing to. It's a woman with amazingly long honey blond hair, pulling a blue and orange mountain bike out of the back of a steel blue SUV.

It's Janey, all right, and as we get closer, we watch her shut the back and push her mountain bike up alongside the driver's door. Then, just as we're passing by, she leans in the SUV's open window and plants a kiss on the cheek of some guy wearing a ball cap.

Cricket gasps. “Did she just
kiss
that guy?”

I nod. “It sure looked like it.”

“Go around the block!” Cricket tells her brother. “We've got to find out who that is!”

“Why?” Gary asks.

“Janey's two-timing Quinn!”

“Who cares?”

“I do! He will! Go around the block, Gary!”

Gary's still not keen on the idea, but he do-si-dos through traffic and around the block anyway. Trouble is, we hit all red lights and everyone seems to be moving so
slow
that by the time we get back to where the SUV was, it's long gone.

The parking place, though, is still available. So Gary dives in and we all get out to deliver the itty-bitty mounted bird together.

Now, it takes us a little while to get over to the museum. And then, as we're finally shuffling up the entrance steps, the front door comes whooshing open and Janey comes blasting out. And before the door's had a chance to finish closing,
whoosh,
it flies open again, and this time
Quinn
comes running out. “Janey! Janey, wait!” he shouts, but he's too late. Faster than you can say, I'm outta here, Janey is on her bike and
gone
.

Quinn throws his hands in the air and curses, then turns to us and says, “She dumped me!
She
dumped
me
.”

“She was two-timing you,” Cricket blurts, like it's the hottest gossip she's ever heard.

“What?” he asks, and suddenly his dark eyes look cold.

Dangerous.

Cricket takes a step back. “We . . . we saw her get her bike out of the back of someone's car.” She points. “About four blocks that way. Then she went up and kissed the driver.” She hesitates and glances around at us. “At least we think it was a kiss.”

He just stands there a minute, then starts back up the museum steps muttering, “Girls and their mind games! Why chase a guy if you're just going to dump him?”

Cricket follows him up the steps. “Are you going to tell her you know she was two-timing you when you see her?”

He looks at her like she's crazy. “Why would I see her?”

“Well, she works here. . . .”

“Not anymore. She quit!” He gives her an exasperated look. “Now can I please have some space?”

So Cricket backs off, but I intercept him at the door and push the sandpiper on him. “We're delivering this for Lester Blunt.”

He looks at me, then the bird, then me again. “For whom?”

I watch him very carefully. “Lester Blunt.”

His forehead's a mess of wrinkles, and they all seem to be shoving in different directions. “Who?”

“You know, the taxidermist in Santa Martina.”

His face smoothes a little. “Oh, right.” But then his eyebrows scrunch together as he asks, “Dennis asked you to do this? I thought you two hated each other.”

“Uh . . . we haven't talked to him.” Then I try to sound all nonchalant as I ask, “Is he the one who picks up and drops off projects?”

“Usually.”

“But . . . he doesn't work for the museum, does he?”

Quinn pulls the door open and says, “Look, if you don't mind, I
really
need some space,” then disappears inside with the bird.

As we start down the steps, Cricket sighs, “Poor guy. He's really hurting.”

Gary snorts. “At least he knows why he got dumped.” He eyes his sister. “You delivered that news so tactfully—very impressive.”

Casey and I kind of grin at each other, and when Cricket realizes her brother is being sarcastic, she blushes and says, “I guess I really didn't like her.”

“I guess not!” we all say.

On the way back to the Kuos' we stopped and got dollar burgers because we were all starving, and after that we were wiped-out tired. And since Casey had to get going and Cricket said, “Can we unpack tomorrow?” I just hiked home.

I like walking. Well, not when I have big balloon blisters or if it's icy-windy or pouring down rain, but other than that, I really like walking. My friends all listen to music when they're walking or cruising along on their skateboards or bikes, but I like to listen to the rhythm of moving. It kind of lulls my mind into a place where I can sort things out. Where I can
think
.

And since my feet were feeling a whole lot better, I really
wanted
to walk. There had been so many new people and new places and changes in the last few days that I hadn't really had the chance to get
used
to them. The walk home gave me time to turn all the new bits and pieces and
people
over in my mind. It was kinda like reviewing for a spelling test—it didn't teach me anything
new,
it just got me more comfortable with what was there.

But still. Like a list of spelling words, I couldn't seem to string the bits and pieces and people together in a way that made sense. I was missing verbs. Or maybe my list was
all
verbs. Whatever. The
point
is, I may not have had any revelations, but by the time I got home, I felt better. At least I'd reviewed. At least I wouldn't bomb the test.

Not that there
was
a test, but you know what I'm saying.

Then I walked through the door and discovered that I'd bombed a completely different kind of test.

The trust test.

Grams glared at me from the kitchen, where she was talking on the phone, and I heard her say, “She's home now. . . . No, I'll tell her. . . . No, Lana, I'll do it. Goodbye.”

She hung up, and I could tell that whatever she and my mother had been discussing was something that I was going to hate.

My knees went wobbly, so I sat down at the kitchen table. “What's wrong?”

She crossed her arms, and I could see her counting to ten.

“Grams? What's wrong?”

Then, in measured, angry words, she said, “You're moving to Hollywood.”

I'd been kind of expecting this since my mother had landed the role of an aristocratic amnesiac on
The Lords of Willow Heights,
but I hadn't expected it in this
way
. And I'd expected that instead of agreeing with her, Grams would tell my mom that me moving to Hollywood was a bad idea. She'd tell her that we were getting along fine, that I had good friends and was making decent grades at school. Why mess up all of that and move me to a place I would hate?

I
would
hate it, too. I mean, come on. The only thing worse than going to school with Heather Acosta would be going to school with Barbie and Ken.

But here Grams was, telling me that I was moving. Not discussing,
telling
. And she was angry. Not at my mother, at
me
.

And then it hit me—Casey's dad had told my mom about the overnighter in the tent. And because my mother had then broadsided Grams with this little tidbit of scandal, I was now plastered with poop.

Normally I would have started ranting about how unfair it was that she was telling me I had to move and how she and my mom were, once again, jumping to conclusions. But for some reason I felt more calm than panicked. This really was an overblown misunderstanding.

I had not done anything wrong.

Well, except for that little bit about not telling the whole truth, but I pushed that whisper of doubt out of my mind, looked Grams in the eye, and said, “No, I'm not.”

I said it calmly. Certainly. Like there was just no disputing this fact.

She, on the other hand, screamed, “Yes, you are! This is not open to discussion!”

Boy, was she flustered. She didn't know what to do with herself—she was twitching at the face and moving all around this one little area in the kitchen without actually
going
anywhere. Which, for some funny reason, made me feel even calmer.

“No, I'm not.”

Grams twitched and sputtered some more, then did something I'd never seen her do before—she threw herself in a chair, buried her head in her arms on the table, and started bawling.

I rushed over. “Grams, it's all right. Everything is going to be—”

Her head snapped up. “I will not go through this again! I will not!”

Right away I knew what she was talking about. And even though I'd never actually thought about what it must have been like for
her
when my mom broke it to her that she was expecting
me,
in a little flash of understanding, I got it.

“Grams. Grams, calm down. You're not going to have to go through that again. I promise.” I gave a little laugh. “Grams, I'm thirteen years old!”

Her cheeks were glistening with tears. “But kids grow up so fast these days! I've read statistics and I know that—”

“Grams! Grams, get a grip! I've never even kissed a boy!”

She took off her glasses and wiped away the tears. “But Lana told me—”

“What does she know? Stuff she's heard thirdhand from people who weren't even there!” I held both her hands and said, “I didn't tell you because I
didn't
want you to worry. It was an emergency, okay? There were five of us—three girls and two boys—in one tent. Did you want us to shiver out in the cold all night? Get attacked by coyotes or snakes or centipedes?”

She looked horrified.
“Centipedes?”

“Or ticks or scorpions?”

She shook her head, her eyes wide.

“Well, neither did we.”

“There were
scorpions
out there?”

I snickered. “Oh, yeah.”

She looked at me a minute. Just looked. Like she wasn't really sure it was me or not. Finally she said, “You're growing up so fast, Samantha.” Her chin quivered. “Can't you stop? Can't you just stay my precocious little granddaughter forever?”

I laughed and sat back in my chair. “No, but I could stay
here
forever. Or at least a lot longer.” I leaned toward her again. “I don't want to go to Hollywood, Grams. I like living with you.”

She nodded, then held my cheeks and said, “Thank you.”

After she let go, I said, “The person you've really got to be worried about is your daughter.”

“Lana? Why?”

“She doesn't
think,
Grams. She gave Warren Acosta her phone number, and obviously he's using it!”

“
That's
how she found out about your camping trip?”

“Bingo.”

Grams' jaw dropped. “She told me she'd heard a rumor!”

I snorted. “Way off in Hollywood?
Right
.”

Her eyes got wider and wider as she put the pieces together. “Is she
dating
him?”

“I have no idea.”

“But if she winds up marrying Warren Acosta, Heather would become your stepsister!” She stood up. “Oh, this can't be! This cannot happen!” She headed for the phone. “I've got to put a stop to this. I've got to put a stop to this right now!”

I chased after her, grabbed the phone away, and hung it back up. “You can't, Grams. The more you try, the more she'll go after him.”

“But why him? Why him of all people?”

“Because she's Lady Lana, Grams.”

I said it like it was the reason and the whole reason, but in my gut I had the awful feeling that it might be something even harder to control than my mother.

Something a person really can't change, no matter what they do.

Fate.