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  Ricky Ray said, “Yeah, and he was right, too. Only he had to go and make sure, but he couldn’t get past the spiders in the mailbox.”

  “So what did he do?” I asked. I could just see Randy Nidiffer with his hands on his hips, tapping his foot impatiently as he tried to come up with a solution to this problem.

  Ricky Ray grinned. “He knocked the mailbox down. And then he stomped the spiders. And then he ran back to his house and got Princess Crystal and brought her home to the castle. The end.”

  We all clapped. It wasn’t a bad story for a six-year-old boy to come up with.

  Murphy had a somber expression on her face as we packed up the scissors and magazines for the afternoon. “I think Randy Nidiffer’s grandmother was a spider,” she said. “A spider disguised as an old woman. Spiders suck the blood out of things, right?”

  Donita looked at her strangely. “Yeah, so do vampire bats. Maybe Randy Nidiffer’s granny was Count Dracula.”

  “No, no,” Murphy insisted. “That’s the wrong story. The story of Randy Nidiffer’s grandmother is the one where she spins a web and traps his little brothers, but Randy gets free.”

  “If you say so,” Donita said. “She sounds like just another mean old lady to me.”

  • • •

  That night in our room after lights-out, Murphy whispered, “Maddie, are you still awake?”

  “Sure,” I answered, turning toward the sound of her voice in the bed next to mine. “Are you okay?”

  “Tell me about your grandmother and that old man,” she said. “Tell me a funny story about things they used to do.”

  “Okay,” I said. I propped myself up on my elbows. “But how come?”

  Murphy pulled the sheets up to her neck. “It’ll keep me from dreaming about spiders.”

  So I told her the story about the time Granny Lane and Mr. Willis decided to go to the church Halloween party as a horse, only they fought so hard about who’d be the head and who’d be the behind that they stopped talking to each other for a week and missed the party altogether.

  When I finished, Murphy was fast asleep. I crept over to her bed and smoothed down her sheets and brushed a curl from her forehead. I would’ve bet she was used to her mama doing that for her every night. I would’ve bet she was missing home.

  Chapter 12

  For the first two months of her life as a citizen of the East Tennessee Children’s Home, Murphy belonged to the fort and to us. If anyone else was trying to get her attention, hoping she’d turn around and look in their direction, they were just so many tree branches clicking against the window on a windy afternoon.

  And then one day, this began to change.

  The first time I noticed it was at lunch a few weeks after we’d finished building the fort. It was me, Murphy, and Logan, all of us poking at our Tuna Melt Delights with our forks because there was a rumor going around that instead of tuna, the lunch ladies had chopped up gerbils and melted cheddar cheese over them. We didn’t really believe it, but for a few minutes it was fun to pretend.

  As we were busy poking and prodding our sandwiches, an eraser flew across the cafeteria and hit Murphy in the head. It was the kind of eraser that you stick on the end of your pencil, and the person who threw it was Brandon Sparks, the star soccer player of the sixth grade.

  Murphy rubbed her head where she’d been hit, then picked up the eraser and examined it. “I’ve been bombed,” she told us, then looked over at Brandon. “I think you lost this,” she yelled at him.

  I waited for Brandon to say something low-down and rude, but instead he called, “Then I guess I better come find it.” The next thing we knew, he was standing next to Murphy with his hand stuck out. “Give it over, thank you very much.”

  Murphy folded her fingers over the eraser. “No way,” she said. “Finders keepers. Besides, I have a lot of things I need to erase today.”

  They continued joking around like that for a few minutes, ending with Brandon’s grand gesture of making a gift of the eraser to Murphy. The whole time he didn’t say a word to me or Logan, or even act like we were alive.

  Over the next few days I began to hear Murphy’s name everywhere. I heard it as I was walking through the hallways or dressing out for gym, like it was part of a song everyone all the sudden knew the words to. “Her parents died in a car crash,” kids told each other, their voices quiet and dramatic. “She’s waiting for her aunt to come rescue her,” they reported, “but she probably won’t.”

  One day Olivia Woods picked Murphy for her team in PE. Olivia Woods was always a team captain, but she only picked three or four people for her team. After the special few were chosen, Olivia stepped back and let one of her followers, Jaycee Laws or Katha Coleman, pick out the rest. When Olivia called out Murphy’s name, somebody actually gasped. Murphy walked over to Olivia’s side like it was no big deal at all, like maybe she could fly and who cared what Olivia Woods thought. I knew this would make Olivia Woods like her even more. That was how the Olivia Woodses of the world operated, as far as I could tell.

  “Olivia Woods keeps talking to me,” Murphy told me one Monday afternoon when we were working at Potter’s Used Auto Parts and Misc. Supplies. We were going through shoe boxes filled with nuts and bolts and screws, sorting them out and storing them in plastic containers. Mr. Potter was up front, talking to a man about carburetors.

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked, sifting through a pile of medium-sized bolts. “What about?”

  “How I should come over to her house and eat dinner,” Murphy said. “How her mother collects oriental carpets so you can’t wear shoes inside. How she has a window in her ceiling and counts stars at night until she falls asleep.”

  “When does she tell you all this stuff?”

  Murphy shrugged. “In math class. Between lunch and PE. On the way to the buses in the afternoon. She keeps slipping in conversations when I’m not looking.”

  I scraped at the rusty head of a screw with my fingernail. I hated Olivia Woods and wanted to be Olivia Woods’ best friend all at the same time. I wanted her to leave Murphy alone. I wanted her to call me up and invite me over to eat pizza on her mama’s fancy rugs.

  “So what does it all mean, do you think?” I asked. “You think she wants to be friends with you?”

  “Who knows?” Murphy said. “We’re going to be partners for a math project. I’d rather do it with Logan, though. Sometimes Olivia acts like she’s a pretty big ball of cheese.”

  “I’ve noticed,” I said, and left it at that, even though my brain had already started buzzing with worries, like what if Olivia Woods stole Murphy away?

  Mr. Potter walked into the back room, his hat on his head. “Just got a call about some parts from an old junker a man wants to sell me over near Hampton. It’s on the other side of town, but I thought you children might like to ride along for a change of scenery. Don’t know how much chance you got to get out and about, what with school and all your activities.”

  I glanced at Murphy, and she nodded. “Driving is one of my favorite pastimes,” she told Mr. Potter as she started putting the lids back on boxes. That made Mr. Potter smile.

  “Didn’t know they let children your age drive, little gal,” he said, returning a box of nuts and bolts to its place on the shelf. “You sure you can see all the way over the wheel?”

  Murphy tossed her head. “Oh, you know what I mean. But watch out, I’m the worst backseat driver you ever met. I’m the sort of person who likes to give directions.”

  The inside of Mr. Potter’s truck smelled like a mix of gasoline and peppermint. It made me think of Mr. Willis’s truck, how it used to carry a whiff of wintergreen from the tobacco he liked to chew and spit into a plastic cup on the floorboard. “I swear, Virgil, that right there is the nastiest habit a man can have,” Granny Lane would complain every time Mr. Willis spit out another brown stream into that cup. “It’s worse than smoking, belching, and the public passing of gas all wrapped up together.”

  “And stil
l all them women are crazy about me,” Mr. Willis always said right back. “I got to spit tobacco just to get some peace and quiet.”

  “When I lived up on Roan Mountain, I rode around in a truck like this all the time,” I told Mr. Potter as we drove down Elk Street on the way to Highway 19E to Hampton.

  “Is that so? Well, for my money, you can’t beat a Ford truck. Now my brother, Clinton, he had the misfortune of marrying a woman who couldn’t abide a Ford truck. No sir, she came from a family of folk who didn’t drive nothing if it didn’t have the word Chevrolet on it in ten different places. Clinton was so in love, he traded in his Ford for a Chevy, and I can’t tell you how many times over the years I had to go bail him out from some mess or another, that truck of his broken down on the side of the road.”

  “My father drove a Chevy truck to work,” Murphy said. She said it like this was a fact she’d just remembered after a long time of forgetting. “A red one. He said that red trucks just rode better.”

  Mr. Potter shook his head. “Good thing I already like you as much as I do, little gal. Don’t know about them Chevy trucks, now. But I do like the color red.”

  We pulled out onto 19E. I turned my head this way and that, catching sight of things I hadn’t seen since I was eight years old. 19E is the road that goes from Elizabethton to Roan Mountain and back again, and I can’t tell you how many times me and Granny Lane and Mr. Willis rode down it to get to the Elizabethton Wal-Mart. Saturdays and Sundays, you could be sure there’d be a caravan of shiny pickup trucks and rusty clunkers headed down from Roan Mountain, and on your way you’d pass cars from Boone and Cranberry, Mountain City and Stony Creek, all on their way to the Wal-Mart, just like you.

  I snuggled down in my seat between Mr. Potter and Murphy, remembering. I used to get so excited smelling that popcorn smell that hit your nose the minute you walked in the store’s front doors. And driving home we’d sing songs and cut up, and at Christmas time Mr. Willis would always buy all three of us Santa Claus hats and foot-long candy canes, and he’d sing “Deck the Halls” at the top of his lungs all the way back up the mountain.

  “I always did like this road,” I said out loud to Mr. Potter and Murphy. “I always liked where it took me.”

  Mr. Potter nodded. “I suspect that’s the highest compliment you can give a road.”

  “That’s the only road worth driving on,” Murphy agreed.

  Chapter 13

  The problem with my curtains was they didn’t look like curtains were supposed to—at least not like the ones you see in magazines, all crisp and fluttery at the same time. My curtains looked more like used handkerchiefs. Sometimes I’d pull the thread too tight, and a hem would pleat up into a yellow and white gingham accordion. Or I’d be concentrating so hard on adding a row of zigzag bric-a-brac, that somehow I’d manage to twist up the material like a pretzel.

  But for all that, I was mighty glad to have something to do on Monday afternoons. Otherwise I’d have been stuck having to listen straight-on to nonstop talk about Olivia Woods’ house.

  The first time Murphy came back to the Home after an afternoon spent with Olivia working on their math project, I hopped onto my bed, practically rubbing my hands together, I was so ready to hear about how horrible Olivia had been. “So was she twice as mean at home? Or only half?” I asked Murphy before she’d even had a chance to set her books down.

  “She wasn’t mean at all,” Murphy said, slipping out of her jacket. “But that doesn’t surprise me, really. I’ve seen it a million times.”

  “Seen what?”

  Murphy flopped down on her bed and folded her arms behind her head. “A person changes from place to place. Like if you were in one house that had beautiful wallpaper and snow white carpets, you might sit up straighter or speak as properly as you could. But then if you went next door to a shabby, old house with no carpet and paint peeling off the walls, you’d feel entirely different. You might forget to close your mouth when you chewed your food or to wash your hands before dinner.”

  “So what’s Olivia like when she’s in her own house?”

  “Like someone who looks at the moon through a window in her ceiling. It’s the house, of course. That house would make anyone a better person.”

  And from then on, that house was all Murphy wanted to talk about.

  “You can tell someone with a very old soul designed Olivia’s house,” Murphy said one Monday afternoon. She was bent over a cardboard box that she was painting blue. “Someone who appreciates big spaces, lots of air.”

  “Why would an old soul appreciate big spaces? I’d think a soul would get tired of space after awhile,” I remarked, biting off a length of thread with my teeth. “In fact, you’d figure a soul might appreciate a closet, just something to stay inside of for a while.”

  “Wrong,” Murphy said, not bothering to look up from her box as she corrected me. “A soul needs air and light, and lots of it. Which is what Olivia’s house has a million times over. It has three balconies on the inside, so you can see every downstairs room from the upstairs.”

  “I’d be careful about walking around in the dark, if you ever spend the night there.”

  “Maddie, do you not understand what I’m talking about here?” Murphy looked up and shook her head at me. “This house is nothing to joke around about. It’s a fairy tale . . . it’s poetry! Olivia’s house is an actual poem made out of wood.”

  “Not to mention air and light,” I added, making Murphy shake her head again and sigh.

  I squinted my eyes at my curtains, like squinting might make the stitches straighten themselves out. If Murphy was going to fall in love with a house, how was I supposed to stop her? I wished I could build a house like a poem, a house that would make Murphy feel right at home, but dang if I could even make a pair of curtains that hung straight. Besides, in all her talk, I noticed Murphy hardly said a thing about Olivia. I couldn’t care less if she fell in love with Olivia’s house, as long as she didn’t give two hoots about the girl who lived inside it.

  I had other things to worry about, anyway, like what was I going to do about Ricky Ray, now that he’d been abandoned for the second time in his life.

  • • •

  It had been two days since I’d met Crystal Jenkins, Ricky Ray’s mother, and I still hadn’t gotten over it. She was about the last person on earth I’d ever expected to meet. I had this movie that showed in my head every time Ricky Ray mentioned her, where she was wearing a party dress and dancing farther and farther away from her little boy. Two weeks down the road, two months down the road, forever down the road. The idea that she might ever turn around and walk on back had never occurred to me.

  But there we were, sitting across from each other, eating lunch at the Tres Chicas Café on Elk Street, Ricky Ray between us jabbing his spoon into his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich like he held a longtime grudge against it.

  I couldn’t believe she’d ordered that peanut-butter sandwich to begin with, but I’d sat right there as she’d pointed to the menu with a pudgy, nail-bitten finger and said to the waitress, “Peanut butter and jelly on white for the little boy. You know that’s all they’ll eat at his age.”

  Ricky Ray stared straight ahead, not saying a word.

  “Ricky Ray, stop it,” his mama said, pulling the spoon from between his fingers after he’d practically cracked his plate with it. “You’re making me nervous. I’m nervous enough as it is.”

  There were a whole lot of things I’d had all wrong about Crystal Jenkins. Clearly, she was too roly-poly for party dresses, and anything frilly or froo-froo wouldn’t have been her style in the first place. Practically the only time her head came all the way out of her baby blue windbreaker with a NASCAR patch right over her heart was to order an egg-salad sandwich. As soon as the waitress was gone, like a turtle, Crystal Jenkins’s head popped right back down. It would have been hard to pull that kind of disappearing act in a slinky party dress.

  “It sure surprised me when you show
ed up with Ricky Ray,” Crystal Jenkins said to me after the waitress set down three glasses of iced tea on the table. “When he said he wanted to get permission to bring a friend, I figured it’d be somebody closer to his own age.”

  I shrugged. “Me and Ricky Ray have always been friends,” I told her. “I don’t see that age has all that much to do with it.”

  “I’m almost seven,” Ricky Ray put in. “She ain’t that much older than I am.”

  “Almost five years,” I said, and he started to do the math on his fingers. I grabbed his hand. “Believe me, it’s five years. I’ll be twelve in April. But it doesn’t matter.”

  Ricky Ray pulled his hand back. “But I’ll be seven in December,” he said, and started counting again.

  Crystal popped her head back out of her jacket. “Seven? Really?”

  “Don’t you know that?” Ricky Ray’s eyes were open so wide I thought they might fall splat onto the table. “Don’t you know how old I am?”

  “Of course I know how old you are,” she said, not sounding too sure. “I just can’t believe how fast the years go. Boy, you sure are getting big.”

  Ricky Ray shrugged. “I told you, I’m almost seven.”

  I ripped open a sugar packet and dumped it in my tea. We’d been in the restaurant for about twenty minutes, but already it felt like the twelve months strung between one Christmas and another. When Ricky Ray had asked me to go to lunch with him and his mama, I pictured sitting at a table with somebody young with bright eyes and hair, someone who’d keep me laughing the whole time, like one of the models in the magazines that Ricky Ray was always calling Crystal. I’d spent the two days between the invitation and the lunch hardening myself to what I was sure would be Crystal Jenkins’s charms. But an overload of charm wasn’t one of Crystal’s many problems.

  “I tried to get your daddy to come,” she told Ricky Ray through a mouthful of mushy egg salad. “But that good-for-nothing jerk wouldn’t even try to get off work. I told him, ‘Ain’t neither one of us has seen little Ricky Ray in over a year, and you can’t get off work.’ Now if I’d told him I had a keg of beer back at my place, then he’d have gotten off work, you can count on it.”