Eight Keys (17 page)

“What about the shaving cream in Amanda’s lunch? Doesn’t that bother you?”

Caroline shrugged. “It’s not like you started it. She had it coming. Did Franklin really do that all by himself?”

Well, Franklin really
had
taken care of everything, but … “He did it for me.”

“Why can’t you be friends anymore? Are you sure?”

I didn’t feel sure about anything.

“Are you worried?” I asked.

“About …?”

“What Amanda will do to you.”

“Oh no.”

“No?”

Caroline shook her head. Then she tapped it.

“I’ve got six years of secrets up here. I don’t think she’ll be trying anything on me.”

Aunt Bessie picked me up after detention. Amanda and I had earned ourselves a week’s worth. Uncle Hugh was waiting on the porch when I got home.

“How’d it go?” he asked, patting the blue-painted boards next to him for me to sit down.

I dropped my backpack and sat. “I had to scrape the gum off the bottom of desks with Amanda. For an hour.”

“Did you talk? Work things out?”

“No. She tried to leave gum wads where I could step in them.”

“Things will get better,” Uncle Hugh said. “
You
will make them better.”

“I can’t make anything better.”

“On the contrary,” said Uncle Hugh. “You’re the only one who can. Start by calling Franklin.”

“Are you going to make me do that?” I asked.

“I’m not going to make you do anything. What kind of apology is ‘My uncle said I had to call you’? Anything you do should come from you.”

Franklin was at school the next day. I left a seat open next to me on the bus, but he didn’t sit there. He passed my table at lunch, too. Those were the hardest tests yet. But I didn’t call after him. I didn’t try to explain. The next couple days after that went pretty much the same way.

After my last detention I walked to Leonard’s. In front of the hardware store was a familiar car. Mrs. White’s.

I thought about running away, but I was already too close. She spotted me when she climbed out of the car.

“Elise!”

“Uh, hi, Mrs. White. What are you doing here?”

“I had to find a parking space. Franklin’s at the orthodontist”—she gestured to the dentist’s office next door—“getting fitted for braces. He has to have two teeth pulled. But you probably know all about that already.”

Actually, I didn’t know anything about Franklin getting braces.

I thought about the first time Franklin lost a tooth, in kindergarten. I wiggled it out for him. He cried when he saw
all the blood, so I reminded him that it was good to lose a tooth. You got a treat at home under your pillow.

Would Mrs. White give him a treat for having them yanked out at age eleven?

She was standing next to me now.

“So, Elise … What exactly happened between you and Franklin?”

“Nothing.”

“Really? Nothing?”

“I have to go inside.”

I turned, but Mrs. White started up again. “I know he acts like a tough guy, but he’s really hurting.”

In what universe would Franklin be called a “tough guy”? Well, he hadn’t been acting upset at school. Maybe that was what she meant. What about at home? Maybe he still wasn’t talking about it there, either.

“Why don’t you come over for dinner?” she offered. “We can all sit down together and talk things out.”

“I can’t.” Would Franklin really be eating dinner with bloody gauze in his mouth? Would he feel like talking? And what would dinner be? Plain boiled veggies over steamed rice?

“Maybe another night, then? Tomorrow?”

“I said I can’t.”

I knew she wanted to help, but it made me angry. This was what was wrong to begin with. Franklin was a baby. She treated him like a baby. Let him take care of his own problems.

• • •

I meant to do my homework. I really did. But I went to my bedroom and lay down with my head on the pillow. I reached my hands underneath it to scrunch it properly, and felt something small and metal.

No way.

I closed my hand around the key and headed out to the barn.

Only three doors left.

The one the key fit opened to a tiny room. The walls were covered with photographs. The name of each place was written on the matting around each picture. Geneva, Switzerland, and Beijing, China, and Johannesburg, South Africa, and about a hundred other places. One frame didn’t have a picture in it, but words:
When I grew up, I was going to be an explorer
.

My dad hadn’t been an explorer, though. He’d worked in a bank.

The room was different from Mom’s and Uncle Hugh’s not just because of the pictures. Their rooms were about what someone else thought was a good idea to know about them, but Dad’s room was what he wanted me to know about himself.

This time, the note said, TREASURE YOUR LIFE.

The part of Dad who had been a little boy had left a train set in the middle of the floor. The part who had been a teenager had left three shelves of trophies, certificates, and
ribbons—sports awards, science fair medals. The college student left a bookshelf of notebooks and papers.

There was a small journal explaining about him being sick. I had only heard that it was a kind of cancer that had spread even though they were trying to fight it. He got it about a year after my mom died. When he had started acting tired and sick, everyone had just assumed it was grief. But it wasn’t. It was a relief to know that Dad had died from something that didn’t have to do with me; it wasn’t my fault. It had nothing to do with being sad about Mom.

There were a few scrapbooks. I really liked the one full of pictures of Dad, Uncle Hugh, and Uncle Beau as kids. They were doing happy things: playing at a lake, playing in the snow, fishing, riding bicycles.… Sometimes there was a fourth boy in the pictures. I’d have to ask Uncle Hugh who that was.

Another book had wedding photos. Mom’s bridesmaids had been in blue—a younger Aunt Bessie was one—and Uncle Hugh and Uncle Beau were Dad’s groomsmen. The best man looked familiar.

I took the two scrapbooks to Uncle Hugh in his workshop.

“Yeah, that’s Leonard,” he confirmed.

“So are all these …?” I flipped through the pictures with the fourth boy.

“All Leonard. Aw, look at him little. Look at all of us. Where’d you get this?”

“Upstairs. The next room’s about Dad.”

“The next room? How’d you get into it?”

“A key showed up.”

“Jiminy, Cricket.”

“Jiminy, Uncle.”

He was studying the pictures, so I let him hold on to the books and went back upstairs.

The next book I found was all about Dad and Leonard. The two of them had had such a good time. It made me miss Franklin. And it made me miss Dad a little.

Which gave me an idea.

“Hey, Leonard,” I said, surprising him where he was stamping prices on boxes of nails.

“Hey there, Cricket. Alone again?”

“Yeah.” I followed him back to the storage room. “I’m here to call in my birthday present: one day-trip to a place of my choice.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“The old lake.”

“You do? When we could go see a 3-D movie and eat a big bucket of popcorn and wear funny glasses?”

“Yep.”

“When we could drive into the city to go to the aquarium and watch the sharks get fed?”

“Yep.”

“When we could wait until spring and go to the amusement park and eat too much cotton candy and ride on the roller coaster and listen to me complain about how my body’s too old for those things?”

“Yep.”

“You know we’ll do all of those things anyway.”

“Yep.”

“When do you want to do this?”

“Next week? We have days off for Thanksgiving. You usually spend time with us then anyway.”

“We’ll see. I’d need time to get ready for a trip like this.”

“It’s not far, right?”

“Not distance-far,” said Leonard. “Another kind of far.”

Thanksgiving with Leonard

Uncle Hugh knocked on my door.

“Are you sick? It’s noon.” He came over, gently tugged on my ponytail, and put his hand on my forehead.

“No fever,” he announced. “You sure you feel okay?”

“I feel blaaaahhh.”

“I didn’t know twelve-year-olds could feel blah on Thanksgiving.”

“Twelve-year-olds feel whatever they want, whenever they want.”

Uncle Hugh laughed. “Sit up.”

I sat up.

“You have pillow creases all over your face.” Uncle Hugh smoothed away the hair that had fallen out of my ponytail. “Tell me why you’ve spent this wonderful day with your face in a pillow.”

“I’m tired,” I said, “and so happy not to be at school.”

Thanksgiving made me want Christmas to come soon, but I wondered if it would feel lonely this year, without Franklin. Who would make his hot cocoa?
No milk
, he always reminds me.
I know!
I always say. And what about candy canes? There
aren’t good ones at his house. His mom’s had the same candy canes on their Christmas tree for ten years. Nobody’s allowed to eat them; they’re for “decoration.”

“Get up,” Uncle Hugh said. “Get dressed. Beau, Sally, and your cousins will be here soon and Aunt Bessie needs your help in the kitchen. She wants to make an apple pie while the turkey thaws.”

“Okay. But I’m not getting dressed up.”

“Okay. Make sure your sneaks are sloppily tied and your socks don’t match, and for heaven’s sakes, don’t comb your hair.”

“Deal.”

I’d never made an apple pie before. It took way longer than applesauce. We peeled the apples, cut the apples, sugared the apples—then there was the crust, which was a whole other story. Aunt Bessie let me take some of the leftover dough to decorate the top of the pie; I made leaves and apples with cookie-cutters.

Annie mixed the stuffing for the turkey. Ava was in her high chair, in a happy, gurgly mood. After I finished the pie, I took charge of entertaining Ava. I put a metal mixing bowl on my head, tapped it with a wooden spoon, and made a funny face to go along with each tap. She let out bursts of laughing squeals.

“Hey, Cricket.”

I turned around. “Hi, Leonard.”

“Ready to go?” he asked.

“Right now?”

“Yes, right now.”

“Aunt Bessie asked me to help her.… ”

“You helped,” she said. “We knew he was coming. That’s part of why we needed to get you dressed.”

They’re all so sneaky.

The drive to the old lake took an hour. I’d expected a sandy beach, but after parking we had a bit of a hike. The path was covered with brown, crunchy leaves, and the only way you could really see it was because the trees were a little farther apart. But Leonard knew the way.

“There she is,” Leonard said finally. “We’d walk up here, sit on these rocks, and just talk.”

“Okay.” We sat, but didn’t start talking. I looked out at the smooth water, dark and far away.

We must have been thinking about the same person.

Would the water freeze soon? Did Dad and Leonard go ice-skating here in the winter? Maybe they swam there in the summer, or looked for frogs like me and Franklin liked to do.

I sighed. “It must be lonely, when your best friend is gone forever.”

“It can be,” Leonard said.

“Were you guys friends till the end?”

“Till the end.”

“So you were friends for years and years?”

“Our whole lives. Or, maybe it makes more sense to say, for your dad’s whole life.”

“Did you fight, ever?”

“Sure.”

I was quiet. Leonard said, “Think Franklin’ll be coming by the store with you soon?”

“No,” I said, in a tiny voice.

Leonard took a turn being quiet. Then he said, “A good friend is one of the hardest things to keep in this life. Don’t forget that sometimes you have to work at it.”

But I
had
forgotten, before I’d even learned.

“I don’t feel different,” I said finally. “I thought I would feel different. You said you always felt different after you went to the lake. I thought it would help, to do something that worked for Dad.”

“Just going to the old lake doesn’t fix anything, you know. It’s how you change at the lake. You go away, think about things, and you come back a little bit different. Only you can change what you are.”

That sounded like things Uncle Hugh had been saying and Dad had written.

I let Leonard’s last sentence repeat in my head. I let it whir and whirl. I let the wind swirl it around and around me and then carry it away. It carried it out across the smooth water of the lake, making ripples that were not smooth, but became smoothed out again.

“Do you like what I am?”

“What?”

“Do you like what I am?”

“I always love our Cricket, whatever she is.” He paused. “The better question is, do
you
like what you are?”

I waited, then said, “I don’t.”

“I want to hear the whole thing, from the beginning, up to how we got here right now. Start talking, Cricket.”

Something to Believe In