The Explorers’ Gate (3 page)

Saturday nights work pretty much the same way.

So, while he snored at his baseball game, I decided what I really wanted was to slip out for some frozen custard up the block at Shake Shack. Actually, I was in the mood for what they call a Concrete—super-dense frozen custard blended with junk like cookie dough and marshmallows.

Unfortunately, a Concrete costs like six dollars and, even though I'd been saving my money for a couple weeks (sometimes, Charlie sends me to the deli to grab him a cup of coffee and lets me keep the change), I didn't have enough.

So, I decided to settle for a Nutty Buddy ice-cream cone out of the freezer box at the deli up the block from the Shake Shack.

Checking traffic, I dashed across 77
^th
Street so I'd be on the north side when I hit Columbus Avenue. The American Museum of Natural History is right across the street from our apartment building. It always looks magical at night, like Cinderella's towering castle lit up by spotlights. Well, Cinderella after she and the prince do the whole shoe-fitting thing.

Since it was just after eight on a warm Saturday night, lots of people were sitting on the park benches ringing the museum. The scent of hamburgers and french fries was definitely in the air.

Almost everybody had Shake Shack sacks.

One bench, right at the corner of Columbus and West 77
^th
Street, was particularly crowded. A cluster of maybe a dozen kids hovered around it. Boys and girls, my age or a little older. They were all sucking down Concretes and munching burgers. They were also laughing, flirting, and having fun.

For half a second, I wondered what that would be like.

But then I saw who was sitting at the center of the cluster.

Brooke Billingsley.

Our eyes made contact.

She sneered.

I dropped my head.

“Ewww, hold your noses, everybody. Here comes the janitor's daughter.”

“Can you smell her perfume?” said Brooke. “It's either Pine-Sol or puke.”

Now the sniggering boys and girls surrounded me.

“Excuse me,” I mumbled, as I tried to shuffle forward, my eyes staring straight down at my shoes.

“Wait a second, Janitor Girl,” said one of the boys, stopping me with a firm hand to my shoulder.

I looked up. The boy blocking my path had poofy lips, bouffy hair, and a sinister sneer. Abercrombie & Fitch's initials were scribbled over every piece of his clothing.

He leaned in and snobbishly sniffed my neck. “It's not Pine-Sol or puke. It's poop. From cleaning too many unflushed toilets!”

The crowd howled with laughter. Brooke pressed in tight to playfully squeeze her handsome A&F prince's beefy arm. “Plus, she shampoos with Liquid Plumr—the only thing strong enough to cut through that greasy clog she calls her hair.”

The kids kept laughing. They tightened their circle around me.

“So,” said the handsome boy as he checked out the graphic on my T-shirt, “who's Ima Gene?”

Okay. I had to chuckle at that.

“It's not Ima Gene. It's
Imagine
.”

“Huh?” He did not sound like a happy camper.

“You know, from the John Lennon song?” I mumbled. “‘Imagine all the people living life in peace?' It's on the mosaic in Strawberry Fields.”

“What?”

“It's this super dorky place in Central Park,” said one of the other boys. “Old farts go there to burn candles, strum guitars, and make peace signs out of flowers. It sucks.”

“Janitor Girl is a Central Park freak,” said Brooke.

“Really?” said her boyfriend.

“Yunh-huh. Get this: She even wears a stupid piece from a Central Park
jigsaw puzzle
around her neck instead of like a diamond or whatever.”

The poofy-haired boy snorted out a laugh. “You're kidding.”

“Nun-unh. I saw her showing it off to our lazy doorman; wasting his time when he should've been asking me if I needed anything.”

The boy's hand slid over to my neck.

His index finger found my necklace's thin gold chain.

“This it?” he asked.

“I guess,” said Brooke. “She wears it like all the time.”

My mouth was dry. “M-m-my mother,” I stammered.

The boy didn't wait to hear who gave me my necklace and why it was important enough to wear every day.

He just hooked the chain with his finger and yanked it so hard he snapped the links.

My eyes filled with tears.

“Don't cry, little girl,” teased the boy. “I'll give you a buck-fifty. You can buy yourself a new necklace at K-Mart. I just
have
to see this.” He tossed my charm up and down in his palm. “Unbelievable. It's actually a piece from a stupid jigsaw puzzle. A map of Central Park!”

“Isn't that like totally lame?” said Brooke.

“Please give it back,” I said, holding out my hand. It was trembling.

“No way,” said the boy. “This is the one piece I need to finish
my
Central Park puzzle!”

“Aw, give it back, Brent,” jeered one of the other guys. “It's her ‘family jewels!'”

As the other kids laughed even louder, the boy named Brent leaned in, and whispered something horrible in my ear: “Stay out of Central Park, Ima Gene. We don't want your kind in there anymore!”

He pulled back.

“Come on, you guys,” he said to the crowd. “There's a party we need to be at.”

Some of the kids stuffed their Shake Shack bags into a big trash barrel.

“Guess I better throw out this piece of garbage, too,” said Brent.

Then he tossed my necklace into the trash can.

Right before a passing dog walker dropped in a plump plastic bag filled with dog poop.

Brooke, Brent, and the rest of the preppy pack waltzed up Columbus Avenue, laughing.

At dorky me and my dorky necklace and my even dorkier “Imagine” T-shirt.

That's when the wind began to stir. The leafy limbs at the tops of the trees lining the sidewalks began to sway. I saw some papers and Shake Shack bags fly up out of the trash barrel, like someone was inside the can, sorting through their rubbish.

Something freaky was definitely going on.

But I needed to find my mother's charm. So I stepped up to the garbage can.

“Gross,” I mumbled as I shoved aside the sagging bag of dog poop.

I went up on tiptoe and basically stuck my head down inside the garbage can but I couldn't see the necklace.

Just a newspaper. A tabloid with the strangest headline I have ever read:

IT'S NEARLY NINE!

Backing my head out of the barrel, I glanced at my watch.

The headline was right. It was 8:55 p.m.

Interesting, but I needed to find my necklace. So I pulled up the newspaper and uncovered an ad from some kind of travel agency:

ADVENTURE IS CALLING! GO EXPLORING!

Peeling back the flyer, I finally found the necklace.

It was sitting on top of a stained copy of
New York Moms
magazine.

When I picked up my charm and chain, a howling wind whipped around inside the barrel, sending up a mini-cyclone that flipped open the magazine pages until they landed on a very interesting article:

WHAT WOULD YOUR MOTHER DO?

This time when I looked up from the garbage can, I saw a beady-eyed raccoon hunkered on his hindquarters on the far side of the fence penning in the museum's lawns. The raccoon was staring at me. Its hands were folded in front of its chest so it could tap its fingers together, impatiently.

“All right, already!” I said to the raccoon. “I can take a hint.”

I tucked my broken necklace into the back pocket of my jeans and headed east.

I was hurrying to the place I figured all “the signs” in the magical trash can (plus one raccoon) were sending me: the Explorers' Gate where, at nine p.m., I was supposed to meet up with Garrett Vanderdonk and his brother Willem.

Yeah. It's what my mother would have done.

I made it to the Explorers' Gate in two minutes flat, so I was actually a little early.

Garrett and his brother weren't there yet, so I said a quick hello to Mr. Humboldt and slipped into the dark shadows under the sprawling tree whose massive roots had rumpled up the pavers circling the heroic bust's pedestal.

Interestingly, the Explorers' Gate is also called the Naturalists' Gate. Good thing Humboldt was both.

There are twenty different gates leading into Central Park, which was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (you don't really meet many Calverts these days, or guys whose middle names are Law.)

Why the odd names for all the entrances?

Well, if I had been asked that at the Park Smarts trivia contest, I would've said the gate names were chosen to represent the professions of the working-class people coming into the park in the 1870s. That's why they're called stuff like Farmers' Gate, Hunters' Gate, Merchants' Gate, and Scholars' Gate.

And, as soon as I was through giving my answer, Jonas Blauvelt would've launched into a whole
blah-blah-blah
about Olmsted and Vaux wanting Central Park to be “a democratic oasis,” not a private playground for the city's richest citizens. So, even though some snooty, high-society types (the Brookes and Brents of the 1800s) wanted to enter the new park in their horse-drawn carriages through Buckingham Palace–style gates, Olmsted and Vaux wanted low stone walls like you'd see bordering a farmer's field out in the countryside.

Okay. Maybe I
do
know as much about Central Park as Jonas Blauvelt. I'm just not very good in competitive situations. I kind of choke under stress.

At exactly nine p.m., I looked up the sidewalk and saw the silhouette of a giant moose in a floppy stocking cap. Garrett Vanderdonk. He was walking with a short guy, also in a stocking cap, whom I pegged to be his brother, Willem. There was a big dog with a bushy tail walking between them. The dog was not wearing a hat. He was wagging his tail.

“Hi, Nikki!” said Garrett. “This is my brother, Willem!”

“Hey,” I said.

“Good evening, Nicolette. Thank you so much for joining us on our quest.”

Willem was about three feet tall and the most well-spoken fourth-grader I had ever met.

The dog, a slobbering Siberian Husky in an old-fashioned leather harness, drooled and panted happily.

After shaking hands and petting the dog, I couldn't help but stare at Garrett and Willem's fuzzy red ski caps, the peaks of which were flopped sideways. Sure, it made them look kind of cool in a lumberjack/grunge rock sort of way, but come on, it was May!

“Um, pardon me for asking guys, but what's with the hats? Winter's been over for a couple months.”

“Ah, forgive me,” said Willem. He reached into his canvas knapsack. “Here, Nicolette, this is yours.”

He handed me one of the red-knit numbers. Actually, it was kind of scarlet with spirals of darker red swirling up to its peak.

“Thanks, but as awesome-looking as this is, I don't really need a hat. My hair's kind of long and …”

“Everybody on our team needs a hat,” said Garrett.

“Oh, this is like our uniform?”

“Exactly! It's our uniform.”

The big guy sounded so sweet and sincere, I went ahead and tugged mine on.

“How's it look?”

“Awesome!”

“I cannot tell you how excited I was to hear that Garrett found you this morning at the Bandshell,” said Willem, showing me his piece of the park puzzle. “We three were always meant to be a team in the coming Crown Quest.”

“Yeah, about that,” I said. “What exactly is a Crown Quest?”

Willem rocked up on his tiny heels. Tapped his fingers together under his nose. For a second, I thought he might turn into a raccoon.

“Did your mother ever mention it to you?”

“Nope.”

“I see. Well, it's something the, how shall I put this, the
true
friends of Central Park sponsor every thirty or forty years.”

“Really? I never heard or read—”

“It's kind of a secret,” said Garrett. “We're not really supposed to talk about it to people outside the, you know, the club.”

I nodded. If that were the case, my mother may not have told me about it. She definitely knew how to keep a secret.

Like how sick she was right before she died.

“So, tonight is like a practice run?” I asked.

“Exactly!” said Willem. When he did, the big dog wagged his tail like a fluffy flag. “Grandfather Vanderdonk has hidden a crown somewhere in the park.”

“He bought it at the Disney store,” added Garrett.

“Good to know. But wouldn't it be safer to do this during the day?”

“Oh, the Crown Quest is always a nocturnal event,” said Willem.

“Besides,” said Garrett, “we've got a guard dog.”

The big dog barked.

“Okay,” I said with a laugh. Any mugger who came after us would definitely end up with a Husky-sized bite mark in his butt.

“We three must decipher clues,” said Willem, “and find the crown as quickly as we can!”

“And then what? There's like a big, secret contest to find a
real
crown studded with jewels and junk?”

“Precisely,” said Willem.

Okay. This was pretty neat. A high-stakes treasure hunt in Central Park. Sort of like that TV show
The Amazing Race
.

“So when's the real deal?” I asked.

All of a sudden, Willem looked sad. His lips quivered. I thought he might burst into tears.

“As soon as it is needed,” he said, kind of choking up.

For a fourth grader, the odd little dude was extremely emotional. So I goosed up my perky quotient: “Well, I guess the three of us better quit standing around gabbing and start practicing, huh?”

Willem smiled gratefully. “Indeed. Thank you, Nicolette.”