Zero to Hero (2 page)

The snack made him feel much better and he returned to his room, determined to make himself adjust to the purple mist around him. But his good mood disappeared when he entered his room. His baseball stuff, including his glove, two aluminum bats, his cleats, his sliding shorts, and his three signed game balls, had somehow
found their way out of the box and were sitting in a perfectly formed circle on the carpet. This was unacceptable. He tore down the hall, shouting Breeze’s name.

“Stop yelling,” she said, poking her head out of her room. “What’s your problem?”

“Let’s get this straight, Breeze. I’ve only asked you two things since I’ve known you. One, don’t touch my baseball stuff. And two, don’t touch my baseball stuff.”

“Why would I even want to touch your infested baseball gear? It reeks.”

“Don’t tell me it wasn’t you.”

“Billy, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Follow me and I’ll show you.”

Billy marched Breeze down to his room and pointed to the center of his carpet.

“There,” he said. “I never gave you permission to take my stuff out of the box.”

“It’s not out of the box, genius.”

Billy whipped around and to his utter amazement, all his baseball gear was neatly packed in the cardboard box, and the lid was taped shut.

“Don’t bother me again with your stupid jokes,” Breeze said. “You’re not funny.”

Billy didn’t answer. He couldn’t. All he could do was stare silently at that box. Was he going nuts? He could have sworn that his baseball gear had gotten out of that box and then put itself back.

But how?

After Breeze left, Billy stood there staring at the box. He was a logical person and he knew that baseball equipment didn’t just unpack and repack itself. As he tried to come up with a rational explanation for this mystery, his mother came into his room, carrying an armload of clothes on hangers.

“Honey, these things need to be hung up in your closet nicely,” she said. The stack of clothes was so big that all Billy could make out was the top of her brownish curly hair and the toes of her red cowboy boots. “You start a new school on Monday and you don’t want to show up on the first day with wrinkly clothes.”

“Just drop them on the rug, Mom. I’ll get to it later.”

“I want you to start on it right away. Here, I’ll show you how.”

She flopped the stack of clothes on the pink desk, picked up three or four hangers, and started for the closet.

“Mom, this is totally unnecessary. I’m one of the great hanger-uppers.”

“Really? What about that pile of clothes in your old room that you referred to as Smelly Mountain? I didn’t see much in the way of hanging up going on there.”

Mrs. Broccoli-Fielding pulled the closet door open and stepped inside. Her nose twitched.

“Billy, you know the rules. You’re not supposed to have food in your room.”

“Mom, I haven’t eaten anywhere but in the kitchen. Honest.”

“Then why does your entire closet smell of orange juice?”

Billy walked to the closet and took a whiff. She was right. It smelled like one of those trees in the front yard.

“I guess the girl who had this room before me must have liked to drink orange juice in the closet.” He shrugged. “She probably did it to get away from all the purple and pink.”

“Okay, young man, start hanging,” Billy’s mom said. “And just to show you that moving day can be fun, we’ve ordered pizzas for dinner, including your favorite, pineapple bacon.”

“Breeze better not touch that,” Billy said, his mouth starting to water.

“Honey, Breeze is vegetarian.”

“Since when?”

“Since this morning at ten. She says she feels better already.”

Billy’s mother left, and with a deep sigh, he started to put his clothes away. The first hanger he grabbed held his baseball jersey from last season. It looked almost new, since mostly he sat on the bench and didn’t get to play much. Billy hooked the hanger on the wooden bar in the closet — but when he turned to get another piece of clothing, he heard a noise that sounded like the hanger scuffling along the bar on its own. Billy glanced into the closet and it seemed to him that his baseball jersey had moved.

No, that couldn’t be.

Just to make sure, he turned his back to the closet, then spun around with lightning speed,
half expecting to catch his jersey moving by itself. But it just hung there, smelling like orange juice, presenting no danger to anyone.

Billy was relieved, because he was not a guy who loved danger. At the top of his list of least favorite things were scary movies, bumpy airplane rides, bungee jumping, roller coasters, creepy or sad clowns, and anything that popped up at him. As a matter of fact, when he was five and a half, he’d smashed his jack-in-the-box to bits with his slipper.

He spent the rest of the afternoon putting his clothes away and organizing his room. By the time he finished, ate some pizza, and crawled into bed that night, he was exhausted. But even though he was bone tired, he just couldn’t drift off. He missed his old room in his old house. And he worried about starting a new school on Monday and having to make all new friends.

Billy rolled to his side and stared at the closet door, focusing on the brass doorknob. He had read once that if you stared at something for a really long time and didn’t even let yourself blink, it calmed you down enough so that you
eventually fell asleep without knowing it. He must have stared at that doorknob for seven minutes, but nothing happened. It just hung there on the edge of the door, being all knobby. He was about to give up when suddenly he saw something that made his stomach flip and his blood run cold.

The knob was turning all by itself! Billy closed his eyes, counted to three, then opened them and focused back on the knob. The knob turned again, as if someone inside the closet was trying to get out.

He tried to call out, “Who’s there?” but his vocal cords snapped shut. Nothing came out but a sorry-sounding rasp.

The knob continued to turn. Billy thought he heard the click of the closet door opening.

The next thing Billy heard was the scraping of wood against wood, followed by a long, low creak. Then, with a sudden jerk, the door flew open. Billy pulled the covers over his head, hoping that whoever was in the closet wouldn’t see him. Even hidden under the covers, his whole body shook uncontrollably. There was
nothing he could do to stop every muscle from twitching.

After a minute, Billy’s curiosity got the better of his fear and he peeked out from underneath the covers, exposing only a tiny bit of his left eye. That little piece of eye was enough for him to see the scariest sight he’d ever beheld. The arm of his red and white baseball jersey was reaching out of the closet door,
but there was no hand at the end of the sleeve.

Billy finally found his voice and shrieked like a five-year-old.

From inside the closet, he heard an urgent teenage voice say, “Shhhh … Do you want to wake the whole house?”

“Yes, I do,” Billy rasped. “I absolutely do.”

“Trust me, that is something you don’t want to do,” said the voice.

“I’m going to scream. I can feel it coming up from my toes.”

“Calm down, Georgie Boy. You sound like my cousin Annabel when she got bit by the horse that was pulling the ice wagon.”

Billy’s head was swimming. Was this a
dream or was he actually having a conversation with a sleeve?

“First of all,” he ventured, “I don’t understand anything you’re saying about your cousin what’s-her-name and that horse. And second of all, my name is Billy. And third of all,
where
is your hand?”

Suddenly, without warning, Billy’s entire baseball jersey flew out of the closet and floated across the room, the red and white sleeves fluttering in the darkness. The jersey came to a stop in front of the mirror on the back of his door. Billy became aware of a strange whirring next to his bed. He whipped around and saw that the numbers on his digital alarm clock were going haywire, spinning like crazy, racing forward and backward like some unknown force was controlling them.

Impulsively, Billy grabbed the clock and threw it at the jersey, which was still twisting itself this way and that, looking at its reflection in the mirror. Unfortunately, Billy had forgotten to unplug the clock before he flung it, and it boomeranged back at him, heading right
for his face. He ducked just in time to see it land on the floor next to his bed.

“Hey, you better pull up on your hand brake, Georgie Boy,” the teenage voice said. “Violence is never the answer.”

All Billy could think about was that this voice, so confident and so invisible, was coming from an empty, floating shirt.

“Who are you?” he screamed. “Where are you? What are you?
Why are you?
”

The shirt didn’t answer. It spun around and headed toward Billy, who had pushed his body flat against the headboard, hoping it would open up and let him escape.

“Do you think these sleeves are too long on me?” the shirt said. “I can’t have them interfering with my fastball when I’m on the mound.”

“Too long for what?” Billy asked. “You don’t have any arms. Or any body, for that matter.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Georgie Boy.”

“Billy.”

“Fine, Billy Boy. I have a body. Or at least, I had one before I died. And it was a magnificent
sight to behold, if I say so myself. Which I have no trouble doing.”

“Are you telling me you’re a ghost?” Billy asked. His voice quivered even though he was trying to be composed.

“Ding, ding, ding, ding. Correct answer. You win the prize, a stuffed cow with a full udder.”

“Can I just say, in this situation, I’d rather be wrong. Not that I couldn’t use a stuffed cow with a full udder.”

The jersey let out a laugh that echoed around the room, bouncing from one wall to the other.

“You’re funny, Georgie Boy.”

“It’s Billy. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“I know, I know. It’s just that you remind me of a very good buddy I had back in grade school. Georgie Cooperston. He was a fun kid. We used to sneak out and drive his dad’s Model T around the orange groves until we crashed it. Back then, you could drive when you were fourteen. He became a broom salesman and I became a ghost.”

“Let me get this straight,” Billy said to the
shirt. “You’re dead? And you’ve been hovering in my closet for, like, a hundred years?”

“Actually, ninety-nine years. That was when the crash happened. Before that, I lived here.”

“In my room?”

“Correction, Billy Boy. Did you notice I got your name right this time? You’re living in
my
room.”

Billy could not even begin to process what he had heard. He had seen movies about ghosts. Watched cartoons about ghosts. Read comic books about ghosts. But never, in all of his wildest imagination, did he ever think he’d be having a conversation with one.

“I can’t believe I’m talking to a ghost,” he said.

“That’s what most people call me, although I prefer
phantom. Ghoul
works in late October, gives it kind of a Halloween-y flair. What really chaps my britches is when people call me a banshee. I mean, that’s just rude.”

“If you’ll excuse me,” Billy said to the shirt, trying to be as polite as possible so the ghost wouldn’t attack him, “this is way more than I
can handle. So hang yourself back in the closet while I take this opportunity to run shrieking out of here.”

Rising to his feet, Billy bolted for the door. He was stopped by a chilly pressure pulling on his upper arm.

“Let me make this a little easier for you,” the shirt said.

Then it started to whistle “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”

“Can’t you hear the whistling blowing?

Rise up so early in the morn …”

Suddenly, Billy smelled orange juice again, even stronger than when his mother had first detected the aroma in the closet. It was the most tangy, wonderful orange smell you could ever imagine. Then the jersey fluttered and seemed to fill with a human shape. Was that an arm Billy saw, coming out of the sleeve?

The whistling grew louder, the orange smell more powerful. And then … out of nowhere … he appeared!

The ghost was a boy about fourteen years old, wearing blousy brown pants that stopped at the knee. As he pulled off the jersey, Billy could see that his pants were held up by faded red suspenders, and on his head was a plaid wool newsboy cap with a button on top and a brim that he wore jauntily off to the side. His socks were covered with a pattern of alternating beige and white diamond shapes. On his feet, he wore lace-up work boots of dark brown leather that came up to the middle of his shin. They were laced up only halfway, which instead of looking sloppy gave him a casual, self-assured look.

“I … I can see you!” Billy whispered in amazement.

“Consider yourself lucky. This is a rare occurrence. Very few people have had the opportunity.”

Billy tried to answer, but once again, no words came out. He was looking at a ghost, a real live ghost. Or more accurately, a real dead ghost.

“Because you seem like a nice kid — short but nice — I’m going to introduce myself,” the ghost said. “You are in the presence of Hoover Porterhouse the Third. How exciting is that?”

“I’m Billy Everett Broccoli the First. Nice to meet you.”

Billy and Hoover went to shake hands, but although Billy’s hand was pumping up and down, he could feel only cold air surrounding his fingers.

“This is so weird,” he said. “I’m shaking your hand, but I can’t feel anything. Just cold air.”

“That’s the way we ghosts roll. Let me tell you, Billy Boy, it can be pretty frustrating when you dance with a pretty girl and she has no idea you’re there. All she does is put on a sweater.”

“Wait a minute,” Billy asked. “You dance?”

“Not so much anymore. But before I died, I could turkey trot with such flair that girls thought there was an actual bird in the room.”

With that, Hoover Porterhouse III put his hands under his armpits, folded his arms like turkey wings, and started high-stepping around the room. He didn’t stop at Billy’s desk or his bed, but danced right through the middle of them.