2. Chloe
Our heist went off without a hitch.
Distracting Gunderson was easy enough for Pepper to do, since he was the sort of man who took twenty minutes to read off his grocery list. A great stickler for detail, our Gunderson, which made him a great librarian but not so great whenever we sat down for a staff meeting. He once put together an entire PowerPoint presentation on alphabetizing when using hyphens and apostrophes—all good and important stuff in the world of books, don’t get me wrong, but nothing that couldn’t have been shared in a quick two-sentence email.
Anyway, Pepper asked him a question about the new metadata requirements for our online catalog system, and he was off on one of his monotone tangents for the next half hour. As I walked out the back with my stolen books, Gunderson did no more than give me a quick glance before returning to his beloved keywords and ISBN-13s.
Poor Pepper got the short end of that stick, for sure. I jimmied open the passenger door to the bookmobile, slid the Harlequins underneath the seat, and tossed Tropic of Cancer into the glove compartment of my huge rusted station wagon until it was time to head home for the day.
Which, blissfully, was now. Eight hours of clearing out books wore on a body a lot more than you’d think, even when that body was only twenty-four years old. Unfortunately, as soon as I stepped up to my front door, half-painted in seafoam green and half-rusted where the paint had run out, it swung open with a bang.
“Chloe, finally!” cried the oldest of my siblings as she came barreling up.
Even though Trixie was an absolute knockout of a fifteen-year-old who defied all the rules of adolescence with her clear skin, naturally straight teeth, and a level of self-confidence usually reserved for mediocre men forty years her senior, she always seemed to be barreling. She also flounced, traipsed, somersaulted, and crashed. Unless it was an active verb in its most active tense, she wanted no part of it.
“You won’t believe what happened today,” she said, beaming. That was another thing she did—she beamed. She was the only person I’d ever met whose sunny disposition went so deep that it was a physical part of her. “Guess which second alternate just landed herself a starting position on the debate team?”
“Penny Harlow?” I guessed. Even though I already knew the answer, I couldn’t resist playing the game. As we spoke, I stepped past our tiny entry into the living room, doing my best to ignore the piles of shoes and backpacks and the other inevitable detritus of the young.
“Ugh. Obviously not. Penny can’t even raise her hand in class without breaking out in hives.”
“Jacob Jarabecki?”
“Chloe, Jake can’t string together a full sentence unless it’s about football—and even then, he only makes sense half the time.” My sister’s lower lip came down in a pout. “Are you trying to be mean?”
“A little bit, yeah,” I confessed, but not before swooping in to press a kiss on her cheek. She smelled, as she always did, of fresh grass clippings and her general air of joie de vivre. Don’t ask me what joie de vivre smells like, because I couldn’t tell you. All you need to know is that it’s chic and effortless, and if anyone finds a way to bottle it up and sell it, they’ll make a fortune. “That’s fantastic news, Trixie. You deserve it.”
She hooked her arms around my neck before I could let go. “I don’t—not really. I only got a spot because Sonya and Sasha’s mom made them drop out. She says the travel expenses are too high, and that there’s no need to pay good money for them to argue in public when they do it at home for free all the time.” She pulled back a little and scanned my face. “That’s okay, right? We can afford it? The team only travels every other week, and I can participate in the fun runs and stuff to help with the costs.”
I thought about the stolen book sitting in my glove box and groaned inwardly. So much for my new dishwasher.
“Sure thing, Trix,” I said. “Don’t sweat it.”
I kept the smile on my face until I felt sure she wouldn’t see anything but my pride in her. Help arrived in the shape of my two other siblings, who came dashing into the living room a few seconds later. To be more precise, Theo dashed. Noodle came out with slumped shoulders and a heavy tread I recognized well.
“Is Trixie telling you about her stupid debate team?” Theo asked. At eleven, he was the baby of the family, but he was bidding fair to outgrow every last one of us. It was almost impossible to keep any meat on his bones, so he was all gangling limbs and awkward angles. He ate a whole box of cereal (off-brand Cheerios) by himself every morning, and finished his day with a second box (off-brand Cinnamon Toast Crunch) for dessert. And that didn’t even touch the mass quantities of calories required to sustain him the rest of the time.
“Ugh,” he muttered. “No one cares about debate. Who wants to talk about politics in front of a bunch of grown-ups?”
“Lots of people,” I said. “Especially the kind who plan to work in politics with a bunch of grown-ups one day.”
He waved me off as only an eleven-year-old blithely unconcerned with anything but the contents of his own stomach could do.
“Whatever. I forgot to tell you—my science project is due tomorrow. Do we have any nitrous oxide?”
I blinked at him, his head level with mine. “Of course we don’t have nitrous oxide. Isn’t that laughing gas?”
“Fine.” His lower lip shot out, but as was the case with Trixie, his optimism ran deep. “What about ammonium nitrate? That’s not hard to get, is it?”
“Yes, it’s hard to get. They use it to make explosives. What on earth are they teaching you at that school?”
I felt a tug on the bottom of my shirt before I could ask any follow-up questions, most of which revolved around the likelihood of our house still standing by dinnertime. Theo was a bright kid, and I was inordinately proud of him for landing a coveted spot at a local charter school, but I was getting tired of putting locks on every cabinet containing anything even remotely flammable.
I glanced down to find Noodle’s fingers twisting my T-shirt between anxious fingers.
“It happened again,” he said in the simple, quiet way he had—wholly unlike our siblings, but equally disastrous in the end. “With the Frisbee. We were working on fetch.”
I bit back a groan. This was the part I’d been dreading the most. “I thought we decided you’d only work on training at the park from here on out.”
Noodle rolled a shoulder in his usual half shrug. He rarely came into full animation unless he was working with our dog, Gummy Bear.
Gummy Bear, who’d never fetched a thing a day in his life. Gummy Bear, who was virtually untrainable. Gummy Bear, who ate almost as much as Theo did on any given day.
Even though Noodle was older than Theo by ten months—Irish twins, my mom always called them, and not in reference to the bright red hair we all shared—he was considerably shorter in stature. He was also wary of anything that didn’t scamper about on four legs. He spent hours every day trying to teach our slobbering, wheezing bulldog to perform the most basic of tasks, but woe to the older sister who tried to get him to step any further out of his comfort zone than that. When he’d been a toddler, he’d lived almost entirely on buttered noodles, which was where his nickname had come from. It was easier to call a sweet, shy, pasta-loving kid Noodle than it was to call him Aloysius.
Actually, it was easier to call a kid pretty much anything other than that. I honestly don’t know what my mom had been thinking when she’d filled out our birth certificates. Clotilde, Beatrice, Theodore, and Aloysius were bitter pills to swallow for kids living in a place with exactly one drugstore.
“How long ago did it happen?” I asked, since of all the disasters facing me right now, this one was the most pressing. Money was only material and scientific experimentation inevitable, but a rogue Frisbee had the potential to bring the sky down upon our heads.
Noodle shifted from one foot to the other. His deeply freckled face was covered in streaks of mud, his fingernails so dirty that I felt sure he’d spent the entire afternoon sitting out back, trying to drum up the nerve to go get the Frisbee on his own.
“About an hour,” Trixie informed me. She grimaced, her nose wrinkled at the tip. “I was gonna offer to get it before you got home, but…”
“She’s a scaredy-cat,” Theo finished for her.
“Oh, yeah? I didn’t see you stepping up to volunteer,” Trixie countered. “All you did this afternoon was pull every cleaner out from under the bathroom sink and read through the ingredients.”
Theo stuck his tongue out at her. “I was researching.”
“You were making a mess.” Trixie turned to me with something like triumph. “He left them out. Every last bottle. Trying to go pee in there is like playing a game of hot lava with containers of bleach.”
I started to pinch the bridge of my nose, but the sight of Noodle’s anxious expression stopped me. “Okay,” I said with a deep, fortifying breath. I even managed a smile, though I was pretty sure my insides were quaking just as much as his were. “First things first. I’ll get the Frisbee from Mr. Holmes. When I get back, I expect the cleaners to be put away—and I mean all of them, Theo—so Noodle can shower. Then…science experiment? Debate practice?”
“Dinner,” all three kids announced, and with so much force that I recognized it for the nonnegotiable it was.
“Okay. Dinner. It’s a plan.”
I paused just long enough to press a kiss on Noodle’s dirt-encrusted hairline before heading back out the front door. It would have been hyperbole to say that my legs actually quaked at the task ahead of me, but there was no denying the twist in my stomach. I’d lived inside this house for twenty-two of my twenty-four years. For every single one of those years, Jasper Holmes had been our next-door neighbor. I’d always considered myself a no-nonsense sort of person, but I had nothing on Jasper. The man was blunt to the point of rudeness and terrifying in ways that only children living in a neighborhood likes ours would understand.
In the area where we lived, west of town, the houses were small and ramshackle, the lawns covered in weeds rather than grass. More than one front yard boasted a car up on cinder blocks, and you could practically hear the collective group pulling out the pots and pans whenever it rained. We were all holding on by a single thread, and with each passing day, you could hear that thread starting to unravel more.
Everyone except for Jasper Holmes, that was—the one man in the world I didn’t want to see today, and the one man in the world I had no choice but to tackle head-on. When it came to Noodle, a lost Frisbee was right up there with a retainer accidentally tossed in the trash or a baby thrown out with the bathwater. He’d feel miserable and guilty until he had the cheap plastic toy back in his care.
Granted, there was a greater likelihood that the sky would open up and rain down gold bullion than that Jasper would give the Frisbee up, but I had to at least try.
I could feel the watchful eyes of my siblings as I made my way to the end of the drive and ducked under the broken trellis that separated our property from Jasper’s. As soon as I set foot across that barrier, it was like being transported to another world—a magical world where oleander shrubs sprang fully formed from the land and mums continued thriving well past the first frost. A white-columned birdbath stood in the center of the yard underneath an arch of purple wisteria vines, and even though I’d never seen anything other than a pack of crows hovering over our own house, there was some kind of yellow-billed bird splashing playfully around in it.
If I were a miserable old man who considerably worsened the lives of everyone around me, claiming every wayward toy thrown over the fence as my personal property, my garden would be a tangle of poisonous weeds and hidden trapdoors, but what did I know? Maybe this was Jasper’s way of luring people in, transforming his home into gingerbread and sweet treats for the unsuspecting.
His shadow crossed over the window, so I knew he was watching as I knocked on the door. Naturally, that didn’t stop him from making me wait a full sixty seconds before finally opening up.
“What the hell do you want?” he barked.
“You know the answer to that, Mr. Holmes.” I stretched my face in a smile and infused a note of false cheer in my voice. It was the same voice I used at the library whenever a patron tried to convince me to turn the SafeSearch function off the public computers. “Noodle accidentally threw a Frisbee over the fence earlier today.”
“And he made you come all the way over here to get it back? Typical,” he said by way of reply. Then, “You’re not doing that boy any favors, you know.”
“I do know,” I agreed, still in my bright voice. “But he’s just a kid, so let’s skip this part, shall we?”
This wasn’t the first time I’d made such a request, and I strongly doubted it would be the last. People who didn’t know Noodle would never understand him. They were always trying to push him deeper into childhood or all the way out of it, as if he either had to be a developmental failure or a wise old soul born with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Give him a break, my heart screamed at them. He’s only twelve years old. He likes crossword puzzles and to suck on ice cubes made from lemonade. He gets along with animals more than people. He wants the world to be a softer, kinder place, but he’s smart enough to recognize an effort in futility when he sees one. That makes him scared and sad and, yes, a little bit sensitive. Deal with it.
I never said any of that out loud, of course. I just kept smiling my too-tight smile.
“I know I should’ve sent him over here to get the Frisbee himself, but I wanted to personally apologize,” I added. “I’m trying to get him to train Gummy Bear at the park instead of our yard, but he doesn’t like going there without one of us to keep him company. Some of the kids can be really mean.”
Jasper Holmes looked me over with a twist to his upper lip. He had one of those faces that was easy to read, his heavy features so weighed down with time that they seemed to show every passing minute. Despite his advanced age, he still had a good head of snowy-white hair, his shoulders so strong and wide that you could practically feel the power emanating off him. In his youth, I imagine he was a highly attractive man. Too bad his heart was made of stone—if he had a heart at all.
“I wasn’t talking about the Frisbee, you fool,” he said. “I was referring to the name.”
I blinked. This was new. Conversation wasn’t something Jasper and I shared very often. Our interactions ranged almost entirely around the property rights associated with childhood toys and the land onto which they fell. Somewhere inside this man’s house lived about thirty soccer balls, an equal number of plastic Frisbees, and an old baseball I’d scrawled with a barely legible Babe Ruth before I’d tossed it over to see what he would do.
“What’s wrong with calling him Noodle?” I asked, refusing to let that fool part get to me. “Lots of kids have nicknames.”
“Not ones named after food.” He narrowed his eyes at me. Like the rest of him, they were powerful, their brilliant blue unwavering. “I knew a boy named Beef once.”
I blinked again, even more taken aback this time. This wasn’t just conversation. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say we were bordering on chitchat.
“That’s a fun nickname,” I said. “Was he a vegetarian?”
Jasper scoffed so hard I could practically see the spittle flying from his mouth. “Of course not. No one was a vegetarian back then. You ate what was put in front of you, and you were grateful for each mouthful.”
I got the feeling I was being insulted, and even though I knew why, I wasn’t exactly sure of the how.
“And before you ask, no, Beef wasn’t a large kid,” Jasper added. “He was the scrawniest scrap of a human being I ever met. Hell of a fighter, though, which is how he got the name. He had a beef with everyone, even if he’d never met them before.”
“I’m not sure I understand the moral of this story,” I said. “Is your problem with Noodle’s nickname that it’s too…weak? He needs something stronger?”
“I’m saying the world takes you at your word. Make sure the thing you’re telling them is what you want them to hear.” His lips pulled down in a frown. “And I’m not giving you that Frisbee. It’s mine now.”
I bit back a groan. After all that, he was still going to make me beg for it? The door started to close, so I slipped my foot in through the crack.
“Please, Mr. Holmes?” I asked. “I know I promised it wouldn’t happen again, but the truth is, I need that Frisbee.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. No one needs a Frisbee. Throw plates if you’re desperate.”
He tried to close the door around my foot, but I wasn’t backing down. If he wanted me to believe that the trick to success was simply standing up and telling the world what you wanted it to hear, then I was ready to give his approach a go. After all, what was the worst thing he could do to me? Steal more Frisbees?
“I know it seems like a little thing to you, but it’ll cost me five bucks to replace,” I said, my irritation mounting. “That’s five bucks I could put toward Trixie’s yearbook costs. Five bucks to put a gallon of gas in my guzzler of a car. Five bucks I could use to buy the name-brand cereal instead of a sad off-brand replacement.”
He stared down at my foot and back up at my face, his gaze equally displeased with both.
“How you waste your money is your problem, not mine,” he said with a grunt. “You kids today are all the same. If you knew anything, you’d realize those off-brand cereals are just as good as the real thing. Half the time, they make them in the same factories.”
As far as I was concerned, that was the final straw. This man, with his marble birdbaths and well-sculpted gardens, his hoard of stolen soccer balls, his kitchen with only one mouth to feed, had no idea what a tiny thing like name-brand cereal meant to a family like mine.
Yes, Theo would eat it in one sitting. And, yeah, technically speaking, it would satisfy the same nutritional needs in the end. But eating that cheap cereal in a cheap bowl every day wore a person down. Not in a way that you could quantify, but by tiny degrees. Each bite was a reminder that no matter how hard we worked or how far we stretched our dollars, some things would never change.
We’d always be starting at the bottom.
“Tell me something, Mr. Holmes,” I said, my voice tight. “You’ve lived in this house for—what—forty, fifty years?”
“Thereabouts,” he agreed, grumbling. “So what?”
“So then you’ve seen my entire life unfold before your eyes,” I said. “My mom’s, too, probably. You saw her hitch herself to a succession of rotten boyfriends, desperate for someone to lift her up and take her away from this place. Watched those same rotten boyfriends come and go, only staying long enough to knock her up before moving on to greener pastures. Saw her bring home four squalling babies, saw how much she struggled to keep them in formula and diapers and cereal—knockoff brand or otherwise.”
I could tell from Jasper’s growing frown that he wasn’t expecting this direct attack, but I was on too much of a roll to stop now.
“You also saw me go off to college, only to return two years later with nothing to show for it but half a degree and a load of student debt,” I added. “And I bet you know why, too. I bet you were the one who called CPS.”
The fact that his gaze shifted to a few inches above my head told me everything I needed to know. Since I was, in all honesty, grateful for that particular intervention, I didn’t press too hard. According to the woman who’d called me, my mom had been gone for over two weeks before the kids had been scooped up and placed in foster care.
Trixie had been eleven at the time. Theo and Noodle had only been seven.
“You know it all,” I continued, eyes blazing. “She left them alone. She walked away from her own children. So, yeah. A five-dollar Frisbee might not mean much to you, but it means a lot to Noodle—a kid whose name you may not think is macho enough, but who’s doing the best he can with the hand he’s been dealt. I can always buy another one to replace it, and I will, but I literally stole a library book from work today to help us get by. That’s what I’m dealing with. That’s what five dollars means to me.”
Instead of immediately going inside to get the Frisbee, Jasper tilted his head. It wasn’t much of a reaction—in fact, it was disappointing considering how much of myself I’d just laid bare—but it was enough.
“Which library book?” he asked.
I was so startled that I answered without hesitating. “It’s called Tropic of Cancer. It’s old, and it’s not in great shape, but there are collectors out there who’ll pay a pretty penny to get their hands on it.”
“Tropic…of Cancer?” he echoed, his hand coming up to clutch at the doorframe. I was afraid that maybe the word cancer was the cause, but he shook his head as if clearing it. “Are you sure about that?”
“About its title or about how much it’s worth?” I returned. Without waiting for an answer, I added, “Yes to both. I may have only finished half my library science degree, but I’m not without my uses. I can both read and accurately assess the value of historic documents.”
He grunted. It was such a judgmental sound that I was suddenly worried about the crime I’d just confessed to.
“And before you go tattling to the library, I found the book abandoned in the basement, so it’s not like anyone is going to miss it. Someone had taken pains to hide it decades ago—probably along with copies of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Color Purple. You know how uptight a town like this can get.”
By this time, I’d decided that (a) I’d already said more than was good for me, and (b) there was no way I was going to get my hands on that Frisbee. I gave Jasper Holmes two more seconds to do the right thing. When all he did was continue staring at me like I’d just pulled my bleeding heart out of my chest and offered it to him as a snack, I gave up the fight.
With a sigh, I turned around and went back the way I came. The yellow-billed bird gave a rattling cackle as I walked by, not unlike the sound my car made on cold mornings when it wanted to get going about as much as I did.
“I know, buddy,” I said as I trailed my fingers playfully in his bathwater. “But what else can we do? This is technically his property. As long as we keep coming back, he’s free to treat us however he wants.”