Jake and Lily (11 page)

I
caved in. I’ll try stamp collecting.

W
e could see it a mile away. It’s probably visible from the space station. We were laughing so hard we were wobbling as we rode down the street. Nacho crashed into a curb.

The paint job looked like the head-on wreck of two rainbows. I never saw so many colors in one place, all splashed and squished and slopped all over each other.

And there was the supergoober, ducking through the doorway and coming out to greet us—laughing. I swear, he was laughing even harder than us. And the more he laughed, the less Bump laughed. And when Soop threw out his arms and yelled, “It’s
beautiful
!” I think I saw steam coming off the top of Bump’s head.

S
tamp collecting lasted a day.

I’m trying homemade greeting cards.

T
oday it was a missing board. Halfway up the side facing the street.

We were staring at it for a while when suddenly Soop’s face appeared in the gap.

“Hi, guys!” he called, all cheery. “Look—somebody gave me a window!”

Bump’s tires bit the asphalt as he peeled out.

S
cratch homemade greeting cards.

I’ll try reading palms.

J
ust me, Nacho, and Burke at the hideout today. Bump is away on vacation with his family. But his calling cards were all around us—black clumps of chewed-up licorice. He doesn’t eat his licorice all the way anymore. He folds a couple sticks in his cheek and chews and sucks and then spits out the wad. I think he thinks he’s chewing tobacco.

So we didn’t ride over to Soop’s. It’s not the same without Bump. He always does most of the talking. But there was still plenty to hee-haw about—for the first time we weren’t just laughing about Soop. We were laughing about Bump too. About how he was getting madder and madder each day.

“Did you see him the other day? Did he blast
outta there or what?” said Burke.

“I saw snots shooting out his ears!” said Nacho.

That’s how it went. Hey, we understood. Nothing is more maddening than a goober who won’t get mad. It’s like they cheat you out of your fun. It’s like you throw a dart at a goober and all he does is say, “That tickles,” and throws it back at you, feather first. If you can’t have fun with a goober, what’s the point? So yeah, we saw Bump’s problem. We sympathized with him. But that didn’t make it any less funny.

Before we left the hideout, Nacho got a stick and scratched in the dirt:

S
U
P
E
RG
O
O
B
E
R 10

B
U
MP 0

And we laughed harder than ever.

I
read Poppy’s palm. I told him he’s going to buy me a car on the day I turn sixteen. He pulled his hand away. “That’s it for your palm-reading career.”

W
e’ve just been goofing off the last couple days. Riding around. Playing a little basketball. Skipping stones at the creek. We even did little-kid stuff at the park. Swings. Seesaw. At one point I found myself standing at the bottom of the sliding-board ladder. I was third in line, staring down at the head tops of two little preschool runts. That’s how bad summer can get. You wonder why you were so thrilled back on the first day.

“Bor-ing,” said Burke.

“That’s the last sliding-board line I’ll ever stand in in my life, if I live to be a thousand,” I said.

“I miss Bump,” said Burke.

“I miss Soop,” said Nacho.

“You know what we are?” I said.

“What?” said Nacho.

“Goober addicts.”

“H
ow about origami?” said Poppy.

“What’s origami?”

“Folding paper. You make things—birds, boats, almost anything. I saw kids doing it all over Japan.”

“I make great paper airplanes,” I said.

We went to the library for a book on origami.

S
o without Bump, we rode over to Soop’s. He wasn’t there working on the shack. We were surprised, but maybe we shouldn’t have been. We usually ride over in the morning, but this was afternoon.

We were ready to push off when we heard a voice calling, “Hi boys!” At first we didn’t know where it was coming from. Then we saw a face sticking out of a second-floor window. A lady. Had to be his mother. “Hold on there a minute, boys,” she said. “I’ll be right down.”

“Uh-oh,” said Burke. “She knows.”

“Knows what?” I said.

“Who’s been messing up the shack,” said Burke.

“Yeah—Bump,” said Nacho. “We’re in the clear.”

“I don’t feel in the clear,” I said.

And then there she was, bouncing out the front door and across the porch and down the steps. She charged straight for us like a fullback. I wished we had cleared out. Her arm was coming up. I got ready to duck. I started to say, “Bump—” I never got to say
did it
because a massive grin broke across her face, and that was no fist on the end of her arm but a hand to shake. “You must be—let me guess—Jake?” She acted all proud of herself when I grunted and shook her hand. She got Burke and Nacho right too. She laughed out loud. “Nacho—I
love
it! Always wished I had a cool nickname.” She stepped back. “I’m Heather. Ernie’s mom.”

My memory is kind of fuzzy on some of this. Probably because it was one of the uncomfortablest times of my life. I mean, everybody knows how to deal with a goober. But how about a goober’s
mom
? There’s no manual for that.

Mrs. Goober took another step back, as if to get us all in the picture. “So,” she said, and just grinned away.
Here it comes
, I thought:
So you’re the hoodlums that have been terrorizing my son.
She had short curly brown hair. And hoop earrings you could spit through. And a T-shirt that said
I BRAKE
FOR TURTLES
. At last she went on, “Finally I get to meet you. I see you coming by all the time, talking to Ernie. Sometimes I’ve been tempted to come out and say hello, but I see you guys laughing and having a good time and I say, ‘Nah, stay outta their business.’ Was I right, guys?”

We glanced at each other. How are you supposed to answer that?

She laughed. “I retract the question.” She looked back over her shoulder at the paint-splashed, lopsided shack. “She’s a beauty, huh?”

Burke and I just nodded, but Nacho piped, “Absolutely.”

She shot a look at Nacho and her cheeks bulged and her lips quivered and a laugh just barfed out, she couldn’t hold it in, and I knew that in her howling laughter she was telling us that she knew that we knew it was the most ridiculous-looking building in the history of mankind. She wiped her eyes. “Well, Wednesday is your pal Ernie’s art lesson day, so I guess you’re stuck with me.” She looked us over again, giving us a grin that seemed like a secret behind a zipper. “I know, I know, you just want to get outta here, escape the old lady.”
She gave a big dramatic shrug. “Sorry, guys.” She waved and headed for the house. “Come on in.” We stayed. She turned. The grin was gone. “I
said
come in.” We parked our bikes and followed her into the house.

She led us to the kitchen. She gave us lemonade to drink. (“We don’t believe in soda, dudes.”) And food. Oatmeal cookies. Brownies. Carrot sticks. Onion dip. Blue corn chips. (“Sorry, no nachos, Nacho.” She giggled for a whole minute over that one.)

She asked a lot of questions. She wanted to know everything about us, like she was writing a book or something. I don’t mean she was grilling us. It was all friendly. She seemed so interested, nodding her head and saying, “Really?” and “Is that so?” The more she nodded, the more we talked. I found out stuff about Nacho and Burke I never knew. And when Burke pointed to me and said, “He’s a twin,” and Nacho said, “His twin is a sister,” she went bonkers.

“Wow—Jake—no kidding? I always thought it would be
so
cool to have a twin. What’s it like?” Before I could answer, she said, “Never mind. Dumb
question. Way too broad. Okay—what’s her name?”

“Whose name?” I said.

That really cracked her up. I think she thought I was trying to be a comic. “Your
twin sister
,” she said.

“Lily,” I said.

“Lily.” She smiled. She repeated it, like she was tasting it. “Lily.” The smile got dreamy. “Jake and Lily.” She took awhile to digest that, then: “Okay…so…tell me, is it true about twins, like, you almost
know
what each other is thinking? Stuff like that?”

Suddenly everybody was looking at me. What could I say? How could I put into words for her something that we could never put into words for ourselves? Unless you count
goombla
. But more than that, her question smacked me up against something that’s been there for a while, I guess, I just never really looked—
it’s not that way anymore
. I suddenly realized how long it’s been since I knew what my sister’s been writing in her journal chapters. I remembered the fights with her, trying to tell her to chill out, we’re just growing up, that’s all.

Mrs. G was tilting, smiling at me. She laid her
hand on mine. “Forget it, Jake. Some things just can’t be put into words, right?”

I looked at her. Something inside me said,
Thank you
. I nodded.

She took it easy on me from then on, and it was pretty okay. I kept thinking,
I’m in a supergoober’s house!
But when I looked around the place, it looked like mine. Somewhere along the line it occurred to me that I wasn’t uncomfortable anymore. At the last second, as we walked out the door, I remembered to say, “Thank you.” Then the other guys did too. She stood at the door. She waved at us as we pedaled off.

We didn’t go back to the hideout. We didn’t talk. We just rode around. From one end of town to the other and back. I know we were all thinking it, but nobody was saying it. Finally Nacho did: “First goober mother I ever met.”

“She’s pretty cool,” I said.

“She called us dudes,” said Burke.

We rode some more, then split and went home to our dinners.

I
stink at origami. Whatever I tried to make came out looking like a giraffe in a bathtub.

Poppy thought about it. He snapped his fingers. “How about this: flowers. You like flowers, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think about them.”

“Everybody likes flowers,” he said. “You’re gonna help me landscape the backyard. Come on.”

So we went to a garden shop and came back with a bunch of plants and flowers and a pair of trowels. He told me maybe I’m a green thumb and just don’t know it.

“What’s a green thumb?” I said. I looked at my thumb.

“Somebody who’s good with plants,” he said. “Green thumbs can make anything grow.”

As soon as we went out the back door I knew I was in trouble. A dog was barking. It was in the next-door backyard. A big black dog. Sticking its nose through one of the diamond-shaped spaces in the chain-link fence and barking. I don’t mean a nice regular doggie
woof woof
bark. I mean a loud, nasty, growly bark. The kind of bark that’s so powerful it makes the dog’s head flop up and down. A bark that’s super excited, but not in a puppy-happy-to-see-you way. Super excited because he can’t wait to sink his teeth into you and rip out a vital organ.

“No way,” I said. I stepped back behind the screen door.

My grandfather laughed. “He just barks. He’s a big baby. Look.” He went to the fence. The dog went even crazier. “Poppy!” I yelled, but Poppy was reaching over the fence and noogling the black ears, and the beast was licking his hand.

“It’s me,” I called. “Dogs hate me. They know I’m scared.”

Poppy came back and took my hand. He didn’t try to drag me out. He would never force me. He
just said, quiet and smiling and looking into my eyes, “You’re safe with me, Lil.”

I hate to say this, but I didn’t totally believe it. I went with him because I could see that he believed it, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “I’ll work over here,” I said, and headed for the side of the yard away from the dog. Poppy laughed, and we spent the next hour digging holes and planting stuff and watering with the hose. The dog stared at us for a while, then went sniffing around its own yard. I have to admit we never heard another peep out of it. I don’t care. I told Poppy that as long as that beast is next door, my new life isn’t going to be happening in his backyard.

W
hen we showed up at the hideout this morning, the first thing we noticed was the dirt. The Bump vs Supergoober score was gone. Scuffed away totally.

“Looks like Bump’s back from vacation,” said Nacho.

Burke pointed his sneaker toe at a couple of heel holes. “I guess he didn’t think our little joke was too funny.”

We rode past his house. We didn’t see him. We hung out front for a little while, staring at the windows. No sign of anybody.

“Maybe he’s not back from vacation,” I said. “Maybe somebody else scratched it out.”

Burke sneered. “Yeah, right.”

“Maybe he’s in there,” said Nacho. “All we gotta do is knock.”

But nobody did.

We rode off. Nobody said, “Let’s go to Soop’s,” but our bikes seemed to be heading there anyway. We were still a couple blocks away when Burke suddenly said, “Stop.”

Burke has the best eyes, but it didn’t take long for me and Nacho to catch up. The shack, visible from outer space, was gone. Well, not completely gone. It was now in a pile. A jagged splashy pile of colors. Like pick-up sticks.

“Holy crap,” said Burke.