Jake and Lily (15 page)

I
watched him again today. From a safe distance. This shack is going to be even crookeder than the last one. Worse than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I kept having an urge to go help him. When my sister and I were little, our parents gave us kid-sized tool belts and started teaching us stuff about building—what kind of nails to use, what a level is for, etc. I could easily show him what he’s doing wrong. But I’m the guy who confessed to wrecking his hut. No way he’ll ever let me near his house again.

It was hot. I was thirsty. But I couldn’t move. It’s like I was hypnotized by those hammer hits. Like a clock. Like a heartbeat. There was no stopping them. All summer long. Through all the
paint mess and all the wreckage…
bam—bam—bam
…. As I sat on the curb squinting through the heat shimmer, one question came through the unstoppable hammering:
why?

Ernest Lindop, why are you doing this?

W
hen my parents came home after work today they seemed hyped up. They both wore big grins and they were aimed at me.

“What?” I said.

“One playground coming up,” said my mom.

I shrieked. “She said okay?”

Dad said, “She said, ‘Sue, schmoo. We’ll get insurance.’”

“What about the vegetable garden?” I said.

“She said they’d rather grow fun than squash. She said they never had kids of their own, and so now they’re going to have some—this way.”

I rushed to the phone to tell Sydney.

T
oday I found my old little-kid tool belt in the closet. I took out the carpenter’s level. It was always my favorite tool. I love getting that bubble right in the middle. Then you know—you
know
—your work is straight.

I waited till after dark. I rode. I parked. I slunk across the grass. I left the level on the ground inside the half-done Leaning Shack of Meeker Street.

W
e cleaned up the empty lot—me, Sydney, and Devon. Not that there was much to clean up. Devon’s job was to pick up stones and paper and so forth. Mrs. Addison didn’t have gloves small enough for him, so she made him use a pair of sweat socks, like mittens. She gave him a plastic bag to dump stuff in. He thought he was King of the World. While the King did his job, Sydney and I fought over the lawn mower. It’s a wonder a blade of grass ever got cut. We were almost done when we heard Devon shriek. We ran. He was stiff with terror, pointing at the ground. “Snake!”

I looked. It was a snake all right, but not exactly a python. It was a garter snake like I see all the time in the woods by the creek. I never understood why
people, especially girls, are so terrified of snakes. This one was less than a foot long.

I picked it up. Devon gasped. I held it out to Sydney—and a funny thing didn’t happen. She didn’t let out a girly scream and run. She reached out and took the snake from my hand. It squirmed like a worm as she petted its head. Then she lobbed it into the Addisons’ backyard. I stared at her. She gave me a smug grin. We tapped fists. She burped. I back-burped her.

I’m liking this girl more every day.

G
ulp.

I used to think it was just a movie thing. Or a thing people do in stories that you read. Somebody gets nervous and surprised by a question and they can’t talk, all they can do is…
gulp
.

But it’s not just a movie thing. It’s real.

Okay, back up….

This morning Mom asked me to go to the supermarket for two packs of kiwi fruits, which she needs for a salad tonight. I had just gotten the kiwis and was heading for the checkout when it happened. Somebody whips around with two handfuls of lettuce and bumps right into me, and while I’m staring at the lettuce, the misty thing that keeps the veggies fresh decides to go off and we’re standing so
close to it that I’m getting mist on my face and the somebody who bumped into me is saying, “Well, my my, look who it is.” That’s when I look up and get the shock of my life: it’s Mrs. Lindop.

Mrs. Heather Lindop.

Ernest Lindop’s mother.

She waves a lettuce in my face. “Hi, Jake. Remember me?”

That’s when I did it—The Gulp.

Until something like this happens to you, you’ll never know how long a swallow can take. When I was finally able to talk, I said, “Uh…hi….”

Brilliant, huh?

Her smile was so big it bumped into her hoop earrings. “So how’s it going, Jake? Haven’t seen you guys lately. Where ya been?”

“Oh, around,” I said.

I couldn’t believe she wasn’t clobbering me with the lettuce and kicking me in the shins.

“Ernie misses you,” she said.

It took awhile to sink in.

Ernie misses you.

I thought,
Is it possible? He didn’t tell her what I said?

“Especially since what happened,” she said.

I did a mini gulp. “What was that?” I said.

“Oh, somebody knocked down Ernie’s clubhouse.” She pitched the lettuces into her cart. “Haven’t you seen?”

“No,” I lied. “We were on vacation.”

“Who would
do
such a thing?” she said. I was going to answer something like “Beats me,” but I saw that she wasn’t really asking
me
, she was looking around the ceiling. She was asking the universe. Her eyes came back to me. “So Ernie was pretty sad there for a while.”

That’s not all he was sad about
.

“But then”—her face and her voice got peppy again—“you know Ernie. He bounces back. So now he’s busy rebuilding.”

She was looking hard at me now, and for some weird reason I knew exactly what she wanted me to say. So I said it. “Good.”

She nodded. She squeezed my shoulder. “Y’know, I shouldn’t tell you this, because Ernie likes all of you. But”—her voice got whispery, she leaned in—“you’re his favorite, Jake. He likes you best.”

He never told her!

I heard my mouth saying, “I like him too.”

“And the strangest thing,” she said. “Guess what somebody did?”

“What?”

“Somebody left one of those leveler thingies in the hut, that carpenters use.” She laughed. “I guess they couldn’t stand to see the lopsided walls anymore!”

We both laughed.

I
t’s a playground!

Well, the start of a playground.

Only two days later and here’s what we have:

• a basketball and hoop
  
• a swing set
  
• a pipe
  

The Addisons bought the ball and hoop and set it up. It’s only five feet high, still way too high for Devon to dunk. But he loves to try—when he can get the ball away from Sydney and me.

The swing set came from my backyard. Jake and I haven’t used it for years, but it was still sitting there. Devon won’t let anybody push him.

The pipe. It’s plastic. Black. Thirty-six inches across. My parents got it from a friend who’s laying a storm sewer. They had ten feet of pipe left over. All my parents had to do was haul it here on the truck and smooth out the edges. It’s perfect—and irresistible—for a little kid to crawl through. Not to mention his big-girl babysitters, who he orders to play the parts of monsters or
T. rex
es or man-eating crocs chasing him through the Tunnel of Doom.

Devon hasn’t asked to go to McDonald’s in two days.

L
ily’s voice. “Wake up.” She was shaking me. “Wake
up
.”

“Huh?…Wha—?”

“There’s somebody downstairs. He wants you.”

“Who?”

“
I
don’t know.” She dragged me out of bed, pushed me. “Go.”

I staggered down the stairs in my underwear. I figured I was still asleep because I dreamed Ernest Lindop was standing in my living room.

“Hi, Jake,” he said. He grabbed my hand and shook it.

It wasn’t a dream hand. It was real.

He looked me over. “I sleep in my underwear too,” he said. I’ve never seen such a big smile so
early in the morning.

The voice in my head was saying,
Why are you here? To hit me? You hate me.
But all that came out was, “Hffffgg.”

He laughed. “Sorry I got you out of bed. I can come back later.”

“’Sokay,” I said.

“I just wanted to thank you.” Was this a joke? I just stared. He was carrying a plastic bag. He pulled something out of it. “For this.” It was the carpenter’s level. He was staring, his face tilting into mine. “It
was
you, wasn’t it?”

I nodded. How did he know?

He nodded. “Thought so. My mother saw somebody running away from the porch the other night. She thought it might be you.” He laughed. “I didn’t even know what it was. My dad had to tell me. So”—he gave me a little arm punch—“thanks to you, I can make straight walls.”

This was crazy. I’d confessed to trashing his shack, and now he was
thanking
me? I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Suddenly he was looking at me all serious. “Jake?” he said.

“Huh?” I said.

He took a deep breath, like he was pumping himself up to speak. “Jake, did you
really
bust up my clubhouse?”

I’ve never been stared at so hard. I couldn’t lie. “No,” I said.

He screeched. He fist-bumped himself. “I
knew
it! The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t believe it was really you. Why did you say you did it?”

I was starting to feel stupid, standing there in my underwear. “Do I have to answer that?”

He tried to sound like a drill sergeant, which was pretty funny coming from him. “It’s a command, private.”

Now it was my turn to take a deep breath. “So Bump wouldn’t beat you up,” I said.

“So I was right. It
was
Bump who did it.”

I nodded.

“And you…you saved me from Bump.”

I nodded.

“You didn’t think I could beat him up?”

I didn’t know what to say, and suddenly he was hugging me. Ernest Lindop was laughing and hugging me in my own living room. And a tiny dark voice was saying,
Holy Death Rays—you’re being hugged by a supergoober!

S
ydney’s family went to Ocean City for the day. They asked me to go along. We had a great time. The boardwalk. The beach. The waves. Ice-cream waffles. Which explains why we didn’t know what happened until late in the day.

On the drive home Devon kept pestering his father to stop at Devon Park, which is what we now call the playground. Devon’s dad said it was too late to play outside, but he would at least drive by to take a look at it. Sydney’s parents hadn’t seen it yet.

When we pulled up to Devon Park, we got one of the all-time shockers. Somebody had painted something on the Tunnel of Doom—the word
GOOBERS
in yellow letters against the black pipe.

“Vandals,” said Mr. Dodds.

Before he finished the word I was out of the car and racing for the pipe. The letters were big and sloppy, and somehow that made it even worse.

Devon was right behind me. He touched the paint. He didn’t seem very upset. He turned to me. “What’s it say, Lil-wee? Devon Park?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Devon Park.”

I figured, why tell him the truth? But it backfired. He started to wail. “But it’s messy! Look how messy it is!”

By now everybody was at the pipe, including Mrs. Addison. She was sad-faced. “I didn’t see it till noon,” she said. “We were hoping to get it painted over before you all saw it.”

Devon had already forgotten it. He dived into the pipe, popped out the other end, and cried, “Basketball!”

Mrs. Addison brought out the ball. While the others were shooting baskets with Devon, I noticed something on the ground by the pipe. A black blob. Looked kind of like tar, but I had a feeling it wasn’t. The sun was down behind the houses. It was getting dark. Mr. Dodds was lifting Devon for
a slam dunk. I knew what I should do, but it was too gross to even think about. Then I thought,
The Gray Shadow would do it.

I picked up the black blob. Even in the dim light I could see it had a chewed-up look. I brought it to my nose. I sniffed.

I was right.

I
didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I let the hug go on for as long as he wanted. Finally it ended.

“How did you know where I live?” I asked him.

He said he bumped into Nacho and Burke and he asked them.

As he watched me eat breakfast, he said thanking me wasn’t the only reason he came over. “I’d like you to help me build the clubhouse,” he said.

Right then I realized I had been hoping he would ask. “Sure,” I said.

He high-fived himself. “Yes!”

On the bike ride to his house he said, “I was just thinking something.”

“What?” I said.

“Maybe we should get some more help. Maybe
we should ask Nacho and Burke. What do you think?”

I guess he knew better than to ask Bump. As for the other two, I tried to think of a good reason why not, but I couldn’t. “Good idea,” I said.

I led Ernie to the hideout. The guys weren’t there, but Ernie was hyper-impressed by the umbrella tree. He walked in circles under the leafy dome. “Wow…cool,” he kept saying.

We bumped into them five minutes later on the road. The shock on their faces was priceless, seeing me with Ernie, but they quick switched to cool. “Hey, dudes,” I said.

“Hi, Nacho. Hi, Burke,” said Ernie, his usual cheery self. “I found Jake”—he laughed—“as you can see. Thanks again for the address. And I know Bump did it. Jake told me his confession was fake.”

The guys looked at me. I nodded. “It’s all cool.”

I could see them relax. Their faces changed. Their eyes. They were no longer looking at a goober. Or, even if they were, they didn’t care. Each of them reached out and fist-bumped Ernie. He was beaming.

We headed for Meeker Street. As we got closer
to his house, Ernie started laughing. It was just a chuckle at first, and by the time we hit his driveway it was a howl.

“What’s so funny?” said Nacho.

Ernie wiped away laugh tears with his shirttail. “My clubhouse. It’s leaning more than the tower of Pisa. It’s probably the ugliest clubhouse ever!”

He cracked up again, and the rest of us joined in.

First I raced back to my house for more tools, while the others raided the garage for Mr. Lindop’s tools. We started by tearing down the mess Ernie had already made. When his mom came out, she knew without asking what we were doing. “Thank you, boys!” she called, and went back inside. We could hear her laughing all morning.

Mrs. Lindop fed us lunch. It was maybe the best lunch I ever had. Not because of the food but because of—I don’t know how to say it—the fun. The laughs. The talk. The good feelings. The guys. The sun streaming in through the lemony curtains.

Maybe it was the light that gave me the idea. As we were building a wall after lunch, I said, “Why don’t we put in a window?”

Everybody thought it was a great idea.

“But we don’t know how to put in a window,” said Burke.

“My parents do,” I said.

At dinner I asked Mom and Dad if they could help us make a clubhouse for my new friend. They said sure, they can do it day after tomorrow, which is Saturday.

My head is spinning with all the stuff that’s happened since Lily shook me awake this morning. If I had to pick the best day ever, I think this would be it.