Here in the Real World Page 3

  There, a big container clad in fake stones stood almost as tall as he was and twice as long. Ware wanted to climb those fake stones to look inside, but the girl was still holding his hand.

  He didn’t want her to be holding his hand, of course, but somehow he didn’t feel he should take it back, either.

  As a compromise, he rose on his toes to peer over the top. The tub was full of wreckage, but through it, he saw that the interior was coated in glassy turquoise.

  The girl dropped his hand and smacked the side of the vessel. “This here is a baptistery—a sinners’ tub. People line up, begging please, oh please, could the preacher dunk them because they are suffering so from how bad they’ve been. Then the preacher dunks them, clothes and all, lifts them back up, and woo-hoo, they’re born again, are all shiny and new, like pennies in Coke.”

  “Huh,” Ware said. His hand was still warm from where she’d held it. It felt a little as if it might be glowing. “A magic tub.”

  “No. No magic tub. ’Cause the very next week, they’re slinking into the Grotto, drinking the rent money, hitting their kids—same old stuff they used to do before they got dunked.”

  Ware sneaked a peek at his hand. It wasn’t glowing, but it felt buzzy, as if it might be glowing inside. He put it into his pocket to preserve the feeling. “How do you know all this, anyway?”

  “My aunt went here every Sunday till they gave up.”

  “Gave up?”

  “Ran out of money. Quit paying, back in January. And the bank kicked them out.”

  “That’s what happened? Why’d they knock it down?”

  “Walter says so nobody could camp here, do drugs and stuff.”

  “Who’s Walter?”

  The girl hitched a shoulder toward the Grotto Bar. “Bartender.”

  “You know a bartender?” Ware gasped, before he could stop himself.

  The girl grabbed her head and groaned.

  Mortified, Ware changed the subject. “Wow. So, there must be a lot of great stuff in all this mess.”

  “Nuh-uh. The church people came before the wrecking crew. They took everything good.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I watched. They took the cross out first, laid it down on a pickup truck. You notice a thing like that.”

  “Trek ten!”

  Ware’s head snapped up. He’d missed three more circuits.

  The girl followed his gaze and then nodded. “You have to go.” She sounded pleased.

  “I’m going.” As he passed her, the oddest thing happened.

  In her mirrored glasses, Ware saw himself reflected. Looking back was the most pathetic kid in the world. You know a bartender? Unbelievable.

  Nine

  His mom’s car and his dad’s truck were parked in the driveway.

  Good. He would tell them both at once, get it over with. Chin up, chest out, advance boldly. “I tried it. It was terrible. I’m not going back,” he practiced out loud on the front step.

  A lizard jumped onto the last sun-warmed patch of cement beside him and began pumping its jerky little push-ups as if cheering his proclamation. Ware didn’t particularly like lizards, with their suction-cup feet, but you had to admire them, thermodynamically at least. A lizard craved the sun, but it didn’t need it. It ran just fine on hot or cold blood.

  “I mean it. I’m not going back,” he repeated for the lizard. He unlocked the door.

  A hushed murmuring leaked down the hall from his parents’ closed bedroom door.

  Closed-door was their parenting style. He hadn’t minded when he was little, but now, more and more, he wished his parents would just straight-out tell him whatever was going on.

  He walked down the hall and raised his knuckles to knock. Looking at his fist, he remembered: the garden-girl had held his hand.

  No, that wasn’t accurate. She’d only taken his hand, not held it, and she’d seemed pretty mad at him the whole time. If he’d been wearing a leash around his neck, she’d probably have dragged him over by that.

  He turned his attention back to the door.

  And heard: “. . . one kid. And he turns out so antisocial. He offered to pay not to go!”

  Ware dropped his hand. He leaned in.

  “. . . now, with my mother sick. Why can’t we have a normal kid?”

  Ware reared back. His face flamed, but the thing in his chest that felt like his soul shrank down cold, like the heart of a lizard deprived of its sun. He edged down the hall. In the kitchen, he sat at the counter and opened a game on the computer. The way a normal kid would do.

  Finally, his parents emerged.

  “What happened to your knee?” his father asked, his brows tented in worry.

  “Nothing—it’s fine.” Ware stood. He cleared his throat.

  “Was that a cough?” his father asked.

  “No. Now, Rec.”

  His mother opened a drawer and started rooting around. She retrieved a lozenge, extra-strength honey lemon, and began to unwrap it.

  “I’m eleven and a half, Mom.” Ware groaned and pushed away the lozenge. He cleared his throat again. “So, Rec. I tried it. It was . . .”

  His mother bit her bottom lip.

  The sight of her anxiety hurt so much, he had to look away. “It was . . .”

  He heard his mother gulp. The gulp undid him.

  The terrible weight of it. The awful responsibility.

  “It was . . . all right,” he said, his voice quavering only slightly. He looked up.

  “See?” His mother sighed, her face relaxing.

  His father smiled. “You just needed to give it a chance.”

  And the thing in his chest uncurled just a little bit.

  Ten

  Next day, Ware waved to his mother from the drop-off space and took a couple of normal-kid steps toward the door. When she’d driven off, he stopped. Ms. Sanchez had said he could come in whenever he wanted, and he didn’t want to just yet.

  He walked casually over to the oak, waited until no one was around, then tucked his backpack into the crotch of a branch and swung himself up. Just to see.

  The girl sat cross-legged in the shade of three queen palms, surrounded by ChipNutz cans. It looked as if she was telling her plants a story. The palms looked like skinny old ladies in green hats, leaning down to hear the story, too, as if it was a good one.

  Ware glanced over toward the church. At the top of the baptistery, a slice of turquoise flashed like a greeting.

  Lying in bed, trying to forget what he’d overheard his mother say, he’d thought about that do-over tub a lot. He could really use a brand-new-self fresh start like that.

  He dropped to the ground, strode over to the girl, stood in front of her. “How does it work? Getting born again?”

  “I told you. Dunking.” She stabbed her trowel down next to his sneaker, a warning.

  Ware took a step back. “I mean . . . the people. They weren’t trying to turn into babies again, so how is it supposed to work for them?”

  The girl blew her bangs out of her eyes. “They get reborn on the inside, not the outside.”

  For the second time in as many days, Ware remembered the laughing counselor. No, I mean inside the group. You’re outside.

  He shook it off. The outside was part of the inside.

  “Right. Is everything changed, or just the bad stuff?”

  “Just the bad.”

  “And people liked them better afterward, right?”

  “Of course,” the girl said. But she didn’t sound quite as sure.

  “Is the tub magic, or the water?”

  “The water. Except it wasn’t, remember? I told you it didn’t work. People went right back to their old selves.”

  “Everybody? Nobody stayed shiny and new?”

  The girl balanced her trowel on one sharp knee. She sat perfectly still except that her toes stretched in her pink flip-flops, as if they were reaching for the answer to his question. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I guess I on
ly know about one person that didn’t stay born again.”

  “So it could work,” Ware pressed. “It must work for some people, or else it wouldn’t be a thing.”

  “Maybe.” She picked up her trowel.

  “Wait. The magic holy water. Was it holy to begin with, or did it get holy by being in the tub?”

  “It has a regular faucet. I guess the preacher did something to it.”

  “What? What did they do?”

  The girl blew her lips out so hard her bangs flew straight up. “Who cares? It’s over! Whatever it was got packed up and left. Look around,” she ordered. “There’s no holy here. No magic.”

  Ware looked. Everything, everywhere, was broken.

  Then his gaze fell upon the garden. On the plants in their rusted tin cans—feathery but brave at the same time. At the bigger plants, sturdy in their row.

  The girl saw where he was looking. “Nuh-uh. They’re better than magic. You can count on them.” She lifted her sunglasses and squinted at him. “Why are you so interested, anyway? I thought you said this was a castle. In case you didn’t know it, castles don’t have baptisteries.”

  “So . . . right. I know.” Ware drew back. He suddenly felt protective about his do-over wish. As if it was feathery and brave at the same time. “But, um, ha-ha, they have moats,” he joked. He added a shrug to show that he didn’t really care, anyway.

  “Well, far as I know, moats go outside a castle, not inside,” she muttered.

  And for the third time, Ware thought of that laughing counselor. He left the girl grumbling beside her plants, climbed the foundation, and headed to the do-over tub.

  Eleven

  Ware climbed the steps he’d found at the back of the baptistery and sat on the rim. He imagined the tub full of water, imagined falling into it and then stepping out a less disappointing son whose report cards said, Ware is extremely social! And also, very normal!

  What would a change like that feel like? Would it hurt to feel your old self being kicked out? What if his old self put up a fight, or refused to budge?

  At a smack on the side of the tub, he opened his eyes.

  The girl again. Unbelievable. She swept off her shades and glared up.

  Ware was reminded of his report. Castle battlements were slotted with narrow openings called arrow slits, through which guards could shoot approaching enemies without being targets themselves. Ware got the impression that the girl’s blue eyes functioned pretty much the same way.

  She narrowed her arrow-slit eyes, but she was wearing a sly half smile. “How would you fill this thing?”

  He gestured to the faucet.

  “Nuh-uh. The city shut it off. So how would you get the water here?”

  Ware looked over at the Rec Center and shuddered. Maybe the library would lend him some. “Oh, buckets,” he tried in a casual tone. He tossed out a window screen.

  “Nope. Hose, that’s how. You got one?”

  “Do I . . . ?”

  “I got a hose. Fifty feet.” She waved her sunglasses back toward the Grotto Bar.

  “You live in a bar?”

  “Above it. Fifty feet’s not enough. It just reaches to the fence. You got a hose or not?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Maybe? Well, you bring me enough hose to reach my garden and this tub, maybe I won’t throw you out of here.” She put on her glasses and settled them firmly on her nose.

  “Maybe you won’t throw me . . . ?” Ware carefully straightened up to standing on the baptistery’s rim. Height was an advantage in medieval warfare. “Who do you think you are, anyway?” his reckless self challenged.

  The girl pursed her lips and tapped them with a grubby finger, pretending to think hard about whether to divulge this extremely important information. Then she shrugged. “Jolene.”

  The baptistery’s rim was narrower than he’d realized. He came down a couple of steps. “Okay.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, maybe I’ll bring a hose tomorrow.”

  He walked past her and scooped up his backpack.

  The girl followed him and jumped off the wooden-door drawbridge when he did. “Hey,” she yelled as he took off for the big oak. “What’s your name?”

  Ware called it back to her and kept walking.

  “Where? Here. What’s your name here?”

  Ware was used to this. On their first date, his parents had discovered they each had a great-great-great grand-father who’d fought at the Battle of Ware Bottom Church in the Civil War—on opposite sides. It hurt his head to think about his ancestors shooting at each other, having no idea they’d share a great-great-great-great grandson—what if one of them had been a better aim?—but mostly he was glad his parents hadn’t decided to commemorate the coincidence by naming their kid Bottom.

  He took a few steps back. “Not where,” he explained, whooshing the h. “Ware. With an A.”

  “Okay, Ware. Bring that hose. It doesn’t mean you can have the church, though. I haven’t decided.” She pulled her hat out of a pocket and tugged it on.

  Ware felt his jaw drop at the unfairness. He really hated unfairness. He wanted to say something stinging back at her, but before she’d tugged her hat down, her mirror glasses had pulled that trick again. And there he was, still the most pathetic kid in the world. He hadn’t even thought about how he’d fill that do-over tub.

  He started toward the Rec again, head down. “Wait,” he heard. He waited.

  “What’s ‘Ix’?”

  He turned.

  The girl was pointing up to the wall by the doorway. “Ix,” she repeated. “What’s it mean?”

  “Not Ix. Nine. In Roman numerals.”

  “Why?”

  He walked back. “They used Roman numerals back in the Middle Ages. And they put sundials on castle walls. See how the shadow is pointing toward the numerals? I made them at nine o’clock yesterday.”

  “Oh. So, here”—she tapped the wall—“this is ten o’clock?”

  “Around there. But I’d have to be here at ten to make sure.”

  She cocked her head at the numerals. “Is that blood?”

  Ware nodded miserably.

  “Huh,” she said, frowning. She seemed to be trying hard to decide something—for real this time.

  Ware took the opportunity to escape. He was nearly to the fence when she ran over to him.

  “The parking lot is the boundary. Between my territory and yours. No crossing it. And you can’t tell anyone about this place.”

  “What?”

  “I decided. You can have the church.”

  Twelve

  The next morning after his mother drove away, Ware jumped up into the oak and concealed himself in a cloud of leaves, deep as a secret, because the first objective of medieval reconnaissance was to gather information about the enemy.

  And in spite of the hand taking with the buzzy feeling, in spite of allowing him the church, that’s what the garden girl was. She’d made that clear. What she didn’t know was that Ware was an expert in castle defense. He’d gotten an A on his report.

  The enemy was digging in the shade of the three queen palms. The palms looked like guards today, curving over Jolene protectively.

  Ware noted how carefully she placed her foot on the spade before jumping on it, probably so it wouldn’t cut through her flip-flops. The enemy’s inadequate footgear was a clear weakness.

  Her trowel jutted out of a back pocket. Obviously gardening was a strength, but strengths, he reminded himself, could be useful as diversionary tactics.

  He released his backpack, heavy with a hose he’d found in his shed, and dropped down after it.

  Jolene turned at the thud. “The boundary,” she yelled, waving a finger at the parking area.

  Ware hoisted the hose like a white flag.

  Jolene nodded permission and he crossed, dropped it in front of her. “What are you doing?”

  She joggled her free hand through the air, as though hunting fo
r the words to adequately express how deranged his question was.

  “I mean, I see what you’re doing. But why?”

  Jolene kicked at a pile of dirt. “It’s basically rock dust. I have to dig out a trench and fill it with good soil before I can put in my plants.”

  Ware took a step closer. “I mean, why are you doing all this work? What’s so important about these plants?”

  Jolene jumped on her shovel again, this time not so carefully. Her hair flopped down like a curtain, but not before Ware had seen her face. She looked frightened.

  His hand flew to his chest, the way it always did. The sight of people being frightened literally stole his breath, like a hundred-arrow volley to the lungs, thunk-thunk-thunk.

  Mikayla was always stunned at how deeply Ware sensed other people’s pain. “It’s like your superpower,” she said, “feeling what other people are feeling.”

  “Right. Captain Empathy,” Ware had joked back. But he hadn’t really thought it was funny. Superpowers weren’t supposed to hurt.

  Now he wanted to tell Jolene not to be afraid. But nowhere in his research for his report had he learned that a good castle defense was to tell the enemy not to be afraid.

  He backed away and climbed onto the foundation to accomplish the second objective of reconnaissance: location assessment. Location assessment required height, so he picked his way over to the tower. Towers were excellent for getting the whole picture of a place.

  The stairway, he noted as he climbed, spiraled the wrong way, at least for real medieval castles. Real castle stairways wound up counter-clockwise so that the castle defenders, streaming down from the top, would have their right arms free to do battle with the ascending attackers, who would have their sword arms to the wall.

  But Ware was left-handed. The clockwise spiral felt like a sign. This place was meant for him.

  Which was crazy, of course.

  From the top of the tower—which wasn’t exactly towering, maybe twenty feet high—he did get the whole picture of the place.

  The lot was almost as big as a football field, and protected from view all the way around, the way castles were protected by their outer curtain walls. The side boundaries—east and west—were six-foot board fences, while the north boundary in the back had even taller evergreen hedges. All of First Street was marked Glory Alliance Parking Only! and the bank had erected a tall chain-link fence covered in orange mesh and warning signs across the front lawn. The same construction fencing had gone up across the driveway in the back that led to the small parking area. Even the nosiest person pressing an eye to that fencing would have a hard time seeing what went on in the lot.