Eight Keys (2 page)

When I sat down in homeroom, my backpack scraped against my legs.

“Crap,” I muttered, running my hand over my skin, getting blood on my fingers. I hoped no one had noticed and quickly wiped my hand on my shorts. The girl next to me made a disgusted face, rolled her eyes, and shifted away from me.

The teacher handed out sheets of paper with locker assignments. There are so many middle schoolers at our school that sixth graders have to have partners—which is, apparently, totally okay according to the teachers, because sixth graders’ textbooks aren’t as thick as seventh and eighth
graders’ books. So while I can look forward to one day having my own locker, I also get to look forward to having really humongous books and backaches from carrying them around.

The locker assignments seemed to be alphabetical, because across from my name, Elise Bertrand, was Amanda Betterman.

We were given twenty minutes to set up our lockers. In the hall, I followed the numbers until I found 2716, and who should show up at the same time but the girl who’d sat next to me in homeroom. I recognized her long, streaky brown hair, held off her forehead by two clips, and her tiny white skirt.

“Oh, gag. I have to share with the Bloody Queen of Scabs.” Several kids standing around her looked at my legs and laughed. Then Amanda said to me, very seriously, “Please don’t get blood on my things. I don’t want to get any weird diseases.”

“I don’t have any weird diseases.”

To make everything one hundred times better (not), who should show up but Sir Franklin, needing to stick up for me. “It’s no big deal, she just got hurt playing Knights.”

Which was not the right thing to say. At all.

“What’s Knights?”

“It’s a pretend game.”

Amanda smirked. “Playing pretend. That sounds
really cool.
”

But the way she said it meant the opposite:
so not cool
.

The other kids started laughing at me and Franklin. Kids we didn’t know but also a couple kids we’d known since kindergarten.

Apparently
cool
sixth graders don’t play. They definitely don’t play Knights. They have streaky hair and short skirts.

But there I was on the first day of school with scabby knees like a kindergartener, and my best friend got me pegged as a baby.

One Last Visit to Summer

The first day of school is always a Thursday or Friday. I like it because we get a little snatch of summer back over the weekend. This year’s Friday start meant I woke up on Saturday completely relieved to have two days off from school. I was in no hurry to go back there.

And it
was
like having summer back. I lay in bed until my door creaked open.

“Hi, Franklin,” I said.

The clock said it was nine, but it was still very dark in my room. Having a first-floor bedroom with the porch outside means that sunshine never bothers me in the morning.

“Hi.” Franklin came in and sat on my bed. “What do you want to do today?”

I thought for a minute, and Franklin let me think. He would never interrupt when I am thinking.

“I want to figure out the best things we did all summer, and then do them again.”

“Okay. Here, I’ll make a list.” He got a yellow notepad and pencil from my desk and sat back down on my bed. “I
really liked the day we found frogs at the stream. We could do that again.”

“Okay.”

“Knights?”

“No Knights.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not better from the last time we played Knights,” I said, feeling the smooth sheets against my rough, scabby legs. And I wasn’t better from getting made fun of. This was the weekend; I wanted to push school way out of my mind, to forget that yesterday had ever happened.

“What else, then?” He tapped the pencil’s eraser on the paper.

“I liked helping Uncle Hugh finish the furniture.” Uncle Hugh is a craftsman. He makes things out of wood, like rocking chairs and tables and cabinets.

Franklin added it to the list.

“And I liked when Aunt Bessie let us make ice cream.”

“Lactose-free?” Franklin asked.

“Of course,” I said. A glimmer of excitement lit Franklin’s eyes. His mom limits his sugar at home, but we always have plenty for him at my house. Franklin can’t have any real dairy products because of his allergies, but Aunt Bessie’s pretty much a genius about getting around that. She really can make anything. She does catering out of our house, so we have a special up-to-code kitchen with stainless steel countertops and lots of fancy appliances.

“I liked looking at the slides on my microscope.” Franklin
finished writing everything. “That’s probably enough for today … what do you want to do first?”

“Let me see if we can do the stuff with Uncle Hugh and Aunt Bessie today at all.” Aunt Bessie and I cook together on Saturdays if she doesn’t have a catering job, but if she did she’d be busy all day.

I climbed out of bed and decided that the tank top I’d slept in would do for the day, too, so I found my shorts on the floor and pulled them on. I didn’t mind getting dressed with Franklin around, especially since he was always certain to fix his eyes on a point on the wall and stare straight ahead. Which is sort of silly, because I know he still wears cartoon underwear. How can you be embarrassed around someone who knows about your cartoon underwear?

I picked a T-shirt up off the floor and threw it at Franklin’s head to signal him that I was done and it was safe to move his eyes around the room again.

“All ready?” he asked.

“Yup.” I slid into some flip-flops as I headed to find Aunt Bessie.

Aunt Bessie was in her chef’s clothes, which are black even though chef’s clothes are usually white. She and I agree that black looks nicer, cleaner, and more slimming for her plump figure than white. She used to be a redhead; now that she’s in her fifties, her hair is dull orange and pepper gray, but she still wears it pulled back in the same long, thick braid. She was carrying trays to load into her catering van.

“When will you be back?” I asked.

“This afternoon.”

“Can we make end-of-the-summer ice cream?”

“I’ll set aside some fresh strawberries for it. Does that sound good?”

“Yum! I mean, yes!”

Aunt Bessie went to set the trays on the racks in the van. That’s a job that Franklin and I are
not
allowed to help with. She doesn’t consider us strong or steady enough. It would never be worth the time it might save in the event that a tray was dropped.

“Ice cream later,” I promised Franklin when he followed me out onto the porch. His eyes got all big and shiny and sugar-hungry again. “Now for Uncle Hugh.”

We headed across the large gravel circle of the driveway in front of our house to the barn.

The barn isn’t old and falling-down like a lot of barns. It was renovated, complete with electricity and a bathroom and an open elevator to the second floor, so that Uncle Hugh could have his workshop there. On the second floor is a hallway lined with shut doors only about as far apart as horse stalls would be, except for the two on either end, which are a little farther away. Once when I was little, I climbed up the stairs (I was never, ever allowed to play in the elevator) and counted the doors: eight. I was trying all the doorknobs when I heard Aunt Bessie behind me.

“They’re all locked, Elise,” she said, holding her hand out to me. I took it. “Let’s stay downstairs.” We walked back down to Uncle Hugh’s workshop. What she meant was I wasn’t to go up to try to open the doors, and I wasn’t to play
upstairs in the barn, and I wasn’t to worry about what was up there. It was probably dangerous equipment for Uncle Hugh’s work.

“Hey, Cricket,” Uncle Hugh greeted me as Franklin and I came into the barn. He’s been calling me Cricket since I learned to talk in full sentences and wouldn’t shut up. I don’t talk all the time like that anymore, but he says all those interesting things I’m not saying are still whirring around in my head.

“Is there anything to finish?”

“Nope. Actually, I just finished finishing.” Uncle Hugh chuckled to himself, rubbing his hands over the legs of a table. “I have to go out on deliveries.”

“So there’s nothing we can help with?”

“Not at the moment. But you’re welcome to play with the scrap pieces.”

Uncle Hugh puts any extra small pieces in a bin for me and Franklin to build with and leaves out some nails and two hammers. We’ve made plenty of neat things. I looked at Franklin, who was still holding the torn-off piece of yellow paper and the pencil. He shook his head at me. “Not on the list.”

“List—?” Uncle Hugh started, but then he changed his mind. Whenever he asks about what Franklin and I are up to, he gets a really long explanation that he’d rather not hear. “Well, I’m heading out. You can play with that stuff if you want. You know never to touch anything else in here. Just don’t tell your mother, Franklin, she wouldn’t like you in here on your own.”

“Aye-aye,” Franklin answered, with a salute. Then he turned to me. “Frogs next, I think.”

Franklin and I ran out of the barn and across the fields next to my house until they became a few sparse trees, until they became the woods, until we reached the stream.

When we got there, we stood still, trying to slow our breathing, because it was hard to hear the frogs. Frogs don’t say “ribbit” or “croak” like everyone thinks they do. They sound like rubber bands. A whole concert of plucked rubber bands:
bung, bung!
After a minute of listening hard and hearing only the gentle movement of the stream, I said, “There are no frogs here.”

“There have to be some,” Franklin said. “It’s still warm out.” He put the paper and pencil in his back pocket and sat down to pull off his shoes. Franklin’s mom insists on sneakers and socks every day. She doesn’t know that most days, at some point, Franklin leaves his shoes behind. Early in the summer I pulled a splinter out of his foot with tweezers because he didn’t want to have to tell her about it.

Franklin stepped gently into the ankle-deep water and started looking along the moist rocks.

“See anything?” I asked.

“No.”

“I told you, there are no frogs here. They’re all gone.”

Franklin searched with his eyes. Then he sighed, giving up.

“Slides?” I asked.

“Oh!” Franklin took a small tube out of his pocket, uncapped it, and dipped it into the stream. “I want a sample of the water. We can look and see if there are any organisms in it.”

“Good idea,” I said. I didn’t care quite as much about that stuff as Franklin, but I did have fun playing scientist with him all summer, pretending that we would discover something big.

Franklin squished his wet feet back into his socks and shoes and we walked to his house. He’s one of my closest neighbors, but still, he lives pretty far away. You can’t see any other houses from mine.

Franklin’s big farmhouse is a lot like ours, but it feels nothing like it on the inside. At our house there’s hustle and bustle and very few rules—at his there are plenty of rules and almost nothing going on.

As soon as we got inside, his mother, tall and thin, swooped upon us.

“Good morning, Elise. I assume you had a good breakfast?”

“Good morning, Mrs. White,” I answered. “I—uh—forgot about breakfast.”

Franklin’s face went expressionless. We both knew what was about to happen.

“Well, come, come to the kitchen,” Mrs. White said. “We must have breakfast. I will make you eggs and toast. Franklin ate breakfast before he went over to fetch you.”

Franklin gave me a smug look. We sat down at the kitchen table and he opened
Scientific American
and started reading. I waited for my fate, which was soon delivered in the form of over-easy eggs and unbuttered wheat toast. I said thank you and started eating. Mrs. White’s eggs seemed slimy compared to Aunt Bessie’s. Even Uncle Hugh’s are better. Even
my own
attempts at frying eggs are better.

Franklin’s mother sat down with us and watched me eat as if it made her really happy.

“There now. You know how important a good start is. Doesn’t anyone make sure you get breakfast?”

Of course Aunt Bessie and Uncle Hugh make sure I eat, but I’m not a baby. They know I can make my own breakfast. Franklin has probably never made any food for himself.

“They were both working this morning,” I said. “I’m in charge of my own breakfast.”

I could tell Mrs. White didn’t think eleven-year-olds in charge of breakfast was a good idea.

If that’s what natural parents are like, who needs them? I’d take Uncle Hugh and Aunt Bessie any day.

I don’t really think about Mom or Dad much. They are mostly just an empty space inside me, a forgotten feeling from long ago. I never knew Mom at all, because she died when I was born, and Dad was gone when I was three. After the doctor told Dad he had a year or two to live, he wrote me a bunch of letters for my birthdays, so I hear from him once a year. Uncle Hugh has the letters—somewhere, I don’t know where, I’ve looked.

I decided, as I finished the last runny bite of egg and abandoned the toast crust, that I would have to be more careful about truthful answers. It wouldn’t be such a harmful lie to say I’d already eaten, would it?