Where I'd Like to Be (8 page)

Logan went to his house and came back with scissors and copies of
Southern Living
and
Good Housekeeping
. “This is the best I can do right now,” he said. “All the other stuff we have is
Sports Illustrated
and
National Geographic.”

That’s how it became our routine, to meet at the fort and cut out pictures and put them in the books.

Now I figured we’d spend most of our time making up a city, just like Murphy wanted. But
the day Ricky Ray cut out a picture of a modular home from the newspaper and stuck it into the book, making Donita laugh and say, “That thing ain’t nothing but a gussied-up double-wide. Just a big hunk of junk by the side of the road.” I couldn’t help but tell the story of living with my Aunt Fonda, who was really one of Mr. Willis’s cousin’s daughters.

“If you don’t count Granny Lane’s trailer as a house, then the first house I ever lived in was a modular home,” I said. I turned to Logan and Murphy and explained, “That’s the kind of house you buy at a dealership, and they ship it to your empty yard on a flatbed trailer. But it wasn’t a bad place to live at all.”

I’d just turned eight when I moved down to Blountville to live with Fonda. Even back then I knew there were pluses and minuses to every situation. On the minus side of this one, I’d had to leave Granny Lane and Mr. Willis, the only family I’d ever known. On the plus side, I had my very own room for the first time in my life.

“It was on the far left side of the house,” I told everyone, pointing to where my room
would have been in Ricky Ray’s picture. “And right outside the window was a black walnut tree. You could sell those walnuts unshelled for ten cents a pound over at Blountville Herb and Metal.”

“Was it a big room?” Ricky Ray asked. “Big as this fort?”

I shook my head. “If you spit across it, you’d better watch out, because that spit would bounce right back in your eye.”

Fonda’s girls, Peyton and Tiffany, had a bunk bed in the room across the hall from me. Ten-year-old twins, they were about the most glamorous girls I’d ever known. They liked giving their old things to me, torn dress-up clothes, junky tea party dishes, coloring books with almost all the pictures colored in. After only a month at Aunt Fonda’s, I had that room of mine so done up with odds and ends, including a play oven and a small but real refrigerator without a cord, that I could stay in it all day, playing house. I could barely turn around in that room, but in my mind it was the size of a mansion.

Only problem was, I had that room done up a little too nice. When summer came around, Peyton and Tiffany started edging me out, telling me I could go sit on the top bunk all by myself, while they doodled and dawdled in my room, making up phony conversations like they were married and having dinner parties. “Oh, Justin is going to turn purple when he sees I burnt the roast,” I remember Peyton exclaiming during one game of Dinner Party. “I reckon he’ll want a divorce,” Tiffany agreed.

“The kicker was,” I concluded, “they liked that room so much, they decided I was in the way. They got talking to their mama, and the day after Labor Day I met my first social worker walking down Aunt Fonda’s gravel drive.”

“Social workers,” Ricky Ray said, sighing. Everyone but Logan nodded glumly. “But I’m glad you got kicked out of your Aunt Fonda’s so you could come over here.”

“I had a lot of stops in between here and there,” I reminded him. Before I could tick all the places off on my fingers, Ricky Ray
counted them out for me. “Three homes in one year,” he said. “The Grindstaffs, the Honey-cutts, and the Fulks. And then Mrs. Estep’s for a long stretch before coming to the Children’s Home.”

I couldn’t help but think of my life at Mrs. Estep’s as I watched Ricky Ray a few days later kneeling over an old copy of
Seventeen
magazine, clipping out a picture of a girl with pink hair and a dragon tattoo on her shoulder. You could tell he was serious about cutting her out exactly right. Ricky Ray did not take his role as a contributor to the books lightly, no sir.

“Now this girl, her name is Crystal, and once upon a time she had a little boy with blonde hair,” Ricky Ray said, taking one last snip. He held the paper girl at arm’s length and admired his handiwork.

Rain tapped on the roof of the fort but didn’t come in, a fact we were real proud of. It was the first week of October and the sky had been sending down rain steadily since Thursday, but here it was Saturday and not a drop had made it inside. Donita and Logan had taken plastic
wrap and a staple gun to close the windows against the nonstop drizzle.

“What happened to the little boy?” Donita asked from where she was curled up in an old armchair with fluff coming out of its cushions. It was one of a bunch of chairs Logan had contributed from his parents’ garage. Three of them were folding chairs, two were chairs that went with a dining room table that Judge Parrish was using in his study, and one was the armchair where Donita sat. She had the
Book of Houses
in her lap and was pasting in a picture of a Williamsburg colonial.

“He ran away,” Ricky Ray told her. “See, Crystal, his mama, was a princess, only she had been stolen by bad fairies when she was just a little girl. She missed her own folks real bad, but she didn’t know what had become of them or where their castle was or anything. She just cried and cried about it. So her little boy, when he got big enough, decided to go find the castle that was his mama’s true home.”

“He was on a quest,” Logan said from where
he sat on a folding chair in the corner, leafing through an old copy of
Family Circle
.

Ricky Ray leaned back and considered this. “I guess that’s what you might call it. He went off looking for something. Is that a quest?”

Logan nodded. “You got it.”

“Then he was on a quest,” Ricky Ray agreed. He turned to me and grinned. “You know what the boy’s name was, Maddie?”

I shook my head. “Was it Ricky Ray?”

Ricky Ray looked at me like he couldn’t believe I didn’t know the right answer.

“No way,” he said. “The boy’s name was Randy. Why, it was Randy Nidiffer.”

O
nce, when Ricky Ray was four, his parents went to a party and didn’t come back for two weeks. Every day while they were gone, Ricky Ray ate a peanut-butter sandwich for breakfast, had another peanut-butter sandwich for lunch, and then ate two peanut-butter sandwiches for dinner.

If he hadn’t run out of peanut butter and bread, he might have gone on living that way forever. It was when the manager of the Winn-Dixie store caught four-year-old Ricky Ray sitting in the middle of aisle five tearing into a loaf of Wonder bread, an open jar of Jif peanut butter by his side, that the Department of Social Services was called to investigate the
situation. That’s when Ricky Ray got put into foster care. He’d been officially recognized as a neglected child.

It meant something to Ricky Ray that Social Services took Randy Nidiffer away for the same reason they took him. When you’re a foster-care child, you’re always looking for kids whose stories are like your own. It makes you feel less lonely. Now, Randy’s mama didn’t leave him alone much, that’s true. He used to say that his mama was usually home but she was hardly ever there. I think he meant she drank a lot.

“I got two little brothers, but they always stayed over at Mawmaw’s, so they didn’t get neglected so bad,” Randy had told me one afternoon when we were working on our books, cutting up the glossy inserts from Sunday’s newspaper. “The State thought Maw-maw ought to take me in too, but she disagreed with ’em.”

“Why was that?” I asked, reaching over him to grab the Sears insert.

Randy gave me what he called his charm
school grin. “Said I was too wild. Said she done got the little boys trained up right, but my mama let me get out of hand.” He snipped around a picture of a lawn mower. “Just imagine. I was only six years old, and already I was purely ruined.”

“You don’t seem ruined to me,” I told him. He didn’t, either. He was the best artist I knew, and his hair shined like the sun had set in it. How could a boy like Randy be ruined?

“That’s because you look at folks for what’s good in their hearts. Mawmaw, mostly what she looks for is the black spots.”

When I told this story in the fort, as a way of introducing the idea of Randy Nidiffer to everyone, Ricky Ray smiled. “You can’t be ruined when you’re six,” he explained to Murphy, Logan, and Donita. “That’s way too little. Randy Nidiffer wasn’t ruined at all. His granny was wrong.

“Randy Nidiffer had freckles everywhere you could see,” Ricky Ray told us, settling back into his story. “Which was a good thing, because freckles are nice. But it was a bad
thing, too, because it made it easier for the bad fairies to see him.”

“Were they glow-in-the-dark freckles?” Logan asked. I shot him a nasty look, and he rolled his eyes at me in return. But then he turned to Ricky Ray and said, “I mean, were they magic in any way?”

Ricky Ray shook his head. “He wasn’t a magic boy. The fairies were magic, but Randy Nidiffer was just regular.”

He walked over and took the
Book of Houses
from Donita, and then he walked to the middle of the room and knelt on the floor and began flipping through its pages.

“Okay,” Ricky Ray said, turning one page, then another, pointing to different houses. “Randy Nidiffer passed by this house and this house, and then he passed by this one. But when he came to this house,” he said, pointing to a picture of an old-fashioned mansion in the style of a Halloween haunted house, “he stopped. There were spiders in the mailbox. That was a clue.”

“What kind of clue was it, Ricky Ray?”
Murphy asked from where she was sitting in the corner. She pulled her knees up to her chest and stared at him real hard.

“Well,” Ricky Ray said, stretching out the word to give himself time to come up with an answer. “Well, Randy Nidiffer knew that bad fairies like spiders for pets. So there must have been some bad fairies who came to this house and left their spiders there when they went away. And this house was so big, it was the kind of house where a king and queen might live, too.”

“Randy thought that’s where his grandparents stayed,” Donita said, pointing at the haunted house picture with her scissors.

Ricky Ray said, “Yeah, and he was right, too. Only he had to go and make sure, but he couldn’t get past the spiders in the mailbox.”

“So what did he do?” I asked. I could just see Randy Nidiffer with his hands on his hips, tapping his foot impatiently as he tried to come up with a solution to this problem.

Ricky Ray grinned. “He knocked the mailbox down. And then he stomped the spiders.
And then he ran back to his house and got Princess Crystal and brought her home to the castle. The end.”

We all clapped. It wasn’t a bad story for a six-year-old boy to come up with.

Murphy had a somber expression on her face as we packed up the scissors and magazines for the afternoon. “I think Randy Nidiffer’s grandmother was a spider,” she said. “A spider disguised as an old woman. Spiders suck the blood out of things, right?”

Donita looked at her strangely. “Yeah, so do vampire bats. Maybe Randy Nidiffer’s granny was Count Dracula.”

“No, no,” Murphy insisted. “That’s the wrong story. The story of Randy Nidiffer’s grandmother is the one where she spins a web and traps his little brothers, but Randy gets free.”

“If you say so,” Donita said. “She sounds like just another mean old lady to me.”

•    •    •

That night in our room after lights-out, Murphy whispered, “Maddie, are you still awake?”

“Sure,” I answered, turning toward the sound of her voice in the bed next to mine. “Are you okay?”

“Tell me about your grandmother and that old man,” she said. “Tell me a funny story about things they used to do.”

“Okay,” I said. I propped myself up on my elbows. “But how come?”

Murphy pulled the sheets up to her neck. “It’ll keep me from dreaming about spiders.”

So I told her the story about the time Granny Lane and Mr. Willis decided to go to the church Halloween party as a horse, only they fought so hard about who’d be the head and who’d be the behind that they stopped talking to each other for a week and missed the party altogether.

When I finished, Murphy was fast asleep. I crept over to her bed and smoothed down her sheets and brushed a curl from her forehead. I would’ve bet she was used to her mama doing that for her every night. I would’ve bet she was missing home.

F
or the first two months of her life as a citizen of the East Tennessee Children’s Home, Murphy belonged to the fort and to us. If anyone else was trying to get her attention, hoping she’d turn around and look in their direction, they were just so many tree branches clicking against the window on a windy afternoon.

And then one day, this began to change.

The first time I noticed it was at lunch a few weeks after we’d finished building the fort. It was me, Murphy, and Logan, all of us poking at our Tuna Melt Delights with our forks because there was a rumor going around that instead of tuna, the lunch ladies had chopped up gerbils and melted cheddar cheese over them. We
didn’t really believe it, but for a few minutes it was fun to pretend.

As we were busy poking and prodding our sandwiches, an eraser flew across the cafeteria and hit Murphy in the head. It was the kind of eraser that you stick on the end of your pencil, and the person who threw it was Brandon Sparks, the star soccer player of the sixth grade.

Murphy rubbed her head where she’d been hit, then picked up the eraser and examined it. “I’ve been bombed,” she told us, then looked over at Brandon. “I think you lost this,” she yelled at him.

I waited for Brandon to say something low-down and rude, but instead he called, “Then I guess I better come find it.” The next thing we knew, he was standing next to Murphy with his hand stuck out. “Give it over, thank you very much.”

Murphy folded her fingers over the eraser. “No way,” she said. “Finders keepers. Besides, I have a lot of things I need to erase today.”