Dread Locks

  “What’s up, Parker?”

  “Dad ... someone’s sleeping in my bed.”

  3

  THE SOMEONE SLEEPING IN MY BED

  You might think such a thing as someone sleeping in your bed wouldn’t be the cause of a major freaking—but if you think that, then it’s never happened to you. The fact was, everyone in my house was accounted for. My brother, my sister, my parents. It couldn’t be our cat, Nasdaq—he was much smaller than the lump in my bed. That meant whoever was in that bed was an intruder.

  Dad and I went up—Dad carrying the trusty tire iron that he kept in the house in case of a break-in. “I think it’s a bum, or something,” I told him. “Some crazy bum who climbed in through a window. He could be dangerous.”

  “We’ll see.”

  We slowly entered my room, and Dad stiffened. Maybe he had thought it was my imagination, but now he knew it was not. A hand stuck out from beneath my covers. We approached the figure in the bed. What if he had a knife—or worse, a gun? My heart drummed against my chest like a low-dribbled basketball. I reached out, clasped the quilt in my hand, and pulled the covers from the intruder’s face.

  The intruder was a girl.

  She slept soundly, the morning sun shining through the blinds onto her face. Even sleeping, I could tell she was pretty. No, not so much pretty as exotic. Her face was so unique it defined its own beauty.

  Dad lowered his tire iron. “You know her?”

  I shook my head. She seemed about my age, but I didn’t recognize her from school. Her hair was the most interesting thing about her. Her head was covered with long, looping curls—bright golden twists of hair tumbling in all directions on my pillow. They were almost like dreadlocks, but very different in the way they glowed, catching the light in glimmering spirals that made each blond curl seem almost alive. I had never seen anything like it.

  I reached out and poked her shoulder. She stirred slightly. I prodded her again. “Hey, wake up.”

  She rolled over, away from us, and pulled up something that had been hidden under the covers. I gasped, thinking it was a weapon—but it was just a pair of sunglasses. She slipped them on, then turned back to us.

  “Good morning!” she said, stretching like a cat. I immediately caught the English accent in her voice.

  “Do you mind telling me what you’re doing in my son’s bed?”

  “I can handle this, Dad.” I looked sternly at her reflective glasses. “Do you mind telling me what you’re doing in my bed?”

  She laughed. “Well, all the other beds in your house weren’t as comfortable as yours.”

  That just made Dad stammer, then state the obvious: “This isn’t your house!”

  “So?”

  “How long have you been here?” I asked her.

  She grinned at me. “Since you went over to my house to peek in the windows.”

  Now it was my turn to stammer. I’m sure I also turned red. Dad looked from me, to her, and back to me again.

  “I ... I was just checking out the new neighbors,” I told Dad, then turned back to the girl. “So you moved in next door?”

  She held out her hand for me to shake. “My name’s Tara. Tara Herpecheveux.”

  I almost laughed. “That’s a mouthful.”

  “It’s French.”

  Hmm, I thought. English accent, French name. She was already more interesting than anyone else I knew. “I’m Parker.” I shook her hand, all the while thinking how weird it was to be introducing myself to some girl in my bed while my father stood next to me with a tire iron.

  “Parker Merritt Baer,” she said.

  I was genuinely surprised. “You know me?”

  “I saw your name on the trophies.” She pointed to my trophy shelf across the room. For some reason I was glad she had taken the time to notice them before taking a nap.

  “This is a strange way to introduce yourself, Miss Herpecheveux,” my father said.

  “But memorable,” she answered. “Bet you’ll never forget meeting me!”

  She pulled back the covers all the way, to reveal that she was wearing a flowery summer dress, even though it was fall, and the leaves were already beginning to turn. She was barefoot, and her toenails were painted a curious granite gray. Although I hadn’t noticed it before, so were her fingernails.

  We saw her to the front door.

  “You have a beautiful home,” she said as she stepped out. “I especially like your collection of sculpted glass.”

  That meant she had been in the den, where Mom kept all the shapeless glass artworks she buys. I wondered how much of the house Tara had explored before commandeering my bed—and how she could have been so stealthy that no one noticed her.

  “We do have a security system,” Dad told her. “You were lucky it wasn’t set.”

  She only smiled, and Dad walked off, satisfied that she was on the other side of the front-door threshold. But I held the door open.

  “Well,” I said, “welcome to the neighborhood ... I think.”

  And then she asked me something. “When you came over to my house, why didn’t you come in? The door was open.”

  “Because there’s a little felony called trespassing,” I said.

  “Simple trespassing is not a felony—it’s a misdemeanor.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s still not right. I wouldn’t just walk into your house uninvited.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Maybe next time you should.”

  I closed the door, but her silhouette against the bright morning remained like a shadow on my vision long after she was gone.

  4

  TOO COOL FOR THE SCHOOL

  Although I didn’t see Tara again for the rest of the day, I couldn’t get her out of my mind. That night I was half-hoping she’d appear, uninvited, in our house again—maybe grab a soda out of the refrigerator and watch the big-screen TV in the family room.

  No such luck.

  “We should have been nicer to her,” I told my father at dinner. “We scared her away.”

  Dad laughed at that. “I didn’t exactly see her running away from us in terror.”

  He was right. To be honest, I had been the only one terrified when I had seen there was someone hidden under my covers. And even though she strode off with a rare kind of confidence, I found myself really wondering when I’d see her again and wondering why I cared.

  Monday morning, for the first time in a long time, I looked forward to going to school. I hoped Tara’s parents had decided to send her to the same fancy private school I was in. The Excelsior Academy. With the school’s tall gates and thick, ivy-covered stone walls, our parents had the satisfaction of knowing their precious darlings were protected from the real world. Or so they thought.

  Sure enough, as soon as I entered the school grounds, I saw her.

  Tara was standing just inside the gate, leaning against the wall, watching as the other students streamed in. It looked like she was doing a head count while at the same time boldly announcing her presence among us. Or maybe she was just trying to familiarize herself with the faces of her new peers.

  “Hi,” I said, stopping in front of her.

  “Hey, there, Baby Baer,” said Tara.

  It should have made me angry, but it didn’t. “Technically speaking, my sister’s the youngest in the family, so she’d be Baby Baer.”

  “Naah,” said Tara. “She’s Little Miss Muffett.” Which was true enough, because Katrina was deathly afraid of spiders.

  Tara had on her reflective sunglasses. Her blond curls tumbled and twitched around her shoulders, glowing in the bright morning light. She wore an elegantly woven Japanese jacket of shiny black satin over a cream-colored silk shirt tucked into camouflage paratrooper pants.

  I had never seen anyone like her before, and apparently neither had anyone else. Everyone was checking her out as they entered through the gate—guys, girls, even the teachers. It would have been hard to miss her. Standing there in the courtyard, she was as out of place
as a Siberian tiger on the school’s front lawn.

  It was funny watching the reactions of the other kids as they made their way past her. Most of them tried to get a good look while pretending she was no big deal, but no one dared to talk to her—they were too intimidated by her sheer presence and confidence. Not even Ernest Benson, the school’s top jock, would approach. He just paused to goggle at her—which didn’t make his girlfriend, Melanie, very happy.

  As for Tara, it seemed as if, behind her sunglasses, her eyes were flicking over every person who walked through the gate, sizing them up, deciding if they were worthy. Worthy of what, I had no idea.

  “Do you know where your first class is?” I asked her.

  “I’ve got it,” she said, not looking at me. A busload of kids had just been dropped off at the curb. They were all entering at once, and she didn’t want to miss any of them. “I’m all set.”

  “I could walk you to—”

  “I’ve got it,” she repeated, more emphatically. But then she turned to me and smiled. “Thank you.”

  I nodded and backed away, not quite willing to take my eyes off her until I had to. Finally, I turned and passed under the stone-arch entrance of the school.

  Dante was waiting inside for me with one of my other friends, Freddy Furbush, famous schoolwide for being able to let loose ear-deafening burps on command.

  “Who—was—that?” Danté demanded, emphasizing every word.

  “And what were you doing talking to her?” asked Freddy, in awe.

  “She’s my new neighbor.” I tried to sound casual but didn’t quite pull it off. “I met her yesterday, when she moved in.” I didn’t mention the part about exactly how I had met her. “She came over for a visit.”

  “I’m gonna be spending a lot more time at your house,” said Freddy. “Way more.”

  I didn’t see Tara again until third period. Turned out we had English together.

  “You again?” I said, slipping into the empty seat next to her.

  “Are you following me?” she asked with a smile.

  “Yeah, right,” I answered. “I spent the morning in the office, rearranging my schedule just so I could have the same third-period class as you.”

  “I suspected as much,” Tara answered, so seriously it took me a second to realize she was matching my sarcasm with her own.

  I was surprised to see she was still wearing her mirrored sunglasses in class, and that the teacher, Mrs. Burton, didn’t make her take them off.

  “Hey, you can’t wear those in here,” I said, reaching toward the glasses.

  Tara smiled and leaned back, easily avoiding my hand. “I have a congenital eye condition,” she said. “I need low light all the time, so I have to keep these on. Do you want to see the note from my doctor?”

  She put her hand lightly on my shoulder. I was surprised by how cool it felt, almost cold, even through the material of my shirt.

  “Thanks for trying to help me this morning,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean to be rude or anything.”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  The bell rang and class began. Turned out Tara knew a lot about English literature—a lot more than any of the rest of us, maybe even more than Mrs. Burton.

  “I think you have to go back to Sophocles,” said Tara, “if you really want to grasp the basis of Shakespearean tragedy.”

  Mrs. Burton looked a little flustered. I wondered if she had any more of a clue about who Sophocles was than the rest of us.

  “Well, certainly ...” she agreed uncertainly.

  “And of course,” Tara continued, “let’s not forget Aristotle’s Poetics, the foundation of all drama. You can trace a straight line from his theories through Shakespeare to Shaw and all the way to Stoppard. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Mrs. Burton was opening and closing her mouth like a fish, but no sound was coming out. Finally, she glanced at the clock. “Well, that’s about all the time we have for literary theory,” she said, sounding relieved. “Let me give you your homework for tomorrow.”

  Then the weirdest thing happened.

  As Mrs. Burton turned to the board to write down our homework assignment, and everyone started copying it down, I glanced over at Tara. She was looking into the purse of the girl in front of her, Julie Robinson. The open purse was hanging over the back of Julie’s chair, and something inside it caught Tara’s eye.

  Then Tara reached into Julie’s purse and took out an antique mirror. It was the one Julie spent half the day admiring herself in—it was her most treasured possession. Tara smiled into the mirror. It was a dazzling smile. She was fluffing her blond curls as the bell rang. Still holding on to the mirror, Tara quickly jotted down the homework assignment that was on the board.

  “Tara?” It was Mrs. Burton, approaching. “I want to thank you for elevating the level of discussion in the classroom,” she said. “It looks like I’m going to have to do my homework, too.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Burton,” Tara answered smoothly, and Mrs. Burton retreated quickly to her desk.

  Tara noticed she still had Julie’s mirror in her hand. I watched as she casually slipped it into Kyle Firestone’s jacket pocket, without even looking to see where Julie was. Then she glanced at me and smiled—not mischievously, or anything, but like it was nothing. Like taking something from one person and giving it to another was a perfectly normal, natural thing to do.

  I didn’t tell anyone, and it became the first in a long list of secrets between Tara and me.

  5

  SOMETHING TERRIBLE, SOMETHING WONDERFUL

  When you drop a pebble into a pond, ripples spread out, changing all the water in the pool. The ripples hit the shore and rebound, bumping into one another, breaking each other apart. In some small way, the pond is never the same again.

  Tara wasn’t a pebble. She was a twelve-ton boulder.

  The impact of her presence on our school was felt that very first day, starting with Julie Robinson’s freaking out in the cafeteria when she discovered her precious little mirror was gone. She practically foamed at the mouth.

  Oh, it was entertaining and all, but things became serious when the mirror turned up in Kyle’s pocket. Even though Kyle was a total straight-arrow honor student, no one believed him when he claimed to have no idea how it got there. He was immediately sent to the principal’s office.

  I said nothing.

  When I got home that day, I found myself spending most of the afternoon trying to come up with a good reason to go over to Tara’s. I couldn’t just show up uninvited like she did. That was her way, but it wasn’t mine. I thought that maybe I could tell her I had forgotten a homework assignment—but it was a flimsy excuse, because I could call just about anyone. No, I couldn’t make it so obvious. In the end, it was my mother who served as my accomplice, without ever knowing.

  “You know, Mom, it’s really rude of you not to introduce yourself to the new neighbors,” I told her as she sat in the dining room, cutting out pictures of us kids for another one of her scrapbooks.

  “Most people like their privacy. They’ll introduce themselves when they’re ready.”

  “Tara already did.”

  Mom gave me a wry look, like she was sucking some meat from between her molars. “Yes—that was some introduction, wasn’t it.”

  “I think you should make them one of your famous fruit baskets. Everybody loves those.”

  Mom considered it. Her fruit baskets truly were famous in our neighborhood, and she prided herself on them. I knew she would want nothing more than to impress the new neighbors with one.

  “Check to see if there are any baskets in the basement,” Mom said, but I didn’t have to check, because I already knew that there were—just as I knew we had plenty of fruit.

  It took her almost an hour to craft it to perfection, and of course I dutifully volunteered to take it over.

  “You’re being awfully helpful today,” she said, looking at me suspiciously, as if I had an ulterior motive—
which I did.

  “He’s probably going to eat it on the way,” suggested Katrina.

  “Don’t you dare!” Mom warned.

  Five minutes later I was at Tara’s door, ringing the bell. I could hear the chimes sound deep within the house, and a moment later, Tara opened the door herself.

  “Hey, Baby Baer,” she said.

  “Hey,” I answered back, not bothered by her nickname for me—as long as she didn’t use it in front of other people. “Somehow I figured with a mansion like this, you’d have a butler answering the door.”

  She laughed. “Well, we ran out of food, so we had to eat him.”

  It was such a weird thing to say I didn’t know whether to laugh or what, so I just ended up giggling stupidly.

  “But it looks like we won’t have that problem anymore,” she said, “because now we have fruit!”

  “Huh?”

  She pointed to the gift basket.

  “Oh, yeah, right. Fruit.” I held it out to her. “Here’s a welcome gift from my mom. She wanted to bring it over herself, but she’s under the weather.”

  “We’re all under the weather,” Tara said. “If we weren’t, we’d be in space, and our lungs would explode.”

  I was not going to let myself be thrown off balance by her weirdness. “Exactly which mental institution did you escape from?” I asked her. “And is there a reward for your return? Because, hey, I could use some spare cash.”

  She fluffed her golden curls. “Wanna come in?”

  I shrugged like it was nothing. “Sure.”

  I stepped in to find myself in a grand foyer floored with purple marble and rimmed with white stone statues. She led me into a huge living room with thickly padded furniture—the kind you would sit in and never want to rise out of. I could still smell the aroma of fresh paint. The walls were shocking pink, with moldings and windowsills painted shiny black. It was a weird combination, yet somehow it fit.

  “Does color blindness run in your family?”