“You got a life. You’re a new Lily. You learned that you could go solo, stand on your own without clinging to your brother.”
I took a spoonful of fudge ripple. I nodded. “Yeah. I guess you’re right.”
He stared at me, thinking. “How would you like to know, not guess?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
“That clubhouse I heard about? That Jake and your parents are going to rebuild for Jake’s new friend, kid named Ernie?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What about it?”
“I’m thinking maybe you should jump in. Help them build it.”
“Why should I?” I said. “It’s gonna be for Jake and his friends. His life.”
He snapped his fingers. “That’s the point. It would be a good test for you. Prove to yourself that you can spend a day with your brother—with the boys—and walk away on your own two feet. Still the new Lily.” He took the spoon out of my hand and stole a big gob of my ice cream. “Whaddaya think? You gonna do it? Or wimp out? Afraid you can’t pass the test?”
I didn’t wimp out.
Next morning I rode the family truck to Meeker Street. I sweated. Lifted. Hammered. Ate. Talked. Even laughed at their stupid jokes. Nacho. Burke. Ernie. Jake. The boys. I asked myself, Do I still want to be one of them? The answer was no. I prayed they didn’t remember that day I yelled after them from my bike, “I’m not a girl!”
The day came and went, and at the end of it I was still me. Still standing on my own two feet. The new Lily. I passed the test.
Jake
The door was open. The two windows were open. Still it was hot in the clubhouse. But we didn’t care. We sat on folding chairs—Ernie, me, Burke, Nacho. Our lemonades sat on a TV tray, along with a bowl of munchies that Ernie’s mom kept coming in to refill. She was funny. Every time she came, she knocked on the door and said, “May a lowly female have permission to enter the grand palace of major dudes?” Ernie acted all serious and granted her permission, then said, “Females are welcome, Mom.”
We sat and munched and talked and just chilled out in the coolest clubhouse in town. We talked a lot about school, which starts next week. Then Ernie said, “Let’s play Revelation. You have to tell something about yourself that the rest of us don’t know.”
We said okay. Nacho went first. He told about the time in third grade when he sang “God Bless America” for the class and everybody was laughing because his fly was open.
Burke told about the time he cut a bug in half. That was years ago and he just remembered it the other day and he really feels bad about it.
I took a deep breath and told them about the first sleepwalk to the train station. Their mouths and eyes were gaping. When I finished, I never heard such silence in my life. Finally Ernie reached over and touched my arm. “You’re lucky,” he said.
Nobody said anything else. We were waiting for Ernie’s revelation. It took awhile before we realized he had already started. He was holding out his hand, palm up. In the middle was a mark. Round. Smaller than a dime. Whitish. I wondered why he was showing us.
“Blister?” I said, remembering our blister lies.
He shook his head, still smiling.
“So, what?” said Nacho.
“Scar,” said Ernie.
And then he told us. Back at his last school in Gary, Indiana, there was a kid who zeroed in on him. The kid would trip him and knock his books to the ground and make life miserable for him. The kid was already smoking, and one day he shoved Ernie up against a wall and said, “I heard you been bad-mouthin’ me.” Which of course Ernie wasn’t, but the kid was just setting him up. “I’ll teach ya to bad-mouth me,” the kid says, and he grabs Ernie’s hand and snuffs out his lit cigarette right there in the palm.
“One day you asked me why we moved away from Gary and came here,” he said. “That’s why.”
“I don’t blame you for leaving that dump,” said Burke.
“It wasn’t my choice,” said Ernie. “My parents made me. I tried to hide the burn, but it got infected and the school nurse saw it and sent me to the hospital, and that’s when my parents found out.”
I was shocked. “You mean, after all that, you didn’t want to move?”
Ernie shook his head. “I had friends. Most of the kids were nice.” He laughed. “I wasn’t going to let one rotten apple run me outta town!”
We all clinked glasses and drank to that and I thought, Goobers have guts.
“But,” Ernie said, holding up his finger, “that doesn’t mean I’m sorry. Because if we didn’t move, I never would have met you guys.” He was doing it again, smiling and hard-staring each of us.
I swallowed. I clinked his glass. “We’re glad too, Ernie.”
Ernie took a swig. “I’ll tell you, it was coming down to the wire. I was getting nervous at the prospect of starting a new school without having a single friend.”
“Now you have three,” said Nacho.
“Right,” said Ernie. “Too bad it’s not four.” We knew who he was referring to. “I guess Bump is busy looking for more goobers.”
I almost gagged on my mouthful of corn chips. For a minute you could practically hear the ice melting in the lemonade. Sooner or later somebody had to say something. I swallowed. “He’s prob’ly away on vacation.”
“Or maybe”—he snapped his fingers—“he just can’t bring himself to be friends with a goober.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” said Burke.
“You’re not a goober,” said Nacho.
“Sure I am,” said Ernie. He looked proud. He laughed. “Whatever it is.” He looked at me. “What exactly makes a goober a goober, anyway?”
Dead silence.
I finally choked out, “You guys are all so stupid. There’s no such thing as goobers.”
Ernie just smiled. Then chuckled. “And I bet Soop doesn’t really mean ‘cool,’ does it?”
More silence. Enough of this, I thought. “Hey,” I said, “anybody going out for football this year?”
Lily
Sydney slept over last night. She was everything Anna Matuzak was not. No makeup. No adoring herself in the mirror. No hogging the pizza or the bed space. No complaining.
But lots of burping. We had a contest. She won. I was laughing too hard to care about losing.
We spent a couple hours in the Cool-It Room. Armed with markers. There’s no empty space left on the walls.
She saw every nook and cranny of the house except the basement. A couple days ago my dad installed a lock on the basement door. He won’t tell me why, only that if I’m dumb enough to break through and go down, I do so on pain of death. I told him I better not be locked out for long because my train stuff is down there.
We wound up watching TV from the bed and eating M&M’s. The last time I looked at the clock it said 1:30 a.m. I guess we scared Jake away. He spent the night at Poppy’s.
We were zombies heading over to Sydney’s house this morning to pick up Devon for the day. He usually wants to head straight for the playground. Not today. He wanted to hang out at my house. Jealous about Sydney’s overnight, I guess.
One thing happened that drained some of the juice out of our super-great overnight.
Devon hid in the mudroom closet. No big deal, except we thought he was lost. Maybe unconscious. Maybe wandering down the street. Maybe whatever. We called and called. No answer. Sydney was frantic, ready to cry, when we found him all grinny in the closet.
The whole thing made me a little sad. It reminded me of the times when Jake and I couldn’t play hide-and-seek because we always knew where each other was.
Jake
I slept over at Poppy’s last night. Lily was having her new best pal overnight, so I escaped.
Or at least I thought I escaped. Until I had the dream. I’m standing in the open, just me and an empty blue sky, and I look up and I see Lily falling. She’s coming from really high, like above the blue, but I know instantly that she’s coming right down on me, and I hold o
ut my arms and I catch her and she laughs and laughs. She won’t stop laughing.
Lily
Sydney and Devon got shipped off to her uncle Bob’s for a couple days, so this morning I biked over to Poppy’s. I love having keys to two houses. We’re having a heat wave, but Poppy’s house is always cool.
At times like this I wish he didn’t work all day, but at least he’s got Wii now. I talked him into it. We do sword fights and Ping-Pong and stuff. It’s not as much fun by myself, but it’s okay. The only thing I don’t like is that it’s hard to cheat with Wii. I did some bowling for a while, then beat myself in tennis.
I made a sardine sandwich with onion and mustard. Poppy says it’s a big world, I need to try new stuff. Then I headed to the basement to play darts. It occurred to me to go out back and weed Poppy’s flower garden. It’s his least favorite job. I was torn, because I wanted to do it and surprise him, but I’m terrified of that big black devil dog in the next yard.
I looked out the back window. I didn’t see the dog. I opened the back door and peeked. No dog. I slunk into the yard, ready to bolt back in. No dog. I pulled as many weeds as I could hold in two hands and ran back inside.
TV was boring. Every channel. I was starting to talk to myself. I kept thinking about Jake telling me I should come over to the orange clubhouse. On the TV a cartoon dog was chasing a cartoon squirrel around a cartoon tree. “That’s it,” I said out loud. I clicked off the TV. I missed Sydney. I was so bored I was ready to look up Anna Matuzak.
I must have backed out the front door, because when I pulled it shut and turned around, I found myself staring at the devil dog. He was sitting at the foot of the porch steps, right next to my bike. A bird was chirping somewhere and the street was all sunny and nice, but my world stopped at the beast. Then I heard something that wasn’t the bird chirping. It was so low I didn’t realize at first what it was. Then I did. It was the dog. Growling. It’s hard to explain, but a low, soft growl is more terrifying than a roar. I never got so much attention in my life as I did from those two little brown eyes. They didn’t blink, only stared. The big black head never moved. And neither did I. I froze. Suddenly I had to pee. I clenched up. Poppy’s front door locks automatically when you close it. The key was in my pocket. But I knew that if I so much as twitched a finger, the monster would be leaping at my throat.
Jake
Another scorcher. It was probably hotter in the clubhouse than outside, but we didn’t want to leave. Besides lemonade, Mrs. L was bringing us homemade ice-cube Popsicles—grape and orange.
We had our shirts off, except for Ernie. He’s no scrawnier than the rest of us. Just more modest, I guess.
We were talking about school starting soon and all the usual junk, but my mind was on a different track from my mouth. I kept looking at Ernie, with his Daffy Duck T-shirt and his white smear of sunblock on his sunburned nose and his clumsiness and his never-ending cheeriness, and I realized he was the same as always. He fit the definition of a goober as perfectly as ever. He hadn’t changed at all. I had. We had. Forget what I said a couple pages ago: goobers do exist. They are what they are, which is pretty much what I thought they were. What Bump thinks they are. But Bump is missing the point: it’s okay to be a goober. Beneath every goober is a kid. A person. Maybe he’s not what you would call “regular.” But so what? Is that a bad thing? Turns out goobers—this goober, anyway—make great friends. I’ll take a goober over a Death Ray any day.
The guys were talking about school activities, and Ernie was saying he wanted to join the band and learn to play the trombone. As he was demonstrating trombone playing he knocked his lemonade off the TV tray. As he dove for his falling glass he knocked over the others. We all laughed and got down on our knees, and as I was picking an ice cube off the new hardwood floor I had a sudden feeling. It had nothing to do with ice cubes or lemonade or friends or clubhouses. It had to do with my sister. Lily. I can’t describe it except to say that for the first time in a long time that special sense was back, what we used to call goombla. If the wordless feeling could speak, it would have whispered, She needs you.
Next thing I knew, I was flying down the streets on my bike and busting into Poppy’s driveway. The big black dog from next door was blocking the front steps. Just sitting there. Lily was on the porch. She looked like a statue, like some alien paralyzer ray had zapped her.
The dog didn’t bother to get up when he saw me. He just swung his big black head. I knew he lived next door, and I knew Lily was terrified of him, even though Poppy keeps telling her he’s just “a big baby.” The dog barked at me. I have to admit it didn’t sound like a friendly bark. More like a don’t-come-one-inch-closer bark. Then the dog got up on all fours. He barked at me some more. His head bounced with every bark like a recoiling pistol. This dog wants to kill me, I thought. I don’t know how long I stood there, staring back and forth from the dog to Lily. Then I was aware of two things: I was moving, and I was thinking, I’m gonna die. And then the dog was coming at me and its bark was different and it was jumping up at me and licking my face and I knew Poppy was right, it was just a big baby.
Lily was still on the porch, still frozen. I went to her. Her eyes were horror-movie wide. I cupped her shoulders. “It’s okay,” I said. She flinched—the dog was licking her hand. Then I felt her relax. Tears came. She sagged into me.
Her voice was muffled against my shirt. “You knew, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I knew.”
Lily
Devon Park is going public!
Devon finally got tired of having a playground all to himself. He whined to Mrs. Addison: “I want playmates!”
The Addisons are giving him more than playmates. They’ve added a sandbox and sliding board to the playground.
We made a sign:
GRAND OPENING SATURDAY!
DEVON PARK PLAYGROUND
(little kids only)
I went to tell Poppy all about it today. There was a monster in the kitchen. The cantaloupe. Right where it’s been for half the summer.
Is there a word for worse-than-rotten? It was soft and moldy. Poppy pressed a finger into it. It made a glurpy sound. I hung back by the fridge. My stomach was looking for a way out.
“I told you,” said Poppy. “You can turn your back on it. Ignore it. Forget it. But it’s still here. Right where you left it. Just like your goombla.”
“My goombla isn’t sickening,” I pointed out.
Before I could stop him, he pulled his new long knife from the drawer and sliced the cantaloupe in half. One look at the smelly orange mush, one whiff, and I was outta there. Let somebody else tell him about Devon Park.
“Hey!” he called. “How about some ice cream? Fudge ripple!”
I charged out the front door. “No thanks,” I called. “Not hungry.”
Jake
Mom and Dad took me to the grand opening of Lily’s friend’s little brother’s new playground. They wouldn’t tell me why. Nacho and Burke and Ernie were there too. Everybody was staring at a big humpy something under a tarp. When Mom and Dad whipped off the tarp, I suddenly knew why I was there and what Dad had been working on in the basement. It was a wooden locomotive. Red and blue and silver. Letters running from headlamp to engineer’s cab said CALIFORNIA ZEPHYR.
My parents held off the swarming little kids so my sister and I could sit in the cab first. Lily was crying. I might have too, if I was a girl.
“It’s our dream train,” she said.
“Our birthday train,” I said.
I closed my eyes. I was back in the Moffat Tunnel. I could hear the click of train wheels.
Lily poked me. She was grinning. “Smell anything?”
I sniffed. “Pickles!”
We laughed.
I told her I was sorry I missed our birthday sleepwalk at the train station. I told her if it would make her feel better she could punch me one time to make up for it. She did.
I invited her to come to the new clubhouse. S
he said she has better things to do. I told her Bump is gone. I told her we’re not the Death Rays anymore. She could bring Sydney and Devon. She said why would she want to hang out with a bunch of boys. I reminded her that a couple months ago she said she wasn’t a girl. She punched me again.
The next day we tried to play hide-and-seek. We couldn’t.
Lily said “I ate them” before I could say “Where are my pumpkin seeds?”
It looks like we’re back on track.
And it feels like the end of this book, so
Lily
Not so fast, buster.
Before we wrap this thing up, one thing’s gonna change. I don’t want to hear you tell me one more time—ever!—that you’re older than me.
Jake
It’s only eleven minutes.
Lily
Feels like eleven years. As long as you have a death grip on the Big Eleven, I’m never going to feel really equal. So give them up. All eleven minutes. Now.
Jake
Okay. But only if you stop stealing my pumpkin seeds. Deal?
Lily
Deal.
Okay…so let’s do the last chapter together, since now we’re finally, really, truly, totally equal
Jake
sister-approved
Jake and Lily
twins!
Acknowledgments
DOUBLE THANK-YOUS TO:
Queen of the Rails, Eileen Oshinsky
Our cyberwizard, Dottie Lieb