“Everyone in school is afraid of him because his family’s rich.” Doodle screwed the lid back onto the jar, and she and Kai fell into step toward the sidewalk. “They own the casket factory.”
“Glamorous.”
Doodle shrugged. “They employ half the town, it seems like. And they always have clients, so . . .”
“Right.”
The girls looked at each other. Kai was beginning to think that maybe Doodle wasn’t a Bunny, after all. Bunnies are pretty on the outside, hollow on the inside, like a chocolate Easter Rabbit. But Doodle was starting to seem . . . solid.
“So—who are you? Where do you live?” Doodle asked.
“That one.” Kai pointed to the strange, stooped house that was perched way back on the lawn, as if considering its own property.
“The Quirk House?”
Kai knew that Quirk was her aunt’s last name. Still, it sounded kind of funny, now that she heard it out loud. It sounded as if the whole house was quirky, which it was. “She’s my great-aunt. Well, my great-great-grandfather’s cousin, actually. But I’m going with great-aunt.”
“Wow—I didn’t realize Lavinia had any family. Alive, I mean.” Doodle’s voice held a strange mix of surprise and relief. “I live right there, across the street.” She pointed to a small ranch house with the driest, deadest grass that Kai had ever seen. There was a single scrawny bush in the front that was so thorny it looked like it could only dream of roses.
“Guess I’ll be seeing a lot of you, then,” Kai said.
“Maybe so.” Doodle looked down at her jar. “Hey—what are you doing after dinner?”
“Nothing. Why?” Kai was hoping Doodle might want to go to the movies. Kai loved movies. She and her mom went every week.
Doodle grinned. “Want to help me catch a moth?”
When she thought about it afterward, Kai was never really sure why she said yes. Maybe it was because she and Doodle had bonded—they had each saved the other from something vicious and ridiculous. Or maybe because it was hard to pass up the idea of going hunting for something that had been extinct since 1882.
Yes, that’s right. Doodle didn’t just want to find any old moth. She wanted to find a particular moth. A moth that didn’t exist: the Celestial Moth. The last recorded sighting in Falls River, Texas, was by a woman named Edwina Pickle.
“Extirpation,” Doodle had explained.
Kai frowned. “You know a lot of . . . words.”
Kai knew a lot of words, too, but extirpation was new.
“That means it’s extinct, but just around here. You can still find them in other parts of the world.”
“So what makes you think we’ll find one here? Now?” Kai had asked.
Doodle shrugged. “Just a feeling. Stuff is going un-extinct all the time.”
“Like what?”
“Like Miller’s Grizzled Langurs.”
“That sounds like something on a fancy dinner menu. I’d like the grizzled langur in chipotle sauce, please.”
“It’s a primate. A monkey in Indonesia. Scientists thought it was extinct, and then they found some. So maybe the problem with this moth isn’t that it’s extinct. Maybe the problem is that nobody’s been looking for it.” Doodle grinned. “Nobody except me. So nobody’s gonna find it . . . except me. I’ve got a good feeling about it.”
Kai had to admit that there were probably not a lot of people out looking for this particular moth. Personally, she had never gone looking for any moths, or heard of anyone who did. So she said okay. She said that she would see Doodle later, as long as Lavinia said it was okay to go on a moth hunt.
Kai clomped up the stairs to lie down for a while before dinner, still giddy from her (very small) adventure.
Kai had never had this kind of freedom before. Her mother always acted as if the city were crawling with drug addicts and child killers, and she wouldn’t even let Kai walk to the bodega on the corner by herself.
Kai reached for her suitcase (she still hadn’t unpacked) and plopped it onto her bed. As she unzipped the top, she noticed something peeking out from beneath her pillow. It was the corner of a book. She shoved the pillow aside. Old-fashioned gold letters spelled out The Exquisite Corpse.
Weird! She didn’t remember putting it there.
She flipped it open and nearly dropped it again.
Someone had written in it. Right after Ralph T. Flabbergast was a complete fool, someone had added,
Yes, Ralph was a fool. But he didn’t know it.
You see, Ralph believed in magic. He believed in it with his whole heart. He had ever since he was a small boy, when his oma told the most magical stories of fairies and talking beasts. He loved his grandmother dearly, and cried bitterly when she died, although he was only three years old and everyone said he was too young to understand what death meant. Four years later, he still remembered the smell of her kitchen and the feeling he had whenever she told her tales.
One sultry afternoon, he shuffled down a hot city sidewalk with a nickel in his pocket. Ralph had a problem: only one nickel, and so many ways to spend it. The smell of hot pretzels wafted over to him. Jewel-colored candies smiled at him from behind a glass window. Toys and whistles, chestnuts, or a movie. It was a torment.
“Roll up, roll up, roll up, and see if you can find the ball beneath the magic shell! Winner doubles his money! How about you, young lad?” The man had a long nose and large teeth, and looked rather like a horse in a top hat. It was impossible to be suspicious of a man who looked like that.
“What’s this?” Ralph asked, so the man explained the game. There were three walnut shells and a pea. The man placed the pea under one of the shells, and then mixed them up.
“You tell me where the pea is,” the man said, “and you’re a winner! Double your money!”
Ralph watched the shells weave in and out, back and forth. It was like a dance. A slow, gentle dance. He pointed to a shell, and the man turned it over. There was the pea. This is easy! Ralph thought as he handed over his nickel for another try.
“Are you ready?” The man made the walnuts dance. Ralph watched. He pointed. There was the pea.
“A winner!” the man crowed. “Really, son, that was amazing. Most people can’t keep their eyes on the shell at all. You’re a natural, you are.”
Ralph held out his palm, but the man said, “Blasted if you don’t get another try for your nickel. Well, I’m a fool to let you do it. You’ll have another dime off of me, and no mistake. I don’t suppose you want to just walk away now?” The man took off his top hat and held it over his heart, revealing a pasty, bald scalp covered with scraggly black threads of hair.
Ralph laughed. He had never been good at anything in his life! “I think I’ll play again,” he said.
The man placed the pea beneath the center shell and made the walnuts dance. Faster and faster, like a mad jig. But Ralph kept his eyes on the shell. He knew it. He knew it. The man stopped. Ralph pointed. The man lifted the shell. The pea was gone. “Sorry, son,” the man said. “Would you like another go?”
“I don’t have any more money.”
“Ah, rough luck.”
Emotion washed over Ralph as he stood, immobile, watching the man put away his shells. I know what you’re thinking: sadness, misery, disappointment. But you’re wrong. You see, Ralph had seen something. Something that changed his life. When the man lifted the shells, the pea wasn’t under any of them.
Ralph’s world tilted on its axis. The sky tore open above him, revealing a white light.
Never mind the nickel. Never mind.
He had seen magic.
Kai flipped through more pages. They were blank.
She slammed the book shut. What the heck was that?
What the heck?
What the . . .
Lavinia wrote it, she thought. She must have! But why? To be funny?
That seemed unlikely. Lavinia didn’t seem like the kind of person for practical jokes. She seemed more like a person f
or practical footwear. Kai looked around the room, wondering if her mysterious great-aunt was about to jump out at her. Slowly and softly, Kai walked over to the closet. With a deep breath, she yanked it open. But the closet was empty, except for the violin case, which lay like a dusty black shadow at the bottom.
Someone sneaked in here and wrote a weird story while I was out, she thought. Or else I went crazy, wrote this myself, and then forgot all about it.
Minds are pretty creative things, aren’t they? Kai’s worked very hard to try to make sense of the story and how it got there. But it was wrong on all counts.
It’s a prank, Kai thought. A stupid prank. She shut the book and shoved it onto the closet shelf. She yanked on a sweater, commanding herself to stop thinking about the book. Don’t think about it, her mind said sternly. Think about the moth, or Doodle. Think about Lavinia.
But she couldn’t. Her mind was consumed with that book and its story for the rest of the afternoon—right up until it was time for dinner.
CHAPTER FOUR
Leila
BEYOND THE WINDOW, THE city of Lahore was dark. Really dark, because the power was out. To conserve energy, the local government had instituted “load shedding”: rolling blackouts during the cooler hours of the day. Inside the Awan house, though, the rooms were bright and cheerful, thanks to the generators humming in the backyard.
Leila breathed in the heavy scent of masala, nicked with the sharp undercurrent of gobi and warm oily parathas, like a scratchy blanket. She knew most, but not all, of the dishes on her plate, and she was determined to try everything—even the green stuff. This was part of having “an authentic cultural experience,” which was a phrase that Leila had read that afternoon on her sister’s blog.
Nadia was in Kenya, as part of a program for middle-school girls who were gifted in science. She was studying elephants and helping to build a library for a village of very photogenic Kenyans, many of whom were pictured on Nadia’s blog, clustered around her while she played her guitar. It wasn’t easy to have a younger sister who was in your same grade, and while the blog made Leila feel closer to Nadia, it also made her want to strangle her a little. Nadia just always had to be the fascinating sister, didn’t she? It occurred to Leila that she should start a blog, too. But she would need Nadia to help her set it up. Also, the Awans’ wireless connection was really spotty, so it would have to wait until she got home. Still, she could take notes. Leila took a bite of green stuff. Hot . . . hot . . . superhot! She downed a full glass of water, which didn’t help.
Title for Blog One: Hot Stuff!
Every few minutes, Chirragh limped into the room to slam a new dish onto the table. He only had two facial expressions, Leila noticed: Glaring, and Glaring Furiously. However, he glared at everyone equally, which comforted Leila slightly. Nobody in the Awan family seemed to care, or even notice. They barely registered Chirragh’s existence, much less his feelings.
“It’s hot,” Rabeea said, adjusting the diaphanous blue duputa draped around her shoulders. She fanned herself with her fingers dramatically, making her sleeves flap.
“The air-conditioning is on,” her aunt, Jamila Tai, said. “Leila, dear, try the gobi.”
Leila didn’t usually like cauliflower, but this was creamy and only slightly spicy, delicious enough to make Leila consider adding recipes to her blog.
“Can’t we make it cooler?” Rabeea demanded. “It’s always stuffy in here. Aren’t you hot, Leila?”
“I’m fine,” Leila said as a trickle of sweat rolled down her back.
“Are you comfortable, Leila?” Her uncle put down his knife and fork. “I’m sure it’s warmer here than you’re used to. I can ask Chirragh to cool things down.” He looked around for the cook.
“Really, Babar Taya, I’m fine,” Leila assured him.
“I’m hot!” Wali said. He was seven. Nobody paid him any attention.
“She just doesn’t want to hurt your feelings,” Rabeea told her mother.
“Rabeea.” Jamila Tai’s voice was a warning.
Leila hoped that sweat wasn’t staining the armpits of her new hot-pink salwar kameez. This afternoon’s shopping trip had been a bit of a bust. First, Rabeea and her mother had taken Leila to a fabric store, insisting that she could have whatever she wanted made. Leila had done tons of research on the Internet and had picked out her favorite styles. But every time she pointed to a fabric and described what she wanted, Rabeea would get this weird, tight little smile and explain, “That’s not really in fashion right now.” And even though she always added, “But you should get it if that’s what you want,” Leila hadn’t come to the other side of the world to look like a dork. So they left that store and went to a place that had ready-made clothes, which culminated in Rabeea and her mother getting into a very polite fight about whether Leila should wear short sleeves.
“It’s not appropriate.” Jamila Tai frowned at the brilliant blue dress that Rabeea had pulled out.
“She’s American,” Rabeea had countered. “She can wear what she wants. Besides, all of the girls are wearing sleeveless,” Rabeea said.
Jamila Tai smiled, and spoke through clenched teeth. “That is absolutely not true.”
“It is true.” Rabeea’s voice was sweet, but her eyes were narrowed. “What, do you want her to wear hijab, too?”
That went on for a while. Leila just watched. This was the same kind of argument that her sister often had with her mother about cell phones. Leila knew that it would not pay to get involved.
She didn’t have the energy to argue, anyway. Here is the thing about Lahore in the summer: it’s hot. And that day, it was hot like you don’t know hot. Even in the air-conditioned store, it was hot. It was the kind of heat that it’s hard to recover from.
Have you ever stood near an oven door when someone opened it to check on something that was baking in there? Have you ever been hit with a wave of hot air like that? In Lahore, that was the breeze. You actually had to close the windows to keep the wind out. You had to keep the house dark in the daytime.
It was so hot, when she went outside Leila could feel her brain cooking inside her skull, like a boiled egg. It was so hot that the idea of a long-sleeved shirt seemed nuts. Then again, Leila didn’t want to stand out as “The American Weirdo.” This is a strange fact: in the United States, people thought of Leila as Pakistani. But here, people thought of her as American. With a white mother and a Pakistani father, Leila used to think that she was both. But Leila was beginning to realize that, in some ways, she was also neither. In other people’s minds, at least.
Anyway, Leila really didn’t care about the sleeves, so she finally just said, “Long-sleeved is fine with me,” and Jamila Tai smiled smugly. From the expression on her face, Rabeea obviously wished she could strangle Leila.
So, here Leila was, in her long-sleeved kameez, with Rabeea still clearly outraged by the situation, but not saying so, at least not directly.
Well, maybe The Sleeveless Debate could be Blog Two, Leila mused.
The doorbell rang, but nobody at the table stood up. They just waited for Chirragh or one of the other servants to answer it. After a moment, a fat woman with an enormous, beaming smile walked in. The silk of her bejeweled kameez (sleeveless, by the way, which showed her dimpled arms) fluttered as she walked. She was beyond glamorous, and Leila liked her right away. But she only thought about her for a short moment, because right behind the glamourpuss was the handsomest boy that Leila had ever seen. The minute he walked in, she knew he was the One. She knew it the way Elizabeth Dear knew it the moment she saw the stableboy in Dreams of England. And the way Elizabeth knew it when she shook hands with the editor of her school paper, Roland Whiting, in Paper Tigers. Oh! And the way Elizabeth knew it when she met the mysterious new barista—Alex James—in Latte Love.
He had thick, dark hair that spiked up, like it was thinking mischievous thoughts and might run off at any moment. His long black eyelashes fringed around inky eyes. They were eyes like a ni
ght sky—dark, with stars. Oh boy, he was handsome. And he cooked Leila’s brain just as good as the hot Pakistani sun, I can tell you. Her brain went straight from hard-boiled to scrambled.
“As-salaam alaikum!” the fat lady sang out, and then everyone got up and salaamed and the women kissed each other on the cheeks.
“Mrs. Haq, I’d like to introduce you to my niece,” Babar Taya said, gesturing to Leila. “This is Leila. Leila, this is Mrs. Haq and her son, Zain.”
“Salaam, salaam.” Peace, peace. Leila could speak this much, at least.
“Ap kitne den Lahore me henh?” Mrs. Haq’s heavily mascaraed eyelashes batted a friendly wave.
“She doesn’t speak Urdu.” Jamila Tai wore the same tight smile that Rabeea had worn earlier, when Leila had described out-of-date fashions.
“Oh! Your parents never taught you?” Mrs. Haq’s face was all smug innocence. “What a shame. And your father is such a brilliant man, mashallah.”
Jamila Tai muttered something, but the only word Leila caught was Amrikan. It was the word that made Zain step forward.
“You’re the American!” Zain said, as if being American were wonderful, thrilling, fantastic!
“Yes, but she’s still dressed more conservatively than a fundo,” Rabeea put in.
Her mother shot her a look that could have melted lead.
Zain laughed. “Not quite a burka,” he said, referring to Leila’s outfit. Leila wished Rabeea would let it go. Leila thought her clothes were pretty. Hot pink cotton with lovely little beads at the neckline and hem of the kameez, this was easily one of the nicest outfits she had ever owned. And she had three more upstairs, in different colors! True, the last time she had come to Lahore—on a family trip when she was four—her grandmother had spoiled her, dressing her like a princess in a new outfit every four hours. But her grandmother had died when she was five. This time, Leila had to spoil herself, but she wasn’t about to complain. It wasn’t like they were making her wear a headscarf. Just the floaty duputa, worn around the shoulders unless it was time for prayers. The men wore prayer hats, too, in the mosque. When Leila was seven, she had asked her father why Allah hates looking down at the top of everyone’s head. She wondered if he felt the same way about heads that she felt about looking at people’s feet.