“Right.” Batty used putting the Chinook down—slowly, carefully—to get control of the tears that threatened to spill.
“Why are we talking about my dad? And what’s wrong with your stomach? You keep touching it like this.” Ben put his hand on his own stomach, where his knot would be if he had one.
“Nothing’s wrong with my stomach.” Batty sat on her hand to keep it from betraying her. “So I was lost in Quigley Woods, hurt my ankle, and called Nick to come get me, and there were these twins.”
“Twins.” Lydia loved this game.
But Ben was still trying to catch up. “How did you know Nick’s number?”
“He gave it to me.” Batty rolled up her sleeve to show him. “In case we needed help with Oliver.”
“Oh.” Ben really wanted Nick’s number written on his arm, too.
“So there were these twins”—Batty paused to let Lydia say “twins” again, but this time she just stared, unheedingly—“named Tess and Nora, and, Ben, they know you.”
“Me?”
Batty got the twins’ drawings out of her pocket and handed them to Ben, who laboriously unfolded them. “What are these hearts?”
“Hearts,” said Lydia gaily. She’d gotten hold of the Dexter (also known as Spike) action figure and was having him climb up the side of the house.
“And is this supposed to be you?” He handed one of them back to Batty.
The drawing indeed contained lots of red hearts and lots of flowers, plus one unattractive stick figure with wild hair, huge boots, and BATI written beside it.
“Yes, that’s me. I looked a little strange. And I don’t know why there are hearts. Maybe she likes you.”
“There are hearts on the other one, too. How can they like me? I don’t even know them.”
Batty thought of Keiko and Ryan the movie star. “It happens sometimes.”
“Here, Lydia, you can tear these up if you want to.” Ben passed the drawings to Lydia, who jabbed them to pieces with Dexter and buried the results under a rock.
“Okay, good,” said Batty. “Thus ends the MOYPS.”
“What?” Ben protested. “We’re done? This was the weirdest meeting ever.”
“I’m sorry, Ben. It’s the best I can do right now.”
This time the dream was about school. Nick was visiting the fifth grade to explain that book report charts were an accurate measure of one’s inner worthiness. The class gave three cheers for Ginevra and her inner worthiness and three boos for Batty, who Nick said had the worthiness of a worm. When Batty tried to stand up for herself—but mostly for worms, because worms were as worthy as anyone else—Nick interrupted to announce that they would now sing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” in French, which everyone but Batty could speak.
Halfway through the song, Batty managed to fight her way out of French spiders and into wakefulness, which at first presented another confusion, since she wasn’t in her own room, but in Lydia’s. And then she remembered that Lydia had pleaded for her to stay another night, in the apparent belief that she would be able to hold on to the safety of the crib as long as Batty slept in the big-girl bed.
So here Batty was again, awake while everyone else in the house slept, just like she’d been the night before, or actually that morning, or—she looked at the clock and it was almost two a.m.—since this was morning again, that had been yesterday morning. With all these extra wakings and sleepings, she was losing track of which day was what.
“This is very early Monday morning,” she told herself. “Which means I need to get back to sleep so I can get up again in five hours to get ready for school.”
Sleep, however, was not so easily bidden. Not after bad dreams and not with the awful ache in her middle. Batty let her gaze drift around the room, hoping for distraction from her woes. The Hound constellation, Lydia on her back, clutching Baby Zingo in one arm and Jeffrey’s pink rabbit in the other, a duck night-light casting strange shadows across the walls and onto the framed photographs on Lydia’s dresser. One photograph showed Lydia’s class at Goldie’s, with a beaming Lydia surrounded by her friends Tzina, Jordy, Gradie, and Lucy. A second was of Asimov trying to remove the doll’s sweater Lydia had just put onto his head. And a third—Batty got out of bed to look more closely at this one, her favorite of the three—was from when Lydia was only a week old. Still just a tiny lump of person, she was being held up to the camera by Iantha. They were in the front yard, under the maple tree, and the sun was shining and Iantha was smiling and her red hair was blowing. Batty leaned in and looked more closely, noticing something she never had before. What was that, just where the picture went into the frame? She turned on the bureau lamp for more light. Why, it was a hand. And though it was only a hand, cut off at the wrist, Batty suddenly remembered that day, and how she’d been standing off to one side, waving at the new baby. It was her own hand.
She turned off the light and turned away then, her stomach throbbing. Stupid girl, she told herself, to be upset because she’d been left out of a photo. She’d been left out of plenty of photos before.
“And I’ve been in plenty, too,” she told the room.
Batty waited, listening, but the room offered nothing back, not from the sleeping Lydia, the duck light, or even from the Hound constellation.
“All right, I’ll prove it to you.”
She turned off the bureau light and made her way downstairs to her parents’ study. There were her father’s bookshelves, crammed with hundreds of biology texts with impossible titles, and way up, at the end of the top shelf, was a box. To reach that high, she dragged over a chair, and even with the chair, she had to stretch up on her toes. There were a few seconds of uncertainty, the box wobbling at the tip of her outstretched fingers, but Batty’s determination won out, and soon she and the box were down on the floor, sitting in a pool of light cast by her father’s desk lamp.
PICTURES. That’s what was written on the lid. More recent family photographs—ones taken since Iantha’s arrival—were neatly stored in albums. The opposite of those albums, this box was a delirious jumble of the four sisters’ years before Iantha. Batty had looked through it several months earlier for pictures of Hound, especially for that perfect one she remembered but had probably made up. But tonight she was looking for something different, though what it was she wasn’t exactly sure.
She dove in, at first scanning each picture carefully, leaping higgledy-piggledy from one year to another, summer to winter, Christmas to Fourth of July, first days of school to last. Many of the pictures did include her—Batty with paint on her face in kindergarten, Batty dressed as a clam for the third-grade play, Batty with Hound and Funty in the red wagon.
“See that?” she said to herself. “You weren’t always left out.”
But something kept her digging into the box, though after a while, she went more quickly—she was getting tired and there were so many pictures. And maybe she wearied of seeing her mother with Rosalind, her mother with Skye, her mother with Jane—but wait, here was one of Hound as a puppy. Batty held it up for a long look, just as she’d done the last time through the box. In the photo, Hound was still so tiny that Skye could hold him in her arms—a young and pigtailed Skye clutching him and beaming. Then, just like the last time, Batty decided she wouldn’t take this one up to her room. It belonged to Skye, not Batty, if Skye ever wanted it.
Batty went even more quickly now, past vacation pictures, sports pictures, on and on, until there, at almost the bottom of the box, finally, she found what she now knew she’d come looking for. A photograph of her mother in a hospital bed, looking so thin and weak that the resemblance to Skye was almost gone. But she was smiling and proudly cuddling the baby who had been brought into the world at such a great price. Who was to say if the price had been too great? Batty, alone in the night, staring at the only photograph she’d ever seen of herself with her mother, couldn’t know. And she had no one to ask.
Exhaustion swooped in and she needed to return to bed before fal
ling asleep right there on the floor. Batty piled the pictures back into the box, except for the most precious one—that was hers now—and maneuvered the box back onto its high shelf, and the chair back to her father’s desk. She would leave the study just as she’d found it, so that no one would know she’d been searching. Then she took the purloined photograph upstairs to her room, and slid it under Hound’s canvas bag at the back of her closet. Another secret, carefully hidden.
She was caught as she left her room to go back to Lydia’s. Ben, who could usually sleep through anything, must have heard her, because suddenly there he was in the hall, only half awake.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing. Go back to bed.”
“You’re sleepwalking, aren’t you?” Ben’s look of alarm filled her with guilt. “Maybe you do have that tsetse fly thing after all.”
“Ben, don’t be silly. I’m fine, really I am.”
“But—”
“Go back to bed. Now.”
His face scrunched with concern, Ben disappeared back into his room.
BEN HAD NEVER BEFORE seen someone sleepwalk, and now that he’d caught Batty doing it, he definitely didn’t like it. As confused as he’d been about her Quigley Woods adventure, at least that had been within normal behavior. Sleepwalking wasn’t. He went back to bed hoping that when he saw her in the morning, she would laugh and tell him it had been a joke. But the Batty he ate breakfast with was pale and sleepy and not in the mood for jokes. Both parents asked how she felt and she said fine, but Ben didn’t believe her. And then when he tried to bring up sleepwalking on their way to school, she said she didn’t want to talk about it. So they talked about nothing.
Ben fretted over it all through school on Monday—except during the exciting touch football game at recess—and decided to discuss it with Rafael. He waited until the end of the day, when they were waiting for Batty outside the big Wildwood front doors.
“You know how Batty slept so much yesterday? I caught her sleepwalking last night.”
“Definitely sleeping sickness,” said Rafael.
“No, because the right flies don’t live in Massachusetts. Uh-oh.” Here came two little girls who looked exactly alike. Ben took hold of Rafael and dragged him across the sidewalk and into the middle of a cluster of sixth graders.
“What are we doing?” asked Rafael. Usually they avoided sixth graders, especially these extra-big ones.
“An evasive maneuver.” Ben wished he could explain the twins to Rafael, but they were tied up with stuff he’d sworn to keep secret at the MOYPS. He risked a glance backward through the sixth graders. The twins had disappeared. No, there they were, getting onto a bus. Whew.
“Alpha-Lima-India-Echo-November-Sierra?” whispered Rafael.
Ben didn’t think it was a big stretch to call those twins aliens. “Yes, but they’re gone now.”
He pulled Rafael back to the safety of a sixth-grader-free zone. There were several fourth graders nearby, but not big ones, so that was okay.
“What did they look like?” asked Rafael. “Blobs or tentacles? Or like robots?”
“Who?”
“The aliens.”
“Oh, you know.” Ben wanted to get back to the oddness of Batty. “So, it can’t be sleeping sickness. And she keeps putting her hand on her stomach.”
“Maybe she has a hernia,” said Rafael. “My uncle Albert had a hernia and needed an operation.”
“It’s not a hernia.” Ben had never heard of a hernia—she couldn’t have that.
“Maybe a giant stomach tumor, then. Or maybe she has an alien implantation!”
“Who has an alien implantation?”
Ben jumped. Somehow Batty had snuck up behind them. He’d dropped his guard once those twins got onto their bus.
“Well, obviously not you,” he answered. “Rafael, tell her it’s not her.”
Rafael was too busy staring at Batty. “How are you?” he asked.
She frowned at them both. “I’m fine, and everybody better stop asking, if they know what’s best for them.”
“Sorry,” said Ben, though he wasn’t, because she didn’t look any better than she had that morning, maybe even worse.
“Sorry,” said Rafael, though he wasn’t, either, because he thought Batty looked terrible, and he was very curious as to which mysterious disease she might be suffering from.
“That’s better. Now let’s go, Ben.”
The walk home was even quieter than the one in the morning. Batty didn’t ask Ben about how his day went, or what Ms. Lambert had taught his class, or even about his homework. He hated it. And as soon as he got home, he ran across the street looking for male companionship, particularly with a male who wouldn’t talk about sisters having alien implantations.
Ben found just what he needed behind the Geigers’ house: Nick working out with weights.
“Can I do it, too?” he begged.
“You’re too young for weight training.” Nick put down the forty-five-pound dumbbell he’d been using for bicep curls.
“But I’m strong.” Ben leaned down to grab the dumbbell with one hand but could just barely lift it off the ground. When he tried with two hands, Nick took it away from him.
“If you touch that again, I’ll have you running laps until you’re in the fourth grade.”
Being scolded by Nick was somehow more fun than being praised by anyone else. Content, Ben sat on the grass and watched as Nick went through his workout. The very last part was push-ups, and for a special treat, he did them with Ben sitting on his back, proudly pretending to be an army pack crammed with gear.
“Enough,” said Nick finally, tumbling Ben onto the grass. “So what’s the news in Penderwick land?”
“Batty doesn’t have sleeping sickness, like Rafael thought.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Why did Rafael think that?”
“Because she slept for so long yesterday.” Ben thought for a minute about the nature of the MOYPS secrecy oath he’d taken, and decided that he didn’t have to keep secret what Nick already knew. “But you know why she slept so long—because she was in Quigley Woods and hurt her ankle. Her ankle is better now.”
“That’s good.”
“But she’s acting weird. Different. And she was sleepwalking last night.”
Nick picked up his dumbbell and started lifting again. “Maybe she’s worried about something.”
“But what?” The MOYPS hadn’t explained anything at all. “You know my father’s dead, right? My first father, not Dad.”
“Yeah, I know that.”
“That’s what I told Batty, that everybody already knows.”
“Huh,” said Nick, and switched his dumbbell to the other hand. “Just keep a watch on her. Consider it collecting data, what we in the military call intel.”
“Intel.” Ben liked that word.
“Not that you’re spying on her, because you and she are on the same side. It’s more like you’re on a reconnaissance mission, keeping the area safe for your unit.”
“Only Batty is my area.” Ben liked this idea. “And I can report to you.”
“If you discover anything you need help with, report to me. In fact, promise me you will.”
“I promise. And now I need your phone number, too.”
“Oh-ho! You know about that, do you?”
“Yes, and I want it on my stomach, not my arm, so that no one else can see it.”
Nick laughed, but he went inside and came back with a pen. Ben found that having his stomach written on tickled, but he bore it like a soldier.
“It’s upside down,” he said when Nick finished.
So Nick wrote it again, but this time upside down so that it was right side up for Ben. “Anything else?”
“Tommy’s number?”
“Why not?” Nick wrote Tommy’s number, too. “Anything else? The phone number for the secretary of defense, maybe? Or the woman I’m taking to dinner tonight?”
“No, tha
nks.” Ben looked happily at his stomach.
“And how was school today for you?”
“Good. We played football at recess. But then after school some twins showed up.”
“The twins I saw yesterday when I picked up Batty? The ones who made drawings for you?”
“Did you see those drawings? They had hearts and flowers all over them.”
Nick whistled. “Maybe the twins like you.”
“I don’t want them to like me.”
“Just tell them you already have a girlfriend. Remy, right?”
“No!” He couldn’t believe it. Even Nick thought this awful thing about him. “Remy isn’t my girlfriend!”
“Sorry.” Nick did look sorry. “I can remember the time when I, too, would have been horrified. These days, I’m delighted when women draw hearts for me.”
“Well, I’m not delighted. No way.”
“This is not a big problem. If the twins bother you, tell them, ‘I’m sure you’re nice people—’ ”
“I’m not sure they’re nice people!”
“You don’t have to be sure. You’re just softening the blow,” explained Nick. “Repeat after me: ‘I’m sure you’re nice people, but I’m not interested in developing a relationship with you.’ ”
Although Ben felt that so tame a statement would be powerless against crazed females, he obediently repeated it until it rolled off his tongue. Then he asked Nick to teach him a few military self-defense moves, just in case Tess and Nora got too aggressive.
“No, I will not,” he answered. “Use words instead.”
“Then could you teach me to jump out of a Black Hawk?”
“Do you see a helicopter here in the backyard? Because I don’t.” But Nick picked up Ben and threw him out of a “helicopter” a half dozen times. “Enough? Because you’re beginning to wear me out, and I thought that was impossible.”
“One more time,” pleaded Ben, who’d landed in a different country each time and had a few more he wanted to try.