A Little Bit of Spectacular (6 page)

“Uh-huh.”

“I did good, didn't I? I told you you'd like her.”

We'd sort of already been through this—I'd told Gram when we drove back from Amelia's that we'd had fun. I'd said I liked her. I'd said we were going to hang out again. But Gram wasn't letting it go. She liked to hear how right she'd been.

“I know,” I said, trying to smile. “I'm glad you introduced me to her.”

“You still hoping to go over to her place tomorrow?”

I didn't want to get into that quite yet. “I think so. Or we might go somewhere else, I guess. I'm going to call her tonight.”

The judge on television banged her gavel, and Gram was quiet for a while.

“You should go talk to your mom,” she said.

I just kept looking at the television.

“She asked me to send you into her room.”

Gram flexed her bare feet back and forth like they were bothering her. Her ankles looked swollen.

“And she said to tell you that you didn't have to talk,” she added. “Or that you could talk about how many times the average human blinks in a day. Something like that. I never know what you two mean.”

“Okay,” I said, relieved. “I know what she means.”

No more Dad conversation. I felt my mood improve a little bit.

Gram nodded, either at me or at the television.

“You know,” she said, “these poor people come on this show and let that judge ask them all sorts of questions and insult them and order them around. Don't you wonder why anyone would ever come on this program?”

“Yes,” I said, because I had always wondered that exact thing.

“I think,” she said, “that it's because people just need to talk. They get stuff built up inside them, and they need to let it out. They need somebody to listen. Even if they don't know it.”

“I don't think that's it,” I said.

I stood up and turned away from the television.

WHAT THE TREE TOLD US

It was easier than I thought it would be to get a ride to the old Plantagenet High School. It turned out that Amelia's mother was used to her daughter requesting rides to strange nooks of the city to look for new frogs. (“Once she took me to the Cahaba River three times in one week,” Amelia told me over the phone. “She'll just be happy I want to go someplace where the car won't get stuck in the mud and have to be towed.”)

When we pulled up in front of what used to be the high school, I thought we might have a problem. My mom had been right when she said there was almost nothing left of the school. Plantagenet High was on an abandoned lot, with a concrete path leading from the sidewalk to what probably used to be the front entrance. Now it was a path to a big blank space. I could barely make out the edges of the concrete foundation because of the tall weeds.

A little ways away from the foundation, there was a broken sign with the name of the school, but some of the letters had fallen off. The unmowed weeds and grass covered everything. And buried in the grass, like really disappointing Easter eggs, were years' worth of aluminum cans and paper cups, bits of cardboard and decomposing paper. The whole scene was dirty and ugly and more than a little depressing.

“Are you girls sure you want to poke around here?” asked Amelia's mom, slowing to a stop.

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

“It seems a little iffy,” she said, frowning. “But I'll park here and keep an eye on you. Try not to stay too long. Don't get out of view of the car.”

“It's just a scouting mission,” said Amelia. “I'd love to find an Eastern spadefoot.”

“I hope when you win the Nobel Prize in frogs, you'll remember to thank me in your acceptance speech,” said her mom, shooing us out of the car.

“The spadefoot is a toad, not a frog,” said Amelia as she slid across the seat.

I shut the door behind me.

“Nice thinking with that whole spadefoot thing,” I said to Amelia.

“What?” she said, scanning the grass at her feet. “I would love an Eastern spadefoot. But I don't think this ground is swampy enough.”

As we stood there, just a few inches off the sidewalk, all the confidence and excitement I'd felt in the car seemed to evaporate, drifting away on the wind like dandelion seeds. All I'd thought about for the last twenty-four hours was getting here. It had felt comforting to focus on the high school. Simple. A high school is a nice solid thing. You can touch it. It's not like dreams or plans or mysteries or hopes or secret messages—those are all things that pop like bubbles. Flimsy and full of air.

I'd been clinging to the idea of a good solid clue. I'd hoped—pretended?—that once we got here, my next step would be clear. I guessed I'd hoped that there'd be some giant
X
on the ground or some flashing neon arrow to my next piece of the puzzle. But all I saw was litter and weeds and concrete.

“So we're thinking what?” asked Amelia, kicking an empty Sprite can. “Maybe somebody's spelled out
Plantagenet
with aluminum cans? Maybe there's a secret group of magicians living underground? Litterbug magicians? Because I don't see anything.”

I agreed with her, but I didn't want to give up and go home without taking a single step. Surely we should at least take a quick look around. I considered the view once more. The cement walkway winding its way to nothing. The sad blank space where the school used to be. The only pretty thing left was the trees. I think they were oaks. The trunks were wide and rough, and the branches spread out across the lot, reaching toward each other. The leaves of each tree brushed against leaves from the trees around it, and it made me think of holding hands. Like the trees were still sad about what happened to the school, and they were reaching out to comfort one another.

“Let's at least look at the foundation,” I said. “Maybe there's more over there than we think. A basement or something. An old storeroom.”

“You're a very glass-half-full sort of person,” Amelia said.

We waved at Amelia's mom to reassure her, then we walked side by side along the path. Amelia was looking down—probably still holding out hope for an Eastern spadefoot—while I looked around. She was lucky—at least she knew what she was looking for. I kept an eye on the grass, on the concrete, and on the tall rectangular sign off to our left; I even kept an eye on the litter. Because any of it might matter. Any of it might look like a path to nothing and turn out to be a path to something.

We stepped onto the foundation of the school, and once we were in the middle of it, it was just a big gray square. It could have been a basketball court or a playground or a parking lot. I thought there might be burn marks from the fire, but the cement was smooth and unmarked. No signs of old doorways or rooms or stairways or plumbing. Other than litter and leaves, the only thing I saw was a plastic
O
that must have fallen off the school sign.

I sighed.

“Let's look at the sign,” I said. As far as I could tell it was the only thing left that even had the word “Plantagenet” on it.

Well, it almost had the whole word. As we waded through the weeds, I kept an eye out for more fallen letters, which had to be somewhere. The sign actually said:

WELC    E TO PLA   T          NET H   GH SCHO   L

HOME OF TH   GO   HERS

“Go hers?” said Amelia. “Oh. Gophers, I guess. Home of the Gophers. That's not a very good mascot. Who's afraid of a gopher?”

I was looking at the base of the sign. I'd really only noticed the plastic board and plastic letters at first, but the bottom of the sign was much more stable and impressive. It was solid stone, and it looked very old. And, as I leaned in closer, I could see words carved into the stone. The letters were faded a little, and the stone was turning black, so I had to strain to read.

“Amelia!” I said. I didn't trust my own eyes. “What does that look like to you?”

She squinted. “Um, it looks like . . . Oh. I think it says,
‘We are Plantagenet.'
”

“That's what I thought,” I said.

The same words written in purple pen on bathroom walls in the twenty-first century had been carved in this stone ages ago. Maybe back when the high school was built. There was no talk of living forever or living in the stars. But words carved in stone seemed awfully permanent. Awfully sure of themselves. More important, somehow, than words on bathroom walls.

“What do you think?” said Amelia, brushing the stone with her finger. “A high school for aliens?”

“Can we sit down a minute?” I looked around my feet. I was standing by what looked like an old moldy T-shirt. “Or maybe not sit. Maybe walk?”

“Sure,” said Amelia. “I wouldn't mind covering more ground anyway.”

She kept her head down as we walked, and I thought she was back to thinking of frogs. I felt like I was trying to lace up a new pair of tennis shoes with more laces than I had holes. I'd found something here, all right, but I didn't know how to make it fit.

“Maybe a school motto,” said Amelia, who had apparently not been thinking about amphibians. “It was written on that sign like a motto. Like our school's motto is ‘Walk don't run.'”

I stopped. “That's our school's motto?”

She shrugged apologetically. “I guess mottoes aren't really the city's strong point.”

“Anyway,” I said. “That would make sense. A motto. So what are the chances it's a coincidence that the school motto—or whatever it is—just happens to be part of the writing I've seen on the bathroom walls?”

“It's only three words,” said Amelia. “Pretty common words, except for the Plantagenet part. But it's still hard to believe it's a coincidence.”

I nodded. Hearing her say what I was thinking made the whole situation seem more manageable. More understandable. I'd gotten so used to having conversations by myself, inside my head, that I'd forgotten how helpful it could be to go over a problem with someone.

“I think so, too,” I said. “I think someone connected with this school has been writing on the walls.”

We were on the edge of the lot now, in the middle of a group of oak trees. The ground was bare, totally shaded by the branches so that grass obviously couldn't grow underneath. The air was cold and crisp, and even in the middle of a city block, somehow it felt quiet and peaceful in the shade. I could hear traffic noise in the background, but I could also hear the rustling of the leaves in the wind.

“Speaking of writing . . . ,” said Amelia. She pointed at the tree closest to her. I could make out a smattering of names and initials carved in the wood. There were hearts with arrows through them. The tree was tattooed all over like an NBA player's arm.

“I guess this is what people did before they wrote on walls,” I said.

“And when it wasn't illegal to have a knife at school,” Amelia added.

I walked to another tree, and there were plenty of carvings in it, too. It was hard to make most of them out—the knife marks were slowly being absorbed back into the wood. The letters looked like they'd been etched a long time ago, and they were fading just like ink did.

I kept exploring until I got to the fifth or sixth tree, one so big that if Amelia and I stood on either side of it, we couldn't have gotten our arms around it. I squinted to try to make out any letters. I could make out one here or there, and occasionally a word, but then I got to one section where the initials looked fresh. They were at least half an inch deep, as if they'd been carved yesterday.

And the initials were inside a slightly crooked star.

“I don't know,” said Amelia, when I'd called her over. “A star? It's not too hard to find a drawing of a star.”

“You think it's a coincidence?” I asked. “‘
Our home is in the stars
?'”

“Yes, I do think it's a coincidence. Otherwise, oh, the American flag might also be a clue. Or those little glow-in-the-dark designs you stick on your ceiling. Stars are everywhere.”

I didn't agree, but I didn't have a good argument. I'd already circled all the other trees, and the rest of the carvings had been faded and shallow. Not like this sharp, clear star. I ran my fingertips over the wood, feeling each line of the star. The wood was rough, and sandy bits stuck to my fingers. When I raised my hands to my mouth to blow off the wood dust, my skin smelled like a forest.

“It's the only new carving here,” I said.

“Right,” said Amelia. “But it could have been done by anybody. I don't mean to be rude, but you might be seeing what you want to see. You might want this too bad.”

I wanted a lot of things.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Is this what you want most of all?” she asked, eyes sharp and focused. “Is this what you would wish for if you could wish for anything? To find out about Plantagenet?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't think so.”

“Then what is it? And don't say coffee this time.”

I frowned. Amelia could be a little repetitive sometimes. Frogs, frogs, frogs, frogs. Wishes, wishes, wishes.

“Why do you care?” I asked.

“Because I'm curious,” she said, like it was obvious. “Why does anyone ask anything?”

That made me smile. Any annoyance sort of drifted away. Because, honestly, Amelia was possibly the most curious person I'd ever met.

“To be back home in Charleston, I guess,” I said. “That would be my wish.”

She studied me with her scientist face, narrowing her eyes and cocking her head. “No way,” she said.

I started to argue with her, irritated that she'd ask for my wish and then tell me I'd named the wrong one. It's not like you could measure the truthfulness of wishes, like she could keep track of my facts and figures like she kept track of her frogs.

“Look,” I said, “that was . . .”

She was already turning away, pointing at her mother, who was gesturing for us to come back to the car.

“Hey, I still haven't seen that cool wall at Trattoria Centrale,” Amelia said. “Will you show it to me? Before we take you home?”

I could have argued with her about wishes. Or I could go get a tasty cup of coffee and enjoy showing a friend—a brand-new
friend—my favorite place in town. I was prepared to let the wish thing slide.

By the time we got to Trattoria, I really had to pee. For the first time in I couldn't remember how long, I actually needed to go to the bathroom for a reason other than staring at the walls. I was in such a hurry that I didn't even look at the purple writing when I first came in. I mean, it had said the same thing for the last couple of weeks. Only when I was turning on the water to wash my hands did I notice that something was different.

I turned slowly, not quite believing what I'd seen from the corner of my eye.