Bob Read online

  * * *

  Gran has made ham-and-cheese sandwiches with pickles. Mom must have told her that it’s my second-favorite lunch, after tacos. She pours us glasses of milk.

  “To rain,” Gran says, raising her glass.

  Mom glances at me and then raises her glass. “To rain!” she says.

  Then they look at me, so I say it, too.

  Beth Ann can’t even hold a glass. She just points at Gran’s nose. She likes to point at people’s noses.

  It hasn’t rained in Gran’s town for a long, long time, which is bad. It’s called a drought. It’s bad for the plants, bad for the animals, and bad for the people who live around here. Mom says the drought is why Gran doesn’t have horses anymore. She couldn’t feed them because her grass stopped growing. She has to share water with her neighbors, and she only gets a little bit. Mom says she’ll show me how to brush my teeth a special way so that I don’t waste any.

  “Livy,” Gran says. “When your mom leaves and it’s just the two of us, I thought maybe you and I could make a cake.” She shows me a fat cookbook called Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cookbook.

  “Livy, this is the best cake cookbook on the planet!” Mom says.

  Cake sounds good. But I have a zombie waiting for me upstairs. And I don’t really want to think about Mom leaving.

  And so I say it sounds great.

  * * *

  Lunch is pretty quick because Beth Ann gets right down to what Dad calls her “job,” which is crying. Yes, crying is her job. And she’s really good at it. No one even bothers trying to talk when she cries because she’s so loud. Gran rubs Beth Ann’s back while we put our heads down and eat. When I’ve finished my sandwich, my pickle, and Mom’s pickle, I shout over the crying to say I’m going upstairs to read in the canopy bed, and Mom shouts back “Great idea!” and says she’ll help me find a book.

  I talk really loudly in the upstairs hall so that the zombie will know I’m not alone. When we walk into my room, the closet door is closed and there is no sign of him.

  Mom puts her hand on my shoulder and leads me to a bookshelf against the far wall. “These were all mine,” she says. I tilt my head to read a few titles: Alice in Wonderland, which of course I’ve heard of, and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, which I haven’t. Mom picks out a book with a strange cover: one half of a smiling girl, and one half of a knight wearing black armor, lined up so that they look like the two sides of one person.

  “Half Magic!” she says. “I loved this when I was your age. Just think, Olivia, when you were here before, you couldn’t even read. Time goes so quickly.”

  I lie on the bed and pretend to love Mom’s book right away, even though it usually takes me a little while to love a book. She gives me a quick hug and goes back downstairs, where Beth Ann is still crying.

  I run to the closet. The zombie is hovering over the pirate ship again, this time with a Lego monkey in his hand. He drops the monkey and puts his hands over his ears.

  “What,” he asks, “is that horrible noise? Close the door!”

  I tell him it is only the baby, doing her middle-of-the-night crying.

  “Is it the middle of the night?” he asks. “It doesn’t feel like the middle of the night, though I admit that a closet is not the best place to decide what time it is. There is a certain timelessness to closets. This one, anyway.”

  “It’s the middle of the night in Massachusetts,” I tell him. “Gran’s house is fourteen hours ahead of Massachusetts time.”

  “Well,” he says, “I guess your baby must be very good at math. But I wish you would make her stop.”

  “It’s annoying, but it’s her job,” I tell him. “And she’s not my baby.”

  Although I did name her. Mom and Dad let me because they read a book that said it might help with my “adjustment” to being a big sister. I have no idea why I named her Beth Ann. They probably should have named her themselves.

  Downstairs, the phone starts ringing. Gran Nicholas has a really loud phone because her hearing isn’t so great. You can hear her phone ringing even when Beth Ann is crying.

  When I talk to Gran Nicholas on the phone at home, Mom always stands right behind me and tells me to speak up. And Gran always says, “Tell your mother I can hear you just fine. I’ve got my ears on.” That’s what she calls her hearing aids, her “ears.”

  I guess the phone was for Mom, because now she’s yelling into it and laughing.

  “My mom hasn’t seen her friends in five years,” I tell the zombie.

  He looks up. “Me neither.”

  “Do you have friends?” I ask him. “Friends—like you?”

  “That,” he says, “is what we were trying to find out. Remember?”

  I’m tired of saying everything I don’t remember. Instead, I point to his foot, the one inside the chicken suit. “Can you wiggle it?”

  “I think so.” I see the bottom of the chicken suit move, and one feather flutters off. He sneezes.

  “Take the suit off,” I say. “I bet your foot’s totally fine.”

  “No!” he says quickly. “I’m—not in the mood.”

  “You’re scared.”

  “I’m not scared. I just don’t feel like it.”

  “What kind of zombie gets scared about taking off a chicken suit? I thought zombies were strong and powerful.”

  “Are they?” He looks up at me.

  “You really never met another zombie?”

  He shakes his head.

  “But what about your parents?”

  He is quiet now, concentrating on attaching the little plastic monkey to the pirate ship’s mainsail. “Two hands,” he tells the monkey. “We don’t want you to fall off and get lost like poor Mr. Parrot.”

  This zombie has definitely spent too much time alone. “You don’t have parents?” I ask.

  He rolls his eyes. “We’ve been over this,” he says. “No parents that I know of. No idea who I am. No idea why I was mixed up with your gran’s chickens. No idea where I came from. Or how to get back.”

  “Then how do you know you’re a zombie in the first place?”

  “The same way I know a lot of things. YOU told me.”

  “Me? You mean—before? When I was five? I didn’t know anything!” I blink a few times and take a long look at him. Why did I even think he was a zombie when I opened the closet door this morning? He’s green and his clothes are kind of ratty, but does that make him a zombie? I’m pretty sure five-year-old me confused both of us.

  “Listen,” I say. “What if you’re not a zombie?”

  “I AM a zombie. I know I am. That’s why I don’t need to eat or sleep much. And that’s why I’m so careful about my parts falling off!”

  “But have any parts fallen off? Ever?”

  He glances at the foot inside the chicken suit. “I’m not sure.”

  “Hold out your hand.”

  He holds out one hand.

  “Look,” I say. “Five fingers.”

  He wiggles them. “But how do you know how many I started with? Maybe I had six. Maybe I had eight!”

  I shake my head. “Take that foot out of the chicken suit. I bet you a hundred dollars it’s still attached.”

  He hugs the ratty-looking orange cloth to his body. “No.”

  This kind of reminds me of the time Suzanna Hopewell kicked me in the face with her soccer cleats. Not on purpose—we were both going after the ball, I tripped and rolled, and the bottom of her shoe scraped the whole side of my face. I covered my cheek with both hands and wouldn’t let anyone look. I was too afraid of what they might see. Finally, Dad blocked the door to the field house bathroom so that I could look in the mirror, by myself. There was a big gash next to my ear, but it wasn’t as bad as what I had been imagining. I got fourteen stitches, and Mom bought me a bag of candy corn almost as big as my backpack.

  “Do you want to look at it by yourself?” I ask him.

  He grunts and says, “If I wanted to look at it by myself, don’t
you think I would have done it by now?”

  I have an idea. I point at the huge dictionary. “Let’s look up zombie and see if you match the definition.”

  He looks worried. “But what if I’m not a zombie? What happens then?”

  “If you’re not a zombie, then your foot is still connected to your body. That would be good news, right?”

  He thinks and then nods. He puts two hands on the dictionary and pushes it along the floor, out of the closet, to where I’m standing.

  I sit on the rug, open the dictionary to A, and then wish I’d started at the back. I have to move the pages in big clumps with both hands. The “probably-not-really-a-zombie” waits patiently.

  I get to Z and trail my finger down the pages like I’ve seen Dad do. I move past zest (spirited enjoyment, gusto), past zodiac (a celestial path), and land on zombie. We lean in together to read the definition.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BOB

  zombie [zom-bee]: noun. A dead body brought back to life.

  “A dead body!” We both jump away from the book. Livy trips on the rug, and we fall into a heap.

  “I’m not dead!” I insist, my face pushed straight into the rug. I unscramble my legs and pick up the dictionary. It is not heavy for me. I flip to the D pages, which I already went through during my first year in the closet, after I taught myself how to read.

  I read aloud, “Dead [ded]: adjective. Lacking power to move, feel, or respond. Incapable of being stirred emotionally.”

  “You are definitely moving,” she observes. “Even your foot.”

  I stand up, shimmy, and turn in a circle to prove her right.

  She reaches out and pinches that sensitive spot under my elbow. “Ouch!”

  “You feel and respond,” she says.

  I rub my arm. “I am very sensitive,” I say, raising my chin. “I’ve always been like that.”

  “Always?” she asks. “Because I thought you didn’t know anything about yourself.”

  I shake my head. “I know I feel sad when Gran worries into the phone about missing the rain. I know I like salty snacks and avocados on toast and warm tea because you gave me that for breakfast last time, only you called it brekkie, which is what Gran calls it, and we both agreed we liked the sound of it. I also like pirates and the color orange and I know my name. But that does not tell me where I came from or what I am.”

  “Can you please tell me your name?” she begs. “Is it … Bertram?”

  I shake my head. “Do I look like a Bertram?”

  “Not really,” she admits. “Throckmorton? Lachlan?”

  I shake my head. “Lachlan?”

  She shrugs. “I remember that’s a common name for boys here in Australia.”

  “That you remember?”

  “Can’t you just tell me?”

  “First you have to promise not to laugh.”

  She makes an X over her heart.

  So I tell her. “It’s Bob.”

  Her lips quiver at the corners, but she keeps her word and does not laugh.

  “I know it’s not a very exciting name for a zombie, but it’s all I’ve got.”

  “You’re not a zombie, though. You could be almost anything.”

  I brighten. She’s right! I think about the possibilities. I know I’m not human—maybe I’m superhuman! “Livy! I could be the Hulk or Green Lantern!”

  I don’t just read the dictionary. Sometimes I read the superhero comic books on the top shelf that I have to stand on the dictionary to reach. I never thought I might be one of them before!

  Livy looks me up and down. “The color’s right. But the Hulk needs to be angry before he turns green. Are you angry?”

  Well, I’m still more than a little ticked off about everything, but not angry. I shake my head.

  “Doesn’t the Green Lantern always wear a special ring?”

  I look down at my bare hands and sigh. “I guess I’m not the Green Lantern.”

  “Don’t feel too bad,” Livy says. “Whatever you are you’re still pretty cool.”

  I haven’t gotten a compliment in a long time. Five years, to be exact. It feels nice. I want to tell her there are plenty of other superheroes I could be even though they’re not green, but she is tapping the cover of the dictionary now.

  “I wonder if there’s a book where we can look up what you are, instead of what you’re not.”

  We both glance over at the bookshelf.

  Livy moves her hand along the edges of the books like she’s looking for one in particular, but then shakes her head. “If there is, we don’t have it. But we’ll figure this out.”

  A look crosses her face, a familiar look. She is concentrating. I like that look.

  “All right,” she says, facing me. “First things first. I need you to tell me everything that happened when I was here last time.”

  I open my mouth, but she holds up her hand.

  “Not right now. My mother’s going to come up any minute to check on me. Can you hide again? If she sees you, she’ll totally freak out.”

  “Maybe I’m like the Invisible Girl from the Fantastic Four,” I say, stalling. I really don’t want to get back in that closet. “Maybe I can turn invisible even though I’m not a girl.”

  “Can you?” she asks, tapping her foot.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and practice being not seen. I open one eye. “Well? Can you see me?”

  “Yes, Bob, I can see you.”

  She said my name. Bob. It makes me feel … well, seen. And heard. Like I’m a person. Or whatever I am. I’m glad I’m not invisible after all.

  I hear her mother approaching the door. Uh-oh! With my super-hearing I should have known she was coming. I was too busy basking in the glow of hearing my name. The Great and Powerful Bob. The Bobster. His Bobness.

  Luckily her mom stops for a second outside the door to knock. She is a very polite mom. Not that I know many moms. Or any moms.

  I take the opportunity to fling myself back into the closet. What choice do I have? Livy sticks out her foot and pushes the closet door closed just as the bedroom door opens. My heart is beating really fast.

  Hey! That’s more proof that I’m not dead! Dead things don’t have heartbeats.

  “Are you up for a walk, Olivia?” her mother asks. “Let’s go get some fresh air.”

  Livy hesitates, but then, extra loud, says, “Okay, let’s go for a walk.” She doesn’t have to talk loud for my benefit. I have excellent hearing when I pay attention. I’ve learned most of what I know about the outside world from listening to Gran Nicholas’s television through the closet wall.

  Like now I hear their feet moving across the carpet toward the door. Then one set stops. “What’s this?” her mother asks.

  “That?” Livy says. “Oh, just some feathers I found in the closet. An old art project I must have started last time I was here.”

  I suddenly realize my elbow feels bare and breezy. I reach around, and sure enough, some feathers are missing from my chicken outfit! I feel wrong without them. Like I’m not me. I hold my breath. I hope her mother doesn’t take them!

  “I’m glad you’re remembering some things from last time,” she tells Livy. “It’s always nice to return somewhere you’ve already made happy memories.”

  Silence. Is she doing something with the feathers? What is she doing? I am itching to peek out, but there is no keyhole in the door, because who would lock a closet?

  “You can just leave those feathers on the bed,” Livy finally says.

  “Of course,” her mother says. “We can see the animals and I’ll show you the well I built with my dad when I was your age. You weren’t allowed to go near it last time because you were too small.” Her voice fades as they go down the stairs.

  The last thing I hear is Livy saying, “I don’t remember having to stay away from a well.”

  But I do. I remember her making a wide circle around that well every time we went out to the backyard. She kept me far away from it, too. She
was good at looking out for me.

  When I hear the kitchen’s back door slam shut downstairs, I fling open the closet door and grab my feathers off the bed. I am glad that my foot is not detached after all, because that would make it hard to run.

  I hold the feathers to my arm. I will have to ask Livy to bring me glue or sticky tape when she returns. Feeling like myself again, I snuggle down into my sleep corner for a nap. Every few months I like to sleep for an hour or two. It relaxes me when I’m stressed.

  * * *

  When I wake up I can tell through the sliver of space in the doorframe that it is dark. I sit upright. That was a long nap! Livy didn’t return in all this time? Has she left me AGAIN?

  I throw open the door. Under the bedsheet is the unmistakable outline of my old friend. Unless … unless she stuffed pillows in there to make it look like her. She told me she did that once at home and then snuck downstairs for an ice pop.

  I’d like to try an ice pop someday.

  I poke one small green finger at the lump in her bed.

  Snore.

  Phew. Pillows don’t snore, so that’s a good sign. I turn back to the closet and nearly trip over the tray of baked beans, a bag of potato chips, and an orange fizzy drink that is sitting right there. Three new foods to try! Hurrah!

  The note taped to the side of the bag of chips says:

  Dear Bob (also known as the not-zombie),

  I didn’t want to wake you. Plus I’m all jet-lagged and needed to sleep. Strange word (jet-lagged, not sleep, which isn’t that strange a word at all). Anyway, I’m sorry again for the wait and for the forgetting. We will figure out what you are, I promise.

  Your friend, Olivia (also known as Livy)

  I beam. I knew Old Livy was still in there somewhere, even though new Livy might have forgotten her.

  I carefully peel the note off the chips and use the tape to stick the feathers back on. Then I settle down to my feast, wishing Livy was awake to share it with me. Humans are strange. Sleeping half their lives away like that. Not that my life has been so exciting these past five years.

  The beans are excellent.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LIVY

  It’s hard to sleep through the night in Australia, especially when Bob is eating potato chips right next to the bed. I wouldn’t say this to his face, but Bob looks sort of creature-ish, as if he might scarf down his food like a dog or something, but from the sound of it, he’s actually a very neat eater. The problem is that he crinkles the bag a lot.