Bob Read online

Our moms take about a hundred pictures of us.

  After dinner, Sarah and her mom walk us back up the road to our car, and Mom asks if I still want to get something at the store. “A t-shirt, or something? It’s not too late if you want to look.”

  I shrug and look into the store window as we pass by. Did I want a t-shirt? Why did I want a t-shirt?

  Mom said the candy was for “after dinner,” and this is after dinner. I reach into my pocket and come out with the caramel, the sour cherry ball, the licorice, and a chess piece—a black pawn.

  The name comes back to me in a flash. Bob. And I realize that I’ve forgotten all about him. Again.

  “Hey,” Sarah says, “you never told me about the chess piece. Is it your lucky charm or something?”

  I stare at that pawn and I finally get it: Something is wrong.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BOB

  I learned a lot of things today on my adventure with Livy, but here’s what I learned after she left: If you put a wet chicken suit in the clothes dryer, all the feathers will come off and the whole thing will shrink into a little ball.

  The car pulls up outside just as I’ve rescued the last feather from the lint trap.

  The tutu scratches at my legs as I climb the stairs with the whole mess in my arms. If I were Superman, I could have just used my heat lasers to dry it off, and it would be as good as new.

  I wait in the closet. Waiting in a closet is not so bad when you know someone will soon be opening it. Plus, being in here is kind of relaxing, like I don’t have to worry about anything other than what’s inside my head. I like filling my head. I flip the dictionary open to U. Now that I know where the light cord is, there’ll be no stopping me.

  I get up to unicorn before Livy swings open the door so wide the doorknob bangs into the opposite wall.

  “That’s gonna leave a mark,” I say, shutting the book. “We can cross unicorn off the list of things I might be.”

  “I could have told you that,” she says.

  I hurry over to the bed to open the bag of clothes that is no doubt waiting for me there.

  There is no bag. I purse my lips at her and wait for an explanation.

  “So you’ll never guess what happened to me in town,” Livy says.

  This better be good.

  “I forgot about you!”

  Only she sort of looks kind of excited about that, which is more than a little annoying.

  “I forgot,” she repeats. “Again.”

  I start to gnash my teeth, but my teeth are already small and kind of stubby. I put my hands on my hips instead. “Why are you happy about forgetting again?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m not happy about the forgetting part, but now I think I understand why I forgot you the first time. I mean, I know I was really young, but let’s face it, you’re pretty memorable.”

  I have to agree there. I always thought I was pretty remarkable as far as mysterious creatures go.

  She begins to pace the room. “When we left for dinner I was thinking about you. And the chicken house, and the clothes you wanted. But by the time we got into town I forgot all of it.”

  My eyes widen. I am less annoyed now, and more curious. “All of it?”

  She nods.

  I reach up and lay the back of my hand on Livy’s forehead. “Maybe you have a fever?”

  She shakes her head. “No, listen, it’s not me. I think it’s coming from you! You have a gift! I think you’re … magic!”

  I stare at her. “Oh great, so my magic is about people not being able to remember me? What kind of stinky magical gift is that?”

  “It’s not so bad,” she insists. “It protects you from strangers, right?”

  “I guess … but it makes you forget me, too.”

  “It would, yes! But I have something that reminds me.” She dives into her pocket and pulls her hand out triumphantly to reveal … the chess piece?

  I’m trying to keep up. “The chipped black pawn from the h7 square makes you remember me?”

  “Yup! I must have figured this out when I was little. Gran said I tried to take it home last time. When I hold it, I remember you.”

  She lowers the pawn back onto the board so it can continue its job of protecting the king. It wobbles as she sets it down. We both reach out to steady it, and our hands close on it at the same time. Our eyes meet in surprise. We’d clutched this same pawn between us before! Back then we’d laughed and rolled around the floor pretending to fight over it. But now we just stare at each other.

  This action, this coming together, it linked us somehow. Livy is right about the magic. For some reason people forget about me when they get a certain distance away. But this pawn resists it.

  This means Livy didn’t really forget about me when she left five years ago! Well, she did, but not on purpose, because she didn’t have the pawn. Knowing this makes a huge difference!

  We finally let go. “See?” I tell her. “I was right about pawns being powerful!”

  “Don’t go getting a big head about it.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a wrapped-up caramel and a piece of black licorice.

  I grab for the licorice. “My favorite candy!”

  “The lady at the store said I used to get it all the time.”

  I nod, chewing happily. “You did. You’d bring it back every time you went to town. You tried it once and said it tasted like dirt.”

  “That sounds like me,” Livy says, popping the caramel into her mouth.

  “Where did you find the black chess pieces, anyway?” I ask as I savor my delicious treat.

  “They were downstairs with a bunch of other stuff Gran put out to show me.” Her voice is a bit slurpy because of the caramel. “There was a green elephant, too, and a—”

  “Rufus?” I jump up. “Gran found Rufus?”

  “Huh? I’m not sure. I didn’t ask his name.”

  “Green and soft? About the size of my head? Long trunk?” I start at my nose and swing my arm out like a trunk.

  “Sounds like the one,” she says.

  I’m halfway out the door before she yanks me back.

  “Hold on there, mister,” she says.

  “Oops, sorry. Will you get him for me?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, please!”

  I wait by the door, hopping up and down. Rufus! Rufus is back! I should probably act my age and not get excited about a stuffed animal. Then she walks in with him.

  “Rufus!” I snatch him from her arms and hug him tight and sniff his head. “He smells just the same! Like cake and the outdoors!”

  Livy half smiles and half rolls her eyes. “I’m glad you have your stuffed animal back.”

  I hold him out to her. “Oh no, he’s not mine. Rufus is yours.”

  “Mine? I don’t think so. I’ve never been an elephant person.”

  What a hurtful thing to say! I hug him again. “But when you were soaking wet in the chicken house, you had him in your arms.”

  She takes a step backward in surprise. “I did?”

  “And he was wet, too.”

  “Rufus was wet?” Livy steps over to the window that looks out onto the yard. Her back is to me for a long time. When she turns around again her eyes are wide. “There’s only one place in Gran’s yard Rufus could have gotten wet. I think he fell in the well!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  LIVY

  “Poor Rufus,” Bob is saying, smoothing Rufus’s short green elephant fur. “Did you fall in that deep, dark well? Bob will keep you safe now. You will never be in that dark well again.”

  I think Bob sometimes forgets that some of us are real live creatures and some of us are inanimate objects. It must have been because of all that time he spent in the closet with the Lego pirates, Mr. Monkey, and the parrot who got lost.

  While Bob and Rufus are having their little reunion, I’m putting two and two together, as Dad says. Except it’s more like trying to add the square root of seven and thirty-one to the fifth
power.

  Bob says I rescued him. But he also says he went to the chicken house in the first place because I was cold. Not him—me. And I was cold because I was wet. And now it turns out “poor Rufus” was also wet.

  Gran Nicholas says I loved Rufus. I took him everywhere with me.

  So I am beginning to wonder if maybe I am the one who fell in the well.

  If maybe Bob saved me.

  “Bob,” I say.

  He ignores me. He’s sitting on the edge of my bed, talking to Rufus with his legs crossed and one side of his tutu sticking up. A strap is sliding down over one skinny green shoulder.

  Wouldn’t I remember falling into a well? Maybe I hit my head. If I hit my head, I could have drowned. But—could Bob really have pulled me out? He doesn’t look very strong.

  “Bob,” I say again.

  He looks up. “Yes?”

  “What if I didn’t save you? What if you saved—me?”

  “No,” he says. “You saved me, Livy!”

  “We have to go outside,” I tell him. “Right now.”

  “Outside? It’s almost bedtime. It’s getting dark out.” He looks at me with big eyes.

  “I know,” I say, throwing him Sarah’s sweatshirt. I’m not too excited about the dark, either. “But this can’t wait.”

  * * *

  Five minutes later, we’re at the far end of Gran’s yard, where the stiff brown grass gives way to a lot of trees and rocky ground. It was easy to sneak out of the house, because Gran was on the phone and Mom was putting the baby to sleep. We just walked out the front door (which Gran almost never uses) and then ran around to the back of the house and over to the well.

  Bob runs up to it but doesn’t touch it. He peers over the top (he has to stand on tiptoes) and then walks around the well slowly, looking as serious as a green guy can look in a tutu and a red sweatshirt so big on him that the zipper is swinging down by his ankles.

  “What are we looking for?” he says. “Clues?”

  “Bob, do you remember being here with me? With Rufus?”

  He shakes his head and points to the chicken house. “I only remember the chickens.”

  But I do remember the well. Not just from yesterday’s walk with Mom, when she talked (a lot) about collecting stones with her father to make the well wall. But from before, from when I was five. For instance, I know that if I walk around this well, I will see three little stones jutting out of the wall, one above the other.

  Like three little steps that I might have tried to climb once.

  I circle the well slowly, and there they are. I raise one knee and try to put my foot on the lowest little stone step. There’s only room for my toes.

  “Bob, you don’t remember this place at all?”

  He shakes his head again. And I’m out of memories. I definitely don’t remember falling in. I force myself to look into the well’s deep dark, and shudder.

  “Let’s go back to the chicken house,” I say. It’s the nearest thing to the well. That’s where Bob thinks our story starts. Even though I’m feeling more and more sure that it starts exactly where we are now.

  It takes less than a minute to walk to the chicken house. Bob stops just outside the fence and says he’s not going in. “I don’t like that chicken,” he says, pointing at a big one. “She has it out for me.”

  “Bob, pay attention. This is where you watched me wake up, right?”

  “Yes, Livy—inside, just like I told you.”

  “And then what?” I say.

  “And then … you said you had to go to breakfast. That Gran would worry. I remember wondering what breakfast was. And you said it was usually something good, like pancakes or waffles. So I went with you.” Bob is excited now, going up and down on his toes. It almost looks like a real ballerina move.

  “Okay, show me how we got to the house.”

  “We walked, silly. I can’t fly, as far as I know.”

  “Ha-ha. Show me exactly the way we went. Maybe we’ll see something important.”

  He looks at the chickens and thinks for a second. “We walked along the edge of the grass, near the trees. You called it going ‘the long way.’”

  When Bob says the long way, I get this memory—like a picture flashing in my head—of Gran’s yard, all green, in the cold sunshine. And for the first time, I remember Rufus. I remember holding him, how soft he was and how I tucked him under one armpit to keep him safe while I used two hands to climb over a rock or a fallen-down tree trunk at the edge of the grass.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. Show me the long way,” I tell Bob.

  We start picking our way along the edge of Gran’s lawn, tripping over tree roots and stumbling on the little rocks that are loose in the dry dirt.

  “Ouch!” Bob says, bending to rub his leg.

  “It’s not that bad,” I say.

  “Not for you, maybe. You’re wearing pants.”

  I start laughing really hard. Because now Bob has a twig stuck to the back of his tutu. Against the dusky blue sky, it looks like he has a little tail.

  Bob stops and turns to me. I can’t see his face, only two glimmering eyes. “Stop!”

  “Sorry!” I’m still laughing. When something hits my funny bone straight on, I just can’t stop.

  But Bob is suddenly serious. “Livy, it’s our rock!” He points to a smooth gray-white rock. It’s like a little table—almost a perfect rectangle, lying flat on the ground and reflecting the moonlight.

  He hops up onto it. He’s a good hopper, very springy. “Remember? You said it was a Sylvester rock! We had picnics here.”

  “You mean like the book? Sylvester and the Magic Pebble?” It actually does look a lot like the rock that Sylvester turned himself into. He wished to be a rock, to save himself from a lion. And then he couldn’t wish himself back. His parents looked for him everywhere. That part always made me really sad.

  “Livy, this is where you saved me that first day!”

  “On this rock? Saved you from what?”

  Bob drops his voice. “From a monster.”

  “Bob, really? A monster?”

  “I was so scared I could barely move. My feet were stuck to the ground. You grabbed my hand and pulled me all the way to Gran’s kitchen door. You saved me! Right here!”

  “What kind of monster?”

  “Oh! A toothsome and furry monster. Also, fast! A fast, toothsome, furry monster. And so loud! That screeching!” He covers his ears.

  I pull his hands down. “Bob, you’re safe. There’s no monster here. Just tell me what happened.”

  “Maybe we should go inside now,” Bob says.

  “Bob. Maybe that monster was from your world. Maybe what you’re remembering is a clue—it’ll help us figure out where you came from!” I start hunting around the rock for more clues, but now it’s almost too dark to see.

  Bob is nodding, excited. “Yes! Maybe in my world, I am the people, like you are the people here. But in my world, there are monsters, and they run after us, screeching like this!”

  And then Bob makes a noise.

  I look up from my clue hunt. “That’s the noise the monster made?”

  “That’s exactly what it sounded like! Do you remember it now? Have you ever heard such a horrible sound?”

  Actually, I have. Because the sound Bob made was this: meow.

  “Bob, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a monster. I think maybe it was a cat.”

  “A cat? Do you mean the small domesticated mammal? Catcher of rats and mice?”

  “Um, I guess so? Most cats are cute and friendly. And they say meow.”

  “They do?” His look of terror disappears. “Well, it doesn’t say anything about that in the dictionary! But still, it was very brave of you, Livy. To save me.” He smiles. Then he pats the Sylvester rock. “And I always liked this rock!”

  I think I get it. Bob saved me (from drowning) and then I saved him back (by walking away from a cat?). But none of this has helped us figure out anything about
where Bob came from. I’m going to have to think of something else. I sit down hard on the Sylvester rock. It wobbles a little.

  “Livy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can we go home now? I want to introduce Rufus to Mr. Monkey.”

  * * *

  We walk into the house the same way we left, and no one even knows we were gone. When we get upstairs, Bob lies down on the bed and insists that he needs Band-Aids for his scratched-up legs. I can’t see any marks on him, but he says he heard a TV commercial once and he definitely needs one on each knee, so I go out to find some Band-Aids in the bathroom cabinet. When I come back into the room, I see Bob, still flat on the bed, with Mom standing over him. I freeze right where I am in the doorway.

  “There you are,” Mom says, turning to me. Her eyes find the Band-Aid box in my hand. “What happened? Did you hurt yourself?”

  I try not to look at Bob, who is lying very, very still and staring straight ahead as if Mom might not notice a tutu-wearing, green not-zombie the size of a four-year-old. I can see his chest moving up and down when he breathes. In fact, I think he might be hyperventilating.

  “This?” I look at the Band-Aids as if they just showed up and surprised me. “Oh. No! I mean, yes! No. I have a sore toe, that’s all.”

  “Let me see,” Mom says, so I take off my sneaker and point to my big toe, and she coos over it and puts a Band-Aid on for me. When her head is down, I wave at Bob to get under the bed, but he’s so busy pretending to be the world’s weirdest stuffed animal that he doesn’t even see me.

  I’m trying to figure it out. Has she seen him? Can she see him?

  A second later, I have my answer. Mom goes straight to the bed, flips down the blanket, and tells me to get in. She doesn’t even tell me to brush my teeth or anything. She says we need a little snuggle time, and when I’m in bed, practically squashed right up against Bob, she sits on the edge of the mattress and starts patting my head like she does sometimes.

  She can’t see him.

  “I’m leaving early,” Mom says. “Before breakfast. You’ll probably still be asleep.”

  “Okay.” I tell the stomachache not to show up, but it shows up anyway.

  “You’re good staying here with Gran, right? It’ll be a lot more fun than all that time in the car.”