Dread Locks (4 page)

I didn’t tell anyone, and it became the first in a long list of secrets between Tara and me.

5

SOMETHING TERRIBLE, SOMETHING WONDERFUL

W
hen you drop a pebble into a pond, ripples spread out, changing all the water in the pool. The ripples hit the shore and rebound, bumping into one another, breaking each other apart. In some small way, the pond is never the same again.

Tara wasn’t a pebble. She was a twelve-ton boulder.

The impact of her presence on our school was felt that very first day, starting with Julie Robinson’s freaking out in the cafeteria when she discovered her precious little mirror was gone. She practically foamed at the mouth.

Oh, it was entertaining and all, but things became serious when the mirror turned up in Kyle’s pocket. Even though Kyle was a total straight-arrow honor student, no one believed him when he claimed to have no idea how it got there. He was immediately sent to the principal’s office.

I said nothing.

When I got home that day, I found myself spending most of the afternoon trying to come up with a good reason to go over to Tara’s. I couldn’t just show up uninvited like she did. That was her way, but it wasn’t mine. I thought that maybe I could tell her I had forgotten a homework assignment—but it was a flimsy excuse, because I could call just about anyone. No, I couldn’t make it so obvious. In the end, it was my mother who served as my accomplice, without ever knowing.

“You know, Mom, it’s really rude of you not to introduce yourself to the new neighbors,” I told her as she sat in the dining room, cutting out pictures of us kids for another one of her scrapbooks.

“Most people like their privacy. They’ll introduce themselves when they’re ready.”

“Tara already did.”

Mom gave me a wry look, like she was sucking some meat from between her molars. “Yes
—that
was some introduction, wasn’t it.”

“I think you should make them one of your famous fruit baskets. Everybody loves those.”

Mom considered it. Her fruit baskets truly were famous in our neighborhood, and she prided herself on them. I knew she would want nothing more than to impress the new neighbors with one.

“Check to see if there are any baskets in the basement,” Mom said, but I didn’t have to check, because I already knew that there were—just as I knew we had plenty of fruit.

It took her almost an hour to craft it to perfection, and of course I dutifully volunteered to take it over.

“You’re being awfully helpful today,” she said, looking at me suspiciously, as if I had an ulterior motive—which I did.

“He’s probably going to eat it on the way,” suggested Katrina.

“Don’t you dare!” Mom warned.

Five minutes later I was at Tara’s door, ringing the bell. I could hear the chimes sound deep within the house, and a moment later, Tara opened the door herself.

“Hey, Baby Baer,” she said.

“Hey,” I answered back, not bothered by her nickname for me—as long as she didn’t use it in front of other people. “Somehow I figured with a mansion like this, you’d have a butler answering the door.”

She laughed. “Well, we ran out of food, so we had to eat him.”

It was such a weird thing to say I didn’t know whether to laugh or what, so I just ended up giggling stupidly.

“But it looks like we won’t have that problem anymore,” she said, “because now we have fruit!”

“Huh?”

She pointed to the gift basket.

“Oh, yeah, right. Fruit.” I held it out to her. “Here’s a welcome gift from my mom. She wanted to bring it over herself, but she’s under the weather.”

“We’re all under the weather,” Tara said. “If we weren’t, we’d be in space, and our lungs would explode.”

I was not going to let myself be thrown off balance by her weirdness. “Exactly which mental institution did you escape from?” I asked her. “And is there a reward for your return? Because, hey, I could use some spare cash.”

She fluffed her golden curls. “Wanna come in?”

I shrugged like it was nothing. “Sure.”

I stepped in to find myself in a grand foyer floored with purple marble and rimmed with white stone statues. She led me into a huge living room with thickly padded furniture—the kind you would sit in and never want to rise out of. I could still smell the aroma of fresh paint. The walls were shocking pink, with moldings and windowsills painted shiny black. It was a weird combination, yet somehow it fit.

“Does color blindness run in your family?”

She put down the fruit basket on a glass table, picking a few grapes for herself. “My family has unique tastes.”

“As your butler found out.”

She frowned at me then. I didn’t expect that. I thought she liked throwing verbal darts at each other. I sure liked it.

“I don’t have a butler because my family doesn’t believe in hired help,” she told me. “We do everything ourselves.”

Somehow I had liked it better when she had suggested they had eaten him.

I sat in one of the soft chairs, and it all but swallowed me. “Are your parents around?” I asked. “Should I meet them?”

“They’re in Europe with my sisters,” she said. “Shopping.”

“Couldn’t they just go to the mall?”

She didn’t answer me, just stared down at me floating in the billows of the chair.

“So then who’s here with you? I mean, they didn’t leave you alone, right?”

She didn’t answer at first, then she said, “They trust me. I’m very self-sufficient.”

I have to say it surprised me—our parents got all worried when they had to leave us alone for a single evening. But then I thought, these people are super-rich. Old-money rich. People like that live by their own rules.

“Want the grand tour?” she asked.

“What’s it cost?”

She smiled. “A basket of fruit.”

“Whew—good thing I had one.” I struggled to get out of the deep, comfortable chair.

“This is the living room,” she said, and added, “but there’s nothing living in here except for me and you.”

She led me to a painting on the wall—a Greek temple or something beneath a blazing sky. “As you can see, we pride ourselves on art. Do you like it?”

I shrugged. “It’s okay.”

“I painted it.”

I wasn’t expecting to hear that. “You’re kidding, right?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been studying art all my life. This is a view of the Parthenon in Athens. I like to paint pictures of places I’ve been.”

I was still dumbfounded. “So you painted that?”

“Yeah. A few summers ago.”

“Wow ... You’re like... Mozart, or something!”

“Mozart wrote music.”

“I know that—I just mean you’re a child prodigy, like him. He wrote symphonies when he was a kid.”

She smirked. “So I guess my painting is better than just ‘okay.’”

I smiled back.

Tara went on to show me the rest of her house, from the ballroom to the huge pool—but it was the artwork that stuck in my mind. Some paintings were by masters: Monet, Renoir—but even more had been painted by her, and her sisters.

“The three of us are always in competition,” she told me. “Actually, I’m glad they’re away—it gives me some time to myself.”

The more I looked at the paintings, the more impressed I became—but also more troubled. I couldn’t say what was bothering me. There was something mildly unsettling about them. Like they were hung just slightly crooked or something. I kept wanting to stare at them to figure out what it was, but she kept me moving through the house.

And then there were the statues. There were dozens of them, and they were amazing.

“Don’t tell me you and your sisters did these, too!”

She shook her head. “They came from Europe,” she told me. “Most of them, anyway. Some people collect stamps, or coins. My family collects statues.”

She claimed that they were just your generic statues, and that none of them were sculpted by the masters, but you could have fooled me. I didn’t know much about art. I knew that Rodin was famous for
The Thinker,
and Michelangelo did that famous statue of David—but the marble and granite statues in Tara’s house, and around the edge of the pool, were every bit as good as those. The rippling muscles, the expressions on their faces.

When we were done touring the house, she made us banana splits in the kitchen, using fruit from my mom’s fruit basket and the richest, most flavorful vanilla ice cream I had ever tasted.

I watched her eat, staring at her like she was one of her own paintings. She caught me watching her, and I began to blush. To hide my embarrassment, I showed her how I could balance a spoon on the tip of my nose like a seal, and she laughed.

“You’re funny, Baby Baer.”

I tried to think of more ways to make her laugh, until I found myself burping the national anthem—a trick I had learned from Freddy Furbush. I knew I’d feel like an absolute idiot when I got home, but right then, I didn’t care.

When I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I finished my ice cream, which had long since melted in its little silver bowl. In the silence that followed I thought of something. Something that I had wanted to ask her but hadn’t had the nerve to before, because I was afraid it might make her mad. But once you’ve burped the national anthem, you have the right to ask just about anything.

“Hey, Tara ... remember that mirror you took from Julie Robinson?”

“What about it?”

“Well ... why did you do it?”

She shrugged. “It was pretty. I wanted to hold it.”

“But you could have asked....”

“Hey, I gave it back, didn’t I?”

“No—you put it in Kyle Firestone’s jacket pocket.”

“Did I? I hadn’t noticed.”

I knew she was telling the truth; it really made no difference to her where she had gotten it or where she had left it.

“It belonged to Julie, not Kyle. How could you not notice that?

She looked at me for a few seconds, like she was studying me.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” she said. “Nothing ‘belongs’ to anyone.”

“I’ve got news for you,” I told her. “Communism went out with the Soviet Union.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s not about communism; it’s just reality.”

“I don’t know what reality’s like where you come from, but in this country, you can’t just walk into people’s houses whenever you like. You can’t take people’s things without asking permission.
That’s
reality.”

She crossed her arms. “Okay—so you’re telling me that the shirt you’re wearing
belongs
to you?”

I looked down at it. Just a blue T-shirt. “Yes,” I said. “It’s mine.”

I saw an eyebrow rise over the rim of her shades. “You have it now—but someday it’ll tear, or you’ll outgrow it. Then it will either go to someone else or end up in the dump, buried beneath a ton of dirt.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe I’ll keep it my whole life.”

“And then what?”

“And then what,
what?”

“And then you die, and even if you take that shirt with you, it
still
ends up buried beneath a ton of dirt.”

Suddenly I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t see her eyes. “I don’t think I like this conversation.”

“All I’m saying is that, unless you’re immortal, nothing can really belong to you. The best you can hope for is to hold something for a while, but in the end you’ve got to give it back.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with Julie Robinson’s mirror.”

She waved her ice-cream spoon at me to make her point. “Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? It’s not Julie’s mirror. The idea of personal property is a myth!”

“Yeah?” I said, getting mad. “Well, sometimes myths are important. Sometimes myths are real.”

That gave her pause for thought. She put her ice-cream spoon down gently on the table.

“So they are, Baby Baer,” she said. “So they are.”

And then she said something that I won’t forget until there’s nothing left of me but a pile of dust.

“Did you ever have a premonition? A feeling that something terrible was going to happen?”

“S-sometimes,” I said. Actually, I always get the feeling that something terrible is going to happen, but usually it doesn’t.

Then she leaned in close to me. “I’ve got a secret for you,” she whispered with an unpleasant grin on her face. “Something terrible is going to happen. Something terrible... and something wonderful.”

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