When Ratboy Lived Next Door (7 page)

But Mrs. Merrill looked worried, all right. She looked scared to death. She had on a wrinkled green skirt and a matching jacket that looked, well, tired. When it was new, it was the sort of thing you'd wear to get fancied up, and here she was wearing it as a housedress.

My ears perked up when I heard Elliot ask, “How did school go for Willis?”

“Not too good. He brought home a letter from the principal. I think he was upset, but you know Willis—he wouldn't talk about it. He took Zorro out of the cage and ran off.” Mrs. Merrill seemed about to cry when she said, “The principal wants one of his parents to come to school.”

“Then you'll have to go,” Elliot said.

“I can't.”

“Then who will? You know Pa won't. You're our stepmother now. You'll have to go tell them how it is with Willis.”

How what is?
I wanted to scream the question.

“Your pa won't like it. You know how mad he gets when he thinks I butt in with you boys.”

Elliot was attacking the garden. “What I
know
is that they won't listen to me because I'm not an adult. Pa won't go, so it'll have to be you.”

Big tears welled in Mrs. Merrill's eyes. Elliot said, “Don't even tell Pa about the letter and everything will be fine. Just go on back in the house now.”

Then she turned to go! I'd never seen anything like these people. If you didn't know better, you would have thought Elliot was the grownup.

*   *   *

When Elliot was alone and busy turning over the dirt, I decided this was a good time to find out what had happened to Willis.

“Hey!” I yelled from the treehouse.

Elliot looked around, not seeing me. “Up here!” I called.

“Hey, yourself,” Elliot said when he saw me, then went back to work.

I climbed down the ladder and got the hoe out of the shed. Then I hopped the fence and began breaking up the dirt clods that Elliot had turned over. He stopped and looked at me.

“This garden hasn't been used since Mr. Ogle got sick. That was a few years back. It's going to be hard work. I thought it would be neighborly to help.”

Elliot watched me for a few more minutes, then finally said, “You don't have to do this. I can manage. But if you want to be ‘neighborly,' then I'll say thanks.”

Unlike Willis, Elliot seemed okay to me. He was nice but not overly much. He wasn't one of those people who fawned all over you.

Beth must have heard our voices. The back door slammed and she came running out. She stood hopping from her bare tiptoes back to her heels, sucking on that finger. She seemed excited but wouldn't say a word until Elliot looked at her and smiled. Then she said, “Hi!”

I didn't care much for babies or little kids. They seemed like a lot of work. They almost never did what you wanted them to, and they always looked kind of dirty to me. Beth's hair lay in strings, and I wondered if anyone ever washed her face. But it made me sad that she needed Elliot's okay to talk to me.

“Hey, Beth,” I said.

Her excitement took over again. She thrust her doll out to me. It had an old rag wrapped around it. “She has clothes now!” she said.

“Well, so she does.” I tried to think of something else to say. “Does this well-dressed baby have a name?”

Beth stopped smiling and looked at the ground as if she was thinking real hard. I had the feeling no one had ever really played with her before. I thought of my Ginny and Betsy McCall dolls stuck away in my closet along with a hatbox full of doll clothes. Mother might not be one to show affection, unlike Daddy and Nanna, but she never hesitated to spend money. Every Christmas morning when I was younger, she gave me more doll clothes than any three kids ought to have—according to Nanna.

It tugged at my heart that Beth didn't know dolls should have clothes or names. I said, “We should call her Elizabeth. I've heard only very special babies get that name.”

When I said that, she bounced up and down with sheer joy, clutching her doll to her. I was glad Mrs. Merrill had told us that Beth's full name was Elizabeth.

“I'm going to tell Mama her name!” she said, and she ran into the house.

Elliot didn't miss turning a shovel of dirt but he said, “That was a nice thing to say.”

I kept working, too, but the ground didn't seem as hard as it had when I started. We worked side by side for a while. When Elliot stopped to wipe his face with his shirtsleeve, I took the chance to talk about Willis. “Your brother is in my class at school.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I was surprised you'd sign up for school when it's almost over for the year.”

Elliot smiled. “You sound like Willis.” Then he got serious. “An education's important. Just look around you. It's the only way poor folks can get a good job.”

I acted interested, but Elliot's words reminded me of all the speeches Nanna and Daddy always gave me.

I tried to get the subject back to Willis. “A funny thing happened today. He was in my class only for a while. Then he sort of disappeared.”

Elliot went right back to the garden. “That a fact?” he asked.

“Yep.” I went back to work, too. “I'm not sure, but I think he might be in trouble. He got sent to the principal's office and we didn't see him again for the entire day.”

I didn't think he was going to answer me. Finally he said, “It was probably a mistake putting him in sixth grade. Willis has an awful hard time reading.”

“Heck, it's not my favorite thing to do, either. I almost never read a book unless I have to.”

“It's not that he doesn't want to. It's that he can't. For some reason the letters just don't make sense to him. Some schools we've gone to put him in with kids his own age. Others bump him down a grade or two. Sounds like that's what'll happen here.”

I lived in dread of flunking a grade. Willis was one of the tallest kids in our class. That would make it even worse. But after all I'd been through with Willis, I thought it sounded like good punishment for a bully. Still, I didn't want to show Elliot my feelings, so I acted as if I felt bad about it. “Being set back a grade or two would be a hard thing.”

Elliot cut in fast. “Willis will be all right. He might not read real good, but he'll do okay. It's not like he doesn't have anybody to take care of him. He has me. I'll always be there to look out for him.”

Elliot was looking right at me with his blond hair hanging in his eyes. He had the most serious look I'd ever seen.

I felt kind of flustered and said, “Yeah, you're right. There're worse things. He'll be just fine.”

I wiped my hands on my pants. “Nanna'll be wondering what happened to me. I ought to go in now.”

I jumped back over the fence and ran all the way into the house and didn't stop until I was in my bedroom. Grabbing the pillow off my bed, I wrapped my arms around it. It was the first time since I had learned about Robert that I didn't run for the sock drawer to pull out his picture when I was upset. I carried the pillow over to my window and looked down at Elliot's back as he worked the soil.

There was something about the way he looked when he said, “He has me. I'll always be there to look out for him,” that tore right into my heart. With his straight blond hair and bright blue eyes, Elliot didn't look a thing like my picture of Robert. Yet he'd said exactly what I thought Robert would say about me if he had ever had the chance. It was what I pretended he said when I had his picture out.

My heart pounded so hard that I squeezed the pillow tighter to my chest. My throat was tight and my eyes stung.

It didn't seem right that mean Willis Merrill should have a big brother in the here and now when all I had was a brother I couldn't mention around my mother, a brother made up of nothing but an old photograph and borrowed memories.

6

Tuesday morning Willis came to school, but none of us could figure out where he went.

After school he ran out the door as if a demon were on his trail. He must've beat it straight home to get his raccoon, because Zorro's cage was empty when I got there. That suited me just fine. Still, I couldn't help wondering about it.

“Where did Willis take off to?” I asked Elliot when he came over to borrow our gardening tools.

“Willis keeps to himself” was the only answer I got.

Elliot was a hard worker. He was planting the seed potatoes and onion sets Nanna had given him. He said he also planned to grow pole beans, tomatoes, and turnips. After working in his garden, he came over to ours. I could tell that a weed wouldn't stand a chance with Elliot around.

I'd noticed that Elliot and Willis walked to school together. Willis hurried home, though, and Elliot came home alone. Since he didn't have a bike, I stopped riding mine to school—waiting to leave the house until after Willis and Elliot were a block ahead of me. Lord knows, I didn't want to walk to school with Willis! Then I only had to dawdle a little after school before Elliot came by and we walked home together.

Wednesday afternoon, I was walking with Elliot when chubby Bobby Wayans saw us and yelled, “Ooh, Lydia's got a boyfriend! I wonder if he knows she's mean as a hornet?”

I spun around to say something, but Elliot put his arm on mine to still me. He turned to Bobby and said, “Excuse me? Do you have something to say to me?”

Bobby swallowed hard. “Um, no,” he mumbled.

“Do you have something to say to Lydia?” Elliot asked.

Bobby hung his head and said, “No.”

“Good. Let's keep it that way,” Elliot said as we walked away. It was exactly the kind of thing a big brother should say to defend you. I don't think my feet touched the sidewalk all the way home.

Life seemed just fine as it was. School was almost out for the year, I was making a friend in Elliot, and Willis hadn't been in my class since Monday. I should have let Willis's being so mean to me roll off me like water off a duck's back. But I couldn't. I wanted to get even with him. It didn't seem right that he should get off scot-free.

Zorro was his weak spot, so that's what I zeroed in on. When I got home, I changed out of my school clothes and pedaled my bike to the one place I never went unless I had to—the library. I walked straight to the card catalog and looked up the word “raccoon.” I found what I needed in the reference section.

“Raccoons!” Mrs. Green said when she saw my book. “So you're going to make friends with that new boy. Well, you're on the right track. If he has a pet raccoon, then you need to find out all you can about them. That will impress him.”

She gave my book a loud
tha-wump!
with the date stamp, closed it with a bang, and handed it to me as she winked. “Always pretend to care about a boy's interests. That's how I got my Sam.”

I smiled a shaky smile and almost ran out of there before anybody saw me. With that loud voice of hers, even the mice in the library basement could have heard Mrs. Green.

*   *   *

I spent all my free time that night and the next day reading about raccoons. I read that they can be mischievous. I read that they are more active at night than in the daytime. I read and read and then I stopped reading when I got to the part about how much they love certain foods. That's when I knew what to do.

Nanna kept our pantry stocked with food in case a natural disaster left us stranded. She was prepared—never mind that we were just a few blocks from the grocery store. I searched through the shelves until my eyes landed on a jar of peanut butter. It was perfect. I hid it behind the boxwood bush beneath my bedroom window.

Near as I could tell, the only way to get to Zorro without Willis would be in the morning before Willis woke up. Nanna got up at six, so that meant I'd have to get up at five o'clock.

That night I put a pillow over my alarm clock so it wouldn't wake the house. When its vibration woke me on Friday, I hurried and put on my jeans and a sweater. I stuck a pencil in my pocket, then opened my bedroom window. It wasn't easy to climb out, but I thought of Robert climbing the water tower and that's all the courage I needed.

I landed on the ground and grabbed the peanut butter jar. Then I sneaked over the fence and tiptoed to Zorro's cage. I opened the jar and put a dab of peanut butter on the end of the pencil. I stuck it in the cage and let him eat it off the pencil. Then I unlatched his cage and left a trail of peanut butter right up to the oak tree that had my tree house in it. Reaching as high as I could where the tree leaned over the fence into the Merrills' yard, I ground a little of it into the bark. Then I went back over the fence into my yard, climbed into my tree house, and waited.

Zorro ate the bits of peanut butter on the trail, then scampered up the tree. He hesitated where he smelled the ground-in peanut butter, then ran right up to the tree house. I planned to ease my way to the ground and leave another trail back to his cage, but as soon as I started down that tree, Zorro was right after me. I jumped the fence and ran to his cage with him on my heels. I threw a blob of peanut butter inside his cage, and as soon as he went in, I locked it.

Zorro had caught on fast. I would just have to unlock his cage and then run to my tree house to have him follow. Now I would wait for the right moment to trick Willis into thinking that Zorro liked me more than him.

*   *   *

The second Free Show came and went. It wasn't near as eventful as the first one. I knew there was no way Rae Anne could talk her folks into coming two weeks in a row, but not having her there was still a letdown. I'd dreaded seeing Willis, but he didn't show up. Neither did Elliot, another disappointment. To top it off, the movie didn't start until twenty minutes after dark, so I spent a long night listening to Nanna complain and having no friend to share it with. The only good thing about the show was the serial. Last week we had seen the first ten minutes of
Buck Rogers
and then the movie. This week we saw the next ten minutes. I liked the serial more than the movie, although
Singin' in the Rain
wasn't bad.