Far away from that deep, misty forest, on one shady street in a big, bustling city, there sat a very small boy named Van.
The boy’s full name was Giovanni Carlos Gaugez-Garcia Markson, but nobody called him that. His mother, the famous opera singer Ingrid Markson, called him Giovanni. Nearly everyone else called him Van, if they spoke to him at all.
At that moment, Van was seated on the broad stoop of a grand, gray stone house. Van lived there for now. But the house was not his house. Van was much more comfortable outside it, even though he could still feel the house looming behind him, its four stories of windows staring down at him disapprovingly. Inside the house, his mother was practicing a new song cycle, her powerful voice ringing through the walls. Van couldn’t hear this. He’d taken out his hearing aids and left them in his bedroom when the practicing started. This was the best thing about being hard of hearing, as far as Van was concerned: it was like being able to plug your ears with your fingers but still have both hands free. Plus, without your hearing aids, you had a good excuse for not talking to anyone, which was very handy when you had no one to talk to anyway.
It was Van’s own fault that they had to live in this snooty house. The house belonged to Charles Grey, director of the largest opera company in the city and Ingrid Markson’s sort-of boss, as well as her sort-of maybe-almost boyfriend. Mr. Grey was wealthy and arrogant and important—or at least he was important to people who liked opera, who were the only people Mr. Grey cared about.
Several weeks before, when Ingrid was hit by a car and broke her leg while chasing Van through the city, Mr. Grey had offered them a place to stay while she recovered. Van knew he should feel grateful for this. But all he felt was a shaky wariness—the sense that as long as Mr. Grey was close, he should be on his guard. He guessed this was what trout felt when they spotted a juicy worm dangling into their stream, its wormy body curved into the shape of a hook.
Mr. Grey had a twelve-year-old son named Peter, who was just a year older than Van. Peter and Van had one thing in common: they both wanted to keep their parents apart. Even though they agreed on this important thing, and even though they could sit at the same dinner table and say “Pass the bread” without glaring, Peter was definitely not Van’s friend.
Van had had friends once.
They had crammed his life with excitement and danger. They had revealed the twinkling stashes of magic hidden in the world all around him. And then they had gone, leaving him behind, taking most of their magic with them.
Van slipped one hand into his pocket and grasped the swirling glass marble inside. The marble was proof that it had all really happened. That he’d been part of something big and strange and wondrous, at least for a little while. Van squeezed the marble tight. Then, letting go, he dragged his attention back to the Greys’ front stoop.
Several acorns from the street’s towering oaks lay on the step beside him. All but one of them still had their bumpy little caps. Van nudged the acorns with caps into a group. The lone capless one was left by itself.
“Hey, Baldy,” Van imagined the largest acorn snarling. “There’s a dress code here. Acorns without caps aren’t welcome.”
The capless acorn sighed and inched quietly away.
Van scanned the grass around the stoop. A few tiny stones. More acorns. But past the base of the steps, just beyond the hedge that divided the Greys’ property from the sidewalk, something glittered. Van scooted down the steps.
Half hidden by the hedge, partially buried in the shady dirt, was a bottle cap. Van tugged it free. Its edges were bent inward so that it formed a perfect bowl. When he brushed the dirt away, the bottle cap glinted like gold in the sunlight.
He set the bottle cap on the bare acorn.
The other acorns let out loud gasps.
“Can it be?” one of them whispered. “Is that the lost crown of Acornucopia?”
Van shoved the capped acorns closer.
“It is!” they exclaimed. “It’s the ancient crown!” All of them—except for the biggest one—bowed their capped heads. “Hail to the king!”
The crowned acorn looked around at the others, dazed and shy. “But . . . but I’m not a king. I’m just an ordinary acorn.”
“The lost crown will only fit the rightful king of the Acornish,” said one of the gathered acorns. “Hail, King!”
“Hail, King!” the other acorns echoed. And this time, even the biggest acorn bowed its cap.
Van checked the ground around the stoop for other lost treasures. Being hard of hearing meant that Van didn’t hear the way most people heard. But it also meant that he noticed things other people didn’t notice. He saw things that most people didn’t see. A lifetime of traveling with his mother to one new place after another, and of being alone in those new places, had honed Van’s imagination as well as his treasure-hunting skills. These things kept him busy. They kept him company. Sometimes they kept him safe.
And sometimes they did the opposite.
Van focused his eyes. A plastic pen cap was wedged against the edge of the sidewalk. A twist tie, a blue button, and a frayed strip of ribbon lay near the curb. And glinting in the dirt beneath the hedge was a long, narrow, silver bolt. Van knelt, thrusting his head and shoulders into the scratching branches. Behind him, unseen and unheard, a garbage truck rumbled onto the street.
Van pried the bolt out of the dirt. A perfect scepter for the Acornish King! He was scraping the grit from its silver whorls when he thought he heard a soft voice say, “Van. Hey. Van.”
Van halted.
He hadn’t heard the voice at all. He had felt it, inside his head.
Which meant he must be imagining things.
His friends were gone. He was alone inside the hedge. No one was calling his name, no matter how much he wished otherwise.
Van crawled deeper into the hedge. The garbage truck rolled closer.
The voice spoke again. “Van. Van. VanVanVan!”
Now Van froze. Maybe he hadn’t imagined the voice, after all. Because he certainly wasn’t imagining the squirrel who had leaped into the twigs just above his face. The silvery, busy-tailed, anxious-eyed squirrel. The extremely familiar squirrel.
“Van!” squeaked the squirrel. “Sheesh! I’ve been calling your name forever. Or for a few seconds. Probably seconds.”
Joy filled Van’s chest.
“Barnavelt!” He lunged toward the squirrel, twigs and leaves snapping around him. “I’ve missed you so much! Have you heard from Pebble? Where is she? Is she all right?”
The squirrel’s round black eyes grew even wider. “Pebble?” he echoed, in a small voice. Then he shook himself, like an Etch A Sketch erasing its own drawing. “No. She hasn’t—it’s not that.”
Disappointment dimmed Van’s joy. “Then what?”
The squirrel blinked. “What what?”
“Why did you finally come back?”
“Oh!” The squirrel shook himself again. “To tell you to watch out.”
“Watch out?” Van repeated. “Watch out for what?”
“No,” squeaked the squirrel. “Just WATCH OUT!”
Barnavelt leaped out of sight.
Van sat back on his heels, perplexed. Just watch out? Had Barnavelt shown up after several empty weeks only to shout a few confusing words and disappear again?
And then, through the twigs of the hedge, Van saw the flash of sunlight on a windshield.
The truck was close enough that at last he could hear it too. The roar of the engine. The shriek of tires as it swerved up over the curb, coming straight at him.
Van dove backward through the hedge. He landed on his back, on the little paved patio surrounding the Greys’ stoop, with one foot snagged on an ornamental yew and the other in a giant stone tub of geraniums. Leaves and twigs rained down around him. A piece of trash—one small square of paper—fluttered free of the swaying bushes and settled directly on his chest.
The truck crunched through the hedge’s other end. It veered over the spot where Van had knelt a second ago, then swerved sharply, tires screeching, and disappeared from Van’s view.
There was an air-bending, world-rattling BOOM.
A jumble of other noises followed: glassy clinking noises, rocky crumbling noises, the sharp note of a scream.
Cautiously, Van sat up. He grabbed the piece of paper that had landed on his chest and peered around the edge of the still-shaking bushes.
A garbage truck appeared to be visiting the house next door.
It had flattened several bushes before barreling straight into the neighbors’ front window. The truck’s cab thrust through the frame where glass should have been. Its body stuck out awkwardly into the front yard, like an elephant halfway through a too-small door. Black tire tracks streaked the pavement just in front of Van’s toes.
It had all happened too fast for Van to be truly scared. What he felt was closer to disbelief, like he’d just watched the world perform an extremely messy magic trick. He swayed on the sidewalk, taking quick, hard breaths. Without really seeing it, Van glanced down at the paper in his hand. It was a tattered old postcard. The only words written on the back were WISH YOU WERE HERE.
Wish . . . , Van thought.
And then, before any passing cars could stop, before any neighbors could rush out of their houses to find out what on earth had happened, Van noticed something else.
A shimmer hung in the air. It was silvery and shifting, like dew that evaporated before it could quite touch the ground. It brushed the tips of Van’s hair. By the time he blinked, it was gone.
Only Van saw that shimmer. And only Van knew what it was.
It was a granted wish.
Someone had wished to hurt him. Or worse. And the wish had been just a few inches—and one squirrel—away from coming true.