A beam of light played against my eyelids, sending red streaks through a dream I was having about an old brown dog of Mr. Willis’s named Gus. When I opened my eyes, I saw Murphy sitting up in her bed, grinning a big grin, a flashlight in her hand.
“Let’s build a house,” she said, aiming the light in my face again.
“Cut it out with the flashlight,” I hissed. “I’m halfway blind from it already.”
Murphy put the flashlight directly under her chin, turning her face into a ghoulish, glowing mask. “Don’t you think building a house is a great idea? It may be the best idea anyone has ever come up with in this room, although that’s probably not saying much.”
“I don’t know the first thing about building a house,” I said, sitting up and pulling my knees to my chest. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
Murphy pointed the light at a pile of books next to my bed and ran it up and down the spines. “Let’s see, I count nine, no, ten library books there, which means you know how to use a library card. We’ll go to the library, check out some how-to books, and we’ll have a house built in no time. A small house. I helped my parents build an adobe hut once in New Mexico, when they were studying the Hopi Indians, so I already know a lot about it. Believe me, Maddie, human beings have been building houses for thousands of years. Anyone can do it.”
“I don’t know, Murphy.”
“Okay, maybe not everyone can do it,” Murphy said, training her light on Brittany and then Kandy. “I’m not saying they could do it. But we could, you and me.”
She turned the flashlight on me again. “Say you’ll do it, Maddie.”
There was something in her voice, almost like she was pleading.
How in the world could I say no?
The next morning we were on our way to the Elizabethton Public Library, with Ricky Ray, Logan Parrish, and Donita right alongside us. It was a beautiful late September Saturday, the sky high and blue, the trees beginning to show their colors.
It would have been a perfect day, if not for the fact of Logan Parrish. Asking Logan along wasn’t my idea, you can be sure about that.
“Hey, Logan, have you ever heard Maddie’s ghost story?” Murphy asked a few blocks away from the library. Donita, who’d heard the story on several occasions, groaned, but Ricky Ray grabbed my hand and said, “Tell it again, Maddie!”
So I did. I was happy Murphy wanted to hear it, especially since I wasn’t sure she’d been as impressed as she should have been the first time I’d told it to her.
The minute I finished, Logan asked, “So why don’t you still live with your grandmother? How come you’re at the Home?”
“Granny Lane got the diabetes and her eyes started going bad,” I said, sounding like I was reciting from a script. “Everyone thought it best that I stay with people more able to meet my developmental needs.”
Murphy put her hand on my shoulder. “Why are you even bothering to answer that question?” she asked. Then she turned to Logan. “It’s absolutely none of your business why Maddie is here, or why any of us are. That’s personal information.”
Logan Parrish turned red as a sunset, which I found very satisfying. You could tell he didn’t want to do anything to get on Murphy’s bad side. He kept looking at her with a dopey grin every five seconds it seemed like, and it was starting to get on my nerves. I wished he’d go fall in love with somebody else.
“What did the ghost look like, Maddie?” Ricky Ray asked, same as he always did, tugging at my shirt. “Weren’t you scared?”
“I was just a baby, so even if I had seen him, I wouldn’t have remembered,” I explained. “But I didn’t see him.”
“I’d be afraid that ghost was going to track me down,” Donita said. “We ain’t that far from Roan Mountain. He could find you, check to see how you were doing.”
“He wouldn’t hurt her, though,” Murphy said, turning to face Donita. “Why would he hurt somebody whose life he saved?”
“A ghost is a ghost, friendly or not,” Donita said. “Whichever way, I bet Maddie don’t want to shake hands with one in the middle of the night.”
Donita was going to the library to check out a book on dolphins for a science report. When Corinne heard that Murphy and I were going to the library, she told Donita to scoot along with us. It was fine with me, but Donita didn’t look any too happy about it. From what I could tell, Donita hadn’t warmed up to Murphy one bit over the past few days.
The Elizabethton Public Library used to be the Elizabethton Post Office, back in the old days when they made post offices in the beautiful style of high ceilings and gleaming floors. Once everything turned modern, though, they built a new post office over by the Wal-Mart. The new post office had gray linoleum and ceilings of regular height, and it was hard to get too excited about going over there to buy stamps if you should need some, which I rarely did.
On the other hand, I was always in need of books to read since I read through a stack or two of them a week, so I was happy that they turned the beautiful, old post office into a library.
The minute we walked in, I went to straight to Mrs. Dugger, the head librarian, and asked her where the house-building books were. Mrs. Dugger didn’t blink an eye, but marched us right over to the shelves featuring books on home repair and the like. I like a librarian who doesn’t ask too many questions and respects your privacy.
Everyone but Donita, who’d gone to find dolphin books, grabbed handfuls of books with titles such as Designing Your Own Home and Contemporary Home Plans and lugged them over to one of the long, oak tables by the reference section.
“This one’s got a lot of house plans in it,” Logan said, flipping through the pages of one of his books, “but I don’t see any directions for how to build the house itself.”
“That’s easy,” Ricky Ray said. “You just get hammers and nails and wood. Everybody knows that.”
“I think it’s a little more complicated than that,” Logan told him in a superior tone of voice. “Although you have the basic idea, I guess.”
Murphy stood up. “I’ll go see if they have any books with instructions. We’ll probably need several different books if we’re going to figure out how to build a house.”
The books in my pile mostly showed plans for the sort of houses you saw out by the new mall in Johnson City. They were subdivision houses with big garages and windows that lay flat against the outside walls. Over the years I myself had developed a liking for houses with more character, although I understood why people might want to buy a house that was fresh and new and completely their own. I spent a lot of time wondering about the girls who lived in the dorm before me. It seemed strange to think how their stuff once cluttered up my desk and their clothes filled the closet I now shared with Murphy, Donita, Brittany, and Kandy. Sometimes I worried about those girls, what might have happened to them.
“My books give a lot of measurements,” I told Logan and Ricky Ray after I’d gone through the whole stack. “But that’s it.”
Murphy came back to the table at the same time that Donita was settling in at the far end of the table with a pile of books I guessed were on the subject of dolphins.
“Here’s a bunch of stuff on renovations and adding extra rooms,” Murphy said, letting an armful of books tumble down on the table. “But nothing that says how to build a house, A to Z.”
Donita looked up from her notebook. “Y’all really serious about building a house?” she asked. “I mean, you got some land around here?”
I hadn’t thought about where we would build the house. We’d gotten so caught up in the idea of building a house at all, we hadn’t really discussed the details. I looked at Logan. “How big is your yard, anyway?” I asked him. If he was going to be a part of this, he might as well come in handy.
Logan reddened again. “It’s pretty big,” he said, like it almost embarrassed him to admit it. “But, well, I don’t think my parents would let us build another house on it.”
“Why don’t y’all just build a fort?” Donita asked, sounding practical. “ ’Cause I used to live with this family where the man was a contractor, and he had to hire lots of people to build his houses. No offense, but I’m not sure y’all could build a whole house by yourselves. Now a fort, that’s a different story. I could even help you get the boards and the supplies for it.”
Murphy sighed. You could tell she really wanted to build a house. But Donita was right, and we all knew it.
“So Logan,” Murphy said after a moment, “we know that building a house on your property is out of the question, but how about a fort? A big fort?”
“Sure!” Logan said, sounding relieved that he could be of some use after all. “The back of our property is mostly woods. My parents would probably like it if I built a fort, as a matter of fact.”
“Why’s that?” Donita asked.
Logan shrugged. “It’s the sort of thing a normal guy would do. My parents would like for me to be as normal as possible. Like right now, my dad’s mad because I decided to be in band instead of trying out for football.”
“You don’t look unnormal to me,” Ricky Ray said nicely.
“Abnormal,” Murphy corrected him. She turned to me and mouthed the words “frog prince.”
Donita bounced her pencil on the table a couple of times. “You hanging out in the woods all afternoon with this bunch is going to make your folks happy?”
“They’ll be glad I have some new friends,” Logan said. “My mom is always getting on my case about making more friends.”
“How many friends do you got now?” Ricky Ray asked.
Logan looked down at the table. “I had one, but he moved last summer.”
“Well, if your parents will let us build a fort in their yard, they must be nice folks, which means you’re probably a nice person too, underneath it all,” Donita said, standing up. “I’m going to check out these books, and then we’ll go see my Uncle Wendell. He’ll help us out.”
We all followed her to the checkout desk. Without so much as a how-do-you-do, Donita was part of the plan.