Once, when Ricky Ray was four, his parents went to a party and didn’t come back for two weeks. Every day while they were gone, Ricky Ray ate a peanut-butter sandwich for breakfast, had another peanut-butter sandwich for lunch, and then ate two peanut-butter sandwiches for dinner.
If he hadn’t run out of peanut butter and bread, he might have gone on living that way forever. It was when the manager of the Winn-Dixie store caught four-year-old Ricky Ray sitting in the middle of aisle five tearing into a loaf of Wonder bread, an open jar of Jif peanut butter by his side, that the Department of Social Services was called to investigate the situation. That’s when Ricky Ray got put into foster care. He’d been officially recognized as a neglected child.
It meant something to Ricky Ray that Social Services took Randy Nidiffer away for the same reason they took him. When you’re a foster-care child, you’re always looking for kids whose stories are like your own. It makes you feel less lonely. Now, Randy’s mama didn’t leave him alone much, that’s true. He used to say that his mama was usually home but she was hardly ever there. I think he meant she drank a lot.
“I got two little brothers, but they always stayed over at Mawmaw’s, so they didn’t get neglected so bad,” Randy had told me one afternoon when we were working on our books, cutting up the glossy inserts from Sunday’s newspaper. “The State thought Maw-maw ought to take me in too, but she disagreed with ’em.”
“Why was that?” I asked, reaching over him to grab the Sears insert.
Randy gave me what he called his charm school grin. “Said I was too wild. Said she done got the little boys trained up right, but my mama let me get out of hand.” He snipped around a picture of a lawn mower. “Just imagine. I was only six years old, and already I was purely ruined.”
“You don’t seem ruined to me,” I told him. He didn’t, either. He was the best artist I knew, and his hair shined like the sun had set in it. How could a boy like Randy be ruined?
“That’s because you look at folks for what’s good in their hearts. Mawmaw, mostly what she looks for is the black spots.”
When I told this story in the fort, as a way of introducing the idea of Randy Nidiffer to everyone, Ricky Ray smiled. “You can’t be ruined when you’re six,” he explained to Murphy, Logan, and Donita. “That’s way too little. Randy Nidiffer wasn’t ruined at all. His granny was wrong.
“Randy Nidiffer had freckles everywhere you could see,” Ricky Ray told us, settling back into his story. “Which was a good thing, because freckles are nice. But it was a bad thing, too, because it made it easier for the bad fairies to see him.”
“Were they glow-in-the-dark freckles?” Logan asked. I shot him a nasty look, and he rolled his eyes at me in return. But then he turned to Ricky Ray and said, “I mean, were they magic in any way?”
Ricky Ray shook his head. “He wasn’t a magic boy. The fairies were magic, but Randy Nidiffer was just regular.”
He walked over and took the Book of Houses from Donita, and then he walked to the middle of the room and knelt on the floor and began flipping through its pages.
“Okay,” Ricky Ray said, turning one page, then another, pointing to different houses. “Randy Nidiffer passed by this house and this house, and then he passed by this one. But when he came to this house,” he said, pointing to a picture of an old-fashioned mansion in the style of a Halloween haunted house, “he stopped. There were spiders in the mailbox. That was a clue.”
“What kind of clue was it, Ricky Ray?” Murphy asked from where she was sitting in the corner. She pulled her knees up to her chest and stared at him real hard.
“Well,” Ricky Ray said, stretching out the word to give himself time to come up with an answer. “Well, Randy Nidiffer knew that bad fairies like spiders for pets. So there must have been some bad fairies who came to this house and left their spiders there when they went away. And this house was so big, it was the kind of house where a king and queen might live, too.”
“Randy thought that’s where his grandparents stayed,” Donita said, pointing at the haunted house picture with her scissors.
Ricky Ray said, “Yeah, and he was right, too. Only he had to go and make sure, but he couldn’t get past the spiders in the mailbox.”
“So what did he do?” I asked. I could just see Randy Nidiffer with his hands on his hips, tapping his foot impatiently as he tried to come up with a solution to this problem.
Ricky Ray grinned. “He knocked the mailbox down. And then he stomped the spiders. And then he ran back to his house and got Princess Crystal and brought her home to the castle. The end.”
We all clapped. It wasn’t a bad story for a six-year-old boy to come up with.
Murphy had a somber expression on her face as we packed up the scissors and magazines for the afternoon. “I think Randy Nidiffer’s grandmother was a spider,” she said. “A spider disguised as an old woman. Spiders suck the blood out of things, right?”
Donita looked at her strangely. “Yeah, so do vampire bats. Maybe Randy Nidiffer’s granny was Count Dracula.”
“No, no,” Murphy insisted. “That’s the wrong story. The story of Randy Nidiffer’s grandmother is the one where she spins a web and traps his little brothers, but Randy gets free.”
“If you say so,” Donita said. “She sounds like just another mean old lady to me.”
• • •
That night in our room after lights-out, Murphy whispered, “Maddie, are you still awake?”
“Sure,” I answered, turning toward the sound of her voice in the bed next to mine. “Are you okay?”
“Tell me about your grandmother and that old man,” she said. “Tell me a funny story about things they used to do.”
“Okay,” I said. I propped myself up on my elbows. “But how come?”
Murphy pulled the sheets up to her neck. “It’ll keep me from dreaming about spiders.”
So I told her the story about the time Granny Lane and Mr. Willis decided to go to the church Halloween party as a horse, only they fought so hard about who’d be the head and who’d be the behind that they stopped talking to each other for a week and missed the party altogether.
When I finished, Murphy was fast asleep. I crept over to her bed and smoothed down her sheets and brushed a curl from her forehead. I would’ve bet she was used to her mama doing that for her every night. I would’ve bet she was missing home.