The fort was starting to fill up with all kinds of stuff, the way I suspect any house will do once you’ve lived in it awhile. There were the chairs that Logan had brought up from his house, always pushed here and there, never in the same spot two days in a row. Donita had gotten permission to take a carpet remnant from backstage at the school auditorium, and we’d laid it out in the middle of the room, careful not to cross its primrose border with muddy feet.
The north wall of the fort was filling up with pictures we’d pulled out of magazines and taped to it. Everybody had his or her own specialty. I had taken to cutting out pictures of pictures, so that my little corner of the north wall was like a miniature art gallery. I had a tiny blue Picasso painting and a picture of a framed Norman Rockwell I was real proud of.
Ricky Ray liked frogs, and Logan tore out ads for junk food because he claimed his mama was always on a diet and never had anything fun to eat in the house. Donita had different moods when it came to taping pictures on the wall. For a while she was putting up real fancy furniture, and then she got on a famous people kick. Lately she’d been in a sports car mood.
Murphy always cut out words. Enchanted. Allure. Soar.
We had boxes for our stuff, the blue box for the books, and a box Murphy had painted blue with yellow flowers to hold my curtains with the halfway-sewn hems. There was Murphy’s gold trash can filled to the brim with little scraps of paper.
Some days the fort filled up with other stuff, too. If someone did poorly on a test or had gotten yelled at by a teacher, then a corner would fill up with that person’s sadness for the afternoon. When one of us came in with an A math quiz to our credit or a good day on the soccer field, the walls of the fort seemed to scoop up the joy and spread it around.
One afternoon the fort got so filled up with Ricky Ray’s knock-knock jokes, I thought if the walls didn’t explode, I surely would. A six-year-old, even one who’s almost seven, will knock-knock joke you to death if you’re not careful.
“Knock knock!” Ricky Ray yelled from where he was lying on the middle of the carpet. He was wearing the red-and-white scarf I’d bought him at Wal-Mart and looking mighty smart. He sounded cheerful as always, like that lunch with his mama had never occurred. But one afternoon when he was cutting out a picture for the Book of People, he pointed to the blonde-haired model and said, “Now this girl, her name is Amy, and she’s a famous movie star.”
Don’t ask me why, but that made me sadder than I’d been in a long time.
“Knock knock!” he called out again, not letting us pretend we didn’t hear him.
“Who’s there?” Donita, me, and Logan asked in a chorus, our voices dragging down low to the floorboards.
“Banana!”
“Oh, man,” Donita groaned. “Not this one again. Ricky Ray, can’t you get a book out of the library, figure out some new jokes?”
“Just say it, Donita!” Ricky Ray called out.
Donita sighed. “Banana who?”
“Banana banana.”
“You’re killing me, Ricky Ray,” Logan said from the armchair. “Please, could we get this over with?”
“Okay,” Ricky Ray said. “Orange you glad I’m not a banana?” He broke up in a fit of giggles and rolled around on the ground. “Okay,” he said, rolling into a sitting position and catching his breath. “I’ve got another one. Knock knock!”
Logan, Donita, and me all looked at each other and shook our heads. “Who’s there?” we answered.
I could tell you who wasn’t there, and that was Murphy. It had been a week since she’d been up to the fort. The math project she had been working on with Olivia, a report on the subject of infinity, was due on Friday, so they’d been working on it every day after school. “I guess that could take an awful long time,” I’d joked when she’d told me about it.
“Don’t confuse infinity with eternity,” she’d told me, all serious. “It’s mathematically unsound.”
I had two thoughts when she finally showed up later that afternoon. The first one was it had seemed like an infinite number of days since Murphy had last been at the fort. The second one was Thank goodness. Now Murphy could take her turn answering those dagblasted knock-knock jokes.
Sure enough, Ricky Ray was the first one to greet her. “Knock knock, Murphy!”
“Who’s there?” she asked, still standing in the doorway.
“What’s black and white and red all over?” Ricky Ray asked her.
“That’s not a knock-knock joke, Ricky Ray,” Logan said. “That’s a black-and-white-and-red joke.”
“Oh,” said Ricky Ray, looking confused. “Well, the answer is a zebra with diaper rash.”
“I don’t know why that can’t be a knock-knock joke,” Murphy said. “Is there a rule that all knock-knock jokes have to be exactly the same?”
Donita buried her head in her hands. “Oh, man, here we go again. Madam Weird is back.”
“I think any kind of joke could be a knock-knock joke,” Ricky Ray said, and he was the only one who spoke. Now instead of jokes, the fort was filled with an uneasy feeling. “What?” Murphy asked, turning around to look at everyone. “Why’s it so quiet all of a sudden?”
Logan shrugged. “No reason. Ricky Ray just ran out of knock-knock jokes, I guess.”
Murphy began pacing the room, her mouth pulled into a tight frown. I wished I could explain to her that you just can’t abandon people for a week and expect them to take you back with open arms. Especially not a bunch of abandoned and neglected kids. We’re real sensitive to it.
After a few minutes of pacing, Murphy broke into the circle and picked up the Book of Houses, which she shoved into Donita’s hands. “It’s your turn to tell a story, Donita. So quit being mad at me and start talking.”
Donita took the book from Murphy, her expression moving from irritation to uncertainty and back again. But she began turning pages, and when she stopped turning pages, she started talking.