I couldn’t bring myself to go to JM practice that afternoon. I didn’t want to see Logan or anybody else for that matter. I tucked my head down into my jacket and pushed my way to the bus line. When I felt a hand on my arm, I shrugged it off, ready to shove an elbow hard into a rib cage if I had to.
Murphy dug her fingers into my arm and dragged me over to the end of the bus line, where the bus to Snob Hill stood hissing out gray smoke. “You know, I don’t much care to go anywhere with you right now,” I told her, trying to pry her hand from my arm.
“I know that,” Murphy said, not turning around to look at me. “Don’t you think I know that?”
I rolled my eyes, but I followed her up the steps and to the last row of seats. “Don’t expect me to sit with you,” I said, taking the seat in front of her, “because I sure don’t have anything to say to you.”
After the bus let us off, I trudged behind Murphy through Logan’s backyard to the fort. The air smelled just right that afternoon, just the way the air two days before Halloween was supposed to smell, rich with leaves and dirt and smoke from the leaves people weren’t allowed to burn, but always did.
By the time we reached the fort, the sky was already beginning to dim, and we wouldn’t have long before we needed to turn around to get back to the Home for supper. As soon as we got inside, Murphy flung herself into the armchair and let her arms and legs flop out.
“Home sweet home!” she said, trying to sound cheerful. I gave her a long look and a big mess of silence.
“Maddie, I’m sorry about the book. Things didn’t go the way I’d planned.”
I’d spent the whole afternoon trying to figure out what Murphy had been thinking. Was her plan to make Olivia fall in love with the Book of Houses so she’d keep inviting Murphy over to her wonderful house, now that their math project was done? Or did she think one look at the Book of Houses would transform Olivia into a poem of air and light, an old soul, a good queen in a fairy tale?
“I know you’re sorry, but who cares?” I said, idly picking up a pair of scissors and putting them down again. “I know I don’t.”
Murphy unzipped her backpack and pulled out the Book of Houses. Even in the late afternoon’s half-light anyone could see it was in tatters. She lay the book in her lap and looked at it a minute without saying anything.
“I’ve thought about it all afternoon. We have to get rid of the books, Maddie.” Murphy leaned forward and looked at me, solemn as Sunday morning. “I’m afraid their magic is gone after everything that happened this afternoon.”
“The books aren’t magic,” I said dully. “They’re just books.”
Murphy stood up, cradling the Book of Houses tightly to her chest. “How can you say there’s no magic in this book? Without it, the fort never would have been built. Without this book, Logan would still be halfway between this world and that one. The books brought him all the way over here to us. He’s not the same person, and that, believe it or not, is magic.”
She began to pace. “You saw Olivia today, when she first looked at the Book of Houses. For a minute she was a different person. She was . . . ” Murphy fumbled for the right word.
“Human?”
“She was the real Olivia,” Murphy replied. “The good Olivia, the one who watches stars. That was magic too.”
Then the air seemed to go right out of her. She fell back into the armchair. “My parents researched this group of Tibetan monks once. If one of their sacred objects even touched the ground, they got rid of it. That’s how they honored their special things. They believed it was better to destroy something than to keep it when it was less than perfect.”
I walked over to the box where my curtains lay in a jumble and pulled them out. I was too mad, just flat out too hurt, to think straight. Maybe if my head had been clearer, I would have seen certain things. I would have realized Murphy had lost something too. Her dream of Olivia’s house was gone. There’d be no more visits, no more light and air and poetry, no more stars seen through a glass ceiling.
But then, even if I’d realized it, I would have thought her loss nothing compared to mine. Because in my eyes, even if she never saw that house again, Murphy still had everything. She had the memory of parents who had loved her and taken her with them when they left for someplace new. She had tales of exotic lands and polished, blue stones hanging over her bed. She was special, a shining star for all to see.
Me, all I had were those books, and they were no good to me now. How could I ever pick up one of them again without hearing those voices laughing and yelling across the cafeteria? How could my books ever be special to me again?
“I don’t care what you do with the books,” I told her. “Do whatever you want.”
And then Murphy was opening the box with the Book of People and all of our supplies in it, and then she was walking outside. “Come on,” she called, but I just stood there. She came back and grabbed my hand, and I followed her like a girl in a dream.
The fact was, no matter how mad I was at Murphy, I’d go wherever she told me to.
She handed me both of the books, said, “Wait here for two minutes,” and ran in the direction of Logan’s house. I thought maybe she was going to get him and tell him to come take the books and hide them in his house, so that we wouldn’t have to look at them anymore.
But when Murphy returned she was carrying a shovel she must have gotten from the Parrish’s toolshed. She motioned me to follow her, and we tracked through the woods until we reached the fence separating the subdivision from Hampton’s Dairy Farm, right at the edge of the trees. “I used to help my mom garden,” Murphy said, beginning to dig. “Mostly I weeded, but first thing in the spring I helped her turn over the soil.”
Within no time she dug a good-sized hole. It took me a second to realize that what I was feeling was scared, like we were about to bury a person, someone we’d murdered.
“Put the books in the hole,” Murphy told me, and that’s when I started to cry. I didn’t know why I was crying. The books were no good to me anymore. Why save them? But I couldn’t make myself hand them over to Murphy, even if the books were ruined.
“Come on, Maddie,” she said gently, laying her hand on my shoulder, and I let my fingers loosen a little bit. I was tired and jumbled up with anger and sadness, and suddenly I just wanted to be done with the whole mess, the laughing voices and the torn pages and Olivia Woods’ closed-down face. Sometimes things get too twisted up for you to hold on to them anymore; I guess that’s the reason I handed those books over to Murphy. She took them from me and buried them deep in the hole and shoveled the dirt back over them.
“This is for the best,” she said, and then turned and ran a few feet before throwing the shovel into the woods. “I’ll come back tomorrow and put the shovel in the shed,” she promised. Then she held out her hand, palm up, to the sky.
“It’s starting to rain,” she said. “We’d better run for it.”