Our house is small. Normally I didn’t care about that, but today I did. Every time I moved, Mom and Dad were there, close by. And every time I passed Mom, she smiled and gave me the look.
I hate the look!
THE LOOK MEANS:
• Do you want to talk?
• I feel bad for you.
• I know how you feel.
• Can I help?
The look is uncomfortable. And no, she can’t possibly know how I feel.
Normally I wouldn’t go hang out in the basement—mostly because it’s dirty and filled with junk—but today I made an exception. It was an escape from the look, and from a potential Mom-talk, and I was definitely not wanting one of those. There was an armchair down there; I could just sit in it and listen to music or something. Mom might follow me upstairs to my room, but she’d never come down to the basement. The basement was safe because it was filled with too many unfinished projects she wanted to ignore.
Mom’s a Freecycle addict—which really just means junk addict. Freecycle is this organization that works like a garage sale, only it’s on the internet, and everything is free. Mom’s a subscriber, which means she gets hundreds of emails from strangers describing junk they want to get rid of. Things like “I have a set of blue dishes with painted llamas on them—anyone want them?” If Mom decides she needs the llama dishes, she emails the person back, and they put the llama plates on the curb for Mom to come and pick up. I don’t like thinking of Mom as one of those garbage-picker-type people, but the truth is, she loves junk. The more stuff she has, the happier she is. At the beginning she tried to get me excited about it, but I only went once; it’s not my thing.
Mom’s favorite part of the whole thing is sorting everything out; she says it’s like treasure hunting. That’s not how I look at it, but I just nod and agree with her—it’s easier that way. She puts her favorite stuff into the basement, and everything else goes into the garage. So the garage is a disaster; it’s hard to even move in there, but Dad doesn’t care—he just parks on the street. He says it’s nice for Mom to have a hobby, but mostly I think he’s supportive because it’s a lot cheaper than if she went shopping.
Once in a while Mom gets inspired and gives something a makeover—that’s how I got my zebra-patterned nightstand; it’s supercool and I love it—but that doesn’t happen very often. Mostly stuff just sits in piles waiting to be noticed.
I grabbed my headphones and disappeared downstairs. I was right about the chair; it was in front of the workbench—not a normal place to keep an armchair—but it was clean and junk free, so I was happy. I turned on the light, pulled out my headphones, and was just about to sit down, but then I changed my mind. There were nails and a piece of wood on the workbench, and just seeing them started a thought in my head. A second later, that thought turned into a project. I could spell Lucy’s name on the wood with the nails.
I’m not afraid of hammers, and pounding the nails was fun, especially when I made a direct hit and the nail pushed deep into the wood. After about ten minutes I had spelled out the L, the U, the C, and half the Y of Lucy’s name. I held the wood out and studied it. It looked pretty good.
Four more nails and I’d be finished. I searched the workbench, but there weren’t any left; I’d used them all. I knew Mom had more. A long time ago I’d seen it—a jar of nails and screws. I scanned the basement. Finding that jar was not going to be easy. There were boxes stacked everywhere, and in between the boxes was random junk—chairs, pipes, clothes, wood, really anything you could imagine. It was chaos and in no way organized. I walked over to the sink and found some rubber gloves. If I was going to dig around, I definitely wanted hand protection.
THE JUNK I FOUND
• Old plastic cups and lots of forks—probably hundreds! Why so many forks, I have no idea.
• A box filled with wire, string, and plastic farm animals. Weird.
• A glass jar with the word WISHES written on a pretty label. Pretty dirty—I was glad to have the gloves on.
• A small box filled with screws. Almost right, but not quite.
• A large jar filled with nails. Exactly what I needed.
It was amazing that I found the nails so fast. They weren’t a perfect match, but once I hammered them in, you could hardly tell they were smaller than the other ones.
I put the wood on the edge of the workbench and sat down and studied it. What would I think if I were seeing it for the first time?
Would I like it? Was it cheesy?
Yes. No.
Was it fun?
Yes.
Would Lucy like it?
I knew the answer to that. She’d love it. I could send it as a surprise, instead of a postcard. Maybe she’d hang it up in her cabin, near her bed or something. I smiled. These were happy thoughts, but they didn’t last.
It’s not always easy to be in control of your thinking. Sometimes even when you are having fun, your brain can still mess things up. There I was, happy one second, and the next, completely sad. It was like being struck by lightning. You can’t ignore lightning, and mine was a bolt of worry.
With Lucy gone, how would I recognize people?
It’s not easy to overcome a weird problem, but Lucy had helped me do it. If I didn’t know someone, she’d quickly whisper a name or say, “Don’t worry—we don’t know them.” It had worked perfectly, and with her there, I’d almost forgotten I wasn’t the same as everyone else. But now things were going to be different. And this kind of different was not going to be good.
I could have sat there for hours feeling sorry for myself, but I didn’t. Maybe it was because “worry” and “wishes” both start with w, or maybe it was just because I was desperate, but whatever the reason, I got up, put the gloves back on, and went to find the jar with the word “wishes” written on the side of it. It was my new hope, and suddenly I wanted to believe in magic.