“I’m Agnes P. Davis,” says the brown-eyed girl with pale skin and boy-short blond hair who opens the door to 914 Butler Towers when Mama and I knock.
We didn’t even have a chance to ask.
“Hi, Agnes,” says Mama. “I’m Mrs. Markham, and this is my daughter, Mattie.”
“You look my age,” Agnes says to me. “I’m eleven years, two months, and four days.”
She stares at me expectantly.
“I’m, uh . . .” I try to do some math in my head, but who can think so fast? “I’m eleven too,” I say.
“You sound like a country singer,” she says to me.
“I’m from North Carolina,” I tell her, nervous that she’ll make fun of me. Lily and Josephine told me that people up north are sometimes mean about accents. They’ll tell you you sound stupid, they said.
But Agnes P. Davis just says, “Cool!” And she grabs my hand. “Let’s play!”
None of my friends at home still play. We hang out, we talk, we do stuff. Before I have time to react, she jerks me inside her apartment. I look back at Mama with wide eyes, but she just smiles and peeks her head in, looking for the parents of Agnes P. Davis.
“Mrs. Davis? Mr. Davis? We heard some banging. . . .” I hear Mama calling as I zoom past a neatly organized living room and into a bedroom of crazy.
The first things I see are the walls. One striped, one polka-dotted, one with stars, and one with tall flowers painted on it. I cannot even list all the colors, but believe me, the rainbow is here. And when this girl said play, she meant it. There are Bratz dolls, Care Bears, and My Little Ponies all over this room. At first it looks chaotic, but when my eyes settle among the bouncing patterns, I see that all of the toys are carefully lined up on shelves and in baskets.
“Wow. This is . . . ,” I start.
“Don’t you love it?” she says, her smile taking up almost her whole face. “I’m into colors and shapes and numbers, and I think everything should have its own space and place so that the world can be an ordered collection of magic and wonder. That’s my design philosophy. What’s yours?”
“Um . . .” Agnes P. Davis makes me not able to talk. Design philosophy?
“What’s your room like?” she asks.
“Well, it’s not really set up yet, so . . .”
Zooooom. Agnes P. Davis is out of here, heading for our apartment’s open door.
I follow her, passing a bewildered Mama, who apparently can’t find the parents of our kooky neighbor.
“Agnes, honey, where’s your mama?” she asks, after we get back to our own apartment, where Agnes is standing in the smack-dab middle of my bedroom.
“She’s grocery shopping,” says Agnes.
“And your daddy?”
“In Boston.” Agnes puts one hand under her chin and tilts her head sideways as she stares at my white walls.
“Blue swirls here,” she says, turning to me. “You look like a swirly girl.”
I look to Mama to explain this hurricane that just blew into our apartment.
“Do you want to stay awhile, Agnes?” she asks.
I freeze. That’s my line. If someone is my age, I’m the one who gets to invite them over. Mama should know that. But then I remember that Agnes is already here, so maybe it doesn’t matter.
“I have to!” replies Agnes. “You closed my door, right?”
Mama nods slowly.
“It auto-locks, and I don’t have the keys with me.”
“Oh,” says Mama. “I’ll leave a note on the door for your mother, then.”
“Thanks!” Agnes smiles that big smile again. “She’ll be home by seven-oh-four p.m.”
Then she lies across my double bed, staring at the ceiling with her arms behind her head. “I think glow-in-the-dark stars will look great up there,” she says. She flops over onto her stomach. “So swirls on that wall, stars above . . . what other ideas do you have?”
Mama gives me a grin as she leaves the room, and I am alone with the craziest girl I’ve ever met.
I circle the bed slowly, unsure whether to sit down with Agnes or not. Suddenly my white-walled room feels like it’s pulsing with color.
“The kid before me had the walls painted orange,” I say, leaning down to show her the spot where I scratched away the white. “Did you know him? Or her?”
She hangs her body half off the bed, legs in the air as she twists to peek behind the comforter.
“No,” she says. “This apartment’s been empty since we got here, but I can tell that whoever it was is a big thinker. Orange is the color of misunderstood genius.”
Then she pops up. “Sorry about the banging, by the way,” she says. “From now on we’ll have a quieter signal—I’ll shine a light outside my room onto that wall.” She points to the brick in front of my window.
And before I can ask her what she means, I see her eyes lock on the windowsill. It makes me nervous, the way she stops talking when she sees what’s sitting up there.
She stands and walks over to my objects, and it’s the slowest her muscles have moved since I met her. She bends over and holds her face very close to each one—the folded paper, the fool’s gold, and the twine ring—without touching anything.
Then she straightens. She looks back at me with knowing eyes.
“Your treasures.”
I nod, and she mirrors me.
“I have some too,” she says.