Chapter Five
Ben
Sunday, October 1
When Ben’s mom knocked on his door Sunday morning, Ben pretended to be asleep, even after she’d peeked into his room and said, “Ben? Honey? Are you up? Because I’m leaving for church in thirty minutes, and I’d like you to go.”
Ben thought about asking if his dad was going, but that was risky. On the one hand, if his mom said no—and Ben knew there was a slightly higher than average chance that she would—then Ben could say, “I’m going to stay home with Dad” and get away with it. His parents were putting a serious emphasis on father-son time now that Ben was about to turn twelve, one year short of becoming a terrible teenager.
But if she said yes, then Ben would have no choice. His best option, he decided, was to pretend to be asleep. His mother would go downstairs, make his sister Sadie breakfast and then braid Sadie’s hair, and by the time she remembered to check on Ben again, it would be too late. A year ago she might have made him go anyway, but that was before Ben had started giving a running commentary of the service and Pastor Alamance’s sermons. “I’m trying to pray here,” his mother would hiss at him. “Prayer is highly unscientific,” Ben would whisper back, and she’d smack his knee and ignore him for the rest of church, even as he continued his critique.
As soon as he heard his mother sigh and shut the door, Ben sat up. He took his glasses off his nightstand and put them on, bringing his room into focus. Right now his plan was to stay in bed and read until his mother and Sadie left for church, after which he’d go downstairs and ask his dad to make french toast.
From outside his window came the sound of bottles crashing into a bin. He bet it was Lila Willis’s mom emptying out the recycling from the party yesterday. He still couldn’t believe his mom had made him go. Why oh why did the Yangs have to move this summer and make their house available to anyone who wanted to buy it? And if they had to move, why did someone like Lila Willis have to move in and make Ben’s life miserable?
“You’ve been invited to a party!” Ben’s mother had declared the minute he’d walked in the door on Friday afternoon. “Lila across the street is having a special and supersecret birthday party tomorrow and you’re one of the special people she’s invited!”
Ben had dropped his backpack on the foyer floor and brushed past his mother on the way to the kitchen. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Lila hates me.”
“How could she hate you?” his mother chirped. “You’re neighbors!”
His mother was always saying things like that. Half the time she made absolutely no sense at all.
“Trust me, Mom,” Ben said as he opened the fridge and searched around for something to eat. “Lila Willis does not like me. She thinks I’m a geek. Which, strictly speaking, I am. But in my opinion, being a geek is a good thing. In Lila’s opinion, it’s the worst thing in the world.”
“Then it’s up to you to change her opinion!” Ben’s mother reached around him and pulled out a bowl of grapes from the refrigerator. “Eat these, honey. Or something healthy.”
Ben took the bowl of grapes. Maybe that could be their trade-off: he would eat grapes and she would leave him alone.
But no.
“What I don’t understand is why Lila would invite you if she didn’t like you,” his mother said. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”
Sitting down at the kitchen table, Ben picked up the book he’d been reading that morning and started where he’d left off. Sometimes if he ignored his mother, she’d go back to her office upstairs, with the warning that they were not done with their discussion.
Not today, unfortunately. She sat down at the table across from him and said, “Seriously, Ben. I think it’s nice you’ve been invited to a party. You need to make some new friends now that Justin has moved.”
“Stefan is my friend,” Ben said. “What’s wrong with Stefan?”
“Nothing’s wrong with Stefan, but all you boys do is play on the computer.”
“We play Settlers of Catan and Risk,” Ben pointed out. “And sometimes we play Dungeons and Dragons.”
His mother raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, well, I’m not crazy about that.”
Ben shrugged and continued to read.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” his mother insisted. “Why would she invite you if she didn’t like you?”
This was the fascinating thing to Ben about his mother: she just couldn’t believe that someone might dislike him. The idea that many of his classmates disliked him was incomprehensible to her. Ben didn’t have the heart to explain that kids like him and Stefan were just too geeky to fit in, and even more importantly, they didn’t want to. Why would he care if Lila or that idiot Carson liked him? They had a combined IQ of three.
He could see from the look on his mom’s face that he was going to have to go to Lila’s party. There was no getting around it. “Okay, fine, I’ll go for an hour,” he said with a sigh, ignoring his mom’s victorious smile.
At four p.m. on Saturday afternoon, he’d gone across the street with a book for Book Harvest in one hand and a birthday card with a Barnes & Noble gift card in the other. He’d picked a book he’d read at least five times and wouldn’t mind reading again at the party. He hoped there was a comfortable lawn chair he could move to the corner of the yard, because that was his party plan: read for an hour and then go home.
The look on Lila’s face when she saw him told Ben everything he needed to know. Her mother had made her invite him. “Food’s over there,” she told him, pointing to a table on the deck. “Pool’s there, obviously. We’ve got extra towels.”
“I might swim later,” Ben said, which was a big fat lie. He hadn’t even brought his suit. “It’s a little chilly right now. Did you ever consider that fall is a strange time to have a pool party?”
“Whatever,” Lila said, and then ran back to the pool, yelling, “Watch out, Matt, because I’m going to get you when you’re not looking!”
Ben knew exactly where he wanted to hang out. When he and Justin Yang had been in third grade, they’d built a kingdom under the willow tree in the back corner of the yard. They’d called it Willowland, and they ruled it together, organizing their armies against the evil Lion Monster (also known as Justin’s cat, Sally, who usually avoided them as much as possible when they were occupying Willowland). By fourth grade, they’d moved inside, into the world of Minecraft, but for a while Ben was obsessed with the world they’d created. He’d even had dreams about it.
Dragging a lawn chair across the lawn, Ben was hardly aware there was a party going on behind him. Third grade was the last time he’d spent much time in Justin’s backyard, and now it was all coming back to him, how the air you breathed under the willow tree seemed different from regular air. It was cooler and fresher and somehow more alive.
This wasn’t so bad, Ben thought as he settled himself into his chair and opened his book. When he got home he’d have to text Justin, give him the update on Willowland. As far as Ben could tell, things looked pretty much the same. They’d spent most of their time constructing walls out of gravel they’d taken from the walkway out front, and though none of the walls had survived, Ben saw gravel scattered here and there around the willow’s roots. Remnants of their kingdom.
He checked his watch and saw that he had fifty-five minutes to go. No problem whatsoever. Wind howled through the night, he read in his book, carrying a scent that would change the world…
“Pretty cool place to hang out.”
Ben had to shake the story out of his head before he could even see who was speaking. Then he had to wonder what the heck Petra Wilde was doing here. She was wearing regular clothes instead of a bathing suit, so maybe she’d gotten tired of hanging out by the pool while everyone else was swimming.
“Mind if I sit down?” Petra said, waving her hand to indicate she meant to sit down on the ground. Ben shrugged. Free country.
“Why have a pool party when it’s almost October?” Petra asked once she’d settled herself on the ground. “Okay, it’s still sort of warm outside, but summer’s officially over. Why not have a Halloween party?”
Ben didn’t reply. He felt strange sitting up high when Petra was down on the ground. He also felt weird because he could see her bra strap at the edge of her shirt’s neckband. Were you supposed to say something about that, the way you were when somebody had a piece of spinach stuck in their teeth? His mom said you should, even if it was embarrassing for the person. But no way was he telling Petra anything about her bra. He started tugging at the collar of his own shirt, hoping maybe she’d get the hint.
“I wish we were doing world history instead of ancient history this year, don’t you?” Petra asked, scooping up a few pieces of gravel from the dirt. “In world history you get to study China. My dad travels to China a couple of times a year and says it’s super interesting.”
Well, that wasn’t the direction Ben had expected this conversation to take. “I read some books about the dynasties last year,” he told Petra, happy to finally have something to say. “The Shang and the Zhou and a bunch of others.”
“My dad’s obsessed with the Yuan,” Petra told him. “He’s in Beijing a lot on business, and I guess that’s where the Yuan were.”
“Yeah, that was a pretty good dynasty,” Ben said, which was possible the stupidest thing that had ever come out of his mouth. “I mean, because of Kublai Khan and everything. Do you want to sit in my chair?”
Petra smiled at him. “No, thanks. I like it down here. It reminds me of when I was little. My sister and I used to play in the dirt all the time. We made up magic fairylands, stupid stuff like that.”
Not stupid at all, Ben wanted to say. He should tell Petra about Willowland, about how on rainy days he and Justin had spent hours at the Yangs’ kitchen table, drawing maps and writing descriptions of all the characters and making family trees showing who was related to who and how. Some days Willowland seemed more real to Ben than real life did. It definitely seemed more interesting.
He almost started to say something, but then he remembered who he was talking to. Petra Wilde was one of them. One of the Muggles, as Justin would have put it. She was acting nice enough right now, but if he told her about Willowland, she’d run back to the pool and blab it to everybody. Ben didn’t care if they laughed at him about other things—being bad at sports, getting caught with a book in his lap when he was supposed to be listening to the teacher, being friends with Stefan. He didn’t care about that.
But if they made fun of Willowland, it would be like a giant coming into the kingdom and crushing it under his foot. Ben would never be able to think about it again, and he liked thinking about Willowland every once in a while. He liked pretending that it was still there, that all he would have to do to bring it back to life was rebuild all those little gravel walls. He’d even written about it in his LA journal, and Mrs. Herrera had left a comment that said, The pebble in my special collection is from the land of Sylvania, which I discovered in my backyard when I was eight. I plan to return there one day.
For a teacher, Mrs. Herrera wasn’t so bad, Ben thought now. Maybe he should bring her one of the pieces of Willowland gravel. He wondered if she’d put it in her special collection of special things.
“You don’t talk very much, do you?” Petra asked him. “If you talked more, maybe people wouldn’t think you were so—well, geeky.”
She sounded like one friend giving advice to another. She sounded like she was trying to help him.
Ben wasn’t falling for it.
“If I talked more, people would think I was even more geeky,” he told her. “Because I am. But I don’t really care what people think.”
He picked up his book and started reading.
He thought he heard Petra sigh, but he refused to look at her. When he glanced up from his book a minute later, she was walking back across the yard. Only she wasn’t walking to the pool; she was headed for the side of the house. There was a good tree for climbing in the side yard, Ben could have told her. A beech tree. He thought about going after her and showing her how to pull herself up into the branches.
But he didn’t. He turned the page. A ball of red flame sprang from his hand and flew toward the elf, fast as an arrow…
He glanced up one more time, but Petra had disappeared. He hoped she was climbing the tree. He hoped she really didn’t think magic worlds were stupid. Because they weren’t. At least the real ones weren’t.
He’d escaped Lila’s party ten minutes early, dropping off Eragon in a big box covered in wrapping paper in the foyer. “Sorry you have to leave so soon, Ben!” Lila’s mom had called after him.
“I have some friends coming over,” he’d lied as he opened the door. “But thanks for inviting me.”
She hadn’t corrected him, hadn’t insisted that Lila had wanted to invite him. She’d just said, “Come over anytime, Ben!”
He waited until he’d pulled the door closed behind him before he started laughing. Come over anytime!
The evening opened up in front of him. Maybe they’d order pizza for dinner, and then Ben and his dad could play a couple of rounds of Star Wars Battlefront, Ben’s idea of a perfect night.
He was just about to cross the street when he thought he heard someone call his name. But when he turned around, he didn’t see anyone. Still, there it was again: “Goodbye, Ben McPherson!”
It was coming from the beech tree in Justin’s—Lila’s—side yard.
He’d thought about calling goodbye back, but he didn’t.
Thinking about it now, he sort of wished he had.