CHAPTER THREE

Kai

KAI SHOULD NOT HAVE gone to the Walgreens. Like I said, that was her second mistake. Oh, she still would have had an adventure—writing in the book guaranteed it. But it might have been a smaller adventure. Oh, well. She went, so it wasn’t.

It was five long blocks to the Walgreens pharmacy. In the gutter, Kai saw a squashed frog that had dried to leather in the Texas heat. I like to call that road jerky. A thick breeze licked at her sweaty scalp. The lawns were patched with grass so dry and brown it looked like hay.

Across the sidewalk, Kai’s flip-flops shlip-shlip-shliped after her. She was the only pedestrian in sight. Everyone else was locked up tight in their cars breathing nothing but air-conditioning, like people who were used to serious heat and didn’t want to put up a pointless fight.

She paused at the stoplight, and looked up the street, to where the black ribbon of asphalt bled against the wavy edge of the sky. It was so hot that the tar patching the cracks in the road had melted, and lay there soft as warm candle wax. When the white letters lit up, she scurried across the intersection, wisely wary. That tar would’ve grabbed her flip-flop and ripped it right off her foot. Then she’d have had to run out into traffic to try to get it back. Probably would’ve gotten run over by a Chevy Suburban, which would have made this into a very different kind of story. Much shorter.

Kai scuttled across the parking lot and onto the wide sidewalk that bordered the strip mall. There it was: the Walgreens. The air-conditioned home of Dr Pepper and Cheetos. Heaven for the kind of girl who was never let out of the house by herself, which—let me tell you—is the kind of girl she was. She even considered buying two bags of Cheetos. That’s how big this adventure was to Kai.

Two newspaper boxes stood sentry outside the double glass doors. A dog leash looped, loose and limp, around one. At the bottom, panting in the shadow of the strip mall’s roof, lay an exhausted-looking brown-and-white Chihuahua. His tiny tongue lolled from the side of his mouth, and his tan ribs rose and fell in quick time.

“Hey, cutie,” Kai said, stooping to doggie level.

“You shouldn’t pet strange dogs.”

Kai looked up. A girl with curly black hair and eight million freckles poked her head around the side of a stucco pillar. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you that?” the girl asked.

This chafed at Kai like a burlap backpack. First of all, her mother had told her that. But her mother never let her do anything. Second, this girl looked like one of the Bunnies—the pretty girls—at her school, who always thought they knew everything, but who really had brains like vacant parking lots. And third, this dog was tiny. He weighed about an ounce; how much damage could he do? Kai ignored the freckled girl and touched the tip of the dog’s ear with a single finger.

That Chihuahua burst like a firecracker! He snarled and snapped at Kai, who screamed and fell backward onto her butt. The dog barked like it was fighting off a shark attack, and a woman in a muumuu blasted out of the electronic door shouting, “Taco! Taco!”

But Taco had already lurched to the end of his leash and clamped his jaws onto the hem of Kai’s jeans.

“Get him off!” Kai screamed.

“Taco!” the woman shouted. Her giant blonde hair quivered with each screech. “Taco!”

The freckle-faced girl walked over and grabbed the dog by the scruff of the neck. She gave him a good shake until he let go. Then she handed him to the woman with the giant hair, who said, “Oh, Taco, you naughty baby,” and nuzzled him adoringly. She turned to Kai and shouted, “What’re you pestering my dog for?”

“Why did you leave your dangerous dog unattended?” the freckled girl demanded. “Taco needs a muzzle. My dad’s a lawyer—you’ll be lucky if we don’t sue. I’ll bet Taco’s done this before—hasn’t he?”

The woman with the giant hair huffed and walked off, cooing to Taco as he licked her on the neck.

Kai stood up and silently watched the woman stuff herself into a small Honda. The dog rode shotgun. Then she turned to face the girl with the freckles.

“I’m Doodle,” the girl said. “And you’re welcome.”

Kai—who had just been about to say thank you—was irritated again. Bunnies always had cutesy nicknames, and this one was no exception. “Why Doodle? Are you an artist, or something?” she demanded.

“I was born on the Fourth of July.”

Kai frowned. “Does that explain something?”

Doodle started humming “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Kai had never heard anyone hum in a way that made it sound like, “Duh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-DUH-DUH . . .”

“Oh,” Kai said, feeling even more irritated and stupid than before. “Well, yeah—thanks for saving me from that Chihuahua.”

Doodle smirked a little. She had a twitchy little mouth, and her smirks were rather comical. Everyone thought so, not just me.

“What’s so funny?”

“Do you think they have a card for that? In the drugstore—‘Thank you for saving me from that Chihuahua.’ With, like, a rose on it? Everything written out in gold letters, all scripty, and a poem inside?”

“Yeah, they probably sell a lot of them,” Kai said. “At this location, anyway. Well, see you around.” She turned toward the doors. The electronic eye sensed her movement and opened for her, blasting her with cold air.

“Hey—” Doodle called after her, “what’s your name?”

For a second, Kai was tempted to pretend that she hadn’t heard. Her mother always said she should never tell strangers her name. Then again, she thought that she’d probably never see this girl again, so who cared? “Kai!” she called, a moment before the doors closed behind her.

Doodle’s funny, twitchy mouth smiled at her through the glass.

Kai didn’t know what to think of that smile. Yet. But I was confident she would figure it out.

It was the same long walk back in the opposite direction, only—this time—Kai didn’t have air-conditioning to look forward to. She’d hung around the magazine racks until the skinny, acne-faced clerk came over and started arranging them protectively. Then Kai wandered around the aisles for a while until the same clerk started following her, eyeing her pockets suspiciously. Finally, she had to admit that it was time to go back outside.

Kai felt the air-conditioning evaporate right off her clothes the minute the electronic door opened. The air shimmered with the sound of cicadas as she started for Lavinia’s house. The good news was that the queasy feeling left over from the airplane had disappeared. Walking had helped.

She heard the argument before she saw it, but wouldn’t you know, the minute she was within spitting distance of Lavinia’s house, Kai saw a certain curly-haired, freckle-faced girl facing a smirking boy with eyes like steel. The boy was taller than Doodle, and if Kai were the type to admit it, handsome. His clothes were fashionably large and new looking, and everything about him seemed to say “I’M RICH” in all capital letters, just like that. The boy was holding something. A jar.

“Give it back, Pettyfer,” Doodle demanded. But she said it in a way that didn’t sound too hopeful. “You’ll damage it.”

“Damage it?” Pettyfer laughed, shaking the jar. “It’s already damaged. What do you want it for, anyway?” He shook it again. Kai could see that there was a bug inside.

Doodle reached for the jar, and Pettyfer yanked it away. And Kai—who never really spoke up to anyone—stepped forward and shouted, “Hey!”

Pettyfer stopped and stared at her.

Now, Kai wasn’t a big girl. She wasn’t particularly good at fighting. But she was good at planning. The kids at school thought she was weird, but they didn’t really pick on her because she had hundreds of prewritten comeback lines and always mapped out her route between classes to avoid the biggest bullies. Kai came from a big city, and she had a plan for almost everything. Her plan for people who wanted to rob her or threaten her was this: Make them think you’re dangerously crazed. So when Pettyfer looked at her, she grabbed two fistfuls of her own hair and roared, then charged directly at him, screaming, “Yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yiiiiiiiiiiiii!”

Pettyfer fell over backward, scrambled to his feet, and took off, tripping over his enormous, expensive shoes.

“Yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOOO! Blooga-blooga! Blooga-blooga!”

“Aaaaaaah!” Pettyfer screamed and picked up speed. He had to hold up his baggy jeans as he ran. In about a half a second, he had disappeared behind a neighboring house.

Panting, Kai came to a stop beside Doodle, who was staring at her, bug-eyed. Kai put her hands on her knees, bending over to suck in a deep breath. “Whoa,” Doodle said.

Kai looked up at her. “He wasn’t expecting that,” she explained.

“Nobody was expecting that,” Doodle replied. “Ever.”

“Is your butterfly okay?” Kai asked as Doodle bent over to retrieve the jar. It was made of plastic, and had only bounced when Pettyfer dropped it.

Doodle held up the jar. “It’s a moth,” she said. “And it was dead when I found it.” She shook her head. “I’d wanted to see if I could identify it, but it’s too messed up now.” She unscrewed the top and shook out the moth, which dropped to the ground just like an old piece of lint, not like something that used to live, and breathe, and fly.

“Who was that guy and why was he trying to steal your dead moth?” Kai asked. “And why were you carrying around a dead moth in the first place?”

“I’m a lepidopterist,” Doodle said.

Kai thought this over. “Is that contagious?”

Doodle didn’t exactly laugh, but her eyes squinched up as if maybe she was thinking about it. “That’s someone who studies butterflies and moths. I’m into moths, mostly.”

“Is that . . . interesting?”

“It is to me.”

“Oh.” Kai squinted at the limp form on the grass—the dead moth. She could see how moths might be interesting. To the right person. “Why was that boy trying to take it from you?”

“Because he likes to destroy stuff he doesn’t understand, which is just about everything.”

Kai nodded. She knew the type. (Don’t we all?)

“Everyone in school is afraid of him because his family’s rich.” Doodle screwed the lid back onto the jar, and she and Kai fell into step toward the sidewalk. “They own the casket factory.”

“Glamorous.”

Doodle shrugged. “They employ half the town, it seems like. And they always have clients, so . . .”

“Right.”

The girls looked at each other. Kai was beginning to think that maybe Doodle wasn’t a Bunny, after all. Bunnies are pretty on the outside, hollow on the inside, like a chocolate Easter Rabbit. But Doodle was starting to seem . . . solid.

“So—who are you? Where do you live?” Doodle asked.

“That one.” Kai pointed to the strange, stooped house that was perched way back on the lawn, as if considering its own property.

“The Quirk House?”

Kai knew that Quirk was her aunt’s last name. Still, it sounded kind of funny, now that she heard it out loud. It sounded as if the whole house was quirky, which it was. “She’s my great-aunt. Well, my great-great-grandfather’s cousin, actually. But I’m going with great-aunt.”

“Wow—I didn’t realize Lavinia had any family. Alive, I mean.” Doodle’s voice held a strange mix of surprise and relief. “I live right there, across the street.” She pointed to a small ranch house with the driest, deadest grass that Kai had ever seen. There was a single scrawny bush in the front that was so thorny it looked like it could only dream of roses.

“Guess I’ll be seeing a lot of you, then,” Kai said.

“Maybe so.” Doodle looked down at her jar. “Hey—what are you doing after dinner?”

“Nothing. Why?” Kai was hoping Doodle might want to go to the movies. Kai loved movies. She and her mom went every week.

Doodle grinned. “Want to help me catch a moth?”

When she thought about it afterward, Kai was never really sure why she said yes. Maybe it was because she and Doodle had bonded—they had each saved the other from something vicious and ridiculous. Or maybe because it was hard to pass up the idea of going hunting for something that had been extinct since 1882.

Yes, that’s right. Doodle didn’t just want to find any old moth. She wanted to find a particular moth. A moth that didn’t exist: the Celestial Moth. The last recorded sighting in Falls River, Texas, was by a woman named Edwina Pickle.

“Extirpation,” Doodle had explained.

Kai frowned. “You know a lot of . . . words.”

Kai knew a lot of words, too, but extirpation was new.

“That means it’s extinct, but just around here. You can still find them in other parts of the world.”

“So what makes you think we’ll find one here? Now?” Kai had asked.

Doodle shrugged. “Just a feeling. Stuff is going un-extinct all the time.”

“Like what?”

“Like Miller’s Grizzled Langurs.”

“That sounds like something on a fancy dinner menu. I’d like the grizzled langur in chipotle sauce, please.”

“It’s a primate. A monkey in Indonesia. Scientists thought it was extinct, and then they found some. So maybe the problem with this moth isn’t that it’s extinct. Maybe the problem is that nobody’s been looking for it.” Doodle grinned. “Nobody except me. So nobody’s gonna find it . . . except me. I’ve got a good feeling about it.”

Kai had to admit that there were probably not a lot of people out looking for this particular moth. Personally, she had never gone looking for any moths, or heard of anyone who did. So she said okay. She said that she would see Doodle later, as long as Lavinia said it was okay to go on a moth hunt.

Kai clomped up the stairs to lie down for a while before dinner, still giddy from her (very small) adventure.

Kai had never had this kind of freedom before. Her mother always acted as if the city were crawling with drug addicts and child killers, and she wouldn’t even let Kai walk to the bodega on the corner by herself.

Kai reached for her suitcase (she still hadn’t unpacked) and plopped it onto her bed. As she unzipped the top, she noticed something peeking out from beneath her pillow. It was the corner of a book. She shoved the pillow aside. Old-fashioned gold letters spelled out The Exquisite Corpse.

Weird! She didn’t remember putting it there.

She flipped it open and nearly dropped it again.

Someone had written in it. Right after Ralph T. Flabbergast was a complete fool, someone had added,

Yes, Ralph was a fool. But he didn’t know it.

You see, Ralph believed in magic. He believed in it with his whole heart. He had ever since he was a small boy, when his oma told the most magical stories of fairies and talking beasts. He loved his grandmother dearly, and cried bitterly when she died, although he was only three years old and everyone said he was too young to understand what death meant. Four years later, he still remembered the smell of her kitchen and the feeling he had whenever she told her tales.

One sultry afternoon, he shuffled down a hot city sidewalk with a nickel in his pocket. Ralph had a problem: only one nickel, and so many ways to spend it. The smell of hot pretzels wafted over to him. Jewel-colored candies smiled at him from behind a glass window. Toys and whistles, chestnuts, or a movie. It was a torment.

“Roll up, roll up, roll up, and see if you can find the ball beneath the magic shell! Winner doubles his money! How about you, young lad?” The man had a long nose and large teeth, and looked rather like a horse in a top hat. It was impossible to be suspicious of a man who looked like that.

“What’s this?” Ralph asked, so the man explained the game. There were three walnut shells and a pea. The man placed the pea under one of the shells, and then mixed them up.

“You tell me where the pea is,” the man said, “and you’re a winner! Double your money!”

Ralph watched the shells weave in and out, back and forth. It was like a dance. A slow, gentle dance. He pointed to a shell, and the man turned it over. There was the pea. This is easy! Ralph thought as he handed over his nickel for another try.

“Are you ready?” The man made the walnuts dance. Ralph watched. He pointed. There was the pea.

“A winner!” the man crowed. “Really, son, that was amazing. Most people can’t keep their eyes on the shell at all. You’re a natural, you are.”

Ralph held out his palm, but the man said, “Blasted if you don’t get another try for your nickel. Well, I’m a fool to let you do it. You’ll have another dime off of me, and no mistake. I don’t suppose you want to just walk away now?” The man took off his top hat and held it over his heart, revealing a pasty, bald scalp covered with scraggly black threads of hair.

Ralph laughed. He had never been good at anything in his life! “I think I’ll play again,” he said.

The man placed the pea beneath the center shell and made the walnuts dance. Faster and faster, like a mad jig. But Ralph kept his eyes on the shell. He knew it. He knew it. The man stopped. Ralph pointed. The man lifted the shell. The pea was gone. “Sorry, son,” the man said. “Would you like another go?”

“I don’t have any more money.”

“Ah, rough luck.”

Emotion washed over Ralph as he stood, immobile, watching the man put away his shells. I know what you’re thinking: sadness, misery, disappointment. But you’re wrong. You see, Ralph had seen something. Something that changed his life. When the man lifted the shells, the pea wasn’t under any of them.

Ralph’s world tilted on its axis. The sky tore open above him, revealing a white light.

Never mind the nickel. Never mind.

He had seen magic.

Kai flipped through more pages. They were blank.

She slammed the book shut. What the heck was that?

What the heck?

What the . . .

Lavinia wrote it, she thought. She must have! But why? To be funny?

That seemed unlikely. Lavinia didn’t seem like the kind of person for practical jokes. She seemed more like a person for practical footwear. Kai looked around the room, wondering if her mysterious great-aunt was about to jump out at her. Slowly and softly, Kai walked over to the closet. With a deep breath, she yanked it open. But the closet was empty, except for the violin case, which lay like a dusty black shadow at the bottom.

Someone sneaked in here and wrote a weird story while I was out, she thought. Or else I went crazy, wrote this myself, and then forgot all about it.

Minds are pretty creative things, aren’t they? Kai’s worked very hard to try to make sense of the story and how it got there. But it was wrong on all counts.

It’s a prank, Kai thought. A stupid prank. She shut the book and shoved it onto the closet shelf. She yanked on a sweater, commanding herself to stop thinking about the book. Don’t think about it, her mind said sternly. Think about the moth, or Doodle. Think about Lavinia.

But she couldn’t. Her mind was consumed with that book and its story for the rest of the afternoon—right up until it was time for dinner.