Which, from Poppy, was almost an apology.
She took the Queen out of her bag. The doll"s eyes were open, but as Poppy leaned her one way and then another, her eyes closed. Zach was glad to see that Poppy had reattached the Queen"s head, although it lolled slightly, like maybe Poppy had done it in a hurry and it wasn"t on exactly right. The lolling head and closed eyes combined to make the Queen look as tired as they were, which was oddly rea.s.suring. Poppy set the doll down and smoothed out her dress, then turned back to the bag. She tugged out a thin-looking coverlet, some safety pins and Band-Aids, a bar of chocolate that had gotten slightly mashed, a package of baby carrots, a bruised apple, a sweater, a pair of socks, a notebook, and one of her mermaid dolls.
"This is what I brought," she said. "To share, if you want any."
"We should take turns keeping watch," Zach said, "like we did on the bus." He took out his jar of peanut b.u.t.ter, package of crackers, oranges, and orange soda and put everything but the soda with the other supplies. Thirsty, he popped the tab on the drink. Fizzy foam bubbled up, and he quickly shifted the can over a mound of gra.s.s so the spraying liquid could spill onto the dirt. Then he took a long swig.
The bubbles. .h.i.t the back of his throat in a satisfying way.
He thought about how he"d met them both, when they were all little kids. Poppy had been riding her bike up and down the block when she saw Zach sitting on his front steps, reading a beat-up old copy of James and the Giant Peach. She stopped to tell him that she"d read the book and it was good, but not as good as The Witches, and had he read The Twits? She was the one who"d met Alice, too, picking her up at a carnival, where they"d been the only two girls who had their faces painted like Batgirl instead of fairies and cats and clowns. The first time the three of them had hung out, they"d dangled upside down from the jungle gym until the blood rushed to their heads, trying to get their brains to work better so that they"d be able to move things with the combined power of their minds.
It seemed like such a long time ago.
"Watch? For what?" Alice said, reaching out her hand for the soda. "It"s not like there are going to be marauding orcs or bears or wolves or creepy, crazy old bus riders. We"re in a tiny strip of park."
"We"ll sleep better if someone"s on watch," said Zach, glancing at the doll"s creepy, almost-sleeping face. He wanted someone making sure she didn"t wake up and move around while their eyes were closed. "Or I will, anyway."
"I can stay up," Poppy said. "How about I wake one of you in an hour?"
"Not me," said Alice, yawning.
"I"ll go second," Zach said. "Kick me if you get tired sooner."
She nodded. He finished off his orange soda in another two gulps. Alice had her enormous red coat off and was quickly layering her change of clothesa"jeans and a blue hoodie with cat ears on the hooda"on along with the gray dress she was wearing. Then she curled up like a bug under her coat, closed her eyes, and seemed to fall almost instantly into slumber.
Poppy had her thin blanket wrapped around her like a cape and was sitting with her back against the trunk of the tree, looking out at the water. Zach"s eyes had adjusted enough to the moonlight that he could see the determined set of her jaw.
On her lap was the Queen, eyes open now as though she was on watch with Poppy, staring at nothing, the bone white of the doll"s face seeming to glow in the gloom. Poppy"s hand rested absently on the thing"s chest, like she was holding it still. As Zach looked, his imagination fed him a horrible image: the Queen staggering across the uneven ground toward him, her chubby arms reaching for him. He wondered if he could convince Poppy to put the Queen back in her bag.
Poppy tilted her head, her gaze going to where he was sitting. "What?" she whispered.
He pointed to the doll, realizing he"d been staring. He kept his voice low. "This whole thing. Is it a game? Just tell me."
She narrowed her eyes. "It"s real, Zach."
"Okay," he said, too tired to fight, lying down on the open sleeping bag and pillowing his head on one arm. "Wake me when it"s my turn to be on watch."
She grunted a yes. He closed his eyes.
HE DREAMED ABOUT a big building near a river billowing smoke from its towers. And then, his dream vision swooping forward, he saw a yellow-haired girl watching as her father spun beautiful things from bone china. Teapots so thin and white that they seemed to glow from inside, covered in paper-fine china roses and lilies and leaves. Vases so fine that it seemed like a breath would shatter them, painted with dots of real gold.
Eleanor.
At the thought of her name, she seemed to turn toward him, her large black eyes widening like she was the one who saw a ghost.
His vision seemed smeared, and he was in front of a big, drafty house, welcoming a skinny and pinch-nosed woman. He knew, without knowing how, that he was looking at Eleanor"s aunt and that she"d come down from the city to take care of Eleanor after Eleanor"s mother had died six months past and it became clear that her father had no plans to remarry.
Children are dirty, her aunt said, and forbade her from playing outside. She gave her ch.o.r.es instead, making her wash the windows and sweep the floors and move the furniture around.
Children break things, her aunt said, and took away the dolls her father had made for her with spare clay, telling her they were too precious for her to keep.
The aunt displayed them, along with less successful bone china pieces Eleanor"s father brought home from the factory. There was the bone china coffeepot wound with a vine that didn"t curve quite right, resting on the sideboard in the dining room. There were sets of too-small teacups and a bowl with alligator feet that were too frightening and no one liked. There were countless vases marred by mistakes, that listed a little to one side or had gold paint that had smeared or blistered before they were fired or had three-dimensional flowers that had broken coming out of the kiln. Soon several mistakes rested on every side table, forcing Eleanor to tiptoe through the parlor to avoid breaking any.
Zach watched as Eleanor swept the floors, polished the silver, and hid things under her bed. Clothespins that she marked with ink so it seemed they had eyes. A pillowcase tied with string so it seemed like it had a neck and head. In the dark of her room at night, when her father and her aunt had gone to their beds, she took them out and played with them, whispering to herself, calling them by the same names as her old dolls.
ZACH WOKE, BLINKING, to blue sky overhead, dotted with puffs of clouds.
Sunlight filtered through the canopy of green and brown leaves, dappling the ground with bright spots and shadow. He heard a sound that reminded him of the ocean. He"d gone to stay with his grandparents one summer, after his dad left, and they"d stayed in a house by the beach. He"d woken up with the crash of the waves in his head every morning.
But this wasn"t the ocean, he knew, and a moment later he realized it wasn"t the Ohio River, either. It was the sound of the highway, of cars and trucks whooshing past the woods, that sounded like breaking surf.
Zach sat up, blinking, stretching out his stiff limbs and looking around him. Alice was asleep on the sleeping bag, wrapped in her coat, braids falling in her face, a few pieces of white fuzz or feathers dusting her skin. Poppy was asleep too, her head lolling back against the tree. She"d fallen asleep on watch, Zach realized.
Turning, he saw the Queen resting in the dirt right behind his head, far from where she"d been the night before. Her black eyes were wide open, leering down at him. Now that it was daytime, he could see that the gla.s.s...o...b.. were slightly too small for her eye sockets, leaving gaps in the corners. An ant crawled out from one of them, marching across her eye and up over her forehead into the thicket of her hair. Zach sprang up and scuttled away from her, his heart racing.
There was more of the white stuff settling on the gra.s.s. It looked almost like snow, but then he realized what he was looking at. It was the inside of the sleeping bag. Something had ripped it, cutting the fabric and pulling out the lining, and scattered that, along with all their food.
Baby carrots were tossed around in the dirt. The peanut b.u.t.ter was smeared on the bark of a nearby tree, the jar resting against a rock as if it had rolled there. Crackers were crumbled over the ground, and the chocolate bar was torn in half, pieces of gold foil scattered like confetti. He wondered who"d done this and then looked over at the doll"s empty eyes, the ant on her bone-white cheek.
As he stared a squirrel ran up to the open jar of peanut b.u.t.ter and stuck its furry body inside.
Looking back at the night before, at Poppy and Alice waking him up in the middle of the night, the story about the Queen, the walk to the bus station, and making camp in the darka"all of those things felt distant, like they"d happened to someone in a book. It didn"t seem possible that they"d spent the night in a tiny stretch of woods in a town he didn"t know.
Turning back to where the doll rested, outside the circle of Poppy"s arms, he wondered about other impossible things. Had a ghost really trashed their campsite? Was Eleanor watching him out of the Queen"s gla.s.s eyes? A chill shivered up his spine.
Out in the middle of nowhere with an angry ghost and no idea how to get to her grave.
Oh yeah, they were in trouble.
CHAPTER NINE.
ZACH WOKE ALICE BY SHAKING HER SHOULDER UNTIL she groaned and rolled over. Her braids spread out on the slashed sleeping bag and more white stuffing got caught in her hair.
"Five more minutes," she mumbled.
"Alice," he said quietly, poking her upper arm. "Something happened. Come on. Get up. You have to see this."
She opened her eyes and seemed surprised to see him there. "Where . . . ?"
"Stranded in East Rochester, Pennsylvania," Zach said with a shrug, hoping that gesture would somehow convey that he shared her feeling that everything had gotten pretty weird.
Then, as she took in the state of their campsite, she turned back to him with her brow furrowed in further puzzlement. "Who . . . ?"
He jerked his head toward Poppy and then the doll. "Do you believe in ghosts?" he asked, keeping his voice low. "Because I think I do now. For real and for sure."
"It could have been racc.o.o.ns," Alice said. Her expression grew more horrified as she looked around. "I thought one of us was supposed to stay awake. Isn"t that what you said last night?"
"Racc.o.o.ns? Really?"
Alice nodded slowly, like maybe she wasn"t so sure anymore. "Or Poppy did it. She was on watch."
"She"s not crazy," Zach said. "And she"d have to be totally crazy to do this. Anyway, I thought you believed her about the ghost."
"I did. I do. I don"t know. It was fun to play along." Alice pushed herself to her feet and walked around the woods, shivering. "This is too much. I don"t believe this. Maybe animals ransacked the camp, or maybe Poppy was mad at us for wanting to go back and was trying to convince us to keep going. Either way, it wasn"t a ghost."
"It seemed like an adventure last night, right?" Zach said, but as he said it, he realized that it still did feel like an adventurea"maybe even more than it had beforea"just not the same kind of adventure. He was scared. Little hairs were standing up along his arms, and he thought that maybe Alice was scared too. That was probably why she didn"t want to believe in ghosts anymore.
But Zach wanted them to be real, wanted that desperately.
If they were real, then maybe the world was big enough to have magic in it. And if there was magica"even bad magic, and Zach knew it was more likely that there was bad magic than any good kinda"then maybe not everyone had to have a story like his father"s, a story like the kind all the adults he knew told, one about giving up and growing bitter. He might have been embarra.s.sed to wish for magic back home, but there in the woods, it seemed possible. He looked over at the cruel, gla.s.sy eyes of the doll, so close that she could have touched his face.
Anything was better than no magic at all.
He thought about what Poppy had saida"about how if they didn"t go on the quest right then, they never would. How if they faltered, they"d never come back.
And he thought about his dream.
"I think it was Eleanor," Zach said. "Maybe her spirit"s angry that we aren"t taking this quest seriously enough. Maybe she"s mad that we got off the bus before we got to the right stop. Or maybe she"s mad that you want to go home."
"I"m sticking with the racc.o.o.n explanation," Alice said, picking up her coat and shouldering it on over her layers. "I bet Poppy got that story about Eleanor and the bones from one of her library books. I"m not trying to be mean. Poppy makes everything more interesting, but sometimes she gets carried away, you know?"
He thought about that, turning the words over in his mind. Alice was saying racc.o.o.ns, but the rest of what she said pointed to Poppy. Poppy, who"d been the last one awake and who wanted to convince them both to stay on the quest. Who might have thought it was funny to put the Queen so close to him, knowing it would freak him out. "What about the ashes? Those were real."
Alice nodded, but not in a way that was agreeing. "I keep thinking about them. Maybe she took some ash from a grill and mixed in pieces of chicken bone. It was dark when we both looked at it. People fake that kind of thing onstage all the time."
He remembered that he"d wondered the same thing the night before, about whether it was all a trick, but somewhere along the way he"d become convinced, and he didn"t want to give that feeling up. He wanted to tell Alice about his dream and insist it meant that she was wrong, but he realized it didn"t prove anything. He"d just dreamed about what Poppy described, like the way that after you see a movie, you sometimes dream yourself into it. He had no way to know if any of it was true or if it was just his brain regurgitating stuff.
Alice seemed to have lost interest anyway, unzipping the front part of Zach"s backpack and sticking her hand inside, fishing around. "Do we have anything left? Any food?"
"No," he said. "I don"t think so."
Her hand came out of his backpack, her fingers clutching a folded-up square of paper. She began to unfold it. "What"s this?" she asked, distracted by her discovery. "A note? What"s in here? Secret boy stuff?"
He knew exactly what she was holding.
"Give it to me," Zach said, grabbing for the paper.
Alice stood up, still reading, the smile sliding off her face. It was replaced with an expression of astonishment. Zach could see the scrawl of his own handwriting across the page and doodles decorating the margins. "These are the Questions Poppy gave you. You answered them. You told her you didn"t, but you did."
"I guess I did. Can I have them back now?" He stood too, starting toward her. He lunged forward to grab the note from her hand.
She danced out of his way. "But why would you answer them when you were going toa"?"
Alice never got to finish because at that moment Poppy jumped up from the sleeping bag with a shriek. She was crouching, blinking in the sunlight, her hands outstretched like she was ready to fight. It was a move of surprising awesomeness.
"Poppy?" Zach asked.
To his relief, Alice folded the note twice and shoved it into the pocket of her coat, then walked over to Poppy. They sat back down together. Zach could see that Poppy was still breathing hard.
"I dreamed that I was Eleanor. I fella"" Poppy said, pressing her hands against her face.
Zach didn"t speak for a long moment. He wondered if he was a bad person if he didn"t say anything about his dream. He wondered if Alice would think he was ridiculous if he did. The leaves overhead rustled. "I think you better look around," he said finally. "Did she seem angry? Because it looks like something trashed our camp."
Poppy stood up and dusted herself off, going over to the Queen and lifting her up. The doll"s eyes moved to half-open, which made it appear as though she was watching them, the way his cat did when she was pretending to sleep.
"You think a ghost did this?" Poppy asked finally, turning back toward them.
"I don"t," Alice said. "I think it was racc.o.o.ns. But I thought that you"d say it was a ghost."
"It"s cla.s.sic poltergeist stuff, isn"t it?" Zach asked.
"She"s not a poltergeist," Poppy said, as though Zach had suggested her brand-new box set of Doctor Who DVDs were bootlegs. "And why would she toss out our food? Ruin the only thing we"ve got to sleep on? She wants us to take her to East Liverpool. She"s not going to make it harder for us."
Zach thought he detected a note of uncertainty in her voice, though.
"Okay, whatever," he said. "You think it was racc.o.o.ns too?"
Poppy looked around and sucked in her breath. "I don"t know. What if it was Tinshoe Jones? What if he followed us?"
A shiver went up Zach"s back, ending with a twitch between his shoulder blades. He could too easily imagine that weathered, smirking face watching them from the darkness. But there was no reason for Tinshoe to have gotten off the bus, followed them, waited for them to fall asleep, then tossed around their stuff. No reason at all. They didn"t have anything he wanted. He probably thought they"d all been grabbed by aliens and gotten their faces stolen.
But Eleanor had plenty of reasons to be mad at Alice and was probably frustrated that she wasn"t already in her grave.
"Look, I want to figure out what happened as much as you do," said Alice, looking between them like she wasn"t sure which side she was on just thena"maybe neither of theirs. "But can we please please get out of here first? The woods are creepy and I have to pee and I"m hungry."
"We pa.s.sed that donut shop last night," Zach said.
Alice nodded. "Perfect. So long as they have a bathroom."
There wasn"t much to pack up, so they didn"t. The sleeping bag had been ruined along with the rest of their supplies, the long gashes making puffs of white stuffing well up with every gust of wind. The best they could do was gather up everything, roll up the wounded sleeping bag, and dump it all in one of the trash cans along the river.
No one else was there, but that didn"t mean that no one else had been.
They walked back along the highway and managed to find a spot to cross that was less crazy than jumping over the median. Then they walked quietly, heads bent against the chill air. Zach could smell the melting sugar and rising dough of the shop blocks before he could see it. By the time he got to the door, he was practically drooling.
"How much money do we all have?" Poppy asked.
"I"ve got fifteen dollars and fifty cents." Zach had started with twenty-three dollars, but the bus ticket had cost him seven fifty and it would be another seven fifty to get back. Of the fifteen fifty he had, that left him with only eight dollars he could actually spend.
"I have twenty," said Alice.