The Danger Box Read online

  I put down things other people don’t have to think about. Like ~Get Up, ~Get Dressed, ~Make Bed, and all that kind of stuff. When something gets done, I like to cross it off that instant, no matter where I am.

  Before lists, I got stuck all the time. If I knew I was supposed to do something, sometimes I just couldn’t do it. Instead I pressed on my eyebrows over and over, tapped my chin a million times, or squeezed my elbows. When I was real young I screamed if my grandparents tried to stop me.

  Then my grandma realized that I just needed something special, something that was mine to do, before the necessary thing like going to school. She tried to help me figure out a routine, like stretching my arms and legs every morning before I got out of bed, but that didn’t work too well — was it my left leg then right, or the other way around? Soon I was pinching each toe before I could put on my socks and then waving my glasses in a circle around each ear before putting them on. And if the circles weren’t perfect, I had to keep waving until they were.

  Things were starting to get pretty busy.

  And then Gam fixed it. “Lists!” she exclaimed one day. “I’d be lost without them. Hodilly-hum.” That’s her way of saying Amen, Thank Goodness, and That’s the Way It Is. She went right out and got me my first list notebook, a small one from the Three Oaks Pharmacy.

  My grandpa and grandma aren’t like me. They’re more like sheets drying outside on a breezy day — they change directions without any fuss. But me, if I was a sheet and the wind blew me, I’d never stop flapping.

  My grandparents learned a long time ago that even the smallest changes can make me jittery-splat, as we call it. That’s when my stomach starts jumping around like crazy and the rest of me gets stuck, usually tapping. When I was little, they had to warn me before Gumps got a new pair of boots, or before Gam cut my sandwiches in half instead of in triangles, or before they bought me a new pair of pants. They still try to warn me about everything new. At least, everything they can see coming.

  I want to live with them forever.

  AS PLAYER FOUR left the men’s room in a roadside bar in Flint, Michigan, he heard someone say the name of the estate. His destination. The last item on the checklist.

  “What in heck —?” he muttered, sinking down on a bar stool. He looked up at the only person talking in the room, the TV newscaster.

  And there it was: the famous main entrance, the grand front gates decorated not with lions but with gilded 1964 Mustang cars. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  The owner of this famous home, Mr. Zip, had died. Heart condition. The announcer was just saying with a smile that he had been one of the wealthiest automobile manufacturers in the United States, a man without surviving family. A famous loner. Who would inherit his millions?

  The man listening slapped the bar with one hand.

  I LOOK DIFFERENT to other people from the way I see myself in a mirror, and they look different to me. We don’t see the same. I’m not one hundred percent blind, but my eyes have what’s called Pathological Myopia, and I’m legally blind. My grandparents call it a good thing that we can say it, because it gets me lots of help for free.

  Stick your finger straight out from the tip of your nose: That’s how far I can focus clearly. To see farther, I have to put on my glasses, which are heavy. The lenses are about as thick as a homemade oatmeal cookie, and the frames are brown. With glasses, you can see my whole eye and I guess it looks far away, like it’s maybe in the next room. That’s called an Optical Illusion. From my side, the glasses let me see exactly an arm’s length in front of my face, but the stuff on the edges looks bendy even if it’s straight. When I’m older, my grandma says I can get glasses that work like a telescope, and maybe even contact lenses. She says that by then they’ll have more inventions for people like me.

  I mostly take off my glasses to read and see anything else up close. They have a stretchy purple cord so they can hang around my neck and not get lost. When I’m looking at something like words, I move my head back and forth, back and forth. My face is often so close to things that I notice smells other people don’t, like the delicious scent in the binding of a new book. Gam says I’m the family hound. That’s because of my determination — once I start on something I never want to stop — and my expert nose.

  I’m shorter than other kids my age, and I have thick hair that grows north, south, east, and west, even after a buzz cut. Gumps, who doesn’t have much hair, says I’m lucky to have it.

  I have veins that don’t look blue through the skin on my hands, and I don’t get sunburned like my grandparents do. We all think I have more practical skin than the other Chamberlains. When we look at pictures of Buckeye, the three of us think I have his exact same chin and toes. And the curly smile he had when he was a little boy. At home there’s a framed picture of him in a cowboy outfit on Elm Street, holding a huge lollipop. He looks like a kid who might be my friend but of course that’s impossible. If we were on a big family list, he’d be on one line and I’d be on another much later on, because we’re divided by a ton of crossed-off years in between.

  When I learned how to walk, before they knew I had Pathological Myopia, I fell a lot and crashed off stairs and curbs. I broke an arm and a bunch of fingers. Then I got my first glasses and that helped lots. But I can’t ride a bike down the street or play ball, at least with anything smaller than a beach ball. Besides, when you have my kind of eyes you’re not supposed to do rough sports or smack your head — a huge jolt could make your sight even worse.

  Gumps set up an awesome bike that stays out on the screen porch at the back of the house. It’s stuck on a heavy base so it doesn’t go anywhere, but it has gears, brakes, and an adjustable seat. It even has a bell. I can use it all year, even in the coldest weather, and when I ride on windy days it feels like I’m speeding along. I think it’s better than a regular bike, because you can’t slip on leaves or ice and you don’t have to worry about cars.

  One day I was reading a book about how bodies are put together, and how each human has a unique combination of traits. I like that word, traits. Suddenly I got an amazing idea, and here it is: I don’t know how anyone else sees the world, and no one else knows exactly how I see the world! We each see in our own, unique way. There isn’t a Right or a Wrong, and that’s how it’s meant to be. Maybe this means that it’s fair getting any kind of vision you happen to get. If you can see More, it isn’t always Better. Just different.

  Who knows, I might see more detail up close than other people do. Maybe they miss a lot because they’re so busy looking far away. I know that a piece of bread has tiny bowls in it and a hand has lines like the rivers on a map. Paper in a book isn’t smooth — it has marks that remind me of footprints on gravel. And if you lie on your stomach in the grass, you’ll be shocked at everything going on; it’s truly a jungle.

  I’ll bet most people don’t know how interesting everyday stuff is if you look closely. The only reason I do is my different kind of seeing.

  GAM SAYS SHE can’t think without sorting. She calls me her Number One tidier and helper.

  I reorganized the kitchen so that most things with corners (cereal boxes, crackers, breadboard, tea bags) are in one area, and all the round things (juice glasses, salt and pepper shakers, spice bottles, pots and frying pans) are in another. Things with corners are harder to figure out than things that are round.

  My grandma leaves a fresh stack of my notebooks on the kitchen counter near the place mats and a handful of identical purple pens in a jar near the spices. That way I’m ready for anything.

  “Lists make sense out of a mess,” Gam likes to say. She sits at the kitchen table and writes her words on a long pad with a magnet. Then she sticks it to the refrigerator. Sometimes she tears off a page and puts it in her pocket when she leaves the house.

  Her lists are shorter than mine. They’re about things she might not remember, and mine are about things I can’t forget. Here’s one of hers:

  ~Ivory Soap
<
br />   ~Seasoned Salt

  ~Rice

  ~Lard

  Here’s one of mine, the morning part:

  ~Bring Purple Pen Downstairs

  ~Have Cornflakes & Raspberries in Yellow Bowl

  ~Check for Flower Blossoms in Front

  ~Water Garden in Back

  ~Help Shake Out & Hang Laundry

  I just learned that “&” sign and love to use it. Gam calls it Efficient. She and I are both more relaxed when we get to cross off a list item by item. Sometimes I use a line; sometimes a check; sometimes an X.

  My grandma says keeping a list is like stepping on one stone and then another to get across a stream. Even if the stones are different sizes or slippery, it’s better than jumping into the stream and not knowing if it’s over your head. Sometimes lists make me think about Harold, from Harold and the Purple Crayon, a picture book that I still love.

  My copy says Buckeye Chamberlain inside, written in messy, little-kid letters. I added Zoomy Chamberlain right underneath.

  In this book, Harold draws himself into an adventure and then draws himself out of it. He concentrates hard while he’s drawing, and he makes his world do what he wants it to do.

  I wonder if he also kept lists.

  PLAYER FOUR WAS thinking. Thinking hard.

  This job had been an easy one, with the promise of excellent pay. He had no idea what was in the box, but knew it must be priceless; the instructions had been unusually hush-hush. Supposedly, no one but Mr. Zip knew all of the players and their moves. But now …

  Having ordered a burger and fries with orange soda, the player picked at his meal and tried to ignore the only other customer in the bar, a young man who had clearly had too much to drink and was babbling about having lost his job in one of the automotive plants.

  Player Four took a sip of his drink. If he kept the box, would anyone miss it? Would someone come after him? Why would Mr. Zip have gone to all the trouble if this weren’t the treasure of a lifetime?

  If he went ahead and delivered it, who knew what would happen? He might be arrested. Or he could be handing it over for no pay. But if he disappeared …

  Tempting — it was truly tempting.

  It was also a gamble.

  The drunk left first, after muttering something about survival. The player asked for his bill. He’d made a decision.

  Stepping outside minutes later, he took a deep breath of evening air. The sky was a delicious, bottomless blue — the last blue before dark. The color of a sapphire. Tonight he was a poet; he could afford to be. He might be on his way to becoming a wealthy man.

  Walking happily toward the parking lot behind the building, he looked for the first star. He hadn’t thought of this rhyme since he was a kid:

  STAR LIGHT, STAR BRIGHT,

  FIRST STAR I SEE TONIGHT.

  I WISH I MAY, I WISH I MIGHT

  HAVE THIS WISH I WISH TONIGHT.

  He made a silent wish and chuckled to himself, shaking his head. Then, turning the corner of the building, he stopped dead. How could this be?

  He dashed back into the bar.

  “My truck!” he shouted at the bartender. “It’s gone!”

  COLORS ARE IMPORTANT, maybe because I can see them even without the shapes. Distances and spaces are complicated. As Gam explains it, everyone learns how to judge the distances between things, but most people can easily tell how deep the water is in a bathtub just by looking at it. I had to learn by putting my arm down into it. That’s when I started using the word Deep.

  When I was little, my grandparents said I thought everything was made up of Deeps — there was a Deep of sky, and a huge outside Deep of green or brown or white, depending on the seasons. I sometimes still think trees are like the stitches in one of my grandma’s old quilts, and that they hold the Deeps together. They grab the sky but also reach into the earth and hold on to that, too.

  Because of who I am and how I see, my life has many kinds of secrets, things other kids just might not know. I don’t have many out-of-family friends, not close ones, but I don’t mind. My buddies are my grandparents and some of my special things — my notebooks and the collection in the Danger Box.

  But just this summer, the friend list has changed.

  There’s Gas.

  And Lorrol.

  GAS IS HIS secret name.

  He’s no longer alive. Gas was his nickname when he was young.

  He’s the kind of friend kids dream about: never boring or mean, and not so perfect he gets you discouraged. The kind of guy who makes you believe you might get things done in the world. Like your ideas might matter, even if you’re not sure what those ideas are. Like you might even be famous one day, too.

  He’s good company even though we can’t exactly talk. He had jittery-splat moments his whole life, and he understood how a secret could be both good and bad.

  Lorrol is different. She’s still one hundred percent alive. She’s like a rare beetle, the kind with iridescent colors and pincers. Fascinating, powerful, and possibly explosive: You have to watch out. She’s not exactly predictable, but she makes things happen.

  It was Lorrol’s idea to start the Gas Gazette.

  * * *

  The Gas Gazette: Issue One

  A FREE NEWSPAPER ABOUT A MYSTERIOUS SOUL

  ~I was born before Three Oaks.

  ~My mother died when I was eight years old.

  ~I wasn’t very good at school. Here’s what I wrote about it later: “School as a means of education to me was simply a blank.”

  ~Sometimes I lied. Once I stole valuable peaches and plums from my father’s orchard and left them in a pile, then “discovered” it. No one believed me.

  ~When I was very little I remember being shut in a room for bad behavior and breaking a window. On purpose.

  ~I loved hunting when I was young. My father once said to me, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

  Who am I?

  NEXT ISSUE TO COME.

  FREE!

  * * *

  UNTIL GAS AND Lorrol, most of my experiences with other kids were not fun at all.

  Once Gam invited a boy down the street to come play. I thought we could make a baking soda volcano, which I’m really good at doing. He just wanted to jump on my bed and throw things. Then he tried on my glasses and asked if he looked like a weirdo, too. Next he made up a game: I was the mad scientist with shrunken eyes who wanted to catch him and turn him into a troll. He called me Slowpokey and Inchwormy instead of Zoomy.

  Running to the other side of my room, he kept saying, “Which finger am I sticking up?” I couldn’t see his hand. When I explained that, he started a game of hide-and-seek with something larger, a dictionary. He re-hid it over and over before I got close, saying “duh” like it was so obvious. I knew he was smiling — if someone talks and smiles at the same time, I can hear it. When his mom picked him up, I crossed the Troll off my list right away. Before they were even out the door. Gam told me that looked rude, and I was glad.

  My grandma has always said that when I’m older, I’ll be able to go to a special school just for teens who are legally blind, and it’ll be much easier to make close friends. She once told me that most people think everyone sees the world just as they do, and that’s why some kids are impatient or unkind. They can’t understand what I see any better than a bird flying overhead can understand what they see. Then she said hodilly-hum, and I hugged her extra hard.

  AT SCHOOL I stay in the Special Room. It has paper stars all over the door, and a name inside each star.

  I’m not in the regular classroom because I wouldn’t be able to see the blackboard, most of the other kids, or the teacher. This way, I don’t have to worry about what I’m missing. Kids in our school say hi to me in the hall and I always say hi back, but they move very quickly. Sometimes I’m not sure who’s speaking.

  I’m glad I have a separate place to go at school. And I feel
like one of the lucky ones; some of the kids in the Special Room have a much harder time.

  Once I brought a cicada in a jar and showed it to a girl with long, skinny braids. I thought she’d like that because she always carries a stuffed ladybug. I bumped her elbow by mistake when we were looking, and she bit my ear. Hard. The jar fell on the floor and broke and I never saw the cicada again.

  The kids in our room don’t mean to have those bad things happen, it’s more like they can’t help it. The world gets them so fizzed up, they can’t think straight.

  Most of them don’t like to talk or read much, and they’re happiest if they can do things on their own. I’ve learned to mind my own business and stay at my round table in the corner.

  That’s where I do regular school stuff with my very own teacher, Mrs. Fufty. She’s nice and looks like a twice-baked potato, the kind that puffs out of its jacket. Sometimes she brings yellow stickers with a smiley face and puts them on the back of my hand. She gives me assignments to finish when she’s not there. I also get lots of computer time, which is the absolute best thing about being at school.

  I like computers because:

  ~They don’t jump around.

  ~They never get tired of doing what you want them to do.

  ~They know more details than anyone alive.

  I’m nuts about the Search Box. All I do is type in a subject or a name, and lots of cool stuff pops up. I click on what I want to read, and that leads me to something else. Sometimes I imagine a huge tree inside the Search Box — I climb in and inch along one branch, then crawl to another, and on and on. Not that I’ve ever seen the details up in a really big tree, but I’ve seen plenty of pictures and stood next to the trunks. I know those branches are up there.