CHAPTER THREE

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Henry slept for a long time. He woke because he couldn’t sleep any longer. His body was full. He picked himself up out of bed, pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt, and felt his way down the steep stairs with feet a little soft from sleep. He found his aunt in the kitchen.

“Henry!” she said, and grinned at him. She was still canning. Her hair was staggering away from her temples, and her face was tomato red above a faded green apron. An enormous black pot boiled on the stove. “We were about to send out a search-and-rescue team.” She laughed and cranked a contraption that was pulping wrinkly apples. Henry stared at the long snake of peels and cores and nastiness that was crawling out of one end. Dotty looked back at him and laughed again. “Don’t you look down on my apples, Henry York! The worms add to the flavor. Cold cereal’s on the shelf behind you if you like, and I’d think you would after coming out of hibernation. Bowl’s on the counter. Milk’s in the fridge.”

“Thanks,” Henry said, and began assembling his breakfast. He was used to milk with transparent edges, milk that looked a little blue. This milk looked more like cream. It was thick, white, and coated the cereal with film as Henry poured. In his mouth, he could feel it clinging to his tongue. His tongue didn’t mind.

Dotty dumped a bowl of pulped cores into the trash and turned around.

“Well, then, Henry York,” she said. “When you’re finished there, you can rinse out your bowl. Then, unless you want to go back to bed and sleep through another meal, you can head out to the barn. Your uncle wants to talk with you. You should have it to yourselves. The girls are off in town for a birthday.” She wiped her hands on her apron and turned back to her work.

Henry, licking his teeth, walked out of the kitchen, through mounds of boots in the mudroom, and onto the back porch. The overgrown lawn drifted downhill to the foot of the barn. Beyond the barn, flat fields stretched to the horizon, broken only by irrigation ditches and the occasional dirt road. The rest was all sky.

Henry stood and stared blankly at the landscape. At another time, it would have affected him. He would have marveled at the flatness, at the bareness, at how much space could fit into a single view. Instead, he wandered through his sleep-cobwebbed mind, trying to sort and straighten thoughts just as filmy as his teeth and tongue.

Distracted, Henry walked down to the barn. The door was a puzzle. It was a slider, and he couldn’t get the metal lever to unlatch. When he did finally succeed in jerking it up, he couldn’t persuade the big plank door to plow along its rusty runners. With a slip and a stagger, he got it in the end and walked inside, too curious about the contents of the barn to notice his rust-stained hands. It was bigger inside than he had expected. There were old plank stalls along both sides. A Weed Eater and three bicycles dangled from the beams.

“Henry? That you down there?” Uncle Frank’s voice fell through the ceiling above him. “Come on up. There’s a ladder at the end.”

Henry found the ladder, nailed to the wall and completely vertical. He stepped onto the lowest rung, a dry, dirty board, and stared up the ladder shaft—up past two levels, up to the underside of the barn’s beamed ceiling. There had been a ladder on Henry’s bunk bed, and that was as high as he’d ever climbed.

“Henry?” his uncle yelled.

“Yeah, I’m coming, Uncle Frank.”

“All the way up. I’m in the loft.”

Henry started climbing. If he fell, there would be an enormous dust cloud where he landed. Would Uncle Frank even hear him? How long would he lie there? What would he look like to Frank, from up in the loft? He shivered.

As he climbed through the second level, he glanced around. Large pink chalk clouds decorated the floor beside a hopscotch grid. He quickly scrambled up the last couple of rungs and stuck his head through the floor into the loft.

“Heya, Henry,” Uncle Frank said. He was sitting at a desk buried in stuff. “You like the climb?”

“Sure,” Henry said, breathing hard. He came the rest of the way up and stepped off the ladder.

Frank smiled. “It goes higher. Up all the way to the roost. Climb on up if you like. There’s a little door you can throw open, and a shelf that’s pretty much pigeon world. You have to be careful. It gets slick if they’ve been there recently. It’s probably the highest elevation in Kansas, not counting other barns and the silos. There’s some big ones around here.”

“Silos?” Henry asked, looking toward the roost. “Like where they store grain?”

“That’s what I mean,” Frank said. “Now, Henry, I want to tell you something. Your aunt doesn’t know about it, and I might not even tell her for a good while. But I need to spill beans to somebody, and here you are.”

“What is it?” Henry pulled his eyes down from the roost and looked at his uncle. Frank had a computer on an old buffet, a hutch full of doors and drawers. The monitor sat in the middle, surrounded by mounds of knickknacks—jumbled figurines, small vases, and tools. Henry could see a hatchet handle and a miniature Canadian flag in one pile, half a model ship in another.

Frank leaned back in his chair and curled his lips against his teeth. “I got a store on the Internet, and I sell things to people all over the world. Been doing it for almost two months now, and today I’ve struck it rich!” Frank laughed. “I’ve just sold two tumbleweeds for fifteen hundred dollars.”

“Who’d buy tumbleweed?” Henry asked. “That’s a lot of money.”

Frank grinned and put his hands behind his head. “Yes, it is. I would have been happy with ten dollars for the both of them, but some Japanese businessmen got their blood up for the weeds, fought it out with each other, and here I sit, a wealthy man. That’s seven hundred and fifty dollars a pop.”

“Wow,” Henry said. “Do you really think they’ll pay?”

“Sure they will.” He straightened and slid forward in his chair. “Are you busy with something? How about we ride into town for some ice cream and then go pickin’ money? Run in and tell your aunt we’re going. I’ll be in just after I e-mail my new client.”

 

Henry didn’t ride in the back of the truck this time. He bounced and jostled between the door and the long prong of the stick shift. He was not buckled. He had waited to be told, but now he suspected that wouldn’t happen.

Henry cranked his window down, put his arm out, and leaned his face into the wind. They were going all the way to the other side of town, his uncle had said, and so they had taken the farm roads around rather than driving straight through. Henry’s father had given him a book on city planning for Christmas, so he couldn’t help thinking of the road as a sort of beltway, a ring road. Only it’s gravel, Henry thought. And barely two lanes.

He stopped thinking about cities and watched the town of Henry slide past to his right. He was thrown against his door and bounced up to the roof as the truck failed to leap a pothole. The window handle dug into his leg, and he hit his head on something. Still, he didn’t buckle. He did, however, sneak his hand up when he thought his uncle wasn’t looking and lock his door.

Locusts were flying up in front of the truck and spinning off in its wake when Frank turned right to connect to the main road and reenter the town from the other side.

“Is that really faster?” Henry asked.

“Nope,” Frank said. “Just more fun. No point in taking a truck like this down Main Street except when we’re heading to the barbershop or closer.”

 

The two of them began with ice cream at a gas station. Then they pressed their faces on the window of the closed antique shop, squinting at stacks of wheels in the dusty darkness. The ice cream made Frank hungry, so he took Henry to a place called Lenny’s, owned by a man named Kyle, and they ate flat cheeseburgers and thick fries. In a town smaller than Henry had first imagined, they managed to dawdle away the afternoon, going from place to place for one reason or another or no reason at all. Until finally they arrived at the city park and a rummage sale run by senior citizens beneath a sagging pavilion.

As Henry climbed out of the truck, an old woman in a red vest told him to make sure to spend his money, because all of it would go toward the Fourth of July fireworks at the football field.

Henry didn’t have any money, and he wasn’t all that interested in the rummage sale. He sat down with his back to a pole.

“Hey, Henry!” Frank yelled across three rows of tables. “You got a glove?”

“A glove?” Henry blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Baseball glove,” Frank said. “You got one? ’Ope, never mind, it’s a lefty.”

Henry sat up. “I’m left-handed,” he said. “But I don’t think I want it. I don’t really like baseball.” Which is what many people say when they mean “I’m not any good.”

“Well, get on over here and try it on. Boy needs a glove.”

Henry didn’t need to try it on. If he had a glove, then someone would want to play catch, and he would have to throw. He wanted to practice before that happened. Still, he stood up and picked his way through the rows of tables until he stood in front of his uncle. The leather was dark and old. Hairline cracks stood out on the thick fingers, but the palm was shiny smooth. Henry slid his hand inside. It fit nicely.

“We’ll oil it up when we get home.” Frank took Henry’s gloved hand and held it up to his face. “Smell that leather,” he said. “Specially treated with dirt, sweat, and ten thousand catches. An old glove’s the best glove. You can’t buy history new.”


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When they left the rummage sale, Frank stowed a wide-bodied lamp and an incomplete set of encyclopedias in the back of the truck. And Henry was not only the fearful owner of a new baseball glove, but also a knife. It was a lock-blade that didn’t lock, and it felt strange in his hand. His parents had never prohibited his owning a knife, probably because it had never crossed their minds that he might get one. Henry held the blade open and touched its edge with his finger.

“Pretty dull now,” Frank said, taking his eyes off the dirt road. “But I’ll sharpen it up for you. Dotty’s got the sharpest knives I know of. Can’t tolerate a dull knife. Anybody half smart keeps their knives sharp.”

“Does she ever cut herself?”

“I’ll tell you a little secret, Henry, a secret that everybody knows. It’s the dull knife that cuts you.” Frank leaned over and slapped Henry’s knee. “You aren’t gonna slip whittling with a sharp blade. And if you did, the cut would be cleaner and easier to tend. Sharp knives are safer. Fact. I’d even recommend you not go carving anything until I get out my kit and put an edge on that blade.”

“Okay, Uncle Frank.” Henry let go of the blade, and it dropped limply back into the handle. “How come it won’t stay open?”

Frank drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Oh, somethin’ or other’s busted on the inside. I’ve had lots of knives like that. Doesn’t make much difference unless it comes open in your pocket. I’ve still got a scar from when one did that. Forgot I had it with me and slid into second base. Just press your thumb down on the side of the blade when you’ve got it open and you’ll be fine. Gets you a much stronger grip, too.”

“Okay,” Henry said. He didn’t put the knife back in his pocket.

Uncle Frank pulled the truck onto a dirt patch that straddled a ditch and faded into the field.

“Here we are, Henry. Tumbleweeds are like people. They tend to collect someplace out of the wind.”

“What?” Henry asked. Frank was already getting out of the truck.

“It’s not just people and weeds,” Frank said. “It’s everything.” He stepped down into the ditch. A trickle of water ran along the bottom and into a culvert. Tangled and muddy, tumbleweed clung to the culvert mouth and rustled around Frank’s legs as he moved. He grabbed the matted weeds, lifted them up, and threw a pile onto the gravel shoulder. The bottom of the lump dripped brown water.

“You ever wonder, Henry, how bits of dust find each other on the floor?” Frank began kicking the remaining weeds into a mound. “Some part of a blade of grass gets eaten by a cow and dropped out its back end, where it dries in the sun and gets trampled. Then some wind picks it up, and, of all the little bits of nothing much in the world, it comes in your window and lands on your floor.”

Henry watched while Frank scrambled out of the ditch and threw the tumble-blobs into the back of the truck.

“Then,” Frank continued, brushing off his hands, “that little bit of dust meets another little bit of dust, only it came off your sweater, which was cut from some sheep in New Zealand, and the two bits grab some of your hair and some other hair that you picked up on your shirt from a booth in a restaurant, and then they get kicked around until they all roll under your bed and hide in the corner.”

Frank was trying to tie down the weeds with string.

“It’s the same with people. If they’re a little lost, they get blown around until they drop into some shelter or hole or culvert.”

He snapped off the end of the twine and climbed back into the truck. Henry climbed back in beside him.

“There are holes like that in cities,” he said, “in houses—anyplace. Holes where the lost things stop.”

“Like where?” Henry asked.

Frank laughed and started the truck. “Like belly buttons. Like here. And Cleveland. Henry is on a much smaller scale, so fewer people drift here. And when they climb out, they end up pushed around until they come to rest someplace else.”

Henry watched Uncle Frank shift into gear.

“I was lost once,” Frank said, and looked over at him. “But I’m found now. I’m under the bed. I’m in the same culvert you are. Only, I don’t think you’re done tumblin’.”

Despite the string Frank had thrown across the truck bed, pairs and clusters of tumbleweed gusted away every few hundred yards as they drove home.

“That’s how rich I am,” Frank said when Henry pointed out one particularly large cluster in the road behind them. “Thousands of dollars flyin’ out of my truck and I’m not even gonna slow down. If I was half smart, I would have brought a tarp. Let’s see if I can lose all of them before our turn.”

He punched the gas. A column of dust, flying gravel, and the occasional bouncing weed followed them all the way home.

When they arrived, Frank pulled the truck into the grass and drove across the lawn, around the house, and straight up to the barn. Henry kicked his door open and walked back to where Frank stood beside the tailgate. There were four weeds tangled up in the string, hanging behind the truck. Frank’s rummage-sale lamp had lost its shade, and the box of encyclopedias had tipped over and spilled its contents against the tailgate.

“Hmm,” Uncle Frank said. Henry didn’t say anything. “Sometimes, Henry, I do wish I had a bit more of your aunt Dotty in me. Grab those weeds and throw ’em in one of the horse stalls. I’m gonna get a tarp and run back out real quick. You stay here. Don’t tell your aunt what we’ve been doin’.”

“Okay,” Henry said.

 

After dinner, Dotty and Frank went out to the front porch for the one smoke Frank was allowed per day. Henry followed the girls to their room and collapsed onto the floor. He had accepted Uncle Frank’s offer to divvy up the girls’ leftover meat loaf, and now there was more meat inside him than there had ever been in the history of his life. Probably more ketchup, too. His cousins were talking around him, but he couldn’t make his mind listen.

A population of dolls was scattered throughout the room. Some, china-skinned and delicate, stood in a line across the top of the dresser, each propped up by its own metal stand. A few others, with floppy limbs and stitched features, sprawled on beds, and one, a plastic child, lay on its side looking at Henry. One of its eyes was shut.

A little creepy, Henry thought. But then, he’d never been around a doll that hadn’t been used in primitive rituals. His parents had been bringing those back from their trips for as long as he could remember.

A bunk bed filled one side of the room, a smaller bed squatted on the other, and a big window between them looked out on the barn. The view from Henry’s room would have been nearly identical if he’d had a window.

“Why do all three of you share a room?” he asked, trying to sit up. He lay back down quickly. “This is a really big house.” He was interrupting a disagreement over whether everyone should play pirates or Monopoly. The advocate of the board game was Henrietta; of pirates, Anastasia. Penelope lay on the top bunk, unaffected, fully aware that she was the swing vote but ignoring the whole discussion. She was reading something.

“It is,” Penelope said, putting down her book. “There is another room on the first floor, but it’s Mom’s sewing room. And it’s where Dad keeps the television. I wonder if he would let us watch it tonight?”

“There are three bedrooms on this floor,” Anastasia said. She was sitting on the top bunk by Penny’s feet. “Mom and Dad’s, this one, and…”

“Grandfather’s,” Henrietta finished. She looked in Henry’s eyes. “He’s dead.”

“Really?” Henry asked. “I thought—” He stopped suddenly. He’d known his grandfather had died. He remembered his mother calling him at school. But he was remembering something else, too. Except that he couldn’t. Not quite. He could only remember that he was forgetting something. His cousins were looking at him. He blinked.

“Yeah,” he said. His face felt hot. “I knew that.”

“Grandfather’s is the best,” Penelope continued. Anastasia and Henrietta both tried to cut in, but Penelope just spoke louder. “It’s got a huge bed, because he was so tall, and the two windows right on the front of the house. Mom and Dad will take it once they get it unlocked. Dad lost the key. He thinks it’s on his desk somewhere.”

“And he won’t call the locksmith even though Mom wants him to,” Henrietta added. “Says he’s a sneak, and he’ll fix it himself.”

“The windows won’t open, either,” Penelope said.

“And there’s the attic,” Anastasia said. “Where you live. You get the whole thing. Mom says we can’t play up there anymore unless we ask.”

“Shhh,” Penelope said.

“Who locked Grandfather’s room?” Henry asked.

“Mom thinks it isn’t locked, just broken,” Penelope said. The other girls nodded. “Dad says old doors do funny things.”

“How long has it been broken?”

“Since Grandfather died,” Penelope said. “Two years ago.”

“It’s been locked for two years?” Henry asked.

Penelope nodded.

“And no one has been in there since?” Henry climbed to his feet. He opened the girls’ door and stepped onto the landing. “That’s the one, right?” He was whispering.

“Yeah,” Henrietta said.

Henry walked slowly down the landing, past Frank and Dotty’s room, and past the bathroom. The girls, all silent, watched him. The door to Grandfather’s room looked old but normal enough. The stained brass handle drooped. Henry put out his hand, then stopped. His eyes weren’t focused on what was in front of him. They were straining at an image in his head. A short old man. Was he purple? Dressed in purple? In a purple dress? A short old man in a purple robe was watching him play baseball.

“See? Watch.” Henry jumped at Henrietta’s voice in his ear. She jiggled the handle. “Now c’mon. Let’s go do something.”

“I don’t want to play Monopoly or pirates,” Anastasia said.

“Fine,” Penelope said. “Hopscotch Cannibals. I’ll even play with you kids for a bit.” She looked at Henry.

“They do it in the barn.”

“Like you’re so old,” Anastasia said. She turned to Henry. “She invented Hopscotch Cannibals.”

Penelope started down the stairs. “When I was little,” she said.

“Were you little last summer?” Henrietta asked.

The three girls disappeared as they descended. For a moment, Henry stood looking at Grandfather’s door.

“Henry?” Anastasia yelled. And Henry followed them.

 

Henry tried to play. And while he enjoyed being up in the barn and jumping around and watching the dust fly, the game was a little embarrassing. He was not above make-believe, he just usually did it by himself in his room.

So Henry left the girls, descended the ladder, and wandered over to the house and inside. He borrowed a tattered old book from Uncle Frank titled Up Periscope and climbed the flights of stairs to his room in the attic, glancing at Grandfather’s room as he went. The sun was not long down, and he sat on his bed looking out his doors, across the length of the attic, and out the round window at a few of the flickering, halfhearted, or malfunctioning streetlights in Henry, Kansas. After a while, he shut his doors, leaned back on his bed wondering what sort of book Frank had given him, and fell asleep with his light on.


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Henry jerked awake and squinted in the light. At first, he wasn’t sure why he was awake. He didn’t need to use the bathroom, his arms weren’t asleep, and he wasn’t hungry. He couldn’t have been sleeping long.

He sat up. A piece of plaster rolled down his forehead, bounced on the tip of his nose, and landed on his chest. He ran one hand through his hair, and more bits of his wall dropped onto his lap. He looked up.

Above him, two small knobs protruded from the plaster of his wall. One of the knobs was turning, very slightly. A small scraping noise grew until a final thump rained fine plaster dust down on Henry and his bed.

For a few minutes, Henry simply stared—holding his breath, breathing heavily, and then holding it again. The knobs were so perfectly still that he began to wonder if one had actually moved. He had been sleeping. He could have dreamed it.

I didn’t dream it, he told himself. They’re right there, sticking through my wall. Henry knew what was on the other side of the wall—absolutely nothing. One floor down, the girls’ window looked out over the fields, and beneath that, there was the kitchen wall, a mudroom door, and the grass that ran down to the barn.

Henry turned around and carefully poked at the knobs, then began picking chunks of plaster off the wall. Leaving a pile of dust on his blanket, he cleared out the area around both knobs and discovered a square metal door no more than eight inches wide, tarnished and stained green and brown under the dust. He leaned forward to take a closer look at the knobs themselves. His shadow wouldn’t get out of the way, so he brought his lamp over onto the bed beside him.

The knobs were in the center of the door. They were a very old and dull brass, slender—hardly knobs at all—with filthy broad skirts. Henry took one in each hand and turned them. They spun easily and silently, but nothing happened. One large arrow stuck out of each skirt. Around the left-hand knob, symbols had been inlaid into the door, and around the knob on the right, numerals. The symbols on the left began with A and ended—back beside the A—with something like a G. He didn’t recognize the others. The knob on the right was simpler. It was surrounded by letters that he knew were actually numbers: I to XXII in Roman numerals. He counted the strange alphabet on the left and found that there were nineteen letters.

Henry had never been terribly good at math, but he knew he would have to multiply nineteen by twenty-two to find out how many possible combinations there could be to open the door. But knowing what he needed to do and being able to do it were two different things. After several attempts to do the math in his head, he left his room and went as quietly as he could down his stairs, to the second-story landing, and down again. He was less careful once he was on the first floor and made his way quickly into the kitchen, where he began rooting through the junk drawer for a pencil. He found a pen and a small instruction manual for a blender. He tore the back page off and hurried upstairs.

Back in the attic, Henry ran on his toes straight to his small room and knelt on his bed. The knobs had not disappeared. He scratched out the math on his bit of paper: 22 times 19 was…418. Henry sat back and looked at the number: 418 was a lot.

“What are you doing?” a voice asked from behind him. Henrietta stood in his doorway. Her thick hair stuck out from her head and a pillow crease ran down her cheek, but her eyes were bright. “I heard you coming down the stairs.” She stepped into his room, looking past him. “What did you do to the wall?”

Henry coughed and unswallowed his Adam’s apple. “I didn’t do anything. It just cracked, and I was trying to see what was underneath the plaster.” Henry turned to the wall. “I found this little door. And it won’t open unless you know the combination, and I figured out that there are 418 possible combinations and only one of them will work, and I’m going to try all of them until I get it open.”

Henrietta knelt on the bed beside him. “What do you think’s inside?” she asked.

Henry sat quietly for a moment. “I don’t know yet,” he admitted.

“Yes, but what do you think?”

Henry searched his mind for anything that could be kept behind small, hidden doors.

“Somebody’s old things, maybe,” he said. “Socks or a pair of shoes. Some old fountain pens would be cool.”

“Oh,” Henrietta said. “I was thinking there might be a map or a book explaining how to get to a secret city. Keys to a forgotten door or something. Maybe diamonds.”

“Well,” Henry said, “I think I should start trying to get it open. I’m going to start backward. I’ll put this arrow on the last letter and then try it with all of the Roman numerals. Then I’ll do the next letter with all the Roman numerals, until I’ve done all 418.”

“Okay,” said Henrietta, and she plopped back onto the bed to watch as Henry began turning the knobs and pulling on them. “I hope it’s a map,” she added.

Henry had finished three and a half letters before she interrupted him for the first time.

“How many are left, Henry?”

Henry stopped and thought. “I’ve done 76. I can’t subtract 76 from 418 in my head, but there are more than 300 left.”

He was done with five letters when she interrupted again.

“Henry, what are those other marks on the knobs?”

“What marks?” he asked.

“Those ones,” Henrietta said, and she sat up on her knees and licked her thumbs. Henry moved out of her way and watched her rub the knobs clean. The large arrows he had been using stuck out of the knobs. When Henrietta sat back down, Henry could see three more arrows on each knob. Much smaller and on the surface of the skirts only, they divided the knobs into quarters.

“They look like compasses,” Henrietta said. “See? The big arrow is how they do north on maps, and then there’s south, east, and west. I bet there is a map in there. What else would be behind compass knobs?”

Henry didn’t answer. He slumped.

“What’s wrong?” Henrietta asked.

Henry flopped all the way back on the bed and clicked his teeth. “We’ll never get it open.”

“We won’t? Why not?” she asked. “Stop grinding your teeth. There can’t be that many left.”

“There’s way more. I don’t even know how to find out how many more. With four pointers on each knob, there could be thousands of combinations.”

“Oh,” she said. “Maybe we should go to bed. We can figure it out tomorrow.”

“Yeah. We should go to bed.” He looked at his blanket. “But first I should clean this up.”

Henrietta stood and stretched. “Just take it downstairs and shake it outside.”

Henry pulled his blanket up by its four corners and slung it over his shoulder like a sack. Then the two of them left his room and crept carefully down the stairs. They reached the girls’ room, whispered good night, and Henrietta hurried to her bunk. Henry continued downstairs to the mudroom. Stepping outside, he decided to go a little ways from the house so nobody would see plaster on the lawn. His bare feet were swallowed by the cool grass, but he didn’t notice. He was staring up at an enormous sky, heavily dusted with stars. A glaring two-thirds of a moon sat just above the horizon. He made his way down to the barn, went around the side, shook out his blanket, and sat down.

Henry had never heard of such a thing as a forgotten door. Back at school, he never would have believed such things existed. But here was different. There was something strange about here. He felt just like he had when he’d found out that kids his age don’t ride in car seats and that boys pee standing up. He remembered unpacking his bags at boarding school while his roommate watched. His roommate had asked him what the helmet was for, and Henry had suddenly had the suspicious sensation that he had been kept in the dark, that the world was off behaving in one way while he, Henry, wore a helmet. He had barely prevented himself from answering his roommate honestly. The words “It’s a helmet my mom bought me to wear in PE” were replaced with “It’s for racing. I don’t think I’ll need it here.”

Whatever was going on inside the wall in his room was much bigger than finding out that other boys didn’t have to wear helmets. If there really were forgotten doors and secret cities, and maps and books to tell you how to find them, then he needed to know. He looked around at the tall, dew-chilly grass and for a moment didn’t see grass. Instead, he saw millions of slender green blades made of sunlight and air, thick on the ground and gently blowing, tickling his now-damp feet, and all the while silently pulling life up out of the earth. Each was another kid without a helmet, a kid who knew how things were actually done.

Above him, the stars twinkled with laughter. Galaxies looked. Nudged each other. Chuckled.

“He didn’t know about secret cities,” Orion said. “His mother never told him.”

The Great Bear smiled. “Did his dad tell him about forgotten doors?”

“Never.”

“Journals?”

“Only having to do with science projects or bicycle trips.”

“Maps?”

“Mostly topographic, or the kind that shade countries in different colors based on gross national product or primary exports.”

“Nothing with ‘Here be dragons’ on the edges?”

“Never. He found a hidden cupboard with compass locks, and do you know what he thought was in it?”

“A unicorn’s horn?”

“Socks.”

“Socks?”

“Or pens.”

“Pens?”

Henry sighed. “I don’t even know how to work compass locks,” he said. He stood and started back to the house with a familiar feeling, the feeling of Now I know. The feeling that means tonight you will sneak down to the dormitory Dumpster with your helmet, a stack of nightgowns, and your therapeutic bear. The feeling of Tomorrow I will have changed.

Henry walked into the kitchen and saw his knife on the counter. He picked it up and flipped it open. The blade’s proud new edge smiled at him. Pinning it open with his thumb, he climbed through the house to his room.

 

The wind scratched its back along the side of the barn. The stars swung slowly across the roof of this world, and the grass swayed and grew, content to be the world’s carpet but still desiring to be taller.

Henry knelt on his bed upstairs and pried plaster off the wall with his knife. His thumb ached.