Chapter six
He gave the room a quick once over before tumbling his books down onto the bed. Then he gave it a more careful examination, like something Sherlock Holmes might have done. He didn’t close his door when he came in, sidetracked by the thought that his mother had been up to something. If he’d closed it, he wouldn’t have heard the sound. He was coming to the end of his examination when he heard it—the soft ticking.
At first, he attributed the sound to voices on the TV down the hall. Yet after a while, he realized the sound wasn’t coming from down the hall, it was coming from across the hall, from A.D.’s room. It was a faint sound, coming every few minutes or so. He strained to listen, but couldn’t make out exactly what it was. A chill snaked down his back as he remembered the strangeness he’d encountered in A.D.’s room the day before, the feeling of being watched.
Tic, tic, tic.
There it was again, a soft ticking, like dice. No. Like pencils knocking together on his brother’s desk. No, that wasn’t quite right either. The sound didn’t matter, what mattered was someone was in A.D’s room.
Dad. Dad’s home early and he’s messin’ around with somethin’ in there.
That was the comforting thought Turtle settled on. He stepped out into the corridor and began moving toward the closed door. With each step he noticed the temperature dropping. It was as if he was approaching an open freezer.
The idea that it could be something ghostly flared in his mind. That was the thought he didn’t allow to enter yesterday. Yesterday when he was putting the model back, he held it at bay, yet today, he had no choice. There were too many things pointing in that direction, and as much as he wanted it to be Dad, he knew, sure as rain, it wasn’t.
The summer that Turtle turned nine, some of the older kids in the neighborhood had started rumoring that the abandoned apartment building on Union Avenue was haunted. The building had been abandoned for less than a year and few of them said they’d even seen the ghost. A.D. insisted they go down to the vacant building and investigate. He said it would be a fun Goonies adventure, but Turtle didn’t want to go.
Turtle was afraid of ghosts. He was afraid of most things, but ghosts and monsters and darkened basements were in the top three. A.D. told him there was no such thing as ghosts. He said if the building was haunted by mean ghosts, they’d’ve hurt someone already. A.D. assured him the real reason the big kids were saying the building was haunted is they were hiding something in there, and A.D. wanted to know what it was.
Turtle admired his brother’s fearlessness, but he wasn’t born that way. Turtle was a scaredy-cat. Whenever A.D. brought up the subject of going down Union Avenue and exploring the house, by the time he’d finished his nagging, Turtle was near tears. After a few days, A. D. stopped pestering his little brother about going down there, and soon after that, the haunted house rumor ran out of steam and died. The boys never found out what, if anything, was really hidden in the abandoned building, although Turtle always believed it was a ghost.
Turtle put his ear as close to A.D.’s bedroom door as he felt safe doing. The cold was coming off the door in waves, his heart strumming in his chest like a bass fiddle. As his ear neared the door, the ticking stopped. He stood motionless, holding his breath, waiting for the sound to start up again, yet praying that it wouldn’t.
Push the door open, go inside and investigate.
The voice in Turtle’s head said something that sounded very much like something A.D. might have said.
I got better things to do, Turtle responded to the voice, like homework.
Right.
He began backing away from his brother’s bedroom door, his eyes fastened to it until he was back inside his own room with the door shut.
*
It was around midnight when the thought came to him. He’d been lying in bed for hours, too restless to sleep. At first he thought he couldn’t sleep because of all the strangeness surrounding A.D.
At dinner he’d casually mentioned the Millennium Falcon.
“Why are you bringing that up now?” his mother asked, her tone edgy, her index finger tap-tap-tapping the table as if she was tapping out Morse code.
“This afternoon I was thinking about Star Wars and…”
“That’s not dinner table talk,” Mabry said, cutting him off. She’d been about to scoop mashed potatoes from a bowl into his father’s plate, and stopped, the spoon suspended in mid-air. “If you’re going to talk like that you need to eat in your room.”
Turtle was surprised by her response. “It’s a movie, Mom,” he said in his own defense. He didn’t mind eating in his room. He would have preferred it, but wasn’t that against the rules?
“It’s not a movie we discuss around here. Ever!” she said, and went back to scooping.
Turtle looked to his father in disbelief. Stan Dawson took a passive role in holding his family together through their grief storm. He was a big, powerful man, with a complexion like dark chocolate and a disposition just as sweet. It was said Turtle inherited his beefy build from his dad. He inherited his sweetness fromhim as well.
Stan’s philosophy in this difficult time was to stay out of Mabry’s way and allow her to grieve. In time she’d come out of it, and they could be a family again. And if they incurred a casualty or two in the process, so be it. They were two years into this philosophy with no end in sight.
“This kind of talk is upsetting to your mother, Turtle. Star Wars and the Millennium Falcon are off limits. Okay?” Stan Dawson said without raising his voice.
“Okay,” Turtle replied. He should have known he wouldn’t get any support from the old man.
That was three hours ago. Now Turtle was lying in bed believing Mabry couldn’t have been the one who’d put the Millennium Falcon in his room. She didn’t even want to talk about it, Turtle thought. I bet if she’d’ve seen it in my room yesterday she’d’ve freak. But if she didn’t put it there, who did?”
Ghost.
This was the kind of question that could have kept Turtle’s mind occupied deep into the night, could have had him quaking beneath the sheets, wondering about the Millennium Falcon and the strange goings on in A.D.’s room, yet it wasn’t the thing that was keeping Turtle from falling asleep.
I don’t have her phone number. Girl’s give their boyfriends their phone numbers.
Rita was the reason he couldn’t sleep.
Turtle had come to the decision he was going to ask Rita for her phone number the next day. That would be the litmus test. If she gave it to him it would prove that Rita was his girlfriend.
But how does a guy just come out and ask a girl for her phone number? He’d never done anything like it before. He’d witnessed girls passing boys slips of folded paper with their phone numbers hastily scrawled on them. He’d been a participant in passing these notes around the room while the teacher’s back was turned.
Turtle wouldn’t pass a note. Asking Rita for her number was nobody’s business, and if he passed a note, Ansley would probably get his hands on it, and then the teasing would start.
Hey, Lard Ass, what do you want to talk to her about, Tastycakes?
He’d ask Rita himself, in person, staring into her big green eyes, but he needed a reason to ask. He didn’t want to seem stupid about it. He didn’t want to seem lame, either, and he most definitely didn’t want to seem desperate.
Teachers asked students to exchange numbers at the start of the semester in case a student was out sick and needed to call someone for homework.
“Hey, Rita, can I have your phone number?”
“Why?”
“So if I’m out sick I can call you for the assignment.”
“Don’t you have Ross’s phone number for that?”
“Well… yeah. But suppose we’re both out sick?”
Okay, that plan had an obvious hole in it. Besides, giving him her phone number to exchange homework wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement that she was his girlfriend. Turtle needed something that said she was giving him her number because she wanted him to have it.
He lay staring at the cracks road-mapping the ceiling, travelling down scenario after scenario of how to ask Rita for her number without seeming stupid, or desperate or lame, and he kept arriving at a dead end.
So I can call you and talk?
That was the best he could come up with. It was also the riskiest, because if he so blatantly laid his cards on the table with Rita, there he’d be, a sitting duck, waiting for her to blow his stupid, lame and desperate ass right out of the water.
It also happens to be true, he thought. He couldn’t think of a better way to spend evenings after supper than coming back to his room, spinning the night away with Rita on the phone.
Tic, tic, tic.
The sound he’d heard that afternoon started up again, interrupting his thoughts. It was louder this time. He knew it was louder because he could hear the ticking even though his door was closed. He also knew with certainty it was coming from A.D.’s room.
He got out of bed. He didn’t want to. He wanted to pull the covers up over his head, like he’d done so often as a child, laying there til daylight came and chased the boogeymen away.
He got out of bed for Rita. He got out of bed because she deserved a boyfriend who was fearless, like A.D., and not a coward, like him. He moved to the bedroom door. For Rita. He opened it. For Rita. The corridor was dark and silent, and maybe he hadn’t heard the ticking sound, maybe it had been his overactive imagination.
Scrunch, scrunch…
The sound was different this time. It sounded as if someone—or something—was crumpling paper. Someone was on the other side of A.D.’s door crumpling up paper.
His heart was a galloping stallion as he stepped out into the corridor. The chill was on him, radiating off of A.D’s bedroom door like a fog, so thick he could almost see it. Yet despite the chill, he was sweating. He made short, halting steps toward the door, and with each step he told himself he was putting the strangeness to rest. He’d open the door and discover his mother had left the window open, and that it wasn’t scrunching paper he was hearing, but curtains flapping against the sides of the window.
He reached the door, gripped the icy doorknob, turned and pushed the door open.
Inside the room, the Millennium Falcon box lay open on the floor, its contents spilled out onto the carpet in a hundred or so tiny pieces. A.D. was sitting on the floor amidst the pieces of the Millennium Falcon. He was wearing his Spiderman PJs, the ones he had to order special out of a catalogue because none of the local stores carried Spiderman pajamas that could fit a thirteen year-old. A.D. was looking at the instruction page that came with the Falcon, holding it up in his hands, unfolded in the air, as if he were reading a map. When the door opened, A.D. lowered the instruction sheet. It made a scrunchy, crinkling sound. A.D. smiled mischievously at his brother as if he’d been waiting for him. “Get in here, quick, and close the door!” he called in a loud, conspiratorial whisper.
Turtle closed the door, but he did not go into the room. Instead, he retreated back into his own room; his heart beating so rapidly in his chest he thought it might burst. He got back in bed and this time he did pull the covers up over his head. He lay there thinking about Rita, about how she deserved a better boyfriend than him. He lay quaking beneath the covers until morning.
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