FROM THE FORT
Chapter One
Evan Donnelly
I get stuck with Ricky the morning after the big storm. A tree branch the size of the Loch Ness Monster blew in through his bedroom window, so his parents need him out of the way while they get everything fixed up.
By the time I haul myself out of bed and struggle into shorts and a T-shirt, Grandma’s already feeding him breakfast downstairs in the kitchen. I take a seat on the opposite side of the round table and she pops a plate in front of me—two pieces of white bread with a little bit of butter.
“Raw toast?” I complain.
“The electricity’s out,” Grandpa supplies with a swig of orange juice. I catch the bitterness in his tone. No power equals no coffee. “You should see town. Branches in the streets. Mangled lawn furniture all over the place.”
“The one in my bedroom took out the whole window frame,” Ricky comments. He’s short and slight, with huge eyes that always make him seem super serious, whether he is or not. “The carpet’s soaked and there’s glass everywhere.”
I turn to Grandma. “When can he go home?”
She shoots me a stink eye—a look she normally reserves for my older brother, Luke. “Mrs. Molina asked this favor of me. We’re glad to have Ricky.”
Grandma works at the same law firm as Ricky’s mom—Grandma as a secretary and Mrs. Molina as a paralegal, whatever that is. The Molinas are new in town, and Grandma is being extra nice to them because she’s extra nice to everybody. It’s kind of annoying, but I guess I have no right to complain. She took in Luke and me when our parents went into rehab—and kept us when they left it without bothering to come home. That’s different, though. We’re family.
“I’ll probably be here all day,” Ricky advises me. “Mom says the glass guys are swamped. Half of Canaan has broken windows.”
I take a bite of untoasted toast and chew until it’s a tasteless paste in my mouth. The one good thing about having Hurricane Leo lay waste to your town is getting a day off school. I polish off my juice and stand up. “I’m going to track down the guys.”
“Good idea,” Grandma approves. “You can take Ricky with you.”
“He probably wants to hang out with his own friends.”
“I don’t have any friends,” Ricky admits.
“You mean you don’t have any friends yet,” I amend. “Don’t worry—you’ll make some. A day like today is the perfect chance to . . .” I wilt under Grandma’s red-hot gaze. “Fine. Tell me what I have to do and I’ll do it.”
“You know what you have to do,” she replies, her eyes speaking paragraphs.
Grandpa is oozing sympathy in my direction. He can relate. He’s been married to Grandma for over forty years. That’s a lot of time to be stationed under the supreme commander.
When I step out of the house, it’s with Ricky Molina by my side. Lucky me.
Grandpa wasn’t exaggerating about the state of the town. The streets are an obstacle course of downed branches and shingles that blew off roofs. Debris is everywhere, and power crews move from pole to pole, patching and replacing. On our block alone, three big trees have been completely uprooted from the soggy ground, flipping whole slabs of concrete from the sidewalk and curb.
The entire side of Grandma and Grandpa’s house is purple from a bombardment of wind-borne blueberries. You can actually smell the crushed fruit like somebody’s got a pie in the oven.
Ricky wrinkles his nose. “Disgusting.”
I swear I was just about to say the same thing. But hearing it from Ricky makes me offended on behalf of my grandparents’ home and blueberries, which are now my favorite fruit.
“It could have been worse,” I tell him. “We could have been pinned to our beds when a giant branch came through the window.”
He shrugs. “It didn’t hit me. I just got some cuts from the broken glass.”
I should say I’ve got nothing against Ricky. He’s not even a total stranger. He’s in some of my classes at school, although I think he’s a little younger than me—not sure how that works. But in a town like Canaan, you’ve known your boys since preschool. That’s a lot of history compared to some random kid who shows up the first week of eighth grade. I’m sure he’ll make friends eventually. I’m just not going to be one of them.
I lead him along Peacock Avenue as we pick our way around the branches and debris on the sidewalk. Some of the stuff we step over is pretty amazing—a weather vane; a smashed skylight; a baby swing; the rusty grill of a barbecue. I reach down and pick up the top half of a two-piece bathing suit, then ask, “How did this get here?”
Ricky shrugs. “Somebody hung out their laundry and it blew away. I’ll bet the bottom half is on its way to Bermuda.”
“More like Canada,” I muse, picturing the TV news projection of the path of Hurricane Leo.
Mitchell Worth and C.J. Sciutto are waiting at our meeting place by the trail that leads into the woods. Wiry, dark-haired C.J. is narrating the play-by-play of his latest “death-defier”—a skateboard drag down the railing at the front steps of the Canaan Public Library.
“. . . I’m sliding along, wind blowing through my hair, when this little old lady grabs hold of the banister like it’s a tug-of-war and starts up the stairs. Well, I can’t just plow her down, right? So I jump her and I nail it—almost.” When he’s telling a story, his mouth moves a mile a minute.
Blond Mitchell examines the scabby scrape on the whole right side of C.J.’s face. “Did it hurt?” He wants more details. Mitchell always wants more details, especially when they’re gory.
“No, it didn’t hurt,” C.J. snaps sarcastically. “It felt like landing on a feather bed.” He turns to me, his brow furrowing as he takes in my companion. “What’s with him?”
“You guys know Ricky from school,” I explain. “His mom works with my grandma.”
“Yeah, but what’s he doing here?” Mitchell probes. He’s staring at Ricky like the kid’s in a specimen jar or something. Mitchell has obsessive-compulsive disorder—OCD for short. It hits different people in different ways. In Mitchell’s case, it means he doesn’t like unexpected twists. Among other things.
“Am I late?”
The voice is distant, but it booms like thunder. Tall, athletic Jason Brax rides up, bent over the handlebars of his silver racing bike. “Sorry! I’m with my dad this week. I had to help him mop out the kitchen. We left the window open last night because we burned the chili. The smoke went out but the hurricane came in!” Everything about Jason is larger than life: His voice; his mane of windblown brown hair. Even his shoulders are broader and more adult-size than the rest of ours.
He falls silent when he sees Ricky standing with us.
“The hurricane came into my house too,” Ricky supplies. “A big branch blew through my bedroom window.”
“Ricky’s with me,” I confess. “You know, while his folks get his room fixed up.”
“But, Evan,” Jason protests, “we’re going to—you know it’s supposed to be a secret, right?”
“I can keep a secret,” Ricky promises.
“You can’t keep it, because it isn’t your secret,” Mitchell puts in with his usual flawless logic.
I sigh. “I have a feeling our secret is blown all over the woods. Just look around you. The whole town is a disaster area. Imagine what the storm did to a few tarps.”
“Maybe the trees protected it,” Jason suggests hopefully.
“Protected what?” Ricky probes.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Mitchell shoots back.
Not that I’m the world’s greatest Ricky protector, but this is working itself up to be a giant fight over nothing. “We built a fort in the woods—”
“A secret fort,” Mitchell interjects, his voice urgent, like he can stop me now.
“So that’s where we’re going,” I finish. “To check on it and see if it’s still standing.”
“It won’t be,” C.J. predicts mournfully.
“Only one way to find out,” decides Ricky. “Let’s go see.”
The chorus of protest is drowned out by the roar of an unmuffled car engine. Louder yet is the pounding bass coming from the beat-up convertible’s sound system. The fire-engine-red Mustang comes barreling down the street, swerves to avoid a fallen TV satellite dish, and screeches to a halt in front of us.
“Morning, losers,” my brother, Luke, greets us from the passenger seat.
A couple of the guys say hi to Luke, but nobody acknowledges the driver of the car, my brother’s new best friend, Jaeger Devlin.
“Gentlemen,” Jaeger greets us in his oily way, his smile oozing fake charm.
Nobody answers except Ricky, who gives him a shy, “Hey.”
Ricky’s new in town, so he probably hasn’t heard about Jaeger yet. The guy should come with warning labels about how he’s hazardous to your health. I wish my brother would stay away from him, but there’s no way I can say that to Luke. We used to be close. What choice did we have? When our parents went off the rails and our family fell apart, all we had was each other. But ever since Jaeger’s been in the picture, Luke’s been a straight-up jerk. I haven’t liked being around him much lately. Scariest of all is the look in his eyes—a little bit crazy, a little bit hunted, yet also absent and disconnected, like nobody’s home. Our parents looked like that just before they spiraled out of control and left us. If that’s starting to happen to Luke, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to handle it. That’s why I hate Jaeger—reason number seventeen. There are all kinds of reasons to hate Jaeger.
“What’s in the woods?” Jaeger asks us.
“N-nothing!” Mitchell stammers. “Why would you think we’re going in the woods?”
Without changing his bland expression to indicate any interest whatsoever, Jaeger inclines his head to indicate Ricky, who’s a few yards past us, clearly starting along the trail.
“I want to see the uprooted trees,” Ricky replies smoothly. “It’s got to be crazy in there. So many tangled root systems.”
Luke makes a face. “Sounds boring. Plenty of damage around town. That’s what we’re checking out.”
Translation: They’re poking around blown-in doors, missing windows, and broken locks, looking for things to steal. Jaeger’s all about the five-finger discount. And lately, everything Jaeger does is just great with my brother.
“Later, gentlemen.” Jaeger throws the Mustang in gear and lurches forward ten feet so his twin tailpipes are pointing at us. Then he revs the engine, spewing a cloud of thick gray exhaust that leaves us all choking. Finally, they screech off down the road.
I get a sympathetic look from the recognizable half of C.J.’s swollen face. “Dude, I know he’s your brother. But what a jerk!”
“Yeah,” Mitchell adds, brushing at his shirt as if he can wipe the smoke off. “What are you going to do about him?”
“Let’s just find our fort,” I mumble, starting along the trail after Ricky. I know from hard experience that there’s nothing you can do when someone you’re close to messes up big.
Luke knows too. He was right there with me, watching it happen.
Chapter Two
Mitchell Worth
It’s no fair that Ricky gets to come to our fort, which is supposed to be secret but isn’t anymore, because Ricky knows about it.
And I’m not the only one who thinks it isn’t right that we have to bring a tagalong to our place.
“You know, I asked you guys about twenty times if I could tell Janelle about the fort, and you said no,” Jason reminds everybody as we make our way through the woods along the trail. “So how’s it okay for this guy? No offense, Ricky.”
Evan, who’s the second-tallest of us, after Jason, ducks under a broken branch that’s hanging low. “Fort rules. Guys only.”
“There are no ‘fort rules’!” Jason complains. “We just finished the thing like three days ago!”
“Who’s Janelle?” Ricky asks.
“Romeo’s got a girlfriend,” C.J. explains.
Ricky frowns. “I don’t think I know her. Does she go to our school?”
Jason reddens a little. “She’s in the seventh grade. Which is fine!” he adds, his loud voice booming even louder. “Girls mature faster than guys do.”
“I’m technically in seventh grade too,” Ricky admits. “They bumped me up to eighth when I moved to Canaan because I went to a special magnet school for the gifted where we used to live.”
“You skipped?” I’m outraged, my tone rising to a high note. “You mean you just get to jump an entire year of school like it doesn’t even exist?”
C.J. tries to put an arm around my shoulder. “Take it easy, man—”
I shrug away from him. There’s no such thing as taking it easy when the subject is school, the central torture of my life. “I have to suffer and this new guy pops up out of nowhere, and he gets a get-out-of-jail-free card on a whole grade?”
“Only because Canaan Middle is a regular school,” Ricky reasons. “There’s another magnet school over in Freeport. If I get in, I’ll have to drop down to seventh grade again.”
Everybody stops walking and you can feel the mood change in the woods. It’s like Ricky just called our school dumb—which means we must be dumb for going there. Calling people dumb is dumb.
“Not cool, man,” C.J. scolds Ricky. “You don’t have to rub it in our faces. It’s not our fault your parents moved you from Magnetville to Stupid Town.”
“I didn’t say that!” Ricky defends himself. “I went to a magnet school. I’m applying to another one. Is that a crime?”
Well, if it isn’t, it should be. I can’t believe Evan’s grandmother is making us hang out with this magnet-headed creep. Then again, Evan’s grandmother is the scariest person I’ve ever met—next to Jaeger, I mean.
We start walking again, and nobody kills Ricky. I guess that means he’s forgiven for being a little snot—by the others (not me). As we hike deeper into the woods, I make sure to brush my elbow against the bark of every seventh tree, because seven is my lucky number. None of the other guys do that kind of stuff—it’s an OCD thing. Dr. Breckinridge says it’s my way of controlling part of my life to make up for the fact that I can’t control the important things—like how my brain works, or Mom getting laid off from her job at the DelaCraft Auto Parts factory. I can’t change the fact that now she has to work three jobs instead of one, so I get obsessed with the things I do have power over—like which trees I elbow, and what song to hum while I’m doing it. That’s assuming Dr. Breckinridge knows what he’s talking about, which he probably doesn’t. I don’t go to him anymore. Not because Dr. Breckinridge is a bad psychiatrist, but because Mom lost her health insurance when she lost her factory job, so we can’t afford it now.
I think it’s pretty rotten of Dr. Breckinridge to drop me like a hot potato, but Mom says nobody should have to do work without getting paid. So I guess I’m stuck with my problems. No big whoop. At this point, OCD doesn’t feel like a disorder; it just feels like me. But still, I hate hating school so much, because what kid has any choice about spending half his life there? I was just working my way out of that when I got dumped. I heard that sometimes old Russian space capsules fall out of orbit and hit things on the ground. I hope one of them falls on Dr. Breckinridge’s herb garden that he loves so much.
Five, six, seven—bop!
Anyway, Dr. Breckinridge didn’t even get the control part right. The farther we get into the woods, the more storm damage we see. So what am I supposed to do with the trees that are bent over by wind, or knocked down completely? Do I include those or not, huh? It’s important because if I get one wrong, the whole count is off.
I hit the next trunk too hard and scrape my elbow. It doesn’t hurt that much, but now I can’t concentrate because I’m worrying that I might need a tetanus shot. I can’t dial 9-1-1, since my phone’s busted and we can’t afford to get it fixed. I’m sure one of the guys would let me use his. Except Ricky. I wouldn’t use his phone anyway. I’d rather die of tetanus. (I have no idea what tetanus actually is, but it sounds scary.)
“We’re here,” Evan says, and everybody stops.
Ricky looks around. “I don’t see any fort.”
Evan indicates the stump of an ancient maple tree. The bark is gone and the dead wood inside is being hollowed out by an army of termites. “From this spot, we hang a left and march twenty-six paces off the main path.”
That annoys me. “How many times do I have to tell you? It can be twenty-five or twenty-seven, but never twenty-six!”
Ricky is mystified. “What’s wrong with twenty-six?”
I’m disgusted. “Didn’t they teach you anything in magnet school? Twenty-six is two times thirteen! That’s the unluckiest number!”
He stares at me. “You have triskaidekaphobia!”
“I do not! I have OCD!”
“Triskaidekaphobia means you’re afraid of the number thirteen,” he persists.
“I’m not afraid of it,” I retort. “I respect it, because I know it can kill me.”
“How about this?” C.J. suggests. “I’ll walk twenty-five paces, Evan’ll walk twenty-seven, and the fort should be halfway between us.”
“Pretending doesn’t work,” I grumble. “We all know it’s twenty-six, so it’s still bad.”
We leave the path and push through the underbrush. I’m trying so hard not to count steps that I’m practically tap dancing. The other guys are used to me, but not Ricky. He’s looking at me like I’m a clown. I’m not, you know. A lot of people have OCD—adults too, not just kids. Maybe that Russian space capsule will bounce off Dr. Breckinridge’s herb garden and land on Ricky.
Not counting is almost impossible for a guy like me. In fact, I’m almost up to a hundred and fifty when Jason groans, “Ohhhhhh!”
“Our fort!” adds Evan in true pain.
The location was a perfect, U-shaped recess in the rock, big enough for all four of us. We made the roof out of old shower curtains from C.J.’s house—a little moldy, but totally waterproof. We attached them to the rock with railroad spikes and tied the front to two skinny trees that were almost like matching pillars for our grand entrance. The walls were formed by a piece of plywood on the left and an old no trespassing sign on the right.
At least that’s what it used to look like. It doesn’t look like that anymore. It doesn’t look like much of anything. The rock formation is still there. The stones we brought in as seats have sunk into the mud from all that rain. The walls and roof are gone, blown away by the wind. A few pieces of the no trespassing sign—each about the size of a postage stamp—are scattered at the base of a nearby elm tree. Strips of tattered shower curtain flutter from branches thirty feet up.
That’s all that’s left of our fort.
“I warned you guys,” I tell them resentfully. “Twenty-six paces is asking for trouble. And now our fort is in the toilet.”
Jason shrugs. “We can rebuild it. You know, bring in a couple more shower curtains—”
C.J. shakes his head. “No good. Mom and Marcus switched to glass doors when we redid the bathroom.”
Evan sighs. “What’s the point? It’ll just blow away with the next storm.”
“Or get crushed by a Russian space capsule,” I can’t help adding. Once I get hooked on a subject, it’s very hard to put it out of my mind.
“Forget it,” C.J. decides. “This is an ex-fort.”
“Hey!” comes Ricky’s voice. “Check this out!”
In all the agony about our fort being destroyed by the storm, none of us noticed Ricky drift away. That’s because it isn’t his agony, because it isn’t his fort. Face it—it isn’t anybody’s fort anymore. Right now, our unwanted guest is about twenty feet behind us, in what probably used to be a clearing but is now covered in underbrush. He’s hacking at the ground with the heel of his sneaker. Then he drops to his knees and starts digging with his hands. What a weird kid!
Evan is the first one over there. “Will you cut it out, Ricky? If you come back covered in mud, my grandma’s going to blame me!” He glances down at the place where Ricky’s digging and squats right next to him. Suddenly, the two of them are scrabbling in the dirt together.
“Get over here, you guys!” Evan calls. “He’s found something!”
I’ve completely lost my count, so I have no idea if this is good luck or bad.
Chapter Three
Ricky Molina
Evan and I dig like crazy, clearing the mud and weeds away from the hard surface underneath.
Jason leans over and brays “What is it?” directly into my ear. The guy has no volume control. Everything comes out at eleven.
I knock on it with my fist. “It’s definitely metal. Feels like a big square plate. The runoff from the storm must have uncovered it.”
“Big deal,” yawns C.J., the one with the messed-up face. “Somebody threw away a piece of metal. Whoop-de-do.”
I keep on digging. I’m not sure why I’m being so stubborn. Maybe it’s this: Evan and his buddies have made it pretty clear that I’m about as welcome in this group as a bad stomach flu. And if this metal plate turns out to be something interesting—or even valuable—then those guys won’t be able to make me feel so useless. Okay, it’s probably just junk, but what if it isn’t? What if it’s the top of a metal box with something cool inside? Like a time capsule. Or a secret grave. For all we know, it could be a million dollars cash from some long-forgotten bank heist!
Evan is working as hard as I am, and so is that Mitchell kid—although he’s digging from a distance with a long branch.
“What’s this?” Evan asks. There’s a slot in the metal near the edge of the plate.
All at once, it comes to me—like one of those optical puzzles where you have to see the hidden image. The slot—a handle!
I stand up, fix the fingers of both hands into it, and heave with all my might. For the first couple of seconds, it won’t budge. Then, with a crunching sound, the earth and stones around the edges break away, and the trapdoor rises up on its rusty hinges with a creaking sound.
“No way!” Jason booms.
All five of us gather around, gawking into the hole.
There’s something there—an underground chamber. A metal ladder, bolted to the wall, descends into the darkness. I pull out my phone and turn on the flashlight app. The ladder stretches about twelve feet straight down to a metal floor, and—
“Is that a welcome mat?” Evan breathes, squinting into the gloom.
“Someone lives here?” Jason asks in amazement.
“I don’t think so,” I answer. “At least not anymore. I’m pretty sure the trapdoor was covered by dirt before the hurricane washed it away. Only one way to find out.” I swing a leg over the side and step down to the first rung.
“Maybe this isn’t such a great idea,” Mitchell says nervously. “There could be wild animals living down there.”
“With a welcome mat?” C.J. challenges.
“I’m going too,” Evan decides. “If anything eats Ricky, I’m better off facing it than trying to explain to my grandmother that I lost him.”
I step carefully at first, but the ladder seems sturdy. Holding my phone light in my teeth, I clamber down until I’m standing on the welcome mat. Evan scrambles after me and we stand opposite each other, frozen in time and a little bit scared.
“Hello—?” I sound like a first grader.
“Anybody get eaten yet?” Mitchell calls from above. His voice seems distant.
I brandish my phone so I can light our way. Before I can look around, Evan yanks down a heavy metal toggle switch on the wall. There’s a loud click and the whole place lights up like it’s high noon. Iclose my eyes from the sudden brightness, and when I open them again, I’m in another world.