Counting Thyme (21 page)

AN ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN

I GUESS EMILY AND LIZZIE'S FIGHT WAS REALLY GETTING TO ME,
because I spent most of the following weekend hanging around the apartment in case Shani called, even though I knew she wouldn't. On Sunday afternoon, Dad showed up at my bedroom door. “You all right?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“You know what you need?” he said. “A good old-fashioned butt-kicking.” He held up our checkers set. “You up for a Champions Tournament?”

We settled on the living room rug to play. First checkers, which I won. Then Blokus. Mancala would be the tie-breaker if we needed it. Every once in a while, we heard laughter from Val's room. He and Mom were catching up on his schoolwork. Cori was out with her drama friends. They had a new idea, something sure to get the school's attention—
and Mom and Dad's,
I thought.

I set a Blokus piece on the game board, and Dad cleared his throat in warning. His long legs were folded underneath
him, his chin propped on one arm. He'd trimmed his beard super short, like a shadow.

“What?” I said.

“Oh, nothing.” Then he picked the exact same piece and played it on his side of the board.

“Copycat.”

He grinned. “What can I say? You learned from the best.”

“You're right. Cori is pretty good at this game.”

“Hardy-har,” Dad said just as an alarm erupted in the hall.

He frowned. “I better go see what that's all about. No cheating while I'm gone.” I rolled my eyes, and he went into the hall. But he came back right away. “Get your boots and coat on,” he ordered. Then he ran down the hall to Val's room. The alarm was still blaring in the hall.

I got ready as fast as I could. “What's wrong?” I asked when he came back with Mom and Val.

“Looks like a fire,” Dad said. He grabbed Val and stuffed his feet into his boots, while Mom threw on her coat and scarf.

“I don't want to go outside,” Val whined, but Dad just zipped his coat up anyway.

Mom ran past me to the shelves by the dining table and came back with a stack of photo albums.

Dad shook his head. “Hon—”

“Don't argue with me,” she warned. “I'm not leaving without them.”

Something tightened in my chest. “What about my jar?”

“Sorry, honey,” Dad said. He scooped Val into his arms and opened our door. There was smoke billowing into the hall.

“But, Dad—”

“Thyme.
Now,
” Mom said, and we all ran out of the apartment.

“Keep your head low!” Dad shouted as we rushed down the stairs. The alarms were so loud, I couldn't think, and my eyes burned. But I could see a little, and as we passed by Mr. Lipinsky's door, I saw smoke pouring out from under it.

On our way out of the building, firemen rushed past us, up the stairs toward Mr. Lipinsky's. There were more firemen outside on the sidewalk. And fire trucks. And police. And about a million people who had no business being there, but stared at us anyway, like we were putting on a show.

I looked down. I was still in my pajamas with the bright pink hearts and flying elephants. Of course people were staring.

I pulled my coat closed, and a fireman directed us off the sidewalk into the street, where the fire trucks had blocked off part of the road. There were other people from our building standing there, so we stood next to them and stared at the building, too.

“I'm cold,” Val complained, and Dad rubbed his arms.

Mom made an angry noise. “We forgot his hat.” Dad took off his own hat and put it on Val. Mom tucked it over Val's hearing aids. “He shouldn't be out here like this,” she said.

“What do you want me to do?” Dad said, but Mom just clutched the photo albums to her chest.

“What about all of our stuff?” I asked.

Mom frowned. “I don't know.”

Just then, a fireman came through the door, pulling Mr. Lipinsky behind him. Mr. Lipinsky was waving his arms around and yelling, but the fireman forced him over to our area.

“I have to get back in there!” Mr. Lipinsky shouted.

“Sir! You've got to calm down.”

“Don't tell me to calm down! Sylvie's still in there!”

“Sir! If you want us to save your bird, I need to get back in there. Stay here and let me do my job. You hear me?”

The fight went out of Mr. Lipinsky's body. “I didn't mean for this to happen. The oven timer didn't go off, I swear.”

The fireman let him go. “Can I trust you to stay here?”

Mr. Lipinsky's head dropped, and the fireman took off.

Mom turned to Dad. “I told you. That man is an accident waiting to happen.”

“No he's not,” I shot back.

Mom shook her head, so I turned my back to her and crossed my arms over my coat, fighting the cold that was creeping through my thin pajamas. Back home, Grandma Kay was all alone in her house. To talk to Mr. Ravelli, Mrs. Ravelli had to go to the cemetery. I thought of Lizzie and Emily tearing each other up, and I thought of Val, and how I at least had him, while Mr. Lipinsky had no one. His wife was
dead. His best friend had moved away and was never coming back.

I walked over to Mr. Lipinsky and tapped his arm. He looked at me, but he didn't say anything. It was like he wasn't there, all husk and no cob.

“Mr. Lipinsky?” I said. “It's going to be okay.”

“I don't know about that, kiddo.” He looked back at the building, his gray eyes shiny with tears.

I hoped maybe he was wrong. That there was a little luck out there for him, and for Sylvie. The firemen knew what they were doing. They had hoses and axes. Surely they could put the fire out.

The thing about fire, though, is it's not the flames that kill you. It's the smoke. That's why they make you crawl on your hands and knees during fire drills. Because high up in the air is the worst place to be during a fire. That's where all the smoke is. But birds don't know any better, even a bird as smart as Sylvie. All they can do is fly higher.

That night, long after the firemen had left, I waited until everyone else was sound asleep. Then I crept out to our landing. The hall smelled like an ashtray, and the wall above Mr. Lipinsky's door was streaked with black smears that stood out against the paint in the moonlight. I whistled extra loud, just in case, but there was no answer from apartment 3B.

THE SILENT TREATMENT

FOR THREE DAYS AFTER THE FIRE, MOM AND MRS. RAVELLI
scrubbed every inch of the apartment to get the smoky smell out. Cori kept asking to sleep over at her friend's house, but Mom said the air was safe thanks to Val's new air purifier. She'd sent Dad to buy it right away. Mrs. Ravelli believed in the power of fresh air, too. She propped the windows open for hours every time Mom and Val were gone, even though it was still completely freezing outside. January was almost over, but winter wasn't.

We washed everything that smelled, too, so I earned plenty of time slips for lugging loads of laundry up and down the stairs. I kept an eye on Mr. Lipinsky's door as I passed by, but it stayed shut no matter how hard I stomped my feet. I even wrote him a note and taped it to his door, the way he used to when he was mad at us. The note stayed there for days, until it finally disappeared.

Mom said it was for the better, and that I should leave him alone. But she was wrong. Being alone never made anything better. I wished he would just open his door and shout at me
like usual. I knew what to do with a grumpy Mr. Lipinsky, but the silent treatment was a lot harder to take.

That same week, I'd also started trying to figure out the sound for the tornado at school. We needed something that howled and scratched and whirred—something that
terrified
. I'd dug around in the prop trunk, testing different materials, but nothing had sounded right. I'd stolen the colander from our kitchen, thinking the holes would make a nice whistling sound, but Mrs. Ravelli had flipped, so I had to bring it back. As it turned out, making fake sounds for real-life things was way harder than I'd thought.

We were supposed to share our new sounds with the team at the end of every week. Jake and Davis had been working with Mrs. Smith on the sound sequence for the yellow brick road. They had the Tin Man's feet clinking (teacups) and the corn rustling (a broom), but the sounds couldn't happen at the same time or they blended together into mush.

On Friday at lunch, Mrs. Smith clapped out the beat while Davis clinked the teacups and Jake swooshed the broom in between each clink. Finally, they got the rhythm down, and with Mrs. Smith playing the piano, the whole effect sounded great. They finished and the people around us clapped, and Jake looked right at me and smiled. At the end of the day, he walked out with me, too.

“You're really good at this sound stuff,” I said, wishing I'd had more to show for a week's worth of work. The tornado sound still needed to be solved.

“Thanks.” He glanced at me from beneath his puff of hair. “I spend a lot of time on it. When my dad was working on a song, he practically lived in his music room. It had foam on the walls, and all of his guitars. He said if you want to figure out a song, you've got to give it everything you've got.”

“Well, I'm trying everything I can think of, but the tornado is impossible. And I don't think Mr. Calhoun would like it if I started living in the auditorium to work on it.”

“Maybe if you bribed him with a bow tie.”

We laughed. “What kind of music did your dad play?” I asked.

“Everything, but mainly blues. And jazz. He loved Stevie Ray Vaughan. You know him?” I shook my head. “You should look him up sometime. He covered the song I was working on. The one I played for you.” He smiled, and I could feel a hot red blush coloring my face.

“Did you play it for your mom?”

“Yeah. She loved it.”

I thumped his arm. “I told you so.”

He laughed. “What's cool is, Stevie didn't even write this song, but he played it so well, it sort of became his, too. The original was by Jimi Hendrix.”

“What's it called?”

“‘Little Wing.' It's about having something good, but knowing it could take off and fly away, like a bird.” He got quiet, and I could tell he was thinking of something else. Maybe his dad. “So I'll see you,” he said all of a sudden. Then he took off down the hall.

But when he got to the big red doors, he stopped. “Hey. Maybe I could help you with the tornado next week?” he called, and my heart lifted.

“Sure,” I called back. “That would be great.”

I woke up that Saturday excited to talk to Shani. It had been two weeks since our last call. After lunch, I propped the tablet on my pillow and got the Thyme Jar out so I was ready to talk to her. I even counted the slips early so she'd know I was on top of things again. One hundred and forty hours of time. I could hardly believe it, but other than the Christmas gift from Mom, I'd earned every single slip. Shani had to see that I was serious about coming back.

But when I called at lunchtime, she wasn't home. Her mom said she was gone for a sleepover with Jenny. That she would be gone all weekend.

“Thanks,” I said, and hung up.

I looked at the Thyme Jar, sitting at the foot of my bed, and thought of all the things I'd wanted to tell Shani—about sound production, and Jake, and the fire and Sylvie. There was so much she didn't know. I could've just e-mailed her, but it wasn't the same as talking face-to-face. Her mom said she'd have Shani call as soon as possible, but with the way Shani had dodged our call, I was pretty sure Mr. Lipinsky wasn't the only one giving me the silent treatment.