Is Anybody There?
Authors: Eve Bunting
Is Anybody There?
BY EVE BUNTING
For my father,
Sloan E. Bolton.
Thanks.
CHAPTER
1
It was the week before Christmas when I first got the idea that someone was watching our house.
My name is Marcus Mullen. I’m thirteen years old, and I don’t usually wimp out over just nothing. What made my creepy, crawly, eyes-on-the-back-of-my-neck feeling so silly was that it was morning. I mean, it wasn’t even a dark and stormy night. The sun was shining and I was standing at the end of our driveway waiting for my friend, Robbie, to come by so we could walk to school together, the way we always do. The sky was a deep, calm blue. The thermometer on the porch said 76 degrees, typical for December 20 in Southern California. Mom had left for work already. I’d made sure the house was safely locked, and my key
hidden where I always hide it, on a nub of the oak tree by the back door.
In other words, it was an ordinary morning. So why was I getting this weird feeling? I began an off-key whistle and turned a slow 360 degrees. The tall oleander hedge that grows between our house and the house next door where Miss Sarah and Miss Coriander Clark live was atwitter with small, busy birds. At the end of our driveway is the upstairs apartment, which Nick, our tenant, rents. I’d seen him leave for work already in his little green Dodge. Nick teaches phys. ed. and coaches football at La Costa High. His door was dosed, his miniblinds tightly shut. I get bad vibes even thinking about Nick and the way he and my mom have started moon gazing at each other, so I let myself look past his apartment, skimming over our house to the neighbor’s roof on the other side. The roof is all you can see from here because of the oak tree and the thick shrubbery that Nick says he’s going to thin out one of these days. He takes care of the garden as part of his rent. I turned some more. On the other side of the street the Dellarosa house stood quietly in the
sun. Nobody was watching me from there. Not even their old dog, Patchin, was in sight.
I stopped whistling. Of course nobody was watching me. I gave my shoulders a little shake and began jogging in place. Then I saw Robbie coming around the corner from Sherwood, where he lives, and I rushed to meet him. I didn’t say anything about the creepies I’d had while I waited. What was there to say, anyway? Actually, I almost forgot about my feeling. It wasn’t until later, thinking back, that I remembered it began that morning.
The last day of school before Christmas vacation is always great. I decided not to spoil it worrying about something that was probably all in my imagination. Ms. Hansen, our teacher, let us play a bunch of games—like Heads Up, Seven Up and Benjamin Franklin—and then she read us the end of
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.
It’s a funny story, and she’d timed it just right so we’d have the last chapter on the last day. We were getting into what Ms. Hansen calls a “meaningful discussion” about the book when the bell rang.
“Everybody go quietly now to the
cafetorium,” Ms. Hansen shouted over the din. “And please behave nicely during the performance. That means you, too, Robbie Roberts.”
Robbie rolled his eyes. “Yes, Ms. Hansen.” He turned to me. “Can you believe we’re going to have the Pacific High School Christmas Program
again
this year?” We have had the Pacific High School Program every Christmas through elementary school and even kindergarten. “If they do ‘Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ one more time, I’m going to throw up,” Robbie told me.
Anjelica Trotter nodded. “Really! Especially if that guy comes prancing out with his nose all lit up.” She groaned a great groan; Robbie and I pretended we didn’t hear.
Anjelica Trotter has become a total pain. I don’t know what her problem is. She’s always hanging around Robbie and me, especially me. She wears a ton of makeup and she has i
LOVE SOMEBODY
printed in big letters on the spine of her notebook. Every time she sees me in the halls or at the lockers, she holds up the notebook and smiles. I guess I’m supposed to figure I’m the “somebody.” It’s weird, because right up through sixth grade Anjelica
was OK. She didn’t wear makeup or anything, and I used to kind of like her, to tell the truth. I don’t like her anymore. At least, I don’t think I do.
“What kind of lipstick is that you’re wearing, Anjelica?” Robbie asked her. It was some strange stuff all right, a mixture of green and red.
“Like it?” Anjelica asked Robbie, batting her eyes at me. “It’s called ‘Color Me Christmas.’”
“It looks as if you’ve been sucking on a candy cane,” Robbie said.
“It
is
peppermint flavor,” Anjelica told me, although I wasn’t the one who’d asked.
I swear Anjelica has gotten really spaced. Robbie says it’s because her hormones are growing up too, but I think she’s flipped out. She even came to my house one day after school. I’d been working in our garage on the bike I’m making Mom for Christmas, and when I opened our front door and saw Anjelica Trotter there, I just about died.
“I found your math book on a bench in the playground,” Anjelica said. “I thought you might need it, so I brought it over.”
“Oh, thanks.” I felt my face going white. “It
would have been OK tomorrow, though. We don’t have math homework.”
“I know. I just thought you might want to study.” She’d raised her four eyebrows. I wasn’t sure four was the fashion now or if she’d made a mistake trying to darken her own.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
For some reason I was really scared of letting Anjelica into my house. “Well, it’s just …” I was half closing the door. “My mom’s not home from work and I’m not supposed to let anybody in if I don’t have permission. It’s a kind of rule. Thanks a lot though for the book.” I’d smiled a fake smile and added, “Would you like some lemonade? I could bring it out.”
“No thanks,” Anjelica huffed.
“Thanks again,” I called as she got on her bike.
It’s truly astonishing that Anjelica still seems to like me after that. Robbie says I was very impolite that day, not to mention chicken.
Anjelica was sitting beside me now at the Pacific High School Christmas Program and I
think she was wearing the same perfume that had blasted at me that day by my front door. The show was pretty good, even though there was a guy in the front row of the chorus who kept grinning down at us and stroking his skimpy mustache. I kept trying to look somewhere else. Still, the show was OK. The whole day was OK. We had turkey burritos and cranberry juice for lunch and only one class afterward, where we did hardly anything.
The minute the last bell rang everyone started shouting “Merry Christmas” and “See you next year!” which sounds a long time away but is really only a couple of weeks. Robbie and I managed to escape Anjelica, who was standing by the door holding a wizened piece of twig that she said was mistletoe. She waved it over the head of any guy she could catch, and Anjelica is pretty quick. There were an awful lot of guys with red-and-green smears on their faces. Robbie and I snuck through the gym and out the side gate.
“Are you sure you don’t want to …” Robbie began, but I squashed him with a look. I felt like one of those calves in cowboy movies that has just escaped the branding iron.
“Have you noticed how much Anjelica’s top has grown these last few days?” Robbie asked me as we walked home.
“I don’t notice anything about Anjelica Trotter,” I told him, which wasn’t true.
“I think she’s got something stuffed in there,” Robbie whispered. “She just about grew overnight.”
“Maybe that happens,” I said. “Like toe-nails. My mom’s always telling me to cut mine, and I—”
Robbie shook his head. “A top couldn’t grow that quick. Last Tuesday there was nothing. On Wednesday … Who knows how big it will be by next
year
!”
I was glad we were almost at my house. Sometimes when Robbie starts talking about girl parts he doesn’t know when to stop.
“Want to come in for a minute?” I asked.
“Naw. I’m supposed to be rushing home. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“See you.” I started walking toward the house, and suddenly I began peering this way and that. Crazy! I never get scared around here.
Nick’s car wasn’t in the driveway. Probably
he was still at school. Even though football season’s over, I’ll bet Nick still has his guys working out. He’s really gung ho. Nick must be some coach, I have to give him that. Robbie’s cousin, Jimmy, is on the team, and he says he is. This is the first time the La Costa Cougars have ever gone all the way to the championships. They were on TV and there was big, old Nick being interviewed, filling the screen, saying he’d had a bunch of fine young men to work with and they deserved all the credit. I told Mom I didn’t think that was a very original remark, and she asked me what I meant, and I said I only meant that coaches always say that and I thought Nick could have come up with something better.
“What is there to say that’s better than that?” she asked quietly, and turned away.
I squinted up at his apartment now. When Mom had advertised it last spring, Nick was the first to show. He took it right away. Who wouldn’t? The apartment is like a little tower sitting on its own at the top of a flight of stairs, like a crow’s nest or a lighthouse. I wouldn’t mind living in that apartment myself.
Nick had planted a new winter lawn in front,
green and lush. Our house looks nice too, all decorated for the holidays, although of course the Christmas lights are not turned on right now. Last weekend Mom and I put up the strings of colored balls above the porch, parallel to the roof. Nick was home, and I was surprised he didn’t come down to help. But afterward I thought maybe Mom told him that she and I have always done this together since Dad died and suggested Nick stay away. We also have a tree with lights in the living room, but we don’t hang the Christmas ornaments on it until Christmas Eve.
I took a sniff of the warm air that smelled of sun on fresh-cut grass. Who needs pine trees and cold anyway? This is Christmas.
I went around the back, dropped my blue nylon book bag by the live oak tree and ducked under for my key. It’s dim in there and you can barely see, but my hand knows its way. I felt for the little nub and found it. Then I pushed aside leaves and twigs, peering at the trunk. The nub was empty. The key was gone.
2
I came out from under the shade of the tree and my creepy feeling was back in full force. In the five years since Dad died, since Mom went back to work and I’d been a latchkey kid, I’d always been able to reach in under that tree and find my key exactly where I’d left it. What could have happened to it? Had someone taken it? Had someone been watching me this morning?
My eyes jumped all around, to the thick shrubbery on the right, to the oleander hedge on the left. I backed up against the house, turned to face the sun-warm wall, and pressed myself small against it. Was someone inside? Sweat trickled down my chest and back.
There had to be a simple explanation. Mom was home. That was it. I slid along the wall to
the back door and tried the handle. Locked. So? She would lock it from the inside. She always locks the house.
“Mom?” I called, but not very loudly, just in case she wasn’t the one.
A UPS package sat on the mat. The guy always leaves packages back here so no one can see them from the front. My aunt Charlie’s writing was on the label, and normally I would have shaken the parcel and tried to guess what she’d sent for Christmas. But this wasn’t normally. I leaned against the wall. About a million ants climbed in a black line two inches from my shoulder. I didn’t move.