The Boys Start the War

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OTHER YEARLING BOOKS
BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR
YOU WILL ENJOY

THE GIRLS GET EVEN

BOYS AGAINST GIRLS

THE GIRLS’ REVENGE

A TRAITOR AMONG THE BOYS

A SPY AMONG THE GIRLS

THE BOYS RETURN

THE GIRLS TAKE OVER

BOYS IN CONTROL

To the young readers of Buchhannon, West Virginia,
which is almost, but not quite,
the location of this story.

Contents

One:
The Aliens

Two:
Burial at Sea

Three:
Ghost

Four:
Conversation

Five:
Peace Offering

Six:
The River on Caroline

Seven:
Free-for-all

Eight:
Floating Heads

Nine:
Ransom

Ten:
Siren Song

Eleven:
Trapped

Twelve:
Letters

Thirteen:
Kidnapped

Fourteen:
Hornswoggled

Fifteen:
Bamboozled

“T
he island’s sinking!”

Wally studied the rivers of yellow that began streaming out from the middle.

“Sandbags! Sandbags!” he cried, lifting his waffle up at the edges with his fork, first one side, then the other.

If he made a little cut in each corner, the hot syrup traveled from one square to the next, but if he poured the syrup directly over the pat of butter, sitting like an island in the middle of his breakfast, the island grew smaller and smaller as the butter melted, until finally …

“They’re coming!”

The back door banged and Wally jumped. Jake and Josh came tumbling into the kitchen, followed by seven-year-old Peter.

“Who?” asked Wally.

“The new guys over in Bensons’ house!” Jake
grabbed the field glasses from the shelf where Mother kept them after she finished her bird-watching. “C’
mon
!”

Feet pounded on the stairs, and Wally knew that his brothers were headed for the trapdoor in the attic ceiling and the small balcony on top of the house—the widow’s walk, it was called—where they could see out over the whole town, practically.

He sighed, picked up his plate and fork, and went up the first flight of stairs to the bedrooms, then the second set of stairs to the attic.

He could never understand why his two older brothers were always in such a rush. Sooner or later they would find out whether the three new boys in that family were their own ages or not, so why the hurry? Wally felt that you should spend the last week of summer vacation as lazily as possible, and now he couldn’t even enjoy his waffle in peace.

Yesterday Josh had been sitting under a tree sketching Martians, or what he thought Martians would look like. Jake had been figuring out what they would all do on Halloween, and Wally and Peter had been lying in the grass, watching ants crawling in and out of a rotten apple—exactly the kinds of ways you expected to spend a summer day. Peter was the only one in the family who liked to study things the way Wally did. They both had brown hair, blue eyes, and thick, sturdy hands like their father’s, Jake and Josh, however, were string-bean skinny, with skin that tanned by the first week of June.

Jake already had the stepladder in place, and Josh climbed to the top and pushed up on the trapdoor. Blue sky shone through the square opening as a shower of pigeon droppings rained down on them. One piece landed on Wally’s waffle. One gray-white blob of digested worms and bugs. Wally stared helplessly at his plate, then set it on the floor and followed his brothers to the balcony above.

He sat down in one corner and watched as Jake inched forward on his stomach, field glasses in hand, until he was close to the railing. The wind whipped at Wally’s shirt, but it was a warm, dry wind that spelled September.

“Why are they just sitting there?” Jake wondered aloud; holding the glasses steady as he stared across the river.

Wally squinted, studying the car in the driveway of the house at the end of Island Avenue. The large piece of land in the middle of Buckman was not really an island, because water surrounded only three asides of it, but people called it “The Island” anyway. If you were coming in from the east; you entered Buckman on Island Avenue and kept going until you were out on the very tip, and then you crossed the bridge over into the business district. You might not even have noticed that the river on your right was the same as that on your left; it simply looped about at the end of the island.

“Okay, a door’s openings here they come!” said Jake.

“How old are they?” Josh asked.

Wally hoped there would be friends for each of them—an eleven-year-old for the twins, a nine-year-old for him, and a seven-year-old friend for Peter. The family that had moved out of the house on the other side of the river—who had left West Virginia to go to Georgia—had five boys of all ages, and they had been the best friends the Hatfords ever had.

“Well, say something!” demanded Peter when Jake didn’t answer. “Are they aliens or what?”

“There’s the father,” said Jake. “Now someone’s getting out one of the back doors.… A guy about twelve, I’d guess…”

“Yea!” cheered Josh.

“No, wait a minute … it’s a girl … no, a boy.…” Jake’s voice began to fade. “A girl. She just took off her cap.”

A girl! Wally and Josh stared at each other. Who said anything about girls?

Josh took the field glasses next. He sat with his elbows propped on his knees, staring across the river. “No one else is getting out…. Now the other door’s opening. It’s the mother…. Here come the rest.” He gasped. “Another girl …!”

“
Two
girls?” wailed Jake.

Wally thoughtfully bit his lip. This
was
serious! He grabbed the field glasses himself, “My turn,” he said.

At the tip of the island a man and woman stood looking up at a large old house. Wally could see a
tall girl behind them, leaning against a tree and holding a baseball cap in one hand. A smaller girl was running down to the river.

Another leg emerged from the backseat of the car. A sneakered foot, faded jeans, a knee, a thigh, and then the last member of the new family got out and stretched.

“A girl,” said Wally, disbelieving, and handed the field glasses back to Josh.

Nobody spoke for almost a minute.

“They’re aliens, all right,” said Josh.

“Three kids in one family and they’re all girls?” Jake cried incredulously. “I thought Mrs. Benson told Mom they had rented their house to a family with three boys!”

Wally tried to remember exactly. “She said she thought there were three kids—”

“And that maybe we would still have enough to play baseball….” added Josh. “I thought she meant
boys!”

Wally’s shoulders slumped. For years, ever since he could remember, the Hatford and Benson boys had got together every afternoon, rain or shine, to shoot BBs, fish, swim, play kick-the-can, camp out near Smuggler’s Cove, climb Knob Hill, explore the old coal mine, or just lie on their backs in the grass and talk.

More than that, with the five Benson boys, the Hatford brothers regularly won first place in the costume contest at Halloween. One year they had
each dressed up like some of the teachers at school; another year they had been dominoes; and a third year they chained themselves together like a prison gang. With the nine of them they had their own baseball team, and every May played a team from Grafton. They had even started their own band. Nothing would be the same again.

Wally stared out over the hills that dipped and rose like a roller coaster all around Buckman. The steeples of the United Methodist Church and the college chapel peeped up over the tops of the trees surrounding the courthouse, and the shiny horseshoe of a river curved around the island. It was a wonderful old town, but anytime he and his brothers walked over the swinging footbridge now, they would find three girls in the last house on Island Avenue, not the friends they had known all their lives.

“We just figured it would be a family of boys, that’s all,” he said at last.

“Well, we figured wrong,” said Josh.

For a long while there was not another sound from the widow’s walk. Finally Jake broke the silence:

“Let’s burn the bridge.”

Wally turned and stared. “What?”

“Just go down there some night and burn the footbridge,” Jake said. “Then the girls couldn’t get over to our side of the river. Not here, anyway.
They’d have to cross the road bridge and get to school the long way around.”

“Don’t be dumb,” said Josh. “Dad would kill us.”

“We don’t have to burn the bridge. We’ll just never invite them over here,” said Wally.

“That’s not enough.” said Jake.

“We won’t have anything to do with them,” offered his twin, whose arms and legs were as long and spidery as Jake’s.

“Not enough,” said Jake.

“Well, what
do
you want to do, then? Vaporize them?” asked Peter, getting right to the point.

Jake sat with his lips pressed hard together and Wally could almost see currents connecting ip his brain. Jake was the ringleader, the planner, and he usually got his way; “Do you remember the movie we saw once,
The Gang from Reno!”

“Yeah,” said Josh and Wally.

“No,” said Peter.

“It was about this village up in the mountains,” Jake told him. “A motorcycle gang from Reno comes and takes over. But the villagers finally drive them out just by making them miserable. We’ve got to make the new people miserable.”

Wally leaned against the railing and studied Jake. It sounded pretty awful, even talking about it. “How do you know that the Bensons will move back if we do?”

“Because they weren’t sure they’d like Georgia,
so they’re only renting out their house here instead of selling. If they have trouble keeping renters, they just might give up and move back. You
know
they’d really rather live here. Anybody would rather live here. We’re just helping them make up their minds, that’s all.”

“But how are we going to make the new family miserable?” asked Josh, and they all turned to Wally. This always happened. Wally got involved whether he wanted to or not. He always said the first thing that came to his head, and that’s why his brothers asked him.