The Friendship Song (3 page)

“I'm not scared!” I yelled at her.

She just stood there staring at me, and who can blame her? Here I was, charging at her like a moose and bellowing like one too, and there she was standing like an Egyptian princess or something. With little sparks of gold in her ears. She had pierced ears already. I'd been begging Dad for years to let me get my ears pierced, and he kept saying not until I was thirteen. Rawnie had probably had her ears pierced since she was a baby.

I made myself calm my voice down, and I said sort of movie-hero style, “Look, we're going to figure this thing out right now. Come on.” I beckoned at her and headed back down her steps.

“What? Wait a minute!” she said, but she came out her door and followed me. I was in moose-stampede mode again, so she didn't catch up to me until I was back across the street in Gus's front yard. My front yard now.

“Heather—”

“My name's
Harper
!”

She grabbed me by the arm to make me stand still, and said, “Harper, what are you trying to do?”

Then she heard it too. I could tell by the look on her face. She didn't look scared or big-eyed, the way she was when I charged her. Her face just got real, real still.

“Wow,” she whispered. “What's that?”

Thing is, what we were hearing was so freaky that sometimes it didn't even sound like music. Sometimes it sounded more like metal banging against metal back in Gus's junk collection somewhere. Or like tree branches complaining in the wind or maybe tapping against something hollow. But that was just on the surface that it sounded like noise. Underneath, it was music, it
felt
like music all the time. It went through you.

“That is what we are going to figure out,” I said to Rawnie, quiet now. “What it is and where it's coming from.”

“Okay,” Rawnie said. At the time it didn't surprise me. I just sort of figured she'd want to know, like I did. But looking back now it surprises me a lot. Why didn't she just say, “No way!” and go home? She barely knew me. But she said, “Okay.”

We stayed close together and started up the front yard, with the cactus and all the rest of the stuff looking down at us. It was starting to get dark, and the street lamps were coming on. Something threw a shadow on my face, and I flinched. “Hey,” I said.

The octopus arms on the top of the spindle thing were going around. Each one had a bright-colored fan of metal at the end. “That's a whirligig,” Rawnie said. “It moves in the wind.”

“Oh.” I watched it a minute. It was making a squeaking sound. “That's not it,” I said.

“No.”

We eased deeper into the yard until we were going past the side of the house. It had a big old porch all around the first floor, and I noticed clusters of metal tubing hanging from the edge of its roof, making soft dinging noises. “Wind chimes,” I said. I guessed Gus had made them, because they were weird, like her, with freak-face circles for the pipes to hang from. Later I found out I was right, she did, but by then so much had happened they didn't seem weird anymore.

“That's not it either,” Rawnie said.

“Darn,” I said. We kept going toward the backyard, past some stripped-down motorcycles, an old gas pump with a broken glass globe on the top, some tall things that I figured out later were the skeletons of vending machines, and something that made me jump and go, “Aaaa!” It was a carnival dummy, the kind you might see on top of the funhouse, with its arms in the air.

“Lights up ahead,” Rawnie said. Her voice quivered and she sounded scared, but she kept right on walking. So was I, getting scared, and I knew if she hadn't been with me, I would have chickened out and gone back.

The lights were strange, all colors but very dim and blurred as if they were floating in fog. The distant music seemed maybe to be coming from where the lights were.

We plodded toward them without saying a word to each other. Like a pair of zombies we reached the creek and stepped over. Still side by side, we went through the maze of aisles and piled-up junk, and with the lights coloring the sky to guide us, it wasn't hard to find our way. As we got nearer, the music didn't really seem to get any nearer, but I felt a sort of heartbeat behind it, a dark rapid pounding rhythm I heard more with my feet than with my ears.

“Drums?” I whispered to Rawnie. Whispering seemed like the thing to do at the time.

She just nodded. Maybe her voice wasn't working. I could see her shaking. The aisle was getting too narrow for both of us to go at once, and Rawnie slowed down and signaled me with her hand to go ahead. I didn't want to do it, but I knew it wasn't fair to make her go first when I was the one who'd had the bright idea to do this. So I went.

The aisle took a turn, and the next thing I knew, I was heading straight toward the music and looking straight at something big and bright red, and I stopped where I was. I lifted my hand to point, and I wanted to tell Rawnie to look, but before I could say anything a voice yelled, “Yo!”

I wanted to either run or faint, but I just stood there. Rawnie crammed herself up next to me, and we both stared, and there was Gus, smiling all over her pink face at both of us.

“Yo, Groover!” she called. “Who's your friend?” She didn't look the least bit mad or anything. Not that we were doing anything wrong, but for some reason I felt—I don't know. Like we were trespassing or party-crashing or something. Like we were breaking and entering and somebody might call the cops. I just felt really creepy about being there, and I was glad Gus wasn't anywhere near us where she could get her big hands on us.

I wondered what she was doing. There was no way I could tell, because she was on the other side of the big red—car, it was a car sitting up on concrete blocks. A huge car, bright and slick, like red red lipstick. In fact, an absolutely humongous red car with majorly large fins, and Gus was looking at Rawnie and me over a sheet of plywood laid across its seats, over the top of where the roof should have been, so I realized it was a convertible.

I think Gus knew who Rawnie was all the time, because she just kept talking. “Isn't she a beauty?” I thought at first she meant Rawnie, but then the direction she pointed that schnoz of hers told me she meant the car. “She's a nineteen fifty-nine Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz. The jerk I got her from kept her under a tarp and made her rust.” Gus made that sound like a punishable crime, then let it go. “But I'll take care of her. Isn't she something?”

I guess she was, because I'd never seen a car that big, and the shape of the fins and taillights made it look rocket-powered. But I wasn't interested in talking about a junker car right then. I said, “Gus, did you hear something? Like some kind of weird music?”

“Well, I'll be.” She glanced from me to Rawnie, who just stood there looking back at her. Gus seemed kind of surprised. “Yeah, I did hear something,” she said after a minute, “but it's gone now.”

She was right about that. It was.

“You guys want to help me put another coat of paint on this baby?” Gus asked.

If she'd been working on the car for long, that sort of explained the lights. There were four big lights set up around it, strange-looking ones not on poles but in six-sided metal buildings made of tall pillars with funky metal flowers at the top. These things were standing in just about the place where we had seen weird lights in all colors. But these light bulbs were plain white, and they were bright, not dim like the ones we had seen.

Rawnie was looking at them too, and she took a couple of steps forward and asked Gus, “What kind of lights are those?”

“Nice, aren't they? Art deco. They're off an old bridge.” Which didn't exactly answer the question, somehow, but at that point my father walked in.

I say “in” because the car and the lights were in sort of a clearing in the middle of the backyard and all its junk. For some reason Gus had welded together a few dozen of those old metal lawn chairs, all different kinds, into rows of six each, like big metal sofas, and they were in there too. They made it even harder to get around. Anyway, Dad walked in by another aisle, past some metal buckets and washtubs and things, like it was no trouble at all.

“Hi,” he said to Rawnie with a smile. When he looked at me the smile changed into his mischief grin.

“Ghosties and ghoulies gonna get you if you don't scram to bed, Skiddo,” he told me.

I felt glad to see him, and better because he was there with me, and mad at him, all at the same time. See, when I was a little kid he used to read me picture books, and my favorite was the one about the ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night. So when he wanted me to go to bed, all he had to say was, “Ghosties and ghoulies,” and I'd scream and run. We made a game of it. But right then I didn't appreciate it because, first of all, I wasn't a little kid anymore and, second of all, I didn't want to hear about ghosties and ghoulies when I was standing in the middle of Gus's spooky backyard. I didn't like being called Skiddo in front of Rawnie either.

“
Dad
,” I complained.

“Okay, earlies and schoolies. You've got to get up tomorrow morning.”

Why do parents always tell kids stuff the kids already know? It wasn't like I'd forgotten I had school in the morning. Not hardly. “
Dad
…” I wanted to tell him I was not stupid, but then I decided to forget it, because I had a thought. “Dad, did you hear music a little bit ago?”

“Music? What kind?”

“Sort of rock music.”

“Sort of?”

“Oh, never mind.” I could see he hadn't. “Dad, why does Gus have all this, uh, stuff?”

I was being a little rude on purpose, talking about Gus like she wasn't there. Dad gave me a look. “Good grief, Harper, ask
her
.”

Gus had come over to stand right by me. She didn't make me ask the question again, though, the way she could have. She just said, “Do you want the truth or the excuse?”

The way she said it made it funny somehow, and I almost smiled. But Rawnie was standing right by me, and she didn't look like she wanted to smile, so I didn't. I said, “Truth!”

“Truth is, I like junk.”

I probably could have figured that out by myself. Rawnie said, “And what's the excuse?”

“The excuse is, I'm a folk artist. Really. A guy from the museum came and said so. That stuff up front is art, and that makes me a folk.”

She made a rubber-mouth face, and I had to smile. In fact, I laughed. Rawnie smiled too, but she said, “I got to get home.”

“I'll go with you,” I said. “Dad, I got to walk Rawnie home.”

Gus said, “Can you two manage okay?” but we pretended we didn't hear her.

Even though it was dark, we didn't have any trouble finding our way across the creek. We didn't say anything until we were on the other side. Then Rawnie said, “Your dad's nice.”

“Yeah.” My dad really does put up with me pretty good, considering. “Except he drives me crazy sometimes,” I added.

“They all do. You should hear my dad yell when I leave something on the sofa in the TV room.”

I said, “Mine doesn't yell much, but he sort of hovers. Like I'm still his little bitty girl. He says he wants me to be something special, but how can I when he never wants to let me
do
anything?”

Rawnie sort of bopped and hip-hopped a few steps and said, “Well, at least he doesn't yell. I think he's nice.
Cute
, too.”

“Uh-huh.” He is. Dad has honey blond hair and a nice face. I have pukey hair and pale weird eyes and braces.

We didn't say another thing until we were back on the front lawn. Then we stood listening to the darkness a minute. The music still wasn't there. I felt like an idiot, like somebody had made a fool of me, and I had a feeling it was Gus, but I couldn't be sure. I didn't say that. All I said was, “I don't get it.”

“Me neither.” But Rawnie wasn't shrugging it off. Her voice had turned soft and dark. “But it was right there, at that big car, before it went away. I know it was. I think it's got something to do with your stepmother.”

That shot through me, because I wasn't thinking of Gus that way. “She's not my stepmother!”

“Well, what is she, then?”

“I dunno. Anyway, I'm not scared of her!”

“Yeah, I know. You're not scared. We already got that straight.”

Rawnie had a smooth quiet face that just looked at me and didn't give anything away. I couldn't tell if she was teasing me or what.

I said, “Well, why should I be?”

We both knew there were about sixteen reasons, but Rawnie didn't say anything. She just looked up and down the street once, and then she said, “Well, I gotta go. Bye.”

“Bye.”

Then I thought, Jeez, I didn't talk to her about walking to school with me. But she was already inside her house. And I felt embarrassed to go knock and ask her when I hadn't even thanked her for—well, for anything.

And I'd already told Dad a dozen times I had it under control. Hey, I was so brave, I was just going to have to make it through my first day at the new school on my own.

Good going, Harper. Why did I always have to go and do this kind of dumb stuff? It was like I was trying to be big. As if I wasn't big enough, almost as tall as my father already.

Once I was safe in my room I listened to my radio again, but “The Friendship Song” didn't come on.

CHAPTER THREE

Next morning, whadaya know, there was Rawnie on the front sidewalk, waiting for me.

“Hey, hi!” I was really glad to see her. “Yo,” I added.

“Yo, ho, ho,” she said. “I hate Monday.”

“You sure you don't want me to drive you, Harper?” Dad called. He was standing inside the front door, watching.