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Thomas found his voice.
“It’s…uh…it’s okay!” he yelled downfield. His eyes did not move from the shattered wood of her leg. “She’s fine! She caught it!” He grabbed the ball, which had landed in the grass near them, and hoisted the victorious catch in the air. Their teammates cheered. Tamburlaine popped up on both legs, grinning and jumping up and down as though nothing could be the matter. What did she mean she’d kept his secret?
While Thomas sat on the grass, stunned, his heart giggled madly and turned somersaults over and over in his chest, for no reason he could tell. His baseball rolled quietly back into his pocket with the warm sense of a job well done in its secret guts.
CHAPTER VII
THE MONSTER ON TOP OF THE BED
In Which Thomas Finds Himself Alone with a Girl, Sees Her Without Her Clothes on, Obeys Vampire Law, Comes Face-to-Face with a Gramophone, and Says a Very Important Word
Tamburlaine’s house stood dark and quiet. Thomas raised his hand to knock. He hesitated. It looked as though no one was home. He clutched her note in his hand like a gentleman’s calling card, though that seemed silly now that he was here. It’s not like she would demand proof before she let him in. She’d written: Meet me at my house After School. 5 Ginger Road. She wanted him to come. She wasn’t angry, or she wouldn’t have used capitals: After Sc
hool. They always did that, all of them, when they wrote notes in class, to show that they were part of the secret elite who knew the truth about the world. All Countries are proper nouns; they get to wear the big letters like medals on their chests.
Tamburlaine asked him to come. He was supposed to be here. But the house was tall and thin and it seemed to be holding its breath, one birch tree in a long row of other birch trees just like it, only this one had a squirrel in it he desperately needed to talk to.
Thomas Rood held his breath, too. Something Awfully Big was about to happen. He felt it like an old fisherman feels tomorrow’s storm in his knee. He knocked.
The door creaked open and Tamburlaine was there. Her big eyes, her long hair, her nervous way of standing—the Fleeing Stance. He could hear music far within the house. He knew the record; his parents had it, too. It had a lady in a lime-green dress and lime-green diamonds on the cover, singing to a bluebird she held in her hand. That lime-green lady sure loved her old ragtime-y songs. Just then, in the snuggling depths of warm, brown-gold house-shadows, she was singing about apple blossoms.
“Hi,” Thomas said.
“Hi,” she answered.
She reached out her hand and drew him inside, quick as a hiccup. Was she afraid someone might see him there? Would her parents be mad if they caught her alone with a boy?
The shadows of the house closed on them. Tamburlaine had all the lights shut off, but the late-afternoon sun danced with the dust below the windows. It smelled nice in her house. Like paper and new milk and trees growing close together. As his irises opened up to let all that dusky softness in, Thomas saw that Tamburlaine’s house was a house of books.
It was not the house of someone who liked books. It did not have a well-stocked library. It was not even stuffed with books. Thomas could not see any part of the house that was not mostly book. Books rose from the floor to the ceiling in unruly, tottering towers. Books held up tables and chairs—and sat in the chairs, at the tables, as though quite ready for supper to be served, so long as supper was more books. They sprawled over the dining table like a feast of many colors. Books climbed the stairs, ran up and down the hallways, curled up before the fireplace, were wedged into the cabinets beside cups and saucers, held open doors and locked them shut. They left no room on the sofa to sit, nor in the kitchen to stand, nor on the floor to lie down. Books had already taken every territory and occupied it. Where the books were content to rest on shelves, like other, less ambitious of their cousins, they had been squashed in so tight their spines bulged, and then bowed under the weight of the books stacked up on top of their sagging rows. Brick and wood only peeked through in a few places, and where they did they looked positively embarrassed, apologetic. It’s only that someone is borrowing The Picture of Dorian Gray at the moment, you see. The Thousand and One Nights has had an accident involving grape juice and has gone on a little trip to the binder’s; please don’t think anyone left this space empty on purpose, goodness no!
“Is your mom home?” Thomas asked, dumbfounded. His voice sounded too loud in his own ears. He had books, of course, and so did his parents. But their books…their books behaved. They didn’t grow and sprawl and soar. They didn’t gobble up a house like they were hungry.
“She’s at a Ladies Auxiliary meeting,” Tamburlaine murmured. “We have a couple of hours. Maybe you can stay for dinner.”
For some reason, this struck her as unreasonably funny, and Tamburlaine laughed shakily, her laugh bursting free of her like bubbles from a soda bottle. She laughed too long, holding her stomach. Thomas waited. He thought maybe she was laughing so that she could put off whatever came next just a little longer. But laughs, even the best and most dearly needed of laughs, have a natural life span, and hers finally died on the battlefield of her nerves. She had nothing else to stand between her and having to explain what had happened on the baseball field that day. So she just sighed, walked straight up to her trouble, and asked it in for cake.
“When you were little,” Tamburlaine said carefully, “were you ever afraid of the monster under the bed?”
“Sure,” Thomas said. “Everyone is. It’s Normal.”
Tamburlaine narrowed her eyes. “Yes, thank you. But…were you really afraid? Did you really think it could get you and eat you up in the dark?”
Thomas felt sweat bead up behind his ears. There was no breeze in the house of books. Not enough air. That lime-green lady on the gramophone wouldn’t shut up about her apple blossoms, either. He remembered Gwendolyn lifting her pretty hand to turn out the light before bed. Begging her not to. Please, Mom! Leave the light!
“No,” he whispered. “Not really.”
“Why not?”
Thomas remembered his mother laughing in a warm, thick, encouraging way, in the back of her throat. She saved that laugh for the rare occasion when he said something a Normal child might say. Oh, darling, are you afraid of the dark? Shall I check for monsters under the bed? Will that make you feel better? And the look on her face when he answered, like he’d just unzipped his skin in front of her. He couldn’t bear the thought of Tamburlaine’s face twisting into that same expression.
“Thomas, why weren’t you afraid? Did you not believe in monsters?”
“No, I believed in monsters.”
Tamburlaine had wooden bones. He’d seen it. He’d seen her blood oozing sticky sap.
“Then why not? Like you said, everyone’s afraid of them. It’s normal.”
