The Prisoner of Snowflake Falls Read online

  Before leaving her bike on the porch, she introduced it to me like it was a real person. “This is Gwenivere,” she said. “My noble steed.”

  Even at eleven, Charlotte seemed a bit too old to be riding a bike like Gwenivere. But since she was extra short for her age, I guess she had no choice. I noticed that she had the same rocket-scientist glasses as her mother and wore the kind of clothes that made her look like an undersized vice-principal.

  Charlotte began to talk very rapidly, barely pausing for breath. She talked about her work as a crossing guard during the school year. She talked about how many library books she planned to read during the summer. She talked about how she was thinking about becoming a total vegetarian. “I don’t understand how anybody could eat a rabbit,” she said, “but it’s considered a great delicacy in France.”

  When Theodora left the room to answer Oscar’s latest scream, Charlotte began eyeing me thoughtfully through her thick glasses. I felt a little like the rabbit she refused to eat. “Are you sure you’re a thief?” she asked. “You have a very trustworthy face.”

  Before I could answer, she said, “I sincerely hope to play a role in your social rehabilitation.” Then she stuck out her hand for me to shake. It looked like she was holding a paddle so that you could step into the crosswalk. “I hope we can be friends, Henry,” she said. I figured if I shook her hand she might stop talking. But she went right on telling me about the life of Charlotte.

  “I enjoy reading the Wall Street Journal, collecting miniature snowmen and helping the less fortunate,” she said. “Every year I go door-to-door soliciting funds for the Empty Stocking Christmas Fund!”

  “I’m not really into Christmas,” I said.

  “You sound just like Harley Howard,” said Charlotte.

  “Who’s Harley Howard?”

  “The town Grinch,” she said. “Harley Howard is so cranky and sour that he hasn’t attended the holiday sing-along since I can’t remember when.”

  “So what?” I said.

  Charlotte looked at me like I’d just confessed to some unspeakable horror. “So what! It’s only the single longest running holiday tradition in the history of Snowflake Falls. It takes place in the town square every Boxing Day from six PM to after midnight! It’s a way to extend the holiday spirit past Christmas. We sing all kinds of songs and roast hotdogs and marshmallows. Almost everybody turns out for it. It’s the social event of the entire season.”

  Charlotte took a big breath to talk some more. “This year we’re having a contest for the town slogan. There’s going to be a new sign as you come into town and everything. They’re going to reveal the new sign and the new slogan at the sing-along. Isn’t that exciting? I’m submitting at least a dozen suggestions.”

  “I think I’ll give it a miss,” I said.

  “You’ll change your mind,” she said smugly. Then she leaned close enough so that I could smell the ghost of berry-flavored bubble gum on her breath. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked.

  “Absolutely not,” I said.

  Charlotte just kept right on going. “Before the sing-along on Boxing Day, we’re raffling off a five-minute shopping spree at Wingate’s!” she exclaimed. “We give the winner a big shopping cart and they have five minutes to fill it up with anything they can fit in the cart.” When I said nothing, she asked, “Isn’t that brilliant? But you mustn’t tell anyone at Biggie’s Bargin Barn. We’re going to be in direct competition with their hideous Holiday Madness Sale.”

  “I just told you I couldn’t keep a secret!” I said. “And you told me the secret anyway. What kind of person does that?”

  “How are you supposed to stop being a criminal type if nobody trusts you?” asked Charlotte. “After all, we have to start somewhere, don’t we?” Then she leaned even closer and started to blush. “You know, there’s always been a part of me that’s wondered what it would be like to actually break the law.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” I said.

  “I know!” she exclaimed, as if we were suddenly kindred spirits or something. “I can hardly believe it myself.”

  “Speaking as someone on probation, I would rather not comment.”

  This did not deter Charlotte. “Do you think I might have a dark side?” she asked.

  “I don’t think anybody who rides a pink bike has a dark side,” I said.

  “It’s just that sometimes I worry I might not be complex enough,” she said. “You know, psychologically speaking.”

  “I don’t know much about psychology,” I answered.

  Charlotte gave me a look that said she had momentarily forgotten I was a person of lower intelligence. “I guess I’m being a bit of a conversational piggy, aren’t I?” she said. “Now that I’ve shared everything I like, why don’t you tell me everything you like?”

  “I like to keep to myself,” I said. “Plus, I don’t like to share things.”

  Charlotte didn’t get the hint. She just kept talking about her many ambitions. She said she had a natural attraction to the business world and her long-term goal was to take over the family store someday. But in the meantime, she wanted to focus on becoming the youngest hairstylist in Snowflake Falls.

  When I observed that hairstyling was a strange ambition for an eleven-year-old, Charlotte did not even bat an eye. “I believe that our outer beauty should strive to express the inner beauty we all aspire to,” she said.

  Personally, I thought this was an odd statement for somebody who dressed like an elementary school administrator. But I let it pass. In any case, Charlotte kept right on talking. “I haven’t actually given anyone a complete haircut yet,” she admitted, “but I’ve been practicing on some of my old dolls.”

  “I guess it makes sense to do your first few haircuts on customers who can’t talk back,” I said.

  “I’m looking forward to working on someone with authentic human hair. Yvonne at The Cut and Curl thinks I have tremendous potential. By next summer, I might not even have to stand on a box. Here’s hoping!” Then she looked at me rather dreamily. “Do you believe in the concept of soul mates, Henry?”

  “No way,” I said, wishing Mrs. Wingate would come back. “How did we get from haircuts to soul mates?”

  “Because I think that maybe I’ll meet my soul mate while cutting his hair one day,” said Charlotte. “Wouldn’t that be romantic?” Her glasses slid down her nose, but she was so carried away that she didn’t even bother to push them up. “I believe everyone has a right to true love. Except for maybe those horrid people at Biggie’s Bargin Barn.”

  Just then, Theodora came back into the room. “I see you’ve met Charlotte,” she said to me. “It may interest you to know that she was head crossing guard on the school safety patrol last year.” Turning to her daughter, she added, “Maybe you can show Henry the sights tomorrow.”

  “There are sights?” I asked, imagining Charlotte pointing out all the traffic lights and advising me never to cross on yellow.

  “Oh, tons!” said Mrs. Wingate. “And you’ll find Charlotte knows just about everything there is to know about local history.”

  “Oh, Mother,” said Charlotte. “Henry doesn’t want to hear you brag about me.”

  While this was certainly true, it definitely sounded as if Charlotte didn’t mind hearing her mother brag at all. So Theodora kept right on going. “Charlotte has gotten straight As every year of her academic life,” she said proudly. “She’s even skipped a couple of grades, and she’s about to become the youngest secondary-school student in the history of Snowflake Falls.”

  Charlotte did her best to look humble. “I’m sure grade eight will be a new and invigorating challenge,” she said.

  Our conversation was interrupted when Mr. Wingate walked in. He was tall and trim and wearing the exact same glasses as Theodora and Charlotte. Side by side, they looked like they all went to the same closing-out sale on geeky eyewear.

  Mr. Wingate had just enough time to introduce himself before we sat down to dinn
er. I thought he was going to ask me a lot of questions, but he was distracted by the Biggie’s Bargin Barn commercial that was playing on the kitchen radio. You could hear the announcer saying, “If we don’t give you a friendly howdy as soon as you walk through the door, your next Biggie’s purchase is free!”

  “Howdy!” said Mr. Wingate hotly, as Theodora turned off the radio with a sigh. “Who actually says that? And the way they leave out the ‘a’ in Bargain!”

  “Absolutely no respect for the basic rules of grammar,” said Charlotte. “Don’t you agree, Henry?”

  Oscar, who looked like he was deciding whether or not to throw his spoon against the wall, shouted out, “Hen-wee!”

  Mr. Wingate looked at his wife as if his boy had just solved a very difficult algebra equation.

  “I know,” said Theodora, who seemed eager to change the subject. “That’s the second time he’s said Henry’s name today.”

  Harrison Wingate looked almost happy. “Way to go, son,” he said.

  I think maybe Charlotte was a bit jealous. She rolled her eyes and said, “Honestly, you’re going to make Henry think that all we do is sit around waiting for Oscar say something.”

  Mr. Wingate looked at Charlotte sternly and said, “I’m not sure I like your tone, young lady. How would you like me to take away your Wall Street Journal?”

  “Please, remember our guest,” said Mrs. Wingate, who was getting flustered. After that, most of us made an effort to concentrate on dinner. Theodora had laid everything out on the kind of expensive china that I could sell to my old friend Lenny for big bucks. While it all looked edible, I soon discovered that Mrs. Wingate was a truly terrible cook. The lamb chops tasted like an old catcher’s mitt, and the peas sat on your fork like pellets from a BB gun.

  In spite of this, everybody ate politely. Everybody except Oscar, who was the only one smart enough to keep spitting out his food.

  “Look, Oscar,” said Mrs. Wingate with cheery desperation. “Henry’s eating his dinner all up.”

  Oscar watched me eating some watery mashed potatoes. “Mmm, good!” I said as if I was auditioning for some stupid tv commercial. You could tell he knew I was lying. Still, he reluctantly shoved a spoonful of Theodora’s mashed potatoes in his mouth. I thought Mrs. Wingate was going to kiss me right at the dinner table.

  Later, when it was time to go to bed, Mrs. Wingate decided to have a little conversation with me while checking on Oscar. “You’re not at all what I expected,” she said, as Oscar snored in the shadowy glow of his clown-shaped night-light. “I mean you’re not anything like the others.”

  “I’m probably worse,” I said. “You know what I was thinking when I saw all your beautiful dishes? I was thinking how much I could pawn the whole set for after I stole it.”

  “Oh, we don’t have a whole set,” said Theodora, as if her opinion of me hadn’t changed in the least. “Oscar’s broken at least three of the dessert plates.”

  “You’ve got the wrong idea about me,” I persisted. “I’d steal your eyeglasses right off your nose if I thought I could get money for them.”

  Theodora took her glasses off and said, “I don’t think you’d get a lot of money for these.” She put them on me, and right away I could tell that the thick lenses were nothing more than clear glass.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “If you don’t need glasses, why do you wear them?”

  “Because Harrison and Charlotte do,” said Theodora. “They have no idea my glasses are fake. Sometimes Charlotte feels rather self-conscious about wearing glasses, even though she’s too stubborn to admit it. When we go to the optometrist, she refuses to even try on a different style of glasses though.”

  “So you wear the same kind even though you don’t really need them? Just to make her feel better?”

  “I guess you think that’s silly, don’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “That’s okay, Henry,” said Theodora. “If you were a mother you’d understand.”

  “I won’t tell Charlotte,” I said. “About the glasses, I mean.”

  “I know you won’t,” said Mrs. Wingate. “And Henry? Could I ask you a favor? Just between us? Promise me you won’t run away.”

  Right then would have been a good time to lie. But something about the way Theodora was looking at me made me say, “I can’t promise that.”

  “Maybe we should take it one day at a time,” she said. “Could you promise not to run away tonight?” When I agreed, Mrs. Wingate thanked me very sincerely and said goodnight.

  I tried to sleep. But everything smelled like baby powder and fuzzy toys. After a while, I noticed Oscar was awake and watching me. “Go back to sleep,” I said.

  “Seep!” said Oscar, grinning proudly. A couple of minutes later, Oscar was snoring his vacuum-cleaner snore. I seriously considered reaching for the earplugs in the drawer, but I was afraid the sound might wake him up and he’d spend the rest of the night pestering me.

  For a while, I thought about how Mrs. Wingate wore those stupid-looking glasses even though she didn’t have too. And then I tried to think of a good reason why Charlotte would insist on wearing the same stupid-looking glasses despite her philosophy on outer beauty, inner beauty and all the kinds of beauty in between. Charlotte Wingate was full of contradictions.

  The entire Wingate family was full of contradictions. I got the sense that every one of them wanted to be genuinely normal, but it was just way easier not to fight their natural urge to be seriously loopy. This discovery made it especially difficult to accept my current state of domestic incarceration. All in all, it had been way easier living with the fictional Hendersons.

  I curled my pillow around my ears and watched the looming shadow that Oscar’s night-light cast on the opposite wall. The bars of the supercrib looked as if they stretched all the way from the ceiling to the floor. “Good night, Uncle Andy,” I whispered. And even though I couldn’t really hear the words, what with the curled-up pillow and Oscar’s snores, it made me feel a little less lonely just to say them out loud.

  NINE

  I woke up way later than everybody else. Mostly because I’d had the most horrible night’s sleep of my life. Oscar was the worst roommate you could ever imagine. When he wasn’t snoring, he was awake and saying my name over and over again. “Hen-wee! Hen-wee! Henwee!” When he got tired of repeating my name, he would try out different kinds of screams.

  They weren’t the kind of terrifying screams that would make Theodora come running. It was more like Oscar was screaming for fun. He’d found the perfect volume for screaming at night. Not loud enough to wake anybody else. But just loud enough to make my life totally miserable.

  Finally, I remembered the earplugs. But when I reached inside my drawer to get them, they had vanished. Oscar was standing up in his crib, with his chubby little hands around the bars. “Where did you hide the earplugs?” I asked sternly. He let go of the bars and looked at me, all innocence. Then he shrugged, with his palms up in the air.

  “Just go to sleep!” I said.

  “Seep!” said Oscar, pointing to his stuffed toy, a little lamb with a missing eye. “Baa-h!”

  “Not sheep!” I said. “Sleep!”

  But it was too late. Oscar began to run through his collection of barnyard noises. He was imitating the snort of a pig for the forty-eighth time when I realized it had blended into one long snore. I must have managed to sleep for a little while after that, because I do remember opening my eyes in the morning and forgetting where I was.

  At first, I expected to see the familiar wooden beams on the inside of Evelyn’s tree house roof. Instead, I saw a mobile of circus animals attached to the ceiling. I looked over at Oscar’s empty supercrib and suddenly remembered that I was in Snowflake Falls. I pulled the blankets over my face and let out a big groan. Even my worst night in Evelyn’s backyard had been better than my first night in Oscar’s room.

  I thought maybe I would just roll over and go back to sleep for a while
, but then I felt a small tug on the bottom of my blanket, followed by a piercing scream. It sounded a bit like a really loud smoke alarm. Except that every once in a while, the smoke alarm would pause for breath before starting right up again.

  I looked up from under the covers and there was Oscar, fully dressed and all flushed from screaming. As soon as he saw my face, he broke out into a big smile. “Please don’t say ‘Hen-wee,’” I begged.

  “Hen-wee!” he said, with a high-pitched squeal of glee. Then he opened the bottom drawer of the dresser and started to throw my folded underwear all over the place. “Put down my underwear,” I shouted. “And it’s not Hen-wee. It’s Hen-ree.”

  After throwing my only clean T-shirt across the room, Oscar squinted at me with his mouth hanging open. Observing his baby squint, I realized that he was probably going to end up needing big clunky eyeglasses. Just like the rest of the Wingates. For a second or two, it made me feel sorry for him. So I thought I’d teach him to make the “R” sound. “Hen-ree!” I repeated. “Hen-ree!”

  “Hen-wee!” said Oscar, before racing out of the room and giving me a few moments of valuable peace. When he was gone, I noticed that he had stepped on my only clean T-shirt. There was a perfect outline of his dirty little shoe right on the front.

  The next thing I knew, I was staring into the Wingate’s bathroom mirror while wearing my stepped-on T-shirt. There were dark circles under my eyes. And no matter how much water I slapped on my face, I still looked and felt exhausted. I was a little slow getting to the kitchen table. Oscar had already finished his breakfast. He was sitting on the kitchen floor, building towers of blocks and then knocking them over. Charlotte was at the kitchen table, drinking vitamin-enriched orange juice and reading the Wall Street Journal.