The Bookist Chapter 1

“Hello?” Maggie knocks the knocker, since the bell must be busted. Is Sandy playing stickers with little Georgie? Is that why the door is sealed shut? He’s three and so cute, but Maggie’s not in the mood for stickers. This many worms don’t come along very often. What if they put them on leaves and raced them down the river? That might be fun.

Maggie bangs again. “Sandy? Mrs. Lee?”

She heads down the steps and around through the wooden gate that leads to the back yard. Nobody’s there, but someone piled a lot of junk in front of the garage, like for a yard sale or bonfire. The wading pool, bicycles, garden equipment, heavy sacks of cement. The heap is taller than she is.

“Sandy? SANDYYYYYY!” she yells up at her friend’s bedroom window.

The kitchen door has more red tape, only instead of being in the cracks, it is stretched in red lines from one side, across the doorway to the other. ‘Do Not— Do Not— Do Not—‘

Figuring that Sandy’s mom is too busy to stop what she’s doing, Maggie decides to peel back a sticker or two and let herself in. Mrs. Lee won’t care. “Hey, Sandy. Mrs. Lee? Georgie-Porgie? It’s me.”

The door hangs off its hinge and scrapes the floor when she pushes it open. When she comes in, she is surprised there’s no peep. Their Eye Friendly is making a weird buzzing noise and the dot part inside is stuck blazing red, not blinking.

The kitchen looks normal at first except two of the stove’s burners are on. Maggie turns them off. They must be eating lunch because soup bowls are on the table along with some grilled cheese sandwiches with bites out of them. As she steps toward the table, her boot sends a piece of glass skating, tinkling across the tiles. One of the soup bowls is busted on the floor. Rice. Pieces of glass in the broth puddles. The wooden knife holder thing is lying on its side, spilling knives across the counter and on the floor. They learned about different knives in class. She catalogues as she puts them away, out of the baby’s reach—paring knife, bread knife, butcher knife, carving knife.

“Hey, guys. Where are you?” The extra quiet house makes her voice sound extra loud.

When she steps into the living room—Oh. Oh, man—it looks like there was a tornado or an earthquake. All the furniture flipped over and the cushions ripped open with foamy white stuffing exploded all over the place. Wires like crazy hair coming out of the piano. The pictures hang on the walls, but smashed. Jaggedy glass teeth still in the frames. One time, Sandy and Maggie saw four coyotes walking across the road, come down from the canyon. Maybe they got in the house. What else could make such a scary mess?

Maggie’s heart is beating hard. “Mrs. Lee? Anybody home? Sandy? Georgie? …Hello?”

Her dad says coyotes are mean, but they’re too scared to attack people. And her dad would tell her the truth. Sandy and Sandy’s mom would be okay, but Georgie? He’s so little. Maybe they had to run for help when the coyotes came. Something tells Maggie for sure—Georgie needs her. He needs her.

“Georgie? Georgie-boy? Don’t worry. It’s Mag-mag.” Maggie’s voice is shaky sounding.

She hurries back to the kitchen to get a pot lid. Her dad said coyotes are scared of noise. She taps the lid with a wooden spoon as loud as she can. TAP! TAP-TAP! TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP! That makes her feel brave. She makes her way, stumbling and climbing though the living room. Her rain boots make crunchy sounds on broken glass.

She reaches the stairs. The coyotes dumped the most stuff there: a mattress, and a nightstand, and the dollhouse that Maggie and Sandy always used to play with, and a jewelry box, the upstairs television. All of them with their insides hanging out.

“Don’t be afraid, Georgie-boy. I’m coming!” TAP! TAP-TAP!

She has to climb over the junk in the stairway, but it’s hard. She can’t hold the railing or she’ll have to stop tapping. Why didn’t she grab a butcher knife instead of this stupid pot lid?

TAP! TAP! “Georgie? Can you answer Mag-Mag? Can you—” She’s at the top landing.

On the wall ahead there are big, wet, brownish streaks of something that she tries not to see, but it’s too late. The spoon smacks the lid: tap-tap tap tap-tap. It doesn’t make the streaks go away. Part of her had hoped it might. Maggie doesn’t want to cry because it might make Georgie upset. But she can’t help it. She rubs her accidental tears with her fist.

She walks past the streaky wall, turns a corner. Georgie’s room is at the end of the dark, dark, dark hall. It’s hard to breathe, it’s so dark. At the end of the hall is an open window letting rain in but not much light. It’s so windy that the curtains flap like a big crazy bird. She flips the dead light switch back and forth. Something is bad here. It stinks. She doesn’t want to go farther.

She tries to say Georgie? but it comes out like crying and she can’t stop it. The only sound is her little tap! tap! on the lid and flapping of the curtain bird. Her mouth tastes funny.

Georgie, he’s so little. He needs her. The coyotes. One boot at a time, she steps.

She’s walking past Sandy’s parents’ room. Outside of the bathroom door. (There’s a bright white light coming under the crack, but Maggie doesn’t want to open it.) It’s so, so, so, so quiet. The rug is sticky under her boots, but she won’t look down. tap! tap!

Ahead, under the waving curtains she sees a lump of something, motionless in the shadows. Against the wall. The size of a doll, a little bigger? She can smell it. She tries to move closer. She can’t. The swooshing curtains brush against it. The dark lump is perfectly still. One part looks like a little knee, or a shoe, maybe. Maggie’s eyes shut. She works at making them open but she can’t. She can still smell it.

“Poor, poor Georgie.” That’s what she tries to say, anyway. She’s just making sounds now, standing in the middle of the hall. “I’m sorry, Georgie. I’m sorry…so sorry…I can’t.”

 Monday morning, the golden California sun spills down. Usually all the girls would be fidgeting, anxious to get out on the playground and run, but today is different. Dressed in their Ortho-brown uniforms, they sit at their desks, eyes front. In the back of the dust-smelling room, Mother Conway stands like a monument.

A happy-looking guardian with red hair and a red face and a gun in his holster gets up to tell them that Sandy’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lee, were very bad people. Sandy and Georgie, too. But it isn’t because they were Orthodox that they were bad, he says. He wants to make that clear.

“The Guardians of Doctrine & Discipline may be Reform, but we don’t target the Orthodox,” he says and laughs like someone told him exactly where. “Right, Mother Conway?”

Using the corner of their eyes only, the students glance over at her. Maybe five times a day, she tells them that the Reform doesn’t really believe in the true Book, but today her stony face isn’t saying anything. She aims her chin at him and gives the smallest smile anyone ever gave. She turns and her stiff, robes rustle as she sits down on a kid-sized plastic chair.

After he tinkers with their Eye Friendly, the guardian calls out their names starting with Bennett, Emily. One by one, all the girls go up to talk. Everyone but Maggie. She already talked to him on that day. When he says her name, he winks.

When he’s spoken to them all, he says he wants to give them a word of advice, that it’s better for everyone to get closure if they don’t mention Sandy anymore, or even say her name. They want closure, don’t they? “Let’s vote on it,” he says and all the brown arms in the class shoot up. It’s unanimous. They want closure.

The guardian divides up the stuff in Sandy’s desk and passes it out to them as a prize for choosing right. Eugenia’s prize is she gets to sit where Sandy used to. Afterward, the guardian props his boots on Mother Conway’s desk and plays a game on his phone for the rest of the school day, while the girls work on their knitting projects and hate him through their smiles.

But Maggie finished her knitting last week. Since the guardian gave her the present of Sandy’s colored pencil set, Maggie tries to draw but everything comes out stupid looking. After seven crumpled up pieces of paper, she puts her head down on her desk and mutters her Twelve Commandments. Even that’s boring because she remembers them perfectly now.

Mother Conway comes up behind and puts her wrinkly hand on Maggie’s elbow. She lifts up her head and Mother Conway stares into her eyes. Maggie knows what she wants. Maggie gives a tiny nod that is like a vow that she will never, ever forget her Sandy’s family and their martyrdom. In return, Maggie gets a good-girl pat on the arm before Mother rustles away.

But in Maggie’s secret-est of secret hearts, she wants to forget. The torn up piano, the picture frames with glass teeth, the thick wet stains on the walls, the flapping-bird curtains, the shoe, all of them are printed on the underside of her eyelids. Every time she blinks she remembers. There were no coyotes. People did those horrible things.

Maggie isn’t sure what closure is, but if it means forgetting, she wants it very badly.

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