I shove my hands in my pockets and push my hair back, off my face.
“Hi,” I say.
Basford steps out from behind the column. “Hi,” he answers. For a long moment, we stay silent. Everyone is looking at us, which makes me nervous.
“Give her a second,” Patricia snorts from behind us. “She’s kind of a vegetarian communicator, if you know what I mean.”
I whirl around, furious, but Freddy gets to her first. “Pipe down,” he tells her. Then he turns back to Basford. “Sorry.”
It’s quiet again.
If I don’t talk right now, he’ll be sure I’m a complete loser, so I say the first thing that comes to my mind. “Basford. That’s a weird name.”
Oh no.
My face crumples as I press my eyes tightly shut. If Basford was red a minute ago, I’m now the color of the sun. No wonder I don’t have any friends.
“Polly!” says Freddy. “Sorry, Basford. She can’t help herself.”
I squeeze my eyes tighter. It’s genetic, it must be. Some ancestor of mine must have been as socially useless as I am. I must be the weak link, the only Peabody who inherited this awful gene. Just my luck.
But Basford just shrugs. “It’s okay,” he says. His voice is quiet, shy. “It
is
weird.”
My eyes dart around, from Freddy to Basford. I’m waiting, I think, for him to scowl or turn away. But he doesn’t.
“Polly Peabody isn’t much better,” I admit, smiling a little. “But at a farm called Rupert’s Rhubarb, I guess it’s just medium horrible, not horrible horrible.”
“Beatrice told me about you,” Basford says. He has light green eyes and a small nose, and he seems like someone who doesn’t give up smiles easily. I look quickly over to Beatrice, who just nods, and I start to make a list in my head about all the things she could have said.
Reads with a book light every night. Scaredy cat. Loves fried chicken.
But then, a blue dragonfly appears, zooming in over Basford’s shoulder. It swerves around his ear, then flits back behind his head and over to me before looping back in front of his face.
Basford stares, entranced. The dragonfly shimmers in the air, bobbing up and down.
“These are the pretty ones, remember?” Freddy winks at me, as if to remind me that dragonflies are not worthy of my bug anxiety. But it isn’t just dragonflies that trigger my bug phobia. Like our rhubarb, our farm breeds both regular bugs (like dragonflies and ants) and crazy, never-before-seen bugs (like Atlas moths that are as big as hawks, or slugs as long as spaghetti). Even Patricia, who likes to think that nothing scares her, runs away from a spaghetti slug.
“Dragonflies are superfast, the cheetahs of bugs,” says Sam, Patricia’s boyfriend. “People who make airplanes study their flight patterns.”
Basford is still tracking the dragonfly. His eyes are bright, but they change as I watch him, growing wider, looking scared.
“Duck!” he yells.
I dive down just as a big black wasp zooms at me, as full-bore as if it’s a rocket. This has happened before. Wasps like me. I hate them. Dad says they target me because they know I’m afraid. Mom says it’s because on the inside, I’m as soft and sweet as pudding. Either way, the wasps on our farm treat me like target practice. I run behind a column and down some steps, holding my breath and trying to ignore the panic rising in my chest.
The dragonfly darts in between the wasp and me as if it’s my protector, but it’s no contest. The dragonfly is fast, but the wasp is mean. Mean wins every time.
“Just don’t swing at it,” Freddy warns. I hold my arms tightly by my side. Even so, the wasp whooshes by Basford’s shoulder and seems to aim at my forehead. I freeze, eyes riveted on its black eyes. Just as my face goes white, a strong, long-fingered hand reaches out from behind Freddy and snatches up the wasp in one quick swoop. It’s so fast all I see is the flash of an emerald ring before the hand closes over the bug.
“Got it!”
I’m breathing hard, so I don’t look up. Besides, I already know who it is. She has come to save me, as usual. I feel like I always do when she’s around—safe, relieved, and awed. She’s like my personal goddess, as if Athena stood on Mt. Olympus and said, yes, she’s the one; I choose Polly Peabody. I’ll watch over her and teach her everything she needs to know.
Aunt Edith.
She’s very tall, like Dad—almost six feet—and the power of the sun seems to light her up as she pulls her shoulders back and rises to her full height. It’s as if the sun itself—not blood like normal people—makes her move.
She walks over to the edge of the landing and gracefully unfurls her fingers, allowing the wasp to fly away. Naturally it didn’t sting her. Not even a wasp would dare sting Aunt Edith. She steps back toward the rest of us. Everyone is watching her, but she looks straight at me, smiling widely.
“See, Polly? Nothing to be afraid of.” She waves her empty hand around the porch, her ring gleaming. “Nothing to be afraid of at all.”
SAME DAY, MONDAY, AUGUST 18
The Umbrella
Mom and Dad love the farm, but they were the first ones to admit that they didn’t know anything about the business side of things the way Grandmom did. That’s why Aunt Edith had to come back. Up until then, Aunt Edith was considered probably the best journalist in the world. She wrote for the
New York Times,
and anyone on the globe who was going to do anything important—bad important or good important—called to get her opinion. She was married once, a long time ago, and has twin sons—my cousins Romulus and Remus—but they are grown up and we don’t see them much. Dad says that she is one of those people who needed to be alone to achieve her dreams. Grandmom used to say that Aunt Edith wanted to be successful more than anything else in the world, including being a wife and mother. Aunt Edith agrees with Grandmom. She says that she’s not ashamed of this, and that no one would tell a man to be ashamed if he said he wanted to be successful.
“You must be fearless, Polly!” she tells me. “People have wasted far too much time on distractions rather than making a real difference, paying attention to the world,
participating
. A life worth living is one that is filled with action, with travel! That will be you, Polly, if I have anything do with it. You will be a
doer.
”
I have no idea why she can’t see that I’m about the most opposite thing from fearless in the world. Picture a tiny mouse who runs away, batting her head against corners trying to escape from, well,
everything
, and you have me.
I’ve tried to tell Aunt Edith this. She says I’m a pearl in an oyster and that I’ll thank her someday for forcing me out of my shell. I’m afraid to tell her the truth: that I
like
my shell.
We’ve walked over to the Learning Garden, which is the place Grandmom and Mom built for children to discover more about “the wonders of nature.” Mom’s installed water hoses so that kids can soak themselves silly. It’s also the home of our most famous tourist attraction: the Umbrella ride. Today’s the only day of the year that we close the farm to the public. We call it “Flannery Day,” after my grandmom, and we always go up on the Umbrella and look around the farm as a tribute to her.
Chico, my favorite farm worker, stands at the controls as we huddle together on the circular platform under the spike of the Umbrella. Today we’re riding on the Umbrella’s platform, even though on regular Mondays, people can also choose to ride on the individual umbrellas hanging from the spokes supporting the canopy. (Those are scary swinglike rides that twirl and sway back and forth as the ride rises and falls.) If I ever come back as another human being, I want to be Chico. He smiles all the time, no matter what, even after a six-inch-long yellow jacket stings him. (Well, he did spend one minute cursing in Spanish, but after that, his smile came right back.) Chico winks at me just as Dad gives him the okay to start the ride.
We lean against the iron railing as the floor of the platform rumbles a bit under our feet. Then we feel it chug, chug, chugging, as it ratchets up in space one click at a time. The Umbrella slowly stretches out above us as we rise—extending its many arms as if it’s a giant red pterodactyl clawing the sky. Soon we’re floating about twenty stories off of the ground, gazing at the farm and the surrounding lands. The sky has grown dark as the storm clouds gather above us. It’s 12:55 p.m.
“Give me a hand,” Dad calls out to Freddy. He’s carrying two big thermal cases filled with apple-rhubarb juice. Freddy’s superstrong—he works out all the time for soccer. He’s also supernice, which means he’s gentle with the plants even after a harvest, when he carries five stacked bushels at a time. Aunt Edith says he’s the most cost-efficient worker we have.
Freddy grips the handles of one of the cases and moves it closer to the center of the platform. Then he opens the lid. At first he pulls out one of the juice bottles, but then he reaches in and grabs a bottle of champagne.
“Celebrating?” He waves the bottle at Dad.
“Not for you, unless you turned twenty-one and I didn’t know about it.”
Dad hands Freddy the other case. Freddy takes it, but his hand slips and he has to lift his knee so that the juice bottles don’t crash.
“Good save,” Dad tells him.
Freddy’s face flushes red, tired. “Gotta get back to the gym, I guess.” He spots me looking at him and quickly looks away.
“Why don’t you show Basford the lay of the land, Polly?” Dad says. He looks over to Aunt Edith, who stands, waiting for him, on the other side of the platform. She’s put on her bifocals and looks like she’s about to go to a business meeting. “I need to check in with the big boss.”
“Yeah, Polly,” Patricia chimes in. “I’m surprised you haven’t started babbling yet. Maybe you can show him your
favorite
place?” An evil smile crosses over Patricia’s face when she turns to Basford. “Ask her about the Dark House.”
The first thing I always think about when I hear the words “Dark House” is fear. The second is terror. And the third is slugs. Specifically slug
sand
, the stream of mucousy slugs that thrash around in a watery quick-sand right near the Dark House entrance.
“What’s a Dark House?” Basford asks.
I bite my lip hard. “It’s really two buildings: a shed and a silo. They’re painted black. We use the shed for the Transplanting. That’s when we replant the Giant Rhubarb into barrels and put them inside the shed for about a month, then have a huge party around Halloween,” I say.
“What’s this ‘we’ you’re talking about?” Patricia laughs. “Polly never goes near there. She thinks it’s haunted.”
“Haunted?” Basford’s eyes light up.
“It isn’t,” Patricia says.
“It is,” I say at the same time. Just last night, I heard terrible churning sounds from my window. As usual, I bolted to Freddy’s room and hid under his covers. Everyone tells me I’m crazy, but I’m sure the sounds come from ghosts in the Dark House.
“You can’t trust what she says,” Patricia tells Basford. “She’s never even been inside. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
Beatrice once told me that chanting the same thing over and over again can make it come true, so I close my eyes and chant:
Make Patricia go away, make Patricia go away.
“Are you okay?” Basford whispers.
“One more second,” I tell him, taking a last deep breath, pushing Patricia out of my mind.
“Okay. Now!” I snap open my eyes just as the Umbrella hits its highest point and locks into place, the platform sturdy under our feet. Perfect timing.
Every time I see this sight, I think of how the diamonds popped out of the ground, outlining Grandmom in their final tribute. Even now, with the rain about to start, the farm seems to shine from the inside. From up here, we can see everything—the sparkling stone of our castle, the gleaming green of the cube where my parents live, the mazes and the lake and the trees and the bridges and all the plants in between, on our property and beyond. A familiar pride swells up in my chest; up here, I feel unconquerable. I feel like I can be as fearless as Aunt Edith.
“What’s your favorite part?” asks Basford in a low voice.
“I love everything.”
Basford raises his almost-white eyebrows; they are even lighter than his hair.
“Okay. Everything
except
for the Dark House.” I move to my left. “Like over there.That’s the Giant Rhubarb.” I point to the east side of the property. “Our Giant Rhubarb helps fix the hole in the ozone layer.”
Basford looks at me skeptically.
“True story. That’s why we put it in the Dark House for a month. It grows huge. After the Transplanting’s finished, we send it to a place where they take off the acid from the plants and mix it with chalk. Then it gets shot up into the air and forms a shield against all the bad stuff that’s tearing a hole in the ozone.”
“Acid?” His eyes get big.
“Oh, yeah. Rhubarb leaves are poisonous. But don’t worry, you have to eat about eleven pounds to die.”