1st 5 Pages Sept Workshop - Shattuck

Julie Shattuck
Middle Grade Speculative
The Key to the Second Born

I tapped my pencil against the desk. Eleven times. Eleven more. Still not lunch. Unable to wait a second longer, I shifted my awareness from my body and into Step-Sideways—the world Pete and I created to hang out in our minds. Risky talking to him during class, but I itched with the need to know.

“Tell me your riddle again.”

“You’ve got the memory of a silverfish.” Pete’s voice in my head replaced the math teacher’s drone in the classroom.

“It’s goldfish.” I grinned.

“Silver sounds better.” Pete’s eyes gleamed with excitement. “Here you go, you have to solve it to find your birthday present: Look in the library and don’t get lost. What a penny, a dime, a dollar cost. My three parts are close but never will meet. Thirty-four meters converted to feet.”

“I can’t get to the library until lunch, but the second line’s easy: a dollar and eleven cents.  How—” A kick to my shin yanked me from Step-Sideways. Blinking, I slid down in my chair.

The room vibrated with the deafening hush of sixth graders eager to avoid the teacher’s attention.

“We’re waiting, Reah. Your answer…?” Mr. Cole fixed me with a glare, eyebrow raised.

My cheeks burned. “Um, thirty-four?”

A snort of laughter erupted behind me. I flinched, hair falling over my face.

“You find that hilarious, Tony?” Mr. Cole lasered his attention on the boy I worked hard to avoid at school, especially now he spent half the week living in my house after his mom moved in with my dad last month.

The school bell saved us, shrilling out the lunchtime announcement. Mr. Cole shouted the homework over the burst of chatter and crashing of chairs colliding into desks. Kids shouldered backpacks, surging for the exit.

Chin down, I barreled out of the classroom, escaping the bottleneck at the door. Hammering rain hurled against the windows, forcing everyone to cram into the hallways rather than use the outside walkways. The mass of damp, middle school bodies smelled like a mixture of wet dog and freshly dug soil. Both good smells on their own. Combined, not so much.

Walking on autopilot, I reconnected with Pete, who waited in our favorite space—the boat cabin we’d created in our minds in a similar way to how kids made rooms in online world-building games. We picked up the conversation where we left off. “I’ve no idea how many meters there are in feet. I’ll look it up.” I pulled out the battered, hand-me-down phone passed from Mom to big sis Nora, then me. No way was it on anyone’s phone wish list. “Sorry, it takes forever to open a search page.”

“At least you have a phone,” Pete said. “You know I’m living in the Dark Ages.”

“True— Hey, watch it!” I jolted momentarily out of Step-Sideways as someone barged into me in the school hallway, knocking the phone from my hand. Tony loomed before me.

“What’s going on? You okay?” Pete hated his inability to see my world.

“Nothing, just Tony being Tony. You know how he is. I gotta go.” Breaking my mental link with Pete, I reached for the phone at my feet, but Tony kicked it to his minion Jon. I clenched my fists, fixing Jon with a pleading stare.

Jon wouldn’t meet my eyes. He booted the phone back at Tony. It hit the wall.

A pack of kids gathered, hoping for a fight. I dodged them, grabbing my phone, the already-cracked screen now a spider’s web. My stomach lurched when I fumbled to turn it on. No luck, and no way to replace it. The shattered phone meant another connection to Mom gone. I swallowed the lump in my throat. I would NOT cry.

“You broke it.” I held the phone up with a shaking hand for Jon to see.

“I didn’t mean—” Jon began, stepping back. He used to be my friend, before he fell in with Tony.

“It was already broken,” Tony interrupted. He thrust his scrawny neck toward me. His hot breath smelled of ham sandwiches left out too long in the sun.

“Wasn’t.” I gritted my teeth, shoving the phone in my pocket, and gazed at the floor to avoid Tony’s hostile glower.

“Aww, is that a tear, Reah? No fear, Reah. Mommy’s here, Reah. Oh, no she’s not. She’s been gone a year. Hey, that rhymes too,” Tony said, all pleased with himself. He glanced at the crowd gawping at us, lowered his voice, and hissed in my face. “And if you tell your dad I broke it, I’ll tell my mom your stupid dog bit me. You know she wants any excuse to get rid of it.”

I swiped my eyes with my sleeve. Tony was right—his mom, Emily, would leap at the chance to send Peggy to the pound or worse.

Tony smirked. “See ya, Ree ya.” He sauntered off with his fan boy in tow.

I scowled at his back and ignored the kids pointing at me. Their laughter loud in my ears, I continued along the busy hallway, automatically avoiding the huddled cliques. Tuning out the noisy lunchtime throng, I connected to Step-Sideways, but Pete wasn’t there. He did that sometimes, went missing on me.

Shoulders slumped, I transferred back into my dreary reality. With only my thoughts for company, I played out in my mind a completely different scene to the one that just happened. I always knew what to say after everything was over, never at the right time: "Yeah, two-home Tony, your mom and dad hate you so much, they don’t want to spend a full week with you." I pictured Pete laughing with me at Tony’s lame rhymes.

Maybe not. Tony’s complicated divorce-housing arrangement wasn’t his fault. But he didn’t have to be such a jerk, especially today. This time last year, Mom celebrated my first double-digit birthday in style. Then we had that awful conversation where I finally told her about Pete. When I woke the next morning, Mom had disappeared with no note, no message, like she’d teleported to another world. Somewhere away from a crazy kid like me.

Sniffing back the tears that welled up every time I thought of Mom, I opened the door to the library. The large, bright room provided secret nooks to hide, where no one would know I was by myself, as usual. So unfair my elementary school friends got sent to the other local middle school. I longed to be back in fifth grade.

“Hi, Reah. Here to help me shelve?” Ms. Angood towered over the shelving cart, more like a basketball player ready to take a shot than a school librarian sorting books. She was Mom’s best friend, back when Mom still worked at Haxby Hills Middle, and she kept a kind eye out for me.

I shook my head. “I’m here to look something up.”

“The library’s the place to be then.” Ms. Angood put down the load she was carrying.

I sat at the nearest computer and wiggled the mouse to wake it up.

Ms. Angood perched on a chair next to me. “What are you researching?”

“A meters to feet conversion.” I typed in my question and scrolled to find a good link. I wished she’d go back to her books, so I could talk with Pete.

But Ms. Angood wasn’t going anywhere.