The Road Out. Deborah Hicks
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sad all the time,” she said.
Alicia was still only nine, and she looked every bit the part of our group’s little girl. She had worked herself into a serious case of the giggles over the kissing scene in A Blue-Eyed Daisy. But when Blair spoke, Alicia’s face softened into an expression that seemed older.
“Why are you sad all the time?” she asked.
“Because I’m tired of sharing a room with my sisters,” said Blair. “And my dad—like she has a father that drinks a lot—my dad’s a drunk and a smart-aleck.”
I thought about the word that Blair used: dad. I had a hard time attaching it to the factual details of her biological father. He had been little more than a passing moment in her mother’s quest for alcohol, drugs, and, I suppose, love, to the extent that love could be distinguished from desperate need and desire. Every time Blair thought about the man she called Dad, she felt angry and confused.
“And he never stops drinking,” she said.
“If I was Ellie, and I had a father that drank and a mother that argued,” said Adriana, “I would call the police. Ellie needs better parents. Parents that are nice, that don’t get drunk and argue with each other.”
Adriana lowered her eyelids, as though her vision were turning inward. “I bet Ellie wants a nice house with absolute no parents and quiet and . . . and a big swimming pool. The reason I say that is that is what I need.”
I thought of the novel and its story about a girl who struggled for a relationship with her damaged and defeated father. “Is what you want different from what Ellie wants?” I said.
“I want it to be no parents,” Adriana replied. “And the reason is—I hardly get to see my real dad. He doesn’t come to see me because he’s too busy up his stepkids’ butt. My mom and stepdad argue all the time in front of me, which they’re not supposed to.”
Adriana let out a small laugh. “This one time my mom and my stepdad were arguing, and my mom threw the coffeemaker on my stepdad. And it broke.”
“My mom beats the crap out of my dad!” said Alicia in her young voice.
“My mom is like hers,” said Blair, looking sideways at Adriana, seated to her left. “Because her mom breaks things over her stepdad’s head, and my mom breaks telephones over my dad’s head.”
“What’s it like for you to read a book with a character who reminds you of yourself in certain ways?” I said. “What does it feel like when you’re reading?”
“Weird,” Blair replied.
“What does weird mean?”
“Crazy,” she said, as if this second word explained everything.
“Why do you want us to read all boring books?” said Elizabeth. She had been unusually quiet during our discussion. Now she seemed downright sulky. And there it was again, the word that Elizabeth loved to throw out at such moments.
“Well, they don’t seem boring to me,” I confessed.
“I know, that’s the problem,” shot back Elizabeth. She had come alive again within our group. Her hazel eyes flashed; her long, skinny torso straightened upward.
I started to explain: “It’s hard for me to understand what you like because—”
“We don’t want your kind,” said Elizabeth, before I could finish my thought.
It was my kind of book she didn’t want. And there was a reason for this: my sentimental novel about a girl’s coming of age couldn’t hold a candle to the paperback that Elizabeth and her best friend, Alicia, had discovered on their own.
It was found in a cardboard box of paperback giveaways, donated by someone from outside the girls’ community. From the moment Elizabeth discovered the book, she knew it was meant to be hers. The Final Nightmare was an old-fashioned ghost story, the third in the House on Cherry Street series about a summer rental house with a dark past. In the stories—written by the husband-and-wife team, Rodman Philbrick and Lynn Harnett—eleven-year-old Jason, his mom and dad, and his four-year-old sister Sally moved into an old gabled house for the summer. Almost right away, the house began to assert its haunted nature.
The spirits haunting the house revealed themselves only to Jason and Sally—the children. This was in part because at the book’s narrative center was the ghost of a child, Bobby, who had died when an evil nanny, Miss Everett, chased him with such malice that he crashed through a second-floor banister and fell to his death. The nanny’s spirit still reigned as an evil witch. Little Bobby also roamed the house, his child-voice aimed mostly at young Sally.
The morning following my attempt to lead the book group, Elizabeth and Alicia lay sprawled on the carpet with pillows to cushion their elbows. In front of them on the floor was the paperback with its torn front cover. The two girls took turns reading pages, though Elizabeth read faster. She read aloud like she spoke—fast and with an edgy tone in her voice. Alicia listened closely. Young Jason had gone upstairs to the attic to investigate some inexplicable things about the summer house on Cherry Street.
I stepped into the attic.
I gasped in surprise. And instantly bent over coughing as the dust flowed down my throat. But I didn’t care.
The attic was a wreck!
The walls were totally smashed in. There were big holes in the floor.
And Bobby’s rocking chair was still there!
The little rocking chair was the only thing that wasn’t smashed to bits—everything else was broken or damaged.
Even my parents would have to believe the house was really haunted when they saw this!
I was about to yell for my dad. Then I heard something move behind me. A rustling, sneaky sound in the shadows.
The back of my neck tingled.
I was slowly turning around to look when a horrible voice spoke right by my ear. A creaky, raspy voice of the undead.
“You!” it shrieked. “It’s all your fault! I’ll get you! I’ll get you for good!”3
It was not surprising to me that Alicia chose to read the paperback book that she and Elizabeth had discovered in the box of secondhand giveaways. Alicia had lost crucial ground in reading that year. Near the end of the summer before, just months before she was to enter fourth grade, Alicia moved across the river to Kentucky. There was some hint of family trouble, but none of this was spelled out for teachers such as me. Later I would be able to fill in some of the pieces—the street drugs, her mother’s falling out with an older churchgoing generation, the desperate need for housing. But mostly what I saw were their effects. In late spring of the school year, Alicia had moved back to Cincinnati, looking lost and reading far behind peers such as Elizabeth. The Final Nightmare was at just her reading level, and she read even its fast-paced action and campy dialogue slowly—word by word.
Elizabeth was in a different place. She was already a stronger reader, and she had been part of my weekly class during the school year. Across the school year she had changed so much as a reader that I knew that summer reading could be a turning point for her. Also, I felt a teacher’s sense of urgency, because already Elizabeth was beginning to lose her attachment to school. This was strange and troubling to me, because earlier that same year she had started to find herself in the world of books.
The previous winter, when our ritual of talking about fiction was interrupted by the clang and hiss of an old radiator letting out its steamy heat, I had decided to introduce Kate DiCamillo’s sweetly moving and sentimental novel Because of Winn-Dixie.4 Set in a working-class locale in rural Florida, the novel featured themes familiar to Elizabeth. Its young heroine, India Opal, lived with her single dad in a trailer. India Opal was motherless and she felt alone, but her fate changed one day when she befriended a mangy dog in the local Winn Dixie grocery store.
Until then, Elizabeth had been