Life came round with more disasters, my sophomore year at Normal Prep. Beanie, Bird, and Freon were juniors. Fall was a fresh start, a clean slate, and even the hideous uniform couldn’t stop the spring in my step.

“Can we forget about Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key?” Freon asked me. He was five inches taller and had safety-pins in his ears. “No hard feelings, right? Good vibes only. Can you, uh, be my girlfriend? I kinda like you.”

“Sure, whatever,” I said. How romantic.

Bird tittered behind her hand and often muttered, Freon, Freon, wither art thou, Freon? Teasing me. Only when she thought I wasn’t listening.

I remember a conversation one night…

She was writing a song for Save the Spotted Geckos, a song in honor of Beanie, while I sat on the opposite bed in our dorm, writing a love note to Freon. We both should’ve been doing our homework. Out of nowhere, I said, “How will I ever graduate with my perpetual string of Cs?”

“Stop mooning about boys. Sign up for study hall,” said Bird, glibly.

I narrowed my eyes. “All the losers take study hall. I am not a loser! And don’t lecture me about boys. Cause I see you with Beanie in the dark gym together alone.”

She sniffed. “Beanie and I are totally different than you and Freon-pooh. He and I discuss important matters, like the exports of Algeria.”

I threw a dirty sock at her. “That’s a lie. In school, you’re all Miss Studious, but you have a complete personality makeover when you’re around Beanie-pooh. Ah, Beanie, if I could but drink from the honey-pot of thy lips!”

“Thou hadst better quit that talk,” said Bird, in an unusually ticked-off tone. She stuck out her tongue at the smell of my sock, or maybe at me.

My relationship with Bird soured after that night. Boys messed up our conversations. So did school-talk. Just my imagination?

Next day, I walked in slow-motion brain fog down the hall, well-chewed pencils and spiral-bound notebooks in hand. Then a huge girl rammed into me. In my shock, I dumped two overflowing trash cans.

“Pick that up, loser!” She spit her gum on the floor and said, “Try chewing on that for a change. You gonna report me for bullying, huh? Why don’t you get Freon-pooh to rescue you?”

“You’re Lenore Caldwell, Freon’s old girlfriend,” I said, cluelessly. “The girl who wants to ban paper towels. You started Save the Spotted Geckos, didn’t you?”

“Thief,” Lenore hissed at me. “You stole my only consolation in life!”

“Take Freon back if you want!” I said. I shuddered. “Just don’t come near me—don’t you dare—”

Wham.

She leered at me between her yellow ponytails, and then she bashed my head into the water fountain. Kids stood around gaping. I staggered down the hall of shame and spent that day in the nurse’s office, with an ice pack and bandage plastered across my face at a very unflattering angle. After that day, I kept my eyes down. Lenore’s sneer was so violent—I could hear, feel, taste, and smell its hatred.

I moaned to Bird. “How can I hold my head up to Lenore? She’s launched a hate campaign against me. You wouldn’t believe. She spreads vicious rumors about me and Freon. Yet on the Student Council, she’s a star. Whenever she drinks a can of soda, she says a prayer of penitence to Albert Gore. She’s all about getting rid of trash, and she considers me trash—”

“Do to others as you would have them do to you,” said Bird, glibly. “Pacify her with gumdrops. Take these orange gumdrops.”

Bird didn’t understand. She had this magnetic force-field which drove bullies away from her. Bird-less, I thought up my own plan. Join Save the Spotted Geckos. They can’t attack and maul you if you’re one of them. If you can’t beat them, join them…and pray for mercy!

One day in November, I visited Save the Spotted Geckos in the music room after PE class. Bird, Penny, Lenore, and Monique were all giggling and gossiping together. Drumsticks, keyboard manuals, cords, pedals, and bells littered the floor. “Hello, people,” I said. “Would you mind if I joined your band—just to turn the pages of music books, set up equipment, and take out the trash?”

I will be your indentured servant. Please, Lenore, do not break my kneecaps.

Lenore flipped her ugly yellow ponytail. “Not her. Not Pepper. Two-faced ninny, boyfriend stealer! I hate her. She’d steal your boyfriend as soon as look at him.”

Monique nodded at Lenore and made obscure hand signals. Her glittery colored beads shook all over her cornrowed head. Monique wasn’t deaf, but she only communicated in sign language so that people would feel sorry for her.

“Monique says you smell like a cockroach-infested water bed with a leak,” Lenore translated.

Fury filled me. What was wrong with Lenore? Why was Freon hot property? He wasn’t that great—kissing him was like kissing cold, flaky linoleum. I considered announcing this fact to Save the Spotted Geckos, but I shut my mouth. Stitch those lips like a lady, Grandma had said.

Penny Thomas had no such notion. Her wide red mouth spewed words.

“Beanie Jacks is a fab bae! He does all the chores for us Save the Spotted Geckos girls, like turning on the amps and microphones. Adjusting sound equipment so we don’t blow the fuses or people’s eardrums.  He saved Save the Spotted Geckos. Dear boy! He actually has talent, and we don’t. He could make the sun rise and fill the world record books with home runs and open a shoe factory on the moon. When I see him poised like a god on the pitcher’s mound, I could give the world a high-five.”

People were always endorsing Beanie like he was a new Crest product, but Bird got angry. She said, “I dedicated my song, ‘Eagle on a Mountain,’ to him. Don’t forget, he’s my boyfriend.”

“He’s soooo smart—did you hear that he went to Young Blood Camp for Lovers of the American Flag?” asked Penny.

“That’s a lie. It was low-calorie camp, the fatso,” said Lenore.

“He sent me postcard after postcard,” said Penny, glowing.

“He didn’t send me a single postcard,” said Bird, red-faced.

“Oh. I guess he’s my boyfriend now. Don’t cry, honey.”

Disgusted, I fled the music room. Disgusting! All this meaningless melodrama grated my nerves, like Save the Spotted Geckos playing ‘Eagle on a Mountain.’”

Come nighttime in our dorm, Bird grabbed onto my arm hard. Nighttime had never been so black. Her face was blotchy pale with red spots.

“Help me, Pepper,” she whispered.

“God helps those who help themselves,” I said.

“Get Beanie back for me, or I’ll jump into the Pacific Ocean.”

“Don’t talk like that, Bird.

“I will stalk him the hallways. I will make his life a living Hades. Beanie promised he’d stay with me forever.”

“Beanie’s no good. You’ll find another boyfriend soon.”

“I have fingernails of steel. I will get Beanie back!”

For weeks, Bird’s dark eyes in her sallow, lifeless face followed Beanie as she walked like a zombie through the halls. Her grades slipped. She hardly ate a thing. She cried herself to sleep.

One day, in geometry class, she started puking uncontrollably, until she passed out from dehydration and they had to call an ambulance. The whole school was in chaos.

She ended up in the Flamingo County Hospital for two weeks, suffering from a contracted double whammy of strep and mono. None of us kids were allowed to visit her. We sent huge bundles of flowers and cheesy get-well cards. Poor Bird. When she returned to Normal Prep, a pale and listless noodle, she still wouldn’t speak of anyone but Beanie.

“He is gone and will never come back to me, Pepper.”

“Is that all you have left to say?”

She claimed she’d caught the kissing disease from Yours Truly. Beanie had caught it from Penny and spread the germs to her, she accused. If she wasn’t so ill, I would’ve laughed.

Life was very dull without Bird. Skies looked like last week’s mashed potatoes. Beanie continued golden boy, president of the student council, acing his classes, making fiery speeches, selling yearbooks, and maybe making the sun rise. I don’t know. The jerk. Freon and I sneaked down to the gymnasium—the floor reps ignored us. We kicked off our shoes and practiced idiotic dance moves. We would talk and talk. He planned to blow up the world and settle Mars, he said.

“Aw, Freon, you’re just talking!” I laughed and slapped him like he was a comedian. I always wrote bad poems, like, “I got a bae, his name is Freon. I wish his name was lit in neon. I will love him for an eon. Oh yeah bae, that’s my boy Freon!”

Mrs. Waffle understood. Visiting her trailer on weekends, I gobbled dark chocolate volcano cake, sipped acidic green tea. I listened to basket-weaving Mrs. Key talk about astral projection. I told Mrs. Waffle about Lenore’s bullying—and then Mrs. Waffle looked mortified.

“Don’t speak about Lenore. It isn’t proper!” she said. Shook her head.

I stared at her playing-cards, wondering if Freon was right. Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key had a secret. What if the murder and lobotomy had taken place? Why were they so strange?

I was clueless.

“You stay away from those freaks!” Freon warned me. But I had enough freaks to occupy my troubled mind for decades.

Easter of my sophomore year, Normal Prep held a huge talent show. Save the Spotted Geckos performed; there were speeches and awards. We traveled by buses called Great White Whales to McKenna Park. Grandma and Grandpa Watkins were thrilled and told me over the phone, “Stay strong and do well—the credit of England’s throne is upon you, Pepper.”

My only act was orange-juggling. Who wanted to see a future duchess juggling oranges?

“This is gonna be sick,” Freon said. He looked gloomy. Dark, ink-stained clouds swept the sky, and the sea roared.

There was a terrific, horrific gale—only it wasn’t in the form we expected.

Normal Prep’s Greatest Talent Show of the Decade was torture. I juggled my oranges. The cheerleaders waved their batons, the football players took a bow, Miss Chavez lead us in ‘Normal Prep, We Love You Forever,’ while the cheerleaders yelled, ‘Give me an N! Give me an O! Give me an R! Give me an M! Give me an A! Give me an L!” The string quartet struck up “Stars and Stripes Forever” while the audience roared like a mighty ocean.

We kids sat in a tight, sweaty huddle on the gazebo, under the fading stars and approaching night. The Save the Spotted Geckos girls snubbed me cruelly. It was all Lenore’s doing.

“Man, the night’s cold,” said Freon. “Do you wanna wear my hoodie?”

“I don’t want your sweat-stained jacket,” I said. Lenore made the night cold. Lenore was shooting ice shards from her soul.

Freon slipped his arm around me and let me rest my head in his shoulder, all sweet and boyfriend-like, but Lenore was saying, “You reckless destroyers of the planet, you slayers of innocent baby polar bears, you abusers of Mother Earth Gaia and Sister Rain and Grandmother Sun, you’ll get what’s coming to you! I’ll be in front of the United Nations one day, crying on behalf of my generation, while you’ll be grubbing in the gutter of stupid gossip. Pepper doesn’t know what’s coming to her. If Pepper was the only person alive, I wish Freon would blow up the world and exterminate her so it would be a vacant, blank wasteland.”

“God! What an awful person!” said Freon.

I didn’t answer. I saw matches and fireworks sticking out of Lenore’s hemp-woven backpack.

Beanie was onstage, saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you! I’m thrilled to represent the student body and counsel at Normal Prep. This has been a wonderful year. Simply wonderful. I’ve learned many important lessons, kept up my GPA to 4.0, sold hundreds of yearbooks, and got myself a beautiful new girlfriend named Penny. Now, I would like to thank the honorable Miss Chavez, and—”

I didn’t listen to Beanie’s speech. I watched Bird’s pale, contorted face.

Save the Spotted Geckos launched into a bombastic, metal-driven, “Eagle on a Mountain.” Go, Beanie! Hurray, Beanie, you’re so fine. You blow my mind. Hey, Beanie! The crowd hollered and threw kisses. Monique’s beads glowed under the spotlight as she plunked on the keyboard. Lenore whacked those drums with a shifty look in her eye. Penny sawed at the violin. Bird’s voice cracked with sobs. She was like a ticking time-bomb.

A ticking time-bomb…oh, gosh, what an awful choice of words.

A broken amplifier crackled. Penny stood the microphone (now screeching and crackling unbearably). I raced like a rat to fix the problem. New crackling sounds emerged, like fireworks under the stage.

BOOM!

People screamed and toppled over each other. McKenna Park vanished in a fireball, a billowing mass of smoke.

Bird put my grandmother’s hand-knit afghan over me. “You’re still shaking, Pepper. Please calm down. You’re all right.”

Was it luck or amnesia that saved me? I’ll never know. One minute I stood onstage at McKenna Park—then, fire and smoke. Fire and smoke and nothing. Somebody yelled Bomb! I blacked out. Right now, I was back in my Normal Prep dorm, two days after the explosion.

“A bomb,” I quavered.

“Yes, dear, there was a bomb,” said Bird.

“Lenore Caldwell did it.”

“Honey, we can’t make accusations. The police have investigated and found no evidence one way or another.”

“You’re fibbing. That’s just what the police told you to say.”

“Pepper, you gave us all a frightful scare. I was so scared…”

“People got badly hurt,” I whimpered. “People are dead.”

“People were shaken, but nobody got more than minor burns. It was a miracle from Heaven, I say. Let’s hope to God it was just some smart-aleck looking for attention, not a killer.”

“It was Lenore,” I insisted.

Bird sighed. “Hero Freon dragged you offstage. I never saw a girl so crazy as you. Then you just crumpled like a hamburger wrapper. Where’s your spunk, Pepper?”

“Check in the laundry-hamper. Where did I misplace my spunk?”

My emotions were a can of firecrackers. Resentment for Bird. Hatred for Lenore. Gratitude for Freon. Apathy for Beanie. Anger at my own stupid-old-stupid-old-stupid-old self.

Bird cried all night, but the bomb didn’t scare her. Beanie’s jerky behavior traumatized her. Our Fearful Foursome was broken. “I’ll never find another him. I’ll die without him!”

“Please, Bird, let me cheer you up. You help me,” I said. Sympathy was like rhubarb pie when a person wasn’t hungry. Too rich to feast upon. I was furious at my friend, but I couldn’t let her destroy her life over a boy.

I told Bird to strain for tomorrow’s brightest horizon. Tomorrow was a new day. Tomorrow was a glorious future. Go for the gold. I even offered her Freon as a consolation prize, but she declined.

“You can keep Freon,” Bird said. “I am completely done with boys.”

Life at school was subdued. The floor reps and hall monitors were hawk-eyed. Miss Chavez got security systems and metal detectors installed, and she dragged in a dozen kids for three-hour interrogations. The police asked questioned. And then—well, people can’t walk in a cloudy haze of questions forever. Life fell on its back paws and ambled on.

“So how is school going for you, honey?” asked Grandma Watkins, teacup in hand. It wasn’t a friendly, sociable question. She had to know if I was doing credit to the throne of England.

During my sixteenth summer, home in Dekalb, I lied to Grandma.

“Life’s fine! Life is one hundred fifty percent amazing!”

“Well, my baby girl is sweet sixteen, and pretty as a tea-lily in the Queen’s garden. I hardly recognized you.”

I forgot to mention my C-filled report card, Lenore’s bullying, the Mrs. Waffle scandal, or the bomb. My grandparents had sent me to AquaFish therapy camp, so they believed I was all fixed and my teen angst phase was gone. That’s the frustrating thing about sixteen. Your middle school and early high school blunders are behind you; it’s the most carefree time of your life. Your acne is gone, you have a steady boyfriend, and you can drive. That’s what everyone says.

Nobody mentions that the teen angst can hang on.

So there I stood, shivering, in the basement of the abandoned Flamingo Beach Hotel. Freon’s footsteps echoed in my ears.

It was November of my junior year at Normal Prep. Freon and I had been conscripted by Miss Chavez to perform a useful community service, cleaning a decrepit building. Trespassing in a decrepit building was more like it. The Flamingo Beach Hotel, boarded up for twenty years, was the most decrepit building imaginable. Hanging onto its foundations by a thread. Just like my soul. The mayor of Flamingo planned to throw its junk into dumpsters and convert the place into the Flamingo Senior Bingo-Hall and Fishpond.

“I’ve heard from Mrs. Waffle—I mean, from local sources—that the Flamingo Beach Hotel closed twenty-five years ago,” I’d told Freon.

Freon smirked. “Some creep lives in there, and I’m not touching it with a fifty-foot pole.”

The place did look…occupied. Broken into. Why not? It was rotting, collecting dust and mildew, a haven for life’s bums and weirdos.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Like every good trespasser would say, ‘You never know until you go in.’”

Freon grinned from freckled ear to ear.

Life at Normal Prep had started out so wonderful. Bird and Beanie were back together, and Bird had said, “Pepper! It’s stupendous! Life has been so unutterably dull without you. This year is gonna change everything—our Fearful Foursome has never been more incorrigible. Snobby old Lenore Caldwell doesn’t know what’s coming to her.”

Freon sat next to me at breakfast every day. We laughed at jokes so stupid that milk shot straight from our ears and noses, and we gasped and choked.

“I honestly don’t know what potential you see in Freon,” Bird confided in me. “He acts like a sixth grader. I think he plans to major in whoopee cushions. What will you major in?”

Blasted abandoned buildings. Why did that rebellious spark in Freon’s eye silently pass the Trespassing Virus to me?

From the beach hotel basement, there lived a man known as Muffy the Bum. He lived there like a cockroach and stalked out his prey.

Bless your soul, Normal Prep. Junior year, I slammed my head full of geometry, super-advanced biology, English drama, classroom skills, government (yawn), agriculture (who cares?), and physics. (I told Freon that I’d rather take a psychics’ class. He was taking astronomy and wished to take astrology. Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key could enlighten us on this). Life was hard and boring and awful. Life was too short to think about grades, college, and graduation. Why not take a break and trespass in the Flamingo Beach Hotel?

One of Grandma’s favorite songs had a line that said, “I’m going to be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender.” I was a happy idiot all right, a blissful fool, a merry imbecile, a laughing lunatic. I was obviously not struggling for the legal tender because I had no job. The result of no job would be no car, college, or life, so I’d better whip myself into shape.

That’s what Bird told me. “The brakes of your life will squeal to a screeching halt in the middle of a crowded freeway,” she said.

“That’s funny,” I said. “I can’t drive.”

“I mean, the metaphorical wheels of life, genius.”

“You’d better say a prayer for me if I ever get behind the wheel.”

“Sure, because I’ll be your driving instructor.”

Miss Chavez shook her brown finger in my face and said, “You do credit to Normal Prep, take a broom and Lysol, march into that hotel, and make yourself useful!”

“Can Freon help me?” I asked Miss Chavez.

“Sure. Still…that bum had better behave himself. Keep an eye on him. No messing around together in that basement, you hear?”

Why had I just set up Freon for the trespassing adventure of his life?

“Holy Thomas Jefferson!” Freon shouted. “Holy Moses, holy Napoleon!”

“Shut up and stop shouting in my ear,” I said.

Freon yelled oaths by the names of historical figures like Lincoln, since Bird complained about him taking God’s name in vain. Message received. Freon was excited as a barrel of Lenore’s firecrackers, hearing about the Flamingo Beach Hotel job. He was goin’ down there if it was the last thing he did.

“Archa coming?” Freon demanded of me. He stood outside with his jackknife and baseball bat. It was November 28th.

“What made you think I wasn’t coming to meet the Bum at the Flamingo Beach Hotel? Come on, let’s leave!”

The Flamingo Beach Hotel had that dead-rat smell. Age. Grime. Neglect. It echoed in my bones and made me shiver, even on hot days. Live electrical wires. Hotel rooms piled with torn beach umbrellas. Pipes broken and dripping. I could never tell when the door might stick, leaving me stranded in semi-darkness.

A Bum lived behind the walls. I heard him, I felt him. I just never saw him.

Freon’s eyes blazed in the cavernous basement depths.

“I won’t stop. Won’t stop until I’m as famous as God. Mummify me if you wish, trap me like the plague, kill me—but I swear, I will freeze myself in nitrate and come out a thousand years later to take over the world. And after all the world’s girls are gone, you will remember me. You and me, we’ll go down in a bloody firestorm. You ready to break the planet? We’re young, and all we got is this raw fire, the will to accomplish what all the other fools are too cowardly to try. And you will help me. Holy Genghis Khan, I swear!”

I muttered to myself, “Was I unwise? How did I end up down here?”

Better get to work, Pepper.

Freon stomped off in one direction, and I set to work.

Thirty or forty years ago, Flamingo was a neat little tourist town with the hotel balconies lit by Japanese torches. Babies played in the seashore sand, girls slathered with suntan lotion lay motionless on towels, adults drank and danced late into the hot nights, and the Pacific was full of surfers. Now…junk heaps contained a moth-infested surfboard, a shattered snow-globe, a grimy pair of bikini bottoms, a child’s shovel and bucket, and a 1977 calendar. Dumpsters would carry this all away. Trash, trash, trash. Treasure? I stumbled upon more sealed cardboard boxes. What could be inside—jars of seashells or gaping-mouthed plaster fish? Those plaster fish in the basement gave me creeps and shivers. Trash, treasure…more trash, more treasure.

Shocked, I found a wooden trunk with the name SUZY OKABATU painted on the lid. The bright blue and yellow paint had chipped, but I knew this was a long-lost Japanese girl’s trunk. Why was it in the Flamingo Beach Hotel basement? Who was Suzy Okabatu?

“Will the real Suzy Okabatu please explain?” I wondered. I jerked open the lid.

Suzy’s old clothes lay neatly packed—underwear, bobby socks, shorts and woolen school skirts. My hands shook when I lifted a delicate, hand-sewn white dress. A dress for a baptism or confirmation? A graduation dress? So many mysteries. Then I found the best thing of all, a photo album of black-and-white photos. The writing was firm and clear. Soon, I was lost in Suzy’s life. Suzy eating Japanese rice, Suzy saying the Pledge of Allegiance in school, Suzy goofing off on the beach, Suzy with little siblings or friends…on and on. Oh, looky! A diary!

I scanned the last entries. Suzy was frightened. It was 1942. All her friends from Nihonmachi, San Francisco, their siblings, and their families, had gone into internment camps due to Executive Order 9066. Suzy’s parents were going to smuggle her into the Flamingo Beach Hotel to wait out the war. A stranger would drive her to Flamingo, Suzy stuffed in the trunk. Suzy was frightened, and Suzy was filled with lonesomeness at the sight of Pearl Harbor signs and black-out skies.

Weary, I laid the diary into Suzy’s trunk. Suzy had slept in this Flamingo Beach Hotel basement. Was she more terrified of the dark or the light? Had the place always been so dark? How did I know that Suzy wasn’t the modern-day Bum…still hiding here sixty years later?

“Why, Lord?” I asked. It seemed nonsensical, that a Japanese American girl would hide like a rat in her own country, in Flamingo, far from her family. Nonsense. Depressing nonsense.

Oh, well…surely terrible things like Suzy had seen during World War Two would never happen again. I wouldn’t be stuck in the Flamingo Beach Hotel basement.

Distracted, I started upstairs to fetch my Lysol and bucket and to use the bathroom. The door stuck and stuck and wouldn’t budge. It was like an ogre had his back to the outside door. Stuck!

“Let me out!” I shrieked, stupidly. I heard no answer but my echo. Maybe that was the Bum, mocking me. “FREON!” I yelled.

I was stuck in the Flamingo Beach Hotel basement.

I had to search for my Absent in Action Trespassing Companion. Tough to walk around the Flamingo Beach Hotel basement in pitch-darkness with a bursting bladder and wobbly knees. My flashlight was awfully shaky. Wham! I hit a wall and howled. Well, my howl was more of a whimper. Actually, I didn’t hit a wall—it was a door hinge.

The door opened automatically. Lights blazed in my face.

“Welcome to the Secret Room,” said a voice. A pleasant voice. “There’s a restroom on the right.” I had encountered the Bum, and Freon was with him.

“Help!” I yelled.

“I am Muffy Werms,” said the Bum. He was a little man with a goatee. I gaped at him with all my usual intelligence. Muffy Werms? Seriously? He was far more goat than goatee. He couldn’t have been over forty, but his hair was snowy. His eyes were pleasant but hungry looking.

“That’s Pepper Watkins, my bae,” Freon said to Muffy Werms.

“Freon…Freon! Where did you…how did you know?”

He grinned. “Sure, I know, crazy, but it’s definitely true.”

The Bum’s hideout was a whole new building built under the Flamingo Beach Hotel. Not just a dank and musty basement hole. The walls were white as Ultrabright toothpaste, the floors vacuumed. Muffy had bathrooms, bedrooms with bunkbeds, a kitchen, and a parlor.

Have you ever dreamed that your house had different extensions that you never knew about? Have you ever dreamed of a place you felt in your soul existed, but it didn’t really exist? The doctors say those dreams are about hidden dimensions in yourself, facts you are unwilling to face about yourself, or your hidden dreams of paradise.

Muffy’s Secret Room was that dream come alive.

“Stay longer, my dear guests,” said Muffy. His beard bristled, and his eyes twinkled. “I bought presents from Target when I sneaked upstairs into the world.”

“You are amazing. How do you sneak upstairs without being caught?” Freon asked. Freon looked at the Bum like he was Jesus.

Muffy showed us his special kits with black ski masks and keys to hidden passageways. If Muffy had owned the Ring of Bilbo Baggins, Freon couldn’t have been more impressed.

“That’s rad!” he kept saying.

Bewildered, Freon and I sank into the feather-soft sofa. A TV blared trash, but all that I saw was that it was flat-screen, brand new, beautiful. Trashy magazines lay on the shiny, oaken coffee table. Junk food bags filled a neat, geometric metal trash can. The sofa was specially designed to relax you, like you see in the mall and on TV, and it had an extendible footrest. Muffy Werms brought us tall glasses of soda and said, “Make yourselves at home. Pepper and Freon, and I am pleased to meet you.”

I was already at home. I knew that Freon and I would stay in the Secret Room.

We ate chocolate-drizzled Oreo pie for supper, tall glasses of Coke mixed with whiskey, and potato chips. Freon and I played a video game called DeathStar, and Muffy gave me a wrapped package. How had he known I would come? Why had he given me this? I gasped to find a real diamond necklace and gold bracelets!

Thank you!

“Oh, Mr. Werms—I mean Muffy—I mean the Bum—I’m sorry—”

He smiled, beard bristling. “Call me the Bum. I don’t mind, since I am an extensively wealthy bum with a substantial home living and great comfort.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bum,” I said, overwhelmed.

The jewelry dazzling on my body awed me, like I was a whole new girl, like the Pepper Watkins of the world upstairs was dissolving…dissolving into newness and danger. Whoever knew trespassing could be so wonderful?

Muffy said, “Tomorrow, I will give you a tattoo—a real one. I have tools to do it.”

“You’re a filthy-rich bum,” I said.

“I inherited a fortune from my old man,” he said. Grinned.

He held me in his arms and spoke smoothly, soothingly. “Pepper, get rid of that school uniform. Boarding school cookie-cutter child—you will be that old girl no longer. Express your individuality. Down here, in the Bum’s Secret Room, you can be anyone you please. People’s opinions don’t matter.”

“I love you,” I cried.

“I love video games! I could play DeathStar all day and all night!” cried Freon.

“You can—anything! Anything you please,” said the Bum.

Night fell. I was sleepily relaxed, happy. Freon was here. I was safe. We sat on the feather sofa, and our conversation drifted in unnatural, embarrassing new directions. Once or twice, I thought What would Bird think? What would Beanie think? What about Miss Chavez, Grandma and Grandpa?

“They’re all a narrow-minded pack of lizards,” said Freon.

“Whom do you mean?”

“Bird and Beanie, the prissy-cats.”

I snorted.

“Bird is a simpering specimen of a lady, always bugging me about my manners. She crochets hymn verses on hankies, and she’ll grow up to become a nun. The only thing worse than a churchy good girl is a churchy good boy. Beanie, the overbearing stink.”

“Not anymore,” said Freon. “We live in the Secret Room of the Flamingo Beach Hotel. Muffy Werms is our friend.”

“This is a strange new world,” I said.

I fell asleep.

If Normal Prep was a strange new world, the Secret Room was another universe.

Joy! Freedom!

Freon and I ate Oreo pie, cookie ice cream, potato chips, and hot dogs. We drank only soda, no water. We watched hilarious TV shows, played video games, and opened presents. All day. All the time.

My new bedroom—dazzling! My bedroom had girly, glittery movie-star posters all over the walls, countless beanbag chairs and electronic Bratz dolls as maids. Freon’s room had black ninja warriors, light sabers, and machines blaring death metal.

“Here in the Secret Room, every day is a birthday,” said Muffy. Muffy was our king.

Deep in my mind, I heard a refrain—Stupid moron, happy idiot, Pepper Watkins, you have surrendered so young, and you will regret this. You will regret moving into the Secret Room!

I told the refrain to be quiet. Then I opened a box of cinnamon-red hair dye. “Thank you, Bum!”

“My pleasure,” said the Bum.

Looking in the bathroom mirror, I saw that my freckles had vanished. My hair was dyed four different colors. I had piercings up and down my ears and on my tongue. Those piercings hurt so badly I wanted to scream, but the Bum said pain was just the price for looking sexy. I’d enter fashion shows, and Freon would be my handsome Duke. We would run off together like two characters in a harlequin romance. Sassily swinging ponytails, platform wedgies, spaghetti straps, and nail polish. Now…my makeover was complete. The Great Unveiling.

Or not. The Bum had carefully inserted tattoos beneath the skin on my arms. Now I had chains, hearts, and daggers. They would never come off. I thought having a chain tattoo was creepy, but the Bum assured me that chains were glamorous.

“Time for a dance party!” the Bum called.

The Bum was setting up the new boom box, which blared “Uptown Funk.” Freon took my hand, and we stumbled drunkenly, tripping over our feet. At Normal Prep dances, Freon had left me a wallflower, because dancing was for dorks and losers. Now, we didn’t care. The Bum laughed loudly along with us.

Every day was a good time. Let the good old fun roll!

Weeks passed in the Secret Room. Every day was a birthday. I forgot that the world upstairs existed. For now, it was just Freon and I and the Bum in the Secret Room together. Freon and the Bum. The Bum and Freon.

Joy! Freedom!

“These days, we’re not gonna fool around no more,” growled the Bum.

He ripped streamers and balloons. He whipped the fresh strawberry shortcake from the table. Snarling, he thew boxes of tissue paper and electronic gadgets. Cursing, he threw the mess into the trash can and popped the helium balloons.

Freon and I paled. We exchanged anxious looks.

The Bum was on the loose. He was once our guardian angel, but he had become a dragon. He was irritable. Our anxious questions only produced snarls.

We were both too fat, lazy, and complacent. We had learned to obey the Bum—he watched us every minute, even in our rooms asleep, through special video-cameras on the ceiling. Disobey his orders, he might cuss us out or worse.

“Kids,” said the Bum suddenly, “Listen to me. I have big news. Kids, we are leaving for San Francisco tonight. No questions.”

Freon gaped. “No!”

Muffy said, “Don’t fear, child. Muffy Werms the Bum will protect you. Once we go to San Francisco, we will party, just like in the Secret Room. We must widen our horizons, rights?”

“Right!” I said. “What time will we leave?”

Down in the Secret Room, time meant nothing. I slept when I wanted and ate when I wanted. Like an infant. Muffy had taken my Swiss Army watch which my grandparents had given me for my twelfth birthday. He had no clocks of any kind. Who cared? I had gold bracelets, so why did I need my grandparents’ watch?

“We will leave when the time is fit,” said the Bum.

Freon looked pale and sick, like a fish out of water. His eyes bulged strangely. As I watched my boyfriend, my last bite of birthday cake soured in my mouth.

It was a drizzly night in January when we escaped. We left the Flamingo Beach Hotel through a broken window. Muffy’s sledgehammer did its work. We all had ski masks, jackknives, and strict instructions to keep quiet.

“Mum up!”

Air! Sweet, beautiful AIR! Rain fell on my tongue. Muffy took us to the local junkyard, where we piled into a crushed Gremlin. It had a bashed back end and no seat belts. How Muffy had gotten keys to the Gremlin, I’d never know.

Most things about Muffy Werms, we never knew. He whipped on a ski mask. He crunched the key into the ignition.

We blasted down the Ashcan Highway. Freon kept muttering, “I can take the wheel if I need to.” Muffy’s Gremlin reminded me of Grandma’s reckless driving, only with added carsickness. My birthday cake spewed out my green mouth.

Lights from Normal Prep filled me with sadness— I thought of Bird and Beanie. Their lives spun in a whole different orbit than ours. My mind was too numb to think about search parties, missing child posters, and the chaos our disappearance had caused at school.

Disappearing from Normal Prep had caused chaos. Now I was officially a teen runaway. Going to San Francisco. Without flowers in my hair.

We passed the Golden Gate Bridge as dawn licked the sky like a cat’s tongue. I watched, dazed. Water and ships sang beneath me. The world was watercolor and ignited my veins with beauty, beauty, beauty.

We were trapped in a crushed Gremlin with Muffy Werms and Freon…headed for a party.

“What’ll San Francisco be like?” I said.

“The Party of Parties,” he said.

After the Bum parked his Gremlin, we took heavy suitcases from the trunk and carried them twenty city blocks to our hotel. My arms wanted to snap off. Freon offered to carry my bags, but he was already weighed down. Before noon, in America’s second-largest city of lights and horrors, I was bone-achingly tired. Lost. Hungry.

The Bum said nothing and just carried on.

Things have got to get better if we look out for each other, I thought.

Crazily, I thought the Bum was my ally. Then we approached the hotel, and found it a washed-out, shabby place with smashed windows. A sign over the door read HAPPYVILLE CENTRE FOR THE RIGHTEOUS ROLLERS.

“What the fricking heck?” said Freon.

He dropped all his suitcases, and I had to collect them. Rancid, rotten smells, like rats and forty-year-old mold, hit our senses. The world reeled and spun. The Bum was like a phone with a busy signal.

“Where are all the righteous rollers?” asked Big-Mouth Freon. I made an expression to tell him to shut up, but Freon wouldn’t.

“If you bother the Bum, he’ll lock you away in jail, till the sun drops like a watery lemon candy,” I said.

“I don’t care what the Bum says. Just wait awhile! Let him lock me up and away. Look at this city—a world without birds, a world without wind or sunshine. Just locked doors. A world without keys or hope.”

“You’ll stay in this room,” said the Bum. We gaped at him.

Freon flopped on the edge of a narrow cot in our room. “So what is this place, juvie?”

“The Bum is taking care of us,” I said.

“My faith in the man is shaking,” said Freon.

Day was lost to Freon and I. We now lived in Happyville Center for the Righteous Rollers, a seedy boardinghouse in San Francisco. Muffy Werms always wore ski masks. He locked Freon and I in a cell—our sleeping quarters separated by a glass wall. We had stale pizza crusts three times a day to sustain us.

“You kids can’t fool no more,” he said, jangling the keys to our jail cell. “You knew I would make you mine. Well, you two are mine. You will never get out of this building.”

Never.

Ever.

Freon and I whispered across the glass wall when Muffy left us.

“This place is a cult ground,” said Freon.

His face had not one trace of the boy I knew back at Normal Prep.

 “Haven’t you seen? Haven’t you heard? The people who ‘board’ here sing ‘We Are the Happy, Happy, Righteous Rollers,” for endless hours, until they’re hoarse and hypnotized and brainwashed. They are all shut in dark rooms like us. This. Place. Is. A. Cult. Ground.”

The song went like this:

We must confess that we are the

Happy, happy righteous rollers.

We are two-headed cows,

We are sinners,

We must honor, we must listen,

We must obey.

Imagine hearing that ten hours a day.

“Why does it go on? I hate it,” I said, bewildered. Everything was a gray blur.

“It’s like in China. Or Russia. They make dissidents sing in the gulag,” said Freon.

“No, no…”

“You’re brainwashed, idiot! Can’t you listen to me? This is pure evil. We can’t stay here. I repeat, we will escape. We will escape. We will escape.”

“The Bum will take care of us,” I said above the screaming. Greedily, I gnawed a pizza crust.

Freon’s face was hard, troubled. Forgetting all the Bum’s flattery, cake, and presents, I was stabbed with terror. Freon was my best friend. What if he smashed a window, took the broken glass shards, and cut himself in a last-ditch attempt to escape? He could do anything. Freon was determined.

“Remember what I said, that we would rule the world? We will rule the world. Pepper…Pepper, I think you’re the only person I’m scared for. Except for my only sister, Florinda. She died. Too late for her. In my mind, you’re my sister, brainwashed idiot or no. I have to save your life.”

“Just fight a little longer…the battle belongs to the Lord,” I said, numbly.

“Where are the keys to our prison cells?” said Freon.

“I’ll find you, Freon, even if we’re trapped here forever,” I said.

Freon thought awhile.

“The Bum has been giving us sleeping pills in our boxes of pizza crusts, so we’ll be knocked out cold, and won’t bother him while he does creepy cult-leader tasks. We should collect and hoard our sleeping pills.”

“No,” I said, shuddering.

“My idea is this. We’ll crush up the sleeping pills on the pizza crusts and force-feed them to Muffy Werms, when he comes. He’ll be knocked out instantly. We’ll grab the keys. So then, we’ll walk the hell out of our prison cells.”

“You’re not gonna kill the Bum, are you?”

“Why not?” said Freon, grimly.

In the darkness and pizza crusts, locked in our glass-separated prison cell, we collected our sleeping pills. The Bum gave us two each day. He let us out only for bathroom breaks, and to join the other haggard prisoners in singing, “We Are the Happy, Happy Righteous Rollers,” till our eyes rolled backwards. If we refused to sing, we were beaten with toilet plungers, rulers, yardsticks, and flyswatters. We hadn’t seen the sky in…forever.

We were suffocated like bugs in a jar. Our souls crushed like old watermelon.

“Not for long,” said Freon. “Believe it or not, tonight we’ll be free.”

“Free?”

 His hands crushed the sleeping pills and sprinkled the fine dust across the pizza.

“I hope the Bum enjoys his pizza,” I said numbly, stinging with fly-swatter bruises.

Freon grinned in spite of his pain.

Freon and I were thin, hollow shells of teenagers. We were covered in bruises and looked hideous. Now we shared a bond like never before. We were about to witness a miracle.

The Bum took the pizza crusts we offered him, and he wolfed them in our presence with the door open. His hard eyes glazed, and he turned to a sleeping statue. His beard slumped into his neck.

Freon yanked me and yelled, “Now we leave!”

I scrambled off the dirty floor. We skittered off like rats. Freon and I dashed for the door of the Happyville Center for the Righteous Rollers, and we escaped into the streets of San Francisco.

Someday, I thought feebly, the haggard faceless screamers in those other cells will break free. But we have enough to think of about our own survival.

Freon and I were missing children in San Francisco all day and night. I clung to him only for survival. We scrounged in dumpsters outside shopping centers, under streetlights, hung by hard chain-wire fences. Our eyes were too hollow and tired to care about creeps in tattoos with heroin eyes, sickos, policemen, serial killers, or the Bum. Hunger plagued me. I dreamed of big juicy chicken legs, turtle pie, ice cream sundaes. Even broccoli casserole and fried spinach would be welcome.

Remember Grandma Watkins? How she could cook her mutton and teacakes, her bangers and mashed. Oh, Grandma! I miss you! Most of all, the faces of Grandma and Grandpa swam before me.

How could I have disappointed them, so deeply?”

“Freon…”

“What?” he scuffled impatiently.

“I’m thinking of home. Back in IL. My grandma and grandpa’s butler eat better than I do, and I’m their granddaughter—they said I deserved an English throne. How ridiculous. I’m a guttersnipe. The floor reps and hall monitors and janitors at Normal Prep feast daily. Here I am, here we are, students of Normal Prep…starving in the gutter.”

“Think I’m enjoying myself?” Freon snapped.

“I could beg forgiveness a hundred million times. Even that wouldn’t make up for all the hell my grandparents and Normal Prep have gone through. You do realize we could end up in jail, Freon? Huh? I’ve got to get on my knees—I can’t get any lower. Grandma and Grandpa! How I miss them!”

“They’d kick you in the butt,” said Freon.

“You never had much of a family to lose, just a dysfunctional mother. Your sister’s already gone.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m clinging to you for survival.”

“So am I. Harder than you could ever imagine. No one ever trusted me like you did, Pepper Watkins. The world is full of hatred for people like us. You don’t pretend to lord it over me, like Bird and Beanie did. We’re just humans, here in the gutter…humans, humans. Just humans. In the gutter. Gutter in the humans. Humans! Gutter! So let’s leave, Pepper. Aren’t you coming, Pepper? After all we’ve suffered?”

I stared at the softness of his sandstone hair. Those awful blue eyes pierced me. Freon Lyte, my best friend. There was no one in San Francisco, in the whole world, but Freon and I. I wanted to claw and hug him.

“Come on. We’re not a bad sort, just two lost and lonely teenage kids,” he said.

“I want to go home,” I said. A blubbering sob rose in me.

Though we’d escaped Muffy, Freon had a slippery way of abandoning me when I was in great danger, my soul in turmoil. He’d have to stick with me this time.

“Let’s go,” I said, my knees shaky.

“To find a warmer dumpster?”

“No, Freon. We gotta get on a bus or train.”

“Going where?”

“Don’t play dumb. We’re all alone on the streets. What’s to stop us from eloping across the country? You’re eighteen, and I’m touching seventeen.”

Plastered on a pole, there were our pictures and names. Penelope Watkins and Freon Lyte. Good gravy, how had we not been spotted? Then I saw the date of disappearance, and I felt a plunge in my soul.

Five months had passed. Five months since I’d slept peacefully beside Bird at Normal Prep.

“I want to puke,” said Freon. “Except I have nothing left in me.”

I stared at him. My voice rambled.

“Evening falls hard as cement in San Francisco. Sail on, ships of dreamy dreams, sail on past the Golden Gate. The morning sun will be a spotlight for us. See how the seagulls shine. And I’m your friend. So we’re going to leave, run away on a cross-country tour together. We can stow away on a bus.”

Freon poked a stick in the gutter. His words were quiet, but intent. He had to run home to his mama, he said.

“Run home, Momma’s boy,” I said, angry.

“You don’t understand, Pepper.”

“What don’t I understand?”

“Muffy Werms killed my sister, Florinda, years ago.”

“No!”

“Yes. I suspected him for weeks, but I thought that was just me being a weirdo. The first time I saw him, actually, was in a U-Haul van. But I was semi-loopy.”

“You’re not making sense, Freon. Begin at the beginning.”

He sighed.

“It’s just this—Muffy Werms called himself Mr. Goat. My family was moving to a new house. I was seven, Florinda was six. Muffy was the U-Haul driver. We got into the U-Haul, he kidnapped us. While he was fleeing the cops, he got into a head-on collision. Felt like an atomic bomb in my head and knocked me flat. Our furniture flew out the back end. Florinda died instantly. I nearly died, too, but woke up hours later. Muffy went to prison, but he escaped in a conspiracy with fellow scammers, killers, and cheats. Momma ain’t forgotten a minute of this. She acts like it…like it happened yesterday. I have flashbacks.”

I couldn’t say anything. Did I have to?

“Momma needs me, since I’m her only child. I’m going home to Momma.”

“Are you really all set to go home?” I asked Freon.

“I have to,” he said, “fattened calf or not.”

We huddled by a stoplight. A red stoplight. Car headlights gaped around us. I tilted my head ever so slightly toward him and gazed into his eyes, and then we shared a long slow kiss. Then he pried himself away from me. His eyes were full of worries, like bipolar mothers and his own survival.

I wiped his slob from my lip. There went Freon, and I was alone in San Francisco. The miles would roll behind him like a red carpet. Now, I must go back home, to the town where I should wake up every day—Dekalb, where Grandma and Grandpa Watkins lived.

I gazed at myself in a store window. I looked like a streetwalker who took too much Novocain. Fiercely, I ripped the piercings from my ears. Those earrings had Muffy Werms’ kiss of death on them. Paid for by his stolen money. The snake!

I went into a café and made three collect phone calls to Grandma. No answer. I pawned away the cold jewelry I wore and begged enough money for a Trailways ride back, back, back to Illinois.

How can I describe that bus-ride back to Illinois?

What did my grandparents know? Why hadn’t they answered my calls? What would they do when they found out? Probably call the police. Then I would go to juvie. Their little duchess and future heir, in prison.

Leave your doors open just a crack, Grandmother and Grandfather. Maybe I can sneak inside.

The journey from California to Illinois was gorgeous. Mostly, I sat on the sticky bus seat and coughed and slept. A nice passenger donated a pack of cigarettes, and I moved to the back so I could smoke them peacefully. Smoking felt good, but I was still a jar of raw nerves. Guilt was a perpetual sonnet playing in my head.

You were stupid, Pepper. If you hadn’t run away from Normal Prep and gone into the basement of the Flamingo Beach… if only! If only!

Approaching the blank bus-station wall, I wiped sleepy gunk from my eyes, lifted my stick legs, and took off walking.

I knew what was waiting for me at my grandparents’ house, but I had to face consequences. A whipping. A thousand dunce caps. I know.

Back home in Dekalb at last, back at my grandparents’ mansion, I shrieked for shock. Amazement. Horror.

The wide green lawn had a gazebo and bouncy house, a live band churning swing jazz, and who knows? Maybe clowns on stilts. Maybe chocolate fountains and cotton-candy cannons. I don’t know. All I saw was a huge banner draped across the house. WELCOME HOME, DUCHESS PEPPER!

Grandma and Grandpa flew all over me. Their smooches slid down my cheek. They looked like fools. Grandpa wore a tuxedo left from Victorian times, Grandma wore her lilac-print dress and heels. She reeked of lavender perfume.

“Grandma…I’m sorry…for being a fool,” I muttered lamely.

Grandpa laughed from the depths of his beer-belly.

“Fool?” said Grandpa. “Who’s the fool? Your grandmother and I are fools. Look at our party-hats and party-blowers! Bloomin’ nonsense! Hallelujah!”

“We’d took you for dead, Pepper. We heard that you ran away. Then, we got a call from the cops…they saw you in San Francisco. You are alive! Everyone knows it. Come on, celebrate!”

Grandma dragged me off to the banquet table. Gorgeous tablecloth! There lay the most gigantic birthday cake in the Guinness World Records, carved and ready for me. The band started playing, “St. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and I knew Grandma and Grandpa had chosen that one for me. Being for the Benefit of Pepper Watkins.

Why?

I was mortified to attend a party, the way I looked. My eyes were like glassy black plugs, and I had makeup running down my dirt-crusted face. My clothes were tattered. They were celebrating me. They loved me so much.

Forget English royal dignity. Look at those blooming fools. My grandparents had gone dodgy, those blokes. I knew they were senile! They’d prepared a banquet for a runaway guttersnipe named Pepper Watkins.

“It’s good, good, wonderful to be home,” I told Grandma Watkins.

“Glorious Lord be thanked! You gave us a scare,” said Grandma, for the millionth time.

We’d talked of the Great Disappearance for weeks and weeks. It was glorious to be home. It was slightly less glorious for Freon to be home. He would’ve been expelled from Normal Prep like me, only he had fled home to his Momma for refuge and Momma saved his behind. Freon’s Momma had a cow when she heard of the Great Disappearance to San Francisco— hardly a fattened calf. It was a conniption fit. A blow-up.

Thank Grandma and Grandpa! By some freakish miracle, my Grandma and Grandpa Watkins paid my bus ticket fare back to California, so I could collect my belongings and say goodbye to my friends. When I saw Flamingo and Normal Prep again…well, talk about a let-down.

When we were in San Francisco, we had no idea that Muffy’s building was about to explode.

The newspapers bannered the news. MUFFY WERMS’ CULT COMPLEX EXPLODES INTO FIREBALL. OTHER CULT MEMBERS RESCUED, UNDERGO RECONDITIONING. Muffy had committed suicide while messing with a holy oil and lighter. Everyone fled shrieking into the streets except Muffy. Police never caught him and he didn’t pay a cent for his deed. My scarred fists clenched as I read that newspaper on the bus.

Then I was back in Flamingo.

“Pepper!” cried Bird.

Bird hugged me till I fell over. Beanie hugged me. Normal Prep glowed with Christmas lights, and Save the Spotted Geckos played “Pomp and Circumstance.” Festoons and garlands filled the familiar, smelly auditorium. Everyone made exceedingly long speeches. Beanie was valediction, and everyone was in tears by the time he got done.

Bird said, “Pepper, I can’t describe how worried I was when you…when you vanished. I thought, Did I drive her away? She’s not in her right mind. Pepper would never run away. It ruined my grades. I couldn’t eat, sleep, or think. I just paced on the beach, calling your name, searching in the Flamingo Beach Hotel. The Hotel was shut down, oddly. It was locked and barred. Never mind. No matter what happens, you will always be my friend. You and Freon I both love dearly. Our Foursome is together again. And I’m not going to lose you, not for all the chop suey in China!”

Bird’s eyes looked so brown and wide in her small, applelike face. Her sweeping white dress hardly concealed her thinness. Her words would later return to haunt me.

After graduation and Beanie’s speech…then came a shocker.

Passing Mrs. Waffle’s trailer, whom should I see on the front step but Lenore Caldwell?

“Are you trespassing, girl?” I shouted.

Something was wrong with Lenore. This was a totally different girl than the one who’d rammed me into a water fountain. She wept loudly, her tears mixing with the rain.

“Lenore?” I called. I got to Mrs. Waffle’s trailer and spotted a notice over the door. An eviction notice. The windows were dark, the place deserted.

“Pepper,” said Lenore, “my mother’s left town for good. And she took that imbecile Mrs. Key with her. You might as well know. My real name is Lenore Waffle, and I am—I was—Mrs. Waffle’s adopted child.”

I gaped. Rain fell into my mouth.

“Where did they go?” I asked. What was Flamingo without Mrs. Waffle, Mrs. Key, and Ketchup?

“Gone to San Francisco. They rented an inner-city apartment, and they managed to sneak in their dumb dog, also.”

“You’re sopping wet,” I said. “Do you want my coat?”

“Sure, I know I’m wet! Damn wet! I don’t care that I graduated!”

I swallowed. “Did you really say…are you kidding? Mrs. Waffle adopted you?”

“Yeah, when I was two years old. From an Indian reservation in Montana. Mr. Waffle was alive then. He swung me in his arms and built sand castles on the beach—right here. He would buy four ice cream bars in a row and set me to sail on the waves in my little water-wings. Then, when I got older…things changed.

“That horrible bus accident. I was at my aunt’s house when I heard that Mr. Waffle—I mean Daddy—went to Heaven. Mrs. Waffle—I mean Mother—she got so shaken and upset that she wouldn’t eat. For weeks. I had to fend for myself, an orphan, and look after Mother. When I turned fourteen, she put me in Normal Prep and took up with Mrs. Key. ‘You’re on your own, girl. Don’t come crying to me, cause you’re on your own. You’re an adult now,’ my mother said. So all these years at Normal Prep, I never came to this trailer. My mother was too upset about Daddy, too sucked into her crazy grief-world.”

Who was crying harder, me or Lenore Caldwell? I tried to slip my arm around her, but she just sighed and turned away.

“So you heard my story, Pepper. Let me guess, you don’t believe a word of it.”

“I believe it,” I mumbled.

“No, you don’t. Brat, you’re moving back with your own Grandma and Grandpa.”

“I know. The Great Disappearance happened. That’s why I’m kicked out of school for senior year. Never mind.”

“Miss Chavez changed her rules. Now school shuts down for holiday vacations. No lonely stragglers allowed. Normal Prep is in deep legal trouble because you and Freon ran away.”

Lenore let that statement sit out, like a soggy guilt tortilla.

“Good. I needed to get away from Normal Prep, and the mess I made here.”

“Spoiled rotten, Pepper—you’re spoiled rotten. You’re a senior, so you get one more year of being protected like a baby. Me—I have nowhere else on earth. I’m on my own, like Mother said. So I’ll try to get back to my Indian reserve in Montana. Buses use diesel fuel, cars are toxic, and airplanes are destroying the earth—so I’ll walk.”

Good grief. I felt my feet getting sore for her already.

“I’m sorry, Lenore,” I blurted. The girl stood determinedly, pushed her soggy hair from her face, and was gone. “Goodbye,” I called.

A short summary of my senior year:

Back home in Illinois, I watched cornfields and blue skies. Leaves fell, and winter winds howled. So a summer and autumn and winter and spring passed, lickety-split, while I did my lessons from home and I crammed-slammed my brain with facts. That’s what homeschooling is all about.

In May came the Achievement Tests Which Will Determine Your Life Fate. I filled in half the bubbles randomly, crushed for time in clueless agony. I knew I wouldn’t make it into college.

People sent me letters—Miss Chavez, Freon, Beanie, Bird, and even Lenore Caldwell. Freon was home with mama, had a job at McDonalds. Beanie was at the University of San Diego, piling up credits, studying his brains out. Bird had a job helping in an inner-city, San Francisco daycare called Rainbow Bridge Center. Her letters were long. She said that the kids were drug babies and had devastating behavior problems. “I still think of you, dear Pepper,” she always ended her letters.

Come June 17th, my grandparents held a small graduation party on the lawn. I wore a lizardy green dress, waved my diploma, and I was so glad just to be done.

“Life will get easier, my duchess-in-the-making,” said Grandma, with a patented wink over her champagne.

I thought adolescence was over, but I had the critical problem of getting a life before me.

I was like thousands of other fools—I started writing poems and stories, sending them off to publishers. Foolishly, I thought the world ended when I got rejection letter after rejection letter. After my high school folly, I was lucky not to be living on the street—but the Great Disappearance was far behind me. I was eighteen, restless as a kite caught in the tree branches.

“Just be honest, Grandma. I’m a wandering fool. So stop calling me a duchess, for Heaven’s sake!” I said.

“Now, Pepper, don’t shout. The key to being a duchess is taking regular cold baths, embroidery, tea parties, and manners,” said Grandma, primly.

“Hopeless!” I moaned, rubbing my sore and ink-stained hands.

Now Grandma, small and frail though she was, got a fierce look on her face. “Duchess is not on the outside, Penelope. It’s what you make of yourself inside. When blokes fling mud with their words, you just hold your head high and say, ‘How dare you insult a duchess, an heir to the throne of England?’”

I shook my head over my teacup.

“So you are a duchess, my dear—a duchess who writes stories. My sweet little duchess. Now you’ve got to find the proper duke to marry.”

I only knew of one candidate—Freon. He was a bum. Freon sent me many moony love letters from California. He hadn’t gotten the point that I hated him and was done with him for always.

I got a more welcome letter from good old Beanie, saying, I took pity on you and arranged a school-assistant internship. It’s in Watts, LA. Counts for a whole year of college training. I’m footing your bills. Please accept this. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance.

“I’ve got a job, Grandma!”

Oh, boy. Wasn’t this a plot? Beanie attended a sheltered, white-brick university and played on the football team. Teachers in Los Angeles were looking for fresh meat to toughen up for the burdens they faced. Just the chance to break my eighteen-year-old stiff neck.

Thanks, Beanie. I was racing back across America, Grandma’s platform sandals busting up my feet, a suitcase between my feet, and a crazy head swimming with high hopes. Beanie called me again, in Des Moines. He said, “You don’t need to worry about housing arrangements. You’ll live with Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key.”

“Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key live in San Francisco,” I said.

“Well, they moved to Los Angeles. Can’t keep their dog Ketchup in a building, so they move a lot.”

“They can’t take a boarder into their apartment, can they? Isn’t that illegal?”

Beanie didn’t answer.

The scum and depression of the inner city dragged me down more than sight of billboards, palm trees, and nightclubs electrified me. I stared at my map and wondered, Why not Lynwood or South Gate? Why not San Juan? Why not Orange County? Everyone in Los Angeles seemed so lost and sad—even the hoity-toity coffee-shop girls with designer bags and miniskirts, who shot me stink-eyes.

Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key hugged me, smelling of mothballs and old trailer furniture and Ketchup’s mess. They thumped me on the back. Took my suitcase. Showed me my new living quarters.

“We’re a couple of peas in a pod, darling. You’re always welcome here,” said Mrs. Waffle, beaming.

Mrs. Key barked along with Ketchup. I wondered how Mrs. Waffle could board a virtual stranger, but not allow her own daughter, Lenore Caldwell, to come near her. Mrs. Waffle, you’re impossible. You’re uglier than ever, and a bundle of contradictions!

My first year in LA was a wonderful experience. Wonderful, if you don’t count the leaky apartment roof, the rats, Ketchup, and Mrs. Key’s pacing the floors at night. Wonderful, if you don’t count gunshots and nine cop-car arrests on weekends. Wonderful, if you don’t count the overt racism and kids with hungry, love-starved eyes. Five-year-olds who knew whole books of cuss words, whose parents fed them wine mixed with apple juice. Wonderful—if you don’t count all the bruises and bangs I got from my cruddy, low-paying job in understaffed, underfunded kindergarten slash daycare center.

Mrs. Waffle spied out the windows of her apartment with her binoculars whenever the cops showed up.

“Massive gang war!” she cried. “Massive drug bust. Come watch! We’ll be on TV! They found cocaine, marijuana, steroids, the whole nine yards!”

“Get away from the windows,” I cried.

I was terrified that they’d get shot, but they spied with their binoculars, gossiping and talking.

Strange changes took place in me, in spite of everything, which made my own comfort seem petty. I loved my kids. There is no moment like when a five-year-old knows how to read his own name, when his brown eyes light and he gives you a high-five. I forgot myself, lost in the kids’ worlds. They didn’t want pity or missionaries. They were just ordinary human kids, eager-eyed and awful and joyful.

“The Big Dog Jumped Over the Lazy Fox—”

¿No es usted feliz también, señorita maestra?”

“I can read! I can readddd! I CAN REEADDD!”

“Hi-Five, Maestra!”

Thank you, Beanie. Thank you, God.

Life cruised smoothly, until the following summer, when I turned nineteen. School had just let out. A Long, Hot Summer was beginning. One June evening, I was watching TV with Mrs. Waffle, when Beanie showed up unexpectedly.

On TV, Lauren Lake yelled, “What’s goin’ on here?” while the jailbird daddy got custody of a schizophrenic teen from the mother who was on cocaine. Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key stared glassily, but I ran for the door.

“Hello, old friend,” I said in the doorway.

Beanie looked thin and distraught. His “casual clothes,” his necktie and pressed white jersey shirt, were crumpled and stained. He had dark under-eye circles.

“Exams getting you down?” I asked.

Beanie shook his head. “I suppose you heard the news about Bird,” he said, slowly and sadly.

“What news about Bird?”

“I thought she wrote you letters.”

Guiltily, I remembered. Bird faithfully wrote me long letters, but they’d gotten scarcer as I had less time and energy to respond. I figured we were drifting apart. What had Bird been up to lately? Maybe I should visit her…

“Bird has been having severe medical issues for a while.”

“Yeah, I remember when she had mono and strep throat. That was after you broke up with her and drove her to despair,” I said, hotly.

Beanie wrung his large hands, and I saw it in his eyes: he still loved Bird, had always loved Bird, and always would love Bird.

“Forget the past, Pepper. That was ages ago—we were young and stupid. But Bird has real medical issues. Never was strong. Couldn’t keep her weight up, lived in an unsanitary apartment, and worked too hard in her daycare job—”

“Just tell me the truth, Beanie!”

“Bird was working so hard at her daycare job, and she thought she was just tired. She tried drinking caffeine to keep awake—but she got so pale and tired that she couldn’t work. Couldn’t walk to her mailbox or pay her rent. Couldn’t do anything. When I went to visit her, she looked so thin and ghostlike. She had these bruises under her eyes where she’d rubbed them too hard.”

My hands shook. My mind teetered.

“So…so…what was wrong with Bird?”

“Cancer. She has Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia. Since she waited so long, there’s a very good chance—”

He launched into a detailed description of bone marrow and blood counts and chemo. You’d think Beanie himself had diagnosed Bird’s sickness. My mind pounded to the rhythm of one word. Die.

The teetering stilts of my soul fell.

Beanie said, “I drove all night to tell you this. You wouldn’t answer the phone. Now I’ve got to return to college and to bid Bird goodbye. Goodbye, Pepper.”

Goodbye, Pepper. My two new least favorite words. My head just kept on spinning.

I called off my job “sick.” I dashed to San Francisco, to San Juan Memorial Hospital, where Bird was. Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key held down the fort and bid me a sorrowful farewell. “Come back soon, Pepper,” said Mrs. Key.

“Where’s my friend? I’ve got to talk with her,” I said, when I reached San Francisco.

 “She is in room 315. Just sign this paperwork, please,” a young Hispanic nurse said.

My face fell away when I saw Bird. Never had I imagined her so thin and spectral. Her hospital gown hung shapelessly about her frail self, and she was hooked up to feeding tubes and monitors. Yet her smile—that blessed friendly smile I knew so well—was bright as ever.

“Hello, Pepper,” she whispered. So much frail oxygen throbbing around my name.

“Bird,” I said, “I don’t know how to describe how sorry I am. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

She shook on her hospital bed like a boat, laughing. Because of her baldness, her teeth looked incredibly white, her eyes piercing brown. Her fishhook ribs pulsed up and down with her laughter.

“Pepper! Pepper, how I longed to see you. How’s life in old LA? Do you love your children? I miss Juanito Mendoza most of all. The cherub! Can’t wait to get back to Rainbow Bridge Daycare. Oh, Pepper—we’ve so much to talk about!”

“Bird, I’ve been a selfish, stupid donkey.”

“You were busy with your kids, Pepper, just like I was busy with mine—up to the very last minute. Never mind. At least you’re here—and I don’t have to worry about you running to San Francisco with Freon like hooligans. Remember when we were roommates, how I used to give you advice? You almost never took it. I was planning to send you Bird’s Patented Book of Worldly Wisdom!”

I chose to recall the Bird of the olden times—her Rosie the Riveter poster, her manga and Justin Bieber and The Great Gatsby and stalking Beanie in the hallways. Bird, the fighting girl with the fingernails of steel!

“Stay here a little longer. Let’s talk about Normal Prep,” she begged.

Maybe Bird’s cheerfulness just a medicine-induced façade, because I saw fear in her eyes. She could hardly drink water or orange juice without puking. I had to hand her The Great Gatsby and her balls of yarn.

My own gladness was a fallen railroad bridge. I kept thinking, Keep up your spunk. You’ve got to stay strong for Bird. Things will get easier—and they will! And they will! And they will! My own talk about rainbows and dreams and gold-pots played on infinite repeat, but I was scared. Terrified.

Bird and I stayed together. When she got tired of The Great Gatsby, I read the newspaper, the weather report, the farm report, the phone book. Anything to keep our minds off death. Her frail hands never stopped winding yarn, and she still laughed that crazed and random laugh. I found zero humor, but I whooped and hollered, so loud that the nurses told us to shut up.

Face it. People would rather laugh when they want to cry and cry when they want to laugh. People are so sad.

Bird and I talked endlessly. Talked about families and the good times we had as kids. Talked about our misadventures at Normal Prep. Talked about Rainbow Bridge Center. We talked about our hopes and dreams while they drifted out of sight, like a barge whistle that gets fainter until it is no more. No matter how much we talked, I could never penetrate to the heart of what we wanted to say. There was a heavy barrier between us that neither or us dared to approach.

Stay cheerful for Bird, stay-strong-stay-strong, hold on, hold out, things will get easier.

“Pepper,” said Bird, “Pepper, I get such a creepy feeling, alone in a hospital room at night. Surrounded by strangers and medicine and death. Thinking about the mess in my blood and bone marrow. It makes me feel like—like I’m just a shadow. Doctors and nurses won’t tell me a thing. They just fill up my tubes with more pain medicine and tell me to sleep like a good girl. Look at me, Pepper. You think I look like a hideous ghost, don’t you?”

“I’ve never seen a hideous ghost. How should I know?”

Bird bit her lip. “I will lick this. I will sink my teeth into this! You’ve gotta help me. Don’t let me fall asleep. I’m scared to fall asleep now.”

“You’ve got to sleep to get well.”

“All right…”

The childlike pain in her face penetrated me. I looked at her eyes, deep in their sockets, and said, “You want a stuffed unicorn from the gift shop? I could smuggle you a sundae from McDonalds. Stuffed unicorns and ice cream make anybody feel better.”

Bird smiled. “Please come back soon, Pepper.”

But I was a coward; I didn’t want to look at Bird. So I fled the hospital, went to Golden Arches, and ordered a double-chocolate fudge sundae. Ate it myself. Walking on the freeway, I watched day fall into night.

The unicorn stared up at me, sympathy in its eyes. My stiff fingers made dents in its fur.

“Time to go home,” I whispered.

Bury your friend. Say goodbye. I had reached the dead end of childhood, but I didn’t know it yet.

The young Hispanic nurse looked at me with deep sympathy. “I’m sorry to tell you, miss, but your friend—she died an hour ago.”

My tearless eyes stung like razors. Bird is gone!

I didn’t want to own you…I didn’t want to drive you to your early grave! Twenty years old. You loved children. How come your train came so early? I just wanted to see you smile. When will my turn come?

Bird!

Lord!

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away…”

Shut up! I wanted to shout at the mourners. What did words have to do with death? I hated the squeaky, yellow sun for rising on a world with no Bird in it. Why couldn’t the rain turn green, the sun turn into a shriveled black raisin? Didn’t people know that Bird had died?

I’m not sure how I spent the next few days. I think I banged a trash picked tambourine, laughed loudly, and wandered the freeway. Birds really did sing out of tune, and rain clouds hid the moon. The loneliness in me swelled up from a hidden source, like a river that I never knew existed.

I am the Resurrection and the Life. He who believes in me shall never die.

Words again. These Bible words stilled me a little, so I got my wits together. I gazed at my panhandle money, went to a phone-booth, and called Mrs. Waffle.

“Honey-child?”

“I’m headed back to LA.”

Fired.

I had no more job at my daycare center. I’d been Absent Without Notice, far, far too long. So what? At least Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key still loved me. Things could’ve been worse. They could’ve been Evicted.

“Things happen so fast,” I said numbly.

“You poor fingy,” said Mrs. Key, pityingly. She called everyone “poor fingy” when they were sad. She was a tender soul and wouldn’t stop hugging.

“How are you feeling, dear?” asked Mrs. Waffle, peering over her owlish glasses at me.

“Fine,” I gasped, around the lump in my throat.

My nights were unreal, swirling with the melatonin tablets I downed, plagued by nightmares. I wandered the apartment with Mrs. Key, both of us wearing long, trailing nightgowns. I read all Bird’s letters and postcards, memorizing every line she’d ever written, trying to stamp them on my soul.

Bird nightmares. Bird regrets. Bird relics. Bird letters and postcards…God help me! I couldn’t think of anyone but Bird.

You should TRY. Try to get a job. Go home…go to college. Go anywhere. Get. A. Life!

That night, I kind of lost my wits. I waved my hands in the air, weeping, pacing, I got out my suitcase and stuffed underwear inside. I stashed the Bird letters inside along with all her postcards.

“Where are you going?” asked Mrs. Key. I was too crazy even for her. She dropped the shriveled Easter-grass basket she was weaving.

“Going to San Juan Memorial Hospital, in San Francisco, to save Bird’s life,” I said. “When I find her, I won’t let go this time. Totally different. This time!”

Just then, in God’s impeccable timing, the telephone rang. Mrs. Key sprang like a Mexican jumping bean to answer the phone, but I got it first.

Freon!

I knew Freon’s lazy, gruff voice. He said, “Just get along to Flamingo, Pepper. I promise I’ll fix things between us, so it’s like nothing ever happened.”

That was all. Slam. He was gone.

Mrs. Key giggled. “Your boyfriend called?”

“Just go visit your boyfriend, honey,” said Mrs. Waffle, balancing a teacup on her knee.

“He’s not my boyfriend! He’s not even my friend!”

“Go!” Mrs. Key pushed the suitcase into my hand.

What does Freon want with me? Why did he want to visit? Don’t tell me he’s also dying.

“I’ve got to leave here tonight. You two ladies have been more than good to me…but I’ve got some important things to figure out alone. Never mind where I’m going.”

Back to Flamingo. Back and back and back.

It was August, and licorice was in bloom. Whole world smelled like candy. Flowers waved in the sea breezes on the Trashcan Highway. Sure, I had no idea what I’d do in Flamingo—Normal Prep was just a hulking reminder of Bird. When I thought of Freon, I had a curious mixture of shame, horror, and longing. My heart was a nibbled-up biscuit.

I hate him.

Back and back and back.

Evenings can fall so hard in California. I had no plans for getting to Flamingo except hitch-hiking from strange dudes. Sunset in Flamingo runs, shines, and throws out its arms like a true friend. I gazed at the Pacific—the big, beautiful bouncing Pacific. Thought how fine it would feel to jump.

“Where are you going with that suitcase?” “Are you visiting family?” “Do you need a sandwich?” “Money? Take a five-dollar bill!”

“I’m fine! Just dandy!” I said.

Every mile took me farther from Bird’s tragedy, LA, Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key—closer to my Great Debut. I felt my heart unfold like a diploma. Freedom! I was a new thing, a wild thing just out of its shell, standing shakily. Learning to fly.

Back and back and back.

Then I knocked on the door of Freon’s cookie-cutter house. I checked my watch. Ten forty-five at night. I banged, I knocked, I called—nobody answered, and the door was open, so I just walked in.

“Freon?” I called.

A thin woman in a bathrobe sat before the TV. She muttered in a sickly way… “Oh, it’s you. You came to see my son. He is in the basement. Never leaves anymore.”

I snooped at the family pictures, seeing first-grader Freon with a toothless little girl who must’ve been his sister. She had straight black hair like me. Why did that send a hollow spark of pain through my bones?

Why did Freon have this obsession with basements? Like a racoon, he was attracted to night. Night swelled inside him. Night was the bread and water he lived upon. He lived under the cover of night and wouldn’t face the truth about himself.

“Man, what I wouldn’t give for a barrel of tear gas,” said Freon.

“Hi,” I said.

Freon wasn’t startled to see me, even though we hadn’t talked in two years. He had his TV in the basement, like his mother had her TV upstairs. Had a sloppy bunkbed, Cool-Ranch Dorito bags, a laptop, a collection of childhood Erector Sets, and a diploma on the wall. Random, useless papers cluttered the floor. I examined one and found it a map, a drawing, a scribbled-out diagram.

“Pepper, you must help me if you can. I’m stuck here,” said Freon, desperation in his ultra-blue eyes.

I plopped beside him on the floor. Gave him stink-eye. “Well, that was kind. You want me to take care of you, but what about your mother upstairs? Who’s taking care of her? Not her only child.”

“Mom’s bipolar,” said Freon, like that explained everything. “She refuses any sort of medicine.”

“Freon Lyte…I can’t put this into words! We survived Hades together, just two lonesome kids, and then you ran off to hide in Mom’s basement. I’ve lived a hundred years in just one. You can’t imagine.”

“Tell me about it,” said Freon. Not mocking. He was genuinely interested.

So, I blabbered about the school in Los Angeles—as much as I could understand or bear to tell. I talked for two straight hours. Freon listened.

“Now…now it’s all over. My future. I have nowhere to go, nothing to do. I really loved those children, better than myself. And I would’ve led more of them to read and write, if it hadn’t been for—”

“You mean Bird dying,” said Freon.

He nettled me. It was also irritating how Freon nudged closer and closer to me, taking my hands, pawing my face. I scowled. “Get away from me, Freon. Yes, our best friend is dead at twenty. She didn’t deserve a bit of it. She suffered horribly in her last weeks. Or were you too wrapped up in playing MineStar Warrior? Did you just want to take advantage of my weak emotional state? Is that why you called?”

Freon was shaking his head. “Bird and I talked on the phone, wrote letters, emailed, everything. Every day. She called me the brother she never had—we were that close. Bird had four brothers, but the youngest was ten years older than her. When we were kids, we celebrated our birthdays together at Disneyland, dressed up as cartoon characters. We’d lick ice cream and cotton candy all day long. We had inside jokes and everything. And you, Pepper—you just knew her for five years. We were friends when we were in our strollers!”

Now it sounded like Freon was accusing me of being ignorant.

“So you think I didn’t love Bird? That she wasn’t the comfort and structure of my life? That we didn’t talk about all our hopes and dreams together?”

He got a Patient TV Therapist look. “Pepper, calm down and forget about Bird for a minute.”

“I haven’t thought of anyone but Bird but for weeks.”

“Pepper, you know, I’m gonna set the world on fire. My key? My ticket? Look at those wires on the floor. Look at those amplifiers. I am gonna be a rapper, the dopest, yeetest rapper in the whole wide phat world. You see my life unfurled? You’re around my finger girl. I got you curled. Snoop Dogg and M&M—move over, old boys! Freon Lyte, he Dat Madman now!”

“My God,” I said. I did not normally take God’s name in vain, but this was too much.

“I will set the world on fire. No one can stop me. I’m free, I’m done getting kidnapped, I got power. Old Muffy the Bum is dead!”

“Don’t talk about fire and Muffy. I can’t stand it!” You might’ve said I screamed.

Freon’s interest shuffled like a deck of cards. He got a faraway look.

“Speaking of the Flamingo Beach Hotel? They never finished remodeling the rattrap. Shambles. Secret Room’s still down there. A birthday cake is on Muffy’s table, crumbling to dust. Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key abandoned their trailer. Lately, don’t it seem the whole town has gone to the graveyard?”

I’d heard enough. “Freon, don’t you ever regret your words? You and I always got in huge trouble, and you’d run off like a coward. Boys can say any obnoxious thing, and people just smile. Girls get judged more harshly and have to face consequences.”

Freon stood shakily. “It’s midnight now.”

“I wanna leave here,” I said.

“Can ya dig it? You actin’ sus. Let’s walk on the beach. The moon must be lovely over the ocean about now. Just us two.”

Now Freon shut off the TV, and we walked upstairs. Freon’s mother unleashed a bloodcurdling shriek. Her eyes had a strangled look. Freon just said, “Hold your horses, Mother,” and walked outdoors.

“I wonder why you don’t keep breakables in the house,” I said. I quivered.

“Yeah, I wonder, too.”

“Your mother needs help, bad.”

“Don’t we all?”

The moon whispered and quivered over the sea. It was orange, like a slab of soap, lighting up every grain of sand. That moon was a sight you never really got over. All I heard was the ground scraping under Freon’s feet, the harshness of his breathing. There was nothing good in the air for either of us to say.

Or not. Freon burst out like a TV boyfriend, spilling his wretched heart.

 “I love you, Pepper Watkins. I love you for all the chop suey in China! I love you for every starfish on the shore. I love you for all the palm trees in California. I love you for all the soot in Los Angeles. I tell ya! I loved you from the moment I met you, and I always will. Don’t you believe that, honey?”

This was so strange—I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t watching TV.

“Do you believe it? I love you, I love you! Just look at yourself, Pepper—”

“Since when are you Mr. Romance? I thought you knew Bird so well and confided in her all the time. What good is selfish, stupid Pepper?” I spat.

Freon glazed over me with his gaze. “You know what I mean, Pepper. I love you. Simple as that. Bird is dead; we’re alive. Just because God or the Force or Nature or Chance decided to take Bird doesn’t mean we can’t live. We’re only human kids. Only children. I love you. So love me back—it’s the only thing I’ll ever ask of you.”

He kissed me, and I kissed him back. Hard. In the moonlight.

When we came up for air, Freon said, “Will you marry me?”

“No, because I hate you with all my heart,” I said.

“You don’t mean that.”

I burst into rasping sobs. Confused and melting, I gasped out tears. Freon took me in his arms, and he smothered me with his kisses. I saw that I wouldn’t escape him.

My words, “I will,” lay on the night like a wet pearl necklace I’d fashioned down in my voice box.

We were destined for each other. That’s what I knew, like a deep sea-song.

Two weeks later, Freon sent me a lumpy letter containing the ring—a birthstone. Looking closer, I found that it had cost five dollars at Wal-Mart. Poverty-stricken Freon had sold his MineStar Warrior games just to afford this. He said that his poor mama had finally agreed to go nicely to the local mental asylum to get better for a time. The wedding-party would double as Mrs. Lyte’s farewell party.

When I got home to LA, Freon called me endlessly. The phone banged off the hook. He wanted me to say I loved him and that I would marry him. “Say it again,” he begged. “Say it again!”

“I will marry you—”

“Say it again!”

“What’s that boyfriend of yours after?” asked Mrs. Waffle.

“If he bothers you, hit him with a tire-iron,” said Mrs. Key, her lip curled.

I blushed girlishly. “He wants to marry me, and I agreed.”

Mrs. Key and Mrs. Waffle clapped their hands. They embraced me and rained kisses on my head.

“I called it years ago, with my playing-cards,” said Mrs. Waffle. “The cards do not lie, my child!”

“CAKE! Presents! Rings and kisses,” cried Mrs. Key. “Leave it up to us, Pepper. We will come to your rescue and arrange the wedding.”

Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key hadn’t paid the rent in three months. Mrs. Key weaved baskets, and Mrs. Waffle was a cleaning-girl at the local Citgo. They lived on Sunbeam bread and canned peas. How could they afford a wedding?

“Thank you.” I smiled gratefully.

“Who’s coming to this wedding? Your classmates from Normal Prep?” Suddenly, Mrs. Waffle looked drained.

“Sure, I’ll invite everyone, even Lenore Caldwell—”

“Do not mention Lenore!” cried Mrs. Key.

“Lenore? Who’s Lenore?” sing-songed Mrs. Waffle.

My eyes blazed. “She’s your daughter. You two, get reconciled. Lenore told me everything—and it made me sick! You’ve got to help each other! I’ve wanted to say this for years.”

Mrs. Waffle rocked back and forth, back and forth on her knees.

“Well, what’re you gonna do, Mrs. Waffle?” I said.

“I’ll call her, I’ll write a letter—I’ll try. My poor lost baby. You’re right—I never could forget Lenore.”

Mrs. Waffle sighed. Her voice dribbled off into sobs.

“Now who is this Freon person you’re marrying?” Grandma Watkins demanded over the phone.

“Is he of royal blood?” Grandpa inquired.

“Nobody marries you without careful questioning and surveys!”

“He’ll have to tour my knife collection.”

“Freon’s fine, you know—he saved my life when we were kidnapped together. Didn’t I tell you?”

Grandma sucked in her breath with despair. “Now how will you arrange a ceremony?”

Our wedding day arrived in no time.

You should’ve seen the freaks who showed up. Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key showed up in their ugly1940s style dresses, gleaming with fake pearls, chattering and laughing. Lenore Caldwell was back from Montana—a huge shock. Her clothes were loose and colorful, and she wore no shoes, like a complete hippie. She kept a cautious distance from her mother, Mrs. Waffle, though Mrs. Waffle’s eyes looked ancient and sorrowful when she saw Lenore. The Save the Spotted Geckos girls arrived, dressed exactly alike, and they played “Pomp and Circumstance” on their tubas. Penny brought her new baby in a tight shoulder-sling. Mrs. Chavez was there, all the hall reps and floor monitors from Normal Prep, Beanie, and the policemen who’d first called my grandparents after the Great Disappearance.

What a crowd.

Good day, sunshine, what a day to take a walk in the park… Save the Spotted Geckos launched into Sixties sunshine pop. Birds sing out of tune, and rain clouds hide the moon…

Freon wore his grease-stained cutoff shorts and flipflops. I wore the pale, shimmery green number from graduation. We were married on August 21st. We were married on the beach in Flamingo, and that was simply perfect. The seagulls serenaded us, and the clouds flew high and whispery.

Freon grabbed me from the crowd. He’d sneaked up from my left like a vampire. His face looked like he’d been bitten by wasps. “We shouldn’t get married. We’re just kids,” he said.

“We can’t back out this time,” I said.

“What about our children? We’re both too volatile and high-strung to have kids. People like use shouldn’t have kids. They will be just like us! What if they’re just like Muffy Werms?”

“Look at Penny—there’s no girl more high-strung, and now she has a baby on her shoulder.”

“You do realize if you marry me, you will be named Mrs. Freon Lyte?”

“Of course I realized that! Why are you acting like this? No fake amnesia, and you’re not alone. We’re getting married!”

His lower lip trembled like he’d cry. “I used to have dreams about marrying my sister, Florinda. You look a lot like her.”

A world without love. I won’t stay in a world without love.

“Do you, Penelope Watkins, of your own free will, take Freon Lyte to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

I do. I do. I do and I do and I do. Forever and always.

A collective shriek rose from the people. They flung daisies and rice, chasing us up and down, up and down the beach. Screaming, I climbed onto the hood of Freon’s junkyard-salvaged pickup. The truck had a sign: Just Married, For Better or Worse, Let’s See How Bad It Gets…

“Love is purple, love is blue, love is magenta, love is faithful, love is true,” sang Save the Spotted Geckos. “So happy together!”

“Who’s driving the honeymoon car, you or me?” I said to Freon, breathless.

“Honeymoon? Where are we going? I’m hungry, and I’ll smash something if the kids eat all the wedding cake.”

The three-tiered wedding-cake tasted like sand to me. Kids swarmed and jabbered around us, and the guests clinked glasses. “Kiss now! Kiss now!” they begged.

We obliged.

“I can’t…I can’t believe Bird is dead on a day so perfect like this,” I told Freon, that night.

Freon gave me a strange look. “Bird is in her family cemetery in San Francisco. That’s the first place we’re gonna visit on our honeymoon.”

It seemed morbid to visit a cemetery on a honeymoon. But I loved Freon enough to keep quiet. Crazy as he was, Freon knew that I needed to see Bird’s final resting place. I needed to lose the mountain of tears inside me. That night, we drove down the Trashcan Highway one last time, leaving Normal Prep and our family and friends behind.

Save the Spotted Geckos serenaded us with “Something in the Way She Moves,” and “You Can Close Your Eyes.”

“We haven’t been to San Francisco since we were kidnapped,” I said.

Now we were newlyweds, rice clinging to our clothes and flowers in our hair. The Golden Gate Bridge was just as splendid, singing and singing while the Pacific rumbled with freighters. Plunk, plunk, plunk. Rain had drummed on the pickup roof for a full day and night. Rain muffled our voices, like drops on a tin can.

“This is the cemetery,” said Freon, grimly.

Lemon trees and almond trees and lilacs filled the air with dizzy wedding-fragrance. Freon and I laughed and talked, flinging our umbrellas, getting soaked like children. We were so happy to be together.

Then I stopped at the place, silent with horror.

I had known Bird was dead, but now the thought was like hailstones. She would never smile at me, call me, or write me another letter. So it was true. My best friend was gone, and all her dreams with her. Gone.

“Help me through this,” I whispered, choking up. I gazed at the lilacs I held, and I thought, Life is utterly unfair. Nobody should have to die, but especially not Bird. Why? Why?

Through my sobs, my wretchedness made me feel a thousand times better. Before I knew it, I laughed through my sniffles. Then I just stood with a mysterious smile, thinking about Bird and all the good-horrible-wonderful times we’d had together…

“There’s no way anyone could kill the real you,” I said.

The inscription on her stone said Bernadette Meredith Parker, 1994-2014. Home is the Seagull, Westward-Bound, Home from the Stormy Waves. After life’s fitful dreams and feverish awakenings, she rests.”

“Nothing can kill the real friend you are, Bird. You just go on and on.”

I was shocked when I turned and spotted Freon with Bird’s parents. “We need to borrow you and Freon for some official business,” Bird’s parents said. “Since you are near to us.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Come to our house, straight away,” said Mrs. Parker.

Talking to Bird’s mother and father had not entered my befuddled mind. Mr. and Mrs. Parker were stooped with red and careworn eyes, toothy smiles, brown skins. Their house had a rock garden and fishpond. The lived in one of San Francisco’s ritzier, richer areas, like Beanie did—a place called Treemont Avenue. Felt more like New England than California. The quaint coffee tables and china-hutches and lace cloths were downright homey, and I knew where Bird had gotten her prim manners. The Parkers sat in their stiff, overgrown armchairs, hands folded, like it hurt to be respectable.

“What do you kids plan to do after your honeymoon?” asked Bird’s mother.

I looked at Freon. Freon looked blankly at me.

“Grandma kindly rented us an apartment in LA,” I said. “We can always move back with Mrs. Waffle and Mrs. Key, if we get lonesome.”

“Do either of you work for your living?”

“Naw. Freon brought his sound equipment—he wants to be a rapper, and he practices at night. I will get another daycare or teacher’s-assistant job in LA. College is out of the question. I sure hope we don’t have a baby. We are dependent on Grandma just for daily bread.”

“Don’t talk like I’m a bum!” said Freon. He swatted me.

Mrs. Parker swallowed hard. “You know that our daughter Bird had wanted to marry Beanie Jacks, who is at the University of San Diego.”

“Yeah,” said Freon. “I remember those two lovebirds at Normal Prep.”

I socked him.

 “Beanie is like a son to us—he is so smart and ambitious, so noble and selfless. He has comforted us greatly in the loss of Bird. We know he would’ve made an excellent son-in-law. Death can’t change this. Did you know that Beanie purchased the Flamingo Beach Hotel? The place was about to be demolished. Beanie said he would remodel the hotel, as he’s a champion house-flipper, and make it a home for Bird when they married.”

I gasped. How had I not known this?

“We explored the Flamingo Beach Hotel,” said Freon. “Man, did we explore it! Tons of crap moldering down in that basement. Secret rooms and tunnels and passages. It would make the Catacombs seem like an empty, small-town street.”

“There was a Japanese girl, Suzy, who hid there during World War Two,” I added.

“History geek,” said Freon.

“Beanie is so selfless and noble,” said Mrs. Parker, “that he wants to give the Flamingo Beach Hotel to you and Freon. As your home.”

“Yeah, the Flamingo Beach Hotel was our home for weeks,” said Freon.

I was astounded. “Whatever possessed…I mean, what made Beanie so noble? We get to live in that dungeon…I mean, wonderful place? But…?”

But the Flamingo Beach Hotel lies in ruins. It has the legendary Basement. And the Secret Room. We were kidnapped there. It’s swarming with ghosts!

Mr. Parker waved his hand. “Beanie has hired a work force of students from Normal Prep to remodel the Flamingo Beach Hotel. They’re called the Worker Ants. They are sanding, painting, cleaning, clearing the old asbestos, laying new drywall. The Worker Ants should finish it in three years.”

“Beanie is a great organizer. He’s super bossy,” said Freon.

I clasped my hands. “Well, if you insist, I’ll try to live there. Can we choose which color to paint the hotel?”

“Which colors do you want?”

“Turtle pink. Sunset blue. Seashell gray. Hansa yellow. Hippie flowers.”

“That can be arranged. We will inform Beanie. Anything for the newlyweds!”

Tears leaked from my eyes. Thank you, God. Maybe You can bring beauty out of the stupidity and despair of the Flamingo Beach Hotel.

I began to talk.

 “Freon, what if we bring Los Angeles kids to the Flamingo Beach Hotel? During the summertime, they’d love it! They could play on the beach. They would grow just like the palm trees. We should plant palm trees all over and have murals. Paint the staircases in psychedelic 3-D paint. Everything!”

Freon sighed. “Ambitious, Pepper. Still…what if we had a kid of our own?”

“No for a long while. And it’ll be a girl, you know. And she’ll be named Bernadette, after Bird.”

Now there was gushy, sentimental dampness in the eyes of Mr. and Mrs. Parker. This was the greatest honor we could pay their daughter. I hoped Little Miss Lyte would act just like Bird, without her faults and oddities. Had she lived, that girl would’ve been tickled with pride!

“Bird is the main reason Freon and I got married. She totally set us up, the minute Freon and I first locked eyes. In the sacred Normal Prep cafeteria. All the years we walked those hallowed halls!”

“We hated each other lots of times during our high-school careers. So now we have to get busy making up time, loving each other,” said Freon.

The Pacific was calling me back. The Flamingo Beach Hotel! I saw it, I felt it in my bones. It belonged to Freon and I. It was the Children’s Palace! It was painted turtle pink, sunset blue, seashell gray, hansa yellow, and hippie flowers.

“Let’s go, we’ve got a hotel to book!” said Freon impatiently.

So that is the story of my life, so far.

It is chock-full of different people and places and things. I’m always running into new souls and falling in love with new places. I have a million people to thank just for seeing me through high school. There’s Miss Chavez, Grandma and Grandpa—and Bird, bless her soul. And Beanie’s been so kind and good to me. Freon, sweet Freon, he will never change.

God bless you, Flamingo. God bless San Francisco and Los Angeles and Normal Prep and the Ashcan Highway. I love you all. Expressing that affection would take another book—the Love Song of Pepper Watkins.

Mrs. Waffle once told me, “Birds of joy and sadness must fly through everyone’s head, but we feed them all.”

In my crazed life of birds, I love them all. Where the seagulls fly over Normal Prep, in the sky where dreams come true—that’s where you’ll find me.