“…and that’s why Mr. Abernathy is definitely evil!” The emphatic way Lyn said it made Leo jump.
“What?” he asked cautiously, not understanding where his best friend had been for the past few minutes. He had been researching the blue symbol on the van that had been so hard to see from Lyn’s bedroom window. But Lyn had begun to rant about the book she was reading. Callie didn’t listen to her earlier, so she wanted to see if Leo would. Usually, he’d be all for that, but this was more important. And Lyn knew that.
“That’s okay,” she assured him. “I’ll catch you up later. For now, though,” she said, changing the subject quickly, “I want to hear what you’ve found!” She sounded energetic as she said this. It was as if almost being kidnapped happened every day.
“Oh! Well, uh…” Leo thought over what he had found and tried to tie it all together in the best way possible. “Ok, so the guys in the van work for a company called Buy ’N Large, and someone in our house knows something about them that they don’t want the public to know, so they sent tweedle-dumb and tweedle-dumber to kidnap the one that knows and make sure the secret doesn’t get out. So now, we just have to figure out who knows the information they don’t want the public to have so we can keep them safe…” Leo trails off looking up at Lyn’s perplexed face. He tried to figure out what was going on in that brain of hers, but couldn’t even begin to guess.
“What’s going on up there?” Leo asks her. She looks up, startled. Then Lyn mutters something under her breath. Leo’s eyes narrow as he realizes what she’s doing. She doesn’t want to talk about what she’s thinking, so she’s going to say it as quietly as possible first to see how it sounds, and then she’ll speak louder with the phrase she chooses to use.
Luckily, Leo has played this game with her many, many times. So, he sits patiently at her desk, waiting for her to decide her words carefully.
Eventually, Lyn looks him in the eyes and says, in almost a whisper, “It’s me, Leo.” A look of confusion spreads across his face. Usually, when they play, the way she chooses to say something is simple and clear, but this was hard for him to comprehend.
“What do you mean it’s you?” he asks slowly, trying to work out what she meant by that. “Of course, it’s you, you’re standing right in front of me, I know it’s you…” He trails off as he sees Lyn’s eyebrows narrow in anger. Not at him of course, but at that stupid company and the stupid information.
Then, bitterly, she yells, “ME, Leo! They’re after ME!” Suddenly, Leo’s face went from confusion to shock and understanding.
“Of course!” He says it as though he were saying eureka. “Sorry, I’m just tired. It was a long night yesterday.”
“You’re absolutely fine!” Lyn tells him immediately. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’m just scared that they might…” Lyn trails off just as Ben struts in, meddling with their plan of keeping their friends in the dark. Not the best plan ever, of course, but what you don’t know can’t kill you, right?
“What are you guys doing in here?” Ben asks the two very startled kids that are practically clinging to the ceiling. They stare at him like the very guilty children they are. “Well, whatever it was, I wasn’t supposed to get involved huh?” He looks back and forth between their guilty faces as though that might give him a clue as to what they were doing. “Whatever,” he says. “You guys want cookies?”
Ben was a close friend, just like all the other kids in the household. None were related, except, of course, Leo and Cody. But all the kids got along as if they were siblings. And if you have siblings, you will know what I mean by that.
Back downstairs the kids munched on cookies as Lyn and Leo exchanged glances about how they were going to tell their make-shift family about what they had found. Leo kept hinting that he wanted to know what Lyn knew, along with the usual excuses. Not out loud, of course. That would not be smart, as the other kids were bright enough to pick up on hints like that. Luckily, the other kids were creating a raucous to annoy Cody. He was trying to read as the other kids spoke loudly with crumbs falling out of their mouths. He was a neat freak, so they wanted to see how long they could do it before he burst and absolutely destroyed them all.
In the front hall, next to the dining room that was hardly ever used except for holidays, stood Rei and Grandma Wendy. Rei was Cody and Leo’s father, while Grandma was Ben’s grandmother. Rei had basically started a foster home by taking in the kids along with Grandma Wendy. Wendy’s daughter and son-in-law had died in a bad car crash when Ben was very young, and she had taken care of him ever since. She was an incredibly fun, religious woman and she always managed to keep the family on their toes.
“Can you believe it?” Rei was saying. “They all agreed on that story about the van and the kidnappers just to hide the fact that they tried had to drop glitter on me.” He looked confident as he said it, as though he had figured this out when they had been telling the story.
“Mhm,” Wendy agrees sarcastically in her thick southern accent.
“They’ve never lied before, why would they start now?” Rei began to pace. Wendy’s eyes followed him, and a quizzical expression shown through on her face. “They didn’t lie about the ladder hitting my car. They didn’t lie about the beehive in my bed, not even when I glared them down. They didn’t change their story a bit when I asked them individually about the fire in the kitchen.” He stopped, leaned against the wall, and grabbed at his thick, wavey black hair. “Why now?” He asked again, this time more to Grandma Wendy than himself. “What do you think?” He asks her, looking up.
“Has it ever occurred to you that they might not be lying?” She slurs through her words the way that makes them sound like honey on a pleasant afternoon.
“Really, Wendy?” Rei addresses her. “Kidnappers and a van, you really believe that?!”
“As you said,” she tells him calmly, “they never lied before, so why should they start now?”
Rei looks into her eyes as he thinks about this. “Maybe you’re right,” Rei says quietly, right before Cody leaps up from the kitchen island and slams his book onto the table.
The whole house goes quiet. Except for the washing machine, he doesn’t like to follow orders. “Stop being strident,” Cody tells his friends in a surprisingly calm voice. This is the scariest voice you will ever hear in the household. Everyone else is either too chill to be scary or too energetic to even try.
“Strident?” Ben says, breaking the silence.
“Strident,” Cody begins, “Making an irritatingly loud and harsh sound.”
“We can certainly stop being irritatingly loud, can’t we children?” Grandma Wendy asks, coming over to the island to calm them down. “Maybe you have had enough sugar for today,” she tells them. Rei walks up behind, smiling to himself because of how incredible she truly is.
“Aww,” all the kids groan, knowing what she means.
“Come on, now. Upstairs to brush that sugar off your teeth.” They all drag up the stairs, Lyn and Leo trying hard to go as slow as possible. They were still thinking of all the methods they could use to tell their loved ones what they knew. Lyn wanted to break it into conversation gently, while Leo thought it would be best to wait until the last minute to tell them. If they didn’t soon, they might be too late, Lyn had argued. But Leo thought that randomly bringing it up into conversation would be too abrupt. Lyn wasn’t entirely sure about either option but was sure waiting was the worst option. So, without thinking, she blurts to her family.
“Those men were trying to kidnap me because of the knowledge I possess about their company’s actual business.” She speaks so fast that only Leo knows what she said.
“Lyn!” He yells at her, just like old times. She always did this. She would do something stupid and reckless that turned out to be the right thing to do and Leo would be all upset that she hadn’t followed their well, thought-out plan.
She turns and gives him a charming smile before yelling his name back. “Leo!”
“Hush!” The rest of the kids are fed up with their screaming. Grandma isn’t upset though, she stands there, chuckling to herself about their childish ways.
“They were here for you?” Rei sounds skeptical as he says this, though not to his family, more to the stairwell. He stares past them while he thinks aloud. “Maybe Wendy was right,” he tells himself.
“Right about what?” Ben asks. The children groan at him as Rei comes back to reality. Ben was not the smartest one in the house, to say the least.
“Oh, you know…” Rei trails off, not wanting to tell them about the doubt he felt earlier. “It doesn’t really matter; what matters is that you all stay safe tomorrow.”
“What do you mean?” Callie speaks up for the first time all night. At the kitchen island earlier, she had been working on designs for a new dress while her friends annoyed her boyfriend. She had been so deep in her designs that she hadn’t spoken to anyone while she munched on her fluffernutters.
“I mean,” Rei begins, “you all will stay in this house all day tomorrow. No people entering or exiting this house.” He pauses and draws in his breath. This next part was going to be hard to say. The children look amongst themselves, knowingly. “Which means-”
“NO SCHOOL!” The kids shriek with excitement and hurry up the stairs to get ready for tomorrow.
“I think I’ve gone deaf,” Rei tells Wendy after the kids have left.
“Hah!” She turns, walks toward the kitchen with a hop in her step, and says, “I’ve still got plenty of time before I go deaf, maybe you ought to try some soy products sometime. Or how about some limes or lemons or –oh!– Grapefruits work, too, for age.”
“Ha, ha,” Rei says sarcastically. “You’re so funny.” He thinks for a moment, then tells her, “You know? I’m starting to think you being sassy towards me is proclivity.”
She laughs aloud at that statement. “You might be right,” she slurs.
Back upstairs, the kids are rushing around in their PJs. The excitement about the next day had quickly permeated throughout all the children. The top of the stairs connects to a long hallway attached to a large bonus room. On one end of the hall are the girl’s rooms and their very own bathroom.
“Has anyone seen my hair curlers?” Callie asks, sticking her head out of her room.
“I think they were in the bathroom,” Lexie responds, rushing out of the bathroom, to her bedroom.
“Here!” Lyn says, throwing Callie her hot pink hair curlers, then turning back into the bathroom and shutting the door.
On the opposite end of the hall are the boys’ bedrooms and their own bathroom.
“Where’s my teddy bear?!” Ben stomps out of his room to interrogate the other boys.
“Cody took it,” Leo tells him immediately as if he practiced saying it a thousand times.
“That is not true!” Cody calls from the bathroom.
Ben looks back at Leo, only to see him turn and make a run for his own room.
“Leo!” Ben yells, annoyed that he chose tonight to play keep away. He chases Leo into his room, where they square off. Poor Teddy sits in the middle of the room while the boys circle him, challenging each other to make a move for him.
The way they lunge for Teddy is merely reflective of the fact that the girls are much calmer at this time of night.
Eventually, the whole family gets settled in front of the TV, and they begin to watch Nickelodeon. They don’t pay as much attention to the show as they do to their own conversations. They slowly go to bed one by one. Until eventually Lyn, Leo, and Rei are the only ones still sitting there talking.
Out of nowhere, Rei says, “Thanks for telling the truth today.” Then he stands up, out of his chair, and begins to walk away. The kids follow him with their eyes. Then, he stops and says, “Even if the story wasn’t very believable.” Then he walks up to his bedroom, right above Grandma Wendy’s.
The kids laugh at how serious their father could be. Rei smiles to himself as their laughter fades into the night.
Author Notes: I don't think there'll be a part 3, but I might write more about them...
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United States • 16 years old