The Mostly True Story of Jack by Kelly Barnhill

Author:Kelly Barnhill [Barnhill, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780316056724
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-one

Freedom, and Other Security Risks

IT WAS STILL LIGHT AFTER WENDY AND HER FAMILY HAD eaten, but her mother had already fallen asleep on the couch watching the early news. Wendy tiptoed upstairs to check on her brother. As usual, he slept on his back, his eyes loosely closed, his lips a thin line, and his breathing so gentle you had to know him to know he breathed at all. She slipped on her shoes and checked the time. Her father, who, in addition to his job at the Exchange, sometimes worked the swing shift as a janitor for the college, didn’t get off until nearly midnight.

She had time, she told herself as she shut the door as silently as she could and tiptoed down the squeaky wooden steps. She was, after all, the one no one worried about. Wendy had known from the time she was very young that this lack of worry translated to an abundance of freedom. It also gave her time to think.

She went back in her mind to the day that Frankie disappeared, when the lost boy appeared in the cornfield out back, the boy only Wendy could see. The cops had assumed she was lying. They called it attention-seeking. The psychologist called it transference, and the minister said that she was constructing a hero’s narrative in her hope of finding her brother alive. Adults, Wendy knew, said a lot of things. And while it wasn’t polite to tell them their ideas were completely idiotic, it certainly didn’t stop her from thinking it.

Wendy had seen that boy each day that Frankie was gone. She had called to him, yelled at him, left bowls of cereal and milk at the edge of her yard, but she never saw him up close. When Frankie returned, scarred and silent, she didn’t mention the boy in the cornfield. And anyway, after she threw that rock, the boy had disappeared, so it didn’t much matter anymore. Some things were better left unsaid.

And, more importantly, some things were up to her to find out, because if she waited for the grown-ups in her life to tell her the truth, she would probably wait forever.

Two months before Frankie disappeared, when they were both eight years old, Wendy, Frankie, and Anders were all playing with some boys in the schoolhouse, throwing rocks into the open door, and screaming with laughter when they didn’t hear the rock land. On a dare, one boy named Anthony went through the door. He did not come out. The children ran home, crying that the schoolhouse had collapsed with Anthony inside, but when a pack of panicked parents arrived at the scene, the schoolhouse was leaning on its dusty foundation, unchanged.

By that same evening, the adults had forgotten about Anthony. They accused the children of making the story up and inventing an imaginary boy. By the end of the week, most of the children had forgotten about the missing boy—only Frankie, Wendy, and Anders seemed to remember—or, at least, they were the only ones who claimed to remember.

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