Sharon Creech - Walk Two Moons

Tommy bashed into me, and when I started to fall backward, Ben caught me. He put his arms around my waist and held on to me, even after it was obvious that I was not going to fall. I could smell that funny grapefruit smell again and feel his face pressed up against my hair. “Let go,” I said, but he didn’t let go. I had an odd sensation, as if a little creature was crawling up my spine. It wasn’t a horrible sensation, more light and tickly. I thought maybe he dropped something down my shirt. “Let go !” I said, and finally he did.

It was at the drugstore that I got a little scared. Maybe I had been listening to Phoebe’s tales of lunatics and axe murderers too much. Phoebe and I were looking at the magazines when I felt as if someone was watching us. I looked over to where Ben was standing, but he and Mary Lou were busy rummaging around in the chocolate bars. The feeling did not go away. I turned the other way around, and there on the far side of the store was the nervous young man who had come to Phoebe’s house. He was at the cash register, paying for something, but he was staring at us while he was handing his money to the clerk. I nudged Phoebe. “Oh no,” she said, “the lunatic.” Phoebe hustled over to Ben and Mary Lou. “Look, quick, it’s the lunatic.”

“Where?”

“At the cash register.”

“There’s nobody there,” Mary Lou said.

“Honest, he was there,” Phoebe said. “I swear he was. Ask Sal.”

“He was there,” I said.

Later, when we had left Mary Lou and were on our way to Phoebe’s house, we heard someone running up behind us. Phoebe thought we were doomed. “If we get our heads bashed in and that lunatic leaves us here on the sidewalk—” she said.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. My brain was saying, “Scream! Scream!” but my voice was completely shut off.

It was Ben. He said, “Did I scare you?”

“That wasn’t very funny,” Phoebe said.

“I’ll walk home with you,” he said. “Just in case there are any—any—lunatics around.” He had difficulty saying lunatic . On the way to Phoebe’s house Ben said some odd things. First, he said, “Maybe you shouldn’t call him a lunatic.”

“And why not?” Phoebe said.

“Because a lunatic is—it means—it sounds like—oh, never mind.” He would not explain, and he seemed embarrassed to have mentioned this in the first place. Then he said to me, “Don’t people touch each other at your house?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I just wondered,” he said. “You flinch every time someone touches you.”

“I do not.”

“You do.” He touched my arm. I have to admit, my instinct was to flinch but I caught myself. I pretended not to notice that his hand was resting there on my arm. That creature tickling my spine was back. “Hmm,” he said, like a doctor examining a patient. “Hmm.” He removed his hand. “Where’s your mother?”

I had not mentioned my mother to anyone, not even Phoebe, except for the one time Phoebe had asked about her and I had only said she didn’t live with us.

Ben said, “I saw your father once, but I’ve never seen your mother. Where is she?”

“She’s in Idaho. Lewiston, Idaho.”

“What’s she doing there?” Ben said.

“I don’t really feel like saying.” It didn’t occur to me to ask him where his mother was.

He touched my arm again. When I flinched, he said, “Ha! Gotcha!”

It bothered me, what he had said. It occurred to me that my father didn’t hug me as much anymore, and that maybe I was starting to flinch whenever anyone touched me. I wasn’t always like that. We used to be a hugging family. As I walked along with Ben and Phoebe, I remembered a time when I was nine or ten. My mother crawled into bed with me and snuggled close and said, “Let’s build a raft and float away down a river.” I used to think about that raft a lot, and I actually believed that one day we might build a raft and float away down a river together. But when she went to Lewiston, Idaho, she went alone.

Ben touched Phoebe’s arm. She flinched. “Ha,” he said. “Gotcha. You’re jumpy, too, Free Bee.”

And that, too, bothered me. I had already noticed how tense Phoebe’s whole family seemed, how tidy, how respectable, how thumpingly stiff. Was I becoming like that? Why were they like that? A couple times I had seen Phoebe’s mother try to touch Phoebe or Prudence or Mr. Winterbottom, but they all drew back from her. It was as if they had outgrown her.

Had I been drawing away from my own mother? Did she have empty spaces left over? Was that why she left?

When we reached Phoebe’s driveway, Ben said, “I guess you’re safe now. I guess I’ll go.”

“Go ahead,” Phoebe said.

Mrs. Cadaver came screeching up to the curb in her yellow Volkswagen, with her wild red witch hair flying all over the place. She waved at us and started pulling things out of the car and plopping them on the sidewalk.

“Who’s that?” Ben asked.

“Mrs. Cadaver.”

“Cadaver? Like dead body?”

“That’s right.”

“Hi, Sal,” Mrs. Cadaver called. She dumped a pile of lumpy bags on the sidewalk. Ben asked if she wanted any help. “My, you’re very polite,” Mrs. Cadaver said, flashing her wild gray eyes.

“She scares me half to death,” Phoebe said. “Don’t go inside,” she whispered to Ben.

“Why not?” he said, too loudly, because Mrs. Cadaver looked up and said, “What?”

“Oh nothing,” Phoebe said.

Mrs. Cadaver said, “Sal, do you want to come in?”

“I was just going to Phoebe’s,” I said, glad for an excuse.

Phoebe’s mother came to her front door. “Phoebe? What are you doing? Are you coming in?”

We left Ben. As we were going in Phoebe’s house, we saw Ben lift something off the sidewalk. It was a shiny new axe.

Phoebe’s mother said, “Is that Mary Lou’s brother? Was he walking you home? Where’s Mary Lou?”

“I hate it when you ask me three questions in a row,” Phoebe said. Through the window, we could see Ben lugging the axe up the front steps of Mrs. Cadaver’s house. Phoebe called out, “Don’t go in!” but when Mrs. Cadaver held the front door open, Ben disappeared inside.

“Phoebe, what are you doing?” her mother asked.

Then Phoebe pulled the envelope out of her pocket, the envelope containing the newest message. “I found this outside,” Phoebe said.

Mrs. Winterbottom opened the envelope carefully, as if it might contain a miniature bomb. “Oh sweetie,” she said. “Who is it from? Who is it for? What does it mean?” Phoebe explained what an agenda was. “I know what an agenda is, Phoebe. I don’t like this at all. I want to know who is sending these.”

I was waiting for Phoebe to tell her about seeing the nervous young man at the drugstore, but Phoebe didn’t mention it. A little later we saw Ben leave Mrs. Cadaver’s house. He appeared to be all in one piece.

That day when I got home, my father was in the garage, tinkering with the car. He was leaning over the engine, and I couldn’t see his face at first. “Dad—what do you think it means if someone touches someone else and the person being touched flinches? Do you think it means that the person being touched is getting too stiff?”

Dad turned slowly around. His eyes were red and puffy. I think he had been crying. His hands and shirt were greasy, but when he hugged me, I didn’t flinch.

When I had first started telling Phoebe’s story, Gram and Gramps sat quietly and listened. Gramps concentrated on the road, and Gram gazed out the window. Occasionally, they interjected a “Gol-dang!” or a “No kidding?” But as I got farther into the story, they began to interrupt more and more.