So I’ve just been sitting here chewing my pen and trying to figure out how to write what’s around me, but it’s hard to capture. The sun is sinking and it’s getting chilly out. The air smells like fall—that exciting dry smell that reminds you of all the falls of your life. Behind me our big ambling Victorian is winking at me. I’ve always thought of our house as a lady’s face, with the two highest windows as the eyes—and one of the eyes closed because the curtain’s always drawn in that room. My little brother, Sam—whom we call the Mouse because he’s small for his age, and quiet, especially because he always has a cold—is silhouetted in one of the parlor windows practicing the flute (Mom made us each learn an instrument; we’re all disasters). Millie is probably watching Extreme Witches at top volume as usual, where they put six witches together in a big house and film them arguing with each other. Mom tries to get her to watch more informative stuff, like this segment CNN does once a week on the gods called The Immortals, Where Are They Now? Each week they feature a different god: Last week it was Zeus, sitting on a lawn chair up on top of Mount Olympus, where only authorized camera crews are allowed to go. But Millie couldn’t care less.
With two siblings it’s the quiet that you want, trust me. Especially when you’re not the oldest or the youngest or the beautiful, graceful one but just the one that happened to fall in the middle. I’ll tell you in one sentence what it’s like to be the middle child, in case you don’t know: Everyone on either side of you squeezes you until you almost explode, and all the time that they’re smushing you they’re not really noticing you’re there. So you have to find a place that’s just yours, and that’s how I found this old church stone at the corner of our yard.
Ugh. Mouse just called out the window to say Mom’s looking for me and that it’s time to take a shower. I hate bathing in general. When I was little, Mom used to threaten me into the bath by saying dirty children get sent to the Crow’s Nest, where my grandma lives (speaking of witches), deep in the heart of the Smoky Mountains. Supposedly, in the seventies, Grandma caused three people to disappear forever just by cursing hairs she got from their hairbrushes. She—
Oops, Mom just spotted me—she’s hanging out her bedroom window yelling. Her hair is all wet from the shower and flopping down the sides of her face like curtains. How’s that for descriptive?
September 8th
I’m back on the hill—I think this will be my favorite spot to write and record my life. Mom’s taken Sam the Mouse to a doctor’s appointment and Dad is home working on a new invention to record something called “entropy” (I can’t imagine a word that sounds more boring) so he won’t notice where I am.
Dad was in the paper today, right between an article on a new mall in Waterville with a giant for a security guard, and a meeting announcement about the lady’s quilting guild. There was a picture of my dad and then a headline underneath it that read METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF UPPER MAINE OUSTS THEODORE LOCKWOOD DUE TO PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERENCES.
I guess that explains what happened at Dairy Queen yesterday: Dad was just about to buy us our Blizzards (Heath bar for me, Oreo for Millie, M&M’s for Sam, and Mom always gets a cherry dip) when a man stepped up to the register and paid for us. My dad was looking at him in confusion, smiling to be polite, when the man said, “You’ll need all the help you can get, since you’ll be out of a job soon.”
My dad just looked down at his wallet and shuffled his feet. He doesn’t like confrontation. My mom, on the other hand, doesn’t mind it at all, and she pushed her cherry dip against the man’s shirt, pretending it was an accident. “Looks like you’re out of a shirt,” she said. Then she turned on her heel and led us out the door, making us leave our Blizzards on the counter. I glanced back at my large Heath Blizzard in agony as we made our way out, but when Rebecca Lockwood, a.k.a. my mom, makes up her mind on something, you follow along. She’s just that kind of person.
* * *
Mom says Dad is a great scientist but an unlucky one. He invented a special sort of barometer only to find out someone else had patented the same exact design eight days before. He was invited to present a paper on the three major types of clouds, titled “Cumulus, Stratus, Cirrus, Seriously,” but got booed offstage by everyone, including the mayor, because he’d made one simple mistake on the math that threw the whole thing off. He actually wanted to go into physics in college instead of meteorology (he loves learning about the stars and planets more than anything else), but he didn’t get good enough grades. This is the second time he’s been kicked out of the Meteorological Society, which he helped to found. Sometimes it’s like my mom’s the only person who believes in him at all.
All the failures make him sad, I think, and sometimes he goes into a “swamp” (that’s what Mom calls them) where he wears his pajamas for days. But it never stops him from being obsessed with science. Even last night after Dairy Queen, he watched the sun set in his usual way: First he stood at the living room window, then he walked upstairs to see how it looked from higher up, then he wandered out into the yard to view it from a few different places on the grass, all the while taking notes in a little notebook he carries everywhere. Meanwhile Sam was calling out for someone to reach the Teddy Grahams on the top shelf, and Millie and I had to stop fighting over the remote control and who would get up to adjust the antennae (the TV is always fuzzy) and help Sam, when we’re not even the parents. Dad doesn’t notice life kinds of things at all. He lives in his brain.
Millie says that when I was being born, Dad brought his notebooks to the hospital and worked on some calculations while he waited. I’d rather not believe that he wasn’t more concerned about my arrival . . . but the sad thing is that I do. Mom calls him “science haunted.” Instead of coming to our ball games or school plays like the other parents do, he climbs the hills around Cliffden with his instruments almost every weekend, long after dark, recording the positions of the stars and changes in temperature. Mom says, “He’s got a great but unorganized mind.”
Still, beyond all his failures, the one thing that makes my dad such a target for jokes in our town, and the thing that’s gotten him kicked out of the Meteorological Society twice, is his stubborn insistence on the existence of the Extraordinary World.
* * *
The Extraordinary World is an old legend—a land rumored to exist at the Southern Edge of the earth. Dad’s one of the few people who believes it’s real. He’s written three letters to the editor about it in the Cliffden Tribune. He belongs to the Club for the Discovery of the Extraordinary World with a bunch of weirdos, including the guy who put the burritos out for the dragons, and a lady who says she’s secretly married to Prince William.
In the Extraordinary World, the legend goes, there are no dragons or krakens or sea serpents or Dark Clouds or bad omens. There are no demons or nymphs hiding in the forests, no vicious mermaids or yetis. “It’s clear,” my dad wrote in his third editorial, “that the unexplored Southern Edge of the earth is the place we have to look for it, and we should pour our money and resources into doing so as soon as possible, for the benefit of mankind.” They also ran his editorial in the Enquirer alongside headlines like I WAS KIDNAPPED BY AN ALIEN AND NOW I’M HAVING HIS CHILD! and THE EASTER BUNNY VISITED ME IN MY SLEEP WITH A MESSAGE FOR THE WORLD.