Page 75 of Everything All at Once

“So you’re back,” he said through the crack in the door.

“We made a mistake,” Alvin said.

“Ran off with that good-for-nothing Everlife Society, did you? No brighter than your parents.”

He shut the door in their faces, but they heard him unchaining the many chains and undoing the many locks that protected him from who knew what.

Finally, after much fumbling, he opened the door.

“I knew you’d be back,” he said.

“The Everlife Society are a bunch of jerks,” Margo said, pushing her way into the house. Alvin followed her. They waited as Grandpa Hatter went through the complicated process of locking the door again.

“We didn’t know where else to go,” Alvin said. “We thought you could help us?”

“I can’t even help myself,” Grandpa Hatter said sharply, but then he softened, as if noticing how tired and cold his grandchildren were. “Oh, fine. Follow me.”

He led them through the massive house, down hallways they’d never seen before, past more closed doors than they could count. Again they had the feeling that this house, likethe house in the woods, was somehow bigger on the inside than it had seemed from the outside.

Finally, after what seemed like ten full minutes of wandering, they stopped at the dead end of a hallway. There was a bookshelf here, with a wall sconce on either side. The candles were extinguished.

“Your father forbade me to show you this, but I’ve never taken kindly to being forbidden to do something. Plus, maybe you’ll find something useful here,” Grandpa Hatter said.

Then he reached out a hand, grabbed a very specific book by its spine, and pulled.

At once the sconces sprang to life and the entire bookshelf started rotating to reveal a literal, actual, secret passage.

“No way,” Margo breathed.

“I’m going back to bed. Don’t make too much noise,” Grandpa Hatter said, and he left them alone.

—fromAlvin Hatter and the Wild-Goose Chase

17

Em cornered me at my locker the next day, her face a perfect cartoon picture of concern. She wore what I knew was her most favorite outfit: a Dashboard Confessional T-shirt (worn in irony, she said, but not really) tucked into a pair of denim cutoffs. Her blue hair was wrapped into a bun on the top of her head. The few pieces that weren’t long enough fell down around her ears. She wore little LEGO block money stud earrings. A gift from Jackie, maybethegift, the one that made her realize she was in love.

“Lottie!” she said, slamming herself against my locker as soon as I’d gotten it open. It clicked shut again, locked. “I missed you. Please don’t ever leave me again!”

“It was just one day.”

“That stretched on literally forever. Okay? Literally.”

“Would you think it was weird if you asked somebodywhat the worst thing they’d ever done was and they just wouldn’t tell you? Like at first you thought it was a joke or something, but then they really, actually wouldn’t tell you?”

“I’d think they probably murdered someone,” Em said thoughtfully.

“Yeah. That’s what I figured.”

“Who are we talking about here? Sam?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would you even ask someone that? That’s on you.”

“I don’t know, it was on my mind, it was something my aunt had written about in one of her letters. I guess it’s kind of a personal question.”

“Yeah, I mean, I’m sure he just didn’t want to tell you because he likes you and he wants you to have this very curated impression of him, you know?”