ones.
“I wouldn’t lie to you about this,” Ma says while I’m slurping the juice. “I couldn’t tell you before, because you were too small to understand, so I guess I was sort of lying to you then. But now you’re five, I think you can understand.”
I shake my head.
“What I’m doing is the opposite of lying. It’s, like, unlying.”
We have a long nap.
Ma’s already awake, looking down at me about two inches away. I wriggle down to have some from the left.
“Why you don’t like it here?” I ask her.
She sits up and pulls her T-shirt down.
“I wasn’t done.”
“Yes you were,” she says, “you were talking.”
I sit up too. “Why you don’t like it in Room with me?”
Ma holds me tight. “I always like being with you.”
“But you said it was tiny and stinky.”
“Oh, Jack.” She says nothing for a minute. “Yeah, I’d rather be outside. But with you.”
“I like it here with you.”
“OK.”
“How did he make it?”
She knows who I mean. I think she’s not going to tell me, and then she says, “Actually it was a garden shed to begin with. Just a basic twelve-by-twelve, vinyl-coated steel. But he added a soundproofed skylight, and lots of insulating foam inside the walls, plus a layer of sheet lead, because lead kills all sound. Oh, and a security door with a code. He boasts about what a neat job he made of it.”
The afternoon goes slow.
We read all our books with pictures in the freezing kind of bright. Skylight’s different today. She’s got a black bit like an eye. “Look, Ma.” She stares up and grins. “It’s a leaf.”
“Why?”
“The wind must have blown it off a tree onto the glass.”
“An actual tree in Outside?”
“Yeah. See? That proves it. The whole world is out there.”
“Let’s play Beanstalk. We put my chair here on top of Table. .” She helps me do that. “Then Trash on top of my chair,” I tell her. “Then I climb all the way up—”
“That’s not safe.”
“Yeah it is if you stand on Table holding Trash so I don’t wobble.”
“Hmm,” says Ma, which is nearly no.
“Let’s just try, please, please?”
It works perfect, I don’t fall at all. When I’m standing on Trash I can actually hold the cork edges of Roof where they go in slanty at Skylight. There’s something over her glass I never saw before. “Honeycomb,” I tell Ma, stroking it.
“It’s a polycarbonate mesh,” she says, “unbreakable. I used to stand up here looking out a lot, before you were born.” “The leaf’s all black with holes in it.”
“Yeah, I think it’s a dead one, from last winter.”
I can see blue around it, that’s the sky, with some white in it that Ma says are clouds. I stare through the honeycomb, I’m staring and staring but all I see is sky. There’s nothing in it like ships or trains or horses or girls or skyscrapers zooming by.
When I climb back down off Trash and my chair I shove Ma’s arm away.
“Jack—”
I jump onto Floor all on my own. “Liar, liar, pants on fire, there’s no Outside.”
She starts explaining more but I put my fingers in my ears and shout, “Blah blah blah blah blah.”
I play just me with Jeep. I’m nearly crying but I pretend not.
Ma looks through Cabinet, she’s banging cans, I think I hear her counting. She’s counting what we’ve got left.
I’m extra cold now, my hands are all numb under the socks on them.
For dinner I keep asking can we have the last of the cereal so in the end Ma says yeah. I spill some because of not feeling my fingers.
The dark’s coming back, but Ma has all the rhymes in her head from the Big Book of Nursery Rhymes. I ask for “Oranges and Lemons,” my best line is “I do not know, says the great bell of Bow” because it’s all deep like a lion. Also about the chopper coming to chop off your head. “What’s a chopper?” “A big knife, I guess.”
“I don’t think so,” I tell her. “It’s a helicopter that its blades spin real fast and chop off heads.”
“Yuck.”
We’re not sleepy but there’s not much to do without seeing. We sit on Bed and do our own rhymes. “Our friend Wickles has the tickles.” “Our friends the Backyardigans have to try hard again.”
“Good one,” I tell Ma. “Our friend Grace winned the race.”
“Won it,” says Ma. “Our friend Jools likes swimming pools.”
“Our friend Barney lives on a farm-y.”
“Cheat.”
“OK,” I say. “Our friend Uncle Paul had a bad fall.”
“He came off his motorbike once.”
I was forgetting he was real. “Why he came off his motorbike?”
“By accident. But the ambulance took him to the hospital and the doctors made him all better.”
“Did they cut him open?”
“No, no, they just put a cast on his arm to stop it hurting.”
So hospitals are real too, and motorbikes. My head’s going to burst from all the new things I have to believe.
It’s all black now except Skylight has a dark kind of brightness. Ma says in a city there’s always some light from the streetlights and the lamps in the buildings and stuff.
“Where’s the city?”
“Just out there,” she says, pointing at Bed Wall.
“I looked through Skylight and I never saw it.”
“Yeah, that’s why you got mad at me.”
“I’m not mad at you.”
She gives me back my kiss. “Skylight looks straight up in the air. Most of the things I’ve been telling you about are on the ground, so to see them we’d need a window that faces out sideways.”
“We could ask for a sideways window for Sundaytreat.”
Ma sort of laughs.
I was forgetting that Old Nick’s not coming anymore. Maybe my lollipop was the last Sundaytreat ever.
I think I’m going to cry but what comes out is a huge yawn. “Good night, Room,” I say.
“Is that the time? OK. Good night,” says Ma.
“Good night, Lamp and Balloon.” I wait for Ma but she’s not saying any more of them. “Good night, Jeep, and Good night, Remote. Good night, Rug, and Good night, Blanket, and Good night, the Bugs, and don’t bite.”
• • •
What wakes me up is a noise over and over. Ma’s not in Bed. There’s a bit of light, the air’s still icy. I look over the edge, she’s in the middle of Floor going
Ma stops, she puffs out a long breath. “I need to hit something,” she says, “but I don’t want to break anything.”
“Why not?”
“Actually, I’d love to break something. I’d love to break everything.”
