I jumped up and felt my way to the living room. Somewhere in there, my foot caught something and brought it down with a crash.
“Sorry!” I yelled as I patted down the couch for the phone. I was pretty sure I’d just destroyed a half-built, motorized bird feeder, Dad’s latest project.
“Hello?”
I was right. It was Charlie.
All the things I’d been dying to tell him about flooded my brain: Josh, the Purple Demon, the flash flood, ice hockey…
“Hey! So, it’s like the North Pole up here, and my room’s in the attic, which is extra cold so bring all the clothes you own,” I said, speaking as fast as Josh. “And definitely bring a sleeping bag because mine smells funny since Zoe used it and—”
“We’re not coming,” Charlie said. “I know. It sucks.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Nothing. Or, I mean, not just one thing. Justin’s got this cold, and my dad’s been working really hard. Oh, plus my mom says they didn’t know it was so far when they said yes.”
What? Nobody had gotten hit by a bus? Nobody had bird flu?
I was getting the dog-ate-my-homework, this-seat-is-saved, didn’t-you-get-the-invitation. And not just from anybody. From Charlie.
The Kramers didn’t want to come. Fine. They and my parents were just friends because Charlie and I had been forever. But what about Charlie? I knew what angry Charlie sounded like—spitting, cursing, I’ll-show-them Charlie. This wasn’t him.
“It’s not like you won’t be coming back to the city, right?” he said. “I mean everybody comes to the city sometime.”
“I guess,” I said, wondering what Charlie would say if I told him Josh had never been to New York City.
“My mom says it will just be easier to see you on your trips back home.”
“Back home, huh?” I said.
“What?”
He didn’t get it. “Nothing.”
“And she said maybe we can go up there in the summer. You know, when it’s not so cold.”
“Sure.” Sure, summer, seven months from now.
Then we both went quiet, which feels weird when you’re on the phone, because you can’t see the other person, and you start to feel like you’re alone, especially when you’re standing there in the dark thinking about the things you wanted to say but suddenly don’t anymore.
Then Charlie said, “Anyway, I got to go. Sam and I are going back to school. They’re keeping the gym open late so we can get a little more practice in before tomorrow.”
He wasn’t coming for Thanksgiving. He hadn’t asked me anything about Petersville, and now he was getting off?
“Oh, right, tryouts,” I said, and as I did, I could feel this dark corner of me hope he wouldn’t make the team.
“Let me know when you’re coming home,” he said, and it felt even worse this time than it had the first time he’d said it.
Mom and Dad did their best to cheer me up. Mom promised to make all my favorite dishes, including double-layer carrot cake with coconut frosting and baby brussels sprouts with pancetta (think bacon but better). Then she and Dad came up with this really “fun” idea to make Thanksgiving even more special: we were going to pick our own turkey, not plucked and headless from a butcher, but live with feathers from a farm.
I think they thought it was going to be like picking your own Christmas tree, not that any of us had ever done that before either. The thing about a Christmas tree though is that even if you’re chopping one down, it’s a plant, so it’s pretty easy to get over the whole ending-a-life thing. Turkeys, however, are very obviously alive. They don’t actually “gobble, gobble,” and they’re not cute or anything, but they do make noise and run around. Another important difference between Christmas trees and turkeys: we don’t keep Christmas trees in little jails where they walk around looking sad and begging to be rescued.
So, let’s just say, this was one more “surprise” that would have been perfect for that other family, the one with the four-year-old girl who loves staring at sad turkeys in little jails, because that girl wouldn’t have masterminded the biggest turkey breakout in Thunder Hill Farm pick-your-own-turkey history.
Luckily, turkeys aren’t very smart—how much brain could fit into those tiny heads anyway?—so even with Zoe chasing them out of their cells, yelling, “Run! Run!” they refused to go very far.
I’d been afraid Mr. Jennings, the guy who owned the farm, would flip out, which particularly worried me because he was the size and shape of a WWF wrestler. But he just laughed. He wouldn’t even let Mom and Dad make it up to him by buying the biggest, most expensive turkey he had.
The worst part about my parents’ stupid idea was that when Thanksgiving did finally come, and Mom had made this amazing dinner and brought out that delicious turkey, I couldn’t eat it. Not one bite. I kept seeing all those birds running around Mr. Jennings’s yard, and I just couldn’t separate the live birds running around in my head from the bird on our table. And the idea of putting one bite in my mouth was just impossible, like eating something that wasn’t even food, like sand or a pencil or a sister. I tried to talk myself out of it. I tried so hard, but nothing worked. The thing that really drove me crazy: I was the only one who felt this way. Even Zoe, the great turkey rescuer, ate three portions. Of course, they all said it was the best turkey ever.
Nobody got to eat dessert that night though because before Mom made it, all the lights went out again, just like they had when Charlie called. Dad offered to hold a flashlight while Mom made crepes—they’re his favorite—but she didn’t think it was a good idea. The lights came back on again sometime in the middle of the night but then went out again the next day, so my parents called an electrician. Of course, when he came, the lights worked
