In the second week of December, Adam’s school flooded its students with end-of-semester tests. Spelling tests, geography tests, reading tests, test tests, and so on and so forth. Outside of school, Adam was kept busy handling the stream of customers at the bustling bakery. The break-in a few weeks ago was quickly forgotten. With the arrival of the winter holidays, Uncle Henry whipped up piles of deep-fried doughnuts and flaky rugelach for Hanukkah, and took in mounting orders of gingerbread men, snowflake cookies, and fruitcake for Christmas.
Why anyone liked fruitcake was beyond Adam. But we digress.
The magic snow globe, the music box, and the pendulum lay quietly inside Adam’s dresser for a week. So it came as a great shock on Sunday evening, long after Adam had fallen asleep, when the music box suddenly went off.
He sat up in bed. The muffled, eerie melody, which had previously captivated him and inspired a sense of wonder, now filled him with dread. He jumped up to open the drawer. The music magnified in the open air.
Uncle Henry’s snores broke off in the living room.
“What’s that sound?” Adam heard his uncle mumble sleepily.
Adam tried to close the music box. The lid wouldn’t shut.
The melody continued to play, conjuring bleak images that made Adam more panicked with each passing second. He pushed on the lid with all his strength, but it was stuck. He tried turning the box over and pushing from the bottom, but it was no use.
That was when Adam saw that the initials on the bottom of the box no longer read JCW, but ALT.
Adam Lee Tripp.
Uncle Henry entered the room just as the melody finally faded.
“Adam? Everything all right in here? It’s two in the morning.”
Adam trembled. He couldn’t speak.
“Adam?”
“Uncle Henry…” Adam swallowed and looked down at the music box in his hands. “Something bad is going to happen.”
“What? Oh. I see.” Uncle Henry gave an understanding nod. “You had a nightmare. Don’t worry, boy, bad dreams can’t hurt you.” He glanced at the music box, and had he not been in such a sleepy state, he might have wondered where his nephew had gotten it. “Music does help soothe the mind after a nightmare, but I’m not sure that particular melody helps.”
“No, you don’t understand! Someone is going to die!”
Adam tried to explain how the music box was bad luck. But he couldn’t tell the full story unless he explained how he found Jack’s letter through the traveling snow globe, and the last time he’d tried to explain the snow globe’s powers to his uncle, it hadn’t gone so well. Then again, he reasoned, this was a matter of life and death. So he told Uncle Henry the truth. Again.
His version sounded jumbled, even to himself, and seemed as if he’d made everything up. A nightmare certainly was the easier explanation. Worried, Uncle Henry coaxed him back to bed and said they’d talk about it in the morning. The next day, he secretly made a call to Adam’s school counselor.
Now, as much as Ms. Ginger prided herself on finding an easy solution to every problem, her true joy came from whipping kids into shape, one way or another. You could take a pair of troublemakers to her, and she’d mold them right into little angels, with a few minor scars.
What kind of scars, you ask? About seven months ago, the then-infamous fifth grader Roger Daly had been sent to Ms. Ginger’s office for disrupting class one too many times. Nobody knew what had happened behind the closed door, but Roger emerged from the room clutching his ears and moaning, “Too much talking, too much talking.” From that day on, whenever he saw Ms. Ginger in the hallway, he’d duck, cover his ears, and run off in the other direction.
As stated before, Adam’s shyness had always been of particular interest to the school counselor. He was not a troublemaker, but his teachers all agreed the boy was much too quiet. Ms. Ginger firmly believed only she could wheedle Adam out of his shell and transform him into a sociable boy, like her own darling sons.
On the day of Adam’s appointment, she sat in her office with her back straight and her pencils sharpened. Her red suit matched her lipstick, and her flaming red hair was tied back in an orderly bun. Hung against the wall behind her desk were various plaques and awards, each of enormous pride for Ms. Ginger:
• Perfect Attendance Award
• Ninth-Place Speed Reader in the Manhattan Women’s Book Club for Impressive School Guidance Counselors Aged 30–35 [1]
• Fourth-to-Last-Place Finisher of the Central Park Mile Race
• Runner-Up to the Employee of the Month Award, March 1990
• What looked like a framed letter from an editor at a short stories magazine that read, “Although we appreciate your unusual and slightly confusing tale about a guidance counselor with superpowers who turns bratty children into snakes, we unfortunately must decline your submission.” [2]
When Adam entered, Ms. Ginger gave him a bright red, falsely cheery smile. Adam did not return the smile. He had been to Ms. Ginger’s office several times before, and each time, the school counselor had given him the same useless advice—“Join an after-school club!”—without thinking about Adam’s limited time and resources. Not to mention the guidance counselor tended to ramble with doting stories about her two sons, one of whom was in the same class as Adam and had stolen Adam’s favorite pen in the fourth grade.
“Your uncle tells me you’ve been having nightmares,” said Ms. Ginger as she opened her spiral notebook to a blank page. “Why don’t you tell me about them?”
Adam sucked in his breath, then exhaled. He might as well try. “I have this music box,” he began. “It—”
“A music box?” interrupted Ms. Ginger. “Children
