“I thought you’d like to know—I mean, I wanted to tell you that—”

  “Tell me what? That you’re a freak?” she said.

  Then she crossed her eyes and tapped her nose with her finger three times.

  The nasty look on her face reminded me of that ugly old bullhead. Only the whiskers were missing.

  Lindsey’s friends had stopped playing and were watching us now, whispering to each other behind their hands and laughing. A small crowd began to gather. Like most bullies, Lindsey Toffle loved an audience.

  “Hey, Aurora Franklin!” she shouted at me. “Why don’t you show the whole world your flowered undies again?”

  I knew I should walk away, but I couldn’t move. It was as if my feet had grown roots. I wanted to tell Lindsey that (A) thanks to her, I didn’t wear flowered underwear anymore, and (B) I hadn’t meant for anyone to see them. We’d been in second grade when it happened. I’d been fooling around on the monkey bars by myself during recess one day. After hooking my knees over one of the bars I’d let go with my hands, forgetting that I had on a dress. The next thing I knew, my dress was around my ears and Lindsey Toffle was laughing her head off, telling everyone to come look at my underwear.

  Later that day when I got home from school, I’d told my mother I needed some new underwear.

  “I bought you three pairs last week,” she’d said. “Yellow with pink roses. They’re in your top drawer, sweetie.”

  “From now on I only want white,” I’d told her, and hurried off to my room before she could ask me why.

  “Earth to Aurora. Do you have something to say to me or not?” Lindsey asked now, her eyes gleaming the way Thurman Hill’s sea-glass eyes must have looked the day Heidi showed up at Hilltop Home asking him a million questions he didn’t want to answer.

  I wanted to tell her that just because a person acts a little different, or accidentally showed their underwear on the playground once, doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings like everyone else. How would she feel if nobody ever wanted to play with her, or sit next to her at lunch, or had ever picked her, even once, to work with them on a school project? There were a lot of things I wanted to say, but the words got stuck in my throat, piling up until I felt as though I’d swallowed a mouthful of rocks.

  “Well?” said Lindsey.

  It was obvious this wasn’t going to be my Wrigley’s moment. Lindsey Toffle and I were not going to be friends. Ever.

  “Never mind,” I said, slipping the silver bell into my pocket and walking away.

  When we came back inside after recess, Lindsey was slumped down in her seat, crying. Mr. Taylor explained what had happened and asked the class if anyone had seen the missing charm. I folded my hands on top of my desk and didn’t say a word. I had never kept a secret before, and I was surprised by the way it made me feel like a jar full of lightning bugs.

  Later that afternoon when I got home, I went out to the garage and dug around in the recycling bin until I found an old metal Band-Aid box with a hinged top. After stuffing it full of cotton balls—eleven in all—I tucked the little silver bell inside and snapped the lid closed.

  I considered several hiding places before settling on one. I figured that because I made my own bed every morning and changed the sheets myself every other Sunday, no one would ever have a reason to look under my mattress. Lifting up one corner, I slid the box under, carefully smoothing the covers when I was finished. I smiled to myself, enjoying the special sparkly feeling bubbling away inside me.

  By morning, the special feeling was gone, replaced by a twisted-up pretzel of guilt. Keeping something that doesn’t belong to you isn’t the same thing as keeping a secret. It’s stealing. Not only that, but I had lied to Mr. Taylor, my favorite teacher in the whole world. I could hardly wait to get to school. As soon as the coast was clear, I dropped the silver bell on the floor near Lindsey’s desk where I was sure she would find it. As the knots in my stomach began to loosen, I crossed my heart and swore up and down that I would never, ever keep anything that didn’t belong to me again.

  It wasn’t too long before I broke that promise.

  A few weeks later during Easter vacation, my mother asked me to go check and see if the mail had been delivered yet. Duck came along, trotting down the driveway beside me with his tongue hanging out one side of his mouth. The little red flag on the side of the mailbox was up, and as I stepped out onto the road to pull open the flap, I kicked up something hard with the tip of my shoe. At first I thought it was a stone or a rusty bolt that had come loose and fallen off a passing car, but it turned out to be a cigarette lighter, the old-fashioned metal kind, like the one my uncle James used to light his pipe.

  Duck gave it a quick sniff, but he was far more interested in the grasshoppers that were jumping around in the tall weeds. Doggie Cheetos, I called them, because they were one of Duck’s favorite snacks when he was lucky enough to catch one.

  Clearly the lighter had been there for a while. The outside was caked with dried mud. I turned it over and scraped the bottom with my fingernail the way my father scratched off the numbers on the Quickie Chance lottery tickets he bought at the gas station sometimes. As the dirt flaked away, letters appeared. Z-I-P-P-O. Zippo.

  One time when my uncle James was visiting, I’d asked him to show me how his lighter worked. Uncle James lived in Sacramento and taught science in a private middle school for brainiac kids. We hardly ever got to see him. He looked exactly like my father, except that his hair was red instead of brown and his mustache was skinny. He put some kind of special wax on the ends to make them curl up. We were out in the backyard because my mother had told him he couldn’t smoke in the house. He flipped open the lighter—svvvit! Inside was a little metal wheel that he had to push down with his thumb to make a spark to light the wick.

  “Can I try?” I’d asked, reaching for the lighter.

  My mother saw us from the kitchen window and came running.

  “Have you lost your mind?” she’d yelled at Uncle James.

  “I was only showing her how it worked, Ruby,” he’d explained. “She was curious.”

  “In case you haven’t heard, curiosity killed the cat,” my mother had said, snatching the lighter away from him and storming back into the house.

  “Wow,” said Uncle James, shaking his head. “Your mom used to be so chill back in the day. Since when did she become such a worrywart?”

  “Since forever,” I’d told him.

  Later that night, when my father had come into my room to say good night, I’d asked him why my mother worried so much.

  “That’s one of the ways she shows her love,” he’d said.

  “Like when Duck licks my face?” I’d asked.

  He’d smiled and kissed my forehead.

  “Yeah,” he’d said. “Only without the slobber.”

  I wondered if the lighter I’d found in the grass worked the same way as Uncle James’s had. I pried open the top with my fingers. Inside was the same type of notched wheel, only when I pushed down on it with my thumb, it didn’t budge. I tried a few more times, but it was jammed tight. I didn’t care if it was broken—I still thought it was cool. I wanted to keep it, but I knew there was no way on earth my parents would ever let me—especially not my mother. I wasn’t even allowed to make popcorn in the microwave, for fear that I might burn my fingers opening the bag.

  I turned the lighter over. It fit so perfectly in my palm, and I couldn’t explain why, but there was something exciting about that word, Zippo. What if I didn’t tell my parents about the lighter? After all, it didn’t work, and there was no way I could return it to its rightful owner. It was probably some city person passing through, or someone who had chucked it out the window because it didn’t work anymore. Why shouldn’t I keep it if I wanted to? What harm could it do?

  “Finders keepers, losers weepers,” I whispered, closing my fingers around the lighter as that lightning-bug feeling came bubbling back up inside me. I had a real secret this time, one of my very own.

  I skipped up the driveway and hopped up the porch steps backward just for the heck of it, tapping the railing three times before I went inside.

  “Anything interesting today?” my mother asked as I handed her the mail.

  “Blimey, yer ladyship, see fer yourself,” I told her.

  “Look!” she exclaimed happily, holding up a pale yellow envelope. “It’s a letter from Heidi!”

  It had been almost thirteen years since Heidi had traveled alone from Reno, Nevada, to Liberty, New York, on the wings of a mysterious four-letter word. After Heidi went home, she and my mother kept in touch, exchanging cards on major holidays and picture postcards if either of them went someplace interesting. At the bottom of each one they would always write the same thing: soof.

  “What does it mean?” I’d asked my mother one day when I was a little girl.

  She opened the flowery birthday card she’d bought for Heidi and uncapped her pen.

  “Soof was Heidi’s mama’s special word for love,” she explained.

  “Why did she need a special word?” I asked, reaching for the pen as soon as my mother was finished writing so that I could color in the middle of those two beautiful little o’s.

  “Because Heidi’s mama was special,” she said.

  “Am I special?”

  “Yes.” She kissed the top of my head. “You are, but not in the same way.”

  When my mother had worked as an aide at Hilltop Home, one of the people she’d helped take care of was Heidi’s father, Elliot. Heidi’s mother had lived at Hilltop for a little while too, but that was before my mother’s time, so they’d never actually met. I’d never met any of them, but I’d seen pictures.

  Luckily my mother was too busy fussing now over the new letter from Heidi to notice the small lump in the back pocket of my jeans. I left her in the kitchen and went to my room. After closing the door, I took out the lighter and polished it with the hem of my T-shirt until it gleamed like a jewel. I didn’t have the Band-Aid box anymore, so instead I put the lighter inside a pink sock that had lost its mate and tucked it under the mattress for safekeeping.

  Over the next few days I took it out every chance I got, practicing flipping open the top until I could do it in a single motion, the way Uncle James did—svvvit! If my parents noticed that I was spending more time than usual alone in my room with the door closed, they didn’t say anything about it. My father was busy at work, and my mother had other things on her mind, like washing the windows and polishing the silver. The reason Heidi had written was to say that she was coming to visit, and my mother wanted everything to be perfect.

  “Don’t let me forget to get the jelly bean jar down from the attic before Heidi gets here,” she told me. “She’ll want to see that again, I’m sure.”

  Heidi had won a free taxi ride by guessing the exact number of jelly beans in the jar when she’d first arrived in Liberty. There were 1,527 originally, but she’d eaten a few so now there were only 1,521. I knew that because I’d poured them out on the table and counted them one day when I was bored. There were 422 reds, 392 oranges, 275 greens, 220 yellows, 114 blacks, and 98 pinks.

  While my mother was busy dusting and mopping and washing and waxing everything in sight, I was busy too, dripping oil onto the little wheel inside the lighter, trying to get it to move, but it was stuck as tight as ever. I even tried using coconut oil, but all that did was make it smell like a macaroon. After a while my excitement about the lighter began to wear off and the sparkly special feeling lost its fizz, like a bottle of soda gone flat. By the time school started up again, I had forgotten all about it.

  My parents’ thirtieth anniversary was May eighteenth. Dad had been up in the attic for weeks, working on a surprise for my mother. He was refinishing an antique steamer trunk that had belonged to her great-grandmother Alpha. First he’d taken off the tarnished brass hardware and soaked everything in vinegar, then he’d spent hours carefully sanding the dark oak panels, rubbing them with old T-shirts soaked in linseed oil to bring out the grain. He worked on the chest every chance he got, mostly on weekends, and it was my job to be his lookout.

  If I saw my mother coming up the driveway from town or heading into the house after hanging up the wash, I would signal him by knocking on the ceiling in my room with the end of a wooden broom handle. A constellation of little black marks dotted the plaster above my bed from all that tapping.

  Saturday morning, my mother spent several hours working on Heidi’s baby quilt in the living room and listening to WJFF on the radio. I would check on her every fifteen minutes or so, then report back to my father, who was keeping busy out in the garage getting the recycling ready for a dump run until the coast was clear and he could go upstairs to his workshop.

  After lunch, my mother finally put her sewing away and went off to the Stop & Shop to buy fixings for a special dinner she had planned. As soon as she was gone, I ran and got my father.

  “Come take a look and tell me what you think,” he said.

  Duck followed me up the narrow stairs to the attic, where he made a beeline for the mouse hole he’d discovered the last time we’d been up there together.

  “Think she’ll like it?” my father asked as he picked up a dirty rag and tossed it onto a pile in the corner.

  “I bet she cries when she sees it,” I said.

  The chest was beautiful. The brass hinges glistened like golden fish in the pool of warm sunlight that poured in through the skylights. Even with the windows open, it was hot up there.

  I tapped my right elbow three times, then my left so they’d be even.

  “You okay?” my father asked, glancing over at me.

  I knew why he was asking. I tended to tap more when I was anxious.

  “I’m fine,” I told him, even though it wasn’t true.

  “You’re not feeling nervous about Heidi’s visit, are you?” he asked, wiping the sweat off his face with his sleeve.

  My father knew me too well. All my mother had been able to talk about lately was Heidi’s visit. She’d even planned the meals she was going to serve right down to the dessert. I knew all the Heidi stories backward and forward, but I didn’t know her. I was worried she wouldn’t like me. Or that my parents would decide they liked her better than me.

  “Why should I be nervous?” I asked, resisting the urge to tap again and biting the inside of my cheek three times instead. “She’s a nice person, right?”

  “Very nice,” my father said. “You’ll be sharing your room with her. Are you going to be okay with that?”

  “Does she snore?” I asked.

  My father laughed.

  “I guess we’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?” He took the cap off the bottle of linseed oil and poured some on a clean rag.

  “Dad?” I said, unable to hold it inside any longer. “Does Heidi know that I’m weird?”

  He stopped what he was doing and looked at me, his face all sad and soft.

  “I wish you wouldn’t say that, baby girl,” he told me. “You’re not weird, you’re wonderful, and Heidi is very excited to meet you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She said so in her letter. Ask your mom if you don’t believe me.”

  “What if Heidi doesn’t like me?” I asked.

  “What’s not to like?” he said, screwing the cap back onto the bottle of oil and setting it aside. “Now scoot and let me finish up before your mom gets home, okay?”

  Right before dinner, my father brought the chest downstairs and presented it to my mother. Just as I’d predicted, she burst into tears the minute she saw it.

  “Oh, Roy! It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “I told you she was going to cry,” I said.

  “I’m afraid my gift pales in comparison to yours,” my mother said, wiping away her happy tears. “I made you a pie.”

  “Lemon chess?” my father asked hopefully.

  My mother nodded, and he let out a happy whoop.

  “You know how I feel about your pie, Rube.”

  “She made real whipped cream to go with it too,” I told him. “Not the fake stuff from a can.”

  “I guess mine wasn’t the only secret you’ve been keeping, huh, baby girl?”

  “It was my idea to put a fan in the window so you wouldn’t smell the pie baking,” I admitted.

  “Come to think of it, how on earth did you manage to do all that work on Great-granny’s chest upstairs without my even noticing, Roy?” my mother asked.

  “Rory was my lookout,” my father said proudly, throwing his arm around my shoulders. “She’s a regular James Bond.”

  “James who?” I asked.

  “Bond. James Bond. He’s a famous spy,” my father explained.

  “Like Inspector Gadget?” I said.

  My mother laughed. “Yes, only James Bond is very handsome.”

  “Hey,” said my father. “What about me?”

  “You’re far more handsome than James Bond, and our daughter is an excellent double agent,” my mother said. “I didn’t suspect a thing.”

  “The chest isn’t quite finished,” my father explained. “The wood is old and thirsty. It’s going to need a couple more coats of oil. I’ll get on that right after dinner.”

  I ran my fingers over the smooth top.

  “I sure wish I had something like this in my room. I could (A) keep summer clothes in it in the winter, and (B) keep winter clothes in it in the summer. That way I wouldn’t ever run out of hangers.”

  “Oh, no you don’t,” my mother teased. “You may have your father wrapped around your little finger, but this chest belongs to me. Even if I have to spend the next thirty years baking pies to pay him back for it.”

  My father grinned and pulled her close.

  “Happy anniversary, Rube,” he said and leaned in to give her a kiss.

  Duck barked and wagged his tail, the way he always did when anyone hugged or kissed each other in our house. It made me happy too.

  We had steak and twice-baked potatoes for dinner. There was garlic bread with parsley butter, green beans, and of course, the lemon chess pie for dessert. There were even candles and fresh flowers on the table.