I think I need to bring you up to
date, a little (or refresh your memory), about Harriet and me. As I’ve said, we
were best friends, a relationship that had begun back before we were even in
school. Her family (she was an only child) moved in next door to us, and soon
we were practically living in each other’s house—though, to be accurate, she
was at our house far more than I was
at hers. I didn’t really understand
it at the time, but there was lots of tension between her parents, and I felt,
always a kind of vague discomfort when I was there. Sometimes I felt Dr.
Eastbrook staring at me. His eyes, I thought, looked angry. And I could not
figure out why.
He never said anything—or did
anything. But I could tell. Something about me worried him—or angered him. Once
I said something to Harriet about it, but she looked at me as if I’d just told
her that chocolate chip cookies didn’t taste good. (Harriet, remember, loved to eat.) So I dropped it. And it
wasn’t too long before her father, Dr. Eastbrook, took off and left his wife
and Harriet all alone.
But not for long. My father sort of
adopted them, and he and Mrs. Eastbrook became good friends—very good friends after a while. (It took
Harriet and me a long time to catch
on to this.) They ate at our house a lot—and we ate there, too. We spent
holidays together. Mrs. Eastbrook worked at Father’s newspaper for a little
while, then moved on to become head librarian when old Mrs. Lodore suddenly
died in her desk chair. (Mrs. Lodore, by the way, was the sister of Mrs.
Bishop, the part-time librarian I mentioned earlier. They were both ancient, Harriet and I thought.)
Soon, strange things began to
happen, things that tested our friendship—and our families’ friendship. Dr.
Eastbrook reappeared quite by accident when we were in third grade. While our
class was on a spring field trip to Middle Island in the Ohio River, we found
that he had been conducting bizarre experiments on dead and living creatures—including
our former classmate Blue Boyle. Right on Middle Island. When I saw Blue
through the fog that day, he was as large and muscular as a professional
football player. But he saved me from Dr. Eastbrook in what may well have been
the last decent deed of Blue’s life.
And, more recently, in the summer
after sixth grade we found Dr. Eastbrook again,
this time conducting his experiments in an abandoned lighthouse on Green Island
in Lake Erie. Blue Boyle was there, too—looking even more monstrous. He very
nearly killed Harriet and me, and it was only by the greatest good fortune that
we escaped—again.
But when we got back to southern
Ohio, a tornado greeted us, a twister that did some damage around town but
seemed most interested in our house.
Again, Harriet and I barely survived it. It took the rest of the summer for
workmen to do the repairs, but throughout the fall there were still days when
they were in—or on—our house.
As you might expect, these bizarre
events affected how the Eastbrooks and the Stones related to one another.
Although there were initial flares of romance between our parents, both Harriet
and I knew something had happened; something was cooling between them, perhaps
caused by the cold breath of fear—or of worry about their children. We were
together less.
And as I also wrote in the previous
installment of these papers, Harriet had been drifting off on a path much
different from mine. I, always interested in books and research, was spending
more and more time in our library—or in my basement laboratory (which Harriet
had never seen). And she had lots of popular friends she liked to spend time
with, as I’ve said, and then, later in the summer after sixth grade, something
happened that widened the divide. Cheerleader tryouts.[i]
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