Growing Up Neighborlee

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Chapter One

My name is Lanie. That's all anyone really needs to know, because everyone in Neighborlee knows who I am. I'm the only Lanie, but not the only one of my kind. If that makes any sense? Well, if it doesn't now, it will eventually.

I was one of the Lost Kids Some of us who have found some answers are pretty sure we weren't lost, per se, and we weren't exactly thrown away, either. Don't get me started on the whole Superman routine of being sent away to protect us, because I'm not too sure of that explanation, either. Although it would sure be an ego-boost, wouldn't it?

I'm getting ahead of myself.

What or who are the Lost Kids? Every few years, a child just shows up on the outskirts of town, or within four miles of the borders. A child old enough to be self-mobile, but not really communicative, and certainly not old enough to remember anything once she learns to talk. I'm sticking with the female pronoun because hey, this is my personal experience, and confirmed by my friends who have gone through the same thing.

While there are plenty of orphanages in Cuyahoga County, all these lost kids end up at the Neighborlee Children's Home. I've checked. Mrs. Silvestri, the administrator of NCH while I was there, kept really, really good records. The mystery of the lost children was something of her hobby.

While many abandoned or misplaced or lost children who ended up at NCH are identified and claimed, one way or another, some of these specific Lost Kids are never, ever, no matter who looks and what questions are asked, identified Never reported missing. No DNA markers to link them to someone even years later. Freaky, right? Especially considering the use of the Internet and genetic testing, which make the world a much smaller place, and make it a lot harder to hide.

For the most part, Lost Kids grow up and graduate from NCH and make good lives. Get this: They don't leave Neighborlee, and when they marry other Lost Kids, things sometimes get interesting.

Except...

Except for the ones who vanish mysteriously.

Again, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Once in a while, some of us Lost Kids develop interesting little talents. Nothing spectacular like being bulletproof or able to see through everything or time travel or shoot lasers from our eyes. At least, not that I've checked. What we can do... Well, that's where my friends and I come in.

I was found on Old Mill Road, as opposed to New Mill Road, which was named when the trees above the quarries were all cut down and the people expanding Neighborlee had to go in another direction to get their lumber. August 9, a Monday, after a torrential rain.

Funny thing, though. Despite all the deep ruts filled with water everywhere in sight where I was found, I wasn't wet. At least, not until Mr. Lawrence's truck bottomed out in one of those Godzilla-sized ruts and splashed me.

I was curled up in the shelter of one of the humongous blackberry patches that still to this day line both sides of Old Mill Road, heading down into the quarries. That muddy water splashed my face and I let out a holler. Mr. Lawrence, for all that he was in his eighties, had very good hearing. He slammed on the brakes, killing his antique truck, jumped out, and proved his eyes were still twenty-twenty when he saw me crawling out from under the brambles. My face was wet but my thin white T-shirt and diaper and nondescript knit socks were dry. As near as anyone could tell, I had crawled in under the blackberry brambles to eat, since my hands and mouth were sticky and dark with berry pulp.

Part of the tradition of the Lost Kids is that whoever finds them contributes to their name. The road or building where they're found, the month, the day of the week, and whoever finds them. If I had been a boy, chances were good I would have been called Larry or August, or Augustus, or maybe just Gus. Someone suggested Mona for me, since I was found on a Monday. Mona Miller? Ugh. Fortunately, Mr. Lawrence had some say in it. He said I reminded him of his daughter, Elaine, because of my dark curls and getting all messy with the blackberries. He thought I was pretty amazing, since the doctors said I was just about a year old, but I knew enough to get at the berries and feed myself and find shelter. He wanted to name me for his daughter. So that's how I became Lanie August.

Usually, when we Lost Kids got old enough, around high school age, we were allowed to choose our names and legally change them. Most of us just changed our last names. For instance, Principal and then Mayor Wellington chose his last name because he was a British military history fanatic. Ford Longfellow chose his name because he was going through a poetry phase in high school. My friend, Kurt was happy with his last name of Hanson and stuck with it. Nice that they gave us the choice, right?

I settled into Willow Cottage—the baby cottage—at NCH. Like I had any choice? My birthday was listed as August 9, until all the queries and searches and notices posted through official channels brought someone to claim me. If ever.

Need I point out the obvious? No one ever claimed me.

I spent the next four years relatively sheltered in the baby cottage. We had our own courtyard and playground, separate from the rest of the NCH campus. Part of that was just to make it easier to keep track of us, and part of it was to prevent what Mrs. Silvestri called the shatters. Face it, babies are much easier to adopt out than older children. How kind is it to let the older girls in the orphanage get attached to cute, cuddly, living dolls and then put them through the pain of losing their adopted brother or sister when adoptive parents show up and take them away?

The thing is, the tall wooden fence that separates the baby playground from the playground for the rest of the orphanage isn't exactly soundproof, and there are gaps in it that get wider every year. The babies always got to know everybody else in the orphanage before we graduated out into the general population. We made friends, we knew who we liked and who we didn't. We learned who the bullies were and which of the older boys and girls would defend us before we got dropped into the swim of things.

That kind of sounds like there were hundreds of kids at NCH, with a faint tinge of being a prison, and the babies were in solitary, right? Far from it. The highest population ever recorded at NCH topped just over one hundred, and that was about fifteen years before I was a resident. We were a family, not prisoners. We knew we belonged, we knew we were protected, and even if we didn't have blood relatives who belonged to us, we belonged to someone.

Graduation from the baby cottage meant, essentially, admitting that the little girl or boy was getting up there and the chances of finding a real family were dwindling. I graduated from the baby cottage shortly after my fifth birthday. There was a lot of fuss with moving me into Oak Hall, the house that I would live in until I turned eighteen.

I was the only one graduating, in preparation for the start of the school year. Checking the records, I learned that at the time I was in the baby cottage, there were only five of us. Small numbers make for a more personal touch, I guess. Mrs. Silvestri herself sat me down to explain all the changes in my life, introduced me to my new housemother, Miss Abby, and then took me shopping. I would be going into Kindergarten in less than a month, and my fifth birthday was a big occasion.

Outings with Mrs. S were special occasions. We all loved her, though admittedly she ruled with an iron fist and no one could ever get away with anything. The important thing was that we knew she loved us, fiercely, like a lioness or a mama eagle. No one ever made fun of her children or pushed us to the back of the line or made us second class citizens because we were throwaways, in the words of the Gladstones.

The Gladstones were Neighborlee's resident robber barons and spoiled rich kids, with the attitude that they were entitled to everything and anyone they wanted, and if they had to rewrite history to prove it, they would.

Mrs. S took me to Divine's Emporium, after an amazing lunch at Miller's Café, with my first ever peanut butter chocolate malt. I knew Stephanie Groves, the waitress who took care of us, because she was one of the girls who came in once a month to do crafts or bake with the children, or just play games with us. I found out later, many of the people who acted as big brothers and sisters had been Lost Kids in their turn. They always came back to NCH and repaid the debt of love and care they had been given.

It was a good thing we had lunch before going to Divine's, because I probably would never have tasted my lunch afterward, still caught in the amazement of the shop, and meeting Angela. Divine's is an old Victorian house, one of the oldest in town, painted olive and gold, with all the fancy gingerbread trimming and gables and skinny windows and a deep porch and a flagstone walk and a wrought iron fence across the front. It sits on the edge of a somewhat steep hill, at the end of a dead end street, looking down over the Metroparks. The hill isn't too steep that deer can't come up the slope to Angela's garden in back. They don't pillage Angela's garden like they do other gardens in town, and she puts out salt licks and bins of grain and fruit for them. The deer, all the animals that come to visit, behave themselves in Angela's garden.

That's the outside. The inside...is a wonderland. Lots of rooms that, from the outside, should be small, yet seem huge when entered, with all the wonderful hodge-podge of treasures displayed there. Lots of secondhand items, with Divine's doing a booming resale business. A glorious mixture of pottery and crystal, rag dolls, candles, candy, used books, wind chimes, old furniture, nostalgia toys, a tiny soda fountain/coffee shop tucked into a corner, jewelry, vintage clothes, apothecary jars full of penny candy, mysterious locked rooms upstairs—yes, we were allowed up to the second floor when we were older, especially if Angela invited us to her private rooms—and more old books—did I mention candy?—and the Wishing Ball.

The Wishing Ball sat on the marble countertop in the main room of the shop, where Angela ran the huge, old-fashioned brass cash register. It was about the size of a bowling ball, something along the lines of those gazing balls that some people put in their gardens, but dark, with metallic rainbow streaks all through it. The funny thing about the Wishing Ball was that the colors seemed to move, right from the first time I saw it. Not when I was looking straight at it, but as I turned my head, or from the corner of my eyes. Its stand was a coiled, dark brass dragon, the long tail wrapped around twice.

From the moment I stepped into the main room with Mrs. Silvestri, the Wishing Ball caught my attention. I walked as close to the counter as I could get before I lost sight of it, sitting high up on the counter above me. The funny thing was that Mrs. Silvestri didn't stop me when I headed straight over there, but came with me. Well, she was holding my hand, after all. Looking back, maybe she wanted me to see it? Maybe taking me to Divine's, taking me to see the Wishing Ball and meet Angela, was something of a test.

A warning for strangers and newcomers: If Divine's Emporium doesn't like someone, they don't hang around very long. I'm not talking about the shop, I'm talking about Neighborlee. The entire town. Some people who resisted the go away, we don't like you sensation for a while, long enough to become conscious of it and tell someone about it, described it as itching powder that soaked into their skin. If they dug their heels in and stayed in town, they usually went kind of crazy. Not a fun, genial, wacky old favorite aunt kind of crazy, either. The nasty, megalomaniac, the world owes me mindset that deliberately picks fights with people over totally stupid, worthless matters.

For example? The crazy old woman who filed restraining orders on everybody on her street, trying to keep them from even looking at her house when they drove by. She even insisted they had to keep their leaves off her lawn in the fall. She kept requesting that the girl who delivered her newspaper would come to her front step and ring the doorbell and hand it to her, just so she could take the girl's parents to court and charge them with harassment.

Yeah, she was the kind of nasty wacko who would deliberately throw snow on her front steps in winter while shoveling the driveway. When the mailman fell on steps that had turned into a ski slope, she sued the entire Post Office for the emotional abuse she suffered from having him lie there until the EMTs came and took him away with a broken leg and cracked skull.

Anyway, Divine's definitely welcomed me. I stood there for a few seconds, staring at the Wishing Ball, with my hand firmly tucked in Mrs. Silvestri's, just amazed. I wanted to get up there, and I was playing with the idea of using my trick to get up to the counter for a closer look, when Angela walked into the room.

My trick was something I had discovered quite by accident, just a few months before. I was momentarily unsupervised at the cottage while the houseparents were busy with the babies. I wanted a cookie and I didn't want to wait for someone to open the cupboard and get it for me, so I climbed up onto the table in the kitchen and walked across it to the counter. A logical progression for a nearly-five-year-old, right? The problem was the four-foot gap between the kitchen table and the counter. I didn't stop to think, I just took a couple steps back and made a running leap, like I had seen someone do on TV the night before.

My jump took me up to the top of the cupboards, and I hung there in the air, for a good ten seconds before drifting down to the shelf where the cookies sat out in plain view.

I could fly. Kinda-sorta fly. Not zipping through the air like a jet like a certain alien superhero. More like controlled gliding, or going straight up, hovering, and coming straight down. When I got older, that talent made it possible to get incredible photos. But again, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The thing is, for a nearly-five-year-old, I had no idea that I couldn't or shouldn't kinda-sorta fly or hover or whatever the formal label was for what I could do. I just figured it was another ability that was part of growing up, like tying my shoes, counting past one hundred, telling time, and reading. By this time, I had already figured out that learning a new trick before one of the adults showed me how to do it earned some uncomfortable attention. I didn't get in trouble for learning to read and tie my shoes faster than normal, but the fuss and extra attention made me uncomfortable.

Explain to me why it's so unusual to learn how to read by leaning over the shoulder of the person reading to us before bed, and picking out the words on the page and following along? Just pay attention, and it's easy to learn dozens of necessary tricks to get along in the world. Of course, being less than five years old, I didn't have that reasoning worked out in my head, I just did what worked. Explaining what I hadn't verbalized was next to impossible.

By the time I walked into Divine's, I had figured out that it was smart to keep new tricks hidden until I saw other kids near my age doing the same thing. So, I kept my hovering to myself, and practiced at night, when everybody was asleep, or when I was alone on the playground behind the cottage.

That day in Divine's, though, I cast my five-year-old caution aside and was ready to raise myself up for a closer look at the Wishing Ball. I was still attached to Mrs. Silvestri, like a kite on a string.

Angela walked in just as my feet got about three inches off the floor. She smiled at me, winked, and gestured down at the floor with a flick of her fingers. I settled back down and she came around the counter, pulled out a four-step ladder, and put it next to the counter on the end, giving me a more ordinary path up to the Wishing Ball. Right that moment, I knew this pretty blond lady who smiled at me like we had an enormous secret—and who didn't shout in astonishment at what she saw—was going to be a very good friend. Mrs. Silvestri introduced me to Angela while I climbed up, my gaze on her the whole time, and that was when Angela told me it was called the Wishing Ball.

Angela was, is, and likely always will be, one of those ageless women, with long, oval face and sculpted cheekbones. She has an incredible, thick, long fall of hair in a dozen shades of gold, with hints of strawberry in it, and big eyes that are usually blue—different shades, depending on her mood—but can sometimes seem gray and sometimes hint at green. The day I met her, she wore her usual handkerchief print blue dress with draping sleeves and no waist, what some might call a granny dress or hippie dress. Since it was August, she wore sandals.

Do you know what a wish is, Lanie? Angela asked me, once I was settled on the counter, with my legs hanging off the edge, braced on one arm and gazing into the Wishing Ball.

It's something you want really bad lots, only it's kind of hard to get. I saw her reflection next to mine in the dark rainbow swirling surface of the ball, and tore my gaze away from it long enough to meet her incredible blue eyes. And sometimes it's something you want really bad lots for other people, because they need it a whole lots more than you.

Really? Like what? Her smile softened and turned thoughtful, and she glanced at Mrs. Silvestri, who was standing behind me with one hand resting on my back. Like she thought I might fall off the counter?

Like... I turned to look at Mrs. Silvestri. Thinking back, I can't really say what concerned me more. Revealing orphanage secrets? Or revealing that I was very good at standing by the fence and listening to the children talking and playing on the other side of the tall wooden slats, to learn about the world outside the baby cottage? Ginny Olsen wants her aunt to come back from Indiana and adopt her.

How in the world... Mrs. Silvestri patted my back and let out a little sighing chuckle. Ginny's only worthwhile relative is a missionary in India. She wants the girl, but the other relatives won't let her take custody and take her out of the country. At the same time, none of them will bestir themselves to take custody themselves. They'd rather let the government be responsible for her. She stepped around the side of the counter to look me in the eye. Where did you hear that, Lanie?

At the playground.

For some reason, after staring at me for a moment with her mouth dropping open, Mrs. S laughed. Then she kissed me on my forehead. Angela smiled and nodded, and for the first time I got that full-chest feeling that was partly relief, partly amazement, and the knowledge that I had pleased her.

Angela showed me how to put my hand on the top curve of the Wishing Ball and make a wish for Ginny. She told me wishes made for the good of other people were always much stronger than wishes we made for ourselves, then she told me to make a wish for something for myself. I wished for another book like Half Magic, which I had just finished reading. Angela then gave me a peach-flavored licorice whip from one of the dozens of apothecary jars behind the counter. How did she know I loved peaches? She helped me down off the counter and the ladder, and told me to go look in the book room.

Not until I was curled up in my new bed in Oak Hall that night, with my new book, The Time Garden, by the same author of Half Magic, did something occur to me. No one had showed me where the book room was at that particular time in my first visit to Divine's Emporium. I just knew. Or perhaps more accurately, the wonderful magical weirdness that filled the shop guided me to the book room?

Just about the time I had worked my way through the bookshelves to the E's, where Edward Eager's books could be found, Angela and Mrs. S had caught up with me. I had heard their voices coming from the other side of the shop, and figured they were taking care of adult business. They both smiled at me, and Angela told me the book was mine as a birthday present. Then we went on a tour of Divine's, and Mrs. S and Angela both told me I could come visit whenever I wanted, but I wasn't allowed to leave NCH grounds by myself until I was twelve. Angela assured me there would be plenty of older boys and girls who would be willing to be my escorts for visits.

Three days later, I met Kurt.

Chapter Two

I already knew who he was, and I had a good idea of what he looked like, but studying the world through a half-inch-wide gap in a solid wood fence made for some slightly warped images. I hadn't really talked to Kurt because the boys just didn't come near the fence and socialize with the babies. Everything we learned about the boys at NCH, we learned from the girls, or we eavesdropped on the adults. That meant we heard about the boys who were really nice, the heroes who defended the younger children from the bullies, the boys the big girls had crushes on, and of course, the bullies. Kurt was one of the nicer older boys, but since he was only three years older than me, he hadn't built up much of a reputation yet.

Thanks to that we've-got-a-secret smile from Angela, I decided I needed to practice my kinda-sorta flying, to show her what I could do next time we met up. I found a sheltered spot at the far end of the field where the older kids played baseball and soccer, in the thick clump of trees enclosed by the fence encircling the orphanage grounds. My practicing consisted of rising up as high as I could get before I got scared and then hanging there until the ground started to look a little fuzzy before I came back down. At five years old, twenty feet off the ground was the equivalent of Mount Everest. I had just worked up the nerve to try some sideways shifting when Kurt walked into the little clearing where I was practicing, and looked up at me. Fortunately, I was wearing shorts, rather than a skirt. Skirts were for church and school.

You hum really loud. He was grinning at me.

No I'm not. I was rather indignant, because I knew enough to keep quiet while I was practicing, so the bullies and bigger kids who might make fun of me wouldn't see me.

Yeah, you do, but it's not the kind of humming that people can hear.

That's stupid. How can you hear it if people can't hear it? I came down a little faster than I intended and my knees wobbled when I hit. Kurt caught hold of me, and a funny buzzing sensation kind of shocked me where his hand touched my bare arm.

Like that. He grinned wider, gray eyes sparkling, and rubbed the hand that had touched me on the front of his t-shirt. It's okay, I hum too.

Are you laughing at me? I had already run into the two chief bullies who reigned during my time at NCH. They had overheard Miss Abby talking with another houseparent, so delighted with my reading ability, and came running to inflict their new nickname on me: Lanie Brainy.

Nope. We're superheroes.

Huh?

That was my introduction to the amazing world of comic books and superheroes and mutants and super powers and saving the world.

We had some simple rules at NCH, and one of them was that boys didn't go into the girls' cottages and the girls didn't go into the boys' cottages between five in the evening and noon. Kurt caught me practicing at ten in the morning, so that meant he couldn't take me to the room he shared with three other boys and dig out the stacks and stacks of comic books he owned. He had me wait on the porch of his cottage, Ponderosa, while he ran inside and brought out a handful. Yes, all our cottages were named after trees. Don't ask why, because I never did. Then, we found a quiet corner in the combination social hall/gym/party room in the central administration building, and my education began.

For an eight-year-old, Kurt was a pretty smart guy, figuring out a theory that explained why he was different, why he could do what he did, and protect his sanity. More important, he discovered guidelines for keeping his weirdness hidden and protected, so he didn't get persecuted by the bullies and turned into a tool of the manipulators and users, such as the Gladstones. Or, in the