Mrs Hough surprised them after they came in from the schoolyard with a chocolate cake, and the whole class sang the Happy Birthday song. Jon understood why they put his name first—happy birthday, Jon and Melanie fit the rhythm better than happy birthday, Melanie and Jon—but it still didn’t quite feel fair. Melanie told him to stop being silly and enjoy the cake.
He thought it was good that she knew him so well he didn’t even have to say anything before she guessed what he was thinking.
Most of their classmates still got picked up or walked home by their parents, but Jon and Melanie had proved over and over that they knew the way and knew how to be careful, so this term they were allowed to walk home on their own. They waved a cheery goodbye to Mrs Hough—and Miss Goldman, who was waiting on the pickup line with her class—and held hands as they walked to the end of the block.
Once they had turned the corner and were definitely out of sight, Melanie turned to Jon with a challenging glint in her eye. “Better hope your bag is zipped today.”
“Better hope your skirt stays fastened,” Jon countered. He matched her smirk. “Last one there’s a wretched weasel.”
“That doesn’t start with a W,” Melanie protested.
“Does too. W-R-E-T-C-H-E-D. Daddy spelled it for me.” Jon tilted his chin defiantly at Melanie. “It’s like ‘write’ and ‘wrong’, it’s got a silent W.”
She huffed. “Fine. Wretched weasels it is. Ready, steady, go!”
She took off running before she actually finished saying the last word, but Jon was expecting that and took off at the same time. They hurtled pell-mell down the street, bags bumping against their backs, skipping over cracks and dodging around those few other people who were out walking. Melanie’s hair ribbons had come loose and Jon was pretty sure his shoe was untied, but neither of them slowed for a minute. They ought to have, of course, Miss Goldman and Mrs Hough and their parents had impressed on them the importance of looking both ways before crossing the road, and that had been one of the conditions of their being permitted to walk themselves home. They also had been explicitly told not to run like this after Jon’s homework folder had gone flying and Melanie had torn her knees tripping in an attempt to catch her skirt from falling down, but they’d secretly agreed that what the grown ups didn’t know wouldn’t hurt anyone. And so, giggling and breathless and still managing to tease one another, they pounded along the pavement until they got to the shortcut.
Mummy had fussed a bit about this, too, even before they were walking themselves, but this part was all right; Mr Fister had told Daddy that the footpath was an ancient right of way and there was an understanding—he’d called it a tacit agreement, and Jon had made him spell it three times to be sure it stuck in his mind—that anyone could use it at any time as long as they weren’t committing a crime, and since Mr Fister was generally agreed to be two years older than God and had moved to Woodley on the day He invented dirt, if he said a thing was true it was understood to be correct. Here, too, stones had been laid down as a kind of footpath, stones that were constantly being replaced and retrod as spring mud and the passage of feet pushed the old ones deeper. Since the planting season had just started, this year’s stones hadn’t been placed yet, so it was still a bit muddy and half the stones were completely sunk. Melanie, as was her habit, hopped from stone to stone trying to only touch the clean parts, not because she cared about her shoes but because that was the game. Jon’s challenge was to only touch every other stone, which was harder this time of year when so many of them couldn’t be seen, since it meant he sometimes had to jump pretty far. When Daddy took the shortcut with them, he always had to do it on one foot like a pogo stick; Mummy didn’t play those sorts of games herself, but she was usually pretty tolerant of theirs. (Jon liked that word, tolerant. It was a grown up word for be kind and polite to one another even if you don’t understand why the other person does it that way and took a lot less time to say, and Mrs Hough had agreed when he told her that and taught it to the whole class and it had been their Word of the Month, which was fun even if—maybe especially because—Mrs Hough hadn’t let him suggest the word after that but asked other people to suggest good words. It meant Jon got to learn new words too and didn’t have to be the one teaching them all the time, and it meant the other kids in the class knew how to use the grown up words and didn’t tease him so much for using them himself.)
Just because they were racing didn’t meant they didn’t have to follow those rules (yes, they had been told not to race, but that was an order, not a rule, so it was fine), but they had both been doing it long enough that they could do it at speed. Melanie shrieked with mingled annoyance and excitement when Jon careened into her trying to jump over a stone she was standing on, grabbed him to steady herself, and overbalanced, sending them both toppling off the path and into the nearest furrow, plowed but not yet planted. Jon managed to twist to keep from losing his glasses or spattering them with mud. The rest of him didn’t fare so well.
He didn’t care. He rolled off of Melanie and pushed himself to his feet, jumping back to his stone, then grabbed Melanie’s hand and pulled her up before taking off down the path again.
“Hey, no fair!” Melanie called, but she was laughing as she chased after him.
From the other side of the shortcut it was only a couple of blocks and then a sharp turn almost doubling back on itself and home was right there. Jon, for once—he refused to think the fall had anything to do with it, he’d almost been ahead of her before that point anyway—was just a little in front of Melanie as they tore down the sidewalk. He glanced over his shoulder, giggling, dodged around the Babashanians’ rubbish bin, swung around the corner—
“Hello, Jon.”
Jon pulled up abruptly. Melanie nearly crashed into him this time, but managed to skid to a halt just in time. Standing between them and the gate over their front path was a man who looked almost exactly like Sir Topham Hatt brought to life save that, rather than being completely bald, there were wisps of steel grey hair curling out from beneath his black silk hat. His eyes, which were almost the same color, were cold and calculating, and the smile on his lips didn’t touch them.
And Jon, who knew everyone in town by name, house, and shoe size, had never seen him before in his life.
“Apologies for the interception,” the strange man continued, “but I had to be certain you would stop and speak with me, so I thought it best not to call attention to myself.” He ran an eye over Jon and added, “You ought to be more careful, you know. It would be a dreadful shame if anything happened to you because you weren’t…watching.”
Jon took a half step backwards, doing his best to stay between this man and Melanie. He didn’t trust him for a minute. Melanie, of course, was quite often hard to convince that she needed him to protect her and would stand shoulder to shoulder with him against any threats. This time, she not only got up next to him, she tried to push in front of him to keep between him and the man.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “What do you want?”
“Ah, you must be Melanie.” The strange man’s smile widened in a way that was clearly meant to be even friendlier and more welcoming but, to Jon, only seemed even more dangerous. “I’ve heard so much about you. You two care for each other very much, do you not? And to answer your question, why…” He produced from a pocket a small, rectangular box wrapped neatly in shiny gold paper and tied round with a green ribbon done up in an elaborate bow. “I’m Jon’s grandfather, and I’m here to give him a present for his birthday.”
Fear took hold of Jon’s stomach and twisted it like a clown fashioning a balloon animal. In the first place, the last time he’d encountered someone informing him they were his grandparent, it had been someone who wanted very much to take him away from his family. In the second place, anyone talking about it being his birthday wasn’t somebody who knew or cared about him, because everyone who loved him loved Melanie too and it was their birthday, thank you. That was kind of how being twins worked. Third and most importantly, they didn’t have any grandfathers anymore. Grandfather Sims had died not long after they were born, Grandpa King had died just before their first birthday, and even if both of Mummy’s parents hadn’t died before she even met Daddy, this man was definitely not Chinese. In fact, he looked like the kind of person who only didn’t use words like the one Scott had hurled at them on their first day of school because that wasn’t refined.
Blindly, he groped beside him for Melanie’s hand. She grabbed it tight, the security a comfort. He could feel that she was just as scared as him of this strange man who knew their names. Melanie usually got angry when she was scared, and since Jon didn’t want her to fight him, he spoke up in as steady a voice as he could. “I—I don’t have a grandfather.”
“Of course you do,” the man said soothingly. It gave Jon an unpleasant, sticky feeling that he didn’t like. “I’m only sorry it took me so long to find you. I was…unaware that your mother existed, I’m afraid, and of course by the time I learned that she was already gone. I thought her husband and only child were gone as well, but then I learned about you. I wanted to know everything about you before I approached. To be sure that you would…truly appreciate this.”
He held out the present again. “It’s yours, Jonathan. Take it.”
Jon didn’t want to. He didn’t. But he found himself responding to the authority in the order, reaching out with trembling hands—even pulling his hand free of Melanie’s—to accept the box. It felt cool and strangely heavy for its size.
The man smiled. “Well? Don’t you want to see what’s inside of it?”
“Hey!”
Mummy’s voice shattered the fog that had tried to close around Jon’s mind. He jerked sideways, stumbling into Melanie, and looked up guiltily as Mummy strode towards the gate, a frown on her face. It wasn’t directed at him, though. “Excuse me, who the hell are you?”
“I’m Jon’s grandfather,” the man repeated.
Somehow, Mummy got out the gate and between Jon and the strange man. “Like hell you are.”
“I assure you, I am. I am his mother’s father—”
“I’m his mother,” Mummy interrupted firmly. “And my father is dead. So is my husband’s. We don’t know you and we do not appreciate you hanging around bothering us, so get away from my children and stay off our property.” Without turning away from the man, but still clearly talking to Jon and Melanie, she added, “Get on inside now and out of those dirty clothes. Lucky for you it’s laundry day.”
Melanie grabbed Jon’s wrist and practically dragged him through the gate. Jon wasn’t willing to take his eyes off the man, either, for fear of what he might do. The man’s eyes and that cold, pale smile followed him all the way up the path and through the door until Melanie let it shut behind them, effectively cutting them off.
Jon wilted. “Thanks, Melanie.”
“Of course.” Melanie scowled at the present. “Why’d you take that?”
“I—I don’t know. I just felt like I had to.” Jon stared at the present, too, then shook his head. “I’m not going to open it, though.”
Decisively, he opened up one of the cupboards in the sideboard that they never used, then shoved the present inside it and shut it firmly. “There. Now it won’t bother us.”
Melanie eyed the sideboard a little uneasily. “What do you think was in it?”
Jon shrugged. “I don’t know. And I don’t care. Come on, let’s go get cleaned up before Mummy comes back in.”
He dragged Melanie towards the bedroom and changed the subject, chattering about the party they were going to have tomorrow. She took the hook, or at least let him think she was taking it, and at least pretended to forget about the present. Jon was glad. It meant he didn’t have to admit to her—yet—that while the first part had been true, the second part definitely wasn’t.
He did care. For right now, though, he was more afraid than curious.
He just worried that wouldn’t hold forever.