Circa Now Read online

  Thankfully, Nattie answered.

  “First of all,” Circa said, “no, I didn’t tell Miles about the wart.”

  “Phew, good,” said Nattie. “If you find it, you can keep it.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Sorry,” said Nattie. “Watching your little brother slob all over a hunk of cheese kind of puts you in gross mode.”

  “Double yuck,” said Circa.

  “So what’s going on?” said Nattie. “You sound spacey. You all right? Did Miles remember anything yet?”

  “I’m okay, and no,” said Circa. “But I have to ask you something, and I know it might sound crazy, but just hear me out.”

  Circa wondered how in the world she could phrase her question without sounding totally nuts.

  “Nat, do you think that things can just appear out of nowhere?”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Like anything.”

  Nattie was silent for a few seconds. “Sure,” she said. “I guess anything’s possible.”

  “Yeah, but I mean, you think that still happens nowadays?” said Circa. “Things appearing out of nowhere? And not just that, but maybe even with the help of a person?”

  “You mean like a miracle?”

  “Sort of,” said Circa. “It’s kind of hard for me to explain right now without you thinking I’m nutso.”

  “Hmmm,” said Nattie. “Maybe you’re just having a platypus moment, Circa.”

  “A what?”

  “You know,” Nattie said. “Like the way the first person to ever see a platypus must have felt. Like it’s such a bizarre thing that it’s hard to describe to anyone without them thinking you’re Looney Tunes. And yet, there’s that platypus right there in front of you, real as it can be.”

  Circa thought about the nest, the wart, and the glasses. And then she considered the really big platypus…Miles. “But what if it’s several bizarre things?” she said. “Would a few platypuses wander up to you in the very same week?”

  “Platypi,” said Nattie.

  “Whatever,” said Circa. “Wait. I have an idea. Stay up a little while, Nattie. I’ll call you back.”

  Powered by the confidence that came with her successful cloud angel, Circa rolled up to Dad’s computer again and took another look at the pic of her and Nattie in the Boones’ front yard, wondering what she could edit fast and simply as a test. She was immediately inspired by the little empty doghouse in the background and searched up a photo of the perfect dog for Nattie, the dog who never quite happened because Durret was born and brought with him three dogs’ worth of mess.

  After finding a shaggy brown-and-white dog just like the one Nattie had always wanted, Circa set out to do the work quickly. She used a basic Photoshop technique that Dad did all the time, carefully tracing around the dog, copying him from the one pic and pasting him onto the yard. She blended and tinkered with the coloring and such to make him look like an actual part of the scene. Like a real deal Ernie Brown Boone. After that, she saved her work, just in case that made a difference when it came to Shopt magic. Then she went to the front studio window to check. It was a too shadowy for her to see that side of Nattie’s yard in the distance, and she sure didn’t want to scare the maybe-dog off by running out there, so she called Nattie back for a bird’s-eye view.

  “Hey,” Circa said. “Look out your bedroom window at your yard, and tell me what you see.”

  “Okay…” Nattie said all drawn out. “Hang on. All right, I see a mailbox, a light that needs changing, some bushes, some grass. What exactly—”

  “Look all over the yard.”

  “I’m looking.”

  “Near the doghouse.”

  “Okay…”

  “Anything moving around?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah?” Circa felt a flood of exhilaration.

  “Yeah,” said Nattie. “I see my dad sneaking from the car with a stack of presents in his arms. Is this a trick? Have you done something goofy for my birthday?”

  Circa was jarred back into reality. Oh no, she thought. She’d totally forgotten Nattie’s birthday was this week. “Never mind, Nat,” she said, her excitement drying up as fast as it had come. “I was just being dumb is all. And um, happy early birthday.”

  Circa hung up and shut down the computer. In a muddled haze of potential, disappointment, guilt, hunger, and exhaustion, she left the studio for the night. On the way upstairs, she stopped in the kitchen for a snack and noticed that Mom had neatly sliced a bad-day pill in two, leaving one of the halves on the edge of the sink. That small win for Mom seemed like reason enough for Circa to have dessert at bedtime, so she cut herself a giant wedge of peanut butter pie and whisked it up to her room. There, she perched at her open window and savored every bite, pausing in between to look at only one thing. That nest. That big, goofy, lopsided nest. All the while, as if they were mocking her, a bevy of neighborhood dogs barked in the distance.

  When you’re hired to lead all the inflatable weirdos out of a town, the problem arises where to house said weirdos. You can’t just deflate them all, because that would be cruel. And you can’t very well open a bouncy playground, because after all, it is only 1903. So, instead, you let them stay with you….Then you scatter some nails around your yard and hope for the best.

  For three days they ran Miles’s picture on the local news, but still, no word. And for three days, Circa began every morning and ended every night at her window, studying the freckled eggs in that nest and still wondering about it, the wart, the glasses, the dog, and the boy. Mom was doing more and more portrait appointments, sometimes as Sunny Backdrop, but mostly as her real self, with the occasional need to be excused to secretly compose her thoughts. Miles was eating better, sleeping better, and looking surprisingly less lost by the hour. Nattie popped in as often as she could for lessons on how to play Chicken Foot, when she wasn’t busy watching little Durret eat cheese. All of this made life at the Monroe house feel like it had been sprinkled with a dash of normal across the top. Circa felt glad that Miles had not been claimed yet, comforted by his company and convinced that his presence alone meant that there must be some kind of message from Dad inside him. After all, she thought, why else would this sort of thing even be allowed to happen?

  During her rare alone moments, Circa brainstormed possible ways to further verify her Shopt ideas. She couldn’t ask Miles too many questions without him being suspicious. She knew that it might crush him for her to blurt out her thoughts, like she was telling him he wasn’t human, or worse yet, not even real. She tried secretly searching up some of Dad’s past Shopt work to see if any of it had come true, but had found that near impossible with the Internet still knocked out from the storms. Not to mention the fact that most of the Shopt pictures were so old that most of the stories would be unverifiable anyway. Besides, Circa thought, maybe not all the stuff became real? Maybe the only Shopt details that came true were the ones that would help deliver Dad’s special message from heaven to her. Either way, it was clear that the only way to gather more evidence was to put her own Shopt powers to the test as soon as she could.

  Thankfully, she and Miles were spending as much time as they could at Dad’s computer getting in some good practice on some Dad-style Shopt work. Together, the two of them came up with crazy photo concoctions for Circa to copy and paste Great-Uncle Mileage into. And together, they made up even crazier stories to go with them. Tales of the continuing saga of the spy baby and his exploits throughout the decades. How he grew up to travel the world, obsessed with the ongoing mission to find his great-nephew Miles. How he never stopped searching, even after being injured when his plane grazed a towering twenty-story pretzel and had to make an emergency landing.

  Every time she sat in that swivel chair and worked, Circa wondered if Dad had felt such satisfaction when he created the Shopt stories for her. She wondered if he
would have done things differently had he known that they just might come true. Most of all, she loved the sparkly, hopeful feeling it gave her inside. Made up as everything was, Miles also loved discovering a possible version of his history and seeing a Shopt photo to document it, so much so he’d cut a meal short to join Circa at the computer. Even when she was only half done, he’d nag her to give him hints about the story.

  One particularly sparkly afternoon, Circa and Miles had just wrapped up an image of the Great Sphinx covered in orange sherbet. In its story, Great-Uncle Mileage had hijacked an ice cream delivery truck and cooled down the monument just before record high temperatures could destroy it. When he finished reading the tale, Miles paused.

  “So you think Captain Mann has tried to sneak out of Maple Grove any more this week?”

  Circa couldn’t believe Miles had mentioned the captain, after all that misery before.

  “Did the hijacked truck remind you of him?” said Circa.

  “No, the Egyptian heat he was blasting in that van,” he said. “But honestly, I haven’t been able to get him out of my head ever since Monday.”

  “Oh, man. Sorry,” said Circa. “I told you. You’re not going to end up at Maple Grove, Miles.”

  “No, it’s okay,” said Miles. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just I’ve been feeling sorry for him, sitting there all day long in a room by himself.”

  “Yeah,” said Circa. “Me, too. I just don’t know how to make it better, though, if he won’t even let us see him.”

  Miles’s face lit up. “This might be dumb,” he said, “but maybe we could do a Shopt story for him. You know, just for fun. You could put it under his door or something.”

  Circa got all twitchy inside. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “How come?”

  “I told you before,” she said. “We’ve just kind of always thought of the Shopt as a Monroe thing, you know? My dad took his work very seriously. He didn’t want this to mess up his reputation. I mean, I’ve never even told Nat about the Shopt stuff.”

  Miles gave her a baffled look. “Circa, are you forgetting something?” he said.

  “What?”

  “That I’m not a Monroe,” he said.

  “Yeah but you might—” Circa began. “Well, you live here. So that counts,” she said. “Besides, the Maple Grove people will have the Memory Wall someday.”

  “But what if Captain Mann doesn’t have anything to put on the wall?” said Miles.

  “Nurse Lily said he’s got that one picture,” said Circa, feeling a twinge of guilt for keeping the Shopt a secret from a man who could probably really use it. “Hey, you want to see some of the Maple Grove pictures?” she said, changing the subject fast.

  “Sure,” said Miles. “But aren’t they, like, protected by a mom alarm or something?”

  “Yeah. Probably,” said Circa. “But she still doesn’t come near this desk, so maybe she won’t notice.”

  She double-clicked open a file called MEMORY WALL on the computer. Then she dragged to select thirty or so scanned pictures and launched an automatic slideshow.

  “My dad had finished restoring a few of them,” she said. “He’d begun to restore a few others, but most of them are still damaged or faded.”

  Circa narrated the photos as they appeared on the screen as if she were telling of lifelong friends. Miss Rempy next to her plane. Hank-not-the-Mayor as a little boy in his family’s pecan orchard. The Nelsons with a shiny silver cup they’d won in a dance contest. Even one of Joe the food man with a huge catfish caught when he was Circa’s age. Then there were photos of things the way they used to be in Wingate. People riding horses and driving tractors. A drive-in restaurant with a giant onion ring—or was it a skinny doughnut?—on top. A myriad of storefronts that had changed hands a dozen times.

  “See?” Circa sighed. “It’s a ton of work still to be done.”

  “So when are you going to start?” said Miles.

  Circa’s shoulders went heavy. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s kind of overwhelming to think about, the big pile of work and my mom not wanting me to even try it.”

  Miles grinned. “Hey, it can’t be any more overwhelming than covering the Great Sphinx in sherbet, right?”

  “I guess not,” laughed Circa, a new confidence awakening in her.

  Mom wandered into the studio to set up for her next portrait appointment. Circa stopped the slideshow and closed out of the Maple Grove folder with a swiftness that made Miles snicker.

  “Guys, I’ve been thinking we might need to go ahead and make a poster with Miles’s picture on it to post on a few bulletin boards around the area,” Mom said. “Like the post office and grocery stores and such. For people who’ve quit watching all the coverage about the…what do you call it, Circa?”

  “Ordeal.”

  “Yeah, for those who’ve quit watching about the ordeal on the news. Plus there are still tons of people like us without Internet connection. One of those people might just belong to Miles.”

  Mom loaded a big stack of paper into her printer. “I’ve put together a simple poster on my laptop, Circa. Would you guys mind printing fifty or so off?”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  “And maybe you can go hang them around after church tomorrow?”

  “Me and Miles?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Will you go with us?” Miles asked Mom.

  “No, I trust you two to handle it,” she said without hesitation.

  Circa shot an I knew she wouldn’t look at Miles.

  “How about Nat?” Circa asked.

  “If it’s okay with the Boones.”

  “If what’s okay with the Boones?” came a cheerful voice from the front studio entrance.

  Nattie came bouncing in wearing stiff new jeans and a tie-dyed tank. “Hey, guys. We playing dominoes?” she said.

  “Printing posters,” said Circa. “Want to help?”

  “Sure,” said Nattie, gliding gladly into the mix.

  Per Mom’s instruction, Circa printed fifty of the Miles posters. The poster was a simple one, with the picture Mom had taken of him, and underneath in big letters it said, DO YOU HAVE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS BOY?

  Once the printing was done, Miles laid the posters out next to each other ten at a time on the available desk space while Circa set to stamping the Studio Monroe info on the bottom of each one. Ever since Circa was old enough not to make a total mess of it, Dad had always let her be the one to stamp the Studio Monroe logo on the backs of restored pictures. The smell of the inkpad gave her a lump of sadness in her throat. On the other end of the desk, Nattie found herself a yellow highlighter pen and drew borders around the edges of the posters for extra effect. Circa laughed inside when she saw her friend sneak one of the posters, fold it twice, and cram it into her back pocket.

  Once the flyers were complete, Circa stacked them up neatly and Miles rested on his stool near Dad’s computer. Mom had already ushered in her next portrait family and was arranging two parents and twin five-year-old kids on a velvety bench.

  “Dominoes?” said Nattie, trying to wipe the yellow from her fingertips. But Circa had found herself itching to do some more Shopt work with Miles, especially since she’d found out they’d be busy hanging posters all day tomorrow. She could even maybe sneak some kind of a secret Shopt test into the work they did together.

  “Nah,” said Circa. “I’m kind of tired of playing Chicken Foot.”

  “How about another game, then?” said Nattie. “We could do just regular dominoes.”

  “I’m not really in the mood,” said Circa.

  “Me, either,” Miles chimed in.

  “Hey, Nat, how about this?” said Circa. “Mom said me and you and Miles can all go hang the posters tomorrow after church. You want to?”

  “Sure,” said Na
ttie, with a hint of huffiness. “But you can still play a game even if you’re not in the mood, you know. Especially on somebody’s birthday.”

  Birthday. Oh, man, Circa thought. No wonder Nattie had the new outfit on. How could she have forgotten her best friend’s birthday not just one time, but twice? She’d made a mental note, but somehow her crowded brain had crumpled it right up.

  “Um, surprise!” said Circa with awkward overenthusiasm. “Happy birthday, Nat! Look here.” Circa started clicking like crazy on the computer, making the printer spit out a picture in record time. “I made you a present this year.”

  Circa handed over the still-wet photo of the brown-and-white dog. “See?” she said. “I did you an Ernie Brown.”

  Nattie took the picture by the corners. “Thanks a lot,” she forced out under her breath. Mom’s camera flash-lit the whole room, as Circa flashed a nervous grin.

  Nattie turned dramatically on her heel to leave the studio, but not without first leaning in close to Circa’s ear. “You and your new favorite friend have fun today,” she whispered sharply.

  Circa felt her face go hot. “Nattie Boone, I’m going to pretend you didn’t even say that,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

  In a swirl of air, Nattie was out the door.

  “Happy birthday,” said Miles to no one.

  Cousin Octibald had never RSVP’d to the wedding, so no one really expected him to show. Yet there he was, sopping up the dance floor, hogging the punch bowl, and wriggling his way into every single picture. Someone heard the preacher nearly curse. Two of the in-laws fainted. All Aunt Floreen would say was that the big sucker could have at least had the decency to wear a suit. Fortunately, the bride and groom were unfazed. After all, hitched is hitched, whether it’s squishy or not.

  Before the Monroes even got past the church welcome mat on Sunday morning, a dozen people had swarmed around to meet their young guest like he was some kind of celebrity. Word had spread about Miles’s plight, and as a result, the amount of food brought into the church kitchen for the family had doubled. Circa made a special point of apologizing to the secretary for wrestling the photo of the building out of her hands the week before, but immediately followed her apology with a quiet request to get the pic later for use on the Memory Wall. Then Circa, Miles, and Mom sat in the little room with the one-way window at the back of the auditorium, just in case Mom was overcome with a panic that was difficult to push through. There were three short pews in there full of young mothers and their newborns, old people and their walkers, and the Monroes.