Iris only blinked. It had been nearly twenty-four hours, and she still hadn’t said a word. She followed Vi around obediently, watched, listened, and nodded or shook her head, seeming to understand, but her face was unreadable. She was wearing Vi’s old clothes: a pair of faded bell-bottom jeans and a red-and-blue-striped turtleneck that she’d put on backward and inside out—the tag flapped at her throat. She still had the dirty old orange hunting cap on, pulled down over her ears. Vi put on a Neil Diamond album—Moods—and dropped the needle.
They listened to “Play Me” for a minute—you are the sun, I am the moon—then Vi just kept talking, not able to stand the awkward silence. She wished Eric would come down and help her out, but it was Friday, and Eric cleaned all the animal cages in his room every Friday—a chore that took all morning and a good chunk of the afternoon too.
“Gran has a few pictures from when the Inn was built—soldiers missing arms and legs and stuff. Maybe she’ll show you if you ask. I bet it’s haunted. I mean, how could it not be, right?” She looked at Iris, who stared back, eyes wide. “Anyway, back then, this house was where the superintendent and his family lived. But now we live here. When Gran retires, which she says won’t be anytime soon, she’ll leave, and the next director will move in.” Vi smiled like it was all very matter-of-fact, but there was a weight on her chest. She couldn’t stand the idea of having to leave the only home she remembered. And it didn’t help that the next director would probably be Dr. Hutchins. Vi hated to think about it—Dr. Hutchins with his tufty hair and squinty eyes eating breakfast in their kitchen, probably never even sitting on the porch swing because it squeaked and he was unsettled by loud noises. Vi and Eric loved to take advantage—to put whoopee cushions on his chair before dinner, toss firecrackers beneath his office window.
“Let’s get some lemonade and go outside,” Vi suggested.
She measured scoops of powder into a pitcher of water and stirred, and Iris watched her with wonder, as if she’d never seen anyone make lemonade that way. Iris gulped down two glasses right away, messily, the lemonade trickling down her chin.
* * *
“MY BROTHER AND I, we’ve got a club. You can be in it if you want.”
The porch swing chains squeaked as Vi pushed the two of them back and forth, back and forth, with the toe of her sneaker on the gray painted floorboards. It was a hot day. The rest of the lemonade was sitting in two sweating glasses on the little wrought iron table beside the porch swing.
“So… do you want to?” Vi asked her.
Iris just stared. She hadn’t taken off her orange knit hat, and Vi could only imagine how uncomfortable she must be. Vi could see the sweat forming on her forehead, which was white and shiny and perfectly smooth like marble. The hat was filthy, stained with grease and God knew what else. Vi was surprised that Gran let her wear it all the time, even to dinner last night, which was just plain crazy because Gran had all these strict rules about dinner: always at six in the dining room, show up in clean clothes, hair combed, hands and face washed. Best manners. Please and thank you and no elbows on the table, not ever. And everyone needed to be a member of the clean-plate club, or no leaving the table.
But Gran had said nothing, just let Iris wear the grimy thing. And because Iris didn’t talk, she didn’t have to say please or thank you, or the other big part of dinner, which was telling a story about your day. When you told your story, you got extra praise for using a new vocabulary word you’d learned. Gran was big on vocabulary and on the idea that they should always be challenging their minds. Last night, Vi had used the word abhorrent: “I think Old Mac shooting the rabbits that get into the garden is abhorrent and completely unnecessary.”
“It’s a monster club,” Vi told Iris now. “We talk about monsters. We go to see monster movies at the drive-in on Saturday nights in the summer. We go on monster hunts. And we’re writing a book. The Book of Monsters. We’re putting everything we know about them into it, and Eric’s drawing the illustrations.”