Curious, Lucy opened the book to a random page and read:
Astrid didn’t like the rules. When her parents told her she had to wait an hour after eating to swim, she always jumped in after twenty minutes. And when she saw a sign that said No kids allowed! That means you, kid!, she walked right past it.
Lucy was hooked. A girl who broke the rules? A girl with a cool name like Astrid instead of a dumb old lady name like Lucy? If Astrid had been at the hospital, she would have found a way to sneak in and see her sister.
She wished Astrid was her real sister…
In Lucy’s mind, she erased little Max from the cover of the book and replaced him with herself. Now it was Lucy and Astrid on Clock Island together.
Hours after her parents left her alone, Lucy’s grandparents came and picked her up. She took the book with her.
“You stole it?” Christopher sounded more impressed than horrified.
“It seemed like something Astrid would do,” Lucy said. Christopher accepted that.
After that, nothing could get in the way of Lucy and her Clock Island books. She checked out everything the school library had. When her birthday came, she asked for nothing but money. When her grandmother took her to their local bookstore, Lucy bought every book there was in stock, even the ones she’d already read from the library. She even dressed up like Astrid for Halloween, wearing white clamdiggers, a nautical blue-and-white-striped shirt, and a white sailor hat. Nobody knew who she was, but she didn’t care. And when her fifth-grade teacher assigned them all the task of writing a letter to their favorite author, Lucy already had her writer picked out.
Jack Masterson. Easy enough. If you wanted to write him—or Master Mastermind—then all you had to do was write— “I know,” Christopher said. “You write ‘Clock Island,’ and the letter will go right there.”
“How did you know that?” Lucy asked.
He looked at her as if she were possibly the stupidest person alive.
“It’s in the back of the books,” he said.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Forgot.”
Lucy spent a whole week working on her letter to Mr. Masterson before working up the courage to give it to her teacher to put in the mail. The assignment said they were to tell the authors why they first read their books, why they liked the books so much, and then ask the authors one question. They were graded on their letter-writing abilities and not on the author’s response, thank goodness.
Mr. Masterson never wrote her back.
When she didn’t receive a reply after several months, Mrs. Lee told her not to be discouraged. Mr. Masterson was one of the biggest-selling authors in the world. His kids’ books sold more copies than those of many famous adult writers.
Lucy had been hurt but not heartbroken. She was used to love being a one-sided sort of thing. And really, at that age, she couldn’t quite conceive of Jack Masterson as a real person. He was a name on the cover of the books, and that was it. The thought of him living in a house and sleeping in a bed and eating cake or going to the bathroom seemed as crazy as Jesus doing all those things. Or Britney Spears.
“Who’s Britney Spears?” Christopher asked her.
“You don’t know the Great Britney?” Lucy asked.
Christopher shrugged.
“I have failed you, child,” Lucy said. “But we’ll get to her later. Back to Mr. Masterson.”
Although Jack Masterson hadn’t written her back after her first letter, Lucy decided to keep writing him. Every couple of months she sent him a letter. Without her teacher reading the letters first, Lucy could write more honestly than what she’d written before. She wrote about how her parents didn’t love her the way they loved her sister, how she lived with her grandparents because nobody wanted her around.
In fact, she told him about how she’d gotten to go home for spring break that year. And how for that one week, Lucy had counted the words her parents said to her. From Monday morning to Sunday night, she kept a running total.
The final tally?
Mom: 27 words.
Dad: 10 words.
She counted the minutes they spent in the same room together.
Mom: 11 minutes.
Dad: 4 minutes.
When she counted how many times they said they loved her that week, it looked like this:
Mom: 0
Dad: 0
Maybe that was what had done it.
That was the letter Jack Masterson answered.
Chapter Six
Christopher leaned in close as if she were about to reveal nuclear codes to him.
“I remember that day like it was yesterday,” Lucy whispered. She was having too much fun telling him this story.
One autumn day she came home from school, and there on her grandparents’ kitchen table lay a pale blue envelope with her name on it. She’d only just turned thirteen, but she knew it wasn’t a birthday card. Nobody sent her birthday cards. She found a kitchen knife and with a zzzt, she opened the envelope.
“What did the letter say?” he asked.
Lucy told him word for word. She’d read it so often she had the letter memorized.
Dear Lucy,
Here is a secret—I have a monster in my house. He stands behind my chair in my writing factory and doesn’t let me leave until I’ve finished all my work. This monster is called an editor, and he’s green and covered in fur, and his teeth are long and full of the bones of other writers he’s eaten for not making their deadlines. At the moment, he’s tied up in the corner of my writing room, gagged and blindfolded. He’ll get out soon enough, but while he’s chained up, I finally have a chance to write you back.
It’s a terrible thing your parents have done to you. Oh, I guess you could make excuses for them. Your sister is chronically ill, and while being a parent is a full-time job, being a parent to a chronically ill child makes you a prisoner to the illness. Nobody wants to be a prisoner. No one asks for that. I wish that hadn’t happened to your sister or anyone’s sister or brother or mother or dad.
That being said, it’s a terrible thing your parents have done to you. It’s so awful I wrote it twice. I may even write it a third time.
It’s a terrible thing your parents have done to you.
If you were my daughter, the numbers would look very different.
Words spoken to you in a week?
100,000 (mostly about what a rotten monster I have to deal with daily).
Minutes spent together in a week?