Jake and Lily Read online

  Jerry Spinelli

  Jake and Lily

  Dedication

  TO THE KIDS,

  BOTH GRAND AND GREAT-GRAND,

  WHO HAVE ARRIVED SINCE THE LAST LIST:

  Wesley

  Lulu

  Oli

  Vika

  Kolia

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Intro

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  Intro II

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  Jake and Lily

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Jerry Spinelli

  Back Ad

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Intro

  I’m Jake Wambold.

  I’m Lily Wambold.

  This is the story of our lives.

  Life.

  Whatever. We’re taking turns.

  For this intro, we’re taking turns on lines.

  Like, this line is me (Jake).

  And this line is me (Lily).

  Then we’ll take turns on chapters.

  We don’t know how many chapters this book will have.

  But even if it had a million chapters,

  we couldn’t tell you the whole story.

  Because

  well

  uh

  it’s hard to explain.

  You’ll just have to take our word for it.

  Especially the beginning. You might think it’s weird.

  Forget might. They’re gonna think it’s weird.

  Anyway, first you’re going to hear from me

  (Jake) because

  Don’t say it.

  I’m older.

  Ha!

  That’s why I did the first line too.

  Whoopee.

  But that’s not the cool thing.

  Finally he’s off who’s older, who’s first.

  The cool thing is, we can do this without looking at

  what each other is writing.

  We could show each other, but we don’t have to.

  I told you you might think it’s weird.

  Gonna.

  Let’s get started before we weird them away.

  Not so fast. Tell them how much

  older you are than me.

  Here we go.

  Tell them.

  Eleven minutes. Happy?

  Eleven measly minutes.

  First is first.

  Because of eleven minutes,

  I’ll be in second place my whole life.

  Boohoo.

  One more thing.

  So you probably figured it out by now. We’re not just brother and sister. We’re

  twins!

  (That last word was done by both of us.)

  Jake

  Light!

  Hurricane of light coming at me. Swallows me. I am blinding, screaming light. It’s gone. I’m still here. Dark. Cool. Silent.

  Below me railroad tracks gleam in moonlight. Cool, rough cement on my bare feet. Somewhere a clock strikes. I count. Three. In the morning? I’m in my pajamas. Where am I? Why aren’t I in bed? Am I dreaming?

  I smell pickles.

  I am not alone. I hold out my hand.

  Lily

  Our hands touch. Everything is okay.

  “I just had a dream,” he says.

  “What about?” I say.

  “I was standing down there”—he points to the tracks—“and there was a bright light and—”

  “—and a train went through you!”

  He looks at me. “How did you know?”

  “I had the same dream.”

  We look at each other. We look up the tracks. There is no sign of a train.

  “Maybe we’re still dreaming,” he says. “Poke me.”

  I poke him.

  “Harder.”

  I poke harder.

  He squeals, “Ow!”

  “Tickle me,” I say.

  He tickles me, in my worst spot.

  I howl.

  “We’re not dreaming,” he says.

  “Not anymore,” I say.

  “Where are we?” he says.

  We look around. Railroad tracks. Benches. Wooden posts prop up a roof that brims out over the concrete platform we stand on. A dim mist of light from the street behind.

  “I think it’s the train station,” he says.

  “What are we doing at the train station?” I say.

  “How did we get here?” he says.

  We stare at each other.

  “Sleepwalk?” I say, not believing myself.

  “Sleepwalk?” he says. “I don’t sleepwalk.”

  “Me neither,” I say.

  We stare into the darkness. Crickets shake their rattles.

  “Well,” I say, “I guess we do now.”

  We’re quiet some more. Thinking. Or trying to. How do you think about something you don’t understand?

  “Lil?” he says.

  “Huh?”

  “In the dream?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you smell something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?”

  “You say it.”

  “Let’s both say it.”

  “
Pickles!”

  More silence. A distant voice shouts but I can’t make out the word.

  “Jake?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you scared?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  Silence. Night.

  “Jake?”

  “Huh?”

  “When the train came?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you feel something?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Feel. When the train came, did it feel like something?”

  “Yeah. It felt like a train coming.”

  “What else?”

  “Huh?”

  “What else? What else did it feel like?”

  He looks at me. His eyes go wide. He smiles. “Home.”

  Jake

  That’s how it started. I said “home” and my sister smiled and then for no good reason we both started giggling, just standing there giggling on the train platform in the middle of the night.

  We left the station. We started walking down the street. Talking…

  Lily

  and talking…

  Jake

  and talking.

  We were only six then, but we were old enough to know something amazing had just happened. We had both sleepwalked to the same place at the same time—on July 29, our birthday!

  And there was more—the train station, the train. All our lives we had been hearing the story: we were born on a famous train, the California Zephyr. Our parents already knew they were going to have twins, but we weren’t supposed to come out for another month, so Mom figured they had plenty of time to go to San Francisco for Uncle Peaceboy’s wedding. They took the cross-country train instead of flying so Mom could be more comfortable. After the wedding, on the train back, we were born to the surprise of everybody. In the Moffat Tunnel. The Moffat Tunnel is over six miles long and goes under the mountains in Colorado. Personally, I was perfectly happy to wait till Mom got home to be born. But Lily, of course, being Lily, she couldn’t wait. I swear if I concentrate real hard, I can remember her inside our mother pushing me from behind. So into the world we came, first me (I’ll say it for her: ha!), then Lily, in a compartment in a sleeping car. By the dark windows of the Moffat Tunnel. And pickle smell. Because it happened so fast that Dad came rushing from the club car, where he had just bought and taken his first bite out of a big fat dill pickle. There was no doctor, just Dad and the conductor and two waitresses from the dining car.

  So now we walked along the night-lit streets and talked about that and boggled over it and nudged each other and giggled at the amazement of it all. And we started to remember things, things that up till then we hadn’t thought much about. Like the time Lily was crying, “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!” only she wasn’t. She was sitting on the living room floor with a coloring book. It was me who was stuck. Mom found me in the backyard. My foot had gotten caught beneath the fence and I couldn’t pull it loose.

  Like the time I yelled “Stop!” and Lily heard me and stopped—just as she was about to chase a ball into the street when a car was coming. No big deal, maybe you’re saying, except at the time I was at the dentist—five miles away.

  Lily

  As if that explains everything.

  As usual, Jake misses the point. He skims the top off things. Sure, what happened was that we both sleepwalked to the train station at the same time. And had the same dream. And talked and talked. But that was just the cherry, the whipped cream. Down deep with the hot fudge and ice cream was what else happened. What really happened. Which was this: we became ourselves. I know, it sounds weird. But it’s like, on the train in the Moffat Tunnel that night, not quite all of us was born. I mean, it looked like all of us was born. But something was missing. The knowing. We didn’t know who we were. Not really. (The important word there is we.) We just went along with the program for the first six years, being but not knowing ourselves. Being “twins.” To everybody else: adorable, mysterious twins. To ourselves: Duh, so what’s the big deal?

  And then we awoke that night hand in hand at the train station, and it’s like the rest of us was finally born. We knew. At last we knew. We saw ourselves like everybody else saw us. It suddenly hit us: we’re different!

  It’s like a beautiful present had been sitting there for six years and we never noticed it and then finally we did and we tore it open and…wow! The present was us.

  So what exactly is it that we finally knew?

  Well, we knew that not everybody can hear their brother from five miles away. We knew that not everybody yells, “I’m stuck!” when it’s happening to somebody else.

  Okay, that’s what we knew about everybody else, but what about us? What did we finally know about us?

  We couldn’t say—we could only feel—because there were no words. It’s like, whatever it was, it existed on the other side of words. So if you were following us on the way home from the train station that night, you wouldn’t have heard regular, full-sentence talk. All you would have heard were scraps, like “Did you see…!” and “What a fantastic…!” and “Do you believe…!” And that’s about all. Because the rest of the talk was happening between our heads, not our mouths.

  What an amazing night, the night we unwrapped ourselves. Before we knew it, Jake pointed to the sky and said, “Look—it’s morning!” We had been circling our block all night—two six-year-olds in July in pj’s and bare feet. We raced for home. The front door was wide open. We ran to the kitchen, grabbed cereal boxes and bowls. We were just starting to eat—hard to do when you’re gulping giggles—when Mom came down.

  She nearly fainted. “What are you two doing up? You’re never up this early.”

  “We’re too excited to sleep,” Jake said.

  “It’s our birthday!” I said.

  Jake

  Our birthday party was in the backyard. Some cousins were there plus a couple of neighborhood kids. Dad grilled hot dogs and hamburgers. The cake had blue and pink candles. We both blew them out at once. Well, I blew. Lily burped. It was her first public burp. Everybody laughed, so ever since then she thinks she’s the world’s greatest burper. She can burp on command. She practices.

  Dad took our picture as we stood next to a stepladder. He said he was going to do it every year on our birthday, to show how we’re growing up the ladder.

  For her present, I gave Lily a model train engine. (Mom paid for it.) Lily didn’t even know she wanted it, but I did. I wrapped it in a paper bag. When I gave it to her, she screeched, “A train!” Mom said, “No fair, you peeked.” But she didn’t peek. She didn’t have to.

  Lily gave me a stone. I was already collecting stones by then. She must have found it at the creek, because it was worn smooth as glass. It was the size and shape of a robin’s egg, gray with thin pink lines through it. I still have it.

  Every year our parents give us tools. That year it was a tape measure for Lily, a ball-peen hammer for me. Mom and Dad have their own construction business. They build and renovate houses. They don’t believe in buying stuff you can make. Their motto is “If you want it, make it.”

  One of the kids at the party was a mystery. Nobody knew him. He said his name was Bump. Turned out he lived up the street. Bump Stubbins. He saw the party going on and invited himself. Nobody had the heart to tell him to scram. He had a Mohawk haircut.

  After we opened our presents, I saw him walking away. A couple minutes later he came back with a big grin and said, “Happy birthday,” and gave me a stone. A muddy, ordinary-looking stone. I was thinking if I washed off the mud maybe it would look pretty neat. But Lily wasn’t fooled. “That’s stinky,” she said. She grabbed the stone from my hand and threw it into the next yard. She snarled at him, “Don’t ever give my brother a stinky stone again.” Already she didn’t like Bump. She turned to Dad. “Daddy, kick him out. Nobody invited him.” Dad just laughed and said, “Now be nice, Lily. You’re the birthday girl.”

  That was the day we found out we c
ouldn’t play hide-and-seek. There were no good places to hide in the yard, so us kids were let into the house. “You can hide anywhere downstairs,” my dad told us. “But no upstairs.”

  When Lily was It, I hid in the back of the closet in the mudroom. As soon as Lily reached one hundred, I heard her call, “Give it up, Jake! I know you’re in the mudroom!”

  When I was It, Lily cheated. She sneaked upstairs. My sister cheats a lot. Which is no big deal, because she’s so bad at it she doesn’t fool anybody. She lies too. Anyway, when I finished counting and opened my eyes, I knew exactly where she was. “Lily!” I called. “Come down from behind the shower curtain!”