farm and Hilliard House. Nothing from before I met him except for a five-second clip filmed in a noisy school lunchroom titled “Bullied3.” It was just a shaky view of kids sitting at a table, so I figured it was something old he’d forgotten to delete.
The only other thing that caught my eye was an app called “Media Vault,” which I recognized because Blake had installed it on his phone once. That had only lasted a day, though. The instant Mom saw it she forced him to take it off, because it was for hiding photos and videos you didn’t want anyone else to see. Knowing Blake, he’d probably put his own selfies in there or something sad like that. What would Julian hide? When I clicked the app, it prompted me for a password, just as I’d expected. I didn’t bother to type anything—I was already yawning my head off, so there was no way I’d crack Julian’s code tonight.
Since there was nothing else to snoop through, I turned the air conditioner down and opened the movie Julian had told me to watch. The opening credits dragged on for about a hundred years, and I had to turn the volume down because the music was loud and dramatic in that “HARK, A SCARY MOVIE!” way.
Finally the story started with a man and a woman finding a beautiful old house on a cliff that faced the sea. They talked really fast in that old-fashioned, prissy style that annoyed me about black-and-white movies. I’d been worried this one would be too creepy for me to watch alone in the attic, but it was so old-timey that it didn’t get under my skin at all. When the man and woman turned out to be brother and sister—and bought the house so they could live there
together
—I gave up and crawled under the covers.
My second-to-last thought before I fell asleep was that Blake would have found the whole brother-and-sister thing hilarious. My last thought was that he would never know because there was no way I was going to tell him about it.
The next day Julian and I took the gravel road down to the blacktopped highway that led to Clearview Cemetery. The sky was bright blue and a light breeze carried the scent of freshly mown grass. I waited quietly as Julian took in the flowers on the headstones and the tall trees that leaned forward to make a curtain around the graves.
“Huh,” he said. “It’s like a park. Only with dead people.” He turned to me. “Is your dad’s grave here?”
My stomach convulsed. He’d caught me off guard
again.
“Um, no.”
“Why not?”
Why, why, why?
The answers came so easy to me back home, but here…somehow it was harder to lie. “Because he wasn’t from around here.”
That much
was
true.
Julian nodded. “I know you don’t like talking about him. I just wanted to pay my respects if his grave was here.”
The tightness in my shoulders eased up. Sometimes he talked like he was a lot older—maybe it was all those old movies he watched—but that was the most gentlemanly thing I’d heard him say. Heck, it was the most gentlemanly thing I’d heard
anyone
say.
I grinned. “Are you hungry? Because I worked all morning in the garden and now I’m starving. Plus, I want to show you something.”
A wooden fence lay on the eastern edge of the cemetery, and on the other side was a wooded area. Within those woods was a grove of dwarf blue spruce trees. When we were younger, Blake and I decided the grove was a magical place. A forest within a forest, blue within green. It was quiet and cool there, the perfect spot for spinning tales about Kingdom during the hottest part of the day.
I climbed over the fence and looked back at Julian. “Coming?”
“Will I be trespassing again?”
“The land across the fence belongs to Mr. Shepherd, but he’s never shot at us or anything.”
Julian froze and looked around, as if expecting a crazy rifleman to appear from the tree line.
“It’s safe, I promise.” As soon as he was on my side of the fence, I led him to the circle of plump spruce trees. Then I
Kay Stewart, Chris Bullock