What Goes Up Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Wen Jane Baragrey

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Stevie Lewis

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Baragrey, Wen Jane, author.

  Title: What goes up / Wen Jane Baragrey.

  Description: Robyn Tinkerbell Goodfellow, twelve, lives in a house that seems to attract trouble, so when a satellite is expected to crash she races to learn the truth about her long-lost father before it is too late.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017034839 | ISBN 978-1-5247-6581-1 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-5247-6584-2 (hardcover library binding) | ISBN 978-1-5247-6583-5 (ebook)

  Subjects: Identity—Fiction. | Single-parent families—Fiction. | Family Life—Fiction. | Artificial satellites—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.B3678 Wh 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9781524765835

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.3.2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  For Jayden, the smallest person I ever looked up to

  When my bare foot touched the rickety boards of our front step, a man’s voice came from somewhere high above me.

  “Hello down there!”

  I squealed and held up my hands in a classic self-defense position. “Identify yourself!”

  Things landed on our house all the time: balls, kites, and even our neighbor’s giant tree. None of those things had ever talked to me.

  “I’m real sorry to bother you, little girl, but I could use some help.”

  “I’m not a little girl. I’m practically twelve,” I said, my heart thumping hard. “If you’re trying to break into our house, you should know I invented the art of Focus Pocus, and I have a black belt.” The truth was, my best friend had invented it, but I’d been there and helped by surviving the first-ever Focus Pocus Doom Glare. It wouldn’t do much to stop a determined burglar, but it might confuse him a little.

  “I have no idea what Focus Pocus is, and I’m not trying to steal anything. I’m a bit lost. If you would call nine-one-one, I’d be very grateful,” he said.

  Since a thief wouldn’t ask for 911, my heart settled a bit. I pushed my glasses back on my nose, shaded my eyes, and squinted upward. There, dangling by his harness from my grandma’s rooster weather vane, was an embarrassed-looking skydiver.

  “Could you throw down a Frisbee or two while you’re up there?” I asked.

  He looked at his swinging feet. “Not without falling.”

  I sighed.

  There were probably toys on that roof from when Grandma was a kid. I could have made a fortune selling them on the school black market if I could’ve gotten them down. But Grandma was terrible with heights, and Mom couldn’t be trusted with a ladder. The treasure was so close, but there was no way for me to get my hands on it.

  Half an hour later, the fire department was trampling all over Grandma’s roses. They used to grow in neat rows beside the path until she felt sorry for them and set them free. Now they straggled everywhere in random tangles.

  Chief Watson marched over to greet me. On the way, his boot caught in one of the drooped-over rosebushes. His arms flailed and his helmet slipped sideways, but he stayed upright and managed a smile. Thanks to my strict Focus Pocus training, I kept my cool and didn’t giggle, but it was a close one.

  “How goes life beneath the magnet roof, Robyn?” he asked, winking at me. We were practically friends, since he had been to our house more often than the mailman.

  “It’s okay, except for skydivers and nosy neighbors,” I said.

  Chief Watson’s eyes twitched toward Mrs. Cuthbert’s house. Since Mrs. Cuthbert thought she was a special undercover operative for the FBI, she would for sure be peering through her binoculars at us. If anyone even looked in her direction, she’d take that as an invitation to come and run things. In other towns, people probably called the police to report neighbors like meddlesome Mrs. Cuthbert. In Calliope, you left your neighbors alone, because chances were if they moved, you’d end up with someone way odder. I wasn’t sure there could be anyone worse than Mrs. Cuthbert.

  The chief patted the pom-pom of hair in the ponytail on top of my head. “Hang in there, kiddo.”

  Grandma arrived home in the middle of all the fuss, carrying a paper bag filled with groceries.

  “Watch where you put those ladders, Davy Watson!” Grandma growled as she elbowed her way through the small crowd of busybodies gathered at our front gate. Chief Watson saluted her as she hurried by, but she didn’t even stop to wave.

  Grandma took my arm and herded me through the front door and into the room that used to be our living room but now was a fairy-themed party room. These days we watched TV in the kitchen, and Mom hosted parties in her homemade Fairy Wonderland. Papier-mâché forest critters peered out at us from behind giant toadstools and fake weeping willows with gauzy leaves.

  They had taken Mom months to make. She still painted over the animals’ eyes sometimes, trying to get them to look focused.

  Today she sat cross-legged on the low party table she had painted to look like a rock with ivy vines. She was turning paper napkins into small folded fairies. “Ooh, the fire department is here,” she said, placing her latest fairy in a basket with dozens of others.

  “Did you hear the news, Mary?” Grandma whispered to Mom, like it was a big secret.

  “News? Not if I can help it. Too depressing.” Mom unfolded herself from the table and stretched out her back. “I should go and supervise the firefighters.” She tapped my shoulder with her wand, leaving sparkles all over my T-shirt.

  “Hush,” Grandma said. “NASA said one of their satellites has gone rogue and will crash back to Earth sometime soon. A month at most, they reckon.”

  Mom shrugged. “So?”

  A little shiver wriggled through me. Satellites were a lot bigger and heavier than skydivers or kites. Even a roof that was used to things la
nding on it might struggle with an out-of-control satellite.

  Grandma and I looked through the window at the firefighters lowering the skydiver to the ground. Everyone ducked to avoid a Frisbee he knocked loose, as it looped the loop on its way down.

  “Oh, the magnet roof. I see,” Mom said. “Don’t let that worry you. I doubt it can attract satellites.”

  Grandma sniffed. “Why shouldn’t it land here? This is as good as any other house.”

  Sometimes when Mom and Grandma said “I love you,” it came out sounding like an argument. Truth was, they only argued for the fun of it. They agreed on most everything, and I could tell that neither of them took this problem seriously.

  “Maybe we should move,” I said.

  Mom waggled her very realistic-looking fairy wings at me. My mother wore fairy wings and a tutu every day, even to pick me up from school. Lucky for me, there were stranger moms in Calliope. Well, as strange, anyway.

  “I’ve got ten kids coming in the morning,” Mom said. “We’d never find another house with space for parties. I can’t move the Fairy Wonderland.”

  She had a point. The animals and trees would be pretty hard to fit in a moving van.

  Mom half skipped, half danced outside to wave her wand at the firefighters as they packed up the fire truck.

  “I was born in this house, and it’ll take more than a satellite to get rid of me,” Grandma said. “This old house can stand up to anything. Your mom and I have rebuilt all the damaged parts over the years. It’s solid as they come.”

  That didn’t help at all. While Grandma was great at building things, Mom was another story. We still used a spice rack she had put together. It had come with instructions even I could understand, but instead of keeping her jars of herbs and spices neat and tidy, it flung them out into the kitchen like tiny out-of-control satellites.

  We were doomed.

  I followed Grandma into the kitchen. It was the biggest room in the house, so we used it as our living room as well. It worked fine in winter, when the stove kept the whole room warm, but in summer it felt like a sauna around mealtimes.

  Grandma took down a pot and a bunch of herbs that hung over the sink.

  “Mrs. Cuthbert’s tree smashed a huge hole in the house,” I said, gripping the edge of the kitchen counter.

  “The house wouldn’t stand for that sort of nonsense twice,” Grandma said with a shrug, sliding the biggest chopping knife out of the knife block. “It was pure bad luck, that’s all.”

  “What if we get bad luck again?”

  Grandma chuckled and leaned her hip against the sink. “I bet the satellite would bounce.”

  “Bounce! How could it bounce? The roof is metal, and a satellite is metal—I guess—and metal doesn’t bounce. It would just burn a hole right through, wouldn’t it?” I gasped for breath, pushing my glasses farther up on my nose. “This isn’t a joke.”

  Grandma patted my nose with a bunch of chives. “You, Robyn Tinkerbell Goodfellow, are a born pessimist.”

  Reminding me of my embarrassing middle name did nothing to help, but Grandma was too busy humming to herself while she rinsed the herbs to answer any more questions. I dumped my backpack onto the part of the kitchen sofa where the springs stuck out, flopped into my favorite spot, and flicked on the television.

  “Do I hear the TV?” Mom yelled from the porch. Dealing with sugar-rushed toddlers all day gave her lightning-fast reflexes and bionic hearing. She preferred I do something creative to stretch my brain in the afternoons, but my brain already felt as stretchy as pizza cheese.

  “Nope,” Grandma called back, winking at me.

  I flipped through the channels until I found one that looked interesting. Thanks to Grandma’s rejecting anything but public stations, the best we had was the local news.

  “NASA predicts the XR-26 satellite’s orbit will continue to deteriorate until the craft reenters Earth’s atmosphere sometime in June. For now, scientists believe the satellite has a low chance of making landfall,” said the news anchor. I could tell by her serious expression that she did not believe that story any more than I did.

  My stomach tightened into a nervous little ball. When Mrs. Cuthbert chopped down her ancient sycamore tree the previous year, it had smashed my bedroom wall and ceiling to splintereens. I would have died if I’d been in bed. A satellite had farther to fall and would hit a lot harder than a tree.

  Something went ping-zip near the stove. Grandma yelped, and a tiny thing whizzed through the air near my head. The ancient glass vase on the coffee table exploded into a million flying shards. I threw myself backward onto the sofa, grabbing at my chest and gasping for air.

  “Stupid spice rack! My mother gave me that vase!” Grandma panted, hurrying over to sweep up the mess. She patted my knees, which were curled up near my nose. “Oh, Sparkles. Don’t look so worried. You heard them. They say the satellite’s going to land in the ocean. Even if they’re wrong, I’m positive this house can withstand any satellite NASA throws at it. You’ll see.”

  It couldn’t stop a tree.

  By the time Grandma swept up the last of the glass, the news had finished and What’s Current had come on. I crossed my fingers for something a bit less nerve-racking than killer satellites, like “The Calliope Pedigree-Cat Show” or “Mr. Wilkins Grew a Giant Eggplant.”

  I did not get it.

  A dark-haired woman with very red lips smiled at the camera, a microphone in her hands. “Last weekend, Calliope’s Towne Park played host to a most unusual family get-together. Three generations of the O’Malley family gathered for a picnic, as they do at a new location every month.”

  The screen showed a shot of the park, followed by a view of several picnic tables sagging under a ton of food.

  “Against very steep odds, many of the O’Malley grandchildren have been born with albinism, a rare inherited condition that often causes visual problems as well as very pale skin and blue eyes. It certainly produces a striking family resemblance.”

  Shaking, I pointed the remote at the TV and lowered the sound until I was sure Grandma couldn’t possibly hear it over her banging pots and pans. Albinos. Like me. I’d asked Mom and Grandma a million times where I had gotten my albinism, since both of them had dark hair and decent tans. Mom said that both parents had to have the gene for a child to have it, and the parents’ skin tone didn’t matter. But no one else in Mom’s family had albinism. Only me.

  Maybe the gene was stronger in my dad’s family. Or maybe the O’Malleys were his family! After all, how many families with albinism could live so close by? But Mom wouldn’t tell me anything about him except that I reminded her of him. I’d never even met him. I thought I never would.

  The next shot showed a class-field-trip-sized group of kids of different ages. Quite a few of them had the same hair as mine, pale as moonlight and curly as a bucketful of springs under their sun hats. The remote control toppled out of my fingers and onto the floor.

  Surely there were more people like me out there than just this one family. But how many of them had frizzy spirals for hair? Because every one of the kids filmed in Towne Park that day did. I could have slipped in and shared the picnic without looking a bit out of place, and I always looked out of place. Always. Even though I was lucky with my albinism and only needed to take care in the sun and wear glasses, I still stood out.

  The story ended and a new one came on, but I stared straight ahead until my eyeballs nearly dried out. If the reporters mentioned the satellite again, I didn’t hear it. I barely heard Grandma ask if I wanted her extra-special, personally invented Plum Pullover for dessert.

  During dinner, Mom peered at me over the top of a spoon loaded with plums. “What’s wrong, kiddo? You haven’t said a word all through dinner.”

  I couldn’t tell her about the O’Malleys. Nothing made my mom clam up faster than when I mentio
ned my dad. “Nothing.”

  “It’ll be the satellite thing,” Grandma said.

  I groaned. That too.

  Mom waved her hand in the air as if it still had her wand in it. “I shall cast a shield of fairy dust over the house to protect us all.” Sometimes I wondered if Mom was artistic, like she said, or downright peculiar, like Grandma said.

  I rested my cheek on my hand and poked at my food. I had almost forgotten about the stupid satellite, thanks to the O’Malleys. My dad had to be one of them, which meant I had to be one of them too. All I had to do now was figure out how to find him before the satellite flattened me.

  One month was a long time when it came right before Christmas or my birthday, but it was no time at all with a satellite hurtling toward my house.

  * * *

  • • •

  After sunset and bedtime cookies, I trudged up the stairs in a terrible mood. Mom appeared from her workroom and followed me to my door, grinning a grin almost as wide as her whole face.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “I thought I’d tuck you in.”

  Technically, Focus Pocus masters weren’t supposed to be tucked in after they were ten years old, but we had made up that rule before we knew about satellites. “Shouldn’t I get into my pj’s first?”

  She reached in front of me and grabbed the door handle. “In a minute.”

  The door swung open. I blinked, then blinked again.

  Glowing stars covered every space on the walls and ceiling. Dozens of them, like small colorful galaxies. The most amazing thing, though, hung right in the middle of the ceiling.

  A large white paper moon, glowing brighter than all the stars, real and pretend. Fluffy clouds floated around it and caught the moonlight.