How High the Moon Read online

  “Well, you guzzled it like a pig,” I told him as I sat down on one of the empty crates sitting beside the metal door that only Mr. Morgan and the delivery guys used. I turned another one on end so Charlie could sit down, too. “It’s just from the fizz,” I told him. “Burp and you’ll feel better.” Charlie didn’t know how to make himself burp, so I showed him how to swallow air and burp it back up. “Joey Jackson showed me that trick. He knows how to do all sorts of cool things.” I burped a big one. Charlie laughed, so I did it again, my loudest ever, and he laughed all the harder.

  Charlie’s burps were about the size of a pimple, which made me laugh until I snorted, and pretty soon we were doing nothing but burping and cracking each other up. That’s when Mr. Morgan swung around the corner and started down the alley. “There he is,” I told Charlie. “Come on!”

  Mr. Morgan’s eyes got buggy when he got up close enough to see me good. “What you got on your face there, Teaspoon?” he asked. I explained as quickly as I could, because I wanted to get to the important question. Mr. Morgan didn’t let me, though. Not until he told me that respectable little girls didn’t paint their faces. I reminded him that I wasn’t respectable anyway. Mr. Morgan looked at Charlie then, wincing, like he thought maybe the orange on Charlie’s lips might be lipstick, so I set him straight on that one.

  Mr. Morgan didn’t look too happy when I asked him if me and Charlie could sneak in to see the Disney cartoon. And I knew why. He told me once that I couldn’t tell a soul that he let me in for free, because if Mrs. Bloom ever found out, he’d get the ax.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Morgan,” I said. “Charlie’s the only person I’ve ever, ever told. Cross my heart. But Charlie’s not going to tell a soul because he doesn’t talk. I’m not kidding. You can’t get a word out of him for nothing. Watch…” I turned to Charlie. “Say something, Charlie.”

  “What do you want me to say?” Charlie asked, like he didn’t have a brain in his round, scabby head. I jabbed him in the gut with my volcano-cracked elbow, and he grunted.

  “Mr. Morgan,” I said, “Charlie’s dad is in jail, and his ma is in heaven. Now he’s living with Mrs. Fry, his great-grandma. And although she’s real nice, it can’t be much fun living with an old lady who doesn’t do nothing but sew and knit and turn channels on her TV looking for a love story.

  “Look at him once, Mr. Morgan. Ain’t he the most pathetic thing you ever saw in your life, with his head all gouged up like that and not a friend in the world but me, and I’m not even his friend? This is a good movie for kids, not like that East of Eden or Giant you said you’d never have let me watch if you’d seen them first. Charlie’s never going to get to see a movie at the Starlight unless he gets snuck in, same as me. Ain’t that a shame? And he’s only eight years old, so he’s got to wait four whole years before he’s old enough to get in without an adult. Who knows if he’ll even be here by then. His dad could get springed from the clink and come get him, or his grandma might get cured of her rheumatoid and ask for him back… you never know. I’ve only got to wait two more years, though, so if it’s that you don’t want to let two kids in for free because you think that’s doubling the chances of getting the ax, then let Charlie go in my place and I’ll wait for him out here.”

  Charlie looked horrified when I said that, like he thought I meant it, even though the truth of the matter was, if Mr. Morgan was only going to let one of us inside, then it was going to be me.

  Mr. Morgan sighed. “Just this one time,” he said. “And you two be quiet in there, or I’ll have your hides—right after Mrs. Bloom has mine.” Then he slipped inside to see if the coast was clear.

  The second Mr. Morgan disappeared, Charlie turned to me. “I don’t feel good again,” he said. And for sure, he didn’t look good. His face was as pale as popcorn despite of the spatters of butter-colored freckles. I told him to burp again and he’d feel better, but did he listen?

  “What if we get caught?” Charlie said. “Then all three of us are gonna be in big trouble.”

  “Nobody is even in the building yet, Charlie, and we’ll be watching from the catwalk. Nobody goes up there but for Mr. Morgan when a light needs changing. I’ve been doing this forever and I’ve never gotten caught. I don’t plan to, either.”

  “But we told Grandma G that we were just walking down the street. We said we’d be right back.”

  “She won’t even know how long you’ve been gone,” I said. “She’s always asking Teddy for the right time because that grandfather clock of hers keeps losing it. According to that old thing, it will probably look like we’ve only been gone for ten minutes.”

  Luckily, Charlie didn’t have time to think up more reasons why he should be a worrywart, because Mr. Morgan opened the door. He didn’t say anything. He just poked his head out, looked up and down the alley, then nodded when he saw that the coast was clear.

  Charlie almost fell over when he got inside because the place was midnight-dark and there was a stack of candy boxes lined up just inside the door. I steadied him while Mr. Morgan clicked a switch to give us at least enough light to see where we were going.

  Once Charlie’s eyes adjusted, his Orange Crush mouth opened and his eyes were sparkling so bright they would have made mine water if I’d had a cold and they were dripping to begin with. I gave him the shush sign, even though who would have blamed him if he’d shouted out Wow! at the top of his lungs, right then and there.

  “Look up there, Charlie,” I whispered, pointing to the sky above the top edges of the castle and stretching high above our heads. The ceiling was forty-five feet high. Cobalt-blue, and dark even when lit with thousands of twinkling lightbulb stars.

  The door that would lead us up to the catwalk was across from the lobby. Not the front lobby, with its dangling chandelier as big as a Volkswagen Beetle, but the lobby where the bathrooms and two concession stands were lined up. That meant that we didn’t have a wall to hide us, and had to crouch down between the first and second rows of seats and wait while Mr. Morgan hurried up the stairs. When he got to the top of the third tier of seats and slipped inside the projector room, I grabbed Charlie’s arm and ran him fast past rows of seats, showing him how to crawl on hands and feet like a monkey over the swirly carpet.

  Up, up, up the steps we went, past the balcony seats that sat behind a wrought-iron guardrail, getting to our feet only when we reached what Mr. Morgan called the nosebleed seats.

  The door was open when we got there, and we slipped inside. “Crouch down, Charlie,” I said, “so if anybody comes into the theater, they don’t spot us through the windows.” The windows in the projector room had no glass, because the projector gave off far more heat than the sun coming through a row of school windows and if the room was closed up, Mr. Zimmerman, the tall skinny guy who ran the projector, would have cooked like a french fry.

  Mr. Morgan unlocked the attic door and was about to scoot us up when Charlie moved to the front window and hooked his fingers on the ledge. I went to stand by Charlie and together we peeked out into the dimly lit theater. “This place was built way back in 1928 by some big film company,” I told Charlie. “But they sold it to some other theater outfit, who messed with it and almost ruined it. So Mrs. Bloom bought it after her rich husband croaked, and she fixed it up just how it was when it was first built.

  “See those gold light things hanging along the walls? Mr. Morgan said they’re the originals. Mrs. Bloom found them in the basement and had them shined up like new and hung back up.

  “She brought back the old ways, too. And at every movie, the show starts with the emcee, Randolph Carter, wearing one of those tuxedo suits, stepping onto the stage under a spotlight with a microphone in his hand, announcing what we’re about to see. The crowd claps, and then that red velvet curtain with the gold tasseled fringe at the wavy bottom rises up so we can see the screen.”

  I looked at Charlie to see if he was impressed. He was, so to dazzle him a little more, I told him, “This place cost a whopping
six hundred thousand dollars when it was built back in ’28. That’s five zeros, if you don’t know, which is a whole lot.”

  Mr. Morgan checked his watch, gave a little sigh, then leaned over and whispered, “Watch this, Charlie.” I grinned because I knew what was coming, and I couldn’t wait to see Charlie’s face when it happened.

  Mr. Morgan opened the door to the electricity room—the one I figured would make Teddy as happy as electricity school itself if he saw it, with all those switches and fuse boxes—and stepped inside. There was a flick of a switch and light spilled out of the three giant domes over the balcony seats. Charlie uttered an “Ooooo,” and I grinned, because I knew the magic was just beginning. Another click woke up the lights at the floorboards, and their beams raced up walls the color of beach sand.

  And then it happened. Mr. Morgan flicked the switch and brought the cobalt sky to life. “Wowwwwww,” Charlie whispered, his head tipped back. His mouth stayed open but no sound could even get out when Mr. Morgan flipped another switch and lit the stars.

  “Ain’t that something, Charlie?” I said in a hush. “Mr. Morgan doesn’t know how many stars are in that sky, but there’s got to be a billion.”

  “There’s gotta be,” Charlie whispered back.

  We stood there quiet for a few seconds, watching the stars twinkle. Me thinking about how nobody in their right mind could blame Ma for wanting to give up her piano bar playing and becoming a movie star once she saw the inside of the Starlight.

  I pointed at the blue behind the top of the castle walls. “Look there, Charlie. Don’t those treetops look real? They aren’t though. They’re just painted ones.”

  Suddenly you could hear the faint giggles of girls in the distance, and Mr. Morgan opened the attic door in a rush, then pulled us to it by our jackets. “You tell Charlie the rules,” he whispered as he gave our backs a shove.

  “Ow,” Charlie said when the heavy metal door shut behind us with a click, probably clipping his heels. And then, “Uh-oh,” when he found himself standing with his toes and nose butted up against the black metal steps that went straight up like a ladder. “What’s this?”

  “It’s the steps to the attic,” I said, my voice hushed as I grabbed the railing and climbed up a couple of rungs. “Hurry now, or we’ll get caught.” I went up a few more steps then cranked my head around to see if Charlie was following.

  He wasn’t.

  I motioned him up, but Charlie just stood there. He looked scared. Scared enough to turn and start pounding on the door for someone to let him out. I backed down the steps and hissed in his ear, “You gotta come up, Charlie. Mr. Zimmerman could come into the projector room any minute now, and he’ll hear us if we’re standing here. Come on!”

  When I reached the top of the stairs, the attic was wool-blanket hot. I waited a second to let my eyes adjust, because the only light up there was the pale glow coming from where the spotlights poked through the floor, then I turned and looked down.

  “I don’t like high things,” Charlie said from where his feet were frozen, halfway up.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said in a hushed voice. “Just hang on to the guardrails. It’s not like this the whole way.”

  Charlie hung on for dear life as he climbed the rest of the steps.

  If Tinkerbell had looked from the ceiling, she would have seen a flower-shaped catwalk, the path to the flower’s center straight like a stem, and six walkways sprouted out like petals. At the end of each of the three top petals, underneath, where the ceiling was the lowest, there sat a round, empty hole about the size of a tetherball, serving no purpose that I could see but for letting a kid watch a movie if they lay flat on the catwalk and turned their heads sideways to get the right angle. Mr. Morgan said the catwalk was set up like that so a guy could go down any one of the paths to change a burned lightbulb or to reach the wiring if there was an electric problem. I loved the shape of the catwalk, and wanted to run down the length of its stem and out onto each petal. But Charlie? Well…

  When he got to the top of the stairs, he stopped and looked up at the bunches of cables that stretched across the ceiling and the vents big enough that we could have run through them standing upright without bumping our heads and he froze all over again. I could tell that he didn’t care for the way the ceiling was tall only in the middle—like a tent with a pole holding it up—and the way it slanted down so far in every direction that anybody over the age of five would have to duck or downright crawl unless they wanted to scrape their heads on the ceiling when they reached the circular ends of each petal.

  “Just look at the catwalk, Charlie,” I said when I saw how he was weaving. “See? Nice and flat. No more steep steps. And look, the floor is only two feet below us. Course, we can’t walk on it, or… or… they’ll hear our footsteps. So hang on to the guardrail and stay over on this side so there’s no chance of falling off the edge, because if you fall, you can bet they’d hear the thud.”

  I just made up that last part because I knew Charlie would have croaked on the spot if I’d told him the truth—that the reason the catwalk was there in the first place was because when Mr. Morgan or an electric man came up to fix something, they wouldn’t have to step on the floor, which was really the theater ceiling. If they did, they’d plunge right through and fall forty-five feet down, smashing right onto the red velvet theater seats and splattering like bugs.

  The top petal was my favorite hole to watch from, because it was dead-center in front of the screen. I led Charlie there and tugged his jacket to get him to sit down. I pointed to the hole. “That’s where we look to see the movie.”

  Charlie sat in a tight ball. “When’s the movie starting?” he asked, his pale gray eyes bouncing all over the place.

  “Soon,” I said, even though it would have been more accurate to say, Not anytime soon.

  When I sat here by myself, waiting that hour or so for the workers to get in and make the popcorn, and Mrs. Feingold to open the ticket booth so people could buy their tickets and refreshments and take their seats, I always kept busy by thinking up good things. Things like the opening credits coming on and the words, STARRING CATTY MARLENE appearing across the screen. Then Ma driving home from Hollywood in Teddy’s car, because the second she found her dream, she realized that she missed me and Teddy until it hurt. I’d imagine her bringing home lots of movie-star money, and paying Teddy back so he could go to electricity school, and her and me spending our afternoons at the Starlight, sitting in the first row, sipping soda pops from waxy paper cups and dipping our hands into a red-and-white-striped box of buttered popcorn.

  But there was no chance to think up good things like that with Charlie up there. He was sitting with his feet pinned under his butt, fidgeting as though he was afraid that if he didn’t hold his feet down, they’d go banging around on the floor. He leaned over to look down every couple of seconds, though, while his nervous hands picked at his clothes and the scabs on his head. I offered him a half of the piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint I found in the back pocket of my jeans, but he didn’t want any. He had me so riled up that by the time the movie started, I was more glad than he was.

  It sure was a good movie, though, with those dogs cute as can be—one respectable, one not—falling madly in love. Even Charlie forgot about being scared long enough to giggle behind his hand at the funny parts as we lay on the catwalk, the metal diamond-shaped floor working like cookie cutters against our bellies, the tops of our heads touching and our faces cocked sideways. Every now and then, when the beam from Mr. Morgan’s flashlight waved below because somebody was talking too loud, or putting their feet on the seat in front of them, or throwing popcorn, I’d look down at the heads below us to see if I recognized anybody.

  When the movie ended, the kids clapped, and everybody started leaving. Man, oh man, were they loud. Messy, too. When Mr. Morgan turned up the lights, the theater looked like a dump, with the seats and carpet polka-dotted with popcorn, and tipped-over paper cups and empty candy boxes
strung all over the place.

  Charlie stood up, like he was going to leave right along with the crowd, so I had to pull him back down. “Can’t go down yet, Charlie. Mr. Zimmerman has to rewind the movie to the reel it came on, and Mrs. Feingold has to count up the ticket money. The concession stand people have to clean their area and restock candy, too. Mr. Morgan will get busy cleaning while the others do their work, because he can’t open the door until the coast is clear.”

  I don’t know. Maybe it was having Charlie swiping at his sweaty face every couple of seconds, twisting his shirt and picking at his head, jumpy as a spooked alley cat, that made time seem to stretch on forever. “Mr. Morgan should have comed for us by now, shouldn’t he?” Charlie asked for the millionth time. Only this time I was thinking the same thing.

  I peered down and saw the floor and seats spiffy-clean, the lights even dimmed. “Come on,” I told Charlie. “We’ll stick our ears to the door. Maybe Mr. Zimmerman’s just being extra pokey today.”

  Charlie got that I-might-pee-my-pants look at the ladder, so I put my pointy finger against my lips, then turned around and went down, showing Charlie how it’s done. He followed me, but probably only because he didn’t want to be up there alone.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I turned and leaned my ear against the heavy metal door, listening for the whir of the projector as it rewound the film, the thudding of footsteps—anything. But there wasn’t a speck of sound coming from behind that door.

  I turned back to Charlie. He was wobbling like a bumblebee in a windstorm as his feet felt for the next step, all while trying to spin his chubby self around to face me. And then it happened: Charlie fell, rolling into me like a bowling ball.

  We rammed against the door with a loud thump. “Charlie, get off me!” I said as I shoved, probably too loud, but man, that kid was heavy.

  The door opened then, and there she was, Brenda Bloom herself.