Page 4 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

Noodle rolled a shoulder in his usual half shrug. He rarely came into full animation unless he was working with our dog, Gummy Bear.

Gummy Bear, who’d never fetched a thing a day in his life. Gummy Bear, who was virtually untrainable. Gummy Bear, who ate almost as much as Theo did on any given day.

Even though Noodle was older than Theo by ten months—Irish twins, my mom always called them, andnotin reference to the bright red hair we all shared—he was considerably shorter in stature. He wasalso wary of anything that didn’t scamper about on four legs. He spent hours every day trying to teach our slobbering, wheezing bulldog to perform the most basic of tasks, but woe to the older sister who tried to get him to step any further out of his comfort zone than that. When he’d been a toddler, he’d lived almost entirely on buttered noodles, which was where his nickname had come from. It was easier to call a sweet, shy, pasta-loving kid Noodle than it was to call him Aloysius.

Actually, it was easier to call a kid pretty muchanythingother than that. I honestly don’t know what my mom had been thinking when she’d filled out our birth certificates. Clotilde, Beatrice, Theodore, and Aloysius were bitter pills to swallow for kids living in a place with exactly one drugstore.

“How long ago did it happen?” I asked, since of all the disasters facing me right now, this one was the most pressing. Money was only material and scientific experimentation inevitable, but a rogue Frisbee had the potential to bring the sky down upon our heads.

Noodle shifted from one foot to the other. His deeply freckled face was covered in streaks of mud, his fingernails so dirty that I felt sure he’d spent the entire afternoon sitting out back, trying to drum up the nerve to go get the Frisbee on his own.

“About an hour,” Trixie informed me. She grimaced, her nose wrinkled at the tip. “I was gonna offer to get it before you got home, but…”

“She’s a scaredy-cat,” Theo finished for her.

“Oh, yeah? I didn’t see you stepping up to volunteer,” Trixie countered. “All you did this afternoon was pull every cleaner out from under the bathroom sink and read through the ingredients.”

Theo stuck his tongue out at her. “I wasresearching.”

“You were making a mess.” Trixie turned to me with something like triumph. “He left them out. Every last bottle. Trying to go pee in there is like playing a game of hot lava with containers of bleach.”

I started to pinch the bridge of my nose, but the sight of Noodle’sanxious expression stopped me. “Okay,” I said with a deep, fortifying breath. I even managed a smile, though I was pretty sure my insides were quaking just as much as his were. “First things first. I’ll get the Frisbee from Mr. Holmes. When I get back, I expect the cleaners to be put away—and I meanallof them, Theo—so Noodle can shower. Then…science experiment? Debate practice?”

“Dinner,” all three kids announced, and with so much force that I recognized it for the nonnegotiable it was.

“Okay. Dinner. It’s a plan.”

I paused just long enough to press a kiss on Noodle’s dirt-encrusted hairline before heading back out the front door. It would have been hyperbole to say that my legsactuallyquaked at the task ahead of me, but there was no denying the twist in my stomach. I’d lived inside this house for twenty-two of my twenty-four years. For every single one of those years, Jasper Holmes had been our next-door neighbor. I’d always considered myself a no-nonsense sort of person, but I had nothing on Jasper. The man was blunt to the point of rudeness and terrifying in ways that only children living in a neighborhood likes ours would understand.

In the area where we lived, west of town, the houses were small and ramshackle, the lawns covered in weeds rather than grass. More than one front yard boasted a car up on cinder blocks, and you could practically hear the collective group pulling out the pots and pans whenever it rained. We were all holding on by a single thread, and with each passing day, you could hear that thread starting to unravel more.

Everyone except for Jasper Holmes, that was—the one man in the world I didn’t want to see today, and the one man in the world I had no choice but to tackle head-on. When it came to Noodle, a lost Frisbee was right up there with a retainer accidentally tossed in the trash or a baby thrown out with the bathwater. He’d feel miserable and guilty until he had the cheap plastic toy back in his care.

Granted, there was a greater likelihood that the sky would open upand rain down gold bullion than that Jasper would give the Frisbee up, but I had to at least try.

I could feel the watchful eyes of my siblings as I made my way to the end of the drive and ducked under the broken trellis that separated our property from Jasper’s. As soon as I set foot across that barrier, it was like being transported to another world—a magical world where oleander shrubs sprang fully formed from the land and mums continued thriving well past the first frost. A white-columned birdbath stood in the center of the yard underneath an arch of purple wisteria vines, and even though I’d never seen anything other than a pack of crows hovering over our own house, there was some kind of yellow-billed bird splashing playfully around in it.

IfIwere a miserable old man who considerably worsened the lives of everyone around me, claiming every wayward toy thrown over the fence as my personal property, my garden would be a tangle of poisonous weeds and hidden trapdoors, but what did I know? Maybe this was Jasper’s way of luring people in, transforming his home into gingerbread and sweet treats for the unsuspecting.

His shadow crossed over the window, so I knew he was watching as I knocked on the door. Naturally, that didn’t stop him from making me wait a full sixty seconds before finally opening up.

“What the hell do you want?” he barked.

“You know the answer to that, Mr. Holmes.” I stretched my face in a smile and infused a note of false cheer in my voice. It was the same voice I used at the library whenever a patron tried to convince me to turn the SafeSearch function off the public computers. “Noodle accidentally threw a Frisbee over the fence earlier today.”

“And he made you come all the way over here to get it back? Typical,”he said by way of reply. Then, “You’re not doing that boy any favors, you know.”

“Idoknow,” I agreed, still in my bright voice. “But he’s just a kid, so let’s skip this part, shall we?”

This wasn’t the first time I’d made such a request, and I strongly doubted it would be the last. People who didn’t know Noodle would never understand him. They were always trying to push him deeper into childhood or all the way out of it, as if he either had to be a developmental failure or a wise old soul born with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Give him a break, my heart screamed at them.He’s only twelve years old. He likes crossword puzzles and to suck on ice cubes made from lemonade. He gets along with animals more than people. He wants the world to be a softer, kinder place, but he’s smart enough to recognize an effort in futility when he sees one. That makes him scared and sad and, yes, a little bit sensitive. Deal with it.

I never said any of that out loud, of course. I just kept smiling my too-tight smile.

“I know I should’ve sent him over here to get the Frisbee himself, but I wanted to personally apologize,” I added. “I’m trying to get him to train Gummy Bear at the park instead of our yard, but he doesn’t like going there without one of us to keep him company. Some of the kids can be really mean.”

Jasper Holmes looked me over with a twist to his upper lip. He had one of those faces that was easy to read, his heavy features so weighed down with time that they seemed to show every passing minute. Despite his advanced age, he still had a good head of snowy-white hair, his shoulders so strong and wide that you could practically feel the power emanating off him. In his youth, I imagine he was a highly attractive man. Too bad his heart was made of stone—if he had a heart at all.