Tom pretended it was a tank and stood on his seat and machine-gunned an army of invisible Nazis out the window, but you could tell his heart wasn’t a hundred percent in it.
Then they climbed down again. It was all a little anticlimactic.
“You know what we should do?” Kate said when they were back on the ground. “We should connect these tracks with the old ones in the woods.”
There were some rusty old tracks out there, buried in leaves and sunk in the mud—she and Tom found them one day when they were out exploring.
“Those old things?” their father said. “Been a long time since a train ran on those tracks.”
“All right, everybody!” Their mom clapped her hands for attention. “It’s Kate’s birthday today! Who remembers when my birthday is?”
“Next week,” Kate said.
“That’s right. One week from now. That’s how long you can keep the train. Then, as your birthday present to me, Herbert, you’re going to get rid of it.”
“What?!” Kate said.
“But what if I already got you something else?” Uncle Herbert said in a small voice.
“Did you get me a flatbed truck hauling away a gigantic blazing steam train?” Kate’s mom put her hands on her hips. “Is that my birthday present?”
“No.”
“Then whatever it is, send it back. For my birthday you’re going to get this thing out of here.”
“No!” Kate shouted before she even knew what she was doing. “You can’t! It’s mine!”
3
Kate Said a Lot of Other Things, Too
KATE TOLD HER PARENTS THAT SHE HATED THEM AND that they were the meanest and worst people in the world. She said she never got anything special or good, and even when she did they always ruined it. She said they didn’t love her and all they cared about was their stupid phones.
I wish I could tell you that she said these things in a calm, reasonable tone, but she didn’t. She yelled them as loudly as she could.
Then she said that this was the worst birthday ever, and her mother told her to go to her room, and she said Fine, I will, and she slammed the door, even though at that exact same moment her mom was yelling at her not to slam the door. Kate stayed in her room for the rest of the afternoon.
None of the things Kate had said were strictly true, except maybe the one about it being her worst birthday ever, although when she was two she’d had a fever and spent her whole birthday throwing up, so it was a close call.
Deep in her heart Kate knew that. She knew that her problems weren’t real problems, at least not compared with the kinds of problems kids had in stories. She wasn’t being beaten, or starved, or forbidden to go to a royal ball, or sent into the woods by an evil stepparent to get eaten by wolves. She wasn’t even an orphan! Weirdly, Kate sometimes caught herself actually wishing she had a problem like that—a zombie apocalypse, or an ancient curse, or an alien invasion, anything really—so that she could be a hero and survive and triumph against all the odds and save everybody.
Which of course she knew was wrong. She just wanted to feel special. Like somebody needed her. And obviously, having a steam engine wasn’t going to make her special. Obviously. But she’d felt special for a bit. And now her mom was going to send it back to wherever steam engines came from.
And the worst part of it all, Kate thought—as she lay on her bed, her eyes feeling sticky from crying, and stared glumly out the window, and the afternoon stretched on and on toward evening—was that she kind of saw her mom’s point. Kate hated to admit it, even to herself, but even though the train was real and awesome, it was also insanely big and kind of ridiculous, and, bottom line, it didn’t really do much of anything. Given the untold skrillions of dollars Uncle Herbert must’ve spent on it, he probably could’ve bought, I don’t know, a mini-submarine, or a rocket, or a supercomputer.
Or a robotic exoskeleton maybe. Anything but a stupid steam engine. Maybe he could return it and they could keep the cash instead.
Someone knocked on the door—she could tell from the knock that it was Tom. She didn’t answer. He went away, tried again, went away again, then finally he just came in without knocking and flopped down on the lower bunk. They had their own rooms, but they used to share, and there were still bunk beds in Kate’s room.
Tom just lay there for a while, but he couldn’t stay still for long. He always seemed to have more energy than he could comfortably store in his body, and he had to burn it off somehow. He started singing under his breath. Then he started drumming along with the singing. Then he kicked the bottom of Kate’s bunk. Then he pretended to be shot and fell off the bed to try to make her laugh.
Kate didn’t laugh.
“Go away,” she said.
“At least we get to play on it for a week. It’s better than nothing.”
Somebody must’ve told Tom once that you were supposed to look on the bright side in situations like this. She wished he wouldn’t. It was annoying. Nobody ever took Tom’s presents away. He never got sent to his room. Or it seemed like that anyway.
More silence. He still didn’t go away.
“I think it’s on fire,” Tom said.
“Good.”
“Why are you being mean about the train?”
“Because I hate it.”
“Why?”
“Because I hate everything! Including you!”
“That’s not very nice.”
“I’m not trying to be nice!”
Tom was looking out the window.
“Well, it’s your lucky day because the train really is on fire. Seriously. Look at it.”
Kate looked out the window. She frowned. There was the tiniest flicker of what looked like warm firelight in the cab of the steam engine.
“That’s strange,” Kate whispered.
“Do you think it’s really on fire?”
“How could it be on fire? It’s made of metal.”
They slipped out of Kate’s room together, and out the back door onto the evening lawn. The grass was cool on their bare feet. You’d think that at this point Kate and Tom would have alerted their parents that there might possibly be a flaming steam engine on their property, but they didn’t. Something interesting was happening, and Kate didn’t want the grown-ups to swoop in and take it away. Not yet.
“Hey, look at that,” Tom said. “More tracks.”
He was right: That afternoon the train had just been on a little stub of track, but now bright new silvery steel tracks curved away from it through the grass.
“I thought that was a good idea you had,” said a voice from the shadows. “Connecting them with the ones in the woods.”
Uncle Herbert was standing there, leaning against the train. Kate hadn’t seen him.
“It wasn’t a good idea, it was a stupid idea,” Kate said. “Those tracks are all old and rusty, like my dad said, and they don’t go anywhere, and even if they did, the train doesn’t move. In case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I had noticed, actually,” he said. “Kids aren’t the only ones who notice things, you know.”