Charlie's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

That night, Charlie climbed the three floors of the storybook house with the green door. The clubhouse filled the top room. Boxes and old junk crowded every corner. Bridgette stood by the window with a girl two years older than Charlie. "Find the old, broken thing," Bridgette said. "That's the test. Get it right." Charlie's stomach twisted. He had no idea what she meant. The room held a hundred old, broken things. A cracked lamp. A chair with three legs. A dusty box of tangled string. Guess wrong, and he wasted his one chance. The older girl, Jojo, leaned against a shelf and watched him. She grinned like this was a game she already knew. Charlie turned in a slow circle. He couldn't ask. Asking would prove he didn't belong. So he did the thing he was good at. He looked. He looked hard. Most junk in the room was dusty and gray. But one shape near the wall had no dust on the strings. Someone touched it often. A battered viola leaned there, its varnish faded, one edge cracked and softened. A baby rabbit sat beside it. The rabbit was small and brown, with two tiny fangs poking from its mouth. It nosed the viola's broken corner, then looked up at Charlie. He froze. He almost pointed at the rabbit and blurted the wrong answer. Jojo snickered. She turned to Bridgette. "Is your brother always this funny?" She thought he was lost. She thought he'd fail. Charlie ignored her. He knelt by the viola. The crack was old. The strings were new. "This," he said. He set his hand on the faded wood. "It's old. It's broken. But somebody still plays it. That's why it matters." The room went quiet. Jojo's grin dropped. Bridgette stepped forward and stared at Charlie. "Nobody told him," she said softly. "He found it himself." She picked up the viola and held it like something precious. "This was our grandmother's. We've been fighting over who fixes it." Charlie's chest loosened. He had guessed right. He had seen what the others missed, again. Bridgette looked at Jojo, then back at Charlie. "He's in," she said. "He earned a look at least." Jojo crossed her arms but said nothing. Then Bridgette's face changed. She turned the viola over. A folded paper stuck out from the crack, jammed deep inside the body. "Wait," she said. "What's this?" She tugged it. It wouldn't come free. "Somebody hid something in here." She looked at Charlie, and now her eyes were serious. "You found the viola. But you didn't find what's inside it. And I can't reach it." Charlie stared at the tiny gap in the wood. His hands were smaller than anyone's in the room. Everyone was looking at him now.