The Friendship Song Read Online Free

made myself calm my voice down, and I said sort of movie-hero style, “Look, we’re going to figure this thing out right now. Come on.” I beckoned at her and headed back down her steps.
    â€œWhat? Wait a minute!” she said, but she came out her door and followed me. I was in moose-stampede mode again, so she didn’t catch up to me until I was back across the street in Gus’s front yard. My front yard now.
    â€œHeather—”
    â€œMy name’s Harper !”
    She grabbed me by the arm to make me stand still, and said, “Harper, what are you trying to do?”
    Then she heard it too. I could tell by the look on her face. She didn’t look scared or big-eyed, the way she was when I charged her. Her face just got real, real still.
    â€œWow,” she whispered. “What’s that?”
    Thing is, what we were hearing was so freaky that sometimes it didn’t even sound like music. Sometimes it sounded more like metal banging against metal back in Gus’s junk collection somewhere. Or like tree branches complaining in the wind or maybe tapping against something hollow. But that was just on the surface that it sounded like noise. Underneath, it was music, it felt like music all the time. It went through you.
    â€œThat is what we are going to figure out,” I said to Rawnie, quiet now. “What it is and where it’s coming from.”
    â€œOkay,” Rawnie said. At the time it didn’t surprise me. I just sort of figured she’d want to know, like I did. But looking back now it surprises me a lot. Why didn’t she just say, “No way!” and go home? She barely knew me. But she said, “Okay.”
    We stayed close together and started up the front yard, with the cactus and all the rest of the stuff looking down at us. It was starting to get dark, and the street lamps were coming on. Something threw a shadow on my face, and I flinched. “Hey,” I said.
    The octopus arms on the top of the spindle thing were going around. Each one had a bright-colored fan of metal at the end. “That’s a whirligig,” Rawnie said. “It moves in the wind.”
    â€œOh.” I watched it a minute. It was making a squeaking sound. “That’s not it,” I said.
    â€œNo.”
    We eased deeper into the yard until we were going past the side of the house. It had a big old porch all around the first floor, and I noticed clusters of metal tubing hanging from the edge of its roof, making soft dinging noises. “Wind chimes,” I said. I guessed Gus had made them, because they were weird, like her, with freak-face circles for the pipes to hang from. Later I found out I was right, she did, but by then so much had happened they didn’t seem weird anymore.
    â€œThat’s not it either,” Rawnie said.
    â€œDarn,” I said. We kept going toward the backyard, past some stripped-down motorcycles, an old gas pump with a broken glass globe on the top, some tall things that I figured out later were the skeletons of vending machines, and something that made me jump and go, “Aaaa!” It was a carnival dummy, the kind you might see on top of the funhouse, with its arms in the air.
    â€œLights up ahead,” Rawnie said. Her voice quivered and she sounded scared, but she kept right on walking. So was I, getting scared, and I knew if she hadn’t been with me, I would have chickened out and gone back.
    The lights were strange, all colors but very dim and blurred as if they were floating in fog. The distant music seemed maybe to be coming from where the lights were.
    We plodded toward them without saying a word to each other. Like a pair of zombies we reached the creek and stepped over. Still side by side, we went through the maze of aisles and piled-up junk, and with the lights coloring the sky to guide us, it wasn’t hard to find our way. As we got nearer, the music didn’t really seem to get any nearer,