The Dangerous Doors of Shannon Anderson

Chapter Twenty One

By 1:00 AM the house had been dead quiet for two hours. I made my move, my bedroom door creaking as I slipped out into the hallway, tip-toed down the steps, and sat down at Dad's desk with my last-hope letter clutched in one hand. I clicked on the little green law library lamp that sat on his desk and started pulling out drawers looking for an envelope. When I found one, I folded my letter into neat thirds and tucked it inside, licked the adhesive, and sealed it shut with a kiss for good luck. I felt a little guilty, but that was probably just my Catholic showing. Then I started the hunt for a stamp, the forty-six cent sticker that would determine my whole future.

"What are you doing?"

I swung around in Dad's leather chair to see Aidan standing in the doorway.

"Nothing that concerns you," I whispered. "What the hell are you doing awake, anyway? Don't you have school?"

"It's Friday."

How was I supposed to know that? My days had become monotonous blurs of terrible TV shows, my nights full of romps through stories where the date had no bearing. I couldn't be bothered to keep up with something as unimportant as the day of the week.

"Seriously, Shannon, tell me what you're doing or I'm going to get Dad," Aidan said.

Aidan had never been much of a tattler, so that surprised me a little. "If you must know, I'm mailing a letter."

"To who?"

"Don't worry about it."

"I am worried about it," Aidan said, suddenly looking a lot younger than he was, more like my little brother and less like the little man he was slowly becoming. "It was really freaky when you disappeared, you know. And you've been acting like a weirdo since you came back."

"Don't I always act like a weirdo?" I teased.

"A super weirdo, then. I'm serious. Who's the letter for? Do you have a secret boyfriend or something?"

I thought of Fritz, who for all his manly hunting instincts was alarmingly chaste. I was fairly certain he didn't know what a vagina was. I laughed out loud, and even to my own ears it sounded cold.

Aidan took a step back. He almost looked like he was going to cry, and suddenly I felt really awful, and not just because I knew he was about to run upstairs and wake up Dad. My brother was a tough kid; he'd been hit by more pitches than I could count, and he hadn't even cried when he had to get stitches after falling out of the big oak tree in our backyard when he was ten. For him to look that upset because of me... I hadn't realized until now the toll getting stuck in New Switzerland had taken on my family. And as frustrated as I was that no one cared to believe the truth about where I had been, if I looked at it from their perspective I could see how vanishing for three days, missing all my exams, and coming home with a seemingly outlandish story about magical book doors and massive hurricanes might be pretty unsettling.

I wanted to give Aidan a huge hug, but the second I stood up he took off up the stairs. I followed behind him, dashing up to my own room to stash my letter somewhere before Dad could find it. But Aidan was so much quicker, he stopped me in the hallway just as Dad was shuffling out of his room, pulling on his robe.

"What've you got there, Shan?" Dad said through a yawn.

"Nothing." I hid the envelope behind my back and tucked it into the waistband of my pajama pants. "See?" I held up my empty hands. Dad rolled his eyes.

"Shannon, I'm not an idiot. Hand it over."

"No."

"No? Should we call your mother then and see how she'd like to handle this?"

Considering that would probably result in a one-way express ticket to the loony bin for me, I said no. And that's when I had my second great idea.

I grabbed the envelope out from my pants and tried to tear it in half as quickly as I could, hoping to have it shredded into a million bits of explanation letter confetti before Dad even knew what I was doing. But the envelope was made of that weird reinforced paper that the post office used for really big envelopes, and no matter what I tried, even pulling at it with my teeth, it wouldn't tear. Dad plucked it out of my mouth and opened it.

"No, no, no!" I tried to snatch it back from him, but he turned away from me and paced towards the window at the end of the hall. I scurried after him.

"Oh, Shannon," he said so gently, turning to me with the letter in his hand. "Why won't you just tell us what happened? No one will be angry with you."

"I did tell you what happened!" I yelled. "I told you exactly what happened, and I'm sorry it didn't work when I tried to show you. I don't know why the door didn't pop up, but that's been happening a lot lately, the door doesn't always show up right when I want it to, and you can't imagine how much that's been freaking me out. But I need you to stop asking me to tell the truth and be honest with you, because I already did and you didn't believe me, so now I have literally no idea what else I can do because the honest to God truth is that I stepped into New Switzerland during the rainy season and had to hide out inside a tree for three days because I twisted my ankle and smashed my knee and Fritz wouldn't let me go back to my own door until the rain stopped."

Aidan's eyes were as big and round as baseballs and now he really was crying a little, and I was crying, and Dad was pushing his glasses up his nose and running a hand through his thinning hair and looking like he really wished Mom was here.

"First thing in the morning, I'm going to call your mother's psychiatrist and see if we can't get your appointment moved up to tomorrow. If we can't, we're going to the ER. Something's not right."

"Nothing is right," I corrected. "I failed high school, NYU is this close to kicking my ass out, I can only get into my books seventy-five percent of the time lately, no one believes a thing I say anymore, and now you're going to force me to go sit with some stranger and lay all of this on her. What, is she going to believe me when even you won't, Daddy? No, of course she won't. She'll whip out her prescription pad and give me something to tone down my out-of-whack brain, because that's what you think this is, don't you? And that's what she'll think, too. Please don't call tomorrow, Dad. Please."

"Go to bed, Shannon. We'll talk in the morning."

I stalked off to my room, slammed the door shut, and opened The Swiss Family Robinson. Mercifully, the bamboo door appeared beside my desk right away, so I scrambled through, signaled for Fritz on my whistle, and waited.

A/N: Welp, so much for that plan. What is Shannon going to do now? Let me know your theories in the comments!