The Lost Things Club Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by J. S. Puller

  Cover art copyright © 2021 by James Gulliver Hancock. Cover design by Neil Swaab.

  Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: August 2021

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  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Puller, J. S., author.

  Title: The Lost Things Club / J. S. Puller.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2021. | Audience: Ages 8–12. | Summary: Visiting her lovable younger cousin in Chicago over the summer, twelve-year-old Leah tries to help him recover from the trauma of a school shooting.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020030153 | ISBN 9780759556133 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780759556102 (ebook) | ISBN 9780759553903 (ebook other)

  Subjects: CYAC: Cousins—Fiction. | Post-traumatic stress disorder—Fiction | School shootings—Fiction. | Jews—United States—Fiction. | Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.P787 Lo 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030153

  ISBNs: 978-0-7595-5613-3 (hardcover), 978-0-7595-5610-2 (ebook)

  E3-20210709-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To: Doctor Stephanie Kaplan

  From: Your Loyal Companion

  Thank you for all the childhood adventures!

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was lost.

  There are lots of different kinds of ways to be lost. I don’t mean to say that I didn’t know where I was. I knew exactly where I was: sitting in the back seat of my mom’s silver Chevy Impala, cruising south on I-94, past billboards with splashy logos and smiling faces. And it wasn’t like I’d forgotten who I was or where I was going. I was Leah Abramowitz, a brown-haired, brown-eyed lump of a girl, heading down to Chicago from my home in Deerwood Park, about an hour north.

  This was a new kind of lost.

  The kind that left me antsy, fidgeting in my seat, inventing new ways to keep myself busy.

  He isn’t talking.

  I had already looked up several websites that were posted on the billboards we passed, just to figure out what they were. A country-western radio station, a touring Broadway musical, and a customized car-mat service, for the record. Staring out the front windshield, between the headrests, I held up my phone and took a picture of the Chicago skyline. It was like a jagged row of teeth, biting a perfect blue sky. I studied the picture, my eye drawn to one of the smaller skyscrapers; it looked like some kind of crystal, with its corners sliced off, a sloping, smooth diamond on the top, catching the sunlight.

  What was that place?

  Did amazing and wonderful things happen there?

  I opened a browser on my phone and typed “chicago building diamond shaped top” into the search bar.

  The Crain Communications Building.

  A picture of the building came up immediately, along with a link to the Wikipedia page. I clicked on it and tried to read, but the text on the page blurred in front of my eyes.

  He isn’t talking.

  I heard the words again and again in my head.

  I closed Wikipedia.

  Next, I opened up an app that let me fit together the pieces of a virtual puzzle. This one was a picture of a beautiful hiking trail. The kind where lost campers met up with the monster with a chain saw in the first five minutes of a horror movie. I could usually put puzzles together in my sleep, but after sliding all the edge pieces to one side of the screen, I gave up and closed the app.

  I just wasn’t in the mood.

  Maybe I could play some music?

  But my earbuds were in the trunk, at the bottom of one of my duffel bags.

  Check my email?

  I’d already done that twice.

  Update my apps?

  Everything was already up-to-date.

  Anyway, they were all just excuses to ignore the reality of my situation.

  We were getting closer.

  Closer to the apartment where Uncle Toby and Aunt Lisa lived.

  With TJ.

  He isn’t talking.

  TJ was my cousin, named after Uncle Toby, because Aunt Lisa insisted. Toby Isaac Cantor Jr. A mouthful for such a small kid, not even eight years old, who still asked me to check under his bed for monsters when he slept over at our apartment, up in Deerwood Park. “TJ” felt more appropriate, somehow. Two little taps on the keypad. Two beeps. Little noises for a little boy.

  A little boy who wasn’t himself.

  “He isn’t talking,” my mom warned me, as I packed my duffel bags for the three weeks I was spending in Chicago.

  “What do you mean, ‘isn’t talking’?” I asked her. I knew TJ. Sometimes, it was impossible to get him to shut up. Aunt Lisa was an English teacher, and she’d had TJ reading and writing practically the moment he was born. Every day, she insisted, he had to write a hundred words. And read for at least half an hour. He knew words that I didn’t even know. Words like “omnipotent” and “obfuscate” and “octogenarian.” Words I had to look up after, while pretending I knew exactly what they meant in the moment. He went through books so fast that he was visiting the library once a week, at least, always coming back with his arms—and Aunt Lisa’s tablet—loaded, his eyes gleaming brighter than silver coins as he admired the covers with their bright, colorful characters. He gave me long, thoughtful book reports about all of them, even though I kept telling him that I wasn’t his teacher and he didn’t have to.

  “I mean not talking,” my mom replied, leaning against the doorframe. “Uncle Toby says not a single word.”

  “How is that possible?”

  She didn’t have an answer for me. And I think that was part of what was scaring me.

  I liked answers.

  I liked them a lot.

  Every July, w
hile my mom traveled out of the country for work with her boss and her boss’s boss, I spent three weeks with Uncle Toby, Aunt Lisa, and TJ. Those three weeks were always the best weeks of the year. We’d visit museums and go to concerts in Millennium Park. See plays. Ride the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier. Take long, lazy walks along the shore of Lake Michigan. Make faces at the fish in the aquarium. Have all kinds of adventures. Tell each other silly stories until we fell asleep laughing.

  But TJ wasn’t talking.

  Which meant this summer wasn’t going to be like other summers in Chicago.

  I had the sinking suspicion that there wouldn’t be any adventures.

  Or stories.

  For the first time ever, I was beginning to dread getting there. Which, of course, meant we were there before I knew it.

  But I swallowed my fear. I was always really good at hiding my feelings. I learned that if I let my feelings show, people usually bothered me about it. Especially teachers. I always hated it when Mr. Gardener, my third-grade teacher, asked me “How’s life at home?” It was none of his business. So I learned to never look sad, and I never let myself cry, either. Not anymore. Not since my parents split when I was eight years old, and my dad moved away.

  There weren’t any skyscrapers or museums or monuments where Uncle Toby and Aunt Lisa lived. Technically, yes, their home was in Chicago. In a neighborhood called Oak Lake. But it was about as far from the excitement of downtown as you could get. The streets were evenly spaced, latticed like a piecrust. Along both sides of the car, there was nothing but town houses and trees. The occasional shop. And then more town houses and trees. The only clue that we were in the city at all was the rumbling of the elevated train lines, somewhere in the distance, hidden behind—you guessed it—town houses and trees.

  The curbs were cluttered with parked cars. So many that we had to go around the block three times before my mom found a spot. We grabbed my duffel bags and walked to Uncle Toby and Aunt Lisa’s front door. A buzzer let us in, and we climbed up the cement stairs, huffing and puffing the whole way.

  “What did you pack in here, Leah?” my mom asked, trying to hoist the strap of a duffel up higher on her shoulder.

  “Just stuff,” I said.

  Clothes. Shoes. A toothbrush. My laptop. My tablet. The tablet charger. My phone charger. Three external batteries. A portable keyboard. My Nintendo Switch and its charger. Nothing special.

  Aunt Lisa was waiting on the third floor, in the doorway to their apartment. She had tight bleached-blond curls that spiraled down to her shoulders, and she wore a pale pink dress, with little roses embroidered across the hem. She was so pretty. Like a picture. I quickly took out my phone and snapped one with the camera.

  “Leah!” she said when she saw us, in her lilting Southern twang. “Oh, don’t take any pictures of me, sweetheart! I’m a mess this morning.”

  Her idea of a mess was most people’s idea of a classy magazine shoot. The photo looked great. She reached out and took the duffel bag from my mom, letting out a grunt of surprise. “Ooof, that’s heavy. You planning on moving in, Leah?”

  She always asked me that.

  “So much stuff. She’s turning into a teenager,” my mom said. “Twelve now. I only have one year left until it happens!”

  “Oh, teenagers aren’t so bad. You just need to learn how to work with them. My students? Every year, they come in snarling like tigers. But by the end of the year, they’re all just sweet little pussycats.” Shaking her head, she ushered us inside. “Toby!” she shouted, calling down the hallway. “Toby! Get over here. Your sister is here with Leah.” She turned back to my mom. “He’s been in his study all morning, fiddling with this new gadget he picked up. It’s some sort of drone.”

  I looked around the front room. We hadn’t visited since March, and it was July already. But it hadn’t changed. It was in pristine condition, in fact. Picture-perfect. Just the way Aunt Lisa liked it. Not a speck of dust to be found. The same white-and-gray couch facing the TV. The same bookshelves, so tightly packed that the extra books were lying on the top in jagged piles. The same kitchen table, cluttered with papers and notebooks and whatever Aunt Lisa’s latest summer project happened to be—she always had one, because she said it helped her not miss her students so much. But something felt… different. What was missing?

  “Hello, hello,” Uncle Toby said, coming in from the hallway. He was a large man, almost as round as he was tall. His hair had thinned into a dark ring around the base of his skull long ago, but his beard and mustache were still thick and black, with only the faintest hints of silver. He might have been intimidating, all that weight, all that power. Like a grizzly bear. But really, he was all marshmallow on the inside.

  “Talking about my new drone? It’s great. It reminds me of the spy drones we used in the CIA,” he said, taking a sip from a bottle of orange pop—I almost never saw him without one.

  Aunt Lisa swatted his side with the back of her hand. “Don’t start with that again. You were never in the CIA, Toby.”

  “That’s just what I want you to think,” he said, his eyes shifting to me, like he was checking to see that I was listening. “If you knew my true identity, I’d be forced to erase your memories.”

  “And how would you do that?” Aunt Lisa asked.

  He smiled absently, but it looked a little thin. “I fear I’ve said too much already.”

  “Probably fancy government nanotechnology,” I said, pinching my fingers together. “Robots that are so bitty they crawl in through your ear and mess with your brain.” I’d started reading Wikipedia pages and found one on nanotechnology a few days before. Really, I was happy to read any old page. I loved the “Random article” link. Every page I read was like a little treasure. Shining information. Part of the larger puzzle that was the world.

  My favorite pages, though, were about people. I liked to figure out what made someone special enough to have their very own page.

  Aunt Lisa huffed. “Sweetheart, I think if nanotechnology was able to do that, I would have used it on your uncle to reprogram his brain years ago.”

  “Now, that’s just insult on top of injury,” Uncle Toby said.

  He walked over to give my mom a kiss on each cheek before leaning down to look at me, his hand on his knee. “How’s my favorite Illinois niece?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Why don’t you get Leah settled in and show her that drone of yours?” Aunt Lisa said. She turned to my mom. “I’ll bet you could use some coffee, Hannah.”

  My mom groaned happily. “Yes. Please.”

  “Come on,” Aunt Lisa said, setting my duffel bag down on the floor. “I’ll put on a fresh pot.” And without warning, she snatched the bottle of pop out of Uncle Toby’s hand. “And you. Healthy food from now on, remember? It’s on Ms. Weinstein’s list.”

  “Hey,” he said in annoyance.

  “We’re all going to follow everything on that list, Toby. All of us.”

  And with that, the two of them disappeared into the kitchen.

  “That was harsh,” I said, wondering who Ms. Weinstein was and why she was suddenly controlling Uncle Toby’s diet.

  “Good thing she doesn’t know where I keep my secret stash,” Uncle Toby said, picking up my bag with a grunt. “This way; we’re putting you in the study this time. There’s an air conditioner in the window, so you should be very comfortable.”

  Air-conditioning. I’d read that Wikipedia article a week before on a sweaty, humid morning when I went to work with my mom and she insisted on opening the windows instead of cranking the AC in the car. The article said there was evidence of primitive air-conditioning as far back as ancient Egypt.

  It was pretty primitive here, too.

  Uncle Toby and Aunt Lisa’s building had been built decades ago, before central air-conditioning was a thing. The hallway was stifling, the heat swelling up the floorboards so they creaked and groaned with every step. I followed Uncle Toby, cringing at the noise. But w
hen he passed TJ’s room, I stopped and looked in through the doorway.

  I felt something twist in my throat, like I’d swallowed a live goldfish. But I forced it down.

  He isn’t talking.

  The bed in TJ’s room was made.

  It was neat. Impeccable, as a matter of fact.

  TJ was sitting on it, at the corner where the bed met the wall. He had one of his pillows in his lap. And he was staring at it. I noticed that he didn’t have any books open beside him.

  “Hey, Hedgehog,” I said, taking a step toward the threshold of the room, then taking a step back for some reason.

  He looked up. TJ had the same chubby, round features as Uncle Toby, but he had Aunt Lisa’s light coloring. His eyes were storm-cloud gray.

  And there were heavy bags under those eyes that hadn’t been there back in March. Deep purple.

  He didn’t say anything.

  After a moment, he turned his attention back to the pillow on his lap. Just like that. Like I hadn’t been there at all.

  “Hedgehog?” I said.

  This time, he didn’t look up at all. Like he hadn’t even heard me.

  “TJ?”

  Nothing.

  “Hey. It’s me. Your favorite Illinois cousin.”

  It hurt that he didn’t respond. The kind of hurt I couldn’t exactly describe, but one that cut deep into my soul.

  Not that I let it show. If I wasn’t going to cry in front of my third-grade teacher, you can bet I wasn’t going to be caught dead crying in front of Uncle Toby.

  Uncle Toby put a hand on my shoulder. I looked over at him, and he shook his head before gesturing for me to follow him.

  So it was true. TJ wasn’t talking. I found that I missed the sound of his voice. Usually, when I came to visit, TJ would come bounding into the front room the second he heard the buzzer. He’d be jumping around like a little acrobat.

  “Leah! Leah! Come to my room! Read me a story! Read me a story!”

  That was it.

  That’s what was missing when I first came into the apartment. The feeling that something was different.

  There was no TJ.

  No roly-poly Hedgehog.

  The front room felt empty without him. Incomplete, somehow. Like a puzzle that was missing a piece.