Ivy and Bean_ Books 4,5,6 - Annie Barrows [7]
Bean looked up. The wooden square was getting closer. She looked down. The floor was far away. Ivy waved. “You’re doing great.”
“Aren’t you coming?” asked Bean.
“Oh. Sure.” Ivy stepped onto the bottom shelf. “Gosh. It bends.” She took a deep breath, caught hold of the washcloth shelf, and pulled herself up. “You guys have a lot of towels.”
“Uh,” Bean grunted. She was concentrating. She climbed past a bowl of fake fruit and bonked her head on the ceiling. “Ow.” Holding on to the shelf as tight as she could, she looked up. The door to the attic wasn’t really a door. It was a square of wood in a frame. It didn’t have a handle or hinges or anything.
Bean leaned out, trying not to look down, and pushed against the wood square with her hand. Nothing happened.
“What’s going on up there?” said Ivy.
“Can’t get it open,” Bean puffed.
“Scooch over.” Now Ivy was leaning out, too. “We’ll push at the same time. One.”
“Two,” they said together.
“Three!” They bashed the wooden square as hard as they could.
The door leaped upward and thumped down somewhere in the darkness above them. From the open hole, black, lumpy dirt rained down on Bean and Ivy and all the towels and sheets in the closet.
Bean began to cough. “What is this stuff?”
Ivy was trying to blink the dirt out of her eyes. “Your parents probably put it there to stop us. Like they use poisonous snakes to guard treasure.”
“Dirt won’t stop us,” Bean said. “We like dirt!”
“Nothing will stop us!” said Ivy.
Bean reached out and grabbed the edge of the opening. A pile of dirt fell on her face. She ignored it. With her feet, she pushed herself up until her top half was inside the attic.
There was a silence.
“Well?” said Ivy.
“I think we’re the first people who have ever been in here,” said Bean.
“Really? What does it look like?”
Bean’s voice echoed from above. “Well, it’s empty, and there are lots of boards poking up sideways from the floor. It’s not very tall. There are little window things on each side. It’s kind of mysterious. It’s …”
“It’s what?” asked Ivy
There was a pause. “It’s our own private little house.”
“Hang on!” Ivy called. “Here I come.”
UH-OH
“They’ll never figure it out. Not in a million years,” Bean was saying. “We’ll just disappear and then—ta-da!—we’ll come back a few hours later, and they’ll have no idea where we’ve been.” She put the door back into its hole and turned to Ivy. “It’ll be our secret fort.”
Ivy was moving into the shadows. “We’ll fix it up so it’s all comfy and cozy. With silk curtains and rugs and poofy pillows.”
Bean walked carefully across the boards. “Right over here we could put a little stove, so we could make hot chocolate,” Bean said. “We could have a cat, too. And maybe one of those tiny monkeys.”
“We could get beds and have secret sleepovers,” Ivy went on. Her mother didn’t let her have sleepovers yet. “I could sneak out of my house and come over here—”
“And I’ll tie a string to my toe and dangle the string out the window. You pull on the string to wake me up, and I’ll let you in, and we’ll come up here. Oh, I know! Instead of beds, we could put up hammocks, like a ship.” Bean hugged herself. It was such a great idea. “And they’ll never know. They’ll say, ‘Where have you been?’ and we’ll say, ‘Us? We were right here.’ And it won’t be a lie!”
“And when we grow up and they think we’re in college, we’ll live here,” said Ivy. “We’ll go out at night to gather food.”
“We’ll cut a hole in the wall and go out on the roof,” said Bean. “After the attic, the thing I want most is to go on the roof.”
Ivy got up and knocked on the wall. She could hear outside sounds through the wood. “We could make a balcony,” she said. “Our own secret balcony on our own secret house.”
“It’s going to make Nancy wacko,” Bean giggled.