The Third-Floor Bedroom

Joey’s family was very wealthy. His parents were extremely successful business people. His father was the president of the Smile Toothpaste Company, which was the most popular toothpaste company in the United States of America. His mother was the vice president. Smile Co. was almost like a monarchy. When Joey’s grandfather retired, his father took over as the president of Smile Co. The company was founded by his great, great grandfather and has been a family tradition ever since. Every president of Smile Co. had only one son. It just always conveniently worked out that way. No one ever had a brother or a sister. Just one little boy— one doomed little boy. Maybe Joey’s mother had started back on birth control after he was born or something. Joey knew he was the heir to the Smile Co. throne. His parents were always telling him how proud they were of him. He got good grades, he didn’t do drugs, and he never disobeyed them. 1

Every time Joey would brush his teeth, his father would walk into the bathroom, put his hand on Joey’s shoulder and talk about how Joey would make a wonderful Smile Co. president. But every time Joey’s father did this, Joey’s heart would sink. Joey didn’t ever want to be the president of the toothpaste company. In fact, he despised the taste of Smile Co. toothpaste. Joey had only one passion: painting.2

The house Joey lived in was almost big enough to be considered an mansion. There were three floors: a basement; screened-in front and back porches; and a massive lawn containing several gardens with flawless-looking flowers and growing vegetables. However, as big as Joey’s house was, he stayed only in one room.3

Joey’s room was on the third floor at the end of the hallway. He had blue-plaid bed sheets, an off-white carpet. His hamster, Henry, was in a cage next to his dresser. His room was a lot cleaner than most 14-year-old boy’s rooms. All his schoolwork was in a neat pile in the corner of his atomic orange desk, which Joey loved because it clashed with the whole blue theme of his room. Especially his sky-colored wallpaper, which had dull white doves on it, lined up in a pattern. Joey’s mother told him the doves in his room were painted by his great grandfather before he was born. Because of this, Joey had respect for his great grandfather; at least one of his past relatives wasn’t a complete toothpaste freak.4

Joey liked his room, but he loved his bathroom-sized walk-in closet even more. Underneath a pile of Joey’s old clothes was a small cabinet. In the bottom drawer of this cabinet lay his precious paints. His artwork was kept underneath a pair of sneakers he hadn’t worn since he was six years old. Every day, Joey would claim to his mother that he had hours worth of homework. Every day, he sat at his desk, finished his homework in ten minutes, and then locked himself in his closet. Joey loved his paints more than he loved people. He loved creating a two-dimensional world that he could control. He felt as if he was God to the people and creatures painted on the canvases that were set out to air-dry on small shoe boxes behind a curtain of his clothing. At the moment, Joey had several of his best works behind his hanging pants.5

One of the pictures was a life-sized portrait of his hamster. Joey captured everything down to the shine of Henry’s eye and his tiny pink lips and he ran on his spinning wheel.6

Another picture was of a cowboy in the moonlight with an acoustic guitar. He was sitting on a rock, soaking from the rain with his feet sinking into the thick mud underneath him.7

Joey had many other pictures in that bottom drawer underneath the pair of sneakers. He painted horses, dragons, medieval scenes involving knights in shining armor, a quartet of four men playing fiddles, and many other things.8

It was a Friday and Joey had just come home from school. Joey despised school with a burning passion. He was shy and anti-social. The other kids in his class, labeling him as an easy target, would pick on him constantly. Joey was a short red-headed Irish kid. His classmates would refer to him as “the leprechaun” or “carrot head.” As they walked past him, they would shout things like, “Watch out Joey, we’re after your Lucky Charms!”9

Joey came home to find his mother in his room with a very angry look on her face. 10

“Oh dear!” she said when Joey came in, “those rotten kids threw a baseball through your window again!” 11

“Should I call Bill?” Joey replied.12

“No Joey, I called Bill earlier. His mother is very sick and he’s taking time off work to take care of her.” Joey’s mom said back. Bill was the repair man. Joey’s family knew Bill very well because Joey’s mean classmates threw all sorts of objects attempting to break the glass of his bedroom window. 13

“Then who’s going to fix the window?” Joey asked his mother. 14

“Well, there is another repair man I’ve heard of... He’s probably not as good as Bill, but he’ll get the job done.” replied Joey’s mother as she handed Joey the phone book and the phone. She flipped to a page and pointed to a number. Next to this number, bold letters read “Jacque O’Reiley’s Repair Services.”15

* * 16 HOURS LATER * *16

On Saturday at 9 A.M., Joey was in bed, still asleep due to the fact that he had stayed up all night with his precious paints. Joey just laid there sleeping, lifelessly staying still and not moving an inch. His parents were both at work already, and Joey was in his house alone, with the exception of Henry. Joey had just barely opened his eyes when he heard the doorbell ring. He got out of bed, squirmed into his pants, and ran down the stairs to answer the door. He opened the door to see a little man, no taller than he was. By the tool belt attached to his pants, Joey inferred that this was the repair man. 17

“Hallo Mister, ah, Henderson, is it? I be Jacque O’Reiley, repairman extraordinare! Tell me now, where does dis shattered window hide?” The repairman had the weirdest accent Joey had ever heard. He couldn’t tell if it was French or Spanish... or maybe even Italian? The repairman reminded Joey of Mario from the Nintendo games, with his funny mustache and big red trucker hat. As much as Joey knew he had never seen this man before in his life, for some reason he still looked strangely familiar. He might have been a co-worker of his father’s at some point. 18

“Up the stairs.” Joey guided the repairman, pointing to his room on the third floor.19

Joey sat in the living room, reading his book, waiting for the repairman to finish his work in the third floor bedroom. He had only read four pages of his book when he heard the repairman coming back down the stairs. 20

“That be ten dollars, sir. Thank you, and have nice day!”21

Joey looked at the repairman like he was crazy. If he was charging ten dollars, and fixed the window in five minutes, he must have done something cheap. Joey paid the man anyway, figuring he would just call Bill to get a real job done when his mother was well again. 22

“Thank you.” Joey said to Jacque O’Reiley, handing him the ten dollars with a fake smile on his face. Jacque smiled, tucked the money under his red trucker hat, and walked out of the door waving goodbye to Joey. After Jacque left, Joey went upstairs to find out how mutilated his window still was.23

“He probably just smacked duct tape all over it,” Joey thought to himself. His eyes grew wide as he opened his bedroom door. 24

The window was flawless. There wasn’t even a single scratch on the glass.25

* * 25 HOURS LATER * *26

Joey lay on his bed as he broke down in a fit of tears. He had come home from church to find every picture he had left to dry behind his pants missing. They were just gone. Disappeared for no reason at all. Joey cried like a little baby, pondering over what could have happened to his beautiful pictures. Could Jacque have taken them? Probably not. Jacque was in and out of Joey’s room in five minutes. He wouldn’t have enough time to go through Joey’s closet. What would he want to do with a 14-year-old boy’s paintings anyway? Could his mother have found them and put them in the trash? Joey looked over at his bedroom window. It was open. Maybe his mother had opened his bedroom window and thrown all of his pictures into the back yard with firey hatred. That was a possibility. However, Joey didn’t want to talk about it with his mother, so he decided to not say anything unless she brought it up.27

In order to clear his troubled mind, Joey decided to take a walk. Afraid his mother had found his artwork, he put a note on the door instead of telling her he was going out in order to avoid what her reactions might be if he talked to her in person. He walked out the back door, and as he opened the gate leading out of his back yard, he heard a high-pitched squeaking sound coming from somewhere near his feet. Apparently, a poor little baby bird had fallen out of it’s nest. Joey bent down to look for the bird, and his eyes fell upon a small pile of wiggling leaves. He removed the leaves, but did not find a bird. Instead, he was staring back at Henry with his soft caramel fur and cute twitching nose.28

“Henry!” Joey shrieked in surprise, “How did you get here?” Joey picked up his hamster and walked back inside, all the way up to his room on the third floor. He opened the door to find the hamster he had in his hands was, in fact, not Henry! Henry was still in his cage where Joey had left him. The hamster Joey had found must have been a runaway. 29

“This is strange,” Joey thought to himself. “I’ve heard of runaway cats and runaway dogs, but a runaway hamster? In my backyard?” 30

Deciding to keep the newly found hamster, Joey tied a pink ribbon around its neck to tell it apart from Henry, and placed it in the hamster cage. Henry was probably lonely, and needed some company anyway. Joey started walking toward his bedroom door to go down the stairs and back outside, but then he noticed a few unfamiliar spots near his closet door. He walked closer to investigate. There was mud on the carpet. Joey thought that maybe he had forgotten to wipe his shoes when he came inside, but he hadn’t tracked mud anywhere else in his house. Besides, his feet weren’t even muddy. Maybe the dirt was there yesterday and he just hadn’t seen it. Joey knew he had to clean this mess up. He also knew that in order to obtain a washcloth and carpet cleaner, he would have to talk to the one and only woman he did not want to speak to at the moment: his mother.31

Joey shamefully dragged himself down the stairs toward the kitchen where his mom was washing the dishes. Forcing himself to put one foot in front of the other, Joey prepared himself for the reprimanding he would get, knowing his mother had found his paintings.32

“Mother?” Joey whispered cautiously as he walked up to her, staring at the floor instead of looking into her eyes, “May I use the carpet cleaner?” Joey spat his words out as fast as he could so his mother wouldn’t get the chance to interrupt. 33

“Sure honey, it’s in the cabinet under the bathroom sink,” his mother said back. Joey’s jaw dropped at how calmly she was speaking to him. She didn’t say a single word, or even give a hint, about his paintings. Maybe she hadn’t found them at all. Or maybe she was saving the conversation for later when she wasn’t busy. 34

Either way, Joey didn’t want to take his chances. He bolted to the bathroom, snatched the carpet cleaner and tripped back up the stairs to his bedroom. As he scrubbed the dirt on his floor, he looked around his room for something he could use to dry the wet carpet, so it wouldn’t be soaked with cleaning chemicals. Being too lazy to look for a washcloth, Joey opened the bottom his dresser to remove an old shirt he never wore anymore. As he pulled out the shirt, he noticed that one of the doves in the pattern of his sky-blue wallpaper was missing. 35

Since Joey had already been having an odd, stressful day, he decided he must have been dreaming. He blinked and then looked back at his wall. To Joey’s astonishment, not only was the dove still missing, but it looked as if another was peeling off! Joey’s eyes grew so wide they nearly fell out of their sockets. The bird peeled off his wall, and the fluttered out of the still open window in Joey’s bedroom, the window that Joey had thought was left open by his mother, who he assumed was throwing his artwork out of in disgust. But if Joey’s mother hadn’t left the window open, then who did? 36

One by one, the birds peeled off the wall, beat their little wings, and soared out of the open window. Joey took a glance out the window and noticed that the birds were lining up in a row along his backyard gate. He dropped the carpet cleaner and made another run down the stairs and out his back door, not even bothering to tell his mother where he was going. 37

As Joey got closer to the birds, they started flying away. Again, one by one, they were flying down the street. Joey decided to follow his off-white wallpaper birds. Slowly, they flew down the street near the sidewalk in a single-file line. Joey was so busy following the birds he didn’t even know what was going on around him. Eventually, Joey and the birds reached the parking lot of a run-down, partially destroyed empty apartment building. 38

However, the doves did not stop here. They continued to fly through a large, broken window of one of the apartments. Curious, Joey walked up to the window and climbed through it, being carful not to get cut by the broken glass. What he had climbed into was a small room. A small room filled with nothing but a set of stairs leading down to an open door which the doves were flying through.39

Joey walked down the stairs. As he got closer to the door, he heard music. The sound of a chorus of string instruments was reaching his ears. Joey heard some fancy fiddle-playing along with a few acoustic guitar solos. As Joey walked though the door, he spotted a small table right after he entered the room. On top of this table were five tiny people. There were four men in a string quartet. Next to them was a cowboy with his muddy boots and acoustic guitar. But these weren’t just any five minuscule musicians, these were people Joey had painted! 40

“Sorry about your carpet!,” the little cowboy yelled in a shrill voice as he looked up at Joey. Joey just stood there, speechless and awestruck. Then he walked further into the room to take a look around. Next to the wooden table with the cowboy and the quartet stood an antique floor lamp, with tiny horses racing around it. Joey realized that all of the creatures he had painted were in this room. He also realized that the hamster in the cage with Henry was no stray hamster. The doves were perching themselves everywhere, along lamps, the backs of chairs, tables and the ceiling fan. In front of Joey, there was a chair facing away from him, in front of a fireplace. Joey assumed it was fake, because there was no fire and he did not see a chimney outside. Then he noticed the chair was rocking back and forth slightly. He slowly walked up to the chair, being careful to avoid stepping on the tiny knights and fire-breathing dragons he had painted which were fighting near his feet. 41

“Is someone there?” Joey whispered, uncertain about what he might find. To Joey’s surprise, a small man stood up from the chair. As he turned around, Joey saw his red trucker hat and big funny mustache and knew it was Jacque O’Reiley. 42

“I see the birds have led you here,” said Jacque. His French/Spanish/Italian accent was now non-existant. “I’m assuming you are wondering why you are here and what is going on.” Jacque continued. The only words Joey could manage to get out were “Yes sir,” as he stood there awestruck. 43

“Well you see, I am a self-taught magician,” Jacque replied as he bent over the unlit fireplace and pulled a book out of the ashes, which looked ancient. “See this book here?” Jacque asked. Joey nodded. “Well, when I was a small child, I was abandoned here at this apartment we’re in right now. The old hag who used to live here took care of me. I think she might have been a gypsy, or a witch, or something along those lines. She was always reading this book, constantly. I wasn’t allowed to touch it. She kept it in the ashes of the fireplace so that if she saw me with dirty black hands, she would know where I’d been. Then one day when I was seven years old, she just fell over and died. I called 911, and they took her to the cemetery. Since the old hag was dead, I stole her book and taught myself witchcraft. Pretty neat, eh?” 44

As Jacque finished his story, Joey just stood there in shock. He believed in magic, but he never believed he would witness it! That wasn’t what confused Joey though. There was still something he didn’t understand. 45

“But ....why my paintings? What’s so special about them? Out of all the teenage boys in this world, why me?” Joey asked the repairman. 46

“That’s an even longer story” Jacque answered. There was a pause as Jacque looked straight into Joey’s eyes. “I have a few confessions to make,” Jacque said, breaking the silence, “Every time a baseball has smashed through your window, it wasn’t one of your mean classmates... It was me. I was looking for a way to get into your room so I could hex all of your paintings in hopes they would lead you to me. The broken window seemed like the perfect plan, but NO! Bill’s repair services had to beat me to it every single time! So then I had an idea .. I followed Bill home one day and found that the 37-year old man still lives with his mom. She still cooks for him too. So one day when Bill was at work, his mom was making macaroni and cheese for him when he got home. As I watched through the window, I saw the old woman slowly walk out the door to water her flowers. I was lucky she was so old. I think she was half blind and half deaf. Anyway, I took that chance to run inside and pour a bunch of laxatives in the macaroni. My plan didn’t work exactly how I wanted it to. When Bill got home, he felt sick and decided he didn’t want any macaroni. Apparently, his mom did, because as you know, she ended up sick. So while Bill was taking care of his poor, sick mother, I was breaking your window and putting up a bunch of signs for ‘Jacque O’Reiley’s Repair Services’!” 47

As Jacque finished his story, Joey started to turn around and prepare to run. 48

“YOU SICK, CHILD-STALKING CREEP!” he shouted. 49

“Wait,” Jacque replied, as he took hold of Joey’s arm so he couldn’t get away. Then Jacque took the red trucker hat off of his hear revealing a mess of orange hair the same color as Joey’s. After that, he gripped the end of his unusually large mustache and started to pull it off. If Joey didn’t fully believe he was dreaming, he would have had a heart attack at this point. Now he knew why Jacque seemed oddly familiar. There, standing before Joey, was himself. His mirror image. A short, red-headed 14-year old boy.50

The other Joey dropped Joey’s arm as he fell to the floor in shock. He was emotionally drained for the day. Everything just kept getting weirder. 51

“Have you ever wondered why every president of the Smile Toothpaste Company has had only one son?,” Joey’s mirror image asked. Joey looked up at him. “There could only be one president of Smile Co. That’s the tradition. It always has been,. My name is Jeremiah Henderson. Joey, I am your brother. When our mother had twins, she didn’t want to ruin the family tradition that had been going on for generations, so she felt she had a leave one of us on some random person’s doorstep.” Joey’s brother paused for a moment. He put a hand on Joey’s shoulder and then he said “It’s okay, Joey. Stay here. Live with me. You can stop hiding yourself and your passion for painting. We’re reunited now. Here we are starting a new life,”52

Jeremiah paused, and a sneaky grin started to spread out on his face as he finished his sentence: “...and it all began when someone left the window open.”53