I just started re-reading The Trespassers by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. She’s a YA author who also wrote the Newberry Honor books The Egypt Game and The Headless Cupid. This one is also a YA book, and I’m pretty sure I bought it from a Scholastic book order back in the day. I think this is probably the case because I don’t own any of her other books, and if I had bought one of her books in a bookstore, it probably wouldn’t have been this one.
The point is, I own it, and because I own it, I’ve probably read it at least three or four times. I like to re-read stuff, especially YA stuff, because you notice different things each time. Also, Snyder writes the kind of books that I can fall into, so I always read it so quickly, that going back to it, the ending is fuzzy all over again and it only falls into place as I re-read it and the bits and pieces of the story that I responded to most strongly before remind me of the rest of it. It’s a different thing than just reading a story and learning what it’s about the first time, if that makes sense.
Here’s the first paragraph (I’ve only read the first chapter as I write this.)
Toward the end of Cornelia Bradford’s sixth-grade year at Carmel Middle School she wrote a very successful report for Mr. Hardcastle’s Language Arts class. Mr. Hardcastle liked it a lot. When she got it back, it had a large, red A at the top of the page. And beneath that the words “Good for you, Neely. Well written and fascinating material. Particularly fascinating to me, and to everyone in my core class this year.” The title of the paper was “The Tragic Story of Halcyon House.”
Anyways, the story is about two kids, a brother and sister, named Cornelia and Gregory. The kids go by “Neely” and “Grub,” respectively, and Neely is older. Somehow (I can’t remember how yet because I’m only on the first chapter) the kids find a way to sneak in to an old, abandoned mansion in their neighborhood. The mansion still has lots of stuff in it, and the kids find that it is a great place to play, even if it does seem a little haunted and even if the stories about why it’s abandoned are vague and varied, with a hint of scandal. Actually, that probably makes it more fun.
Through a series of events, the kids are discovered in the house when the family that owns it — the ancestors of the guy who built it — move back in. The family’s only child, a son, Curtis, is the one who discovers them, and Neely strikes up a kind of friendship with Curtis that is mostly perpetuated by the fact that she and her brother still want access to the house. As I remember it, it isn’t that Neely doesn’t want to be nice to Curtis, but Curtis is a difficult kid to like — domineering, threatening and petty when he doesn’t get his way.
I’m not sure exactly how it all plays out, but some pretty bad stuff happens and Curtis eventually leaves town again, with only Neely really understanding all the secrets that surrounded his family’s abandonment of the house, then and now. I’m looking forward to finding out the rest of it.
The real reason I wrote this post is, it wasn’t until I read that first paragraph just now that I really read the word “halcyon” correctly for the first time. (See the correct stress and hear it at this link to Dictionary.com.) Until I read it tonight, I had always pronounced the word to myself, and possibly said it out loud, as Hal-ick-con. I mixed up the “c” and the “y” consistently, every time I read it, my whole life. I wondered if it may even have started when I read this book, because I think my pronuncioation has a nicer cadence when paired with the word “house” than the real one.
So I was wrong, and I only now know it. And that makes me sad. I guess that sounds a little overdramatic, but I have this whole part of my little world that was built up by the relationship I have with the things I read when I was a kid. And having even one little piece of it all the sudden turn in to something else is really weird and disconcerting. It’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. The plus side is, I can now use the word “halcyon” in conversation without mispronouncing it. (Assuming it ever comes up. It isn’t applicable to much I can think of in my life just now.)
Thinking about it some more, I realized that I DID look up that word for the first time when I read this book. I remember that I was reading it before falling asleep, and for some reason I was sleeping in my little brother’s room. I’m guessing that this might have been right after he got a new bed, a waterbed, of which I was extremely jealous. To get me to shut up about how unfair it was, my parents probably negotiatied with him to switch rooms with me for a few nights at some point. So there I was, sleeping in the water bed, with my brother’s faded, blue football-themed comforter, and I distinctly remember looking at the temperature gauge at the end of the bed and seeing that it was made by a company called “Halcyon.”
It was the very day that I must have learned what the word meant (but not how to pronounce it) and I had just finished reading a book that was about how calling something that name didn’t guarantee things would be perfect, and how it could even mean that things went worse than anyone could have expected because the name made everyone less prepared. And I also remember how, back then, I had read somewhere about how water beds could kill people. It was very unlikely, but it could happen if the temperature gauge broke. The sleeping person could just lie there in the water, getting colder and colder, but not waking up and then eventually they wouldn’t be able to wake up at all and they would just die, frozen.
I kind of doubt that that could really happen. I don’t know where the heck I read it. Maybe I was confusing it with the Rescue 911 episode where they resuscitate the little girl that falls asleep in a snow bank. Either way, I know it was real for me then. And now I have a reason for why, around the age of eight or nine, I sometimes snuck into Brian’s room if I woke up late at night, just to check that he was okay.
I don’t know if anyone cares about all those memories but me. But I’m still going to post them here so that I won’t forget again. So maybe next time I pick up this book and I’m not quite sure what happens, I’ll be able to look back and remember not just what the story is, but what the story is for me.
Now, on to Chapter Two…
