Read Online Where I'd Like to Be by Frances O'Roark Dowell - Free Book Online

of all this noise, Murphy gave a dramatic clearing of her throat. We all turned to look at her. “I think this is an important occasion that should be marked somehow,” she said, and the rest of us nodded. “Maybe if we got together in a circle and somebody said a few words.”
    “Something exactly right,” Ricky Ray put in.
    “Something just right,” Murphy agreed. She looked at me. “You read a lot of books, Maddie. Maybe you know the right thing to say.”
    “Give me a few seconds,” I told her, thinking she should be the one to say something; she always had such amazing things to say. But she’d handed me the task, so I walked away from the fort to stand behind a sycamore tree, searching for the words like I might find them on the ground among the leaves and the acorns. I peeked around the tree and took the long view of what we’d built. The fort was nestled in a stand of trees, the dappled shadows of leaves falling across its walls. What was once a clearing of dirt and moss and rocks was now home to this collection of boards and nails. I wished that it had an address people could write letters to.
    I didn’t have many words to say about it, which was unusual for me. When I walked back to the fort, I motioned for everyone to join me in a circle. I looked at the window and imagined a curtain of blue calico blowing through it.
    “Today is a good day,” I said. “And we have made a good place. May it stand for a long time among these trees.”
    I thought that keeping it short was best. I could tell by the look in everyone’s eyes that they agreed with me. We smiled at each other, and then Murphy said, “It’s time for the ceremonial march inside, beginning with the youngest.”
    And so Ricky Ray, beaming so hard with pride I thought he might just burst into rays of light, led us inside.
    Standing in the center of the room, I looked up at the ceiling and turned slowly around. Who would have believed we could’ve done this almost entirely by ourselves?
    None of it was easy work, and it took us two weeks of squeezing in time between school and practices and church activities, two weeks of hiking from the Children’s Home up Allen Avenue, over Dewey Payne Road, and a quarter-mile through the woods that ran along the edge of Hampton’s Dairy Farm, hiking until the woods thinned and we could see the backyardsof the houses in Logan’s neighborhood through the black walnut and sycamore trees, and then counting one, two, three, four houses, until we were in the farthest back part of Logan’s backyard.
    I would have made that hike five times a day. Six times a day. It was that worth it to me.
    The inside of the fort was one room, ten feet wide and fourteen feet long. This was plenty of space for everyone to stretch out and get comfortable, which everyone immediately did. You could look into any person’s eyes and see that they were coming up with dreams for the fort. Me, I wanted a place for cubbyholes, the kind that my kindergarten class had, where we could keep our things and maybe leave each other mail.
    Even without furniture, the fort was the kind of place I liked to be. There were two windows, one east and one west, and a nice breeze blew through, bringing with it the smell of the woods. Wednesday, after we’d gotten the roof raised with the help of Mr. Potter, we’d all pitched in and painted the walls a soft off-whitewith paint Logan had borrowed from his parents’ basement. Now the walls seemed to glow with light.
    “I believe I’d like to live here forever,” Ricky Ray sighed, leaning back against the wall and breathing in deep a mix of fresh paint and autumn trees.
    The rest of us just nodded yes. We didn’t even need to say it out loud.
    After that first day, we were all at the fort as often as we could be. Murphy and I got into the habit of hiking up there after we worked at Mr. Potter’s store on Monday afternoons. No one else was there on Mondays—Logan was gone off to play in the