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It’s 3 AM, and Zoey can’t sleep. She climbs out of bed in her sock feet and putters into the kitchen for some cold pizza. It can give you strange dreams, she knows, but it’ll soothe her racing mind.
It’s been a couple weeks since they moved to Mayview. Even though she’s settled into the new routine in the new town, some nights she still can’t sleep. Tonight, she’s worried about her old friends. She’s already made new ones here, but it’s hard to keep up with both old and new, and she knows her old friends will eventually slip away. At least Max has a cell phone so he can text his Baxborough friends. She isn’t even old enough for Facebook yet.
She creeps through the mountains of unpacked boxes in the living room (the family has yet to figure out what to do with them). She can hear Max’s voice coming from his room, presumably talking to himself or sneaking in a phone call with Sam or Doghouse. Once she reaches the fridge and opens it, the light inside goes off, and she hears Max’s voice falter, then start back up again. She sighs. She doesn’t want to bother him, but she could use the comfort of another person (or brother) right now.
She slips a slice of pizza out of the box and moves to sit down on the couch. She doesn’t want to turn on a light in case it disrupts her brother or her dad, so she sits and eats in silence.
Something moves to her left. Zoey squeaks and jumps off the couch, ready to get her father, but it’s only Max with his baseball bat held defensively in front of him.
“What are you doing?” They both whisper to each other quickly. Max drops his stance, and now his bat hangs by his waist.
“You first,” Zoey says, eyeing the bat.
“...I thought there was an intruder,” Max says, though something in his voice makes Zoey wonder what kind of intruder he was prepared to face.
“What kind of person robs a convenience store?”
“Hopefully one who can be taken down by a 12-year-old with a baseball bat. Now, what are you doing up?”
“I couldn’t sleep.” Zoey holds up her pizza. “I needed pizza.”
“Oh…”
She can see Max wondering if he should go back to bed. His eyes dart around the room as if there are other people there. He whispers something like “...go back to my room.” Then he sits down next to her.
“Hey,” he says. “I don’t know if you want to talk about what’s been keeping you up, but weird stuff’s been going down in this town lately. I’m up a lot at night now, too. But you can come to me with whatever, you know that, right?”
Zoey nods.
“No, seriously. Wake me up at all odd hours of the night. I can handle it. I’m so proud of how you take care of us now that mom’s gone, but you deserve to get taken care of too,” Max says. He sees the tears welling in Zoey’s eyes, and he is not prepared to deal with it. Quickly, he looks around the room for something else to talk about, and an idea springs to mind.
“Hey, Zoey, you want to build a blanket fort?”
And for the rest of the night (thank god it’s not a school night), they use the endless boxes in the living room to create the best blanket castle they’ve ever seen. And when Dad Puckett wakes up in the morning, he enters the living room to see his two children covered in a giant blanket in the middle of the fort, sleeping the morning away