“You can’t tell anyone,” Nico says to me before telling me the whole story. “Do you swear?”
“Yes.”
“Swear it, Ada.” “I swear.”
He looks at me, takes a deep breath, and then he starts talking.
It started soon after we moved here. When Nico broke that window and started doing chores for the Lowells. The first time he went, it was just ordinary stuff like washing dishes or mopping the floor. But then the second time, he made a freaky discovery:
The Lowells have a tiny room that is identical to ours, also hidden below their staircase.
When he was vacuuming, Nico noticed the very edge of the door on the wall, mostly hidden behind a bookcase, and—being my troublemaker brother—he decided to push aside the bookcase, open the door, and go inside. But unlike the room under our staircase, this one was not empty.
“It was filled with toys,” he tells me. “Cool toys. Stuff that we could never afford. So well, nobody was around, so I thought I could play with the toys just a little bit. But then Mr. Lowell caught me while I was playing with this really cool Transformers truck, and I dropped it and it broke.”
Mr. Lowell told Nico that the toys were collectors’ items, and the truck he broke had been very expensive. And now he owed the family thousands of dollars, plus the money for the stained-glass window he
also broke since he had been playing instead of doing chores. Mom and Dad are always talking about how worried they are about money—I mean, they talk quietly so we can’t hear, but we always hear them. So Nico was scared about them having to pay all that money.
But Mr. Lowell came up with an idea. He told Nico that he was thinking about building some toys of his own, and if Nico would help him by playing with different toys and telling him what his favorites were, then he wouldn’t make our parents pay for the stuff he broke.
“So that’s what I was doing when I went over there,” Nico explains to me. “I wasn’t doing chores. I was playing in the little room. And Mr. Lowell was watching from the camera.”
Mr. Lowell explained that the door had to be closed when he was in there, because Mrs. Lowell would be mad about letting him play with the toys, so she couldn’t ever find out. He recorded what was happening using a camera up on the ceiling, and he watched. But then one day, Nico needed the bathroom really badly, and he couldn’t get out of the room. He was banging on the door, and nobody would let him out. He was panicking. By the time Mr. Lowell finally opened the door, Nico had wet his pants.
Mr. Lowell made fun of him for wetting his pants. He said he was going to tell all Nico’s friends about it, and my brother had to beg him not to.
After that, the visits continued. Even when Mrs. Lowell found out about it, and she made Mr. Lowell tell Mom that they didn’t want him coming anymore, he told Nico privately that he still needed to keep coming.
“And then I told him no,” Nico whispers through the darkness of my bedroom. “I said that I couldn’t come anymore. That I didn’t like it, and I was bored of playing in the room. And also, I I was scared. Except he told me that I didn’t have a choice.”
Mr. Lowell told Nico that if he didn’t keep coming, he was going to sue our family for not just the broken toy and the broken window but also all the damage Nico had done to the other toys while playing in the room. He said that we would be homeless and that our parents would hate him. That worked for a little while, but then when Nico
said that he was going to tell them anyway, Mr. Lowell used a different approach.
“He said that if I told anyone about the room,” Nico says, “that he would kill my whole family. He said he would kill Dad first, then Mom, then you.”
And now he’s crying. I climb out of my bed and lie next to him on the sleeping bag. I put my arms around him. The weirdest thing is I am not crying. Practically everything makes me cry, but I’m not crying now.
I’m angry.
“Nico,” I say, “Mr. Lowell could never hurt our dad. Our dad is a lot bigger than he is.”
“He told me he could do it. He said he’s done it before.”
I don’t think it’s true. Mr. Lowell is no match for our dad. Nobody is. Mr. Lowell is just a big bully.
“We have to tell Mom and Dad about this,” I say.
“No!” Nico sobs. “Ada, you promised you wouldn’t tell anyone! You swore!”
“But this is really serious.”
“If you tell anyone,” he says, “I will never, ever trust you again for the rest of my life.”
His dark eyes are shiny in the moonlight. He looks like he means it. But Nico is only nine years old. Even if I tell, someday he’s going to realize I did the right thing.
Right?
“You promised you wouldn’t tell!” he reminds me. “You better not break that promise, Ada.”
“Okay,” I finally say. “I won’t tell them. I won’t tell anyone.”
Nico lets me wrap my arms around him, and eventually, he stops crying and then his breathing evens out. He’s asleep. But I’m still wide awake.
I’m going to keep my promise to my brother. I won’t tell anyone about the secret he told me.
Except Mr. Lowell needs to know that Nico is never going over to his house ever again.
