Rica Baptista: The Box of Possibilities

All morning, I watched Serenity walk by the box. She didn’t look at it. She didn’t pick it up. I don’t even think she noticed it was there which, in my opinion, made my cousin the weirdest person in the whole entire world.
It was a mysterious . . . sealed-up . . . box. It could contain anything. A magic wand. Radioactive material. Love letters from an alien world. Anything!
Yet Serenity completely ignored the box. She paid a lot of attention to other things: she stared at her phone constantly, she obsessed over her fingernail polish, and it seemed like every day she came up with a different idea about what she was going to be when she grew up. But the box? I don’t think she even knew it existed.
To be fair, Momma and Dad hadn’t paid much attention to the box, either. This morning Momma used the box to put her feet on when she tied her shoes. Dad tripped over it on his way to work and then just kicked it over to the wall. Didn’t they know the secrets to the universe could be in that box?
“It’s just a box from your uncle Moose,” Momma told me. “He’ll be back from his trip later this week, and he’ll stay here for a few days before he heads home. I’m sure he’ll tell us then what’s in the box.”
There are normal people, and then there’s Uncle Moose. How my mother could stay so calm about a mystery box from Uncle Moose, I’ll never know.
“Can we open it?” I asked.
“No,” Momma answered. “It’s addressed to Uncle Moose.”
“So . . . he sent the box to himself?”
“Evidently so,” answered Momma.
“And . . . he sent it here?”
Momma nodded.
“Why wouldn’t he send it to his house?” I asked.
“We’re talking about Uncle Moose, remember?” said Momma. “Some things just can’t be explained.”
A box sent from Uncle Moose to Uncle Moose and not even sent to his own house sounded kind of strange to me, but it also sounded very Uncle Moose–like.
I went back over to the box and sat next to it. I tried to convince myself that it was just a regular box. It was brown, cardboard, and square. It was the length of three of my feet on one side and three of my feet on the other. It looked like a normal box.
I laid my hands on the box and put my face close to it. I could sense it. It was clearly not a normal box.
When Serenity walked by, I asked her, “So, what do you think is in the box?”
“Something for Uncle Moose, obviously.”
“I think it’s a horse,” I told her.
“Sure,” she said. (Even though she said “sure,” it was clear she didn’t mean it.) “Because that’s what people do—they put horses into boxes a hundred times smaller than an actual horse. And then mail them across the ocean.”
“A miniature horse.”
Serenity rolled her eyes and then walked out to the front porch with her nail polish kit.
I should have done myself a favor and not followed her onto the porch, but I had so many ideas about what was in the box that I just had to share them. “It’s a stuffed giraffe, but when you open the box, it turns into a real giraffe.”
Serenity sat down on the steps and opened her bottle of sky-blue nail polish.
I sat next to her. “It’s about the size of a rolled-up magic carpet, you know.”
She admired the fingernail she had just painted and didn’t even turn her head toward me.
“It’s a car from the future,” I said. “It folds up really small so you can carry it with you when you want to walk instead.”
Serenity shook her head and then painted clear glitter polish over her blue fingernail.
“You look annoyed,” I told her.
“Probably because I am,” she answered.
“Is my imagination annoying you?” I asked.
“What do you think?” The look on her face clearly told me that it was.
“Aren’t you even a little curious about what’s in that box?” I asked her. “That box from Uncle Moose?”
“No,” she said, finally turning to look at me. “There are a number of logical reasons that Uncle Moose might have sent that box. Maybe he has too much to bring back. Or maybe it’s something fragile and he felt better about shipping it. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to carry it through the airport.”
Serenity pointed her glittery sky-blue fingernail in the air and kept on talking. “The reason you think there’s something unusual in that box is because you have an unusual imagination.”
Inside my head, I said, If it’s up to you and your no-imagination self, the world will never have a fold-up car. Out loud I just said, “I like my imagination.”
“Well, imagine all you want,” said Serenity, “but it’s likely that Uncle Moose sent something very ordinary.”
“Ordinary?” I looked at Serenity as if she had lost her mind. “Have you ever even met Uncle Moose?”
Serenity ignored me and went back to painting her nails.
The word ordinary doesn’t belong in the same sentence with Uncle Moose. This was just further proof that Serenity is weird. Very weird.
And not only did I have to share the planet with someone as weird as Serenity, but for one whole week, I was going to have to share my room with her, too.