Nothing to Fear

Shirley Zigler is afraid of just about everything. Mice, fire, heights, turtles, crowds, being alone, the merry-go-round at the carnival, bikes, toy guns, stuffed animals - Jake and Danny can rattle off her fears faster than she can defend herself. So when Jake dangles his pet mouse Luther in front of her face at Whit's End, Shirley's shrieking brings Whit hurrying over.

Whit tells the boys that everyone is afraid of something, and often for very good reasons. But some fears, he says, are worth overcoming, because they show a lack of faith in God. The Bible says that perfect love casts out fear, and Whit explains it the way a light works in a dark room: you don't have to carry the darkness out first. Switch on the light and the darkness is simply gone. Then he asks Shirley a question no one has asked her before. What happened the last time she held a mouse? She has never held one. Coaxed by Whit and stung by Jake calling her a coward, Shirley holds out her hand, and for one surprising moment she decides Luther is soft and rather cute - until she is sure he has bitten her. Luther goes skittering off into the store, and Shirley goes home to her mother, a nurse, to have the invisible bite inspected.

Jake is furious about his lost mouse, and by the time Shirley wakes from a nightmare about a giant Luther at her bedroom window, he has already begun planning a lesson for her. He rigs a stack of boxes in Whit's dark basement, waits until Whit leaves for a meeting at City Hall, and tells Shirley that Whit is downstairs waiting - and that he said she was brave enough to come. Danny's job is to keep Connie busy and to run the train set loud enough to cover any screaming.

The prank goes exactly as far as Jake wants it to and then a good deal further. The lights go out, Shirley starts to cry, and Jake, trying to reach his flashlight, trips over his own trap. The boxes come down on him, the flashlight is lost, and his leg is hurt badly enough that he cannot walk. Their shouts for help are drowned out by the train upstairs. There is only one way out, and it means Shirley walking back through the pitch-black basement alone.

So she goes. Feeling her way past a workbench and a puddle of spilled paint, frightened by every creak of the old water pipes, Shirley prays out loud, reminds herself that the noises are only her imagination, and starts to sing: greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. She is still singing when she walks straight into Whit, whose meeting was canceled after all.

Afterward, over a double scoop of chocolate ripple, Shirley learns that Jake has torn a ligament and will be off his feet for a while - and grounded, his father says, until he is twenty-five. Danny is in deep trouble too. Shirley hopes they are not punished too badly, because she is oddly glad the whole thing happened. Once she kept her mind on Jesus, she tells Whit, she stopped thinking about how scared she was. She may never be afraid of anything again, she announces - right up until somebody shows her a bug.