The Tiny Mansion

by Keir Graff

“You’ll know me.”

  I took a deep breath. Everything was happening so fast. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to end up on the other side of the world.

  “I miss you a lot,” I told her. “But can I just wait a little bit to decide?”

  “Of course you can,” she said, not sounding very happy about it.

  “I’ll call you soon,” I promised.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  TRENT, LEYA, SANTI, and I stayed at the shelter for four days, until the fire had been put out or burned out and the ground had cooled where it started. Leaving Helen Wheels in the middle-school parking lot, we took Trent’s truck back to the compound to see what was left. Really, nothing was. The fire had moved so quickly that most of the big trees were still standing, but it had burned so hot that it destroyed practically everything else in its path. All we found of Leya’s art installation were a few blackened shreds of fabric. The lawn chairs were twisted, deformed aluminum tubes. My sleeping bag, the star lantern, the shade trellis— all gone.

  Trent’s wall, of course, was fine, even though it, too, was now sooty and black.

  It gave me a funny feeling to see everything burned down to the ground. I had hated being there at the start of the summer, but now that it was all gone, I had a lonely, empty feeling inside, like we were truly homeless. Even Helen Wheels needed work before it would be habitable again.

  HABITABLE: capable of being lived in.

  “Let’s go see Blake’s house,” I suggested.

  “I don’t see why not,” said Trent.

  It wasn’t like we had anything to do or anyplace to be. We all piled back into the truck and drove around the charred, still-smoking forest until we found the Bertholds’ winding driveway. At the end of it, the steel-and-glass spaceship house looked like it had crash-landed after a particularly rough trip through the galaxy. Glass was cracked, steel was twisted, and the chopped-open door hung askew.

  “That poor family,” said Leya, shaking her head.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Dagmar?” asked Trent.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  I know it sounds awful, but we were both thinking about unobtanium. It was unfortunate that the Bertholds’ house was a ruin, of course. But something can always be salvaged from even the worst disaster.

  We didn’t go on an unobtanium hunt right then, however, because in front of the scorched smart mansion were parked three shiny new cars.

  As we got out of Trent’s old truck, I was surprised to see Blake, Reynold, Anjali, Lyndon, and Penelope all file out of the house.

  “How does it look?” Trent called. As a fix-it guy, his first instinct was to ask whether something could be repaired.

  “A complete write-off,” answered Reynold. “The circuitry and wiring are all melted, and I suspect it’s structurally unsound. I’m suing my architect for failing to anticipate the threat of fire and specify the necessary safety features.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” said Trent, not sounding all that sorry, to be honest.

  “Why are you guys here?” I asked Penelope and Lyndon.

  “We told Reynold we wanted to talk this out one last time before we got the lawyers involved,” said Penelope. “If he’s willing to form a new corporation with the two of us as equal partners, then we won’t have to pursue legal action.”

  “You guys really want to go into business with him?”

  Penelope shrugged. “We haven’t been very effective as a family. Maybe we’ll do better as a business.”

  That sounded like a terrible idea. But it did give me a great one.

  “Do you need a place to stay while you rebuild? Maybe Trent could make you tiny houses to stay in temporarily.”

  Penelope looked interested. “That’s not a bad idea—although maybe instead of a tiny house, we could make it a small house?”

  “And I could help him,” said Lyndon, nodding. “There’s plenty of lumber we can salvage. It might make a good project for all of us to team up on.”

  Reynold and Anjali looked at each other skeptically.

  “I had been planning to buy another forest and commission another smart mansion from a different architect,” he said. “But perhaps as an extremely short-term solution . . .”

  Trent laughed, stepped forward, and held up his hands. “Thanks for the suggestion, Dagmar. I’ll be very happy to refer the Bertholds to an excellent contractor, but we’re not sticking around.”

  Santi looked up from where he had been digging in the ash with a stick, his clothes and face smudged with soot. “We’re not?” he asked.

  Trent looked at me and smiled. “Nope. We’re going back to Oakland.”

  “But you need the work,” I said.

  “And you need Imani and Olivia and the rest of your friends,” said Leya, giving my arm a squeeze. “I’m not sure we’d all be here if it weren’t for your bravery and resourcefulness. Your father and I both agree you’ve earned the chance to go home.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Trent and Leya had just told me we were going home, and everything around us was a wasteland of swirling ash. But now it actually sort of made sense to stay.

  Everybody was watching me to see what I’d say next. And Blake actually laughed out loud when he heard it.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I have another plan.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  This One Worked

  It was a good plan, too. First, we got signed contracts from Reynold, Penelope, and Lyndon for Trent to build them small houses so they’d have places to stay while everyone figured out what came next. Then, after repairing the roof of Helen Wheels, we moved it onto their land near the remains of the spaceship. We all pitched in to salvage lumber, and the Bertholds paid Trent enough money that he was able to hire crews of workers from nearby towns to help the work go faster.

  The fire had been bad, of course, but it wasn’t quite as bad as it looked at first. After the wind blew away some of the ash, and a light rain fell one day, we could see a lot of green, growing things that had survived the conflagration. Most of the trees had lived, too, their bark charred but their trunks still strong and growing. It would take time, of course, but the forest would come back, and maybe its owners would appreciate it even more.

  In early August, we moved back to Oakland. It felt amazing to see Imani, Olivia, Hailey, and Nevaeh again. Though it had only been a few months, I felt like we were all a whole year older. Even better, it was almost my birthday, and Imani told me she had my party all planned out—even though Olivia had tried to take over. Some things never change.

  After a few days in a hotel, we found a new apartment and paid a whole year’s rent in advance with the money Trent was earning. Helen Wheels stayed in the forest, and Trent commuted back and forth, spending weekends with us in Oakland and sleeping most weeknights at the job site.

  Trent and Kristen seemed to have reached some kind of an agreement, helped by the fact that money suddenly wasn’t an issue. She came back once, for a weekend in July, and took me to a spa in Napa Valley. It was good to see her, but the place was completely boring: how many mud packs and cucumber slices and pedicures and mixed-greens salads does one person need?

  Since then, we’d texted every day, and Kristen promised the next time she came home, she’d stay for months. She said she’d be back again by Christmas, maybe even Thanksgiving. But with Kristen it’s best to just wait and see what happens.

  Santi and I started school in mid-August with everyone else, and in some ways, it was like we’d never left—except I had a new friend I still hadn’t quite told my old friends about. Before I went back to Oakland, Blake and I spent a lot of time coming up with new challenges for each other, but just for fun this time. He liked hanging around Trent and Lyndon, and even learned a little bit of carpentry.

  Blake started school on the othe
r side of the bay—he’d had private tutors before at the spaceship house—and we kept in touch. Sometimes we’d get together in San Francisco or Oakland, and once in a while, we went up to the forest with our parents to visit Lyndon and Penelope and her animals. There were still moments when he acted like a spoiled jerk, but most of the time he was pretty fun to hang out with.

  I knew he didn’t think he was better than me, because he told me so. A couple months after the fire, as we were following his new bodyguard, Oleg, into a movie theater for a Saturday matinee, he said, “You know, I couldn’t have done what you did during the fire. You were smarter than all the adults and braver than everybody.”

  Then he added, “Do you want some popcorn?”

  He acted like it was nothing, but I think he’d been saving up that big speech for a while, timing it just right so I couldn’t make a big deal out of it. That was okay by me. I knew he was still getting the hang of the whole being-nice thing. We got our snacks and went into the movie, and I felt like it didn’t really matter if I ever beat him in a challenge again.

  Although of course I did.

  Predictably, the truce between Reynold, Lyndon, and Penelope didn’t last for long, and even though Blake didn’t talk about it much, it sounded like the fighting wasn’t going to end anytime soon. Rich people are ridiculous. I felt sorry for them, honestly. I mean, nobody’s family is perfect, but sometimes they’re all we’ve got. And after getting to know the Bertholds, I realized Blake’s life was a lot weirder than mine.

  We salvaged lots of unobtanium from the house in the forest. Trent used some of it to build new things, and Leya used some of it for her next big art project, which was basically a display of melted electronics on scorched tree stumps. An art gallery loved it and gave her a big show. But because we had permission to use all that stuff, it wasn’t as much fun as getting it the old way.

  I did take one thing for myself, though, something nobody knew about. One day, while we were digging through the wreckage of Blake’s house, I found a twisted lump of metal where the front door used to be. After cleaning the ashes off, I realized what it was: the locking mechanism that had trapped us inside the house until Lyndon chopped his way in. The fire had burned so hot that it was almost unrecognizable, but the metal had melted into a really cool shape, and I decided it was a sculpture formed by the catastrophe. It was a symbol of what happens when you keep people out but also when you let them in. And it was a reminder of the scariest day and the biggest adventure of my life.

  It also made a perfect doorstop when I wanted to prop open the door to my bedroom. Because, for the first time ever, I had my own room. And sometimes I even missed Santi.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book has its origins in my childhood and a night I slept beneath redwood trees outside a trailer belonging to my family’s sculptor friend. (Yes, there were spiderwebs on me when I woke up!) But the specific idea of setting a story in Northern California was born during school visits to Montclair Elementary (Oakland), Corpus Christi (Piedmont), Thornhill Elementary (Oakland), and especially the magical Canyon School in the enchanting community of Canyon—my thanks to the students, teachers, and librarians at all four. I’m grateful to Esperanza Surls for giving me a guided tour of the hand-hewn homes of Canyon and bookseller extraordinaire Kathleen Caldwell of A Great Good Place for Books for repeatedly providing a warm welcome to this author.

  The first draft of this book was completed shortly before the terrible Camp Fire of November 2018, and I’ve watched in alarm as fires have become more frequent and destructive throughout the Golden State. While Dagmar’s adventures are fictional, too many people have lost their homes for real—and their experiences are terrifying, not thrilling. My heart goes out to all the young readers and their families who have been threatened or displaced by wildfires.

  This book was shaped by Kate Meltzer and Stephanie Pitts, two terrifically talented editors at G. P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers. Copy editor Ana Deboo did a wonderful job of whittling away at my linguistic tics, and Kaitlin Kneafsey continues to provide welcome support to my books in the wild. Sheila Hennessey again deserves appreciation for all she has done over the years.

  I would like to thank my agent, Josh Getzler, for helping my books find the perfect homes—whether huge or tiny—and Jonathan Cobb for his always timely assistance.

  Above all, I’m grateful to my wife, Marya, our sons, Felix and Cosmo, and my furry muses, Toothless and Totoro.

  And YOU for reading this book!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Keir Graff is the author of funny and fantastical middle-grade adventure novels, including The Phantom Tower (a Chicago Tribune Best Children’s Book of the Year) and The Matchstick Castle (an official Illinois Reads Selection). He also writes books for grown-ups—some of them under made-up names! A longtime resident of Chicago, he lives near the shore of Lake Michigan with his wife, Marya, their sons, Felix and Cosmo, and their cats, Toothless and Totoro. Find out more at keirgraff.com.

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