“What does that even mean?” Janie asked.
“It just confirms a lot,” Brooke announced imperiously. She couldn’t stop herself. “We thought they were moving out of town. I mean, that’s the only way it made sense. It’s the Langsom house, whether or not you live there. The Langsom family built it generations ago. So when they put it on the market, it was just weird, especially during Thatcher’s last year of high school. I mean, who moves right before their kid’s graduation?”
“My family, for one,” Janie said with an edge in her voice. “It’s not ideal, but we’re making it work.”
“Yeah, you’re making it work in a landmark home. And why? Why did you move here from—?”
“Northampton. And there were lots of reasons.” The edge sounded sharper.
“Janie’s dad was transferred—” I added, but she cut me off.
“There were lots of reasons.”
I felt desperate to move on from the conversation. “Stuff like that happens,” I said. “And we don’t know—maybe Dr. Langsom got transferred too.”
We were careening off-road somehow, into dangerous territory. But Brooke seemed determined to keep us skidding. “Clearly he didn’t,” she said. “Because Thatcher’s still here. Only now, he’s washing our mugs and mopping floors, which is seriously un-Langsom-like behavior. I mean, where is he living?”
“Maybe he’s going to finish out the year on his own,” Kaia offered. “His parents moved but he wanted to stay on.”
“So what? He took a job to pay rent?” Brooke shook her head. “No, something else is going on. And luckily for Janie, whatever happened to the Langsoms gave her family a chance to swoop in and move here.”
“Yeah. Lucky me,” Janie said coldly.
Brooke bristled. “What does that mean?”
“It means why does it matter? Maybe they just felt like moving. Maybe that kid just feels like working at a coffee shop. Why do you all care so much?”
“You don’t really understand the Langsoms,” I tried to explain.
“They’re a little snobby,” Kaia offered.
Janie looked directly at me. “That’s not what you said before. You said they were nice.”
“Well, yeah, but kind of aloof, you know? Like they’re kind to us little people. That type of thing.”
“I didn’t know money mattered so much around here.”
“It doesn’t!” Kaia and I practically leapt to say it at the same time.
“I mean, not really,” I added. I turned back to see Thatcher smiling at the middle-aged woman at the register, handing back change that she promptly sank into the tip jar. The coins made a cheerful clanging noise as they landed. “The Langsoms sort of symbolize something in Glennon Heights.”
“Well, he’s a person,” Janie said. “Not a symbol.”
“Maybe you should go say hi,” Brooke suggested. “Tell him who you are. Maybe he wants to come over and see his old bedroom.”
To my complete relief, Janie laughed. She said, “I’ll wait and let him wonder who I am a bit. Besides, I don’t want to make my approach from a table of you goons.” We all laughed then, pretending she was entirely joking. I told myself that I only imagined the way Brooke and Kaia rolled their eyes at each other. Just like Janie probably told herself that she’d eventually get used to us all; we couldn’t be as shallow as we seemed.
And Thatcher Langsom?
His face remained as blank as his apron. I had no clue what Thatcher Langsom was thinking at all.
After the listing went up with Harrington’s, Aunt Jillian had made it her mission to get the scoop on the Langsoms’ move. Days later she was back in our kitchen, reporting on the results of her sleuthing.
It hadn’t taken much digging for her to discover Dr. Langsom hadn’t been transferred; in fact, he wasn’t allowed to practice medicine anymore. No one would say definitively why.
Aunt Jillian pursued various theories. First she assumed he’d been arrested for drunk driving, but then she worked out this whole story involving a missing prescription pad. Whatever he did, it was bad enough for them to revoke his license, instead of just suspending it.
“That poor woman,” Aunt Jillian kept saying, in a way that made it absolutely clear she didn’t feel sorry for Helena Langsom at all. “She was probably so embarrassed she couldn’t come to me with the listing.” My mom nodded in the way that usually calmed her sister down. “As if I would ever judge her situation!”
According to Aunt Jillian’s sources, the Langsoms had planned for Thatcher to attend boarding school for his last year, just in case the story broke in the news. But Thatcher didn’t want to leave, especially when he was about to captain the lacrosse team and college recruiters were circling. So they moved into a two-bedroom apartment on the other side of town.
“That’s temporary,” Aunt Jillian reassured my mom, as if it should matter to either of them where their former friend lived with her disgraced husband and deflated son. “He’s still hoping the board reverses their decision, but he is absolutely deluded. Textbook denial—those surgeons, they all think they’re infallible. And Helena’s staying with him, even after all this.”
“Well, Jill, you just don’t pack it in the moment life gets hard,” my mom murmured. I forced my eyes to stay on the pages of the book I’d been pretending had my full attention.
That night turned out to be one of the hottest of the summer. It was humid and stuffy in the house, so I went and sat on our front steps, thinking about my mom and wondering when her life had gotten hard and if it had stayed that way. Fireflies blinked across the lawns. Up and down our street, some porch lights shone, collecting halos of moths around them. Sixteen Olcott sat dark. I tried to imagine Dr. and Mrs. Langsom screaming at each other. Or Thatcher lying on his bed, holding a pillow over his head to block out the sounds.
I stared at the house—and it almost felt like the house was staring back.
It knew what had happened.
I could only guess.
Like criminals on the run or a family whisked away by witness protection, the Langsoms had moved from 16 Olcott Place in the dead of night. Maybe they packed up all their possessions into brown cardboard boxes during the days and scheduled the movers to come long after dark. As the neighborhood slept, the movers skulked up and down the porch steps—somehow hauling out four generations of furniture and the wardrobes and belongings of a family of five without a loud grunt of exertion or the heart-stopping rattle of good china. Maybe Dr. Langsom slipped the driver a fifty-dollar bill and asked him to wait until he turned the corner before flicking on his headlights. They might have dressed in all black, the Langsoms and the movers, so that they looked like a band of night prowlers. They might have worn ski masks to camouflage themselves more thoroughly in the darkness.
Whatever they did, none of us saw it.
We found out they’d left from the mailman, who wondered aloud when the new folks would be moving in. “Been on this route for forty years,” he told my dad. “Strange to see that house in particular change hands.”
We didn’t know then who would be moving in, just that the house had been listed low, according to Aunt Jillian, and it sold fast. There wasn’t an open house or anything—my mom had planned to go just to look around. By the time the realtor came by to hammer a sign into the lawn, it already read SOLD.
“Why do they need a sign, then?” I’d asked Aunt Jillian. We were walking my dog, Toby. Or rather, I was walking Toby and Aunt Jillian was capitalizing on the excuse to take a closer look at the Harrington’s sign.
“It’s a feather in his cap. Although a property that well maintained, priced to move, you’d have to be half-dead to botch that sale.” She jabbed her finger at the sign. Ned McGovern’s cheesy mug grinned at us from the swinging, wooden panel.
“Smug idiot,” Aunt Jillian muttered. With the sign slightly moving, it looked like Ned was winking.
“You still hang out with him?” I asked Aunt Jillian, without being enti
rely sure she would answer. They had dated a little when he’d separated from his wife. It hadn’t gone well.
“Ned McGovern? You remember that whole episode?” she asked. I looked straight at her in response. “Yeah, I guess that one would be hard to forget, huh? No. And that’s okay.” She turned away from the sign and tugged at Toby’s leash in my hand. “Let’s walk to the park.”
I glanced sideways at Aunt Jillian. “You okay?”
She sighed. “Yeah. That was a hard time. But you know, Olivia, we were both adults, making adult decisions. I knew what I was getting into. Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten into it. But I did.”
“He’s still married?” I knew he’d gotten back together with his wife. We sometimes saw them at church, sitting third row, with two little boys who drove toy cars all over Ned’s shoulders.
“Yep. And I switched agencies. So we don’t see each other. We don’t talk. If Ned McGovern wrecks anything now, it sure won’t be because of me.” She looked at the house then. “And anyway—that place has a history, and part of me feels relieved that I don’t have to deal with it. The less you tell the new owners, the better. That’s always true.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
But she just shook her head and walked away.
That day I kept turning it over in my mind—the strange way that friendships sometimes work. I passed the four houses that stood between our home and the Langsom house. Which was no longer the Langsom house. Where my mom’s best friend growing up recently lived, except that by the time she lived at that address, they were no longer best friends. I thought of the way I had felt so close to Kaia Gillespie in the second grade, how people pronounced our names LivandKai so frequently together it became its own name, to which we both answered. And we were still friends, but the rhythm of Brooke and Kaia sounded much more familiar lately. And that summer I’d hardly spoken to Allie Hodges, even though I used to go up with the Hodges to their lake house every Labor Day weekend, for years.
That’s the ebb and flow I was thinking about when I followed Aunt Jillian up the street. My friendship with Janie Donahue did not ebb and flow and lap softly like lake water against the shore.
With Janie, friendship was more like the ocean, sometimes with crashing waves and an unexpected undertow.
Here is a comprehensive list of facts I learned about Janie Donahue in the last week of July and the first week of our friendship:
Her real-life laugh sounded like a fake laugh; she actually said, “Ha-ha-ha-ha.”
She used to be pigeon-toed when she was little, and still had to wear specially molded inserts in her shoes, which meant she did not wear open-toed shoes, even flip-flops in the summertime.
Even though the pigeon-toed thing gave me pause, because people who walk like that tend to run faster than average, Janie didn’t run cross-country, or even track. She wouldn’t compete with me for a spot on the team. Her sister, Lucy, was the runner. Janie was into diving.
She could not remember a sequence of numbers to save her life, so we decided early on that we’d share a locker at school and I would remember the combo for both of us.
Janie hated the Beatles, and when I asked, “Who hates the Beatles?” it turned out she had this theory that a person either loves the Rolling Stones or the Beatles and whichever is the case reveals his or her whole personality.
That theory was probably her dad’s, but she claimed it as her own.
I used to think I liked the Beatles fine, but sitting up in Janie’s freshly painted and still empty room, with the milk crates that held her father’s record collection between us, and listening to Mick Jagger’s gravelly voice singing, “She’s my little rock and roll,” I stopped being so sure.
“I mean, okay,” I told her. “But I still don’t hate the Beatles. I don’t see how anyone hates the Beatles.” Throughout most of elementary school, our vacation bible school chorus had sung “Let it Be.” No anthem of youth or anything, but a perfectly fine sentiment for a song.
“But it doesn’t make you move in your seat,” Janie pointed out. “Who would you rather dance to?”
“Well, you wouldn’t sing this song at vacation bible school, that’s for sure.”
We abandoned records to unpack the rest of her stuff. Between us, we maneuvered a rolled-up rug to the center of the room and unfurled it. Janie was apparently really into chevron. “You think you’ll try to stay in touch with anyone?” I asked. But what I meant was Is there space for me? Janie FaceTimed a lot with her old friends. Her phone would chime with texts. Back then, in the first weeks, she’d read them to herself so it felt like I existed on only one strand of her social life. She was also living another version, one that didn’t include me.
“It feels like I’m in orbit,” she told me. “You know, like in space? It’s self-centered and everything, but it’s hard to believe life is still going on like normal without me there. Like someone else will use the locker I would have used and after a week or two, it won’t even seem strange that I’m not at lunch. Everything will just seal up again. Without FaceTime, it would feel even weirder—like when we left home, home evaporated.”
“Would that be better or worse?” I asked. As I opened boxes, I handed over piles of clothes and Janie filled her closet with them. Janie’s closet was worth moving to a new state for. It had built-in drawers and a small ladder that led up to the attic.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe easier.” She shut one drawer, then another, and looked past me at the shambles of bedding and boxes in the room. “My dad says I have four years here and that I need to make the most of them.”
The Donahues talked a lot about college and the future and potential. I figured that out in the first few days, when Mrs. Donahue asked me about my courses and if most kids in Glennon Heights took the ACT or the SAT, which I didn’t know because I am not some kind of prodigy like Lucy apparently is. Janie generally assumed the twins would be headed back to Massachusetts when it was time to go away to school. “At least Lucy will. She’ll apply early to Smith.”
“Will Ben apply there too?”
Janie snorted with laughter. “He wishes. Smith is all girls and that’s probably why Lucy’s so set on it—he can’t follow her there. He might take a year off first anyway.”
Ben still had not said a single word to me, even though I’d spent most of my waking hours at the house since the Donahues had first moved in. Occasionally, we’d see him in the kitchen and he’d grunt, but I honestly couldn’t tell if he was making a minimal effort to acknowledge us or if they were accidental noises. I couldn’t imagine Ben taking a gap year and volunteering in Honduras or building houses for Habitat for Humanity. At that point, I could not picture him interacting with other people at all.
“What will he do?” I asked.
“He’ll probably be on parole or something.” Janie shrugged and laughed.
“I plan to go to college in your new closet.”
“It’s dope, right?”
“Are you kidding? It’s entirely possible that we can climb that ladder and find ourselves in a magical realm.”
“I’m thinking that once I get done with my room, I’ll start taking over the attic before Lucy and Ben even realize it’s open space.” The attic extended the full length of the house. It was hot and creaky, but the beamed ceilings made it look like the inside of a Viking ship.
“I can basically run cross-country up there.”
Janie grinned. “I’ll ask to install a pool for Christmas.”
I knew she was joking, but it was the kind of joke that pried open a window to talk about a topic I’d studiously avoided since the coffee shop debacle. I didn’t know how Janie would take it, so instead of wading in, I just dove.
“Can I ask you a question? What does your dad do?”
“You mean, are we rich?”
“It’s a really nice house.”
“It’s my mom’s dream house.” Janie looked around. “Maybe she’s having a midlife crisis or
something, but she found the listing online and just went crazy. She had to have it.”
I tried to wrap my head around uprooting a whole family, making the kids switch schools, and moving to a new state after finding a house online. It was a beautiful house, but still. “Wait—are you serious? Aren’t you so angry?”
“We had to move anyway.” I waited for the rest of the explanation, but it didn’t come. Instead, after a few beats of silence, Janie said, “But no, we’re not rich. My dad’s a consultant, so he can work from anywhere, really. And my mom’s a nurse. I mean, I don’t think we’re hurting, but back in our old house, Lucy and I had to share a room. Now she gets a turret and I have that closet.”
“But that doesn’t just happen, right? Maybe they won the lottery. They just don’t want to tell you in case it ruins your work ethic.” I didn’t want to believe Janie would lie but she wasn’t making a whole lot of sense either. So maybe she was just wrong. Maybe it was Janie who was so trusting, believing her parents despite any logical explanation to the contrary. “Did somebody you know die recently?” I asked her. “Maybe it’s an inheritance? Maybe your mom was caring for a really wealthy patient, who had no family of her own—”
“Seriously, all anyone seems to care about around here is money.” Which was the last thing I wanted Janie to think, of course. I’d just gotten wrapped up in the mystery. Taking a step back, seeing it from her side, I felt instantly sorry.
“We don’t— It really doesn’t matter to anyone. I just wondered and figured it was better to ask.”
Janie looked away and bit her lip and for a second it seemed like she had something else to tell me. Then she nodded. “It is better. I’d rather you ask. But if other people are wondering, Olivia, there’s no story. It’s my mom’s dream house. She does a lot for us. We weren’t going to stand between her and something that would make her so happy. At least I wouldn’t anyway.”
Because I didn’t want to annoy her with more questions, I didn’t ask Janie who would stand between her mom and 16 Olcott. None of it made a whole lot of sense, but it wasn’t mine to make sense of. I tried to find a way back to the easy jokes we’d been sharing a few minutes before.
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