The House That Wasn't There

by Elana K. Arnold

  Alder looked like someone who had not slept the night before—or, if he had slept, it had been fitful and plagued with nightmares. His hair swirled in an unruly mess of curls; his long-sleeved T-shirt was rumpled and half tucked in, as if by accident, and up close, Oak could see hard bits of crust in the inner corners of his eyes. Even worse, Alder didn’t respond to her greeting. His hands remained fisted around the straps of his backpack, and after a cursory glance, his gaze returned to the sidewalk. On he went, not breaking his stride, past Oak and toward the corner to meet the bus.

  “Rude,” Oak mumbled, loud enough to be heard, but ahead of her, Alder didn’t flinch.

  Never mind him. Oak wasn’t going to let her crabby neighbor ruin the first happy morning Oak had had since the move. It was made happier, the morning, by the memory of how she’d left little Walnut—he was curled in a ball near the foot of her bed, his fluffy chest rising and falling with each gentle breath.

  Oak channeled the kitten’s calm as she focused her eyes on Alder’s backpack in front of her. It looked heavy, like he’d brought home all his books the night before. And he walked so slowly. There was no reason Oak should have to slow her pace and stay behind him, she decided. After all, she’d done a nice thing by waiting for him and saying hello; if he was too impolite to even answer, then she’d just speed up and push right past him.

  And that was what she did. With long, forceful strides, Oak powered up the hill. She caught up to Alder in no time, but even though he had to know that she was wanting to pass, he stayed stubbornly in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “Rude,” Oak said again, and then she stepped up next to Alder’s right side, shoving a little with her left elbow to make room.

  She didn’t push that hard, but maybe she did push harder than she’d intended. Or maybe Alder’s backpack had been even heavier than it looked. But whatever the reason, when Oak’s elbow pushed into Alder’s side, it knocked him off-balance, and the next thing Oak knew, he was down on the sidewalk, arms flailing, a surprised “Oof!” coming out of his mouth.

  Maybe she should have stopped to help him up.

  Probably she should have.

  But, Oak thought, probably he should have answered when she had said hello.

  And so, with a bright flame of meanness springing to life in her chest, Oak stomped on up the hill, cresting it just as the yellow-orange school bus rounded the corner and pulled to a stop.

  The door hissed open, and Oak mounted the steps.

  “Hello, tree girl,” said Faith with a smile.

  “Hey,” Oak answered, and she headed up the aisle.

  “What’s up, tree boy?” Oak heard Faith say behind her. And then, “Alder, buddy, what happened to your hands?”

  “It’s nothing,” Oak heard Alder mumble. “I just scraped them.”

  “You need a Band-Aid,” Faith said, and the concern in her voice made Oak’s breakfast curdle in her stomach. Oak hadn’t noticed that Alder had gotten hurt.

  “I’ll be okay,” Alder said.

  Oak tucked herself into an empty row, parking her backpack on her lap.

  She looked out the window and pretended not to see Alder as he walked by, pretended not to see the red scrapes on his palms, pretended not to notice the way he stopped and looked around for a seat before he disappeared into a back row.

  Outside, the clouds gathered and darkened. As the bus’s door closed with another hiss and the bus pulled onto the street with a screech, Oak heard a third sound—a rumble of thunder, far away.

  Chapter 9

  When the bus’s doors opened in front of the school and the kids climbed down the steps, it was into a light drizzle of rain. Alder’s hands, scraped raw, still stung, and he held them flat in front of himself to let the cold water mist them. It felt better.

  “Wow, that looks pretty bad.” It was Beck. “Maybe you should go to the nurse’s office before class. Do you want me to go with you?”

  Alder, who had fully intended to go to the nurse’s office, said, “It’s fine,” and shrugged as if the scrapes were no big deal.

  “You should get, like, an antiseptic spray or something,” suggested Marcus, who was next to Beck.

  “It’s no big deal, all right?” Alder didn’t mean to raise his voice, and as soon as the words were out, he was embarrassed by how loud they’d been. He tried again. “I’ll be fine,” he said.

  “Whatever,” Marcus said, and he and Beck went into the school building.

  A fat droplet landed in the palm of Alder’s outstretched hand. The rain was coming down heavier now, and he hurried up the steps toward the entrance.

  “Hey,” said a voice behind him—Oak’s. “I’m sorry you got hurt.”

  “Sure you are,” said Alder, and he wasn’t even sure what he meant by that.

  “I am sorry,” Oak said again. She pulled open the door and held it for him to pass through.

  Alder didn’t say anything. He headed for the bathroom to rinse off his hands.

  When he got to class a few minutes later, everyone else was already in their seats. He’d washed his hands and patted the scrapes dry with a paper towel. It wasn’t much, but it was better. He slumped out of his backpack and slid into his seat, looking through the window at the falling rain. It was coming down harder now. Maybe it would be a real storm.

  He hoped so. He hoped it rained and rained and rained.

  Sometimes, wishes come true. It did rain and rain and rain, all morning long; it rained so much that the class had to eat lunch inside, at their desks. After they finished eating, Mr. Rivera facilitated a game of Heads Up, Seven Up, and even though Alder screwed tight his eyes and held his thumb straight up, no one picked him, not once in the game’s three rounds.

  Oak, Alder noticed, got picked every single time.

  And then, after lunch, Mr. Rivera said it was time for them to get with their partners to work on their Pieces of a Person project.

  “We’re going to spend fifteen minutes with each partner, for a total of forty-five minutes,” Mr. Rivera said. “I’ve worked out a spreadsheet of who’s with who for what.” He waved a piece of paper in the air, and Alder could see that Mr. Rivera had color-coded the list.

  “First pairings,” Mr. Rivera said, and he began to read a list of names. Alder tuned him out until he heard his own name: “Alder, you and Marcus are together for TOENAILS.”

  Alder perked up. Maybe this would be good—a chance for him and Marcus to sit together for a few minutes, just the two of them. Maybe they would have a really good time and Marcus would remember why they were best friends, and he’d say something like I don’t know why we haven’t been hanging out together! Want to come over to my place after school?

  Feeling cautiously optimistic, Alder gathered up the research about toenails he’d done the night before and scooted his chair next to Marcus’s desk, trying not to show that he cared that Marcus hadn’t moved his chair to Alder’s desk.

  “Hey, Marcus,” Alder said, immediately hating how eager his voice sounded.

  “Hey,” Marcus said, his voice sounding bored.

  “So, uh, toenails,” said Alder, feeling like a complete idiot.

  “Yeah,” said Marcus. “I don’t know why I wrote that down. I wish I would have chosen something else. Anything else.”

  “Yeah,” said Alder, though he had been sort of excited about all the weird information he’d found about toenails. “Me too.”

  Marcus sighed heavily. “Well,” he said, “let’s get this over with.”

  Marcus’s heavy sigh punctured Alder’s excitement; he felt the air going out of him, like a deflating balloon. Defeatedly, Alder pulled out his research and scanned the list of facts he’d compiled. “Um,” he said, “well, toenails are made of the same stuff—keratin, a protein—as animal hooves and horns.”

  Marcus nodded and wrote that down.

  “And,” said Alder, “toenails are basically human claws.”

  “That’s sort of cool, I guess,” said Marcu
s. “And I read that toenails are, like, basically full of bacteria, all the time. Like, underneath.”

  Alder nodded and wrote that down, even though he’d discovered the same research already. Then he said, “Do you know about the world’s longest toenails?”

  “No,” said Marcus. “Gross!”

  “Yeah,” said Alder. “They belong to a woman who lives not too far from here. In Compton. They’re, like, six inches long.”

  “How does she wear shoes?”

  “That’s the thing,” Alder said, and Marcus’s eyes widened at the fact that Alder had more information. This was more like it. “She only wears flip-flops! If she lived somewhere that got really cold, where she had to, like, wear snow boots or something, she couldn’t have grown them so long.”

  “Huh,” said Marcus, and he looked out the window where the rain was coming down in sheets. “What do you think she’s doing right now?”

  That was an excellent question. Alder stared into the rain, too, and imagined the woman with the world’s longest toenails, splashing in her flip-flops through rising puddles. “She’s out there somewhere, doing something,” he said, more to himself than to Marcus, but Marcus nodded, like he knew exactly what Alder meant and how Alder felt . . . sort of amazed to think that the woman with the world’s longest toenails was a person, a real, living, breathing, walking person who might be caught out in the rain, right at that very moment, and just down the road.

  A moment passed, Marcus and Alder together, wondering. Then Marcus said, “Hey, maybe, like, for extra credit, we could do a comic strip about the world’s-longest-toenail lady in the rain. You can do the pictures and I’ll write the words.”

  “Okay,” Alder said. It was a really good idea, but Alder was so glad to feel like a team again with Marcus that he probably would have agreed to pretty much anything Marcus had suggested in that moment.

  They spent a happy ten minutes together, thinking about their toenail comic strip, until Mr. Rivera called, “Time to switch groups!”

  The warm, happy feeling of having been close to Marcus buoyed Alder as he drifted from Marcus’s desk to Oak’s, where he positioned his chair and sat back down.

  “Hey,” Oak said. “I’m sorry again about what happened to your hands.”

  Alder barked a laugh. “What happened to my hands?”

  Oak blushed, but she looked mad. “I don’t know what more you want me to say,” she said.

  Alder wanted to tell her that there was a big difference between saying she was sorry for “what happened” to his hands and being sorry that she shoved him. Saying she was sorry for what happened didn’t really mean anything. It was like him falling down had nothing to do with Oak. Like it was something that just happened instead of something that she made happen.

  But instead of saying any of that, Alder just said, “Whatever.” He felt his good mood melting away.

  “So,” Oak said, in a tone that made it clear that she thought the whole incident was behind them, “how do you want to do this family project?”

  Alder shrugged. “Whatever,” he said again.

  Oak raised an eyebrow. “Well, I have an idea for the science section. What if we both did one of those kits? You know, where you send in a DNA sample and they tell you about your family? We could record the results for our project. I’ll bet no one else is doing that.”

  “How do they work?” Alder asked. It was, he thought begrudgingly, a good idea.

  “It’s pretty simple. You can buy the tests at the drugstore—I just saw them when I was running errands with my mom. You fill a little plastic vial with spit—”

  “Gross,” said Alder.

  Oak shrugged. “Sometimes science is gross. Anyway, then you mail it to the company and they analyze your DNA from the spit sample. Then they send you information about who your ancestors are, and what part of the world they were from.”

  “Is it expensive?”

  “Sort of,” said Oak. “The one I saw costs fifty-nine dollars.”

  “I have some money saved up,” said Alder. “From birthdays.”

  “I’ve got almost a hundred dollars from the yard sale we had before we moved,” said Oak.

  “It could be kind of cool,” Alder admitted.

  “So, do you want to do it?”

  Alder shrugged. “Whatever,” he said, for the third time.

  Oak pressed her lips together into a thin, angry line. Then she said, “If you’re going to be like that, then we can just sit here and each work on the other sections separately. I don’t care either way.”

  “Whatever,” Alder said again, and this time, the word felt satisfying.

  When the school day was over and they went outside to meet the bus, it was to a lightning-cracked sky.

  It was only just past three o’clock, but already the sky looked evening-dark. Wind blew, strong and cold, battering raindrops hard like pellets into Alder’s face, which he tucked into the collar of his jacket as he hurried onto the bus.

  Faith’s cheeks were flushed a cheerful red; she had the bus’s heater cranked up, and it was a welcome rush of warmth after the cold wet wind outside.

  “It’s a real storm,” she said with a smile, like this was great news.

  Once the bus was loaded, Faith pulled a little knob next to the steering wheel to turn on the headlights; they cut a bright hole into the darkening day. “Here we go,” she said, and they were off.

  Rain pounded down onto the bus’s metal roof, sounding like someone was throwing handfuls of pebbles down at them. They stayed in the far-right lane, and in places where the gutters were overfull, the bus’s wheels splashed waves up onto the sidewalk. Each time this happened, the busful of children cheered. Every few minutes, lightning lit the sky as brightly as the flash of a camera; then, in unison, the kids counted, “One, two, three, four . . . ,” until the thunder struck, like an answer to the lightning’s call.

  The bus had the raucous atmosphere of a party and the musty scent of damp hair and clothes.

  By the time they reached the hill at the top of Rollingwood Drive, rain was coming down so fiercely that Faith called over her shoulder, “Tree kids! I’ll take the bus down the street and drop you at your houses. What are your addresses?”

  “Fifteen!” called Alder, relieved to not have to walk down the street in the rain.

  “Eleven,” called Oak.

  Faith cranked the enormous steering wheel and maneuvered down Rollingwood Drive, pulling to a stop between their houses. “That’s funny,” she said as Alder made his way to the front of the bus. “There’s no Thirteen.”

  Alder blinked. Faith was right—his house was number Fifteen, and right next door was Oak’s house, number Eleven. How had he never noticed that before?

  “Maybe they thought it was bad luck to number a house Thirteen,” Faith said.

  Lightning flashed, and in the sudden bright light, everything in the bus looked . . . a little strange. Alder shivered, though he wasn’t cold. The bus filled with the voices of the other kids, counting, waiting for the thunder to follow.

  “One, two, three . . .”

  This time, when the thunder struck, it was with a terrible crack, like the world was splitting. Behind him, a hand grabbed Alder’s arm.

  “Sorry,” Oak said. “That was scary.”

  “All right, tree kids,” Faith said. “See you tomorrow.”

  She pulled the lever to open the bus’s door, and Alder and Oak went out into the storm. The harsh wind pressed them together for one moment, and then each took off, Alder up his driveway and Oak up hers, trying, separately but together, to outrun the storm.

  Chapter 10

  Oak’s mom wouldn’t be home from the office for another hour or so. And because of the rain, the construction workers weren’t on the roof either. Oak unlocked the front door and slammed inside, breathing heavily from the run and dripping onto the entry hall floor. She let her backpack slide to the entry hall rug, and she pulled down the zipper on her sweatshirt. I
t was heavy with rainwater, soaked nearly through, just from the time it had taken her to go from the bus to her front door.

  It felt good to be safe and sound inside. Oak knelt to untie her shoes, and at the same time she called, “Walnut! Here, kitty!”

  There was no answer. Oak stayed still, hands on the laces of her sneaker, and listened.

  Nothing.

  “Walnut?” she called again.

  When there was still no sound—no meow, no thump from the kitten jumping off the bed—Oak stood up, shoes still tied. Slowly, she walked through the living room and toward the hallway to her bedroom.

  A terrible feeling was beginning to rise in her, a feeling she couldn’t connect to anything particular—just the uncomfortable, anxious knowledge that in a moment she would realize something.

  The door to her bedroom was partway closed. Maybe that was why Walnut hadn’t heard her calling him, Oak thought, but she knew that wasn’t true. She knew she was lying to herself. Slowly, Oak pushed open the door. She stepped into her room.

  Oh, it was cold! Wind leaked in like a ghost through the window that—oh, no—the window that Oak had left cracked open that morning before school, thinking that a little fresh air would be good for Walnut.

  But now, Oak saw, the screen had come loose—was it from the wind? The rain? She didn’t know, only that it was loose, and the window was open, and Walnut was gone.

  “No,” she whispered, and she spun around and ran for the front door. “Walnut,” she called, throwing open the door.

  The storm had redoubled. The sky, a flat plane of steel gray, felt oppressively close, and rain flew in sideways sheets, soaking through Oak’s long-sleeved T-shirt in seconds. “Walnut!” she called again. Her hair dripped in strings across her face, and she wiped it back.

  What was that—there, by the tree stump, did she see something? A flash, a movement, maybe something orange? It was there—she was sure of it! But then Oak blinked the rain from her eyes and it was gone.

  Maybe it was her kitten. Oak headed toward the tree stump, leaning into the wind. “Walnut!” she called, and then she heard something—