The House That Wasn't There

by Elana K. Arnold

  They passed the bus ride in uncomfortable silence. When they reached Rollingwood Drive and Faith called, “See ya, tree kids!” both Oak and Alder mumbled their goodbyes.

  Maybe now that they were off the bus, they could talk some more about Mort, Oak thought, but Alder sped up, like he wasn’t in the mood.

  “Well, see you,” he said as he turned to head up the path to his front door, but Oak called, “Hey, wait!”

  Alder stopped.

  “Hey,” Oak said again. “Why did you ignore me today in the cafeteria?”

  “Ignore you?” Alder said.

  “Yes,” said Oak. “When I called your name and waved you over to our table. How come you didn’t join us?”

  “Oh,” said Alder. “That. Well, it’s nothing personal.”

  “Whenever anyone says that,” Oak answered, “it’s always personal.”

  “No,” said Alder, “it’s not. It’s just—I mean, it was nice of you to invite me to sit with you and your friends. But. I mean—”

  “What?” Oak felt herself growing angry, though she didn’t know what she was angry about yet.

  “Well,” said Alder, “I don’t know exactly. I was kind of hoping someone else was going to ask me to sit with him at lunch, I guess.”

  “It’s not because we were all girls, was it?” Oak asked.

  “No,” said Alder quickly. Then, “But, I don’t know, maybe it would be . . . weird . . . for me to sit at a table with all girls.”

  Oak felt her face turning red, just the way her mother’s face sometimes got when she was mad. Alder must have noticed, because he spoke more quickly now, like his words were trying to outrun a wildfire. “It’s nothing personal,” he said again.

  Oak was mad enough to spit, but she didn’t let herself yell. In fact, her voice got quieter. “Darla sits at a table with her Dungeons and Dragons friends, and they’re all boys. Is that weird?”

  “That’s different,” said Alder quickly.

  But when Oak asked, “How?” Alder didn’t have a reason.

  “It just is,” he said.

  Oak turned away from him and toward her house.

  “Want to get the kittens together this weekend?” Alder called after her.

  Oak didn’t answer. She just slammed her door behind her.

  The rain came back that night, but gently. No wind; no bright flashes of lightning. No ominous rumbles of thunder. It fell, misty and silent, all night long and most of Saturday. Oak spent the day inside, mostly in her room, with Walnut.

  She sat on her bed and looked out the window into the damp gray day. The rain was so light that she couldn’t hear it falling, and at some angles, she couldn’t see it falling, either. But if she adjusted her eyes and paid better attention, then there it was, like a screen, barely there but still absolutely there, also.

  Walnut seemed content to cuddle, curled into a round orange ball in her lap. Not really a ball, Oak thought, stroking the kitten from head to rump. More like the frond of a fern that has not yet unfurled. She had seen many such fern fronds at home in San Francisco, and thinking about them now made Oak aware of the fact that it had been a few days since she’d felt truly homesick. For better or for worse, this felt like home now, this house and this street and this school.

  Soon, her dad would be moving down permanently, and then it would become all the way home.

  And thinking of fern fronds made Oak think, also, of Fern. Walnut’s sister. How very strange it was that her kitten and Alder’s kitten had both found their way outside during a storm, and that they had both somehow made their way into that house that wasn’t there . . . though, as she moved further away from that strange incident, even Oak was having a more and more difficult time remaining convinced that it had truly occurred.

  Wasn’t there a book that she’d seen somewhere? About cats? Where was it . . . was it at school? That didn’t seem right. Was it at Alder’s house, maybe?

  No. Oak remembered.

  Trying not to wake Walnut, Oak scooched him off her lap so she could stand. Walnut made a sound like he was a bit disgruntled, and he shifted position, but then he fell back into noodly sleep.

  The book had been black, that she knew. She remembered this because when she had arranged the shelf in a rainbow of spines, this book had belonged on the very bottom shelf, far to the right. It was the book her father had given her mother years ago, the one he’d gotten on that business trip up to Washington State.

  Black, with gold lettering. What had the words read? Feline . . . something.

  Of course, since her mom had rearranged all the work Oak had done to make the books into a rainbow, the book would no longer be in the bottom right corner. Still, Oak checked there first, just in case.

  No luck. That shelf held a series of short story collections, all books from Oak’s father’s college days.

  Hmm.

  Oak took a step back to scan the shelves as a whole. Maybe the book would stick out in some way.

  No.

  So Oak decided to begin at the beginning. She scanned her eyes along each row, from the top left to the bottom right, sure she would see the book if she looked for it that way.

  Still, no.

  Now Oak felt a little nervous. Could the book have disappeared, like Walnut had?

  She moved the ottoman over to the bookshelf and climbed atop it. Begin at the beginning, she told herself, and so she did, making sure to touch each and every book one by one.

  It took the better part of half an hour, but eventually Oak found herself, yet again, crouched down by the bookshelf’s bottom right corner. She felt a sight twitch in her eye.

  “Mom!” she yelled.

  “Don’t yell, come find me!” Mom yelled back.

  Oak put a hand up to her eyelid and held it still. But when she brought her hand down again, the twitch was still there.

  Oak found her mother in the third bedroom, which she had converted to a home office for days when she worked from home or when she still had work to do after business hours. She was sitting at her computer; there were blueprints on the screen, plans for a mini-mall that her architecture firm had been hired to design. “What do you need, my love?” she asked, but she didn’t look up from her work.

  “I’m looking for a book, and I can’t find it,” Oak said. She didn’t mention that the reason she couldn’t find it was that her mother had reordered the bookshelves.

  “Did you look carefully?”

  “Yes,” said Oak. “Twice.”

  Then she waited for her mother to reply, but her mother seemed to get lost in her work, forgetting that Oak was even there. Insulting.

  Oak cleared her throat, loudly, and when that didn’t work, she jostled her mother’s chair.

  “Oops,” Oak said. “Sorry.”

  At last, Oak’s mother swiveled around. She ran her hand across her short hair the way she liked to do when she was thinking. “Let’s see,” she said. “I suppose it could have ended up in the giveaway box.”

  “What giveaway box?”

  “The library was doing a fundraiser; I saw a sign. A book sale. We had more books than we needed, they needed books, voilà.”

  “But I need this book,” Oak said. “And you never asked me, Mom.”

  What she wanted to say—what she didn’t say—was that her mother never asked her anything. Not about books. Not about bookshelves. Not about moving. Oak felt tempted to say all of this, but right now, the book was the important thing.

  “What book was it?” Mom asked.

  “I don’t remember the title,” Oak admitted.

  “Well, what’s it about?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” Oak said. Her voice went up an octave.

  Mom laughed. “So you don’t remember the title, and you don’t know what it’s about, but you need this book?”

  Oak didn’t say anything. There was no point, when her mom got like this. For some reason, Oak didn’t want to tell her mom that the book was the one her dad had brought
home from that business trip. Her mom shouldn’t have forgotten; she shouldn’t have given it away. It was a gift. From Dad.

  Maybe Mom noticed that Oak was upset, because she stopped laughing and cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, “hmm. I suppose we could go over to the library and see if they still have it. I’m not sure when the book sale is happening. I could take you . . . tomorrow?”

  Oak did not want to wait until tomorrow. “I’ll go myself,” she grumbled. “I’ll ride my bike.”

  “Wear your helmet, and be careful,” Mom said, turning back to her work. “It’s wet out there.”

  Oak turned away, so angry she felt like punching something, or someone. If her mother had just left the bookshelf the way Oak had arranged it, then Oak wouldn’t have to ride her bike all alone in the rain to the library. If her mother ever listened to her, or cared what she thought, they wouldn’t even be in this dumb city.

  A little voice inside her head tried to remind Oak that if they weren’t in this dumb city, she wouldn’t have ever met little Walnut, but Oak did not feel like listening to that voice, not now.

  She yanked open the front door. Before she went outside, she turned back and yelled, “I want to paint my room! I hate white walls!”

  With that, she slammed the door.

  It was wet outside, but at least it wasn’t raining anymore. Oak pulled her bicycle from the garage, strapped on her helmet, and zipped up her jacket. She glanced over at Alder’s house and considered, for a moment, inviting him to go with her. It would be nice to have company. But then she remembered how he’d ignored her in the cafeteria, and how he’d tried to explain it. She turned away and headed up the street, standing as she pumped her bike up the hill.

  It was just over a mile and a half to the library, and by the time Oak arrived, she felt much better. The cold, clear air felt good on her skin and in her lungs, and it felt good to move her legs and push herself. And it was exciting, too, to be exploring a new place like this all on her own. Oak found herself wondering why she’d waited so long to venture away from her new neighborhood; back in San Francisco, she’d walked all over the place by herself—to Stacia’s apartment, to school, to her old library and three different parks and the ice cream place during the summer. Here, things were more spread out, and barely anyone seemed to walk or bike anywhere. Everyone either rode the bus or got a ride to school, and other than people dressed in tight-fitting clothes, speed walking or jogging for exercise, nobody seemed to use the sidewalks.

  So by the time she arrived at the library, a bit out of breath but feeling rather pleased with herself, Oak’s eye had stopped twitching and she was feeling quite confident. She marched straight up to the circulation desk, unlatching her helmet as she went.

  “Hello,” she said to the man behind the counter.

  He blinked up at her, a book in his hands. “Hello,” he said. “Can I help you?”

  “I need to find a book,” she said.

  The man chuckled and spread his arms out wide. “You’re in the right place.”

  “No, a specific book,” Oak said, and then, before he could make another joke, she rushed on. “My mother accidentally donated a book from home for your book sale. And she didn’t know that I needed it. But I do.”

  “Oh,” said the man. His smile faded.

  “It’s okay if I have to buy it back,” Oak rushed on. “I mean, I guess it’s for a good cause, and I brought my allowance, so if I have to, I’ll buy it.”

  “No,” said the man. “It’s not that.”

  “What, then?” The good, powerful, I-can-do-anything energy Oak had been feeling was slipping away.

  “It’s just—well, the sale was this week, Monday through Friday. Yesterday was the last day, you see.”

  “Oh,” said Oak, feeling desperate. “Well, maybe no one bought my book. Where are the leftovers? I’ll look through them, if that’s all right.”

  “You don’t understand,” the man said. He looked very sorry. Sincerely sorry. “There are no leftover books. The remainders were picked up this morning. They’ve been taken to recycling. But maybe we have a copy of the book in our stacks!” He said this last bit encouragingly, trying to soften the blow, it seemed. “I’m happy to help you look.”

  Oak took a step back, away from the counter. “I don’t remember the title,” she said.

  “Well, what’s it about? We can look it up that way, too.” The man pressed the button on his mouse to bring his computer to life.

  Oak shook her head. All she remembered about the book was that it had the word “Feline” in the title, and that it had been a black book with gold embossed lettering. Surely that was not enough to go on.

  “That’s okay,” she said, even though it really wasn’t. “Thanks anyway.”

  The ride home was mostly downhill. An easy ride. It should have been fun, and Oak should have had a book tucked into her jacket’s inner pocket.

  But it wasn’t. And she didn’t.

  Chapter 17

  Alder spent the whole weekend feeling like a jerk.

  On Saturday he paced around his house mumbling “idiot, idiot, jerk” to himself. Fern sat on the pink velvet couch, watching him curiously. He only left the house once, to run errands with his mom. At least they stopped by the drugstore and picked up a DNA kit for the school project. Filling the little vial with spit (which was disgusting), Alder thought maybe this would help a little with Oak being mad at him.

  Sunday, Alder lay flat on his back on his bedroom floor for a good part of the morning, staring up at a water stain on his ceiling.

  “She should understand that it’s different for boys,” he told himself.

  But the words, said out loud, felt not right.

  He thought about Darla, and what Oak had said about her—“Darla sits at a table with her Dungeons and Dragons friends, and they’re all boys. Is that weird?”

  His immediate response had been that no, of course that wasn’t weird. What he hadn’t said was what he felt inside. It was fine that Darla was like one of the guys. The fact that she was a girl who played Dungeons & Dragons after school every day, that she always wore a baseball cap, and that, for her last birthday, she had invited four of her best friends, all boys, to spend the afternoon at Comic Con, where they’d all had their picture taken together in front of an enormous poster of the new movie based on that game Starfield, all of that was perfectly fine.

  But him, sitting at a table full of girls?

  That made Alder feel . . . nervous.

  And feeling nervous about the possibility of sitting at a table of all girls made Alder feel bad. About himself.

  “Jerk, jerk, jerk,” he said, rolling over onto his stomach and banging his forehead against the floor.

  But not sitting with Oak and her friends wasn’t only about the girl-boy thing. The truth was that each day at lunch, Alder hoped that Marcus would want to eat with him. That there would be an empty seat next to Marcus and, just like old times, he would wave Alder over as if it was no big deal at all, and they would sit together and joke about things. Nothing special, but still somehow completely special. There it was again—the way something could be two opposite things in the same moment.

  Anyway, if Alder sat with Oak and her friends, that would be like giving up hope. It would be admitting that Marcus didn’t want to be his friend anymore.

  Alder rolled the other way, onto his back, and stared up at the ceiling.

  Fern hopped down from the bed to see what he was doing. She purred and pushed her head into his arm. Fern didn’t think he was a jerk, Alder comforted himself.

  But, another voice said that was just because Fern didn’t know.

  Alder stood. He picked up Fern and wandered to his window. He looked over at Oak’s house. The addition above the garage was coming along; it had walls now, though they weren’t yet covered in stucco. Today was a Sunday, so the construction workers weren’t there.

  Then Alder’s gaze fell to the tree stump. He sighed. It h
ad been a beautiful tree. But he realized that, though he was still sad about it, he wasn’t angry anymore. He wondered when, exactly, that had changed.

  Fern perked up, as if she saw something interesting. She made a little sound like he’d heard her do when she saw a fly, a cross between a meow and a growl. A meowl. Alder took another step toward the window so his forehead pressed against the cold glass pane.

  “What is it, girl?” he asked. He squinted and focused, trying to see what Fern saw.

  Nothing.

  He relaxed his gaze and gave up. And that was when he saw it—a glint, a glimmer, a shimmer.

  Fern seemed to know when Alder saw it, for she meowled again, as if she were saying, “Finally! What took you so long?”

  Alder tried to memorize what he was seeing—or what he thought he was seeing—but as soon as he focused in and looked directly at the spot, the shimmer disappeared. He softened his gaze again, letting the world slip out of focus . . . and there it was. The trick seemed to be not to look directly at it, whatever it was.

  Doing his best to keep his eyes loose, Alder set Fern on his bed and left his room, heading for the front door. He heard Fern jump down from the bed, he heard her padding behind him. Not bothering to put on shoes, Alder cracked open the front door and slipped outside. Fern yowled crossly when he shut her in, but Alder ignored her. He wasn’t about to risk losing his kitten again.

  Shoes would have been a good idea. Alder had regrets as he picked his way through the damp grass. The ground felt a little squishy too, in a way that made Alder think of worms. Alder was not a fan of worms or wormy things. Not even spaghetti. But he pressed on, in spite of the dampness, in spite of the squish, in spite of the images of worms in his head. As he did, he tried his best to keep his gaze soft and gently scanned the area around the tree stump, looking for the patch of shimmer.

  When he couldn’t find it, Alder decided to walk in a circle all around the stump. Maybe he would see it from a different angle. Slowly, Alder circled the stump. Gently, Alder scanned the air. Gingerly, Alder stepped through the grass.