by Jenn Bishop
“We’re going to stay at their house? For how long?” I ask.
“It’ll take a little while to work out the timetable. Mom and I are still waiting to hear back from the insurance folks.”
“We’re going to stay with strangers?”
“Maddie.” Dad’s tone turns sharper. “The McLarens aren’t strangers. They’re our neighbors, and they’re going out on a limb here. Your mom and I are very grateful. Would you rather we blow through your college fund to stay in a hotel?”
I shake my head. “What about Grammy’s house?”
Mom pipes in. “Dad and I need to be able to commute to work. Besides, Maddie, this is where we live. This is our home.”
But it’s not. Mom of all people should know. A home is where your stuff is. Your memories. Your life. All that’s here is a mess.
“Never mind that the McLarens were extremely generous to open up their home to us,” Mom says.
I don’t want somebody else’s home. I want mine.
“Come on, Mads.” Dad squeezes my shoulders. “Peg—sorry, Mrs. McLaren—is excited to have us. She said the more the merrier. Right, hon?”
Dad’s waiting for Mom to jump in, but she’s not taking the bait. “It’ll be an adventure,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “An adventure.”
It’s so like Dad to try to spin it this way. To turn losing our house in a tornado into something out of a made-for-TV movie. At least Mom’s not falling for it either.
“It turns out the McLarens have more extra bedrooms than they know what to do with.” Dad is staring at Avery now.
Avery lays the guitar down on the ground, accidentally hitting a string in the process.
“Avery and his parents are going to be staying there for the summer, too.”
I feel like I’m on that ride at the carnival where they take you to the top, hundreds of feet up in the air, and then drop you, fast, like an out-of-control elevator.
“Really?” Avery asks.
“Yup.” Dad’s still grinning.
My heart and my stomach are in all the wrong places. I want someone to let me off this ride I didn’t sign up for, but instead Dad just told me I’m on it for the rest of the summer.
—
After Dad breaks the news that we’ll be staying with the McLarens for the summer along with Avery’s family, it’s hard to think about anything else.
As Avery and I work together to move a collapsed bureau, I try to convince myself for a second that maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe in the Hallmark movie version of this summer, all it will take is spending more time together for Avery to realize that he likes me, not Gabriella, and that asking her to dance was a mistake.
But then when we uncover a toilet—one of the few things the tornado didn’t break—I remember that sharing a house means sharing all of those things, too.
What if Avery uses the bathroom right after me? What if he uses it after I poop? How am I ever going to poop all summer with Avery around? Can a person die from not pooping for an entire summer? It’s the kind of question Cammie loves asking Mom when we’re at the grocery store and everyone can hear.
I stare at the toilet. If I don’t poop all summer, I will die for sure.
“Hey, Maddie, look what I found!” Avery is sitting in the tub from Mom and Dad’s bathroom.
Trying to pretend that everything is all right, I flash him a thumbs-up.
I’m going to have to get undressed in the same house as Avery, too. What if he walks into the bathroom when I’m in the shower? The McLarens better have good locks on their doors.
Can you die from not bathing? I figure the smell would probably scare off Avery—and everyone else—first.
As I’m squatting down to put broken bits of glass in a bucket, somebody jumps on my back. Somebody that reeks of peanut butter and chews with his mouth wide open.
“Cammie! Personal space!”
“Sorry.” He plops down on the grass an arm’s length away. He has a towel pinned to the back of his shirt that I’m just going to ignore for right now.
“There’s glass all over here, so you need to be careful.”
“Okay, okay. Hey, Maddie? Look what I found.” He opens up his hands to show what’s tucked inside. It’s my Minnie Mouse watch, the one Mom and Dad got me when we went to Disney World with Grandma and Grandpa, before Grandpa stopped understanding what was going on around him and forgot who I was.
I strap it onto my wrist.
“It’s broken,” Cammie says.
He’s right. But it’s all that I have left.
“You should get a new one.” Cammie twirls, his towel cape catching the air.
“I don’t want a new one.” I rub the crack with my fingers. The glass isn’t going to fall out. It’s only cracked.
“But Daddy says we’re gonna get new things because all our old things are broken.”
“There are some things you can’t replace, Cammie.”
I look past him to Mom. She understands. It’s why she wants the photo albums. She doesn’t want to lose the memories. Mom doesn’t have a brother or a sister. She’s the only keeper of her family’s memories.
“You want to be a helper?” I ask Cammie.
He nods.
I point toward an area where there isn’t any broken glass. “If you pick up all the shingles and sticks over there, maybe we can help Mom find more of the photo albums. Can you do that?”
“Like a treasure hunt?”
“Exactly.”
Cammie hops up and gets right to work. Avery climbs out of the tub and we work together, digging and sorting.
After a while, Mom yells over at us. “I found a bunch of stuff from your room, Mads.” She points to a big pile with a purple beanbag chair. It’s okay if that didn’t make it. Half the beans had already fallen out before the tornado. “Can you see what you want to keep? It might rain tonight, so we’ll want to bring it over to the McLarens’ house.”
Avery follows me to my pile.
“That’s probably about how much survived from my room,” he says.
I pick up my now-headless stuffed giraffe.
“That’s super creepy,” Avery says. “It totally defeats the purpose of having a long neck when you’re missing your head.”
It would be funny if it were somebody else’s giraffe. But I can’t muster up a laugh. This is the stuff from my room, all that’s left. And it’s hardly anything.
I sit down and pick through a drawer of clothes. Somehow, my bottom drawer survived, even though the rest of the dresser is missing.
“Wait, is this yours?” Avery holds up a brown leather book. My diary.
I bolt up from my spot on the ground. “Yeah.”
“Is it your diary or something?”
“No,” I lie. “It’s not my diary.”
He flips it open to a page in the middle. “I did so badly on the history test today. I don’t know—”
I snatch it out of his hands. Part of me wants to breathe a sigh of relief that he didn’t stumble on an entry about him. The other part of me wants to whack him on the head with it, Anne of Green Gables–style. “What’s wrong with you?” I sit back down.
Avery laughs. “Hey, you’re the one who said it wasn’t your diary, even though it obviously is.”
I glare at him. “You know, we didn’t even invite you over here. I don’t need your help.” It comes out so much meaner than it sounded in my head.
Avery’s eyes get real big. “Fine. Sorry.” He stands up. “I can go over to my hou—” He stops himself from saying that word: house. “I thought we were friends.”
Friends. There’s this feeling in my stomach. It’s been there all day, but it keeps morphing and I don’t know how to make sense of it. Not like a punch or a kick, but like I need to let something out, like I’m keeping a secret and it’s munching away on my insides.
Gregg is his friend. Naveen is his friend.
Gabriella? Is she his friend, too?
“Yeah, well, nobody’s keeping you here.”
I’m still staring down at the diary in my hand when Avery walks away.
“Maddie? Is everything all right?” Mom crouches down on the grass next to me. “Did something happen between you and Avery?”
“It’s nothing,” I say. But Mom lingers anyway.
I wish I could excuse myself to go to the bathroom, to have a moment just for me. I want to sit on my bed and write in my journal and have nobody bother me. Not Mom, not Dad, not Cammie, and especially not Avery.
I would let Hank in, though. He would nuzzle his head into my lap and look up at me with those eyes, like he understood everything, everything I was feeling. All he ever wanted to do was make it better.
But it doesn’t matter because he’s missing and there’s no place anymore that’s mine. And there won’t be for a long, long time.
“Maddie?”
Instead of answering her, I close my eyes.
All I have is this pile of things that used to be mine, and none of them, except for the watch and maybe my diary, are the things that I want. I want my books. Not all of them. What I want is that copy of Matilda that Grandma read to me. The corners are permanently creased from where we stopped every night because Grandma didn’t believe in bookmarks. I want the Monet poster I got at the Museum of Fine Arts when we went there on a field trip and Avery lent me money because I forgot to bring mine. I want the bunny I’ve had ever since I was a baby, Baba, even though it’s missing an ear and I haven’t slept with it since I was seven. I still want it.
Just those things. Those three things.
But I’m never going to get them back. I’m never going to get any of it back.
Mom’s hand folds around mine. “You know, with all that happened last night, I’m not sure I ever asked you how the dance went.”
I open up my eyes. With my free hand, I twist a piece of grass between my fingers. When I finally look up at Mom, I don’t have to say anything out loud for her to understand.
Before we head over to the McLarens’ house, Dad borrows Mr. Manoukian’s car.
It doesn’t make sense how the Manoukians have their house and their car and all their stuff, and we have nothing.
I wonder if that’s what Dad is thinking, too, as he turns Mr. Manoukian’s key in Mr. Manoukian’s car and backs out of Mr. Manoukian’s driveway.
We start up the hill. Dad rolls all the windows down. If Hank were in the backseat, he’d stick his head outside. His ears would flap in the breeze and he’d open his mouth like he was smiling.
“Hank!” I yell out the window, squinting as I look for any sign of him as we drive by our neighbors’ yards, ever so slowly. With no cars behind us, we creep up the hill at ten miles per hour. The radio’s off, which is weird because Dad always listens to the sports station out of Springfield. We’re both listening, waiting, hoping, praying for that bark.
Dad whistles out his window. “Hank, buddy? Hey, Hank-aroo?”
“Hank? Come on, Hank!” I yell.
We call and whistle and call and stare while the chain saws buzz, buzz, buzz away.
Until we’re at the end of the street, a few miles away from our house, at the stop sign. On the left side of the street, a SOLD sign creaks with the breeze at the end of the driveway at the Lewises’ old house.
It’s been years since they lived there—a couple of other families have lived there since—but for some reason we still call it the Lewises’. They moved to Florida not long after their dog, Nutmeg, had puppies and we adopted one of them.
I was only six and Cammie was practically a baby. Mom took me over there and let me choose which puppy to take home. I chose Hank. He wasn’t the littlest or the biggest, but right in the middle, and he licked my chin when I held him. At least, that’s what Mom likes to say: “Love at first lick.” I don’t remember getting licked by Hank. Not that time.
I wipe my eyes. “Should we turn left or right?”
Dad turns to me. “Honey…”
“Right?”
There’s a leaf on the road in front of us. A green maple leaf, fluttering in the breeze. I don’t know what’s keeping it tethered to the pavement—why it won’t just fly away—because it sure seems like it wants to. Better than being run over by Mr. Manoukian’s car’s tires.
“We need to go back, Mads. It’s time to head over to the McLarens’ and have some supper.”
I peer deep into the forest on my right, hoping for a glimpse of Hank’s golden-brown tail from behind a tree.
But our lazy Hank has never run this far in his life.
I take in a shaky breath. “Okay.”
—
Mrs. McLaren opens the door holding an extra-fluffy calico cat in her arms. “Come in, come in.” I hope she doesn’t catch Cammie wrinkling his nose at the cat. “This is Snickers. He’s a little shy.”
I reach out to pet Snickers, but he swipes a paw at me and hisses. “Maybe more than a little,” I say.
“He’ll warm up to you in no time. And wait till you meet the others! You’re going to be roommates, after all.” Mrs. McLaren leads me up the hardwood stairs. Along the wall are pictures of her kids, two boys and a girl, back when they were little; they’re all grown-up now. There’s one where it looks like the heads of everyone in the family are floating in outer space. Then I realize they’re actually all wearing matching navy-blue turtlenecks and that the background is also navy blue. Weird.
She points to a closed door on the right. “Now, your friend Avery is going to be staying in this room. And his parents will be staying across the hall.” She opens the next door. “And here’s where you and Cameron are going to stay.” I cringe. Right next door to Avery?
The room has two twin beds with pink flowery quilts. Every table and bureau in the room is covered in lacy doilies. It looks like one of the cats barfed up a craft store. On the plus side, there is a flat-screen TV mounted to the wall.
Cammie runs past me and jumps on the first bed he sees. “I get to stay with Maddie!”
“Cameron,” Mom says.
“Well, I’ll leave you alone to get settled,” Mrs. McLaren says. “You give me a holler if you need anything. And please, call me Peg.”
“Okay, Peg!” Cammie says.
“Are you okay sharing a room with Cammie, honey?” Mom asks me. “I know it’s a lot to ask.”
I move aside one of the pillows on the bed and lie down. After all the manual labor, I’m ready to crash. “I’ve done it for vacation before.”
“That’s true. It’s just…this is going to take a lot longer than a vacation.”
“How long?”
Mom breathes out a puff of air, blowing her bangs up. “I wish I knew. Not days or weeks, though. Probably several months if we’re going to rebuild.”
Months of having Avery in the room next door. The whole summer? I almost want to scream into my pillow. Not out of happiness or anger but out of everything all at once. I don’t know what to feel anymore. I’ve done enough feeling today and yesterday. Anyway, there’s cat fur on the pillow and Mom is still staring at me, waiting for a reaction.
“Months,” I finally say out loud.
Mom squeezes my shoulder. “We’ll get through this.”
She closes the door behind her, leaving me alone with Cammie, who’s lying on top of the other twin bed doing scissors kicks in the air.
“It’s just like vacation. Right, Maddie?”
I get up from the bed and stare back into the mirror on top of the long bureau. Mom’s right not to believe in mirrors. The person I see across from me isn’t at all the person I picture in my head. There are dirt smudges all over my face from when I pushed my hair out of the way wearing the gardening gloves. Never mind the salt crusties along the side of my nose from dried-up sweat, or Mrs. Manoukian’s T-shirt, which could probably fit three of me.
No wonder Avery only sees me as a friend. Why would he see me as anything else?
“Right, Maddie? Right?”
>
Cammie’s still waiting for an answer.
Like all the adults who tell us that everything is going to be okay, I lie to him. “Right, Cammie. Just like vacation.”
—
After dinner, Kiersten stops by with a suitcase of clothes for me to borrow. Mom says it will tide me over until we get a chance to go shopping tomorrow. Nothing I salvaged from the tornado mess exactly makes an outfit.
“Sorry it took me so long to get here. Some of the roads are closed.” On the other side of Hitchcock, where Kiersten lives, everything’s just fine. Like a tornado never even happened. It’s like my family and Avery’s—really, everyone out on Hollow Road—are living in a different world.
I lead Kiersten into my new room and shut the door. Cammie is downstairs watching TV with his new best friend, Peg, so for the first time in twenty-four hours, I have a room to myself.
“At least, you get to stay in this nice house, right?” Kiersten pulls stuff out of the suitcase: tank tops and summer dresses and shorts and, thank God, a package of new underwear.
I pick up the pair of shoes she brought, but it turns out we don’t wear the same size. “They’ve got heated floors in the bathroom.”
“Whoa,” she says. “My mom said some of the other people from your neighborhood are staying at the school. In the gym. Can you imagine? They probably haven’t even cleaned up from the dance yet.”
I hold up the tank dress. It’s a little faded—probably not something Kiersten would have worn this summer anyway. Mom always says beggars can’t be choosers. Is that us now?
“I’ll turn around and close my eyes.” Kiersten sits down on Cammie’s bed.
I laugh. “I don’t think you have to do both.”
“Okay, then. I’m keeping my eyes open. So, what’s this about Avery staying here?”
I slip off Mrs. Manoukian’s clothes and pull the tank dress over my head. “The tornado blew the roof off his house. Everything upstairs is gone. His dad said it might be condemned, whatever that means.”