I reach up and tousle Art’s hair again, touting, “I make friends because I have such amazing hair. You should let me give you a mohawk. I could color it red, white and blue before Independence Day, then everyone will want to hang out with you, too. Mohawks are cool.”
“Mohawks are not cool,” he mutters, and in the glass I watch the reflection of his eyes arc full-circle just before he smooshes his forehead into the window again. “And neither are you.”
But I miss that last part, which would ordinarily earn him a pinch and me a threat from Mom, because beyond the crowd of lookie-loos I see a guy unlike any other. Apart from the crowd and completely disinterested in what’s drawn their attention, he sits on the front porch swing of the house directly across the street from ours, the chin-length locks of his dark black hair hanging in his face like a curtain while he tunes the strings of an acoustic guitar. He’s wearing blue jeans, worn and faded, a white tank top that looks so crisp in contrast to the darkness of his hair, and I don’t know why it strikes me enough to notice, but he’s barefoot, toes stretching outward absently as he fiddles with the pegs of his guitar.
Maybe it’s crazy, but the moment he brings his head up, I swear he sees me through the tinted windows of the van and we stare at one another. It’s like time stops, the van crawling through an ocean of endless minutes as I lose myself in the depth of his beautiful eyes. They look blue from here, but maybe they might be green.
It feels like fate, like every moment of my life has been leading straight to this one, and I kid you not my heart offers an abrupt flutter that actually makes me gasp. There’s no way he can see me, but he’s looking right at me, and the silent headphones still cushioned against my ears amplify a chorus of angels singing hallelujah.
In my analysis of face recycling, I realize I’ve never seen a face quite like his before. It’s new and it’s beautiful, all sharp angles and cheekbones, and maybe it’s really superficial but I instantly want to know him. Everything about him. His name. His astrological sign. His email (seriously, you can tell a lot about a person from the email he picks.) I wonder what song he’s thinking about playing on that acoustic guitar when he’s done tuning it, and if he can sing, too.
Then Dad turns into our new driveway and I lose sight of him for the moment. Before I can get out of the van, Art shoves his way through, claiming loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear that he’s going to pee his pants—yep, definitely going to have a hard time making friends. Mom ducks in through the back doors to unhook Gwen, who is also exclaiming that she has to pee, from her car seat, and by the time I manage to drop my feet into the gravel driveway and spin around to sift through the throng of gawkers for another glimpse at the hotty on the porch, he’s gone back inside and the only eyes I meet are Not-Heather Marlowe’s.
She’s smiling sweetly, something I don’t think I saw Heather Marlowe do once in the three years I knew her, but my inborn prejudice, and the fact that I just spent a thousand years driving across the country, makes it easy to look away without acknowledging her kindness.
I guess we’re all bitches in the end.
Even me.
Or maybe I’m just tired of being in a car. I mean, it’s not like I don’t have other, more important things on my mind because seriously, I do, and if I actually get to know this girl at some point, I can always brush it off and say I didn’t even see her.
We’re parked around back, and though I’ve seen the hundreds of photographs Mom and Dad took when they came to close on this monstrosity, pictures don’t do it justice at all. It’s sort of hideous, quite possibly the most rundown house Dad’s ever set his heart on restoring, and there’s a moment when I can’t even imagine living in it.
The mauve, ash grey and yellow paint isn’t just chipped, it’s stripped away in some places and colored over with graffiti. The rusted rooster weather vane atop the east-facing tower is dangling suicidally. A swift wind will probably jostle it loose and send it spiraling downward to impale some innocent bystander if it’s not taken care of, so I make a mental note not to walk anywhere near the eastern side of the house. There are shingles missing from several sections of the roof, and at least one of them sports a hole large enough to convince me someone will be making an animal control call before day’s end. Two of the windows on the third floor are broken out, and there’s a baseball lodged in the glass of another.
“Isn’t she gorgeous?” Dad’s dreamy voice jerks me back to the moment, intensifying the reality of this nightmare.
“We can’t seriously live here.” I swallow hard, past the tightness threatening to choke me, and glance over at my parents.
Mom looks exhausted, like she doesn’t care where she lives, just so long as she can stretch out, and Dad’s got that glimmer in his eye—the one that sees the beauty none of us can even begin to imagine beyond the rundown exterior of his new project.
“There are probably entire colonies of mice, maybe even rats, and I bet there are at least six bats living in that attic. Nests of birds, droppings everywhere. Cockroaches…”
“Tali,” Mom says softly, and when I turn to look at her, she shakes her head.
What, exactly, she’s shaking it to dissuade, I can’t imagine. Is she telling me not to rain on Dad’s parade? To look past the unlivable and see what he sees? Because I can’t. I never get it at first, even though I’ve seen him work his magic.
I could probably say anything I want, and he wouldn’t hear me. He’s dreamily gliding toward the back door, where Art’s impatiently dancing to be let inside so he can unleash his bladder, and though I know she’ll be mad at me for saying so, I look right at her and proclaim, “The first time some ghost creeps through my room in the middle of the night and asks if I can see dead people, I’m on the first plane back to Austin.”
“Don’t be such a drama queen.”
Right, easy for her to say. She made this choice; the rest of us are just along for the ride. She shifts Gwen to her other hip and follows Dad toward the back door, and it takes everything I have inside me to join them.
THREE
Empty houses always feel haunted, and the fact that this one actually looks like it came straight off the cover of a bad horror novel doesn’t help its case one bit. Truth is it doesn’t really matter when a house was built, the early 1800s or 1985—once someone’s already lived in a place and then moved on, their life there lingers.
I don’t know how long it’s been since someone lived here, but judging from the dank, musty smell that invades my senses the moment Dad pushes open the door, I’m guessing it’s been at least a decade.
And yet, I can feel the essence of the people who last lived here. It’s stifling, like they left a chunk of their well-being behind when they moved on, and that kind of energy takes ages to shoo away so a house starts to feel like home.
“Daddy,” I start, “are we all going to die in our sleep from toxic mold inhalation?”
“What? Like penicillin?” Art must have forgotten how badly he has to pee, because even he stops dancing and just stands there in front of us all, tilting his head around to look into the room beyond.
There’s a layer of muck and grime at least a quarter of an inch thick on the floors, dead bugs and only God knows what else sticking to it. I wonder how many floods this place has seen. My shoes stick to the linoleum tiles, and when I pry my foot up there’s a sickening noise, like peeling apart one of those nasty fly tapes you sometimes hang up in the kitchen.
I think I’m gonna barf.
“Can we stay in a hotel?”
Mom’s close enough that when her elbow clips my ribs I’m pretty sure it causes internal bleeding.
“The inspector’s assured us that despite the damp smell, there is no mold in this house.”
“Yeah,” I whisper, rubbing my side, “right.”
The back door brought us in just behind the kitchen, into what I’m assuming was once a pantry of sorts, and while my parents saunter away from the entryway, I just stan
d there silently asking myself why I didn’t stay in Austin.
I had a decent part time job at The Second Scoop ice cream shop, and I know my boss would have given me more hours if I’d offered to stay because he promised me before I left my job would be there when I came back for college. Dad might have even spotted me enough money to get an apartment near St. Edward’s campus, but when Arthur turns around to look back at us, he’s putting his best face on for our parents. He doesn’t want to be here anymore than I do, but he doesn’t have a choice. He can’t go back to Austin, no matter how much he wants to. I know he’s probably broken every muscle in his face trying to get that smile to work, and I can’t help thinking how much he looks like our father without the hopeful gleam in his eyes—even when he’s faking it.
God, that kid needs me. At least for the summer. Mom and Dad are going to be busy getting this place in order before he starts the real renovations, and as much as I hate to admit it, I love that stupid little twerp. Enough to sacrifice my own health and sanity, obviously.
“Daddy, where’s the bathroom?”
“Turn left out of the kitchen and there’s a bathroom two doors down on the right.”
Without another word he’s off, and in that he is far braver than I am. His shoes don’t sound as sticky after a while, but that doesn’t improve my perspective much. I wonder if they even turned on the water and electricity yet, or if one of my parents will send me out exploring with the van to bring back gallon jugs to flush water through the pipes until everything is squared away. It wouldn’t be the first time we arrived somewhere only to find running water wasn’t even an option.
“Do we even have water?”
“Water should be on,” Mom says. “Electric, too.”
Dad reaches over and flips the switch right beside him, shedding a dirty sort of yellow light over the shambles of the room we’re in. The dainty, flowered wallpaper peels away in great chunks, revealing a soft pink layer of gouged paint beneath, and I can actually see discoloration where shelving used to be. I think the shadows of hundred year old canning jars are visible too, and I shudder a little bit while trying to wrap my head around whatever it is my dad sees in this place.
“Are we even allowed to live here? Is it up to code? Like, what if the health inspector came with child services…”
“Tali.” Mom’s grinding her teeth, the tightness of her mouth around them making my name sound not just angry, but chewed up in her mouth before she spit it out.
“I’m just saying,” I mutter. “I hope it’s not haunted because at this point I think ghosts would be the least of our worries.”
“Tali, please stop.”
“She’s fine,” Dad laughs. “If it’s haunted, maybe we can have a séance, get the ghosts of those who used to live here to tell us exactly the way it’s supposed to be.”
“The fact that you’re serious about that is what bothers me most,” I smirk.
He reaches over and with a half-closed fist bumps my chin as he winks at me. “You should go upstairs, stake your claim on a bedroom before your brother gets out of the bathroom.”
He has a good point. Art’s old enough now to fight me for living space, and while I’m pretty sure I could beat him in hand to hand combat, our wounds would probably get infected in this place. I shake off a shudder and dart through the kitchen—at least I think it was a kitchen once; there aren’t any appliances, only the vague outline where they possibly once sat and greasy black stains on the floor.
Who lives in a house like this on purpose? All I can think as Mom calls after me, “Not the master!” is that some little old lady wound up here all alone, unable to maintain her house while it crumbled down around her. She probably died here, and she’s going to creep into my bedroom every night and whisper really bizarre things that drive me mad.
I wonder if I could turn that concept into a game?
It’s enormous, the interior just as wrecked as the outside. I push my way through the hall and groan inwardly as I realize my next few days are going to be spent cleaning because there’s no way we’re unpacking anything until we can actually see what the floors look like under that layer of grime. It’ll probably be weeks before it starts to feel semi-livable, and something inside me coils up and tightens as I realize it’ll be just as long before I can escape into the one place I feel comfortable in this world: a video game. The furthest concern from Dad’s mind will be getting the Internet connected, and while I have plenty of games that don’t require a net connection, I’m pretty sure my guild in Heart of the Dragon has fallen to ruin without me there to guide them.
Malik texts me at least four times a day, asking when I’m coming home. There’s no way I can make him understand I don’t really have a home without him thinking I’m homeless, so I just keep telling him soon, and promising to kill him with my bare hands if we lose our ranking on the leaderboards.
See, I’ve actually stopped thinking of these places as home. This’ll be the fourth house Dad has restored since he started this gig when I was five. His first restoration was a Victorian, too, with more bedrooms than people to fill them, and for a couple years he liked to joke with Mom about all those bedrooms being the reason they ended up having Arthur.
The nice thing about his passion for Victorian and Colonial homes is that I’ve never had to share a room with anyone. There’s something to be said for privacy and personal space, it develops character, and as I push through piles of stacked boxes, weaving through mattresses set up and about to topple like dominoes, I squeeze through to the winding staircase and expect the knob at the bottom of the banister to come off in my hand like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. It doesn’t, much to my relief, but every stair feels like it’s about to give beneath my feet, and my heart is thumping a million beats per breath by the time I reach the second floor landing.
Downstairs Art’s sneakers thump across the floor, and I smile triumphantly before peering down the shadowed hallway full of closed doors. There’s a little bit of light bleeding through from beneath each door, but it’s only enough to illuminate the seemingly endless length of the hall. I swallow the nervousness building up inside me, remind myself it’s just a house and there are no such things as ghosts, and then head toward the first door on the left.
It’s a bathroom painted in the most hideous sea foam green I’ve ever seen, and there are weird little mermaids stenciled in white mid-wall. The clawfoot tub hides behind a mildew-stained shower curtain hooked around a rusted metal oval hanging above the bath. That curtain will be the first thing to go when Dad sees it, followed quickly by the shower itself, I’m sure.
Backing out of the bathroom, I leave the door open so some of the light pushes through the window and crawls across the floorboards of the hallway. Diagonal is a bedroom, medium-sized with a thin white closet you couldn’t even fit a hanger in and dark grey wallpaper sporting tiny pink rosebuds drawn in green diamond patterns. I shake my head and turn away, crossing the hall to the next door and finding even more hideous wallpaper trim separating the dark brown paint on the bottom from a soft tan layer above. The trim has cowboys on horseback, their lassos looping outward, and the modern ceiling fan fixture dangles a cowboy hat charm that immediately begins to tick when I flip on the light. I should find a way to trick Art into taking that room.
There are two other bedrooms on the second floor, the master and a tiny little space that might once have been a nursery, and then I find myself winding the stairs to the third floor, not sure what awaits me when I reach the landing. Colored light pours through the stained glass window reaching from floor to ceiling at the end of the corridor. Spanning the length of the house, there are only two doorways, one on each side, so I venture forward and open the one on the right.
The room is huge, the vastness of it exaggerated by stark white paint and faded, cherry-stained hardwood floors. It could easily be three rooms with dividers. There’s a walk-in closet and a private bathroom. Tall windows line the east-facing wall,
daylight streaming in, save for the shadow left by the baseball lodged in the glass, and the opposite wall holds built-in cabinetry and drawers. I take another step inside, instantly knowing that no matter my father’s plans for this room, it will be my private space for the duration.
It’s hot in here, no, not hot, more like stuffy, but it smells better than downstairs. I walk toward the windows with plans to open them and press my fingers against the baseball, but it doesn’t budge.
Staring down over the roof on the balcony below, the extensive damage to the tiles is even more evident from up here.
This place.
What was Dad thinking when he sunk himself into this money pit?
I know in my heart his greatest motivation isn’t just restoring the beauty of these places. A part of him is actually searching for something, maybe even his own place to finally call home, but I can’t visualize things the way he does, and right now I can’t imagine this place ever being truly livable, much less comfortable enough to call home. I’ve got a feeling this house isn’t going to be his permanent happy place any more than the last one.
In fact, as negative as it sounds, I’m pretty sure he’s never going to find the place he’s looking for, but I’ve never said that out loud, not to either of my parents anyway. What would be the point of crapping all over their big dream? Even if I don’t see the point in it.
As much as it sucks moving every time he finishes a place, our family could be a lot worse off, I guess. My parents really love each other, which is more than I can say for a lot of the kids I’ve been friends with over the years. They want us to live and experience life to the fullest, to travel, see the country and grow feet as itchy and dreams as big as theirs. All my life they’ve taught me that following the dream is the only way to ensure you don’t wind up on your deathbed with a list full of regrets.
Reach for the stars, Taliesin, reach beyond the stars.
I know what it means. I get it; I really do. Life is precious and fleeting, but it’s really tough to make sense of someone else’s dreams, no matter how much you love that person. And me, I know I want to make beautiful games one day, stories that people can lose themselves in the way I’ve lost myself in countless games over the years, but I don’t know if that’s the same thing Mom and Dad are talking about, or if there’s more to me than that deep down inside.
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