by Sarah Dooley
Jamie laughed at this while Natasha told us to hush or she would kick us out right here.
“You would get in so much trouble!” Lanie protested, shoving me sideways into the dogs so she could dig the end of her seat belt out of the crack of the seat.
“Some days I don’t care,” Natasha said in warning tones. “Get your seat belt on!”
“I’m doing it! Geez!”
“You girls are worse than me and my brothers.” Jamie laughed. “Hey, don’t kill each other before we even get to Mickey D’s!”
“We’re going to McDonald’s?” Lanie shrieked.
“It’s too yellow,” I protested.
“It is not too yellow!” Lanie cried in exasperation. Although she kept patting my arm, as though I were one of the yellow Labs, in her voice and her face she was back to normal today.
“We’ll drive through,” Jamie compromised.
“That’s okay, we’ll eat when we get home,” Natasha said quickly, and Lanie groaned in dismay.
“Are you sure?” Jamie asked.
Casting a fierce glance at Lanie in the side view, Natasha nodded. “We’ll be fine.”
“I’m buying,” Jamie offered.
“Oh! Natasha, I have science fair money,” Lanie said, pulling a wad out of her pocket. My eyes widened. She had almost ten dollars stashed away. It was the longest I’d ever seen Lanie hold on to money.
“Oh,” Natasha said. “Well, I guess we can. Lanie, if you buy something for you, you have to buy something for Livvie, too!”
“I can wait,” I said quickly, and Natasha looked at me in surprise. “It’s too yellow,” I repeated. I noticed Lanie glancing suspiciously out of the corners of her eyes, but I didn’t say anything else. Jamie eased the car to a stop at the first red light and began singing along with the radio, some rambunctious country song.
The first house came before McDonald’s, and it was yellow. It was the wrong yellow, though, a mustardy gold color sort of like McDonald’s. I made Jamie drive past it without stopping.
“Livvie, you never know,” Natasha protested weakly. “The inside might be nice.” But she didn’t look any more eager than I did to stop at the mustardy house on its crowded little street.
“Where’s the next one?” I demanded.
“Kinely Street.”
“That’s the one with the fence,” I announced, remembering my phone call with the soft-spoken woman who owned the Kinely Street house. “She says it’s pet friendly and she loves”—I leaned a little farther away from the Labs and dropped my voice low—“cats.”
“Next stop: Kinely Street!” Jamie announced in his train engineer voice, steering a bit crookedly around a pothole in the road. There were fewer of those, I realized, ever since we passed the first stoplight of Neighbor. I wrapped the fingers of both hands around the seat belt fabric as Jamie accelerated onto Kinely Street and bumped to a stop next to a blue-and-white trailer.
“You didn’t mention that,” Lanie said pointedly.
“Neither did she,” I said, although I didn’t mind trailers in the least as long as they had good bathtubs. Nudging Lanie, I followed her out of the Bronco, eager to escape the hungry stare of the giant yellow Labs in the back.
The trailer stairs creaked and the front porch sagged. I noticed a neighbor sitting on her front porch directly across Kinely Street, staring at us. When she saw me looking, she stood and shuffled to her top step.
“Are you going to move in?” she called, which seemed premature, considering we had just pulled up. “I hope you’re a quiet bunch. My husband’s a day sleeper.” Never mind she was bellowing across the road in the middle of the day.
“We haven’t made any decisions yet,” I called across to her, and began to hum. I didn’t like her stare or the way her eyes went narrow.
“Actually, we have,” Lanie said protectively, stepping in front of me. “Time for Mickey D’s, right?” She led us back to the car and opened the door for me. The yellow Labs looked glad to see me back.
The McDonald’s was next to a Wendy’s and a Taco Bell. I didn’t know Neighbor had so many restaurants and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Each indulged too much in its own overwhelming, neon-bright color: McDonald’s in yellow, Wendy’s in orange, and Taco Bell in purple. Despite my distaste at the decorating scheme, my stomach growled and I scooched a little closer to the yellow Labs so Lanie wouldn’t hear it. Jamie swung the Bronco into the drive-through behind a family in a Pontiac and began tapping his fingers on the wheel in time to the music from an advertisement for Schick razors.
“May I take your order?” he said dramatically to Lanie, and she crossed her eyes and giggled, then passed nine dollars to the front. “Three double cheeseburgers, two with no onions and pickles and the other with no pickles and extra onions. Three small fries. And a medium diet soda.”
My eyes fixed on Lanie in surprise. That was too much food for one eleven-year-old. That was also almost all of her money.
“Lanie,” Natasha scolded. “You didn’t have to get me anything.”
Lanie snorted. “Maybe they’re for the dogs,” she said, but when the greasy bags were handed through the window, she distributed them accordingly.
My sandwich had pickles on it even though she had asked for none. I scraped the onions off the pickles and gave the pickles to the Labs, who licked their lips and scooted closer to me, eyeing me in a way that made me hunch over my sandwich protectively. It had been ages since I’d had restaurant food and the burger was warm and delicious. I ate it in four quick bites as Lanie watched me skeptically.
“Don’t choke,” she said firmly. “Mom will know something’s up if we get home and you’ve choked to death.”
“Good point,” Jamie said, and turned to me. “Remember what Mrs. Rhodes says?”
“Your food isn’t going to get up and walk away, so slow down,” I recited, then eyed the Labs. “Except my food really might get up and walk away. Right down these dogs’ throats.”
“Amber. Christina. Lay down,” Jamie commanded, and the dogs happily ignored him and kept their eyes trained on my fries.
The fries were salty and crisp with an underlying sweetness that made me close my eyes and sigh deeply. This was bliss. The sweet warmth of McDonald’s fries, long absent from my diet, had been missed, but never forgotten.
“You look like you’re about to fall over,” Lanie said, elbowing me. “Is it that good?”
I smiled blissfully. “Better!”
She smiled back like she just couldn’t help it and I saw something new in her eyes. “Good,” she said.
The third house on our list was on Lilly Avenue, and the inside smelled like mildew. Natasha took one step inside and stopped so quickly I immediately stepped on her heel.
“Ow,” she said flatly.
“Sorry.” I stepped back, right onto Lanie’s toe.
“Ow!” Lanie shrieked.
“Sorry!” I said again, starting to get flustered.
“It’s okay,” Natasha said quickly. “This one won’t do. It stinks.”
“Couldn’t we clean it?” I asked, starting to feel my hopes slipping away. There was only one more house on our list and at the rate we were going, we were still going to be homeless by the time the day was done. I was even starting to wonder whether we would have to go back and look at the Mustard House.
Jamie circled the block and pulled through the last stoplight in Neighbor. Two blocks later, he turned left onto Crab Orchard Drive. Crab Orchard wound along the creek and crossed over a tiny bridge. I felt a little pressure ease. I liked the way the trees watched us here.
“Three eighty-seven,” Natasha said, peering again at Lanie’s scribbled notes from the phone call she had helped me with.
Three eighty-seven Crab Orchard Drive was marked by a mailbox and a long gravel driveway. Jamie pulled the Bronco into it and we crept slowly up the rutted drive. Halfway up, we saw that Crab Orchard looped around so it passed the property closely on the side, but on t
he other three sides, the house was private.
Something started to snag at my memory and suddenly I felt like I was wearing wet slippers. The slippers took me back to the bus bench, and the bus bench took me back to the bus, a decade ago.
“The bus came here,” I said abruptly.
Natasha looked around at me as we climbed out of the Bronco. “What are you talking about?”
I pointed to the loop of Crab Orchard. “It must have come there.”
“How do you know?”
Because I knew the house, but I was speechless and couldn’t tell her. It was a gentle brick. Orange brick. It had moons carved into the shutters. I knew the house, all right.
Something streaked across my vision and ran to hide under the porch. All that was left in my line of vision was a calico tail poking out. Somehow I knew that the animal who owned the tail also owned this empty house.
Right then, all the pressure went out of me and I grabbed my sisters’ hands.
“This is it,” I said, and we stepped forward.
Chapter 16
I smelled the paper, more solid than ever, while we sat on the bench and waited for the bus to come.
“You’re all right, Livvie-bug,” my mother promised when the bus’s staring eyes made me afraid. She and Tash took my hands and guided me on despite my protests.
“Don’t, don’t, don’t.”
But we did, and it wasn’t so bad once we were on. Immediately, I turned and sat on my knees so I could stare out the window as the trees rolled past. The bus swept a turn around the factory, where workers trailed back and forth with their hard hats and their lunch pails, hollering over the factory noise and laughing out loud about things like football.
I was little, but I understood laughing. I mimicked it and Karen ruffled my hair. The bus drew us down Pendleton Street and turned left onto Main, chugging past the bank and the gas station and the hardware store. The courthouse, still open back then, winked in a friendly way as we bounced past it. The bus beeped and I put my hands over my ears, but Tash tugged them away and said, “Look who we’re stopping for!”
It was a little girl my own age and she bounced onto the bus in a way that was familiar. I had never met the girl, but she bounced right up to me and sat down next to me, and I started humming G notes. Our mothers started talking, but neither one of us listened. I showed her how to sit on her knees like me, and we watched the streets of Nabor-with-an-A slip by as the bus picked up speed.
I didn’t know any of the other houses in Nabor well, not back then. Still, certain ones seemed to be calling for my attention. A white one with shutters. A blue-and-white trailer. As we drew toward the end of Nabor, my eyes caught on the entrance to a trailer park and I watched it all the way past. Something made me hug my arms as I watched. The little girl beside me mimicked me and squealed.
The bus seats were plastic covered in fabric, and they rug-burned my knees through the sweatpants I liked to wear. All the way to Neighbor, I felt the fabric burning my knees, but I didn’t want to move. I liked the kid next to me and the way she bounced at every little thing. We didn’t have to talk to have a conversation. Her little hands pointed every which way and my eyes went dizzy trying to keep up with all her observations, but in a good way. When she bounced off the bus at the first stoplight in Neighbor, she waved wildly and I flapped my hands at her and shrieked out a giggle. Mom laughed, watching us.
“You made a friend, Livvie,” she said happily. “I’ll have to give her mother a call.”
The bus chugged us through six more stoplights and swung left onto Crab Orchard Drive, the back way in to the old Walmart, the one that wasn’t as big. Though my friend was gone, I still stayed stuck to the window, unable to turn away. Houses slipped past by the creek and I liked to watch them with their friendly faces. One had pink-and-yellow curtains in checkers. Another had moons cut into the shutters. That one waved at me like the trailer park had done, and I waved back shyly.
“Who you waving at, bug?” Tash asked. When I didn’t know how to answer, she lifted her hand and waved, too. “Hi, house!”
“Hi, house!” I echoed. “Hi, house, hi!”
“Hi, house!” Tash began to giggle and we waved together at the house as it slipped out of sight.
We had grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch at the diner, and drank milk out of mugs that felt like they were made out of mud. My parents laughed back and forth over our heads and Tash taught me a finger play about a church and a steeple and all the people inside.
The day was long, much longer than a tired four-year-old could manage, and I fell asleep on the bus heading home. I woke as the bus chugged onto Pendleton Street. It must have been six, because the mill whistle blew, attaching itself to the memory of the perfect day I’d had. Forever, the whistle would conjure up bus rides and grilled cheese sandwiches, mugs as smooth as mud and the house with the moons in the shutters.
Simon carried me off the bus and put me on my feet and I tensed, still sleepy and not sure where we were.
“It’s okay, Livvie,” Simon told me, and he showed me on the mailbox, where curly letters danced among pastel flowers. “We’re back home, see? Simon, Karen, Tash, and Livvie Owen live here.” I traced the letters with my fingers for a moment.
Then Simon steered me inside and sat me at the table while Karen lit the fire in the firebox. I heard the soft clicking and smelled the gas. It was the first cold night in Nabor that year and Karen hadn’t lied. We were all right.
Chapter 17
Even though none of my classmates liked hugging, I felt the need to hug them when they offered to help me throw a party for Tash on Monday.
I attacked Michael first. Hugging Michael was like hugging Lanie’s book bag with all the pens and pencils. He was all sharp points. He squirmed free and straightened the collar of his polo. He was less concerned with hugging than with the idea that there might still be snakes in the science lab at Tash’s new school, and if there were, could she send him a picture.
Bristol came next. Even though she didn’t like me, she liked Tash so much that, when I told her Tash was switching to the high school in Neighbor-with-an-E, she put her blue sweater on over all her warm colors. I hugged Bristol more for Bristol than for me, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when someone’s sad. But Bristol was only sad for a minute before she started hollering orders to Robert, who was pulling chairs into the kitchen so there would be enough for the party. Hollering orders always made Bristol wear warm colors again, and off came the sweater after a moment.
G hugged me six or seven times, till I thought my ribs would crack. I kept telling her it wasn’t me who was leaving, it was Tash, but she kept on hugging me, anyway. When I asked her why, she slapped a picture onto her Velcro of a beaming cartoon face with its stick hands clasped over its heart. Relief.
“Me, too,” I admitted. “Livvie’s re—I’m relieved, too.”
When I first told G about moving to Neighbor-with-an-E, at the end of last week, she got this look on her face like maybe she wanted to dig out her picture of a cartoon frownie face. But I was beaming so big, I couldn’t figure out why. She looked at me without saying anything for so long that I backed up a step and started rocking on my heels. My beam got less bright.
When she finally put the frownie face on the Velcro, it had a picture of me in front of it and I knew it was a question: Won’t you be sad?
That got me started wondering if I would be sad to leave Nabor High School, and once I started thinking about that, I couldn’t think about anything else. I asked Simon when I got home that day whether G could come with me to Neighbor-with-an-E, and whether I was really going to have to leave Mrs. Rhodes right when I finally found Mrs. Rhodes.
Simon put the half-empty saltshaker he was about to pack down on the table and let the old newspaper he was wrapping it in drift back down into the box. He looked me square in the eyes, and even though that usually made me squirm, this time I met his gaze steady and waited.
&n
bsp; “Absolutely not,” he said without hesitation. “You’re not switching schools, Liv, unless you want to. We’ll get your principal to agree to it at your next meeting, and I’ll drive you to Nabor High just like I used to drive Lanie to Neighbor-with-an-E. Problem solved.” He dusted his hands as if there was an imaginary problem he was dusting away, though all there actually was was salt.
That was when relief happened. It was only later I realized that he just said me. Not Tash.
I spent most of the week refusing to think about it, because I wasn’t sure what to think. But on our last morning living in Nabor-with-an-A, I blurted out the whole story to Mrs. Rhodes. And Mrs. Rhodes, of course, helped me find a way to manage things.
“Cream cheese makes a good chip dip for a party,” she announced, banging things out of the cabinet. “That sister of yours, we’d better tell her good-bye before she rushes off to greener pastures.”
“There’s no pastures at Tash’s new school, there’s just a parking lot and it has eighty-eight parking spaces,” Michael informed her. “I went there for summer school and they had snakes in the science lab. Do you think they still have snakes in the science lab? The black snake ate a Mus musculus. That’s the proper name for a mouse.”
“Well, Tash is leaving us for greener parking lots, then,” Mrs. Rhodes allowed. Then, “Michael, sometimes it’s best not to tell a girl if her new school has too many snakes.”
We tricked Tash into coming to her surprise going-away party by sending her a note from Mrs. Rhodes that was written in Official Teacher Language. Bristol read it aloud to us before she and Mr. Raldy went to deliver it.
“Please send Natasha Owen to Mrs. Rhodes’s classroom at your con—at—”
“—At your convenience,” Mr. Raldy said, with what I was pretty sure was a hint of a smile, and the two of them went off together. Mr. Raldy was more interested in doing things around the classroom now that Otis Andrews seemed to be threatening to take his job. Otis had arrived as a volunteer at the end of last week and did not appear interested in leaving any time soon.