by Gin Phillips
“Thanks,” says Lydia. “But I don’t think this afternoon works.”
“Mom said I could invite you,” he adds, like maybe that was the problem. “She says you can come have lemonade. She makes really good lemonade. It has cherries in it.”
You can tell by his voice that he’s impressed by his mom. Maybe everybody’s impressed by their mom when they’re six years old.
“That sounds great,” says Lydia. “But we’ve got some stuff we’d like to do today.”
“Like what?” he asks, looking back and forth between us.
“Exploring,” I say. “Checking out some things.”
As soon as I say it, I can tell he’d like to come with us. I can see him think about inviting himself along, and I wouldn’t blame him if he did. I’m almost sure I couldn’t turn him down, not with him looking at me with those big eyes. But he doesn’t ask. The hope fades out of his face, and for about a second he looks disappointed. Then the disappointment is gone, and he grins.
“Okay,” he says. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“And thanks a ton for finding Saban,” Lydia says.
I can tell she feels a little guilty, too. We don’t really have a set plan for today, although we always wind up exploring one way or another. The truth is that we like being on our own. That’s why we’re here. We came to Lodema to get away from family. And now there’s this whole new family—a family that lives underground in an abandoned house for fish, that is—and they’re sort of invading our space just by being here. It feels like we should set some rules, draw some boundaries. I don’t want to be rude, but I’m not really interested in being best friends with Jakobe. No matter how adorably odd he is. Or how cute and chubby his cheeks are.
He doesn’t seem to need our company anyway. He’s tromping through the grass again, paying no more attention to us than if we were a couple of turtles he thought might be entertaining until we refused to come out of our shells.
“Hey, Jakobe!” I call.
He keeps swishing through the grass. “Yeah?”
“If I were a bird, what would you sing to get me to come to you?”
He stops. “What kind of bird are you?”
“Does that matter?”
“Sure.”
“Mmm, okay. I’m a sparrow.”
“Are you sitting out in the grass, right in the open? Or are you hiding?”
“I’m hiding,” I say. “Under a bush.”
“All right,” he says, narrowing his eyes. “That makes a difference. Some birds are easy—they just want to play. They want to be entertained. The hiders need more than that. They need to know why it’s worth coming out.”
The kid has clearly thought about this.
“Okay,” he says. “So you’re under the bush. You’re a small bird, but fluffy. I can hear you cheeping. . . .”
He swallows a couple of times and leans in closer to me. I feel like he’s about to reach out and touch me even though he’s still ten feet away. Lydia starts to giggle, but I can barely hear her over Jakobe.
“You have soft feathers . . . and small blinky eyes,” he sings. It’s to the tune of “On Top of Old Smokey,” and his voice is clear and sweet. “You think you’re safe if you stay in disguise/But you can’t fly if you stay where you are/So come out and see if you can land on a star.”
Lydia’s not giggling anymore. She’s smiling, but it’s a friendly smile.
“I’d come out for that,” I say.
“I don’t think birds can really land on stars,” Jakobe says, “but I also don’t think they know that. It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it, to tiptoe around on one? I bet they’d be fizzy.”
For the rest of the afternoon, I wonder every now and then if Jakobe is singing any birds out of bushes. If you’d asked me a month ago to name some talents, I’d probably have said dancing, painting, sports, baking . . . stuff like that. But out here at Lodema, there are different talents. Jakobe singing animals out of hiding places. Gloria transforming an underground aquarium into a beautiful apartment. Lydia’s coyote howling and bug finding and algae diving.
At first I just thought there were amazing things inside Lodema. I’m starting to realize that, actually, there are amazing things inside of people. Maybe all the wide-open space here makes it easier for those things to come out.
It’s getting harder and harder to come home every day. I’m usually climbing the fence and walking through the Wasteland just as the sun is going down, and as the light disappears, so does life at the golf course. It’s started to feel like my real life, and my life in the apartment is the fake one. The dream one. The apartment is mostly in the dark, with a black sky outside, and Lodema is in bright light all the time. I’m definitely awake there. I can see everything. Things get cloudier at home.
Tonight when I step into the apartment, I see three boxes piled on the kitchen table. That means one thing: board game night. Mom loves board games. Not the word ones, like Scrabble and Boggle, which I usually win. She doesn’t like the strategy ones, either—like Battleship or Labyrinth, which I always win. She likes board games that involve acting or singing or charades or drawing spaceships that everyone thinks are hats. She likes being as silly as possible.
“I never did grow up,” she says, grinning.
“No, Mom,” I say, because I know that’s what she wants me to say.
We play a game where you look at a word, then you draw a picture of that word, pass it to the next person, and that person guesses what the picture is supposed to be. You do that until you’ve passed it all the way around the table, and usually the final guess is nowhere close to the real word. Usually you’d want to play with more people, but we don’t need to because Mom is an absolutely terrible drawer. Seriously. She draws a cow, and you think it’s a spider; she draws pigtails, and you think it’s a squash. Once her word was “lemonade” and Lionel’s best guess was “a baby.”
She’s also a terrible guesser, although I think she’s bad on purpose sometimes.
I pick up the drawing pad and turn to my original phrase.
“This was a piñata.” I show my fairly decent drawing of a hanging piñata and some kids hitting it.
I turn the page. “And Mom guessed . . . a zoo? You guessed a zoo?”
“There are kids looking at an animal,” she says. “A horse. Or a zebra.”
Lionel has already cracked up.
“No, they’re not,” I say. “There are kids hitting a horse with a stick.”
“Rough zoo,” says Lionel.
“They could be feeding it,” says Mom. “Feeding it candy canes.”
We’re all giggling now.
“Why would they feed it candy canes?” I ask.
“It’s Christmastime,” she says, and she throws her tiny pencil at me.
I guess I’ll go ahead and admit it: One reason that things are cloudier at home is because not all the nights are bad. Some are pretty fun. Sometimes I go to bed smiling. It’s easier, though, during the bad nights and the bad days, to think that everything is always miserable. It’s simpler. If it’s not always miserable, then you have to start thinking: If I get five good nights for every ten bad nights, does that mean I should be satisfied? Two good nights for every ten bad nights? Does it matter how bad the bad is and how good the good is?
And if it’s not good enough, then what? What option do I have?
On good nights and bad nights, I look through my window and watch Marvin peering over the trees. If I was a strange little kid like Jakobe, I’d think that dinosaur was wondering where I was.
CHAPTER 13
HATLESS ACORNS
There’s a huge oak tree on the edge of the putt-putt course, and the ground underneath is filled with fallen acorns and their hats. The hats are the top part—the stem part—of the acorn. At Marvin’s house, ther
e was an oak tree nearly as big as this one, and he parked his pickup truck underneath it most days. The bed of the truck would fill up with nuts, sometimes with the hats attached, sometimes not. And I’d go out there and sit in the middle of the truck and try to match up any bald acorns with their missing hats. It’s rare that you can find a good fit—every acorn is different. Most hats are too small or too big. But occasionally you slide one on, and it’s a perfect match.
I’m sorting through nuts now, sitting cross-legged on the ground, a root digging into my knee. Lydia has gone to check on the baby birds, but I find acorn-hat hunting relaxing. And a little sad. There’s something lonely about an acorn with no top, its little round head unprotected. That’s why it’s so satisfying when I can pair it up with the right hat.
I’ve got a handful of hats in one hand and a pile of acorns in front of me when I hear footsteps behind me. It’s Maureen, her curly hair pinned back with sparkly blue clips, and she’s holding a bag of M&M’s.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” she says.
I expect her to say something snarky about me playing with a bunch of nuts, but she doesn’t. She looks a little uncomfortable.
“M&M’s?” she says, holding out the bag.
I take two red ones and a yellow one and hand the bag back to her. She folds herself up and sits next to me, brushing the acorns out from under her. I crunch my M&M’s and wait for her to say something.
“What are you doing with the acorns?” she finally asks. She says it like she’s really curious, not like she thinks I’m probably an idiot.
“Trying to match them up with the right hat,” I say.
She glances over the ground, taking in the hundreds of acorns and hundreds of hats. “Do you ever find the right one?”
“Sometimes,” I say.
She picks up an acorn and studies it. Then she starts collecting hats in her other hand. We work silently. I try to stay focused on acorns, but I’m really confused about Maureen being here at all. First of all, she didn’t seem to like me or Lydia at all. Second of all, she’s seventeen. In my experience, high schoolers don’t hang out with middle schoolers. They do not sit in the dirt and play under trees.
“When you came by our place the other day,” she says quietly, “I was still a little weirded out that you two were here. I was embarrassed for anyone to know this is where we lived. And I guess it seemed a little unfair that you have perfectly nice houses, and you just come over here for fun. It felt like the fact that you’re here, I don’t know, makes fun of us somehow.”
I think about that. It hadn’t occurred to me that Maureen could think we would seem luckier that she was. I’ve thought about all she has—a cool mom, a funny little brother, total freedom, and an aquarium for a house. For a second, I get a flash of what she doesn’t have: her own bedroom, hot water, a television, money to buy clothes or books or maybe even food.
“You don’t think all that anymore?” I ask. “You don’t feel like we’re making fun of you by being out here?”
“Not most of the time,” she says, cutting her eyes at me. “I’m only slightly weirded out now.”
I nod. One thing that’s occurred to me lately is that I don’t usually have to make conversation. With Lydia, conversation just happens. I don’t have to think about it. When I’m home, whatever I say is totally wrong about half the time, so I try to stay fairly quiet. I don’t meet a lot of new people. So you put me face-to-face with Adam Cooper or Alexia at the gas station or a random seventeen-year-old, and I’m not sure how to talk.
“You don’t need to be embarrassed,” I say, because it’s true.
“Right.”
“You don’t.”
She raises both of her eyebrows and they make neat little semicircles over her eyes. “Do you know what I found in my bed this morning?” she asks. “A dried-up starfish leg.”
“You did not.”
“Oh yes. I mean, who else wakes up and finds pieces of sea animals under their blankets?”
“The Little Mermaid?” I guess.
We both grin. I notice she has chocolate on her chin.
“I showed it to Mom, thinking she’d laugh,” says Maureen. “But she nearly cried. She’s more embarrassed about this whole thing than I am. She thinks she let us down.”
“Do you think that?”
“No,” she says immediately. “I get ticked off and worried that everyone at school will realize we lost the apartment, and I hate not being able to get new clothes, and I miss having a bedroom of my own. But Mom’s doing all she can. She’ll find something else. She’s right—this isn’t going to be permanent. I know that. But sometimes I don’t feel it, you know?”
I nod. Nodding silently is something I’m very good at.
“You know what Mom still buys?” she asks. “Even though we tear napkins in half to make them last longer and she can’t buy Tylenol when she has a headache? She buys big jars of honey because that’s what Jakobe wants when he has a sore throat. Or just when he’s faking a sore throat. How could I stay mad at her when she’s still determined to buy him honey?”
I wonder if maybe there’s wild honey somewhere around Lodema. There seems to be everything else. Why wouldn’t bees set up shop in a nice hollow log? I decide that the next time I see a bee, I’ll try to follow it.
There’s probably not much chance of finding a nice healthy bunch of wild Tylenol.
Maureen has found a hat for one of her acorns. She holds it in the palm of her hand proudly, then sets it carefully on the ground.
“You want to come have hot dogs with us later?” she asks. “We usually build a fire in one of the sand traps and roast them. They’re pretty good.”
I feel like I’m in a tough position. I want to say, “We can’t come because we have to be home for dinner.” But is it rude to mention home when she doesn’t have one?
“We don’t usually stay here past dark,” I say instead.
She shrugs. “Mom thought that might be a problem. We’ll eat early. Five o’clock? That’ll get you home way before dark.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“I guess.”
I’m still trying to make this new Maureen fit with the old Maureen we met in the aquarium.
“Why are you inviting us?” I ask.
Her hair clips sparkle in the sun, and she digs the toe of her sandal into the dirt before she answers.
“I should say Mom made me,” she says. “I should say it’s all her idea and I’m only trying to be nice. Or that Jakobe wanted you over. Because he gets bored with just the two of us for playmates.”
“But that’s not what you’re saying?”
“I’m bored, too,” she admits. “I mean, my two best friends know Mom lost her job, and they know we moved into our car for a while. They think we’re still bouncing around from our car to motels. No one else knows we’re in trouble. But living out here sort of limits my social life. I can’t really have people over to spend the night or watch a movie, and we don’t exactly have a lot of gas money for me to go meet friends. So I guess I’ve decided you two might be better to hang out with than a kindergartner and a forty-five-year-old woman.”
“Thanks,” I say. But I’m starting to think Maureen isn’t so bad.
It’s only hot dogs, right? It’s not like they’re asking to adopt us. We can eat dinner with them tonight, be polite, and then tomorrow go back to our regular routine. It’ll be something new. Jakobe and Maureen aren’t the only ones who’d like to see a different face now and then. Maybe Lydia and I could use a little more company. And there’s something else: I’m curious how they do it. I’m curious how they live here. I’m curious how they are together. I’m curious about what sort of family they make. We’ve explored everything else here—maybe Gloria and Jakobe and Maureen are worth exploring, too.
Lydia’s not ha
rd to convince about the cookout, mainly because she really likes hot dogs. It turns out that an old sand trap is a perfect place for a fire—there’s no danger of sparks landing anywhere flammable, and you can just kick the sand over the fire when you’re done. We all find our own long thin branch, and we roast our hot dogs until the skin is black and crunchy. We cover them in ketchup and mustard and eat them right off the sticks, one bite at a time. Then Gloria shows us how to roast figs—which are not good with ketchup, by the way—for dessert. The figs are sweet and hot and melty and taste like little fruit pies. They fall apart in our fingers as we take them off the sticks.
Jakobe hisses and jerks his hand away from a smoking fig. He glares at it. Then he starts singing to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
“Cool down, cool down, don’t you burn my hand/Or I’ll stomp you and bury you in sand.”
“Did that help?” asks Maureen.
Jakobe pokes at the hot skin. “Well, no,” he says, “but I haven’t worked with fruit much.”
As soon as he’s done licking his fingers, Jakobe starts asking if Maureen will read him a book after supper, so we all walk back toward Hole Nine. Maureen and Jakobe disappear down the stairs. That leaves Gloria, Lydia, and me. I suggest I could go get my deck of cards from inside Marvin.
Gloria shrugs.
“I was wondering if y’all would mind, um, if I fixed your hair,” she says a little timidly. “I used to do that for a living. Style hair. And you girls have great material to work with. Since Maureen cut all hers off, I haven’t had anyone to practice on.”
I can tell she’s afraid we won’t like the idea, that maybe we’re too old to have our hair fixed. But Lydia loves for people to play with her hair. Gloria has barely finished speaking before Lydia’s scooting near her.
I offer to go get a hairbrush and ponytail holders, and once I grab them from Marvin, I walk slowly back to the windmill where Lydia and Gloria are sitting. There are low wispy clouds, and they throw shadows across the ground. As Gloria’s hands weave in and out of Lydia’s hair, the shadows of tree branches move across their shoulders and arms.