by Jenn Reese
Caitlin’s eyes popped open. “Try to forget about that, too.” She shut them again.
Sam stood awkwardly in the doorway for another minute, waiting to see if Caitlin would say anything else, but that was it. When Caitlin wanted to forget something, she did.
Her own room seemed smaller after seeing Caitlin’s. The boxes were everywhere, great imposing stacks of them. Although—she tilted her head—the way all the plastic bins were stacked, they almost looked like the stones of a castle wall.
Yes. She could see it now.
The bins in the closet were the most promising. Sam pulled out the ones in the middle and stacked them to the sides. She worked slowly, careful not to make any noise. And she didn’t open any of them—moving the bins represented a certain level of trouble, but opening them … well, that was just asking for it. Aunt Vicky was big and Hannah looked strong and Sam had no desire to make them angry. You brought this on yourself. Not on her first day. Not when she didn’t even know how long she had to stay here.
Sam arranged the bins like a medieval stonemason, building her new structure with a critical eye. It felt strangely good to be using her body after hours of sitting on the plane and in the car, after days of sitting in plastic chairs while adults talked above and around her, while doctors hovered over Caitlin in her hospital bed, while people whispered and glanced and tried not to point. Until last week, she hadn’t realized that sitting could be so exhausting.
But she wasn’t sitting now—she was working. Soon Sam had carved out the center of the closet bins, leaving two walls that reached out into the room. It took her six tries to throw the bed quilt over the top to make a roof, but then she had it.
A fort.
A castle fort.
She lined it with the pillows from the bed. Back home, her pillows had been fluffier, all four of them deep-sea blue with a tiny dolphin-and-shell pattern. They were probably still on her bed, probably still arranged exactly how she had left them, along with the rest of her things. She imagined her room like Sleeping Beauty’s Castle—everything in a magical sleep awaiting her return.
She’d always had her own room, ever since she was little, and although her mother had picked the pale-yellow paint of the walls, Sam had been allowed to cover those walls with posters. She’d found them folded up in the creases of her father’s National Geographic magazines—he had a collection going back to the early 1900s. The old maps were her favorites. Sometimes on Saturdays, she’d go with her dad to one flea market after another. They’d comb through boxes of stinky, dusty magazines looking for the issues they were missing. Sam kept the official list in a notebook. Any time they found one, they got ice cream to celebrate. And if they didn’t find one, they got ice cream anyway.
There were no posters on the walls of Aunt Vicky’s room, only a row of small, framed flowers near the door. Nothing interesting. Nothing familiar.
Inside the fort, Sam opened her backpack and pulled out all the books. She arranged them by size along one of her castle walls: the illustrated book of fairy tales on the left, because it was the biggest, all the way down to her paperback copy of The Hobbit, dog-eared and ripped and stained, because she never went anywhere without it. There were a few books she hadn’t even read yet—one about a girl who was actually a dragon and another about a robot boy and his robot dog. She winced when she saw the spine of the last one. A library book. That belongs in a library in a whole ’nother state.
That last night, the night that everything went so awful—the thud of something hitting the wall—Sam had been reading this book. Trying to get to the end of a chapter before anyone noticed that she was still awake. Her finger wiggled between the pages where the bookmark was nestled, but she didn’t open it. She was afraid of what might happen.
Sometimes Sam’s mind took her places she didn’t want to go. Someone would ask her a simple question at school, and even though she was standing by her locker, her mind would be back in San Diego on a family vacation at the very moment when a snarl, a snap. The flash of a fist.
Sam pulled her finger from the pages and slid the book into place on her makeshift bookshelf. She’d try again later. It wasn’t due back at the library for another eight days, and maybe she’d be back home by then anyway.
Back home.
Sam eyed The Hobbit. J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous book had a second, less well-known name, and it made Sam’s chest hurt a little to think of it. The subtitle of The Hobbit was There and Back Again. Because it wasn’t enough for Bilbo Baggins to go on an epic quest across all of middle-earth. He had to go back home again afterward.
Heroes always went home.
Sam’s eyes began to prickle, and she looked away. That’s when the glittery, golden type on A Game of Fox & Squirrels caught her eye.
Sam fluffed her pillows and settled into her castle nest. She tugged at the faded cardboard tongue of the game box, and it slipped free, eager to spill its secrets. Two stacks of playing cards slid into Sam’s palm. The backs bore an ornate forest design in purples and blues. Faded gold birds sang from the branches of a massive central tree, and the silhouettes of a gold fox and squirrel sat on either side of its trunk. What kind of forest was purple instead of green? A fairy forest, maybe. Or a forest in another world. The kind of forest where the animals were all made of gold. Oh, how Sam wanted to see it for herself! It hurt her heart to know places like this existed but that she had no way to reach them.
Something flashed under the bed. Sam started. A golden tail?
No, of course not.
It was only the sunlight reflecting off the shiny surface of the table lamp. It couldn’t possibly have been anything else … no matter how much she wanted it to be.
Sam flipped over one of the cards in her hand. The six of spades … except the spade was etched into the body of an acorn at the corner and the six acorns scattered in the middle of the card were being gathered up by a nervous-looking squirrel. She leafed eagerly through the deck. Each suit had a different type of squirrel and a different type of nut: acorns with spades, almonds with diamonds, walnuts with hearts, and peanuts with clubs. Sam sighed. Peanuts weren’t actually nuts, they were legumes. Whoever had made the game should have done their research!
It was easy to overlook this small mistake, though, in light of how the cards made Sam feel—like she was looking through a window into another world. The “royal” cards—the queen, king, and page—were particularly handsome, their squirrels decked in tiny robes and crowns. Sam lingered over the Queen of Hearts, whose little squirrel paws were holding a magnificent walnut as if it was the greatest prize in all the kingdom. The squirrel seemed so proud, so regal, that Sam couldn’t help smiling and sitting a little straighter herself.
Sam admired each card—touching the noses of the animals, counting the nuts (and legumes!)—until, finally, she reached the end.
And found the Fox.
The Fox was dashing. He wore a fancy purple coat lined in gold and carried a satchel. A jaunty feathered hat sat angled on his fuzzy red head. He seemed alive enough to breathe, right there on the card! He could have been a Disney character, except his eyes were regular fox eyes, golden brown and sharp, and not huge cartoonish eyes that took up half his face.
Sam heard a knock at the door and then Aunt Vicky call out, “Dinner.”
Her heart burst into rabbit mode. That’s what a doctor had called it once, rabbit mode, when he was explaining it to Sam’s mother. Hearts were supposed to pace themselves as if they were running a marathon—slow and steady like the tortoise in that old fable “The Tortoise and the Hare.” But sometimes Sam’s heart tried to be the hare, jumping this way and that, frantic and foolish, as if it were trying to escape from her chest.
What if Aunt Vicky opened the door and saw the castle fort? Sam should never have touched her aunt’s things, should never have moved them, should never have presumed. Sam clutched the cards in her hand, completely frozen, while her heart raced in wild circles.
But Aunt
Vicky didn’t open the door, and a moment later Sam heard her knock on Caitlin’s door and say the same thing before moving back down the hallway. Sam let out a breath. Aunt Vicky wasn’t coming in. She wasn’t going to see what Sam had done.
None of that mattered to her rabbit heart, though, which kept hopping and bouncing against her ribs. The doctor—he was the comfy-chairs-in-an-office kind, not the sterile-examining-table-and-stethoscope kind—had given her some exercises, and she tried them now.
Breathe. One, two, three. Breathe. Four, five, six. Breathe. Seven, eight, nine. By the time she got to eighteen, her heart was almost a tortoise again.
Sam wiggled the Fox & Squirrels cards back into their box with shaking hands and shelved the game next to her books along her castle wall. She should dismantle her fort, she knew. It would be safer than leaving it here to be found. She’d gotten lucky this time. She wouldn’t always be. She never was.
But Sam left her castle standing, closed the bedroom door behind her, and, like a tortoise, slowly made her way to dinner.
FROM THE RULES FOR FOX & SQUIRRELS
THE FOX
Winter isn’t the only thing the squirrel must plan for; there is also the Fox. The Fox can appear at any time.
The Fox might be happy. (Happy foxes are a joy!)
The Fox might be charming. (Charming foxes are a delight!)
But sooner or later …
The Fox will be hunting.
CHAPTER THREE
CONDIMENTS SAT IN the center of the kitchen table like a tiny cityscape: ketchup and sriracha soaring above the rest, two thin spires of hot sauce, spice jars plump and low and labeled GARLIC and OREGANO and SHALLOTS. What was a shallot? It sounded dangerous.
The four of them were crammed around one end of the long table because computers occupied the other half, big black monitors arranged like an altar, worshipped by keyboards and mice and surrounded by coils of unkempt black cords.
Sam did not ask about them, and neither did Caitlin. They knew better. Sam slid into the seat next to her sister.
Hannah spooned scrambled eggs onto Sam’s plate. Sam’s mother only made scrambled eggs for breakfast, and she stirred in cream cheese so they were gooey and soft. Or sometimes she sprinkled sesame seeds on top for a little crunch, or added crumbled crackers to the eggs before she cooked them. Hannah’s scrambled eggs were just eggs.
But at least Hannah sat at the table once she was done cooking. Aunt Vicky kept popping up to go to the fridge, or to take a glass to the sink, or to “grab another napkin.” Like she could hardly stand the thought of sitting for more than five seconds at a time.
“The eggs are delicious,” Caitlin said. “Did you use special spices?”
Hannah smiled, clearly happy to be asked. “Just salt and pepper. You know, the usual suspects.”
“Do you girls have everything you need tonight?” Aunt Vicky asked. “Toothbrushes, toothpaste? Pajamas?”
Sam said nothing, knowing that Caitlin would answer.
“We have all that stuff,” Caitlin said, on cue.
Her sister did not say that it was their caseworker, Mrs. Washington, who had given the supplies to them—brand-new brushes and floss and shampoo tucked into brand-new toiletry bags, pink for Caitlin and green for Sam. The implication had been clear: they were going to be away from home long enough to need these things. Longer than one night. Longer than two. And now they’d been away so long that the little bottles of shampoo were almost empty. But Sam refused to ask Aunt Vicky or Hannah for more. What if they gave her a full-sized bottle?
“Good,” Hannah said. “I’ll be gone in the morning. I work in town. But your aunt Vicky and her business partner will be here working all day. You can ask for anything you need. Right, Vic?”
Aunt Vicky blushed red. Was she upset? Sam felt her heart shifting back into rabbit mode.
But Aunt Vicky only nodded. “Armen and I will be working here at the table. We have a project due, and I couldn’t push the deadline. But if you girls need anything, just ask. Don’t worry about interrupting.”
Sam dug her fork into her eggs and silently vowed not to interrupt.
“Armen’s son usually walks over with him during the summer, so don’t be surprised if you see a scruffy-looking boy running through the yard,” Hannah added.
Caitlin’s eyes widened with interest.
“He’s your age, Sam,” Hannah continued, and Caitlin’s excitement faded instantly. “We’ll have more time to talk tomorrow about … everything,” Hannah said. “You’re both registered for school, but it doesn’t start for almost three weeks. That should give us some time to get your supplies and whatever clothes—”
“School starts in two weeks back home,” Sam said. “It starts on the twenty-eighth.” Her own voice startled her.
It seemed to startle everyone else, too. Even the forks and knives stopped their clattering. Sam tried to melt into her chair, to become one with the wood.
“Sam,” Caitlin hissed.
“No, it’s okay,” Hannah said smoothly. “Sam, honey, your caseworkers have asked us to proceed as if you’ll be staying with us for … well, for a while. And that means school here, instead of Los Angeles. I know it’s a shock, but we’ll do our best to help. Okay?”
Sam did not answer, even though she felt Caitlin looking at her. How could she? How was this, in any way, okay?
“She’ll be fine,” Caitlin said quickly. She never let silences go too long. “Maybe she’s just not used to being eleven yet.” Caitlin bumped Sam’s shoulder playfully, but the tiny display of sisterly concern was more for Aunt Vicky and Hannah’s benefit.
“It seems like a good time for cake!” Aunt Vicky pushed away from the table abruptly, her chair scraping across the floorboards, and said, “I’ll take your plates.” She took Sam’s before Sam had even finished with her eggs and replaced it with a clean one, and a fork.
“It’s birthday cake,” Aunt Vicky said, and there seemed to be a nervous question hidden in her words. “For your birthday.”
Sam nodded dully. She clung to her chair as if a river had rushed into the room and was trying to sweep her away.
School was starting in two weeks. What would BriAnn think if Sam wasn’t back by then? What would everyone say? Would all her classmates sit around at lunch talking about why she wasn’t there?
Aunt Vicky plunked a glistening cake onto the table. The flames of eleven tiny candles bobbed and swayed atop the swirly chocolate icing.
“That looks amazing,” Caitlin said, nudging Sam with her good elbow. “Doesn’t it look good, Sam? You love chocolate!”
Sam gripped the seat of her chair even harder. Her voice had vanished. She couldn’t have answered even if she’d wanted to. She managed to give Aunt Vicky a small smile.
“Make a wish,” her aunt said, encouraged. “But don’t tell us what it is, so it has a better chance of coming true.”
Make a wish, and keep it to herself. Finally, a thing Sam could do!
She blew out the candles. Every last one.
Aunt Vicky cut the cake and put a huge slice on Sam’s plate. The moment Sam tasted it, the tightness in her throat began to loosen. The cake was still warm from the oven. The gooey frosting soaked into the sponge and made it super moist. At home, she always heated hers up in the microwave, but it was never as good as this. She would have had a second piece if anyone had offered. No one did. Aunt Vicky slid the cake under a glass dome and collected their plates a second time.
“You girls can watch TV tonight,” Hannah said. “And we have a few movies on DVD.” Sam noticed that she didn’t mention anything about school or Los Angeles again. Not that Sam could stop thinking about them anyway.
“Or we could play a game,” Aunt Vicky added. “I have—”
“Can I use the treadmill in my room?” Caitlin interrupted. “I haven’t gotten in a run in ages.” She hefted her broken arm as proof.
“The doctor’s instructions said light exercise was fine, so keep
it at a jog,” Hannah said. She chuckled. “I can’t remember the last time I used that thing, so you’ll probably need to dust it first. I’ll grab the cleaning supplies.”
And then Hannah and Caitlin were gone, off to the treadmill in Caitlin’s room, leaving Sam alone in the kitchen with Aunt Vicky. Any second now, Aunt Vicky would speak. She would ask Sam a question.
And answering questions was the last thing Sam wanted to do. That’s how she’d ended up in Oregon, after all. Because she’d been tired and confused when people had started asking her the sorts of questions that no one had ever asked before. She should have kept her mouth shut. And now school was about to start, and Sam was in the wrong state.
Sam pushed away from the table too quickly, sending her empty glass of milk into a wobbly dance, and hurried back to the room she’d been given. As she was closing the door, she heard Hannah say, “Where did she go?”
Away. To her books. To her castle.
The door to her room had a lock. Would Aunt Vicky get angry if she used it? She could get caught once, probably. She almost always got by at least once. The tiny switch fought her at first, but with a little force, the mechanism creaked and whined and the bolt slid into place.
Locked. Safe.
She pulled the sheets off the bed and dragged them into the castle fort. Why would she sleep all exposed when she could have the walls of her fortress to protect her? Why all beds weren’t fortified and defensible was a mystery. Rapunzel may have been trapped all the way up in that tower of hers, but she was probably sleeping better than everyone else in the kingdom. If Sam were Rapunzel, she would have cut her hair off and made sure no one could visit her at all.
As long as the tower was filled with books, of course.
Once her castle nest was cozified—which should totally be a real word—Sam crawled inside and cocooned herself in sheets. She surveyed the neat row of spines in her makeshift library, trying to decide which book to read. Her eyes kept going to her birthday present instead. To the worn box holding Fox & Squirrels.