The summer had been a mess so far.
Noh was supposed to be spending the already messy summer with her father in the Appalachians while he studied the mating habits of the Appalachian Russell Newt. But at the last minute he had decided that his daughter was just too young to go slogging through the muck In Search Of, so he shipped her off to Aunt Clara’s house for the summer.
When she got there—the note from her father explaining the situation clutched in her small, sweaty hand—she found that Aunt Clara had packed up her family and gone to the beach for the summer.Well, since she wasn’t sure exactly what beach her aunt and cousins had decamped to, she didn’t think spending the summer with them was going to be a viable solution.
Noh thought about getting back on the train and trying to find Harold, but she decided against it in the end. She thought, quite justly, that he would already be far into the woods and completely unreachable.
She sat on Aunt Clara’s stoop for a good two hours, debating her options and eating the lemons (rind, seeds, and all) she had collected from the backyard.
Tired and feeling the onset of an acidy stomach, she walked back to the train station and booked a seat on the night train to New Newbridge. She knew that the only stable person in her family (i.e., guaranteed to be where they were supposed to be) was her aunt Sarah, who taught English literature at the New Newbridge Academy. And anyway, Noh was going to be starting there in the fall for sixth grade, so she figured it was as good a decision as she could make at the time.
She slept the whole way on the train. Her mind was filled with very lucid dreams that tickled her brain. She saw a boy her own age sitting at a tall desk, reading a crumpled and smudged letter. Sensing her presence, he glared angrily at her.
The old lady sitting beside her nudged her awake at the New Newbridge stop. Noh collected her bag and stepped out into a very humid summer day.