TWO

I know the apartment will be empty when I get back. A few months ago, you’d never have caught Dad awake before eight. (Early mornings are Mom’s department. She’s out the door by six thirty because, as she says, she does her best thinking before everyone else gets to the university.) Dad used to roll out of bed as late as possible. He could dress, shave, comb his hair and grab a smoothie from the fridge in about ten minutes. When I heard the front door open, I’d run down the hall, grab my backpack and follow him out.

Dad lost his job at Brockhurst in November. He’d been the Social Studies teacher at my school since before I was born, and every day after he left, I had to listen to kids rehashing the details of him getting sacked. All my life, he’d spent our drives home ranting about young people who were born with silver spoons in their mouths, but he’d always kept his views under wraps at school. Then one day he caught Kaitlin Green showing off her new phone when she was supposed to be working on her Industrial Revolution assignment. He snapped. Kaitlin ran out of the classroom in tears, and a week later Dad was eating ripple chips on the couch.

My best friend—her name’s Sofia—and I tried to convince my parents to let me transfer to our neighborhood school. Actually, we’d been trying for ages, because I’d never really fit in at Brockhurst. Everyone else who went there lived in a mansion and had a driver to bring them to campus. I showed up in Dad’s twelve-year-old hatchback. Everyone knew we weren’t rich enough to really belong, but most of my school fees were covered because Dad worked there. Until he moved to Ripple Chip Land, that is.

In the end, none of Sofia’s and my efforts mattered anyway. In January, Dad announced that he’d found a job in Victoria and that I was going out west with him. Mom agreed that it was for the best, since she travels so much for work, and she said she’d come visit me in March. No one asked me what I wanted. When I threatened to disappear just before the plane left, my parents both laughed. Together. As a unit, for once.

I would have thought a job good enough to move across the country for would be a real humdinger, as my grandfather would say. One that came with a big salary, amazing benefits and incredible job satisfaction. But my dad’s gone from teaching at one of the most prestigious private schools in Montreal to managing a dumpy apartment building across the street from where my grandfather lives. The Suffolk Arms is as old and hideous as the faux-fancy name suggests.

Our hallway smells like a chain-smoker. So does our apartment. I fumble in the dark for the light switch, and the bare bulb in the hallway flicks on. Except for a few coats and shoes in the closet, our place is mostly empty because we only had a suitcase and two small backpacks when we got here. Dad didn’t want us to bring anything more because he didn’t want Mom to feel like we were leaving her. (Uh, hello?) I said we should at least bring the houseplants, on humanitarian grounds—I once found a cactus in Mom’s office that died from lack of water—but Dad said we needed a fresh start. So here we are, furnitureless and fresh in a crappy apartment. We each have a mattress now and a few dishes, but that’s as far as we’ve got in the interior-decorating department. Dad has big plans for this place, but as far as I’m concerned, no matter what he does to redecorate, it’s still going to be a dumpy place with views of a parking lot.

The door opens behind me. “Up and dressed already!” Dad wipes his forehead on the back of his hand. He’s drenched in sweat, but he’s got a smile on his face, two things that rarely happen together. My dad’s a big man, and he used to be some incredible outdoor endurance athlete when he was a teenager. But in my lifetime, I’d never once seen him intentionally exercise. Until we moved here. “Looks like we’re both turning over new leaves.”

“I went for a walk,” I say.

“Discover anything interesting in the ’hood?”

I don’t mention the fruit grafting. Dad hasn’t warned me away from my grandfather, but he hasn’t exactly encouraged me and Uli to get to know each other either. Even though we’ve moved across the country because of Uli, Dad is still very particular about our time together. We run errands. We go to restaurants. I haven’t been inside my grandfather’s house yet, and he hasn’t come over here. I’ll keep our early-morning conversation to myself for now.

I guess Dad takes my silence for complete disgust with my surroundings. “Give it time, Chloë.” He claps me on the shoulder. “It’ll get better.” Then he tells me how he met one of our neighbors running along the beach this morning. The guy has a friend who’s moving and wants to sell his furniture. “By the time you come home from school, I might have this place all decked out!”

He’s so excited that I can’t help but smile. One happy parent is better than none, right? I keep telling myself that. Maybe by the time we move back to Montreal, I’ll believe it.

Apart from Mom, the person I miss most right now is Sofia. We were neighbors in Montreal and have been best friends since I was two. Other families on our street came and went, but ours were permanent fixtures. On schooldays she always showed up on our doorstep about five minutes after Dad and I got home. We did homework together, ate supper at whichever house had the best menu and hung out until bedtime. The first few days after I left, we were texting all the time, but that made me feel even farther away.

This street only has two kids my age. One apparently lives in our building, but he’s off visiting relatives, so I haven’t met him yet. The other guy lives in the little gray house with the brown door, next to my grandfather’s. On my second day here, I noticed him sitting on his front steps, playing with a black rat on a leash. Rats creep me out, but Sofia challenged me to introduce myself to one new person a day. So when I saw the same kid in my math class at school, I got up the nerve to talk to him. “Hi, I’m Chloë. I just moved into the building across from your house.”

“I know,” he said. I already knew his name was Slater, but he didn’t bother to introduce himself. Instead he looked around to make sure other kids were listening. “You guys had the pest-control van come to your place yesterday, right? I hear bedbugs really suck.”

A few kids laughed.

“Har, har.” I wished my face didn’t feel so hot. “It was just a routine check. It’s not like the place is infested.”

“Uh-huh.”

Jerk. I sat down, pretending to ignore the whispers behind me. I could imagine what they were saying—That new girl? Don’t get too close or you’ll start scratching too—and I didn’t bother introducing myself to anyone else after that.

But faces are becoming familiar as the weeks go by. Once in a while I smile at some of them. Mostly they smile back. I act as if Slater doesn’t exist, which can get tricky because we walk home at the same time every day. (Except Thursdays, when he walks in the opposite direction, with his soccer cleats hanging off his backpack. I love Thursdays.) Today, I am half a block ahead. I can feel his eyes on me.

I step onto the patchy grass in front of our building. To be honest, I don’t blame Slater for thinking we have bedbugs—or any number of other pests. A month ago this place was all long grass, flaking paint, burned-out lightbulbs and broken, faded fencing around the back parking lot. Dad’s tackled most of it, and the place is looking much better, but even if it was a dump, who is Slater MacIntyre to point that out? He lives with a creature known for carrying the bubonic plague, and his house is no palace either.

I hear a grunt near the front door of our building. A guy my age I’ve never seen before has two bulging bags of groceries hanging from one arm, and he’s wrestling with a key in the lock. His long black ponytail hangs down past the collar of his denim jacket. Flames are embroidered up both arms, and he’s wearing sandals, despite the March rain. He yanks at the key, can’t get it out, kicks the door and howls in pain. Eventually he gets the key out of the door, which he props open with one elbow. I think of tiptoeing around to the back entrance, so he won’t know I’ve seen this whole embarrassing scenario, but now he’s trying to push a box full of food into the building with his foot. I step forward and hold open the door.

“Whoa. Where’d you come from?” he asks.

“I live here.”

“Cool!”

Together we get the box through. He puts his bags down, wipes one hand on his jeans and holds it out to me. I hesitate for a second before I shake. It just seems so formal.

“I’m Nikko,” he says. “You must be Chloë. Welcome to the Suffolk-ating Arms!”

I laugh. “Thanks.”

“How’s Victoria so far? I mean, you moved here from Montreal, right? My mum told me. You’ve probably seen her around. Japanese woman, tiny glasses?” He makes circles with his thumbs and index fingers and holds them up to his face. “Not that there are a lot of Japanese people around here, with or without glasses. You’ve probably noticed that by now. This whole neighborhood is white. Not like Vancouver. Or Montreal. Are you liking it okay? Here, I mean? It must be a big change.”

The words come nonstop. He’s out of breath by the time he finishes talking, and I smile. He’s the friendliest person I’ve met so far. I don’t want to hurt his feelings by saying how boring his city is, so I try to think of something positive to say. “I like being this close to the ocean.” That’s true, at least. I’ve gone down to the rocky beach almost every day since we got here. That, Uli’s stories and my texts to and from Sofia are the only things keeping me sane right now. Dad hasn’t said a word about when we’re going back to Montreal. Mom hasn’t either.

Mom acts as if we’re here for good. She calls every two days, tells me about funny things students have said in her classes or about international conferences she’s looking into. Yesterday we talked about her trip here next weekend. She’s renting a car, and the two of us are driving to Tofino, about six hours away. She says she wants to try the rugged west-coast thing that Dad always raves about, but her version of rugged is a lodge by the beach. Which is fine with me. The place she booked has a TV and a Jacuzzi—much more our style than Dad’s. He’d stay on the beach in a tent in the pouring rain.

Nikko looks at me, and I realize I’ve totally missed what he said. Something about the ocean. Not sure how to respond, I change the topic. “You’ve been away, right? That’s why I haven’t seen you around? My dad told me.”

“Yup, I was visiting my grandparents. In Revelstoke. That’s on the other side of BC, in the mountains. I go every winter.”

“Nice. Must be good to get a break from school.”

“Nah,” he says, “I homeschool. I can log on from wherever, and believe me, my grandparents make sure I do. They’ve never quite understood the whole homeschool thing. At first they thought I was going to wind up completely illiterate and antisocial. They’ve chilled out a bit now, but they’re strict about how many hours I study a day.”

“Huh.” Homeschooling explains his outfit. He’d never last a day at school with Slater.

“Your dad’s doing a great job.” Nikko nods at the lobby walls. Dad painted them last week. He cleaned the carpets too, and this week he plans to put in better lighting. Somehow he still finds time to go hiking or kayaking every day. He’d never kayaked in his life before we got here, but within days of arriving he’d signed up for lessons and joined a club that rents out boats. Go figure. It’s like all those weeks on the couch at home, he was storing up energy that burst out when we got to the west coast. He keeps threatening to take me out on these outdoor adventures too. In the summer, he says, we can swim in something called the Gorge. He swears it’s cleaner than any of the nearby lakes. But what’s wrong with a proper indoor pool, I’d like to know?

“The last caretaker was a bit of a disaster,” Nikko says.

“No kidding.”

“Estelle on the third floor got on his case all the time. She’s the capital S in Suffolk-ating Arms, by the way. Have you met—?”

“Yes.” I interrupt because it seems like the only way to make him pause for breath. “She showed up on our first day with a list of stuff for Dad to do. She called every day until it was done.”

Nikko tells me about some of the other neighbors, an old guy on the fourth floor who’s the building’s friendliest, a lady on the second who is some kind of fortune-teller, and Estelle’s cat, who watches everything that goes on in the parking lot when Estelle can’t be there to do it herself. Soon Nikko’s talking about the cars and how he can tell who’s coming and going by the sound of each engine. “Our family doesn’t have a car though. We bike everywhere. Mostly, anyway. We’re part of a car share too, but mostly we bike. We should go together sometime. On a bike ride, I mean. I’ll show you around. Maybe you’ve already been exploring, but I could show you some places you might not have discovered yet.”

The thought of me on a bicycle makes me almost laugh out loud. Sofia has been bugging me to learn to ride for years, but I never saw the point. Everything I wanted to do was within walking distance. “No bike. Sorry,” I say, although I’m really not.

Nikko looks at me, wide-eyed. “You can’t live in Victoria without a bike. You’re missing too much! I’ll find one for you, and then I’ll show you the city.” The elevator doors open. He places the box of food on one hip, hoists up the bags and hobbles into the elevator. “I’ll let you know when I find you some wheels.”

The doors close. I shake my head, but I’m smiling as I pull out my phone. I haven’t texted Sofia since yesterday, when I sent her a selfie of me standing on the rocky beach.

Greetings from the west coast. Note the lack of sports gear.

From the moment I’d told Sofia that I was going west, she’d teased me about becoming a granola-eating yogi who went everywhere by bike and dressed like a hiker for every occasion. She said that’s what happens when people move out here. I’d laughed it off, but it still felt important to point out that the same old me could enjoy the beach without becoming someone else entirely.

I’m sure Sofia was laughing when she answered my text.

Matter of time. Happy metamorphosis!

Now, on my way down the hall, I tell her about Nikko.

Met the other kid in our building. Wants to know if I have a bike.

Her answer is instantaneous.

Congrats, my beautiful butterfly!

Flap. Flap. Flap.