hey let me pack a suitcase before leaving.

“Honestly, Enid,” my mother said. “You spend half of your life at Mrs. Delavecchio’s. What else could you possibly need?”

“Toothbrush,” I answered.

“Good dental hygiene is vital,” said Dr. Holden.

“Vital to what?” asked my mother.

Their bickering blocked my bedroom door.

“Excuse me,” I said, grabbing the handle of my rolling suitcase and dragging it behind me.

“Lift it, please,” said Dr. Holden. “You’ll scratch the hardwood.”

“I won’t.” I wheeled the suitcase back and forth a few times. “See. Not a — oops.” I looked down. “Sorry.” The wheels had indeed left white marks behind on the floor.

“Those aren’t scratches,” my mother told us. Bending over and licking her thumb, she rubbed them gone. “Dirt from the wheels has simply been ground into the floor.”

“She still should have lifted the suitcase.”

“Why?” we asked.

“Because I told her to.”

“That may be —” My mother and Dr. Holden resumed their bickering. I stood, shifting my weight from foot to foot. Defying Dr. Holden was only half the reason I’d rolled the suitcase along. The other half was that my suitcase and its contents weighed roughly the same as Jupiter, and I couldn’t physically lift it off the ground. Not knowing how long I’d be gone for, I’d had to pack pretty much everything I owned.

“Now that Dr. Holden is here,” I interjected during a pause wherein my mother and Dr. Holden were eying each other warily in the aftermath of discovering that they each preferred a different brand of toothpaste, “you can show our landlord —” I made sure to make that sound as obsequious as possible “— the corner of the ceiling that has water damage.”

“Water damage?” Dr. Holden looked panicked.

“It’s by the crawl space to the attic in the master bedroom.” My mother pointed him towards the far end of the hall. “A house this age is sure to have a few harmless peculiarities of the sort.”

“After the disaster your house became, I think I should take a gander and decide how ‘harmless’ this damage is myself.”

My mother glowered at Dr. Holden, but led him down the hallway to her room anyway. I waited until their spat flared up again offstage, then sneakily wheeled my suitcase down the hall, down the carpet runner on the stairs (to make sure it didn’t thump too loudly), and onto the ground floor. My zip into the kitchen to grab a snack was a success, but then my getaway was almost foiled by the metal strip that separated the tiles of the entryway from the hardwood of the hall: without an incline on the metal, the wheels banged loudly against the strip.

“What was that?” my mother called down.

“I stubbed my toe,” I improvised.

“Clumsiness is never becoming.”

Coaxing one wheel at a time over the metal strip, I shouted back, “Your concern, as always, warms my heart.”

“I am concerned, Enid. I wouldn’t want this to be a sign of a stroke.”

“It isn’t.”

“Well then, have a pleasant mini-break at Mrs. Delavecchio’s.”

“I will.” Only one wheel left.

“Make sure to look for your notebook while there.”

“What?” The edge of my notebook peeked out from the suitcase’s front pocket.

“We ascertained that your notebook was most likely at Mrs. Delavecchio’s house.”

Right. I hadn’t told my mother about getting it back from Amber Holden. I hadn’t told her about the faerie in the house. I hadn’t told her (obviously) that I was plotting against her. All this when I usually told her everything, in detail, often in triplicate. None of this was right. We were supposed to be a team, just the two of us, not this new pair that Dr. Holden was intent on them becoming.

“I’ve got to go,” I shouted, hoping the wobble in my voice wasn’t apparent.

“For goodness’ sake, Enid, stop dilly-dallying and just go already,” Dr. Holden yelled.

“Sure thing, Dr. Holden,” I called back. “You interfering interloper,” I whispered under my breath. I let the door slam hard behind me on the way out, knowing how much our landlord hated that. Then, to add to my symphony of frustration, I banged my suitcase down the front steps, which were cheap poured concrete, brittle and ill-prepared for my suitcase’s weight. A loosed chunk of step wedged its way into one of the suitcase’s wheel casings. Roll-roll-roll-kthunk it sounded as I went along. Roll-roll-roll-kthunk. The rhythm was kind of hypnotizing. The faerie that had been tailing me the past few days must have thought so too, since it shimmered in my periphery.

“Oh, don’t you worry,” I said to it. “We’ll be talking soon.”

I winked.

It vanished.

Now, as for setting my plan in motion. I had a few days before my mother wandered over to Mrs. Delavecchio’s house and discovered that not only was I not there, I had not been there. So that gave me a timeline for action. And my mother and Dr. Holden’s wrangling over its electric bill had provided me a location: the farmhouse, the house where we’d lived before moving into town, the house my mother had been trying to sell for the past year. Uninhabited, dilapidated, and remote, it was the perfect plan-enacting location. I just needed a few more supplies for faerie trapping and I’d be fully set to get Dr. Holden out of my life.

Once he leaves, you’re still going to have to deal with him being your father.

That, I decided firmly, was a Future Enid problem.

Current Enid problem (okay, less a problem than something that had always annoyed me): Dr. Holden’s car. He drove one of those uselessly extravagant SUVs with silver paint, leather interiors, seat warmers, satellite TV, a coffee maker, a Sudoku-puzzle solver, a registered accountant living in the trunk to do one’s taxes, etc. I felt like deflating a tire; Mrs. Delavecchio had a pair of pruning shears that I could use as a pointy thing. That would show Dr. Holden.

Show him what? That you’re a vandal? That you’re acting out? That you’re not handling any of this maturely?

And Mrs. Delavecchio would probably see me getting the pruning shears, then ask me what was going on, then I’d have to make up some reason I was taking her pruning shears, then we’d get to talking, and I’d never get my plan in motion.

Fine.

WASH ME, I wrote with my finger on the basically non-existent layer of dust on the car’s side.

Take that, Dr. Holden.

I looked around to make sure no one had seen me, then scampered.