MY HOUSE looked the same. Same windows shaped like jack-o-lantern eyeballs, same drooping rain gutters, and same red doorknocker like a dopey dog with its tongue stuck out, happy to greet me. I wondered if I looked the same. I didn’t feel the same. The world, to me, felt different after everything that happened. The Hero Academy fight, Mom’s return, followed by her disappearance, once again. The massive cover-up. I felt different, too. I had a tiny, beaded braid in my hair for proof. I had just been on the best trip of my life, spending weeks helping indigenous farmers in the Amazon rainforest. It was so beautiful, days in vivid yellow and green, nights that felt like endless blue. I ate the best coconut I’d ever had there, saw rainbow-colored birds the size of insects and was bitten by insects the size of airplanes. PeriGenomics had touched down, door-to-door service, dropping me and my bag of stuff off on the lawn — “Jump, Sarah!” they said — and then the propellers clattered back off into the sky, only to disappear, and I was alone. Returned.

I took the spare key from under the frog next to the welcome mat and walked inside the house. It was empty.

I felt a flicker of disappointment, even though I had known it was going to be empty. A few weeks earlier, after he stopped yelling at me on the phone, Dad said that he was spending the last half of August in Maine, camping and communing with nature. He was off the grid. “Look, you’ll be fine,” he said. “Johnny will be around.”

“He can barely feed himself!” I replied, trying to will myself to get good reception even though I was on some ancient brick of a phone on a one-way street in a shadow of a town. “You guys need me, right?”

“It’s not as if you gave us an itinerary, Sarah, before you just went on a helicopter ride with some PeriGenomics drone.”

“You’re a PeriGenomics drone,” I pointed out, and we laughed.

So the red carpet that you secretly wish for when you return home was nonexistent. Just an empty house. Dad on vacation and Johnny who-knows-where. I had missed my family and friends when I was away, and I wanted to see them immediately to tell them all about my amazing journey. But the only one listening was the four walls of my small house in Doolittle Falls.

 

DAD SAID he would only be gone for ten days. I think this was day three. But from the look of the house, it had been abandoned for decades. Dishes piled up in the sink. Clothes all over the floor. The lawn half-mowed. Empty bags of chips and drinks all over the place. And the couch looked worn in, more so than normal. I could nearly make out the shape of my brother’s body. He had pulled the video game console out into the living room, in front of the large TV, ready at a moment’s notice.

I went up to my room and put my bag on the floor. My whole summer was in the bag. Postcards, seashells, a jar of sand, new clothes. When I got in the plane with Sam I only had the things on my back. PeriGenomics had let me borrow some gear, but in the end they took back everything that wasn’t a PeriGenomics t-shirt. I surveyed my room. Everything I left was there: the humidifier, my Black Zephyr poster, my computer, clothes, books. All of it. It was the same as when I left it. The bed was made, although I got the distinct impression that someone had been sleeping in it. As I walked over to inspect it I saw a few brightly colored drops of dried paint on the floor.

It could only be one person: Hamilton.

Johnny must have been using my room for guests. I was going to kill him. I went back downstairs, sent him a quick text, and I made a sandwich. As I stood at the kitchen counter, chewing, half-famished, I realized there was only one person I wanted to see. I called Alice. The phone rang and rang but no one picked up. I tried a few other friends but the same thing happened.

Where was everyone?I had this fantasy in my mind; they’d all be hanging out somewhere waiting for me to get back. They should’ve known I was coming back. Between calls and texts and emails, I’d practically sent out a virtual little trumpet boy to herald my arrival.

It was time to canvass the streets. I grabbed my bag and went outside into the thick summer heat. When I got to the pizza shop on Main Street, I saw someone running toward me, flailing their arms. It was Betty. She had spent the summer at the Academy retreat in Cuernavaca, Mexico, or, to be clearer, three weeks there and the rest of the summer scooping ice cream. I went for a hug but she grabbed me by the shoulders.“Hey! Betty! It’s great to see you!” I said, a little confused.

“We need your help. Where is he?” she demanded. She looked at me, quizzically. Her hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail and she had on a black t-shirt and Capri pants. She looked like Audrey Hepburn dancing with bohemians in Funny Face. I felt epically bedraggled in comparison: ratty t-shirt with holes in it, cut-off shorts, and a braid that felt like it was disintegrating on my head.

“Who?” I asked

“Butters!” She was tense, like a soda can ready to pop. What had happened? Did the world threaten to end, again?

“Well, I’ve been back for about five minutes now,” I said slowly. Maybe this radio silence meant that we were in the middle of a post-apocalyptic dream world. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t find anybody.

“I sent him to find you when we heard you were getting back. I should have gone myself. That boy is so distractible. And the Spectors! We’ll never make it.”

I looked at her, totally confused. “Betty, slow down. What’s going on? Is someone after you? Is it the Hero Academy again? Did Dr. Mann resurrect himself in order to make a bigger, better machine?” It had to be something important. The last time she was this worried she was about to confess to me regarding George.

“No. It’s bigger than that. The whole world depends on it,” she said.

“What is it? Is the town under attack? Is Dr. Mann back?” We were standing still on the sidewalk, facing each other. She wasn’t very good at getting me wherever I needed to go.

“No. Worse,” Betty said. She looked at me with the most serious face in the world and spit out the truth: “Karaoke!”