Isaac was waiting for me when I got off the bus Monday morning. “Hey!” he called.

His hair was combed back and still a little wet. I went over to him, thinking that instead of a wild anemone mule, he looked like a turtle walking on two legs. “What’s in there?” I asked, slapping his backpack.

“Oh, everything!”

He sounded mighty excited, and it made me laugh. I slipped him a wily look. “Like…a zombie in a wheelchair?”

He laughed, too. “Wish I’d known you were going to be at Brookside on Friday,” he said. “I’d have come.”

“To Brookside?” My face went a little screwy. “Why? And how’d you know I was there?”

“My mom. She said she saw you looking all miserable in a corner.”

“She did?” I thought back to Friday. It had been a long and miserable day. One that would have been a whole lot better with Isaac there. “It was the slowest day ever….”

“No food fights?”

I laughed again. “Dentures went flyin’, but that’s about it.”

“Hey, are you doing the Alzheimer’s Walk on Saturday?”

“Uh…I don’t think so. It’s Ma’s only real day off.”

“Well, my mom said if you wanted, you could come home with me Friday after school and we could camp out in the tree fort and then do the walk on Saturday.”

My mind went twirlin’. “You have a tree fort?”

“Yeah! It’s got a trapdoor, a pulley-system dumbwaiter, and a telescope for stars.”

I was in. I was all in. “I need to ask Ma, but…sure!”

The warning bell rang. “Hey,” he said, “you want to meet up at lunch?”

I laughed. “For a food fight?”

He smiled, big and bright. “I’m up for that!”

“Maybe they’re servin’ Jell-O!”

He laughed, too, then said, “What do you do at recess?”

I shrugged, not wantin’ to say I hid out somewhere with my notebook.

“I could meet you right here if you want. We could hang out?”

For the first time since school started, I was bubblin’ inside. Bubblin’ with the excitement of findin’ a friend. “Sure!”

Then Kandi came running up. Her cheeks were all rosy, and her fingernails were painted white with red stripes. Like candy canes. She probably thought she was being clever, but I thought it was annoying. December was still a day away, and she was already claimin’ it as her month.

She looked back and forth between Isaac and me with nosy written all over her face. “So…did you have a nice Thanksgiving?”

I slid a look at Isaac.

He slid a look at me.

“It was fine,” I said, and Isaac nodded his agreement.

“I didn’t know you two were friends,” she said, and she was twitchin’ a little. Like she was feeling guilty for what she’d said about Isaac.

“Uh-huh,” I said, giving her a cool look.

“I’m glad,” she said, still twitching. And since we weren’t saying anything more, she ran off, calling, “We need to get to class!”

“Her mother died last year,” Isaac said, watching her go.

“What?” I wasn’t even sure he’d actually said it. It was so out of the blue.

“Brain cancer. It happened quick.”

“What?” I still wasn’t sure this was a real conversation.

“My sister says she’s a mess.”

“Your sister does?”

“Yeah. She knows her sister.”

“Whose sister?”

“Kandi’s sister.”

“Kandi has a sister?” I said it like it was the world’s biggest revelation. I have no idea why.

Isaac laughed. “A lot of people do.”

The blacktop was almost cleared, and we were going to be late, so we took off running. “I’ll meet you at recess!” I called.

“Righty-o!” he called back.

In class, Kandi was being chatty with everyone around her. She sure didn’t seem messed up to me. She seemed nosy. And annoying. And seeing her flit around, smiling all the time…seeing her boss folks like a camp director…seeing her throw little tantrums when things didn’t go her way…none of it added up to her being messed up. It added up to her being kinda spoiled.

But maybe I’d added things up wrong.

It felt like when I’d read the Resident Spotlights in the Brookside Bulletin. I’d thought I had folks all figured out, then it turned out I didn’t know much about them at all. But it was more than that. All this time I’d been writing stories about made-up people that I could see clear as day, but the real folks around me had stories I’d been completely blind to.

The thought put me in a wobbly mood. Ms. Miller, though, was in a great mood, and very excited about our new writing assignment. “You’re going to detail your Thanksgiving experience,” she said, pacing around like a caged tiger. “I want you to use all the senses. What you saw, what you heard, what you smelled, what you tasted….Make me feel like I was there.”

Colby’s hand shot up, and when Ms. Miller called on her, Colby asked, “So you want us to describe Thanksgiving dinner?”

“You don’t have to limit yourself to dinner. The buildup to dinner, the cleanup after dinner, the family traditions, the games you played or movies you watched. Did you travel? What was that like? How about Black Friday? Did you go shopping?” She laughed, like she was going back in her mind, remembering. “Lots of sights and sounds there!”

Benny called out, “How long does it have to be?”

“This is a volume piece. The longer the better,” she said. “Grab me with your opening line and go! I will not be grading on syntax. I want you just to write, write, write. I want you to enjoy the process and not worry about anything but getting your experience down on paper.”

“So how many pages for an A?” Colby asked.

“Hmm,” she said, studying her. “How about ten? Yes, ten!”

She was winging it like no teacher I’d ever known.

“Ten?!” Benny cried. “I can’t write ten pages!”

“Then maybe you’ll only write seven and get a C.” She leveled a look at the class. “You had five days off. Tell me about them.”

Back before Thanksgiving break, I could have written ten pages about any made-up story, easy. Which means that before Thanksgiving break, I could have made up a story of what happened on my Thanksgiving break, easy. Like, I could have made up a story about Aunt Ellie and Cheyenne coming over to our big house for a feast. Wild turkeys could have been flappin’ and gobble-gobblin’ in the backyard tree, tryin’ to escape their doom. Our dog—a big, happy hound—could have been barking and bounding around all over the place, trying to reach the turkeys. I could have planted our own garden in the story, where corn and yams and carrots were just waitin’ to be harvested.

I could have, and who would’ve known it wasn’t true?

Nobody.

And nobody would’ve cared.

But now I felt strange inside. Like I was done with making stuff up. Done running from things. Done hiding.

But I couldn’t write about what had happened. If I told the truth, Ms. Miller might call the cops. Besides, how could I explain how I’d spent most of my vacation with folks who had lost their minds? How I’d seen two old ladies die? How I’d eaten leftovers from a food-fight Thanksgiving meal for four days running and had hidden out from an army of ants in an apartment with my new, one-eyed cat?

There was no explaining it. Not in ten pages, not in a hundred.

So while Colby’s feather pencil flapped around and Rayne and Wynne had their noses low over their pages and scribbled away, I sat on the edge of our continent with a blank page, feeling stuck.

Stuck and alone.