Chapter 2

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It was in August that construction began at 11 Rollingwood Drive. And the first thing construction would entail was chopping down a large walnut tree that sat near the property line between that house and its neighbor.

“It’s a shame it has to go,” Oak’s mother, Olivia, said with a shake of her head, “but there’s nothing to be done about it. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.” She said this as Oak stood underneath the tree’s wide, green foliage and looked up into its tangle of leaves. The day was hot, but in the circle of the tree’s shade, it felt measurably cooler.

Oak did not want the tree to be cut down, but even more than that, she did not want to be moving into this house at all, even when it had a second story added to it, which would be made possible by the clearing of the tree. Besides, the second story was just going to be a master bedroom and bathroom, which wouldn’t improve things for Oak at all.

But what Oak wanted did not matter. Her parents insisted that the move was “nonnegotiable.”

Not that either of her parents were prone to negotiating, even in the best of circumstances. Take, for example, the time in the fourth grade when Oak had presented them with a detailed presentation about why they should allow her to get a dog. She had given them research about how kids with pets have fewer allergies as adults than kids raised in a pet-free home; she’d showed them studies about how people with dogs live longer and are less depressed than people without dogs; she’d made a chart demonstrating she knew all the responsibilities associated with being a dog owner (feeding, watering, walking, poop scooping, saving allowances toward vet appointments).

But all her mom had said was “We are not dog people, Oak.”

And that had been the end of that.

Now they were moving her here, to this dumb little house on Rollingwood Drive, which would soon be a not-quite-as-little-but-still-dumb house hundreds of miles from San Francisco, where she’d lived all her life, here, to Los Angeles, where it was so hot that people’s lawns would dry up and die if they weren’t watered on automatic timer systems, where lawn had no business growing even.

“You’ll feel differently when we’re settled in,” Mom said, and then she nodded to the man who stood nearby, orange hard hat on his head, chainsaw in his hands.

When the chainsaw growled awake, Oak turned away from the tree and headed back to the car.

Just before she slammed the car door, dulling the sound of the chainsaw, she looked up into the front window of the neighboring house. Peering out at her was a boy with a round white face, flushed red cheeks, a mess of short black curls, and a piercing, angry stare.

“What’s your problem?” she said out loud, even though he couldn’t possibly hear her from inside his house and over the chainsaw’s growl.

Later, back at the Residency Suites, where Oak and her mom were staying until the tree was demolished and the master bedroom suite was framed out, Oak lay flat on her back, completely still, on the floor between the two beds. From the bathroom came the sound of her mother taking a shower. Oak crossed her hands on her stomach and felt them rising and falling as she breathed. She stared up at the ceiling, let her eyes run across the vast blankness of it, and tried not to remember everything she had left behind.

The list formed anyway:

That final one—Dad—wasn’t technically something she’d left behind. He’d be driving their stuff down in a few weeks, and though he’d have to go back to San Francisco for work after unloading, it would only be for a couple of months, and then he would join them in Los Angeles.

But the rest of the list was permanent. Maybe Stacia could come visit for a week next summer, or maybe Oak could go stay at her house during spring break, but those maybes were far enough in the future not to count at all.

What bothered Oak more than the loss of any of these things in particular, or all of them collectively, was the fact that neither of her parents cared about what Oak was losing or how she felt about the move.

“Our family isn’t a democracy” was the way her mother had put it.

“You can have a vote when you pay the mortgage” was what her father had said.

Oak understood that sometimes people had to move because of their parents’ jobs. There’d been a kid, Sergio, in her fourth-grade class who’d told them all matter-of-factly that he started almost every year at a new school because of his dad’s job as a consultant. It didn’t seem like it bothered him at all.

Compared to Sergio, Oak supposed she was lucky. Other than changing apartments when she was three (which she didn’t even remember), this was the first time she’d had to move.

And, as Dad had said when Oak complained that it wasn’t fair, “Would it be fair to your mom to tell her she can’t take this great work opportunity?”

No, Oak had thought, silent but bitter. That wouldn’t be fair either. But at least it would be unfair to someone other than her.

Dad had reminded her that he was giving up a lot too, to make this move happen for Mom; he was leaving his job as a graphic designer at First Place Advertising and was going to have to find a new job once he moved down to join them. And he’d be leaving friends, of course, and his favorite coffee shop, which he claimed was “the real tragedy here,” as LA didn’t “understand coffee” the way the Bay Area did.

“Oak?” Her mother came out of the bathroom. “Where did you go?”

Oak waited a moment before replying. “Down here,” she said at last.

Rubbing her head dry with a towel and dressed in her robe, Mom came around the end of the bed and looked down at Oak. “What are you doing down there?”

“Remembering,” Oak answered.

“Ah,” said Mom, lowering herself to the edge of one of the beds. “Remembering.” The towel dropped into her lap, leaving her short, fuzzy hair exposed. It had been nearly two years since her mom had decided to cut her hair so short, practically a buzz, but Oak still missed it. Her mom, on the other hand, said wearing it this way was “freeing,” though for the first few months she’d had to wear a hat whenever she went outside to protect the pale white tips of her ears.

The hair had been a big change for her mom, and maybe, Oak thought, looking back, she should have known that it would be the first of many—the hair, then finishing up the master’s degree program she’d put on hold years ago when Oak was little. That led to a promotion to project manager at the architecture firm where she worked, and all of that culminated in this most recent, biggest change: a new job at a new firm, with a new title, junior partner. Oak should have been proud of her mom, and happy for her.

But she wasn’t.

“Oak, baby, I know this is hard for you.”

Oak closed her eyes. Her hands, still folded, rose and fell with each breath.

“Change is hard on everyone,” Mom went on.

“It isn’t hard on you,” Oak said, eyes still closed.

Mom sighed. Oak imagined her mom rubbing the spot between her eyes the way she often did. Then she said, “I know it might seem that way. But change is hard on me, too.”

Oak considered opening her eyes, then thought better of it. She rolled onto her side and tucked her hands beneath her head. “I’m tired,” she said.

“It’s only four o’clock in the afternoon,” Mom said, but when Oak did not say anything to this, Mom sighed again. Oak heard the bed shift as her mother stood up and headed to the bathroom. “Twenty minutes,” she said. “Then we’re going for a walk.”

Though Oak had often wished for a pool, after spending over two weeks hanging out at the hotel’s, she decided it would be perfectly fine to stay dry for the rest of her life. When the first of September arrived, Oak didn’t look back as they drove away from the motel and toward 11 Rollingwood Drive. They arrived to find that the walnut tree had become a stack of firewood in the garage and that the skeleton of what would be the new rooms was attached to the top of the garage.

After depositing their things inside, Oak and her mom waited together on the small front porch for the moving van. There were three good things about this day:

One, Oak wouldn’t have to stay in the terrible hotel room any longer.

Two, her stuff from home—the rest of her clothes, her books, the model horse collection that she was too old for but loved anyway—would arrive.

Three, her father would be driving the moving van.

And, Oak thought, watching her mother out of the corner of her eye, she wasn’t the only one who was excited to see her dad. Mom had put on lipstick this morning—a deep burgundy red—and she was wearing earrings too, little gold dangly ones with tiny bells.

They were both dressed in cutoff shorts and T-shirts, ready for a day of unpacking, but even so, Mom had put on the earrings and the lipstick. That made Oak feel kind of happy but also sort of embarrassed at the same time.

Without the tree, their front yard and that of their neighbors’—the house where the angry-looking boy had peered out at her through the front window that first day—sort of blended together. Both front yards were mostly grass. The neighbors’ house had a bed of flowers that ran along the front underneath the windows, splitting to allow for the path to the front door and then resuming along a small front porch that matched the front porch of Oak’s new house.

Between them was the near-flat stump of the decimated walnut tree. And as she studied it, she saw that the grass that had been shaded by its foliage was thinner than the rest of the lawn, probably because it hadn’t gotten as much sun. She wondered how long it would take for that circle of grass to grow in as thick as the rest of it, how long before you couldn’t tell anymore where the tree had once shaded.

Then Oak saw something that she wasn’t sure she saw. Or she didn’t see something that she thought she saw. A flicker—a shimmer—right near that tree stump, or maybe just beyond, a movement of light almost as if a mirror had cast and reflected a beam of sun, just there. She squinted her eyes, trying to decide what was casting that strange light.

Just then, a car pulled up into the neighbors’ driveway. The driver was a woman with pale skin and strawberry hair. She wore it loose and long, like her skirt. A boy—the one from the other day, the one who had looked so mad—climbed out of the back seat. He was pink cheeked, a little bit round, with moppish dark curls. Together, the boy and his mother gathered grocery bags from the rear of the station wagon.

Maybe she should offer to help, Oak thought. After all, this kid looked about her age, and it would be nice to know someone on the first day of school. . . . She was about to take a step in their direction when she saw that the woman had already collected the final bag.

The kid slammed shut the trunk, and he followed his mom up the path to their front door. But before they went inside, both the woman and the boy turned to look at Oak and her mother. Oak started to raise her hand to wave hello, but then the woman tightened her lips into a straight line. Slowly, she shook her head—at Oak? at her mother?—and then turned to unlock the door.

The boy did the same thing; he shook his head at her. Suddenly Oak felt glad she hadn’t offered to help.

“Did you see that?” Oak’s mother said. “How rude!”

It was rude. Oak’s hand, which she had been prepared to wave, tightened into a fist instead.