Chapter 20

“Did your friend leave already?” Oak’s mom asked. She was holding the mug Oak had brought her.

“He just rushed out,” Oak said. Through the front window, she watched the back of Alder’s dark, curly head as he hurried down her front path and then turned left up the sidewalk and disappeared from view.

“I was just going to see if you guys felt like pizza.” Mom took in the leftover sandwiches and tea. “But it looks like you already ate.”

“Just a snack,” Oak said. And then, “Mom, the weirdest thing happened.” Feline Teleportation was still open on her lap, along with Walnut. “Remember I was looking for a book? The one you gave away? Well, you’ll never believe it—the lady right next door, our new neighbor, she actually bought it at the library sale, and Alder brought it over to give to me! Isn’t that bizarre?”

“The neighbor?” Oak’s mom said. “Which one?”

“The one on the other side of the tree,” Oak answered. “The tree you cut down.”

The thing about Mom’s super-short hair was that there was nothing to disguise her expression—no bangs, no forward-falling locks of hair, nothing. So when her eyebrows arched and her mouth opened in surprise, and then when, a flash later, she drew her whole face closed like a shuttered window, Oak saw everything.

“You say that like I wanted to get rid of the tree,” Mom said. “Like I enjoyed it or something. I don’t just go around looking for trees to cut down, you know.”

Oak didn’t know what to say.

Mom’s voice went higher, louder. “We needed to build another bedroom if we were all going to live here. Sometimes, a tree has to go. Sometimes, one thing has to end to make room for something else. All of us have to make hard choices, Oak. Someday, you will understand.”

The wonder and magic of the book drained away, replaced by Oak’s quick anger. “You’re always saying that,” she said, as loud as her mother, which woke up Walnut, who hopped down from her lap. Oak got up also, too mad, suddenly, to stay sitting. “You say that someday I’ll understand, but you don’t understand all kinds of things, so what makes you so sure I will? And you know what’s even harder than making hard choices? Dealing with hard choices someone else got to make.”

Mom didn’t say anything, but her eyebrows were up in twin surprised arches. Her forehead crinkled all across. “Is this about the move?” she said at last.

“Take your pick!” Oak said. “The move. The tree. The bookshelf.”

“The bookshelf? What about the bookshelf?”

Did her mom even remember? “You rearranged all the books,” Oak said.

“Oh, that,” Mom said. “Honey, I didn’t think you’d mind. It was pretty the way you did it, but I couldn’t find anything.”

“Well,” said Oak, “I did mind. I mind all of it.” Her throat felt thick, tight. “You could have asked me what I thought about moving.”

“Oak, honey, sometimes grown-ups have to make decisions that aren’t popular with kids. Like moving. Or cutting down trees. Not everything can be a vote.”

“We’re not a democracy,” Oak said, quoting her mom.

“That’s right,” Mom said. “We are on some things, but not on all the things. But the bookshelf—you’re right about that. I should have asked. We can put the books back the way you had them, if you want.”

Oak shook her head. Putting the books back into a rainbow wouldn’t change anything real. Anything that mattered.

“And we can paint your room,” Mom said. “Any color you want.”

“Black?” Oak asked. She didn’t even want a black room.

“Well,” Mom said, “any color within reason.”

That was the problem—what felt reasonable to Oak and what felt reasonable to her mother weren’t the same.

“As for the tree—”

“I don’t want to talk about the tree anymore,” Oak said.

Her mom set the mug down on an end table and rubbed her face with both hands. “Okay,” she said, but then she said, “I can’t uncut the tree. I can’t unmove the move.” Mom’s hands dropped to her sides. “This new job,” she said, “is tougher than I thought. It’s stressful. And the construction, all the mess and dust. And I miss your dad.”

Walnut meowed and made a figure eight between Oak and her mother, purring and circling as if to knit them together, but neither of them took a step toward the other.

“I miss him too,” Oak said.

“Of course you do,” said her mom. She sat down on the couch. “It’ll all work out. It just takes time.” She patted the spot next to her, but Oak didn’t sit. “Now, what was it you were saying? Something about a book?”

Just a few moments ago, Oak had been on the verge of telling her mom all about the strange book, and the kitten coincidence, and maybe even about Mort. But now . . . “Never mind,” Oak said. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing’s nothing,” Mom said. “Even ‘nothing’ is something. It’s nothing.” She smiled at the joke, but Oak refused to smile.

Still, she wanted the conversation to be over, and Oak knew that when she wanted her mom to drop a subject, the best tactic was to bring up another. “How are the blueprints coming?”

“Oh, fine,” said Mom. “It’s no Palace of Fine Arts.”

This was a joke Mom often made when she was working on a project that wasn’t particularly artistic—comparing it to her favorite San Francisco structure.

“Well, they can’t all be the Palace of Fine Arts,” Oak answered, which was what her father usually said in reply.

“That’s right,” Mom said, running her hand across her hair. “So,” she said, “pizza?”

While they were waiting for the pizza to be delivered, Oak tucked the book safely and secretly away in her room, inside a pillowcase on her bed. As she did, she pictured the look on her mother’s face when she had told her that the book had come from the woman next door. She had seen a similar look somewhere else lately . . . where was it?

Her gaze drifted out her bedroom window. And then she remembered—Alder’s mother. The way she had looked when she’d come home to find Oak sitting in her front room. No, that wasn’t exactly true; when she’d first seen Oak there, she had looked happy about it, like maybe she was glad to see that Alder had a visitor. It was only after he had told her that Oak was the new next-door neighbor that her expression had shifted.

Oak had said to Alder then, “That was weird, wasn’t it?”

And now she found herself saying the same thing again, this time to herself, about her own mother: “That was weird, wasn’t it?”

There was no one to answer her question except for Walnut, who had nothing to say on the matter. And, Oak ruminated, the list of things to which her question could apply—the kitten coincidence; the apparition of the house that wasn’t there, and its strange inhabitant; the disappearance and reappearance of Feline Teleportation—all of it was weird.

But even in the midst of weirdness, most things stayed reliably commonplace. Dinner and dishes; kitty litter and showers; homework and bedtime.

Oak had just managed to get through all the things she had to do for the evening when her mom poked her head into her bedroom to say, in her regular voice, with no trace of her earlier upsetness, “Lights out, ladybird!”

“Already?” said Oak.

“Morning comes early,” said Mom. She crossed the room to turn down Oak’s bedcovers. Oak was seized with a sudden fear that Mom would fluff her pillow, discover the book, and take it away, which was completely irrational, because the book had been on their family’s bookshelf less than a week ago. There was nothing contraband about it.

Still, the fear persisted.

Mom’s hand grazed the pillow, but just then Walnut decided it was time to play, and he attacked Mom’s slippered feet as if they were two great warships and he was the kraken, determined to take them down.

“Ow!” Mom yelped and turned away from the bed. “Walnut, cut it out!”

Now Walnut purred and flipped onto his back, stretching his front legs up high to expose his orange-and-cream belly. No one could resist such a sight; Mom cooed and knelt to scratch him, and Oak dove into bed, thumping her head onto her pillow and pinning the book into place.

“Good night, Mom,” Oak said. “Hand me Walnut, will you?”

Mom scooped up the kitten and kissed his head before tucking him in along with Oak. “Sleep well,” she said, and she turned off the light on her way out, leaving Oak’s door cracked open.

She would wait until Mom’s light went off. And then she’d get a flashlight from the kitchen, and she’d fish the book out from her pillowcase, and she’d see what Feline Teleportation was all about.

It was a good plan. A solid plan. But as Walnut purred and knit his paws into Oak’s arm, as he rubbed his head beneath her chin and settled warmly into sleep, Oak’s eyes grew heavy too, and she felt her thoughts slip away on the vibrations of his purrs.

I’ll just close my eyes for a few minutes, she thought.

“Oak!”

Oak’s eyes shot open, then squeezed shut at the sudden assault of light.

“Honey, we overslept,” called Mom.

Oak groaned, and against her side, Walnut echoed her protest with a weak mew. She heard the sound of Mom pushing Oak’s bedroom door all the way open. “Up and at ’em,” Mom said.

Oak could feel her mother standing in the doorway, and she knew she wouldn’t leave until she saw, as she liked to say, “the whites” of Oak’s eyes.

With great reluctance, Oak peeled her eyes open. “I’m up,” she croaked.

“You may be marginally awake, but you aren’t yet up,” Mom said.

She was too tired to argue, so Oak chose the path of least resistance and threw back the covers, swinging her legs over the edge of her bed. Startled by the movement, Walnut shot off, racing past Mom and away into the house.

“I’m up,” Oak said again, and this time, Mom nodded in agreement.

“The bus will be here in fifteen minutes,” she said. “I’ll make you some toast for the road.”

“Road toast,” mumbled Oak.

“Fifteen minutes!” Mom called from the kitchen.

Oak rubbed her eyes, sighed, and began to get ready for the day.

Toast in hand, hair unbrushed, Oak barely made it to the bus in time.

In fact, she didn’t quite. “Wait!” she yelled as it began to pull away, but there was no way Faith could hear her through the thick glass doors, over the rumble of the engine.

But then the bus stopped anyway, just a few feet down the road, and the doors hissed open, and Faith called out, “Hiya, tree girl! Tree boy told me to stop.”

And there was Alder, smiling a small smile halfway down the bus on the street side. “I saved you a seat,” he said, “and I watched out the window just in case you were coming after all.”

“Thanks,” said Oak. “I overslept.” She offered Alder a slice of toast.

“Thanks,” he said, and they fell into companionable silence as they ate.

The bus turned out of their neighborhood and onto the main street. Sitting comfortably next to Alder, Oak remembered the way she had felt about him not that long ago, on the day she’d been so angry and frustrated that she’d shoved him out of her way. She remembered the satisfaction of watching him fall.

“Alder,” she said.

“Mm-hm,” he answered, taking another bite of the toast.

“I never really apologized for that time.”

“What time?”

“That time I pushed you down. I’m really sorry. That was mean. I promise I’ll never do it again.”

Alder looked over at Oak and smiled. “That’s all right,” he said. “I forgive you.”

“Thank you,” said Oak. There was a lump in her throat that was not peanut butter toast.

“Let’s be friends,” Alder said suddenly, and he looked a bit startled, as if he didn’t know he was going to say those words until after he had said them.

Oak swallowed. “Okay,” she said.

And it was almost magic, or maybe there was no “almost” about it. Those words, said, felt like a charm.

When the bus arrived at school and Faith called out, “Bye, tree kids,” Oak and Alder answered in unison.

“Bye, Faith!” they said. And, tree kids together, they went inside.