Chapter 7

TOENAILS

WATER

FAMILY

Those were the three words that Alder circled from his list. Water, because he knew how important it was for life—the fern’s near-death experience had made sure he’d never forget that; family, because Alder barely had any—it was just him and his mom, the smallest size a family could be; and toenails, because that was the most ridiculous thing on the list, and Alder couldn’t help himself.

“Okay,” Mr. Rivera said after everyone had circled their three words. “Now, who remembers what subject we’re supposed to be working on right now?”

“Science?” said Oak. She had her heavy textbook out on her desk.

“Exactly,” said Mr. Rivera. “So—who here knows the meaning of the word interdisciplinary? Yes? Marcus?”

“Is that when a student gets in trouble for lots of things at the same time?”

Mr. Rivera laughed, but not in a mean way. “That’s a great guess, Marcus, but no. Anyone else? Beck?”

“Doesn’t it mean, like, trying to look at a problem from lots of different angles?”

“Exactly, right,” said Mr. Rivera, and his smile was so bright and proud of Beck that all the other kids—Alder included—sat up a little straighter, warmed too by that look.

“So, in school, we do math, right? And science and language arts and current events and history.”

“And art!” called Cynthia.

“Art!” barked Mr. Rivera, so loud and quick that Alder was a little bit startled. “Yes! Art.”

“And PE,” said Oak from behind him.

“Indeed,” Mr. Rivera said, nodding. “Where would we be without physical education?”

It was a rhetorical question. Alder was mostly sure.

“Okay,” said Mr. Rivera. “But even though we think of all those as different subjects, they aren’t all that disconnected, really. Things don’t fit into neat compartments. Take, for example . . .” And here he turned around to the whiteboard, scanning the list of words. “Well, take any of them. Arms! Why not? Take arms. Which subject, would you say, does arms fit into?

“PE?” Miriam said. “Like, push-ups and stuff.”

“Yes.” Mr. Rivera nodded so vigorously that his hair flopped on his forehead. “But just PE?”

The class was quiet for a moment, thinking. Then Oak offered, “Well, weapons are sometimes called arms, so I guess, history and current events?”

Mr. Rivera’s eyes glistened with excitement. “Perfect,” he said. “And, anyone ever heard of an armistice?”

No one answered.

“Look it up!” he said. “Who’s got the dictionary?”

No one had the dictionary. It was sitting on a pedestal near the window, closest to Cynthia’s desk, so she got up and flipped through the thin pages, tracing her finger down entries until at last she said, “Armistice! Here it is. Noun. It means peace treaty.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Rivera. “It means a laying down of arms—of weapons.”

“Isn’t there a book about war with arms in the title?” asked Darla. “My older brother read it last year in high school.”

“Indeed,” Mr. Rivera said. “A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, most likely. So literature too then—so far we have literature, and history, and current events, and physical education.”

“The arms of a triangle!” Alder burst out, suddenly and loudly. “Math!”

“Outstanding!” said Mr. Rivera. “Good work, Alder. So what about art? And science?”

“There are lots of paintings of arms,” Cynthia offered. “And sculptures.”

“Like on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” said Miriam. “We went to Italy last summer and saw it, that painting of God and Adam touching fingertips.”

“And isn’t there a whole part of science all about the human body?” Marcus asked. “What’s that called?”

“Physiology,” said Mr. Rivera. “Or anatomy. Excellent. So there you go.” He circled ARMS an extra time for good measure. “One little word, one part of a person, and look where it has taken us. All through our classroom day, through each subject.”

Alder was impressed. The whole time they’d been talking, he’d totally forgotten that they were in school and that Mr. Rivera was giving them an assignment. It had just been fun.

“Okay,” said Mr. Rivera, “what I want you all to do is put together an interdisciplinary study of the three words you’ve circled. For example, let’s see . . .” He walked over to Alder and looked at his paper. “So Alder here has circled toenails, and water, and family.”

Everyone laughed at toenails.

“Who else chose toenails?” Mr. Rivera asked. A bunch of hands went up, more than Alder would have expected. “Okay . . . Marcus!” Mr. Rivera said, pointing. “You’re Alder’s TOENAIL partner. The two of you can work together to research TOENAILS—figure out a way it connects with each of our classroom subjects and report back.”

For a moment, Alder’s heart soared.

Then Mr. Rivera continued. “WATER . . . who else picked WATER? Let’s see . . . Beck! You can be Alder’s WATER partner. And FAMILY? Great! Oak, you and Alder can team up. That’s perfect! You two can investigate family trees.”

Mr. Rivera chuckled at his own joke, but Alder did not join in. Any excitement he’d felt over being paired with Marcus escaped from him like air from a leaky balloon.

“You all get the point now, right? Each of you, find three different people, one for each word you chose.”

The class sat quietly, looking at each other, until Mr. Rivera loudly clapped.

“You’ll have to get up! Move around! Talk to each other. Let’s go!”

And then chairs scraped the linoleum as they were pushed back, and the room filled with the loud chatter of kids yelling back and forth—

“Sebastian, which words did you choose?”

“Did anyone else choose TEETH?”

“I can’t believe I chose BACTERIA,” groaned Cynthia, who had suggested it in the first place. “There aren’t any poems about bacteria.”

In the end, almost everyone found the matches they needed, and then Mr. Rivera helped the few stragglers shift their lists so that no one was left unmatched.

“You see,” said Mr. Rivera when they had finally settled back at their desks, a very loud twenty minutes later (during which Alder had had nothing to do, since Mr. Rivera had used him as the example and he was already matched up), “the group of us is like that list of words. We may seem separate and unattached, and maybe some of you don’t know each other well yet, but we are connected, we are intertwined. For the next nine months, at least!”

Mr. Rivera probably meant for that to sound uplifting and exciting. But to Alder, looking over his shoulder at Oak and, beyond her, at Beck, it sounded more like a threat than a promise.

At home, however, Fern waited for him. Sleepy, warm, a fuzzy orange puddle on the foot of his bed. She looked up when Alder came into the bedroom, and when he placed his hand on her back, she began to softly purr.

Alder scooped her up and held her against his chest. Her head fit just perfectly under his chin. He sank down onto his bed and leaned back against his pillow.

Fern fell back to sleep, a pleasant floppy weight. But Alder’s eyes were open. From where he lay on his bed, he had a good view of his front yard and, now that the walnut tree was just a stump, of Oak’s, too. Walking home from the bus stop, he’d felt Oak walking about five paces behind him, but she didn’t rush to catch up, and he didn’t slow down to wait for her. She’d gone up the driveway to her house without a word to Alder, which he thought had been rather rude, even though he had no desire to speak to her. And by the time he’d gathered Fern and peered out his window, it was to see Oak and that woman leaving the house again, climbing into their car and driving away, leaving the construction workers up there on top of the garage, shooting the framework of the new second story with loud nail guns.

There were stacks of construction materials on the neighbors’ driveway, boxes and boxes of shingles and rolls of black paper, covered in plastic to protect them. It could be neat to be a construction worker, Alder considered, to use your hands to build something that didn’t exist before you started.

But, he thought, his eyes flicking to where the walnut tree used to stand, sometimes building something new meant destroying something old. That Alder didn’t like. Not one bit.

Then Alder saw something . . . sort of a flicker, a shimmer, where the old tree had been. It looked to Alder like an extra-shiny patch of air. Probably it was just a reflection off his window, or off one of the windows next door. He stood, Fern still tucked under his chin, and walked toward his window to take a closer look.

It was still there, the shiny spot, hanging in the sky like a window without a frame. And the longer Alder stared at it, the more unsettled he felt.

Alder rubbed Fern’s forehead with his thumb. He blinked, and when he looked again for the shiny patch, he couldn’t see it anymore.

But though the strange optical illusion had disappeared, Alder’s unsettled feeling hadn’t.

It was a feeling deep in his gut that something was wrong. Something was torn. Something that was meant to be together wasn’t.

Fern awoke and stretched, and one of her tiny, sharp claws ran across Alder’s arm, scratching him.

“Ow,” he said, but he barely felt the pain from her claw before he forgot it. Because he realized what was wrong. Something was missing.

The other kitten. Fern’s brother.

“Siblings shouldn’t be separated,” he said out loud, suddenly, urgently. And he knew it was up to him to set things right.

When Mom got home, Alder was waiting for her on the pink couch. Fern was sharpening her claws on the rug.

“Don’t let her do that,” Mom said.

Rather than get into a debate about why cats need sharp claws, Alder picked up Fern and set her on the coffee table. Now was not the time to let Mom focus on the downside of pet ownership.

“Mom,” he said, “I have something serious we need to talk about.”

Alder’s mom, who had been unlacing her shoes, looked up. It was sort of funny—her hair falling forward, her shoes half undone, the wide-eyed expression on her face. “What’s the matter, Alder?”

“Take your shoes off first,” he said. He couldn’t have a conversation with her like that.

She kicked them off and joined Alder on the couch. “Is it school?” she asked. “Is it a problem with Marcus?”

Sometimes, his mom was irritatingly perceptive. But none of that was what Alder wanted to talk about. “It’s Fern,” he said. “I think she misses her brother.”

Mom sighed—relieved or annoyed, Alder couldn’t tell. “Baby,” she said, “Fern is a cat. She’s fine.”

Alder shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, and he picked his words carefully. It felt really important that Mom understood. “It’s just . . . Mom, they’re siblings. I mean, I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful. I’m really glad you let me get a cat. And it’s not that I’m just trying to get a second one! It’s just . . . well, earlier, I had this feeling. You know? Like, I knew something suddenly. I knew that it wasn’t right to split up siblings. And Mom, if we keep Fern away from her brother, I think I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life.”

For a couple of minutes, his mom didn’t say anything. She just sat next to Alder, her mouth scrunched up tight. Fern leaped from the coffee table onto the pink velvet couch, landing squarely between them. Absentmindedly, still thinking, Alder’s mom ran her hand down the kitten’s back.

At last she spoke. “We don’t need two cats,” she began.

“It’s not about needing another cat,” Alder interrupted, but his mom held up her hand to stop him.

“Let me finish,” she said. “We don’t need two cats, but I can see that you need this. Okay. We’ll go back for Fern’s brother.”

Alder was so excited that he jumped up and whooped loudly, startling Fern, who puffed up and hissed before jumping off the couch and diving under the coffee table. Then, as if realizing she had overreacted, she stuck out a hind leg and began to casually lick it.

“Come on,” Alder said, and he ran to grab his mom’s purse.

“Okay,” his mom said, going to put her shoes back on, “just don’t say that I never did anything for you.”

But when they got to the kitten corral at the pet store, only two kittens remained—the black and the tabby. And the girl who’d helped them wasn’t there either; in her place was a translucently pale young man, no older than twenty, with a name tag that read “Volunteer” and another that read “Stan,” who seemed very interested in something on his phone.

“Excuse me,” Alder said, “what happened to the orange kitten?”

“What?” Stan said, not looking up from his phone.

“The orange kitten,” Alder said. “Where did he go? Is he in another cage?”

“Oh,” said Stan, looking up at last from his phone. “No, that kitten got adopted earlier today.”

“That’s good news,” Alder’s mom said, dropping her hand on his shoulder, squeezing it.

It didn’t sound like good news to Alder. “Who adopted him?” he asked.

“Sorry, little man,” Stan said, smiling. He shoved his phone in the back pocket of his jeans. “We aren’t allowed to share that information. How about a different kitten? These are both pretty cute too!”

Alder tried not to cry as he shook his head and turned away. He had failed Fern, and he had failed her brother. They were separated. And now they’d probably never see each other again.