Chapter 8

“What will you name him?”

Oak sat cross-legged on the rug in the front room of her new house that felt, suddenly, a lot more like home. In the little diamond of space between her legs, curled into an appealing circle of orange fluff, was the reason why.

“Walnut,” Oak answered.

“Walnut?” said her mother, who sat nearby. “That’s adorable.”

Gently, Oak placed her hand on Walnut’s fur. Immediately, he began to purr. “I can’t believe you let me get a kitten,” Oak said. She looked up at her mother and smiled. “Thank you.”

“Hey-y,” said her mom, smiling back. “That’s the first real smile I think I’ve seen from you since the move.”

Oak nodded.

Mom stood up and placed her hand on the top of Oak’s head, just as Oak had her hand resting on Walnut’s back. “Bedtime soon, okay?”

Oak nodded again and her mom’s hand moved away, and Oak heard her footsteps as she headed into the kitchen to finish up the dishes from dinner. Normally, that was Oak’s job, and Oak was extra grateful to her mom for taking care of it. She didn’t want to disturb the kitten.

But after a minute, he woke up anyway, stretching his two front legs, unsheathing his whisker-thin claws, and yawning, his pink barbed tail uncurling, his needle-sharp tiny teeth gleaming white. He wandered around the room, sniffing the legs of the couch and the bottom row of books. Watching him explore the books, she found it a little bit easier to accept the fact that her mom had undone all her work of arranging the shelves in a rainbow.

When Oak had returned home from school that day, it was to find that the cookbooks were with the cookbooks. The novels were with the novels. And some of the shelves had been repurposed entirely, holding things like picture frames and candles and little decorative carvings. Oak’s book rainbow was gone. All her work, disappeared. It had stung, Oak could admit to herself now, with Walnut beside her. Neither Oak nor her mother had mentioned it, but Oak had been angry. Her feelings had been hurt.

She glanced up at the wall clock; it was eight thirty. That meant only five hours had passed since she had gotten off the bus and walked back down Rollingwood Drive to find the construction workers still atop the roof and the shelves rearranged into their mundane categories.

“Let’s go run some errands,” Mom had said at that moment. Oak had groaned and whined about having just gotten home and needing to do homework, but the truth was that she didn’t want to be with her mom right then. She wanted to be alone with her anger about the books. But her mom, it turned out, was in one of those weird moods when she just insisted on Oak going with her. After another minute of whining, Oak recognized it was no use, and she’d dumped her backpack just inside the door of her bedroom and reluctantly followed her mom to the car.

First to the gas station.

Then to the grocery store.

Then to the optometrist to pick up Mom’s new glasses.

Then back to the grocery store because they had forgotten to get milk.

Then a stop at the drugstore so Mom could pick up a prescription—a boring long line there, but at least Oak noticed the display of DNA test kits near the counter, which gave her an idea for the school project.

And finally, to a coffee shop for fresh-roasted coffee beans because, Mom said, “The first thing to find in a new town is the best place for freshly roasted coffee.”

The coffee shop was in a little strip of stores that also included a dry cleaner’s, a yoga studio, and a pet store. Mom had gotten her bag of coffee beans and they were walking back to the car when Oak saw the sign on the pet shop’s door: CAT ADOPTION FAIR ALL WEEK!

“Mom,” she said, and pointed.

Mom read the sign. “Oak, honey,” she said, “we’ve been through this before. We aren’t pet people.”

“No,” said Oak. “That’s not what you said. You said we aren’t dog people. And anyway, I don’t see why you get to decide what kind of people we are.”

They were in the middle of the parking lot, and Oak found that she had stopped walking. Mom stopped too, and she rubbed the top of her nose, up close to her eyes, as if Oak was giving her a headache.

“Baby,” her mother began, “we’ve been having such a nice afternoon together. Let’s not spoil it, okay?”

A nice afternoon? It was as if her mom hadn’t even noticed how Oak had been dragging her feet, how she had hardly said a word, how she’d been a totally unwilling participant in this afternoon of boring chores. Just like she hadn’t noticed Oak’s book spine masterpiece.

Oak could have said all of this. But instead she said, “Mom, you might not be a pet person. But I am. Let’s go look at the kittens. Please?”

Mom sighed. She tucked her bag of coffee beans into her purse and said, “Okay, Oak, fine. We can go look at the kittens, if you really want to. But remember, we are only looking. Okay?”

Oak grinned, but she didn’t say anything. She wasn’t making any promises she couldn’t keep.

Inside the pet store, off to the right, was a plastic-walled play structure. Oak made a beeline for it, her mother calling after her, “Just looking! Remember!”

Peering into the enclosure, Oak spied two sleeping kittens, a black one and a calico, lumped together. And then she saw a third kitten—orange and white striped—sitting alone, tail curled around its paws, looking, Oak thought, rather lonely.

Mom had caught up to her.

“Mom,” Oak said, pointing at the orange kitten. “See?”

“That one’s been sort of mopey since last night,” said a bored-looking young man, whose name tag read “Stan.” He sat on a stool near the enclosure and his thumb flicked up on the screen of his phone.

“How come?” said Oak, crouching down to peer through the clear plastic enclosure at the kitten’s face.

“His sister got adopted yesterday,” Stan said. “Maybe he misses her.”

“I don’t think cats miss each other,” Mom said.

“Did you ever ask one, ma’am?” Stan said.

This Oak’s mom didn’t seem to have an answer for, which was very unusual indeed.

Stan stood from his stool and scooped up the kitten with one hand. He offered it to Oak. “Want to hold him?”

Oak did.

“He sure seems to like you,” Mom had said at the pet store, squatting down next to Oak. She reached out to stroke the kitten; he was light orange and dark orange stripes all over, with a little white patch just beneath his chin.

“He reminds me of one of those vanilla-orange ice cream bars,” Oak said.

“Those used to be my favorite when I was a kid,” Mom said.

“Really? I’ve never seen you eat one.”

This Mom didn’t answer either. She scratched the kitten’s white patch. She stood up. Then she did something that Oak couldn’t have expected. She turned to Stan and said, “So, how do we adopt him?”

That was the first time Oak had heard the kitten purr, as soon as her mom had said that. She still couldn’t believe, five hours later, watching the kitten exploring their living room, that Mom had changed her mind. And now, here they were—Oak and Walnut—and Oak made a silent promise that she would try not to complain so much—not about the move, not about the bookshelves.

Because even though she missed their place in San Francisco, and even though she missed her friends and her school, if her parents hadn’t made her move to Southern California, maybe even if they hadn’t moved into this house, she never would have met the kitten—the tiny orange-and-white fluffball of a kitten—who was now her own.

“Oak,” Mom called from the kitchen, “let’s call your dad before you get ready for bed. You can tell him about the cat!”

“Sure!” Oak stood up. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Walnut was trying to jump up onto the window seat in the front window, but he wasn’t quite big enough to manage. Oak lifted him up and placed him on the wooden bench. “Just a quick look,” Oak told the kitten. “Then let’s go say hi to my dad.”

The kitten’s white whiskers radiated out from his little orange muzzle like sunbeams. His ears twitched forward as he looked through the window, and he lifted one paw and scratched at the glass.

What was he looking at? Oak bent down and angled her head so that she was looking in the same direction as the kitten. Oak couldn’t see much, but she’d heard somewhere that cats could see in the dark. Walnut made a funny little sound in his throat—like a meow crossed with a purr—and he scratched at the glass again.

“What is it?” Oak asked. And that’s when she saw it: a flicker of movement between her house and the neighbors’. It came and went so quickly that she thought it might have been a hummingbird. No—it couldn’t have been a hummingbird . . . they wouldn’t be flying around at night. She squinted her eyes a bit and tried to see the movement again.

“Oak,” Mom called. “Come say hi to Dad!”

Oak scooped up the kitten and headed to the kitchen. “Wait until you meet my dad,” she said to Walnut. “You’re going to love him.”

Maybe it was the addition of the kitten to the household that put Oak into such a generous mood; whatever the reason, when she headed off to school under a wide, gray sky, thick white clouds way up high, she resolved to make the best of her new situation. So when she heard her neighbor trudging behind her, up the hill toward the bus stop, Oak stopped and waited.

“Hello,” she said, and she even smiled.

Alder looked like someone who had not slept the night before—or, if he had slept, it had been fitful and plagued with nightmares. His hair swirled in an unruly mess of curls; his long-sleeved T-shirt was rumpled and half tucked in, as if by accident, and up close, Oak could see hard bits of crust in the inner corners of his eyes. Even worse, Alder didn’t respond to her greeting. His hands remained fisted around the straps of his backpack, and after a cursory glance, his gaze returned to the sidewalk. On he went, not breaking his stride, past Oak and toward the corner to meet the bus.

“Rude,” Oak mumbled, loud enough to be heard, but ahead of her, Alder didn’t flinch.

Never mind him. Oak wasn’t going to let her crabby neighbor ruin the first happy morning Oak had had since the move. It was made happier, the morning, by the memory of how she’d left little Walnut—he was curled in a ball near the foot of her bed, his fluffy chest rising and falling with each gentle breath.

Oak channeled the kitten’s calm as she focused her eyes on Alder’s backpack in front of her. It looked heavy, like he’d brought home all his books the night before. And he walked so slowly. There was no reason Oak should have to slow her pace and stay behind him, she decided. After all, she’d done a nice thing by waiting for him and saying hello; if he was too impolite to even answer, then she’d just speed up and push right past him.

And that was what she did. With long, forceful strides, Oak powered up the hill. She caught up to Alder in no time, but even though he had to know that she was wanting to pass, he stayed stubbornly in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Rude,” Oak said again, and then she stepped up next to Alder’s right side, shoving a little with her left elbow to make room.

She didn’t push that hard, but maybe she did push harder than she’d intended. Or maybe Alder’s backpack had been even heavier than it looked. But whatever the reason, when Oak’s elbow pushed into Alder’s side, it knocked him off-balance, and the next thing Oak knew, he was down on the sidewalk, arms flailing, a surprised “Oof!” coming out of his mouth.

Maybe she should have stopped to help him up.

Probably she should have.

But, Oak thought, probably he should have answered when she had said hello.

And so, with a bright flame of meanness springing to life in her chest, Oak stomped on up the hill, cresting it just as the yellow-orange school bus rounded the corner and pulled to a stop.

The door hissed open, and Oak mounted the steps.

“Hello, tree girl,” said Faith with a smile.

“Hey,” Oak answered, and she headed up the aisle.

“What’s up, tree boy?” Oak heard Faith say behind her. And then, “Alder, buddy, what happened to your hands?”

“It’s nothing,” Oak heard Alder mumble. “I just scraped them.”

“You need a Band-Aid,” Faith said, and the concern in her voice made Oak’s breakfast curdle in her stomach. Oak hadn’t noticed that Alder had gotten hurt.

“I’ll be okay,” Alder said.

Oak tucked herself into an empty row, parking her backpack on her lap.

She looked out the window and pretended not to see Alder as he walked by, pretended not to see the red scrapes on his palms, pretended not to notice the way he stopped and looked around for a seat before he disappeared into a back row.

Outside, the clouds gathered and darkened. As the bus’s door closed with another hiss and the bus pulled onto the street with a screech, Oak heard a third sound—a rumble of thunder, far away.