“LEMONADE!” HANNAH SANG. Literally sang, with notes and everything.
“And at least four—no, five—cookies,” Aunt Vicky added.
“Hurry up, or I’ll eat them all myself,” Hannah said.
Sam walked softly to the main part of the house, which seemed to be the kitchen and dining room and living room all in one. Aunt Vicky and Hannah bustled back and forth, pouring lemonade into glasses, finding plates and napkins, pulling boxes from the cupboards. They reminded Sam of the chickens in the yard, always moving.
Caitlin sat at a long wooden table that seemed to be part kitchen table, part office, judging from all the computer equipment at one end. Her good hand was wrapped around a sweating glass of lemonade. Sam perched on a chair next to her, ready to bolt back to her room if necessary. Caitlin gave her a quick nod of encouragement, and Sam settled a little more into her seat.
“Cookies?” Aunt Vicky asked, shaking a mostly empty box of Thin Mints at Sam. “I finished off the peanut butter ones last week, before I knew you were coming. Sorry about that.”
Sam stared at the box of cookies. Maybe this was some sort of fairy test, and if she ate the food here, she’d have to stay forever.
She shook her head.
Aunt Vicky rattled the cardboard again. “Okay. There’s still lemonade. And cake later, if you want. But after dinner! We don’t only eat sweets around here, even if it seems like it.”
“I could live off pie,” Hannah said casually. “There are so many different kinds. I don’t know why you’d need to eat anything else.”
“I’m a little tired,” Caitlin said with a yawn. “Would it be okay if I took a nap in my room?”
“Certainly,” Hannah said at the same time Aunt Vicky blurted, “Of course!” They both exploded into action, pulling shades and depositing suitcases and delivering secondary glasses of lemonade to both their rooms. Sam pressed her back to the wall and tried to stay out of their way.
“Can I help with the dishes?” Caitlin asked.
Sam hid a smile. There were no dishes. Such was Caitlin’s brilliance.
Hannah beamed. “Absolutely not! You go rest after that long flight.”
The drive had been longer than the flight, but Sam didn’t say so. Caitlin thanked them both for the lemonade and went to her room without even looking back. Sam realized, almost too late, that if she didn’t escape now, Aunt Vicky and Hannah would turn their attentions on her.
She followed her sister before anyone could stop her. But before returning to her own assigned room, she pushed open the door to Caitlin’s.
A treadmill, folded up and shoved against the wall, stood guard next to the nightstand. The bed itself was new, the white headboard the only thing in the house that wasn’t covered in a layer of dust. Caitlin was older, almost fourteen and about to start high school. It made sense for her to get the new bed and the room that wasn’t filled with bins and boxes and someone else’s life.
Caitlin flopped onto the bed, fumbled with her headphones, and closed her eyes. Muffled music tumbled out of them, an upbeat rhythm with a woman’s raspy voice overlaid. Without even opening her eyes, Caitlin said, “Get out.”
“I just wanted to see your room,” Sam said from the doorway.
“You’ve seen it. Now get out.” Caitlin’s toe bopped in time with the music.
Sam tried again. “Is your arm doing better today?”
Caitlin sighed dramatically but then, much to Sam’s surprise, actually answered. “It’s a pain, but it’s not, you know, actually painful anymore. Just forget about it.”
As if Sam could do that, could just forget about what had happened. But she knew better than to press Caitlin about it now. And besides, there was a more important question weighing on her mind. “When … when do you think we can go back?”
Caitlin’s eyes popped open. “Try to forget about that, too.” She shut them again.
Sam stood awkwardly in the doorway for another minute, waiting to see if Caitlin would say anything else, but that was it. When Caitlin wanted to forget something, she did.
Her own room seemed smaller after seeing Caitlin’s. The boxes were everywhere, great imposing stacks of them. Although—she tilted her head—the way all the plastic bins were stacked, they almost looked like the stones of a castle wall.
Yes. She could see it now.
The bins in the closet were the most promising. Sam pulled out the ones in the middle and stacked them to the sides. She worked slowly, careful not to make any noise. And she didn’t open any of them—moving the bins represented a certain level of trouble, but opening them … well, that was just asking for it. Aunt Vicky was big and Hannah looked strong and Sam had no desire to make them angry. You brought this on yourself. Not on her first day. Not when she didn’t even know how long she had to stay here.
Sam arranged the bins like a medieval stonemason, building her new structure with a critical eye. It felt strangely good to be using her body after hours of sitting on the plane and in the car, after days of sitting in plastic chairs while adults talked above and around her, while doctors hovered over Caitlin in her hospital bed, while people whispered and glanced and tried not to point. Until last week, she hadn’t realized that sitting could be so exhausting.
But she wasn’t sitting now—she was working. Soon Sam had carved out the center of the closet bins, leaving two walls that reached out into the room. It took her six tries to throw the bed quilt over the top to make a roof, but then she had it.
A fort.
A castle fort.
She lined it with the pillows from the bed. Back home, her pillows had been fluffier, all four of them deep-sea blue with a tiny dolphin-and-shell pattern. They were probably still on her bed, probably still arranged exactly how she had left them, along with the rest of her things. She imagined her room like Sleeping Beauty’s Castle—everything in a magical sleep awaiting her return.
She’d always had her own room, ever since she was little, and although her mother had picked the pale-yellow paint of the walls, Sam had been allowed to cover those walls with posters. She’d found them folded up in the creases of her father’s National Geographic magazines—he had a collection going back to the early 1900s. The old maps were her favorites. Sometimes on Saturdays, she’d go with her dad to one flea market after another. They’d comb through boxes of stinky, dusty magazines looking for the issues they were missing. Sam kept the official list in a notebook. Any time they found one, they got ice cream to celebrate. And if they didn’t find one, they got ice cream anyway.
There were no posters on the walls of Aunt Vicky’s room, only a row of small, framed flowers near the door. Nothing interesting. Nothing familiar.
Inside the fort, Sam opened her backpack and pulled out all the books. She arranged them by size along one of her castle walls: the illustrated book of fairy tales on the left, because it was the biggest, all the way down to her paperback copy of The Hobbit, dog-eared and ripped and stained, because she never went anywhere without it. There were a few books she hadn’t even read yet—one about a girl who was actually a dragon and another about a robot boy and his robot dog. She winced when she saw the spine of the last one. A library book. That belongs in a library in a whole ’nother state.
That last night, the night that everything went so awful—the thud of something hitting the wall—Sam had been reading this book. Trying to get to the end of a chapter before anyone noticed that she was still awake. Her finger wiggled between the pages where the bookmark was nestled, but she didn’t open it. She was afraid of what might happen.
Sometimes Sam’s mind took her places she didn’t want to go. Someone would ask her a simple question at school, and even though she was standing by her locker, her mind would be back in San Diego on a family vacation at the very moment when a snarl, a snap. The flash of a fist.
Sam pulled her finger from the pages and slid the book into place on her makeshift bookshelf. She’d try again later. It wasn’t due back at the library for another eight days, and maybe she’d be back home by then anyway.
Back home.
Sam eyed The Hobbit. J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous book had a second, less well-known name, and it made Sam’s chest hurt a little to think of it. The subtitle of The Hobbit was There and Back Again. Because it wasn’t enough for Bilbo Baggins to go on an epic quest across all of middle-earth. He had to go back home again afterward.
Heroes always went home.
Sam’s eyes began to prickle, and she looked away. That’s when the glittery, golden type on A Game of Fox & Squirrels caught her eye.
Sam fluffed her pillows and settled into her castle nest. She tugged at the faded cardboard tongue of the game box, and it slipped free, eager to spill its secrets. Two stacks of playing cards slid into Sam’s palm. The backs bore an ornate forest design in purples and blues. Faded gold birds sang from the branches of a massive central tree, and the silhouettes of a gold fox and squirrel sat on either side of its trunk. What kind of forest was purple instead of green? A fairy forest, maybe. Or a forest in another world. The kind of forest where the animals were all made of gold. Oh, how Sam wanted to see it for herself! It hurt her heart to know places like this existed but that she had no way to reach them.
Something flashed under the bed. Sam started. A golden tail?
No, of course not.
It was only the sunlight reflecting off the shiny surface of the table lamp. It couldn’t possibly have been anything else … no matter how much she wanted it to be.
Sam flipped over one of the cards in her hand. The six of spades … except the spade was etched into the body of an acorn at the corner and the six acorns scattered in the middle of the card were being gathered up by a nervous-looking squirrel. She leafed eagerly through the deck. Each suit had a different type of squirrel and a different type of nut: acorns with spades, almonds with diamonds, walnuts with hearts, and peanuts with clubs. Sam sighed. Peanuts weren’t actually nuts, they were legumes. Whoever had made the game should have done their research!
It was easy to overlook this small mistake, though, in light of how the cards made Sam feel—like she was looking through a window into another world. The “royal” cards—the queen, king, and page—were particularly handsome, their squirrels decked in tiny robes and crowns. Sam lingered over the Queen of Hearts, whose little squirrel paws were holding a magnificent walnut as if it was the greatest prize in all the kingdom. The squirrel seemed so proud, so regal, that Sam couldn’t help smiling and sitting a little straighter herself.
Sam admired each card—touching the noses of the animals, counting the nuts (and legumes!)—until, finally, she reached the end.
And found the Fox.
The Fox was dashing. He wore a fancy purple coat lined in gold and carried a satchel. A jaunty feathered hat sat angled on his fuzzy red head. He seemed alive enough to breathe, right there on the card! He could have been a Disney character, except his eyes were regular fox eyes, golden brown and sharp, and not huge cartoonish eyes that took up half his face.
Sam heard a knock at the door and then Aunt Vicky call out, “Dinner.”
Her heart burst into rabbit mode. That’s what a doctor had called it once, rabbit mode, when he was explaining it to Sam’s mother. Hearts were supposed to pace themselves as if they were running a marathon—slow and steady like the tortoise in that old fable “The Tortoise and the Hare.” But sometimes Sam’s heart tried to be the hare, jumping this way and that, frantic and foolish, as if it were trying to escape from her chest.
What if Aunt Vicky opened the door and saw the castle fort? Sam should never have touched her aunt’s things, should never have moved them, should never have presumed. Sam clutched the cards in her hand, completely frozen, while her heart raced in wild circles.
But Aunt Vicky didn’t open the door, and a moment later Sam heard her knock on Caitlin’s door and say the same thing before moving back down the hallway. Sam let out a breath. Aunt Vicky wasn’t coming in. She wasn’t going to see what Sam had done.
None of that mattered to her rabbit heart, though, which kept hopping and bouncing against her ribs. The doctor—he was the comfy-chairs-in-an-office kind, not the sterile-examining-table-and-stethoscope kind—had given her some exercises, and she tried them now.
Breathe. One, two, three. Breathe. Four, five, six. Breathe. Seven, eight, nine. By the time she got to eighteen, her heart was almost a tortoise again.
Sam wiggled the Fox & Squirrels cards back into their box with shaking hands and shelved the game next to her books along her castle wall. She should dismantle her fort, she knew. It would be safer than leaving it here to be found. She’d gotten lucky this time. She wouldn’t always be. She never was.
But Sam left her castle standing, closed the bedroom door behind her, and, like a tortoise, slowly made her way to dinner.