My house was becoming a maze of boxes. Mom kept out only the essentials: five plates, cups, and sets of silverware; necessary clothing; and, of course, the raisins. Every minute that she wasn’t busy rolling our breakables in paper, she was stress baking. One night she even put raisins in the meatloaf. Which, by the way, proved incorrect my long-held hypothesis that meatloaf couldn’t be made any grosser.
“When are we moving?” I asked one evening, pushing a plate of peanut butter raisin toffee bars away. The Bacteria leaned forward and grabbed one with his non-Vega-hand-holding hand. It was like the kid couldn’t get tired of raisins.
“As soon as we’re all packed,” she said. “Dad’s new job starts in a few weeks, and we’d like to have some time to settle in before he goes to work.”
Vega and Cassi took one look at each other and started bawling, the two of them rushing up to their bedrooms again, leaving the Bacteria free to fill a second hand with a cookie.
“I’ll miss you, li’l dude,” he said, which kind of made me feel a little bit bad about how much I wouldn’t miss him at all.
So with the deadline being “as soon as we’re all packed,” it seemed like the best possible way to put off moving would be to never get fully packed. So I began sneaking around at night unpacking things. Just a few things here and there—a snow globe in the dining room, a stack of T-shirts in my bedroom, the toilet brush, the toaster oven. So far Mom hadn’t figured out that she’d been repacking the same things over and over again, though she kept mumbling that she didn’t understand why this was taking so long.
Now, before you go feeling bad for my mom, just remember that parents trick kids all the time. How many times have you heard, “This shot is only going to feel like a little pinch?” And how many times has it in fact felt like someone had ripped your arm off and shoved it down a garbage disposal and then run over it with a train? That’s what I thought. Moving on.
During the day, Tripp and Priya and I would scrounge for something to play with, something that hadn’t been packed (my house), or wasn’t girly (Priya’s house), or wasn’t broken or stolen or being hidden down the front of someone’s pants (Tripp’s house). And then at night I would meet Cash up on the hill and we would fire up Huey, tapping out new messages. We tried the obvious:
WE COME IN PEACE
And the less obvious:
DO YOU LIKE ANCHOVIES ON YOUR PIZZA?
And even the downright dumb:
KNOCK KNOCK
WHO’S THERE
THAT’S WHAT WE’RE TRYING TO FIND OUT!
“I don’t know if we’re ever going to find anyone,” I said one night as we traipsed back through the woods. Our traipsing had gotten much slower these days, and Cash usually had to stop a couple of times and bend over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath along the path.
“You shouldn’t give up on something you believe in, kid,” he said between coughs, his cigar burning between his fingers. I had noticed that Cash had begun looking a little gray, and his skin had started to hang looser than usual, the whites of his eyes dull like eggs fried in bacon grease.
“Maybe you should give up smoking those things,” I said, finally working up the courage to say what I’d been thinking since we met. “It’s not good for you. They make you cough a lot.”
He spat in the weeds at the side of the trail and glanced at me. “Come on, let’s go.” And we took off again, him leading the way like he was trying to prove to me that he could.
I got home that night and unpacked more things than usual, starting with a whole shelf full of bed sheets and ending with the TV trays that Mom had spent an hour wrestling just right into a box that afternoon.
She came down the stairs just as I pulled the last tray out of the box.
“Arty, what are you doing?” she said, and I whipped around like I’d just been caught stealing something. Which I kind of was. Stealing all her hard work.
I lowered the tray to the ground.
“Nothing.”
“Yes, you are. You’re unpacking those trays. Why?” She came into the room, gathering her pink fluffy bathrobe around her. She stopped and her eyes grew big, like something had just dawned on her. “You’ve been unpacking things. I haven’t been going crazy after all. It’s you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, but I knew there was no way I was going to convince her when I’d been caught tray-handed. I sat on the hearth. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean to make you think you were going crazy. I just wanted it to take longer.”
“The packing? But why? You like to see me work?”
I shook my head miserably. “I don’t want to move.”
“Oh, honey.” Mom moved through the box maze and sat on the fireplace next to me. She wrapped her arm around my shoulders, and I couldn’t help it. I nestled my head against her and closed my eyes like a little kid. “None of us wants to move,” she said.
“Then why are we?”
She took a deep breath. “Because we have to. This is important for your dad, and a family supports one another through important decisions.”
“But I’m losing everything important to me,” I said. “Priya, Tripp, the observatory, CICM, Cash, everything.”
She leaned away so she could look into my face, which I ducked, trying to hide from her. It was much easier to whine when nobody was looking at you. “You really like that mean old coot, don’t you?” she said, and her voice was filled with wonder, rather than the irritation it’d been filled with all the other times she’d talked about him.
“He’s an astronaut.”
“He’s a Grouchytush,” she said, and I smiled, even though smiling tended to mess up whining efforts.
“Mom. He’s an astronaut.” I said it more slowly this time, eyeing her importantly. “And he’s not mean. Well, not that mean.”
She tucked her lips in on themselves and nodded. “I should have seen that earlier. He’s an astronaut. Of course you’d love him.”
I blushed. “I don’t love him. Gross.” But I supposed in a weird way I kind of did. Not like in a gushing, slobbery way like Vega and the Bacteria, and not in the totally obsessed way of Cassi and the Brielle Brigade, and definitely not quite in the same way Comet loved Cassi’s swing. But in my own way, yeah, I guess I did.
“Well,” Mom said, patting my knee and standing up, smoothing her robe over her knees, “you have a couple of weeks left with all of them. Make the most of your time. Don’t sit around moping before you’re even gone. Besides, it’s not like when you move away, it’ll be the last time you’ll ever see them again.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said.
I guess she was right. There was still plenty of time.