<<Come in, Olive. Come in. Over.>>
<< Hi, Liza! Over.>>
<<What are you doing? Over.>>
<<Mending socks. And digesting lentil soup. Over.>>
<<Tree house? Over.>>
<<Tree house. Over.>>
<<Go-t—ing—O-er.>>
<<You’re breaking up. Tree house. Over.>>
I got walkie-talkies last month for my birthday. I wanted a cell phone, but Mom is too cheap. Well, that’s not how she tells it.
“Cell phones mess with your brain,” she says. “Radio waves equal radiation. Radiation spells tumors.
Experts predict a brain-cancer tsunami in ten years. No one under eighteen should use cell phones—except in an emergency.”
Olive is my neighbor and best friend. It’s a cool September evening, so I throw a jean jacket over my sweater as I head out to the tree house. These are the best weeks of the year, because I can reach out the tree-house window and pick apples straight from the branch. I’m munching one when Olive straggles up.
“Bad news,” Olive puffs. “I looked everywhere for batteries. We’re out.” She gives me a look. What she’s really saying is that our walkie-talkie days are over.
“I can get some,” I say.
“No,” Olive says gravely. “That would be cheating.”
Three months ago, Olive’s family decided not to buy anything new for a year. Except food. I started it. I’d learned that an oil company was polluting farmland in Guatemala and not compensating local farmers. I formed Girls for Renewable Resources, Really! We protested and got the company to pay up.
Olive joined GRRR!, but her parents didn’t want Olive getting too involved. When she couldn’t come to our protest, Olive got her parents to watch An Inconvenient Truth, a movie about global warming. They were so freaked out about carbon levels that they decided Olive had to be in GRRR! They vowed to reuse, reduce and recycle with a vengeance.
So, if Olive is out of batteries, our walkie-talkie days are over.
“Morse code?” I propose. “Telegraph?”
Olive giggles. “How about semaphore flags?”
“Carrier pigeon!” I say. “Smoke signals.”
“We could just yell,” Olive points out. “It isn’t that far.”
“We could put a string between our houses, and zip-line notes to each other.” I’m serious this time.
“A laundry line would do the trick,” Olive muses.
“No.” I grin. “I’ve got an idea. Let me surprise you.”
“Okay.” Liza plucks an apple from a branch and takes a noisy bite. She frowns. “Sad news about Richard, huh?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s weird. He just sat there and never talked. You would think you wouldn’t miss him. But it feels so big, so loud, that he’s gone.”
Olive nods. “I know. Mom says he made us anxious in a good way. He reminded us how lucky we are to have a warm home.”
“Maybe,” I say. “I just wanted him to be warm, in a little apartment somewhere, and not always on public display.”
“Well, he’s not on public display now,” Olive deadpans.
“That’s for sure,” I say. “He has vanished. Disappeared.”
I remember the feeling I had in the park. “Where do you think he is?” I ask.
“Nowhere,” Olive says. “We’re just a mass of electrical impulses, Liza. Without our bodies, we’re like a DVD without a DVD player. There’s no picture, no sound, no story. The only life after death is the worms that feast on your body and the plants that shoot up as you rot away.”
“Ugh, Olive! Fat worms and a crop of tulips? That’s life after death?”
“What do you think? That Richard’s an angel, floating around looking down on us? Or that he’s”—she puts on a spooky voice—“a ghost?”
I try to think up an answer. Then the tree house groans. It sways, and then boards tear from each other with a screech, leaving raw edges and bent nails waving in the air.
Olive and I freeze. We stare wildly into each other’s eyes. We’re half smirking, as if it’s funny, and half terrified. Suddenly, the entire tree house skids down the tree trunk, scraping off bark and snapping branches. I protect my eyes with one hand and grab the windowsill with the other. Olive screams.
Then—whomp—it stops. My tailbone throbs. Olive moans and rubs the back of her head. We sit for a few moments. Then, slowly and without a word, we ease ourselves out the little doorway and leap to the ground. We run like mad, yelping and laughing. We fall onto the lawn, clutching each other.