The Island

Prologue

The Olsen children were forbidden from the start. Ever since the battered U-Haul rolled into the driveway of the house next door. The one that had stood empty for months now, windows dark, blinds drawn, a For Sale sign in the yard.

My aunt pushed the brim of the floppy straw hat she used when gardening up and eyed the white moving van with barely disguised disdain.

Her expression got even tighter when a green minivan flecked with rust stains followed the U-Haul into the driveway. The doors flew open, and people started spilling out.

I stared, mesmerized. I didn’t know you could fit that many kids in one car. It almost looked like a magic trick—the one where a magician pulls a scarf out of their sleeve, and it just keeps going and going.

The Olsens filled the evening air with shouts and loud laughter, so foreign and unexpected on our quiet street.

“Oh no,” Aunt Nina muttered under her breath as she eyed them over the fence that separated our front yard from theirs.

“What?” I asked.

She simply shook her head, a sour look on her face. “This is how neighborhoods go to hell.” Her voice was laced with the kind of doom that didn’t really fit with the sunny, mild spring day we were having.

I aimed my gaze back at the house next door and the kids who were already running around in the backyard.

I ventured a guess that whatever was happening there wasn’t proper .

Aunt Nina liked when things were proper.

I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, but unpacking six kids, three cats, something that looked like a terrarium for either a snake or a turtle, and eight chickens in a house with four bedrooms and a moderate backyard didn’t seem to be it.

Later that night I heard her and my uncle talking when they were sitting on the couch in the living room, wineglasses in hand, after I’d been sent to bed.

My bedtime was always at nine o’clock on the dot, rain or shine, summer or winter.

Today, I couldn’t fall asleep because the house next door was still alive with shouts and noise.

Not that I minded. I’d been perched on the window seat, exploring the chaos from a safe distance away, spellbound by what was happening, eyes wide, heart beating loudly from excitement.

I’d only gone to get a glass of water once Mrs. Olsen had hollered at the door and made the kids go inside.

“Six kids,” Aunt Nina was saying. “Have these people never heard of birth control?”

“Might be nice for Dylan to have kids his age living nearby,” Uncle said.

“Be serious. He won’t be playing with those kids.”

My heart sank the tiniest bit, even though I’d already kind of figured Aunt Nina would never approve.

She rarely approved of anything I got up to.

There was always an allusion that I could be better.

Straight As could’ve come with pluses attached to them.

First places could’ve been won by a larger margin.

I could have participated in more after-school programs. Better after-school programs. And clearly, the Olsens weren’t going to make me a better, more accomplished version of myself, so there were more appropriate friends to have.

Aunt Nina said more appropriate.

I said boring and stuck-up.

I mean, not out loud. But I definitely thought it.

“They’re right next door,” Uncle said, ever the voice of reason. He sounded tired. He always did. “Unless you put up a wall, I don’t see how you can stop him. And why would you? So they have a lot of kids. You make it sound like Freddy Krueger moved his family in.”

He looked up then. Toward the stairs. His gaze landed on me. My heart jumped in my chest, but instead of reprimanding me, the corners of Uncle Jon’s lips quirked upward, and he winked.

“Chickens,” Aunt Nina said. “Chickens in the front yard, Jonathan!”

The carton of fresh eggs Mrs. Olsen, with a toddler on each hip and a wide smile on her face, shoved into Aunt Nina’s hands the next day when she reluctantly took her welcome-to-the-neighborhood casserole over, all decked out in high heels, a pencil skirt, and a silk blouse, did nothing to make my aunt change her mind about their family.

Neither did the fact that, in a way, Aunt Nina had been right.

The Olsen house was one of those houses.

You know the ones. The kind where the first snow fell on a porch decorated with skulls and skeletons and fake spiderwebs, and Christmas lights pulled double duty as fairy lights for the summer.

The kind where the lawn was mowed only periodically and left alone most of the time, until it looked like a few cows wouldn’t be out of place grazing in that hay field.

The kind where the backyard was littered with bikes and lawn furniture and toys nobody ever seemed to pick up.

Various home improvement projects were started and abandoned midway through, so there were always ladders, paint cans, brushes, and a variety of tools lying around.

Mr. and Mrs. Olsen threw loud, raucous street parties with the neighbors in the summer, and let their kids roam wild and free in the streets around our neighborhood with no supervision.

Over the following year, the Olsen family added a pair of twins to their brood, bringing the total up to eight. All of them were nearly two years apart in age, all of them a bit wild, a bit loud, a lot loving. Will, Adrian, Harriet, Hunter, Jackson, Mia, Charlie, and Daisy.

Maybe I would’ve listened to Aunt Nina and stayed away from the Olsens—truthfully, they were a bit intimidating with their carefree laughs, loud games, and even louder affection—but then my uncle died, and life morphed into something out of balance and lonely.

And frankly, it had already been lonely in the first place.