3. age eight
age eight
Mom and Dad were fighting, so Nat was in my bed.
Her alarm clock—a junky old thing that doubled as a radio—played the only station it reliably got.
There was more static than there was music, but I didn’t mind.
The noise was enough to make Dad’s shouts garbled, to make them sound like they weren’t words at all.
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you,” Nat mumbled against my ear. She was curled around me, and it was getting too hot. Neither of us moved an inch. “Mrs. Watson died.”
I flipped over so fast I accidentally knocked our foreheads together.
“Are you sure?” I whispered. My bedroom was mostly dark, but I could see the silhouette of her face. She was rubbing her temple and grinning at me despite it.
“Yep. I walked over there and everything. Asked Mrs. Lewis.”
We lived in a gated neighborhood, nestled in a subdivision by Hayden Lake. All the homes were big and beautiful with massive lawns and fancy cars in the driveways. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis lived two doors down, and Ms. Watson was the grumpy old lady who lived between us.
She was awful. I wasn’t necessarily happy she died, but…
“When do the new ones get here?”
“Dunno.” Nat rolled me back onto my side and tucked tighter against me. “Maybe a few weeks. A month. Depends how long ‘til someone buys it.”
“It won’t be long,” I said, more out of desperate hope than anything else.
Our cul-de-sac only had six houses, and so far, we were the only kids on the whole street.
If Mrs. Watson, the mean old lady who gave out expired fruit snacks for Halloween, was gone, that meant there was an opening.
And if there was an opening, that meant we might finally end up with kid neighbors.
Something broke downstairs. Glass, it sounded like.
Too heavy to be a dish. Maybe the vase Mom bought last weekend at the antique store.
I was getting good at telling the difference between all sorts of things.
Plates versus wine glasses. Lamps hitting the wall versus the floor. A woman being pushed versus slapped.
“Try to sleep,” Nat whispered against my ear.
“Okay,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t. That she wouldn’t either. When the yelling faded, when it was impossible to know what was happening, I let out a small sob. “I hate him, Natalie.”
I rarely used her full name. I wasn’t sure why I used it now.
“Me too.” She tightened her hold. Last month, she tried to stop him, and it made everything worse. That was what Dad said. That was what Mom said too, as we got ready for bed the next night.
I need you girls to stay in here, she’d said. Then, looking at my big sister, she added, Can you do that, Nat? Can you keep Violet up here?
“Just think about the new neighbors,” Nat said. “I bet there will be two girls. One eight. One eleven. We’ll all be the best of friends, and someday, we’ll move far, far away. And we’ll be really happy.”
“And Mom will come with us.”
“Sure. Mom will come with us.”
Downstairs, the front door slammed and Dad’s truck rumbled to life.
Nat turned up the radio as loud as it would go.
It was an entire nine weeks before the moving van arrived.
Nat and I watched from my bedroom window, breaths held as we studied our new neighbors.
There was a woman. Short and curvy and wearing a pretty sundress.
A man appeared next. Big and muscular and serious looking.
He reminded me a bit of Dad, and my lip snarled before I could stop it.
It only lasted a second though, because a third person climbed from the truck. A girl.
“I think she’s my age,” Nat said. “Don’t you think?”
“Maybe she’s nine,” I said, even though I thought Nat was right. “Then she could be both of our best friend.”
“That would be perfect.”
We didn’t move from the window. I pressed my face to the glass, breath fogging against it, and waited. And waited and waited and waited, until finally—
“Ugh! It’s a boy.” I slumped down on my bed, which Nat and I had dragged beneath the window sill. We’d need to move it back into place before Dad got home.
“There might be another one,” Nat assured me. She grabbed my hand and tugged me back to the window. “Let’s keep watching.”
So we did. The two kids disappeared into the house as the parents made trips from the moving truck to their new home. I stared hard at the front of the truck, desperate for a third child—a girl, my age, obviously—to materialize from the back seat.
Nat sat with me in solidarity, until eventually, she whispered, “I don’t think there are any more kids.”
Even the parents hadn’t been out in a while. Nat’s stomach grumbled noisily, and I suspected that meant I was about to lose my only ally.
“The three of us will be best friends,” she promised. She squeezed my hand before pulling me into a hug. Like the baby I was, I started to cry, and that’s how Mom found us a few minutes later.
“Lunch is ready,” she’d announced.
“It’s a boy!” I wailed in response. Mom’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, and when Nat scampered past her for the promised lunch, she warily stepped into our bedroom. Before she had the chance to ask, I rambled on. “I wanted a friend and I got a boy!”
Mom let out an amused chuckle, and that only made me cry harder. Of course she didn’t understand. She never understood anything.
“You can be friends with a boy.” She sat beside me on the bed, jostling me into her side. She wrapped an arm around me and kissed the crown of my head.
“No, I can’t.” I wiped my running nose on my sleeve. My mouth tasted like salt I’d been crying so hard and my stomach was starting to hurt. “Nat got a girl, and they’re going to be best friends, and they’re n-not going to want to be friends with me.”
“Nat will always be your friend.” Mom hugged me tighter. “Your best friend.”
“Promise?”
“Of course.” She brushed my hair off my damp cheeks. “Nat will be your friend, and I’m sure the neighbor girl will be your friend too. Who knows, maybe you’ll end up liking the boy after all.”
“Boys break things.” I sniveled, but my breath was coming easier.
Her body tensed against mine. She didn’t respond for several minutes, until she finally whispered. “Not all of them.”
“Promise?”
This time, when Mom didn’t immediately respond, I knew she wasn’t going to.
“Nat said we’d be friends,” I said, just to fill the silence. “All us girls.”
“See?” Mom tucked my hair behind my ears before rising to her feet. “Everything will be fine, Violet. Now help me move this bed back where it belongs.”
Nat was a liar, and I obviously could never trust Mom again.
“So cool.” Our new neighbor studied Nat’s bucket list. I didn’t fully get why it was called a bucket list when it was actually just things Nat wanted to do this year.
Phoebe Blake obviously got it. She was a year older than Nat and four years older than me. That meant she was a sixth grader, which was a big deal. Even Nat was still in elementary school.
Phoebe read over the list and grinned at my sister.
“Which one will you do first?”
I stood between them, but I wasn’t part of the conversation. In the ten minutes we’d been out here, talking at the stone divider between our yards, Phoebe had barely looked at me. Apparently, I was too little, too lame, to be included.
Phoebe’s parents were on their front steps, attempting to assemble a porch swing. The boy hadn’t made an appearance yet, and though I wouldn’t admit it, I was relieved when he finally showed up.
“I found a frog!” He announced as he barreled into our group.
From our bedroom window he had looked so young, but down here, he seemed older.
It was his height, I decided. He was as tall as his sister, almost a head taller than I was.
He puffed his chest as he looked from Phoebe to us.
“Phoebe said they don’t exist here, but they do. I knew they did. I already found one.”
“No, you didn’t.” Phoebe shoved the boy’s shoulder, and despite his height, he stumbled. He was as skinny as he was tall, and as clumsy, it seemed. “Don’t lie, Atlas.”
I’d never heard the name Atlas before, but I liked it. If I weren’t so shy, I’d tell him.
“I did.” Atlas crossed his arms over his chest and proudly lifted his chin. “It slipped out of my hands, but I found one.”
Atlas looked like he was waiting for Phoebe to argue with him, but she didn’t. Instead, she asked Nat another question about her list.
“Who are you, anyway?” Atlas asked. It took me a moment to realize he was talking to me. After being ignored by Nat and Phoebe for the last several minutes, I felt a surge of hope.
Maybe Mom was right. Maybe a boy could be my friend.
“Violet. Like the flower. Or the color.”
“I’m Atlas,” he said, even though I’d already figured that out. “Like the guy who holds the whole world.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I wasn’t going to admit it. I decided not to say anything at all.
“Do you want to see my room?” Phoebe gave the list back to Nat and stepped toward her porch. My sister’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, and a smile blossomed over her lips.
“Yeah, sure!”
“Can I come?”
“No, you’re too little. Maybe Atlas will show you his room though.”
“Next time, Vi,” Nat promised as she got dragged away.
Liar! I wanted to scream. You said we’d all be friends!
“My room’s really messy,” Atlas informed me. I knew it wasn’t his fault I wasn’t invited to go with Phoebe and Nat, but I despised him all the same.
“I don’t want to see your room. I don’t want to be your friend at all!”
It was stupid and mean, but my heart ached that Nat had chosen Phoebe over me. She didn’t even know her, and she’d replaced me that eagerly.
I left Atlas standing in the space between our lawns, too busy crying to worry over him. I didn’t figure he’d care that I ran off, but when I peeked through the living room blinds, he was standing right where I’d left him.