“Somebody will test the ice, okay? I promise. We’ll make sure it’s safe,” my father said, as if Jeanine was actually crying because she was afraid of falling through ice.
“Like who? Professional ice testers?” I said, trying to force my face into a smirk and failing because smirking is impossible when you’re dropping out of the sky.
“I don’t know who,” my father said, his smile finally failing. “All I know is that we’re going to figure it out, and when we do, it’s going to be great. The ice, the house, the land, all of it! And you’re all going to love it!”
If it was all so great, and he knew we’d love it, would he have to keep telling us we would?
I knew great. Great was New York City. Great was Barney Greengrass. Great was Charlie Kramer, who’d been my best friend since we were in the Red Room in preschool together.
It was as if my parents had made up this story about some other family, one that loves ice-skating and nature and is bored of living in the greatest city in the world, and we were just supposed to play along and pretend that was us even though none of it was true.
Three hours later, Dad turned off Country Road 21B into woods so thick they cut out the sun.
“We’re here!” he practically sang as we started up a steep, zigzagging dirt road.
But “here” wasn’t where we were. “Here” was at the top of the mountain, and we were still at the bottom. We had another whole vomit bucket to go before “here.”
Finally, we came out of the trees and rolled to a stop in front of a sagging, purple house.
Dad was wrong. We were here now. I was seeing it—the land, the house, and all of it—and I wasn’t getting it. Not the broken-down, grape-colored house with windows popping out in all the wrong places. Not the shed that really was only half a shed because the other half looked like someone had burned it to the ground. Not the miles and miles of lonely sky and house-less, people-less fields and woods trapping us on top of this cliff.
“C’mon, guys, don’t you want to come check it out?” Mom said.
Jeanine, Zoe, and I didn’t move.
“Can I have your phone?” Jeanine asked, sniffling.
“Why?” Dad said.
“To call Kevin.” Kevin Metz, chess champion, is the male version of Jeanine. They met in Gifted and Talented in kindergarten and have been best friends ever since.
“You can call Kevin on the way home. Now you’re seeing the house,” Mom said.
“Where are we?” I asked, looking out the window.
“Petersville,” Dad said.
“Is there an actual town?” I didn’t see another house anywhere.
“About six miles away,” Mom said.
“How are we supposed to get there?” I said.
“Car or bike,” Dad said.
“We need to get in the car just to get milk?” I said.
“What do you think of the house? Big, right?” Mom was smiling that huge smile again.
Clearly, that was a “yes” on needing the car to go get milk.
“No more sharing,” Dad said as he and Mom got out of the car. “You guys each get your own room. Don’t you want to go in and look around?”
Jeanine, Zoe, and I still didn’t move. For once, I’m pretty sure we were all thinking the same thing: if we went inside, that was it. The house was ours. From the outside, it could still belong to someone else.
Mom opened the door to the back seat. “Come on! Come see.”
“Why are the windows all different sizes?” I said, staying put.
“It’s neat, right?” she said. “An artist and her husband built it. They wanted something completely original. Something that would surprise you.”
“Were they color blind?” Jeanine asked.
Mom laughed. “No, the artist’s name is Iris, you know, like the flower. Most of their furniture was purple too. Pretty zany.”
“Is that code for crazy?” I said.
“They aren’t crazy,” Dad said. “We met them. They’re great.”
“Mmm, like everything else here,” I said into my T-shirt.
Dad opened the back door on the other side. “Enough! Everybody out.”
Jeanine, Zoe, and I obeyed but in slow motion, and we didn’t go to the house. We just stood beside the car on the brown lawn. Even the grass looked unhappy to be there.
Jeanine leaned back against the car and studied the house. “Did they give it to you for free?”
“Of course not,” Mom said.
“How do you know it’s safe?” I plopped down on the grass next to Jeanine’s feet. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to get any closer to the house than I had to, I needed to stick with my side. This was us versus them, and we were going to lose—we’d already lost, even if Jeanine didn’t realize it yet. And if we were going down—maybe even because we were—we had to stay together. Jeanine must have felt it too, because a minute later she slid down the car until she was kneeling next to me on the ground.
Dad blew his cheeks out like a chipmunk. He was definitely annoyed we didn’t want to go in the house, but he didn’t try to make us get up. Instead, he and Mom walked across the sad lawn and sat down on the porch stairs opposite us.
Zoe looked at my parents, back at us, and then climbed into my lap. She still didn’t get the everything of what was happening, but even she knew there were sides and which was hers.
“What does an artist know about building a house anyway?” Jeanine said. “Was her husband an architect?”
“He worked for the postal service,” my father said.
“What’s it called when you’re not supposed to go into a building because they’re afraid it’s going to fall on you?” I squinted up at a portion of roof that looked like it was working particularly hard to resist the force of gravity.
“Condemned?” Mom said.
“Oh, yeah.” Jeanine nodded. “It’s totally condemned.”
“It’s not condemned,” Dad said. “It’s
