A House Like an Accordion by Audrey Burges

Author:Audrey Burges [Burges, Audrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

20

The House in the Reeds

JULY 1993

The summer months meant too many teenagers and college students out of school for the number of businesses that could employ them. I’d learned that lesson the prior summer, our first in Hixon, when Erma helped me get the job at Beans n’ Beads. And now that we were in the midst of our second summer here—the first time we’d ever been anywhere so long—the lesson still held true. I hadn’t had so much competition for hours at the coffee shop during the school year, when others had curfews to meet and term papers to write, but the hot months had become lean and desperate.

I’d signed Neil and me up for summer school, partly to give us both a cool space to spend some of our days, partly for the free lunch that was served in brown paper bags. Papa had gone from frequently absent to wholly unreliable. The high school was adjacent to the middle school, and I could check on Neil during the day. But the weekends were the hardest hours to fill. Sometimes we’d walk long miles to the public library, or anywhere else I could think to get us on foot. The heat made us more careless than we should have been. My efforts to stay invisible had started to slide.

I had no one to blame but myself.

After Tobias puttered away on his moped, the afternoon sun no longer seemed so full of possibility; it just felt hot, sapping us of any willingness to do anything at all. I trudged into the main open room of our house, where Neil and I had piled cushions and blankets and tablecloths and anything else that looked warm and soft. This was where we slept at night, and during the day, it also made an acceptable nest. The heat of the day would rise to the tall beams and grant us the grace of some distance. I burrowed into the layers and looked at Neil, who shook his head at me and pointed outside, to the pond.

I grimaced. “I don’t feel like swimming.” Neil put on his pleading face, pouting, but I was unmoved. “It’s too hot, Neil. I don’t want to go outside.”

He frowned at me, then shrugged. Suit yourself. He walked out and closed the doors behind him, and I splayed out on the floor. I thought about reading, or drawing, and I gathered my arms around my sketchbook. But before I thought much more about either option, exhaustion crashed over my head and took me down with it. The slanting light told me I’d slept longer than I meant to when I awoke to the sound of wheels on the road above me. More of them than two, and heavier than a moped. Not Tobias. Erma? Maybe bringing a group of classmates along?

A new light blazed through the skylights, flashing, rotating. Blue. Red. Blue. Red. In my sleep-blurred state, I could almost convince myself I was back at Gran’s house on

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