The House That Wasn't There by Elana K. Arnold

Author:Elana K. Arnold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walden Pond Press
Published: 2021-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Alder spent the whole weekend feeling like a jerk.

On Saturday he paced around his house mumbling “idiot, idiot, jerk” to himself. Fern sat on the pink velvet couch, watching him curiously. He only left the house once, to run errands with his mom. At least they stopped by the drugstore and picked up a DNA kit for the school project. Filling the little vial with spit (which was disgusting), Alder thought maybe this would help a little with Oak being mad at him.

Sunday, Alder lay flat on his back on his bedroom floor for a good part of the morning, staring up at a water stain on his ceiling.

“She should understand that it’s different for boys,” he told himself.

But the words, said out loud, felt not right.

He thought about Darla, and what Oak had said about her—“Darla sits at a table with her Dungeons and Dragons friends, and they’re all boys. Is that weird?”

His immediate response had been that no, of course that wasn’t weird. What he hadn’t said was what he felt inside. It was fine that Darla was like one of the guys. The fact that she was a girl who played Dungeons & Dragons after school every day, that she always wore a baseball cap, and that, for her last birthday, she had invited four of her best friends, all boys, to spend the afternoon at Comic Con, where they’d all had their picture taken together in front of an enormous poster of the new movie based on that game Starfield, all of that was perfectly fine.

But him, sitting at a table full of girls?

That made Alder feel . . . nervous.

And feeling nervous about the possibility of sitting at a table of all girls made Alder feel bad. About himself.

“Jerk, jerk, jerk,” he said, rolling over onto his stomach and banging his forehead against the floor.

But not sitting with Oak and her friends wasn’t only about the girl-boy thing. The truth was that each day at lunch, Alder hoped that Marcus would want to eat with him. That there would be an empty seat next to Marcus and, just like old times, he would wave Alder over as if it was no big deal at all, and they would sit together and joke about things. Nothing special, but still somehow completely special. There it was again—the way something could be two opposite things in the same moment.

Anyway, if Alder sat with Oak and her friends, that would be like giving up hope. It would be admitting that Marcus didn’t want to be his friend anymore.

Alder rolled the other way, onto his back, and stared up at the ceiling.

Fern hopped down from the bed to see what he was doing. She purred and pushed her head into his arm. Fern didn’t think he was a jerk, Alder comforted himself.

But, another voice said that was just because Fern didn’t know.

Alder stood. He picked up Fern and wandered to his window. He looked over at Oak’s house. The

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