Dedication

  For Ann

  In memory of our tree house,

  of the mysteries we hoped to solve,

  of bicycles and roller skates

  and swimming pools,

  of books and paper dolls

  and dollhouses,

  of woods and trees

  and creeks and railroad tracks,

  of all the things our mothers didn’t know

  but didn’t matter

  as long as we were home in time for dinner.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  About the Author

  Books by Mary Downing Hahn

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  For some reason, boredom maybe, Skylar picks the hottest day of the summer to ride our bikes all the way to the town limits.

  I ask her why, and she says, “Don’t you want to see exactly where Evansburg stops and Newton starts? Haven’t you ever wondered about endings and beginnings?”

  “Not really,” I say. “I’d rather talk your mother into driving us to the pool.”

  “I’m not in the mood for swimming. I want to do something different.”

  “Like have heatstroke and go to the hospital?”

  “Oh, come on, Abbi. School starts in a few weeks. Let’s go somewhere we’ve never been. Aren’t you tired of doing the same old boring thing day after day? Pool, mall, library. Pool, mall, library.”

  I try to reason with her. “In case you forgot, that side of town is where that girl we call Slap Your Face lives. What if we see her and she starts calling us names like she does in school? Or she slaps us like she slapped Lindsey?”

  “She must be in juvie by now,” Skylar says. “I know for a fact she shoplifts at the mall.”

  “How about Jason and Carter? They live over there too.”

  Skylar shrugs. “They’re probably in the state pen.”

  “I wish.”

  “We’ll take some pictures and go home, Abbi. We won’t be there long enough to see anybody we know.”

  Even though I think it’s a dumb thing to do, I run out of arguments and end up letting her talk me into a long, hot bike ride to a place I don’t want to go.

  We take Grant Road to Route 203 and ride along the shoulder. Traffic roars past close enough to touch. The sun beats down on us. The smell of diesel fumes chokes me. I’m scared I’ll fall off my bike and an eighteen-wheeler will run me over.

  We turn off the highway and take the road to Newton. Skylar coasts to a stop and checks the mileage on her bike. “We’ve only ridden five miles,” she says. “That’s hardly any distance.”

  “If you added extra for the hills, it would be twenty miles,” I say. “And if you factored in the temperature, it would be fifty miles.”

  Skylar pushes her hair out of her face. We’re growing our hair long this summer. So far, hers has grown faster than mine. It touches her shoulders already, a blond mane of thick waves. Mine is wispy and as fine as a baby’s, hanging around my face in a tangle of red curls. No matter how long it gets, it won’t look like Skylar’s hair.

  I’ll never look like Skylar either. She’s an inch taller than me, wears a bra, and is the prettiest girl in our class. She’s my best friend, so I try not to be jealous. Mom says, “Just wait till you’re eighteen. By then you’ll be beautiful.”

  It’s a long time to wait. Why can’t I be just a little pretty now?

  At least Skylar’s not smarter than I am. We both pull down easy As in most of our classes. She gets ahead in math sometimes but never in language arts. Her main talent is singing, and mine is art. I can’t sing, and she can’t draw, so we’re even there.

  I have one advantage, though. I’ll be thirteen three months before Skylar, so I’ll be a teenager first. Which isn’t much of a consolation, but still, I plan to remind her that I’m older than she is as frequently as possible.

  Skylar interrupts my thoughts. “There’s a gas station across the street. Let’s get water.”

  It’s the first sensible thing she’s said all day. I fish around in my pockets to find what’s left of my allowance—one damp, wrinkled dollar bill. I might have to ask Mom for a loan against next week’s allowance. All Skylar comes up with is fifty-three cents.

  The gas station is off-brand and pretty run down. No cars in the parking lot, no air-conditioning inside, a cooler full of water, soda, and beer. We pay the guy at the register one dollar and thirty cents, including tax, for two bottles of water. Luckily there’s a two-for-one sale or we wouldn’t have had enough.

  If I had more money, I’d buy an extra and pour it over my head. That would feel so good.

  Before we leave, Skylar asks the guy how far it is to the town limits.

  He looks up from a hot rod magazine and says, “Huh?”

  “The town limits,” she says. “You know, where Evansburg ends and Newton starts.”

  “How should I know? I don’t live around here.” He goes back to his magazine, and we leave.

  “Moron,” says Skylar. “It can’t be much farther. Remember the sign we saw for Newton—three miles?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I sit beside her on a bus stop bench that’s been spray-painted with so much graffiti, I can’t tell what color it is. A bank across the street has a big red thermometer on the side that reads 96 horrible degrees.

  We sip our water and try to make it last. My bottle feels cold, so I press it against my forehead, hoping it will cool me off, but it doesn’t.

  Just as we’re getting ready to leave, a beat-up red pickup slows down long enough for the driver to bang on his door and yell something gross at us.

  Skylar scowls at the truck as it speeds away. “I hate guys like that.” She finishes her water and gets on her bike. “Let’s go before he comes back.”

  I look at her, suddenly worried. “Do you think he will?”

  “Maybe. He’s a perv, isn’t he? Yelling things like that at twelve-year-olds.”

  My skin feels tight, itchy, like I’m getting heat rash or something. I don’t like this part of town. I don’t like this gas station with its old gas pumps and its garbage overflowing the dumpster. It stinks in the heat like somebody’s cooking rotten food. Most of all, I don’t like the guy in the pickup.

  I take one last mouthful of water and swirl it around before I swallow it. “Let’s go home,” I say. “This place creeps me out.”

  Skylar squeezes a few more drops of water out of her bottle and tosses it into the trash can. “We’re riding to the town limits,” she says. “You agreed.”

  “Why? There won’t be anything to see.”

  “How do you know? We’ve never seen the exact end of Evansburg.” Skylar looks annoyed. Heat does that to her.

  “Suppose our mothers find out?”

  “How will they know?” Skylar asks. “Mom never cares where I am, as long as I’m home for dinner, and your mom’s at work. We’ll be back before she comes home.”

  “She’ll find out. She always does. I can’t get away with anything, and you know it.”

  “Oh, Abbi, that’s because you always tell the truth.” Skylar makes it sound like a character defect.

  “She isn’t as easy to fool as your mom.”

  “You just need to fib sometimes, that’s all.” Skylar straddles her bike and waits for me to get on mine. She pushes off, and I follow. I’m a little anxious, mostly about getting into trouble with Mom, but I follow Skylar to the top of another hill.

  She zooms down the other side ahead of me, her hands high in the air. I let go of my handlebars. The bike picks up speed, and I feel the rush of air in my face. Not so long ago I was scared to ride no hands, but Skylar has made me more reckless. Not as reckless as she is, but more reckless than my mom thinks I am.

  We stop to rest beside a street sign for Marie Drive. A dead-end sign leans to the left beside it, like it’s too tired to stand up straight.

  “I’ve always wondered what’s at the end of a dead-end street,” Skylar says. “It’s kind of like a riddle.”

  Even though my legs are tired and my T-shirt is soaked with sweat, I get back on my bike and follow her down Marie Drive. We cruise past a row of little ranch-style houses side by side, one after another, as tightly packed as a brand-new box of building blocks. Chain-link fences separate each green lawn from the one next to it.

  It’s as ordinary as our neighborhood, I think, and even more boring because it’s so new and tidy and sort of unlived in. No one walks a dog. No kids play in the yards. No one mows grass or weeds the garden. All I hear is the hum of air conditioners. It’s weirdly quiet, almost like it’s under a spell.

  I can’t imagine Slap Your Face living in a little brick house with flowers in the front yard. Or Jason or Carter either.

  After we leave the ranches behind, the houses get bigger and older. Weeds grow in some of the yards. We’re in Slap Your Face territory for sure. I keep an eye out for her angry red face and squinty eyes, but all I see is a woman sitting on a porch. She watches us go by, as if she’s been waiting for us to c
ome along and put on a show for her.

  Skylar says, “Maybe we should entertain her with some wheelies.”

  Dogs to beware of come out from under porches and hurl themselves against sagging chain-link fences. They snarl and bark and growl at us. We pump up speed and leave them behind, still barking. They look like the kind of dogs Carter and Jason might own—trained to kill.

  At the bottom of a hill, we skid around a curve and Marie Drive turns into a rutted dirt road. A few houses, shabby and mysterious, hide way back in the trees. You can’t tell if people live in them or not, but if someone does, you might not want to meet them. Rusty mailboxes lean this way and that. Some hang open like nobody’s gotten any mail for a long time.

  I expect Jason and Carter to jump out from the weeds and throw rocks at us. They’d have their dogs with them. Barking ferociously, the dogs would chase our bikes and bite our legs while Jason and Carter laughed.

  If I were with anyone else, I’d turn around right now and go home. But I don’t want Skylar to know I’m scared of those houses, and the kids who might or might not live in them, so I keep my mouth shut and keep pedaling. I really don’t care what’s at the end of a dead end anymore. Or what’s beyond the town limits. All I want is to see a road with a familiar name and follow it home.

  A few minutes later Marie Drive stops at a wooden barrier painted with diagonal yellow and black stripes. On the other side is a field of waist-high weeds. A trail of ruts made by cars leads across the field to the woods on the other side. Even though people must use it sometimes, it’s not a real road, so I declare it the official end of Marie Drive.

  Skylar stares across the field, saying, “It’s hardly worth riding all this way.” We let our bikes fall on their sides, and we collapse in the shade of a huge oak tree.

  “I sure wish I hadn’t drunk all my water,” I say.

  “The next time we take a long bike ride,” Skylar says, “we should bring a gallon jug.”

  I lean against the tree and look up into its branches. High over my head, I see what looks like a platform. I nudge Skylar. “Is that a tree house?”

  “Where?” Skylar peers up, and I point. “Wow,” she says. “Let’s find a way to climb up there.”

  On the other side of the tree, a few old pieces of wood are nailed to the trunk like a ladder. Skylar reaches for one and hangs from it to test her weight. The nails hold. I inch my way up the tree behind her.

  Once we’re high enough to grab a branch, we abandon the ladder and climb from limb to limb like monkeys.

  Skylar and I have had a lot of practice doing this. When we were nine or ten, we climbed every tree in our neighborhood. We even built a flimsy little tree house at the end of our street where we thought no one would notice. It was just big enough for us to sit in and read on hot summer days.

  For a few weeks it had been our secret place. We even talked about finding a way to spend the night there. But before we could do it, our neighbor saw it and tore it down. Our mothers had no idea that the tree house Mr. Bowman called an eyesore was ours.

  We never spoke to Mr. Bowman again. We even crossed the street if we saw him coming. At night we dared each other to knock on his door and run. Other times we ran around his house yelling. Once he actually chased us, but we could run lots faster than he could.

  Last year, Mr. Bowman’s daughter moved him to a nursing home. Skylar still hates him. I feel kind of sorry for him. He was mean to us, but now he’s old and sick, so how can she hate him? “It’s easy,” Skylar said. “He tore down our tree house.”

  We hoist ourselves onto the platform. This tree house is bigger and much better built than ours was. The wood is solid. We sit down and look way out across the field. From up here I see where the train tracks cross a stream and disappear into the woods. The sunlight is dazzling bright on the tracks and the water. In the other direction I see the houses on Marie Drive.

  “Do you think the tree house belongs to anyone?” I ask.

  “Let’s claim it,” Skylar says. “We can hang out here.”

  “Our secret hideout,” I say.

  “No one will know where we are,” Skylar says. “Not even your mother with her superpower eyes.”

  I love this idea because somebody, usually my mother, has always known where I am—maybe not the exact place, but close enough. School, home, church, the mall, the swimming pool, the library. But here Skylar and I are in unknown territory—what old maps call terra incognita.

  We sit together quietly, awed by the idea of total privacy. There’s not a person in sight. A couple of deer amble across the field. Squirrels play hide-and-seek in the branches above our heads. A train rumbles through the woods, blowing its whistle for the crossing in town where the old station used to be.

  “This is so much higher than our old tree house,” Skylar says. “You can see forever from here. I love it.”

  “Me, too.” I rest my cheek against the tree trunk. It feels rough and alive, warm from the afternoon sun.

  “Uh-oh.” Skylar points across the field. “Somebody’s coming.”

  Two faraway figures come out of the woods. We watch them walk toward us. When they’re closer, we both groan.

  “Carter and Jason.” Skylar mutters a curse word she probably learned from her brother, Rob. “They aren’t in jail after all.”

  We both hate Carter and Jason. Everybody does. They’re in the same grade as we are, but we’ve never had a class with them.

  They get in fights and pick on pitiful sixth-graders. They steal kids’ lunch money and act up in the cafeteria. They say gross things to girls, the kind of stuff you pretend not to hear because—well, just because.

  Bullies, that’s what they are, mean and nasty and ugly.

  If this is their tree house, we won’t have a secret place after all. And we’ll have one more reason to hate Carter and Jason.

  As they approach, we lie flat on our bellies and peer over the edge of the platform. They walk right under the tree without looking up. They don’t see us or our bikes. They’re too busy arguing with each other.

  “You better not tell anybody about this,” Carter says to Jason. He’s the bully in charge, tall and skinny, with a long, narrow face and small, mean eyes set too close to his nose. He tells Jason what to do, and Jason does it. The hit man, Skylar and I call him.

  Jason’s short and squat, built close to the ground. His face is round, and his chin kind of blends into his neck. He’s as dumb as an empty tin can rolling down the road. He scuffs along, hands stuffed in his pockets. His baseball cap is pulled low, hiding his face.

  All of a sudden Carter shoves Jason and almost knocks him down. “Keep your big mouth shut. I mean it. You’re always blabbing stuff. One of these days you’ll get us in trouble.”

  “Okay, okay,” Jason mutters. “I won’t say nothing about him or what he does. We got a good deal. Why mess it up? I’m not stupid.”

  “Could’ve fooled me,” Carter says, fishing a pack of cigarettes out of his jeans pocket and lighting one. He doesn’t offer the pack to Jason.

  Tough guy, I think.

  They walk up Marie Drive without talking and disappear from sight.

  “Whoa. That was close.” Skylar rolls over on her back and stares up at the leaves. “I wonder what their big secret is.”

  “Probably something totally boring,” I say.

  “I bet Jason would tell me.”

  “Why would he tell you anything?”

  She laughs. “Because he’s in love with me. Haven’t you noticed the way he looks at me?”

  I laugh too. In fact, we laugh so hard we almost fall out of the tree. “Are you serious?” I ask her.

  She snorts a last laugh and says, “Yeah, I am serious. Just before vacation, he started leaving notes taped to my locker. You wouldn’t believe how bad his spelling is.”

  “You never told me!”

  “I didn’t tell anyone. I just wadded them up and threw them away. It’s so gross. If other kids found out, I’d never live it down.” Skylar narrows her eyes at me. “Promise you won’t tell, Abbi.”

  “Of course I won’t.” I check the time on my phone. “Oh, no. It’s after four already. I’ll never beat Mom home.”

  We climb down and pull our bikes out of the weeds. Skylar starts pedaling toward Marie Drive, but I stop her. “That’s the way Jason and Carter went. What if we catch up with them?”

  “Good thought.” She consults her phone. “There’s a road just before the paved part of Marie Drive starts. It goes over the train tracks and ends at Brooke Street. We know how to get home from there.”