1
HOW IT BEGAN
It was the last day of school and everything was singing. The birds were peeping and trilling and cooing. The bugs were buzzing and humming and chirping. The leaves rustled in the trees, the seeds rattled in the grass, and twelve-year-old Rufus Takada Collins, walking home with nothing in his backpack but the sweatshirt he’d found at the bottom of his locker, sang to himself: Summer, summer, summer. Of course Rufus knew better than to actually sing out loud, because people already thought he was weird, and also, the song didn’t have much of a tune. But even if his lips weren’t moving, even if he managed, through sheer force of will, to stay completely silent, his heart was singing, his bones were singing, his skin, warm in the sunshine, was singing: Goodbye, sixth grade. Hello, summer, summer, summer.
Rufus did not hate school, he just hated who he was when he was there. Which was, basically, nobody. He was not brainy like his father or athletic like his mother, and while he liked talking to people when he had the opportunity, he never knew exactly how to get the conversation started. He had one friend, Xander, who had spent all of sixth grade trying—without much success—to get him interested in an obscure collectible-card game called Marshannyx. Most of the other kids at Galosh Middle School ignored Rufus. The few that didn’t found as many ways as possible to remind him of the three fatal errors he had made during his sixth-grade year.
Fatal Error Number One: In September, on a field trip to Crescent Cove, he had noticed an unusual shorebird and said—maybe a little too loudly—“That’s a masked booby!” Which might not have been Fatal if he hadn’t tried to explain how rare it was to see one on this side of the Pacific and if Aidan Renks hadn’t stared right at him and said in a high, too-enthusiastic voice, “I know! It’s crazy! I can’t believe I’m looking at one now!”
Fatal Error Number Two: In October, during recess, he had stopped in the middle of a basketball game because there was a salamander under the hoop. Which might not have been Fatal if he hadn’t then taken off his left shoe and put the salamander inside so it wouldn’t get squashed. And even that might not have been Fatal, except that Aidan Renks had yelled, “Oh my God, look! It’s a barefooted booby!” and suddenly the whole booby thing from September was back in play.
Fatal Error Number Three: In November, he forgot to clean out his pockets before coming to school, and when he sat down at his desk, a clump of unusual berries he’d collected in the woods had gotten squished and left a purplish-brown stain on the seat of his pants. Which might not have been Fatal if Tyler Zamboski, who sat behind him in Math, hadn’t yelled, “Barefooted poopy!” And at that moment, Rufus had understood that his best choice—his only choice—was to become invisible and stay that way.
But now it was June and the school year was over. The rains, which fell in Galosh with little interruption from October to May, were done. Summer days could be spent at Feylawn, the rambling family property across town where his grandpa Jack lived. Galosh was small as cities went, with not too many high-rises and quite a few parks. But Feylawn was better than a park. It had a forest, and a meadow, and an orchard, and a cold trout-filled creek. The days there were long and bright and aimless, just the way Rufus liked them, and there were seventy-five of them before school started again in the fall. Hello, summer, summer, summer!
As Rufus opened his front door, he squared his shoulders a little, tucking his summer song deeper into his chest. His mother, Emi, would have already left for her shift at the hospital. His father, Adam, would be sitting at the kitchen table scrolling through job listings on his laptop. His dad never meant to ruin Rufus’s mood, but lately he couldn’t seem to help it. His gloom was so huge and dark and cloudy that it seemed to suck everything into it, like a black hole.
But today his father wasn’t in the kitchen. He was in the hallway, waiting for Rufus.
“Grandpa Jack’s hurt,” he said. “We need to get to Feylawn.”
* * *
“I don’t understand,” Rufus said during the drive across town. “How did he break his arm?”
“He fell.” His dad ran a hand over the uncombed clumps of his wavy brown hair.
“But how did he fall?” Grandpa Jack wasn’t the falling type. Rufus had never seen him lose his footing, not even when jumping from stone to stone while crossing the creek at Feylawn.
“According to Mom, he stepped through some rotting floorboards in the barn.” His dad glanced over at Rufus and raised his eyebrows, as if to add italics to the statement. “And since phones don’t work up there, he had to drive himself to the emergency room. If Mom hadn’t showed up for her shift just as he was leaving the hospital, we might not even know.”
“What rotting floorboards?” Rufus asked. “I was just in the barn last week. I didn’t see any—”
“It’s Feylawn, Rufus. Don’t try to make sense of it.”
But Rufus wanted to make sense of it. He knew Feylawn and Grandpa Jack about as well as he knew anything in the world, and nothing his father was saying jibed with his understanding of either of them. He was about to ask his dad another question when he saw that they had just sped past the road to Feylawn.
“Dad,” he said. “That was the turn.”
His father slammed on the brakes and squinted through the windshield. “I can’t see it.”
“Back up—it’s behind us.”
The streets of Galosh had been laid out in an orderly grid. It had no cul-de-sacs, back alleys, roundabouts, or other streetscape surprises, and hardly any roads with curves. But for reasons no one could quite explain, the dirt road that led to Feylawn was almost impossible to find, even if you knew exactly where it was. It was on the edge of downtown, sandwiched between a parking lot and a burrito shop, yet it always faded from sight just as you approached it, as if swallowed by a sudden fog. Rufus, however, had a knack for finding it.
“Not yet,” he coached as his dad reversed down the street. “Not yet. Now.”
His father made an abrupt Hail Mary turn and their old blue Toyota plunged into a blur of green and brown. A moment later the road came into focus again, bordered by tall trees on either side. It meandered uphill and then suddenly ended. Grandpa Jack’s bottle-green pickup was parked in its usual spot, smack in the middle of the road, keys dangling in the ignition. No one outside of the family ever came this way, so there was no need to worry about thieves. The road dead-ended at a stand of seven oak trees. Beyond that, flanked by a meadow dappled with blue lupines and orange poppies, was Feylawn.
Text copyright © 2020 by Dashka Slater. Map credit © Celia Krampien.
