CHAPTER 1TOAST IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE

I’m not afraid of toast.

Just to be clear.

I am afraid of fires, though. Which can be caused by everyday appliances, like toasters.

So toast isn’t the problem, but you could say it’s the start of a slippery slope.

Since the move, I’ve been eating oatmeal for breakfast.

A lot more than my breakfast has changed since we lost our house. Don’t worry, it’s not as dramatic as it sounds. We have a place to live: It’s just that now, we live with my great-uncle.

“It’s temporary,” my mom says, “until we get back on our feet.”

But I don’t know how she plans to do that, since she spends most of her time either job hunting or in bed with the door closed. And that’s not mentioning the stack of bills and letters from lawyers on the kitchen table that she never opens.

So I think we’ll be here for a while. Here, somewhere at the opposite end of “on your feet.”

But Uncle Ray’s house isn’t so bad. Like always, I’m making the best of things.

Take our rooms, for example. At our old house, I always had my own bedroom. But now I share with CeCe, in a small room upstairs that used to be Uncle Ray’s study. It’s a nice room but it’s cramped, and when I first walked in and saw the two twin beds with a narrow space between them, I knew I could find a better solution.

Uncle Ray’s old study has a long walk-in closet, and our first day here, I claimed it. And no, I don’t mean that I put all my stuff in there. I mean I put myself in there. It turned out it was big enough to fit:

1. A twin mattress, if you lay it on the floor,

2. A small bookshelf,

3. A lamp to go on top of said bookshelf.

So, the closet is my bedroom.

It’s perfect. CeCe has her bed in the corner, along with a giant basket filled with her stuffed animals. Then there’s just enough room for a bureau where my bed would have been, and a big wardrobe from Uncle Ray’s basement, which has all the things we would have put in the closet. Meanwhile, I have privacy and a space of my own.

The arrangement is pretty much perfect, or would be, if it wasn’t for the whole fire thing. Because if the house burns down at night, will a firefighter really think to look in the closet?

This occurred to me my second night here, and I knew it was something that had to be dealt with. So after some worrying, I came up with a solution. The next day, I took a piece of paper, and wrote:

ATTN Firefighters: There are 4 people in this house (and one annoying Chihuahua). Please rescue us all.

I taped it to the front door until we could get a more permanent sign made, but Mom made me take it down.

So I’ve taped my note up on the sliding closet door. Also, I sleep with the closet door partially open, so if there’s a fire, I’ll hopefully hear the commotion and get saved along with everyone else.

I’m still getting used to New Warren, which is our new town. It’s a funny mishmash of old (and I mean OLD) and new. Some of the houses date back to before the Revolutionary War. Others are huge and like mansions and all metal and glass. Others, like Uncle Ray’s, are just medium or small, scattered in between all the rest.

I think this explains Uncle Ray’s street. He lives on a road filled with a neat row of one- and two-story houses, all with little yards. But then, right next to Uncle Ray’s house, there’s a dead end.

And past that, is the old town junkyard.

Apparently it’s old, like old, pre-cars old. And the town just kept filling it with stuff, and then realized how ugly and full it was, so they fenced it off and forgot about it.

You can see it from my bedroom window (or, more accurately, the window to the right of my closet). I can just make it out over the large, red-brown wooden fence. It’s so close that the giant oak tree in Uncle Ray’s yard stretches out over it, like the branches were curious, and wanted to see what was going on over there.

I think Uncle Ray’s so used to it, he almost forgot it was there.

“Oh right, the junkyard,” he said when I asked about it. “The town’s going to clean it up at some point. This house was A LOT cheaper than other New Warren houses, because of it. Just don’t go in, and always wear shoes in the yard, and especially by the fence. People have been using the junkyard since way back in the day, and sometimes the ground shifts. I’ve found glass, and old nails coming up in the dirt. So shoes, always.”

Great, I thought. Another very safe feature of our new lives.

But I kept the feeling inside.

* * *

Tomorrow is my first day of school, which is another set of worries. It’s October, which means I’ll stick out—everyone’s already gotten to know each other, and the building, and the teachers, and everything. Not to mention the fact that New Warren is a small town, so the other students have probably known each other for years, and aren’t looking for new friends.

I know how that goes. For most of my life, that was me. Laura and I have been best friends since kindergarten, and nothing, and no one, could change that. That is, until tomorrow, when I start at New Warren Middle School, and she goes back to Ridgemont Intermediary, almost two hours away, in a town where we don’t have a house anymore.

Everything is laid out for tomorrow. I have my backpack, my #2 pencils, and a ballpoint pen that I found under Uncle Ray’s couch, which he said I could keep.


Copyright © 2023 by Susan Tan