“This is it!” Mom said brightly, opening the door to my new room with a grand, ceremonial swing.
I stepped over the threshold, eyes wide as I took in the high arched ceiling, the oak window seat, and my lamp—a bust of Edgar Al an Poe I’d made in ceramics class, already assembled and looking hopelessly out of place against the stark white wal s.
You and me both, buddy.
“What do you think?” Dad asked, coming up behind us. “Just a second,”
he cal ed down to one of the guys from the moving company.
“This is it,” I echoed, trying to muster enough cheer to appease them.
“Do you like it?” Mom asked, pushing back one of the curtains the previous owners had left behind. It was some sort of floral chintz and would be coming down the second I was alone. “We were going to wait and let you pick for yourself, but then on the tour—this just screamed Mil ie.”
It was a cool room, I couldn’t deny that.
It just wasn’t my room.
But it was now, I supposed, no matter how I felt.
Mom and Dad were both scientists. Researchers who specialized in viral pathology. Mom had gotten a pretty sweet job offer at the University of Michigan, working in the hospital labs during the summers and spending the rest of the year as a professor. Dad was going to stay at home while he worked on writing his first book. Some dry textbook he swore would be in freshman biology classes al over the country.
Not a fun book, like the thril ers and mysteries I read.
I’d never seen them so excited before.
We were supposed to leave Memphis in May, al owing me to get through school and stil spend part of the summer with my friends, getting to do al our favorite things together one last time. I’d have June, July, and August to settle in and hopeful y meet some new friends, just before senior year would start.
But then COVID-19 broke out and literal y everything fel apart.
I didn’t finish the school year. I didn’t get one last concert or film festival, no last Grizz game or barbecue nachos, no cupcakes from Muddy’s bakery.
I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
Our house—our old house—already had an offer on it, with most of our stuff packed away into boxes and bins when the governor closed the schools, then the stores, then the state.
“Stay at home?” I remembered shouting at my parents with an anger completely uncharacteristic of me. “How do you stay at home when we have no home?” I’d burst into tears and run up to my room before they could answer.
Mom and Dad had talked late into the night, their furtive whispers fil ing the house. I could hear them wondering what to do, wondering if they were making the right decision, wondering how we’d get through any of this.
Less than twenty-four hours later, everything was decided for us. The hospital in Michigan wanted both Mom and Dad working there. Pronto.
In the blink of an eye we were supplied letters certifying that my parents were essential, pledging that our movers were essential, swearing up and down that the new house was essential.
Everything was essential but my misery.
“The light is different here,” I said, feeling both sets of their eyes on me now, their concern as heavy as the semi truck parked along our drive.
Our lane, as my father insisted cal ing it.
Back in Memphis we hadn’t had a driveway. Now we had a lane. Of our own.
A lane and a garden and a little old supply shed, painted barn red and outfitted with scal oped white trim.
There was no way to deny it. We were country now.
“Different?” Mom repeated, glancing about the room as if she could find the source of my discontent and eradicate it as she would a virus.
“It’s softer,” I said, joining her at the window and looking out at the open fields. “Greener.”
“Al those trees, Mil ie,” Dad said, patting at my back. “Look at al those pines.”
“They’re pretty,” I admitted.
And they were. But they didn’t hold a candle to the magnolias currently bursting into bloom across my backyard right now.
My old backyard, I reminded myself.
“Coming, coming!” Dad shouted as a mover cal ed up the stairwel .
“Let’s get through this day and we’l celebrate tonight, al right?” He kissed my mom’s forehead before jogging downstairs.
“Celebrate?”
Mom nodded and ruffled my dark blond locks. They were long overdue for a trim. I’d planned on getting a haircut during spring break, but by then the salons were closed. Dad very helpful y volunteered to lop it al off with his clippers.
Um, thanks, no.
I’d taken to wearing it in a giant topknot instead.
“We made it here,” she explained. “There were a lot of moments we didn’t think it would happen. But we did. And that’s worth celebrating, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so.” I ran my finger along the red curtains. They real y were terrible.
I wanted to say more, but a burly mover stepped into the room, his arms impossibly laden down with boxes marked MILLIE.
“We’l think up something fun,” she said. “I promise.”
—
“I’ve never hurt so much in my entire life,” I said hours later, col apsing onto the rug.
The movers had left and for the first time, it was just the three of us in the house. It was simultaneously too quiet yet alive with a host of unfamiliar sounds. The old wooden floorboards squeaked and something in the basement Dad cal ed a sump pump kept issuing unexpected and startling thuds. We hadn’t had a basement in our old house and the one here was ful of spiderwebs and weird shadows.
It felt like that calm before the storm in any horror movie. The happy family moves into a new-to-them-but-stil -very-old house, and things are good but night fal s and then…
I paused, waiting for something weird to happen.
A box mysteriously toppling over.
A flock of birds flying into the window.
Blood seeping down the staircase.
Nothing stirred and I begrudgingly rol ed over.
Mom lay sprawled across the couch, her feet propped on too many throw pil ows. She was rubbing at her temples as if warding off a headache. Dad was on the floor beside me, trying to stretch out a kink in his back.
“What a day,” he said, wincing as his spine cracked. “That’s better. What are we doing for dinner, Mol y?”
“There’s nothing in the fridge,” Mom said, opening her eyes. “We’l have to go grocery shopping tomorrow.” She paused, self-correcting. “We’l have to place an order for groceries tomorrow.”
“Think they’l deliver, al the way out here?”
“We’l see. Why don’t we order in tonight?” She pul ed out her phone, fiddling with it for a second before frowning. “I don’t have any data, do you?”
None of us did.
Or reception.
This explained a lot.
My phone had been unnatural y quiet al day. I’d worried my friends in Memphis had already forgotten about me, but maybe there was a whole slew of messages waiting for me, they just couldn’t deliver.
“Maybe a neighbor has open Wi-Fi?” I swiped hopeful y through my settings.
“What neighbors?” Dad asked as the available networks list came up completely blank.