My new next-door neighbor, Hope Birdsong, has magical powers, I’m, like, 80 percent sure of it.
Fact: She makes bullies twice her size cower in fear (which suggests mind control, or at the very least, otherworldly bravery).
Fact: Her hair smells like honeysuckles in spring, and she has the entire world tacked to the walls of her bedroom.
Fact: Did you miss the part where her name is Hope Birdsong? Ordinary people don’t have names like that.
Given all this information, I should have happiness shooting out of my pores. There’s just one problem.
Fact: Hope Birdsong will never, ever, EVER love me back.
I blame the cookies.
At any given time, there’s a 35 percent chance my stepmom is baking cookies. Some days, the cookies feel like more than just baked goods—like they’re harbingers of awesomeness. Other days, they’re just really freaking delicious.
Pam is working on another batch of Peanut Butter Blossoms when I hear a great big engine yawn to a stop next door. Before they can get their doors open, I’m peering through the blinds, fingers crossed by my side that there will be kids coming out of the moving van and that they won’t be a bunch of Neanderthals like my big brother, Dean, and all his friends. I wait and wish. The graphic of carnivorous plants splashed on the side of the truck seems like a very good sign.
Let him be the kind of kid who likes Minecraft and spy gear more than punching people.
Let him think camping is the best way to spend a Friday night.
Let him—
And I never get to finish that thought because the door opens, and out jumps her.
“Spencer, what are you looking at?” asks Pam.
Some things can stun you into absolute honesty. “The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
“Oh, yeah? What does she look like?”
You can hear the amusement in her voice, and it’s pretty cool of her not to make fun of me. In fact, Pam is mostly a pretty cool stepmom, except when she does weird stuff like freak out and buy an industrial amount of cleaning products just because I told her I pee in the shower. Like everyone else doesn’t.
“She has white hair,” I finally manage to say.
Pam looks up from where she’s rinsing a bowl. “You mean blonde?”
“Uh-uh. White.” It’s practically glowing. It reminds me of fiber optics.
I watch in wonder as she frolics around the yard with a German shepherd that is halfway between a dog and a puppy.
“Hope!” yells a voice from the house, and she runs inside.
Hope. Of course that’s her name.
The oven beeps.
“Do you think we should take some cookies to our new neighbors?” asks my stepmom.
YES! Yes, that is the best idea in the history of good ideas! Yes, I should do it right now because Hope has been gone for six whole seconds and I’m already starting to go through withdrawal! My mouth is open, but nothing comes out. The one slippery, life-changing word I need hovers cruelly out of reach.
And at exactly that moment, I hear my brother’s voice behind me. “Who’s that chick with the white hair?”
Hope! I turn, and there she is in her yard again.
“Boys. Welcome cookies?” Pam holds up the gleaming plate, and she is looking right at me, but my jaw has spontaneously wired itself shut. Not Dean’s. He swoops past and plucks the plate right out of the air, plucks the confidence right out of my chest. He had to have seen me trying to say yes. My feelings were so big, they were bubbling against the ceiling and leaking out the open window. He had to have noticed.
I watch—seething—as that a-hole skips up the stairs of the Birdsongs’ front porch and into Hope’s heart.
It should have been my hand clanking the anchor-shaped door-knocker the Rackhams left behind.
It should have been my eyes eating up her smile and beaming it back.
It should have been me.
I’m still kind of moping about it the next day. Pam suggests I go over and introduce myself—no way—and then she says if I keep making that face, she’s going to take me over there herself and make me shake hands with everyone in their family, so I decide it’s time to get out of the house. ASAP.
I escape to the mudroom and try to figure out what to do next. I guess I could see if Mimi–that’s my grandma–wants to go hiking. I glance out the window at the apartment over the garage where Mimi’s lived ever since Grandaddy died six years ago. The light is on, so she’s probably home. I can’t help glancing at Hope’s house, too, but I don’t see her, and anyway, I need to stop being pathetic.
I shake my head and grab my hiking boots. I do not expect to find a caterpillar lurking behind them.
“Well, hi there, little guy. How’d you get inside?”
He’s brown with a bright sunny green patch that covers his entire back like a blanket, except for dead center, where there’s a small brown circle that looks like it’s meant for a miniature rider. I do not pick him up. A saddleback sting is worse than ten bees. Those little tufts that cover the horns on his head and tail and look like they’d be oh-so-fun to pet? They are poison-filled barbs.
I can’t resist, though, so I touch my index finger to the soft skin of the caterpillar’s saddle. He rears back his head and tail, body curving into a U. The petting zoo is closed today, my friend. I jerk my hand away. I’m pretty sure he’s glaring at me.
“Hey, Spencer. Whatcha doing?” My dad sweeps in and sits on the bench across from me.
“Oh, well, I just found this caterpillar.”
He squints at it. “Huh. Funny little guy. Listen, Dean and I are fixing to go to the cabins to make some repairs. You’d probably rather stay here and catch caterpillars, though. Right?”
He doesn’t really look at me while he’s talking, busy pulling on his tennis shoes without bothering to untie and retie the laces.
“Oh, um. Yeah.” The last time I tried to help out at the cabins, there was an unfortunate incident involving a staple gun.
“Thought so.” He touches the top of my baseball cap. “See you, buddy.”
(Everything you need to know about my dad: One time he sliced his leg with a chain saw while he was cutting down trees, and he took a shower AND made himself a BLT sandwich before driving himself to the hospital.)
I go grab a piece of printer paper and gently prod the caterpillar onto it with the tip of a work glove. Dean rushes in and squeezes his feet into his already-laced-up shoes.
“Crap, I forgot my hat.” He runs back downstairs to his bedroom.
I look down at my unlaced boots. I wonder if everyone puts on their shoes the same way except me. Maybe my mom doesn’t. Maybe she drinks skim milk with her Chinese takeout, even though everyone else thinks it’s gross. But I don’t know. I haven’t actually seen her since I was five.
I carry the saddleback outside on his paper stretcher. You can tell it’s summer just from the noises. Kids yelling and laughing, and the sound of a basketball echoing against the asphalt. For some reason, the raucous pick-up game across the street makes me feel more alone than ever.
Then I realize I’m not. Alone, I mean.
Hope is standing on her front porch, empty cookie plate clutched against her chest. And the expression on her face, well, I’m pretty sure it matches the one I was just wearing.
Dean slams the door behind me. Hope turns toward the sound. Sees me. Waves. She’s walking down the stairs. This could be my shot. I have approximately twelve seconds to think of a stunning introduction. Something that will make me seem worldly. Cool. Mysterious.
“This is my brother, Spencer. He’s playing with a caterpillar.”
Not that.
But she smiles. “Hi, I’m Hope.”
“Hi,” I say. And then I tic. It’s just a shrug, probably my least embarrassing tic, but now all I can think about is whether I seem nonchalant or deranged. My tic-shrug isn’t the same as my real shrug. When I tic, it looks like my shoulders are connected to a piece of string, and someone decided it would be fun to give me a yank.
Hope doesn’t seem to notice even when I tic-shrug a couple more times. I’m not ready to put her on the Kids Who Don’t Make Fun of Me list, but we’ll call her a solid maybe. “I, um, brought your plate back. The cookies were really good. Thanks.”
I reach my hand out, but Dean snags the plate first (again). His hand brushes against Hope’s, and her cheeks turn pink. I hate my brother. I mean, I really hate him.
“Dean!” my dad bellows from the truck. “Let’s go.”
“See ya.” He cocks his head at Hope and shoves the plate against my chest like he’s doing a football handoff.
I guess I expected Hope to leave after that, because it surprises me when she stays standing in front of me.
“So, what grade are you gonna be in?” she asks.
“Seventh.”
“Me, too!”
I am thinking this is possibly the best news I’ve received all summer, when a woman with the most toned arms I have ever seen emerges from Hope’s house.
“You ready to go to the farmers’ market?”
“Sure,” Hope calls over her shoulder. She smiles at me. “I’ll see you around, okay?”
“Sure. Definitely.” I am proud of myself because I manage to say it as she walks away instead of after she’s already in her car.
A couple of the basketball guys stare at her as she goes. I can already see it happening. They’ll assimilate her right into the fold, and that will be the end of it. I upgrade the chance she’ll be making fun of me by next week from maybe to probable.
But then I notice her watching them as her mom drives away. She’s making that face again. The lost one.
I downgrade from probable to maybe not at all.