Chapter 1


I don’t hate them. They probably didn’t know that house was my inheritance. Or that it was the last thing that kept me from going completely insane. But now the Bakers had crossed the line. They legally stole my house and inherited a paparazzo, hell-bent on their downfall.
“Lena, what are you doing on the roof?” my younger sister asked.
I dropped the camera lens from my face, and looked down at Ivy, who was incredibly out of place in her skull tank, ripped jeans, fishnet stockings and dark make-up against the wooded backdrop. She had her hands on her hips and was frowning. Shifting my weight to one side, I tried to shove the camera behind my back, nearly losing my balance on top of our garage. Even though this part of our house was only one story, the collision with the concrete driveway underneath was not very high on my to-do list.  
“Taking in the view?” I answered.
“Not spying on the neighbors?”
Only their moving van.
“No,” I said, holding up my camera. “If I were, I wouldn‘t be using this.”
Though it’d been working pretty well for the past few hours.
Ivy threw her weight to one side, narrowing her eyes.
“Oh come on,” I yelled. “They went into their van over three hours ago. They haven’t even come out for air.”
“Ever think they don’t want an audience?”
“It isn’t like they can see me.”
“Right, because standing on the roof isn’t being obvious…”
Maybe I was being a tad bit obvious, but if they were going to move into my house, they needed to be worthy. Save dying children, invent a cure for cancer, recycle… at the very least they needed to get their junk out of the van.
Mom should have never sold Gran’s house. My parents had moved into this house a year before I was born and for seventeen years I’d been free to roam the property without any real thought. But now there was a Baker line, a border dividing the thick woods that used to be wholly ours, and all I could do is watch as it was being drawn.
“Lena, you should come down.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
My hair was a tangled mess, tiny red strands sticking to my face thanks to the Florida sun and I knew the direct sunlight was not going to help my freckle problem.
“Really though, you don’t find them weird?” I asked as I climbed down the rickety ladder on the side of our house.
“I haven’t even met them,” she said, holding out her hand.
“Yeah but why haven‘t they started unpacking?”
“Maybe they don’t have power yet and that’s the only place with air conditioning.”
Ivy would come up with the most rational of answers. That was one thing I could always rely on, though in all fairness she had no stake in what they had already taken.
I looked down at her open hand.
“What do you want a medal?”
“I had something a little bit bigger in mind.”
#
A little less than an hour later, I marched up to my room, camera-less. There was no hope in retrieving it now that it resided in Evil Asimov‘s cage. I took the last few stairs in twos and stopped by Ivy‘s door.
Pushing it open slightly, I peered into her seemingly normal room until I saw it. The huge cage sitting by Ivy’s bed that housed the largest freakin’ lizard I’d ever seen. My skin writhed as its creepy crawly eyes turned towards me. Technically, Evil Asi was an iguana but all lizard are the same to me. E.A. was sitting on the right side of his cage, basking in the fake sunlight and on the exact opposite side sat my camera. I just knew that as soon as I put my hand in the cage, E.A. would attack. I shut the door before E.A. got any ideas and headed for my room.
The sage green walls offered a cool relief to the sweltering outside and plastered on them were pictures from all over the world. Some were taken by me, most were not. I jumped onto my dark brown bed and pushed the tan canopy out of the way to reveal a small window. With a quick glance around, I dropped to my knees and yanked out a pair of binoculars Gran had bought me for bird watching a year ago. My heart flip-flopped as I stared at the sealed box. Just another promise unfulfilled.
I ripped the package open and shoved the thought into the trashcan along with the paper. I aimed them towards my old house and stared at the large U-Haul van that hadn’t moved an inch since it was parked.
Jeez, what were they doing in there? Investigating a murder case, filling out their tax returns, talking to the mothership? There wasn’t much else that required that kind of time except for going to the DMV and last time I checked, that office hadn’t moved.
Footsteps on the hardwood floor sent the binoculars flying under my bedspread. When Ivy knocked on my door, I was perfectly normal, a National Geographic magazine at the ready.
“Come in.”
She entered, her short red hair startling next to the white of the door.
“Hey, I wanted to apologize about outside.”
I took a deep breath.
“Why, you weren’t the one acting crazy.”
She half-smiled at my admission.
“Yeah but I know things have been…” she paused. “Strange for you lately.”
I shook my head. Ivy hadn’t been as close to Gran. She had a hard time grasping what our relationship had been like, how Gran had just understood. I could still remember the feel of her hands on mine, soft and wrinkled, as she taught me to use my camera, the patient way she smiled every time I ruined a roll of film.
I hadn’t been able to confront what our last meeting held and the last things we said, let alone say them aloud. My fingers found the tiny opal pendant around my neck, the only thing I had left of her now.
“Well yeah,” I said. “That house was mine a month ago.”
“No, not…” but she didn’t push the issue. “Anyways, I was wondering if you wanted to go to the bookstore tomorrow.”
“I guess we could.”
She nodded, resting her hand on the doorknob.
“Seriously though,” I added. “How long would it normally take a family of four guys to empty a truck that size?”
Ivy rolled her eyes but humored me by walking over. I opened the blinds up wide enough for us both to see.
“I don’t know. Not this long I guess.”
But she didn’t believe what she was saying. I glanced at the spot where she was sitting on the bed. A few feet over the binoculars lay covered by my sheet.
“It’s weird.”
“Not as weird as that,” she said, pointing.
When I turned back around, the large moving van I’d been staring at all morning was gone. Like abracadabra, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, poof into thin air gone.
“I didn’t hear them driving it,” I said.
“And I didn’t see them driving it either,” she whispered.
We both turned to stare at each other and then raced over to my other window which faced a tiny dirt path, the only possible way to the road. No van there either.
“Now I think they might be a little strange,” Ivy whispered, her face turning whiter than my door.
“I kind of thought so all along.”
We both walked slowly back to my bed.
“No, there has to be an explanation for this.”
I grabbed the binoculars from underneath the covers. Ivy probably wouldn’t care about them now.
“We must of just missed it,” she said.
I opened the blinds enough to push the lens through them.
“You were staring right at it.”
“Sometimes your mind shows you what you want to see.”
I nodded.
“Right, and how do you explain this?”
I handed the binoculars over her way. With a shaky hand she peered out into the woody expanse that divided our houses but what she was looking at I could see without the help of my tool.
Four figures stood in the middle of Gran’s old driveway, stark black on the grey dirt.
“B-but Mom said there were four. Three boys and their dad.”
“Exactly,” I whispered. “So who was driving the truck?”
#
The smell of Chinese wafting through the air gave the binoculars a rest for the night. I marched downstairs through the living room and into the kitchen. Mom was unpacking a brown paper bag full of chicken fried rice ready to be sacrificed to my growling stomach.
“Hey hun, how was your day?” Mom asked, looking up.
“Interesting.”
Ivy rushed in behind me, grabbing the only pair of chopsticks in her wake.
“Got’em,” she said, pinching the two sticks together dramatically.
“Like I still care about that.”
“You did last Tuesday.”
I rolled my eyes and grabbed a fork. For some odd reason, we had gotten it in our heads to race for chopsticks. When we were younger Mom would only bring a pair home for herself and Ivy and I would have to fight to see which one got them when she was finished. For us, it was like turkey on Thanksgiving, an absolute must.
“What was so interesting about your day?” Mom asked.
She emptied the other bag in her hands and set a bouquet of tulips into an empty vase on our table. With Mom owning one of the only floral shops in town, this wasn’t an unusual event.
“The neighbors moved in.”
“Yeah, I saw one of the boys at the mailbox today. Very handsome.”
I rolled my eyes. Any boy our age was very handsome in Mom’s standards. She was more desperate for us to get a dates than for herself.
“Maybe so, but that wasn’t what made our day so interesting. Right Ivs?”
Ivy looked up from her bowl of rice, intrigued now. I waited patiently for her to take the wheel. After all, Mom was probably going to believe her more easily than me. Ever since I told her my third grade teacher was a leprechaun, which was perfectly logically at the time, she’s had a hard time believing any of my theories.
“Well?” Mom prompted.
“I was sort of watching them today,” I began under Mom’s disapproving glance. “Err, well, Ivy and I were just glancing over there and then, their van disappeared. Like into thin air, abracadabra, poof, now-you-see-it-now-you-don‘t, disappear.”
Mom arched an eyebrow and turned to Ivy.
“And how did they manage that one?” Mom asked.
“That’s the question, isn’t it? And we saw all four of them right after standing in the driveway.”
I realized that my voice was alone, confirming the story. I looked over to Ivy who had the same doubting look as Mom on her face.
“Tell her Ivy,” I said, frustrated.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said finally. “I took your camera away from you. How were you spying still?”
“The binoculars, remember? You used them when we didn’t see the truck on the road.”
She dropped her chopsticks and stared directly into my face, frustration shaking her voice.
“Lena, I saw them drive away.”