Mine Read online

  “We?” Lily growled, her throat tight. “How much can we do before you start your jobs? You guys get to go to work all day, and I have to stay home alone all summer in this…this…stanky trash heap!” She wished there was a convenient couch she could throw herself on, but the couch was buried in garbage bags and looked as wet and soft as a mushroom, so she just fluttered her hands around in annoyance and tried to breathe through her mouth.

  “We don’t get to go to work.” Her dad turned to glare at her, his shoulder knocking into a pile of boxes, causing it to tumble over and making Lily dance back. “We have to go to work. And this negative attitude is only going to make it harder for everyone.”

  Mom pulled Lily to her side and squeezed her shoulders. “I have a few weeks off and then a part-time schedule at the urgent care at first, remember? I wouldn’t leave you alone with…this.”

  As Lily looked around at the deluge of garbage, she saw her summer disappear before her eyes. She was twelve, and school was out, which meant that she was free labor. And there was nothing she could do about it. And her dad’s last dig at her attitude was a good reminder that if she had any hope of getting what she wanted—theater camp, some kind of pet, the chance to go back to Colorado—she had to play nice.

  Luckily, she’d seen Mary Poppins so many times that she could easily paste on a chipper smile and can-do attitude, even if she felt horrible on the inside.

  “Where’s my room?” she asked.

  “You get the whole upstairs to yourself,” Dad said. “Although maybe it’s more of a loft than an entire floor. The realtor told me it was the cleanest part of the house. Should be some stairs around here. Just let me hit some more lights.”

  He fiddled with the switches, and Lily’s mom said a bad word when the full horror of the house was revealed. No surface was clean or empty. There was clearly furniture somewhere under there, but it was hidden by dust and cobwebs and…stuff. Greasy pizza boxes were piled to the ceiling in one corner, magazines moldered in limp towers, and Amazon boxes were stacked haphazardly everywhere—hundreds, maybe thousands of them.

  “We passed that hotel by the highway—” Mom started, soft and tentative.

  “There’s the stairs,” Dad said firmly, having already shot down the idea when they passed said hotel, claiming that now every dollar counted as he glared at Lily in the rearview mirror.

  Lily knew there was no hope, so she stepped around a pile of newspapers—who even read newspapers anymore?—and over a black-stained towel glued to the floor. The wooden stairs, amazingly, were empty. Not clean, of course, but not being used to store more junk. She hurried upstairs, noting that the air, at least, felt cleaner up there. At the top of the stairs, she looked down in disgust at the mounds of stuff on the first floor that she’d have to start moving tomorrow, at the piles of polo shirts and pants still on hangers and the leaning towers of bottled waters. Her parents stood amid the garbage like strangers lost in some new city with odd customs. Her mother went back to her phone, and her father just rubbed his beard and shrugged like it was someone else’s problem. Which, Lily understood, it now was—hers and her mom’s.

  She turned away. Whatever was up here had to be better than what her parents had to deal with down there. If the master bedroom was anything like the den, it wasn’t going to be fun finding a spot big enough and clean enough to let them both lie down and get some sleep without touching literal garbage.

  Opening the door at the top of the stairs and flicking on the overhead light, Lily was pleasantly surprised: The room was free from hoarder junk. There was an old daybed with rumpled covers and a collection of meticulously placed stuffed animals, a stand with a small TV and a gaming system, some bookshelves, and a dresser. Much to her horror, the dresser held a glass terrarium with a screen top, and within it lay a dead snake, curled in a spiral of bones and rot.

  Once her initial shock wore off, she edged closer and peered inside. She wasn’t squeamish, and she thought snakes were interesting, if a bit inconvenient, as long as they weren’t out in the yard and trying to kill her. The sight was strange and beautiful, in its way, the snake coiled on its back, ragged bits of scaled orange skin rippling over visible bones. The poor thing. Left here, trapped without water or food or a way out. Her eyes traced the edges of the room, considering how long the house must’ve sat empty. And wondering why anyone would leave it that way, as if they’d just closed the door and walked away.

  She decided it had to be years. Which meant that the sheets on “her” bed were years beyond detergent, which wasn’t okay. She opened the small closet and quickly closed it again when all she found were dirty clothes and old, broken toys. There was nothing upstairs but a small landing and her room, definitely no linen closet, so she had to find her parents and ask about sheets, a blanket—even a garbage bag, at this point. Anything to keep her skin from touching those pee-yellow pillows and sheets. She was halfway down the stairs and just about to yell out to her mom when she heard her parents arguing again.

  “Look, this was a good deal. An investment. We’re lucky Jack found it—” Dad was saying.

  “And what kind of commission did your frat brother make on this garbage heap?” Mom sighed. “You promised me it wouldn’t be a money pit.” Her voice was ragged, exhausted.

  “It’s not,” Dad snapped. “This is all cosmetic. The dumpster is already here. We’ve just got to make it work. All our savings—”

  “I know. But we didn’t look upstairs first. Do you think there’s any sign of…what happened?”

  The pause sat so heavily that Lily could hear the dust settle.

  “It happened downstairs,” Dad said firmly. “It was natural. Jack said the upstairs was fine.”

  Lily couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Mom? Do we have any sheets? This bed is super gross.”

  Her mom appeared at the bottom of the stairs, looking lost and a little apologetic. “Somewhere in the car…I just need to…maybe there’s a closet?” She waved her hands, pantomiming that her brain was so overwhelmed that she’d forgotten how to find sheets.

  Lily went downstairs. Since she knew there was nothing in the den, she passed right by her mom and into a narrow hallway. Underneath all her theatrics, Lily was a logical person, and logic suggested that the best place to find blankets would be a closet near the master bedroom, or possibly shelves in the laundry room. But of course when she found the closet, everything in it was old and smelled like mildew. As she rummaged between some threadbare towels that had once been white, something fat and dark dropped on her hand, heavy as a grape. Lily screamed and jerked her hand back. The biggest roach she’d ever seen plopped off onto a towel and skittered back into the shadows as if she’d offended it.

  “What’s wrong?” her mom called—without coming any closer.

  “It’s raining giant, gross roaches!” she shouted back. “This place is awful!”

  “That’s enough of that attitude!” her dad boomed with, she noted, an awful lot of attitude.

  Lily wanted to get out of his line of fire and had to wash her hands, so she opened the door to what she hoped was the downstairs bathroom. She was right, and it was relatively clean, aside from a stack of old Prevention magazines and a scuzzy black comb. The water sputtered brown when she turned on the faucet and the old soap dispenser was cloudy with a clogged pump, but she managed to wash her hands, grateful at least that the water was hot enough to scour off the feeling of roach feet.

  But when she glanced into the toilet bowl, she found something she didn’t understand. It was full of wet ashes and the remains of photographs. Dozens of them, mounded together, their edges burned black and the water glistening among flashes of shoulders and hands, of what looked like a woman and child—but no faces.

  The faces had all been burned away.

  Lily backed away from the toilet, shivering, her breath coming in re
al gasps, her heart stuttering in her chest. Whatever this was, it wasn’t normal.

  She thought about telling her parents, but she could hear them arguing elsewhere in the house, trying to keep it quiet so they wouldn’t worry her. Funny how they always said that—that they didn’t want to worry her—but when she was really worried, they either told her she was being melodramatic or ignored her completely, like now.

  The last leg of the car trip had been a long one, and now that she was here, she had to pee. At least it seemed like there were no bodily fluids already in the bowl. She held her breath and reached into the toilet with both hands, pulling out the photos and dumping them into an old metal trash can, which was half full of used tissues and other garbage. When the bowl was empty, she washed her hands again. After she’d done her business and washed her hands a third time, she stared at the garbage can, noting that water was leaking out of its rusted bottom. The photos were just too creepy; she felt an urge to get them out of the house.

  Even though she was terrified of more roaches, she picked up the garbage can between two fingers, hurried to the front door without a glimpse of her parents, fiddled with the outside lights, and walked fast to the dumpster. It seemed much taller now than it had when they’d first pulled up, and she almost dumped the photos in the dirt yard to deal with tomorrow. But something about them—they needed to be out of sight.

  Taking a deep breath, Lily climbed a few rungs of the ladder built into the side of the dumpster and upended the trash can, letting the wet photos splatter against the metal far below. Then, on second thought, she chucked the trash can in, too. It landed with a heavy clank, and something down there rustled like it was alive and mad. Lily jumped off the ladder and ran back to the open front door, holding her breath the entire time.

  A soft whine caught her attention, and she spun to stare into the woods, right where she’d seen the green flash of eyes earlier. Something moved, and she squinted as a shadow detached itself from the forest and took a few halting steps toward her. It was taller than a raccoon or possum, more upright than a gator, and bigger than a cat. Was it…maybe…a dog?

  “Here, boy,” she called, and the creature paused.

  “Lily, what are you doing?” her dad asked from inside.

  The shape slunk back into the forest, and she went inside and closed the door.

  “Just tossing some junk,” she said. “That’s what I’m supposed to be doing, right?”

  His lips pressed together; he hated it when she walked the fine line between polite and talking back, but sometimes she couldn’t stop her mouth. “Look, I’ve had enough with—” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, fighting for control of his temper. “It’s late. You’ll have plenty of time to clean tomorrow.”

  She nodded and scurried upstairs without a word. When Dad got mad, it was better to just stay out of his way—he had one of those voices that only had two modes, soft and reasonable or a dominating, furious shout, and lately it had all been shouting. She’d found no blankets or towels that she was willing to touch, and she would have to get past her dad to find her mom, so she curled up on the floor with her head pillowed on her backpack, miserable and uncomfortable and willing herself not to cry.

  Only later, when she woke up in absolute silence and utter darkness, did it occur to her that if the house had been closed up for years or even months, all those photos should’ve been a dingy gray mass of waterlogged pulp, their images long faded away.

  But no—they’d been as bright and crisp as if they’d been printed that day.

  Aside from the burned bits.

  The burned faces.

  3.

  Lily woke up, in a word, badly.

  On most summer mornings, she opened her eyes in her own comfortable bed back in Boulder, the sun outlining her window with molten gold. Today, she woke up on the floor, covered in sweat and dust, hot and aching and as cranky as she was when she had the flu. Between the heat and the humidity, she began to think that maybe living in Florida just felt like being sick all the time.

  Lily knew her friends back in Colorado were jealous and thought moving to Florida would be amazing, like being on vacation every day. As it turned out, life in the Sunshine State was not all swimming at the beach with dolphins before eating dinner with princesses at Disney.

  Her room wasn’t much better by the light of morning. It looked like some other kid had simply walked out one day and never come back. The fan wobbled like crazy if she turned it up too high, and the air-conditioning didn’t seem to do much—the air was still and thick, almost choking. The blinds were dusty and bent and didn’t block the sun’s light or heat. Before her mother could set her to work on something downstairs, she quietly poked around, trying to understand more about whoever had lived here before her.

  Like the sheets, the walls were light yellow, and the comforter had once been white with pastel polka dots but was now the color of old piano keys. There were two printed canvases on the wall, one showing an elephant and the other a llama. The video game system by the TV was an older one, and there were plenty of games, but the TV wouldn’t turn on.

  When she opened the drawers in the dresser, she discovered that a little girl had lived here. And she was younger and smaller than Lily was, judging by the T-shirts—maybe eight years old, by Lily’s guess. She’d been neat, whoever she was, with all her shirts, shorts, and jeans carefully folded. A series of uniforms were in the bottom drawer, polos in navy and white and a variety of khaki bottoms. Lily’s mom had told her that most of the schools here had some kind of uniform. She wasn’t looking forward to that part. Being the same as everyone else—well, the thought made her wrinkle up her nose. Even if she’d been forced to promise her dad she’d tone down her attitude, she wasn’t sure if it was possible to completely change who she was—or even act like she had changed all that much. All she knew was that she’d promised she would try.

  She went to the bookshelf and nosed around some more. Unfortunately, the books were mostly chapter books for younger readers, not the contemporary YA stories Lily liked. There were a few bigger fantasy novels that didn’t have their covers cracked yet, plus the kind of boring classics that well-meaning elderly relatives offered up at Christmas along with stale candy and fuzzy socks. On a hunch, Lily picked up a few of the books and soon found what she was looking for written inside the front cover of a Magic Tree House book…

  The kid’s name was Britney.

  Britney West.

  And now Lily was seriously curious about her. Britney seemed like an organized kid—and yet she’d left all her stuff here. And let her snake die. If Lily’s parents had let her have a pet, there was no way on earth she would leave it behind. But maybe it hadn’t been Britney’s fault. Maybe her parents had swept her away against her will, just like Lily’s had—but with even less notice or choice.

  “Well, Britney. Let’s see if you left any secrets,” Lily said softly.

  Lily checked behind all the books, ran her fingertips along the inside edges of the drawers, even got on her hands and knees to check the empty space under the daybed, but all she found was dust. No diary, no computer, no jewelry box, no loose wooden floorboard that lifted up to reveal hidden trinkets. No trophies, awards, or photos. Just a couple of safety pins and the clear plastic tags that came with new clothes.

  “Sorry, but you were boring,” she told the room.

  Heading downstairs, she steeled herself to see the house for the first time in daylight. The den would’ve been airy and full of light from the huge windows if not for all the looming junk and the heavy, once-white curtains that Lily knew her mother would get rid of immediately. The front door was open, and the newspaper stacks were already disappearing. Outside, Lily heard the thump of something heavy landing in the dumpster. So much for checking out the photos she’d tossed last night—judging by the path her mom had left behind in the big ro
om, the photos were already buried.

  With the photos out of reach, Lily was ready to get down to business, just so she wouldn’t have to look at the garbage anymore. Better to do something than nothing. And maybe, just maybe, if she was super helpful and showed that she’d changed her attitude, there might be a chance they could go back home.

  “I brought doughnuts,” her mom said, appearing in the door in old sweats with her dark hair up in a bandanna. She smiled a smile that said Everything is terrible and we both know it, but we have to pretend so we don’t cry, and in return Lily gave her a tight, pinched smile that said Yes, and it’s all your fault because you’re the adult and you didn’t stop it from happening, even if we both know it’s really my fault.

  “Dad’s already at work?” she asked, taking a chocolate glazed doughnut.

  “I dropped him off. We need the car.” Mom put her hands on her hips and frowned at the house, hard-core. “First, we need a grocery list.” She pulled out her phone and murmured, “Garbage bags…”

  “Gloves,” Lily added.

  Her mom nodded. “Gloves. Paper towels. Cleaning spray. Toilet paper.”

  “Sheets, blankets, and towels.”

  At that, Mom’s jaw dropped open and she went red with guilt. “Oh no. You asked, and I completely forgot. There was just so much going on last night. Your stuff is still in the trunk. Honey, I’m so sorry. It’s just the drive, and this place, and your father…” She trailed off and shook her head. “Anyway, yes, we have sheets for you. Is your bed…” She trailed off.

  Lily breathed out hard through her nose. Of course they’d forgotten her.

  “Gross and covered in someone else’s dandruff and dead skin mites? Yes. So can we please unload the car?”

  The move had been so sudden that they’d been forced to pack everything into a big portable storage container. Until it arrived in Florida, all they had was what fit into the sedan. And most of that was Dad’s work clothes, as his job was the most important thing they had going on this summer and her mom just wore nurse’s scrubs. Lily had a backpack full of clothes, a shopping bag full of books and yarn, and that was it. Even her bike had gone in the container. She was pretty much trapped here, and she was already clearly last on the list of things to care about, which hurt, but…well, it was a familiar kind of hurt, a kind of hurt she was accustomed to shoving down.