But I don’t need to say it to Cherish. I don’t need to give a defense. When I say I want her to take me home, she doesn’t ask why. She just looks me in the eye after fastening her seat belt and nods like she would’ve gone anywhere I asked.
In a moment or two, we’ll be there, and everything will feel right again.
Whether the house is nothing but a house, whatever happens next will be my choice. Whether I choose to make it an emblem or I relinquish it, everything after tonight will be control.
I can’t see the house as we come down the street, not really. There’s an island roundabout in the bowl of the street, directly in front of my house, and a smattering of white-bark birch trees that match the ones on my property serve as a kind of privacy barrier.
The Turner family home isn’t as stately as the ones closer to the golf course, but it does have the same lovely trees that speckle the grounds. My dad loves the white bark; he said it felt like proof that we were still a part of the community—despite the fact that our garage could only accommodate two cars. Ours is only a mid-length drive, setting the house back from the street and making room for more trees on either side; there isn’t room for a valet to line up a dozen or so cars for party guests.
You used to catalog every flaw, my mother’s voice accuses me.
She’s right. I had a list of ways my home didn’t measure up to places like the Whitmans’ back when I didn’t know houses could be lost. Now, when Cherish stops the car half in the driveway and half in the street, like at the last minute she remembered we no longer have a right to be here, I do not match her hesitation.
This house is perfect, and it’s still mine.
“What is that?” I ask, but I don’t wait for Cherish to reply. I get out of the car and stand in the headlights to investigate a strange addition to the lawn. Just beyond the curb, staked in the soft ground outside the staggered line of our personal birches, a long white post holds up a transparent box.
Inside there are packets.
“A Charming Country Home with Country Club Amenities,” I read, and then there’s a lurch in my stomach because of the photo bannering the top. It’s my house, but it’s impersonal. My mother’s deep barrels don’t flank the front door with fragrant and colorful bouquets. There’s no welcome mat that reads The Turners. It’s been stripped of us—of me—in hopes of enticing someone new.
“This four-bedroom, five-bath—hey, I didn’t know you had the same number of bathrooms as us.”
“We don’t,” I answer Cherish, but neither of us looks away from the page. “Your house has five full baths and two half.”
“Does it?”
“Pitched rooflines and a hidden two-car garage add to the curb appeal of this thirty-one-hundred-square-foot jewel”—I continue reading so she knows I’m not going to answer her—“whose gourmet kitchen, elegant master suite, and outdoor living spaces must be seen to be believed.”
I don’t like the way that’s written.
“Like you’d never believe how amazing the inside is?” Cherish echoes my irritation in that way she’s always had. It says that even though she’s not as discerning as I am, because I’ve filled the void, she can still sometimes read my mind. “I don’t think you reel in buyers by saying you don’t think the house has enough curb appeal.”
“Maybe people aren’t interested,” I say, and I don’t mean to sound so quiet and hopeful that the house I sometimes thought wasn’t good enough won’t be good enough for someone else. That maybe if no one else wants it, I can still take it back.
It’s already done.
It’s been less than fifteen minutes and I’d already forgotten.
My parents lied.
They don’t want it back. They don’t want to keep what’s mine. They’re ready to leave for good—and if that weren’t enough, my mother hoped to poison the Whitmans against me so I couldn’t possibly stay.
Gracious, she said, as though I have to be for them to let me stay.
I know it’s where you’d rather be, she told me—only she tried to take their home from me, too. Because Nichole Turner doesn’t care where I am, so long as she decides it. She has no preference but control, because my mother and I are alike.
The house doesn’t matter. Not the layout or the square footage. What matters—what my mother understood would matter most—is that it’s mine.
I kick the white stake, and the transparent box reverberates.
“Whoa!” Cherish jumps back, her hands flying up in surrender. “Are you okay?”
This time she watches me kick the stake. She’s ready for the suddenness of the violent sound, even when the second strike causes splintering and pieces like dozens of toothpicks rain down onto the lawn.
“Why are you asking if I’m okay?” I ask, before kicking the stake again. I made the first two look easy, but the third attempt doesn’t connect as precisely, and the sole of my shoe slides off without causing any more damage.
When I snort in amusement, Cherish’s hands slowly come down, and she smiles like she’s relieved.
“Go ahead, if you can do better,” I tell her, gesturing at the lopsided stake and smiling back.
“If I can do better than the first two, or that weak last one?”
She leans back to wind up, and when she releases her foot and it connects with a thunderous crack, we squeal in celebration.
Whatever it looked like before—however my mother might have presented it as an evidentiary exhibit when it was only me—now it’s a teen prank. It’s harmless, a pointless bit of destructive fun, but not one that speaks to a troubling pattern. It can’t be thought upsetting unless I do something sinister later. Unless we both do.
Cherish and I alternate now, each taking turns like it’s a piñata, until finally the stake snaps, and the top half comes down like a felled tree. The transparent box crash-lands and sprays informational packets across the lawn.
“Grab them,” I tell Cherish through huffs, and we collect them all, Cherish picking up the box, while I retrieve the top half of what used to be a white stake. Now its paint is strewn throughout the grass around the sad, beaten base that remains. “Come on!”
Giggling, and dropping packets along the way so that we keep having to double back and start again, Cherish and I run across the street to the forest island in front of my house.
“Hide it,” I tell her, but we’re laughing too hard to whisper, and while we haphazardly bury the half stake and box and packets, we have to fight to keep from collapsing against each other.
“Shh, it’s done,” Cherish says, patting handfuls of fallen birch leaves over our victims. “No one will ever know.”