How to Build a House Page 3

  Gabriel wasn’t always so serious. He once read comic books. He perfected a dead-on imitation of the lunch lady. He’d put his hands over his head and jiggle his hips and bare his stomach like a belly dancer. It was his good-luck dance, performed in the moments when he needed some luck, like when he dialed our local radio station, praying that he’d be caller ninety-four, so we could score free tickets to the Green Day concert.

  This was all before I grew breasts and he grew six inches.

  Cheekbones pushed their way out of his doughy boy cheeks. His eyes sank in a little deeper and green flecks appeared out of nowhere.

  One night when he was over and we were watching a DVD, I was lying with my head near his lap, and the arm he’d draped over the back of the couch slipped and grazed my newly grown breasts, and something started buzzing in me in a place I hardly knew existed.

  He quickly picked up his arm and draped it back over the couch.

  A few minutes passed. Then he gently picked up his arm, and lowered his hand purposefully onto my breast and left it there.

  I stopped breathing.

  We were still. We didn’t move an inch.

  Then, slowly, I arched my back and pushed against his hand, and he grabbed me harder, and I let out a mortifying moan.

  We heard the key in the front door and I sat up. Panic crashing through me like a dropped stack of dishes.

  Dad and Jane.

  When the movie with a title that to this day I can’t recall ended, Dad drove Gabriel home. We were only fourteen.

  We didn’t speak after that for a month.

  Eventually we found our way back to each other, but without any honest conversation, or confession about true feelings, like you see on TV. One day we just started talking again as if there hadn’t been this month of silence, or the hand-to-breast contact, between us.

  We went back to being friends for two more years. I’d help him shop for clothes. He’d burn me CDs. I’d read his English papers. We developed an addiction to blueberry-banana smoothies from a stand near the beach.

  During that time he had many girlfriends, not just friends who happened to be girls, but girlfriends who also noticed his cheekbones and green-flecked eyes. Girlfriends he took to school dances and parties on nights I’d hang out with Tess and pretend I didn’t care.

  Did I care?

  I don’t even know how to answer that. Something resembling jealousy gnawed at me, but I don’t know if that was because of Gabriel’s interest in other girls, or because those girls basked in the warm light of a boy’s interest. It made them walk taller. Heads high. Chests out. Smiles adorably coy.

  Gabriel became somebody who probably wouldn’t have given me the time of day if we hadn’t become friends early on. He became the boy all the girls talked about. Quiet, serious, cool Gabriel. And I was the girl who could approach him at school without getting tongue-tied, the girl everyone knew was Gabriel’s old friend Harper, who nobody envied, because nobody wanted to be the girl he saw, with those beautiful green-flecked eyes, as just a friend.

  And then, finally, someone else started to notice me, it doesn’t really matter who, it was just a boy who wasn’t Gabriel, and it was only then that Gabriel showed his interest in me again.

  HERE

  There’s a knock at our door at six-thirty a.m.

  I hear Linus’s booming voice. “C’mon, everyone. Break fast is in half an hour. Don’t be late. We need every single one of you beautiful people.”

  He’s moving his way down the West Wing, pounding on every door.

  Does this place have any other guests? If it does, how do they feel about Linus shouting about breakfast, as if it’s the apocalypse, at six-thirty in the morning?

  I roll over and look across the room. Marisol’s bed is empty. As I adjust my eyes to the light, and this wonderfully dingy, anonymous room, I realize that the shower is running.

  Marisol and I go to breakfast together, a spread of donuts and muffins and little boxes of low-rent cereals with too much sugar. I grab a banana and a cup of coffee that comes out looking like filthy tap water.

  Starbucks. Peet’s. Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

  I find myself whispering the names of the places at home, on every corner, where I could find a cup of coffee worth getting up at six-thirty for.

  Everyone seems excited. They’re freshly showered. Dressed in tank tops and lace-up work boots. Hats emblazoned with the names of sports teams or local restaurants or vacation destinations on their heads.

  The room smells of sunblock.

  There’s a palpable buzz in the air. And I can say with absolute certainty, it isn’t from the coffee.

  My stomach is unsettled. My banana is barely going down. I’m tired, sure, and wondering what it is I’m doing here with all these strangers in the conference room of a motel in the middle of nowhere, sitting in a folding chair drinking crappy coffee. But I also have that first-day-of-school feeling.

  That delicious mix of anticipation and dread.

  Linus comes in carrying a cardboard box filled with spiral notebooks. He begins to pass them around. They have our names on them. I start to open mine but then Linus is standing on a folding chair yelling about how there’s time for reading about what we’re doing later. Now it’s time to start doing what we’re doing.

  “Here’s what you need to know: we’re going to do right by this family. They deserve it. Since April they’ve done nothing but help clean up their neighbors’ houses while their own lies in ruins. Those neighbors wrote to us on their behalf. They asked us to come and help and that’s what we’re here to do. We’re going to give this family something better, something safer than what they had before. You don’t know it yet, but you can do it. There’re some other teams down here working on some other houses, but you’re the only teenage group, and you’re the only ones who’ve given your entire summer over to this project. We’re going to prove that you can do this job better than anybody else. Now let’s get to it.”

  He herds us all outside. The bus is spewing thick black smoke into the already scorching-hot air around us and I start to do some impossible calculation in my head about whether the bad by-products of trying to do good (individual cereal boxes, foam coffee cups, gas-guzzling buses) outweigh the good deeds themselves.

  I get nowhere.

  Marisol and I sit together. Roommates cling to each other like life rafts.

  She does most of the talking. She’s into hiking and camping, which explains her hideous shoes.

  “I can’t relate,” I say. “Why sleep on the ground when there are beds? Why walk when you could drive?”

  “You’re so L.A.”

  “And you’re so smug. Typical Northern Californian.”

  She laughs. “I’ll take you camping sometime. I’ll convert you.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “So what brings you here?”

  “You go first.”

  “Well, my mom wanted me to go on a trip with my church youth group this summer. Of course. And I convinced her to let me come here by promising to go to church every Sunday, but I just don’t see that happening.”

  “You have plenty to choose from in these parts.”

  “I noticed. But I think I’ll work on learning how to sleep late instead.”

  “I’m a bit of a sleep expert. So if you need some coaching, look no further.”

  “Excellent,” she says, and readjusts her glasses. “Mom used to do missionary work, both my parents did, so they were pretty psyched about this program, but I think they were just as psyched that I’d be getting away from Pierre. He’s my boyfriend. He’s almost twenty. That they’re not so psyched about. They still think I’m eight.”

  I start to tell her a little about why I wanted to come, how Dad found this program for me. I tell her about wanting to help, and less about wanting to run away, but I do say something about how things at home are a mess.

  Then we fall silent. Most of the bus does. Struck dumb by what we see outside ou
r windows.

  Houses with their roofs torn off. Barns lying on their sides. Piles and piles of wood and insulation mixed up with unrecognizable appliance parts, furniture stuffing, panes of glass and the bright primary-colored plastic of toys.

  In fact, the houses and the barns look sort of like toys, knocked over by one gigantic, clumsy toddler.

  And in between are stretches of quiet, idyllic countryside that take on an eerie quality. Like in a horror movie when you know that too much quiet means something evil is lurking, a long stretch of green starts to hint that a new pile of wreckage can’t be too far off.

  “This is it, people,” Linus says in a voice without its boom. “The path of the tornado.”

  We pull off a dirt road into a big parking lot surrounded by about a dozen trailers. When we file out I take in a deep breath of the dust kicked up by the bus and some of the lingering exhaust.

  I feel the heat through my clothes. On the crown of my uncovered head. I reach into my bag and pull out an L.A. Dodgers cap.

  “Over here, campers,” Linus calls from the shade of a tree.

  The trailers are lived-in. You can tell by the chairs clustered around barbecues. Soccer balls. Plastic kiddie pools. Shoes lined up outside front doors. Laundry hanging from ropes tied between the trailers’ roofs. But there aren’t many people standing outside, and I suspect that this has something to do with the heat.

  We gather around Linus, clutching our water bottles.

  He does a head count and then turns and starts walking. We exchange some puzzled looks and follow. I’m next to the guy who snapped Linus out of his meditative stupor last night. He’s pretty cute. We exchange a look, my first shared moment of understanding since I arrived here.

  He’s got shaggy blond hair and a deep tan. He obviously didn’t read the instructions about what to wear to work, or else he chose to ignore them, because he’s got worn-out flip-flops on his brown feet.

  We walk for what feels like a long time. The air is so thick it’s like wading through water. The land is flat. The grass is dried out and brittle and it crackles beneath my boots.

  A single bird flies in a slow, lazy loop above us.

  Finally we come to a large stretch of caramel-colored dirt flattened by some kind of truck or tractor.

  Linus reaches down and begins to unlace his boots. In the distance I can see more wreckage. A pile of chaos.

  “Shoes off,” he says.

  I’m thinking that cute blond tan boy had some information I didn’t as I watch him slip right out of his sandals. I begin the long process of unlacing my heavy boots.

  “Sit in a circle,” Linus says, and he waits as we arrange ourselves.

  “By the time you leave here and go back to your lives, your friends, your family and your schoolwork, by the time our twelve weeks together is up, there will be a house. Right here where we sit.”

  I take a look around. It’s pretty hard to imagine that a house will be standing here so fast.

  Some kind of bug lands on my foot and I take a swipe at it and I wonder what on earth Linus was thinking, having us remove our shoes out here.

  “This is sacred ground,” he says.

  I look up at the empty sky. The bird is gone.

  “This is going to be somebody’s home. Treat it with respect. Home is a sacred place.”

  STEP TWO:

  LAY THE FOUNDATION

  They moved out in October.

  Even though Tess and I stopped sharing a room after Rose left for college, when Tess moved out of our house, somehow my room felt empty.

  I tried rearranging the furniture.

  Desk by the window. Bed in the corner.

  I put new posters on the walls. I covered practically every square inch of the sea-green paint.

  Nothing worked.

  Here’s something it’s important to know about Tess: she’s my best friend.

  Or at least she was. It’s all pretty unclear now.

  She was my sister.

  Now she isn’t.

  That is crystal clear.

  HERE

  Linus gives out our assignments. He puts us in pairs, or what he calls our double-y partnerships, the double y standing for—are you ready for this—yin and yang.

  But I quickly forgive Linus when he informs me that my double-y partner for the week is that cute shaggy blond boy.

  His name is Captain, which apparently is not a nickname, but his actual legal name. I even check his driver’s license, and there it is.

  Captain and I spend the day digging holes for the footing, which I now know is one of the first steps in laying the foundation of a house.

  The house will be a rectangle, forty by sixty feet with a front porch and a set of steps from the kitchen in the back. The plans are in our notebook. A dizzying array of diagrams, measurements and terminology, as incomprehensible to me as if they were in Arabic. But flipping through the pages during a much-needed break from digging, I notice something.

  “There’s no basement,” I say to Linus as he comes by to check on our progress. “Why?”

  “Too expensive.”

  “But where are these people supposed to go if there’s ever another tornado? Where do they hide?”

  “There’s a shortcut for everything, and in this case it’s called a tornado-safe room. We buy it prefab and install it inside the house. No doubt it’d be better and safer to have a basement, but our budget simply doesn’t allow it.”

  I look up and see that Captain has wandered over to Seth and Frances, who are putting wooden stakes in the dirt and then connecting them with bright pink plastic roll tape. Captain has taken some of the tape and tied his hair into pigtails with big pink plastic bows.

  I nod in Captain’s direction. “Yeah. I can only imagine how tight your budget must be if we’re who you’re counting on to get this house built.”

  Linus laughs and then he looks me in the eye. “You’re here because you want to be here, all of you. And that, Harper, is priceless.” He walks away.

  Have I mentioned the heat?

  There should be another word for what it feels like out here in the sun, because hot is coming up seriously short. I have big sweat stains under my arms like our sixty-year-old Russian next-door neighbor, Mr. Sidorov.

  By the end of the day I’ve dug four holes. When we get back to the motel I’m exhausted, a little sunburned, and my body hurts all over.

  There’s a barbecue going on out by the pool. Hamburgers and hot dogs and potato salad. Limp American cheese in plastic wrap, the kind we were never allowed at home.

  I’m sitting with my feet in the hot tub, next to Captain, who, I’m happy to report, has removed his pigtails. His legs are muscular and he has a scar on his left knee. I find myself wanting to run my finger along it, but don’t, of course.

  I’m not sure what’s come over me. The humidity, maybe. One day of hard work in the heat and I seem to have forgotten my vow of solitude. My legs are on fire from the sunburn, but I sit here with my feet dangling in the too-hot water listening to Captain talk.

  He’s from Florida, which explains the tan. He has some family who lost their home in a hurricane when he was seven, which explains why he’s here. He just broke up with his girlfriend of a year, which explains why I’m sitting next to him, and why, under the bubbling water, I just grazed his foot with my own.

  Her name is Marcy. He says she never understood him.

  I understand you, I think, even though I also understand that I don’t know this guy at all. One shared puzzled look and a day of digging holes in the sun and I’ve lost all perspective.

  But then I think about where knowing somebody has gotten me: nowhere. No, someplace worse than nowhere, because when you’re nowhere I’m pretty sure you feel nothing.

  Maybe this is just what I need. I need to not know somebody. I’ve known Gabriel since sixth grade. I know everything about him.

  I take my feet out of the water and fold them underneath me. “If you want my opini
on, understanding someone, or knowing someone, or whatever you want to call it, is way overrated.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it doesn’t really matter how well you know somebody, it doesn’t make love any easier, it might just make it harder.”

  He smiles a big broad smile at me that’s almost as beautiful as the last light of this fading summer night.

  “Yeah, you’re probably right,” he says, and then his look turns conspiratorial. “Listen. There’s some talk of a midnight swim. You in?”

  That’s against the rules.

  Oops—I said that out loud. I didn’t mean to do that. I’m a stickler for rules, but that’s not one of the first things I like someone knowing about me.

  “It’s going to be a long twelve weeks with that kind of attitude.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Count me in.” My sunburn has turned from a feeling that my skin is too tight for my body into a wonderful tingling feeling of skin that is suddenly alive.

  “Awesome.” And then, because things always seem to end up this way when it comes to me and boys, he adds: “You know Frances, right? Wanna check with her? See if she wants to come too?”

  This should make me feel sorry for myself, but somehow it doesn’t. Of course Captain likes Frances. Who wouldn’t? Just look at her. She’s standing on the other side of the pool talking to Seth, probably about music, with one earbud of his iPod in her ear, and she’s moving, slightly, but unmistakably, to the rhythm of hip-hop. Poor Seth. He doesn’t know yet that he doesn’t stand a chance.

  I know why I’m here. I’m here to work and to forget and I don’t need any complications in the form of Captain, even if just a minute ago it was what I thought I needed.

  We’ll be friends. Just friends who are not anything more. He will be a real boy friend.

  It feels like a relief.

  I reach out my finger and touch his scar and I ask him how he got it and when he tells me that he fell off his skateboard, I know something new about my friend Captain.