“Well, where’s the phone? You do have one of those, right? I want to call Dad.”
“Why don’t you wait until morning,” Aunt said more as a command than a question. “It’s getting late.”
“Can you at least tell me where my room is?” she said, rolling her eyes. She never wanted to come in the first place and these people didn’t even have a TV. How would she watch movies or find out what was going on in Iraq? She felt her skin turning hot. No TV!
“Haaaarooooooold!” Aunt called out in an uncomfortably loud voice. “Haaaaarooooold! Where are you?”
“I’m coming, just a second.”
“Why don’t you answer?”
“I said I’m coming. Now pipe down.”
“Don’t you tell me to pipe down.” Aunt’s face turned bright red. She slammed the cupboard door. It sounded like something porcelain broke inside. “The kids need their stuff! Don’t you tell me to pipe down!”
Uncle was just walking through with some bags, winked at Olivia, and said, “Follow me, Butterfly.”
“Don’t call me Butterfly,” Olivia ordered.
“Huh?”
“Butterfly. Don’t call me that.”
“Follow me, Kumquat,” Uncle smirked
“And don’t bother bringing them all inside. You can take me home tomorrow,” she mumbled as they walked down a long hallway. “This house keeps getting bigger and bigger inside.”
Down at the end of the hall was a bright blue door. Uncle turned the old glass knob and walked in.
“Here you go! Good as new.”
To Olivia’s surprise, the room was surprisingly clean and bare. “What? No shrunken heads or stacks of magazines or giant boulders?”
Uncle chuckled to himself and walked out.
The bed looked like something an emperor would sleep in, the emperor of mummies. It must be five hundred years old. The large dark bedposts rose all the way to the ceiling. When Olivia jumped onto the mattress she sunk down low. It was like lying in a big pile of fluffy snow. She fell asleep before she even got her shoes off.
Aunt came in later. “Goodnight Olivia. Just knock on the green door down the hall if you need anything. The bathroom is the next room down. The room with a yellow door.” She yanked Olivia’s shoes off and pulled the sheets over her.
“Is that Mom in that picture on the shelf by Uncle’s rock?” Olivia asked, half asleep.
“She was just a little older than you when that was taken.”
“I’m still going home in the morning, you know. I’m not even going to unpack.”
“I know,” Aunt said, kissing her on the forehead. She left the door cracked.
Olivia stared out the window from the bed. The moon was shining brightly on the white sand. The bedroom windows were covered with dripping water on the outside, distorting her view of the forest. The cold, air-conditioned air caused dew to form on the glass as it contacted the hot humid air of the outdoors.
Olivia whispered, “Condensation,” proud of herself for remembering a vocabulary word from school. She reached up and felt the red birthday barrette in her hair and fell back onto the soft mattress.
As her eyelids grew heavy and blurry, she noticed several tree frogs clinging to the wet window. They were walking and hopping along the slick surface. Their circular suction toes spread wide as they stepped gently, leaving intricate tracks in the dew. She could hear them calling to each other in their language of peeps, gargles, and burps.
“There are no frogs like that in Sun Prairie,” she thought. She could hear Aunt and Uncle arguing in the living room. And for reasons that Olivia could not explain, she began to cry.
3
Hunting the Bobwhite Witch
To Olivia’s relief, the cupboard overflowed with boxes of cereal. She had figured that the Milligans were going to make her eat Cream of Wheat or bran muffins or grapefruits washed down with cranberry juice. These old anti-TV hippies certainly wouldn’t have anything good to eat. On the contrary, there were so many boxes of cereal she couldn’t think of a single kind that wasn’t in there. From behind the Frosted Flakes and Cinnamon Life, she pulled out the Froot Loops and sat down at the kitchen table. Gnat was already shoveling an extraordinarily large bowl of Cocoa Puffs into his mouth with an extraordinarily large spoon.
“Uh, . . . Gnat. Who said you get to eat so much sugar?”
He pointed his spoon to the other room, “Mothership.”
“She is not your mothership. She is your aunt. Did you sleep all right?”
“Affirmative.”
“Well, I sure did. That weird bed was . . . What is that?” she said looking out the window. There, in the sand outside, a red-, yellow-, and black-banded snake slithered from the house toward the forest. It carved a curving trail in the sand. Precisely following the trail left by the first snake, another snake came out from under the house. And another. A long line of snakes, nose to tail, slithered their way to the trees. Because they all followed the same track, the sand looked like only a single snake had passed.
Aunt leaned over the table. “Those are the coral snakes. They live under the house. Don’t go messin’ with them, they are very poisonous.”
“They live . . . under the house?” Olivia stammered.
“For almost as long as we’ve lived here,” Aunt said.
“Then why don’t you kill them?”
“They haven’t hurt anyone.”
“Yet,” mumbled Olivia. Still, she couldn’t resist watching the colorful snakes as they ribboned their way in the sunlight.
“They will come back home before the sun goes down.”
“Why do you have so many cereal boxes?” Gnat interrupted.
“Because we knew you liked cereal,” Aunt responded.
That answer made sense to Gnat and he nodded his head as he pushed another spoonful into his mouth.
Olivia watched the last tail of the last snake disappear behind a pine tree. “I wonder where they are going,” she said to no one in particular. “Maybe they have a job. I wonder what kind of kingdom they have underneath the house.”
“I don’t know, but listen to me, don’t you go looking,” Aunt said sternly. “I mean it.”
“I’ll bet their kingdom is filled with jewels and pretty little birds that they have charmed. I’ll bet they have beds of silk down there.” Olivia paused for a second and then stood straight up. “All right. I want to call Dad and have him come get me . . . I mean us — unless Cereal Freak wants to stay here. I’m sure he will love having no TV. Where is the phone?”
Aunt studied Olivia for a long time and then pointed to the phone on the wall behind a big jar of artfully arranged noodles.
Gnat looked up from the table with a chunk of cereal stuck to his chin. “What? No TV?”
Olivia grabbed the phone and stormed to another room where she stayed for several minutes. Then she returned the phone to the wall. “I left a message. He will be here this weekend.”
Olivia threw her cereal bowl on the counter and ran outside to find the coral snake trail. It was already hotter at nine in the morning than