It was a cool Labour Day but not—unusually for Vancouver—a rainy one. Freddy crossed the patio to the smoke bush, which she had always thought was the prettiest plant in the yard. The leaves were naturally deep purple instead of green; in a few weeks, they would turn red. It towered over the patio. If Freddy moved around to its other side, she would no longer be visible from the house. For now, she just stood beneath it, breathing in its clean scent. The best thing about the smoke bush was that it wasn’t a treacherous genius little sister or a shambling mess of a stepbrother. It just sat there. It didn’t drink milk straight from the carton, and it didn’t talk back.
Mel was good at dealing with change. She’d accepted Roland as a matter of course almost as soon as she’d met him. Mel accepted most things as a matter of course. Freddy never could. It had been hard enough trying to fly under the radar at school when it had just been Mel cheerfully spreading her weirdness around. Now Freddy had Roland to deal with as well. She’d been relieved—and guilty about the relief—last year when she’d started grade eight and left Mel behind at the elementary school, but Jordan and Roland had moved in in late September, meaning that Freddy had once again found herself living in the same house as someone who went to her school and was no good at flying under the radar at all. Sure, Roland took most of his classes at the School for the Deaf, which was, unfor tunately, housed in buildings connected to Roncesvalles High, yet he was always in at least one hearing course per semester, and last year, he’d turned up in Freddy’s math class. It was hard to avoid being noticed when you had an almost-stepbrother blundering all over your geometry lessons.
Freddy glowered at the smoke bush. And it gets to start all over again tomorrow. She had worked so hard at seeming normal. She knew she was normal compared to Mel, who could have been in university by now if she’d wanted, and Roland, who was proud of the fact that he had been voted the School for the Deaf ’s student most likely to drive accidentally off a cliff within the next ten years. Everyone knew she was nothing like either of them, but it didn’t seem to matter. Bits of them clung to her like secondhand smoke.
And there’s Mum, she thought. She immediately shoved the thought away. Mum wasn’t the problem. She was never around, anyway.
Someone yelped nearby, jarring Freddy out of her reverie. She raised her head. A voice said something indistinct; another voice went, “Sssh!” Someone was in the yard behind her backyard, the side yard belonging to the house on Grosvenor Street.
The yards were separated by a chain-link fence and two rows of cedar bushes, one on either side of the fence. The bushes on Freddy’s side were neatly trimmed and rose only to Freddy’s shoulders, a fact of which she was a little bit proud, as a year before she’d barely been able to see over them. The bushes on the other side had grown out of control. They towered above the fence, their upper branches spilling over into Freddy’s yard. Jordan had tried to get the Johannsens to cut them back, but the Johannsens seemed to be trying to pretend the house didn’t exist. Now Freddy ducked around the smoke bush and approached the cedar hedge. If the house had been sold, it was possible the new owners were in the yard right now. She wouldn’t be able to see them over the bushes, but she could at least hear what they sounded like.
The people in the other yard were whispering frantically. Freddy paused beside the bushes to listen. She couldn’t make out much, though she thought there were two voices. “… being obtuse,” she heard, and then, “… can’t chance it. Even this was a hundred to one against. If we…” The whispers sank into incomprehensibility. Cautiously, Freddy pressed herself against the cedar branches. “… listening! Right now!” hissed one of the whisperers. Freddy jerked back a little. Did the speaker mean her? She—or he—couldn’t have. Freddy had moved silently over the grass; these people couldn’t have known she was here. “Well, we should go over…” said the second whisperer. Something rustled, and there was silence.
It had all been just strange enough that Freddy went out through the side gate onto Grosvenor Street to take a look. But the street was empty of cars, and the house looked as unlived-in as usual, and when Freddy dodged around the big pine and peered right into the yard, she could see there was nobody there.
*
By noon, shortly after Freddy discovered that the book her friend Rochelle had recommended to her a few months ago was about tragic nuzzling immortal teenagers and deserved to be shredded, Mel and Roland had gone a bit overboard with the whole RPG thing. Their campaign wasn’t starting until three, but it didn’t seem to matter. Freddy was drearily certain they were going to spend the next three hours talking about nothing else. Then Todd and Marcus would show up, and the game-speak would continue until midnight. Mum and Jordan wouldn’t care. They were out already. Typically, they hadn’t said where they were going, but had just slid out of the house while everybody else was focussed on breakfast. Freddy had the vague sense it had been days since she had seen them properly. She sometimes wondered whether they got around by tunnelling through the walls.
The problem was that Roland and Mel were having their conversation in the living room, which had been deserted and deathly quiet when Freddy had sat down to read in it ten minutes before. Freddy scowled at her book and tried to ignore the half-spoken, half-signed, entirely earnest discussion about thrice-woven circles and the particular skills of Mel’s cleric character. Mel had the Coleridge book with her and apparently felt it was a good idea to read the entire pleasure-dome poem aloud in dramatic tones, complete with signed translation. The game itself was going to be worse. It would inevitably involve screaming and a fistfight. I wanted to read, thought Freddy. And she had been here first. Deliberately, she brought the book up in front of her face, blocking out the other two and trying to force herself to concentrate on a book that she kind of wanted to throw against the wall or possibly burn.
“I think you should maybe use monsters that aren’t eldritch tentacled horrors from beyond the depths of space and time,” Mel was explaining. Freddy gritted her teeth and read a description of somebody’s sweater for what felt like the thirty-fifth time. She couldn’t seem to take it in.
“I like tentacled horrors. I’m comfortable with them,” said Roland.