Page 17 of The Boo Next Door

The gym on Wednesday night is chaos with a bake-sale budget. Nine stations, forty feet of tunnel, a swamp room, a graveyard, a mad lab with a bubbling cauldron that is technically a crockpot from Ruth's church kitchen. Parent volunteers wander in after work wanting jobs, and Lila gives them jobs, and this is the thing I wasn't braced for — watching her run a build.

She's different with a crew. The armor she wears at the fence line goes in a toolbox somewhere, and what comes out instead is this — competence with the doors open. She walks the tunnel with Denise's husband, who is scared of the drill, and by the time they come out the other end he's making holes in plywood like a man reborn. She takes the bin of thirty-year-old cotton webs, which I'd have thrown out, and teaches three sixth-graders to pull it into fog banks across the graveyard, and it looks better than anything in my equipment catalog. She stands in the middle of a gym full of noise with a clipboard she made herself out of Carol Finch's binder and a chip clip, taking questions like a general, spinning once in a slow circle to check her sight lines, pencil through her hair.

And I'm at the saw station, feeding her cut list, watching this, and somewhere between a four-by-eight of lauan and the swamp room wall, the thing I've been calling a problem all month quietly upgrades itself to a diagnosis.

"Station six." She materializes at my elbow with two coffees, hands me the one that's had the tar cut with cider, because she retaliated against my coffee by inventing something worse and now we both drink it. "I want to change the scare. Carol had a guy in a mask jump out, but I've been watching the walk pattern, and the kids bunch at the pinch exactly like we planned, which means⁠—"

"The scare should come from behind."

"The scare should come from behind." She looks up at me with build-fever all over her face, wide open, zero armor, and this close her eyes have amber in the brown, a thing I have officially known for four days and been trying to un-know for four days. "They'll walk right past a monster that doesn't move, they always do, and then when it steps in behind the last kid⁠—"

"Chain lift on a garage-door track," I say. "I have one."

"Of course you have one." She grins, and it lands the way her laugh landed on the lawn in the fog, somewhere under the sternum, structural. "You know what you are, Ellis? You're a supply chain with feelings."

She goes to terrorize the swamp room, and a kid appears at my saw station.

Maybe eight. Somebody's daughter, dropped off with the volunteer herd, wearing a bike helmet she has clearly been told is the price of admission to a construction zone. She watches me feed the saw for a while with her hands behind her back, regulation distance, trained by somebody.

"Is it going to be scary?" she asks, during a break in the cutting.

"Parts of it."

"How scary."

"There's a chicken exit," I tell her. "Door on the side, marked with a pumpkin. Any room you don't like, you look for the pumpkin and you're out in the hallway with the cider before the monster's even done turning around."

She processes this with the seriousness it deserves. "Did you make the monster?"

"She did." I nod across the gym at Lila, who is at that moment standing in the swamp room directing three sixth-graders and a fog machine like Patton. "I just make the doors."

The kid looks at Lila a while. "She's loud."

"Yeah," I say, and there's apparently something in my voice, because the kid gives me a look I won't be taking questions about from an eight-year-old — a long, level, actuarial look, the kind her generation apparently issues at birth — and then she nods once, like paperwork got approved somewhere above both our heads, and walks off to inspect the chicken exits with her hands behind her back.

I feed the saw another sheet and decline to think about what just got approved.

I stand at the saw with a coffee-cider abomination, forty feet from the shelf where her grandmother's moon sits behind two totes because I couldn't make myself store it any farther away, and I run Ravi's math again.

The tarp is a decision. The shelf is a decision. Every day is a decision now.

Thursday we build alone, because the volunteers stay home ahead of the weather, and school let out at noon. Somebody's got to skin the tunnel, and it's a two-person job, one inside holding, one outside stapling, trading positions every panel, passing the staple gun over the top like a relay baton.

It's easy. That's the whole problem with her, the thing I can't explain to Ravi. Six years I've built alone, by preference, on the theory that other people's rhythms cost more than their hands are worth. Her rhythm doesn't cost anything. She anticipates like a second set of my own arms, and I apparently do the same for her, because at one point she says, without looking, "Thanks," when I brace a stud she hadn't asked me to brace, and neither of us comments on it, and the tunnel goes up in half the time Carol's binder budgeted.

We break at nine on the gym stage, sitting on the apron with our boots hanging over, eating bake-sale rejects — the brownies that came out wrong, which Ruth left us like we're raccoons she's fond of.

"Can I ask you something without you doing the jaw thing," she says.

"I don't do a jaw thing."

"You do a jaw thing. It's like watching a garage door decide." She pulls a corner off a structurally unsound brownie. "Fine, I'll just ask, and your jaw can do whatever it needs to do. Why'd you move here? Nobody moves here at thirty. You either never leave or you come back. Which was it, because you don't talk like New England."

The gym's quiet. Fog machine off, lights half-down, forty feet of tunnel we built with four hands sitting there in the dark like proof of something.

And I hear myself actually answer.

"Cleveland, originally. Moved here at twenty-nine with a truck and a divorce." I watch the tunnel instead of her. "Married my college girlfriend. She was — is — fine. We were fine. We got to twenty-eight and she looked across the table one night and said she felt like she was living with a load-bearing wall. That I held everything up and gave nothing back and she couldn't tell the difference between me and the house." The brownie's gone. I don't remember eating it. "She wasn't wrong. That's the part that took a couple years. She wasn't wrong."