The day she saw the truck in front of the house on Bernadine Street was clear and sunny, the warmest so far that spring. All day during class she’d cheered herself up thinking about how she’d spend the afternoon in the house organizing her periodicals, like they did in the library. But then she got there to discover the truck and the door to the house wide open. So Clementine set her book bag down in the weeds across the street and waited.
After a while, she got bored and rolled onto her belly and pulled out a magazine. It was a new one, a science magazine, less than a year old. She’d found it in the trash on her way to school, and she’d spent almost the entire lunch period reading it. Science was her favorite. It was the nice thing about eating alone, that no one was there to interrupt her, and so while she’d chewed and smacked a crustless PB&J wrapped in cellophane, she’d read a story about eyes. About the evolution of eyes. About how there were a bunch of different kinds of eyes, people eyes and insect eyes made up of bunches of little tiny eyes, and octopus eyes, which were the opposite of people’s eyes. And the story was about how for a long time scientists had thought the fact that there were so many different kinds of eyes meant that eyes were an ordinary thing, that even though they seemed complicated, everything over time eventually grew them, in one way or another. Maybe in another million years, worms would be squirming around in sunglasses.
But then, the story said, scientists eventually discovered all those different eyes had something in common, a gene, and that a creature a billion years ago had that gene, which meant that one creature was where all the eyes in the world came from. So eyes weren’t ordinary at all. In the whole history of the world, they’d happened only once, and over time they’d changed, until every animal got the eyes it needed. If it hadn’t been for this one creature, this prehistoric slug or whatever it was, there wouldn’t be any eyes at all. Here was another thing Clementine knew that the rest of her family didn’t.
Lying there in the weeds, she flipped through the rest of the magazine. Her stomach was growling like crazy. When the guys with the gray truck finally came out of the house on Bernadine Street, she felt let down. They were wearing identical brown jumpsuits, like mechanics. One was fat and one was short, and they were both white, and there wasn’t a single interesting thing about them, except the short one had flames tattooed all up and down his arms, but even they were boring, like the stickers on the doors of Matchbox cars.
But then the fat one shut the door of the house on Bernadine Street, and Clementine heard the sliding of a bolt. That was something new. They pulled away from the curb, and Clementine closed the magazine and put it back in her bag. From her crouch, she watched the truck get smaller and smaller, and when it was gone, she got up and crossed the street.
It wasn’t just new locks they’d put in. There was a whole new door. Now when she put her knuckles to it, the door didn’t sound like a dead, hollow tree. She walked around the back and slipped in through the kitchen window. Dummies.
She was lucky her magazines were still upstairs, just where she’d left them. It had been so long since anyone other than her had been in the house on Bernadine Street that she’d stopped hiding them. They were sitting in the corner of the second-floor room that looked like a castle tower. It was her favorite room. On rainy days when she had nothing else to do, she liked to go up there and pretend she was a knight and the squirrels were an invading horde, and she drew back her bow and arrow and—thwunk, thwunk, thwunk—they dropped from the telephone wires. She took the new magazine out of her bag and added it to the pile. Then she gathered up the whole stack and crammed it into the hole behind the loose paneling. When she was done, she went downstairs, and with her favorite marker, a fat red one that looked like it was bleeding when it touched paper, she wrote hahaha right beneath the peephole.
She was home in time for dinner.
At first it seemed she’d scared them off. A week passed, and the men in brown jumpsuits didn’t come back. No fat man, no flame tattoos, no gray truck. Nothing else changed at the house on Bernadine Street, except that some paper went up over the windows one day when she was at school.
She got bored sitting and waiting. She’d read all the magazines and shot all the squirrels a thousand times. Besides, she reminded herself, she had the whole neighborhood to patrol. She couldn’t go spending all her time in just one place.
So she moved on, and for a few days she managed to forget all about the house on Bernadine Street.
But then one afternoon later that week, she was passing through the lot on her way home from school, and someone new was standing on the porch, the new door and the shiny deadbolt open behind him. But there was no truck at the curb, nothing but him. He was tall, and coils of red hair flopped around his head like ribbons. He was dressed in worn corduroys and a heavy coat that fit him like a tin can on a beanpole. He was so pale he almost disappeared in the glare of afternoon sunlight. He was looking right past Clementine, as if she wasn’t even there.
She knew four different ways to get into the house on Bernadine Street. Not to mention that she’d seen the short man with the flame tattoos hide the key in the drainpipe. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t see anything through the papered windows, but eventually she figured out that during the day the guy who looked like a sickly clown left the back door open, probably for light. From the empty lot behind the house, she could sometimes catch a glimpse of him moving around inside. No matter how hot it was, he was always wearing the same heavy coat buttoned up to his chin.
After that first time on the porch, she never saw him outside. But somehow he managed to get furniture: a table, a chair, a mattress. She didn’t know what else. At just the right angle, she could see him moving the stuff around, trying different spots. As if it mattered, as if the place wasn’t a complete dump. He ended up leaving it all in the living room. She would’ve put the furniture up in the tower. If he was the kind of hoodlum with guns, the tower would’ve given him the clearest shot. For any kind of hoodlum, that was the smart place to be.
That weekend Clementine was supposed to be helping May-May in the garden. Clementine usually didn’t mind helping, but Car was there too, and she was being the word Clementine wasn’t allowed to say but everyone knew Car was. The two of them were shoveling compost, and anytime a speck touched her shoes, Car would shriek and stomp her foot until it fell off.
“What will the other skanks think,” Clementine said, watching the routine for what felt like the thousandth time, “when they hear you’ve been standing in horse poop?”
“What will your friends think?” Car said, flexing her blood-red talons. “Oh wait — you don’t have any friends.”
“All right,” May-May said, “all right.” And she came over and lifted the wheelbarrow by the handles. “You’re both excused.”
“She’s acting like a baby,” Clementine said.
May-May had already turned away. “I’d rather do this alone.”
Car gave Clementine a nasty look, her face even more hideous than usual.
“Go text somebody,” Clementine said as her sister walked back toward the house.