The Tiny Mansion Read online

  I put my book down, stood up, and joined Trent in walking after him. Santi, who had been digging in the dirt with a stick, ran over to Leya and tried to climb into her lap even though she was standing up.

  “I’m Trent,” said Trent. “And this is Dagmar,” he added, pointing to me.

  The boy looked at us blankly and climbed the steps to Helen Wheels. His dogs were between us, so we didn’t exactly feel encouraged to follow.

  “Make yourself at home,” I said sarcastically.

  He went inside for a self-guided tour while the dogs roamed around, sniffing everything and lifting their legs to pee on a couple of carefully selected trees.

  “I don’t like these dogs,” said Leya, holding Santi protectively, while Santi held on to his stick like it might do him some good if the dogs decided to attack.

  Trent frowned. He obviously wasn’t crazy about the dogs or the boy, but unlike me, it’s really hard to make him mad. He tends to trust people until it’s too late—which probably had something to do with why we were living in Helen Wheels in the boonies instead of an apartment in the city.

  Finally, the boy came out of our house. He even said something.

  “You guys really live here?”

  I wasn’t sure if I was more mad than embarrassed, or more embarrassed than mad. I felt like someone had seen me in my underwear. I wanted to say something smart like, It speaks! or At least I don’t live in a giant ball of aluminum foil, but I couldn’t get the words out. And even if he lived in a giant ball of aluminum foil and I lived in a house the size of a walk-in closet, we obviously had one thing in common: neither of us could believe a whole family lived in such a tiny home.

  But why would a kid who lived in a real mansion be so interested in a house so small the word mansion was a joke?

  “We’re just stopping by,” said Trent, conveniently ignoring the fact that we had planted a garden and started building a stone wall and were now turning the bushes into art. “Is this your land?”

  The boy shook his head and came down the steps. I started wondering if words somehow hurt his throat.

  Trent moved closer, and I could tell he wasn’t going to let the kid go without getting at least a few answers. I moved closer, too, so it would be harder for him to escape.

  Then I felt a wet nose on the back of my bare leg and jumped, making an embarrassing EEEP! sound.

  The dog who nosed me gave me a big lick, I guess trying to see how I tasted, and I squirmed away. The boy whistled, and both dogs heeled.

  “What’s your name?” asked Trent.

  “Blake.”

  “How old are you?” I added.

  “Twelve.”

  “What are your parents’ names?” asked Leya, coming over with Santi hiding behind her legs.

  “Reynold and Anjali Berthold,” he said with a scowl.

  Trent and Leya looked at each other, like they recognized those names, even though they seemed totally random to me. I couldn’t understand why they were being so calm about this trespasser! I wished we had our own dogs—bigger, meaner, and more of them—so we could chase him off of our land.

  I know it wasn’t really our land, but you get the point.

  But I didn’t have to chase Blake Berthold away, because he left just as suddenly as he arrived. All he had to do was whistle again, and his dogs loped down toward the creek, sniffing and slobbering, while he strolled along behind them without looking back once.

  “Did you hear that? Reynold Berthold,” said Trent, once Blake was out of sight.

  He said the name like he’d discovered we were living next door to Bruce Wayne, but it didn’t mean anything to me.

  “Who’s that?” I asked with a shrug.

  “He’s a huge tech guy, or was,” said Leya. “He invented some really important stuff and made a billion dollars and then just disappeared.”

  “What did he invent?” asked Santi. It always surprised me when I found out he was listening.

  “Something to do with computers, but I never really knew what,” said Trent.

  “Stuff that’s not even real, in a way,” added Leya. “Computer codes and processes that connect different devices together, I think mainly for surveillance and so-called ‘smart homes’ that do everything for you. He changed life for everyone on the planet without making a single thing you can touch.”

  Everybody was quiet for a minute while we thought about that. It was weird to know our hideaway in the middle of nowhere was right next to someone who had changed the world.

  “I’m going to change life for everyone on the planet by inventing burritos that float in the air so you don’t have to hold them and get your hands messy,” said Santi, who apparently wasn’t having deep thoughts like the rest of us.

  “I’ll make burritos for dinner if you want,” said Leya, “but you’re going to have to use two hands like everyone else.”

  I love a good burrito. In fact, burritos are my favorite food. But Leya’s burritos—whole wheat tortillas, brown rice, tofu, carrots, and broccoli—barely qualified. Fortunately, we had avocado, but because Helen Wheels wasn’t hooked up to electricity, the fridge wasn’t working, and we didn’t have cheese or sour cream.

  So the less said about dinner, the better.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  THAT NIGHT, WHILE Trent, Leya, and Santi snuggled up in the sleeping loft, I shook out my sleeping bag and got ready to sleep outside again. It was too hot and stuffy inside, and besides, the one night I did sleep there, I woke up with Santi’s finger in my mouth. He was asleep, and it was an accident, but still he gagged me and I almost barfed all over him.

  Fortunately, he was afraid of sleeping outside.

  The only downside, really, was that in the morning my sleeping bag would be covered in thick spiderwebs. I didn’t like to think about the size of the spiders who built them, but so far they hadn’t bitten me, so maybe we had an understanding.

  Unless they were trying to cocoon me.

  Shudder.

  In the fire ring I had put the battery-powered star lantern from our old bedroom. It was surprisingly bright, even outside, and as the cylinder slowly rotated, it projected a mosaic of stars all over the compound and the surrounding trees. High overhead, real stars glimmered in the clear night sky, moving too slowly for the eye to see. It was beautiful and peaceful, kind of cozy and vast at the same time.

  I thought again about what Leya had said, how Blake’s dad had changed the whole world for everyone. I guessed there were different ways of doing that. Like, the guys who invented the airplane obviously made it so eventually everyone could fly, and everyone knew their names. Then again, the person who invented the seatback tray table also changed life for everyone, because people could eat or read books or whatever without doing it on their laps. But nobody knew his or her name, which seemed unfair.

  I didn’t want to change the world. I would have been happy with changing even one thing for one person: me. All I wanted was to go home and have life back to normal, with my friends, my phone, and cheese and sour cream when I wanted them.

  How long would it take for my brilliant idea to work?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  An Argument in the Forest

  I don’t know how long it took me to fall asleep that night, because I was mad and I had growing pains. When you’ve grown three inches in nine months like me, sometimes your bones just hurt, and it’s usually worst right when you’re trying to fall asleep. When I finally drifted off, I dreamed Imani and Olivia were in Imani’s bedroom, dancing around to some song they obviously really loved but that I’d never heard. When I tried to sing along, I thought they’d laugh because I didn’t know the words, but they couldn’t even hear me. Worse, they couldn’t even see me. Somehow I was seeing it all, but I wasn’t even there.

  That’s when I realized the sound I was hearing
wasn’t a snare drum playing a funky beat but Trent’s truck tires popping gravel. My eyes popped open. The sun was up, and I was hot and sweaty inside my sleeping bag.

  The truck door slammed, and Trent walked down toward the compound, calling, “Breakfast!”

  After checking for spiders, I crawled out of my sleeping bag, breaking a couple of sticky spiderwebs as I made my escape, and followed Trent into Helen Wheels.

  He was carrying a box of groceries and a bag of ice he’d gotten at the little store twenty minutes down the road. The groceries included milk, cheese, eggs, and . . . sour cream!

  Trent winked at me when he pulled the plastic tub out of the bag. It was his idea of a peace offering, because it was pretty obvious how much I’d hated my burrito the night before. Leya doesn’t eat dairy, but the rest of us love it.

  I should have just accepted the peace offering and gotten on with things, but my dream about my friends was so real it made my stomach ache. So I ignored him, even though I could tell it hurt his feelings. If I was going to win the war through sabotage, I couldn’t surrender that easily.

  I acted normal while Trent made breakfast. I like his cooking better than Leya’s because, even though he doesn’t know how to make as many things as she does, he makes them normally. Using the propane stove in Helen Wheels, he fried some onions and green peppers before scrambling a big bunch of eggs to make breakfast burritos. I topped mine with cheese, salsa, avocado, and a giant glob of sour cream.

  Burritos are definitely the biggest brick in our family’s food pyramid. But really, anything rolled up in a tortilla can be a burrito, so we still have lots of variety.

  After breakfast, everyone else went to take showers, which meant dumping buckets of water over their heads at the pump. Helen Wheels did have the world’s tiniest shower stall, but since it wasn’t hooked up to a water line, it was useless in our current situation.

  While they were gone, I committed another act of sabotage.

  I was glad Santi enjoyed a big glass of milk at breakfast, because he sure wasn’t going to like the next one. I poured three big glugs of vinegar into the milk jug, screwed the cap on, and gave it a good shake before putting it back in the cooler. Then I went outside and scooped up a handful of the smallest gravel I could find. I mixed that into the granola, because everyone in the family ate that all day long whenever they got hungry.

  While I was getting the gravel, I saw a fat slug under a leaf, so I went back and got it and put it in Santi’s shoe.

  After everyone came back from the pump, their hair dripping, I changed into my swimsuit, took my towel, the bucket, and the watering can, and headed over to take my turn. We had biodegradable soap that also doubled as shampoo, even though it left my hair feeling dry and tangled.

  At the pump, I filled the bucket and dumped it over myself. The water was ice-cold, but I liked the shivery feeling while I soaped myself up and the way my long, wet hair felt on the back of my neck. I knew I would be hot and sweating before long because, once again, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It took two more bucketfuls to rinse myself off. I’m not sure how clean I really got, because I couldn’t scrub under my swimsuit and I wasn’t about to take it off outside, even if I was alone.

  I pumped a little bit of water into the bucket and watering can and carried them back to Leya’s garden. Obviously, sour milk and gritty granola alone wouldn’t overthrow the government. I needed to keep attacking on multiple fronts.

  As I went down the neatly furrowed rows of Leya’s vegetable garden, I thought of a reason to be mad each time I sprinkled a tiny amount of water on the leaves.

  This is for my friends, I thought.

  And this is for making me miss Imani’s birthday party.

  Finally, I just emptied the bucket and the watering can on the ground. And this is for everything else!

  I looked down. The dirt caked on my wet feet made it look like I was wearing brown socks.

  Just as I headed back to Helen Wheels, I heard a wail of despair.

  Santi had found the slug.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  IT SEEMED LIKE a good time to get lost, so while Trent and Leya explained to Santi that slug goo wasn’t flesh-eating poison and promised he could hold a funeral for the shell-less mollusk, I pulled on shorts and a T-shirt over my swimsuit and headed out.

  I went down the path to the pasture, keeping my eyes and ears open for any roving bovines, and then went straight for the fence around Blake Berthold’s forest.

  I wondered how serious Trent was when he said we shouldn’t go in. Was he just saying that to make Leya feel better? And did he only mean that I shouldn’t go in with Santi? That was reasonable, and I didn’t want to take Santi again, anyway. The little man just slowed me down and was likely to set off traps.

  I stared at the NO TRESPASSING sign. I paced up and down, eyeballing the trees. I listened for the snuffling of the big dogs.

  I made up my mind when I heard Santi coming down the path.

  “D-D-Dagmar!” he called, still half crying. “Come help bury the slug!”

  That did it.

  Before he could reach the pasture and see me, I scrambled up the fence, dropped down on the other side, and hid behind a big redwood.

  “Dagmar!” he yelled. “There wasn’t very much left, but we wiped it on a leaf, and now we’re gonna bury it!”

  I didn’t answer, obviously. It didn’t take long before he went back, probably to tell Trent and Leya I’d run away or something. If I was lucky, he’d get distracted by an interesting rock and forget to mention it.

  I moved deeper into the woods. This time, when I reached the path, I turned right, away from Blake’s house. I was curious to see it up close, but I wasn’t exactly excited to encounter him or his dogs again. And who knew what else I would find?

  I walked beside the path, not on it, moving slowly and keeping my eyes peeled for anti-trespassing devices. I saw a new one, too: a big bag of rocks hanging high in a tree that would drop and crush anyone unlucky enough to walk underneath.

  Who made all these traps? And why? They didn’t fit with the futuristic fortress I’d seen through the trees. And if Blake’s dad really was a tech wizard, it seemed like he would have protected his property with drones, lasers, and robots, not ropes and logs.

  The forest got darker as the canopy grew thicker overhead. The path was so overgrown with ferns and things it was hard to follow—making it hard to spot trip wires or other triggers, if there were any.

  I stopped, suddenly not sure I wanted to keep going. Honestly, I was afraid of getting lost. A forest isn’t like an abandoned factory, where you always know the way out.

  And then I heard voices.

  “Step back on your side!” shouted a man.

  “I am on my side! And stop putting traps on my land!” bellowed another man.

  “Don’t forget what we came here to talk about!” pleaded a woman. “What’s going to happen isn’t fair!”

  I couldn’t understand what they said next, because they quieted down, but I could tell which direction the voices were coming from. Dropping to all fours so they wouldn’t see me, I crawled toward the argument. It felt like a whole other world under the ferns that covered the forest floor: I saw spiders and centipedes and a slug I hoped wasn’t related to the one I put in Santi’s shoe. I also saw a bunch of pine cones, some tiny and some as big as footballs, making me wonder if people who walked through really old forests should wear helmets.

  I went up a little hill and hid behind a fallen log, where I was able to see who was talking. There were two men and one woman, and they looked almost as out of place as the spaceship house. One of the men was dressed like he worked in an office, wearing gray slacks and a crisp white shirt. The other man looked like a lumberjack in jeans and a plaid shirt. The woman was wearing huge sunglasses and a scarf around her head, l
ike a movie star who didn’t want to be recognized by her adoring public.

  Even though they weren’t yelling at the moment, they all looked mad enough to start hitting. They kept interrupting each other, rolling their eyes, and throwing up their hands in exasperation. The last time I’d seen behavior like that was when Santi was with a group of his friends and they all started arguing. In other words, these people were acting like five-year-olds.

  Concentrating hard, every now and then I caught just a little bit of what they were saying.

  “. . . act like no one else exists . . .” said the movie star.

  “. . . want it all for yourself . . .” said the lumberjack.

  “It’s mine,” said the businessman, practically spitting. “All mine!”

  I had just decided to go around the log and work my way closer when someone touched my shoulder.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Smart House

  I almost screamed. And then I nearly decked the person who touched me.

  I would have, too, if he hadn’t ducked. When someone scares me enough, my initial reaction is to swing first and ask questions later.

  Blake gave me a weird look, like he thought it was funny I’d tried to punch him. On either side of him, his dogs watched me, panting, their big tongues hanging out like short pink neckties.

  “Trespasser,” he said.

  “I got lost,” I said, keeping my voice down because I didn’t want the grown-ups to hear us. It was a dumb thing to say, but I didn’t want to admit he was right.

  “Liar,” he said, like it was no big deal.

  “There must be a place where there’s no fence, because I didn’t even realize I was on your land,” I said, doubling down since he’d already called me a liar.

  Blake smirked. “I watched you climb the fence. We have cameras in the trees.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. It gave me a weird feeling to think this beautiful forest had primitive but deadly traps and high-tech surveillance equipment. Was it a real forest, or was it some fake Disney version?