Free How to Build a House by Dana Reinhardt Page A

our typical silences settles in. Teddy reaches for his T-shirt and pulls it over his head.
    “The last time I came swimming here was last summer. I took my sisters and their best friend, this funny-looking girl named Belinda with red hair. Alice and Grace used to love sleeping over at her house. They said her dad made the best pancakes. They couldn’t get over the idea of a dad cooking. Our dad can’t make toast.” He stops and squeezes some of the excess water from his shorts. He looks out toward the pond. “Now they’re both gone. Belinda and her dad who made great pancakes.”
    Nine people died in April. Bailey has a population of just under one thousand. I guess if I’d stopped to do the math I could have figured that Teddy would know some of the people who didn’t survive.
    “My sisters couldn’t sleep for two months. Part of that’s from the moving around. We spent the first few nights with some friends. Their house sat about twenty feet outside the path and it was totally untouched. Not even a crooked picture on the wall. Then we moved to another friend’s. Even after we got the trailer and got all settled in, still they couldn’t sleep.”
    “So how’d they start sleeping again?”
    “I build them an invisible wall. When they’re both in their beds and they turn out the lights, I go in and put up a wall around them that keeps out bad dreams, monsters, tor nadoes, everything.”
    “What’s it made of?”
    He looks at me and smiles.
    “Invisible bricks.”
    We watch as Captain climbs out onto a branch of a tree and swings with both arms. It looks dangerous, but he lets go and lands with a splash and comes up laughing.
    “What’s it like?” I ask.
    “You mean a tornado?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Like nothing you’ve ever experienced. I mean, I know you have earthquakes out where you’re from, and I’m sure being in an earthquake is no party, and maybe a tornado is no worse, but it’s certainly different. It sounds like a locomotive. It smells like hell. And when you’re in the middle of one, it feels like the fingers of a giant hand have reached under your home to rip it right off the foundation.”
    “That sounds terrifying.”
    “It is. And what it leaves behind is impossible to describe. Remember, we’ve been cleaning up already three months now, pretty much full-time, since before y’all got here.”
    Everyone is out of the water now, and they’ve all picked a spot of grass a safe distance away from where Teddy and I are sitting. I look over at them just in time to catch Captain exaggeratedly moving his eyebrows up and down and puckering his lips.
    Suddenly it all seems too stupid, his taunts about Teddy and me. There isn’t room for that kind of thing when your world is falling apart. You may think there is, and think it’s what you need, and that may send you running off to your oldest friend, and it may make you turn your naked body to his, but you’d be making a big mistake.
    When something comes along and rips your home right off its foundation, you have to use everything you have just to try to hold yourself together.
    HOME
    Tess came up to me at school on the Monday after the party and apologized.
    Maybe this is it , I thought. Maybe this is Tess coming back around .
    “I shouldn’t have left you like that. And I definitely shouldn’t have left you and then gone off and done four Jell-O shots.” She made a face. “Jell-O is disgusting. I don’t even understand what it is. I mean, what are its properties? Is it a solid? A liquid? By the way, adding vodka into the mix sheds absolutely no light on these complex questions.”
    For the briefest moment, I forgot everything and just laughed at her like I used to.
    “So, how was your night? I’m guessing it was better than mine because I didn’t see you anywhere near the Jell-O shots.”
    I had seen Gabriel talking to Sarah Denton with his face about three inches from hers, and I took off without saying goodbye to him, figuring