The Battle of Darcy Lane
Read The Battle of Darcy Lane Online
Authors: Tara Altebrando
Copyright © 2014 by Tara Altebrando
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013946377
E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-5199-9
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Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing
Designed by T.L. Bonaddio
Cover art by T.L. Bonaddio
Edited by Lisa Cheng
Typography: Pupcat, Museo Sans, and Museo Slab
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FOR ELLIE AND VIOLET
Contents
1
.
Taylor and I were sitting
on my front porch pretending to be millionaires as the afternoon turned into evening. It was only the second week of summer vacation and already boredom was like a pesky mosquito that we were swatting away.
“Only boring people get bored,” my mom had already said like a hundred times. “Life's what you make it.”
We'd spent the day in my pool and lounging on the deck out back, and planting some seeds in my vegetable garden, then playing tetherball and now Millionaire. From where we sat on the swinging bench, with tall glasses of lemonade, there was still no sign of the cicadas and it was like the whole of Darcy Laneâthe whole town, tooâwas holding its breath.
Dad was predicting there would be mayhemâcar crashes caused by swarms, that sort of thingâwhen the huge, beady-eyed bugs finally showed. My mom, a teacher, was mostly interested in the educational aspect of the whole spectacle. I was lucky I hadn't officially been quizzed yetâabout the cicada's life cycle, about the forty-three countries where people eat them like popcorn.
I was in believe-it-when-I-see-it mode. Which, come to think of it, was how most people on the block had felt about the rumor that people were finally going to be moving into the new house across the street. But here, at long last, were our new neighbors. So at least
something
was happening.
“She looks like she might actually
work
for a living,” I said, when the new mom appeared at their front door.
Taylor fanned herself with a magazine. “Oh, the poor woman!”
“There goes the neighborhood!” I said, and we laughed in a fake-stuffy, rich person way. This was pretty much how you played Millionaire.
Right then, the moversâwho had so far carried in a lot of boxes plus a very large television, an extremely large fish tank (empty), and a huge stuffed giraffeâpulled from the truck a plushy hot-pink chair with the name
ALYSSA
stitched into it so big we could read it from all the way across the street.
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah,” Taylor said.
We were hoping that before dinner we'd get another glimpse of the new girl, whom we hadn't seen since about 4:00 p.m.âalmost two hours agoâwhen she'd gotten out of a car and gone inside.
“My mom met the mom,” Taylor said. “The grandmother died last week. They came home from the funeral yesterday, and the moving truck was waiting for them.”
“Jeez,” I said. One of my grandmothers, my mom's mom, had died a long time ago and I didn't really remember her.
Taylor stretched her legs out in front of her and I did the same. She flicked away a little pebble stuck to her calf and said, “Then because of all that rain yesterday afternoon, the movers couldn't move their stuff in because it would all get ruined, so they had to sleep on the floor last night.”
Taylor looked horrified but I said, “Sounds sort of fun.”
I thought about borrowing some of the details for our game, imagining a massive mansion and us with sleeping bags.
“Their grandmother
died
.” Taylor rolled her eyes at me. “She was supposed to live with them and everything.”
I rolled my eyes back, but not so that she could see.
I hadn't noticed anybody walking across the streetâI'd been stirring my drink with my straw and thinking of funny
things a rich person might say about lemonadeâbut then she was there, on the path leading up to my porch.
The new girl.
Taylor stood up.
2
.
A little over a year ago,
I had been the new girl moving onto the block and Taylor had come over to say hi. She'd shown me how to suck the nectar from the blossoms on the honeysuckle vines that grew through the fence next to her house and that had been that: best friends.
We hadn't been in any of the same classes at school last year, but after school and on weekends we'd been pretty inseparableâriding our bikes, playing cards, painting by numbers, and trying to flirt with Peter (me) and Andrew (Taylor) from the next street over. We were beyond excited to finally have the whole summer to just hang out againâand now we'd have a new person to do it with. Since our first sighting of the new girl, we'd been playing Millionaire,
yes, but also talking about the possibility of new clothes to trade and borrow, and slumber parties in a house neither of us actually lived in. Maybe the new girl even had cute boy cousins from towns not so far away who'd come by all the time for pool parties.
The new girl had long
dark brown hair with the sides pulled up to the top of her head in a butterfly clip, and her top lip looked like it had been pinched and gotten stuck in a permanent pucker.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Taylor said, “We're just hanging out,” before I had a chance to explain that we were pretending to be millionaires. “I'm Taylor and this is Julia.”
The new girl studied us. “Are you sisters?”
Taylor pointed. “No. I live two houses down.”
“Yeah, didn't think so.”
It was true that Taylor and I looked nothing alike but for some reason it sounded like an insult.
The new girl bounced a tennis ball I hadn't noticed in her hand. “You don't really believe in unicorns, do you?”
The T-shirt I was wearing said
SAVE THE UNICORN
above a drawing of one. “No,” I said. “It's a joke.”
“I don't get it.” Then the new girl seemed to lose interest
because she said, “Do you guys know how to play Russia?”
“No.” Taylor stood up and walked over to the top porch step, almost stepping on my foot. “How do you play?”