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Pine needles wash across the conservatory roof when it rains, funnelling down the gutters, Pacific Northwest. Some are always more stubborn than the others and stick to the glass.
On the first day of her only summer at the new house, Sam looks up and mistakes the spindly leaves for insects, possibly caterpillars, probably dead. She tells her father and laughs when he dons a bike helmet to brave the still-taped boxes in the spider garage, claps when he emerges triumphant minutes later with a dustpan, here. Sam obeys and climbs out of the second floor window to tightrope along the parapet in her tennis shoes.
Nothing unusual about that. She liked the outdoorsy chores she had now, got them done early so company waited till later to slip through the conservatory doors, propped open with a rake for a silent getaway, boots tracking dirt through the hallway at dawn. Sam envies the marks they leave and buys a matching pair. Sometimes her mother winks and slides a fluorescent post-it across the breakfast table. Here. From the boy next door. His face swims vaguely in Sam’s glass of orange juice.
Pine trees are evergreen, but fuller and greener still in spring, 95’. New needles can survive the rain.
Her mother pins the notes around her room, outside, inside, green and yellow, Sam keeps missing them. She’s busy in the rafters, twisting tape around her finger until it spins back into the cassette, changing tracks, company won’t press play until all her strings pull tight in the dark but the moths like light, like heat. Her father starts locking the conservatory door. Company clambers through the basement window instead and Sam sits there with a flashlight, waiting to help her down. They climb the spine of her parents' house together to the upper beams, scare the starlets pasted on the walls, take turns running their fingers along the door of an empty bedroom.
The attic gets hotter, a few degrees above intolerable so now they stay in the basement, further down. There’s got to be something more than this, something that gives a little, flat on her back and swallowing lamplight passing through floorboards, her hand clamped over Lonnie’s mouth. It’s unnatural. You knew? Sam doesn’t like it and her parents hate it, listening to her run between the walls at night. They tell her so. Told.