Excerpt: When Everything Changed

Ellen was hiding under the Winslow’s front porch the afternoon the world changed. It wasn’t the perfect hiding place, especially when the Winslow brats were around, but her selection of hiding places had become smaller after Tommy Sutter had found her place behind the dumpster at the Italian restaurant. Ellen winced as she rubbed the shoulder that still ached after the beating that Tommy had given her on Wednesday when he caught her there. But she should be safe enough under the porch here for the rest of the afternoon. She had an old beach towel to lie on, two Cokes that she’d stolen from her step-father’s stash, a peanut-butter sandwich in a baggie so she wouldn’t have to go home for lunch, and, most importantly, three new library books.
On Saturdays, the whole Winslow family was usually gone all day and often into the evening, what with Katie Winslow’s soccer games, and Brian Winslow’s softball practices, and the twins (Bette and Bradley, but who Ellen privately thought of as Bette and Boo) who usually had some sort of piano or dance recital. Ellen thought that once the smallest Winslow, the two-year-old toddler Jamie, was old enough to be enrolled in some activity, no one would ever be home at the Winslow’s old-fashioned clapboard house. Which would be just fine with Ellen, as that would make her under-porch hiding place even safer.
Ellen sighed and closed the book she’d been reading, using her finger to hold her place. She looked through the slats of the latticework that enclosed the dank space under the porch, over toward the empty lot next door. She reached out a hand and pulled the lattice more firmly into place against the wall. She’d discovered the loose lattice a couple of weeks ago when she’d gone after an apple from her lunchbox that had fallen out and rolled over next to the porch. She’d found that she was able to pull the lattice away from the wall just enough to squeeze through into the empty space under the porch. And the ground sloped downward enough so that there was an area where she could even sit upright, with her head just grazing the boards of the porch. Although at the rate she was growing, she bet that by the end of the summer she wouldn’t be able to sit up without bonking her head.
She wondered what it would be like to live in a large, loving family like the Winslows. Well, at least she assumed they were loving – just because the parents were willing to pay for sports equipment, and piano and dance lessons, and actually attended games and recitals and PTA meetings and scout meetings and school open-houses, didn’t mean that they were loving once everyone was behind closed doors at home, as Ellen was well aware. But Ellen had never seen any evidence that the Winslow mom and dad were anything but the doting parents that they seemed to be. Katie was only one grade ahead of Ellen at Long Lake Reaches Elementary School, and the twins were two grades behind, so Ellen had seen plenty of the family over the years. And any dad who could say that Bette’s dreadful artwork was “the most beautiful picture I’ve ever seen!” was either blinded by paternal love, or was the best liar she’d ever met.
Ellen was idly daydreaming about the perfect family she’d like to have – today she decided that she’d like to have only two siblings, an older brother and a younger sister, for the perfect mix of brotherly protectiveness and sisterly bonding – when something in the empty lot caught her attention. She watched in growing astonishment as one of the weedy yellow flowers growing in small patches here and there in the lot seemed to shake itself free of the rest of the patch and stood up. Ellen’s eyes and mouth opened wide as the flower opened its eyes and peered cautiously around the lot. “Flowers don’t have eyes!” was the only thought that Ellen was able to form in her stunned mind as the first flower, determining that she (he? it??) was alone in the lot, gestured to the other flowers with a leaf that was also an arm, and the other flowers in the patch also transformed themselves into little people-ish flowers. Ellen was frozen in place, watching this impossible transformation, her book starting to slide from her numb fingers.
The flower-people clustered together, turning their flower-faces away from Ellen and forming a sort of huddle, where it sounded like they were talking to each other. All Ellen could hear was a kind of whispery rustle, like wind in tall weeds. Ellen leaned forward, trying to distinguish words in the low rustle, and her forgotten book fell from her nerveless hands. The slap of the book against the dusty ground sounded very loud in the afternoon silence, and the flowers turned to look toward the sound. Ellen found herself staring into surprised eyes in the faces of seven flowers, while they stared back at her. This tableau held for a long, timeless moment.