MAY 18, 2015

They wouldn’t stay. They couldn’t stay.

Olive watched from her perch high up in the crook of an old maple, binoculars pressed against her face. She had her camouflage pants and jacket on. She’d smeared mud on her face so she’d blend in against the trees. Her hair was pulled back in a tight braid.

“We’re gonna be late,” Mike whined, voice too loud. He was perched on a branch below her, clinging desperately to the tree.

“Shh,” she hissed down at him. His face was round and sweaty, and his hair had been buzzed by his mom, who’d missed a few strands, leaving him with funny little sprigs like antennae. If she were a truly good friend, she would offer to trim them. “Keep still,” she said.

Daddy had been taking her hunting since she was six years old. She knew how to hold still, to blend in, to keep from being seen. Ninety percent of hunting was studying your prey: tracking, watching, holding perfectly still, and waiting, waiting for just the right shot.

“I don’t get what the big deal is,” Mike complained, voice lower now. “I mean, why are we even watching these people?”

“Because they don’t belong here,” she said. “They’re ruining everything.”

She studied the Connecticut license plate on the couple’s brand-new truck through the binoculars. Noted the unblemished tan work boots the man wore, along with a crisp flannel shirt and jeans. He looked like he had walked straight off the pages of an L.L.Bean catalog. And the woman, she looked like she was ready to go to a yoga class in leggings, running shoes, a formfitting hoodie—all of it new looking, shiny, expensive.

“Flatlanders,” Olive said with disgust. She knew the type. Her dad complained about them all the time. They’d post NO HUNTING signs on their property, drive all the way into Montpelier to buy organic food at the co-op, join the book discussion groups at the library, drink craft beer and eat locally made artisanal cheese. They’d complain about the black flies, the impassable roads during mud season, the smell of the dairy farm down the road. Yeah, she knew the type all right. And she knew that sometimes, they couldn’t tough it out—one winter and they were putting their land back on the market and heading south.

    But some of them stayed.

Some of them adjusted.

And walked around saying they’d never felt more at home.

And wasn’t it wonderful to be in a place where everyone was so accepted, everyone could be their own true selves.

Talk like this made Olive want to puke.

Olive’s father had warned her. He’d said an out-of-state couple had bought the land half mile down the road, filed a building permit. There had been surveyors and excavators out there. But she’d thought there would be more time. That they might not actually come. But now here they were in their shiny new truck with their shiny new clothes, watching a cement mixer pouring a foundation. It was really happening.

She dug her dirty nails into the rough bark of the tree, picked at a loose piece until it came off, then watched as it bounced off Mike’s head and fell down to the ground.

“Olive, if I’m late to school again, my dad’s gonna skin me.”

“So leave,” she said. Mike could be such a wuss. He was always chickening out on her, wriggling out of cool plans they’d made, because when push came to shove, Mike hated breaking rules. He hated getting in trouble and was one of those kids who would burst into tears when a teacher singled him out and yelled at him, despite the fact that he was now a high school freshman, not a baby middle schooler anymore. Sometimes it seemed like Mike was just begging to get his ass kicked, which happened all too often, especially since they’d started high school.

“Really,” she said now. “You should hurry up and get to school.” The truth was she didn’t want him here anyway. He didn’t know squat about holding still and blending in.

“Come with me,” he begged, this totally sad pleading look on his face, all big eyed and weird like a baby doll. To make it worse, Mike’s voice always rose at the slightest possibility of trouble, making him sound more like a five-year-old girl than a fourteen-year-old dude. “If you skip again, they’ll, like, send the truant officer after you or something.”

    Olive chuffed out a disgusted laugh. There was no truant officer. If there had been, he would have been banging down her door weeks ago. She hadn’t exactly been a model student this year and had lost track of how many days she’d either left early or skipped altogether. She turned in some of her assignments, showed up for tests and usually did pretty well, despite not studying.

“Look,” she whispered down. “Either stay or go. I don’t really care. But if you stay, you gotta hold still and shut your face.”

“Whatever,” Mike said, climbing clumsily back down the tree, then lumbering off once he got to the ground, heavy backpack weighing him down. The kid moved like a bear. He was built like one, too: tall, rounded shoulders, big belly. People at school said he was a retard and he got that way ’cause his parents were brother and sister, but none of that was true. Olive knew Mike was a thousand times smarter than anyone she’d ever met. Scary smart. He could read a book and remember every single thing in it and was doing math that some seniors in honors classes wouldn’t even attempt. She felt a little bad sending him away like this, but what choice did she have?