House at the End of the Street Read Free

lighter over, studying it. “There are things I miss, sure. But when we were married, he was always on the road, and when he wasn’t, we were always fighting. You saw it. It’s better this way. Now he gets to write songs about me, and I get you.”
    Elissa pushed the spaghetti around on the plate. She’d heard the songs too, though she’d never tell Sarah she spent several hours a weeks on her father’s band’s website. “Blue Eyes,” “She Said, He Said,” “Back There”—those were three of the songs. She’d listened to their lyrics, waiting for there to be some hint of him coming back, of himregretting what he’d done. But in the end, it always felt like the songs were about shedding excess, letting go, embracing the freedom that comes with loss.
    Neither of them spoke for a long while. Sarah swallowed down a few forkfuls of pasta before looking back up. “Liss… this place,” she said, glancing around the house. “This is new. This could be good for us.”
    “It’s going to take me a while to get used to having you around.”
    “Come on, I gave you the biggest room,” Sarah joked. “How hard can it be?”
    At that, Elissa smiled. She wanted to believe her mom. Sarah had promised her that after her night shifts at the hospital they’d make dinner together, they’d watch old movies, or spend time on the back porch, working through Sarah’s old record collection. She promised Elissa a whole week of Joni Mitchell, where they’d go through all her albums, Sarah playing her favorite songs as they downed Arnold Palmers in the late summer air. But part of Elissa was always waiting for things to return to the way they were—the edgy silence that always settled between them. How could a new town really change that?
    Sarah stood, clearing the dishes from the table. Elissa moved to help, but Sarah shook her head. “You cooked, I’ll clear,” she insisted. “Go finish unpacking.”
    Elissa glanced up the stairs, where a stack of cardboard boxes still awaited her. She could unpack tomorrow. Thesun was still hovering in the sky. There were only thirty more minutes left before it went down, maybe less. Now that she finally had a backyard…she wanted to use it.
    “I just want to look around first,” Elissa said. She slid open the back door and started down the steps, toward a path that wound up into the trees. She kept her eyes on rocks and twigs, careful not to trip as she kept going, moving farther up the hill, into the higher land of the state park.
    The sun was lower in the sky. The abandoned house was a few yards below, a broken swing set visible from up high. She kept going, pushing beyond more trees, trying to get a vantage point to see how far back the park went. This was her new home now. Everything was going to be different—at least that was what Sarah hoped. They’d never spoken about it, but Elissa knew that beyond what had happened with her father, part of the reason they were here was because of Luca. Elissa had met him the winter before, and within fifteen minutes they were skipping seventh period to smoke a joint in his faded gray pickup truck. They’d been in school together since fifth grade, but Elissa still remembered the day she first noticed him—or noticed him noticing her.
    He sat beside her in study hall, carving something into the desk with a Swiss army knife hidden in his palm. He dug into the wood, the tiny shavings falling down aroundhis feet. When he was done he uncovered it, curving his palm so only she could see.
This blows
, it read.
Wanna get high?
    Luca was the kind of guy all the girls at Rossmore High School wanted to know, if only to say that they did. He was undeniably attractive, with toned biceps and dirty blond hair that fell into his green eyes. He always wore gray T-shirts and ripped jeans, sometimes also throwing on a wrinkled button-down on better days. He did things— smoked pot, drank, skipped class, had sex—and everyone knew it. Being around him