“Mmm. They’re amazing bedtime snacks, too,” murmured Crenshaw. “Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind a little amphibious morsel.”

I could see he was in full predator mode. His eyes turned to dark pools. His rear wiggled. His tail twitched.

“See you, Crenshaw,” I said.

“Fine, Jackson,” he whispered, eyes lasering in on the frog. “You win. I’ll leave, do bit of hunting. I am, after all, a creature of the night. Meantime, you get to work.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “On what, exactly?”

“The facts. You need to tell the truth, my friend.” The frog twitched, and Crenshaw froze, pure muscle and instinct.

“Which facts? Tell the truth to who?”

Crenshaw pulled his gaze off the frog. He looked at me, and to my surprise, I saw tenderness in his eyes. “To the person who matters most of all.”

The frog jumped off the sill, back into the night. In one magnificent leap, Crenshaw followed. When I ran to the window, all I saw was a blur of black and white, streaking through the moon-tipped grass.

I felt like I’d taken off an itchy sweater on a cold day: relieved to be rid of it, but surprised by how chilly the air turned out to be.

17

Robin was waiting for me in the hallway, sitting crisscross-applesauce. Her stuffed armadillo, Spot, was in her lap.

I took her hand and led her back to her bedroom. Her rainbow nightlight painted stripes on the ceiling. I wished I had one in my room, although I’d never admit it.

“I heard you talking,” she said as she crawled under her blanket.

“Sometimes I talk to myself.”

“That’s kind of weird.” Robin yawned.

“Yeah,” I said, tucking her in. “It is.”

“You promised Lyle,” she reminded me.

I’d been hoping she’d forgotten. “Yep.”

“He’s in my keepsakes bag.”

I rummaged around in the brown paper bag. A bald doll poked out of the top, sizing me up with blank and beady eyes.

“Scooch over,” I said. Robin made room for me on her mattress.

I opened the book. Its pages were soft, its cover tattered.

“Robin,” I asked, “have you ever had an imaginary friend?”

“You mean like inbisible?”

“Invisible. Yeah. Like that.”

“Nope.”

“Really? Never?”

“Nope. I have LaSandra and Jimmy and Kylie. And sometimes Josh when he’s not being a boogerhead. They’re real, so I don’t need to pretend.”

I flipped through the pages of the book. “But sometimes, you know, when you’re alone?” I paused. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to ask. “Like say you’re home and you don’t have any friends over and you really need to talk to someone who’ll listen. Not even then?”

“Nope.” She smiled. “’Cause anyways I have you.”

It made me happy to hear her say that. But somehow it wasn’t quite the answer I’d been hoping for.

I opened to the first page. “‘This is the house. The house on East 88th Street. It is empty now—’”

“Like our house,” Robin interrupted. “Only we live in a ’partment.”

“True.”

“Jacks?” Robin said softly. “Remember when we lived in the minivan for a while?”

“Do you really remember that? You were just little.”

“Kinda I remember but not really.” Robin made Spot do a little dance on her blanket. “But you told me about it. So I was wondering.”

“Wondering what?”

Spot performed a backflip. “Wondering if we’re going to have to live there again. Because where would we go to the bathroom?”

I couldn’t believe it. Robin was just a kid. How had she figured out so much? Did she spy on our parents the way I did?

Robin sniffled. She wiped her eyes with Spot. I realized she was crying without making any noise.

“I … I miss my things and I don’t want to live in a car with no potty and also my tummy keeps growling,” she whispered.

I knew what to tell her. She needed to hear the facts. We were having money problems. We were probably going to have to leave our apartment. We might even end up back in our minivan. There was a good chance she’d have to leave all her friends behind.

I put my arm around Robin and hugged her close. She looked up at me. Her eyes shimmered.

You need to tell the truth, my friend.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “We can’t live in our car. Where would we put Popsicles? Besides, Aretha and Dad snore like crazy.”

She laughed, just a little.

“You worry too much, girl. Everything’s fine. I promise. Now let’s get back to Lyle.”

Another sniffle. A nod.

“Hey, fun fact about crocodiles,” I said. “Did you know that a bunch of them in the water is called a ‘float’?”

Robin didn’t answer. She was already sound asleep, snoring softly.

Me, I couldn’t sleep. I was too busy remembering.

PART TWO

Mashed potatoes are to give everybody enough

—A HOLE IS TO DIG: A FIRST BOOK OF FIRST DEFINITIONS,

written by Ruth Krauss and illustrated by Maurice Sendak

18

I guess becoming homeless doesn’t happen all at once.

My mom told me once that money problems sort of sneak up on you. She said it’s like catching a cold. At first you just have a tickle in your throat, and then you have a headache, and then maybe you’re coughing a little. The next thing you know, you have a pile of Kleenexes around your bed and you’re hacking your lungs up.

Maybe we didn’t become homeless overnight. But that’s what it felt like. I was finishing first grade. My dad had been sick. My mom had lost her teaching job. And all of sudden—bam—we weren’t living in a nice house with a swing set in the backyard anymore.

At least that’s how I remember it. But like I said before, memory is weird. It seems like I should have thought to myself, Whoa, I’m going to miss my house and my neighborhood and my friends and my life.

But all I remember thinking was how much fun living in our minivan was going to be.

19

We moved out of our house right after first grade ended. There was no big announcement, no good-bye party. We just sort of left, the way you abandon your desk at the end of the school year. You clean it out, but if you leave a few pencils and an old spelling test behind, you don’t worry about it too much. You know the kid who has your desk next fall will take care of things.

My parents didn’t own a lot of stuff, but they still managed to fill our minivan. You could hardly see out the windows. I saved my pillow and backpack to load last. I was putting them onto the rear seat when I noticed something odd.

Someone had left the back windshield wiper on, even though it was a sunny day. No rain, no clouds, no nothing.

Back. Forth. Back. Forth.

My parents were packing odds and ends in the house, and Robin was with them. I was all alone.

Back. Forth. Back. Forth.

I looked closer. The wiper was long and awfully hairy.

It looked a lot more like a tail than a windshield wiper.

I leaped out and ran to the rear. I saw the dent in the fender from the time my dad backed into a shopping cart at Costco. I saw the bumper sticker my mom had used to cover the dent. It said I BRAKE FOR DINOSAURS.

I saw the windshield wiper.

But it wasn’t moving. And it wasn’t hairy.

And right then I knew, the way you know that it’s going to rain long before the first drop splatters on your nose, that something was about to change.

20

When the minivan was packed, we stood in the parking lot. Nobody wanted to get in.

“Why don’t I drive, Tom?” said my mom. “You were in a lot of pain this morning—”

“I’m fine,” my dad said firmly. “Fit as a fiddle. Whatever that means.”

My mom strapped Robin into her car seat, and we climbed into the minivan. The seats were hot from the sun.