Emma picked up the comb, thin metal teeth, delicate and close together; it had come from a lice removal kit her mother had purchased from Walgreens a year ago. She had picked Emma up from school, a wordless short drive to the store, Emma staying in the car, the warmth of her breath fogging up the passenger window as she blew on it and drew into the moisture that clung to the glass.
Then Mom drove her the short drive home, where she was stripped of her clothes and a warm bath was poured. Her mom washed her hair and used this small comb to slowly remove nit after nit from her hair. It took the rest of the day for her mom to wash all the bedding and clothes, vacuum every room, and place every toy in a plastic garbage bag, tied tight.
Emma didn't have a single toy to play with for two weeks.
But Emma saved the comb and kept it in her room, on the bookshelf between a copy of Stellaluna with the last page partially ripped, a worn copy of Amelia’s Notebook, and a Goosebumps choose-your-own-adventure book which she had never gotten past the first few pages before becoming too scared and putting it back on the shelf.
She saved it because it could be useful.
And now, a year later, no lice had returned, but the comb fit nicely in her small hand, and it slid through her dog Toby’s coarse white and black fur easily, catching fleas in between its teeth with each stroke.
Emma had long ago discovered there were two types of fleas. The first were small and black, fast, still agile and leaping quickly from the comb into the carpet or her clothing or the dog, never seen again. Though they were the most difficult to catch and kill, they weren't the most satisfying to kill.
The most enjoyable kill was the second kind of flea. At least ten times bigger than the little black ones, it had a swollen, large light brown abdomen, as if stretched by eggs or blood. She didn't know if it was just pregnant or an actually different species or just full from sucking Toby's blood, but they moved slow and couldn't hop far. When she used the little crescent of her nail to press into their bodies, there was usually, though not always, a soft crunch, and sometimes, if she was lucky, a little bit of blood.
Once, she had asked if there was shampoo for fleas on dogs like there had been shampoo for the lice she got at school.
“Dogs have fleas. That's just how it is.”
There was no reason to question it. Her mom knew everything.
Toby began to scratch at a perky, straight ear with his back paw, and Emma pulled the comb away. A small, tiny black flea leapt before she could get it. She scratched a red bump on her own ankle; it reddened, splotchy and growing slightly raw.
“Emma, hey, honey, go outside and play. My friend is here to visit,” her mom called from the first floor.
Emma slid the comb back between the books and climbed down the stairs. Her mom sat on the sagging brown couch with a man Emma had never seen before. Both held plastic tumblers with condensation beading along the sides.
Her mom hugged her lightly, and the man reached out and ruffled her hair.
“Don’t touch her.” Her mom pushed his hand away.
The man laughed, like it was a joke he was in on, and pulled his hand back slow.
Emma stepped back but didn’t leave, like she was waiting for something else to happen.
Her mom didn’t look at her again. "Go ahead and play."
Emma stepped outside, wishing she had as many friends as her mom did.
The apartment complex was nice, at least Emma thought it was. Townhouses, two and three bedrooms, all pressed next to each other, sharing walls.
To the left of hers was an elderly Indian woman named Shashi who sometimes watched Emma when her mom was out; to the right was a family with twin girls in high school who played basketball, Jessica and Amanda. Emma never knew which was which until a few months ago, when the school bus driving back from some game out of town was hit by a speeding drunk driver in a large pickup truck, killing one of the players. Now it was only Jessica.
It was a nice place to live, with lots of families and kids and always someone cooking and someone outside, and all the adults seemed in cahoots. When Emma pulled and broke off multiple limbs from a tree not far from the entrance, not one but two adults had told her mother before she had even gotten home. The punishment came swift, quicker than a little black flea jumping off a comb.
But once you walked past the townhouse apartments, past the building called a clubhouse but was just an empty room with some tables and laundry facilities that stole quarters and Mom refused to use, there was an alcove of bushes that Emma had to get on her hands and knees and crawl through.
On the other side was a large willow tree that reminded her of Grandmother Willow in Pocahontas, but no matter how hard she tried—eyes squinting, finger in the deep crevices of the bark—she couldn't get it to turn into a face.
But she liked the willow tree best of all the places a child could play, even though there was a playground with swings and a slide and sharp chunks of wood mulch only feet away from her home. The branches dripped into curtain-like leaves to make it feel like a private oasis, hidden from the world, and when it stormed and was windy, they whipped around, and when it was calm they gently grazed upon each other in a soothing rhythm that made Emma sleepy.
She often napped within the safe, lush, cool shade and moist air smelling fresh and green. It always smelled like wet, growing green in the tree. It wasn't the kind of tree to climb—to find one of those, you'd need to go to the tree line just beyond the clubhouse—but this tree was a tree for hiding, sleeping, privacy.
So Emma was shocked when she parted the verdant curtain and saw a girl, a new girl, never seen before, sitting beneath her tree. She was chubby, dark-complexioned, with curly hair, which had a headband with cat ears on top. The girl also looked to be about her age, which Emma did not like.
For a moment, Emma considered heading over to the playground, swinging on the swings, perhaps, from a distance, watching other children play—children with brothers and sisters and who didn't need another friend, or at least not Emma.
However, this felt like she would be relinquishing her tree. She would be handing over her secret hideout to whoever this new girl was, and Emma knew this girl couldn't possibly understand how special this place was and wouldn't care for it the way it deserved, so she boldly straightened her shoulders and strode up to the girl, who had a stick in a hole.
"Who are you?" Emma asked, trying to sound tougher than she was genuinely capable of.
"Oh." The girl looked up, the stick still in the earth below her, the sun scattering thready shadows of the willow branches across her face. "I'm Amanda. I just moved here."
"We already have an Amanda here," Emma said, thinking of the twin basketball player, tall enough to get frisbees that got caught on the roofs of sheds.
"Oh." The girl looked down at the hole and began moving the stick in circles, widening the entrance.
"I mean," Emma corrected, "she died, so I guess it's okay. You'll be the new Amanda. And," Emma motioned up to indicate the girl's height, "she was, like, super tall, so you can be the short Amanda."
Then she looked at the girl harder. "What are you even doing?"
"I'm digging a hole."
"What for?" Emma approached and crouched down next to Amanda for a closer look.
"Oh, I thought this would make a good hideout. But," the girl looked at Emma, dirt smeared on her cheek, "a good hideout needs a place to go to the bathroom and a place for food."
"Yeah," Emma nodded in fervent agreement. This was indeed something that was necessary, and Emma was a little frustrated that she hadn't thought of this before. She began to survey the area and pointed at a lower space between two roots, strong, solid, and bursting out of the ground in thick woody veins. "We can do the kitchen here." Emma picked up a decent-sized stick. In silence, the two girls worked for a while, moving dirt with sticks and in their shirts held at the hem to form makeshift baskets, until two nice-sized holes were formed.
Emma and Amanda stood side by side and looked over their work in satisfaction.
"We need to get food and blankets and toilet paper," Amanda added.
Emma looked at the sun in the sky.
"I can't go home quite yet."
Amanda nodded. "We have lots of stuff at my house." Then she began to walk in the opposite direction of Emma's apartment complex, into an area that Emma had never been brave enough to venture—an area that most definitely was outside of the "complex" she was supposed to stay in.
When they slipped through a hole at the bottom of a tall wooden fence hidden behind a thicket of shrubs, Emma's heart twisted in that pounding fear, like when her mom called out her full name. Emma Marie Duncun. When you knew you were in trouble. Partially because she was concerned that she wouldn't know her way back home, but mostly because it was a very different place than she was used to.
First, there were houses—real houses—without adjoining walls, without parking spots crowded next to each other. There were fences separating one yard from another and driveways leading to garages, most cars tucked within, but the few outside didn't seem like the cars Emma knew. These were not cars that used a screwdriver as a key to the ignition or with a window that had a strip of silver duct tape to keep out rain.
Amanda stopped in front of a house. Green door, no numbers on the door. No 2A, no 21B. No neighbor smoking a cigarette so close that the smoke could be smelled inside when she opened the door. Really, the only thing that seemed familiar was the emptiness—the lack of bodies inside the house.
She had plenty of experience being alone. Most mornings, her mom left for work, and so Emma waited for the last episode of Garfield to end, locked the door, and walked to the bus stop, which was at the mouth of the apartment complex and usually filled with a couple kids and an adult or two—it made perfect timing. She always arrived before the bus.
Most afternoons, she arrived home, unlocked the door with her key or had Shashi open the door with her spare. It was pleasant to rule the rooms, go freely from one to another, make a little or as much noise as she wanted.
This, however, seemed different. How, she didn't quite know.
Amanda was swift-moving, grabbing a fleece blanket and draping it over Emma's shoulder, pulling a roll of toilet paper off the holder in a bathroom which felt thicker and nicer than Emma usually had, then moving toward the kitchen. She tucked a box of Lucky Charms under one arm and a huge box of Fruit by the Foot under the other.
"Let's go," Amanda said with the confidence only a determined child can muster.
"Yeah, okay," Emma said, but she didn't feel at ease until they returned to the willow tree, where she was once again assured of her ability to return home, and the sheer comfort of familiar jurisdiction.
It was fun setting up the hideout with Amanda, setting up the various sections—a blanket on the ground to be the bedroom, a hole with the cereal and snacks, and a hole with a roll of toilet paper, stuck on a willow branch loosely tied to a peeling chunk of bark off the trunk.
When the sky turned that soft, pink sorbet color and the streetlights began to flicker on one by one, Emma pushed herself up from the ground, brushing the loose dirt from her jeans and the front of her shirt.
“I have to go,” she said, glancing up through the willow branches as if they might hold the light in place a little longer. “You probably should too.”
“No,” Amanda said, jutting her chin out slightly, though she didn’t look at Emma when she said it. “I’m staying.”
Emma lingered for a second, not quite sure what to do with that, the idea of someone deciding not to go home sitting there in her chest, before it passed as quickly as it came.
“Okay,” she said, like it wasn’t anything at all.
She made her way back toward the alcove of bushes, dropping to her hands and knees to crawl through, the branches catching lightly in her hair, and then slipped past the playground and the clubhouse, toward the rows of apartments that suddenly didn’t feel quite as still or predictable as they had that morning.
There were people outside—more than usual—moving with a kind of purpose she didn’t recognize, flashlights cutting through the dimming light, voices calling out, overlapping, searching. Police officers stood in clusters with adults, all of them talking at once, pointing, shifting, looking.
“Oh my God, Emma. You’re safe.”
Her mom broke from the group and hurried toward her, pulling her into a tight hug that pressed the air from her lungs just slightly.
“There’s a missing girl,” she said quickly, her voice too sharp, too thin. “Have you seen her? Anyone new? Anyone at all?”
Emma shook her head.
“Nope. Played alone all day.”
That night, lying in bed, Emma could still feel the cool dampness of the willow tree, the soft give of the dirt beneath her hands.
She could feel the small give of something between her fingers.
Tomorrow, she would go back.
The best ones were the ones that didn’t get away.
