3

The vans were loaded, the house was empty, the sun was setting.  Both Loxley and Robin had been trying to stay out of people’s way, because the house was very full.  There had been so many people in and out of the house for the past weeks, and today had been no exception.  Over half a dozen people were there to help pack up the last few things, and one family was even staying the night to help bring everything and everyone to the airport in the morning.  Robin’s friend and her friend’s mom had just left and Robin stood on the front porch watching their taillights grow closer and closer together as their car drove further and further away until the two red lights merged into one and at long last disappeared.  Robin felt something brush against her leg and she looked down to see Loxley standing there.

“Oh, Loxley,” Robin sighed, “why me?  It’s as if everything I ever cared about I’m leaving behind.  My plans for college, my hopes for a career, poof! all gone with one blow.  And my home, Loxley—I was meant to live in a place like this!  The dirt of…of the country, you know, it runs in my veins!  I know the paths the coyotes take every winter, and I can call to them in their own language.  I know exactly when the farmers are about to break out their combines every fall.  I could probably even tell you what each field around us is due to have planted next year!  And all my friends are staying except you.  What am I going to do?  You know I turn into a hermit when I don’t have any of my friends.”

“Though even as it’s been until now, you didn’t really see any of them that often,” Loxley commented.  “It’s not as big of a change as you think.”

“It is, though!  It’s hard enough for me to socialize with anyone, even my own friends!  What’s going to happen when I don’t know anybody?”

“Let’s go out into the back yard,” Loxley said.  “Looking at the road always makes you melancholy.  Besides, you want to drink in the view of the stars as long as you can.  You won’t be seeing them in the city, you know.”

“I know,” Robin said gloomily.  They went past the house, going a bit out of their way to be sure the light from the windows didn’t reach them so they wouldn’t attract attention from those inside.  When they got to the back yard, they stood with the house behind them and the church graveyard on their left and they looked up.

Across the white-flecked sea of black velvet stretched the band of faint silver that was the Milky Way.  The stars flickered and winked, and a little to their right a small dot crept along, alternating green and red blinks: it was an airplane, flying so high up that Robin and Loxley on the ground couldn’t hear the sound of the engines.

“You know,” Loxley said distractedly, “you could try making new friends.”

“I could try.  But what are the chances that that’s going to happen?  30 percent maybe, 40 if I change my personality.”

“Or,” Loxley added as an afterthought, “you could try the hermit thing.  It’s going to be a trick in a city that big, though.”

“I’m up to the challenge,” Robin said.

“Maybe,” Loxley said.  “I’m not entirely opposed to the idea myself.”

“I know.”  Robin tipped her head to the side a little.  “There’s the Big Dipper,” she said, pointing.  “Hello, big guy!  I’m going to miss you.  Now just a moment…”  She closed one eye and began measuring her view of the sky with her hands.  “Yes!  Look, Loxley!  My star is out!  Golly, I haven’t seen him in a while!”  She bit her lip in a happy expression as she greeted the little speck of light that slowly changed from pink to green to blue to white.

“Eärendil,” Loxley commented.  Robin nodded.

“Named after the star in Middle Earth,” she said softly. “I know that Venus is supposed to be Eärendil, but I thought I’d give the name to a star, too, since Venus is a planet.”  Robin and Loxley watched the colors of the star oscillate for a while.  But slowly Robin’s smile faded.  “What am I going to do without the stars, Loxley?” she asked.  “And what am I going to do without the world to myself anymore?  I won’t be able to go outside and sing whenever I’m feeling lonely.  There will be people everywhere when I’m living in the city.”

“You’ll have your own room,” Loxley said, “for the first time in your life!”

“Yeah, and that’s great.  But I’d trade having my own room to having my own star any day.  Best of all would be if I could have both.”

“Well, you can’t have both.”

“I know.  But I wish I could all the same.”

“Of course.”

Then there was a long silence, which Robin broke at last by saying, “Well, if you don’t mind, I’m going to have one last go at singing at the top of my lungs, since I’m guessing it will be a while before I have another chance to do that.”

“Go ahead.”

So Robin started to sing, and after going through three or four songs, she looked out towards the horizon where the golden lights of their neighbor’s farmhouse twinkled warmly.

“I’m going to miss this place so much!” Robin whispered.

“As am I,” Loxley agreed.

“We’d better go back inside or I’ll be out here all night.”  Robin gave the sky one last long look and then tore her gaze away and started back to the house.  The grass was already wet with dew, and though it was still late summer her bare feet were very cold.  “I wonder if I’ll be able to go barefoot outside there?” she wondered out loud.  “Probably not.”

They crossed the ditch, not using the old wood-planks bridge that Robin’s father had put there years before and was now worn smooth with weather and use, but by jumping over the ditch, because it was not as deep or wide as it once had been.  They had to pass by the old swing set on their way to the house, the very old one that had been there when Robin’s family had moved in.  Robin gave one of the swings a half-hearted push.  “I’m going to miss all of this!” she exclaimed.  “What am I going to do with myself every day?”  Loxley didn’t answer and Robin shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans.  “I’m sure stuff will come up that I’d rather not do, of course.”

“And maybe,” Loxley offered, “stuff will come up that is far more interesting than you could ever have imagined.”

Robin shrugged.  “Maybe.”

2

The knock on the door echoed through the almost-empty rooms.  Robin, reading a book in the guest room, heard it quite clearly and wondered vaguely who it was.  “Hellooo?” called a voice.  Eleanor, Loxley’s sweetheart, dashed to the window and craned her neck trying to see who it was.  Her ears were twitched straight forward and all her whiskers stood out.

“You’re not going to be able to see from there,” Robin said.  “I’ll go out and look.”  She tiptoed to the door and opened it as quietly as she could.  Then she heard it: the unmistakably unsteady voices of small children, three boys to be exact.

“It’s the people here to take the van,” Robin reported in a whisper, closing the door with the knob turned so the latch wouldn’t make the clicking sound as it shut.  “But it’s okay; maybe they won’t come in here.”  And she went back to her book.

All three of them could hear Robin’s mother opening the front door, and all three of them could hear (quite plainly) the thundering of small shoes in the hallway, sounding like a herd of dwarf wildebeest.  Then—oh, horror!—the sound became louder still, and closer still…!

Robin was at the door in an instant, and with a flick of her wrist the lock was turned and she sprang back and stood alert, her gaze on the door.  When nothing happened right away, she turned back to Loxley and Robin.

“This is getting ridiculous, I know,” she whispered to them, “but I really do not want to meet anyone at all right now.”  There was a thump on the door, almost certainly one of the visiting boys trying the lock.  Robin let out a barely audible sigh of relief.

“Just in time!” she whispered softly.  The herd of wildebeest did not linger by the door, but instead the beat of their hooves announced their departure and traced their path back up the hallway and around the corner, and then came a creaking that showed that they had discovered the stairs.  Robin winced.  Even though none of her things were upstairs anymore, the bedrooms upstairs had always been private family rooms: no guests allowed.  And rules that have been in place for fifteen years are hard to break.

Five minutes of contented reading passed as Robin shut out the sound of the ceiling overhead groaning as the boys tore about through the two bedrooms on the second floor.  But then there came a noise like a hundred basketballs being dropped at the same time, and Robin knew that the boys were coming downstairs again.  And then she heard it.  Her mother's voice, saying the exact words that Robin had hoped beyond hope not to hear.

“Where are the kids?  Oh, they’re around somewhere.  Do you want me to try to find them?”

No!!  Mum!  Whyyyyyyyy?

“Kids?”

There was no other response.  Robin’s sister and brothers must not be inside the house or they’d have heard that.  Robin gave one last longing glance at her book, then closed it and hid it under the blanket in the corner.

“I’m in here,” she called half-heartedly.  She hoped the tone of her voice would imply that she would rather not be disturbed.  But it didn’t.

“Robin’s in the guest room,” she heard her mother say.  “Do you want to go play with her?”

Robin could almost hear the characters in the book she was reading bidding her farewell as to one they would never see again.  And she could definitely hear the floorboards in the hallway creaking underfoot.  Loxley crept into the corner of the room, keeping his head low to the ground.

“No, Loxley, don’t leave me!” Robin hissed after him.  But now there was a knock on the door.

“Hey, Robin, can you open up the door?”

Robin whimpered, but said, “Sure, Mum.  Be right there.”  She went to the door and unlocked it.  At once it flew open and the three boys came tumbling in.

“I’m going to show their mom and dad the van.  Can you keep them occupied until then?”

“I guess,” Robin replied.  What am I supposed to keep them occupied with?  The house is as good as empty!

But the boys had already found something to occupy themselves!  “Hey, you have cats?” one of them asked in a voice shrill with excitement.

“Uh…”

“Cool!”

The boys were on Eleanor and Loxley in a moment, before Robin could do anything about it.  For a minute or maybe a minute and a half they played with them in a more or less normal way, mostly petting them (rubbing the fur the wrong way as often as not), but then the youngest spied a large, empty cardboard box in the corner of the room.  “Hey!” he shouted, “we could put them in here!”  So they took Eleanor and put her in the box, and for a while they just watched her (calmly enough, Robin thought).  But when Eleanor didn’t do anything interesting, one of the boys closed the top and then, without warning, tipped the box on its side!

Robin, after a moment of stunned silence, leaped to Eleanor’s rescue, but Eleanor had already burst out of the box and had dashed into the hallway with the boys in full pursuit.  Loxley crouched lower in his corner, trying to make himself as small as possible.

“Yes, you stay hidden,” Robin whispered to him.  “I have to go save Eleanor.”  With that, she went out into the rest of the house.

Where had they gone?  But there!  A thump came from somewhere overhead.  Robin made for the stairway, but just as she got there Eleanor came racing past her, her tail and head low; the three boys were hot on her trail, nearly falling over each other in their eagerness.

“Wait!” Robin said, but they didn’t listen and continued in full pursuit.  Robin ran after them, but she was only one and they were three, so they had the advantage of being able to split off, and they did.  By the time Robin caught the one that was chasing Eleanor, she had no idea where the other two were.

Eleanor was cowering in a corner in the kitchen and one of the older two boys was reaching for her when Robin caught his arm in her hand.

“Hey!” she said.  “How about we go do something else, okay?  Maybe Eleanor is tired of playing for right now and if we come back later she’ll want to play again.  Sound good?”

“Okay!” the boy agreed.  Robin let out a sigh of relief, but then she heard again the sound of the wildebeest stampede, and it was coming from the living room.

Turning, she saw that the other two were after Loxley.  Robin sprang into action again, and caught them just in time to save Loxley from going through the same chase Eleanor had.  But by this time there was no stopping the boys, and they went from chasing Eleanor to chasing Loxley and back to chasing Eleanor again so that Robin was always after at least one of them.  But then she came round a corner to find all three boys standing in the living room looking very perplexed and with no cats in sight.

“Where are Eleanor and Loxley?” she asked them.

“We don’t know!” they replied.  “They were right here!”

Robin groaned.  “Well, they must have hidden from you guys because they didn’t want to play anymore.”

“Oh, don’t worry!” one assured her.  “We can find them!”

“That’s not—” Robin began, but the boys were already gone.  “Exactly what I meant,” she finished lamely.  “Oh, well,” she sighed.  “Eleanor and Loxley are big enough to take care of themselves.  And they must be hiding pretty well for the boys to not be able to find them, so that’s alright.  At this point, I can’t really do anything else but wait for Eleanor and Loxley to come out by themselves once the family has left.”  She returned to the guest room, shut the door, took her book out from under the blanket, and lost herself once more in the story.

She was brought sharply back by a young and very frightened voice (can’t anyone read the hint that I just want to be left alone?), and she looked up to see one of the boys standing in front of her.

“We can’t find them anywhere!” he said.

“And you’ve looked all over the house?”

He nodded hard.  Reluctantly Robin put her book down and stood up.

“Alright, let’s go see,” she said.  Anxiously the boy led her all through the living room, the office, the dining room, the kitchen, all the upstairs—everywhere, in fact that he had looked himself.  The other two joined in the search as they went back through all the house yet again, looking in every bedroom closet.  Suddenly Robin had a thought and dropped back as the boys continued their search.  She slipped softly into the kitchen and looked over the back of the stove.

Two wide yellow eyes peered back up at her.  “Hello, Eleanor,” Robin whispered.  “You stay there, okay?  I’m going to find Loxley.  Be quiet now!”

As Robin backed away from the stove, she heard a slight stirring coming from under the table.  She got down onto her hands and knees and looked underneath.

At first, she didn’t see anything, but then she caught a glimpse of something on one of the chairs, effectively hidden by the slatted back of the chair from the rest of the kitchen.  Loxley’s eyes glowed brightly.

“Shh,” Robin whispered.

“Don’t say anything, please!” he pleaded.

“Oh, that’s a clever spot!” Robin replied quietly.  “I won’t tell them. Just don’t move!  They’ll never find you there.”

“Okay,” he replied.

Robin straightened up and wandered out into the dining room.  Upstairs she heard the thundering of six small shoes.  The boys must already have found something else to do, goodness knows what.  But that was alright.  Robin’s book was long, and if the boys needed her, they knew where to find her.