Nellie is always busy, always distracted. She’ll come up with a billion new things to do rather than stick with one thing for more than a day

Eli: Nellie and I keep fighting — over what to do to raise money, over which ideas make sense, even over whether or not a hurricane is going to hit this weekend.

Nellie: It really upsets me. I found this strange piece of a map in a bird’s nest and I can’t even show it to Eli right now.

Squizzle: I think the twins just need some time to talk things out — but they have to be talking in order to do that!

The map makes no sense. Eli can figure out where it starts — there’s that row of houses, and he can track the beginning of the path from the woods behind the house, but that’s it. Once he tries following the path, it takes him to the left side of the map, and then continues on past what’s written on the map. To get to the quarter-loop at the corner of the page, he’d have to follow a path that doesn’t begin, just snakes across the top of the map from outside of it with no explanation.

Well, at least he knows that the quarter-loop, which must be Treeo, is to the northeast. He tracks the movement of the sun to figure out which way is east, then guesses on the direction he needs to go, but he walks for ages and finds nothing.

This would be so much easier with Nellie here. He can imagine her above him, climbing across trees and calling down what she can see from afar. But he hadn’t asked her to explore with him this time. Every time he mentions it, she ignores him or brushes him off, and Eli has given up on asking her.

He’d thought she’d been as fascinated by the treehouse as he is, that she’d also want to find it again. But Nellie is always busy, always distracted. She’ll come up with a billion new things to do rather than stick with one thing for more than a day. And now she’s decided that she doesn’t care about the treehouse.