“We made enough money to buy a bike. A good bike, even. Shlomo’s going to love it”

Eli: That map doesn’t make sense, but I did find a tool from the clubhouse in the woods. And the brook!

Nellie: Ha, you should tell them about how you fell into the brook with Kivi!

Squizzle: Brook, Kivi, clubhouse… no one gives me any credit. I was the one to find that tool, not Eli!

Eli is wrong, by the way, which might be a first. There’s no rain on Sunday, though there are warnings that the edge of the hurricane might hit their neighborhood on Monday. And Nellie has her camp on Sunday morning, like she’d wanted to, while Eli is at school and can’t see every little thing that she hasn’t planned ahead.

It feels wrong, somehow, wanting to do something without Eli. Sure, they go to different schools and have different friends and interests. But at home, they’ve always been a team. Nellie can’t stop thinking about all the ways that Eli could have been there at her backyard camp. There’s one little boy who keeps crying, and Nellie just knows that Eli would have been great with him. The kids ruin two of the arts-and-crafts sets and leave them short one, and Nellie can imagine exactly how Eli would have convinced two of the kids to share. They’d have liked his bike tricks, too.

But Eli isn’t there, and Nellie is right about how much money she’ll make with it. The envelope of bike money is thick now, full of nearly enough for the bike — no, more than enough, she realizes a moment later, because Eli must have raked another two backyards and added the money to it without telling her.

They can finally buy Shlomo a bike.

Yes! Nellie does a little spin, then jumps into the air and lands in a perfect split. “We did it!” But there is no one in the room to laugh at her antics, no Eli to cheer with her. Nellie gets up again and trudges outside.

Eli is still in school for another hour, and Nellie wanders the backyard as she waits for him, her hands tucked into the pockets of her sweatshirt. Inside the pockets, she can feel some of her recent finds: that vine-like material from the leaf pile and the weird map from the nest. She takes out the map, squinting at it as though it might suddenly start to make sense.