Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A. S. King Read Free Book Online Page A

was a feeling I can’t really describe. I felt like I had purpose or something—like I was doing something bigger .
    For the rest of the week, while Charlie still searched for the perfect tree for his tree house, I hung around and watched TV. I drank lots of yogurt smoothies and ate lots of low-salt no-frills tortilla chips.
    “What are you doing?” Dad asked, openly annoyed that I was on the couch with the remote control before noon on a weekday.
    “ The Price Is Right is on in a minute.”
    Before he could start giving me a lecture on how I should be doing something more productive with my time, like weeding the vegetable garden or inventing a board game that would sell for millions, Charlie walked through the kitchen door.
    “I found it!” he said.
    I turned off the TV, then turned to Dad and shrugged. “Gotta go.”
    He nodded and went back into his office.
    We walked out into the forest. Charlie said, “The Great Hunter picked this tree. What do you think?”
    It was a great tree, no doubt.
    “We start with the ladder, and then the floor.” Charlie reached into his back pocket and pulled out a tattered and taped piece of lined spiral notebook paper. “This is what I want it to look like.”
    I studied the paper. There were two distinct rooms. One had a bed, the other a small futon couch. Up to that point, I’d envisioned a tree house Dietz-style. A piece of old plywood, a rope, and a great imagination.
    “Are you planning on living here?”
    “Yeah.”
    I looked up through my bangs. “Over winter?”
    He looked at me as if I was making fun of him. I wasn’t.
    “Why are you always trying to make me feel stupid?” he asked, pulling the napkin out of his pocket that he’d scribbled on earlier.
    “I wasn’t.”
    He glared at me—testing. I looked as serious as I could and didn’t laugh, even though I wanted to because when Charlie got testy, it was funny. He added something to what he’d already written and ripped off the corner where the writing was. Then he popped the paper into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed.
    “Let’s get to work on the ladder first and then stop for lunch.”
    We were ten minutes in, me holding a two-by-four’s end while he sawed perfect thirty-inch segments on a pair of carpenter’s horses, when a car stopped in the gravel shoulder of the road. We were so deep in the woods, I couldn’t see much, except that it was white.
    Charlie said, “Hold up. There’s something I have to give this guy for my dad.”
    I waited for ten minutes and tried to creatively visualize the tree house. This was Dad’s new thing since Mom left—creatively visualizing everything from making dinner to the weekly grocery shopping. He made me do it for tests, too. (And I had to admit, it worked. Though it did not work for getting him to let me adopt a puppy.)
    Charlie arrived back out of breath and red-faced.
    “You didn’t have to run,” I said.
    “I’m just pumped to get this thing up, you know?” He leaned back against the tree, and balanced the wrinkled paper napkin on his knee again, and scribbled something else on it. He’d been doing this since we were kids, and it annoyed the hell out of me. It’s one thing to be purposely mysterious, but it’s rude to be scribbling stuff right in front of someone. It’s like whispering or something. So I reached over and grabbed it off his knee.
    “Give it back!” he screamed, instantly losing all control. “It’s mine!”
    “Dude, I—”
    He grabbed my arm roughly and twisted it behind my back, which made me drop the stupid napkin onto the forest floor. He kept hold of my arm while he leaned down to pick it up.
    “Holy shit, Charlie.” I didn’t know what else to say.
    “Don’t ever do that again,” he said. “Some stuff is private.”
    “Sure,” I said. “Of course. Me too.”
    “Everyone is allowed to have secrets,” he said.
    “Yeah,” I agreed, though I never knew anyone like him, who scribbled those secrets on napkins