“Why don’t you just mind your own business, Ada?” he snaps at me.

Nico has never spoken to me that way before. I freeze in my tracks, shocked. Nico keeps running to the water, and I should go too, but I don’t want to go if Nico is mad at me. Something is going on, and I don’t understand what.

I look back at where we set up our chairs on the sand. Mom is sitting on a chair, and Mr. Lowell is next to her. She waves at me. I wave back.

Okay, I can’t let this get me down. I’m not going to let my brother ruin the day.

I follow my family out to the water. Dad is a really good swimmer, and so am I, but he doesn’t like me to go out farther than where he can reach me, just in case. I swim out as far as I feel safe, and then I swim back. On my way back, I notice Nico bobbing in the water nearby. And that’s when I also notice that Mrs. Lowell is next to him and they’re talking. I tread water as close as I dare, trying to hear what they’re talking about, except there’s water in my ears and it’s hard to hear.

“Don’t even think… telling anyone,” Mrs. Lowell is saying to Nico. “Don’t you dare… Do you know how much trouble you’ll be in?”

And then Nico says in a tiny voice, “I won’t. I promise.”

Was she… threatening him?

I don’t know what they were talking about, but I didn’t like the tone of her voice. She was threatening him. I’m sure of it.

I keep thinking about it as I’m swimming, and I get madder and madder. How could she talk to my brother that way? And what were they talking about? I get so angry, I can’t even think straight. And then when I’m swimming under the water, I pass by her legs.

I don’t know why I do what I do next. I’m just so mad. So the next thing I know, I’m grabbing one of Mrs. Lowell’s skinny legs and pulling as hard as I can, yanking her down into the water. She doesn’t see it coming at all.

Right away, I’m sorry I did it. She wasn’t prepared to go underwater, and it’s obvious that she can’t get back up. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to save her.

And I think to myself, what if she drowns because of me? I’d be in so much trouble!

But of course, Dad comes to the rescue. He grabs her and pulls her out of the water, and it turns out she’s okay. So I didn’t end up drowning her after all.

SEVENTY

Step 5: Find Out the Truth

I hate it here in Long Island.

I don’t have any friends. I mean, not real friends. There are girls that I eat lunch with, and they are nice to me, but nothing like my old friends back home. Hunter bothers me almost every day in Library. Nico barely speaks to me, and he keeps getting in trouble at school.

I don’t need a whole year to decide. I hate it already and I always will. I wonder if I have to wait the full year before asking to go back.

Oh, who am I kidding? We are never going back. We will live here forever.

I lie in the dark of my room, trying to fall asleep. There was a time in my life, like when I was a little kid, when it was easy to sleep. I don’t remember lying awake when I was in kindergarten. But now it seems like every night, I can’t sleep. I just stare at the ceiling every night. And the cracks in the ceiling aren’t even interesting—I miss Constance.

Finally, I get out of bed and walk over to the window. One thing that’s nice about living here is how clear and pretty the sky is. You can always see the moon and lots of stars. It’s still not worth it though.

When I look out the window, my gaze falls on the house next door to ours. Number 12 Locust Street. The lights are out in the house, but somehow I see movement in the windows. I can’t tell what room that is—the bedroom?

I can’t stop thinking about what happened at the beach. There’s something funny going on with the family next door. Why does Nico hate the Lowells so much? It’s so weird.

I hear a noise behind me. It’s a knock at the door. I run back to my bed, not wanting Mom or Dad to catch me wandering around my room in the middle of the night. I’m not sure if I should pretend to be asleep, but they probably hear me moving around, so I call out, “Come in.”

Slowly, the door cracks open. I blink in the darkness, not sure if I’m seeing right.

It’s Nico. And he’s holding a sleeping bag.

“Can I sleep here tonight, Ada?” he asks me.

“Sure,” I say. “Of course you can.”

I keep the lights out, but both of our eyes have adjusted to the dark. Nico lays his sleeping bag down on the floor next to my bed. Then he crawls inside. I lie down in my own bed.

“Good night, Nico,” I say.

“Good night, Ada.”

But I don’t close my eyes. I look over at Nico in the sleeping bag, and he is looking at me too.

And that’s when I notice his eyes are wet.

“Nico?” I say.

Except he doesn’t answer right away because he can’t stop crying. But after a few minutes, he tells me everything.

SEVENTY-ONE

“You can’t tell anyone,” Nico says to me before telling me the whole story. “Do you swear?”

“Yes.”

“Swear it, Ada.”

“I swear.”

He looks at me, takes a deep breath, and then he starts talking.

It started soon after we moved here. When Nico broke that window and started doing chores for the Lowells. The first time he went, it was just ordinary stuff like washing dishes or mopping the floor. But then the second time, he made a freaky discovery:

The Lowells have a tiny room that is identical to ours, also hidden below their staircase.

When he was vacuuming, Nico noticed the very edge of the door on the wall, mostly hidden behind a bookcase, and—being my troublemaker brother—he decided to push aside the bookcase, open the door, and go inside. But unlike the room under our staircase, this one was not empty.

“It was filled with toys,” he tells me. “Cool toys. Stuff that we could never afford. So… well, nobody was around, so I thought I could play with the toys just a little bit. But then Mr. Lowell caught me while I was playing with this really cool Transformers truck, and I dropped it and it broke.”

Mr. Lowell told Nico that the toys were collectors’ items, and the truck he broke had been very expensive. And now he owed the family thousands of dollars, plus the money for the stained-glass window he also broke since he had been playing instead of doing chores. Mom and Dad are always talking about how worried they are about money—I mean, they talk quietly so we can’t hear, but we always hear them. So Nico was scared about them having to pay all that money.

But Mr. Lowell came up with an idea. He told Nico that he was thinking about building some toys of his own, and if Nico would help him by playing with different toys and telling him what his favorites were, then he wouldn’t make our parents pay for the stuff he broke.

“So that’s what I was doing when I went over there,” Nico explains to me. “I wasn’t doing chores. I was playing in the little room. And Mr. Lowell was watching from the camera.”

Mr. Lowell explained that the door had to be closed when he was in there, because Mrs. Lowell would be mad about letting him play with the toys, so she couldn’t ever find out. He recorded what was happening using a camera up on the ceiling, and he watched. But then one day, Nico needed the bathroom really badly, and he couldn’t get out of the room. He was banging on the door, and nobody would let him out. He was panicking. By the time Mr. Lowell finally opened the door, Nico had wet his pants.