There’s a noise behind me, and I turn around slowly. Somebody’s jumping on the trampoline—it makes a sound like a rattle, but there’s also a kind of twangy noise, like picking a guitar. It’s a girl with short yellow hair. She’s wearing jeans but nothing on her feet, which even from where I’m sitting look dirty. It’s kind of hypnotizing, watching her go up and down—she goes pretty high. But then someone calls out, “Lunchtime!” and for a second I think it’s my mom, but it’s not. She’s still lying in the grass, but she sits up now and says, “Seriously, where’s Ben?”

“I don’t know,” Granma tells her, getting up. She sounds a little worried now, too.

“Ben!” Mom calls out.

Granma goes in the house and comes back out again. “He’s not in his room,” she says. “He’s not in the bathroom.”

“Ben!” Mom calls again. For a minute, they both go in the house—I can hear them calling my name, a little fainter now, and sometimes louder. I don’t know why I don’t say anything, I just don’t. Then Mom walks into the garden again, wearing shoes and a button-up shirt over her swimsuit. She goes to the shed to get out a bike, but she’s still shouting my name. The girl on the trampoline next door has gone inside, and I step out of the bamboo hedge.

“Jesus, Ben,” Mom says. She lets go of the bike, which falls down on the grass. “Where the heck were you? You scared the daylights out of me.”

“Just here,” I say. There are bamboo leaves in my hair, and my face feels dusty with dirt.

“What were you doing in there?” Mom says, and Granma comes out again. “He’s here, he’s here,” Mom tells her. “He was hiding in the bamboo.”

“I wasn’t hiding!”

“Then what were you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“How long were you there for?” Mom asks.

“I don’t know. I was just . . . making a den,” and I show her the saw.

“Jesus, Ben,” Mom says again, and then sort of hangs her head. “Calm down, everybody’s okay.” She’s talking to herself, and laughs. “Give me that for starters,” she tells me, and takes the saw away. “Where’d you find that?”

“In Granma’s shed.”

“It’s fine, Jenny. He’s fine,” Granma says. She’s standing on the back porch, holding the screen door in her hands. “Come on in, it’s lunchtime anyway.”

But as we walk inside, Mom turns to me again. “How long were you sitting there?” she asks quietly.

“I don’t know. A while. All morning.” But she doesn’t have time to respond before Granma tells me to wash my hands before sitting down to eat.

After that, I start hanging out in the den. Granma lets me take cups and plates out there, and even a little dingy rug from the front porch. I lay it on top of the old dead leaves, for something to sit on. Sometimes I take a book out there. It’s a good place to read—the bamboo stalks make tiger stripes of sunshine and shade. Nobody bothers me. That’s the funny thing about being on your own. Even though I get bored after a while, I don’t really like it when people . . . interrupt me, even though I’m not really doing anything important.