The Fiche List

Chapter Nine

6. Build a treehouse

   “No.”

“Sean!”

“Are you crazy?! No!”
“Well, thank you for that.”

“No, you are crazy. We can’t do this! I refuse to stoop to stealing.”

My mouth fell open. “You think I would steal?”
He gestured to the construction site. “What else do you expect me to believe?”
“Um, what we told you?” Duh. “I’m seriously offended you think I would steal.”

He shot me an exasperated look. “I’m sorry, Fiche. I don’t think that. I just don’t—“

“Yea of little faith! And yea of little hearing. We might need to drop by a clinic on the way home…”

Sean reached out to clip me around the ear. I ducked, giggling, and gestured to my brother, who was standing back and watching us, bemused. I’d told him to keep quiet. Surprising Sean never got old. “Jase knows a guy who works here and got him to ask if we could have any scrap materials. He put it in a pile for us to pick up…” I looked through the mesh of the gate and glanced around the site, looking for the board with pink tape wrapped around it. Jase said his friend collected everything he thought we could use to build our treehouse, from wood to that waterproof plastic stuff they wrap houses in. I was more than grateful. We’d been on the lookout for something like this, so we wouldn’t have to buy as much material. The three of us had been saving for months so we could do our bucket list. Stuff wasn’t cheap, so we had to try to spread out the funds for everything and not lose it all on a few individual items. Like the treehouse. “See? There. Now we just have to wait for John to get here and let us in.” I turned around and leaned back against the fence with my arms crossed.

Sean was now staring at me, bemused. “I don’t know how you do it, but every time…” he trailed off and didn’t finish his thought.

I smiled, guessing what he was thinking anyway. As I watched the road for John, I turned over our plans in my mind.

   Sean lived on the other side of town, where the backyards were bigger and your neighbours weren’t right under your nose (you couldn’t watch Gary Sussox’s TV through your bedroom window at Sean’s place. That was a luxury reserved for mine and Lea’s half of town. And one I found as a constant source of amusement when I couldn’t sleep. Oh, the things he’d watch… like what respectable man watches Desperate Housewives or The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills?? Just no. No). Sean’s backyard sported a perfect treehouse tree, and was therefore marked as the victim of this particular bucket list item. 

The poor thing didn’t know what it had coming. 

We were going to screw planks between the V in the middle of the tree to make the floor, and then build the rest of it, with our special modifications. It couldn’t just be a treehouse. That was so boring. 

A ute pulled up to the curb behind Jase’s and cut the engine. John had arrived. 

Since we knew how impossible it would’ve been trying to fit it all in Lea’s car, we’d roped Jase into taking us so we could use the bed of his ute to transport it all. And on top of that, we’d even managed to rope him into helping us build it. 

Small miracles did occur.

   Forty minutes later, we were standing around the base of the tree with the materials behind us. 

“So, how’re we going to do this, exactly?” Jase asked. 

“Screw those planks—“ I gestured to them— “up there in the V, and then we’ll go from there.”
“You guys don’t have any plans or anything?” he asked, not at all surprised.