The Dangerfields

Chapter Two

"Oh, crap," I say quietly. Livia was right. I spoke too soon, and now we have to deal with whoever is probably messing up our treehouse.

I see a boy stick his head out the window. Livia and I keep walking towards the tree, as if we hadn't seen him.

    A couple of seconds later, I hear the door in the floor of the treehouse open, and the boy starts to climb down the rope. I try to contain my relief. If there's only one boy, maybe we can explain that this is our fort, and he will leave.

    My relief quickly vanishes when another boy starts climbing down. And another boy. And another one after that. Now, I'm getting worried about our chances at reclaiming our fort. One last person starts down the rope, and he closes the door behind him, and I hope that means he is the last one.

Once all five of the boys have climbed down, they turn to me and Livia, and walk towards us. They stop about ten meters away from the treehouse, and four meters away from us. The pine needles that cover the ground muffle the sounds of our feet as Livia and I come to a stop between two pine trees.

    I study the trespassers. They look like they are about our age - fifteen, so I decide that they must be new around here, because I would have recognized them from our tenth-grade class at school. They all look so alike that I realize they must be related. Their hair and whether they wear glasses or not is the only way I am able to tell them apart.

I am shaken out of my daze when they start questioning us.

    "What are you doing here?" Asks the first boy, obviously the leader. He has blonde hair and wears his jeans hanging low, as if it will make him popular.

His question irritates me. He has no right to come into our treehouse, then ask us what we are doing here.

    But, I push my frustrations aside, and give him a half smile. "This is our treehouse, and we came to hang out in it," I say, hoping to convince him to leave.

    But the leader frowns and says, "Well, we were here first, and as I'm sure you've heard, finder's keepers, losers weepers."

    This makes me angry, and when I speak I can hear the frustration in my voice. "I was hoping we could be mature about this.This is our fort. We built it when we were six, and it has been ours for nine years."

    They all laugh at that, and another boy with brown hair and glasses, through bouts of laughter, exclaims, "Oh dear! We stole your treehouse! Go home to your Daddy and cry, little girl."

    This makes me so mad, I clench my fists and bite my tongue to keep myself from doing something I might regret. Livia looks at me then back at the group. "I wouldn't insult her like that, unless you have a death wish."

    That makes the boys laugh even harder. "What's a little girl going to do to us?" Asks the leader.

    I fight to keep calm and not go into kick-ass mode, but the daddy comment hit me hard. I don't need to be reminded that my dad left because he didn't want me. But I take a deep breath and say, "If you even knew half of the things I could do to you, you would all be running for the hills right now."

    By now they have all stopped laughing, but that statement has them all doubled over clutching their stomachs as they laugh the hardest they have yet.

    "What's the worst you can do, throw us a tantrum?" Laughs a boy with brown hair and freckles. "Come on, guys, let's teach these little girls a lesson to never come near our tree house ever again." One by one, all five of them kneel to the ground, grab a fist-sized rock, and get ready to throw them at us.