Love At Second Sight

Chapter Five: Hammer Time

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     Jonah covered my eyes as we got out of his car. “Did you guys get me a car?” I asked, being more eager than I’ve ever been.

  I heard him chuckle. “Lucy, you survived your allergies, not cancer. We didn’t go exactly all out.”

  He removed his hands from my eyes and I looked in front of me. Jonah joined my group of friends by a large oak tree. They had planks of wood all in front of them and tool belts around their waists. My eyes grew wide when I realized what they were doing.

  “Oh my god!” I exclaimed, running up to them with a giant smile on my face. “You’re building a tree house!”

  Mason ran his hand over the tree. “It’s what we’ve wanted to do since we were twelve, remember?” He said, looking up at the millions of leaves above him.

“How can I forget?” I responded.

  “Well, we thought that after seven years, we should get started on that goal,” Jessie told me as she grabbed on to one of the tree’s branches and swung back and forth.

  “The landlord actually let you guys use this tree?!” I asked, knowing that all of this was too good to be true and there had to be a bummer-side to it.

  “Actually,” McKinley began, swinging next to Jessie. “She asked us to build it for the apartment.” She hoisted herself up on to the branch and laid her head on the trunk. “She said she was tired of getting complaints from people being annoyed with the screaming kids, so she thought it’d be a good idea if we built a tree house for them to play in.”

  “Plus, she’s paying us twenty dollars per hour for this,” Jonah added. “We might as well work as slowly as possible so we can get as much moola as possible.”

  I laughed and then I went to join them near the tree. It was huge, seeming as if it just got taller and taller, never ending. Reaching the heavens, passing through clouds. I couldn’t help but imagine a giant living up on the top of the tree like in Jack and the Beanstalk.

  “So, how about we get started?!” Drew suggested. “It’ll take a long time to finish this, so we might as well get the work started ASAP.”

  And we did. Mason went to fetch me another tool belt and we spent the whole entire day working on the tree house. Even when evening came along, we didn’t quit. I had to admit, I’d most probably hang out with the kids in the tree house. By the looks of the blueprint it was going to be awesome. It had a staircase for the toddlers that couldn’t climb ladders and the main part was almost the size as a king sized bedroom. From one branch, there was a thick rope with a knot at the end that could be used as a swing.

  It was fabulous

***

  I had spent a whole week with my friends working my butt off trying to get this tree house finished. So far we had gotten the staircase finished and Jonah and I at the moment were working on the floor at the moment.

  “I hope we finish this before winter,” I said as I used a hammer to nail a nail into the wood. “It would suck if we would have to work on this during the winter.”

  “Agreed,” Jonah said, removing the nail that he was holding between his teeth and nailing it into the correct spot.

  Just then, we heard a high pitched, “It’s true!” We both looked up to see three blond kids running towards us with huge smiles on their faces.

  “I can’t believe it!” One with very curly hair exclaimed as she stared at the tree house. It looked as if she were about nine or ten by her height. Her jaw had dropped when she saw us, revealing a small gap between her teeth.