Owen and Eleanor Meet the New Kid

by H. M. Bouwman

  “Owen and I are the most famous detectives in the universe,” said Eleanor. “I even have spy glasses.”

  “Binoculars?” asked Mom.

  “What are those?” Eleanor said.

  Dad went to the closet and got out an old pair of binoculars. If you put them to your face, everything far away got really big. It was actually very hard to see anything through them, but they made you look very detective-like. Eleanor asked to borrow them.

  “That’s fine,” said Dad. “But no spying through people’s windows.”

  As if she would.

  (But she had been thinking about it.)

  Well, she would just spy on things in the street and peek into the moving truck when it got here.

  As they ate, everyone had things to say about their day—what they learned in school, what they ate for lunch, what the walk to the bus was like, all of it. Finally, long after Eleanor was done eating and had started to get wiggly, supper was over.

  “My detecting skills say that we are having ice cream for dessert,” said Eleanor.

  “Hmm,” said Dad. “Really?”

  Eleanor ran to the freezer and opened the door. There was no ice cream inside.

  “Well, that’s one way to find out,” said Mom. “You could also ask your parents.”

  “Are we having ice cream for dessert?”

  “No.”

  As they cleared the table and Mom started washing dishes, Dad said, “Here’s a question: Does Eleanor know her spelling words for Monday? How would I find that out if I were a detective?”

  Eleanor shook her head slowly. Uuuuugh.

  “I’d give her a quiz,” said Aaron, grinning. “Come on, Ellie, I’ll run through the list with you. You can prove you know your words.”

  Eleanor proved she knew some of her words—eight out of ten. (She was pretty sure she would never, ever understand how spelling worked—if who and what and when and where and why all started with WH, then why didn’t how? Whow did spelling even make sense? On top of all that, would just wasn’t a fair word at all. Sneaky little L.)

  After the practice quiz with Aaron, Eleanor ran upstairs to see if Owen was done with supper.

  Owen and Michael and their dad were still eating, Owen at a normal speed and Michael very slowly. They were about to have dessert, so Owen’s dad phoned downstairs to see if it was okay for Eleanor to have some too. And since she hadn’t had dessert at their own supper, she got to have it with Owen.

  IT WAS ICE CREAM.

  Eleanor gasped when she saw the little bowls. “I’m an amazing detective!” Of course, then she had to explain what she had detected about their freezer, all the way from downstairs. She felt super smart. Exactly like a world-famous spy. Maybe she should put the googly eyes back on.

  “We were just talking about the new people before you got here,” said Owen. He took a bite of ice cream and chocolate syrup.

  “I knew that!” she said. “Because of my detective skills. What did you say about them?” She took a giant bite, and the syrup dripped a little bit on her chin.

  Usually Michael, who was five, was even messier than Eleanor, but today he was only taking tiny bites, smaller than Owen’s. He said, “The For Rent house isn’t for rent anymore.”

  “My dad met them this afternoon,” said Owen.

  They all looked at Owen’s dad, who was drinking milky coffee and not eating ice cream. Owen’s dad smiled and put his cup down. “I didn’t meet them; I just saw them for a second when I went for a run this afternoon. They were pulling into the alley with a few pieces of furniture. We waved at each other. When I stopped by to say hi on my way back from my run, they were already gone.”

  “Was it a flowered sofa?” said Eleanor. “In a pickup truck?”

  “Nope. A kitchen table and some chairs,” Owen’s dad said.

  “How many chairs?” said Eleanor.

  Owen’s dad frowned like he was trying to remember. “Maybe five?”

  “They waved,” said Owen. “That seems friendly.”

  “Did they have toys? Bikes?”

  Owen’s dad shook his head. “Not that I saw. But I’d guess they’re moving in for real this weekend, so we’ll find out soon.”

  “Well,” said Eleanor, “my detective skills tell me that they are old people who sit on a flowered sofa all day. But we need to detect more to be sure. It’s also possible, since they have five chairs, that they are a mom and dad with triplets who are the same age as me and Owen, and the triplets know how to shoot targets with a bow and arrow and they also know how to build tree houses, and they’ll build a tree house in their backyard and then they’ll shoot an arrow over to our tree house—because we’ll build a tree house in our backyard, too—and the arrow has a string attached to it, and then we catch our end of the string and the triplets hold onto their end of the string, and we tie the string between the two tree houses, and then we have a high-wire act between the two tree houses and we all learn to do tricks on the high wire, and when the circus comes to town, the circus owner asks us all to star in their show.”

  Owen’s dad said, “That’s a very long, very specific theory.”

  “I’m a detective,” said Eleanor. “It’s my job to find out if it’s true or not.” She lifted her bowl and tipped it to get the last drips of melted ice cream into her mouth.

  Owen ate his last spoonful and nodded.

  “We could wait for them to move in this weekend and then ask them if they have triplets . . .”

  Michael’s spoon clattered into his bowl, which wasn’t even empty. His cheeks were red. “I’m not hungry. Can I eat my ice cream later? Can you save it for me in the fridge so it doesn’t get melty?” He sounded tired.

  “Oh,” said Owen’s dad. “Of course.” He put the ice cream in the freezer, and by the time he came back, Michael had gone into the room he shared with Owen and crawled into his bottom bunk bed. Their dad went to take Michael’s temperature.

  “I deduce,” said Eleanor, “that your brother is sick.”

  Chapter 4

  Owen

  Michael was still sick on Saturday morning, so Owen was supposed to be quiet—which was fine, since he and Eleanor wanted to play outside anyway. Or, as Eleanor said, they wanted to be detectives out in the wild.

  “I think this is actually a lab coat,” said Owen. They were standing in the backyard. Eleanor was squinting around the googly eyes in her spy glasses, and Owen was rolling up his sleeves again on the Dr. Frankenstein jacket. “Like scientists use.”

  “But scientists aren’t as cool as detectives,” said Eleanor.

  Really, Owen thought scientists sounded pretty cool too.

  Eleanor twirled around and fell over into the tiny remains of the leaf pile, which was now really just crumbs mixed into the brown grass. (Aaron had bagged most of the leaves last night with Owen’s dad after supper.) She sat up and pushed the googly eyed glasses back up her nose. Owen wasn’t sure how she could see anything around the googly eyes. “These glasses aren’t working very well.”

  “I wear glasses all the time,” said Owen. “Real glasses. They don’t make you a detective. I mean, you can be a detective without them too.”

  Eleanor studied him, ducking her head and squinting around the googly eyes. Then she took off the fake glasses and put them in her pocket. “I guess it’s better to be a spy who can see.”

  Owen sat down next to her on the leaf crumbs. “What’s our plan? Do we watch the new people?”

  Eleanor said, “We’ll sneak down the alley when we hear the truck come, and we’ll watch them unload. But what can we do until then?” She jumped up like she wanted to spy right now.

  Owen said, “We have our notebooks. Maybe we should write down all our clues so far.”

  Eleanor started turning wobbly cartwheels across the lawn. “The family is super old. That’s my first clue.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a clue,” Owen said. But he wrote it down. “Why do you think they’re old?”


  “Flowered sofa. Only old people buy flowered sofas.”

  “But we have a flowered sofa. We got it from our grandma.”

  “Okay . . .” said Eleanor, thinking between cartwheels. “Then another theory is that they have a grandma who gave them a flowered sofa.”

  “Or they could have bought it at the thrift store.” That was where Owen and Michael’s dresser and bunk bed came from. “Or maybe they like flowers on sofas.”

  Eleanor wrinkled her nose as if that option didn’t make sense at all. “Now watch!” She ran across the lawn and did a flying side kick. Run-run-run-run-jump-KICK-land-fall. Then she ran back and did it again the other direction. Run-run-run-run-jump-KICK-land-fall.

  Owen thought some more. Then he wrote down “CLUE” in the notebook. Under “CLUE” he wrote “flowered sofa.” And next to that he wrote a list of all the things that a flowered sofa could mean. “My dad also saw five chairs and a table.”

  “Which means parents and triplets.” Eleanor ran back and forth across the lawn. It made Owen feel a tiny bit tired to watch her, but he knew she liked to run and jump while she talked. Running and jumping helped Eleanor think.

  Owen wrote down “table and five chairs” on the CLUE side of the page, and then wrote “triplets” next to it, and also wrote down two more possible explanations: “five people in the family (not triplets)” and “extra chairs for visitors.”

  “And we know about the old man and the teenager,” said Eleanor, “because I saw them in the truck.”

  Owen wrote down the old man and the teenager as a clue, and then he added two theories: “Teenager is just helping” and “Teenager lives here.” Then he paused because he had a big question.

  “Do we . . . ? Eleanor . . . ?” He couldn’t think of a good way to say what he wanted to say. And maybe it wasn’t a detective question. But it was important.

  Eleanor finished her kick and her fall and her getting up, and then she skipped back to Owen. “Do we what?”

  Owen put the notebook down and looked up at her. The sun made a bright halo behind her head, so he couldn’t see her face very well. He needed to ask his question, even if it sounded weird or bad. Even if he felt kind of mean saying it—because it didn’t sound very friendly to him. “I know this isn’t a clue and it doesn’t belong in the notebook. But I don’t exactly know how I feel. I mean, our block is really nice the way it is. Do we want there to be kids in this family? Like, a new kid who is our age? Do we want more kids in the neighborhood? Or do we not?”

  Chapter 5

  Eleanor

  Eleanor was surprised by Owen’s question. She had never thought about whether they wanted a new kid in the neighborhood. She had just been excited to find out all about the people moving in and to try out her spy skills. And now that Owen asked the question, she realized that maybe they didn’t want a new kid their age. Did they? She wasn’t sure. Things were good just the way they were, like Owen said.

  On the other hand, a new kid might be really good at playing with her when Owen wasn’t around. A new kid might follow all her directions—which not even Owen did.

  On the other other hand, a new kid might not want to play the same games that she and Owen liked. A new kid might not even know who Sherlock Vader was, and a new kid might not want to play laser-sword fighting or superheroes or spy. A new kid might be really different from them.

  She decided to put her googly-eyed glasses on to think about the problem, but the glasses had fallen out of her pocket sometime during all the cartwheels. They glinted at her from the grass. She ran over, picked them up, and jammed them on her nose.

  The glasses did not help. She didn’t feel smarter.

  “So, do we want a new kid?” Owen asked again.

  Eleanor said, “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  Eleanor’s mom called her back inside because Eleanor hadn’t made her bed or picked up her room, which, according to her mom, she was supposed to do every Saturday—actually, she was supposed to do it every day, according to her martial arts teacher. She usually did something in between what her mom wanted and what her martial arts teacher wanted. But today she’d been too excited about being a detective, and she’d forgotten to do any picking up at all. Her room was kind of a mess.

  Owen had already picked up his room last night before bed, because that was his family rule, so he helped Eleanor shove her toys into the closet while she made her bed and put her art supplies away. Alicia was finally back from her sleepover, and she was lying on top of her bed with her eyes closed like she was tired. “Try to be quiet,” she said. “I only got three hours of sleep last night.”

  “It was a sleepover,” said Eleanor. Did Alicia not understand the word?

  “We were up talking really late,” Alicia said, yawning. “And watching a movie. And we did our fingernails.”

  Eleanor picked up Alicia’s limp hand and studied it. Her nails were super pale pink and sparkly. Usually Eleanor loved pink sparkly things. But if you could paint your nails any color in the universe, why wouldn’t you make them look like bloody claws of death? She didn’t understand Alicia at all.

  Owen’s face looked like he didn’t think pale pink was the right color either. With her spy skills, Eleanor just knew he must be thinking of bloody claws of death too.

  But what if there was a new kid in their neighborhood who didn’t understand about bloody claws of death? What if the new kid thought super pale pink was the right color for fingernails?

  Eleanor shuddered. “Let’s go back outside and wait for the big truck. We need to figure out who exactly is moving into our neighborhood.”

  They hid under the big pine tree in their front yard. The pine tree was on the corner of the yard nearest to the For Rent house, and it had huge drooping branches that came down around them like a tent. Owen and Eleanor could both stand up under the tree if they stood near the trunk. And they could sit on the pine-needle-covered dirt that, if you used your imagination, felt just like a soft carpet. The branches were thick with needles. If someone stood outside the tree and stared at it, that person would only see the very bottom of them sitting on the dirt—and even then, only if the person was looking right at them and knew they were there. Owen and Eleanor tested out the hiding spot before they got under the tree, making sure it was really hidden. It was a good spot for making scientific observations. The new people would never think to look under a tree while they were moving in.

  They sat under the tree for ten whole minutes before the moving truck showed up. Owen had an old watch of his dad’s in his pocket, so they knew how long they were sitting there.

  Ten minutes was a long time.

  Ten minutes was long enough to build a mountain out of pine needles, make little pinecone people march up the mountain on a journey, and have a horrible storm blow them down the other side of the mountain. It was long enough to build a tiny cabin out of twigs for more pinecone people. It was long enough for one of you (Eleanor) to run back inside for Dad’s binoculars and bring them out. It was long enough to realize that when you’re hiding under a pine tree, you can’t really see much with binoculars and mostly you are looking at pine needles. It is long enough to pull a magnifying glass out of your pants pocket (Owen) and study pine needles, and it is long enough to realize that pine needles under a magnifying glass look exactly the same as regular pine needles, just bigger. It is long enough to play hangman two times on Owen’s notebook paper—and long enough for each person to win one time. And it is long enough to start getting bored.

  Finally, after ten minutes passed and Eleanor was just about ready to say she was done being a detective, something happened.

  The big moving truck arrived.

  And the old man and the teenager got out of it.

  And then something else happened.

  A car arrived, right behind the big truck.

  And a woman and girl got out of it.

  A girl about their size. A new kid.

  Chapter 6
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  Owen

  The first thing Owen noticed about the new kid was that she was wearing a scarf on her head that covered up all her hair and a long skirt that went all the way to the ground. The second thing he noticed was that her skin was brown, darker than Eleanor’s.

  Or maybe he noticed her scarf and her skin color the other way around—things were happening so fast, he couldn’t tell.

  He also noticed that she wasn’t smiling. She stood with her arms wrapped around herself like she was cold. Or maybe unhappy?

  The woman (the mom?) was wearing a scarf over her hair too, and a long skirt just like the girl. The teenage boy and the old man (who did not look that old to Owen, not like a grandpa age, anyway) did not wear scarves or hats on their heads. They had brown skin like the woman and the girl, and they had short, very dark curly hair—except where the man’s hair was gray.

  Eleanor whispered, “Four people. One of them is a kid.” She raised the binoculars to her face, focusing for a few seconds before wrinkling her nose and dropping them. The binoculars clunked against her chest on their string while she peered through the branches with her bare eyes.

  Owen nodded, then realized Eleanor couldn’t hear a nod. “Yeah. A kid who looks like she is our age.”

  The man took a key out of his pocket and unlocked the door, and the four new people went inside. The door shut. They were inside the For Rent house.

  Owen and Eleanor stayed hiding under the tree, just in case the new people came out. They sat on the pine needles, and Owen took out his notebook and wrote down their clues and observations. “Make it sound detective-y,” said Eleanor.

  Owen thought maybe she wanted to write it down herself, but when he held the notebook out to her, Eleanor shook her head. She was scooping needles into a pile.

  So Owen wrote down the people’s hair and their clothes and their head scarves. He showed Eleanor the clues.