Becoming Ellen by Shari Shattuck Page A

Temerity were the only people actually standing or walking on the wide sidewalk. The bus stop consisted of a covered shelter with a bench and a large map of the bus system. Just that—there were no ads, no trash in the gutters, no graffiti.
    And then even the reassuring presence of the bus abandoned her as it pulled away, and Ellen found herself standing in a strange new world.

9
    A ll righty, then,” Temerity said as they stood stranded on a sidewalk with nothing edging it but grass and trees. Ellen felt marooned, lost, and utterly forsaken, except for Temerity.
Temerity,
she thought,
isn’t afraid of having no boundaries.
She felt the shiver of jealous fear.
    â€œWe have to walk from here.” Temerity unfolded her stick. “What do the directions say?”
    â€œIt says go south on Winston and take the second left on Florita,” Ellen told her, swallowing her dismay. She turned in a circle. In the city you could tell which way was south by the street numbers getting bigger or smaller, but there were no street numbers anywhere in sight and the next road sign was too far away to make it out. “How do we know which way is south?”
    Temerity pointed up. “It’s winter, late afternoon, the sun sets in the west. So . . .” She turned until the weak warmth of the sun fell full on her face, then pointed a finger to her left. “That way!” she announced.
    They went south. Ellen realized very quickly that there were no such things as “blocks” in the suburbs. She felt like they’d been hiking for miles when they finally turned left into a community of homes. Ellen stared at the similar brick houses, all two-story, with lots of windows. Of course Ellen had seen this kind of suburb on television and in photos, but this was her first actual visit, and it was like a cartoon come to life. Everything seemed so . . . endless. Most of the houses actually had their own
trees
. Full grown, glorious
trees
. It had never occurred to Ellen before that individuals would own trees. Plants of course you could buy, lots of people had plants or small potted trees even, they carried those at Costco, but something thirty feet tall? She wondered why Costco didn’t sell them; they sold everything else. She would have enjoyed having a big oak tree in the store, though dusting it would be a challenge.
    â€œHow are you doing?” Temerity asked as they took a right onto a curving street called Lilac Road.
    â€œUh . . . Okay. It’s really far away from . . . everything.” Ellen was fighting down her open-space panic. It was easier to hide when you weren’t the only one.
    â€œHave you ever been out here before?” Temerity asked.
    â€œNo. I’ve never actually been out of the city. It smells nice, I guess.” Ellen would have felt safer if she could crawl under something.
    Temerity giggled. “Yeah, that it does. Okay, we should be getting close. What’s the address, 3250 Lilac, right?”
    A glance at the sheet in her hand confirmed this and Ellen thought to ask, “What are we going to do when we get there?”
    â€œScope it out, of course,” Temerity said.
    In a few minutes they had come to the house, which was the last one on the dead-end street. After she had taken a look at it, Ellen said, “There are trees all behind and beside the house. I think that if we hide there, we’ll be able to see into the windows on the side of the house.”
    Walking past the house and driveway, they took a sharp left into the trees at the end of the street. Pushing through a bit of light shrubbery, they positioned themselves beneath the canopy of leaves and pine needles, where they were shielded from anyone inside the house. It smelled even better here, though Ellen thought a whiff of truck exhaust might have gone a good ways toward calming her nerves, every one of which had split ends. The trees edged a