The Last Train Home

Chapter Fifty

"You can finally see what you're doing," Alec said, trying to hand me a plank of wood.

"I could see what I was doing before."

"No, you couldn't. You were constantly moving your hair off your face."

"Shut up and hand me the piece of wood."

Alec grinned and lifted the plank of wood a little higher so I could grab onto it. "You know I'm right."

The day after our trip to the lake, I headed up to the Thompson farm to accept Mrs Thompson's offer of a haircut. She had cut it back to its old length and it finally felt like a weight had been lifted, literally. I only ever saw growing my hair as an experiment so it was nice to have my old length back. It also meant that I wasn't spending most of my day pushing my hair out of my eyes and I could tie it back with a ripped piece of fabric rather than an assortment of pins that I usually ended up losing.

Having somehow overheard Alec's comment, Eva had teased me about it when she saw me in the village a few days later. Since we were in public, I had to refrain from hitting her, especially since I had tried my hardest to ignore Alex's comment. I didn't know why he had said it or what he meant by I, nor did I have the desire to find out. First, there was the small jolt of energy when he grabbed me - the second time that had happened - then the comment about my hair. Although I did want to accept that Eva might have been right, it was starting to look like she was.

I tried to ignore it and instead threw myself back into working on the treehouse. With my birthday behind us, Alec and I had started on the roof. It was certainly turning into one of the hardest parts of building the treehouse. I was perched on a branch just above the shell of the treehouse with Alec passing me planks of wood from inside. He had the better of the two jobs, but I was better with a hammer and that was an achievement in my book. Still, balancing precariously on a tree branch was not how I wanted to be. We were so close to finishing and neither of us wanted to get hurt until we were finished.

"We're so close to finishing, I can almost taste victory," Alec said. He stared up at me from the treehouse, watching me slide the plank of wood into place.

"Don't say that, you'll jinx it."

"Jinx what?"

I pulled the hammer and some nails out of my toolbelt. "Us finishing this thing."

"How would me being positive jinx finishing the treehouse?"

"Because something might go wrong. Dad always told me to never say something was going well because it usually ended up going wrong immediately after."

Alec frowned at me. "That's a weird superstition to have."

"Not really. At least it doesn't seem weird to me."

"Alright, no more positivity. I don't want the Vaughn family superstition to come true."

It wasn't a superstition, not really, but it was something that had happened on more than one occasion. There had been a few times before I started to believe Dad when I would come home from school and tell him that I think I did well on my reading comprehension test. I would be so excited, talking about how easy the questions were and that I might have finally achieved a decent mark. Of course, that never happened and I would always end up disappointed when I failed. After a while, I stopped trying to be positive about it in the hopes that Dad might have been right. He wasn't.

Still, it had almost become a family tradition to never talk about how well something was going, just in case. Dad had even jinxed himself once when he had been fixing the roof. He had looked at me said that the job had gone rather smoothly, but the moment the words left his lips, he dropped his farm and damaged several of the tires we had already fixed. I took that as a sign to never tempt the fates and hadn't ever tried to be positive about completing a task since. Several accidents might have been avoided by that action.