The Great Treehouse War

The Last Day of Fourth Grade
a year before what happened happened
There are a lot of things you should probably know to understand why a bunch of kids decided to climb up a tree- house and not come down. But to really understand it, you’d have to go way back in time, and peek through the living room window of a girl named Winifred Malladi-Maraj, on her last day of fourth grade. Since time travel isn’t possible, you’ll just have to picture things. So picture this:
After walking home from school, Winnie stepped through the front door, with her backpack over her shoulder. Winnie’s parents were sitting on the living room couch, with their hands in their laps. They were watching the front door, like they’d been waiting for their daughter for a long time.
Winnie pulled off her backpack and dropped it in the doorway. Buttons, who is the world’s greatest cat, wove his way between Winnie’s legs, like he knew she was about to need snuggling. “Mom?” Winnie said, squinting her eyes at her parents on the couch. “Dad?” She could tell right away that something weird was going on.
It’s probably important to know that Winnie’s parents have never been exactly normal. Like, instead of playing board games after dinner, the way some families did, Winnie’s dad-a biologist-might sit her down for a slide show about his latest research on the beneficial properties of bat guano, which only made Winnie wish she’d never eaten dinner at all. Or Winnie’s mom-a mathematician-might try to explain her current work on the Conway’s thrackle conjecture, which only made Winnie wish she’d never grown ears.
(Once, Winnie made the mistake of asking if she and her parents could play Boggle after dinner, and afterward she’d had to sit through a two-hour presentation of all of her parents’ many awards and grants-none of which, they informed Winnie, had been won playing Boggle-and a four-hour argument about whether or not Winnie’s dad had more awards than Winnie’s mom because there were simply more prizes for biologists than there were for mathematicians.)
(Winnie never asked about Boggle again.)
But finding her parents waiting for her on the couch to- gether seemed especially weird to Winnie. Because, normally, Winnie’s parents weren’t even home when she got out of school. Normally, Winnie started her homework all by herself and then heated water on the stove exactly at 5:55 p.m., so the pot would be boiling and ready to put pasta in as soon as they got home. (Winnie’s parents were very precise about mealtimes.)
(They were very precise about a lot of stuff.)
Another weird thing Winnie noticed that afternoon was the way her parents were sitting. While she was stand- ing in the doorway with Buttons weaving between her legs, she realized that she hadn’t ever seen both of her parents on hadn’t the same couch before. When they watched television or sat with guests, Winnie’s mom usually squished herself against one couch arm, while her dad sat in the recliner on the far side of the room.
“What’s going on?” Winnie asked. Even Buttons let out a confused mew?
“Come sit down,” Winnie’s mom replied, patting the couch cushion between herself and Winnie’s dad.
“Yes,” Winnie’s dad agreed. (That was another weird thing, Winnie noticed. Her parents never agreed.) “Have a seat. We marked a spot for you.”
And that was the weirdest thing of all. There was a tiny X of masking tape stuck to the center of the middle couch cushion. Her parents, Winnie realized as she stepped closer, had measured out a spot for her, so that she’d be sitting exactly evenly between them-not one millimeter closer to one than the other.