Squizzle whimpers. “Nellie, I think I might be imagining animals again,” Eli whispers
What?” Eli says.
Nellie shuts her eyes. She has to be dreaming. She has to be. Maybe she banged her head in the storm and knocked herself out, and now she’s lying on the ground in the middle of the woods behind her house.
But when she opens her eyes again, there is no sign of the woods, or her house, or even the treehouse where they’d been exploring before Eli’s squirrel friend, Squizzle, knocked a little glass globe off a string and broke it. Nellie isn’t wearing her sweatshirt anymore. Instead, she’s wrapped in a thick coat she’s never seen before. Eli has a matching one, and even Squizzle is wearing a tiny parka. A hole in the back lets his fluffy tail poke through. Squizzle chitters, shivering in the coat, and climbs onto Eli.
The worst part is the snow.
It stretches on for miles. When Nellie sits up, she can see nothing else: just snow and ice and pale blue water crashing between the ice in the distance. It looks like one of those puzzles that she does with Eli sometimes, with a thousand pieces that all sort of look the same. But even she wouldn’t do one with snow.
Nellie hates the snow. When she was five, there was a huge snowstorm in her neighborhood. After the snow had settled, everyone ran outside to play, to build forts and have snowball fights and play hide-and-seek. Nellie had hidden at the edge of a ravine in the woods. She fell into a snow bank and was in so deep that she couldn’t get out. No one could find her for hours. She’d gotten so cold and wet that she’d been sick for days. She missed the rest of the snow days and a week of kindergarten. Since then, she’s always stayed inside when it snows.
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