Tale of Treeo: Chapter 15

Eli: So we finally made our way back to the treehouse, and it was exactly as amazing as we remembered!

Nellie: But right after we started to explore, Squizzle got us in big trouble.

Squizzle: I knocked over a snow globe, that’s all! What’s the worst that could happen?

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.