Magic Rats — Jess Mowry

Tumbleweed Terrace Desert View Homes, somewhere south of Tucson, Arizona - “A nice place to raise your kids,” as promised by a faded billboard usually used as a vulture perch - is broiling under a blazing brass sun. The land all around is empty except for cactus and sagebrush, mostly shades of rust and gray, and the only green for many miles are the squares of lawns in Tumbleweed Terrace, which, from a vulture's point of view, probably looks as alien as a place to raise your kids on Mars. Tumbleweed Terrace had burst upon the defenseless desert with snarling trucks and roaring bulldozers, screaming saws and thudding air hammers, during America's last housing boom, but then a bust had broken its back like a train running over a rattlesnake and the project has languished for over a decade with most of its houses unoccupied - those that have actually been built - while others are still only skeletons of slowly shriveling two-by-four bones. Dustin Rhodes and his mom and dad are not only one of the very few families who live in this nice suburban ghost town, but also the only black people. Dustin home-schools online, while his father, a Fed-Ex pilot, and his mother, a train dispatcher, are usually away; and Dustin has known mostly solitude for all his thirteen years, though he has, a computer, a love for reading, and a "not-dog" named Spot. Perhaps he thinks he's not really lonely, but after he shows kindness to an elderly Apache shaman, someone moves into the house next door. At first they appear to be only a middle-aged man-and-wife, friendly and seemingly nice, but Dustin soon discovers they seem to be hiding someone in their house. Dustin begins to investigate and comes to the conclusion that it must be a boy of around his own age… but why is he being hidden?