Natalie stared at the ornate dollhouse on the floor across from her bed. She remembered when her grandmother gave it to her forever ago. She didn’t ask for it, and the dolls were creepy looking. Even her My Little Ponies didn’t like to use that house – or at least she pretended they didn’t when she used to play with her My Little Ponies. A brief smile of memory fought its way to her face. Then She sighed. What eighth grader still had a doll house? “Not this one,” she said aloud.  She got up and headed to the garage where she raided the packing stuff for bubble wrap, a couple of folded cardboard boxes, and packing tape. Back in her room, she spent the better part of the morning wrapping the house with the dolls inside it, and constructing an elaborate carboard sarcophagus around the two-story house with the boxes, expending most of the roll of packing tape to keep it all firmly in place.

Her mom ducked her head in at one point when Natalie was securing a cardboard flap across the second-floor dormer windows. “What are you doing?”

Natalie sighed dramatically and said, “Eighth graders don’t have doll houses, mom.”

Her mom raised her eyebrows but left without saying a word.

Covering it had been a frustratingly long process, but getting it out of the room and down the stairs proved to be another thing entirely. Too heavy and awkwardly large, she pushed it across the carpet in her room until she reached the hardwood floor of the hallway where she slid it onto a runner and dragged that across the hardwood floor until the stairs. From there she descended the stairs backwards, ahead of the mummy-wrapped dollhouse as she guided it down the steps. She stole her brother’s skateboard for the journey from the bottom of the stairs to the garage, and in the garage, she guided it to a corner. She’d ask her dad for a better place for it when he got back from golf.

Back in her room she climbed back into bed to admire the empty corner of the room. The dollhouse had occupied that spot for so many years, the empty spot seemed glaring. But, she told herself, a good glaring. An eighth-grade glaring – and that was just fine.

* * *

Natalie woke with a start. She heard a noise, or thought she did, but when she listened she couldn’t hear anything. She reached over to turn on the light, but her arm was stuck. She tried her other arm, but it, too was held fast. She tried to move her legs, but she couldn’t budge them. The light she had intended to turn on switched on by itself. She looked over and saw the figure of the boy doll from the dollhouse on the night stand beneath the lamp switch. He stared back at her and she watched him walk from the nightstand, leap gracefully to the bed, and move to a thin cord that she now could see ran from the side of the bed and over her to the other side. He plucked the taught cord and it hummed like a guitar string. She felt pressure on her body and looked down to see the mother and daughter securing a cord around her leg.

She started to freak out and opened her mouth to scream, but as soon as she opened her mouth something was jammed into it – a sock? Eww. She frantically looked around and saw the father doll just to the right of her shoulder – he must have been the one to jam the sock in her mouth. He climbed up her shoulder like a mountaineer, and then walked over and stood on her clavicle with his arms folded across his chest. The other dolls – the mother, the sister and her brother, even the grandmother scrambled up onto her torso and stood behind him. The father doll shook its head and pointed to the empty corner where the dollhouse had been.

* * *

Natalie’s mom poked her head in her daughter’s room and saw her carefully removing the bubblewrap from around the dollhouse, surrounded by pieces of cardboard and tape. “I thought eighth graders don’t have dollhouses.”

“This one does,” Natalie said.