The street was lined with suburban homes, much like the ones on Candace's side of town. Vanessa checks the postcard in her hand again and looks back up. The addresses match.
Her knock on the door is answered by a pale brunette boy wearing a friendly expression and a large backpack. "You must be Vanessa!" he says enthusiastically.
"I am, actually. How did you…"
"Your dad put a picture of him and you on his nightstand," he explains, and her heart warms, cooled only slightly as he continues, "right next to his picture of him and Perry the Platypus."
"Figures. Are you one of the Murphys who live here?"
"Sure am; I'm Milo Murphy. Come on through! Your dad's out in the backyard making modifications to our shed."
"Hanging out in a backyard building stuff?" says Vanessa. "He should meet my friend Candace's brothers."
Milo's eyes light up. "Candace the sister of Phineas and Ferb Candace?"
"You know Candace and Ferb and Phineas?"
"Of course I do! We stopped an evil gang of Pistachions trying to take over the world together!"
Vanessa stares. "Wow, they really did keep that sleepover conversation light." By way of answering Milo's confused expression, she adds, "I talked to Candace and Ferb just last night, and neither of them said anything about being involved with that."
"Were you caught up in the chaos?" Milo opens the slider to the backyard and ushers her through.
"Nah, I was doing homework all day at my mom's place."
Milo's eyebrows furrow incredulously.
"Her walls are super soundproofed."
"Vanessa!" Doofenshmirtz calls happily. "You found me!"
"You sent a change-of-address card," she says, waving the postcard.
"He what?" yelps Milo.
"It's only a temporary change, while I get the, you know, sinkhole situation sorted out."
"You're staying until your building's rebuilt?" Milo asks.
"Shouldn't be more than two years. Three, tops."
"Hang on…."
Vanessa talks over Milo. "Dad, you can't sleep on somebody's couch for three years."
"Well, obviously. That's why I'm remodeling the shed; I'll be sleeping out here. I'll only be living in the house."
Vanessa casts a glance at the surprisingly silent Milo. His face is even paler now, and he's muttering about what somebody named Sara is going to think of all this.
A group of kids meanders around the hedge.
"Hey, Milo. Doctor D. Total stranger," greets a curly-haired girl.
"This is my daughter, Vanessa," Doofenshmirtz explains. "Vanessa, these are Milo's friends and some other girl."
"It's not some other girl, it's Amanda!" Milo protests.
Amanda puts her hands over her mouth. "Why is a pharmacist making a house call? Are you sick, Milo?"
"I'm not…I'm not a pharmacist, I'm a scientist."
"He gets that all the time, though," Vanessa concedes.
"What brings you here?" Milo asks, addressing Amanda alone.
"Hi, Zack," says the boy who had entered the backyard with Amanda. "Hi, Melissa."
Melissa elbows him.
"Danville is thinking about not granting the permit for Lard World to rebuild," Amanda explains. "I'm going around collecting signatures so they know it's still a popular destination for enjoyment and family togetherness."
"That's a petition I can get behind, one hundred percent! Let me at it."
Amanda hands Milo a clipboard with a pencil attached. The lead snaps, so she offers a pen, instead. As he takes it, the pen breaks in half and bleeds ink all over the paper. Undeterred, she tosses him a black crayon, in which he scrawls his name in the bottom signature space of the petition.
"Good thing you didn't have any other signatures on that page yet," he says as he returns her items.
"Proper planning. You were my first stop."
"We're going downtown to check out the new frozen yogurt place," offers Melissa. "Wanna join us?"
Amanda looks hesitant.
"I'd love to!" says Doofenshmirtz. "Vanessa, you can get a tour of the shed later."
Vanessa grabs him by the shoulders and turns him around. "I came all the way here; show me now. Have fun, guys! Nice meeting everybody!"
She grabs the handle to the shed, and it pops off in her hand and falls into the grass. "That's weird…."
"Probably not as weird as you might think," says Melissa.
A raccoon sprints across the yard, grabs the handle, races to the edge of the house, turns to nod at them, and continues on his way.
"Still not as weird as you might think," says Zack.
"I got it!" Milo whips off his backpack, takes out a screwdriver and a zip tie, and quickly opens the shed and loops the zip tie in place of the handle. "That oughta hold."
He waves and trots back to Amanda. "So, what do you say? Want to come on our froyo expedition?"
"I'd ask what could go wrong," she replies, "but I know it's 'anything.'"
Milo points at his backpack. "I'm ready for it!"
"We can drop the petition off at my house on the way so nothing happens to it," volunteers Melissa.
"Well, I suppose I could…" Amanda is saying as Vanessa shuts the shed door behind her and her father.
"Wow. It's dark in here."
"Of course it's dark, it's a shed. I only got here a few days ago."
"You usually work quicker."
"My building was destroyed; I've been depressed. And the Murphys have introduced me to this new television show called Doctor Zone, which is enlightening because of course I worked with him, not the real doctor, but the writer, except philosophically is the writer the real voice, or is it the actor…. What are you doing?"
Vanessa moves from peeking out from behind the shed door to pushing it open completely.
"It's okay, they're gone now."
"Why didn't you want to go with them?"
"Dad, they're a bunch of thirteen-year-olds we barely know. I don't think we were invited. Besides, I didn't want to get in the way of that love connection."
"Love connection?"
"That Milo kid has it bad for his friend Amanda."
"He said that?"
Vanessa shook her head. "Didn't need to. I'm really good at recognizing these things. Five for five in a row at calling it before couples actually get together."
"Are you saying you have the superpower of knowing when romantic attraction exists?" His eyes light up. "Now there's an Inator idea!"
She laughs. "It's intuition, not a superpower. I can just always tell who boys like."
"Most of them you hang around probably like you, I guess," he mutters.
"Don't worry, Dad. That's just fatherly bias talking."
Doofenshmirtz's upper lip curls. "Boys like that Johnny…he's not good enough for you."
"I'm not dating Johnny anymore."
"His loss. Completely. No loss whatsoever to you."
"You never like any of the guys I like."
"Nonsense! Just because I didn't like Johnny. Or Lance. Or Patrick."
"What if I dated somebody you knew? Like, I don't know…maybe your boss's son?"
Doofenshmirtz looks disgusted. "He's only ten years old. What…what are you going to do, wait til his eighteenth birthday party?"
"Gross, Dad, not Principal Lang's son! Major Monogram's son!"
Doofenshmirtz blinks. "I…I don't know what you mean."
"I know you've been doing some side work for O.W.C.A. I've seen you and Perry in your matching hats."
Her father still looks confused. "Francis has a son?"
"Monty?"
"The acrobat? Monty the acrobat is Francis' son? Well, what do you know. Guess there isn't anything in heredity."
"They look almost exactly…you know what, never mind. You're never going to like anybody I like, because I'm your baby girl, and nothing's good enough for me, and I didn't come to argue about my ability to make my own choices." She draws a deep breath and demands darkly, "Show me the shed."
Doofenshmirtz gives her the tour, which doesn't take long because it involves opening the door to the dusty shed and pointing out the places he wants to install windows, and what his plans are for all the landscaping equipment currently housed there. Vanessa is trying to think of a supportive response to her father's plan for an addition that resembles the top of his lost building when she gets a text.
"Oh, wow! They found him!"
"What is it?"
"Ferb and…I mean, some friends of mine went out to the building site today with metal detectors and found Norm."
"Fern?"
"Ferb."
"Why does she have a metal detector?"
"Ferb's a boy," she says absent-mindedly as she texts Candace back with the Murphys' address.
Doofenshmirtz's eyes narrow, and she scoffs. "Don't worry, not the kind of boy you need to be worried about. The young kind. Candace is going to drive Norm's head over this afternoon, along with some of the other things they found."
"Is Candace a boy?"
"No, Dad."
She volunteers to drive him over to Blueprint Heaven to get the plans for his shed addition. New blueprints were always a sure-fire distraction from any line of conversation that was getting annoying.
As they drive through the downtown area, she sees Milo and his friends sitting outside the frozen yogurt place. The awning is dripping with some dairy-related product, but the quartet is sitting beneath an umbrella and seems clean.
"What's going on over there?" Vanessa asks.
"Probably Murphy's Law. 'Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.' It runs in his family."
She looks askance at him. "Should you two be sharing the same spaces?"
"I told you, I'll be sleeping in the shed."
"Right."
She glances in her rearview mirror, catches a glimpse of Amanda touching Milo's arm while laughing, and smiles.
Maybe she does have a superpower.
