Wish You Were Here, Liza

by Robin Wasserman

  That was the bad news. The good news was that for some reason, when Kirsten went off with the grown-ups, Jake stuck with us. (You know the reason, an eager little voice in my head said. He’s hanging around because he likes you.) Well, technically he didn’t stay with us. More like a few steps behind. He kept his earbuds in, and his head down. It was like we were all supposed to pretend that he was just a stranger who randomly ended up going to exactly the same places we did.

  Not that you’d know it from the photographic record. Wherever I pointed my camera, Jake was careful to be somewhere else. I got an excellent shot of Caleb banging a gavel in the old courthouse, Dillie with her head and hands locked in stockades in the town square, and both of them behind bars in the old jailhouse. (This one was almost too perfect for the Journal of Torment. It clearly belonged on page one, with bold, black print underneath: Help! I’m a prisoner of summer vacation!). But the only picture I snagged of Jake was a shot of his back as he wandered into the gift shop.

  “Dude, old-time baseball stuff!” he said as we stepped inside. “I didn’t even know they had baseball back then.”

  “Actually, baseball as we now know it was popularized at the beginning of the twentieth century, just when this town was booming,” Caleb explained. “And of course the game of baseball itself was—”

  “Come on,” Dillie said, dragging me over to a shelf filled with tacky souvenirs. “Unless you want to get stuck listening to them talk baseball all afternoon.”

  “Yeah, that would be…” I pictured me and Jake walking through the empty ghost town together. All afternoon. “Um, terrible.”

  “Talk about terrible.” Dillie giggled as she began examining the merchandise. “I think this one’s my favorite.” She pointed to a shawl studded with bright pink sequins. “Or maybe this one.” A giant gold brooch in the shape of a cactus.

  “Definitely this,” I said, showing her the matching cactus earrings. “Those would look absolutely perfect with my rhinestone cowboy boots.” I stopped laughing abruptly, realizing that those earrings might actually be the kind of thing Dillie thought looked good.

  But she was laughing even harder, and her nose was wrinkled in disgust.

  Then she gasped. “Lizard, look! It’s like they were made for you!”

  “Don’t call me—” The awfulness of what she was pointing at took my words away. “They” were two ceramic lizards…dressed up like cowboys. Their bright green skin clashed in a deliciously tacky way with their wide-brimmed purple hats and red cowboy vests. They were quite possibly the ugliest things I’d ever seen.

  “What are you guys laughing at?” Caleb asked, popping up behind us. Even Jake—still trailing behind him—looked half interested.

  Dillie and I exchanged a glance. Then I gave them my most mysterious smile. “Inside joke,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I feel like their little lizard eyes are watching us,” Dillie murmured as we stepped out of the gift shop.

  I giggled—but cut myself off as soon as I realized that Jake’s eyes were on me. I didn’t want him to think I was some silly little kid who just laughed at nothing all the time. I could talk about serious stuff, too. I could even talk about baseball. He just had to give me a chance.

  Even better, I would make my own chance.

  “Look!” I pointed at a sign on the ramshackle storefront we were passing. “Let’s do it!”

  “Take a ride through the old silver mines?” Jake read the sign in a dubious voice. “Sounds kind of…”

  “Yeah, boring, I know,” I said quickly, even though I thought it sounded a little bit cool. “But at least it’s out of the sun.”

  A pretty girl with a blond ponytail and a Silverado employee vest waved us over. “Cool off in the silver mines,” she said, beckoning us toward the entrance to the ride. “You know you want to.”

  Jake tilted his head. “I guess it could be cool.”

  I didn’t like the way she was looking at him—and I really didn’t like the way he was looking at her. But it wouldn’t matter once we were squeezed into one of the little mine cars together. I didn’t know too much about romance—okay, I didn’t know anything about romance—but I was pretty sure that qualified.

  “Come on!” Dillie said to me as she and Caleb climbed into one of the mining cars. “There’s plenty of room.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t want to squeeze. Jake and I can just—”

  “Don’t be crazy, there’s plenty of room!” Dillie patted the space next to her on the seat.

  “I said, that’s okay” I repeated through gritted teeth. I tried to send her a telepathic message: Let it go. Sam and Mina totally would have gotten my ESP. Of course, they wouldn’t have needed it, because they wouldn’t have tried to mess with my perfect plan in the first place. “Jake shouldn’t have to ride all by himself.”

  “Why would he—oh.” Dillie stopped, a slow grin creeping across her face. “Right. Sure, ride with Jake!”

  But it was too late.

  “No, go with your friends,” chirped the blond girl. “I can ride with Jake so he doesn’t get lonely.”

  I glared at her. “Don’t you have to work?”

  She gave me the fakest smile I’d ever seen. “It’s cool,” she said. “I won’t tell my boss if you don’t.”

  “But—”

  “It’s okay,” Jake told me. “Go.”

  So I went.

  I squeezed into the mine car next to Dillie, which was not big enough for three people. I folded my arms across my chest. I listened to the tinny voice piped through the car’s speaker, droning on about how many pounds of silver the mine had turned out per year and how many miners had worked per shift and a million other details I didn’t care about.

  The ride seemed to last forever.

  This would have given me forever to talk to Jake, was the kind of thing I was not thinking.

  The mines were cold and damp and dark. They seemed like the kind of place giant spiders might like to play.

  If I were sitting with Jake, he might put his arm around me and tell me not to be afraid, was the kind of thing I was especially not thinking.

  The tinny voice was droning about the silver mining process and how we could try it out for ourselves at the pan-for-your-own-silver exhibit.

  If Jake were here, I wouldn’t be stuck listening to this ridiculously boring voice, because Jake would be talking about baseball That would also be ridiculously boring, but it would be Jake talking in Jake’s voice, and that would automatically make it interesting, was the kind of thinking that was slowly but surely driving me insane.

  Finally, our car rolled through one last tunnel and emerged into the light. Dillie hopped out almost as soon as it stopped moving. “Let’s go down to the Photo Parlor and take pictures of ourselves dressed up as cowboys,” she said brightly.

  “You go,” I told her. “I’ll wait here for Jake.” I peered into the dark tunnel. If I could get Caleb and Dillie away before his car rolled out, we could at least have a little time together.

  “We can wait,” Dillie said as one empty mining car rolled out, then another. Where was he? “It’s not like there’s some kind of cowboy-costume emergency.”

  Caleb looked at me carefully. “Let’s go,” he told Dillie. “Liza can meet us there.”

  “You sure?” Dillie asked me. She looked at the empty mine cars rolling by, then back at me, like now she was the one trying to send some kind of ESP message. But whatever it was, I didn’t want to hear it. I was on a mission.

  “Go,” I said firmly.

  “Fine,” she said. “We’ll be at the Photo Parlor if you need us.” And finally, they were gone.

  I lounged against the side of the mine shack, waiting for Jake’s car to show up. I didn’t get why it was taking so long. Had I missed him? Maybe he didn’t get on the ride in the first place?

  And then he appeared.

  He and the blond girl, side by side. Their hands glued together.
/>
  Their faces glued together.

  I was going to puke.

  “Oh!” the girl squeaked as the ride came to a stop and she spotted me. She pulled away from Jake and climbed out of the car. He followed her.

  I just stood there. It felt like my foot was asleep. Actually, it felt like my whole body was asleep. That pins-and-needles tingling crawled across my skin. I was pretty sure my face was on fire.

  Plus, there was the fact that I still really wanted to puke.

  “Hey,” Jake said, grinning like nothing had happened. Except that Jake never grinned. He always looked bored or cranky or sulky. I was supposed to be the only one who could make him smile. Me. Zard.

  “I…I…uh…” I backed away. At least I didn’t throw up on his shoes. “I have to go meet Dillie and Caleb. Later.”

  I spun and ran around the side of the building.

  Then I stopped. I just needed to catch my breath. To think. To figure things out. I wasn’t trying to listen—but I heard, anyway.

  “So is she, like, a friend of yours or something?” the girl asked Jake.

  There was a pause. Then, “Nah, just some little kid that’s on this trip with us.”

  “It must be a total drag to be stuck with those kids all summer.”

  “Yeah.”

  That’s when I finally forced my legs to start moving. But I only ran for a few feet before I realized I didn’t have anywhere to go. So I just started walking. Staring at the ground. Trying to blink back the tears. Trying not to stomp and punch and scream and throw a temper tantrum like a “little kid.”

  I will not cry, I told myself. No big deal. Why am I surprised?

  After all, he was two years older than me. He was a baseball player. And I was just…boring, bland, little Liza Gold.

  “Lizard!” someone shouted. Dillie darted out of a nearby building, waving her hands and running toward me. She was wearing a long, ruffled yellow skirt. Caleb followed, a wide-brimmed cowboy hat slipping down over his eyes. “Lizard, you have got to see these costumes,” Dillie said breathlessly. “They’re amazing, and we can wear whatever we want!”

  “She’s right, Lizard,” Caleb said eagerly, tipping his hat. “It’s great.”

  Lizard.

  Such a dumb nickname. A dumb little-kid nickname. A nickname I had told them and told them and TOLD THEM not to call me.

  “You okay, Lizard?” Dillie asked.

  I lost it.

  “No, I am not okay,” I informed her. 7 am not okay!”

  “You don’t have to shout,” Dillie said.

  “Yes I do!” I shouted, even louder. “Because you two will not listen! Can you hear me now?”

  “Urn, people are staring at us,” Caleb said in a whisper.

  “I don’t care!” I yelled. And for the first time in my life, I really didn’t. “Stop calling me Lizard! You know what? Stop calling me anything. Just leave me alone!”

  This time when I ran away, I ran.

  And I kept running.

  I ran until I got to the very edge of the ghost town. I thought I would feel better once I was alone. I was wrong. Maybe it was because I was by myself on a hill that reminded me too much of that hill in Oklahoma and the night when Jake had finally seen me as an equal. Or so I’d thought.

  Turned out he’d never seen me as anything but “some little kid.”

  Some little kid named Lizard.

  I wiped my face angrily and pulled out my camera. For a second, I wanted to hurl it off the hill. Or bash it into a rock. It would be satisfying to see something break. But instead, I took a picture of the Texas desert stretching out beneath me. Not quite happily ever after, I captioned it in my head. But this one was too tormented for the Journal of Torment. It was just for me.

  Footsteps crunched the ground behind me.

  It’s Jake, I thought. He wants to apologize. And as soon as he looks at me, he’ll realize that I’m the only one for him and we’ll laugh about this whole thing and it will be part of the funny story of How We Met and—

  “You okay, Liza?”

  It wasn’t Jake.

  I kept my back to Caleb. “Fine,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t notice that my voice was fuzzy. “So you can go.”

  He sat down.

  “I don’t want to talk,” I told him, trying not to sound mean. Caleb wasn’t the kind of guy you wanted to be mean to, no matter how rotten and twisted you felt.

  He took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses against his shirt, trying to wipe off the desert grit. “You know why we call you Lizard?” he asked quietly. His eyes were really green and wide without the glasses. But then he put them back on, and I decided I liked him better that way. He looked more like Caleb.

  “Because you love to annoy me?”

  “Because you asked us to,” he said.

  That didn’t make any sense.

  “When we were seven,” he continued. “It was on that trip to Florida. Our parents dragged us to some kind of alligator farm, and it was ridiculously boring until you started naming all the lizards and making up stories about what they were doing. You saved us from dying of boredom. And you made us call you the Lizard Queen for the rest of the trip.”

  I remembered the alligator farm, but not the rest of it. “That was a long time ago,” I pointed out.

  “Pretty memorable,” Caleb said.

  I didn’t know what to say. I’d never really thought of myself as the kind of person that anyone remembered. If anything, I always figured I was easy to forget.

  Caleb rummaged in his backpack and pulled out a small cardboard box. He shoved it in my direction. “These are for you,” he muttered, his face bright red.

  “You got me a present?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “I mean, yes, I guess, technically, but not really. It’s just something—no big deal. I just…” He looked down. “I wanted to cheer you up.”

  I opened the box. Two porcelain figurines were nestled inside: the lizard cowboys Dillie and I had seen in the gift shop that afternoon. Specifically, the ugliest things we’d seen that afternoon. Or ever.

  “Oh,” I said, trying frantically to think of something else to say. “They’re…wow.”

  “You like them, right?” he asked eagerly. “I saw you looking at them in the gift shop, and…I don’t know, it seemed like they made you happy.”

  I realized I was smiling. “They really do, Caleb,” I said honestly, slipping the box into my bag. “They’re awesome.”

  And they were. Weird, tacky, and hideously, mesmerizingly ugly.

  But awesome.

  Dillie popped up behind us and flopped down in the dirt. “So what are we talking about? How much Lizard—I mean, Liza—hates us?”

  “I don’t hate you,” I said.

  “Really?” Caleb asked.

  I gave him a light shove. “How could I hate the person who gave such awesome lizard cowboys to the Lizard Queen?”

  Dillie burst into laughter. “So you do remember!” she exclaimed. “How great was that?”

  “Not as great as that trip to Tiny Town, when she suckered us into sneaking into the restaurant diorama and pretending we were giants, there to crush all of the miniature hungry people,” Caleb said.

  “How about when she carried that cardboard Pikachu cutout all over Santa’s Candy Castle, and kept telling people that her pet Pokémon was hungry?” Dillie sputtered through her laughter. “And then pretended to cry when they thought she was joking, so that they’d give her candy just to shut her up.”

  “But the best one was—” Caleb started.

  “The Ben & Jerry’s Factory!” they said together.

  Dillie shook her head. “You got us into that off-limits tasting room. And then you actually convinced them to give us free pints of their new flavor!”

  “How do you guys remember all this?” I asked. “It was forever ago.”

  Dillie looked at me like I was nuts. “Who forgets free ice cream? That was epic.”

  “Legendar
y,” Caleb agreed.

  It all sounded familiar—most of it, at least. But I had a hard time believing what they were saying. Had I really been the mastermind behind all those adventures? “It just doesn’t sound like me,” I said.

  Caleb looked away.

  “People change,” Dillie said softly.

  I knew exactly what they were thinking. The person in those stories didn’t sound like me because it wasn’t me, not anymore.

  But maybe it could be.

  Chapter Seven

  Location: San Jon, New Mexico

  Population: 306

  Miles Driven: 1,834

  Days of Torment: 42

  “Caleb’s in,” Dillie whispered to me a few nights later while Kirsten was sequestered in the bathroom on the phone with Thomas. (Even in my head, I’d started saying his name the way Dillie said it, in a fluttery, lovesick voice: Thooooomas.)

  “In for what?”

  “You know.” Dillie wiggled her eyebrows, waiting for me to catch on. When I didn’t, she rolled her eyes. “What else? Getting back at Jake the snake.”

  “Who said we were getting back at Jake?”

  “You don’t have to say it.” Dillie rolled her eyes again, like I was being dense on purpose. “He messes with you, we mess with him. That’s just how it works, right?”

  “Caleb really wants to help?”

  “Caleb’s got his own reasons for wanting to get back at Jake,” Dillie said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the guy’s a total jerk. He treats Caleb like he’s some kind of giant, glasses-wearing mosquito. Trust me, we just need to work out a couple problems, and then we can totally do this.”

  “Do what, exactly?”

  Dillie hesitated. “Well, that’s where you come in. We need a plan.”

  “And you want me to come up with one?” Ever since the ghost town, Caleb and Dillie had been acting like Lizard the Mischief Mastermind was back. But I wasn’t so sure about masterminding any mischief.