Wish You Were Here, Liza

by Robin Wasserman

  On the other hand…

  “You already have an idea, don’t you?” Dillie asked.

  I couldn’t help smiling.

  “I knew it! Never cross the Lizard.”

  She let out a cackle, then slapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes darting toward the bathroom door. In low, urgent whispers, we made a plan.

  Location: Tucumcari, New Mexico

  Population: 5,989

  Miles Driven: 1,901

  Days of Torment: 45

  We waited for another camping night. It took a few days, but the wait was worth it, because the Tucumcari Area Campground was perfect. Enough room to set up camp where no one else could see or hear you. Hiking trails that twisted and turned through winding ridges, framed by prickly cacti. A shallow, nearly dry creek. Just what we needed.

  It was torture, waiting for the perfect time to unleash our plan. Especially since that night, it was the professors Kaplan and Novak’s turn for Family Entertainment Hour. The last time around, Professor Novak had delivered a lecture on the dining habits of west Texan gophers. This time, Professor Kaplan gave us a talk about the nineteenth-century explorers of the Southwest, with special emphasis on the history and geology of nearby Tucumcari Mountain. Since Professor Kaplan was an English professor who specialized in French poetry from the 1600s, it wasn’t clear to me how she’d managed to find so much heinously boring information about random explorers out here in the middle of nowhere.

  As she droned on for one hour, then two, then finally paused for questions, I decided not to ask.

  Finally, everyone crawled into their sleeping bags, zipped up their tents, and went to sleep. Everyone except me and Dillie, that is. We waited until midnight—and then we put our plan in motion.

  “I heard something!” Dillie cried in a low voice, poking her head into Caleb and Jake’s tent. I peeked in, too, trying not to laugh. Caleb, who was only pretending to be asleep, gave us a thumbs-up. But Jake didn’t stir. Dillie repeated herself—louder this time, though still softly enough not to wake the grown-ups. Jake bolted out of his sleeping bag.

  “Whaaaa?” he asked groggily, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

  “Out there!” Dillie hissed. “A noise. What if it was a bear? Or, I don’t know, a jackal?”

  “Then you’ll probably be safer in your own tent.” Jake lay down again and shut his eyes.

  Dillie glared at Caleb. He cleared his throat. “Uh, how can we help, Dillie?”

  “We have to go see what it is,” Dillie insisted. “All of us. It’s safer that way.”

  “Good idea,” Caleb said.

  Dillie elbowed me in the side. “Yeah,” I added. “Just to be safe.”

  Jake groaned. “I’m not getting any sleep until I do this, am I?”

  “I would hate for you to get eaten by a bear,” Dillie said sweetly.

  Jake snorted, and mumbled something about how he’d rather take his chances. But he got up, switched on his flashlight, and led us into the dark.

  “This way,” Dillie said. We followed the path until it dead-ended in a dense growth of cacti. “Now,” she whispered to me. “Go for it.”

  I hesitated, suddenly feeling a little guilty. Talking about getting revenge was one thing. Actually doing it…Did Jake really deserve that? I wasn’t sure. But before I could say anything, Dillie screamed. “Skunk! It’s a skunk!”

  “What?” Caleb shouted, right on cue.

  “Where?” Jake yelled, whirling around.

  “I thought I was supposed to be the one to see the ‘skunk,’” I whispered to Dillie.

  She grinned. “That’s what friends are for, Lizard,” she whispered back. “You can thank me later.”

  The whole scene was total chaos—Dillie and Caleb made sure of that. And when Jake’s back was turned, Caleb slipped out a tiny water gun and shot him in the leg.

  “What was that?” he yelped.

  “What?” Caleb said innocently, slipping the water gun back into his pocket.

  “I felt something…” Jake’s voice was filled with dread. “Wet. On my leg. You don’t think it was…”

  “Ugh, what’s that smell?” Dillie asked.

  Caleb faked a gag. “It’s Jake.”

  “I don’t smell anything,” Jake said.

  “Well, of course not.” Caleb did his best to sound like he knew what he was talking about, even though every word out of his mouth was a lie. “The person who gets sprayed doesn’t smell it, not at first. There’s a…an olfacto-depressing agent in the spray.”

  “Olfacto-depressing?” Jake echoed.

  “That means it numbs your smell detector,” Caleb said, taking several large steps away from Jake. “Consider yourself lucky.”

  Jake sniffed himself. “It’s really that bad?”

  Dillie started backing toward the campground. “If I don’t get away from you, I’m going to puke.”

  I could have ended it at any point. But I kept my mouth shut.

  “Wait!” Jake pleaded. “You have to help me! How can I get rid of the smell? Caleb, man, there must be a way. You know everything. Come on.”

  Caleb tapped his finger against his lips. “Well, you could take a bath in tomato juice.”

  Jake was getting more frantic by the minute. “I don’t have tomato juice. Or a bathtub.”

  Caleb shrugged. “The smell should go away by itself. In a few weeks.”

  “A few weeks?”

  “There may be one other way…” Caleb said slowly. I knew this was killing him. He hated it so much whenever anyone said anything that was incorrect or misleading. And here he was, spilling out one horribly wrong fact after another. “It’s a traditional remedy, used for hundreds of years by people who didn’t have doctors or tomato juice or anything, because they lived in the wild.”

  Jake nodded eagerly, jabbing a finger into his chest. “That’s me! Stuck in the wild! Spill.”

  I pressed my hands over my nose and mouth to keep in the giggles. (Hopefully it looked like I was trying to keep out the “stink.”)

  “Well, first you’d have to submerge yourself in fresh water, then cover yourself with earth, and let it seep into your skin for at least seven hours,” Caleb said.

  “That’s it?” Jake asked. “Seems pretty easy.”

  “Seems pretty crazy,” Dillie said, just like we’d planned. “You sure that will work?”

  “Of course it will work!” Jake said. “This is Caleb we’re talking about. Kid’s a know-it-all freak. Only thing he’s good for.”

  At the look on Caleb’s face, I dropped the last of my doubts. Maybe Jake hadn’t meant what he did to me. But he meant the things he said about Caleb, and that was enough. “Let’s go,” I said firmly. “We should get started, because you’re really starting to stink.”

  Jake dipped a toe in the creek a few minutes later. “It’s freezing,” he complained. “You sure I—?”

  “I’m sure,” Caleb said.

  Jake shuddered, but he waded into the ankle-deep water. “How am I supposed to ‘submerge’ myself when it’s this shallow?”

  “You’re a smart guy,” Dillie said. “You’ll figure it out.”

  We lined up along the edge of the creek and watched Jake frantically trying to cover himself with the icy water. He cupped it in his hands and dumped it over his head. He drizzled water down his shirt and along his arms, shivering with cold. Finally, in disgust, he dropped to the ground and started rolling and splashing in the creek.

  “This is just sad,” Dillie said quietly, shaking her head.

  “Sad?” Caleb repeated. “This is the greatest day of my life.”

  “And now we’ll remember it forever,” I said, pulling out my camera. Time to record Jake’s humiliation for all time. “Say cheese,” I murmured, hoping he’d be too distracted to notice the flash.

  It was the most satisfying picture I’d ever taken.

  Moments later, Jake stood up, soaking wet. “What now?”

  Caleb pointed to the shore. “No
w, you cover yourself with earth.”

  “You mean, like…dirt?”

  Caleb nodded. “Head to toe. It’ll leech out the skunk juice.”

  Jake came toward me. “Come on, Zard, smell me. Maybe the water washed out the stink.”

  I pinched my nostrils together. “Trust me, it didn’t.”

  Jake sighed. But he did exactly as Caleb ordered him. He lay down and started rolling and flopping around like a fish. The dirt stuck to his wet skin and clothes, caking him in a thick layer of brown grime.

  “That’s probably enough,” Dillie said. “Though I could watch this all night,” she added under her breath.

  “And I really have to sleep like this?” Jake asked.

  “You don’t have to sleep,” Caleb said. “But you can’t wash it off until morning.”

  Kirsten was waiting for us when we made it back to the campsite. She stood in front of our tent, glaring, and I was pretty sure we were sunk. Kirsten would wake our parents, tattle on us for wandering off, and Jake would find out the truth. But instead, she pursed her lips and pointed at Jake. “You,” she said. “You stink.”

  Dillie, Caleb, and I gaped at her in surprise.

  “Skunk,” Jake muttered. “I’m working on it.”

  “Well, work on it somewhere else,” Kirsten ordered him. “Away from here.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” she said. “Get your sleeping bag and take it far enough away that we can’t smell you.”

  When Kirsten gave you an order, it was hard not to obey. Soaking wet and covered in mud, Jake slouched toward his tent, retrieved his sleeping bag, and dragged it about fifty feet away. He was still close enough that we could watch him toss and turn in his muddy pajamas.

  “So, um, Kirsten,” I said hesitantly. Even if Kirsten had somehow managed to figure out what we were doing, no way would she go along with it. “You really think Jake…stinks?”

  “Definitely,” she said. And then she winked.

  Location: Somewhere between Tucumcari and Santa Rosa, New Mexico

  Population: 3

  Miles Driven: 1,924

  Days of Torment: 46

  Jake didn’t tell on us. Not when he woke up to discover that the mud had hardened, turning him into a sun-baked mummy. Not when the grown-ups discovered him and wanted to know what in the world he’d been thinking. Not even when Professor Kaplan made it very clear that no one, nowhere, ever thought water and dirt would make a good remedy for skunk spray. Jake had just shrugged. “I don’t smell anymore, right?” he said. “So something must have worked.”

  But from the way he looked at us, I knew that he knew.

  Good.

  After that, he didn’t call me Zard anymore, and he didn’t tease me, or bore me with his long baseball stories. He went back to treating me like he treated everyone else—like I didn’t exist.

  Even better.

  After that, the days blended together, just like the dusty towns dotting the desert. Our cramped little Volvo was speeding along toward Santa Rosa and the Route 66 Auto Museum when the noise started. At first, it was just a small, quiet clanking, like the Ghost of Road Trips Past rattling its chains.

  “What’s that sound?” my mom asked, turning down the radio. She was navigating while my father drove. The Schwebers and the Kaplan-Novaks were already miles ahead, thanks to my parents’ unscheduled, hour-long stop at the Route 66 Roadside Extravaganza! gift shop.

  “It’s nothing,” my father said, cocking an ear to the side as if he could tell something from the noise. But my father could barely tell how to fill up the car when we stopped at a gas station.

  The clanking got louder and turned into more of a squealing, grinding clatter, like someone had poured a jar of metal screws into our engine. That was when smoke started pouring out of the hood.

  “I think we should stop, dear,” my mother said in the voice she uses when she’s trying not to completely freak out.

  “You think?” My father, on the other hand, was using the voice that meant he was trying very hard not to break something. As he pulled over to the shoulder, the engine cut out completely. The car drifted to a stop about six feet past the shoulder, in the middle of the desert sand. A big, red, Volvo-shaped rock. We weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

  “Everyone okay?” my mother asked.

  “Everyone but the car,” I pointed out.

  “No one worry,” my dad said. “We’ll just take a look at the engine, and, uh, see if we can figure out what’s wrong.”

  Well, we figured out where the engine was. We even figured out how to open the hood to look at the engine. It was still smoking.

  “Something’s wrong with it,” my father pointed out.

  “Very observant,” my mother said.

  They glared at each other. I held my breath, wondering which one would explode first.

  But they both exploded at once…with laughter.

  “I told you we should get the car checked out at the last gas station,” my mother said, giggling.

  “And I told you we should bring along that fixing cars for dummies book,” my father said, leaning against the car, trying to get control of himself.

  My mother patted his shoulder. “It’s fixing cars for dummies, dear, not fixing cars for dummies who can’t even fix themselves a sandwich.”

  After that, they were laughing too hard to speak.

  I wondered how close the nearest mental institution was. And whether they had taxi service.

  “Um, guys?” I said finally, sweating in the afternoon sun. The Volvo’s air conditioner may have been wonky, but it was better than nothing. “What do we do now?”

  “Don’t worry, Liza,” my mother said, drawing in a few deep breaths. “We’ll just give the Kaplan-Novaks a call and…oh.” She stared at her cell phone, brow furrowed. Then she started to laugh again.

  “Oh, what?” I asked. “‘Oh’ doesn’t sound good.”

  My father peered over her shoulder and chuckled. “Oh, there’s no cell service out here in the middle of the desert.”

  “This is not funny!” I shouted. “We’re stranded in the desert! With no car! No phone! No nothing! Why are we not freaking out?”

  “No point in freaking out,” my dad said. “This is just a minor setback. We’ll get past it.”

  “How?” I demanded.

  He smiled at me. It was his wicked smile, the one he used whenever I was foolish enough to complain about being bored and he suckered me into cleaning out the garage or alphabetizing his CD collection.

  “Exactly like our brave and hardy ancestors would have,” he said cheerfully. “We walk.”

  Chapter Eight

  Location: The side of the road

  Population: 3

  Miles Walked: 2

  Days of Torment: 46

  We walked.

  And walked.

  “This is officially the worst family vacation ever,” I said, about a million miles after we started out.

  Okay, according to my mother’s jogging pedometer, it was about a mile and a half. But when it’s ninety degrees out, and there are no landmarks except for the cacti and a coyote staring at you like it’s waiting for dinner, one mile might as well be a million. (True, the coyote might actually have been a jackrabbit, but you can never be too careful.)

  “It can’t be that bad,” my mom said, passing me her bottle of water so I could down the last few drops. I have to admit: Moms are good like that.

  “I thought it couldn’t be that bad,” I said. “And then our car broke down in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Seems like you’re having a little fun on this trip,” my father pointed out. “Or was that some other Liza Gold I saw cackling all through dinner last night?”

  That was only because Dillie had molded her soggy French fries into a surprisingly good replica of her mother’s face.

  “And you didn’t look especially miserable at the Cadillac Ranch, when you kids were running around the cars, screa
ming at each other,” my mother added.

  We were only running because Dillie had ambushed me and Caleb with a Super Soaker she’d picked up at the gift shop, and then ran away before we could get her back. But we caught up with her eventually, just in time to dump a bottle of ice water over her head.

  Mmm, ice water…

  I got so distracted by the thought of a cool, refreshing bottle of water—poured down my throat or over my head or, preferably, both—that I almost forgot what we were talking about.

  “Maybe she just means she’s miserable spending time with us,” my mom said. “Her annoying, embarrassing, ridiculous parental figures.”

  “Couldn’t be,” my father said. “After all we’ve done for her! Fed her. Clothed her.”

  “Stranded her in the desert,” my mother pointed out. “Dearest daughter, is there anything we can ever do to make you forgive us?”

  I couldn’t help it—I had to smile. It was impossible not to, when my parents got like this. “You could buy me a car when I turn sixteen,” I suggested.

  My father pressed a hand to my forehead. “We better get her back to civilization soon,” he said. “I think she’s getting delusional.”

  Location: Roseland, New Mexico

  Population: 224

  Miles Driven: 1,920 by car, 4 on foot

  Days of Torment: 46

  It was dark by the time we got to the nearest town. Fortunately, it was easy to find the local garage…because that was pretty much the entire town. One garage, one general store, and one diner.

  The general store and the diner were closed.

  “So there’s nowhere to eat?” I asked as my father climbed into the tow truck. He had to show the tow truck driver where our car was. The driver leaned out the window, winking at me.

  “Don’t worry, little lady,” he said. “You won’t starve, I promise.”

  They drove off, leaving me and my mom alone with the driver’s slobbering guard dog. A spiky collar and thick chain kept it safely on the other side of the garage, but its teeth looked sharp enough to chew through the chain if it got angry.