Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green

by Helen Phillips

  A few steps in, though, she glances back at me, ready to convince me that I have to follow her and Kyle. She knows what a scaredy-cat I am. She always has to convince me to do things we shouldn’t be doing. But this time here I am, right behind her, no convincing needed. She gives me a surprised grin. What she doesn’t know is that I’d follow Kyle straight to the top of this volcano.

  Speaking of Kyle: He’s moving fast, and Roo’s little pause gave him a ten-foot lead. He seems barely aware of us as he pounces up the trail. The jungle noises, which got loud the instant we opened the gate, seem to get louder with each passing step. Roo, now that she knows I’m not too scared, is having more fun the scarier it gets. She looks at me, her face glowing with humidity. “Cool!” she says.

  Right then a big bright green iguana darts across the path in front of us, and I only scream a tiny bit.

  “Super-cool,” Roo whispers, watching the iguana vanish into the dimness.

  We walk for a while, I don’t know how long, it’s hard to keep track. We climb up black volcanic rocks and step over slippery vines as thick as Roo’s arms. Big, poisonous-looking jungle flowers give off heavy smells. Some of them have petals that look like black velvet. Others seem to be made out of pink plastic. I start to get sort of used to seeing tons of little neon lizards darting every which way. I even start to feel friendly toward the endless line of tiny red ants marching up the trail alongside us, each one carrying a leaf twice its size.

  Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I think I spot a monkey tail or monkey arm or monkey face in the nearby trees, but the second I turn to look, there’s nothing there anymore.

  “Hey!” Roo yelps, pointing. “Check it out! The Froot Loops bird!”

  I look up and see that Roo’s right. The toucan from the Froot Loops box—not that Mom ever lets us have Froot Loops—is crossing from tree to tree above us, its enormous red and pink beak leading the way.

  I have this sudden feeling like I’m about to cry, but not from sadness, more from amazement.

  “No way!” Roo squeals a few minutes later. “A butterfly with eyes on its wings!”

  She takes off running and shoves past Kyle, chasing some sort of moth-looking thing. Kyle stops and waits for me to catch up with him, which makes me grin, until I realize he was just pausing to examine some moss on a tree trunk.

  Anyway, we head upward together. Turning the bend, we almost bump into Roo, who’s standing frozen in the path.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask her.

  “It did have eyes on its wings! Owl eyes!” Roo whispers. “And here’s a secret path.”

  “Where?” I say, looking around, not seeing anything resembling a secret path.

  “Here.” She points to the super-thick underbrush on the right-hand side of the trail, and I start to wonder if now fifty percent of my family is insane, because there’s no way in heck that’s any kind of a path. But then next to me I hear Kyle making a weird sound, a sort of cough-sigh-gasp. When I glance over at him, his cool, calm face doesn’t look so cool and calm anymore.

  So I look again at the side of the trail. And when I stare hard, I do start to see a path—at least, I think I do. Hardly a path, more like the echo of a path, just the tiniest bit of interruption in the jungle underbrush. The path we’re on is practically a highway in comparison. Roo’s secret path is narrow, almost too narrow for feet, and it looks dangerous, heading off into deeper, dimmer jungle.

  “Listen,” Kyle says darkly. It’s weird to hear him speaking English again. It makes what he says next sound even scarier. “You can’t ever go down that path. Okay? Swear you’ll never go down it.”

  He’s being so melodramatic that I think he must be joking.

  “Ha,” I say. “Very funny.”

  Usually Roo would join in, saying something like Ooo, scary, scary, scary! and shaking her body in a silly way as though spooky chills were running up and down it. But when I glance over at her, her face is solemn.

  That’s when I realize that Kyle’s not joking. He’s not joking at all.

  “Swear to me,” Kyle says. I feel like his eyes are burning my face. “On your father’s life. That you will never go down that path.”

  Our father’s life.

  Are we allowed to swear on that nowadays?

  “I swear,” Roo says quietly, looking at the ground.

  “Mad?” he says. I can’t believe he’s staring at me this way, so intensely.

  “Sure,” I say. If he knew me better he’d know I’d never go down such a freaky path.

  “I want you to swear,” he says.

  “Okay, okay, I swear,” I say, blushing. His eyes, jeez. He stares hard for a couple more seconds before his eyes let go of me.

  Then he continues walking up Normal Path, and we follow him. But Roo keeps glancing back at Invisible Path.

  “Pay attention to the trail or you’re going to trip!” I scold her, but mainly I just don’t want her to be so fascinated by that path.

  “I can’t believe you spotted it,” Kyle says to Roo after a few minutes. “No one ever does.”

  Does he really have to say that? Doesn’t he know his praise will only encourage her?

  Roo wriggles with the compliment. “You have to notice the tiniest things in the world. You have to think like a bird.”

  She’s quoting Dad—it’s something he says about bird-watching—even though she’s acting like she came up with it herself. Well, good for her. Dad taught Roo a ton about tracking birds, because Roo is a natural. And me? I’m a bad bird-watcher. I have no patience for it, and I definitely don’t know how to think like a bird. Neither does Mom.

  “So, what’s down that path anyway?” Roo says, her voice eager, secretive.

  Kyle replies in lightning-fast, impossible-to-understand Spanish.

  “Tell me what it is! In English!” Roo groans.

  Wanting to distract her from thinking about the creepy path, I ask Kyle how old he is. Roo loves knowing how old people are.

  “Fourteen,” Kyle says.

  Wow. I can’t believe he’s only fourteen. Just about a year older than me. He seems so grown-up and fearless.

  Right then we burst out of the jungle onto a ledge of black volcanic rock. On the hillside below and above the ledge, the never-ending tangle of jungle. The air and sky are much lighter now, without the jungle surrounding us. From here you can stare up at the volcano, huge and perfect against the pale sky. Roo gives an admiring whistle, and I would too if I could whistle, which I can’t.

  “El Mirador,” Kyle announces.

  He plops down on the ledge and we plop down next to him. The volcanic rock with all its little holes is rough against our bare legs. Kyle says some long thing in Spanish and points at the jungle and the volcano.

  “This is not a good classroom!” Roo says. “Everything around here is way more interesting than Spanish class!”

  Kyle responds by asking us a question in Spanish.

  “What’d he say?” I whisper to Roo.

  “I think he wants us to guess what El Mirador means,” Roo whispers back. “If we get it right, we get to have our Popsicles.”

  Kyle looks expectantly at us.

  “Well,” Roo tells him, “I bet it comes from the verb mirar. To look. Like, a lookout.”

  I seriously don’t know how my sister got so brilliant. Kyle nods and hands each of us a melted Popsicle.

  “Ooo, gracias!” Roo says, accepting the messy gift, and she’s not being sarcastic.

  When I finally get mine open, it explodes out of its plastic wrapping, sticky green syrup spraying all over me. But it’s still delicious in a way, the sugar and the liquid.

  Kyle looks at me—golden, yes! but whatever—and says something. Then he says the same thing again, and again. A short sentence. Obviously he wants me to repeat it. So, eventually, I try.

  “Yo ab lo ven te i dio mas.”

  Kyle nods and repeats it several more times. I try again and again. Then it’s Roo’s turn. Kyle
looks at her. She’s perched behind us on the ledge, staring up at the volcano, her chin purple with Popsicle. “Hola,” he says. “¡Hola!” He has to say hola six times and tap her knee before she starts paying attention to him instead of the volcano.

  “Yo hablo veinte idiomas,” she says beautifully on her very first try.

  So Kyle focuses on me again, making me repeat that stupid sentence like a hundred times. He keeps correcting my pronunciation, but I can’t hear the difference between the way he says it and the way I say it.

  Finally I get so annoyed I shout at the volcano: “¡YO HABLO VEINTE IDIOMAS!”

  Kyle nods his approval. I seem to have gotten it right that time. I guess now he’s satisfied with my Spanish, because—O wonder of wonders—he actually responds in English when I ask him, “What does that mean anyway, Yo hablo veinte idiomas?”

  “I speak twenty languages,” he says, lying down on the ledge.

  “I speak twenty languages!” The least useful sentence he could have possibly taught us. “You are so mean!”

  He just grins.

  “You have to admit, it’s funny,” he says.

  “Look, it’s not my fault that I’m not fluent in two languages like some geniuses around here.”

  “I’m not a genius,” he says with a shrug. “It’s just that my dad is from here and my mom is from the States, so we use both languages. I was born in Ohio, but I spend every summer here working at the Lodge and bird-watching.”

  “You like bird-watching?” I say. “Our dad does too.”

  “Yeah,” Kyle says, still lying down. “Your dad is my hero.”

  “Ken’s not our dad,” I say flatly.

  Kyle rolls his eyes. “Not that goof,” he says. “I mean your dad. The Bird Guy.”

  I get that hot, burny feeling of tears.

  “You know our dad?” I whisper. If Kyle knows Dad, maybe he knows something about what happened to Dad.

  “I didn’t say I know him,” Kyle says. “I said he’s my hero.”

  Sometimes I forget that Dad is famous. At least to bird-watchers. Every bird-watcher in the world knows who James Wade is. I wait for Roo to chime in, to start bragging about Dad, but she doesn’t. I turn around to see what the heck is stopping her, since telling people how awesome Dad is is her favorite hobby: He’s the best bird-tracker on the planet, and seriously, I’m not just saying that because he’s my dad! The magazines say it too.

  But Roo isn’t there.

  “Roo!” I scream.

  Kyle jolts up.

  “Roo—she’s gone, she’s missing, where is she!” I panic.

  He stands and grabs me by the wrist and pulls me running down the trail. If I weren’t freaking out I might enjoy the feeling of his fingers, but right now I couldn’t care less about Kyle.

  “Roo, Roo, Roo, Roo, Roo, Roo!” I shout, pretending that somewhere out there in the jungle she’s shouting back, Mad, Mad, Mad, it’s okay, I’m okay, don’t worry, relax. “Um, hello, shouldn’t we be looking for her? Like, around here?” I yell at Kyle.

  But he just keeps dragging me down the trail, and I keep slipping in the mud, and I keep calling for Roo.

  Then he stops very suddenly, and I’m going, Okay, why are we stopping now? until I realize (of course, duh, here we are) this is the spot where the dim, secret path branches off from the nice, normal trail.

  Of course. Where else would Roo have gone? If I’d stopped panicking for half a second I’d have figured it out too.

  Kyle looks over at me.

  “I really, really, really don’t want to do this,” he says. Then he tugs on my hand and together we plunge down Invisible Path.

  We can’t walk hand in hand on the narrow path, so Kyle lets go of me. I immediately start to feel more freaked out, if that’s possible, more worried about Roo than I’ve ever been (and I’ve worried about Roo a lot in my lifetime). For some reason, though, I don’t think I should keep calling her name. There’s a hush over this part of the jungle, the animal sounds somehow muted here, a kind of quiet that seems as though it might have ears. I have this weird feeling that by saying Roo’s name I might put her in extra danger. Instead, we just creep down the path, vines and leaves smacking our legs and faces.

  “Faster,” I hiss at Kyle. “Faster, please.”

  He tries to speed up but it’s hard. The path is so vague, and slippery.

  We’ve only been on Invisible Path a little while when there’s this enormous whooshing sound above us, and for a second I’m positive the volcano is erupting, until I realize it’s a sound I recognize.

  We hear the rain for a moment before we feel it. It’s up there, hitting the top leaves of the tallest trees, and now here it comes. I look up and see it rushing toward us like we’re standing beneath a waterfall, and I think we’re going to drown in it, so I shut my eyes and brace myself.

  But the water doesn’t hit.

  I open my eyes and look up again. What I see is a huge blue … flower, I guess. Kyle is standing behind me, his chest almost touching my back, holding it over us like an umbrella. Its big, waxy blossom keeps us completely dry while the monsoon booms all around us.

  I look back at him and can’t help but smile in amazement. Amazed by the umbrella flower. Amazed that I’m standing in the jungle beneath an umbrella flower with this boy.

  “How did you do that?” I ask, but it’s way too loud to talk.

  When the amazement wears off a few minutes later, though, I start to get really mad that the dumb old monsoon is slowing us down. We have to keep going. We can walk in the rain with the umbrella flower to protect us. I nudge Kyle and give him a come-on-wimp-let’s-keep-walking face, but he’s gazing off down the trail, looking shocked. Around the bend about twenty yards away, blurred by the heavy rain, comes a blue blob. It’s some kind of crazy jungle creature, and I’m terrified, remembering all the things that could harm Roo—the jaguars and tarantulas and snakes and poisonous plants and sheer cliffs and things I can’t even imagine. I inch closer to Kyle, because that creature is coming right at us, making my heart do acrobatics.

  Then the little blob waves happily and practically dances down the trail toward us beneath her blue umbrella flower. She looks very small, walking between the walls of jungle in the rain, and I just want to squeeze her and cuddle her. But also I want to yell at her, and I bet Kyle does too, although no one can say anything over the sound of the water. The three of us stand there under the umbrella flowers, waiting.

  When the monsoon ends, as quickly as it began, the first words out of Kyle’s mouth are “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?” Roo asks perkily.

  “That!” Kyle says, pointing at her blue umbrella flower, which is already beginning to shrink. Ours too is shriveling.

  “Well, you did it too, so I guess you know how I did it,” Roo says.

  Kyle still looks shocked. “No one can do that,” he says.

  “I can do it,” Roo says, “and you can do it.”

  “How did you know which one to pick?” Kyle demands. “How did you know where to squeeze it?”

  “I don’t know,” Roo says. “I just … did it.”

  The umbrella flowers are deflating very, very quickly now. We watch as they turn into normal-sized blue flowers with waxy petals. I reach out for Roo’s flower and she passes it to me. I squeeze it here, there, and everywhere. But nada. Go figure.

  “Gee whiz,” Roo says, “I can’t believe it’s already after 3:08. That day sure flew by.”

  “It’s not after 3:08,” Kyle says. “Why would it be after 3:08?”

  “Ken says the monsoon comes at 3:08 every day. He says we can set our watches by it.”

  “That guy,” Kyle says, shaking his head. “First of all, around here we don’t call it the monsoon, we call it La Lluvia, with capital Ls. And it does come every afternoon, but not always at the same time.”

  “Lluvia,” Roo repeats. “Even though it starts with an L you make a Y sound ’cause there are two Ls in a
row, right?”

  She’s doing that thing she does where she distracts you from her disobedience by bringing up other topics. It’s just so Roo of her that I want to grab her up in a ginormous hug, but I think it’ll be better for her in the long run if I yell at her now.

  “Roo!” I freak out. “What were you doing? You swore you wouldn’t go down here! I’m so mad at you!”

  “Don’t be mad, Mad,” she says, grinning.

  “How far did you get?” Kyle asks her.

  “Well, La Lluvia started,” she says, “so I had to turn back.”

  Kyle seems relieved for half a second before getting that dark look on his face.

  “Ruby Wade,” he says solemnly.

  “Ruby Flynn Wade,” I correct him.

  “You have to believe me that what you just did was very dangerous,” he says with a quiet fury. “Now do you swear for real that you’ll never go down this path again?”

  It’s all pretty intense and I can’t help wondering if Kyle is overreacting a bit. But he looks so very serious, and it’s so obvious that he truly doesn’t want us going down Invisible Path. Man, if I had Roo’s personality rather than my own, I know I’d be dying to find out what it is that Kyle doesn’t want us to see.

  “I swear for real,” Roo says with a smile.

  Kyle glares at her. “Don’t smile,” he says.

  “I swear for real,” Roo says, this time with a huge, exaggerated frown.

  He glares at her more and then turns and leads us back toward Normal Path.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Girls,” Mom says that night at dinner in the Selva Café, smiling spacily into her piña colada, “I have a very special surprise for you.”

  She’s been sort of weird ever since she got back from yoga this afternoon. I don’t quite know how to explain it. Like, she’s got this permanent smile on her face, which sounds like a good thing, but somehow it’s just not. Maybe because her eyes are so calm, like robot eyes.

  “Oh boy! What is it! Tell us, tell us!” Roo squeals. “Do we get to go see Dad now?”

  Mom frowns for half a second before returning to her yoga smile. I frown too. I’m sorry to say it, but I don’t really want to see Dad today, or tomorrow, or any time until he’s normal again.