“Whoa!” Enjoy myself? Sure, the days don’t feel eight years long anymore now that I’ve got Needles to look after, and the gas pains have been less now that I’m mixing a little real food into the veggie-palooza. Still, I have to call baloney on the friend thing. Yeah, it’s better to hang out with people than to be bored and talking to yourself. But Grace flat-out hates me. Brooklynne? I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her. Tyrell? He’s a good guy, but would he have talked to me in the first place if my name wasn’t Baranov?
“Listen, Jett,” Matt says reasonably. “I’m not going to take your candy away. I’m not even going to ask where you got it. You’re a kid with a million opportunities. Just consider the possibility that being at the Oasis is one of those opportunities. And you’re not going to take advantage of it by gorging on chocolate when nobody’s looking. Fair enough?”
I don’t respond. Consider it? Yeah, for about a millionth of a second.
Matt favors me with a gentle smile worthy of Nimbus himself. “Be whole.” And he wanders out of the kitchen, leaving me clutching my candy bars, my jaw halfway to the floor.
“Are you serious?” I choke. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that Fuego wonder boy Matt Louganis is turning into another Oasis cheerleader. It almost makes sense. Vlad always talks about the burnout rate among Silicon Valley up-and-comers, who struggle to get ahead by staying at their desks long into the night, writing code and ordering greasy take-out burgers and breakfast burritos. They get no sleep or exercise, survive on junk food, and live in a pressure cooker. Then there’s Oasis, which is zero stress, healthy eating, and exercise up the wazoo—along with a steady dose of Nimbus and Ivory, who act like they have all the answers. It’s easy to see how a frazzled Fuego employee might buy in.
What’s happening to Matt?
14
Tyrell Karrigan
If this keeps up, Jett is going to be even richer than his dad.
We sell seventeen candy bars in the first three days. That proves there’s a healthy demand for unhealthy food—at least among the kids at the Oasis.
When I say kids, I exclude Grace, because she’s more like a forty-year-old in a kid’s body. In her opinion, Jett’s secret candy business is about the same level of crime as murder.
“Bad enough he’s ripping everybody off by charging more than five times what those things are really worth,” she complains. “He’s also undoing all the good nutrition Evangeline works so hard to give us. How can you achieve wholeness when one of the three pillars of mind and body wellness is messed up?”
“Why are you talking about me like I’m not standing right next to you?” Jett asks irritably.
“Because when I talk right to you, you ignore me!” Grace accuses.
The four members of Team Lizard are in the shed, cleaning the paint tray and refreshing the water. This is turning into a bigger job than it used to be. Now that Needles is eating real meat, the poop situation means the water needs to be changed every day.
As gross as it is, I can handle it better than the others. Who has more experience than me dealing with strange lotions, ointments, and medicines for my latest rash—usually on a body part most people don’t even know they have. I’m not asking for sympathy or anything. I’m just saying that if you think a little lizard poop will make me queasy, think again.
By trial and error, we’ve worked out a pretty good system. Grace serves as lizard handler. I’m the designated tray scraper. The older Needles gets, the more he nips at people, so Jett’s in charge of pinching his jaw shut.
While I set down the clean tray filled with fresh water, Brooklynne tries to measure Needles with a ruler. The way he’s eating, he should be five hundred pounds by now.
“Keep him still,” she urges. “I can’t get a good reading.”
Jett maintains a grip on the snout between his thumb and forefinger. “Shouldn’t Needles trust us by now? We’ve been looking after him kind of a long time.”
Grace shakes her head. “Reptiles are cold-blooded. You can’t expect them to warm up to people like a cat or a dog would.”
At last, Grace and Jett drop Needles back in the paint tray and he assumes his usual position with his nostrils just above the water line. Now he’s so still that Brooklynne has all the time in the world to measure him from nose to tail.
“Half an inch longer,” she reports. “Maybe a little less.”
“He’s a shrimp,” I comment. “He’s going to get beaten up in lizard middle school.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Jett puts in. “That’s why I have to sell those candy bars. Meat isn’t cheap, you know. And if we run out of money, where does that leave Needles?”
“Yeah, and it has absolutely nothing to do with gorging yourself on fried chicken and pulled pork,” Grace snaps back.
That’s when things get really quiet in the shed, because Brooklynne and I have also done our share of Hedge Apple feasting—on food that no pathfinder would ever approve of.
Jett and I have been hanging out a lot. Okay, everything we’re doing is illegal—we have an illegal candy business, we’re hiding an illegal lizard, and we’re tampering with the US mail, which, in the old days, was punishable by hanging. We’re still intercepting Sarah’s love letters from Landon and adding a few text abbreviations to drive her crazy.
I know it sounds mean, and I guess maybe it is. But I swear Sarah has been so much calmer lately. Before she had nothing to think about besides how much she missed Landon. But now she’s too busy trying to figure out what Landon is saying to her. And the beauty is, she’ll never solve any of it because it’s just Jett and me messing with her. So when Sarah reads NEMO, she assumes it has something to do with the Disney movie. The odds of her guessing what it really stands for—Needles Eats Meat Only—are at least a billion to one. Ditto WL&J4A, which is the end of the Pledge of Allegiance—“with liberty and justice for all,” or UUQ, the chemical symbol for ununquadium, whatever that is.
Oddly, Sarah’s been so much nicer to me since all this began. She even asks for my help sometimes.
“Look at this, Tyrell.” She has the letter folded so I can’t see the whole thing. “I think L4U19 means ‘longing for you’ and the 19 is nineteen more days till we can be together.”
I frown. “But we’re here for almost another month.”
“Well, yeah,” she agrees, “but Landon isn’t very good at math. Now, the BB either means ‘baby’ or that it’s a double bummer that we’re apart. So all I have to figure out is **$* and I’ve got it.”
I bite my tongue. L4U19BB**$* happens to be Vladimir Baranov’s Wi-Fi password. But since Sarah can’t possibly know that, I give her a lot of credit for getting this far.
The whole thing would be really funny except for the fact that one day we’ll be home. She’ll show Landon the letters and he’ll say, “I never wrote that.” And if Sarah puts two and two together, she’ll run me over with a steamroller and feed me through the paper shredder.
I try to share these worries with Jett, but he has his own problems. The downside of a booming candy business is that, in no time at all, you run out of stock. Remember, we still owe Brandon three bars a day to keep him from exposing Needles. So pretty soon Jett and I are back on the launch to Hedge Apple on a shopping trip.
Don’t get me wrong—I love hanging out with Jett. But he’s a lot braver than me. He doesn’t panic over “borrowing” a boat that doesn’t belong to us. He already has a reputation as a screwup, so if he gets kicked out of the Oasis, it won’t surprise his father or anybody else. But if I get kicked out, my family will never forgive me. Well, maybe Sarah, since she’ll get to go home to Landon. But Mom and Dad? Forget it. I’ll be disowned.
“We won’t get caught,” Jett scoffs. “I never get caught.”
“If that was true,” I retort, “we’d be traveling by hovercraft right now.”
He laughs it off, because he gives zero hoots. Meanwhile, the illegal candy/lizard/boatjack
ing is stressing me out. I wish I could be more like Jett and not care, but it just isn’t possible. I give hoots. I’m too nervous not to be nervous. And seasick, I reflect as the familiar queasiness comes over me.
I hang my head over the side for most of the trip, so I see it first. About halfway to Hedge Apple, where the road veers in toward the river, I spot a bicycle pushed up into the brush as if someone was trying to hide it.
“Hey,” I call to Jett. “Isn’t that an Oasis bike?”
Jett peers into the woods. “Ivory would have a heart attack if she knew one of her precious mountain bikes is dumped out there.”
“Should we tell her?” I wonder.
“Oh, sure.” Jett rolls his eyes. “Like I wake up every morning thinking of ways to make life better for Ivory. Besides, what’s your explanation for how come you saw it?”
“Good point,” I concede, feeling pretty stupid.
Jett’s mood brightens as we get closer to Hedge Apple. Or maybe I have that backward—the Oasis casts a cloud of gloom over him, so any other place is an improvement. If we were in Antarctica right now, he’d be dancing with the penguins.
We have two objectives: candy bars for our customers and meat for Needles.
Jett shrugs this off. “Later. Aren’t you starving?”
“I’m a Karrigan,” I tell him. “I’ve been on a diet since the day I was born.”
We hit the fried chicken joint, but I order a burger instead, since something in the chicken batter gave me a rash last time. It’s my first burger since coming to the Oasis three weeks ago, and nothing ever tasted better.
My stomach is contented, but the nervousness is seeping back into the rest of me. I’m thinking the sooner we pick up our supplies and get back home, the safer we’ll be. “Where to now? The market?”
“Not yet” is Jett’s reply. “Not till we get a closer look at that mansion just outside of town.”
“Aw, come on!” I groan. “Do we have to?”
“I have to. And considering I have the key to the boat, you have to too.”
We start walking north along the road that leads to the mega mansion Jett’s so curious about. I’m uneasy. Every step takes us farther away from the boat we need to get us home, and we still have to buy our candy bars and meat. I sweat when I’m nervous and damp skin makes me itchy—or should I say itchier?
Pretty soon the pavement ends, even though the town is still in view. We’re on gravel for a while, and then just plain dirt. We round a bend and suddenly the mansion is laid out in front of us in all its glory.
“Wow,” Jett breathes. “That’s nice.”
Only the son of a billionaire could describe a place like that as merely “nice.” It’s by far the biggest, most beautiful house I’ve ever seen. Against the backdrop of a place like Hedge Apple, it rises from the ground like the Taj Mahal.
“We can turn around now, right?” I say hopefully. “We’ve seen it and now we can leave?”
Jett is lost in his own thoughts. “Why would Snapper build a place like this in Hedge Apple?”
“We’ll probably never know.” I say that hopefully too.
But Jett keeps on walking. With a sinking heart, I note that the size of the house means it always looks closer than it really is.
That’s when we hear it—the tremendous roar of a large engine.
“A tractor?” I wonder.
“A sports car,” Jett amends.
“Out here? No way.”
Jett points. At first, it looks like a cloud of dust, but it’s moving too fast. I spot a sleek dark shape at the center of it, closing on us. For a second, I lose it, blinded by the sun. The motor noise reaches a shrieking crescendo.
The next thing I know, Jett grabs me by the scruff of the neck and hauls the two of us into the tall grass by the side of the road. A fraction of a second later, an ebony-black automobile screams by at an incredible rate of speed. Within the same heartbeat, the dust cloud envelops us, stinging our eyes, blinding us, and leaving us choking in the ditch.
By the time we recover, the car has thumped onto the paved part of the road and disappeared, leaving the dust cloud settling behind it.
“What was that?” I gasp.
“That,” Jett replies in a tone of deep respect, “was Snapper.”
“Really? How do you know?”
“That was a Ferrari 488 Spider,” he explains. “Only the owner of that house could afford that car.”
“Did you see him?” I ask.
Jett shakes his head. “Too much dust, plus a tinted windshield. He’s cool, though. He has to be. I think he was wearing sunglasses.”
I’m still coughing. “Sorry,” I manage. “I’m allergic to dust. And dirt. And million-dollar cars.”
“Only half a million,” Jett informs me. “You know, nicely equipped.”
“In that case,” I retort, “I’ll take two.”
Now that we know Snapper isn’t home, I’m praying that Jett will turn around, but no such luck. He insists on getting closer to the house. But when we do get to a point where we can see it better, it opens up more mysteries than it solves. It’s by far the greatest home I’ve ever seen, yet it’s completely naked—not a bush, not a flower, not even a blade of grass. The river runs a few hundred yards behind it, so the view must be nice. But it’s ruined by the fact that everything else around the structure is plain gray-brown dirt and scrub.
“Maybe that’s the Hedge Apple style,” I suggest, grasping at straws. “You know—maximum house, minimum everything else.”
Three young men, each about the size of Brandon Bucholz’s dad, come around the side and start washing each other down with an outdoor hose. Mud streams off them, and there’s a lot of spirited cursing as the cold water hits. I pick up a few new words and store them away for future use during my next knock-down-drag-out with Sarah. One of the guys is bleeding from his upper arm and the other two wrap a bandage tightly around it.
Jett has seen enough. He grabs my arm and we back away. This time, we head for the cover of the trees for our walk back to Hedge Apple.
We’re out of view, but I lower my voice anyway. “Who are those guys?”
“They work for Snapper” is the reply. “A waitress at the barbecue place told me about them, but I wanted to see for myself.”
“They work for Snapper doing what?” I demand. “If they’re the grounds crew, they’re the worst landscapers in history. And they’re not cutting the grass because there isn’t any.”
“That one guy looked like he had a run-in with a Weedwacker,” Jett muses.
“Could they be bodyguards?” I offer.
“Maybe, but you’ll notice Snapper drove off without them. And why do they look like mud wrestlers?” Jett’s laser eyes narrow until I can almost see the beams cutting through the Arkansas humidity. “They’re guarding something.”
I shrug. “The house.”
“The house isn’t something you can steal. There has to be something in the house. But what?”
As much as I’m focused on getting back to the Oasis with our candy bars and lizard food, I have to admit Jett has a point. Who is this mysterious Snapper? And what is he doing in his palatial mansion in the middle of nowhere?
15
Grace Atwater
I’m so disappointed in the kids this year.
Okay, I understand that I’m pretty much one of a kind when it comes to appreciating the food here. Most kids would take chicken nuggets or a hamburger over a salad every time. And even my fellow vegetarians gravitate toward pizza, not to mention snacks and sweets.
I’m used to the griping and complaining at the Oasis, the speeches about stomach cramps, or burping so much, or “trading my left butt cheek” for a Big Mac or an order of chili nachos. It happens every summer. It’s never more than half serious because everybody knows that there’s no junk food bonanza to trade body parts for, and it’s mostly in good fun. Some of us like the food more than others; we all make the best of it.
No one is making the best of it this year. No one has to—courtesy of Jett.
This is the Summer of the Candy Bar. Jett has flooded the Oasis with them. Now that we have our own keys to the private launch, he has access to the grocery store in Hedge Apple, which means a never-ending supply. Put aside the fact that he jacks up the price about 600 percent. If his customers are crazy enough to pay it, that’s their problem. Ignore the undeniable truth that Jett needs money like they need sand in the Sahara. Forget that I can’t even turn him in because his side business is also providing Brandon with the three bars a day he requires in exchange for keeping silent about Needles.
I can handle all that. I don’t love it, but I’m mature enough to accept that I don’t live in a perfect world. What I can’t accept is that a few dozen candy bars are ruining everything Magnus Fellini has built. Before, kids would get into the Oasis lifestyle because they had no choice. By the end of their time here, even the most negative would have to admit that they were better off because of it. They were fitter, more energetic, more positive, calmer, and more whole. And somewhere along the way, they usually managed to enjoy themselves at least a little.
But Jett isn’t just selling candy. He’s offering a way to drop out of everything Magnus worked so hard to bring to the world. You start off by missing all the great nutrition because you’re glomming candy bars on the side. Then you’re goofing off at Awakening because you don’t have enough energy—or missing it altogether, since you can’t wake up in time. Soon the Bath feels too hot, the activities too exhausting. And forget meditation—nobody can seem to settle down. I know Ivory senses it too, but she can’t figure out what’s wrong. The problem isn’t her pathfinding—it’s the fact that most of her students are buzzing on a permanent sugar high!
So I’m disappointed. It’s disappointing that the kids here are so shallow that they’d throw away a chance at mind and body wellness for the fleeting taste of a little chocolate. It’s disappointing that Tyrell would let himself be turned into Jett’s loyal sidekick. And, sure, I have my problems with Brooklynne, but the one thing you could always say about her is she’s independent. Where’s that independence when she’s hawking candy right alongside Tyrell and Jett?
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