Mayday

by Karen Harrington

  Denny whispered, “Next up, Sears.”

  Why?

  “Miserable girls.”

  Denny had a way to put a thousand questions in my brain (who wants to look at miserable girls and why are they in Sears?) and answer each one just as fast (many girls are dragged to the mall against their will on a dad errand).

  Denny said that finding a pretty girl in Sears was a gold mine. Her misery made her more beautiful because she was out of place, standing around all those tools and tires. Denny said it was like spotting a rare bird at a landfill.

  Which, after I thought about it, sounded pretty good to me. I decided I might be able to learn a thing or three from Denny Rosenblatt.

  You spend a lot of time here?

  “I practically grew up here,” he whispered.

  So we trudged to Sears to test out Denny’s theory. We moved through the rows of power drills and toolboxes in search of loveliness.

  True story.

  And doggone it if Denny wasn’t right.

  A girl with a long brown braid and a red-and-blue flannel shirt trailed behind a male parental unit.

  “But, Dad, when can I get my phone back?” she whined.

  She looked completely out of place and full of misery.

  Beautiful misery.

  Denny rounded the corner and walked right in front of the Sears girl.

  And he sang, “If you want to find a rare beauty out of school, look in the store where you can buy a tool.”

  And the girl did some eyebrow gymnastics at first, but then she broke into a laugh. I stepped up behind Denny and shrugged at the girl, then pulled him away.

  “See what I mean, Wayne on a plane,” Denny sang. “A beautiful creature out of its element is even more beautiful. Even if I can’t talk to her.”

  If a pretty girl is spotted in an unsearched area of the mall, then how many fallen objects may be found in unsearched areas of East Texas? That was the path my brain chose to take.

  Fact: I ended the day with three new things. New shoes, a new friend, and a new theory about unsearched areas of Texas.

  DATA

  New debris found.

  A one-pound biography of Steve Jobs was found in the yard of one Thomas Flint near Route 69 between Jefferson and Karnack, Texas.

  Fact highlighted on Texas map—Thomas Flint lives two miles farther east of established debris field.

  The Steve Jobs biography and the American flag exited Flight 56 at approximately the same minute.

  Debris field widens to seventeen miles.

  Notes: Unpopulated areas of East Texas just beyond crash site have yielded zero reported debris. Potential unsearched debris field.

  Extend search area east toward Caddo Lake State Park, potential Sears of investigation.

  CHAPTER 16

  Ever since Denny and I spotted the beautiful miserable girl in Sears, I couldn’t stop thinking about unsearched geography. I couldn’t stop thinking that unsearched geography was the key to solving the mystery of the missing flag. It was still out there. I was sure of it. Why not. Did you know that people were still finding debris from the tragic Columbia space shuttle disaster? Back in 2003, that shuttle broke up over East Texas, too. The debris field stretched over hundreds of square miles. Investigators and searchers found about eighty-four thousand pieces of debris (only 39 percent of the shuttle’s total weight) early in the investigation. But people are still finding debris. Someone found one of the doomed shuttle’s tanks on a lake bed eight years after the disaster. So my hypothesis was that people in East Texas were still looking for debris. And maybe they’d stumble upon our flag. Do you know how hopeful that made me?

  The inside of my closet door was fast becoming covered with maps. I had just shown them to Denny, and he was the only other person on the planet who knew about them. A map of all the areas the NTSB had searched. Red pins denoted searched areas, and yellow pins indicated sites where East Texas residents had reported debris near their barns. The maximum distance an object was located from the crash site was still within a seventeen-mile radius. What was beyond that radius?

  As I considered this theory, my phone buzzed.

  Was it a message from Liz Delaney?

  No.

  It was Sandy.

  Mom won’t let me break up with W!!!! Says it wud b cruel 2 do right now, which is true??

  Then she wrote back to me in a hurry:

  Wayne, my kid sister was playing with my phone. Ha ha! How r u?

  How was I? Well, I was in the know.

  That’s how I was.

  What I wanted to reply: Please listen to your mom!

  What I did reply:

  Hi.

  I know. I know. No one would ever accuse Wayne Kovok of being Shakespeare.

  “Hey, open up, soldier. New muffins have arrived via Sandy’s mother,” Grandpa said through my closed door. “I’ve been alerted that I need to check with you if I want to consume them.”

  I shot a look at Denny.

  I closed the closet door before Grandpa could see. He was in the hallway, already consuming a muffin.

  I gave him a quick thumbs-up.

  “Why are you wearing sunglasses indoors?” he asked. This was sort of a stupid question considering he was wearing his sunglasses indoors at that exact moment. I could see my reflection in them.

  I shrugged. When you don’t have a voice, you appreciate the economy of the shrug. It communicates I don’t care, I don’t know, or maybe in one convenient gesture, and those were all the feelings I had about sunglasses and muffins. I squeezed past Grandpa and went to the kitchen.

  A white basket of blueberry muffins mocked my feelings for the most beautiful girl in the world. They were a baked reminder of plane wreckage and Wayne-and-Sandy wreckage.

  I might have destroyed a blueberry muffin.

  Okay, I destroyed a blueberry muffin.

  I squeezed it into pieces. Mr. Darcy ran over to gobble it up off the floor.

  Denny tried to whisper to me, “It’s okay.”

  Then I went into the living room. Being equidistant from my room, which held my cell phone, and the kitchen, which had pity muffins, it seemed like the only safe place in the house.

  “Sergeant, just go ahead and give the man his coup de grâce!” Grandpa shouted at the TV. Muffin crumbs dribbled from his hand.

  What? I wrote and pushed the note in front of his face.

  “What? A coup de grâce? That’s a death blow intended to end the suffering of a wounded man. Now, stop talking over this movie, W!”

  I tried hard to concentrate on the military movie. I’d noticed lately that if I sat very quietly with Grandpa while he was watching a show, he would talk to me. More accurately, he would point things out and I would nod. It was the closest thing we had to normal conversation. And to tell you the truth, I was starting to get used to it. To enjoy it a little. Grandpa had a ton of cool facts in his brain.

  “Hey, Wayne, if you get a chance, tell your girlfriend you want bran muffins next. Keeps your morning constitutional regular. You know what I’m saying, right?”

  Grandpa had mentioned his morning constitutional once before. I thought it had to do with something patriotic. It doesn’t. It means your first visit to the bathroom.

  I looked it up.

  I nodded to him about the muffins and pretended to watch the TV. But my brain kept saying, Wayne, you’re not stupid. You know who Sandy’s other friend with a W is. They’ve been friends since the fourth grade.

  Wendy.

  Wayne.

  W.

  The wrong W in a list of phone contacts.

  Was it just me, or was the accidental text the likely deathblow of many a relationship?

  Denny whispered to me, “You need unbiased girl confirmation. Maybe it doesn’t mean what you think it means.”

  Where could I get unbiased girl confirmation?

  I ran down the hall, grabbed my phone, and sent a text message of my own. I texted my old friends Mysti and Rama
and told them the whole story in three spare sentences.

  After thirty minutes, they texted back. (I figured they used that space of thirty minutes to call each other and discuss my coup de grâce.)

  So sorry, Wayne.

  That was their studied answer.

  “So sorry, Wayne on a plane,” Denny sang.

  In my brain, I filed a new scientific method report. I pictured the report morphing into a science-fair display board with bright, bold lettering on a table in the Beatty Middle School library.

  Question: What happens to a boy with a beat-up face and no voice when he gets an accidental breakup message from the girl of his dreams?

  Hypothesis: The boy will do nothing about it.

  Procedure: Epic denial of misfired text.

  Probable conclusion: When Wayne Kovok regains his voice, he will lose his sort-of-boyfriend status.

  New topic.

  Denny, did you know that Minecraft was originally called the Cave Game and that the Creeper started out as a coding error?

  “You were like this before the crash, right?” Denny asked.

  Pretty much.

  “Except you could eat french fries and tacos.”

  Yeah. Except I had an uncle and a sort-of girlfriend, went to a normal school, and didn’t share a bathroom with my grandpa. Except for those things, I was mostly the same.

  DATA

  Items still missing in the world:

  Possible treasure buried beneath the Alamo, known as the San Saba treasure believed to have been buried by the Texas defenders.

  The fortune of 1930s mobster Dutch Schultz, which vanished without a trace

  Part of Montezuma’s treasure rumored to have been stored in Utah.

  The Amber Room: An entire room that went missing. Made with elaborate amber panels and gold-leaf mirrors in the eighteenth century, given to Russia’s Peter the Great. Later disassembled by the Nazis and taken to Königsberg Castle, never to be seen again.

  Spartacus, whose body was never found

  Amelia Earhart, aviator who disappeared in 1937 while trying to fly solo around the world

  CHAPTER 17

  Twenty-four hours had passed since the nightmare of the mis-sent text.

  But there was some good news.

  I’d just come from Dr. P.

  “The swelling around your vocal cords has significantly decreased,” he said. “I don’t expect permanent damage, so you can resume dreaming of being a famous rock star.”

  I raised my good eyebrow. Once I had invented a group called Epic Scientists, but had only gotten as far as writing the title for a hit song. It was called “The Data Says You Like Me.”

  True story.

  But I never really had the dream of becoming a rock star.

  He said if I kept up my therapy, I should expect fast results.

  “You should expect fast results,” Dr. P said. “Probably be saying my name out loud in four to five weeks if you keep up with your exercises. You might also be able to start eating more solid foods.”

  So that was good news.

  But also bad news. Sandy would let me go as soon as I could speak. I knew that. I even understood it. But I didn’t want to accept it.

  I decided to distract myself by working on math. Yes, I know that’s sort of lame: forgetting a girl by doing something mathematical. But here’s another weird story Uncle Reed once told me. There’s a technique they teach Special Forces soldiers to employ when they’re under intense questioning. It’s thought that if you run the multiplication tables in your head while answering a question, you can beat a lie detector test. So why not apply that method to forgetting about anything?

  It worked.

  It worked really great. I started looking up facts about multiplication. Then I just couldn’t help but do more research on strange flights and missing objects. The more I researched, the less the falling sensation took hold of my body. It was a good strategy. I logged hours of computer-screen therapy. I forgot about the missing flag for a little while, too.

  It was a great distraction until I found something new to worry about.

  Did you know that one new worry can cancel out one old one?

  Now, Grandpa didn’t know how to efficiently use the computer. Nope. Not at all. He might have been super smart about rifles and reconnaissance and how to drill patriotism into new recruits, but he knew nothing about how to close out computer programs. Every time I used the computer after he’d been on it, I’d find about fifty windows open, sucking up all the computer memory. He did this all the time.

  All. The. Time.

  Even before he lived here, he’d come over and work on our computer.

  Yours just works better. Mine’s too slow, he’d say, and I’d think, Yeah, because you have fifty windows open. Don’t they teach you that in the army?

  But I liked to spy on Grandpa’s search history.

  Weather sites. Old-car rallies. The best kind of food for a turtle. Balms for joint ache. Climate-change conspiracy theories. You never knew what you were going to find with him. Back when I had a voice, I could go look at his computer history and sneak it into a sentence to get him worked up.

  For example, My science teacher said old cars are damaging our environment and could be linked to climate change.

  The face. The Grandpa face. A mix of frustration and grumpiness and I’m gonna tell you, kid all in one. I used to love getting him to make that face. I had to laugh on the inside. Any outside laughing was cause for a push-up challenge.

  So you think you’re funny, do you, Kovok? Well, I can still beat you at push-ups! Drop and do twenty, he’d order.

  And I’d have to drop right there and do twenty push-ups. By the time I was on push-up number fifteen, he’d be done and standing over me. Who’s laughing now, Kovok?

  True story.

  So I sat down in front of our computer and snooped at his open windows.

  The first window: Baylor Liver and Pancreas Disease Center.

  The second window: Willowbend Health and Wellness.

  Third: Dr. Lisell, oncologist.

  And it went on and on.

  Articles about the pancreas. Best foods for pancreatic cancer patients. Best treatments. Best prognoses.

  With each window I scanned, I tried to follow what I read. Connect it to Grandpa.

  I didn’t like the associations my brain made. It formed a mind map like one of those school analogy assignments where you draw a line across the page from one word to another.

  Apple—Fruit

  Shoe—Foot

  Stomach problems—Grandpa

  Grandpa—Cancer

  I pushed away from the keyboard like it was suddenly toxic. Dangerous. Like I understood too much, too fast.

  “What are you doing?” Grandpa’s sudden ninja-like presence never stopped surprising me.

  I spun around lightning fast and there he was, holding a coffee mug, wearing his aviator sunglasses, smiling. Smiling either because he scared me or he caught me. He wore that you need to drop and do push-ups face, too. I figured he’d caught me.

  “What are you staring at?”

  Shrug.

  “You’ve got a question, Wayne, let it out.”

  I had lots of questions. But it wasn’t like any of them were going to push themselves out of my “significantly improved” throat.

  “Your mother’s home, so go help her with the groceries,” he commanded.

  In the kitchen, Mom boiled water for pasta. I rearranged the blue glass birds back into circle formation. Then I made my dinner smoothie.

  I wrote a note: Set out two plates?

  Maybe a change in Grandpa’s diet would reveal a clue.

  “Yes. Two.”

  That didn’t give me any data. He wasn’t eating anything different from Mom.

  “How is your friend Denny?”

  Good.

  “That’s good. I’m glad you’ve made a new friend. New friends are important, don’t you think?”

&
nbsp; Important. Sure.

  “I might have a new friend, too. How would you feel if I went on a date with a new friend?”

  I found myself double shocked. First I find out my grandpa might be sick. Right when he’s not the most annoying houseguest ever. And second, my mom is querying me about a date. My mom dating? Let’s just say that rarely happens. She is super picky, as she should be.

  I wrote on my notepad: Who?

  “His name is Tim LeMoot. And why are you wearing those sunglasses to the dinner table? You look like you’re spying on me.”

  Wait, Tim LeMoot, the Texas Boot?

  “Yes.”

  The TV lawyer guy?

  “Yes.”

  Tim LeMoot! TIM LEMOOT! Tim LeMoot who screams through our TV?

  “Yes, Wayne, that’s the guy.”

  What??? Why??

  “Well, we have a lot in common.”

  After your money?

  “No, nothing like that.”

  Facts: Tim LeMoot, the Texas Boot, is that accident-injury attorney, and my mom has recently been in an accident.

  Smelled like a bad idea.

  “I know what you’re thinking. That it’s a bad idea. But he’s a human being. He happened to graduate from Southern Methodist University and has a thirteen-year-old daughter named Debra. He likes to play Ping-Pong, and he also sails on White Rock Lake.”

  I looked at her bug-eyed and she said, “I anticipated your interrogation, Wayne, so I thought I’d just go ahead and give you his biography.”

  I wrote: Does he like Jane Austen movies?

  It was doubtful he did.

  “Well, I don’t know. Why?”

  And I wrote: Because YOU do. Important!

  “Look, the truth is that we went out a couple of times before the accident, so…”

  Oh.

  What was I going to say to my mother about dating, huh? That was a place I didn’t want to go. It made me feel nauseated just thinking about it. Tim LeMoot. The Texas Boot. No way was that a good idea.