The Summer of Everything

by Catherine Clark

  I get out a pen and start to write. Already I have a lot to write home about.

  “So.” My neighbor takes off his headphones. “I’m Andre.”

  “Hi. I’m Ariel,” I say.

  “Like the mermaid.”

  I smile, but not happily.

  “So, how did you get onto the bus?” he asks.

  “Steps?” I suggest.

  He laughs. “Really. Because I was dragged. Kicking and screaming.”

  “I didn’t notice that,” I say.

  “You were probably too busy kicking and screaming yourself. Couldn’t hear me.”

  “Exactly. What, you mean you’re not thrilled to be spending ten days on a bus?” I ask him in a soft voice.

  “I’m giving this trip two days, max,” he says. “Then I’m ditching.”

  Just as he says that, music starts to blare out of the bus speakers. It’s the soundtrack to the musical Oklahoma!

  “Hey, you want to listen to this instead?” he asks, nudging my shoulder and pointing to his iPod.

  I shrug. “No, it’s okay,” I say, wondering if he really means that part about ditching the bus. I hadn’t thought seriously of that yet, except in my overactive fantasy life, as I lay awake the night before listening to my mother snore.

  “Really. It’s cool. You can have half.” He takes out one earbud and hands it to me.

  “My mom made me leave my iPod at home because she wanted us to talk,” I explain as we shift positions and get comfortable. “Not that it’s very good anyway; it was a bribe from my dad. Only he didn’t buy a good one, so it wasn’t much of a bribe.”

  “Parents.” He smiles a little sadly. “Here.” And we listen together. After Beck, some of the music I don’t know but some of it I do, and it’s nice even if it’s only one ear’s worth.

  After a few minutes, when we’re on the highway, he points out the window and I follow his gaze and see a gas station with a red flashing sign that alternates between:

  EAT

  GAS

  EAT

  GAS

  EAT

  GAS

  I look at him.

  “No comment,” he says, and we both smile. It’s the first time I’ve smiled hearing those two words together in a long time.

  Leisure-Lee says, “Welcome aboard! Sit back and enjoy the ride in our new deluxe coach! See the U.S.A. at your pace!”

  Dylan!

  You won’t believe this.

  I’m trapped on a tour bus with my relatives.

  And other crazy people.

  And two overly chipper tour guides.

  It’s some crazy plan to get us to bond while seeing the USA.

  Wish u were here instead.

  Ariel

  Chapter Six

  We pull off the highway and stop at a rest area for lunch. Jenny slides out a giant tray of brown-bag lunches from a chilled compartment next to our luggage. Maybe that shouldn’t gross me out, but it does.

  We’re spread out at various tables, eating bag lunches. Or at least some people are eating them. I had so many Skittles that I really can’t think about eating much else, and besides, it doesn’t look all that yummy. Something about our lunch being so close to the hot pavement that we were driving over is just wrong.

  “Is every lunch going to be on the road?” I ask Jenny as she smiles and sets a brown bag in front of me. I’ll go through it and pull out the stuff I want to eat later, just like I do for away track and cross-country meets. The apple and the cookie can be preserved. I’ll drink the soda now. The sandwich can be tossed.

  “Some will be, but others we’ll eat out,” Jenny says. “Any place with a sign up that says, ‘Buses Welcome,’ we’re there.” She winks at me.

  I study her face, feeling like I can’t trust her. They’re keeping secrets for some reason. I’m sure of it. They’re delivering us to some strange location, like that underground storage place in Nevada. We’ll all be part of some bizarre genetic study involving nuclear waste, which might be less risky than eating this lunch. It looks slightly genetically modified, as if it were built to withstand two weeks on the road, though I don’t know if this is possible with cold cuts. Or would they be warm cuts?

  I turn the sandwich over in my hand. It has a sticker that says, HAM ’N’ CHEEZ.

  Just as I’m about to throw it out, I look up at my grandfather, who’s watching me.

  “Um, you want this?” I ask.

  He just widens his eyes. “Hell, no,” he says. “I have my health to think of.” And he pulls out a PowerBar for lunch.

  I’m sitting at a table with my family, but I cannot make eye contact with my mother. I refuse to. She’s keeping secrets these days, too. Hoarding information. She’s become a hoarder. One of those weird people with fifty-seven cats, only instead of cats, it’s stuff I don’t know but wish that I did.

  “This is so much better than driving,” she keeps saying.

  “How is this better than driving? And why are we here? I don’t mean to sound so existential, but really, what are we doing here?” I ask before I sip my soda.

  “Would anyone be willing to trade?” Uncle Jeff is asking around. “I’ve got a nice ham sandwich here. I’m looking for turkey.”

  “Here,” Andre says, offering up his Turkey ’n’ Tomato.

  “You sure now?” Uncle Jeff asks as he reaches for the sandwich trade, like this is elementary school and he’s the big, yet polite, bully.

  “I’m sure,” he says.

  “Fantasterrific!” my uncle says.

  Andre looks at me and raises one eyebrow as he hands the sandwich to Uncle Jeff. As the sandwich travels past Andre’s mom, a tiny dog’s head pokes up over the top of her big purse and tries to eat the turkey sandwich right out of his hand.

  Uncle Jeff, with his fear of small animals due to the Great Squirrel Incident, immediately drops his ham sandwich to the ground and leaps backward. “What the—”

  “Cuddles. Cuddles! He’s not usually so aggressive,” Mrs. O’Neill explains, as if having a dog in her purse—on a bus trip—is perfectly normal. She tries to pull back the dog, who is barking and wrestling with the sandwich, trying to eat the whole thing even though his head is tiny and his mouth is smaller than a snake’s.

  “Ma!” Her son looks at her with disgust. “What were you thinking? How could you even think this would work, and you lied to me, and—”

  “Anyone else have turkey?” Uncle Jeff is asking as everyone gathers around to see the dog. “Turkey, anyone?”

  “I’ll take a turkey,” one of the older passengers says, clearly having misunderstood.

  “Ma. I told you this would happen,” Andre says.

  “And I told you, I couldn’t leave him at home in a kennel,” she says. “He’s just a baby.” She makes embarrassing kissy noises, saying, “Who’s my favorite boy?” as she snuggles the dog to her, kissing him on the mouth but getting mostly bread.

  I try to picture smuggling Gloves onto the bus. She’d yowl so loudly that we wouldn’t make it up the first step.

  Lenny and Jenny march over, as if they’re the police, which I guess they are in this case. “All right, people. Let’s talk,” Lenny says.

  “We don’t need to talk about it,” Jenny says. “We’ve got a policy to deal with situations like this. It’s called no pets!”

  “But perhaps there’s a reason for this. A medical emergency or something,” my grandmother suggests.

  “What kind of medical emergency can be helped by a Chihuahua?” my mother says. “And is that a Chihuahua, or a rat?”

  “It’s nothing more than a desire to look like one of those celebrities who carry little dogs in bags,” my grandfather mutters to me. “Annoying. Cruel.”

  “Yet occasionally stylish, depending on the dog’s outfit,” I add.

  Lenny climbs up on a picnic table and claps his hands to get everyone’s attention, as if everyone’s not already gathered around staring at the dog. “All right, everyone. Listen up. Now,
the first thing we need to investigate is whether anyone in this group is allergic to dogs?”

  He waits a second, but nobody claims to be.

  “He’s a very well-behaved dog,” Andre’s mom speaks up. “He’s completely potty-trained, and you haven’t heard him bark once, have you? He sleeps like an angel cuddled next to me. That’s why I named him Cuddles.”

  Andre looks at me and rolls his eyes. I realize that maybe the two of us are going to get along, because I start thinking how much both our moms are annoying us right now. It isn’t much to bond over, but it’s something.

  “I’ll pay an extra fee, if need be,” Mrs. O’Neill offers. “A pet deposit. Whatever you want. But please, please, don’t ask me to leave him behind.”

  Andre adds, “Plus, she’ll go insane if she has to leave the dog somewhere, and then we’ll have an insane woman on the bus.”

  I glance at my mother. Two insane women on the bus.

  “Nobody wants anybody to lose her mind on this trip, I can assure you,” Lenny says. “That happened to us on a tour once. Middle of Arizona. Woman went stark raving mad in the desert. Had to get her flown out by helicopter.”

  “That sounds promising. Do you think Mom did any research on this bus company?” I ask my grandfather.

  He smiles at me. “Yes, she did, because she called us about a dozen times to ask if we thought this was a good idea.”

  “And you said . . . ?” I ask.

  “Hey, we’ll do anything to spend time with you guys,” he replies with a shrug. “Well. Almost anything. We put the kibosh on a nature retreat with a bunch of life-coach seminars.”

  “Thank you.” I sigh, turning my attention back to the dog debate.

  “The issue is whether we let both of you stay on the bus,” Jenny says. “This is a major infraction of the rules.”

  Mrs. O’Neill looks at her with narrowed eyes. “If I go, then my son goes,” she says. “We’ll demand a full refund. And that’s two paid passengers you won’t be able to replace at the last minute.”

  “Perhaps a surcharge, then,” Lenny says nervously, “would be the best solution.”

  “No, we have to go by our published policy for situations like this,” Jenny states with a meaningful glare at her hubby. “We’re bringing it to a bus vote. Bus votes are what we do when we have conflicts. So. How many people are in favor of letting Cuddles stay on the bus?”

  As I stand there watching some of the older passengers’ hands shake as they hold them in the air, I realize that if the dog goes, Andre goes, and he is the only person on the bus I could remotely bond with, and he let me listen to his iPod.

  I raise my hand as high as I can. “Let them stay on the bus,” I say. “I bet half of us have pets at home that we miss.” I look around the crowd and see everyone watching me. Why am I doing this, again?

  “And unlike my cat, Gloves? Cuddles is transportable. He doesn’t whine, or scratch, or demand to be let on and off the bus.” Unlike me, too, I think. “So maybe Cuddles could be, like . . . our mascot. Every bus—every team—needs a mascot. Right? Like at my school, we’re the mighty Panthers, and so it cheers us all up when the Panther’s on the bus—”

  “You have a live panther?”

  “Oh, jeez, that’d worry me.”

  “Anyway,” I say. “What’s the harm in letting Cuddles stay? Maybe he could be like our, uh, therapy dog.”

  “Ooh!” my mother cries. “Great idea.”

  “But he’s going to make it impossible for us to gain entrance to certain sites,” someone complains.

  “You’d be surprised. The policies on pets are changing everywhere,” Mrs. O’Neill says. “He does have lots of cute outfits. He’ll charm his way in.”

  “We can’t hang out here any longer talking about this. Who’s for Cuddles?” Jenny asks again. “Raise your hands.”

  Lenny counts the votes. “Thirty-three. That carries. The bus has spoken. Cuddles the Chihuahua . . . welcome to Leisure-Lee Country, where the miles and smiles aren’t far apart.” He reaches over to rub the dog’s head, but Cuddles looks like he’d rather chew his hand.

  As we meander back over to the bus, Andre comes up to me. “I don’t know whether to kiss you or to kill you.”

  I feel my face turn red. “What?”

  “That dog was my chance. To escape. And you blew it for me,” he says as we stand in line to get back onto the bus.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t think—”

  He shrugs. “No, it’s okay. I was joking. If we had to leave, I’d go home, and that’s not where I want to spend the summer either,” he admits.

  “I hear you,” I say. “Sort of.”

  “So is your mom as nuts as mine?”

  “Probably,” I say.

  “My mom picked this tour because she wants us to bond,” he says. “One, I get carsick on buses, which makes it hard to read; two, she brings the dog; three, we’re, like, in the middle of nowhere, and could anyone stare at us more? All these old people want to kill us.”

  “What? No, they don’t.”

  “Look at them.” He subtly points to a couple of retirees who are regarding us with what can only be called skepticism. Or contempt. Or hatred.

  “Probably they don’t like anyone under the age of twenty,” I say. “One of those ageist things.”

  “Teen hatred. Right. I’m sure.”

  “So, are you and your mom bonding yet?” I ask.

  “Like rubber cement,” he says. “Epoxy. Gorilla Glue.”

  “Really?”

  “No. More like dry Scotch tape.”

  “I could go for a dry Scotch,” my grandfather says with a sigh as he stands behind us in line to get back on the bus.

  Look for the evasive jackalope—a legendary creature feared and respected by all who visit the American West. Able to run and hop at high speeds.

  Dear Gloves,

  I miss you. There is a dog on the bus. It’s an outrage.

  But you don’t like riding in cars, so I doubt you’d like buses.

  Because who does, really?

  Go tell Grandma you’re hungry for some chopped tuna. Starving, actually.

  You’ve never been so hungry in your life.

  XX OO

  A

  Chapter Seven

  Here’s another sentence I never thought I’d write: I think the Corn Palace is cool.

  In case you haven’t been there, it’s this giant place covered in corn kernels. I don’t think I can even describe it all that well, except to say that they have a theme every summer, and there are murals made out of different-colored corn kernels. Like, when you were little and didn’t want to eat your vegetables, and you made a pattern on your plate of green beans and corn.

  My grandmother has taken my mother and Zena to see the Enchanted World Doll Museum across the street. I bowed out and am killing time at the Corn Palace gift shop. Naturally I’m looking at the postcards, trying to find my next victim, when I try to spin the rack and it goes nowhere. I see a blue blur on the other side that looks like Zena’s hoodie, so I say, “What’s your name, what’s your name, I want to buy you an ice cream,” in a creepy, twangy voice, the way we’ve been doing whenever we talk to each other, which isn’t often.

  But the person on the other side doesn’t respond and just keeps pushing at the postcard rack, trying to spin it, and my hand gets kind of wrenched.

  “Oh my god, Zena, would you stop it?” I say, but then I see Andre step out on the other side.

  “Don’t call me Zena,” he says. “I have enough problems without being called a girl.”

  “That’s my sister,” I say. “And you’re right.”

  “Where is she? Where’s your mother?”

  “Across the street,” I say.

  “Same.”

  So far neither of us has asked about dads, and I like that.

  He looks at the collection of postcards I’m holding, which are all fairly goofy. “You need a lot of postcards,” he observes
.

  “I’m sending them to a bunch of people. Plus I want to save some for myself,” I say. “Otherwise, who will ever believe I went on this amazing trip?” I roll my eyes to let him know I’m not serious.

  “Your really long and boring testimony about it should scare them off. Somewhere, there has to be a recording of that dude’s presentation.” He mimics Lenny and his highway narrative. “The drought was absolutely devastating to the people.”

  “You have a pretty good Australian accent,” I say. “Where are you from?”

  “Chicago,” he says.

  “That explains it. Isn’t there a neighborhood like Little Australia? Little Sydney or something?”

  “No,” he says, not looking all that amused. “Anyway, I’m from outside Chicago. You?”

  “Way outside Chicago. Milwaukee,” I tell him. “Actually, just outside Milwaukee.”

  He finally laughs. “So. What will you write on your postcards about the Corn Palace?” he asks.

  “That it reminds me of Russia,” I say.

  “You’ve been to Russia?”

  “No, I just meant those little thingies at the top.” I point to a postcard in my hand, showing him what I mean.

  “The spires? Minarets,” he says.

  “Right. Those.”

  “They’re mostly used in mosque construction. Islamic mosques. So I don’t know what they’re doing on a corn palace in South Dakota.”

  “Are you, um, Islamic?” I ask. Oh no, I sound like an idiot. “Muslim, I mean. Is that why you didn’t want that turkey sandwich?”

  “No, I’m vegan,” he says.

  I smile. “Then the meat sandwiches aren’t gonna come in handy, are they?”

  “No, just kidding. I’m actually nothing,” he says. He shrugs. “I mean, no restrictions. Food-wise, religion-wise—”

  “Ariel.” I feel a tug on my sleeve. “Ariel.”

  I turn slowly and see Zena behind me. “Yes?”

  “Give me ten dollars,” she says.

  I narrow my eyes at her. “For what?”

  “This corn pen. Plus this snow globe with the falling corn.”

  When I look back around, Andre’s gone.