I sigh and flop back on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. Being on a real bed after camping for two nights feels so nice. Do I really want to trade it for a few questionable nights on the road?
Mom stands over me, holding out her hand for the phone. “Andre, I have to get going,” I say. “But I’ll see you for that early run we talked about.”
“Early run?” he asks.
“Before the marathon—you know, the warm-up jog you’re going on with me and the rest of the group. Meet me outside at six.”
“Six?” He sounds as if he is nearly choking.
“Good night!” I say cheerfully.
“I didn’t know Andre was a runner,” my mom comments as I hand her the phone.
“Oh. Well, he is.” I nod.
Black Hills Buffalo Barbecue & Co.
We kill it, you grill it.
Buses welcome.
Mom,
Don’t worry about me. Andre and I will be together and I’ve got some money and we can take care of ourselves. I’ll be safe. I’ll be realsafe.
But I’m leaving because I just can’t stand everything.
I don’t want to stay where we are, and I don’t want to move.
When I figure it out, I’ll be back.
Love,
Ariel
Chapter Twenty
In the morning I get dressed to go running. I’ll play it cool to my mom if she rolls over and wakes up, tell her I’m going out for a jog like every other morning. But of course she doesn’t wake up, because she’s not that kind of sleeper. She’s the kind who needs three alarms just to get her attention.
I went down earlier this morning to stash my backpack in a bush on the edge of the parking lot, across from the lobby. I’m like that soccer-playing girl in Bend It Like Beckham. I’ve also left a note for Andre under his room door about where to meet me, for real.
I leave the postcard on the motel bathroom sink, but then I read it again and decide, no, I’m not leaving it. I’ll figure out another way to get in touch. I throw it out, but then picture Mom searching the room and finding that, and it’s not very good and doesn’t really tell her anything. So I stuff the postcard under the waistband of my running shorts. As I do, the hundred-dollar bill from my dad falls out of my little key pocket. It seems like bad luck, so instead of putting it back in, I leave it as a bookmark in Zena’s Us magazine.
Once outside, I crouch down to get my backpack from under the bush. When I stand up and glance back at the motel, I see my uncle peering out through the lobby window. Why do I have to see my uncle watching me leave? He’s up early for the breakfast buffet, reading the newspaper, and I wave, and he looks at me like he’s onto me. But I can outrun him, so it’s okay.
He gives me a little wave and I hide the bag on my other shoulder, then start running.
I run under a banner that says KEYSTONE KEY TO THE BLACK HILLS MARATHON. A car goes by and some older guys leer out the window.
I run to the gas station where I told Andre to meet me—I’d scoped it out when my grandpa and I went running before dinner.
I think about that first day of our trip when I rushed into the gas station convenience store after Zena, and how that guy with the twirled mustache wanted to talk to her. Now here I am. Totally twelvulnerable, like her.
Tip: Never run away when you’re wearing short shorts.
I pace around the parking lot nervously, feeling kind of stupid, but also determined.
Andre shows up to meet me, panting and out of breath. “I think Lee saw me,” he says, and we both start laughing. “This should be a good place to catch a ride. Any prospects yet?”
“No. Did you make a sign?” I ask.
“A sign?” His forehead creases in confusion.
“You know, a sign. Like, ‘L.A. or Bust,’” I explain. “Or whatever. We’re hitching, right?”
“Yes, but subtly, so we don’t get caught,” Andre says. “Are you new at this?”
“Like you’re not,” I tell him. “You brought a big enough bag.”
“I’m not planning to come back for a while,” he says. “Hey, check it out. Here comes our ride.”
A dated-looking avocado-colored RV with Ohio license plates pulls into the gas station. The RV is about as long as a football field and takes up two pump islands.
“Well, at least there would be room for your bag in there,” I tease him.
“Shut up. Come on, let’s ask them for a ride,” Andre says.
“We’ll have to see who’s driving first,” I say. “Check them out before they check us out.”
“You think anyone dangerous gets around in that thing?” Andre asks.
We watch as a family with parents, a couple sets of grandparents, and six kids piles out of the RV.
“Told you,” Andre says. “Come on, that’s our ticket.”
“We’re here, kids! We did it!” The dad starts to high-five all the assorted kids as they all run around the RV, like some bizarre exercise/travel routine.
“Reginald. We’re not all the way there,” one of the grandparents says.
“Mother, please. This is as close as it gets without being able to actually touch Mount Rushmore. You said you needed to stretch your legs, so do it. I’ll top off the tank.”
“So we’re actually doing this?” Andre asks as we walk over to the RV. Since the vehicle is so huge, it’s not a long walk. “Ditching. Bolting. Abandoning ship.”
I laugh. “I should have known not to worry. Your vocabulary can get us out of any dangerous situations.”
Andre narrows his eyes. “What dangerous situations?”
“I don’t know. Two teenagers with luggage. Doesn’t exactly look, um . . .”
“Copacetic.”
“Right.”
“Or logical,” says Andre. “But let’s see if they’ll give us a ride.” We walk over and introduce ourselves, mention that we’re headed back home to California, that our car broke down and we have no way to get there.
“Really,” the dad, Reginald, says. “You two don’t look old enough to be out here on your own.”
“Oh, we’re young, but we’re in college,” Andre says. “I’m eighteen and so is she.”
“We took lots of AP courses,” I add, which sounds really stupid.
“We actually were here on, uh, a class project,” Andre says. “Extra-credit summer course. Exploring the great back roads of America.”
“And you’re students at . . . ?” the wife asks.
“USC,” Andre says quickly.
“Great school. Great football team. Nothing like Ohio State, of course.” Reginald grins and half punches Andre’s shoulder.
“Gotta love the Buckeyes,” Andre says, nodding.
“Did we mention we’d give you some money for gas?” I add out of nowhere, smiling at the mom.
“We could take you as far as Denver,” Reginald offers.
“Denver would be . . . incredible,” Andre says, shaking his hand. “Thank you, sir. You have no idea how much this helps.”
“A couple of road rules,” his wife says after we meet the kids and grandparents, and we all step into the RV. “One, no smoking. Two, no anything else.”
I nod. “Got it.”
We try to find room to sit down and end up crammed onto a small bench together, facing the six kids on a sofa opposite us, grandparents on either side of us in seats. We pull out onto the road, but it’s slow going. There’s tons of traffic because of the marathon, which starts at eight. Streets are blocked off. We’re moving so slowly that I glance out the window, wondering if I’ll see my grandfather running—and passing us.
“This reminds me of a bus trip I took once,” Andre says, smiling.
“Oh, I love bus trips,” one of the grandfathers says.
One of the boys keeps sticking out his tongue at me, while another is making arm farts. The two girls are playing one of those clap-and-sing things that drive me crazy, and there’s another boy in Spider-Man one-piece PJs, who’s
got his arms folded in front of him and is just staring at me. He looks about five years too old for Spider-Man PJs.
“Is this a great plan or what?” Andre asks out of the side of his mouth.
“No,” I say as the camper struggles up its first hill. “Probably not.”
“Well, you know what they say,” the dad calls over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. “You can’t rush Mount Rushmore!”
Andre and I look at each other. It’s like that movie Groundhog Day. We’ll wake up every morning and go to Mount Rushmore until we change our ways.
One of the grandmothers falls asleep and, after a few minutes, rests her head on my shoulder. The other one is firing off questions at Andre, who’s trying to answer them as best as he can, while he now has two of the boys in his face, attempting to arm-wrestle with him.
We go slower and slower. The engine groans. I glance out the window to see if we’re actually moving at all, and I see black exhaust—or smoke—coming out from underneath the RV.
Finally Reginald pulls over, or attempts to. “Kids—folks—everybody off!” he says. “The Check Engine light is on. I’m going to refill the coolant, see if that takes care of the problem.”
“Haven’t we been on this bus before?” I ask Andre as we get out and stand by the side of the road—well, what’s left of it, with the giant field-size vehicle pulled over. I don’t know who looks or feels more pathetic—me, him, or the avocado RV.
Or maybe the boy in the Spider-Man PJs, who now has to watch dozens of cars and hundreds of people pass by, in his footed pajamas.
“Is it us, do you think? Are we a curse?” I ask Andre as Reginald works on the RV. People are honking their car horns because they have to go out into the oncoming lane to get around the giant beached whale of a camper. I think about Grandpa saying to Lenny, “You should have gone around,” and if these cars don’t go around, they’ll probably overheat, too, and this town will grind to a halt, filled with broken-down automobiles.
“You want to kill time by writing some postcards?” Andre asks me.
“Not really,” I say. I stretch my arms over my head and wonder if Mom and Zena are awake yet, if they’ve noticed that I’m gone and wondered where I am. “You want to learn some vocab?”
Andre shrugs. “Not particularly. And just so you know, you have ink on your stomach,” he tells me.
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He reaches out to show me where, and I flinch at his touch, then laugh, embarrassed.
“Oh yeah. I put a postcard there earlier,” I say. “I forgot about it.”
“You carry postcards on your lean little tummy. Okay.” He leans forward to try to make out the words on my stomach. “Right. Okay, so, let’s say this RV doesn’t make it another foot. How much money do you have?”
“About forty bucks.”
“What happened to the hundred?”
“I left it with my sister,” I say.
Andre stares at me as if I’m the dumbest person on the planet. “Okay, who gives away a hundred bucks and then decides to run away? Who does that? Talk about a bad plan. You’re undercutting yourself. Sabotaging. Derailing.”
“Probably,” I admit. “But I didn’t want to use it. It seemed unlucky, since it came from my dad.”
“For what it’s worth,” Andre says, “he seemed like a nice enough guy.”
“He is. Or he was. He’s just . . . pretty screwed up right now.”
“Yeah. He seemed a little on edge. But not like terminal. Hopeless. A lost cause,” says Andre.
“No? Really?” I ask.
Andre shakes his head. “You want a definition of that? You can check out my dad.”
“But your dad’s good to you.”
“Sure, yeah. But he’s also never going to be a big part of my life,” Andre says. “I kind of realized that when I met his eighteenth girlfriend over the phone last week when I called. He spent about two minutes talking to me; then he had to go.”
“Well, what did he say when you told him you were coming?” I ask.
“I didn’t exactly tell him yet,” Andre says. “If I called to tell him, he’d call my mom to alert her, and we’d never have gotten out the door.”
“So . . . did you leave her a note?” I ask.
“Sure, of course. I put it in Cuddles’s food dish. I know she’ll look there,” Andre says.
“What if Cuddles eats the note first?” I ask.
“Hm. I didn’t think of that.”
“He does like to eat paper. Pop-Tarts boxes, anyway,” I remind him.
“Well, I wrote it on an actual Pop-Tart, so it should be safe,” Andre jokes.
All this talk about Pop-Tarts makes me realize how hungry I am, so I reach into my bag, searching for an energy or granola bar. I usually take some extras from the continental breakfasts and stash them in my backpack. Instead of finding one, though, my fingers close around a plastic case I don’t recognize, so I pull it out to see what it is.
I start smiling, then laughing. “Look.” I hold up the Oklahoma! CD.
“Oh, man, you actually stole it?” Andre asks.
“I didn’t. Didn’t you?”
He shakes his head.
“Then . . . who?” But I think I know the answer to that already. The only other person we talked about this with was Grandpa. He didn’t tell me that he’d taken it. He just left it for me to find. “When did he do that?” I wonder out loud.
I turn the case over in my hands, tracing the scratches in the case. The CD is so worn that it’s amazing it still works. Did he want me to throw it out, I wonder, or keep it as a memento?
Either way, he’s onto me, I can’t help thinking. He knows I’m leaving and this is his attempt to get me back. And I hate him and I love him for it.
“You know what?” I turn to Andre and take his hands. “I think you’re, like . . . the coolest person I’ve ever known. That I’ll ever know, period.”
“I feel the same about you. Otherwise I wouldn’t be out here getting carbon monoxide poisoning.” He waves his hand in front of his face as Reginald restarts the RV and a cloud of black smoke kicks out.
“But I still can’t do this,” I go on, as difficult as it is.
“You can’t? Why not?”
“Because . . . this will sound really rude. Mean. Thoughtless.”
“You’re doing the three synonyms thing,” he says.
“Oh. Sorry.” I think of how much I’ll miss that, how I’ll probably keep doing that all year, and nobody will understand why, or that it’s cool and in honor of Andre. “It’s just . . . I really love spending time with you, and there’s nothing more I want to do than get off that bus and away from my family for even one night. It’s, like, such a great fantasy.”
“So what’s the problem?” he asks.
I think about our dysfunctional family dinner the night before. “The past year has been really hard. We’ve sort of had enough drama. If I take off, I’ll be a little too much like my dad. He’s never there anymore. Not even when he had the chance, the possibility, of taking off with me and Zena. He didn’t show up. And even though my mom is not cool at all, I think I’d better not take off, too.”
Andre looks at me and slides his sunglass visors up so he can get a better look. “You’re serious. We’ve come this far. We’ve got a ride. And you want to go back.”
“You know how nuts your mom went when Cuddles ran off? What do you think she’d do if you go missing?”
“I’m no Cuddles. I don’t compete,” he says.
“Shut up already. You’re her favorite boy.”
“No, I’m her only boy.”
“Same thing,” I say.
“Andre? Ariel? We’re good to go,” Reginald tells us. “Come on back in!”
He waves, then climbs back behind the driver’s seat. His wife steps up into the passenger seat, the kids and grandparents clamber in, and Andre and I just stand there beside the road, not yet moving.
Reginald honks the
horn, which sounds like an injured—or mating—moose must sound. The mom leans out the front window. “Kids, you coming?”
Andre narrows his eyes at her. “Did she just call us kids? Okay, I am definitely not going now.” He picks up his backpack and waves at her. “We’re good! Thanks!”
“You sure?”
“Yes, thanks anyway!” I call to her. “Have fun at Rushmore!”
“Good luck!” she calls back.
All the kids press their faces to the windows. One boy sticks his tongue out at me, and the two girls give us beauty-queen waves, while Spider-Man boy glares, and then gives us the finger.
“Well. We might have problems, but at least we’re not in that family,” Andre comments as they inch up the hill away from us. “Freaks.”
“Totally,” I agree. “So. You want to go out to breakfast or something?”
“Sure.”
We walk and walk down the hill, into town, until we find a diner and sit down at a booth. I open the menu, wanting to order something big and hearty like an omelet and pancakes, except here they’re called “flapjacks,” which makes me laugh so hard that Andre nearly calls for a defibrillator.
“Flapjack,” I explain. “It’s like . . .” I find that I can’t explain it, but I’ll have to just buy a postcard of the place, so that I remember.
I meet Uncle Jeff at the fun run start line at noon, while Andre heads to the finish line.
“Ariel!” Uncle Jeff says when he sees me approaching. “You scared us half to death. Where on earth did you go?”
“Andre and I went on a, uh, hike. My dad’s not around by any chance, is he?” I ask, eager to change the subject of Andre when Uncle Jeff is around, for obvious reasons. It’s not every day your uncle sees you making out with a guy on the ground. And it shouldn’t be.
Uncle Jeff shrugs. “Haven’t seen him.”
“Huh.” I’m not surprised, but I wish the news were different. I stretch my muscles and look for a place to stash my backpack so it’ll be safe. I decide to just wear it, so I don’t lose anything. “Hey, Uncle Jeff. Do you ever read people’s postcards?” I ask as we count down the last minute before the run.
“Oh no, of course not, that would be unethical,” Uncle Jeff says, as if he’s never done anything unethical, like, for instance, try to kill an innocent squirrel. “Anyway, I don’t look at every individual piece of mail; it’s in a presorted stack. On the other hand, if it looks interesting and I want to know what the picture is, I look at the back, and sometimes, well . . .”
The Summer of Everything Page 33