“So, why exactly were you sprinting like you were being chased by wolves?” Arman asked Wiener over bacon-cheddar-ranch fries at Tower Fries.
“I was looking for Chico and Missi,” Wiener replied.
Arman narrowed his eyes. “Uh-huh. And you got separated how?”
“It’s not that they left me or I left them,” Wiener explained. “It’s just—well, as a newbie counselor it’s probably hard for you to understand the pressure of a Scavenger Hunt.”
“Try me.”
“How can we be expected to stick together when there’s so much to conquer, to ride, to—”
“Yeah, I’m going to stop you right there.”
Wiener tried to keep eye contact with Arman to show that he had nothing to hide. But then his eyes started watering, so he looked down at the mushy fries on the napkin in front of him.
“Let’s try this,” Arman said. “How and why did you steal a Twizzlers wristband?”
“I didn’t STEAL it,” Wiener answered way louder than he’d intended.
“Come on, buddy,” Arman nudged. “Be honest.”
“HONEST? YOU WANT ME TO BE HONEST?” Wiener shoved a mushy fry into his mouth. He tried to swallow, but it formed a lump at the back of his throat.
“I’m not here to get you in trouble,” Arman said gently. He leaned in across the metal picnic table. “If I tell you something truthful, will you do the same?”
Wiener dropped his eyes to Arman’s Terminator Arm. “It depends on what truthful thing you tell me.”
“I was born like this.”
Wiener blinked, confused. “You were born like what?”
Arman flexed his robot fingers. “No cheetahs. No crocodiles. No crushing boulders. I’ve always had a nub for an arm.”
This was crazy news. Wiener thought maybe Arman’s arm had gotten mangled in a workplace accident. Or a boat accident. Something more believable than fending off a family of cheetahs, but something less boring than no story at all.
“Disappointed?” Arman asked.
“A little,” Wiener admitted, slurping his lemonade.
“Yeah, I get it. There’s no wow factor to the real story.”
Wiener cocked an eyebrow. “Is that why you lie about your arm?”
“Sort of,” Arman replied. “Though ‘lie’ is an ugly word. I prefer the term ‘armor.’”
“Armor? Like the protective metal stuff?”
“Yup,” Arman said with a grin. “Growing up, I got made fun of a lot. Kids called me an alien, and I had one friend: my mom. So when we moved to the States, I decided to play around with my arm’s backstory. My ‘armor’ brought out the cool, silly side of me, you know?”
“Did everyone believe whatever you said?” Wiener asked.
“Not a chance,” Arman replied with a chuckle. “But it wasn’t about that. It was about making people laugh. Even now, when I meet new people, the wild stories make me feel more confident. People stop focusing on my arm and start focusing on me.” He sighed and licked the salt from his robot fingers. “Some people are born looking different, and it’s just that, for me, I found my own way of dealing with it. That make sense?”
Wiener nodded slowly, wondering if his letters to Max weren’t big ugly lies, just . . . armor.
“I can see your wheels spinning,” Arman said. “You ready to come clean?”
Wiener lowered his head. “Honestly? No. I can’t tell you. I could make something up, but that would be the bad kind of lie. And that I don’t do.”
He waited for Arman to get mad, but instead he put his robot fist out for a pound. “I hear you, buddy,” he said. “And I respect that. I’m giving you a Get Out of Jail Free card.”
“Really?” Wiener asked.
“Really. But until we find your group, you’re going to have to stick with me.”
“Fair,” Wiener said, pounding him back.
Arman cleared the table, and the two of them began walking around the park. Wiener couldn’t stop thinking about Arman’s armor. Like his counselor, he’d never lied to hurt someone or be mean. It’s just that, sometimes, the truth stunk, and his stories made him feel a whole lot better. Awesome-sauce, even. What was the harm in that?
“Can I get your advice?” Arman asked Wiener as they tacked on to the end of a medium-long line.
“Oh, uh. Sure thing,” Wiener replied.
“Do you think I should spill the beans about my arm? To the rest of the Wawels, I mean?”
To Wiener, the answer was obvious. “Nah,” he said. “Your arm, your story.”
“WIENER!” Missi called on repeat, pacing up and down the Midway America section of Hersheypark. When Wiener had been a no-show at the Storm Runner exit, Missi had thought he was in the bathroom or in line for lemonade. But after twenty minutes of standing around and eyeing every blue-shirted, spiky-haired kid that passed, she’d decided it was time to search for him. So far they’d hit up Founder’s Way, The Hollow, Pioneer Frontier, The Boardwalk, and now, Midway America.
No Wiener.
“Ugh,” Missi said. She drew in a breath. Chico, too. “WIENEEEEEER!” they shouted together.
A woman beside them ear-muffed a toddler and shuffled her away toward the Pony Parade. “Sorry,” Missi mumbled after them. “It’s not what you think.”
“It’s not like Wiener to leave us,” Chico said, kicking at some littered gummy bears at his feet. “He never leaves me alone. Like a shadow he is. A weird, nice shadow.”
“Well, I dunno. Maybe he’s mad at us.”
“Why would he be mad?”
“Um.” Missi chewed her lip. She’d been contemplating that very question for the last forty minutes, and it was seriously bumming her out. (a) Wiener could be upset that she and Chico had gone on the Storm Runner when it had nothing to do with the hunt. (b) When Wiener had decided to jump ship, he could have secretly hoped they’d do the same. Or maybe (c) Wiener was simply jealous of Chico. According to Jenny, Play Dough was jealous of Chico, and Chico hadn’t even flirted with Jenny. “Maybe Wiener’s just, you know,” Missi said suggestively, “ ’cause of the one time we . . .”
“The one time you what?”
She looked at Chico, waiting for the Spin the Flashlight story to leap to the surface of his brain. Surely Wiener had told him. But Chico just stared back at her, clueless. “Wiener and I—” Missi cut herself off. Her cheeks were on fire. It was probably a dumb idea to out her one-off kiss with her crush’s closest friend. What if she was wrong and Wiener wasn’t jealous at all? “Friends have history is all,” she said, trying to be as vague as possible. “I bet Wiener just wanted to score some points on the hunt and then got distracted.”
“I have the camera,” he said, pointing to his shorts pocket.
“Oh.”
“He carries all the baggage.”
“Right.” Missi took a hard look at the map. “There’s only one more section of the park we haven’t searched.” She vaguely pointed to its super-evocative name, hoping that Chico wouldn’t start bouncing his eyebrows, all I know why you want to take me there. But he just slurped his chocolate milkshake as oblivious as could be and said, “Let’s go to it.”
“Cool.” Map in hand and heart a’skipping, Missi led the way to Kissing Tower Hill.
They passed the Chevrolet Music Box Theatre, where a crowd was lined up to see Drumboys, the newest drummer–boy band; and the SooperDooperLooper, which, despite its name, had only one upside-down loop; and Bizzy Bees, where little kids were buzzing around in a bee-car carousel. Coming off the ride was a girl, probably eight or nine, wearing something familiar. “I have that shirt!” Missi exclaimed. On it was a sketch of a cat drinking milk from a hollow carrot. It read: I DON’T CARROT ALL. The cat’s ears were blue sequins for no reason, which was the best reason when it came to cats.
“You should wear it sometime,” Chico said. “I bet it looks nice on you.”
Missi’s lips curved into a smile. “Really?” She followed Chico’s gaze, but he
was staring at a different girl. She looked seventeen, and her shirt was cropped to her belly button with a moose-skull design in the middle. “Aw, shucks. I forgot to bring that shirt to camp,” Missi lied. She wasn’t a fan of fashion skulls, especially ones that glorified hunting. But Chico didn’t need to know that.
As she and Chico neared Kissing Tower Hill, Missi noticed that they weren’t talking. Chico transferred the camera into his back pocket. He jammed his hands into his front pockets. He took his hands out to clean his sunglasses’ lenses with the bottom of his Rolling Hills T-shirt. He might as well have been screaming, “I’M BORED.” Missi was making him bored.
“So,” Missi said. Terrible conversation topics burst in her brain like microwavable popcorn. Ginger Pride Walk! No. Golden Grahams with goat’s milk! No. Cats in heat! God no. What would Rebecca Joy talk about? What would the kind of girl wearing a cropped moose-skull T-shirt talk about? Oh, sweet Hershey, I’m going crazy. “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?” she blurted out.
“Come to camp.”
“Ha, no, I mean—”
“You mean peligroso?”
“Does that mean adventurous?”
“Once I jumped off a cliff into a waterfall even though the sign read: PELIGRO—Danger!”
“What—how—did you get hurt?”
Chico swept back his glossy wave of hair, exposing a scar across the top of his forehead. “Nineteen stitches.” He pointed to his elbow. “Fractured.” Then his ankle. “Broken.”
“Triple ouch!”
“Oh, that’s nada. Another time I rode my cousin’s motorcycle down Avenida Diagonal, but I didn’t have a permit, so I got arrested. Four hours I was in jail.”
Missi giggled. Then she stopped. That wasn’t funny at all. It was actually pretty reckless. Just this past autumn, her mom had hitched a ride from a motorcyclist through Indonesia, and she’d flipped off the back and landed in a three-day coma. “You know, you’re lucky you didn’t hurt yourself,” Missi said. “Or, like, someone else. Not to be lecture-y, but yeah.”
Chico shrugged. “I’m fine. Not a scratch on the bike, either.”
“What did your parents do? My grandparents—I mean, my mom—she would have kept me locked in my room for all eternity.”
“My parents told me: ‘Boarding school, young man. That’s where you’re going!’ They shipped me out of the country, away from all my friends.”
“Whoa. Well, do you like it there at least?”
“The teachers are nuns. The kids are brainwashed.” He pouted his lips like he was sucking on a lemon. “The school is on a farm—you eat what you grow.”
Missi perked up. Going to school on a farm sounded kind of awesome. She and her grandparents also ate what they grew, and it was the coolest part of living there. Well, second-coolest to all the animals. “Are there animals on the farm?” she asked.
Chico rolled his eyes. “Yup. We have to wake up early for farm duties and taking care of the chickens. They stink.”
“As in they smell or taking care of them isn’t fun?”
“Both. But if you like hanging out on your grandparents’ farm, then maybe you would like it.”
“No, you’re totally right. Farms stink all around. Blech.” Missi shook her head, trying not to show how weird she felt for having dissed her favorite place in the world. “Well, anyway, maybe if you prove yourself, like, show your family that you’ve matured, they’ll let you come back home for good.”
“That’s what I thought, so I was on my best behavior for months. But then when I flew home for Christmas, my room had already been turned into an office. They didn’t even give me a chance.”
“Another ouch.”
“You’re lucky that you have a mom who cares.”
Missi swallowed and it felt like little shards of glass. She thought about being honest with Chico and explaining that it wasn’t until her mom had woken up from a coma that she’d decided to care. It took a horrible accident for Rebecca Joy to come home to meet her daughter and promise to watch her grow the rest of the way up. But would she then have to admit that she’d lied about her grandparents, and the farm, and everything? Missi stopped walking, and Chico stopped, too. Then she looked down at her calloused garden fingers and tried to think of something understanding to say.
“Hey, don’t feel bad for me,” Chico said. “My parents were looking for an excuse to get rid of me, and I had fun giving it to them.”
“But how’d you end up at Rolling Hills?” It seemed bizarre that a bad boy from Barcelona would spend his summer in an upstate New York sleepaway camp. She imagined Rolling Hills was the opposite of a strict Swedish boarding school. “Did someone in your family go here?”
“My mom’s friend went to college with Kerri Jerecki.”
“Who?”
“The, uh, camp leader person.”
“The Captain?”
“Yeah. My parents are staying with friends in Saratoga for the summer, which is close by. They still don’t trust me. Camp is eight weeks of childsitting.”
“Well, I dunno if I’d call it that,” Missi said.
Chico shifted the camera to his front pocket. He jammed his hands in his back pockets. He took his hands out and cleaned his sunglasses’ lenses again. He was bored, bored, bored. Except a camp trip to Hersheypark was not a time for boredom. It was a time for stomach-flipping fun.
“I have an idea,” Missi said slowly, looking at Chico with a glint of mischievousness. She hoped she was giving him the look her mom gave her before they did something spontaneously adventurous like ditch school to picnic at Palisades Park. “Truth or dare?”
Chico cocked his chin. “Huh?”
Missi repeated herself. “Truth or dare?”
“Uh, dare?”
“Okay! LET’S GO!” Missi grabbed Chico’s hand, and together they wove through gaggles of teens, around strollers, behind wheelchairs, in front of international tourists, and next to families posing for pictures. Photobomb! She felt her hair whip around her shoulders, and her dress flap against her thighs, and the heat between their hands grow hotter.
“What are we doing?” Chico asked, mid-leap over a puddle of ice cream. “Are you daring me to run?”
“You’ll see!”
The last time she’d played Truth or Dare was Lauryn Hill summer. Jenny had dared Jamie to put an ice cream sandwich in their counselor’s pillowcase, and then Melman had dared Missi to take it out and eat it, and then Missi had dared Slimey to wear a menstrual pad over her eye like a period pirate, and then Sophie had dared everyone to go to sleep, and the game was over. They’d made such a mess that they’d lost Canteen privileges for three nights. Worth. Every. Second.
Missi stopped short in front of a food stand with a wooden sign that read CHOCOLATE SIN. She studied the menu.
“What is this place?” Chico asked.
“Hi, there,” Missi addressed the woman behind the counter, dressed in a Hershey’s Krackel costume. “I’ll take number four.” Missi forked up two bucks for a chocolate blob in a cupcake wrapper. She handed it to Chico. “Eat it.”
Chico popped it in his mouth. “Huh. Crunchy. Salty.”
“That was a grasshopper.”
“A BUG?” Chico spit it back into the wrapper. The blob was in three saliva-covered pieces. The grasshopper’s legs were jutting out. “Yuckuckuck! No!”
“Oh please, you loved it!” Missi said.
Chico laughed. “That’s truth.” He stepped up to the counter. “Miss Krackel, I’m going to need another bug. For free. Mine hopped out of my mouth.”
Krackel rolled her eyes. “The bug’s dead.”
“Now it is, yes.”
Missi pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. Krackel passed him a free hopper. He popped it in his mouth with an “Mmmmmmmm, gracias,” and then swallowed it in two forceful bites. “Your turn, Miss Missi. Truth or dare?”
“Dare, duh!”
Now Chico took Missi’s hand and led the
way as they raced to a mysterious location, which turned out to be a henna stand. “My lady would like a henna on her face,” he told the tatted artist.
“On my face?!” Missi cried. “It’ll stain me for weeks!”
“A dare is a dare. I’ll get one with you.”
“How are you paying for this?”
“I told you—I have my ways.”
“You really are crazy.”
Missi got a small but beautiful swirly henna from her left temple to the corner of her eye, and Chico got one that danced around his forehead scar. Then Missi went to the bathroom to reapply sunscreen while Chico somehow paid, and the dares went on. She screamed random words in Spanish at the peak of the Sidewinder. He pretended to have a panic attack on the Frog Hopper kiddie ride. She bummed a half sandwich from a Twizzlers mascot on a shift break. He attempted to enter the backstage area of the Chevrolet Music Box, posing as a Drum-boy.
As Missi watched him from a cotton-candy cart, she spotted the J-squad heading in his direction. No, no, no, she panicked. She dashed to Chico and pulled him behind a life-size cardboard cutout of the Drumboys. “Peligro,” she whispered. “Danger. If the J-squad sees us without Wiener, we’re toast.”
“With cream cheese and bacon?”
Missi laughed. “No, like, toast! Like done! Like game over!” “In that case, RUN!” They sprinted to a cluster of people in line for a ride. Then they ducked behind a woman in an enormous sunhat and a man who was the width of three Chicos. When the couple shuffled up in line, they shuffled with them. “I think we lost the scary girls,” Chico said.
“You mean the J-squad?”
Chico nodded.
“Okay, phew.” Missi glanced down at the map in her hands, trying to figure out her next dare—she was running thin on ideas. Let yourself free-fall, baby! she reminded herself. Live like there’s no tomorrow! Whenever she was reluctant to skip school to hang out with her mom or go cliff jumping at Terrace Pond, Rebecca Joy would share motivational tips like that, and off they’d go on their next adventure. Feel the thrill! Missi flipped the map over to the hunt for inspiration. “Omigoodness!”
Freefall Page 9