by Christina Li
Three months ago, I, Benjamin Burns, would have been quaking in my shoes the moment I got a three-day detention. If not that, then surely the moment Mom received the call from the principal’s office and got so mad she wouldn’t stop talking while she was making dinner. “Ungrateful,” she griped. “I tell you to do better in school, and then you go out looking for fights with that troublemaker friend of yours.” She slammed down the casserole dish and shot me a look that could char the potatoes on my plate. “I can’t believe it.”
“He was making fun of my friend,” I said quietly.
“Oh, and you couldn’t think of a better way to deal with it than to try to knock his teeth out?”
Mom furiously signed the detention slip the principal had sent home with me. Danny didn’t say anything, but when Mom’s back was turned, he winked at me, as if to say, It’s going to be okay.
Drew sat three seats behind me in detention. He leaned back in his chair, far enough that I actually thought the chair might fall out from under him. He twirled his pencil and looked like he owned the place. Which he probably did. He sure knew this classroom better than I did.
Why had I gotten myself into this mess? I could have just stuck to my brilliant original plan and avoided Drew for the rest of the year. But I wasn’t thinking. I’d just acted.
I sat at my desk the first afternoon, angrily scribbling a bunch of squiggles with my colored pencils. I considered making my math homework into a paper airplane. The teacher, Mrs. Nelson, suggested we read a book. Drew laughed out loud.
Mrs. Nelson looked irritated. “Got your signed slips?”
I reached deep into my backpack, scrounging through layers of comic books and folded scratch sheets of paper from math and a plastic bag of Red Vines, and pulled it out. The paper was crinkled, and Mrs. Nelson picked it up with two fingers like it was a smelly sock. She turned to Drew. “And you?”
“Left it at my dad’s house,” Drew said.
Wait a minute. Were his parents actually . . .
“Bring it tomorrow, then.”
“Can’t. Going to my mom’s house tonight until Sunday. I’ll bring it Monday.” He’d said it as if it were no big deal at all.
I whirled around in my seat. Drew saw me looking at him and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, What? So the fighting hadn’t stopped after all. His dad had finally moved out. His parents were separated. Divorced, maybe. And I hadn’t known.
But how could I have? I hadn’t had a friendly conversation with Drew since last year.
I was actually starting to feel sorry for him when I felt a sticky wad on the back of my head. Drew grinned from three seats down and lifted the straw to his lips again. I peeled the spitball from the back of my head and gritted my teeth. Mrs. Nelson was reading a magazine.
The second day, right as I was going back to room 204, a kid caught me in the hall.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” It was Jimmy Katz, from my science class. He was the one who had gotten hit in the face with Drew’s lunch Jell-O when our class was making Rube Goldberg machines. “I saw Drew putting slime on your poster. Or Ro’s poster, whosever it was.” He cleared his throat. “I wanted to tell Mr. Devlin, but Drew told me that he would put live crickets in my locker if I did.” He wouldn’t quite look me in the eyes.
I let out a sigh. “It’s okay,” I said. “I knew he did it anyway.”
“Still, I should’ve said something. It’s not right of him to do that. I felt real bad when everyone was laughing at you guys. I didn’t think it was funny at all.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It wasn’t.”
“I’m kinda glad you stood up to him, though,” he said. “Even if it got you in trouble.” And then he met my eyes for a second and smiled a little bit before he turned and left.
I stumbled into lunch detention late. I caught three spitballs in my hair before Mrs. Nelson called it off.
I was so bored that I started going through my overstuffed folders, trying to find things to throw out. I finally got to the folder with all my comics things in it.
I flipped through it halfheartedly, at the parts circled in Ro’s blue Sharpie.
The movie premiere had always been in the back of my mind. But now, the date was staring me in the face.
March sixteenth. As in, tomorrow.
I tossed the comics aside. Not that it mattered anyway, really.
But as the clock ticked its way to noon, I couldn’t stop staring at the dates. I leafed carefully through the news clippings again.
At least I’m not scared of everything.
I picked up the map of California Ro had painstakingly copied onto a sheet of paper. My heart was racing. Something was forming in the back of my mind. An idea was starting to come together. And the thing was, no matter how much I tried not to think about it, I couldn’t ignore it. An impossible idea—
Impossible things, Captain Gemma Harris, are often dares in disguise.
Volume 3, issue 2.
And it hit me. If I skipped this premiere, I might not ever see my dad again. Ever.
I looked at the premiere date again and again. I spent the rest of detention so hunched over my maps that I jumped when the bell rang. I peeled another three spitballs off the back of my neck.
There was just one more thing to do.
I stepped in front of Drew as he was about to leave. “Hey.”
He scowled at me. “What do you want?”
“You don’t know what it’s like to be made the butt of a joke, do you?”
His eyebrows rose in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, I do.” I didn’t budge an inch. “It sucks, you know that? When you played that prank on me with the caramel onion and got everyone to laugh at me, I felt awful for the rest of the day. Did you know that when you ruined Amir’s shirt, his parents thought it was his fault and punished him for a whole week? Or when you planted all those fake spiders all over Mrs. Campbell’s desk, she wouldn’t go near it until the next morning? Your pranks ruin someone’s day. Or week. But you probably think that’s hilarious.”
Drew opened his mouth and closed it. He stepped back. “Okay, freako, let’s not spaz out about—”
“You didn’t just ruin Ro’s day,” I said. “You messed up her science fair project. You ruined something she cared about.” Drew didn’t move. I stared him straight in the eye. “I just wanted you to know.”
And then I turned and left.
I didn’t come back to the last detention.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ro
IT’S HARD TO be alone, mathematically speaking. There were a total of six billion and counting people on the planet. In a room of at least twenty-three people, two people were bound to have the same birthdays. If it was that easy to match birthdays with someone, then surely it wasn’t hard to find someone to talk to.
Still, I had never felt more alone at lunch than I did that Friday.
I didn’t see the fight happen. But with those who had, the story seemed to change with every telling. Some people said that Drew was egging Benji on. Some people said that Benji threw the first punch. Some said Drew did. I overheard Liv Wallace in the locker room saying that she couldn’t believe the quiet kid would throw the first punch.
“I heard he did it for Ro,” Holly said. They stopped talking right when I walked past them. Holly spritzed an extra big cloud of Strawberry Delight into the air.
Benji got in a fight for me?
At least I’m not scared of everything.
I’d regretted those words the instant I’d said them. I’d seen the hurt written across Benji’s face.
I thought I’d been helping him all along, but maybe Benji was right. I thought he’d just kept quiet because he always agreed with me, but then it occurred to me that maybe I’d never asked him what he thought.
I thought that all it took was a well-crafted plan. For science fair. For finding Benji’s dad. But now, neither of those things was going to ha
ppen. I didn’t even know how to fix the poster board. Everything had fallen apart.
And worst of all, I’d lost Benji as a friend.
I picked bits of slime residue off my lunchbox. I hated this silence.
Was it too late to apologize?
It didn’t matter. I was going to do it anyway.
“I just want everything to go back to normal,” I said to Mr. Voltz that afternoon, leaning against the checkout counter. I’d come in here hoping to see Benji, but he hadn’t come today. He hadn’t been in class either. He was probably sick. I thought about bringing a Tupperware of Campbell’s chicken soup over, just in case. I glanced over and straightened the comics. “We used to do everything together. Now lunch is just plain awful. What if Benji hated me all along? What if I was the only one who thought we were friends and I never realized?”
Mr. Voltz sighed, glancing at me over the rims of his glasses. “You’re a good friend of his. I’m certain he doesn’t hate you.”
“He probably does now,” I muttered. I’d thought that someone out there had finally understood me. Accepted me for who I was. I didn’t even have to pretend to like things around him.
But now I’d lost the one true friend I’d made.
“What happened?”
I was just about to tell him everything—about the deal we made, about the rocket and how it failed to launch; about how we were trying to find Benji’s dad through his comic books and how we’d thought he lived in New York but how he actually was going to be in Los Angeles—when the bell jangled and Benji’s mom rushed into the store. She was still wearing her nurse’s scrubs; her hair was piled on top of her head in a heaping frizz.
“Hi, Janet,” Mr. Voltz said. “Is something wrong?”
“Benji,” Mrs. Burns said, her voice shaking. “Have either of you seen him?”
Mr. Voltz and I glanced at each other.
“He hasn’t come by in the past three days,” Mr. Voltz said.
“He wasn’t at school today,” I said. “Why?”
There was a long pause. “Because Benji’s missing.”
Oh.
No.
Benji. Benji wasn’t sick because he was home—he was gone.
My heart raced. Mrs. Burns kept talking for a minute more, but her words slipped through my brain in a fog.
Benji was missing.
“Benji was supposed to be in lunch detention today, but he wasn’t. The principal’s office called me this afternoon. He was supposed to come straight home because he’s grounded,” Mrs. Burns said, her voice high-pitched and panicked. “But he wasn’t at home. What if he ran away? Or someone took him or something—”
“Janet,” Mr. Voltz said, his voice steely calm. “Take deep breaths. We’re going to figure this out.”
“Maybe he’s with Danny,” I said. But there was an awful sinking feeling in my stomach.
“He’s at baseball practice,” she said. “I checked. Benji wasn’t there.”
It wasn’t a coincidence. Today was Friday, March 16.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into him lately,” Mrs. Burns. “He’s been so strange. He used to just stay in and read comics, but now he’s been getting into fights and—”
The Friday before the science fair.
The date of the movie premiere. In Los Angeles.
I reached for the newsstand and frantically grabbed a copy of the Sacramento Bee, hoping wildly that I’d gotten the date wrong, that I’d somehow mistaken it in my mind. But suddenly, staring down at the newspaper, the words swam clear and the date jumped out at me.
Relief slammed into me—and then turned to dread.
I whirled around to face Benji’s mother. “I know where Benji is.”
And I knew that this was all my fault.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Benji
I DON’T USUALLY pay attention in class, especially not on those career-fair days when everyone brings their parents and they try to convince you to grow up and be a doctor or car salesman or something. Usually Mom called me in sick on those days, mostly because she felt guilty that she always had to work and couldn’t go to those days anyway.
But the one day I forgot to skip, I got to hear Liv Wallace’s dad talk. Mr. Wallace wasn’t one of those car-salesman people or those people who toted around briefcases and passed out pens with their company names on them. He was a geologist, and he got paid to go into rainforests and all these areas that hadn’t been seen before and map them. He’d survived a snakebite. He’d once gotten scratched by a bear and gotten twenty-six stitches on his scalp. He told us he had a motorcycle, and he wore a T-shirt to class, and he told us to call him Ray.
I had to admit: he was actually pretty cool.
And Mr. Call-Me-Ray spent his half hour telling us about all the ways people used to navigate, back when there weren’t atlases and maps and friendly strangers who would give you directions, because back then probably no one lived in your small corner of the world. He told us about how fishermen used to be able to predict a week’s worth of weather and find their way home just by looking at the stars and at the position of the sun in the sky, even when they were far out at sea. He told us everything from how the Chinese accidentally invented the compass by rubbing a spoon to how the Inuit found their way home through snowstorms by looking at exactly how the wind had scattered the snow.
When Gemma barely escaped the planet that was holding her captive in the stolen enemy spaceship, one of the engine thrusters was broken. The dashboard navigation panel failed. She had to manipulate the magnets in her suit to help her find the planet that her father was imprisoned on. I even remembered the exact title and tagline of the issue.
A Mad Mission: Will Our Beloved Heroine Successfully Make Her Treacherous Journey across the Galaxy to Save Her Father?
Now, I settled back in my seat, the comic in my lap. I thought about Gemma Harris crossing the universe with a broken navigator. I thought about people crossing these huge oceans to find their way back home with nothing to guide them but magnets between their hands. As the Greyhound vents sputtered out cold air above me and the bus jolted along the highway, I looked at the atlas with each road locked between the crisscrossing grids of latitude and longitude. Here was the entire world, recorded in tiny centimeters and millimeters, and I knew exactly where my dad would be. I looked at the circled dates and my father’s face staring out at me and wondered how it had ever taken me so long to find my way back to him.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ro
“LOS ANGELES?” Mrs. Burns said in disbelief. “He could be anywhere right now, and you’re saying that he’s all the way in Los Angeles? He—he might as well be in another state!”
She had a point. Even Nevada was closer to Sacramento than Los Angeles.
This was all my fault.
I hadn’t meant it. The moment I’d suggested going to Los Angeles by ourselves, I’d realized how impractical an idea that was. How were we supposed to pay for everything? What would we tell our moms? I’d just been so frustrated that Benji was so unwilling to go to the premiere, I was ready to throw out any idea.
But even in my wildest imagination, even when for a split second I’d thought of going to find his dad ourselves, it was always going to be Benji and me. We would go to Los Angeles. We would find his dad. If anything, I could read the maps and figure out where to go and time it so we’d arrive in time for the premiere.
And now Benji was going. Alone.
“He’s not in Los Angeles right now,” I said. “But he’s going to be.” I forced myself to meet her eyes. I tried to push the panic out of my mind. I will do the Next Best Step. Deep breaths, in and out. I had to be calm to explain this to her, so we could go to Los Angeles and get Benji as soon as possible. “He’s going to see his dad. His dad has a movie premiere in Los Angeles, and Benji wanted to find him.”
Mrs. Burns didn’t move, but her expression changed.
She’d known after all.
M
rs. Burns’s eyes flashed. “This is ridiculous.”
No one said anything. I’d never heard the clock tick louder.
“Come to think of it,” Mr. Voltz said quietly, “Benji did mention wanting to look for his father.”
“I . . .” Mrs. Burns blinked. Her expression changed. Her face paled. “I remember now. He said something to me about this, but I never . . .” She swallowed. “I didn’t think he was serious.” She turned to Mr. Voltz. “What did Benji tell you about this? Why on earth is he doing this?”
“That’s all he said,” Mr. Voltz said. He let his shoulders drop. “I don’t know any more about this, Janet. He didn’t tell me anything else. I’m sorry.”
Slowly, she turned to me. “What happened?”
“I . . .” I had to explain. From the very beginning.
I held up the copy of Spacebound. “These are Benji’s favorite comics,” I said. “And it turns out that his dad wrote them. Benji wanted to find him,” I rushed on, trying to tell her everything even as the clock ticked on. I knew that every single second Benji was getting farther from us. “He never knew who his dad was and wanted to see him.”
Her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed into a tight line.
“So I helped him find his dad,” I said. I swallowed, my gut sinking. I reached into my backpack and pulled out the one remaining news clipping I had. Today’s date jumped out at me. I pushed the clipping over to her. “And we came across this.”
I hadn’t just helped him. I’d dared him. I’d pushed and prodded him until he felt like he had no choice but to go. I’d gotten into a fight with him.
I’d made Benji go to Los Angeles.
This was all my fault.
“I didn’t—” My voice was shaking and I fought back tears. “I thought he’d ask you to go with him. I didn’t think he’d go by himself or run off like—”
I dragged in a shaky breath.
I made him do this.
I had to fix this. If I’d known something like this would happen, I would have apologized long ago. I would have talked things out with him.