The Key to the Golden Firebird

by Maureen Johnson

  “This box is so filthy,” May said. “Did I get dust all over you, or…”

  And that’s when it happened. It was almost too dark to see Pete’s face distinctly, but May saw a shadow coming closer. Her first instinct was to brace herself in panic when she felt Pete’s lips trying to find hers (he missed at first, catching her nose). But then she found herself reaching up to his face and wrapping her arms around his neck, and in a moment she was leaning back against the window. Pete was leaning into her, and she was sliding farther down on the bench.

  And the panic was gone.

  july

  Vomiting on Gold family vacations

  a brief history of

  Mike and Anna Gold drive Brooks (age six), me (age five), and Palmer (age three) to Williamsburg, Virginia. Brooks throws my Barbie out of the Firebird on I-95. As cosmic retribution, she is seized by car sickness and hurls into a shopping bag from Baltimore all the way to the Virginia state line.

  The next year the Gold family joins the Camp family for a trip to Florida. I get a very serious case of sunburn while riding in the back of the Firebird on the way there—one so bad that it causes me to barf nonstop. I spend two days in the motel being cared for by my mother while everyone else goes to Disney World. Pete brings me back the stick from his Mickey Mouse Popsicle as a present.

  12

  At seven o’clock the next morning, dressed in the same blue camouflage T-shirt, May carried a laundry basket full of food to the RV. She gazed down the length of the behemoth before climbing in. Even at this hour, it was already hot. The air was heavy and wet. When she stepped inside the RV, May felt herself explode in perspiration. She set the basket down and started loading up the kitchenette counter. Spaghetti. More spaghetti. Taco shells. Cereal. Ziti. Peanut butter.

  It was going to be a starch fest.

  When she was finished, she turned and stared at the spot where she and Pete had been the night before. The Operation box was on the floor. May quickly moved to pick it up, as if it were somehow incriminating. Once she’d picked it up, though, she was flooded with emotion. She held the box as if it were a love letter.

  “What are you doing?” Palmer greeted her, pushing in with a waterproof sleeping bag.

  “Nothing,” May said, tossing the box back onto the stack. “This fell.”

  “Whatever. Move.”

  Palmer managed to knock over most of the groceries May had just piled on the tiny counter. She shoved her way back into the bedroom, which was one tiny space with two small beds. There was what looked like a large curtained shelf right above these beds; this was really yet another bed. This “room” was where the three of them would be sleeping (Palmer had already been assigned the shelf-bed). Brooks had brought her bags down the night before, and her things alone took up most of the tiny space. May had thrown hers on top.

  “Where is my stuff supposed to go?” Palmer whined. “You guys took up all the space!”

  “Snooze, you lose. We got down here first.”

  “I’m moving this crap out.”

  “You can’t. Mom’s sleeping on the pullout couch. You can’t put it there.”

  Assorted grumblings from Palmer as she climbed over the bags.

  “Where’s my bed?” she yelled.

  “Behind that curtain.”

  May heard the curtain being drawn back and Palmer’s groan.

  “How’s it going?” Their mom was at the door, travel mug in hand, beaming over the entire disaster site.

  “Palmer’s complaining,” May said.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, walking away from the door and toward the cab. “Make sure all of that stuff is secure. We’re leaving in half an hour.”

  An hour and a half later, when Brooks had woken up, when the dishes were finally done, and the map had been reconsulted, the four Golds were ready to go. As she climbed inside the RV, May took one last quick glance at the huge load they were towing behind them—the Firebird dangling off the back like an uncontrollable tail that could wipe whole lanes of traffic clear off the road in mere seconds.

  “We’re going to kill everyone,” she whispered to Palmer.

  “Shut up,” Palmer replied.

  The driver’s seat was the only uncluttered space, so the girls each had to find themselves a place to sit. Brooks was stretched out on one of the bench seats at the table and was already trying to go back to sleep, even though she’d only been in the RV for thirty seconds. Palmer nestled amid the sheets and towels on the sofa. May got the passenger’s seat, which was completely surrounded by bags. She had to tuck her legs up.

  “Listen to this,” their mom said as she started the engine. “The Starks told me that all we need to do is fill a big container with hot water, our dirty clothes, some detergent, and a rubber ball or a sneaker. Then we stick it on the back of the RV, and it bounces around while we drive. It acts just like a washing machine. We can try it on the way back if you want.”

  She’s lost her mind, May thought.

  It took six hours for them to get there. Palmer and Brooks slept for most of it. Their mother listened to talk radio. May put her headphones on her ears and stared out the window. She didn’t want to be going on this trip. It was so strange—for years, all she’d wanted to do was get away from Pete. Now the thought of being separated from him was more than she could take.

  May replayed the scene from the night before in her mind. She would find that the memory worked well with one song, so she’d play it over and over until she got bored and had to search out a new song. Then the scene would come alive again, with different nuances. It was one thing to know someone in a sitting-across-from-them kind of way; it was another thing entirely to lie on top of someone. Everything she knew about Pete was different now.

  Of the many varieties of pathetic she had been in her life, May was proud that she had never slipped into the I’m-obsessed-with-my-boyfriend kind—although this was largely due to the fact that she had never had a boyfriend. Now, she realized, she was already slipping into the behavior. She was going to be like one of those pathetic girls who had to call their boyfriends on their cell phone every two minutes, except that she didn’t have a cell phone. Maybe she would start writing things like MG + PC = TRUE LOVE 4 EVER on her notebooks. Then the transformation into Totally Pathetic Girlfriend would be complete.

  Then again, she thought, she shouldn’t be premature. The one useful life lesson that Brooks had taught her was that you shouldn’t assume someone was your boyfriend without solid evidence. But this was Pete. And she knew Pete. And she felt pretty certain that was what he was thinking—that he should be her boyfriend.

  She replayed the scene several more times, looking for clues on this subject.

  After about four hours the memory started to wear a bit, so she tried to distract herself by reading the RV camping guidebook that she’d found in a pocket on the side of her seat, trying to get a sense of what was going on. Anything was better than looking up and seeing the trail of destruction she was sure they were leaving behind them.

  “Okay,” she read aloud, “gray water means the water from the shower and the sink. And black water…oh God…” May put the guide down. “They have actual bathrooms there, right?”

  “I’m not sure,” her mom replied.

  May sank lower in her seat.

  When they arrived at the park, it took twenty minutes for their mom to steer around the narrow roads to get to their space. It took three people to guide them in, but the ride finally came to an end. Their mom hopped out, strangely energetic.

  “We have to hook up the water,” she said, “and the electricity, and I think maybe the air…or that might be with the electricity. I’ll have to ask. Go down and look at the ocean. It’ll take a few minutes.”

  “Where is it?” May said, looking around the lot.

  “It’s the ocean. You should be able to find it.” She strode off in the direction of the park director’s trailer, which they had passed (and, May would have sworn, hit) on the
way in.

  “I’m staying here,” Palmer said, sinking down into a chair.

  Brooks and May walked off without her and promptly got lost in the tangle of tiny roads. All the trailers looked pretty much identical to theirs, so they couldn’t get their bearings. The same kids rode past them on their bikes four and five times in a row and started giving them strange looks.

  “Maybe we should ask someone,” May finally said.

  “We’re standing next to the ocean, but we can’t find it,” Brooks explained. “Imagine what that’s going to sound like.”

  They kept walking in circles until Brooks spotted a small path lined with railroad ties that they hadn’t noticed before. They followed this through another campsite, this one filled only with tents, until they found themselves walking on some sand. They followed the sandy path to an inlet and the inlet to the ocean.

  “There it is,” May said. It was a beautiful view—a gorgeous, clean beach surrounded by a wall of enormous rocks along the inlet. People fished from these. Since it was getting late, people were starting to take down their umbrellas and chairs and head back to the park.

  “Well, here we are,” Brooks said. “Want to go back?”

  On the walk back, they discovered that the entire trip actually took three minutes, not the forty they had spent getting there in the first place.

  “We’re going to starve,” Palmer greeted them.

  “What?” Brooks asked.

  “Something’s wrong with one of our cables or something. We have no electricity.”

  May and Brooks looked up at the dark windows of the RV.

  “Mom’s seeing if she can borrow one from someone else. She’s going around to all the other trailers. We’re supposed to find the grill. It’s in one of these things.” She pointed to the small hatches at the base of the RV.

  “Don’t we need keys for those?” May asked.

  Palmer squinted at one of the hatches.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did she leave the key?”

  “No.”

  “The water’s running, right?” May asked.

  “No. We didn’t have some kind of hose.”

  “Well,” Brooks said, sitting down at the picnic table. “Who’s having fun?”

  The cables and hoses couldn’t be found before dinner, so plans were made to take the Firebird back to town to pick up some fast food. But as May had anticipated, her mother didn’t know how to detach the car from the complicated system of chains and lights that held it to the RV. Some neighbors came over and showed them how to do it.

  It was almost eight o’clock before they were finally able to get out. They brought back a bag of hamburgers and drinks and waited for the man with the cables and hoses to arrive. The rest of the night was spent attempting to hook everything up.

  By eleven they had electricity and water, but—despite the hours of sleep that most of them had gotten in the car—everyone seemed too tired to care. They all decided to use the bathhouse instead of the slightly frightening bathroom (especially since they weren’t entirely sure that they had connected the water supply to the correct feed line, and the consequences if they had made a mistake were too dire to even imagine).

  Washed, groggy, and annoyed, the Gold sisters piled into their “room.” The beds were only a foot apart, and Palmer kept climbing in and out of her shelf, stepping on May and Brooks’s pillows and heads.

  “I don’t get it,” May said, trying to settle herself in her bed. “Mom said she’d been camping before. She said she and Dad used to go all the time.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Brooks replied. “Remember how she used to tell us that when she went to Amsterdam to see Aunt Betje, they used to like to go for coffee all the time?”

  “So?”

  “Dad told me that in Amsterdam a coffee shop is where you go for pot.”

  “Oh…”

  “Mom smoked pot?” Palmer leaned down from her shelf.

  “Mom did a lot of things,” Brooks answered. “I think what she meant was that she and Dad went camping, and Dad put everything up.”

  “Makes sense,” May said. “She doesn’t lie. She’s just—”

  “Mom smoked pot?”

  “It’s legal there,” Brooks said. “Go to sleep.”

  “Dad never told me that,” May said.

  Brooks turned her back to May and switched off her overhead light. May followed suit. A moment later something soft fell over her nose and mouth.

  “Could you keep your socks up there, Palm?” she said, removing the sock from her face.

  A hand came down and clawed up the sock. May closed her eyes and went back to the place in her mind where she and Pete were always kissing, and she stayed there until she fell asleep.

  13

  As far as May was concerned, the days at the beach were just days she had to kill as painlessly as possible so that she could get back home. She stretched out on the sand with her chemistry book (she’d already purchased her textbook for the next year, as was recommended for advanced students), trying to absorb the periodic table. When she couldn’t focus on that, she tried to work through her pile of required summer reading books for English, all of which she’d checked out of the library and brought with her. About ten pages into Frankenstein she flipped over on her stomach and fell asleep. She accompanied Palmer to a batting cage and watched as her little sister stunned everyone by hitting every single ball with astonishing ferocity. She walked along the strip of shops in town with her mom and tried to work up an interest in coral necklaces and knickknacks made from painted seashells. She played cards with Brooks under the awning of the RV.

  But her brain was filled with Pete. He walked into her every thought—all freckles and frizzing curls. When she walked past the old-fashioned photo place, she imagined them getting their picture taken. (He would look cute in one of those gangster outfits.) At night she counted up in her mind the dozens of secluded spots on the campground and the beach where they could be together.

  On the third night her mom and Palmer decided to get some dinner and go to a movie. Their selection held no appeal for May or Brooks, so they were dropped off at the boardwalk along the way. It wasn’t quite dark out, and the crowd was still mixed. There were groups of elderly people and adults with kids, but the first of the night crowd had also arrived, taking their positions in front of the arcade or at the beachfront bars.

  “I feel like a twelve-year-old.” Brooks sighed, leaning against the boardwalk rail, looking out over the sand. “I hate getting dropped off.”

  May was gently pressing on her sunburn, watching the white fingerprints appear and disappear under the pressure. The time on the beach had fried her beyond recognition.

  “What do you want to do?” Brooks asked. “Or are you just going to do that all night?”

  “I might,” May said. She leaned against the rail and put her back to the ocean to watch the slow boardwalk tram chug along at three miles an hour. “Why do they need a train for something called a boardwalk? Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose?”

  Brooks kicked a crab claw in the direction of an overflowing trash can and took a deep breath. The smell of beer and buffalo wings wafted over from the restaurant across from them.

  “What have we got?” she asked May. “Two hours until their movie is over?”

  “Something like that,” May replied, making a happy face of white splotches on her thigh. “We can go back whenever we want. We can just walk.”

  “I guess we could go down to the rides,” Brooks said, squinting at the brightly lit amusement pier, about a quarter mile up from where they were standing.

  They walked along past the T-shirt shops with the throbbing speakers and the endless food stands. Brooks stopped and bought a soda. May bought a small bag of candy fruit slices.

  “Palmer told me that you and Pete were in the RV for almost an hour the other night,” Brooks suddenly offered as they continued toward the pier.

  May almost
choked on her orange slice.

  “I was…showing him…it.”

  “Were you?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Actually, I do,” Brooks said.

  May saw no point in trying to deny anything. Brooks would see right through her.

  “Want me to shut up?” Brooks said.

  “That’s an option?”

  “Come here,” Brooks said, pulling May off to the side and taking a large Coke bottle from her bag. It was filled with a clear liquid.

  “What’s that?”

  “Vodka.”

  “Are you nuts?” May said. “Where did you get this?”

  “I had a bottle left over from before. Come on, we’re on vacation. And I’m not driving. Neither are you.”

  “You can’t have this! You’ve already been arrested.”

  “No one is going to find out,” Brooks said. “Look around. We’re on the boardwalk. We’re walking, not driving.”

  May threw up her hands and walked over to the rail. She stared out over the sand. Brooks followed her.

  “Come on,” Brooks said. She smiled. It was an approving smile, one that warmed May’s heart. Brooks never smiled at her unless she had something horrible caught in her teeth or some piece of damaging information against her. “We’ve never gone out together.”

  This was a first—Brooks was actually trying to include May in something. Normally Brooks’s idea of bonding with her sisters was shooting straw wrappers at May’s face and snickering with Palmer.

  “You have to be kidding,” May said.

  “What else are we going to do tonight?” Brooks asked. “Come on. It’ll be fun. And I’ll shut up about Pete.”

  There was something in Brooks’s tone that warmed May. She really did appear to want to spend some time with her and include her. Brooks wanted to party with her. As much as she hated to admit it, she had always longed for this kind of approval from Brooks.