by Gail Nall
To Eva—may you travel the world but always find home
Chapter 1
93 days until Dueling Duets auditions
Dad putters up to our house in an ancient, rust-spotted motor home. He’s grinning like he just watched the Tennessee Titans win the Super Bowl—and that’s when I know he’s completely lost it.
I’m in my room, practicing for the most important moment of my life, when I hear the thing through my open window. I stop right smack in the middle of singing to my reflection in the mirror and run downstairs. Mom’s acting like a traffic cop. She motions Dad this way and that to keep him from plowing down the mailbox. I stand on the sidewalk next to my little sister, Bug.
Mom windmills her arms. “CUT THE WHEEL!”
“What is that?” I ask.
“An RV. Maybe we’ll go camping every weekend now!” Bug stands on her bare tiptoes as she tries to see inside the ginormous hunk of metal Dad’s driving.
“I know it’s an RV. I mean, why is it here?”
“Stop. STOP!” Mom pounds on the door.
The thing jerks to a halt. Dad climbs out and struts around the front to meet us on the sidewalk. He kicks the front tire like he just drove home a Mustang instead of the ugliest RV on the planet. My best friend Kenzie’s brother drives an old red Mustang with one brown door. He kicks the tires every single time he gets in the car, as if they’re going to pop or something before he drives off.
Dad stands with his hands on his hips and beams. “So what do you think of our new home?”
“Our what?” I ask.
“This rig,” he says as he pats the side of it. “It’s our new home on wheels.”
He really has gone crazy. I glance at Mom. She’s smiling too.
“We’re going to live in it?” Bug practically squeals, as if she’s six instead of nine.
Is crazy contagious?
Dad rubs his hands together, the way he always does when he’s cooking up some awful plan to ruin my life. “It’ll be fun! We’ll camp all over the country.” He and Mom link elbows, and they look at each other all gooey-eyed.
I hold up a hand. “Wait. Let me get this straight. We’re going to live in this thing like it’s a house?” I knock on the side of the RV and wait to see if it’ll collapse in a dusty, rusty heap and end this whole whackadoo idea.
“We talked about moving a few months ago, Maya. Remember?” Mom says.
“I remember. And now we’re going to camp all the time!” Bug’s face lights up.
My stomach feels swirly. Of course I remember. Mom and Dad announced that they were thinking about moving, but I assumed that meant to an apartment or something. And then Dueling Duets announced it was going to hold auditions right here in Nashville this summer, and then Jack asked me to audition with him, and so I didn’t really think much more about the whole moving thing. Mostly because I never thought it would be to something like this. “What about our house?”
“We’re going to sell it. No more mortgage payments.” If Dad could smile any wider, his lips would be touching his ears.
Mom puts her hand on my shoulder. “We can’t afford the house anymore. Dad and I needed to act before things got really bad.”
“And this is so much better than some old apartment!” Dad adds.
I cannot believe this is actually happening. I eye the RV. “But if we sell our house, where will we put our stuff? No way will it fit into that.”
“We’re going to simplify,” Mom says.
“Simplify. . . . Meaning get rid of a bunch of things?”
“Yup! Isn’t it great? Come aboard.” After a couple of good yanks on the door, Dad disappears inside. Mom and Bug follow.
I’m still standing on the grass next to the curb. Sell our house? Live in this piece of junk? Camp out all over the country? And—I can barely even think about it—miss my one shot at Dueling Duets and ultimate fame and fortune as the newest and brightest star of country music?
No. Way.
“I’m not going!” I yell into the RV.
I cross my arms and wait for an answer. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Dad chose this awful thing over something normal, like a cheaper house or an apartment. Ever since he got laid off in January, he’s been acting weird. Like spending tons of time reading library books about nature when he couldn’t find a new job. And whittling this tree limb he found in the backyard into a walking stick. He also stopped shaving for a couple of weeks, until Mom refused to leave the house with him. When I asked Mom if Dad was ever going to get another job, she’d get this sad look and start talking about regrets and unfulfilled dreams.
“Hello? Did you hear me?” I call through the open door.
Still no answer.
I grip the handrail and climb the steep steps. The RV smells like old bananas and mothballs. Kind of like my grandparents’ house, if they ate bananas 24/7 instead of tuna and pickles.
I move past the front seats into a living room–type area, where Mom, Dad, and Bug are standing around and jabbering. It’s brown. All brown. Brown couch, brown armchairs, brown floor. Even the ancient TV is mounted in a brown metal frame on the wall.
“I need to ask Aunt Kim about new upholstery,” Mom says as she whips out her phone, like that’s going to improve this place.
This is not the home of someone destined to win Dueling Duets. Well, maybe if it was all glitzed up and had my name splashed across the side, like a tour bus. But even Kenzie’s brother’s old Mustang is better than this thing. “It’s the same color as dirt,” I whisper to Bug. “The Dirt Den.”
Bug snorts. “Look!” she yells as if I’m not standing right next to her. “This is where I’m going to sleep.” She scrambles up a ladder from the Dirt Den to a little nook with a bed that sits over the front seats. There’s even a miniature (brown) curtain to shut off the world’s tiniest bedroom from the rest of the (brown) trailer.
Mom sinks into one of the (brown) chairs as Dad marches down the length of the RV. I trail after him and check all the corners for cobwebs. Because there is no way I’m sharing this thing with spiders. If I was going, that is. Which I’m not.
“Kitchen. We can have cozy little meals right there.” He points to a table with two narrow (brown) benches that look like school bus seats. I take a step closer. They smell like school bus seats too. I bet there’s old gum stuck to the bottom.
Dad takes a single step up from the kitchen into the middle section of the RV. On each side of us is a bed set up high with a ladder, and a row of drawers and a cramped closet underneath. This would be pretty fun for a sleepover or a weekend trip. But not to live in all the time.
Then I realize there’s only one bathroom.
“No. No way.” I stand in front of the Polly Pocket–sized room complete with a little accordion door and cross my arms. “We can’t live with just one.”
Bug appears beside me. “Yeah, Maya takes FOREVER in the bathroom.”
I elbow her. “I do not.”
“Yes, you do. We’ll all have to go out the windows while we wait for you to put on your silly mascara.”
“You don’t know how hard it is to get right!” Mom just started letting me wear mascara when I turned twelve. It’s really tough to put on without getting tons of clumps in your eyelashes or stabbing out your eyeball.
“Girls, enough.” Mom’s voice echoes from the Dirt Den.
Across from the bathroom, there’s a closet, and then in the very back of the RV is a bedroom.
“How come you and Mom get a whole bedroom and we’re—supposedly—stuck with little cubbyholes?” I ask Dad.
“Because we’re the parents and you’re the kids and that’s just how life is,” Mom shouts from the front.
I check out one of the hallway beds again. The mini-closet i
s barely a closet, and there are hardly any drawers in the dresser. Where will I put my books? Or my stuffed cat collection? All my notes from Kenzie back before we got cell phones? Or my signed posters of Carrie Underwood, Taylor Swift, and Miranda Lambert? I go to sleep every night with the Talented Trio of Treble (or TTT, for short) watching over me. I know Taylor’s not so country anymore, but that’s where she started out.
Simplify, Mom said.
Right. There’s no way I’m giving away or selling the stuff that means the most to me. They’ll have to find a place for it, that’s all.
Then something even more important occurs to me. Actually, two more important things.
“What about Hugo?” I can’t leave my cat. “He’s ancient. He won’t know what to do without us.”
“We won’t leave Hugo behind. He’ll live here with us.” Mom joins us in the tiny hallway.
I feel a little better, until I remember they’re turning my entire life upside down.
“Mom! There’s Dueling Duets, remember? I can’t miss it!”
She tilts her head and chews her lip, like she’s thinking of the right way to tell me more horrible news. “I know you were looking forward to that, honey. I’m sorry.”
“I’ve been practicing so much. And Jack is depending on me. I have a responsibility to be there.” Mom’s big on responsibility.
“We won’t be here, Maya. Jack will still have time to find another partner. And you know how many people will show up for those tryouts. It’s unlikely you two would even make it to the front of the line to audition. And if you did, you’d be up against people much older than you who’ve been singing for years and years.”
Okay, first, Jack finding another partner? Not going to happen. Jack asking me to sing with him is pretty much the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And two, I can’t believe Mom doesn’t think we’d even make it onto the show. Of course we’d make it! If we get to audition.
My phone buzzes. It’s a text from Kenzie, asking what I’m up to tonight. “What about Kenzie?” I can’t imagine not seeing my best friend in the world every day.
“You can still talk to her. We aren’t moving to Timbuktu,” Mom says before following Dad and Bug outside.
I glare at her. Texting and Skype are not the same thing as seeing Kenzie every single day.
I look at my phone again, but there are no words to tell Kenzie what’s going on right now. So I trudge outside to find my psycho family behind the RV. Dad’s in the middle of explaining how he’ll hang a rack for our bikes. Which, if Dad does it, means it’ll be hanging at an angle and our bikes will be kissing concrete.
“And we’ll tow the pickup truck behind us,” he says. “This is so exciting, girls. It’ll be something you’ll always remember.”
Sure, like the flu. Or that time Dad chaperoned the school mixer and started headbanging to some old rock song.
Bug throws her arms around Dad and says, “This is the best thing ever! When do we leave?”
Dad laughs. “As soon as possible. I think we’ll head west over the summer, then maybe work our way south for the winter.”
“Winter? What about school?” I ask.
Dad grins at me. “That’s the best part, Maya Mae. You’re going to do school online!”
“No,” I say.
Bug grabs Dad’s arm. “I want to live in the RV, but I have to be back for school. I’m president of the science club next year. And there’s my Girl Scout troop.”
“Sweetie,” Mom says to Bug, “you’re doing something much bigger than science club or Girl Scouts.”
Bug nods. “Maybe I can FaceTime into meetings. And I could collect specimens from all kinds of faraway places and report back to the science club!”
Mom and Dad get crazy happy grins, and they all go inside our real house like some loony family I’m not a part of. I’m by myself, standing in the street behind the motor home, staring at the spare tire hanging on the back. Its cover has this fakey painted nature scene of trees and freaky-eyed deer. In cloudlike letters above the trees, it reads, Groovy Travels with the Unterbrink Family.
I imagine the Unterbrink family, watching their 1970 TV in the Dirt Den and arguing over who’s been in the bathroom too long. The oldest Unterbrink daughter probably stabbed her eyeball out because no one gave her enough time to put on her mascara. Now she’s half-blind and has to wear an eye patch and everyone probably makes fun of her.
We’re going to become the Unterbrink family. Me and Mom and Dad and Bug. All shoved into one rolling house.
No bedroom.
No school.
No Kenzie.
No Jack.
No Dueling Duets.
The freaky-eyed doe on the tire cover stares me down, and I run for the safety of my real bedroom.
Chapter 2
92 days until Dueling Duets auditions
“YOU CAN’T MOVE AWAY!” Kenzie’s voice shrieks through the hallway at school the next morning.
I should’ve texted her last night, but instead, I spent the whole night hoping I was just about to wake up from some horrible dream. “We’re not really moving away. More like around. In an RV. Did I mention that my parents are insane?”
“Like a hundred times. YOU CAN’T LEAVE ME!” she screams as we round the corner to the sixth-grade wing.
I really should’ve texted. Because at this rate, I’ll be deaf before homeroom.
“Maya! Seriously, you can’t do this. Who will I sit with at lunch next year? You’ll miss everything. CMA Fest! And the concerts in the park. Not to mention School of the Arts, and you know Jack’s going to get in there. I mean, it’s, like, a year and a half away, but still. And Dueling—”
“I know. I have no idea how to tell Jack.” Mostly because I’m head over heels in like with him. When he asked me to be his partner for Dueling Duets, I about up and died. Because he is that cute. He plays guitar (which I’ve tried to do, but am hopelessly awful at), he has this crazy good voice, and he always wears a battered brown cowboy hat over his shaggy dark hair. Except at school, ’cause they have a silly rule against hats. Which they should really change, just for Jack.
“I won’t have anything to do without you around!” Kenzie flings herself against the wall outside our homeroom. “Who’s going to sing me ‘Boot Scootin’ Boogie’ to make me laugh when I get bored?”
“Who’s going to tell me lame jokes and remind me that my hair looks stupid when I braid it?” I wave a braid for emphasis.
“It makes you look like Heidi. Like you just came down from the Alps to sell cough drops.”
“See? I won’t have anyone to tell me that.” My hair takes about an hour to tame into something that doesn’t look like a lion’s mane. Most days, I can’t get up early enough. I figure Heidi braids are better than wild Simba hair. And maybe they can be my thing when I’m famous. Not that it’ll ever happen now, since I’ll be missing my one big shot.
“And you know my dad,” I say to Kenzie as I drape myself against the wall next to her. “We’ll probably end up driving off a cliff somewhere. This whole idea is dangerous to our health.” Dad’s ideas always fall super short of his expectations—in spectacular ways. Like boat-exploding, bicycle-wrecking, building-falling-down ways. Which is why he should’ve stuck to working in insurance instead of dragging us all over the country.
“Your dad thinks you’re going to camp, like, all the time? What if the RV blows up the way that boat did on the lake?” Kenzie asks, reading my mind. There’s a reason we’re best friends.
I perk up. “If it does, then I can come home. Even if nothing blows up, it’ll probably still be a huge disaster, and we’ll come home after a few days. In plenty of time for the pool and Dueling Duets.” I pull out my phone. Five minutes until school starts. Perfect. Jack usually saunters in with about two minutes to spare.
“Wait, you can stay with me.” Kenzie leaps away from the wall and almost crashes right into Lacey—my least favorite person in the entire school. The feeli
ng is mutual. She glares at Kenzie and me before stalking off to her own homeroom. Kenzie completely ignores her and keeps right on talking. “It’ll be like a permanent sleepover. There. Problem solved.”
I smile. I can always count on Kenzie.
“Hey,” she says, sidling up next to me. “Nine o’clock.”
“What’s at nine o’clock? Science?” I think I have my science homework done.
“Nooooo, nine o’clock.” She’s tossing her head to the left so hard that I’m afraid she’ll get whiplash or something.
And then I see what she means. Jack. Battered brown hat (which will find its way into his locker before the bell rings), jeans, and a lazy smile that’s directed at . . . me.
I pull myself out of the puddle I’ve turned into and smile back at him. He holds up three fingers and raises his eyebrows. I nod, and he waves before disappearing down the hall.
“What in the world was that?” Kenzie asks. “Do y’all have your own language or something? Oh my God, that’s so romantic.”
I grab her arm and pull her into the classroom. “No, he was just asking if I’m free to practice after school today. And besides, I don’t know if he even likes me like that.”
I hope he does. I’m halfway through daydreams of Jack-as-my-Spring-Dance-date and Jack-as-my-future-CMA-award-winning-partner when I remember that it’s all sort of pointless now.
Because I won’t be living here in a few months.
When I arrive at the music room after school, Jack’s already inside, strumming his guitar. So I have to take a minute outside the door to breathe, rebraid my hair, and breathe again.
“Hey,” he says when I walk into the room.
I almost dissolve into that puddle a second time.
Then I remember that I have to tell him I’m leaving. Kenzie and I discussed every possible way I could tell him. None of them seem to be good ideas at all now.
He pulls a tall stool up to the front of the room and leans against it. “Ready?”
I paste on a smile and say, “Of course!” Which is true. I’m always ready to sing. Well, after I warm up in the bathroom, anyway. No way would I ever want my voice to do something weird while Jack’s listening.