“And what do you want to study when you get there? Philosophy? Art? Underwater basket weaving?”
He laughs. “What I really want to do is design prosthetic limbs.” The corner of his mouth quirks up in a smile, the first I’ve seen on him all day.
This surprises me. Usually when someone wants to rebel against their parents, they pick something like art or theater or writing the great American novel. But this seems like a perfectly reasonable, respectable plan to me. “Would you be a doctor?”
“No. I think I can major in biomedical engineering. I might not even need a graduate degree, though I’m open to whatever I need to do. I’m going to make an appointment with Ryan’s PT so I can ask some questions and go from there.”
I bite my lip, rolling his plan over in my mind. “So you want to give people who are missing limbs new limbs. And you think your dad won’t like that?”
“I know he won’t like that,” he says, practically spitting the words.
There’s a heavy silence that hangs in the car. Nothing he’s saying makes sense to me. Sure, my mom’s never really encouraged my college plans either, but at least I knew enough to know that her indifference to my college plans was unusual. Most parents I know, like Lainey’s and Ali’s, are all about the college plans, and they encourage whatever dream their kid has that takes them down that path. So to imagine a parent dismissing something requiring a degree in biomedical engineering seems outright absurd to me. But then again, there’s not much about Spencer’s relationship with his dad that I understand.
“And what does your mom think?” I ask, because that’s a relationship that seems to be on more solid ground.
“She thinks that I should do what will make me happy, and my dad will get on board because he loves me.” It sounds completely reasonable, though somehow he delivers it like it’s absurd.
“But you don’t think so?”
“If history teaches us anything, then I’d say it’s highly unlikely,” he replies. “But enough about me.” He takes his right hand off the steering wheel and mimes holding a microphone in his fist. “What is it you want to do with your one wild and precious life, Miss Reed?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe a teacher? I like kids. I’m pretty good with them. And it’s a steady job with a good paycheck.”
“Children are the future,” he says.
“That’s what they tell me.”
We ride along in silence for a bit, and the whole drive I’m sifting through all the things I’ve learned about Spencer in the short time I’ve known him. He’s charming and funny. He’s got a great smile and lots of friends. His mom seems nice, his dad seems like a total dick. His brother is a hilarious ball of energy. But there’s something that’s nagging at me that I can’t quite place in the sphere that is Spencer.
Maybe it’s the moment of honesty earlier, the one I gave him and the one he gave me in return. But somehow now feels like the time, especially since he’s driving a car and we can avoid eye contact.
“I saw you crying on the tennis court.”
He doesn’t say anything at first, but his hands grip the wheel a little harder, and he lets out a short, hard burst of air.
“When?” he finally asks.
“You’ve done it more than once?” But immediately I feel like a jerk. This clearly isn’t something we can joke about. “My first night here. Last weekend.”
He lets out a breath, nodding slowly.
“Fight with my dad,” he says through gritted teeth. “I didn’t know anyone was out there.”
“I couldn’t sleep, and I heard you playing tennis, um, angrily? I went to investigate.”
“Well, aren’t you the little Nancy Drew.” His sarcasm feels like a deflection, but a halfhearted one.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I can tell he’s really thinking about it. He puts an elbow up on the window and leans into his arm, running his fingers through his messy hair. It’s a gesture I’m starting to recognize as one of frustration or confusion from him, so I stay silent, letting him work it out.
“Maybe some other time.”
“Okay,” I reply. I settle back into my seat and watch the road disappear beneath us. “Where are we going?”
“You said you wanted to get away? From all this?”
“Yeah,” I reply.
“I know just the place.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The place turns out to be the parking lot of an abandoned Kmart filled with rides and lights and colors. Spencer says we passed it on the way here, but I have no memory of it. The sun is out now, and it’s hot as a nova, but the pavement still smells damp. It’s not very crowded, what with it being lunchtime on a Tuesday. The park is mostly peppered with tired-looking moms corralling toddlers and pushing fat babies in strollers, and a couple different camp groups in matching T-shirts.
“This is your plan?” I ask.
“No,” he says, pointing down the midway to a giant green dragon. “That is.”
The ride is called the Dragon’s Curse, and it consists of a giant green dragon with rows of seats on its back. When activated, it swings on a metal arm like a pendulum, first forward, then back, higher and higher, until it finally swings 360 degrees, pausing before plummeting back toward the earth to slow its swing to a stop. The ride is almost empty, since nearly everyone at the fair right now falls beneath the YOU MUST BE THIS TALL TO RIDE line (as demonstrated on a plywood sign with a crudely spray-painted dragon holding up his arm). An operator stands at the ready, should anyone show up for the ride. Although “ready” might be a stretch. He’s leaning against the metal railing surrounding the ride, his eyelids at half-mast, his greasy hair falling into his eyes. It looks like he’s mastered the art of sleeping with his eyes open.
“No way I’m riding that,” I tell Spencer.
“Why not?”
“Um, because until recently, that thing was folded up into tiny pieces and hauled around on the back of a truck across interstates. And it was put together by that guy,” I say, pointing at the youngish dude working the controls, “who looks like the only math he can do is calculating whether or not what his dealer sold him is the appropriate weight.”
“Come on, live a little,” Spencer says, poking me in the side.
“A little living is all I’ll have left if I board that thing. Carnival rides only end in vomiting or death, and on bad days, both.”
“You said you didn’t want to think, and I’m pretty sure you won’t when upside down on the Dragon’s Curse. What are you, chicken?”
“What are you, five? And yes, I am chicken,” I reply, but I snatch the strip of red tickets from his hand and march toward the hulking green monstrosity. Because I think he’s right, and hanging upside down on a creaky death trap might be the only way to get my mind to shut the hell up for a little while.
As I buckle into the seat, the stoner carny dude asks me if I have anything in my pockets that might fall out and kill someone below, and I start to have a touch of regret. But I swallow it, and then the ride is groaning and protesting as it begins to swing.
“This sounds like your car on steroids,” I call out to Spencer, trying to joke through my terror.
“Let’s hope it wasn’t assembled with YouTube videos,” he says.
And then we’re swinging. Up and back and up and back, higher and higher each time. I feel my stomach start to catch just before we swing back, the drop feeling more and more intense with each motion. I’m clutching the safety bar so hard I wonder if it’s possible I’ll leave finger-shaped indentations in the metal.
“You gotta let go!” Spencer calls out as we get closer to being upside down.
“Are you crazy?!” I shout back.
“Come on, you gotta!”
We swing forward and back and forward and back, until suddenly we’ve reached the apex. We are completely upside down. My thick hair falls from my neck and reaches toward the ground. I feel Spencer looking at me, and I crack my eyes open
just enough to see his stupid, upside-down smiling face.
“Let go,” he says, but this time he doesn’t yell. He leans close to my ear and whispers, sending a chill up my spine.
And just before we tip and fall back to the earth, I do. I pry my fingers from the safety bar and let my arms drop over my head, hanging free, the bar across my knees the only thing keeping me from the effects of gravity.
And when the dragon goes over and we are rushing toward the ground, I open my mouth as wide as it will go, and I scream.
* * *
We ride the dragon twice more, then hit up the Scrambler (four spinning cars attached to each of four long metal arms that are also spinning in circles), a rickety old-school roller coaster (with cars shaped like pirate ships), and the fun house (where we stare at ourselves in progressively more warped mirrors). Sometimes I’ve felt fear (on the Dragon), sometimes I’ve felt sick (on the Scrambler), and the rest of the time I’ve just felt free.
When we’ve had enough of the rides, we head over to the midway to get food. We use our remaining tickets to buy corn dogs and sodas and a funnel cake topped with so much powdered sugar it looks like a miniature replica of the Alps on top.
“Do you see a free table?” I ask, balancing the funnel cake on top of my cup of soda, a corn dog in my other hand and a straw between my teeth.
“No, but I see something better,” he says. “Follow me.”
“Okay, but for the record, I’m not eating this food while sitting on the Scrambler, so if that’s your plan, get another one,” I reply, taking a bite of my corn dog.
He doesn’t respond, just takes off down the midway between junk-food vendors and those rigged carnival games where, if you manage to outsmart them, all you walk away with is a scratchy stuffed animal or a half-dead goldfish. I follow as fast as I can, little puffs of powdered sugar wafting into my face with the breeze. I hear voices over a tinny, ancient sound system, and as we get closer I realize that they’re singing something. It’s not until we’re right at the stage, with a few rows of hay bales laid out as seating, that I realize it’s a singing duo performing children’s songs (at the moment, a very energetic rendition of “Turkey in the Straw”).
Spencer takes a seat on a hay bale in the last row, setting his Dr. Pepper down by his foot. He pats the empty space next to him. Onstage, the duo finishes up their song, the prerecorded music swelling to a crescendo as they execute a little square dance move. The guy is wearing overalls over a blue plaid cowboy shirt, his sleeves rolled to the elbow and cowboy boots on his feet. The girl has on a matching plaid shirt atop a voluminous pink skirt made of tulle and some kind of metallic material that catches the couple of struggling stage lights pointing down on them. The girl’s hair is up in pigtails that stick straight out from the side of her head and flow down in golden waves, and the boy’s hair is the same color of late-summer wheat fields.
“Hi! I’m Taffy, and this is Joe, and we’re so glad you could join us today!” the girl says into the microphone in an exaggerated singsong. She looks like she’s in her midtwenties, though she seems to be trying hard to convince us they’re both teenagers.
“Taffy and Joe?” I whisper to Spencer.
“Which one do you think is a stage name?”
“Do you think they’re related?”
“Either that or they’re boning,” he says.
I shudder. “Dear god, I hope it’s not both,” I reply.
Up onstage, they launch into an up-tempo remix of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” that somehow involves a hip-hop beat. Taffy bounces and spins, swishing her skirt around her knees with both hands.
“You know they hate each other,” Spencer says, ripping off a chunk of the funnel cake from the plate and stuffing it into his mouth.
“Yeah, because Taffy’s skirt is always pulling focus from Joe’s sick harmonies,” I reply.
Spencer launches into a fussy, angry southern accent. “Goddammit, Taffy, if you swish that skirt one more time,” he says in an impression of a fictional Joe.
I muster my best Taffy, a prissy southern belle with a voice full of nails. “I’m just trying to bring the heat, Joe. Maybe if you tried a little harder we’d have worked our way up to Disney by now.”
“Do not throw that in my face, Taffy. You know how much I wanted that Peter Pan audition.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t get it, considering you never seem to grow up.”
“Shut up, Taffy.”
“Hit your harmonies, Joe.”
A mother in front of us with a sleeping baby in her arms turns to glare at us, and I notice the dried remains of what looks like spit-up on her shoulder. I mouth a “sorry” to her, and she turns back around.
“We need to get out of here before they start pelting us with burp cloths,” I whisper to Spencer.
“On it,” he says.
He takes the funnel cake plate, now just a pile of greasy powdered sugar, and tosses it into a nearby trash can. When he returns, he picks up his soda, passes me mine, and then takes my hand and drags me away before we can wake anyone’s child or ruin anyone’s show. And even though I try to brush it off like the excess powdered sugar decorating the front of my shirt, I feel a touch of electricity pass between us when our palms meet.
* * *
By the time we’re back on the interstate heading toward the island, the afternoon traffic has picked up and we can’t fly unimpeded down the road. A few fender benders cause slowdowns, and by the time we’re driving back over the bridge onto Helena, it’s four thirty, which is past the time I should have been home from work at the Island Club. I pull out my phone, but it still shows NO SERVICE, and all I can do is pray that Kris isn’t freaking out. I worked so hard to leave behind the pain I felt earlier. I don’t want to lose this feeling, this happiness mixed with a sugar coma.
“That was fun,” I say, watching the ocean out the passenger window. “Which is not a thing I’d figured I’d say about today.”
“I’m glad I could help turn it around,” Spencer says.
“Thank you,” I reply. “I owe you one.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Kris is sitting in a chair on the porch, and as soon as she sees the car approaching, she jumps up.
“Why does she look mad?” Spencer asks.
I gulp. “I’m not sure, but I think I’m about to find out.”
He pulls the car to a stop, and Kris doesn’t move a muscle. Her mouth is set in a firm line, her jaw full of tension.
“Good luck with that,” he says.
“Yeah, thanks,” I reply. It’s all I can say, even though I want to say so much more about the fun I had with him. I’m a little peeved that I have to jump out of the car and face whatever this is without a proper good-bye.
“Welcome back,” Kris says, then turns on her heel and heads into the house. She doesn’t say it, but I know I’m supposed to follow her.
I follow Kris up the porch and into the house, my heart thudding quicker and quicker with each passing second. For a ridiculous moment, I actually try to remember what kids on TV would do in this situation, what they would say. But no catchphrase is going to get me out of trouble.
Kris heads straight for the kitchen, and I stay right behind her without a word. She pulls the kettle from the stove and immediately starts filling it while I take a seat on one of the barstools at the island. Great, on top of getting in trouble, I’m going to have to drink tea again. But she only takes one mug from the cabinet. Instead, she pulls a bottle of water out of the fridge and slides it across the counter to me.
“Where were you?” she asks, her tone level.
“I was out with Spencer,” I reply. “I left a note.”
“Oh, right. You mean this one?” She holds up the crumpled receipt, then reads aloud. “Out with Spencer. Won’t be too late.”
“Um, yeah. That’s the note.”
“I’m trying not to thoroughly lose my shit right now,” she says, then turns back to making tea, a heavy
silence hanging over the room. It’s the first time I’ve heard her swear.
“What’s the big deal?”
“Excuse me?”
“I didn’t have any plans, Spencer asked to hang out. I left you that information. I’m sorry you were worried, but I don’t see why you’re this upset.”
“Well, first of all, I had no idea where you were or how long you’d be gone. If something had happened to you, if—god forbid—you’d been in an accident, I wouldn’t have had any idea where to start looking for you. But aside from that, we just had this very conversation last night, so don’t act like it’s unreasonable that I need to know where you are,” she says, clearly winding up. “I would have thought that after last night, you would have realized that you can’t just run off without telling me where you are. That you can’t just disappear.”
“I didn’t just disappear,” I say. “I didn’t know where we were going. And I was back before midnight.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Isn’t that my curfew?”
“Maritza, a curfew isn’t a blank check to disappear without any explanation.”
“I left a note!”
“That contained no information! And you still don’t have a working phone, so I had no idea where you were or what you were doing!” Her voice is growing shriller by the second.
“What does it matter where I was or what I was doing?”
“Maritza, don’t you get it? I’m responsible for you. When I can’t find you, I get worried.”
“Look, I wasn’t doing anything bad. You’re not going to get in trouble.”
She pauses, cocking her head like she’s trying to translate what I’m saying into a native tongue.
“You think I’m worried because I might get in trouble? I care what happens to you. I care about you,” she says. Her voice trembles slightly at the end, causing something to crack open inside me. How can this woman who barely knows me act more like a mother than the woman who gave birth to me? Why am I so annoyed with her for caring, when I’m pissed as hell at my mother for doing the exact opposite? I look down at my hands, which are fiddling with the hem of my shorts. If I learned anything today, it’s that Kris is all I have left.
Better Than the Best Plan Page 15