by Lisa Graff
Jax has pushed up the left sleeve of his jacket and is scratching his lower arm with his right hand. “I’m working spotlight,” he replies. “Not the floor. And I’ll get better at stick shift. I mean, I have to, right? If I want to keep this job.”
I examine the side of Jax’s face as he pretends to study super-important displays on the truck’s dash. Scratching his arm like it’s a lotto ticket he’s sure is gonna cash in huge.
“Try it again,” I say, nodding toward Jax’s clutch foot. I grip the gearshift.
He looks up at me. “Yeah?”
“Sure,” I say. “Ready? And . . . clutch!”
Jax presses down the clutch once more, I shift us into first, and we drive about as fast as a sloth in slow motion.
“You sure you don’t have somewhere better to be?” Jax asks, after we’ve moved all of ten feet. “Birthday party? Homework?”
“Aunt Nic and I aren’t celebrating until later,” I tell him. “And I finished my worksheets hours ago.” All I have left to do before the show is to compile the email list for the monthly newsletter and plan our route for the weekend, but I’ve got plenty of time. “Rev her up a little faster so you can practice shifting into second.” Jax speeds up. “Hear that?” I ask. “That’s the truck telling you to shift. Ready? And . . . clutch!” Together we transition to second gear, then celebrate with a mini seat dance party.
We’re shifting back into first when Jax asks, “You like being homeschooled? Uncle Oscar’s supposed to tutor me too now.”
I point out a parking spot near the theater’s back entrance, across from where Oscar unloaded the sound equipment before picking up Jax at the airport. “Pull in here. We’ll work on reversing.” Jax inches into the spot. “Oscar’s a great tutor,” I tell him. “Even better than Cyrus. Oscar never checks anything. Like, I used to mess with Cyrus sometimes, add extra letters into my spelling tests and stuff, just to see if he’d notice. But last week I turned in a social studies report all about our first president, George Watermelon, and Oscar gave me full credit. Ready? And . . . clutch!”
Jax eases to a stop in the parking spot, doesn’t even hiccup on the clutch as I shift us into park. “He did not,” he says.
I put my hand over my heart. “No joke! I added lots of good details, too, about President Watermelon’s wooden ears, and how he led his troops across the Potato Salad. It was awful. I got an A.”
I can tell Jax does not understand what a great situation he’s lucked into, because he asks me, “But don’t you want to learn stuff?”
“I know plenty of stuff. I do,” I say when he looks skeptical. “I’m in charge of all the navigation for the entire tour, for one thing. I can plan the fastest route to any stop, no tolls, accounting for weather and elevation. I know stuff. Anyway, I read the book about George Washington. I just did a joke report, for Oscar.”
“Mmm,” Jax replies.
I don’t like that “Mmm.” There’s all sorts of judgment in it.
“Ready for reverse?” I ask, and together we slowly back up. “How’d you land spotlight duty, anyway?” Oscar said there was no way I could run spotlight, because we couldn’t afford the medical bills if I fell out of the bay. Still, way up above the audience, where the spot operator works, is my favorite place to be during a show. It’s the closest you can get to Spirit. All I ever get to do is gopher duty—“CJ, go for coffee.” “Go for cable ties.” “Go for electrical tape.” “Go for . . .” “Go for . . .”
Jax adjusts his rearview mirror as he continues backing up. “I told Uncle Oscar I’d rather work up in the spotlight bay than down in the audience,” he explains. “So he said as long as I was super careful—”
There aren’t a ton of crash sounds that are good news, but the enormous CRACK-CRUNCH! that jolts the truck then seems especially bad.
“Uh-oh,” Jax says as the engine coughs and dies.
I whip around in my seat. “I think maybe there’s a better word for it than ‘uh-oh,’” I tell him when I see what we’ve hit.
The sound equipment that Oscar unloaded is flat on the ground. Pieces of the mixing console are scattered across the parking lot.
“Jax Delgado!” comes Oscar’s howl as he storms out of the theater. Just in the few steps it takes him to get to us, his hair somehow gets grayer. “I am going to strangle . . .”
Within thirty seconds, Jax is off spotlight duty.
“But—” Jax tries to argue, which makes me wonder if he’s ever met his uncle before.
“No buts,” Oscar snaps. “You’re lucky I don’t ship you back to Miami this second. One more screwup—I mean one, Jax—and you’re gone. I obviously can’t trust anyone on the spotlight but myself.” He turns to me. “CJ, I need you working the floor tonight with Jax. You’ll handle mics while he’s on camera. Keep an eye on him so he doesn’t cost us another thousand bucks.” He picks up a chunk of the mixing console and growls. “Never thought my nephew would need an eleven-year-old babysitter.”
“No prob,” I reply. Jax is back to scratching at that arm. I wish there was more I could do to help the poor kid, but the truth is, if he’s gonna last on this crew he’s going to have to grow a backbone all on his own. “And I’m twelve now, by the way,” I remind Oscar.
“Oh, yeah,” Oscar says. And on my way to the tour bus, he gives me a birthday high five.
* * *
• • •
The loft above the tour bus driver’s seat is small, but it’s all mine. My bed takes up most of the space, with its midnight-blue bedspread. All up the walls and on the ceiling are glow-in-the-dark stars. I’ve got a photo of my mom beside my window, and a glowy bird lamp, and a shelf on the far wall with drawers for my clothes and knickknacks and atlas. It’s exactly as much room as I’ve ever needed.
As soon as I reach the top of the ladder, I flop onto my bed and pull the atlas out of its drawer, flipping till I find the map of our current location: Santa Barbara, California. Then I turn onto my belly and begin to plot our route.
I’ve been Aunt Nic’s navigator since I was seven years old. That was the year I found an honest-to-goodness road atlas at a garage sale in Bangor, Maine, marked for five bucks. The man whose house it was said, “You sure you want that, little girl? Everyone uses GPS these days.” And I said, “Oh, really?” like that was news to me. Then I haggled him down to one dollar.
I like to plan out our route a few days in advance, adjusting for any unexpected delays or complications. Our crew travels at night, after loading out a show. Me and Aunt Nic mainly drive in the tour bus, with Cyrus and Oscar in the truck, and the grown-ups split driving shifts when needed. We don’t sleep till we arrive at our next location—me and Aunt Nic on the bus, Cyrus and Oscar in a nearby motel.
Luckily, this week’s leg of the tour is an easy one, driving-wise. For the next few days we’re skirting the coast of Southern California—Santa Barbara today, then L.A. on Friday and Oceanside on Saturday. We won’t have more than a two-hour drive till we head east to Phoenix Saturday night. That will give Jax plenty of time to practice before his shift-splitting becomes crucial.
I always do my route plotting in pencil, drawing careful lines across the roads our wheels will spin over in just a few hours, only pulling out my tablet to check the week’s weather forecast.
Two years ago, Cyrus convinced me it would be “a hoot” to be in charge of Aunt Nic’s mailing list. It is not a hoot. Mostly it’s boring. Each theater’s box office sends us the contact info that people plug in when they buy tickets, and I merge the email addresses into our database so we can send out Aunt Nic’s monthly newsletter. But at least the job came with a tablet I can use for web surfing. Cyrus disabled the tablet’s phone capabilities for some reason, even though I told him that everyone I know either lives on the road with me or died a while ago.
As my pencil skims over tonight’s route, it hovers above one pa
rticular city.
Bakersfield, California, is nearly 150 miles northeast of here. Definitely not on our route to L.A. tonight. But it’s close enough that we could make a stop if we wanted to, without hardly losing any time.
We won’t, though.
“Bakersfield is not a place people stop, seedling.” That’s what my mom says every time we travel this way. “It’s a place people pass through.”
Aunt Nic always agrees. “We ought to know, your mom and I,” she tells me. “We lived there nearly twenty years each, with only a few years off for good behavior. And it’s not like there’s anything left to see.”
That’s the thing, though. The house might not be there anymore, but there’s still plenty in the town I’d love to visit. The miniature golf course where Aunt Nic first connected with Grandpa Ames’s spirit, before he went Far Away for good. The art room of East Bakersfield High, where my mom staged her legendary sit-in after the school laid off her favorite teacher. The “dumpster fire of a Dairy Queen,” where Aunt Nic and my mom co-won Employee of the Month in high school because their boss never knew they got the Oreo Blizzard stuck in the ceiling grate to begin with. The Walmart where Aunt Nic worked after she left college to take care of Grandma Ames in the final stages of her Alzheimer’s. The used RV lot where my mom led Aunt Nic two weeks after she died, forcing her to “get off your sad butt and use your Gift to help people already!” I’ve got my pencil pressed so hard on the spot where the 101 meets the 126 toward Bakersfield that I poke a hole in the atlas.
That’s when the tour bus door opens down below. “Hello?” Aunt Nic calls. “Ceej? I want you to meet someone.”
I poke my head through the curtain separating my loft from the rest of the bus. “Hey!” I shout down.
Aunt Nic’s face brightens as soon as she sees me. “You know, you look twelve,” she says, and I grin.
There’s a man standing beside her, tall and skinny, with a knobby Adam’s apple and more gray hair than Oscar, even though he seems lots younger. “Welcome to our humble abode,” I greet him. That’s my joke with Aunt Nic, since the tour bus is so much fancier than our old motor home, with plush armchair driving seats, two flat-screen TVs, and a fridge so smart it announces when we’re low on ice cream. “I’m CJ.”
“I recognize you from your photos,” the man tells me, putting one hand to his cheek to indicate my cherish. “I’m Roger Milmond. It’s lovely to meet you, CJ.”
“Thanks,” I say. Then, before creeping back behind the curtain, I tell him, “And don’t worry about Spirit getting distracted during your reading. They’re used to me up here.” The past few years we’ve been working bigger and bigger venues, so Aunt Nic doesn’t do house calls anymore. But some spirits are shy about connecting in groups, so most afternoons before shows Aunt Nic squeezes in a few people for private readings at our dining table.
“Actually, CJ,” Aunt Nic says slowly, “I . . . have some news.” Her face is happy-worried, and for a second I think maybe she’s about to tell me Roger is her new boyfriend—even though she always says, “Spirit hardly leaves me time to eat a sandwich, let alone date.”
But then Roger tells me, “I’m the lead producer for the LCM Network,” and my squeal fills the whole bus.
“You got the show!” I holler, leaping down the ladder to hug Aunt Nic. “This is amazing!”
Aunt Nic’s been in talks for over a year to see if she’d be a “good fit” for the subject of a reality TV show, and up till now it’s been hard to get her to say more than five words about it. She won’t blink an eye when it comes to talking with Spirit, but for some reason being on TV makes her nervous.
“Don’t get excited yet,” Aunt Nic says, pulling out of the hug. “It’s not quite final.”
“My crew’s here to take footage,” Roger explains. “If all goes well tonight, the big kahunas in L.A. will catch tomorrow’s show—so that’s when your aunt really needs to bring her A game.”
“She always brings her A game,” I tell Roger. Every night, Aunt Nic changes people’s lives. Gives folks hope after they thought they’d lost it forever. Every night, I watch a woman’s face light up as she’s reconnected with her dead father. Or I see a man break down when he hears his daughter’s words, years after she left him. “She’s the best in the business.”
Roger smiles at that, big and toothy. “I agree,” he says. But the happiness doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Will the whole crew be in the reality show?” I ask. “Do I get my own cameraperson to follow me around, or do I have to split one with Oscar and Jax?” If Jax makes it through the week, I don’t say out loud.
Roger glances at Aunt Nic like she’s going to answer that, but when she doesn’t, he says, “We’re mainly focused on the lady talking to Spirit. Unless . . .” He pauses, like something’s just occurring to him. “You’ve got the Gift, too?”
People always ask me that. I guess they figure it must be in my genes or something. “I used to try all the time when I was little,” I say with a shrug. “But nope.”
“Shame.” Roger grins. “Aunt-and-niece mediums would make a really great show.”
“I need to discuss a few details with you, CJ,” Aunt Nic jumps in. So I plop myself down in the passenger’s seat to listen.
But no one discusses.
“Well,” Roger says after a weird moment of silence. “I should be off. CJ . . .” He takes a step toward me, but instead of shaking my hand like I think he’s going to do, he ends up clutching both my hands together super awkwardly. “I’ll see you at the show.”
“Nice to meet you,” I tell him.
I readjust my headband as the bus door closes behind Roger. As hard as I try, I can never get my curls as smooth as Aunt Nic can. Somehow, I always end up with more product on one side than the other, so half my curls are crunchy and the other half are limp.
“You’re not still nervous about the reality show, are you?” I ask Aunt Nic as she settles into the driver’s seat beside me. “You know you’ll be amazing.”
Aunt Nic spins in her seat and reaches for something beside her. “First things first,” she says, then hands me a blue gift box. “Happy birthday, Ceej.”
I open the box.
Inside is a leather bag—not quite a purse but not a briefcase, either. It’s a deep, luscious brown, with a large flap over the front with a brass clasp and one long, long strap. It’s not frilly or fancy but sturdy and plain, with tiny stitches around every seam, and the leather is so soft that I can’t stop smoothing my hands over it.
“It’s a messenger bag,” Aunt Nic says. “I saw it way back in Missoula, and I knew you had to have it. I thought it would be just the right size for an atlas.”
I jump up to grab my atlas from the loft. Sure enough, it tucks perfectly inside. “I love it,” I say. “Thank you.”
Aunt Nic grins big.
“Is my mom ready for pudding now?” I ask, but I’m already halfway to the fridge. Aunt Nic’s been so busy lately that it’s been eons since I’ve talked to my mom, and I have tons of questions stored up for her. Like what she thinks of my new blue coat, and if she thought I made a smart decision about our route out of Toledo, and if she agrees with me that Aunt Nic needs to change the line in her intro about the Vicks VapoRub.
I don’t know when Aunt Nic managed to sneak out and find a Lebanese restaurant, but there are two small Styrofoam containers on the top shelf of the fridge. I’m grabbing two spoons when Aunt Nic says, “Before the pudding . . .”
She’s holding a second gift box.
I head to my seat, set down the two pudding cups and spoons on the center console, and reach for the box, excited.
Only, when I open it, I’m all sorts of confused.
It’s an outfit. Bright-yellow skirt, short and pleated, made of thick, stiff material. Matching yellow blazer. Two identical button-down white shirts and a
pair of yellow socks.
“It’s . . .” I say. “Nice.”
It’s not.
“It’s a uniform,” Aunt Nic tells me.
I am not less confused. “A uniform for what?”
“The Plemmons Academy.” Aunt Nic leans over and unfolds one side of the blazer to show me a patch. “Boarding school.”
I feel a bit like I’m swimming inside a bowl of oatmeal. “I don’t . . .” I start, but I can’t suck in enough air to finish the thought.
Aunt Nic sighs then. Rolls her shoulders like she’s resetting herself. “I’m sorry, CJ, I’m doing this badly. I thought you’d be excited. I should’ve . . . I’ve enrolled you at the Plemmons Academy, in Vermont. You start in January.”
I drop the box and the uniform with it. “Vermont? Next month?” Suddenly my words come out pinched and quiet. “Don’t you want me here anymore?”
“Oh, Ceej.” Aunt Nic reaches over to squeeze my arm. “Of course I do. I love having you here. But this is going to be so good for you. It’s a world-class institution. They have an enormous library. A beautiful atrium!”
“When have I ever said I wanted to go to boarding school?” I ask seriously. “And I don’t even know what an atrium is.”
“See?” Aunt Nic says. “That’s half the trouble.” But she keeps a tight grip on my left arm, like she’s not so ready to let me go. “It’s my job to make sure you’re getting a good education, and you’re definitely . . . not.”
“I get a fine education.”
Aunt Nic raises an eyebrow. “George Watermelon?” she says.
“That was one report.”
“Last month you filled in a test about the water cycle with the names of Pokémon characters.”
That’s true. Cyrus gave me an A-plus on that one.
“What are you even going to do without me here?” I ask. “You need me. Cyrus is out for months, and Oscar says we can’t afford more temp guys, ’cause they’re all union. And have you met Jax? If I’m gone, how are you going to—?”
