Wish You Were Here, Liza

by Robin Wasserman

  But the Cahokia Mounds were just…mounds. Large, grassy lumps. Some were ten feet tall, some were a hundred, but none was anything more than a mound of dirt. I snapped a picture of one of the smaller lumps. As usual, I gave it an imaginary caption: Proof that the past was just as boring as the present.

  Dillie tugged at me and Caleb. “Race you to the top!” she cried, charging toward the tallest mound without waiting to see if we would follow.

  “Come on,” Caleb urged me. He ran after her.

  It was one of those warm, sunny summer days that just made you feel like running. “Hurry up, Lizard!” Dillie shouted over her shoulder. “What are you waiting for?”

  Lizard. I grimaced. If they were going to insist on using that nickname, then let them race without me. Instead, I followed the adults into the “Interpretive Center.” Jake had disappeared somewhere, as usual, but Kirsten stuck by her parents’ side, acting totally superior. Also as usual.

  The Interpretive Center was sort of like a museum, only less interesting. The walls were lined with photographs of the mounds, like we couldn’t just look out the window and see them. One display had drawings of what the ancient Mississippian city might have looked like, back when there were still ancient Mississippians. Another had a bunch of archaeological artifacts under glass: an old spoon, an old bowl, a bunch of old rocks. I wondered what the archaeologists of the future would find when they dug up the musty remains of my bedroom. A thousand-year-old copy of Bring It On? What a legacy.

  “About a thousand years ago, this place was the biggest city in the world,” Kirsten said, loud enough to make sure that the nearest Interpretive Center staffer would hear her. (She was quoting the brochure, but she made it sound like she’d learned about all this a long time ago.)

  The staffer smiled eagerly at Kirsten. “Very good,” he said, gesturing us over to a large map of the state. “That was true in the year 1250. But did you know that by 1300, the city had been almost entirely abandoned? To this day, no one knows why it happened so quickly — or why it happened at all.” The adults all murmured and nodded. Kirsten preened. I slipped out the back.

  Maybe I could track down Caleb and Dillie. Running around with them had to be more interesting than this, even if they did insist on calling me Lizard.

  “Hey, what’s your hurry?”

  I stopped short. Jake was leaning against the back of the Interpretive Center, chucking stones at a huge CAHOKIA MOUNDS sign. It was about six feet wide, with a painting of a giant green lump at its center. “Well?” he asked when I didn’t say anything. “Where are you going?”

  “Oh. Uh, nowhere.” Think, I told myself desperately. I had to come up with something fascinating to say before he stuck his earbuds in again. But my mind was totally, pathetically blank.

  “Too bad. Figured you might know something I didn’t.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Immediately, I wished I hadn’t. I didn’t want him to think I was some dumb little kid who couldn’t understand him.

  But he just tipped his head back and gave me a slow, wide grin. It was the first time I’d seen him smile. “I was hoping you’d found something interesting for us to do.”

  Us? We were an us?

  “Yeah, it’s totally boring here,” I said. Casual, I told myself. Think casual.

  Jake didn’t answer. Instead, he scooped up a few more rocks and started throwing them at the sign again. The stones clanged off the metal.

  Ping!

  Ping!

  Ping!

  “You’re really good at that,” I said.

  He looked at me like I was crazy. “It’s a big sign,” he pointed out. “It’d be hard to miss.”

  “No, I meant…” What I meant was that he hit the same place on the sign each time, like he was pitching a baseball. I wanted to ask if he played baseball, and if that’s why he was always listening to games. But if I did that, he’d probably ask me if I liked baseball, and I would have to admit that I was totally clueless. Then he might decide we had nothing in common.

  Long seconds passed. Jake didn’t tell me to go away — maybe because he’d forgotten I was there. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Anyway, I’m just going to go —”

  “You want to try?” he said suddenly. He held out his hand, palm up. There was a rock sitting in the center. “Go for it,” he said. “It feels good.”

  I scooped up the rock and flung it at the sign as hard as I could, pretending it was my parents’ road atlas.

  Ping!

  It did feel good.

  “So, how come they call you Lizard, anyway?”

  Jake asked, as I started collecting a handful of rocks.

  “No one calls me Lizard,” I said quickly.

  “Sure they do,” he said. “Caleb. Dillie. I’ve heard them. It’s, like, your nickname.”

  I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks. “No, it’s not,” I said furiously. “It’s just some stupid thing they —”

  “I think it’s cool,” he said.

  I froze.

  No one had ever called me cool before. Except for Sam and Mina, and they had to think I was cool. It was in the best friend rule book. But no one else did. Especially not incredibly cute baseball-playing ninth graders.

  “Lizard,” he said slowly. “Yeah, I like it. Zard. That’s what I’ll call you. That cool with you?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Okay, maybe I didn’t say it. Maybe I squeaked it. He’d made up a name for me. Like a secret, just between us.

  “Yeah, that’s cool with me.” I lobbed another rock at the sign, slamming it straight into the bright green mound at its center.

  Ping!

  Location: Granite City, Illinois

  Population: 31,301 in Granite City, 13 in the Ramble Rose Motel, 6 miles out of town

  Miles Driven: 673

  Days of Torment: 9

  The Ramble Rose Motel looked pretty much like all the other motels we’d stayed in so far. A dingy one-story red building curved around an empty parking lot. Each room was named after one of the states on Route 66. My parents got Texas, Caleb and Jake got Arizona, and Dillie, Kirsten, and I ended up in New Mexico. But as far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything particularly New Mexico about the room, other than the cactus painting hanging over each twin bed — and the fact that it was really, really hot.

  When they were trying to sell me on this trip, my parents forgot to mention that real America wasn’t air-conditioned.

  As soon as we dumped our bags, Dillie scrambled up on one of the beds.

  “Dillie, no jumping,” Kirsten snapped. It was like this every night. No jumping on the beds. No candy. No TV after nine. No exploring after curfew. No whispering after lights-out. It was the first time in my life I’d ever stayed in a hotel room without my mom and dad. If Sam and Mina were around, we’d be having the greatest sleepover in the history of sleepovers. I’d be having fun. Instead, I was stuck with Kirsten — and Kirsten didn’t believe in fun.

  It was seriously unfair. Big sisters were supposed to be cool. Okay, maybe not when they belonged to you, but other people’s big sisters were supposed to be cool. Other people’s big sisters let you stay up late and eat nachos and cookie dough for dinner. They knew about makeup, when you should wear it and when you shouldn’t, and how much of it made you look like a clown. They had advice about boys, like when to call them and when to let them call you, and what it meant if one of them had a whole seven-minute conversation with you and gave you a cool nickname and then never said another word to you for another 374 hours. (Not that I was counting.)

  In some alternate, bizarro universe, there was probably a bizarro Kirsten who was totally awesome. Bizarro Kirsten gave bizarro Dillie and bizarro Liza awesome makeovers and awesome advice and let them stay up after hours eating awesome snacks and watching awesome late-night TV. But in this universe, Kirsten was a total dud.

  That night, a few minutes after we dropped our bags in the corner, Kirsten’s cell phon
e buzzed. “Finally!” she squealed, snatching the phone out of her pocket and pressing it to her ear. “Hello? Where have you —? I mean, hey. What’s up?”

  “Tell him how much you miss him,” Dillie said, batting her eyelashes at Kirsten. “Tell him how much you looooooooove him.”

  “Shhhh!” Kirsten hurled a pillow at her sister.

  “Oh, Thomas!” Dillie squealed. “Kirsten loves you sooooo much!”

  Kirsten’s eyes bugged out. “Thomas, can you hold on a minute?” she asked sweetly. Then she slapped a hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. “Delia Morgan Novak, shut your mouth. Right. Now.”

  “Who do you think you are?” Dillie shot back. “Mom?”

  “I can get Mom,” Kirsten warned.

  “And tell her what? That I’m bugging you while you’re on the phone with your secret boyfriend? The one you’re not even supposed to have?”

  I looked up at Kirsten, surprised. She didn’t seem like the type to have a secret boyfriend. That would be against the rules.

  Kirsten just sighed, sounding disgusted. “I’m going to take this call outside,” she said, glaring at Dillie.

  “But Kirsten, we’re not supposed to leave the room,” Dillie said sweetly. “And you’re definitely not supposed to leave us in here by ourselves. What if we get into trouble? I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.”

  Kirsten narrowed her eyes. “Okay, what do you want?”

  “We stay up as late as we want,” Dillie said firmly. “And you bring us back some snacks from the vending machine. Chips, a Snickers bar, and —” She glanced at me. “What’ll it be, Lizard?”

  On the one hand, I wasn’t sure I wanted to team up with Dillie. On the other hand…I was hungry. “Anything chocolate,” I said, futzing with my camera so I wouldn’t have to look at Kirsten. “Um, please.”

  Kirsten just muttered something about blackmail and slipped out the door, slamming it behind her. Dillie flopped back on the bed and kicked her legs in the air. “Free at last!” she cried. Then she jumped to her feet. “So now what?”

  “What what?”

  “She’ll be out there on the phone with Thomas” — Dillie fluttered her eyes and raised her voice an octave as she said the name — “for at least an hour. What should we do?”

  I shrugged.

  So we did everything. Well, everything you can do when you’re trapped in a 16-by-16-foot motel room in the middle of nowhere. We jumped on the sagging beds, competing to see who could jump highest and slap the ceiling. We tapped Morse code messages on the walls — then freaked out and screamed when someone tapped back. We raided the mini-fridge for a guaranteed sugar rush — but chickened out at the last minute when we saw the sign with prices like SNICKERS

  BAR: $7.

  Instead, we decided to mix up our own concoction. After all, motels may charge you seven dollars for candy, but they give you plenty of other stuff for free. Stuff like shampoo. Moisturizer. Mouthwash. Hand sanitizer. Conditioner. Toothpaste. A cornucopia of mini bottles that, when mixed together, turned into a thick, foul-smelling, greenish brown goo.

  “Now try some on your hair,” Dillie said.

  “Are you insane?” I eyed the goo. “You try it.”

  Dillie hesitated for a moment; then her eyes lit up. “Better idea.”

  I watched, half in horror and half in awe, as she squeezed Kirsten’s special bottle of shampoo into the sink…and replaced its contents with our own special mixture.

  “I just want it on the record that I wasn’t involved in this,” I said, backing away.

  Dillie raised her eyebrows. “Bet you wish you were.”

  Maybe.

  We pawed through all the drawers and closets, hunting for whatever weird stuff previous guests might have left behind. We found: One left sock, brown, with a hole by the big toe. Three buttons of assorted colors. One gigantic ball of lint. One fuzzy breath mint. Two pens with PANKOW TRUCKING: BARGAIN RATE, NEVER LATE, ALWAYS GREAT etched

  across them in pale green. And, under the dresser, one freakishly big dead cockroach.

  “Ahhhhhh!” I jumped up onto the bed, trying not to imagine what might be crawling around beneath the covers.

  Dillie backed away, very slowly. “It’s just a…bug,” she said, sounding unconvinced. “A big…big…big…” She shuddered and jumped onto her bed. “Maybe we should forget we ever saw that.”

  “Deal.”

  To distract ourselves, we flipped on the TV. There was nothing on but a three-minute loop of “Welcome to the Ramble Rose Motel” and a woman who had her own fitness show, Candy’s Cooking

  Calisthenics! (She exercised while she baked, then rewarded herself by chowing down on chocolate cake fresh out of the oven.)

  Bored, or maybe still trying not to think about potential creepy crawlies beneath our beds, Dillie grabbed my camera and started fiddling around with it. She peered at me through the viewfinder.

  “Careful!” I warned her. The camera might have been old and annoyingly non-digital, but it was still my most valuable possession.

  “So how come you always take such boring pictures?” Dillie asked.

  “I do not!” Like it was my fault there was nothing interesting to take pictures of.

  “You do, too,” Dillie said, pretending to snap pictures of various parts of the room. “Ooh, a highway. Click. A mound of dirt. Click. A giant catsup bottle. Click. Bo-ring.”

  “Can I help it if this whole trip is boring?” I snapped. “What am I supposed to be taking pictures of?” I would never admit it to her, but even back home, I never had an answer for that one. I didn’t really know why I wanted to take pictures in the first place. I just liked having the camera in my hands — I liked the idea of freezing a moment in time and keeping it around forever. But that didn’t make it any easier to choose which moment to freeze. What kind of photographer can’t come up with anything good to photograph?

  The boring kind.

  “Real stuff,” Dillie said. “Like, how about that guy at the diner tonight who kept sticking his finger up his nose when he thought no one was looking? Now, that’s a picture.”

  “Gross!” I swallowed a laugh. What was this obsession that everyone had with being real? If my parents weren’t so into finding real America, we wouldn’t be on this trip in the first place. We’d be in a hotel on the beach somewhere, ordering room service and eating at chain restaurants and going to the movies and doing all the stuff my parents refused to do. Or maybe we’d just be home. That was real, wasn’t it? Why did getting real have to mean driving halfway across the country and having dinner next to a nose-picker?

  Dillie held the camera at arm’s length and turned the lens toward herself, then stuck out her tongue.

  “Don’t, you’ll waste —”

  The flash went off.

  “— film.”

  Dillie pounced on my bed and shoved the camera in my face. “Come on, do something interesting,” she urged me. “Let’s make a memory!”

  I snatched the camera out of her hands. “Make a memory with your own camera,” I muttered. If only Sam and Mina were here, I thought. They’d never tell me I was boring.

  That’s when I had my brilliant idea.

  Maybe I couldn’t bring them on the trip with me — but I could still bring the trip to them. I would document every horror, every humiliation, every weird, freakish, annoying, or insanely boring thing that happened. And then I would make a souvenir scrapbook for each of my best friends. Liza’s Photojournal of Route 66.

  No — more like: Liza’s Photojournal of Misery and Torment.

  I handed the camera back to Dillie. “You know what, Dillie? You’re right,” I told her as she started making wacky faces into the lens.

  “You mean it?” she asked. “No more boring pictures of scenery and stuff?”

  I grinned, already drafting some captions. Real “fun” in the real middle of nowhere with my really strange roommate. “I mean it,” I told her. “Go for it. Let’s get real.”
<
br />   Chapter Three

  Location: Missouri…Missouri…more Missouri…Florida — no, just kidding — still Missouri

  Population: 5,911,605 residents; 0 friends

  Miles Driven: Enough to make me carsick — twice

  Days of Torment: Too many

  Supposedly, a person can get used to anything. Here’s what I had to get used to: waking up first thing in the morning, also known as earlier than I normally had to wake up for school…even though it was summer vacation. Eating soggy bagels and stale cereal in the motel lobby. Jumping into the car with my parents and begging them to pop in a CD or an audiobook or anything but the local radio station that I knew they would insist on. Losing the argument.

  Then we would drive.

  Sometimes, we would drive for an hour. Sometimes, we would drive for six hours. We always started out together, all three cars bunched in a tight herd, but then someone would stop for gas and someone else would stop at a scenic overlook and pretty soon our little red Volvo would be all alone on the highway. Not long after that, we would usually be lost.

  Route 66 was pretty easy to follow, but the real America that my parents wanted to see — all the farms and basement museums and rusty bridges — those were the kinds of things you had to hunt for. Lots of twisty dirt roads, unmarked turns, signs for streets that didn’t exist anymore, maps that apparently someone just made up from her imagination since they didn’t have anything to do with the real world.

  “I told you to turn right!” That was my dad, realizing we were going the wrong way — and that we’d probably been going the wrong way for an hour.

  “You said left!” That was my mom, gripping the wheel, smiling that don’t-mess-with-me death smile she flashes when she pretends she’s not mad.

  “Left, but then a right at the farmer’s market,” my dad clarified.

  “We didn’t pass a farmer’s market.”

  “What about that fruit stand?”

  “That was a man with a wagon of apples. You’re telling me your directions say ‘turn at the man with the apple wagon’? You’re telling me that every day, all day, that man stands there with his apple wagon so that people like us will know where to turn?”