Applewhites Coast to Coast

by Stephanie S. Tolan

  He put his hand on the side of her face, and she could feel the scratchiness of his calluses. “That,” he said, “is all that matters. Find a way to make it actually work.” He went into the Pageant Wagon.

  “What was that about?” she wondered aloud to herself, as Tyler came back, waving the book in the air.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Jake had been named the “specimen-intake supervisor,” and the next morning he found himself thinking this whole thing had been a tremendously bad idea. He and E.D. had talked about it when they’d gotten back to the campground yesterday and for a little while it had felt like old times, before the Kiss, when the two of them had worked really well together to save the Applewhites’ camp from being shut down. E.D. had asked him to help her work up a list of the kinds of animals the kids might find and the things that might be needed to keep them properly cared for over the day and a half they’d be caged—the kinds of food they might need. The kinds of habitats. But then Tyler had come over to the Applewhite side of the campground, and E.D. had hurriedly closed up her spiral notebook and asked the kid if he could help her organize. Before she’d gone all gooney about Tyler, she’d made Jake think Michaela’s project was sane and educational, but now . . .

  Up the sidewalk in front of the school stretched a long line of Saunders Elementary students, waiting patiently (or, in some cases, impatiently) with the fauna they had collected.

  So far, the dozen or so specimens he’d checked in had all been bugs: crickets in cottage cheese tubs, wolf spiders in matchboxes, grasshoppers in milk cartons. One second grader proudly held up a ziplock bag full of ants. Jake didn’t see any movement in the bag.

  All the cages that had been built for the zoo—in the few frenzied hours they’d had to build them—were sitting empty, while armies of insects already jammed the two glass terrariums they had dug out of a science room’s closet. An emergency call had gone out to residents of Saunders for any empty jars that could be called into service for bug display.

  A couple of kids back in the line was a little girl holding a big pet carrier. Now that looks promising, Jake thought. He assigned the next three kids—grasshopper, crickets, ladybug—to the two oldest French Fries, who were helping him at the specimen-intake table, and waved the little girl forward.

  She stepped up, struggling to get the big heavy carrier up on the table. Then she tucked some of her stringy brown hair behind her ear, opened the front of the carrier, and dumped the contents out. Jake found himself staring at a pile of fur, mostly light brown but with lots of dark red.

  “’S’a jackrabbit,” the girl said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

  “I see it—wait, is that blood?” Jake asked.

  “Well, sure. I winged him with my pellet gun, in his leg.”

  Jake waved frantically for Lucille, who had come along not so much to help as to oversee the humane treatment requirement. “Why did you do that?” he asked.

  The little girl looked at him in disbelief. “I’m not quick enough to run him down otherwise!”

  Lucille gave a yelp of dismay at the sight of the wounded rabbit, scooped it up in her arms, and ran into the school to apply first aid.

  “I do okay?” asked the little girl, looking suddenly concerned. “It was the only way I could think of to catch one! I didn’t kill him like my dad does when we have them for supper.”

  These kids, Jake thought, had a seriously different way of life than he was used to. “You—no, it’s okay. Just try not to . . . um . . . shoot anything else, all right?” The girl nodded and scooted aside just as a boy who looked about eleven slapped a squirming pillowcase onto the table in front of Jake.

  “Snakes!” he announced proudly.

  It took them all morning to get the animals squared away in something like livable conditions. The collection was still mostly bugs, with some truly unsettling variations: large centipedes; two tarantulas, all bristly legs and beady pinpoint eyes; three small scorpions, which seemed to mostly want to hide under rocks; and a horrific creature called a vinegaroon, or “whip scorpion,” which Jake was sure he would have nightmares about all night. It was like a fatter, uglier, mutant scorpion with one long string for a tail. He had put it in the far corner of the “zoo,” but he shivered just thinking about it.

  They had some bigger animals, too: the jackrabbit, looking much better now that he’d been cleaned up and bandaged (the pellet had gone cleanly through his leg, Lucille had assured everybody); two turkeys that a little girl had brought out from her farm (“We need them back,” she said seriously as her dad got them out of his pickup, “they’re for Thanksgiving”); the snakes, which turned out to be harmless garter snakes and were now in a cracked aquarium one of the teachers had gone home to find. There was a kangaroo rat, peeking suspiciously out from the hidey-hole shoe box they had put in its cage. The prize of the zoo was a young javelina, a bushy-haired wild pig that a girl in the fifth grade had brought. “My uncle is a trapper,” she explained.

  Then there were the “rejects,” which had been left out of the zoo exhibit. A girl brought her cat, but Michaela told her to take it back home (“We’re looking for wild animals, dear, plus our children are quite allergic. . . .”). Jake had opened a plastic kitchen container with daisies on the lid and found it full of cockroaches—he’d secretly given those to Destiny, to carry out into the field and release. He didn’t think they qualified as wild animals, either, and anyway, they were gross. The best, or worst, of all, was the boy who dragged up a heavy burlap bag, which didn’t seem to be moving.

  “Whatcha got?” Jake asked.

  “Possum!” said the boy proudly.

  Jake looked at the sack. It still wasn’t moving. “Um,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

  “Side of the road!”

  Grateful that Destiny was nowhere to be seen, Jake waved for the custodian.

  When the students of Saunders gathered at the tables for lunch, having spent most of their morning watching the zoo being set up around the edges of the cafetorium, except for the javelina that was in a pen outdoors, Michaela called for a “brief meeting” in Starry Night, the Organics’ classroom bus. They called the fish bus Pisces, and the windmill bus the Green Machine—whatever they might do differently, it comforted Jake somehow that the Organic Academy had named their buses, too.

  Inside, the French Fries were running around, hollering at one another, getting out puzzles, walking away again and leaving them all over the floor, finger-painting on a big easel, and creating general havoc. Michaela and the other Organic parents seemed barely to notice, and made no move to settle the kids down. Melody was filming the chaos with her phone, Jake saw, and Archie flexed his fingers as if, like Jake, he was imagining banging their heads together.

  After a while, Tyler pushed his long blond hair back out of his face and cleared his throat. He turned to E.D., who was sitting next to him, and said in a voice loud enough to be heard over the din, “Man, those lizards in the bushes out front were cool, weren’t they?”

  E.D. looked confused, but one of the older French Fries pulled up short in the middle of a lap around the classroom. “Lizards?” he asked. “What lizards? We looked all morning and didn’t see lizards!”

  “Oh yeah, cool ones,” said Tyler. “Under the bushes. But you have to be very still and quiet to see them.”

  “COOL!” the French Fry shouted, and tumbled out of the bus with the rest hot on his heels.

  “They’re allowed to go wherever their curiosity leads them,” Tyler said to E.D. “Sometimes you just have to point their curiosity in the right direction.”

  “Excellent work on the zoo, everybody,” said Michaela. “As we go forward this afternoon we turn to the educational portion of the project—”

  “Michaela,” Tyler said, actually interrupting her, “I’ve been thinking about that. Do you mind?” Jake noticed he talked to her like he was another one of the grown-ups. Frowning, Michaela waved him on.

  “Th
e regular way would be to have the kids research the animals. Gather all sorts of facts.” He said those two words in a tone that implied they were totally ridiculous. Jake looked at E.D., ready for her to argue with this, but her mouth was firmly shut. “But!” Tyler continued. “We figure, they could look all that up themselves.”

  “So you are suggesting . . . ?”

  “We’re suggesting we let the kids tell their stories about them. How they caught them. When they first remember seeing one. You know, we’d listen, not talk.”

  “It would make a good video,” one of the videographers said. That seemed to carry a lot of weight with the Organic folks. Few of the Applewhites had an opinion one way or another—Archie was absently picking splinters out of his thumbs from the cage-building. Melody was nodding. Jake was sure E.D. would object—how could she go along with an educational program that didn’t include any actual information?—but she sat quietly, watching Tyler, and didn’t intervene. With general agreement all around, the meeting broke up. Michaela looked oddly disappointed.

  As he headed for the door, Jake became aware of a low rumble, like thunder. Outside, the desert sky was clear and blue. The rumble built and built into an earsplitting roar, and Jake headed out to see what was going on.

  Two big, gleaming motorcycles pulled into the school parking lot. The one in front had tall handlebars with leather dangling from the ends. Riding the bike was a hulking figure with a lush white mustache streaming out on either side of him, mirrored sunglasses shining under a tiny motorcycle helmet.

  The roar of the bikes echoed off into silence as the riders turned them off. “Ahoy, Applewhites!” cried the rider in front.

  “Bill? Bill Bones?” called Archie, ambling over from where he’d been tightening the gate on the javelina’s pen.

  “Archibald,” said Bill with a serious nod. “Jake.”

  “What on earth are you doing here?” Archie asked.

  “Your father called me! We been keeping in touch—always had an eye toward meeting up somewhere.”

  Right on cue, Zedediah came out of the Pageant Wagon. He had on his cowboy hat and a heavy jacket, and there was a backpack over one shoulder. “Good to see you, Bill,” he said warmly. “You’re sure about the loan of the bike?”

  Bill nodded, smiling. “Betsy here”—he nodded toward the other rider, a woman about his age in a weather-beaten leather coat—“can ride on with me.”

  “Wait, you’re leaving?” Jake asked.

  Zedediah nodded. “It’s for the best,” he said. “E.D. can explain. I think it’s time I had an expedition of my own.”

  “We’re gonna get old Zedediah here some of his cowboy back,” Bill said, winking at Jake.

  “Don’t worry,” said Zedediah, putting a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “I’ll be back with you all soon enough.” He picked up the spare helmet, took off his cowboy hat, and handed it to Jake. “Take care of this for me.” When he’d tied his backpack down, he flung a leg over the bike as Betsy climbed up on the back of Bill’s. He checked out the controls, working the handles and the foot pedals once or twice. Then, with a few revs of the engine and a thumbs-up to Jake and Archie, he was off. The motorcycles spat gravel as they pulled out onto the road, and the roar faded as they disappeared into the long distance of the New Mexico high desert.

  Jake and Archie stood side by side, totally flummoxed. “Well,” said Archie at last. “I’ll be.” Shaking his head, he headed back to the school.

  Jake couldn’t picture what the Expedition was going to be like without Zedediah. He went over to Brunhilda to check on Destiny, to take Winston for a walk, and to give himself time to get his head around it. He found Destiny drawing a series of bright green cockroaches on a big pad of paper at Brunhilda’s dinette table.

  “Brunhilda is like our house for this ’spedition, right, Jake?” asked Destiny as soon as Jake came in.

  “Um, right, buddy.”

  “And those cockroach guys live mostly in houses, right?” Jake agreed that they did, and Destiny nodded in satisfaction. “Good. I got them back into their right hab-in-tat, then.” He went back to drawing.

  In front of him, the daisy-covered lid lying on the table next to it, was an empty plastic kitchen container.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It was not quite six o’clock, the sun wasn’t up yet, and E.D. had closed herself into the small bathroom in Brunhilda. It was the only time she could get any privacy. She’d been awake for about half an hour, and had been obsessing the whole time. She sat on the closed toilet with the brand-new spiral notebook she had picked up at one of their stops on the way from Saunders to Sedona, Arizona, where they were now, set up in the only campground in Sedona that could accommodate their buses. The cover of the notebook had the word Journal in flowing script. She had never in her life kept a diary or a journal—had never seen any reason for such a thing. She had her charts, her calendars and timelines, her curriculum notebook, her plans for every day and every week—what was there to write about afterward?

  She thought about Tyler. In the four days they had spent in Saunders, New Mexico, something had changed. Charts and calendars and plans were all about doing. She was really, really good at doing, and she knew it. Melody had given her an assignment, and as much as she hated the idea of Melody ordering her around, she’d taken it on. After all, the style stuff Melody had helped her with had been sort of fun, and she’d really learned some things—about hair and makeup and choosing clothes. So as much as she could, she’d tried what Melody had told her to do.

  It worked. She could give herself an A on this sociology assignment. Tyler had not only invited her to the dance, he’d kissed her when she said yes! And she had kissed him back.

  Now she understood what journals were for. Not for recording what you did. Journals were about sorting out how you felt about it. And maybe why. This wasn’t something she could talk to anyone about, or say out loud in front of a camera. Dear Diary, she wrote now, at the top of the first page. Then she crossed it out. She felt silly writing to a spiral notebook as if it were a person.

  Dear me— (that was more like it—it really was her own self she was writing to!)

  I did it. I got my stupid A. And ever since Tyler asked me to the dance and I said yes, I’ve been kind of sick to my stomach. How come I’m not glad about that A? How come I’m feeling so icky and kind of mad at myself?

  It isn’t that I don’t want to go to that dance with Tyler. I do. He’s cute and he’s nice and he’s the first boy (besides Jake, my almost-brother) that I’ve kissed. It wasn’t quite as good a kiss as Jake’s, but that isn’t Tyler’s fault. It’s mine.

  He’s nothing at all like David Giacomo. He’s truly, honestly, a supernice person. He’s outgoing and friendly and he likes kids and he’s not afraid of standing up to the Organic grown-ups. He has pretty much everything you could want in a boyfriend. It isn’t Tyler who’s the problem here. It’s me. What the heck does he see in me? Who does he think I am?

  There was only one time during that whole four days—at least once Melody gave me my assignment—that I wasn’t pretending when I was with him. I pretended to need help building cages. I pretended I didn’t care if we gave the kids the real scientific information about all the wildlife in the zoo. But we left those kids in Saunders not even knowing that something with six legs is an insect and something with eight is an arachnid!

  The one time—the only time—I was being my real self with Tyler was when he asked me about my favorite books. And that talk was the only real fun I had with him.

  Here’s the thing about having an almost-brother. Jake really knows me. When he kissed me it was because he wanted to kiss me, not some fake version of me. He knows I’m smart and I like to organize and I’m a lousy actor and I’m not very creative, and he still kissed me.

  There was an urgent knocking on the bathroom door. “E.D.?” It was Cordelia, speaking in an intense stage whisper to avoid waking anyone. “Aunt Lucille’s got an appointme
nt with some spiritual guide for a sunrise hike into the most intense vortex in Sedona, and I’m going along. I need to use the bathroom before the guide gets here to pick us up. Are you almost done?”

  E.D. looked down at her journal. Almost done? She was just beginning. “I’ll be out in a minute,” she said.

  It’s Melody, she wrote, hurriedly.

  There’s a reason I felt what I felt the first time I saw her. She isn’t real. She even admits it—is proud of it. All that stuff about telling a story all the time. You can’t trust anything she says or anything she does. And I got caught up in that.

  The trouble is, E.D. thought as she closed her journal and flushed the toilet, Melody’s method worked. That was pretty scary. She wrapped her journal in the towel she’d brought in with her, and opened the door.

  “Thanks!” Cordelia said as they squeezed past each other. There was a loud call from outside that sounded to E.D. like quork! A raven, E.D. thought, peering through the windshield. She shivered as a large, dark shadow flew up into the slightly graying darkness outside.

  After she had grabbed breakfast in the screen house and helped everybody else embark on their activities for the day, E.D. sat at the picnic table to organize the tutorial she was going to film later, and started making a log of what everyone was doing. The Rutherfords had said everyone needed to have a thirty-minute final video, summarizing the whole Expedition, for the judges. Only the top three teams’ videos would be shown to the whole world at the awards ceremony.

  E.D. got a little surge of pride. On the way to Sedona they’d learned that they were now—finally, finally—in first place. It must have been her video tutorial that got them into the lead. It was really thorough and filled in all the stuff with real educational value the Organics had left out of the zoo project at Saunders. She felt as if her own work was maybe about to win them the whole thing.