“Pull over the next chance you get,” I instructed Rowan, grabbing the empty cereal box and shoving it into Ian’s hands.
Ian was the poster child for motion sickness, but he was also the poster child for stubbornness. He never wanted to admit that things made him sick, which meant he was constantly doing things that made him sick. None of us had sat next to him on a roller coaster in years.
“Just a little Irish holiday weather. I’m sure we’ll be through it in no time.” Rowan attempted nonchalance, but the wind blew at us again and he gasped, jerking the wheel as Ian doubled over.
“Ian, you okay? You never told me you had motion sickness.”
“I don’t,” Ian answered. “I must have eaten something bad at the wedding.”
Sometimes I thought my brothers were incapable of admitting to weakness. “Rowan, he’s lying. This is an ongoing condition. A windy road during a storm is the worst possible scenario.”
I turned away from Ian’s scowl and pressed up to my blurry window, focusing on the view. Even without the storm’s theatrics, the Dingle Peninsula was Ireland 2.0—the drama factor turned on and cranked as high as it would go. We were still on a narrow two-lane road, but everything had been pumped up to Dr. Seuss level. On our left, neon green mountain peaks disappeared into pudding-thick clouds, and to our right, a thick nest of rain rested on top of the ocean.
Ian’s phone chimed. “Oh, no. Text from Mom.”
“What does it say?”
He attempted to swivel his queasy face toward me, but the motion made him shudder. “She wants us to check in when we land. I’ll text her back in a few hours.”
Suddenly, a gush of wind blasted Clover, bumping us off the road and into the shoulder. And this time, Rowan’s choice of language was a bit more potent than “feck.”
“Rowan, you got this?” I asked. He cranked frantically at the steering wheel, trying to regain equilibrium, but the hardest gale yet caught us on the opposite side. For a nanosecond, Clover favored her left two wheels. Ian lurched for the cereal box, dry heaving.
I gagged. I could see Ian puke a million times and never get used to it. I patted him clumsily, keeping my face averted. “It’s okay, Ian. It’s okay.”
“Now I’m pulling over.” Rowan pulled over to the foot-wide shoulder, then threw the car into park, collapsing over the steering wheel. Ian rolled his window down, sending in a spray of rain as he stuck his head outside.
“Well, that was traumatizing,” I said, taking a few deep breaths of my own.
Suddenly, the car began vibrating. “What—” Ian started, his eyes wide, but just then a massive tour bus sliced around the corner.
“Hang on,” Rowan warned. I pulled Ian inside, and we all braced for death as we watched the bus narrowly miss our front bumper. A large swell of water slammed into the car. We all screamed, haunted-house style.
“We are all going to die!” I wailed, once we’d all stopped screaming. Water trickled in through Ian’s window, and he quickly rolled it up.
“Death by tour bus.” Rowan sighed.
Suddenly, a terrible non-storm-related thought popped into my head, and I grabbed the back of Ian’s seat. “Ian, there’s no way we’re going to run into the wedding tour, right? Didn’t Aunt Mel say they’re touring western Ireland?”
Ian made a little X with his fingers, which I guess was supposed to mean “no.” “I hacked into Mom’s e-mail and printed out a copy of their itinerary. We aren’t going to be anywhere near them.”
“Hacked?” I said. “By that do you mean you used her password?” Our mom either didn’t know or care that you’re supposed to change your passwords often. Archie had figured it out one December, and we’d been using it to track our Christmas presents ever since. “Can you imagine if we ran into them?”
Ian shook his head. “It’s impossible. I scheduled our trip to make sure there was no possible way for us to run into them. Also, I don’t know if that’s our biggest concern right now,” he said, pointing to the sky. His face was shamrock green.
Suddenly, a shot of ice-cold water trickled down my back, and I catapulted forward. “Cold!” I screamed, water pouring down from my window. The inside of my window. “Rowan! The car is leaking.”
He arched back just as the stream transformed from a trickle to a gush. “No! Max said the new top was fine.”
“What top? Who’s Max?” I asked, like details would solve the fact that it was raining in the back seat.
“The guy who helped me repair—”
“It’s my window too!” Ian yelped, his pitch identical to mine. He grabbed his handle, frantically trying to roll up his already-rolled-up window.
“Ian, that’s not going to help,” I said.
Rowan turned the key and jetted onto the road, and Clover responded by giving up on any attempt at being waterproof. Water flooded in through every possible crevice. We sped over a small bridge, water flowing in at full speed as we pulled into a tiny two-pump gas station.
Ian frantically rolled down his window and stuck his head out, gasping like a beached flounder. I was soaked. Water pooled in the seat of my shorts, and my hair hung in stringy clumps.
“Did that really just happen?” Rowan fell back against his seat.
“Addie, how do we fix it?” Ian asked.
Mechanic Addie to the rescue. I reached up to wiggle the roof, and beads of water tumbled in. “Do we care about pretty?” I asked.
Rowan tapped his hand on the dashboard. “Does it look like we care about pretty?”
“Valid,” I said. “We need tape. Really strong, thick tape.”
Rowan nodded vigorously. “Tape. Got it. I’ll just pop in the shop and ask.” He grabbed a beanie from the cup holder and pulled it on as he sprinted for the gas station.
“We almost just drowned in a Volkswagen,” Ian said, drumming his fingers on the dashboard. “Can you imagine the obituary? Killer car traps trio—”
“Ian.” I reached over to still his restless fingers. I had a theory that Ian had spent a previous life as a hummingbird. Or an athletic coffee bean. “What’s up with Rowan’s mom?”
He glanced back, his eyebrows bent. “What are you talking about?”
“Back at the gas station I overheard him yelling at her. He said something about making a decision before the end of the summer.”
“Really?” Ian tucked a strand of hair into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “I don’t know very much about his family. I didn’t even know his parents were divorced until he brought it up back at the Burren.”
“Are you serious?” This was so my brother. All of my brothers. I wanted to know everything about my friends—right down to the name of their first pet and what toppings they liked on their pizza. Lina claimed to remember our first sleepover as more of a police interrogation. My brothers, on the other hand, seemed to need only a few similarities to form a bond. You like football and tacos? Me too.
Ian followed a bead of rain down the windshield with his finger. “Rowan and I don’t talk a lot about stuff like that.”
I rolled my eyes. “Because you’re too busy talking about Titletrack?”
“No.” He blew his breath out loudly. “I mean, of course we talk about music, but most of the time we talk about deeper stuff, like about things we care about and what’s bugging us. Stuff like that.”
I couldn’t help but grin. “So you’re saying that you and Rowan talk about your feelings?” Once Archie had asked me what Lina and I could possibly have to talk about on our multi-hour phone conversations and I’d finally told him, “How we’re feeling.” Now every time she called, they made fun of me. How’s Lina? How are her feelings?
“Yeah, I guess so,” Ian admitted. He flashed me a look that I recognized immediately. Eyes open and vulnerable—it was what I saw before he revealed something about himself. “Have you ever wished you could have someone see you without all the other layers? Like, not how good you are at sports or school or being popular, or whatever, they just see you?”
<
br /> I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and yell, Are you kidding me? Of course I’d felt that way. That was the defining feeling of my life.
Ian had felt that way? This was news to me. “Like I could just be Addie instead of being Archie’s/Walter’s/Ian’s little sister?”
“Exactly,” Ian said.
Suddenly, I realized something—Ian was talking to me like he used to, like Cubby wasn’t hanging out in the bruise under his eye. I chose my next words carefully, not wanting to break the spell. “But the label thing is just part of being human, right? We like to categorize people, so everyone gets labels slapped on them whether they’re right or not.” I’d never thought about it that way before, but it was true. We even labeled ourselves: Bad at math. Flirt. Clueless.
“They’re never right,” Ian said, a hint of venom in his voice. “Labels aren’t big enough for people. And once you try to categorize someone, you stop looking for who they actually are. That’s why I like talking to Rowan so much. We’re friends but completely out of context. I never thought someone I met online could be such a close friend, but I really needed a friend, and he was there.”
I waited for him to crack a smile on the I needed a friend part, but he just dropped his gaze to his lap, his knee bobbing. If Ian felt friendless, then the rest of us were doomed. We could barely go anywhere without someone yelling his name and wanting to talk about the football season—kids, adult, everyone.
“I didn’t know you were feeling that way,” I said carefully. “You could have told me.”
His hair whipped back and forth. “You were busy—with Lina and soccer and . . .” Cubby. He didn’t have to say it. We both averted our gazes. “So Rowan told me about the guidebook.”
“And?” I said, careful to keep my voice neutral.
“And I care about him and I care about you, so if you guys think it will help you, then fine, I’m up for it.” He twisted around, his eyes fastening earnestly on mine. “But you know that following some guidebook around isn’t actually dealing with what happened, right? It isn’t going to make it go away.”
My anger flared up, hot and bubbly. “And telling Mom is? Getting our parents involved will just make things get bigger.”
“It’s already getting bigger,” Ian said, mounting his big-brother soapbox. “Addie, at some point you’re going to have to deal with it. Don’t you want it to be on your own terms? Admit it. You’re in over your head.”
I wasn’t just in over my head; I was gasping at the bottom of the pool. But there was no way I was going to admit that. “I told you back at the Cliffs of Moher, I am done talking about this,” I snapped.
“Well, I’m not. Not until you do the right thing,” he insisted.
The right thing. The right thing had been to listen to Ian and trust my gut, and ditch Cubby the second things had started to feel off. But I hadn’t done that, had I? It was too late now. “Ian, stop!” I shouted.
“Fine,” he breathed, falling back against his seat moodily. Why did he have to ruin the moment? For a second there, things had felt almost normal between us.
I didn’t have to see the sign to know we were in Dingle, because Guidebook Lady’s description was spot-on. It was Alice in Wonderland meets Ireland—a mash-up of charm and color spiked with whimsy. Stores with names like Mad Hatters and the Little Cheese Shop lined the road in every color on the neon spectrum: tangerine, cotton-candy pink, turquoise, and lime. Rowan snaked carefully through the flooded cobblestoned streets, talking a blue streak the entire time.
“Dingle is a huge draw for Irish teenagers. Every summer they come here for Irish camp. You learn Irish language, dances, that kind of thing. The peninsula was pretty cut off from the rest of the world for a while, so a lot of people here still speak Gaelic.”
The talking had started as soon as Rowan came out of the gas station with the tape and picked up on the tension between Ian and me. He was obviously someone who tried to bury conflict underneath a lot of words—even if we’d wanted to get a word in edgewise, we couldn’t have.
“That’s cool,” Ian finally said, hedging his way into a rare silence. Our argument had sapped the energy out of both of us. Ian was crunched up into a little ball, buried in his phone, and I was slumped against my window, my anger dissolving into sadness.
“So . . . you’re sure you guys are okay?” Rowan asked the quiet car.
“Rowan, we’re fine.” My voice came out more forcefully than I meant it to, and a shadow covered his face. Ian shot me an annoyed look. Poor Rowan. He hadn’t asked for this. I straightened up, swallowing my tone. “Sorry about that, Rowan. Thanks for filling us in on the history. So what’s this next Titletrack stop about?” I snuck a glance at Ian’s map. “Slea Head?”
“Ah, this one’s kind of brilliant,” Rowan said, doing the double-handed-glasses move. “When Titletrack first started, they signed with a tiny record label called Slea Head Records. It doesn’t exist anymore, but the place it was named after does. It also happens to be one of my favorite places in Ireland.”
“Because of Irish camp, right?” I said, to prove that I had been listening to his monologue.
“Right.” He beamed.
The road led us through town and onto a windy road that thinned until we were sandwiched between a hill and a cliff. Thick, fluffy fog billowed on the road, and the ocean all but disappeared into the distance. We kept traveling farther and farther out onto the peninsula, and just when I thought we’d drive straight into the ocean, Rowan bumped off the road, stopping at the base of a steep hill where a goat trail snaked its way up to the top.
“Here?” I said.
“Here,” Ian confirmed, his knee starting in on one of its specialty spastic dances.
“Too. Much. Wind,” Rowan grunted, struggling against the door. Finally, he managed to pry it open, dousing us all with a salty spray of rain.
“Please tell me we’re not going out there,” I said, but Ian was already scrambling over the console, following Rowan out into the mist, and I followed quickly behind. It’s not like the situation inside the car was much drier.
Outside was wet and freezing, and the view was even more intense. The water shimmered a deep turquoise, and a thick afghan of clouds rested on gently sloping hills. All the colors looked oversaturated, especially the green. Before Ireland, I thought I knew what green was. But I hadn’t. Not really.
“This way,” Rowan said, pointing to the unbelievably slippery-looking goat trail. It rose up a steep hill, disappearing into the mist. Ian bounded forward without a second of hesitation, Rowan close on his heels.
I may as well have been climbing up a sheet of glass. My usually lucky Converse sneakers were completely useless in this situation, and I ended up on all fours, digging my fingers into the mud and pretending not to notice slugs nestled in the grass.
Up top, Rowan was waiting to haul me up the last few feet, and I stumbled, finally upright, onto the grassy clearing. Nearby, smooth black rock plunged into the water at a forty-five-degree angle, the ocean wild and frothy in front of us.
“People surf here!” Rowan yelled to us over the wind. I looked down in disbelief, watching the water throw itself against the cliff. He shrugged. “Extreme people.”
“Good thing Aunt Mel didn’t see Slea Head; she would have moved her wedding here,” I said to Ian, but he was bent over his notebook again, scribbling furiously through the rain.
I stepped toward the edge, the wind blasting me like a challenge. “Careful,” Rowan said.
I extended my arms out wide, feeling the way the wind fought and supported me at the same time. Rowan grinned, then mimicked my stance, the two of us standing like Ts, spray hitting us full force.
He touched the tips of my fingers with his. Rain speckled his glasses. “I feel like we should yell.”
“Yell what?” I asked.
“Anything.” He took a deep breath, then let out a loud “Harooooo!”
“Harooooo!” I echoed. My voice sailed out over t
he water, overlapping with Rowan’s. The sound made me feel alive. And brave. I wanted to feel this way all the time.
“What are you guys doing?” Ian dropped his notebook and stepped next to me, the wind whipping his hair into a frenzy.
“Yelling,” I said.
Rowan pointed his chin to the curtain of fog. “Know what’s out there?”
“The Loch Ness Monster?” Ian guessed.
“America,” Rowan said. “This is the westernmost point of Ireland. It’s the closest you can get to the States while still being in Ireland.”
I squinted out into the horizon. America. No wonder I felt so good here. There was an entire ocean between me and my problems.
Ian bumped his shoulder into mine—intentional or not, I didn’t know—and for a second the three of us stood there, the wind pushing as hard as it could and us pushing back. Together. For one second, I imagined what it would be like if this were real life. Me and Ian against the pressure of everything back home.
I wanted this to be real life, not a detour.
The summer had been full of detours, usually of the nocturnal kind.
It was just after eleven p.m. when I snuck out the back door, creeping through the yard and running down the sidewalk to Cubby’s car. His face shone blue, lit up by his phone in the dark, and his radio played softly. I slid into the passenger seat, quickly pulling the door shut behind me.
“What would your brother think of you sneaking out with me?” Cubby’s voice was its usual laid-back drawl, but a thin line of nervousness etched the surface.
“Ian? Good question. Are you going to tell him?” I asked, pointing my finger at his chest.
“Nope,” he said, grinning.
Ian didn’t know I was out. He also didn’t know about the postpractice drive Cubby and I had gone on, or how during the drive Cubby’s hand had just casually made its way over to my knee, as if that was where it had always belonged. And I didn’t push his hand away either. I wanted it there.
There were a lot of reasons I wasn’t going to tell Ian, but the main one was this: Over the past few years my brother’s voice had taken on a specific quality whenever he talked about Cubby. Like he’d just taken a bite of bitter chocolate. And tonight was not about Ian’s approval or disapproval. It was about me.
Love & Luck Page 11
