Hacked

by Linda Gerber

  Daniel came down the line next, but I don’t think he shared our enthusiasm. In fact, it looked like he was about to puke as the workers unstrapped him. He made his way shakily to the waiting bench to sit down.

  “Eyes closed the whole time,” he said, “but I did it!”

  I wondered if that was the way pura vida worked. If you faced a challenge, you didn’t let it stop you. You just closed your eyes and jumped.

  Back at the lodge, the group split up as soon as we reached the front doors. Daniel excused himself for a well-deserved nap, Marco left for some quiet time, Victoria went to work on our lessons for the next day, and Liz had to take a phone call. That left Logan and me with Claudia, who went straight to work, setting up the camera on a tripod in the main room.

  “Well,” I said to Logan, “it looks like it’s just you and me.” I hoped that, in pointing it out, he’d get the hint and stick around. He did.

  We sank down on one of the couches, but Claudia stiffly informed us that we had to sit on the other couch, so we’d be facing the camera. We obediently moved.

  Logan pulled out his phone. “Have you seen the video camera on these things?” he asked. “Excellent zoom.” He pointed it at Claudia, who gave him an exasperated look but otherwise showed no reaction at all. I pulled out my phone as well and we both filmed her, zooming in on the most unflattering angles we could find—the beginnings of a muffin top above her belt, a mole on her neck, the cowlick in her hair that made her bangs hang just a little bit funny.

  “You know,” Victoria said as she walked up behind us, “you could make more constructive use of your time. Start on your research paper. Read a book. Cassidy, you could update your blog.”

  She would have to remind me of that. Talk about bringing the good times to a screeching halt. Suddenly, all my worries about the weird blog entry from the day before came flooding back, and then some.

  “Anyone know if the Wi-Fi’s been fixed?” I asked. Claudia shrugged silently from behind the camera. Right. She was recording us. Which meant I had to get away. At least until I could hide my anxiety better. The last thing I needed was for it to be preserved on video. I pushed off the couch. “I’ll be right back,” I said in a bubbly voice. “I’m going to go check to see if it’s working.”

  “Don’t bother.” Logan held out his phone so I could see the screen. “No Wi-Fi bars. Must still be down.”

  “Oh. Uh.” I kept working my way out of the shot. “I can ask Mama Tica about it. Where is she?”

  “I believe Marco said she was taking care of the horses,” Victoria said. “I’d be happy to walk down and—”

  “No,” I said quickly. “It’s okay. I can go.”

  Logan started to get up. “I’ll come with you.”

  “Good idea,” Claudia said, “a walk to the stables would make for better footage than the interior of the lodge.” She started to unscrew the camera from the tripod.

  “No. Really. I’m just going to run over there. I’ll be right back.”

  I spun around and dashed out the door before Claudia had time to protest. I just wished I had also managed to make my exit before I saw the confusion and hurt on Logan’s face when I left him behind.

  I found Mama Tica in the stable, hanging a bridle on one of the pegs that lined the rough wooden wall. I wrinkled my nose at the sweet-rotten barnyard smell of old hay and cow poop. Or—seeing as there were five horses but no cow in sight—horse poop. Whatever it was, there was a smelly brown pile of it near the empty first stall. Someone must have just mucked it out. Is it really weird that I suddenly missed doing the farm chores with my gramma?

  The horse in the second stall heard me or sensed me standing there, because his ears flicked and he tossed his head the way Logan sometimes did when his hair got in his eyes. The horse nickered and shifted in his stall, and Mama Tica glanced up, a warm smile brightening her face. “¿Que pasa, calabaza?”

  “Um, pura vida,” I replied.

  “Oh, very good. You answer like a tica.”

  “Claudia told me that’s what to say,” I admitted.

  “I see.” She picked up a brush from a cubicle and motioned for me to come in. “I am brushing Cholo. Would you like to join me?”

  “Cholo?”

  “This big boy.” She patted the dappled gray next to her on the rump.

  “Hey, I know him,” I said. “He was out on the grass this morning. I thought he was lost.”

  “Lost? No, not Cholo. He’s el abuelo—the grand-daddy—on this farm. He goes where he pleases.”

  Cholo apparently recognized his name because he whinnied and bobbed his head up and down, his hooves clopping on the stable floor as he danced in his stall.

  Mama Tica laughed. “Sí, sí, papí. We are talking about you.”

  I carefully stepped around the pungent pile of whatever it was and took the soft-bristle brush Mama Tica held out for me. She was still working the stiffer dandy brush over Cholo’s flanks. “You can start on his neck and shoulders,” she told me. “I will finish getting the mud out back here.”

  The wooden oval handle fit snugly against my palm. I ran the bristles over Cholo’s coat in gentle, long strokes. It felt like the most natural thing ever, even though it had been years since I’d groomed a horse. Mama Tica began to hum as we worked. I didn’t recognize the tune, but it was happy, like Mama Tica.

  After several minutes, I asked her for a currycomb to clean the hairs out of the brush bristles. She handed it to me, along with an approving smile. “You know your way around a horse, calabaza.”

  “A little,” I admitted. Gramma and Grampa used to have horses on their farm, but they gave them up when Grampa retired. Only animals that earned their keep could stay, Gramma said. I remember how disappointed I was the next time we visited and I realized the horses were gone. It was stupid, really. Grampa and I used to ride the horses together, and I felt like they had given up something that belonged to us.

  “What takes your thoughts so far away?” Mama Tica asked.

  “Oh, nothing.” I shook the memories from my head. They were making me forget the whole reason why I had come to search for Mama Tica in the first place. “I was wondering if the Internet connection got fixed.”

  Her brows raised just a bit at the abrupt change of subject. “I am afraid not,” she said. “Everything appears to be working as it should be, but there is no signal. I am sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said quickly. “Not a big deal.”

  Maybe I could convince Bayani to take me in to town when he got back. We could go back to that Internet bus. He probably wanted to check his e-mails or something. It might be tight, trying to slip away before mountain biking, but I didn’t have much choice. I couldn’t ask Victoria to take me, because she always paid too much attention to what I was doing. Daniel didn’t have an international driver’s license, Claudia would probably bring her camera along, and Marco had disappeared the moment we got back to the farm.

  I must have been frowning as I figured all that out, because Mama Tica’s smile faded and she looked as if she blamed herself for the Internet malfunction. “Really,” I assured her. “It’s not a big deal.” Maybe if I kept saying that, I’d believe it was true.

  “Took you long enough,” Logan said. He was still sitting on the couch right where I’d left him, fiddling with his phone. He gave me a half smile as I dropped onto the cushion beside him, but the rest of his expression was guarded.

  “Mama Tica likes to talk,” I said with a shrug. I know what he was really saying: I could have taken him along. He was right, but then Claudia would have followed, and I couldn’t talk to him with the camera in our faces and the lavs wired to pick up every word.

  He turned back to his phone as if the conversation was already over for him. “What did you find out?” he asked, although his tone said he didn’t really care.

  I tried to ignore the sting of his indifference. He wouldn’t be acting like this if I could just tell him what was going on. Which I wo
uld like to do, as soon as we could get away from the camera. “The connection is still offline,” I told Logan. “They don’t know what’s wrong with it.”

  He barely lifted his eyes from his phone’s display screen. “That’s good, then, aye? If there’s no signal, the suits can’t expect you to write on your blog, so it works for you.”

  I flopped back against the couch cushions. “Not really.”

  Logan studied me for a moment, frowning. He tugged on his bottom lip like he sometimes did in class when he was trying to figure out a difficult math problem. I tried to give him meaningful looks—as much as I dared to in front of the camera anyway. Trust me, they said. Be patient. I don’t know if the message got across, but his posture finally relaxed when he looked away.

  After a moment, he held his phone toward me to show me an app flashing on the screen. “Look at this one.” He leaned back so that his head rested on the cushions just inches from mine.

  Suddenly, all thoughts of feelings and blogs and Internet connections poofed right into oblivion. All I cared about—all I could even think about—was Logan sitting next to me, his arm touching mine, his smile so close that if I turned my head just slightly, I might just be able to—

  “Hey,” Claudia’s voice cut into the daydream. “What happened to the sound? Sit up, you two. I think you’ve disconnected your mics.”

  I didn’t remember to think about my blog again until I woke with a start in the middle of the night, a weird twinge deep in my stomach. It’s not unusual when we travel for me to wake up disoriented. It kind of comes with the territory. But this was more than the usual feeling of being lost. It was like that panic you get when you’re afraid of getting caught doing something wrong. But I hadn’t been doing anything but sleeping.

  Outside, the rain pelted against the windows and snaked down the glass, casting eerie, squiggling shadows around my tiny cubicle of a room. I quickly switched on my string of lights to chase the shadows away.

  Cheerful twinkles of red, yellow, green, and blue danced across the walls, across my bed, and across my desk, where my computer sat, unused.

  My computer.

  My blog.

  Oh, crud.

  I had meant to corner Bayani to take me to the Internet café, but I got sidetracked.

  It had been raining again by the time my mom and dad’s group got back to the lodge, and Bayani let everyone off at the door the way he had done for me the first night. They rushed inside, laughing, dripping, stomping, and shaking water from their hair. When Bayani came in from parking the SUV, he got sucked into a discussion about the rain, and I didn’t get the chance to pull him aside.

  Then Marco suddenly reappeared, as if he hadn’t taken off somewhere all afternoon. Britt immediately became his shadow, although he wasn’t very focused on her at first. “I’ve been out making the arrangements for the mountain bikes,” he told Bayani, “but we’ll have to schedule that activity for another day.”

  Bayani pulled off one sodden shoe and dropped it with a thud to the floor. “You think?”

  I don’t think Marco caught Bayani’s sarcasm because he said with a completely serious face, “The trails would be much too muddy. However, I was able to get clearance for a night hike at the reserve. If everyone has slickers and boots—”

  “With the network’s equipment?” Cavin peeled a dripping wet jacket sleeve from his arm. “I think not. Let’s plan for another evening, shall we?”

  Marco didn’t say anything, but his lips pinched ever so slightly. He probably thought we were a bunch of wimps, hiding out from the rain.

  Britt must have interpreted his reaction the same way, because she said quickly, “I’d love to go on the hike.”

  She was rewarded with an indulgent smile from Marco. Logan exchanged a quick look with me and rolled his eyes. I had to turn away so Britt and Marco wouldn’t see me laugh.

  I would have asked Bayani about going to the bus after the rain/hike discussion wound down, but by then, Liz had come up with an alternate idea for filming since we were going to be staying in for the evening. She signaled Logan and me to come over to where she stood with Mama Tica.

  “I just had a brilliant idea,” she announced. “Mama Tica was telling me how she was preparing a variety of soups for tonight’s dinner, and I thought, Why not put the two of you to work helping out in the kitchen? What better way to introduce Costa Rican food to your audience?”

  Mama Tica looked confused. “It is only soup.”

  “It’s Costa Rican soup,” Liz clarified. “It will be interesting.”

  Mama Tica looked to Logan and me apologetically. “The soups have been simmering for some time now. There’s not really much to do.…”

  The way Mama Tica was hedging, it was a pretty good guess that Liz hadn’t asked her first before deciding we would invade the kitchen.

  “If you don’t mind—” I began, but Liz cut me off.

  “Of course she doesn’t mind,” she said. “You’ll be helping. Many hands make light work!”

  “Well, if we can really help…”

  Mama Tica gave me a wan smile. “I’m sure I can find something for you to do.”

  Liz clapped her hands. “Perfect. I’ll have Claudia and Estefan set up, and we can get started.”

  “She certainly is energetic,” Mama Tica said, watching Liz cross the room.

  “That’s one word for her,” Logan muttered.

  Mama Tica’s brows pinched. “I’m sorry?”

  “I really like the idea,” I said, diverting the subject, “of different soups for a night like tonight.”

  “I thought you would,” Mama Tica said. “My family loves a soup night when it’s rainy and cold out.”

  “Thank you,” Logan said.

  She gave him a puzzled look. “For what?”

  “For treating us like family.”

  “Well, naturally.” Her smile finally made a full appearance. “I am your Mama Tica, after all.” She allowed Logan to walk ahead of us toward the kitchen, and as we followed, she pointed to his back and mouthed to me, Very sweet boy.

  I flushed as if she had just paid me a compliment instead of Logan.

  There was no question who was in charge of Mama Tica’s kitchen. Before she would let Logan and me even consider approaching the food, she made us put on white chef aprons and scrub up like we were surgeons. The whole time she was being wired for her lav mic, Mama Tica lectured us about being careful around sharp knives and boiling pots. Finally, we were allowed near the cutting boards, but as Claudia and Estefan tried to film from different angles, Mama Tica kept shooing them back out of what she said was her work space. She probably would have kicked them out of the kitchen altogether if it weren’t for the fact that they were in there in the first place only to film Logan and me.

  “Here we have the three choices for tonight. I will put the finishing touches on the bean soup. Logan, you’ll be in charge of the beef stew. And Cassidy, you will complete the pozol.”

  My pot held some kind of corn and vegetable soup. It looked complete to me, so I didn’t know what Mama Tica wanted me to do.

  “I will show you, of course,” she said.

  All I had to do was to chop up a little cilantro to stir into my pozol, but Logan had to trim the ends off a bag full of green beans and cut them to the correct length for his stew. Mama Tica showed us both how to use the knives properly, with our fingers curled under so we wouldn’t accidentally get cut. Logan handled his knife like a pro.

  I have to admit I was pretty impressed by Logan’s culinary skills. Besides being a master chopper, he knew his way around a spice rack, and he even volunteered to knead the dough for the thick cheese tortillas we were making to serve with the soup.

  “Wow, such a chef,” I told him. “I never would have guessed.”

  “Yeah, well, I had no choice, living with Da,” he said. “It was either learn to cook or starve.”

  “Starve?” Mama Tica asked, catching only the end of our conversati
on. “Anyone starves around here, they only have themselves to blame.”

  For an instant, I felt like I could have been standing in my gramma’s kitchen. “My gramma says the exact same thing,” I told Mama Tica.

  She smiled. “Your grandmother sounds like a wise woman.”

  “Yeah. She’s a lot like y—”

  “Wait. Cut. Stop,” Claudia called.

  I blinked out of my memories, startled. I’d almost forgotten Claudia and Estefan were there.

  “Battery’s getting low.” Claudia pointed out the blinking red light on the front of the camera. “I need to switch it out. Can you hold that thought?”

  By the time the camera battery was changed, there wasn’t much more to film. We had finished the soups to Mama Tica’s satisfaction and helped her carry the pots into the dining room, where we set them up on chafers.

  “This will keep the soup hot,” she told us, “so you may relax this evening and eat whenever you would like. I’ll be back to clear it away later.” She set out some bread with our cheese tortillas just as my mom wandered into the dining room.

  “So this is what smells so delicious,” she said. “What a treat! Mama Tica, you’ve outdone yourself again.”

  “I had help,” Mama Tica demurred, nodding at Logan and me.

  Mom hovered as Mama Tica untied her apron and bundled up in her rain slicker for the dash to her own house.

  “Why don’t you stay with us for a while?” Mom asked. “I hate to see you go out in this deluge.”

  “No es nada. It is nothing,” Mama Tica said. “I like the rain. It brings people together.” She winked at me, and then she was gone.

  She was right; the rain pretty much confined the crew inside together. Since the satellite wasn’t working, no one split off to hibernate in their rooms with their computers or TVs. We all hung out together instead, laughing, talking, playing games, sampling the soups. It felt like home.

  Claudia hovered with her camera for a while, but we were finally able to convince her to put it away and join the rest of the group. I mean, really. There’s only so much footage you can film of people sitting around doing nothing. Estefan helped us undo the lav mics. He set them on the mantel next to Claudia’s camera, and we were free.