But Jenny’s too wound up to care. “I just looked up an events schedule for the time we’re around Mount Rushmore. There isn’t a 10K like you thought.”
“Oh.” I feel the excitement sink out of me like a deflated balloon, without the embarrassing pffft sound, thank goodness. It’s hard to ignore the fact that Jenny seems elated by this news, as if it’s her life’s mission to disappoint me.
“But there is a marathon.” Jenny smiles so widely that I can see she is the type who flosses and whitens her teeth daily.
“Oh?” I squeak. A marathon. I’ve never run that far at one time. I might have run that far in one week.
“Isn’t that great?” Jenny hands me a flyer about it and I see it’s called the Keystone Key to the Black Hills Marathon, and there’s also a fun run and various other activities, so I should be able to handle something. “You can enter the marathon,” she says. “Isn’t that great?”
What am I going to do, say no? “It’s so great,” I say, that is, if you consider major muscle damage and emergency ambulance rides to hospitals in strange towns great.
That gives me seven days to get in shape. Seven days to contact Dylan and see if he can meet me. And when he does meet me, I’ll be absolutely exhausted.
But who cares?
“And we’ll all be there to cheer you on,” Jenny says. “There are so many of us that we can easily spread out on the course, so you’ll never be too far from someone rooting for you.”
“Because that’s the way we run marathons,” Andre says in an unnatural, syrupy voice. “Leisure-Lee style!”
Jenny glares at him. “Anyway, you two, it’s time to go. Come on, everyone’s waiting outside. We’re all ready.”
“I’m going to buy a soda first,” Andre announces. “I’ll grab one for you.”
“Jenny, we just got here,” I say. “We’ve been reading about this place forever and—”
“I know, but we got off schedule.”
“Schedule?” I narrow my eyes at her. “I thought we didn’t have a schedule.”
“Don’t be difficult. We need a place to sleep tonight, and we don’t want a repeat of last night, driving around, calling for reservations. Come on, get your things and let’s giddyap.”
“I have my things. I don’t even have . . . things that I take off the bus,” I say. She looks at me as if I’ve just given her too much information, and I probably have. “But I just have one question. What about Wyoming?”
Jenny folds her arms in front of her and looks at me. “What about it?”
“Are we going there, too?” I ask.
“Interesting question. You should know by now that you never know with Leisure-Lee. Just enjoy the journey, Zena.” She turns and walks away in a sort of huff.
“Ariel!” I call after her. “A-R-I-E-L!”
So I go out to the bus, but then I claim to need something personal from the pharmacy department, and so I’m off the bus again and sprinting into Wall Drug and there’s a family using both computers, but I beg them to let me send just one short email, and they do.
Dylan
We will be near Mount Rushmore on June 21.
It’s a Saturday.
Be there!
I quickly buy a few small bags of Skittles and dash outside. My uncle is rushing to the bus ahead of me. He has boxes balanced precariously in front of him as he speed-walks to the bus: boxes of cowboy boots, moccasins, sandals, and every other kind of shoe, it seems, but sneakers.
He can’t see where he’s going, of course, and when he trips on a small rock in the road, the boxes start to topple, then crash to the ground. I run to help him, catching what I can in midair and crouching down to the ground to help reassemble the rest.
Uncle Jeff shakes his head. “I’m so clumsy. I’m a complete klutz.”
I stare at him, and there’s a sadness on his face I’ve never seen before. “No, you’re not,” I say.
“I’m useless.” He sighs. “Absolutely useless.”
“You’re not,” I tell him. “You’re the one who keeps us all sane.”
He struggles to stack the boxes in his arms again. “Why did I just buy all these things, anyway? I don’t even have my full income right now.”
“Cheer up, Uncle Jeff,” I say as we walk to the bus together, side by side.
That’s definitely a sentence I never thought I’d write, let alone say. But I’m in a great mood because we’re heading west again, and I’ll see Dylan soon. This might be one of my last days on the bus, so why not try to have fun?
“Ariel, you are a niece and a half,” Uncle Jeff says.
I smile, not sure what that means. “Thanks. I think.”
Wall, South Dakota: a traveler’s—and shopper’s—dream come true.
D—
We just went to Wall Drug. It’s HUGE. AWESOME. Everything the billboards say. Seriously.
The no-cent ice water and 5-cent coffee were both excellent.
Anyway, as you can see, still heading west.
Next stop: Badlands.
See you soon. I hope I hope.
Love,
A
Chapter Thirteen
I barely have time to finish the postcard because The Badlands turn out to be only, like, ten miles away, and our motel is only fifteen. I could probably run back to Wall and email Dylan again—and pick up some more snacks—but apparently I won’t need to, because this is the kind of travel stop that offers it all, which is nice because we’re going to be here for a few days. Huge motel, huge lounge, huge restaurant, huge pool. But it’s sort of dated, so they have everything except huge Internet access, which seems very bizarre, but there’s some claim to be letting us experience history.
It’s weird because the whole landscape is suddenly getting larger; everything’s getting bigger—the sky, the land, and now even the motels.
It sort of feels, and looks, like we’re on the moon. The mountains look like giant sand hills, but with a purplish tint. I’ve never seen anything like them before. They’re sort of the color of the Grand Canyon, but not exactly. They look like a giant made a series of sand castles, the kind where you pour water over sand until they clump into drips and shapes.
After a quick driving tour of Badlands National Park, we check into our motel and everyone stops to stare through the fence at the giant pool, clinging to the chain-link as if we’re jailed and looking at freedom on the other side.
Before I hit the pool I go running with my grandfather, and with Uncle Jeff trailing us, speed-walking, wearing his new cross-training sandals. They’re actually a cross between flip-flops and sneakers and look really uncomfortable. He keeps talking about the shock-absorbing soles, which must be something if they can absorb the shock of Uncle Jeff trying to run in them.
I shouldn’t be so catty. He is really making an effort to be out here with me, and that does count for a lot, but I’m secretly worried he’ll be in the background of my photo for the cover of Runners World someday. She used to train with her uncle, who was a master of shoe trickery, the magazine article will say. It took years for her to recover from the thirteen-minute-mile pace and regain her strength, and by that time she was thirty. She missed qualifying at the Olympic Trials three times in a row. She was considered a never-been.
“Ariel, you’re really picking up the pace,” my grandfather comments.
I must have been thinking too hard. “I have to pick up the pace,” I tell him. “There’s a marathon I have to run a week from Saturday.”
“What? We can’t do a marathon,” he says. “That would be foolish. We haven’t been training nearly enough.”
“I know. Maybe there’s a half marathon, though.”
“Oh. All right, fine. That we could pull off.”
“Seriously?” I ask.
“Sure. We could run that tonight,” Grandpa says. “Well, except for not being able to see very well. When is it again?”
“The twenty-first. Jenny told me about it. It’s outside Rapid Ci
ty, I think a town called Keystone, and I’m not sure what altitude that is—”
I haven’t even finished talking when it’s as if little rockets appear on the backs of my grandfather’s shoes and he’s off, sprinting. We run intervals; then we time each other doing miles; then Uncle Jeff times us. We’re a team in training. We can’t be stopped. At the end of it, I’m out of breath, my uncle has a sunburned nose, and my grandfather has hardly broken a sweat.
“What are you made out of, exactly?” I ask him.
“Pardon?”
“You’re like a man of steel. You have zero body fat. You never get tired,” I comment.
“Experience, kid. And you don’t have much on you, either.” He squeezes my bicep. “Probably it’s from being the head of this family. It makes you tough.”
“Really?”
He looks to the sky and sighs. “You have no idea.”
When we get back I change into my bikini and head out to the pool, which is mobbed, like no one has ever seen water before. My grandmother is sitting by the pool, giving Zena a pedicure while Zena “reads” the latest issue of InStyle. Mom is reading the new Dr. Phil book, because that’s what she does for fun, keeps up on her “contemporaries,” as she calls them. Sometimes I wish Dr. Phil would show up at her office and listen to her life story and ask, “And how’s that working for you?”
Andre is sitting there in a T-shirt that says REALITY BITES, wearing long shorts and flip-flops. He’s bopping his head to his iPod, the vocabulary book open on his lap to the Ks.
“Why aren’t you in the pool?” I ask.
“Why isn’t anybody? The water’s chilled. Cold. Frigid,” Andre says.
“But the air is extremely hot. Burning. Suffocating. Swim already,” I tell him.
“Yeah, maybe.” When he takes off his T-shirt and stretches his arms over his head, I can’t help looking at his body. He has those cut muscles in his stomach, the ones runners and other athletes get when they’re incredibly lean. I wonder how he gets them, because he doesn’t run endlessly like me, and he seems not to care about being an athlete, though I guess I don’t have much proof of anything. All I know is that I should probably stop looking at him and his cut body.
I sit on the pool’s edge and stick my feet into the water. “Okay, so it’s not warm.” When I turn to look at him over my shoulder, I see him kind of staring at me. He coughs, embarrassed, and so I slide into the pool, even though it’s cold enough to make me gulp.
“Come on, get in,” I urge him.
He slides off his flip-flops and sits on the edge, near me, his feet in the water.
“You call that in?” I ask.
He flicks water in my face with his foot. “Give me a second.”
I tug at his foot, and he gives up and jumps in. “Man. You think it’d be warmer,” he says.
“You’d think,” I agree.
We swim around for a while to warm up, then attempt to float, which is difficult now that people like my grandpa are swimming laps. We swim over to the edge and hold on, treading water in the deep end. It feels comfortable being with him, but sort of exciting, too. I’m not sure what’s going on with him—or us.
Mom comes over to the edge near us and sits down. “So, Andre. Tell me about yourself,” she says.
I look at her, my eyes narrowed. If she doesn’t get into the pool soon, I will push her in. And possibly hold her down for a second or two, just to scare her.
“What would you like to know?” he asks, a lot more politely than I probably would.
“Well, what do you do for fun? Are you on any teams, in any clubs, do you read, do you only eat Skittles . . . ?”
“Don’t give him the third degree, Mom,” I warn.
“I play lacrosse,” he says. “I have my library card, which is well-worn. And I vote. No, wait, I don’t, because I’m only sixteen.”
“So you’ll be a junior in the fall, like Ariel?”
“A senior.”
“How did you manage that?”
Andre pulls himself out of the water and heads for his towel. “I skipped a grade.”
“That’s impressive. I’m always telling Ariel to take AP classes as soon as she can. They’re such an advantage.”
I submerge and swim down to the bottom of the pool, staying there until I run out of breath. Then I get out, dry myself off a little, and flop onto a chair, facedown, my back to the sky. The sun starts to bake the water off my back. I love that feeling. This finally feels like vacation.
“See, if we went on a cruise, Mother, this would be our day. This would be so awesome,” Zena is saying to Mom, who has finally stopped quizzing Andre.
“Boring,” Mom says, pushing up her organic cotton sleeves. She refuses to take off her shirt, even though she has a bathing suit on underneath, and even though she made me look at the Lands’ End site with her for about thirty-six hours picking out said swimsuit. “Pools are boring. And cruises are environmentally unsound.”
Uncle Jeff does a cannonball off the diving board, completely splashing everyone.
Andre comes over to sit beside me in a webbed chair, and I turn to him. “That’s my positive male influence. Him.”
Andre unfolds the chair so he can lie down beside me, and it collapses with a crash, nearly tossing him onto the concrete deck. “Figures,” he says. He unfolds it again and slides into it carefully. “Ariel, look.”
I feel a tap on my shoulder and I turn over.
Andre gestures to Lenny, who’s fast asleep in a lounge chair. Then he points to Jenny, who’s busy playing water volleyball with some of the seniors. “This would be the perfect time to figure out our route. Or just find out some dirt about Lenny and Jenny. Or hide all the old people’s travel pillows and watch them freak out when they get on the bus tomorrow.”
I smile, picturing the chaotic scene. “Okay, but how are we going to get on it?”
“Come on,” Andre urges. “Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. But if we stay here, your mom’s going to grill me some more.”
I’m up for any nonfamily adventure, so I slide on my flip-flops, wrap a towel around me, and together we head out of the pool area. Why am I tiptoeing? I wonder.
“Ariel? Andre! Where are you going?” Mom calls to me.
Maybe that’s why. “Just getting something to drink. We’ll be right back,” I say. “It figures that she sensed I was leaving. She’s got Ariel radar,” I comment to Andre.
“Don’t take long!” she calls after us. “And bring me a coffee, okay?”
“I want an iced tea!” Mrs. O’Neill adds. “And not the green kind. And put some sugar in it!”
“How is this different from being at home, again?” Andre asks as we open the gate and head out to the parking lot. “Wait. Hold on.” He grabs my arm midway to the bus. “The door’s open. Why is the door open?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Someone’s cleaning it?”
“This is it. This is our chance. Maybe they left the keys, too,” he says.
I find that I’m still tiptoeing, which isn’t a good thing, because as I take my first step up onto the bus, I trip on my towel and nearly wipe out.
I grab Andre, who’s ahead of me, to keep from doing a face-plant onto the steering wheel.
“Coordinated much?” he jokes, turning around to help me catch my balance. His hand’s on my waist, and that’s when I realize that my towel is now lying on the steps behind me. I’m not naked, but it’s as close as I’ve ever been, standing this near to a guy.
“No, seriously. You’re in really good shape. Really good,” he says. “I’m sorry I made that crack about runners back in whatever town that was.”
“It’s okay. I mean, thanks.” I feel this weird tension between us.
“Obviously it’s something you take seriously and all, so . . .”
“Right.”
“So.”
“So.”
Pool water drips off my hair and slides down the middle of my back, which is good because
I’m getting seriously hot in here. I feel like Andre is about to kiss me, or maybe it’s that I’m about to kiss him.
“Excuse me. Where are we?” Andre and I jump back from each other as a sleepy-looking old woman approaches us down the aisle. I’m pretty sure it’s Ethel.
“Um . . . at the motel pool?” I say, unable to think of the name of the motel, still in shock over the fact that I almost made a move on Andre, which is ridiculous, because isn’t going west and sneaking onto buses all about seeing Dylan?
“I must have been asleep when we got here, so they just let me be. Ha!” Ethel chuckles. “How funny. Haven’t been able to sleep a wink since this trip started—blasted roommate snores like a freight train. So, what have I missed?”
“Honestly? Not too much,” Andre tells her.
“Right.” I struggle to retrieve my towel before Andre helps her down the steps. As we walk back into the pool area, I realize that I completely forgot my mom’s coffee. Fortunately, we have Ethel to cover for us.
Big Badlands Motor Court—too big to fit on a small postcard!
All-inclusive resort. Try our famous chuck-wagon supper, sip cocktails in the Pronghorn Lounge, or hit the pool with the kids! AARP discount rates.
Sarah,
This bus can apparently time travel. Check out the place on the front. We’re back in the sixties. Or seventies. Turn on the History Channel and maybe you’ll see us.
Temperature is in the high eighties. “But it’s a dry heat,” all the older people on the bus keep saying.
Help me, I’m writing about the weather.
This place has a fantabulous pool.
Have tons to tell you.
XO
Me
Chapter Fourteen
The next night, after hiking all day and being at a chuck-wagon supper for most of the night, we go to our motel room and Mom slides every single bar and lock on our door closed. As if Zena and I were both thinking of slipping out sometime during the night. And as if we couldn’t unbolt all of the locks without waking her up, because she’s a very sound sleeper.
The Summer of Everything Page 27
