by Jenn Bishop
Gabriella sighs. “I really thought if I prayed hard enough, my teeth would end up straight and I wouldn’t have to get them. I’ve known it was coming all summer.”
“You prayed for no braces?” Kiersten laughs. “Sorry, I know it’s not funny.”
“How long will you have them for?” I ask.
“The orthodontist said something like two years.” Gabriella pouts.
“Well, I think you can still have cotton candy.” I point to the booth. “My treat.”
“You don’t have to,” Gabriella says. Maybe she thinks I’m trying to buy her off—trying to make up for what I said at the pool party by getting her a cotton candy.
“No,” I say to her. “I do.”
This is the first time I’ve seen her since that day. She’s been on some text threads with Kiersten and me, but it’s not the same. I know I need to talk to her alone, and I’ve been thinking of what to say—trying out some of my apologies on Hank—but I need to find the right moment.
I step up to the counter. “Three cotton candies, please.” I hand over six dollars. We each choose our colors; Kiersten takes pink, and Gabby and I go for blue.
We walk through the arcade, pulling apart the sticky treat. Up ahead is a lady with a crystal ball, telling fortunes. Kiersten spots her. “You guys want to do fortunes?”
“I think I’ll pass,” I say, “but you should.”
“Sorry, K. I’m with Maddie.”
Kiersten hands the fortune-teller her cash while Gabby and I wait across the way, watching as a little boy and his dad try to win a goldfish by tossing a Ping-Pong ball in the right fishbowl.
I reach my hand into my pocket and feel for the purple headband. I take a deep breath. “Hey, Gabby?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Remember when we played the Ouija board at your house earlier this summer?”
Gabriella nods. Her lips and tongue are all blue. Mine must be, too.
“I was still mad about you and Avery at the dance—well, I guess that’s probably obvious now. Anyway, when I went to the bathroom, I took something. It was stupid and I never should have done it. I never should have kept it this long either.” I pull the headband out of my pocket.
Gabriella takes it from my hand. “I did kind of wonder where this went.” She wraps it around her wrist like a bracelet.
“You were right, you know? What you said at the pool party. I was being selfish about Avery.”
Gabby nods. “Well, I probably could have found a nicer way to say it.”
“I tried to think of what it was like from where you were standing, you know? I’ve never been the new kid at school. I’ve lived in Hitchcock—this tiny town—my whole life, but when school starts, we’ll all be new kids. Trying to figure everything out all over again.”
The little boy holds up his goldfish in the plastic bag, like it’s the coolest thing in the entire world, not some goldfish you could get at the pet store for fifty cents. It feels like forever ago, being that little.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that I get why you said yes to Avery when he asked you to dance. And kiss! Bah! I mean, who would say no to that?”
Gabby laughs. “He didn’t ask me.”
“He didn’t? Did you ask him?”
Gabby shakes her head, laughing even harder. “Nooo! Maddie.”
“What?” I’m surprised by how much I want to know how it happened. Gabby’s the only friend I have who’s kissed someone. I need to file this away for later.
“It’s the kind of thing that happens really fast, you know?”
I nod, like maybe then she’ll think I do know. “How did it happen?”
She lowers her voice. “We were waiting at the back of the line to go up the slide at Gregg’s pool. We were just talking, and…I don’t know—it felt like it was the right time. Like he wanted to and I did. So I just leaned in and kissed him.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah.”
“Except…” Gabby picks off a fluffy cloud of cotton candy and pops it in her mouth. “Once I was halfway up the ladder, I felt really weird. Like I’d made a big mistake. I wasn’t even sure if I liked him. And I kind of wanted to go hide in my bedroom. Except I was at a pool party with the whole soccer team.” She cringes. “So, that was awkward.”
But still, I think. You got to kiss Avery.
“Anyway…I didn’t realize how much you liked him. I mean, we never really talked a lot about stuff like that, you and me. It wasn’t obvious from how you acted around him—I just thought you guys were friends.”
“We are,” I say. “I mean, I had this crush on him, but…I think I’m over it now.”
Kiersten runs over to us, clutching her bag of cotton candy. “Well, that was a waste of money.”
“I could’ve told you that,” Gabby says.
“What’d she say?” I ask.
“She said I’m going to live to be one hundred and eleven years old and that I’ll fall tragically in love with someone. But then she wouldn’t say who!”
“Sounds like a fortune-teller.” I catch Gabby’s eye after she says it.
All three of us look around, trying to figure out where to go next.
“Want to go on the Ferris wheel?” Gabby asks.
It’s straight ahead of us, looming over the whole fair. The sun is close to setting. We’d still have a pretty great view from the top.
“I don’t know,” Kiersten says. We watch as it turns ever so slowly.
“Hey!” calls a familiar voice from behind us.
“I heard you found your dog,” Gregg says just as I’m turning around. “And your house is almost done, too, right?”
“Yup. Avery helped me find Hank. It was pretty awesome. We’re living in a trailer for the beginning of the school year, but hopefully the house will be done before Thanksgiving.”
“A trailer? Wow. That sounds fun. Like camping!”
“Sort of like camping. Except for a lot longer.” There’s something different about Gregg, and I can’t totally figure it out. Did he get a new haircut? Is it his clothes? For the first time, he looks less like spontaneous-chicken Gregg and more like his brother.
“Well, I gotta go find my dad. Maybe I’ll see you guys around later?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Bye, Gregg.”
As he walks away, I think about what Avery told me about Gregg. And the emails. Maybe when Gabby kept bringing up Gregg, she wasn’t thinking about the Gregg who’d been our class clown since kindergarten. Maybe she saw something in Gregg that the rest of us couldn’t see, the way you only can when you’re the new girl.
“You know what’s weird?” Kiersten says.
“Um, that gigantic banana with dreadlocks?” I point at the man in the white tank top passing by with a ginormous stuffed banana in his arms.
“No,” Kiersten says. “Though that is also quite strange. Anyway! I was just thinking how there are all these people around us at the carnival. All these strangers, right? Well, maybe not. I mean, so they’re strangers now. But in a few weeks, we’ll be in school with them. Some of them will become our classmates. Our good friends. Our rivals. Our boyfriends. Okay, maybe not that. But maybe! Right?”
Gabriella nods.
I start looking at the faces in the crowd differently after she says it. Not the older people—the moms and dads and grandparents. And not the little kids either. But the ones that look our age. That boy with the pimply forehead and scuffed-up Vans. I could know him. Or that girl with the short, curly blond hair who’s rolling her eyes at her mom. She might end up being my friend. A minute ago, they were just faces in the crowd to me. Perfect strangers. But now they’re not. They’re people with their own complicated lives, maybe more complicated than mine. And I could know them. Someday. Maybe someday soon.
And then my eyes latch onto a different kind of face. A familiar one. Brown hair sticking out of a dirty Red Sox hat. Navy-blue T-shirt. Khaki shorts. Thumbnails he needs to stop biting but probably won’t.
>
“Avery!” He looks up when I say his name.
“I thought you were out of town already,” Kiersten says as he approaches.
“It’s not that far away,” Avery says. “I mean, a different school, but I’ll still come around. You’re not rid of me yet!”
“We’re trying to convince Kiersten to ride the Ferris wheel,” Gabriella says.
“What, are you afraid of heights or something?” Avery challenges her.
“No!” Kiersten says. “It just looks really rickety. These things fall apart sometimes. People get hurt. I want to live to experience seventh grade, you know?”
“I think your odds of getting crushed to death by a slowly dismantling Ferris wheel are pretty low,” Avery says. “Like one in twenty-four million.”
“You really know that?” I ask.
Avery nods. “I looked it up once.”
“One in twenty-four million, huh?” Kiersten peers up toward the top of the Ferris wheel and sucks in a deep breath. “Okay, I’ll do it. You in, Gabby?”
Gabriella nods.
All four of us get in line.
As they load up the people ahead of us, I notice that there are only two spots in each Ferris wheel car. I wonder who’s going to sit with whom, but no one brings it up. We start talking about how excited we are for school to start and our class schedules and then suddenly we’re at the front of the line.
“I need two of youse guys,” the carnival worker says. “Let’s make it snappy.” He’s got the beginnings of a mustache, and the tone of his voice tells me he isn’t a huge fan of his job.
“I’ll go,” I say, stepping out. Kiersten starts to follow me.
“Wait,” Avery jumps in behind me. “I kind of promised.”
Kiersten and Gabriella look on from the sidelines, confused, and wait for the next car.
He remembers.
As I step in, the whole car shakes from side to side. I sit down on the metal seat. Avery sits across from me. The carnival worker closes the little metal door on the side—the only thing holding us in—and I suck in a breath. Kiersten’s right about one thing. This ride is pretty rickety.
And with a jolt—we’re off.
I close my eyes. I didn’t think I was afraid of heights, but maybe I am, because I don’t want to look down. Or up. Or at Avery. I keep them closed.
“You too, huh?”
“It didn’t look this scary from the ground.” There’s no bar for your hands like on other rides. I clasp mine together. I wonder how many times we’re going to go around. How long until we’re off this thing.
“Oh, wow!” Avery says.
“What?”
“I’m not going to tell you. You need to open your eyes to find out.”
“That’s not fair.”
But Avery doesn’t give in.
I take in a deep breath, listen to my heart slow down a little, and open my eyes. “Oh my goodness. Whoa.”
We’re stopped halfway up while some new riders get on down below. I can see the whole town, or at least most of it, from here. “There’s the library and the grocery store and the stoplight and the church. And our hill. Our street.” Hollow Road. I can see how the tornado cut right across our town. Divided it in two. It was wide; the news said it was almost a mile wide at points. A whole mile. I can barely run the mile in gym. Four times around the track. The tornado was that wide.
But the crazy thing is how, from up here, everything looks so small. My town, where I’ve lived my whole life—it’s tiny. There’s this whole big world out there, stretching far off into the horizon. Starting junior high? That’s only the first step.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Avery says.
“Yeah.”
We start moving again. We reach the top, not even stopping there, and go lower, lower, lower, past the carnival worker, and then up again. I’m not sure how this works. How many times we get to go around and around before we have to get off for good. All I know is I want to stay right here, in this Ferris wheel car with Avery. Just like this.
“I can’t believe you’re not going to be at our school.”
“I’m only fifteen minutes away,” he says. “I timed it and everything.”
“Only fifteen? Really?”
“Yeah,” he says. “You know, I spent the whole summer being worried about moving and leaving everyone. I couldn’t enjoy hanging out with my friends because it felt like it was all going to end. It seemed easier to just…be by myself sometimes.”
I think about how often I found him at the McLarens’ playing computer games on his laptop with his headphones on. Totally in the zone, I thought. More like totally alone.
“But now that just feels so stupid. Moving isn’t the worst thing in the world. I’m still close by. I’ll still be able to go over to my friends’ houses. And you guys can come out to Palmer anytime.” He looks directly at me when he says it.
Avery takes in a deep breath and lets it out, and suddenly I’m back in the car with him, on that ride home that brought us to houses that weren’t even there anymore. Just me and Avery in the backseat. Avery holding my hand and reminding me to breathe. I can almost hear the sirens and the chain saws again. Almost.
He clears his throat. “You know, when I get mad or frustrated about everything that happened, I try to remember that the tornado didn’t get me. It just got my house. I’m still here.”
Our car is lowering again, and I can feel it in my heart: I know we’re the next ones that’ll have to get off. The people walking the fairgrounds are growing larger and larger. We’re getting closer and closer to the ground. We’re quiet, me and Avery, and I wonder what he’s thinking right now. My friend Avery, right across from me.
I know what I’m thinking.
We’re still here.
Growing up in Massachusetts, you never think you’re going to encounter a tornado. A hurricane, sure. Blizzards: been there, done that. But an EF-3 tornado? Definitely not. And yet on a June evening in 2011, an EF3 tornado crossed the street where I grew up, wreaking devastation on my tiny hometown, Sturbridge, and neighboring communities. While my parents’ home, half a mile away from the tornado’s path, was spared, many others were not so fortunate, and their stories reported in the local newspapers and TV news will stick with me for a long time. Though 14 Hollow Road is a work of fiction, this particular tornado informed my understanding of how a tornado could impact a small rural town like the invented Hitchcock. I also must credit one of the most fantastic and enduring episodes of This American Life, “186: Prom,” which focuses on the true story of an early-summer night in 2001 in which a tornado destroyed a third of Hoisington, Kansas, while high school seniors danced the night away. It is one of my all-time favorite episodes and made me wonder how a similar event could shape a girl on the cusp of becoming a teenager. If you haven’t listened to it yet, I highly recommend tuning in.
The journey from a speck of an idea to an actual story is long and winding. This novel grew out of a workshop piece at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and I’m grateful to the participants, whose thoughtful feedback helped develop the work in progress, particularly workshop leaders A. S. King and Alan Cumyn. As always, I’m deeply appreciative of Katie Grimm’s many careful reads and boundless enthusiasm. Kelly Delaney, you saw and articulated the heart of this book better than I could at that stage; revising with you has been such a joy. The entire team at Knopf has been a delight to work with. Special thanks to illustrator extraordinaire Erin McGuire for a stunning cover image that perfectly captures the swirl of emotions spun up by the storm.
I feel fortunate to have found the writing communities who made the sophomore book endeavor way less scary than I expected it to be. My Magic Sevens, who willingly read draft after draft, offering advice at key moments, Robin Kirk, Ellen Reagan, Cynthia Surrisi, Anne Bowen, Kelly Dyksterhouse, and Stephanie Farrow: thank you for your friendship and your wisdom. Autumn Krause, my cheerleader, and all of the M.A.G.I.C. I.F.s: thank you for being there every step of th
e way. The Sweet Sixteens had to be the most ideal companions on the debut journey that I could have ever imagined. The Middle Grade Writers’ Guild has been such a touchstone for me through all the ups and downs of the past two years (and approximately five billion questions about publishing). Love you, girls! Though I’ve left the Boston area—sniffles—the YA writers’ crepe meet-up in Somerville is never far from my heart. Thank you for welcoming me into your circle, despite the fact that I never once ate a crepe and I write middle-grade.
I have to give an extended shout-out to those who do the magical work of connecting books with young readers. No author would be anywhere without their countless hours on the front lines. I’d like to thank the Nerdy Book Club, especially Colby Sharp, and all the teachers and librarians I met during the publication journey for The Distance to Home. I will never forget your support of my debut. Your enthusiasm and the stories you’ve shared with me of young readers who responded to my writing mean more than I can ever say. Ted Schelvan, Shauna Yusko, Patti Tjomsland, Mike Fleming, Alissa Lauzon, and Janet Hilbun, thank you for your continued support. BFYA forever!
To my parents, Robert and Lynn Barnes—without whom I would not exist, never mind be a writer—thank you for handing out bookmarks to anyone with a pulse. In all seriousness, thank you for everything. To my husband, Colin, for your continued support of my dream. To my friends and family, for listening and learning more about children’s literature than you ever needed to know. To my cat, Lilly, for keeping my ego in check with scratches and hisses. Thank you, thank you always. And for Kai Barnes, because it is very cool to see your name in the acknowledgments of a published book when you are in elementary school.
But most of all, thank you, the reader.
Jenn Bishop is also the author of The Distance to Home and is a former youth services and teen librarian. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she studied English, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she received her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Along with her husband and cat, Jenn lives in Cincinnati. Visit her online at JennBishop.com or on Twitter at @buffalojenn.
