The Survival List

by Courtney Sheinmel

  “But then if he googled it and couldn’t find it, he might not let me go. He’s pretty thorough about things like that—about making sure things are what they say they are, and there aren’t any hidden contingencies and taxes you have to pay.”

  “Sloane, I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer me honestly.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you want to go to California? Like, really? Because if you do, then we’ll find a way to make this work. But you’re coming up with a lot of reasons why you can’t go. If you don’t want to, that’s okay, too. You don’t have to.”

  “I do want to go,” I said. “I have to go—for Talley. I didn’t know how sad she was. I wasn’t looking closely enough. Dean said she was special, and special has a way of hiding trouble. But I think that’s just an excuse because we didn’t see what we should have seen—I didn’t see it. I wasn’t paying close enough attention, and I can’t let this list go, too.”

  “All right, then,” Juno said. “We’ll find a real contest. You don’t have to actually win it. You just need to convince your dad that you did.” She raised up her butt to pull her phone out of her back pocket, then elbowed me. “Come on, woman. Get out your phone.”

  I pulled my own phone out of my pocket and went onto Google. “Win a trip to California,” I typed into the search bar. Click. A few million results popped up, and I began to make my way through them. There was a Palm Springs getaway, but the dates were wrong; a trip to wine country, but being underage, I wasn’t eligible to enter; and a Disneyland vacation, but that one was for a family of four. Actually, everything I found was for at least two people. I guess even people who are going somewhere for free don’t want to go alone.

  The heading for the next link was: “Stanford Wins in Closing Seconds.” It was an article about a football game, not a contest, but I stared at the words for a few seconds anyway.

  I remembered Talley telling Dad that the novelist John Steinbeck had been a college dropout: He started out at Stanford, but he never finished.

  Stanford was in Palo Alto. I knew from studying maps of the Bay Area that Palo Alto was the city adjacent to Menlo Park, where Adam lived.

  I had an idea and typed “Stanford Summer Writing Program” into the search box.

  The fourth link from the top was an application for a week-long writing intensive offered to high school juniors and seniors. There were three different sessions, and the first one was the week after next.

  Eddy pounded in the room. “Sloane!” he cried. “You’re here! Neato bandito!” I braced myself for the impact as he flung himself into my arms.

  “Ooof,” I said. “Eddy, you’re bigger every time I see you.”

  “Is this a good surprise?” Juno asked him.

  “Duh,” he said. “It’s the best!” He sat down in my lap and looked at my face. “Hi, Sloaney. Are you crying? Juno, I think Sloaney is crying.” He reached up and softly swiped the tear from my cheek.

  I smiled so Eddy wouldn’t worry. And then, for no particular reason, I started laughing. “What’s going on?” Juno asked.

  “There’s a weeklong writing program at Stanford,” I said. “It’s, like, practically next door to where Adam lives. It starts a week from Monday. I could tell my dad I applied and got in and got a scholarship—including airfare—and fly out there,” I said. “I mean, if your offer still stands.”

  “My offer still stands.”

  “What are you talking about?” Eddy asked.

  “Sloane got accepted into a writing program,” Juno told him. “Isn’t that great? Isn’t Sloane our favorite writer?”

  “She is!” Eddy said. He pecked me on the cheek and bounced out of my lap. “I want pizza!”

  “Trepiccione’s to celebrate your acceptance?” Juno asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  Chapter Twelve

  I GOT TO WORK RIGHT AWAY, COMPOSING AN ACCEPTANCE letter to myself from Stanford. I sent it from Juno’s email account, changed the home address, and printed it out. To the untrained eye, it looked official and legit.

  Juno booked a flight for me from Minneapolis to San Francisco early Saturday morning. She reserved a hotel room at the Marriott in Menlo Park. Then she handed her credit card over. “You need to show this when you check in,” she said. “If you have a problem, call me and I’ll vouch for you. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. I put her card in my wallet. “You are the most amazing friend I’ve ever had.”

  As if she hadn’t already done enough for me, Juno said she’d take care of telling the Hogans about my sudden change of plans. But of course it was up to me to tell my dad. I was nearly shaking with anxiety when I approached him on Sunday. He was sitting at his desk in the living room.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said. He looked up from the book he was reading and pressed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I have something to tell you.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s nothing bad. It’s just . . . you know how I’d wanted to go to that writing program at Hamline in August?”

  Dr. Lee was teaching a writers’ workshop at Hamline University in Saint Paul at the end of the summer, and I really wanted to go. I’d talked to Dad about applying. He hadn’t exactly endorsed the idea. Tuition would eat up a good chunk of the money I’d be making from babysitting the Hogans, and he wanted me to put it away for college—real college, not a week-long summer program.

  I had asked Dr. Lee about applying anyway. She said Hamline wasn’t considering applications from students still in high school. You had to at least be a rising college freshman to take the class, so it was a moot point anyway.

  “I remember the program,” Dad told me.

  “Okay,” I said. “So, the thing is . . . I was thinking about how I still wanted to do something like that. It turned out I’m too young for Hamline, plus that’s not till August anyway, and I don’t want to wait that long. I looked online to see if there was anything else, and there’s a writing program at Stanford University.”

  “Stanford? As in California?” Dad asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Someone dropped out at the last minute, so I sent in the application. I know I should’ve told you first. I didn’t think I’d get in. But I did. Plus, I got a full scholarship. Room, board, airfare, the works. It won’t cost a thing for me to go. Look, here’s the acceptance letter.”

  I handed him the fake email and watched his pupils move quickly back and forth across the page.

  “Juno said she can handle the Hogan triplets on her own for a week,” I said. “It’d be good for me to go. I haven’t been focused on my writing, since Talley . . .” My voice trailed off. “The change of scene is probably exactly what I need right now. What do you think?”

  He lowered the letter to his lap. I held my breath. “I think this is absolutely wonderful,” Dad said.

  “Really?”

  “Really wonderful,” he said. “You’re putting yourself and your future first. I know that is the hardest thing in the world to do when you’re grieving. I’m proud of you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. The relief was enormous and I leaned down to hug him. He wasn’t the huggiest of fathers, and I didn’t usually initiate them with him, either. It hadn’t been that way with Talley. Practically every time I walked through a room, we’d reach our arms out to each other. It was so natural, the way we fit with each other, almost like we’d been two halves of the same person. Hugging my dad felt awkward, like when you’re clasping your hands together and you put the wrong thumb over the other. We didn’t go together quite right.

  “Speaking of my future,” I said, “I have finals for the next three days. I better go study.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “You let me know if you need any help.”

  “I will,” I said.

  I went into my room and opened my statistics textbook. For the first time since Talley had died, I was actually able to concentrate on the words and figures on the page, I think because I had the ticket to Californ
ia. I’d be going there in just six days, and visiting the actual places she’d written down on her list. I could relax and attend to my schoolwork. I doubt any of my friends thought studying was relaxing, but that’s how it felt to me.

  Chapter Thirteen

  JUNO AND I TOLD OUR OTHER FRIENDS THE SAME THING I’d told my dad, and that she’d told the Hogans: I got into a Stanford writing program at the last minute, and the change of scene would do me good. We felt that the fewer people who knew the truth, the better.

  She dropped me off at the airport on Saturday morning. After we hugged goodbye extra hard, I walked into the terminal and showed the security agent my ID and plane ticket. I took off my shoes, went through the metal detector, and put my shoes back on. I got to the gate exceptionally early. I’d been so afraid of traffic that I’d made Juno leave about an hour before she thought we had to, and I had nearly two hours before the flight would even be boarding.

  In the past, BTD (before Talley died), I’d people-watch in the name of story research. It was something I used to love to do—observe people and gather story ideas. But nothing about anyone in the airport seemed nearly as interesting or important as my own life, my own real-life story. No matter what else the other airport people might have been doing—curing cancer, or plotting a space mission to Mars—were they traveling across the country guided by the cryptic list of a dead girl? My money was on no.

  Finally it was time to board. I settled into my window seat and texted Juno that all was well, despite the fact that the man next to me was taking up the whole armrest between us. I pulled Ulysses out of my backpack to read, but before I cracked the cover, I grabbed my phone again to text Dad and let him know I was about to take off, because isn’t that what someone who wasn’t perpetrating the biggest lie she’d ever told her father would do?

  Hey Dad. On plane now. Stanford or bust!

  He wrote back: Safe flight. I’m proud of you.

  I felt the squeeze of guilt, but it was too late to do anything about it, and even if I could have, I wouldn’t have. I knew that. The captain came over the loudspeaker to say all electronics needed to be turned off and stored for takeoff. The plane engine roared louder. I gripped the armrest as we sped down the runway, just as I always did whenever I was on a plane. Please, let us get to California safely, I thought.

  No one wants to die in a plane crash. But for me, it was more than that. I needed to find out the answers. I needed to survive.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I TUGGED MY ROLLING SUITCASE THROUGH THE SAN Francisco International Airport, a place I’d never been before, and now here I was, completely on my own.

  Back at home, everyone knew me and knew what had happened to me. Here, no one knew anything. And I knew nothing about them. I could make up stories about them, but I’d never get to know their true stories. It’s amazing when you think about it—we pass by so many people in our lives, and they all have stories we never get to know.

  I looked for signs leading me to the Caltrain. Juno had told me to take cabs and put them all on her credit card. But when I’d studied Bay Area maps, it looked like the Caltrain stopped near almost every place I needed to go—and it was much less expensive.

  I couldn’t find signs for it, though, and I ended up at the airport transportation help desk. A woman behind the counter pointed me to a bus stop. I needed to take a bus to the Caltrain, and then on to Menlo Park. “Have a good trip,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “And . . . can I ask you one more thing?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you seen this girl—the one in the background photo?” I held my cell phone out toward her. Talley was the girl in the picture, of course. Maybe she’d needed airport help and spoken to this same woman when she’d come to California, whenever that might have been.

  It sounds too coincidental to be true. But Talley, lover of puzzles and statistics, had once told me that people underestimate the probability of coincidences. They think connections are unexplained miracles, when really they’re just about math. “You think it’s so cool when you meet someone who has your same birthday,” Talley said. “What were the chances of that happening? But consider how many people you actually encounter, like thousands of people in your lifetime, and there are only three hundred and sixty-five days in a year—”

  “Three hundred and sixty-six in a leap year,” I’d interrupted.

  “Right, and of course you’re going to run into someone with the same birthday. We always overestimate the probability of winning the lottery, and underestimate that we’ll have the same birthday as someone else we know.”

  But the woman behind the help desk counter shook her head. “Sorry, I haven’t,” she said. “Can I help you with anything else?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  A bus to the train . . . I knew I could just take a cab, as Juno had suggested. It’d certainly be easier, and if Juno were here, that’s what she’d tell me to do, and she’d tell me to charge it to her credit card.

  But what would Talley do?

  She would’ve taken the bus and train combo. It was probably what she had done, whenever she was here. It’s not like she’d had access to Juno’s credit card.

  Oh, c’mon, Sloaners, I could hear Talley say. You can do this. You can do hard things. This isn’t even that hard. Great-grandma Nellie came all the way to the United States from Poland. Everyone else she’d ever known ended up dying in the Holocaust. She was all by herself. She didn’t speak the language when the ship arrived in New York Harbor. But somehow she got to her uncle’s house in Detroit. She learned English. She got married. She raised a family. Imagine that. Imagine if you were her.

  I could barely imagine it. It was nearly unimaginable that I was even related to someone who’d done all that. Somewhere, running through my veins, was the blood of someone brave beyond measure. I speed walked to the bus stop and boarded the bus to Millbrae, which was the bus the woman at the help desk had told me to take. From there, I transferred to the southbound Caltrain. The Menlo Park stop was walking distance to the hotel, and also to El Camino Real.

  I’d texted Adam a few days before to let him know that I’d be in the area, making sure to sound like I wasn’t suspicious of him at all. I was simply visiting to see the things on Talley’s list. It had nothing to do with the fact that I also hoped that when he met me in person, he’d finally spill whatever other information he might have about Talley.

  If he’d said he didn’t think it was a good idea to meet, or made up some other excuse about being too busy, I was fully prepared to show up at his doorstep. He’d told me his last name, and (thanks to Google) I had his address, too. But he’d said yes, and suggested meeting at the El Camino Real diner for lunch on Sunday. You can meet me and taste those eggs from the list at the same time, he’d written.

  I wrote back: Noon?

  You’re on, he replied.

  As the train rolled closer to Menlo Park, I decided not to wait till tomorrow to check out the diner. I’d go by myself, today, and go back again for lunch on Sunday.

  It was just half a block from the Menlo Park Caltrain station to El Camino Real. I made a left and rolled my suitcase another block and a half to the diner, a square silver building in between a Target and a place called Down Dog. A little bell jangled when I walked inside, and a woman’s voice called out, “Sit anywhere you like!”

  I looked around. Was there a clue hidden in here somewhere that would lead me to the next clue, like a note in a mailbox? But where would it be? The diner had a few other customers—three people at the counter, where a woman (the one who’d shouted out to me) was pouring coffee, an older gray-haired man reading a newspaper at a half booth, and a couple of women who were maybe in their thirties, trying to get their kids not to eat off the floor. I decided to sit in the booth in the far corner, because it was the best place from which to see everyone else. For all I knew, it was the very same booth that Talley herself had sat in. Maybe my butt was making an impri
nt on the same red pleather cushion where Talley’s butt had once made an imprint of its own.

  Now I was obsessing about butt imprints.

  I checked under the table, just in case Talley’d left a clue taped to the underside. But nothing was there. It was possible Talley’d never sat at this table; or, if she had, she might have picked the other side. I switched sides, and the gray-haired man looked up from his newspaper to watch me. The other side didn’t have as good a vantage point, and maybe Talley hadn’t sat there anyway, so I switched back again.

  The woman who’d been pouring coffee came by. “Hiya. What can I get you today?”

  Her name tag read Anna. Her shirt was red like the booth cushions, and she had a long, blond braid that went all the way down her back.

  The place mats doubled as menus, just like at the Good Day Café back home in Golden Valley. I hadn’t even had a chance to look at all the selections yet, but that didn’t matter. “Sunny’s eggs, please,” I said.

  “Did you say you want runny eggs, dear?” Anna asked.

  I glanced down at the place mat, then back at her. “You don’t have something called Sunny’s eggs?”

  “We have eggs sunny-side up. Is that what you want?”

  “Um . . . ,” I said. Could Talley have written it down wrong? Or maybe I had the wrong diner. There could be a Royal Road Diner somewhere else, and it wasn’t a play on words. But where? After the conversation with Adam, I’d been so convinced that Talley had been to the Bay Area. But what if Adam had made connections that had nothing to with what Talley’d meant, and now I’d traveled two thousand miles to a place she had never been? Juno would be out all that money—all for nothing—and I’d be stuck here.

  I didn’t have to be stuck. Juno could switch my ticket.

  But then, my dad thought I was going to Stanford, so how would I explain that? That I’d been kicked out? The daughter of Garrett J. Weber, expelled? Yeah, right.