by Liz Fichera
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.” What I didn’t share was that Lone Butte High School had paid my registration fee to the Maricopa County High School Leadership Conference. They’d paid the fees for the two sophomores, two juniors and two seniors with the highest GPAs. I happened to be one of the two juniors. Sucks to be the other sixty students who were invited but had to pay out of their own pockets. Now all I had to do was show up to school tomorrow morning and board the bus. It would get me to Monday and put about 250 miles of desert between me and the Rez.
“What do you want with some leadership bullshit?” Peter said. “You need someone to tell you what you already know?”
I swallowed. The truth? I really didn’t know. My guidance counselor at school, Mr. Romero, had told me about it. He’d said things like conferences and awards looked good on college applications. He’d said I had to be more of a game player, especially since there was a good chance I was going to graduate early and colleges were already starting to inquire about me. Me. Sam Tracy, the smart kid from the Rez. Unfortunately I stunk at playing games. Just give me something in black-and-white, minus the sugarcoating. Minus the doublespeak.
A part of me knew I couldn’t stay in-state, and I think Mr. Romero would just about blow a gasket if I didn’t apply to college, not when my SATs were among the highest in Arizona. Too bad that looking good on paper was more important than simply being smart enough.
I closed my eyes and tried to ignore Peter, even as he teased me for the rest of the ride about being the biggest nerd on the Rez. It was probably true.
Peter was lucky he was one of my best friends. Otherwise I would have tossed him out of the truck, which was pretty easy to do when you were my size.
3
Riley
Mom dropped me off in the Lone Butte High School parking lot early Saturday morning with my overnight bag. The sun was still rising over the horizon, bright as an orange slice. Small bonus: Mom had just gotten off her hospital shift and her red-rimmed eyes were clouded with fatigue, one of the drawbacks to being a doctor, but a major advantage when you didn’t want her to notice stuff. It helped that we had to drive into the sun. That was probably why she hadn’t commented about my fave tie-dyed pink baseball cap being tugged superlow over my forehead. I had to hide the results of Doctor Drew’s secret BOTOX concoction handiwork. I was lucky it hadn’t turned into an infection or a rash or worse. It looked like a couple of ant bites, just as Drew had warned me. She’d conveniently forgotten to tell me, though, that my forehead would feel like plastic. Whenever I wrinkled my nose, my forehead stayed as frozen as stone. Most people wouldn’t notice, but most people weren’t my mom.
“When should I pick you up?” Mom yawned as I opened the passenger door of her Mercedes. Two yellow school buses waited next to the curb, their engines idling. Students had already begun to board. I recognized a few from Lone Butte, a couple sophomores and juniors, but nobody that I knew well. Most of the ones that I didn’t recognize were from other Phoenix schools. One guy was actually wearing a cowboy hat so I figured him for Queen Creek, way out in the boondocks where people still had ranches and dairy farms. Kind of lanky-cute in a Jake Gyllenhaal way.
“Tomorrow night,” I said. “We’re supposed to be back here by six.”
“What time did your brother get home last night?” she asked, her eyes narrowing with newfound sharpness.
I pulled the rim of my cap even lower. “Not late,” I lied. “Probably around ten.” Another lie. More like midnight.
Mom smiled, just like I’d known she would. “Good. Well, have a good time. Where are you going again?”
“Woods Canyon,” I said, but the door had already shut. I had left all the brochures and information about the leadership conference on the kitchen counter, perfectly stapled and organized with pink paperclips and Post-it notes, and, seriously? She’d signed my registration form two weeks ago, so it wasn’t like she didn’t already know. I didn’t want to have this conversation with people staring at us from the bus windows. That was kind of why I didn’t wave, either. I mean, it wasn’t like she was dropping me off for my first day of kindergarten or anything.
Life would be so much better when I got my own car.
Instead, I pulled out my cell phone from my pocket and fired off a text while I walked to the bus:
The conf is @ Woods Canyon. Info on the kitchen counter. Bye. Love u.
I hoped she got the message. Mom didn’t totally get texting and hated that she had to pull out her reading glasses to see the keys. But I wasn’t going to call her when I was within spitting distance from the bus. Even though the windows were tinted, I could see the outlines of faces staring down at me and I was a little distressed to see that almost every seat, at least on the parking lot side, was taken.
Two seconds later, Mom surprised me with a reply: Okay. Have a nice time. Love you back. Always. Mom
Mom always signed her texts Mom as if I didn’t know it was her.
I reached the front of the bus and drew back a steadying breath. Maybe going to this conference was a lame idea, after all. I mean, what normal teenager goes to a leadership conference on a perfectly good Saturday? I should be at the mall with Drew.
I hoisted my bag higher on my shoulder. It wasn’t really a backpack but it wasn’t luggage, either. It happened to match my pink baseball cap. Pink, in case you hadn’t noticed, was my all-time favorite color. Given the choice of pink and anything else, I always went pink. Cheesy, I know, but the color was one of the few things in my life that made me happy. Whenever I saw shades of pink, I smiled inside. I kept waiting to graduate to a more mature color preference, like blue or retro green, but it just wasn’t happening. Maybe when I left for college.
Scott Jin stood at the bus door with a clipboard. His eyes dropped to his sheet when he saw me, presumably to find my name. Scott knew me through my brother, like most upperclassman. I think he may have been on the golf team with Ryan before he traded golf for Math Club and Debate, but he always dressed like he was ready to play—brown shorts with perfect creases and golf shirts buttoned right up to his neck. “Riley Berenger,” he said, very official-like, without looking at me. “You’re in bus number one. This one.” He pointed to the door with a blue pen.
“What about when we get to Woods Canyon?” I said. “Where will I be assigned there?”
“Girls will be in one cabin. Guys in the other,” he said. He might as well have added “Duh” at the end of his sentence.
“Oh,” I said, mildly relieved that this wasn’t a sleeping-in-tents-with-an-outhouse affair. The brochure hadn’t been completely clear on that point, and camping was not my thing. “I didn’t know.”
He tapped his clipboard, dismissing me, and I climbed inside.
There was excitement on the bus but it wasn’t, say, going-to-a-football-game-at-a-rival-school excitement. This was, after all, a collection of some of the smartest kids in all of Phoenix. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I was considered one of them, especially on the days when I felt like the biggest idiot in the world. Like yesterday, when I let Drew inject my forehead with toxic chemicals. What was I thinking?
The bus driver was reading a newspaper, his baseball cap turned backward on his head. He was chewing on a toothpick that looked as if it had been spinning between his teeth for the past six months.
When I reached the top step, I looked across the bus and saw that all of the seats were taken except for the first two rows behind the bus driver and one empty row near the back of the bus. It might have been my imagination but the excitement on the bus dimmed a smidgen. I pulled my cap lower as I surveyed the real estate. I didn’t see any sophomores from Lone Butte, and the juniors and seniors were already sitting with people, talking. There was no way I was walking all the way to the back, so I slipped into the second empty row behind the bus driver. At least I’d have a whole row to myself, so I guessed that arriving late had its advantages.
Behind me, Scott Jin
hopped up the stairs, trailed by Mr. Romero, one of the school’s guidance counselors. Instead of his usual dark pants, white shirt and either red-or blue-striped tie, Mr. Romero looked almost human dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt that said Someone in Bozeman, Montana, Loves Me on the front. But his brow was furrowed as if he were anxious about something—and who could blame him? No doubt he’d rather be anywhere than camping with two busloads of teenagers. “Time to roll,” he finally instructed the bus driver.
Scott and Mr. Romero took the first seat behind the bus driver, thank god. Mr. Romero was okay, but I really didn’t want to talk to him for two hours about college applications and test scores, not when I’d downloaded four episodes of Friends to my iPod along with five new songs that I was dying to listen to.
The bus driver tucked his newspaper next to his seat, reached for the handle that cranked the door shut and steered the bus away from the curb.
We hadn’t even made it to the street when Mr. Romero stood and yelled, “Stop!”
I wasn’t the only one to look up in surprise. I hadn’t even scrolled down to my first Friends episode.
A blue pickup truck sped into the parking lot and headed straight for us.
“What the…” the bus driver muttered as the bus jolted to a stop. It looked like the truck was going to play chicken with our school bus.
I gripped the seat in front of me as a black cloud spewed from behind the truck, which, by the way, looked ready to explode. When it got closer, I could make out two faces behind the cloudy windshield. Boys. The one in the passenger seat was waving his arm out the window.
“Good!” Mr. Romero said, a smile in his voice as Scott returned to his clipboard.
“I thought we had everybody?” Scott said.
“We do now,” Mr. Romero said.
Scott’s brow furrowed as he continued to study his clipboard. He flipped through a stack of white pages. “Who’d I miss?” he said, as if it were not humanly possible for him to miss anything. Which, for him, was probably true. I’d heard that he’d gotten a perfect score on the math section of the SATs. I mean, who scored perfect on that? That was borderline freakish.
“Sam Tracy,” Mr. Romero said as he stared out the front windshield. “But let’s cut him some slack, okay? He traveled a long way to get here.”
4
Sam
Martin’s truck almost stalled three times before we finally chugged into the school parking lot. It was a miracle that his wheels made it at all.
Both my parents had worked late, so if the truck had died, waking them wouldn’t have been my favorite option. At the casino on the Rez, Dad worked security and Mom worked in a back office, “counting the money,” she always said, but really, she was an accountant for the tribe, and a damn good one. Dad was Gila and Mom was Havasupai and they’d been together since the summer of their senior year when they’d met at some high school summer program in Oklahoma. Figures that two Natives from Arizona would have to travel across state lines to meet. According to Mom, they’d fallen madly in love that summer, which was impossible for me to picture. You had to know my dad to understand—and knowing my dad, even a little bit, was one of the hardest things in the whole world. Harder than AP physics. Dad wasn’t exactly the flower-and-chocolates type. “Your dad’s just not sensitive like you are, Sam,” Mom had whispered to me once when I was about ten years old and I’d made him a Father’s Day card at school. “But he loves you, even if he doesn’t say the words. It’s what he thinks in his heart that’s most important.” Dad had looked at the card I’d made and smiled, sort of, but then he’d closed the card and placed it facedown and never looked at it for the rest of the weekend. I knew, because I’d watched him. I’d never made another card for him again. “But you’re more alike than you realize,” Mom had added, which I absolutely had not believed. Still didn’t. Sometimes I wondered if I was adopted.
On a good day, you’d never hear Dad utter five words, least of all to me, but I supposed that came in handy when most of your day consisted of sitting in a smoky haze and watching for people who cheated or misbehaved while playing slot machines or blackjack. I knew that my parents loved me. At least, my mother told me she did all the time. I just wished that I could hear my father say it, even once, before I stopped caring altogether.
Fortunately for my parents, they usually worked the same hours, but that was unfortunate for me from a ride perspective. So Martin really had saved the day by offering to drive me to school at the butt-crack of dawn on a Saturday morning, on the condition that I stayed later at last night’s party.
“How are you gonna stay awake long enough to reach Coolidge?” I stifled another yawn.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” Martin said dully, his eyelids as puffy as mine.
“You sound like a rapper.”
“Don’t I wish,” he said. And then he flashed some sign with his fingers. I had no idea what it meant, but I was sure it was stupid.
I didn’t know how I was going to make it to noon on practically no sleep, much less through the rest of the weekend. I figured I’d catch some z’s on the bus ride.
“There they are.” I pointed to two yellow school buses.
“Dude. I’m just tired. Not blind.” Martin slammed down on the accelerator, grinding it to the floor.
I could smell something burning. Motor oil? It was pluming somewhere in the back of the truck. I felt kind of bad leaving Martin, especially since there was a pretty good chance he’d need a ride home. “Call Fred’s brother, Trevor, if you break down again. He’s good with cars. He’ll tow you home if you need it. There’s a pay phone by the front of the school, next to the drinking fountain.”
Martin nodded. “I’m not worried,” he said, and I smiled to myself.
Martin was about as good a best friend as a dude could have. We’d known each other all our lives. We grew up together. Our dads grew up together. It was like we were brothers, not friends. “Thanks, man,” I said as he approached the buses.
“No prob, bro,” he said. “Just don’t turn dork on me, okay? I’ve got a reputation to uphold.” He smirked, one arm draped lazily across the wheel, even though he was practically playing chicken with a school bus full of high school students, not to mention a couple of teachers.
I chuckled. “Sure. Reputation. Got it.”
Thanks to Martin, the bright yellow bus had no choice but to stop. Its brakes even screeched a little.
Ouch.
I sure hoped that Mr. Romero wouldn’t be too mad at me, but what could I do? It wasn’t like we’d be able to catch up to the bus if we road-raced down the freeway.
“Sure you want to do this?” Martin asked. “I can always keep driving. Here’s your chance.”
Chance. I needed one. I needed a hundred. “Yep. Got to.” I reached for the door handle. “Besides, I think Romero is ready to dive through the windshield. Can’t back out now. He’s probably pissed.”
“Okay.” Martin didn’t sound convinced. He paused. Then he said, “You know you can’t avoid her forever.”
I sucked back a breath, hitching my backpack over my shoulder. I looked at Martin for an instant without saying anything. Then I said, “I know. But I can try.”
Martin just shook his head.
“Later, dude,” I said.
“Later. See you Monday.”
I closed the door—more like slammed it, because the rusted door stuck a little—and then jogged the six steps to the waiting bus.
Even through the windshield, I could see at least thirty faces, including Mr. Romero’s, staring back at me like two rows of dominoes. A few mouths hung open.
“Okay, you idiot,” I muttered to myself. “You asked for it. Now deal.”
When I reached the door, it was already open.
Mr. Romero stood at the top of the stairs. His mouth twitched in one corner below his salt-and-pepper mustache. I couldn’t tell whether he was angry or glad to see me.
“Sorry I’m late, Mr
. Romero. Had some trouble with the truck.” I nodded back at Martin’s ride, as if its mechanical limitations weren’t obvious. Martin turned and headed back toward the freeway as blue-black smoke billowed out of his tailpipe. He was never going to make it to the Rez.
“I can see that,” Mr. Romero said. “Well, glad you made it. Now have a seat. We’re already behind schedule.”
“Sorry,” I said again as I looked over his shoulder at all the faces on the bus. As usual, I was the only Native. I recognized maybe six people on the bus including Matt Hendricks from advanced chemistry. He nodded. I nodded back. Unfortunately the seat next to him was taken.
“You’ll have to put your backpack under your seat.”
“No problem,” I said, removing it from my shoulder. Other than a toothbrush and a change of underwear and socks, it was pretty empty.
There was an open seat up front next to a girl dressed in a pink sweatshirt and pink baseball cap. It was blinding, really. For some reason, she kept pulling her cap lower like she was in disguise. But I recognized her.
“Hi,” I said, slipping into the seat. There was barely any room for my legs. The bus driver closed the door and the bus lurched forward.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m—”
I interrupted her with my sigh. “Yeah, I know who you are.”
The bus lurched again and we all lunged forward, grabbing the seats in front of us. For some stupid reason, I put my left arm out to stop her from crashing her head against the seat.
“Um, thanks?” she said, turning sideways to look at me and then my hand on her shoulder.
My hand snapped back and I nodded, facing forward, wishing I could have found a seat all to myself.
She began to fidget with her hands before fumbling for the iPod in her lap. “Oh. Well…” Her thumb pressed one of the buttons, probably a little harder than she needed to. A notebook with some sketches and doodles sat on her lap.
I leaned my head back, hoping that I could sleep most of the way. Just my luck I had to sit next to Ryan Berenger’s sister, who was every bit as annoyingly perfect as her brother. Maybe worse. The clothes, the pale skin, the graceful way she crossed her legs like a pretzel all the way down to her ankles.
