Where We Used to Roam

by Jenn Bishop

  “Fine, then. You got me. I’m new.”

  “Knew it,” he says, raising his eyebrows. He slips a bookmark into his book and reaches out a hand. “I’m Tyler.”

  “Emma.”

  “Emma,” he repeats. “From…?”

  “Oh, right.” I laugh. “Boston.”

  “Emma from Baw-ston. Did I do it right?”

  “That accent?” I shake my head. “Not exactly.”

  “So, what the heck are you even doing out here, then, Emma from Baaaah-ston. No offense, but people from Boston don’t usually hang out in this corner of Wyoming.”

  “My parents wanted me to have an adventure,” I say. It’s not a lie, exactly. He doesn’t need to know how last-minute this trip really is. For all he knows, this trip was planned out months in advance. Some kind of cultural exchange. Transplant the East Coast girl into wild Wyoming and see how it takes.

  “Your parents wanted you to have an adventure?”

  “Are you pretty much going to repeat what I say?”

  “Am I pretty much—oh no. You’re right. I’m totally doing it.” We both start laughing.

  “Shhhh!” Across the way, the librarian has a finger to her lips and a scolding look on her face.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Tyler says. “Stephanie’s harmless.”

  “You sure?” If you ask me, she sort of looks like she wants to kick us out of here. I know that look, even if I’m not usually the one who gets it.

  “I practically live here.” He must see the look on my face as I try to figure out what that means. “Practically. Not literally. And not the fake ‘literally’ that people use all the time. Anyway, I do have a home. Oh my gosh, you need to get around Wyoming more. We’re not all hicks, you know. Well, okay, some of us are.”

  I have a feeling this boy would just keep on talking whether I was here or not. He and Kennedy could have a contest. “I don’t think that,” I say.

  “Good.”

  My phone buzzes with a text from Sadie. We’re done. Where are you? How did an hour and a half go by so fast? I stand on my tippy toes so I can see the library entrance, and sure enough, she’s there, waiting for me.

  “Crap,” I say, my finger still holding the place in my book. “I can’t check it out. I don’t have a card yet.”

  “You can use mine.”

  “Really?”

  Tyler flashes me a thumbs-up. “You’ll return it in three weeks, right? You’ve already read a third of it.”

  But you barely know me.

  “Well?” he says.

  I’m not sure what to do. He trusts me. We’ve been talking for only ten minutes and already he’s treating me like… like a friend. He probably shouldn’t. He doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into.

  “Come on.” Tyler reaches his hand out for the book. “I’ll take it to Stephanie. She’ll check it out for me. I’ve got an in with her. Big-time.”

  An in with the librarian? What is he, the male version of Becca? Except, no. He’s weirdly self-confident. Becca would never be this way with a stranger our age.

  “You sure?”

  “For the billionth time, yes.”

  By the time Sadie comes over, the bison book is back in my hand with a little printed slip tucked inside. “Of course you would find a book about bison. You’re really obsessed, huh?”

  I shrug.

  “See you around,” Tyler says. Just then I catch the cover of the book in his hand. Boy Meets Boy. The words are inside little candy hearts.

  It doesn’t necessarily mean he’s gay, I tell myself. Still, I wonder.

  As we head for the exit, I ask Sadie, “So what’s your project?”

  “Just this math thing. Nothing exciting.”

  As I unlock my bike, I can’t stop myself from comparing Sadie to Austin. I just want to get to know her a little, but she’s so closed off. With Austin, any question is like an open invitation for him to ramble on about who knows what. At least that’s how it used to be.

  But then again, he’s my brother. And Sadie? She doesn’t have to open up to me. We’re not anyone to each other.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  When Sadie and I get back to the house, we find the kitchen table covered with maps and travel books. “I’ve got an idea,” Delia says with a grin.

  Sadie snags an apple from the fruit bowl and mumbles, “Oh great,” before biting into it with a snap.

  “You haven’t even heard it yet.” Delia pretends to be insulted and turns to me. “I bet Emma here keeps an open mind. Right?”

  Before I have a chance to answer, Sadie sneaks in another quip. “That’s because she’s not your daughter.”

  “Oh, stop it already, Sades. Enough with the suspense. Here is my idea.” Delia stretches her hands out for the official announcement. “A girls-only camping trip!”

  “Can I bring some friends?” Sadie asks, although with her mouth full of apple it sounds more like “Can I brih suh fruhz?”

  Delia furrows her brow. “We’re the girls. Us three.”

  Sadie eyes me and her mom before swallowing. “Oh.”

  “Oh, come on. We don’t have to go far. Just the Bighorns. Emma’s never been. All of this is new to her. What do you say, Em?”

  I’m torn between pleasing Delia and appeasing Sadie. “That sounds fun,” I say. “But I don’t mind if one of Sadie’s friends wants to come along.…”

  Delia bats that suggestion away. “There’s plenty of time for Sadie to hang out with her friends all summer. But we’ve only got two months with you. Let’s make ’em count, kiddo.” She squeezes my shoulder. “You like camping, right?”

  I have a feeling there’s only one correct answer to this question. “Suuuure.” In truth, we O’Malleys haven’t camped since that one time when I was in third grade. Our first mistake was trying to cram all four of us into one tent. Evidently I kept kicking Austin in the night. And then I woke up in the middle of the night having to pee but was too afraid to walk to the restrooms and may have wet my sleeping bag and—yeah, beyond that I’ve blocked out the rest of the camping trip.

  “Great!” Delia claps her hands together. “Oh, and I just finished this article in Real Simple about unplugging, and I think to truly experience nature, we’re going to have to leave the cell phones at home.”

  “Mom, no,” Sadie says.

  “Only for a couple nights. We’ll get back into town just in time for your summer school class on Tuesday. It’ll be good for all of us. We’re all, myself included, far too addicted to—” The second that word comes out, she winces. “Oh, Emma.” She turns to me, her mouth in this puckered pity frown, and I want to evaporate. No, really. I want to turn into air, be invisible.

  Aside from the conversation with Chris this morning, no one’s said anything about Austin. But I guess I knew that couldn’t last.

  “It’s okay,” I tell Delia.

  “No, it isn’t. I’m sorry, Em. We use these words so carelessly sometimes, not thinking what they truly mean to people.”

  Sadie stands there uncomfortably, twisting the stem on the apple core. What does she think about Austin? Does she judge him—me, my parents? She sets the apple core on the table and snags her phone out of her pocket, proving Delia’s point.

  “When would we leave?” I ask, eager to change the subject.

  “In an hour or so? We’d get in just in time for dinner. How does that sound?”

  “Like I have a choice,” Sadie mutters, scooping up the apple core and chucking it in the nearby trash can. It hits the bottom with a clang, and then she retreats downstairs, resigned to tagging along on this trip.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Delia says, once Sadie’s out of earshot. “She’s still adjusting to everything. We’ll have fun, the three of us. You’ll see.” Her earnest smile makes me think it’s still possible. In any case, the decision’s not mine to make. I’m just a guest here.

  I excuse myself and head downstairs with my library book. Worry about Sadie? Wh
y would I waste any time worrying about Sadie?

  No, her reaction makes perfect sense. I only wonder why Delia doesn’t see it. Maybe she feels indebted to my mom in some way, enough to help out, but Sadie’s got nothing to do with it.

  There’s no space left in my mind to be concerned about Sadie when there’s so much to worry about with Austin. If Mom and Dad think putting two thousand miles between me and Austin will stop the worrying, they’re crazy. In some ways, the distance only makes it worse.

  The door to Sadie’s room is closed now, but I can hear her talking. Probably complaining to her friends about how her mom’s dragging her on a camping trip. She’s got music playing in the background, but every so often her voice cuts through the sound.

  I close the door behind me and sit at the edge of my bed. I check my phone, as if somehow I’ve missed one of the many, many text messages coming from back home. I wish. What I wouldn’t give for a text message from Becca right now. Even an angry one.

  No, Emma. Stop. Stop right now.

  My eyes smart, but I stop myself short of giving in to a pity party.

  The strange thing is, even though I hear Sadie’s voice coming from across the hall, somehow I can still imagine the knock on my door and my brother letting himself in, his hair damp from the shower. How I’d end up elbowing him as he made fun of me for something stupid.

  Austin just talking to me. The way he used to. I want to hear it: his voice, his stories. The funny ones, the complainy ones, even the random ones that don’t really have a point.

  What if that never happens again? No, really. I read all those stories online. About people whose moms or dads or brothers or sisters can’t ever get it together and float in and out of their lives. About how things seem like they’re okay for a while, and then—blam—they’re not.

  Addicted to a cell phone?

  As if it’s at all the same.

  The inside of my cheek is firmly latched between my teeth.

  No, no, no.

  That can’t be Austin. It can’t. It won’t. I suck in a deep breath. And another. And another.

  No, this rehab thing is going to work. Mom and Dad, they said it was the best one. They said how fortunate it was for Austin that a spot opened up just when he needed it. And they caught this early, right?

  Thirty days off drugs is going to fix him. Help him go back to the person he was before. Like a reset. A rewind. All the way back to last fall, before any of this happened.

  Maybe Austin can’t technically do his junior year over. Not at school, at least. But he can start over. He can go back.

  God, he’s got to.

  I reach for my backpack, pull out my sketchbook, and begin making lists about Austin, how he used to be. How he can be again.

  And the objects that define him: the buffalo stuffed animal, his favorite UCLA T-shirt, that beat-up paperback of Slaughterhouse-Five he tore through last summer on the Cape and declared to be the best book he’d ever read.

  And by the time I’m done, I feel better. Almost like I put all my worries about Austin in a box and shut the lid.

  I put the sketchbook and buffalo book into my backpack and head upstairs to see what Delia’s up to and how I can help get ready for the camping trip.

  * * *

  When I ask Delia where the Bighorns are, she says they’re in the next town up the road. The next town. Close by, right?

  Not in Wyoming. Turns out if you head north from here, the next town, Buffalo, is two hours away.

  Two. Hours.

  You drive that far in one direction in Massachusetts and, well, you probably won’t be in Massachusetts anymore.

  By the time we reach Buffalo, at the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, Sadie has to pee. Delia’s favorite pottery store is having a sale so she wants to pop in and take a look, which is how I find myself in the general store, flipping through the postcard display by the register. Nearly all of them have bison on them, which I guess makes sense—that’s got to be where the town gets its name, right?

  A buffalo with mist rising around him some cool morning. A buffalo backlit by the sunset. A whole herd of them. The store is having a sale: buy four, get a fifth for free, so I do. I figure I can send one to Mom and Dad, one to Austin, and the other three I can save for a shadow box.

  Or to send to Becca.

  I push that thought to the back of my mind. Send a postcard apologizing to Becca? For real, Emma? One: her parents might read it. Or worse: Bubbe. Or actually, the absolute worst: Becca just dumps it right in a trash can without reading it at all.

  No, they’re better off being used for a shadow box. I hand the postcards to the clerk and pay. By the time I get outside, Delia’s already back at the car with a bag from the pottery shop. Sadie’s leaning against the hood, squinting in the sun. “What’d you get?” she asks before sitting up front.

  I slide into the back seat. “Just some postcards,” I say, fanning them out.

  “You really got a thing for bison, huh?”

  I shrug, wondering if Delia remembers getting the bison stuffed animal for Austin when he was a baby. Does she know how much he likes them? That bison became his favorite animal? That maybe they still are?

  “You know,” Sadie says, “I heard that the other week these Swedish tourists at Yellowstone took a picture right next to some bison that stopped by the side of the road. Like they’re not huge wild animals that could totally gore you to death. They’re lucky they just ended up on the news and not dead. All I’m saying is, I know they’re your favorite animal, but don’t try to pet them. They’re not exactly huge stuffed animals.”

  No kidding, Sadie. “Wait—that really happened?” I ask.

  “Sadly more often than you’d think,” Delia says. She pulls back onto the road. Bye-bye, Buffalo; hello, mountains. “Actually, that reminds me. Would you girls want to take a trip out there later this summer?”

  “To Yellowstone?” Sadie asks.

  “Yeah,” Delia says. “It’s been a few years since we’ve been, and it’d be the first time for Emma.”

  “Everything out here’s a first for Emma, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got to trek all over the place.”

  Delia lets that one fly and focuses on me. “What do you think, Em?”

  I can’t tell her what I really think: that I don’t deserve this. A vacation inside of a vacation, but without the rest of my family. It doesn’t feel fair, and yet of course I want to go. To see a real live buffalo up close—well, not as close as those Swedish tourists. But to see them just roaming about, like how it used to be for them, when it was just bison and Native Americans living out here, centuries ago.

  “That sounds really nice,” I say, which is the truth too. “Would Chris come?”

  “He’s got some longer off stretches later this summer, so hopefully. We’ll have to look into lodging and all of that when we’re back in town. Gets pretty busy with all the kids out of school, but I bet we can swing it.”

  “Oh, if it’s really hard, then don’t worry about it.”

  Delia bats away my reply. “We’re going. It’s settled.”

  * * *

  Late that night I wake up to rain drumming on the roof of the tent, slow and steady. Sadie and I put the rain fly on earlier, but I reach my hands out along the edges of the tent, nervous that all this time, water’s been seeping in. Maybe it’s my O’Malleyness, expecting the worst since it’s a camping trip. But it’s dry at the edges.

  Even though it’s dark, I can make out the lump next to me. Sadie’s nose makes a soft whistling sound every now and then.

  I don’t know why I thought sharing a tent would help me connect with her. Or why I even want to, anyway, except to make sure I’m not disappointing my mom. She texted the other day, asking how Sadie is, and I said she’s nice because, well, what else could I say? I already reminded her that Sadie is two years older than me. Sure, we’re closer in age than me and Austin, but Sadie’s not my sister, and she’s not going to pretend for a few m
onths either.

  Not that I want a sister. Not that anyone could ever come close to Austin.

  I’m not sure Mom and Dad thought things out too far when they took Delia up on her offer anyway. Having me out here let them check a zillion things off their list all at once. I get it, I do. But that doesn’t make it easier for me, exactly. Just easier for them.

  Maybe I didn’t think it through either when I said yes. What exactly am I going to do here for an entire two months? Sure, I told Kennedy and Lucy I was going to be an artist, but how does that work? All my stuff is at home. All I have here is my sketchbook and, okay, five postcards. Also, even if I wanted to, I can’t make shadow boxes all day long, every day. My fingers would fall off.

  Or get glued together.

  Or both.

  It’s like I’m starting from scratch in every way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  By the time we return to town late Monday night, I’m starting to think camping’s not so bad after all. And not just because I managed to survive three days of it.

  I couldn’t admit it in front of Sadie, but it turns out it actually is nice to leave your smartphone behind. To be fair, aside from the occasional text from Lucy, I was only getting texts from Mom and Dad, which is pretty pathetic if I spend too long thinking about it. But by leaving my phone behind, I wasn’t thinking about that. Instead I was noticing the way the light caught the dewdrops suspended in a spider’s web. The soft snapping of a twig as we hiked a trail. The warmth of the sun on my shoulder when we finally reached a clearing.

  I knew when we got back into town, I’d have to start figuring it out: what I was going to do with the next two months in Wyoming. But for two days I didn’t have to focus on that. I just got to breathe.

  * * *

  Tuesday morning, I’m at the kitchen table eating a bowl of granola with almond milk when the doorbell rings. Delia’s still in her sweats from her morning yoga class. She invited me to tag along, but given that in gym class I once knocked over Jesse Polito doing tree pose, I politely declined. Sure, I need to find some way to fill up this summer, but yoga is not it.