Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy)

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  The stairs began to creak. I counted them by noise, creak-squeak-GROAN-hiccup-squeak-rattle, all the way until the disco music turned on. Grandpa Jack tapped at the door and called, “Dinner’s on.”

  “Be right down,” I answered. Disco-rattle-squeak-GROAN . . . He hadn’t visited Los Angeles once in all of my seventeen years. In the few times we’d been north in the last ten years, we’d met in San Francisco restaurants. He jingled the change in his pockets while we waited for a table and didn’t speak much unless Dad asked about fishing. Dad hadn’t grown up in Spooner but the more civilized city of San Marcos on the peninsula. But after Dad’s mother died when he was nineteen, Grandpa Jack retreated north to hideaway Spooner and rarely saw fit to leave.

  I sure wasn’t going to spend nine months talking about fishing! Opening my door, I ducked at the novelty fish to not trigger the sensor. Nine times thirty equaled two hundred and seventy days, and two hundred and seventy times at least two trips daily past the fish meant five hundred and forty disco serenades.

  Dinner was beans and franks, which seemed like exactly the sort of thing that people in Spooner would consider a meal. Set to the news, the television played on the kitchen counter as we ate. I studied my grandfather surreptitiously while he watched the screen. The first second he looked away, I said, “I really have to do some shopping. Where should I go around here?”

  “Depends on what you need.”

  Did he answer every question this way? I breathed meditatively, the way my yoga teacher instructed. “Some school supplies, stuff for my room. A box store like Hubbard’s would have everything.”

  “There’s a Hubbard’s. Take Jacobo up to Spring and turn east. You can’t miss it. Just past the library.” He refilled his bowl with franks and beans. “I can take you tomorrow. Got to pick up some things there myself.”

  Once we finished eating and had loaded the dishes into the washer, he flipped off the television and went into the living room. The television there suddenly started to play a Hot Poppers commercial. Then it muted and Grandpa Jack called, “The scooter is in the garage.”

  Night was falling, so I’d see this scooter in the morning. The dark out the kitchen window looked unwelcoming, full of spiders and creepy-crawly things. I finished wiping down the table and checked the clock. It was too early for bed, but I didn’t know what else to do. Claiming an old phone book from a shelf of cookbooks, I took it upstairs with me to find the high school. Squeak-rattle-GROAN-disco.

  ****

  My first thought in the morning was that there were two hundred and sixty-nine days left of this misadventure. The bed was spotted with light from where it could eke in through the window, and all night I’d listened to the taps and scratches of branches along the glass and walls. While eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast, I poked morosely at my cell phone. The pipes rattled, Grandpa Jack showering upstairs.

  I caught my reflection in the window when I stood. My face looked drawn from the bad night of rest. Beyond my pale shadow was the backyard. It was neater than those homes on the outskirts of Spooner, but the grass needed mowing badly. Down a flight of steps were sagging wooden benches laden with long ignored flowerpots. Those I remembered from when I was seven, all of them still sitting in the exact same spots.

  Letting myself out of the house, I circled around to the garage. The door opened with a metallic screech of protest and caught three-quarters of the way up. Light filtered into the garage, full of cobweb-covered tools on the walls and a broken-down heap of a car that had probably been sitting there for twenty years. Beside it was the scooter.

  Showing up to Bellangame High through junior year in an Incredula had earned me serious points. I wasn’t going to get even a participation ribbon for showing up with this contraption. There was no other word for it than dorky. The steel chassis was aquamarine, and the helmet on the seat was fire engine red. I couldn’t imagine being seen on this thing, but tootling onto campus in an old mail truck was even worse. Already I could hear the catcalls, guys asking if I had a special delivery.

  A new school. That made me nervous. Everyone here would have known each other since kindergarten, and I was going to be the odd one out. As I ruminated on that, Grandpa Jack came up behind me. “Like it?”

  I lied. “Yes. It’s great.”

  “Only five years old. Used to belong to Maybelle over on Pine, but her eyes are going. Good gas mileage. Maximum speed is forty, so don’t go taking it on the freeway. Pop the seat and it’s got a bucket for your things.”

  I consoled myself that it was better than riding a bus to school, or for heaven’s sake, walking. No one in Bellangame ever had to know. “Thank you.”

  I took a shower and covered up the circles under my eyes with cosmetics. Then we left to do the shopping. At Hubbard’s, Grandpa Jack went to automotive and I to home furnishings and then school supplies for a notebook and pens. Mom and Dad had set up their bank account to enter some money into mine every month. Right now they must be on a plane flying to Port Ulsworth, ready to embark on their grand adventure. Sulkily, I indulged in the most expensive pens on the shelves. It had been so much fun telling my friends about the world cruise! Even though they came from wealthier families than mine, this trip was still out of the reach of their pocketbooks. There had even been an article in the local paper about the winner of the prize, with me posed by my parents like I was going along. Figuring out what to wear for that picture took twice as long as the interview and photography session combined.

  There was a poster display of music groups, and my room was in need of decoration. Sliding out a rolled poster for BBG since the band had two cute triplet brothers and a sister with a great voice, I added it to my purchases. Then I caught up with Grandpa Jack in the camping section, where he was talking to a teenaged boy slouched over a cart. When the boy turned at my arrival, I startled and blurted, “How are you here?”

  “So you two know each other?” Grandpa Jack asked in surprise.

  The boy looked at me questioningly. “I don’t think so.”

  The blood drained from my cheeks. This wasn’t possible. “Ten years ago on a visit here I was skating around town and got lost. You showed me the way back to my grandfather’s home, Jaden, but you look exactly the same!”

  The boy’s face split into a broad smile and he laughed, his cheer spilling through the aisle and drawing me in. It was the same laugh, the same languid posture and muscular build, but his curly hair was darker, and long enough for him to tuck behind his ears. Grandpa Jack chuckled and said, “Jessa, this is Zakia.”

  “Jaden’s my older brother,” Zakia explained. All of the blood to have drained from my cheeks rushed back to stain them. He laughed again. “Don’t be embarrassed, it happens all the time. I’ve got four older brothers and we look alike.”

  “And how many sisters?” Grandpa Jack asked. “I just knew Sage and now Lotus back from your aunt’s in Montana.”

  “Five,” Zakia said. “Lotus is the baby. And then there are all of our cousins, and half of them look just like us, too.”

  I knew that I must look red as a beet still. “So I guess I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

  He had not lost his smile, and it was really adorable. “No, the whole brood of us is home-schooled. But you’ll see me around the high school in the afternoons. I’ve got a part-time job tending the grounds.”

  I couldn’t get over how I’d missed the small differences. Zakia had an irregular black mole on his upper right arm, another difference from Jaden. But it had been ten years, and I was only a child at the time and terrified to be lost. Every curve of the road had revealed nothing I recognized. By the time I came across Jaden walking along, I was near tears. He had been very sweet. “How’s Jaden?”

  “Oh, fine. Split Spooner just like all of my siblings do once they turn eighteen. They won’t even come back for vacations. We have to go to them.” Footsteps made all three of us turn. A girl about twelve with a dark braid was staggering down the aisle with a ba
sket full of books. The ones on top were totally inappropriate for her age, adult romances and thrillers, so I assumed they weren’t all for her.

  Zakia nodded to me. “Lotus, this is Jessa Bright, Jack’s granddaughter.” She looked up at me with a shy smile. Zakia hefted her loaded basket easily into his cart.

  “Hi,” I said. The only thing that came to mind was a joking comment that she must be sad to be headed back to school, but she wasn’t going. An employee came into the aisle to restock the shelves. We said goodbye and broke apart to finish our shopping. I cast one last glance over my shoulder, seeing Zakia walk away and still incredulous at how alike he and his brother were.

  On the drive back, I said, “Are they really religious in that family?”

  “The Coopers?” Grandpa Jack asked. “Nah. They just always homeschool their younguns, they and the Kreelings. A lot of homeschoolers live down there in the Gap. Just like to keep themselves to themselves. I go fishing with their grandfather Barney. He says there’s nothing they could learn at a desk that they can’t learn from nature in half the time.”

  “They shouldn’t homeschool. It just makes kids undersocialized.”

  He tapped the steering wheel thoughtfully. “Well, I’ll tell you, I haven’t ever spent two hours in the company of a Cooper kid with them on a cell phone. They look you straight in the eye and have something to say.”

  It had been my last chance to use it! I was going to see my grandfather for nine whole months, so two hours saying goodbye to my cell phone wasn’t anything to consider rude. And I hated having to argue when I was right. Homeschooling was weird. You couldn’t grow up normally when all you ever saw was your family. “It’s warped, Grandpa Jack! How are you supposed to function in society as an adult when you’ve never been exposed to it as a child?”

  “They function fine, that bunch. All of the big boys and two of the girls are off working cattle with their cousins in Montana. The other girls are working fish somewhere else with another branch of the family. Sometimes their cousins come for visits here to work in their little herb and niceties shop. Peas in a pod, every one, trading kids back and forth from the time they’re little. Huge family. I just ask: which Cooper are you?”

  “That proves my point,” I declared. “No college, any of them? No ambition? They don’t branch out past their family because they don’t know how.”

  We waited at a red light for two homeless people to shuffle past. I locked my door as Grandpa Jack said, “That meat you’ll be eating in college comes from families like theirs, so that’d be something to remember. Little Lotus now, she can tell you every flower and shrub growing from the soil in these parts, how to use them for medicine. Smart as a whip, that girl, absolute spitting image of her sister Sage, just darker and longer hair. Weren’t for the hair, I’d still be calling her Sage. Makes infusions, decoctions, tinctures, I don’t know what all. Barney and I fish while she runs about collecting milk thistle for liver complaints. Those go into a tea they sell at their store down in the Gap.”

  “That’s child labor!” I exclaimed. “She should be in school making friends and giggling about boys.”

  As the mail truck rattled up the driveway to the house, Grandpa Jack yawned. “Seems to me those things aren’t what help you function in society. The Coopers don’t need you fussing over how they choose to live. So you have a nice day, I got some more errands to do and I’ll pick you up at dinner.”

  Going up the stairs with my bags, I forgot to duck the sensor and thus set off the disco music. I was going to rip the batteries out of that toy before I came anywhere near the end of these nine months. The silly tune followed me down the hallway to my room, where I dumped the bags on the bed and decided that I’d had enough. Living without my cell phone was unbearable. I was going to fly home. Since my parents were so worried about me being alone, I’d check in with my friends’ parents daily to say that I was alive and well. Or maybe I could crash in their homes. That would be fun, living with Downy or Taylor and always on the forefront of Bellangame High’s gossip and action.

  There was no phone upstairs, so down I went with disco music wafting along in my wake to search. I found it in the living room on the table by the recliner. And then I stared at this hopelessly old-fashioned thing, a squat black base attached by a cord to a receiver lying horizontally across the top. A numbered wheel was on the front of the base. Around the number wheel was a wider wheel made of clear plastic, and there was a hole punched through it at each number. Tentatively, I put the receiver to my ear and poked my finger through the hole by the one. Then I pressed hard on the metal surface beneath. No tone sounded through the receiver in response.

  Of course. I put down the receiver. I was truly trapped here in Spooner. Sinking into the recliner, I saw that Grandpa Jack hadn’t even bothered to lock the front door when we left for Hubbard’s. Who did that? Wasn’t he worried about anyone stealing his televisions and disco fish?

  I channel surfed for hours amongst shows I didn’t know and didn’t really want to know. Lunch came and went without me rising from the chair. I was too depressed to think about food. Everyone had faults, and putting my foot in my mouth combined with a naturally generous spirit equaled a deadly combination. I would give someone the shirt off my back before it occurred to me that now I’d be cold. My parents had better buy me some fantastic souvenirs, or this was going down as the bitterest experience of my life.

  When I could stand no more television, I looked around the cramped living room. The arm of the recliner was brushing up against the arm of the loveseat, and the end of the loveseat touched the side of the entertainment center. DVDs were lined up on the bottom shelf, and the one above it held framed pictures of a younger Grandpa Jack and the grandmother I had never met. She looked like an older version of me, except that she was happy.

  Along the other side of the room was a display case of random items: arrowheads and geodes, figurines of fish and shells. The doors of the three shelves in the case could not be opened without smacking into the bookshelf, upon which dusty volumes were inserted. More framed pictures were there, of my father as a boy and school pictures of myself from years ago. I looked sourly at the smiling girl in the frames and thought that she had no idea what was coming.

  The Internet! I’d been too upset to think about it. But Grandpa Jack was gone so I could hog the line as much as I wanted. I fled upstairs for my laptop, hating every squeak-rattle-GROAN and the disco, and returned at top speed to the living room not daring to hope that I could make this work. But in no time at all I had a connection, albeit a slow one, and was squirming around with impatience waiting for my email to load. Even a spam offer about pills to increase the size of my manhood was a welcome sight, and deleting it a pleasure. I clicked over to Frienzies to read everything my friends were posting about their lives. The wait was an agony, and it only brought up five posts. The rest endlessly loaded and never arrived. I placed comments on the scant posts I could see, editing out everything awful about Spooner. That didn’t leave me much of anything to talk about. But I felt real again, participating in a long chat with Taylor through the comments about what to wear for school tomorrow. Her younger sister was starting her freshman year at Bellangame High and thought our whole chat was stupid, since she was going in jeans and whatever T-shirt was clean in her closet. She had always been like that, hating clothes and popular music, and Taylor sent me a private message that she was glad they wouldn’t have any classes together.

  That cheered me up tremendously for a while, having a thread back to my former life. Then the Internet quit for no reason I could solve, and I still hadn’t had a chance to check out the menu for Forks and Spooners. I went upstairs to plan my clothes for school. I had some really fashion-plate outfits, but I didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself in the morning when I got to campus. Dressing three cuts above everyone else was going to make me look like a snob. From what I’d seen of teenagers at Hubbard’s and on the streets, they were in jeans or shorts, T-
shirts, tennis shoes or sandals. So the miniskirts and fancy blouses were out for now, along with my favorite Ruby heels. No one batted an eye at clothes like that at Bellangame High, but I wasn’t in Bellangame anymore.

  Taking out my clothes from the closet, I tried them all on and eventually settled on my blue Derby shorts and black tank. But the more I looked in the mirror, the less I liked it. My eyes kept getting drawn to the darling summer dress I had discovered at a consignment store down south. Almost ankle-length, deep purple straps came over my shoulders to a lovely abstract striped dress in purple and white, with occasional lines of teal mixed in. The store had also had the same print in white, orange, and black, but it was too reminiscent of Halloween.

  No one else would be wearing a dress like this, and I didn’t think it was so over-the-top as to make a poor impression. It was sweet, not snobbish, especially with a backpack over my shoulder instead of my purse. Now I just had to figure out how to get to school on a scooter while in a dress. Stumbling over this new problem made my eyes roll. I could wear sweatpants underneath for the ride, or pack the dress and change at school, or else take the old mail truck and have everyone ask me the current price of stamps.

  Grandpa Jack’s feelings might be hurt if I didn’t take the scooter for the first day of school. I didn’t know how much he’d paid for that aquamarine monstrosity, yet regardless it was rude to reject the scooter all over the dress I had to wear. So the wisest course of action was to go to school very early in my sweats and change in the restroom before any other students arrived. I’d deal with leaving campus in the afternoon when I got there.

  I packed my backpack with notebooks and pens and put the dress in a garment bag. Then I put that in on top. Shoes! I’d almost forgotten and that would have been a disaster, pairing the dress with sneakers. Plucking my wedge sandals from the closet, I slipped them in and zipped up the bag. Almost on cue, Grandpa Jack rumbled up the driveway and honked for dinner.