But again, I’m feeling compelled to put it down on paper.
Brilliant?!
Really?!
And saving the trip?!
Are we really going to go through that again?
What about all my ideas?
What about all I’d done?
I’d like to think that if it weren’t for me, we’d still be sitting in Gram’s Mustang in a muddy ditch at the side of the swamp.
Or we might’ve had to build a raft to escape the flash floods.
Or perhaps worst of all, our bladders would’ve burst if I hadn’t rallied the troops with the courage necessary to venture into that detestable gas station restroom.
But apparently everyone was suffering from short-term memory loss.
I was so overwhelmed by scorn for Brandon getting so much credit, but at the same time, I was also overwhelmed by an insurmountable question.
Get up in front of the entire Borlandsville Fun in the Sun County Fair crowd and do kooky karaoke?
Were these people bonkers?
Which is exactly the question that came out of my mouth.
“Have you guys gone completely bonkers?”
“What? It’ll be fun!” Brandon said. “We’re going to sing ‘Last Train to Clarksville’ by The Monkees. Do you know that song?”
Brandon didn’t even wait for me to answer.
He was too excited about us making fools of ourselves. He explained how his brother Duncan was in a band, and they played “Last Train to Clarksville” all the time. And it’s one of his favorite songs. And blah, blah, blah.
The honest truth was that Mimi, Gram, and Brandon all seemed like they’d missed the last train to Clarksville.
It seemed like they’d gotten on the first train to Loonytown by mistake.
Or maybe on purpose.
I wasn’t really sure.
I stood staring at the three of them wishing there really were a last train to Clarksville, because if there were, I’d buy a ticket and get on it to get away from all this.
“C’mon, Sam,” Gram said. “It’ll be fun!”
And before I even had time to think of something to say, Brandon shoved the wire-hanger tambourine at me. Then he swiped his phone screen and tapped, and the intro music played.
Gram and Mimi pretended to jam on their “instruments,” and Brandon swayed back and forth with my hairbrush pressed up against his chin. I stood with a tight, tense death grip on the wire hanger, paralyzed by the ungainliness of the entire scene.
And to think that on my first day in Florida I’d been embarrassed by Gram’s prescription driving glasses and her leopard-print babushka scarf.
That was nothing!
I couldn’t figure out why someone as cool as Brandon didn’t see the cringeworthiness of all this. But when Brandon began to sing, I realized why Brandon was so excited.
He was actually a really good singer.
I’d heard him singing during the car sing-along way back on day one of our trip, but that had been with Gram and Mimi’s warbling voices in the background. Singing the first verse by himself, a song he’d obviously sung before, his voice sounded amazing.
That was going to make this whole thing even worse!
Forget about brilliant ideas and saving the say, he’d be a star.
He was going to be the undiscovered talent in the Kooky Karaoke Contest, which meant I was going to look even more magnificently pathetic.
They’d probably bring the Borlandsville County news crew out to do an interview with Brandon after our performance, and he’d be on the five o’clock news.
Gram, Mimi, and I would be on some viral video with the tag, “Borlandsville Backup Singers Cause Fair-goers to Back WAY Up (Preferably out of Earshot).”
I could tell by the way Gram strummed her broom and the way Mimi pounded on the bed with her wooden spoon drumsticks that they didn’t care what they looked like. And when they joined Brandon on the chorus, it was painfully obvious that they didn’t care what they sounded like either. But I did care, and as I ruminated over what the crowd would think when the four of us got up onstage together, my stomach flip-flopped like I was riding the Zipper, the scariest-looking ride at the fair.
Love,
Me
Dear Me,
The next morning just before my scheduled baking time, Gram and Mimi dropped Brandon and me at the fairground entrance. Gram said she was tired because she hadn’t slept well, so she and Mimi went back to the hotel, so she could rest.
I hoped Gram was telling the truth and that she really was just tired, but I couldn’t help wondering if something else could be wrong.
I’d checked her pill container the night before to make sure she’d taken her medicine, and she had.
But what if the urgent care doctor was mistaken and there really was something wrong with Gram?
I never thought Mom would’ve ended up in the hospital, but, completely out of the blue, she had. So even with that all-clear from the urgent care center, part of me was still anxious about Gram’s health.
But with chocolate chip cookies to bake, wire tambourines to play, and me still feeling slighted because of Brandon getting the credit for everything, I didn’t have much brain space left to fret about Gram.
Brandon helped me carry my ingredients to the competition tent. He could only carry one shopping bag because of his wrist, but I was still thankful for his help, because the bags of baking supplies we’d bought at a nearby grocery store earlier that morning were heavy, and the walk was long.
But I was also grateful because I knew I didn’t really deserve his help. Ever since he’d signed us up for that karaoke contest, causing Gram and Mimi to act like he was king of this road trip, I’d been pretty quiet and cold to him.
I knew I wasn’t being fair, but that wasn’t enough to inspire me to turn things around and be grateful.
Brandon was clearly oblivious to how I was feeling about everything, because he talked incessantly about how excited he was about our performance the next day.
He couldn’t wait to tell Duncan.
He couldn’t wait to see the look on the audience’s faces.
He couldn’t wait to see if our act won a prize.
It was pretty amazing since the only thing I couldn’t wait for was for it to be over.
At my assigned baking station, Brandon reminded me that the rules said I could have someone help me until I actually started making my cookies, so he asked if I wanted some help setting up.
All I could think was that if I didn’t watch out, Brandon might take credit for my cookies just because he helped by carrying one grocery bag to my station.
I told him I didn’t need any help.
But then he told me he really wanted to help.
“Maybe while I help you set up, you could tell me how you make your chocolate chip cookies so I can try making them at home.”
Wasn’t it enough that he was a baseball superstar and an awesomely talented singer, not to mention pretty much cuter than any of the boys at my entire middle school?
Again, I knew I was being a super slug and the sarcasm my inner voice was using to have a conversation with myself in my head skyrocketed so high that it wasn’t even in this galaxy anymore. But sometimes, even when you know you’re being unreservedly impossible, it’s hard to give up your unreasonableness. Mine was gritting its teeth and digging in its heels.
And I guess because of that, my sneering scorn leaked out, and I said, “You know what, Brandon, I wouldn’t want you to hurt your wrist.”
I don’t know who was more surprised by what I said and how I said it.
Me.
Or Brandon.
He wanted to know what that was supposed to mean, and when I looked at him and those “adorable” eyes looked back at me, all my frustra
tions came to the surface.
“Don’t act like you don’t know what it means!” I said with way too much disdain in my voice, even for me.
Then I unloaded on him like a dump truck dropping a truckload of that swampy mud that had splashed up in our faces way back on the first day of the road trip.
“I’m sick of you getting all kinds of credit any time you do anything even remotely helpful.
“Especially when in every single crisis, all you ever do is hold up your phone trying to get cell service.
“And it’s so plain to see that you’re milking that wrist injury just so you can get out of the gargantuan, Herculean stuff you keep pretending you wish you could do that would actually help.”
The fact that I used the words “gargantuan” and “Herculean” when talking to a fellow middle schooler only proves just how crazed I was.
I was definitely not in my right mind, which was why I kept going.
I told him I couldn’t believe he was getting so much glory just for signing us all up for that idiotic karaoke contest.
I told him he didn’t care about how laughable I was going to look, because he knew he was going to be the star. As usual.
Then I told him it was pretty apparent to me that he didn’t think I was cool, but I knew he didn’t care because I also knew he thought he was outrageously cool.
When I said the part about him thinking he was outrageously cool, I heard that ringing in my ears, you know that sound you hear super loud in your head when you get caught red-handed for something. Or when you realize someone probably knows you just stretched the truth so far that it snapped like a taut rubber band.
The ringing clanged in my head, because deep down I knew Brandon had never really acted like he thought of himself as cool. I was the one who thought of him as cool.
If I was honest, I had to admit, that he hadn’t ever really done one single thing to make a case for what I’d just said. But having that truth fill up my head only made me feel more atrocious.
Then Brandon did the worst thing he could do.
He turned and walked away.
Without
saying
anything.
And a tear dripped onto the counter of my workstation.
Thankfully the competition tent was noisy with all the other bakers focused on their recipes, so no one had paid any attention to the bratty girl who had just made a gargantuan and Herculean scene.
I’d used baking as therapy innumerable times, but I’d never cried while I baked. Yet there in the Borlandsville Fun in the Sun competition tent, I had to use innumerable paper towels to dry off the counter before I could even begin measuring out the flour and sugar.
Good thing baking was the best therapy, because if I ever needed therapy it was right then.
I was grateful I’d made my chocolate chip cookies so many times that I could do it on autopilot. I could go through the motions of making them without even having to think about it. That way, while the mixer whirred to combine the ingredients, transforming them into sticky dough, I thought about how much stickier the mess was that I’d made for myself with Brandon by spewing my venom all over him.
And what I realized by the time I was dropping blobs of dough onto my baking sheet was that I’d spent my entire school year, the beginning of this summer, and much of this road trip feeling sorry for myself. All that self-pity piled up inside me until I reached my tipping point, and then I’d dumped it all over Brandon, because he happened to be the one standing nearby.
I knew what I had to do, so I finished baking my cookies, put them in the competition container at my station, and ran them over to the judges’ table.
I grabbed my backpack, which luckily had my Dear Me Journal in it, and headed to an empty bench in the corner of the competition tent. I sat down and wrote this letter, hoping it would help me sort out what I needed to sort out in order to maybe fix things with Brandon.
And now that I’m finished reminding you what a sometimes-horrible person you were when you were twelve, I’m headed to the picnic area. It’s where Gram and Mimi are supposed to meet Brandon and me later. I hope I can find Brandon before Gram and Mimi get there, and if I can, I hope I have the guts to be un-horrible and give him the most sincere apology ever.
Even though we’re not wearing our bowling shirts anymore since we both got those new clothes at Stretch Your Dollar, I really hope Brandon will forgive me so that we can go back to being Team Road Trip again.
I’ll write again soon to let you know if it’s a win or a loss.
Love,
Me
P.S. I wouldn’t say this to anyone except you, but in my consternation and distress over what I said to Brandon, my subconscious must’ve been super focused on making my cookies. As a result, I may have just baked my most outstanding batch of chocolate chip cookies ever. And you’re the only one I would admit this to, but I’m secretly hoping they might just be good enough to win some kind of an award.
Dear Me,
When I saw Brandon in the far corner of the fairground picnic area, Mimi’s new plastic purse tablecloth was spread out in front of him. As predicted, her other tablecloth had been left behind at the 3XB, but not just because it would never have been deemed clean enough to use again after covering one of those backyard beach bar picnic tables. It was also because Gram had left in an ambulance, and folding up the tablecloth to take it with us wasn’t a super high priority.
Mimi had bought another tablecloth when we shopped for stuff to make my cookies. And though she liked that it was Florida-themed with palm trees and coconuts printed on it, she said it was practically a sin to pay grocery-store prices for the same thing she could’ve gotten at the Treasures for Pennies store she always shopped at back at Sunny Sandy Shores. But she also said, no matter what the cost, she didn’t see how we could get by without a new tablecloth, especially while we were traveling.
Since the new tablecloth was there, I knew Gram and Mimi had already come back to the fair, but I didn’t see them.
As I headed toward Brandon, my stomach felt as nauseous as if I’d eaten all my cookie dough instead of baking it, but I knew the longer I waited to face Brandon, the harder it would be to apologize. I also knew I might only have a few minutes before Gram and Mimi came back from wherever it was that they were, and it was bad enough that Brandon knew how horrible I could be. I didn’t need Gram and Mimi knowing too.
As soon as Brandon saw me coming, that ball-of-cookie-dough feeling in my stomach traveled up my esophagus and turned into a boulder of pure panic in the middle of my chest.
And I wondered if anxiety attacks were hereditary.
I wasn’t exactly sure how to apologize to Brandon. Except for arguments with my sisters, I’d never really unloaded on someone like I’d done with him.
With Tori and Annalise, it was usually Mom or Dad who sort of forced us to apologize to each other.
But apologizing to Brandon was completely different.
For one thing, he hadn’t done anything to deserve my wrath, and that was never true with my sisters. Even when I was completely in the wrong, they were usually somehow at least a little bit to blame.
But the bigger difference was…it was Brandon.
Brandon.
I really wasn’t sure that I could keep myself from throwing up.
But before I knew it, I was standing right in front of him.
We both said, “Hey,” in quiet voices as the fairground crowds talked, laughed, and ate all around us.
Then something really, surprising happened.
When I opened my mouth to start my apology by saying, “I’m sorry,” Brandon said the same thing first.
What?!
What was he sorry about?
On the walk across the picnic area to where Brandon was, I’d been thinking about what I wanted to s
ay, but now that he said he was sorry, I’d forgotten everything I’d rehearsed in my head.
“What in the world are you sorry about?”
He said, “You were right about a lot of stuff.”
I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about, because I didn’t really think I was right about anything. So, I didn’t know what to say.
But it was obvious that Brandon had also rehearsed what he wanted to say, because he kept talking.
He told me that he could totally see why I was mad at him for stealing the glory for saving the trip. He said Duncan did stuff like that all the time at home, and it really bugged him.
Hearing that made me realize that, even though Brandon’s good looks were what I had noticed about him right away, his niceness was even more attractive.
The only bad part about that was that it made me feel even more unattractive because of how un-nice I’d been to him.
Next Brandon said that he had kind of been a “baby” about his wrist, but his injury was sort of complicated.
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I didn’t have time to think about it because the next thing Brandon said was that, even though I had been right about some stuff, there were two things that I’d been really wrong about.
“I guess you’re entitled to your opinion, but, just so you know, I don’t really think of myself as all that cool.”
I couldn’t help but think of what a cool thing that was to say.
But then the second thing he said that I’d gotten all wrong was even “cooler.”
“If you’re entitled to your opinion. I’m entitled to mine, and I think you’re pretty cool.”
Brandon thought I was cool?!
But he didn’t stop there.
He also told me he thought I was brave for suggesting we get out of Gram’s Mustang just after seeing that alligator so that we could try to push the car.
“I was scared to death that alligator would come back, but it didn’t seem to bother you at all. And then you climbed through the window at Glory Bound Baptist like you were a cat burglar or something,” he joked. “You were just never afraid to do whatever we needed you to do.”
When I Hit the Road Page 14
