At first Fig was relieved because the big bus was more like an airplane than the city bus had been, its tall seats in twos with tray tables and headrests and a place to put your bag overhead, but it smelled worse and came with none of the reassuring aspects of an airplane, such as adults whose job was to make sure you were safe.
“It’s weird how no one recognizes you two,” Bex said. Lots of eyes roved over them—four kids traveling alone—then slid away. “If we were with your mom…”
She trailed off, but Fig didn’t need her to finish. If they were with their mom, everyone would recognize her and Jack. If people were paying more attention, they might recognize any of them, really. Bex had posted those videos. The smears took photos they weren’t supposed to. But no one did pay attention.
Five minutes after they pulled out of the station, Fig already didn’t see anything familiar anymore as they made their slow way out of the city, high above the sidewalks, looking down on the tops of people’s heads. There were lots of red lights and streets that parked cars made almost too skinny to get a bus through. Every time they stopped, the brakes shrieked like something had leaped out at them from behind a bush. Every time they started again, the brakes sighed like letting go was too hard and you were being unreasonably demanding. Fig thought she saw her mother’s car.
Every car Fig saw, she thought might be her mother.
But once they were on the highway, very quickly what should have been a grand adventure became the most boring adventure in the world. Bex let Fig have the window, but all there was to see was miles and miles of the same thing: cars and trucks and billboards, then brown hills and green hills and fields, then trees and trees and trees. Hours went by, and they were no closer to anything. It was like floating in an ocean in the dark. It was like being dead. Fig had come close enough to know.
The biggest difference, though, between alive and dead—she guessed, anyway—was that dead people did not get hungry or thirsty or need to pee, and the four of them did all three. The bathroom on the bus was too scary to use—too small, too smelly, too much risk you might fall in, a risk which even Bex admitted was legit—but the bus made a rest stop every few hours, and they quickly learned that if they hardly ate or drank they could wait. This solved two problems—the bus bathroom and running out of food—but brought up new ones.
There were lots of mirrors in rest-stop bathrooms, many more than in your house bathroom, many more even than in normal public bathrooms, and what they reflected, in flickery, hummy, dim light, was each other into infinity. Once, Fig pressed into a stall whose door was half-open only to have it slam shut in her face with a snarled “Someone’s in here, asshole!” Once, someone asked if she’d prefer a ride instead of the bus, and when Bex came out of her stall and put her arm around Fig and said, “She’s with me,” the ride-offerer grinned with brown teeth and said “I’ve got room for you both.” Fig knew to say no to that.
While they were waiting to transfer in Portland, though, an old man looked at them then looked away then looked back then looked away then eventually came over and said they looked cold (which Bex and Lewis were not because they weren’t LA kids used to year-round warm weather, but Fig and Jack were shivering) and hungry (which they were because their food stash was down to half a bag of tortilla chips, a baggie of crackers, and thirteen dried apricots) and alone (even though they were together and had each other) and asked if he could buy them some breakfast, and that answer was harder because they didn’t know what he knew. Had their mother panicked and told the smears they were missing? Were they headline news, their pictures posted everywhere? They didn’t know because they didn’t have phones, but if they were recognized, they would no longer be missing, no longer almost there, but instead all the way back at the start again.
So they kept their heads and eyes down and said no thank you to breakfast, and Lewis shoved his cape into his backpack because a cape was good for hiding inside but bad for hiding in general, and Bex put on sunglasses and a baseball hat and tucked her hair up inside it. Fig and Jack already had lots of practice being unnoticed and hidden right in front of everyone. Their new bus arrived and they climbed onto it to head west, back toward the ocean.
The third bus ride was long and loud and smelly, but not as long and loud and smelly as the second one. They were closer now to where they were going than to where they’d started. They were out of California, off the Five, headed toward water. The bus was half-empty. Fig could hear her own voice again. She was still surprised, though, to hear it say to Bex, “Are you jealous of us?” She hadn’t meant to ask. It just popped out.
“Who?” said Bex.
“Me and Jack. Or like…” She didn’t know how to say it really, but she’d already started so she kept going. “Do you not like us as much because you hate us a little?”
“Why would I hate you any amount?”
“Because we get to have India Allwood for a mother and you don’t.”
“You mean because she’s rich and famous?”
That wasn’t what Fig meant. From afar, with only what you saw and read from the smears, Fig could see why being placed for adoption rather than raised by India Allwood would seem like you got lucky, but now that Bex was here and could see what her mother was really like, maybe she felt bad.
“I used to.” Bex took off her baseball cap and shook her hair out. “Who wouldn’t want to be rich? And Hollywood parties, private jets, dating some guy you met after the Oscars or whatever.”
“We don’t have a private jet,” Fig said. “Or go to those kinds of parties.”
“And you for sure don’t make famous seem fun. Are you jealous of me?”
“Why?” Fig hadn’t meant to sound so surprised.
“Because I know everything about my birth mother and I even got to meet her, and I know why she gave me up, and any questions I ever had, I could get answers. Whereas you…” She trailed off.
“I remember mine.” Fig looked out the window.
“You do?”
“We were four when we … changed mothers. I remember lots about her.” Fig paused to see if she was going to be able to keep talking about this. “We called her Sarah, but I can’t remember why.”
“My best friend in middle school called her parents by their first names too.”
“Really?”
“They were cooler than normal parents.” Bex shrugged. “Maybe your birth mom is really cool.”
“Maybe.” Fig took another pause. “I know some things about my birth dad too.”
“Like what?”
Fig felt stupid. She knew way more about Bex’s birth father than her own. “He loves fruit. That’s what Sarah told the social worker, anyway. They did a lot of drugs together so she didn’t remember too much about him and never even knew his real name, but she told the social worker he had a thing for fruit.”
“What kind of thing?”
“I don’t know,” Fig admitted. “But if he bought a peach or an apple or something, he’d take a picture before he ate it. And he named them. Like, if he had blueberries he’d say, ‘Thanks Josh,’ and pop one in his mouth and then, ‘Nice to meet you, Penny,’ and pop in another.”
“Weird.” Bex shoved her hat into her backpack and pulled her hair into a ponytail so it looked like Fig’s again.
“He was gone by the time Sarah knew she was pregnant, but that’s why she named us after fruit. I think”—Fig had never said this to anyone—“it was nice of her.”
“You do?” Bex sounded like she did not.
“She could have gone with Banana or Cantaloupe or something like that, but instead she thought till she came up with fruit names that could also be kid names.”
It wasn’t totally fair because when people heard Jack they thought of a boy or at worst a boy and a beanstalk whereas people heard Fig and thought of drizzling it with goat cheese and honey. But it was proof that Sarah wanted to protect her from being bullied and also pass on a little piece of her past and her parentage.
“Do you want to find him?” Bex said.
“My birth father?” Fig could hear that she sounded alarmed, which was also how she felt. “We don’t even know his name. He doesn’t even know we exist.”
“So he’d be surprised.” Bex made it sound like a good thing.
“He might not like surprises.” Fig knew, though, that the reasons she didn’t probably had nothing to do with her genes.
“Okay, but if it wasn’t a surprise? Like you found him, and then you sent him a letter, and then you waited a few months for him to get used to the idea. Then would you want to meet him?”
Fig tried to picture this and could not. She tried to peer past the part of herself that was panicked just thinking about it, but there wasn’t enough of her left after that. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “Why do you want to meet yours?”
Bex blinked. She looked surprised. Then she looked across the aisle, out the window. “I don’t know either.”
They were quiet some more miles. Then Bex said, “Remember the first time you texted me?”
It felt to Fig like years ago, like she had grown up a lot since then, but it had only been six months. “Yeah.”
“You said you were family, but when I didn’t know what you were talking about, you said not family family.”
“I just meant—”
“I know what you meant. It’s not like there’s a name for your birth mother’s adopted daughter.”
“Yeah,” Fig agreed again. She wasn’t sure where this was going. She wasn’t sure she was going to like where it was going.
“Now that we’re about to meet my bio dad, though…” Bex trailed off.
“You think he’s the one who’s family,” Fig supplied.
Bex turned her face from pointing out the window to pointing in at Fig. She looked surprised again. “The opposite, actually. I think you were wrong back then.”
“Me?”
“We are family family. We must be. Who else would follow along with a plan that’s going to get us in as much trouble as this one?” Bex laughed, so Fig laughed too, but then Bex asked, serious again, “Why did you come, anyway?”
“You made me!” Fig said.
“You could have said no.”
“I did say no!”
“You could have said no harder. You could have refused. You could have told your mom. Or mine. You didn’t have to come, but you did.”
Fig hadn’t realized it, but Bex was right. She didn’t have to come. So why did she? “You wanted to go,” she said finally. “I wanted to help you. I didn’t want you to have to go alone.”
“Exactly.” Bex turned her face back out the other window. “Family family.”