“Emma, it’s almost 1:30. If we want to get out of the city before the traffic gets bad I’ll need you to put down your phone and help get us packed,” my mother said.
Reluctantly I lowered my phone and sighed. I wasn’t really looking forward to this weekend camping trip with my mother and brother—especially now that it was May and the mosquitoes would likely be out in full force—but at least we’d been allowed to take the day off school. Not that anybody would even notice I wasn’t there. Being the new kid in a new school starting most of the way into the year had meant that it was too late to make any real friends. Not that I wanted new friends. I just wanted my old friends back.
“If you didn’t want bad traffic we shouldn’t have moved here,” I answered.
She chuckled. “The traffic is definitely a lot worse here.”
“Everything is worse here. Everything.” I repeated it for emphasis, and my mother stopped chuckling and gave me a scowl that almost matched mine.
“You know, wherever you go, there you are,” she said.
“And that’s supposed to mean…?”
“You make your own happiness. A negative attitude can only create a negative atmosphere.”
“Have you thought of giving up being a nurse and writing bumper stickers instead?” I asked sarcastically.
“Maybe I’ll do both—and be happy doing both.”
“I was happy before we moved.”
“Were you?”
That caught me by surprise. The last couple of years had not been easy, with my parents going through all the fighting and drama and then finally separating. But at least I’d had my home and my friends. I’d thought that their separating might make everything better, or at least quieter. Little did I know then that their separation was going to mean a new start in a new city for me.
“I was happier. Happier than I am here.”
“Give it a chance,” my mother said.
The way you gave my father another chance? I almost blurted out, but didn’t. She didn’t need that. She wasn’t the one who had found somebody else.
“This is an amazing city. It will grow on you.”
“Cancer grows. Mold grows. I don’t want anything to grow on me.”
“Attitude…it’s all attitude.”
I heard the door of our condo open and my younger brother, Ethan, appeared. He’d already brought a load down to our car. At eleven he was still young enough to be excited about a camping trip.
“Help your brother with the rest of the bags that are ready to go,” she said, and disappeared into the bedroom before I had a chance to argue.
I turned to Ethan. “I know how to speed this up. How about you go down below. I’ll drop our gear off the balcony and you can catch it.”
“Would that work?”
“Why not? It’s only seventeen stories down. I’m sure you can break the fall.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“I know you’re an idiot. What I can’t believe is that we’re actually related.”
“I keep hoping one of us is adopted,” he said.
He picked up one of the big packs. I didn’t have much choice. I slipped the phone into my pocket and picked up the other. It was heavy. We were only going camping for four days but the way my mother had packed you’d have thought it was four weeks.
“What’s in these packs?” I asked.
“You know Mom, probably everything.”
Our mom was an ER nurse, and a former Marine nurse, and probably a Girl Scout when she was young, so she was always really, really prepared. It was one of her most irritating qualities. That and the fact that she thought she was never wrong. Okay, what was most irritating of all was that she hardly ever was wrong.
My father had said—more than once—that my mother and I fought so much because we were two of a kind. Did any fifteen-year-old girl ever want to be compared to her mother? I would have rather spent the weekend with him, but that wasn’t possible. It wasn’t simply that he lived where we used to live before they separated—halfway across the country—but right now he was stationed on the other side of the world on a six-month tour with his company. My mother had been a Marine—that’s where they met—but he was still a Marine. Then again, I’d heard them both say more times than I could count: “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”
I lugged the bag to the door. My brother dragged his out the door and down the hall to the elevator, which opened as soon as he pushed the down button.
“You coming or what?” he demanded.
“Just hold the door. It’s not going to bite you…or is it?”
He gave me a dirty look. He didn’t like elevators, and I knew living on the seventeenth floor was hard for him. In our new city we’d moved into a brand-new condo. It had been two months but I still couldn’t get over the teeny tiny space we were crammed into. The whole place wasn’t much bigger than the main floor of our old house on the base. It was so small that my old bedroom furniture was too big for my new room.
Sure, it was nice to live in a new building, but new also had its downsides. There was still some construction going on to finish up the last units and to fix the things that were still going wrong. We’d had power and water problems—my mother called them “hiccups”—and today the lights had gone out twice, and the water once. It was getting better, but it still felt like living in a construction site.
My brother kept trying to be cheerful, which was irritating, so I needed to irritate him in response. Bothering my brother was one of the things that made me feel like we were back home.
I stopped at the door, holding it open with one hand. “You sure you want to do this…take the elevator…didn’t you notice that it was, I don’t know, a little iffy today?”
There had been some ongoing problems with the elevators. They were slow and sometimes bumpy, and a few people had actually got stuck. It was only for a few minutes but, still…
“We won’t get stuck.”
“It has happened.”
“Emma, do you remember when you used to be nice to me?” he asked. I shook my head.
“Neither do I. Would it hurt you to try not to be so mean all the time?”
“It’s not all the time. I do sleep.”
I stepped into the elevator, dragged the bag after me, and pushed the button for P3, the third below-ground parking level. The doors closed. As we started down I jumped into the air, and as I landed the whole elevator shook, and my brother gave a little gasp.
He quickly realized what I’d done. “You really are mean.”
“Suck.”
“Loser.”
“Bigger loser,” I said.
The doors opened and we dragged the bags out.
My brother didn’t like elevators. For me, it was parking garages. I’d seen too many murders and assaults and abductions take place in underground parking areas. Well, at least I’d seen them on TV and in movies. Lately I’d been watching a lot of horror movies. What else did I have to do? It’s not like I had any friends here.
At least our parking spot wasn’t too far from the elevator. That meant that there were fewer places for the murderers to hide.
Right beside our car on the concrete floor was our long red canoe. We’d moved it out of our storage unit, and it would have to be carried up to the street and then strapped on the roof. It was wide and stable and big enough to hold all three of us plus all this junk my mother had packed. It was part of our history of camping together. Trips my parents took before I was born and then with me, and then all of us together. There were good memories in that canoe.
We stuffed the two packs into the trunk of the car. Now, with the exception of a few last-minute additions, we were basically packed. That was good since there wasn’t going to be much space left once the three of us piled in.
I took out my phone to text Liv—my best friend from back home—and there was no service. I don’t know what I was expecting down here, buried under the ground. That was yet another reason to hate the parking garage. Maybe that’s why murderers liked them so much. They were not only dark and deserted but you couldn’t call for help.
I was suddenly happy to have my brother with me. Strange to think he might defend me from anything or anybody, though. He was small for his age and, well, a little goofy. I knew if push came to shove I’d be the one to have to protect him. I had before. New kids in new schools often get bullied, and we’d been in a lot of new schools. Military life was like that. Nobody ever tried to bully me, though. Maybe I was my mother’s daughter.
My father was so different from Ethan. He was big and strong and acted and looked and talked and thought like a Marine. From the brush cut down, he was a take-charge, take-no-prisoners sort of guy. My friends—especially my friends who were boys—all seemed a little afraid of him. Little did they know that the one they should have been afraid of was my mother. She wasn’t nearly as big, or physically strong, but she was a Marine too. Because she was much friendlier on the surface, they usually didn’t realize how tough she really was underneath.
“You sure you don’t want to walk back up instead of chancing the elevator again?” I asked Ethan.
“Getting stuck in the elevator isn’t what makes me afraid.”
“It isn’t?”
“No, I’m afraid of getting stuck in it with you.”
“How do you feel about getting stuck with me in a canoe and a tent for the next four days?” I asked.
“Not good either, but at least there’s a chance one of us will be eaten by a bear. I’m hoping it’s you.”
We got back into the elevator. I’d lay off him for this ride.
“If it had to be one of us, I think Mom would rather it was you,” he said.
“It was me what?”
“Eaten by the bear. You know I’m her favorite child.”
Although I knew he was joking, there was a kernel of truth in what he said. I had been giving my mom a hard time about the move—okay, even before the move—and Ethan had been taking it pretty well. She probably did like him better. But I had more to complain about. I had been halfway through sophomore year at high school with my friends when we moved here, whereas Ethan had only been in sixth grade. Starting a new high school halfway through the year was much harder than starting at a new elementary school. Something my mother obviously didn’t even consider when she accepted the job at one of the new hospitals here.
When we got back to the apartment, I could see my mother checking the last few items off her list. She was, as always, organized. It drove her crazy when I forgot things. What she didn’t know was that sometimes I did that deliberately just to make her nuts. After all, if she could force me to move across the country, I could at least cause her a little bit of grief.
“Is the car all packed?”
“We were supposed to put that stuff in the car?” I asked. “We put it down the garbage chute.”
“Funny. Nice to know you haven’t lost your sense of humor completely,” she said without looking up from her list.
“You know, if there isn’t enough room in the car I’m willing to volunteer to stay at home.”
“Responsible parents don’t leave their fifteen-year-old children alone for four days.”
“I’m almost sixteen and I’m not a child. I’m basically an adult.”
“Not according to the law.”
“If we hadn’t moved I would have had lots of friends and their parents to stay with and you could have gone without me.”
“I don’t want to go without you. Besides, you love camping.”
“I used to love camping…when I was little.”
“As opposed to how old you are now?”
“I’m not a baby.”
“I love camping,” my brother said.
“I guess that just reinforces my point about it being for babies. Look, if you did leave me I’d be okay. It’s not like I’m going to invite all of my friends over for a party. I don’t know if this apartment is even big enough to hold all of them.”
“I know it’s not easy,” my mother said. “But it’s not like it’s the first time you’ve changed schools.”
We’d lived on or near nine different army bases. They were in different corners of the country, and one was in a different country altogether.
“Moving is just part of the military life,” she added.
“That was military. We were ordered to move. This move was all about you.”
“Yes, this was for my career, but also for our future together and—”
I pulled out my phone and started texting Liv again to tell her how much my life sucked, and to show my mother how little I cared about what she had to say. My mother very gently put her hand on my arm, and I looked up.
“I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. I’m sorry. It wasn’t fair to you, and if this doesn’t work then we can look at going back.”
“But I like it here,” my brother said.
I felt like screaming at him.
“How about we just put everything aside for the next few days?” my mother suggested. “It’ll be us and nature. We’ll be doing something as a family.”
I was just going to ask, “Oh, is Dad going to be joining us?” when the lights went off. Another power failure.
“Again?” Ethan said.
The floor-to-ceiling windows let in more than enough light for us to see.
“I’m sure they’ll be back on soon,” my mother said. “They always are.”
“It feels like we’re already camping,” I said.
“We’re going away anyway, so what does it matter if there are no lights?” my brother asked.
“Always seeing the bright side, aren’t you?” I asked.
“Well…the semi-bright side, really.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “Not bad.” He always did seem to be able to look on the positive side of things.
I pulled up my phone. The screen was dark. I fiddled with it…
“My phone is dead!”
“No surprise there,” my mother said.
“She means because you use it so much,” my brother added helpfully.
I shot him a look. “Yeah, I get it. I can’t even charge it because there’s no power.”
“It sort of sucks being you, doesn’t it?”
“You can use the charger in the car,” my mother suggested.
“Then what are we waiting for?” I asked. “Let’s go camping.”