AFTER A COUPLE HOURS of laying on the old guilt trip for his violating house arrest, Wes’s mom eased off, and he spent the rest of the weekend in zombie mode. He was so out of it — he’d been out of it for weeks, apparently — he was taken by surprise when his dad came home with a Christmas tree.
“Christmas? Already?”
“Duh-uh!” said Paula. “It’s only like break starts on Thursday!” She glared at him, then added, “I got you something really nice,” letting him know he had better reciprocate.
The next day, Wes obtained permission from his jailers to go to the mall. He wandered from store to store for an hour and saw lots of cool stuff that June might have liked, but he had no idea what to get his own little sister. He finally bought her a gift certificate at the bookstore. She liked to read. He would wrap it in a big box so she wouldn’t know what it was. He didn’t find anything for his mom and dad. He knew he wasn’t thinking straight. June’s face kept popping up, and he kept shoving it back, jamming it deep into the folds of his brain, stuffing the cracks with a cerebral version of black cotton fuzz, which he seemed to have in abundance.
By Monday morning, his head was packed with the stuff — the fuzz — and he headed for school with a muted sense of dread.
He saw Jerry almost right away.
“Hey,” Jerry replied.
That was pretty much it. First period, June was absent. The day passed. He got piles of makeup work in each of his classes, and lots of ribbing from the two Alans, and Calvin, and Robbie. He didn’t see Izzy except once from a distance. After school he ran into Jerry again outside by the buses.
“Hey,” Wes said.
Jerry nodded and gave him a tight smile.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Wes said.
“ ‘S’all right.” Jerry’s shoulders relaxed.
Wes said, “So, how’s the campaign going?”
“I’m taking a break until after break,” Jerry said.
“Cool. So … how’s June?” His voice did something weird. He hoped Jerry hadn’t heard it.
“She’s okay.” He seemed suddenly eager to talk. “You know, she was sick all last week, but I saw her Saturday. Only she had to leave this morning for San Diego with her parents, some family emergency thing. They’ll be gone over break. I bought her a necklace, but I guess it’ll have to be a New Year’s present instead of for Christmas. She texted me from San Diego. It’s eighty degrees there. You want to see the necklace?”
Wes didn’t, but he said, “Sure.”
Jerry opened his backpack and came out with a small blue satin and felt jewelry box. He opened the box. Inside was a gold chain with a pendant made of two interlocked hearts.
Wes almost said, Isn’t that kind of corny? But he caught himself just in time.
“You think she’ll like it?”
“Sure. Girls like that kind of stuff.”
Jerry beamed pathetically and put the box back in his pack. “You taking the bus today?”
Wes looked at the metal tube filled with kids.
“It’s not that cold,” he said.
Knowing that June was thousands of miles away helped him relax. He did not have to think what to do next, or what not to do. He walked home letting little thoughts — fragments of memory and intention — flicker across the surface of his mind. He thought about how clean he had gotten the garage last fall, and what June would have thought if she had seen it. He thought of a clever thing he might say in language arts, and wondered if she would get it, whether she would laugh. He tried walking perfectly, making each footfall exactly the same. He caught himself smiling, and he realized that he was imagining her watching him with her aqua eyes, and that because she was so far away, he did not have to stop himself from thinking of her.
After the first hour in the air, the land changed from white to brown, a crazy quilt of earth and dead vegetation. When they flew over a city, or a large town, the homes and highways and fallow crops looked to June like an infection, out of control, sending out invasive tentacles in every direction. That was Mr. Reinhardt’s fault, with his petri dishes full of mold and germs, talking about how bacteria “colonize” their medium. She liked looking at the rivers, those dark, purposeful arteries and veins, always flowing. There was a lake, and another river, and something moving swiftly across the land. A shadow. The shadow of the airplane.
She wondered if Wes had ever been on an airplane. He would like it. Not the part about being stuck in a seat for hours, but the part where places come and go so quickly.
Her parents, sitting in the two seats to her left, were talking about this and that. June heard her dad say something about Omaha, Nebraska. She leaned forward, looked past her mother, and asked, “You’re going to Omaha?”
“I got a call from Omaha-Benford Bank,” he said. “They have an account that’s having some cash-flow problems. The bank’s on the hook for about sixteen million. It’s a nice gig, but things are going so well at Sani-Made, I’m thinking of staying on in Minnesota.”
“The Sani-Made board of directors is talking about making your father CEO,” said her mother. “A permanent position.”
“You mean we wouldn’t have to move again?”
“If I get the job,” her dad said. “I’ll know more next week. It’s not a sure thing, but it’s looking very positive.”
“Good. I don’t think I’d like Omaha.”
“Oh, Junie,” her mother said. “You’ve never even been to Omaha!”
“Have you?”
“Well, no.”
Her father said, “The point is, whatever happens, we go forward. ‘There Is No Reverse Gear in Time Machine.’ ”
“Dad! Enough with the one-way time machine already!”
Elton Edberg laughed and said, “Next!”
June sat back and stared out the window and gingerly, cautiously, delicately — as if she was performing surgery or defusing a bomb — allowed herself to think about the future.