Chapter 10

A STU PROBLEM

All the way to Amarillo. Stu and Bonnie had a great time. Stu, who sat in the front seat, flicked on the radio as soon as they were out on the road. He found some music and turned it up loud, and he and Bonnie shouted along with it and bounced around in their seats. Duff didn’t bounce. He didn’t shout. He wished he were the sort of person who liked to bounce and shout, but he knew he couldn’t pretend to be; it would look all wrong. Instead, between songs, he told them about how fast-food places could turn into gas stations, and he described a couple more of the computer games he’d created, the ones called Zoomball and Angry Alien Anteaters. Stu and Bonnie listened politely, and Bonnie said, “Amazing!” about the french fry fuel. Then they went back to their music.

After a while, Stu turned down the radio, crooked his elbow over the back of the seat, and twisted around to talk to Bonnie.

“Listen,” he said, “I have a buddy in LA who’s in the music business. Maybe he could help you some way.”

“You think so? That would be great.”

“Sure, he’s in with lots of the groups. And the big companies, too, I think. We could meet up there, maybe, later on, and I could introduce you.”

“Fantastic,” said Bonnie.

“Also,” Stu went on, “this friend of mine has connections to recording studios. You could make a demo, you know? And I could give it to him, and he could play it for the right people.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool. It’s so good I met you, Stu.”

“Hey, what about me?” said Duff. He meant to say it in a jolly, teasing way, but it came out as a wounded croak.

“Sure. You, too,” Bonnie said. “Of course.”

“This buddy of mine,” said Stu, “the last time I talked to him, he was telling me about a guy who sent in a demo—no one had ever heard of him—and they liked it so much they offered him a contract before they even met him.”

“You’re kidding me,” Bonnie said.

“No, really.”

“That is so cool.”

They went on like this. Duff was left out, which seemed unfair, since without him Stu would still be standing by the road with his thumb out. He wasn’t obliged to take Stu anywhere. He could have left Stu in St. Louis to fend for himself. Probably should have, he thought sourly. Then he and Bonnie would be making this trip on their own. Would that be a bad thing or a good thing? Bad: talking to girls made him nervous. Good: he found Bonnie sort of interesting, even though (or because?) she was a criminal’s daughter. He felt sorry for her, too. The image of her crying into Moony’s neck fur stayed in his mind.

By four o’clock, they were rolling into Amarillo. Duff, who had driven the whole way, was seriously tired. Stu, who’d been having a great time, was full of energy. “Okay,” he said. “How about we have a picnic? We get some sandwiches, we find a park, we eat. Then, with rested minds and satisfied stomachs, we figure out what to do next.”

No one had a better plan, so that’s what they did. They found a deli and bought food, and they found a park with a nice big lawn, crowded with picnickers and Frisbee players. It was all very festive, but Duff was too tired to enjoy it. After they’d eaten, he stretched out on the grass with his head on his duffel bag and closed his eyes. Let Stu and Bonnie figure out the next step of the journey. For the moment, he was checking out.

*

“Hey, wake up.”

Duff’s eyes sprang open, and he saw Bonnie standing over him, nudging him with her toe. He sat up. “What’s the matter?”

“Stu’s gone,” said Bonnie.

“Gone?” Duff felt a sudden lightness. He tried to keep himself from smiling.

“Yeah,” Bonnie said. “It was weird. We were just sitting here, and all of a sudden he jumped up with this kind of scared look on his face and said, ‘I gotta go.’ So I said, ‘Go where?’ and he said he had to go get some cigarettes, he was all out. But I’ve never seen him smoke even once, have you?”

“Nope, not once.”

“He said he’d be right back, and that was”—she looked at her watch—“that was over an hour ago.”

“Maybe he just took off.”

“But why would he do that? He likes me—us, I mean. He wants to travel with us.”

Duff thought about this. Here was his chance to part ways with Stu. It would be easy. And no big tragedy for Stu—he had hitchhiked before he met Duff, he could hitchhike again. It would be justifiable, too. Why should they wait around for him if he was going to just disappear like this?

“Maybe something’s happened to him,” Bonnie said.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Like he got hit by a car. Or he got lost. Or he got accidentally locked in the men’s room or something.”

Duff longed to leap to his feet, jump in the car with Bonnie, and be gone, leaving Stu to find his way alone. But he could think of three reasons not to. Reason one was Bonnie. Obviously, for some mysterious reason, she liked Stu and didn’t want to abandon him. Reason two was that it was because of Bonnie that Duff wasn’t still in St. Louis without a car. She had done him a favor, and he should do her one in return. Reason three was plain old human kindness. There was at least a remote possibility that Stu was in trouble and needed help. Yes, he was an annoying human being, and probably a dishonest one, but still he was one. And Duff had to admit that in spite of everything, he did like Stu a tiny bit. He was a cheerful guy, whatever else he might be.

“I guess we better wait till we find him,” he said. “I guess we can’t just leave him.”

So they waited, sitting there in the park in the shade of a large tree. It would have been a good time to talk, if only Duff’s shyness hadn’t grabbed hold of him again. But now that Stu wasn’t there chattering away, he couldn’t think of what to talk about. He’d never mentioned having seen Bonnie crying in the backyard. She hadn’t mentioned it, either. Was she sad about her mother? He thought about how he’d feel if his own mother were put in jail—arrested, say, for pouring hot coffee over some obnoxious patron at the restaurant, though that would be an extremely unlikely thing for his mild-mannered mother to do. But if it had happened, he’d feel all kinds of ways: mad at his mother for doing such a dumb thing, mad at the obnoxious customer, sad that his mother had to sit in some crummy jail, sorry for himself for being suddenly motherless…. Maybe Bonnie felt all that, too. How could he ask her about it?

She was sitting cross-legged, bending over and pulling up grass blades. She pulled them slowly so they came out whole, and then she chewed a little on the whitish root part. She was close enough to Duff that he could smell something sort of sweet and toasty—maybe the suntan lotion she put on her legs. His mind raced, searching for words.

Finally he said, “Your mom, and everything…that must be…I mean, you must feel—”

But as soon as he spoke, Bonnie frowned at the ground and scrambled to her feet. “Don’t talk to me about it,” she said. “You don’t know anything.”

She stooped down to open the door of Moony’s carrying case. He bounded out as if shot from a cannon, ran a few hundred feet in a straight line, and then ran back and leaped around Bonnie’s feet. From inside the case, she fetched an ancient Day-Glo green tennis ball and threw it with a powerful overhand pitch. Moony raced after it.

Duff felt as if he’d had cold water splashed in his face. As usual, he’d said the wrong thing. Why hadn’t he kept his mouth shut? He couldn’t do human relations, he might as well just accept it. For a moment, he had a powerful wish to be back in his bedroom at home, with all his systems humming and the door securely shut—back where any problem could be solved with a few lines of good code.

He got out his laptop. Its battery was still pretty well charged up. And maybe since he was in an actual city he could even get online. He gave it a try. Yes! He was on. There must be a node nearby.

He checked his e-mail. He had two messages. One was this:

Dear M. Pringle,

We appreciate your interest in our revolutionary vehicle powered by air. Many of very brilliant people are helping develop this car. It is a new adventure most exciting!

Thank you for writing to us, and good fortune on your journey.

The Team

Duff was thrilled with this message. He could tell by the oddities in the sentences that it was written by actual French people and came from actual France. The M. before Pringle must stand for Monsieur. He liked that—Monsieur Pringle. There was something friendly and exuberant about this note that made him happy.

The second message was this:

Dear Duff,

A minor problem has come up. Looks like expected funding may not materialize. But not to worry!! Worst case, we make the Vortex team a little smaller. Or cut it down to just YOU!!! Know you could handle it!!!!

Ping

Duff wasn’t sure what to make of this. Should he be worried or flattered? What exactly was involved in running an entire project? Would he have to do things like budgets and marketing? Would he have to do the work of four or five people?

Moony dashed up to him and dropped the tennis ball on his keyboard, where it rolled over the keys, leaving a path of dog spit. “He’s giving you a turn to throw the ball for him,” Bonnie said.

“Oh,” said Duff. “Okay.” With his thumb and one finger, he picked up the slimy ball. He threw it as far as he could, and Moony bounded away.

“What are you doing?” Bonnie said. She seemed to have got over being mad.

“Getting my email,” Duff said. “This one’s from the company I’m going to work for.”

Bonnie leaned over and peered at the screen. One of her ponytails brushed Duff’s chin. She seemed distracted. She stood up. “Stu must have got kidnapped. It’s after seven o’clock.” Then, after a moment, she said, “Uh-oh,” and started walking away.

Duff looked up. Over by the picnic tables, he saw Moony, who had his paws up on a bench beside a fat guy in a backward baseball cap. A second later, Moony jumped up on the bench and snatched something from the table. The fat guy started yelling, and Bonnie ran toward him. She scooped up Moony, said something to the fat guy, and the fat guy, in a loud voice and with many hand gestures, said something to her. Then she turned around and came back to Duff.

“Moony ate his deviled egg,” she said. “Boy, was that guy mad. My fault. I have to keep an eye on this dog. He runs off.” She put Moony back in his carrying case and closed the door.

“Okay,” she said, and her tone of voice made Duff snap his eyes up from the screen. “We have to do something. Stu’s been gone an hour and a half. You stay here with our stuff, and I’m going to go look for him.”

She walked off before Duff could even answer. He watched her go. She marched across the lawn, her arms slicing back and forth, her hands curled almost into fists. Nobody better get in her way, Duff thought.

He shut down his laptop and zipped it into its case. He should have been the one to go out looking for Stu. He should have said, in a take-charge way, “Enough of this waiting around,” and ventured out into the streets of Amarillo. But oh, no. He was glued to the computer screen, as usual. He plunked down onto his duffel bag, put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and gazed at Bonnie’s retreating back, now just a white spot at the edge of a street at the far end of the park. She was waiting for a red light to change. When it did, she sprang forward, running. Why running all of a sudden? Duff stood up and shaded his eyes with his hand. The white spot that was Bonnie ran toward a red spot on the other side of the street. Both spots stood still for a moment facing each other, their arms moving, and then they came back in Duff’s direction.

It was Stu, of course. Bonnie had found him right away, or he had found her. They came closer, growing from spots into people again, and when they came up to him, Duff said, trying but failing to keep the irritation out of his voice, “So how come it took you an hour and a half to buy cigarettes?”

“Time got away from me.” Stu shook his head, smiling ruefully. “The fascinations of beautiful downtown Amarillo, man. I just kind of lost myself in ’em.”

Should have lost yourself permanently, Duff thought.

“And listen,” said Stu. “I got talking to a few locals, and it sounds to me like we should get off the freeways and take the scenic route to Albuquerque. There’s a lot of great stuff to see in this part of the country! We’d probably avoid a lot of traffic, too. And instead of staying here tonight, we ought to get out into the desert, find a campground, and sleep under the stars. Much better than some dump of a motel, and a lot cheaper. Doesn’t that sound terrific?”

Duff and Bonnie answered simultaneously.

“I don’t know,” said Duff.

“I’d love to,” said Bonnie.

“Great!” said Stu. “Let’s get going.”