THREE
“HOW ARE YOU going to have time for schoolwork if you’re out driving?” Aunt Nic asks me. She’s sitting at the table in the middle of the tour bus, sipping her coffee, still in her pajamas. “Plemmons is going to be a real shock, you know, if you’re not prepared.”
I bounce from foot to foot in the doorway. It’s not even seven a.m., but I’m buzzing with energy.
“It’ll just be a couple hours.” I point to Oscar and Jax’s hotel at the far end of the parking lot. “Jax really needs the practice, and Oscar said he was too busy to do it. Please? Next month I won’t be around to help anybody at all.”
As soon as the show was over last night, I rushed to the Ezolds’ seats, but they’d already gone. Then I spent the whole trip from Santa Barbara to L.A. trying to find their email addresses in my contact list—till I realized they must be the sort of old folks who don’t have any. I was starting to worry I’d messed up Spirit’s whole plan until this morning, when I figured out what they must’ve wanted me to do all along.
Aunt Nic wraps her hands around her coffee mug, studying my face. “Okay,” she says at last, and I leap with excitement. “But only surface streets, no freeways. And be back by lunch, all right?”
“Absolutely.” I grab my new messenger bag off the passenger’s seat. Atlas, check. Tablet, check. I drape the strap across my chest. “You’re the best,” I tell Aunt Nic, standing on my tiptoes to give her a hug. It takes everything in me not to tell her where I’m really going, and what I’m going to bring back for her. But with Spirit guiding me, I know she’ll hear her sister’s voice again soon. I can’t wait to see her face light up when she does.
I can’t wait for my face to light up, either.
“This seems like an awful lot of practice,” Jax says as we zoom along the 101 North. “I thought we’d just stick to, like, parking lots.”
“Nah,” I say. When Jax picks up speed, I shout, “Ready? And . . . clutch!” And together we shift into fourth. “Aunt Nic specifically said she wants you to practice freeway driving. It’s six hours from Oceanside to Phoenix tomorrow night.”
It’s not like I want to be lying. And I’ll tell Jax the truth eventually, when it’s too late for him to turn around. But if I tell him now, he’ll only call Aunt Nic. Get her worried about me all over again.
Anyway, I am helping with his driving, so it’s only partially a lie.
“I guess that makes sense.” Jax nods toward the cup holder, where his cell phone is resting. “You mind calling my uncle? I want to double-check when he needs me back to help set up.”
“Eyes on the road!” I scold. “This is a cell-free driving environment.”
Jax scrunches his mouth. “But if you—”
“Chill out. We’ll be fine on time.” It’s a little over two hours to Bakersfield without traffic and two hours back, so we have to hustle if we want to make it back for lunch. But once I bring Aunt Nic my mom’s tether, I figure she’ll forgive me for being a few minutes late. “Keep your eyes peeled for the 5 North.”
That gets another mouth-scrunch from Jax. “You lost or something?”
“I’ve traveled to all forty-eight continental states,” I tell him, “at least three times each, and I’ve navigated the whole way myself. I’ve never once been lost.” I point out the windshield to the sign for the 5. “The exit’ll be on your right.”
“If you’re up to something, you have to tell me. I can’t get in trouble with Uncle Oscar. I can’t lose this job.”
“All I’m up to is helping you out. Like Oscar asked me to.” Technically, Oscar said I could help. “Or do you think you’re ready to shift by yourself already?”
Jax lets out a sigh. “Whatever you say, Miss Navigator,” he replies. He checks his blind spot, then switches lanes.
The 5 is by far the quickest route to cut through California, but it’s incredibly boring. Desert all around. Dirt and highway and highway and dirt. Every once in a while, there’s a tiny speck of a farm.
We drive in silence for twenty minutes or so, until I can’t take it anymore.
“Do you know how to play Horse?” I ask Jax.
“Like H.O.R.S.E. the basketball game?”
“Horse the car game,” I specify.
“Oh. No.”
“Okay, I’m going to tell you the rules. It’s really complicated. You listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“All right, here it is. When you see a horse, you yell, ‘HORSE!’” I shout at the top of my lungs. “You got it?”
He blinks at me. Once. Twice. “That’s it? That’s the whole game? You yell the word ‘Horse’?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I think Aunt Nic might’ve made it up. We drive a lot. We get bored.”
“How do you win, though? You yell ‘Horse’ the most?”
“You don’t win. You just yell ‘Horse.’”
More blinking. “Or we could just, like, not do that.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “You’ll see,” I tell him. “It’s awesome. You just don’t get it, because you haven’t played before.”
“Mmm.”
I do not reply to the “Mmm.” There aren’t any horses around right now anyway. “How ’bout Twenty Questions?”
At that, Jax perks up a little. “Sure. You pick first.”
Jax guesses my pick—a tree—in only five questions, then stumps me completely with Alexander Graham Bell.
“That’s the guy who invented the light bulb, right?” I ask after I lose.
Jax pulls one hand from the ten-and-two position to smack himself in the forehead. “The telephone, CJ. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.” I only shrug. “I think probably your mom and Nic are right about boarding school.”
“At least I know how to drive stick,” I snap back. “Anyway, it’s my pick again. I’m going to really get you with this one.”
Jax guesses in four.
“You keep picking things just ’cause you can see them,” he says.
“No,” I reply, even though I picked my atlas. “Anyway, I’ll get yours this time. Is it a person?”
“No. Nineteen questions left.”
“A place?”
“No. Eighteen questions.”
“Okay, so it’s a thing, then.”
“Is that a question?” Jax asks.
Even though I’m sure I’m walking into a trap somehow, I ask, “Is it a thing?”
“No. Seventeen questions.”
“How can it not be a person, place, or thing? What the heck it is, then? You’re cheating.”
“I’m not cheating. You wanna keep playing or what?”
I huff and slouch in my seat.
“Don’t you think we should turn around soon?” Jax asks while I try to figure out what isn’t a person, place, or thing.
“Nah. Oscar said not to come back till you were a highway-driving expert. I say we stay on the 5 for at least”—I check the atlas—“thirty-five more miles.”
Jax gets this look on his face, like he might be bad at stick but he is not a dummy, and he says, “Cough it up, CJ.”
“Cough what up?”
“I know you’re not hauling me all the way out here to practice stick. You’re trying to get somewhere. And I think I should get to know where.”
I think over my options. On the one hand, even if Jax did want to turn around now, he probably couldn’t without me helping to shift. On the other hand . . . My gaze drifts to his cell phone in the cup holder.
“You promise not to tell Aunt Nic?” I ask.
“Uh, no,” he says. “Actually, the fact that you asked me that makes me think I probably will want to tell her.” And when I scowl at him, he continues, “Look. Maybe I’ll agree to keep going, maybe I’ll flip a U on the highway and call your aunt right away. I won’t know which till I hear the truth. But you could at least tell me what crime I’m helping you commit.”
“It’s not a crime,” I say at last.
“Okay. So.” He nods. “Tell me the truth. And I promise, no matter what, I’ll always tell you the truth, too. Where are you taking me, CJ Ames?”
I take a deep breath.
“Bakersfield,” I say.
And suddenly, it’s like I can hear the gears clicking in his brain.
“That couple from last night?” he asks. “The ones who knew your mom?”
I nod. “I need to get to that mural, the one my mom helped paint. That’s her tether—I know it. It’s my only way to draw her back to Earth.”
“O . . . kay,” Jax says slowly. Like he’s thinking things through. “Only. Okay, say that really is her tether.”
“It is.”
“Say it is, and we get there, and you see the mural, and you have the feeling or whatever.” I nod, not sure what he’s so confused about. “I mean, then what? Every time you want to talk to your mom, you and your aunt have to drive to Bakersfield and touch a mural? Wouldn’t it be easier if you had a doorknob or something?”
“I don’t have a doorknob,” I say. I’m feeling grumpy toward Jax, and I’m not totally sure why. “I have a mural. Anyway, you know what’s better than a doorknob? A whole door.”
“A door?”
“The mural covers the closet,” I explain. “I saw it in the photo. The closet has a sliding door. And closet doors”—I sit up a little higher in my seat, growing more sure of my plan as I say the words out loud—“come off their tracks. So I don’t need to bring Aunt Nic to Bakersfield every time she wants to talk to my mom. I can bring the door to her.”
Jax takes his eyes off the road long enough to give me another look. “How do you know these people will even let you see the mural, let alone take the closet door off?”
“They’ll let me,” I say. Spirit sent me this far. I know they’re not going to give up on me till I get what I need.
When Jax darts his gaze to me again, his face is softer. “Are you sure this is what you want to do, CJ?” he asks.
“I don’t have a choice,” I reply. “Spirit’s telling me what to do. I’m just going where they say.”
Jax doesn’t answer for a few minutes. But he doesn’t reach for his phone, either.
Finally, he says, “Can I tell you something I don’t get? How do you know when Spirit’s sending you a message and when it’s just a coincidence? I mean, with that story you told me last night, with the lady and her dog. Maybe that was Spirit, warning her about the tree, but maybe, like, the dog kept smelling a squirrel.”
I just raise an eyebrow at him. Because Jax Delgado definitely isn’t the first person to try to tell me that the signs Spirit sends aren’t really signs at all. “Fine,” I tell him, to let him think he’s won the argument—just for a second. “Say the dog was smelling a squirrel.” And then I turn it on him. “How can you know it wasn’t Spirit who put the squirrel there, to make the dog bark?”
Jax opens his mouth, like he wants to argue, then closes it again, like he can’t.
Point: CJ.
“Here’s how I think of it,” I say, to try to make it all clearer. Because I was raised around Spirit—to me, it’s like breathing. But I know all this is new to Jax. “Me and Aunt Nic were outside of Cleveland once, when we had our old motor home, and we had to call this repairman. Aunt Nic was mad ’cause she hated to pay for repairs—we used to fix everything ourselves back then. Mostly with duct tape.” Jax snorts. “But this time, we needed help, ’cause there was this hissing.”
“Hissing?” Jax repeats.
I nod. “It’d been there for days, but we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. It was so annoying.”
“Sure,” Jax says. I can tell he’s waiting for me to get to the point, so I hurry it along.
“But then this repair guy, I swear, the second he walks into the motor home, he goes right over to the sink in the kitchen, and he takes this big ol’ wrench, and he just whacks the wall with it. Busts a hole”—I show Jax how big, with both my hands together—“right through the wallpaper.”
“I bet your aunt was thrilled about that,” Jax says.
“Right?” I reply. “Only then, the guy steps back, and we see behind the wall, and there’s this pipe with a gash in it, shooting water out the side, exactly where he busted the hole. That whole time, we’d had a burst pipe, hissing at us right behind the wall, and we had no idea. But this total stranger walks in and bam! He knows exactly where to look. And you know what he said when I asked him how he knew that?” Jax doesn’t shrug or anything, but I can tell he’s listening. “He pointed to these little specks of mold over the faucet, and these tiny bubbles in the wallpaper, and he goes, ‘I followed the signs.’”
I lean back in my seat and fold my arms over my chest, pretty proud of myself for making my point so clear, with a cool little story and everything.
Only Jax just squints into the sunlight. “So . . .” he says slowly, “the lady with the dog is the wrench? Or the mold?”
I sigh. Obviously my story wasn’t as clear as I thought.
“Spirit is like the pipes in our walls,” I explain. “When we lose people we love here on Earth, we can’t see them anymore, but they’re still around, right? They watch over us. They help us out. They’re around us all the time, just like when you’re in a house or a motor home, the pipes are there, too. Only you don’t usually see them, you know? Most people don’t even think about them. They don’t think about where the water travels through to come out of the faucet, and they don’t think about Spirit, either, taking care of them so they can be safe and happy. You don’t have to know the pipes are in the walls for them to work, and you don’t have to know about Spirit, either. But either way, they’re there. And if you pay attention, and you know how to read the signs, you can figure out where they’ve been, and what they’re doing.”
Jax thinks on that. “Maybe,” he says at last. But I can tell I haven’t really convinced him.
I give up. I don’t have any other cool stories. “Wait till someone you love dies,” I tell him. “Then you’ll get it.”
As soon as I say that, I see Jax’s face fall, and I know. I’ve seen that look a hundred times a night.
“Who was it?” I ask. My voice is softer.
It takes him a moment to answer. Not like he’s thinking about what to say, but like he needs time to get the words out.
“My grandpa,” he says. “My dad’s dad. We were really close. He died in April.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. I know from experience that’s the only real thing to say.
“That’s part of the reason my mom thought it might be good for me to work here. She thought your aunt could talk to him for me. But then when I got here, I wasn’t so sure I wanted her to.”
“It’s not scary,” I say, suddenly understanding why he was so freaked out last night. “Your grandpa is just as nice as a spirit as he was when he was alive.”
Jax snorts. “Uh, Abuelo was awesome,” he says, “but he was never nice. Once when my sister was five or something, she showed him this picture of a horse she’d made in school, and he was like, ‘I could do better.’” He laughs a little snot-laugh, then darts a sideways glance at me. I pretend not to have noticed. “He was pretty great, though.”
I’m quiet for a minute, letting Jax think. I know what it’s like to miss somebody. Sometimes you just need space.
But too much space can be bad, too.
“You didn’t tell me you had a sister,” I say.
“Yeah,” Jax replies. “She’s a year and a half younger. She’s super annoying. At some point she decided I should pretend to be an ‘international pop sensation’”—he says the phrase like it’s a curse word—“because she thinks if she’s related to a famous person, she can cut in line at the Cinnabon.” I laugh. “Sometimes my mom makes me take her and her friends to the mall, and they spend the whole time trying to teach me poses.” He hunches into the collar of his jacket, then gives me what I’m guessing is supposed to be a cool-guy sideways smirk. “Mari and her friends call me ‘Jackson Gato.’”
“You look just like a pop sensation,” I tell him.
He does not.
“Once while I was doing it, the woman at the fro-yo shop gave Mari a mini sprinkle cup,” he says, “but I’m pretty sure it was just a promotion.”
When he goes quiet after that, I ask, “Is it weird being on the road? Away from your family, I mean?” Living on a bus is all I’ve ever known, but I can imagine it might be hard, for someone who’s used to staying put.
Jax thinks for a minute. “So, for Christmas, right?” he tells me. “While dinner’s cooking, we always go to the park on the water to watch the boat parade. It’s awesome because everyone decorates their boats with Christmas lights and there’s fireworks and everything.” He drums his fingers—thump, thump—on the wheel. “And Abuelo makes this huge deal, every year, about how no one can eat anything from the food trucks so we won’t ruin our appetites, but then the two of us always sneak off when no one’s looking and grab something.” He laughs, but then he clears his throat, like he’s embarrassed he’s told me something so personal.
I give Jax as much space as he needs.
“Anyway,” he goes on, straightening his back a little, “I’m always in charge of making the relleno for Christmas dinner.” He glances at me and clarifies. “It’s a side dish. Like, Ecuadorian stuffing, basically. And one year when we came back from the park I found out Mari had dumped in, like, an entire jar of extra olives when I wasn’t looking, just to mess with me. So now my main cooking job, every year, is to hide all the olives.” He thump-thumps on the wheel again.
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
“I just keep thinking how this year she’ll probably get away with it,” he says, his voice heavy. “And then the relleno will be ruined for everyone.”
I look out the window instead of at Jax.
“We usually order pizza for Christmas,” I say at last. “And we play poker for pretzels. I kick everyone’s butts.”
“I believe it,” Jax replies seriously.
I lean forward in my seat, finally looking over at him. “If you want,” I tell Jax, “I’ll dump a jar of olives on your pizza so you feel like you’re at home.”
And at that, Jax laughs. “That’s very thoughtful of you.”
I smile back at him. “You know,” I say, “I’m glad you’re the one I tricked into driving me to Bakersfield. I don’t think Oscar would’ve been nearly as fun.” Jax laughs again.
“You don’t have brothers or sisters or anything?” he asks me. “It’s just you and your aunt?”
“And my mom, yeah.”
“No dad?”
“Nah. Well”—I adjust my headband—“I have one, obviously, but no one knows who he is. My mom met him when she was traveling through Europe, but she never even found out his last name or anything.” I move on to something more serious. “Is it a watermelon?”
Jax snot-laughs so hard he has to wipe his nose. “A watermelon is a thing!” he shouts.
“Well, just tell me what it is, then.”
He shakes his head. “You’re down to sixteen questions.”
“Potato?”
“No. Fifteen.”
“Cactus?”
“Are you just guessing stuff so you’ll lose and I’ll tell you what it is?”
“Maybe. Is it a haircut?”
“This is so not how you play this game, CJ.”
“Is it that stuffing stuff? Relleno?”
“No. Thirteen questions.”
“Hey, Jax?” I say. He darts his eyes at me again. “Thanks for not turning around after I told you where we were going.”
He nods. “But if your aunt gets mad at me for helping you, you have to have my back, okay? Because, seriously, I cannot—”
“I know, I know. You love this job more than anything. Don’t worry, okay? Aunt Nic won’t be mad when we get back with the tether.” When he opens his mouth to protest, I say, “And if she is mad, I’ll swear on a Bible that it was all my fault, and that I kidnapped you. Now.” I slap my hands on my thighs. “Is it an alligator?”
“You are so bad at this—”
“Wait, I’ve got it!” I shout suddenly.
“You do not have it.”
“I do.” I’m serious now. “I know what it is.” I shift in my seat because I want to see the look on Jax’s face when I get it. “It’s Spirit.”
“Spirit?” He wrinkles up his nose like he smells something awful, which is not exactly the look I was hoping for.
But I know I must be right. “Yeah,” I say. “Spirit with a capital ‘S.’ All the souls that have left Earth, whether they’re drawn Far Away or still passing back and forth. That’s got to be it, because it’s not a person, place, or thing. I guessed it.”
Jax does that scrunchy-mouth thing he’s so good at. “No,” he says. “Although that would’ve been a great pick. I wish I’d picked that.”
I throw my hands in the air. “I give up. For real. Just tell me. I can’t take it anymore. What is it?”
“Photosynthesis,” Jax replies. When I glare at him, he says, “That’s how plants make their food, using light from the sun.”
“You could’ve picked anything in the world,” I say slowly, “and you picked photosynthesis? Anyway, isn’t that a ‘thing’? I think photosynthesis counts as a ‘thing.’”
“Oh, no.”
“It is,” I say. “It totally is, which means I’m right and you lose.”
He shakes his head at me, and suddenly I realize he’s not thinking about Twenty Questions. “I meant ‘Oh, no, there’s something wrong with the truck.’ Look.”
There’s a blinking light on the dash—a circle around an exclamation point. I’ve lived on the road my whole life, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that blinking exclamation points are never good.
“Get off at the next exit,” I say. “We’ll find a gas station. I bet someone can help us figure out what’s wrong.” I try to sound confident, but there’s one thing I’m worried about—is this detour a part of Spirit’s plan, or are we off course before we’ve barely even begun?