TWELVE
“ARE YOU SURE about this?” Jax asks me as I bite into my vanilla cupcake with thick chocolate frosting. One thing I can say about Jax—he has a knack for picking good dessert places. This one’s called the Sweetest Thing, right outside of San Clemente, still an hour’s drive from L.A. “You really want to try to live with your mom?”
“It’s what Spirit wants,” I clarify. “And anyway, why wouldn’t I? Most kids live with their moms. And she said she’s been trying to get me back my whole life. You heard that, right?” I never was supposed to go to boarding school. That was just another thing Aunt Nic made up. She kicked my mom out of her life to have me all to herself, and now she’s kicking me out because she doesn’t want to share the spotlight once she’s a reality TV star.
Not that she will be a reality TV star.
Not that I’d want to live with her anymore anyway.
“I heard your mom say she never had the money to come get you,” Jax replies, twisting his cupcake around on its little plate. He made a point of grabbing a knife and fork before we sat down, like he thinks he needs them to eat a cupcake.
“Right? Maybe we can get the zoo to give her a raise. I mean, you saw that exhibit. It’s awesome.”
Jax looks up from his cupcake—salted caramel with mango glaze. I thought it sounded weird when he ordered it, but actually it looks delicious. “But you just met her,” he says.
“I just met you, too,” I argue.
“Right,” Jax says like I’m agreeing with him, which I’m not. “And if I asked you to move in with me, it would be weird.”
“Oh, Jax,” I say in a fake swoony voice. I clasp my hands under my chin like one of those ladies in old-fashioned movies who can’t stop fainting. “I had no idea you had such feelings for me!”
“What I meant was,” Jax says, darting embarrassed eyes at the couple glancing our way, “you hardly know anything about your mom. So how can you know if you want to live with her?”
“She’s my mother,” I tell him. I don’t see why any of this is so hard to understand. “And anyway, if Spirit wants me to live with her, I don’t have a choice, really. It’s what I have to do.”
Jax is frowning. “I think you always have a choice about your own life, CJ,” he says.
I let out a huff. “You’re not being super helpful right now,” I tell him. “Didn’t you say your grandpa wanted you to help me?”
Jax carefully peels down one side of his cupcake wrapper. “If that was Abuelo sending me a message,” he says, “then he was probably telling me to look out for you.” He stops peeling and meets my gaze. “Which is different from helping.”
There is a smidge of chocolate frosting on my thumb. I lick it off.
“I just keep thinking,” Jax says as he starts peeling again, “that you didn’t talk to your mom your whole life because you thought she was dead. But she knew you were alive. So how come she never tried to talk to you?”
I roll my eyes. “She told us that. My aunt took me away from her, and then she lied to me about it.” If it weren’t for Aunt Nic, I’d be an artist’s kid in San Diego right now. I’d wear blue every day, and I’d already know how great french fries were with mayonnaise, and probably a million other things, too.
“Maybe you should talk to your aunt before you get mad about it. Just hear her side of the story.”
“You really think there’s anything Aunt Nic could tell me that would make it okay that she lied like that?”
When he doesn’t answer for a while, I think it might be the end of the conversation—maybe Jax will start discussing the baking soda in the cupcakes, or something equally boring. But he doesn’t. Instead he says, “Abuelo used to always tell me about what it was like when he ran away as a kid, back in Quito. Like how for three days, he lived off of these little oranges, and how after he finished reading the book he’d brought with him he wrote his own stories in the margins so he wouldn’t get bored.”
I take a sip of water from my paper cup. I don’t know why Jax is telling me this, but I can tell it’s important, so I try to listen.
“And all that stuff was true, I think,” Jax goes on, “but Abuelo always made it sound like this fun adventure. But then the night of his funeral, we were all up super late playing Cuarenta—that’s this card game Abuelo loved. I don’t think anyone wanted to stop playing, because once we stopped, the night would be over, you know?”
He pauses, and I nod.
“And after a while, my dad and my aunt started telling all these stories about Abuelo I’d never heard before, that were, like, sort of what Abuelo’d told me, but not totally. They said he hid in his neighbor’s yard for a whole week, using a tarp for a blanket. And he got so sick from eating all those oranges, he never ate any again. Which, once they said that I realized, yeah. I’d never seen him eat one, ever. It was like my whole life, I’d heard one story.” He suddenly tugs my half-eaten cupcake toward him, with the bite marks chiseled into the chocolate frosting. “And it was true, what Abuelo told me, but it was fluffy, you know? Pretty. Like chocolate frosting.”
“Chocolate frosting?” I ask. Mostly I want my cupcake back.
“But the story my dad and my aunt told me”—he picks up his cupcake, with the glaze—“it was messy. Definitely not as sweet. But it also . . . It seeped into all the little cracks I never noticed before.” He turns the cupcake this way and that, and I can see the cake through the white-orange glaze, and the tiny dots of holes in the cake’s surface. “It let me see more of what really happened.”
When I’m sure Jax is finished, I point to the chocolate-frosted cupcake across the table and tell him, “I was still eating that.” I half mean it as a joke, but Jax doesn’t seem to think it’s very funny. He slides the cupcake back my way.
“I just think,” Jax goes on, “what your mom said today, about why she left—it seemed like a chocolate frosting sort of truth. And I think maybe you should wait for the mango-glaze truth before you decide anything for sure.”
Here’s what I think, though.
Jax Delgado may be four years older than me, but that doesn’t mean he knows everything about my life, or my mom.
I reach for my cupcake. Chocolate frosting and all.
“I think this truth tastes just fine,” I tell him. And I cram the whole thing into my mouth.
We don’t speak much the whole way back to the theater. The only sounds in the truck are the whirring of the gears and every once in a while a “Ready-and-clutch!” But when we zoom past the theater, with the tour bus parked out front, I have to speak up.
“You missed the turn!” I tell Jax, moving in my seat to watch the theater shrink behind us. “Flip a U at the next light.”
“Your aunt wanted me to drop you off at a diner,” Jax says. “It’s up here. She texted me while we were stopped for gas. She said if I dropped you off, you couldn’t run away, and then you’d have to talk to her.”
I harrumph into my seat. “I wasn’t going to run away like your grandpa and live on oranges,” I grumble. “I’m not doing anything”—I search for the word that Grant used before—“impetuous.” I just need to keep my eyes open for another sign from Spirit. They’ll tell me how to find the money my mom needs to take me in. In the meantime, I do not want to go to a diner with my lying aunt. “Just stay out of it, Jax. You’re not my big brother. Turn around up here.” He zips through the intersection. “Jax!”
“Why can’t you just talk to her?” he asks. “Listen to what she has to say. Then make up your mind.”
“Because she’s a liar,” I reply. I feel hot just thinking about it. Like anger is a feeling you can wear on your skin. “Do you not get that? Everything she’s ever told me, my whole life, is a lie.” I let myself laugh at her stupid jokes, I let her do my stupid hair, I let myself care about what she thought, and the whole time, she was lying. Everything was a lie. “So it doesn’t matter what she has to say now, because it will just be more lies. You were the one who was so sure she was a crook, back at the mansion. And now you’re totally on her side?”
“I just think, even if she’s lying about stuff, maybe she has a good reason. And you’ve known her way longer than you’ve known your mom, so why not listen to her?”
He’s scratching his arm.
“You don’t want to go home,” I say slowly, starting to piece things together. We’re passing hotels, office buildings, a police station. All the while we’re nearing the one person I’d give anything to avoid. “You want to keep working for my aunt so you don’t have to go back to Florida, and if you think she’s some horrible liar, then you’ll feel bad. Right? Is that it?” He doesn’t answer. “I thought your grandpa told you to look out for me.”
“I am looking out for you, CJ.” But he’s still scratching his arm.
“You keep telling me that,” I say as we whiz through another intersection. I see the diner, two lights away. “But you’re the one who needs a twelve-year-old to rescue you.”
Jax doesn’t say anything else until we’re turning into the diner parking lot. “I’m going to park right in front of the door,” he tells me. “Then I’m going to wait until you walk in.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” I grumble. “You can’t even get back to the theater if you leave me here.”
“I’ll call Uncle Oscar to come help me,” he replies calmly. For some reason that calmness makes me even more furious.
“If you don’t pull out of this parking lot right this second,” I tell him, “I’m going to make sure Aunt Nic fires you.”
He finds a spot and shuts off the truck without even making it buck. I can see Aunt Nic at a booth inside. She jumps up and waves as soon as she spots us.
“Thanks for the ride,” I tell Jax, scooping my messenger bag and the orange box off the cab floor.
“CJ!” he calls as I jump out.
But I only slam the truck door. Because there’s nothing left for him to say.
I let Aunt Nic wrap me up in a hug when I walk into the diner, because I don’t want to make a scene. But everywhere her skin meets mine burns like fire.
We slide into the booth’s high-back maroon seats, and I set the orange box beside me, and my messenger bag, too. Feeling the bag’s smooth leather makes me mad all over again—because it’s such a perfect present, and I don’t want to love something that has anything to do with Aunt Nic.
Luckily, the waitress comes over right away, so there are two more minutes of my life I don’t have to spend talking to my aunt. Aunt Nic orders pasta primavera, even though it looks gross in the photo. I get french fries. “Can you put mayonnaise on the side?” I ask the waitress. And when Aunt Nic raises her eyebrows, I don’t bother to explain.
The waitress slides our menus under her arm. “Do I know you from somewhere?” she asks Aunt Nic. Her name tag reads SYLVIE. “TV or something?”
Aunt Nic opens her mouth to answer, but then looks at me and pauses. “I’ve never been on TV,” she tells Sylvie. “Thought I might be, but it looks like that’s not gonna happen.”
The waitress spends one more second blinking at Aunt Nic, then says, “Food’ll be right out,” and leaves to place our order.
“So,” I say, slapping my hands on the table. “Why’d you tell me my mom was dead?”
Aunt Nic wraps both hands around her water glass, and when she pulls them away again they are wet with condensation. “I’m really sorry you had to find out about your mom this way, CJ. But I’m glad, at least, that the truth is out there.”
“The truth?” I say with a sneer. “You told me my mom was drawn Far Away, that I could never talk to her again. You told me our house burned down.” I blink at her. “Was that just so I wouldn’t try to find her?” When Aunt Nic doesn’t answer right away, I dig the cement mushroom cap out of my coat pocket, thump it on the table. “Your plan didn’t work,” I say.
Aunt Nic shakes her head. “Your mom was supposed to clear her stuff out of that house, soon as we left, then I’d sell it. It was as good as . . .” She looks down at the mushroom cap on the table. “I’m sorry, CJ. I never should’ve lied about that.”
“All you’ve ever done is lie to me.”
Aunt Nic’s face looks pained, like I’ve hurt her. Good.
“That’s not entirely fair,” she replies.
“Name one thing that hasn’t been a lie.”
“I love you,” she says immediately. “I’ve always loved you.”
“Well, you’re sure great at showing it,” I tell her.
Aunt Nic doesn’t fight back, like I expect her to. What she says, her voice soft, is, “Do you remember when you were seven or eight and the motor home broke down? We had to stay for a week in Long Beach? Not too far from here.”
I remember. That week was one of my favorites. We found a tidal pool and spent hours searching for starfish, even though it was January and frigid. We went up on the boardwalk way after dark, when everything was shut down, and ate pretend cotton candy and sang at the top of our lungs, because there was no one to hear us but the dolphins. Aunt Nic even helped me hop the gate on the Ferris wheel so we could sit in the bottom car, our feet dangling off the edge while we watched the dark waves crash on the shore. And I remember we were sitting like that, just us two, when it started to snow, right there on the beach. It never snows in Long Beach. Not ever. It was magical. I remember.
“Maybe,” I say with a shrug.
“I tried to tell you that week,” she says slowly. “About your mom. About everything. It was such a perfect night, that last day on the boardwalk, and I thought, ‘Maybe once CJ knows, it could always be like this. No more wandering all over the place. We could get a little house and live right here in this town, and come up on the boardwalk every evening.’ I wanted to tell you then. I really did.”
“So why didn’t you?”
She nudges her water glass back and forth across the table. Back and forth. “You were so happy,” she says at last. And she smiles a sad little smile. “I guess I didn’t want to ruin it.”
But I think I know the real reason. Because if she had told me the truth that day, she knew I’d never want to see her again as long as I lived.
I’m about to say just that when our waitress comes over and plops our food on the table. “Sorry to interrupt, ladies!” she says, way too cheerful. “Enjoy your meal!”
Aunt Nic picks up her fork. “I think servers like to wait around the corner for the exact worst time to come to the table,” she says, and she gives me a look like even though I’m so mad I’ll have to smile.
I do not.
Aunt Nic sighs and sets down her fork. “I know you’re mad at me, CJ,” she says. “Of course you are. And I should’ve told you, only it kept getting harder and harder. And then with the reality show starting—when I thought there was a reality show—I was worried it was all building into this huge tower of lies. And I think I thought . . .” She picks up her fork again. “I told myself that if you were away at boarding school, away from all this”—she waves her fork around the restaurant, toward the theater, herself, everything—“then maybe it wouldn’t affect you if the tower fell. Maybe you’d never find out about the lies, or if you did it would seem like so long ago that it wouldn’t matter so much. But that was stupid.” She stabs a noodle with her fork. “Obviously all of this has affected you more than I intended.”
“But why did you take me from my mom in the first place?” My voice comes out cracked, like I’m sad instead of angry, which is not right at all.
Aunt Nic opens her mouth slowly, then closes it. Squints at me. “CJ,” she says after a moment. “You just don’t know what your mom is like.”
“I do know,” I reply. “She’s nice. And she’s funny. She’s . . .” The way she lit up the whole zoo, just talking. Her sunshine-warm smile. “She’s amazing.”
“She is,” Aunt Nic agrees. “She is all those things. She’s also flighty and unreliable and incredibly frustrating. She’d leave for the grocery store to get you formula and come back six hours later with balloons. You did not need balloons. Sometimes she’d be gone for days.”
“You didn’t have to make her leave,” I say. My voice is a whisper.
The look Aunt Nic gives me then, it’s like she feels sorry for me. It makes me hate her even more.
“Your mother left on her own,” Aunt Nic tells me. “I just told her she couldn’t come back.”
Which is precisely, of course, the moment our waitress pops over to our table and asks, “How’re we doing over here?”
“We’re fine,” I grumble.
The waitress nods, but she doesn’t leave. She’s staring at Aunt Nic, like she wants to ask her something but can’t get up the nerve.
Of course this is happening now. Of course it is.
“Let me guess,” I tell the waitress. Sylvie. “You just figured out where you know her from.” I jerk my head toward Aunt Nic.
Sylvie nods quickly, excited but nervous, too. Her hand is shaking around the wad of straws in her apron pocket.
“Yes,” she says. “Yeah. You’re that lady from the internet videos. You talk to people.” She glances at the customers at the other tables, then leans in close. “Dead people.”
Aunt Nic shoots a look my way before responding. “That’s me,” she says.
“Oh, I just knew it!” And while half of me is annoyed that Sylvie’s interrupting what is clearly a super-intense conversation, the other half is grateful not to have to look at my aunt for a minute. So while Sylvie whoops like Aunt Nic is the greatest human in the history of the world, I focus on folding my straw wrapper into an accordion.
“Well, if you’re hearing the voice of a bald man with a super-gut,” Sylvie tells Aunt Nic, “I just wanted to let you know he’s probably trying to get in touch with me.” And then she gives a little laugh, like she’s joking, only obviously she’s hoping Aunt Nic will say, “Yes, he’s right here,” and do a reading at the table.
I fold my straw-wrapper accordion. Nice even creases.
Aunt Nic takes a sip of her soda. I can feel the heat of her gaze as she tries to make eye contact with me, but I’m not looking. At last she says to Sylvie, “Is he the guy making all the bad jokes?”
Sylvie drops her whole wad of straws on the floor.
“No way,” she says.
I switch to folding up my place mat corners.
“He’s telling me someone missed the funeral,” Aunt Nic goes on. And immediately Sylvie starts crying.
“I couldn’t go,” Sylvie says between blubbering. People from other tables are definitely starting to pay attention now. “The plane ticket was so expensive and . . . Who misses their own dad’s funeral?”
I fold those place mat corners, totally ignoring all of it.
“Your dad’s saying it’s okay,” Aunt Nic tells her. “Please tell her to forgive herself, he says. She’s my little . . . He’s showing me something goofy, like, a piece of food? Some nickname he had for you.” She squints at Sylvie. “What is that? A cupcake or a . . . ?”
I stop folding.
“A buttered biscuit?” Sylvie asks, wiping at her face. “That’s what he called me sometimes. His ‘little buttered biscuit.’” She laughs, like she knows it’s ridiculous.
“That’s it!” Aunt Nic hoots. “Oh, he’s laughing so hard now. He loves you so much, honey. He says, I’m so lucky to get to see the young woman you’re turning into.”
I can’t take it anymore.
“My aunt isn’t talking to your dad,” I tell the waitress. But I look right at Aunt Nic when I say it—and I guess I’m pretty pleased with the way her mouth falls open. “She can’t talk to any spirits at all. She. Is. A. Liar.”
“Uh . . .” Sylvie starts, confused.
Aunt Nic blinks at her. “Sorry about this,” she tells Sylvie, meaning me. “My niece is just having a little bit of a tough time.”
Sylvie puts her hands in the air, like None of my business. “I’ll let you guys alone. Sorry I bothered you. But”—she bends down to scoop up the straws, then grips Aunt Nic’s hand tight in her own, straws and all—“thank you. Seriously. That was . . . You’re amazing.” And she rushes off, stuffing the straws in her apron pocket with one hand and wiping her tears with the other.
“‘Buttered biscuit’?” I ask Aunt Nic when she turns back to face me. She takes a bite of her pasta and says nothing. “You didn’t know that was her nickname. You didn’t even know it was her dad she was talking about until she said so. You’re not talking to any spirits, are you? You never were. Roger was right. You didn’t just lie about my mom. You’ve been lying about everything. That lady’s dad . . .” I say, nodding toward Sylvie over by the register. She keeps glancing our way as she talks to two other waiters excitedly. “He probably is trying to talk to her. And whatever message he needs to pass on, you got in the way.” My voice is fire, like my skin. “What if that woman meets a real medium now, who actually can hear her dad, and she doesn’t believe them, because of all the lies you told her first?” I fold my arms tight over my chest, to keep myself from bursting into a million angry pieces. “It’s one thing to lie to me, and to other people. But you’re messing with Spirit. Don’t you even feel the tiniest bit bad about that?”
Aunt Nic doesn’t bother to argue. She’s too busy darting her eyes around the diner, like she’s worried about someone overhearing. “I didn’t plan on doing this for a living,” she says at last. Which is no sort of apology at all. “It just sort of happened.”
“Do Oscar and Cyrus know you’re a phony?” I ask. Was that what Oscar meant, I wonder, when he told me not to search for answers?
Aunt Nic clears her throat. “They believe what they want,” she says. “They don’t ask a lot of questions.”
I’m so furious right now, my face burns. I’m mad at myself for defending her. I’m mad for all the people she’s lied to for so long. And I’m mad, too, for all the spirits who haven’t been able to connect with their loved ones because she got in the way.
“How do you just happen to lie about something like that?” I say.
“It didn’t start out as anything so . . .” Aunt Nic searches the diner again, then lowers her voice. “Back in college, I was in this theater troupe, and we’d do this mind-reading skit.” She pokes at another forkful of pasta, while I glare at her. I even hate the way she eats now. “We’d pick someone out of the audience, and I’d pretend to read their mind. I didn’t try to be good at it, I just was. It was easy. I just had to ask the right questions.”
“And then you forgot to tell them it was all made up,” I continue for her.
Aunt Nic spears more pasta but sets the fork down on her plate. “After your mom left—”
“After you kicked her out.”
“I knew we needed a change. So we took off in that horrible motor home, no idea where we were headed, no job prospects. And the first RV park we landed in—the very first one, I swear—this little old lady asks me if I know anyone who can reach her dead husband. She wanted to pay for a reading. So”—she picks her fork back up—“I told her I could do it.”
“You lied,” I say. I haven’t touched my fries. They don’t look nearly as good as the ones I had with my mom.
“I felt awful that first time,” she says. She’s really digging into her pasta now, like the most important thing she needs to do is eat. “But the lady was so happy afterward, thinking she’d reached her husband again, and I thought, ‘Well, is it so bad? If it helps her?’”
The worst part, maybe, is that I know she’s partially right. She does make people happy. I’ve seen it. She made Sylvie happy five minutes ago.
But I remember, too, at Meg and Grant’s house, how the tiniest lie can hurt someone more than you ever expected. And if she can’t hear Spirit at all, then obviously she has no idea how they feel about anything.
I’d be willing to bet they’re not thrilled.
I catch sight of the mushroom cap on the table then, beside my napkin. “And the tethers?” I ask. “Do you just pretend to pull spirits back to Earth when you’re holding a tether? How can you know if you’re pulling the spirit down or not? Why even bother?”
“Oh, I just made that all up,” she replies, and she stabs three more pieces of pasta. Stab, stab, stab. “If I can’t get a good sense of someone, I say their loved one’s been drawn Far Away, so they’ll bring me something useful to work off of.” Stab, stab. “You can learn a lot from the stuff these people bring in. It’s—” She cuts herself off when she notices someone nearing our table.
Back when I was six, I broke my leg at an RV park pool. Cracked my tibia like a pretzel stick doing cannonballs in too-shallow water. I nearly passed out from the pain in the ambulance. Couldn’t even walk on the cast for a week.
This hurts worse.
I know I should be focusing on what Spirit wants me to do—to find enough money that I can move in with my mom. But all I can think of is Roger telling me, The truth is out there, if you want to see it. I wonder how thrilled he’d be now if he knew what I’ve found out.
“Call ’im.”
That’s what Aunt Nic says. Just like that.
“Huh?” I jerk my head up, heart thumping in my chest—and the first thing I see when I do is an octopus. It’s a ring, on the finger of a new waiter at the edge of our table. The creature’s silver tentacles wrap the waiter’s index finger all the way up to the knuckle.
I suck in a deep breath.
“What an unusual name,” Aunt Nic is telling the waiter. Neither one of them is looking at me. “Is it German, or . . .”
The waiter’s name tag, I see, says CALLUM.
“It’s Scottish,” the waiter says. “‘Kal-um.’ Uh . . .” He twists his octopus ring around his finger. “Sylvie said that you could, uh, talk to someone for me?”
Aunt Nic glances at me, like she doesn’t want to make me more mad, but the truth is I’m not even paying attention anymore. Not to her anyway.
Call him.
It’s another sign from Spirit.
It isn’t till we’re back on the tour bus that Aunt Nic asks me, “What happened with Jax today, anyway? Oscar wants me to fire him.”
I climb the loft ladder to my bedroom, examining the walls as I go. Knowing that there are pipes behind there, carrying water, even if I can’t see or hear them. Wondering what kind of monster would lie about seeing pipes they really couldn’t. Wondering how furious the pipes would be, and what they’d want to do about it.
“CJ?” Aunt Nic calls up when I don’t answer. “Did you have any opinion about Jax?”
And I only tell her, “Mmm,” and shut the curtain on her.
Because I’m saving all my words for someone else.