In case you were wondering, it is 1,365.84 miles from Liberty, Missouri, to Las Vegas, Nevada. That’s twenty hours of driving. Or, in my case, twenty hours of sitting between the two most annoying sisters on Earth and wishing a UFO tractor beam would suck me right through the roof of the car.
When they weren’t busy whining about the radio station, they were fighting over earbuds. They complained that it was too hot, and then when Mom put on the air conditioner, they griped that they were freezing. Cassi practiced her cheers for 947 hours straight, and Vega’s phone beeped with text messages more often than I blinked. They both bellowed that my legs were touching theirs and that my breath smelled like something died in my mouth and that my atlas was getting in their way.
Comet sat in the row of seats behind us and, every ten seconds or so, licked the back of my head. My hair was plastered to my scalp with dog drool. Which made Cassi and Vega complain even more.
Behind Comet were our suitcases and a box filled with clanking broken pieces of Huey.
I passed the time by memorizing the years that Halley’s Comet passed through our solar system, going all the way back to 1066, and trying to imagine what it would look like from the top of Olympus Mons, the sixteen-mile-high volcano on Mars.
I also passed time by flipping the pages of the atlas Priya gave me, keeping track of the towns we passed.
That was what I’d been doing when I saw it.
After an eternity, we’d finally crossed over into Nevada and I was able to flip to the final page of our journey. The brush and dirt, and even the hazy mountains off in the distance, had gotten boring, so I followed I-15 with my finger, tracing how far we had left to go. We were just outside of Moapa; not far now. My eyes wandered past Vegas and up the page a bit, and my finger stopped.
“Lovell Canyon,” I whispered. Excitement jolted through me. “Lovell Canyon! Lovely cannons!” I shouted, and Cassi, who’d been dozing, jerked awake.
“Ready! Okay! We’ve got spirit yes we d …,” she muttered before falling back to sleep.
I ignored her. “That’s it! That’s what Cash meant!”
Mom twisted around in her seat to see what was going on. “What’s the problem?” she asked.
I pointed to the atlas, turning it so Mom could see it. “Not lovely cannons! Lovell Canyon! It’s a place outside of Las Vegas.”
Mom squinted at the map. “What about it?”
“Don’t you see? He wasn’t talking about some sort of war. I knew it!”
“Who?” Mom asked, looking thoroughly confused at this point.
“Cash! He was telling me where to take Huey!”