IT WAS WEIRD, not having a mission. I mean, I’d spent pretty much my entire life missionless. And Ro and I still hung out after school, and then after school let out, we called each other in the mornings and met up anyway. Sometimes we went over to Vic’s and got huge waffle cones; I mixed it up every time, and Ro consistently got strawberry. We walked along the river until it got too hot and the ice cream dripped down our fingers. But most days, we biked over to Hogan’s and still read comics. I caught up on the latest installment of the X-Men series. Ro had moved on from The Flash to Wonder Woman. We’d found out that Mr. Voltz was planning on taking a cross-country road trip with his dog.
“It’ll be like what John Steinbeck did,” he said, while he was tidying up the register.
I stopped inspecting the candy shelf. “Who’s John Steinbeck?”
“He’s a famous author,” Ro said, finally looking up from her comics. “Right, Mr. Voltz? My mom reads some of his stuff. He took a road trip with his dog and wrote about it. Can we help plan out your trip?”
Still, it was weird to go home and do nothing again. And as school got out and the summer days got sticky-hot, Ro practically peeled me off the carpet of her house and told me we had to do something.
And that was how we ended up at the state fair. I hadn’t been in years, but it was pretty much how I remembered it. There were white tents and colorful rides. I could smell the corn dogs and funnel cakes from the other side of the fairgrounds. The sun was hot on the backs of our necks and made our shirts stick to our skin.
I guess some things were better this time around. They’d added new rides with flashing lights. Danny had driven Ro and me here, so I could stuff my face with as much cotton candy as I wanted without Mom hovering over my shoulder.
Plus, I was completely crushing Ro at the carnival games.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said as I beat her at another round of balloon darts. “Somehow my angles are always wrong.”
“Angles don’t cut it.” I shrugged. “It’s all about instinct.”
“Okay, teach me.”
“Not until I beat you another round.”
“Well, you’re being awfully secretive lately.”
“Nuh-uh.” I leveled my dart and closed one eye to aim. Pop.
“Yeah, you are. You won’t even show me what you’re drawing these days.”
“Hey, that’s a top-secret project,” I said, turning to her. “I’ll show you first, I promise. Even before I show my dad.”
“Huh,” she said. “You show him stuff now?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “I mail him some of my drawings. He sends me some of his sketches for Spacebound, even before they publish it. We call sometimes, too.”
Ro grinned. “That’s good to hear.”
“Yeah.” I smiled at my shoes. “He’s coming to visit us the weekend before school starts. Says he’s going to take us down to Disneyland. You wanna come?”
Ro’s expression froze. “I don’t know.”
“Come on,” I said. I launched another dart. “It’ll be our last weekend of fun before eighth grade starts. I heard all the homeroom teachers are super boring this year.”
She wouldn’t quite meet my eyes. She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “I’m not coming back for eighth grade.”
I stopped playing. “What?”
“I was going to tell you earlier, but I didn’t know if anything was happening for sure or if we would sell the house but”—she took a deep breath—“we did. A week ago, actually. So yeah. We’re moving to San Francisco at the end of this summer.”
Wait.
What?
Ro Geraghty was moving. To a whole other city.
It was as if my heart had dropped into my stomach. Whoosh.
I didn’t know what to say for a few moments. “That soon?”
Ro nodded.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
I looked down at the ground. I mean, I guess San Francisco wasn’t too far away. Two hours by car, tops. I could even probably bike there in a day. Not that I ever would, but it wasn’t like she was moving to Connecticut or something. Still, it was hard to think of her not being a three-minute bike ride from my house.
“You can visit me,” she said. “When I move in. There’s tons of places I can take you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I will. And I’ll write you.”
“You better.”
Ro’s arms were crossed. I couldn’t tell if she was sad or excited or over the moon about this, to be honest. For the first time, I couldn’t read her expression.
She sighed. “I just . . .” She scrunched up her face, like she was trying to think of what to say. “It took me a long while to agree to it. I love the city. My entire family is there. From my mom’s side, anyway. But I’ll have to start all over again. I’ll have to go to a new school where I won’t know anyone. I was kind of mad about it at first, but I’ve kind of come to terms with it. I don’t know. This could be good for us, maybe, in the long run.”
“You’ll be all right,” I said. “You’ll probably meet some cool people in the city.” I smiled a little. “I’ll be replaced.”
“You’re right,” Ro said sarcastically. “Guess I’ll just have to find another comic-book superfan with a secret famous dad to be friends with.”
“Hey, you don’t know,” I said. “The odds could be pretty good.”
“Anyway,” she said, looking at the ground. “I’m still around for a few weeks. At least.” She looked up. “Wanna try that?”
I looked at where she was pointing. It was a carnival ride that was shaped like the top part of a funnel. It was one of those newer rides that were painted with bright colors, with lots of flashing lights and THE GRAVITRON spelled out in neon letters.
“I’ve heard of these things before,” she said. “I heard that the centrifugal force is so strong that you’re practically glued to the wall.”
“Let’s do this,” I said, even though I had no idea what on earth centrifugal force was.
We got inside and leaned back against the walls.
“I heard people try to turn upside down in these things,” Ro said.
“Bet you can’t,” I whispered.
“Oh, you’re so on.”
Sure enough, the machine started spinning, slowly at first, and then faster and faster. My arms started feeling like lead. Ro tried to turn herself upside down on the wall, but the force was too strong, so she ended up in a weird position with her head leaning on my shoulder. And as the ride spun even faster and the lights blurred in front of me, Ro started laughing and her ponytail flew into my face, and despite the crushing weight, I couldn’t stop laughing, either.
When we coasted to a stop, we were so dizzy that we almost fell over each other trying to walk out. Ro turned to me, her freckled grin wide and her hair messy and sticking up, like she’d stuck her finger in an electrical socket or something. “You’re right,” she said. “Couldn’t do it.”
“Told you.”
“Come on,” she said. “I bet I can kick your butt at the ring toss.”
“Fat chance,” I said.
I wasn’t okay with Ro moving away. Not one bit. But I guess I always kind of knew that something like this would happen. Because the truth was, a place like this couldn’t always contain her big grin and her crazy smart ideas and her wild experiments. And I knew that wherever she ended up in the future—in San Francisco, or in a spaceship that traveled to the edges of the universe—she would be just fine.