Chapter 2
EVEN though I was exhausted, of course I couldn’t sleep scrunched up in the back of that stuffy SUV. And to make matters worse, I’d forgotten to pack a pillow—an error I could already tell was going to haunt me for the rest of the trip. And just when I figured things couldn’t possibly plunge any further downhill, my dad put on a polka CD. Yes, you heard me right: Polka! If you’ve ever listened to this crazy shit, you know it’s only fit for the criminally insane, the deaf, and people in comas. Mr. Tightwad has a whole polka library.
“So how much do you think we’d get for a good picture?” my mom asked my dad.
“Geez, Louise, I don’t know.”
“You think a million? Could we get a million?”
I could barely believe my ears. Apparently our vacation had turned into a treasure quest, and our family bonding time was for sale to the highest bidder. Plus, my parents were delusional. I mean, even if Champ did exist, there was absolutely zero chance we were going to be the ones to finally find him. Zero chance.
“Boy, I need a potty stop,” my father suddenly announced, derailing the conversation. “Two miles to the next rest area. Who’s with me?”
“Uh-huh,” Will mumbled from the back row.
“I need to stretch,” my mother said.
“Count me in,” I agreed.
What the hell. Anything had to be better than slowly frying to a crackly crunch in the back of the overheated Maroon Monstrosity. Anything.
The I-87 rest area was pretty much the same as all highway rest areas: obtrusive, commercial, and lacking adequate bathrooms. And, of course, at the mere mention of pee, my bladder started doing somersaults. So with my legs crossed at the knees, I wiggled in place behind a Girl Scout troupe that seemed to be peeing in slow motion. If I didn’t love their cookies so much…well, who knows what I might have done.
And by the time I got back to the food court, my parents had already ordered Chinese without consulting me. I guess they thought I needed the MSG. “Is this mine?” I asked, wrinkling my face in disgust at the plate that sat in front of the empty chair beside Will.
“Yep-a-doodle,” my father responded with undue glee.
“Gee, thanks,” I muttered, slamming my ass into the grooves of the molded plastic seat.
Perturbed, my mother said, “Flora, must you?”
“Well, no. It’s not imperative.”
Instead of picking through the icky mess of food on my plate for something decent to eat, I decided to crack open my fortune cookie. I mean, it was good luck, right? With a quick snap, I yanked the thing apart and retrieved the slim, red-lettered slip of paper.
Bad luck and ill misfortune will infest your pathetic soul for all eternity. I kid you not, that’s what it said. My fortune basically damned me to hell on earth and then some. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Was this a joke? I glanced around to see if anyone was obviously laughing. Negative. Then I read the stupid thing again, coming to the only logical conclusion: The fortunes must have been switched. My real fortune had ended up on someone else’s plate.
“Hey, hands off!” Will objected, as I plucked the paper from the edge of his dish.
Your dynamic eyes have attracted a secret admirer. I checked Will’s eyes just be sure. Not dynamic. Was this my fortune? A secret admirer sounded okay, but I’d rather have a blatant one. And my eyes…not all that dynamic either.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” my mother asked, pausing to wipe her mouth with a coarse paper napkin.
“I’ll take a bite if you let me see your fortune,” I bargained.
She shook her head. “I don’t know about you, Flora,” she said, setting the paper down beside my fork. “I just don’t know.”
A small lucky package is on its way to you soon. Okay, that was vague. Was I expecting something in the mail? I thought about it for a minute, but nothing came to mind. The thing was a dud.
I pushed the fortune back to my mother’s side of the table, shoveled a forkful of fried rice into my mouth, and mumbled, “So, Dad, what’s your fortune say?”
“Well, aren’t you just a Curious George?” my father said. He grinned and tossed the unopened package in my direction. “Why don’t you read it to me, Flowbee?”
I ripped through the crinkly wrapper, snapped the cookie, and nabbed the paper. “A thrilling time is in store for you,” I read aloud.
“Lookie there, Lu-Lu,” my dad said. “It’s a sign, doncha think?”
“It very well could be,” my mother agreed, with one of those in-on-the-joke smiles. “Very well could be.”
On that weird note, I paused to consider my options: a secret admirer, a lucky package, or a thrilling time. Because obviously, a life of doom was out of the question. I mean, I already had enough problems without a curse on my head.
The more I thought about it, a secret admirer sounded lame too. After all, a hundred million guys could like me, and if I didn’t know about it, it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. A secret admirer was out.
And as intriguing as a lucky package sounded, I couldn’t quite think of anything I’d be that excited to receive. I mean, sure, maybe if I was waiting for college acceptance letters, the lucky package fortune would’ve fit. But that was still over a year away.
That left a thrilling time. And even though it seemed pretty unlikely that anything thrilling could happen in the presence of my parents (unless, of course, you counted the possibility we’d all fall overboard and drown in Lake Champlain), I was willing to keep an open mind.
“Can I have this?” my brother asked, stabbing his fork through two pieces of my sweet and sour chicken.
I slid the whole plate over to him. “Yeah, go ahead,” I said. I’d absentmindedly nibbled my way through most of the fried rice anyway. Everything else was dog chow, as far as I was concerned.
As soon as Will finished my meal, we tossed our plates in the trash, made yet another bathroom stop, and finally exited the luxurious somewhere-in-upstate-New York rest area.
And I guess I hadn’t noticed when we’d gotten out of the SUV, but apparently Mr. Tightwad had parked on Mars. So in search of the rented behemoth, we passed row upon row of vehicles. Vehicles of smart people. Vehicles of people who knew how to identify an empty spot within a one-mile radius of their destination. And just when it looked like we were about to crawl over the guardrail into oncoming traffic, my mother finally spotted the Maroon Monstrosity.
“Oh…there…it…is…” she sputtered, squinting into the distance. Meanwhile, my dad and Will came to a dead stop right in front of me.
Will ran his fingers through his shiny auburn locks and muttered, “What the…?”
“Well, I’ll be,” my father said, sounding awestruck.
I leaned around Will to see what all the fuss was about. And from what I could tell, a caravan of hillbilly vagabonds had set up their battered trucks and pop-up campers all around our vehicle. And they’d set up like they were planning on staying a while. To get out of there, we were going to have to strut right through the middle of their cluttered compound. How fantastic.
My mother drew a deep breath, then cracked the verbal whip on us. “Let’s move, people. We’ve got places to go and things to do.”
I must say, I was impressed. Apparently the Mental Hygienist was going to lead the charge into hillbilly territory. Following her lead, my dad, Will, and I plastered stupid, dopey smiles across our faces and snaked through—single file—as close to the Maroon Monstrosity as we could get. But the weird thing was, the hillbillies didn’t seem to notice. For a second, I even wondered if we were invisible—that was, until my sneaker caught the edge of a folding table where two hillbillies were playing cards, nearly flipping it over.
“I’m sorry,” I gushed, bending down to grab the cards I’d spilled (and practically head-butting one of the hillbilly guys in the process).
“It’s okay,” the guy mumbled. Still staring at the ground, he took the cards from my han
d and went right back to his game like nothing had happened.
But I felt like a total dumbass. “Sorry,” I said again, as I reached for the door of the SUV.
There was no reply.
So I was just about to climb into the behemoth and disappear off the face of the earth, when an interesting, unexpected thing happened: I caught the most exquisite hillbilly boy staring at me from the bed of a rusty blue and silver pickup. Trust me, I do not say this lightly, but this boy was the most beautiful human being I had ever seen. Repeat, ever. His raven curls gently kissed his bronze forehead and perfectly framed his emotional steel-blue eyes. And he was tall. Much taller than me. Man tall. But the thing that attracted me most—in a way I can’t fully explain—was his body. He had this lean, muscular body that was all animal. And as if he weren’t sexy enough already, his big, thick hands were kind of rough and dirty, which gave me the chills.
“Flora!” my brother said, delivering a sharp thwack to the back of my head from inside the SUV. “Wake up!”
I guess I’d started staring too. But who could blame me, really? It was like having a front row seat for the Aurora Borealis. I couldn’t look away.
The Maroon Monstrosity started up with a rumble, and Will thwacked me again. “Hey, space cadet. We’re leaving.”
I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell the beautiful hillbilly boy he could have me, no questions asked. I wanted to run away with him. But I couldn’t do any of these things, because I was stuck wasting my life searching for a nonexistent sea monster.
Bad luck and ill misfortune will infest your pathetic soul for all eternity. Of course. Now it made sense.
With every bit of driving skill he possessed, my father extracted our vehicle from the hillbilly compound. Meanwhile, I pressed my face to the window and tried to send a telepathic message to the boy of my dreams. It was like a scene from a really sappy romance movie, where the young lovers are separated by a cruel twist of fate—only, technically, my leading man and I had never even met.