Which all of a sudden hit me was maybe the reason Mr. McKenze started gambling in the first place. How else was he going to keep up?
Anyway, after Marissa gasps, “Uncle Bruce?” she follows up with “Why in the world did he lend Dad money?” but I’m pretty sure I know the answer.
He didn’t know his brother had a gambling problem.
“You’ll have to ask your father how he managed that,” Mrs. McKenze says as she collects her things and stands up, and I can tell she’s thinking she’s already said too much.
“Wait, so what are we going to do? Bail Dad out of jail?”
“I’m not sure how to go about doing any of this.” She frowns. “But I’m sure Sammy’s mother is wondering what’s taking her so long, so we should get going.” And after we’ve walked for a ways, she asks me, “Is she meeting you in baggage claim?”
“Uh … I didn’t check any luggage.”
She looks me up and down. “Aren’t you in the wedding? Don’t you have a dress?” Then before I can figure out how to wiggle out of that one, she decides the answer for herself. “Oh, she’s probably doing one of those rental packages.”
I nod. “I don’t really know what the plan is.”
“I’m surprised your grandmother isn’t here with you.” She eyes me. “I wouldn’t send Marissa to Las Vegas alone.”
And since there are obvious holes in my story, I try to change the subject before she asks me any more questions. “I’m really sorry about your problems. I wish there was something I could do to help.”
She sort of shakes her head. “I wish there was, too.”
Then we walk—actually, more like march—through the airport, past glitzy shops and restaurants and slot machines.
Loads and loads of slot machines.
And when we get down to the bottom of an escalator, Mrs. McKenze looks around and says, “Well, this is baggage claim. I’d think your mother would be waiting for you here.”
So we follow her past these big metal luggage carousels, which are mostly just sitting there empty, to one that’s going around and has luggage on it. “This is the one for our flight,” she says, looking at the people hanging near the area. “Do you see her?”
I walk to the other side of the carousel, checking here and there and all around, and finally I come back and shake my head. “I don’t see her.”
“Hmm. Well, the two of you wait here for her while I take care of the car rental.” She points across the building. “I’ll be right over there.” Then she gives Marissa a stern look and says, “Do not go anywhere until I get back!”
The minute she’s gone, Marissa says, “This is insane! What are you planning to do here? How are you going to get around? You don’t even know where your mother’s staying or where they’re getting married or anything? And my dad’s in jail. Jail! If my mom finds out your mom isn’t coming and that you just jumped on a plane, she is going to kill me.”
“You? Why you?”
She tilts her head. “How did you get to the airport? Who’s going along with your crazy scheme? Sammy, there’s no way she’s going to believe I didn’t know anything about this.”
“So we’ve just got to find my mother.”
“We?”
I shrug and look down.
“Sammy! My dad is in jail, do you get that? We’re having a family crisis! I can’t excuse myself from it to find your ditzy mother!”
“I know, I know.”
“So what’s your plan? What are we supposed to do with you?”
“Nothing. I’ll be fine.”
She rolls her eyes.
“Look. I have money. I’ll just get a room.”
“What if they won’t rent you a room? What if you need a credit card in case of damages?”
“What?”
“You know—like you throw the television out the window or rip up the couch.”
“What?”
“People do that, you know.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause they think they’re rock stars. ’Cause they’re stupid.”
“Well, I’m not a rock star and I’m not stupid.”
“But they don’t know that.”
“Look at me!”
She eyes my ripped jeans and high-tops. “You could pass for a rock star. Some of them dress like that.”
“I’m thirteen!”
“Exactly! And nobody’s going to rent a room to a thirteen-year-old rock star. You would totally destroy the place.”
“I’m not a rock star!”
She shrugs. “They don’t know that.”
I throw my hands in the air. “Good grief.”
So instead of talking about things that maybe could have helped the situation, Marissa and I argued about dumb stuff like that, and then all of a sudden Mrs. McKenze is back and our time is up.
“Maybe she’s outside?” Mrs. McKenze asks, and she’s looking pretty frantic.
So we go to a pickup area outside big glass doors, and after I’ve pretended to scour the sidewalk and streets for my mother, I ask Mrs. McKenze, “Could I use your phone to call her?”
“Sure,” she says, and it’s easy to see that she’d really like to move this along.
So I dial my mom’s cell phone, and when I get the “unavailable” message, I click off and hand the phone back. “Her phone’s off.”
“It’s off?”
I nod.
“Well …” She looks around. “What are we going to do?”
“I’ll just wait for her here,” I say with a shrug. “I’ll be fine.”
“No, you won’t!” Marissa says, then turns to her mom. “We can’t just leave her here.”
Mrs. McKenze scratches the back of her head. “Your mother’s probably just running late, right, Sammy?”
I look down and shrug again. “I’m sure that’s it.”
She studies me a minute. “Well, she wouldn’t not pick you up, right?”
I keep on looking down ’cause I’m feeling pretty bad about working her toward what’s obviously become Step Three. I mean, I can’t just let her leave me here. But instead of confessing what I’ve done and begging for mercy, I tell her, “Just go ahead. You’ve already got enough to worry about. I’ll be fine.”
She looks at her watch, then checks all around trying to figure out what to do. “Are you sure?” she finally asks.
“No!” Marissa cries. “There’s no way we’re leaving her here!”
So we wait around another ten minutes searching for my phantom mom, trying her phone again, shaking our heads, until finally Mrs. McKenze asks, “What hotel is your mother staying at?”
And I’m about to say I don’t know, but Marissa scoots behind her mother and mouths something big and exaggerated at me.
“Uh …,” I tell Mrs. McKenze as I try to figure out what Marissa’s saying, “I think it starts with an M.”
Marissa nods like crazy, then does her big, exaggerated mouthing thing again, but I’m still not getting it.
“Mandalay Bay?” Mrs. McKenze asks.
Marissa shakes her head and air-paints the letters M-G-M.
“Uh, no,” I tell Mrs. McKenze. “I think it was …” And then I just go for it. “Is there a hotel called MGM?”
Mrs. McKenze’s eyebrows go flying. “You’re staying at the MGM Grand? That’s where we’re staying!”
Marissa steps forward. “How about we give Sammy a ride over and figure things out from there?” She looks at me. “Your mother must have checked in by now, right?”
The instant I nod, Mrs. McKenze grabs her stuff and says, “Well, come on then, let’s go.” And as she heads off to a moving walkway across the street, I take a deep, choppy breath and tell Marissa, “Thanks.”
Then right away I start wondering how in the world we’re going to pull off Step Four.
SIX
By the time we’d taken a shuttle bus to the car rental lot and were driving into town, it was seven-thirty, but it didn’t seem like nighttime becau
se everything was lit up, including the nonstop billboards for concerts and fights and comedians and “illusionists” and “peep shows” … all blazing with lights and flashing parts.
“How much were tickets to that show?” I ask Marissa as I point out the billboard for Darren Cole and the Troublemakers, ’cause his “Waiting for Rain to Fall” is Casey’s and my song, and Marissa had told me that her family had seen him in concert during one of their pre-crisis trips to Las Vegas.
Darren Cole is no kid, and people like Candi Acosta swoon over him, so I try not to think too much about the fact that “our” song is done by an old guy, or that Candi Acosta also likes it, because thinking about that is just … gross.
But there was the billboard, and I found myself asking anyway.
And missing Casey.
“Mom?” Marissa asks. “Were they expensive?”
“Were what, huh?”
“The Darren Cole tickets.” Then she adds, “Sammy’s a fan.”
“I’m not a fan,” I tell her, but it doesn’t matter. Mrs. McKenze is already giving me a buttery look in the rear-view mirror.
“Worth every penny,” she sighs.
Which didn’t answer my question, but it’s not like I had time to go check out Darren Cole anyway. I had a mother to find!
Marissa points to a billboard with blazing blue faces. “They were good, too,” she says, then points to the next one. “So was he! … And so were they!”
Mrs. McKenze says, “We have seen a lot of shows, haven’t we?” She shakes her head and mutters, “And now we get to see the jail.”
What a roller-coaster life the McKenzes were having. And the truth is, I used to be jealous of everything they had. Not that I’d ever wanted their life—Marissa and Mikey were basically orphaned by their parents’ jobs, left on their own in their mansion like ignored pets—but all the stuff? The vacations? When everything you own fits inside one little drawer, and you’ve been a whole lot of nowhere for vacation, watching your best friend living large can get pretty discouraging.
And hearing about it can get kind of annoying.
But now here they were, shooting down the tracks, trapped inside a cart of gigantic debt, holding on for dear life as they blasted their way toward jail.
Anyway, while I’m taking a little mental ride on the McKenzes’ roller coaster, wondering if a loop-the-loop was ahead for them or if jail was the end of the ride, Mrs. McKenze misses a driveway and lets out a little curse. And then when traffic pins her in so she has to turn right, she lets out a bigger curse and says, “I do not want to be on the Strip!”
“This is the Strip?” I ask, leaning forward between the seats.
“And it’s Friday night of a three-day weekend,” she moans when she sees all the traffic. “We are just stuck.”
When we turn onto the Strip—which the road sign says is actually Las Vegas Boulevard—all I can do is gawk. The emerald building I had seen from the air is on our right, and it’s huge. Huge and glowing, with an enormous gold lion in front.
“That’s where we’re staying,” Marissa says, pointing to the green building.
“It is?” I gasp.
“That’s the MGM lion.”
All of a sudden I make a connection. “The one that roars in movies?”
“That’s it!” Then she adds, “Well, not that one, but you know.” Then she points across the street to a giant Statue of Liberty standing in front of a hotel that has an actual roller coaster going all around it. With people riding it! “That’s New York–New York,” she says, then points behind us. “That castle? That’s Excalibur. And the pyramid next to it? That’s the Luxor. And that big gold building even farther down is Mandalay Bay. It has an awesome beach.”
“A beach?”
“Uh-huh. With a gigantic wave pool. It’s like being on Maui!”
“It’s nothing like being on Maui,” Mrs. McKenze grumbles. “And there are never enough loungers.”
I look up and down the Strip and say, “I can’t believe all the lights,” and it comes out kind of gaspy because, really, I can’t believe all the lights!
“No energy crisis here,” Mrs. McKenze says. “In the summer they keep the casinos at sixty-five … and they leave the doors open! So you burn up on the Strip, then freeze to death inside.” She slams on the brakes and practically hits the car in front of us. “I hate this place,” she mutters.
So she may be hating it, but I’m just awestruck, soaking in all the buildings and lights and people. I’ve never seen so many people on sidewalks. They’re packed together and just moseying, but even so they’re going faster than we are.
“Here,” Mrs. McKenze says, handing over her phone. “Try your mother again.”
So I do, and when I get the “unavailable” message, I hand the phone back and say, “I wonder if her phone’s broken or something.”
“I have never understood her,” Mrs. McKenze says. “She has always been … aloof.”
“Aloof?”
She eyes me. “How about we call it ‘distant.’ I tried to connect with her at school functions when you two were little, but she always seemed like she was … elsewhere. It was hard to carry on a conversation.” She shrugs. “Maybe it was the age difference. She was a young mom. The rest of us were … older.”
I give a little snort. “Nah. She’s still that way.”
“Well, at least she’s realized her dream.” She glances back at me. “Being on Lords is a big deal.”
“Uh … was, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s been canceled.”
She whips around to actually look at me. “Lords has?”
“Uh-huh.”
She grips the wheel tighter. “Wow. That’s the end of an era, huh?”
“I guess.”
“I used to watch it when I was in my teens and twenties. I used to record it because I didn’t want to miss a thing.”
Marissa stares at her. “Really?”
She tosses a smile at Marissa. “Then I had you and Mikey, and that was the end of the luxury of my soaps!” She looks at me in the mirror. “So what is she going to do now? Does she have something else lined up?”
“For her next act,” I say, sounding all peppy, “she’s going to marry my boyfriend’s father!”
Mrs. McKenze pulls a little face, and I can tell she’s biting her tongue.
Biting it hard.
It takes us at least half an hour to circle the block and get into the MGM Grand’s parking structure. And once the car’s locked up and we’ve collected all our stuff, we go down an elevator and then walk through ground-level parking to some big glass doors that lead into a wide tunnel of shops. At the end of the shops there’s an escalator, and when we get to the top of that, we turn the corner and wind up in the biggest hotel lobby I’ve ever seen.
Actually, the only other hotel lobby I’ve been in is the Heavenly Hotel’s, right across the street from the Senior Highrise. It’s got ancient furniture and heavy curtains and threadbare carpet.… It’s so old it might actually be kind of cool if it wasn’t for the smell. The place stinks like moldy potatoes.
Or maybe rat pee.
Hmm. Now that I think about it, probably both.
Plus, when you sneeze inside the Heavenly’s lobby, you send up clouds of dust, which, of course, make you sneeze some more. So once you start sneezing, you can get a whole dust storm going. Seriously. It creates an atmospheric event. I’m surprised it’s never made the Weather Channel.
But anyway, the MGM lobby is nothing like the Heavenly’s. It’s more a huge glistening ballroom with chandeliers and gold sparkling everywhere. On our right there’s a mile-long check-in counter with a whole wall of screens behind it. On our left are shops with lots of glass walls and gold accents, and in the middle is a flower arrangement the size of Grams’ apartment.
“Impressive, huh?” Marissa says, ’cause my jaw is dangling.
“I can’t afford to stay here!” I whisper. r />
“It’s actually pretty cheap,” she whispers back. “But don’t worry. I’ll get you in our room. Just go up like you’re checking in, then tell my mom your mom hasn’t arrived yet.”
“I don’t even know how to check in! What am I supposed to do?”
“Just go up and act like your mom’s supposed to be here. I’ll keep my mom back. Trust me. This will work.”
There are about twenty check-in lines, so I stand in the one next to Marissa and her mother like I know what I’m doing. And when I get up to the front of the line, I smile at the lady across the counter and say, “I’m meeting my mom here. Her last name is Keyes. Has she checked in already?”
Her fingers fly across her keyboard. “K-E-Y-S?” she asks.
“K-E-Y-E-S,” I tell her. I try to sound calm, but my mouth is dry and I’m feeling really stupid acting like my mom’s here when I know she’s not.
“Could it be under a different name?”
“Uh, Acosta?” I tell her, just putting out another lie. “A-C-O-S-T-A.”
She ticky-types some more, then says, “Oh, here it is. Two guests?”
The rest of me feels stun-gunned, but my head manages to bob up and down.
“She hasn’t arrived yet.” She checks me over. “And we’ll need a credit card and photo ID, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait until she’s here.”
My head bobs some more and I manage to choke out, “Thanks,” as I back away from the counter and hurry over to Marissa.
“Well?” Marissa’s mom asks, because they still haven’t made it to the front of their line.
“She hasn’t arrived yet.” I try to sound confident, but I’m feeling really light-headed. Like any minute I might just keel over.
It’s Mrs. McKenze’s turn now, so she goes up to the counter while Marissa hangs back with me and says, “You look really pale.”
“She’s here,” I whisper.
“She is?”
“Well, she will be. The reservation’s under ‘Acosta’—for two people.”
Marissa gasps. “There’s a wedding chapel right inside this hotel!”
“There is?”
“Yes! You pass by it on the way to the Lazy River.”
“The Lazy River?”
“The pool!” She points. “It’s that way. Through the casino, past the food court … I bet they’re getting married right here!” She shakes her head. “I cannot believe it. She could have stayed any one of a million places, and she’s staying right here?”