Suddenly, I slapped the notebook shut. The elaborately drawn letters on the cover spelled out Journal of Torment, in bright purple and green. But that wasn’t right. Or maybe it was, I thought, remembering Family Entertainment Hour. Torment was definitely part of this summer’s story. It just wasn’t the whole story. It wasn’t the right one. Just like these weren’t the right souvenirs.
Not for Sam and Mina, at least.
I’d already decided I would get them something else when we reached California, maybe some cool sunglasses or one of those bead necklaces that surfers were always wearing in the movies. Something pretty I could give them in person when we were all home again. But for the official souvenir, I needed something special—a way to stuff my entire summer into an envelope, so they could understand.
I dug up the two padded envelopes I’d bought, each large enough to contain one handmade Journal of Torment. Then I found the two lizard cowboys Caleb had given me, and wrapped each of them in several layers of tissues. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t mind me passing the lizards on to my two best friends. It was for a good cause. I was introducing them to the new-and-improved Liza. Liza the fearless, Liza the weird…Liza the Lizard Queen.
I slipped one of the lizards into each envelope. Then I paged through my photos again, looking for the perfect shots. For Sam, the picture from the Hound Dog Hotel—I was waving at the camera, my fluffed-up pompadour poufing over Dillie’s oversize sunglasses. For Mina, a picture from one of our pool trespassing trips. I was balancing at the very top of a fence, one flip-flop wedged into each side of the chain link, my hair soaking wet, my arms raised in triumph. I flipped the photos over and wrote the same thing on the back of each. Wish you were here! Love, Lizard.
I slipped the pictures into the envelopes and sealed them up. Then I started to laugh, picturing Sam’s and Mina’s faces when they unwrapped their souvenirs. They wouldn’t get it—not until we were all back home and I could tell them about Dillie and Caleb, and about Jake, and about lizards, and about everything. Then they would get that things were different now, that I was different. And that at the same time, I was exactly the same. I was pretty sure they would get it all, because no matter who I was or how many weird costumes I wore, they were my best friends.
Getting it was just the kind of thing that best friends did.
Location: The desert
Population: 14 jackrabbits, 2 coyotes, 1 tortoise
Miles Driven: A lot more
Days of Torment: A lot…less?
Arizona was a lot of desert, but not all desert. There was also the Wigwam Motel, where we slept in giant concrete tepees and listened to a radio station that broadcast baseball games in Navajo. There was Meteor Crater, a 570-foot-deep hole in the ground that was about a mile wide and 50,000 years old. There was the Rattlesnake Zone, with one of the world’s biggest collections of live rattlesnakes. “Why would anyone want the world’s biggest collection of live rattlesnakes?” I asked. “Isn’t one rattlesnake still too big a collection?” But when Dillie, Caleb, and I dared one another to hold one of the defanged rattlers, I was the only one with enough nerve to do it.
There were plenty of weird museums for our parents to enjoy—the toy soldier museum, the old teapot museum, the license plate museum, the museum that was just a bunch of dusty mannequins dressed up as famous people. There was yet another Mom’s Café (the fifteenth one that we’d eaten at since starting out), but this one definitely had the best chicken pot pie west of the Mississippi.
And there were Dillie and Caleb, by my side. It was starting to feel like they always would be. But eventually we crossed the border into California, and after miles and miles of more desert, civilization returned. First it was just a few houses. Then a factory, and a bunch of outlet stores. Then, without warning, Los Angeles. It took us several smog-filled hours to battle our way through the traffic into the city itself, but then there we were. The Pacific Ocean. The end of the road.
Literally.
Location: Santa Monica, California
Population: 84,084
Miles Driven: 3,130
Days of (Not Quite) Torment: 55
Hot.
That was all I could think; hot was filling up my brain. But not the bad kind of hot. Not hot like sweaty T-shirts and burning metal doors and sticky skin peeling off vinyl car seats. Not hot like shimmering waves rising from concrete, like scratchy throats and a single bottle of puke-warm water cooked by the sun.
It was hot sand between bare toes. Hot towels laid out on a gently sloping beach. Hot sunlight bouncing off arms and legs slathered in super-SPF sunscreen. Hot that made ice cream melt down the cone before you could get it in your mouth. It was the kind of hot that made you desperate to run headlong into the surf, plunge into the frigid Pacific, then burst out again, dripping and shivering under the bright sun. It was the kind of hot that made you tired, even though all you’d done all day was lie down.
“We should find some shade,” I said, squinting up at the cloudless sky.
“Uh-huh,” Caleb said, stretched out on his towel.
Dillie just sighed and turned over. She’d been flipping through some trashy celebrity magazine, but now it lay beside her on the sand.
“We really should,” I said, too lazy to move.
“Uh-huh,” Caleb said again.
I closed my eyes, enjoying the feel of the sun on my face. “This is the best day ever.”
“Better than the Jesse James Wax Museum?” Caleb joked.
“Better.”
“Not better than the Tee Pee Trading Post?” Dillie said.
“Twice as better.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Caleb said.
“It’s not grammatical,” I argued. “But it still makes sense.”
Dillie fumbled for the cooler and pulled out a soda, without opening her eyes. She popped it open, sighing along with the cool hiss of carbon-ation. “Maybe the best day ever.” She propped herself up on her elbow, just high enough to gulp down the cool drink. “Okay, definitely.”
My parents had delivered on their promise. At the end of the road, we had three days of ultra-normal vacation. Three days of sun and fun at the Oceancrest Resort in Santa Monica, California. No sights to see, no regional food to sample, no people to meet. Nothing to do but lie in the sand and listen to the sound of the ocean lapping at the shore.
There was just one problem: My family was the only one staying. The beach vacation was a special Gold Family favor to me, not part of the official group trip. In a few hours, Caleb’s and Dillie’s families were heading to the airport—which meant this was the end. I wasn’t sorry to say good-bye to gasoline fumes and car sickness and meat loaf. But I couldn’t imagine saying good-bye to Caleb and Dillie.
Not that I wasn’t excited to get home and see my friends. When we got to the hotel in Santa Monica, my souvenirs from Sam and Mina were waiting at the front desk. Mina’s package was tiny, and wrapped in this cool, vintage paper. Even the envelope looked artsy, covered in all her little drawings. Just seeing her handwriting made me remember how much I missed her. And I missed her even more when I opened up the package to discover a funky bracelet that would go perfectly with my favorite tank top. It was the kind of thing I would have seen someone else wearing (someone like Mina) and wished I could have—but would never have picked out for myself.
The box from Sam was a lot bigger, with strips of tape slapped over all the edges to make sure it didn’t bust open on the way. I tore it open and squealed in excitement. (Everyone in the hotel lobby turned to gape at me, but I didn’t care. Once you’ve dressed up like an alien in front of several hundred gawking tourists, a few lobby gapers don’t seem like such a big deal.) It was a beach care package: a shell necklace, a pair of mismatched flip-flops, and a green T-shirt that read I’D RATHER BE SURFING IN SALT ISLE. For a second, I was jealous, imagining Sam spending the summer surfing the waves and lounging on the beach. No highway food for her, no boring museums or skeezy motels.
But then I remembered all the other things my summer had been about, and I wasn’t jealous at all. A few days at the beach would be great—especially now that I had my new flip-flops—but I wouldn’t have wanted to switch places with Sam or Mina. My summer turned out to be perfect, just the way it was. The only unperfect thing about it was that it had to end.
Soon.
I forced myself to sit up. We were running out of daylight hours, and by the time the sun hit the water, Caleb and Dillie would be gone. Besides, I wanted to do this now, while we were on our own. Our parents were sitting under oversize umbrellas down the beach, the way parents do. Kirsten was there, too. After our trip to Roswell she’d spent a day or two hanging out with us, but pretty soon it was back to the grown-up table. Since she’d started bossing us around again, none of us were that sad to see her go. Jake, on the other hand, was…Well, I wasn’t sure where Jake was. Last I saw him, he’d been hanging around some group of pretty blond girls, pretending to care about their dog. For all I knew, they’d kidnapped him and turned him into their full-time pet groomer. Or maybe they’d gotten so sick of his constant baseball chatter that they’d buried him in the sand.
I don’t know and I don’t care, I reminded myself. Jake was old news.
“I got something for you guys,” I said to Dillie and Caleb, pulling their going-away gifts out of my backpack.
Caleb sat up, surprised. “You shouldn’t have.”
“Well, technically I guess I didn’t,” I said. “I made them for you.”
Dillie clapped. “An arts and crafts project? A Lizzie Lizard original? Hand it over.”
I gave one to each of them, a little nervous about what they would think.
“On three?” Dillie suggested to Caleb.
He nodded. “One…two…”
Dillie ripped open the wrapping paper long before Caleb got to three.
“Hey!” Caleb protested. But he was already tearing his own present out of the paper.
When the wrapping paper was balled up in the sand, they both gaped at me.
“Wow,” Dillie breathed. She ran a hand lightly over the cover of the notebook, like she was making sure it was real.
Caleb flipped through the pages, his eyes getting wider and wider. “Liza, it’s…it’s…”
“You like it?” I said hopefully. I’d pasted new covers onto the notebooks. No more Journal of Torment. Now the cover of each read Cross-Country with Dillie, Caleb, and the Lizard Queen. Each page was filled with photographs of the three of us, running wild across the country.
“It’s perfect,” Dillie said. “More than perfect.”
“There’s no such thing as more than perfect,” Caleb said. “That’s just what it is. Perfect.”
“Super-perfect!” Dillie tried, ignoring him. “Perfect plus!”
“I don’t have anything for you,” Caleb said sadly, turning back to me.
“I give you the gift of my presence,” Dillie said. “Well, for at least”—she checked her watch—“forty-eight more minutes.”
Forty-eight minutes had never passed so quickly. But there we were, standing outside the hotel lobby. Saying good-bye.
“I’ll miss you,” I said.
Dillie snorted. “Like you missed us last time? By forgetting everything we ever did together?”
“Not exactly like that,” I promised. “Not this time.”
“Don’t look so glum, Lizard.” Dillie slung an arm around my shoulder and another around Caleb’s. “We’ll see each other soon enough. Maybe next summer. After all, Kirsten’s got her license, remember. Maybe we should do Route 66, the sequel!”
We all glanced over at Kirsten, who was primly shaking hands with all the grown-ups. She caught us watching and—so fast that none of the parents noticed—stuck out her tongue.
The three of us burst into laughter. “Maybe not,” we agreed.
“Do you…” Caleb hesitated. His cheeks flushed pink and his eyes darted from one side to the other. “You want me to go find Jake so you can say good-bye to him, too?”
I knew exactly where Jake was. My Jake radar still pinged whenever he came near. I’d tried to shut it off, but there was nothing I could do.
Ping, ping, ping.
He was leaning against the hotel wall, trying to chat up a couple of pretty girls headed for the beach. If I were still speaking to him, I would point out that they were at least three years older than him. As far as they were concerned, he was probably just some little kid.
I decided to let him figure it out for himself.
“You’re not going anywhere,” I told Caleb. “Who knows when we’ll see each other again? We might as well make this last thirty seconds count.”
Dillie threw her arms around me and squeezed tight. “Thanks for an awesome summer, Lizard,” she whispered. “Don’t forget this.”
“Never,” I promised, hugging her back.
“Delia!” Professor Kaplan shouted, waving her toward the car. “No more dawdling, we’re going to be late for the airport!”
Dillie sighed. “She means we’re only going to be three hours early instead of four hours early. But when Professor Kaplan calls…” She put on a sparkling fake smile. “Coming, Mother dearest!” she yelled back, giving me another quick hug. And then she was gone.
Caleb was next. His cheeks flushed even brighter. “So, um, my parents are talking about visiting some relatives in New Jersey this winter,” he stammered. “I might see you kind of soon.”
I was surprised by how excited I was at the thought.
Well, he wasn’t…un-cute. He had pretty good hair, especially when it was all mussed and sticking up on his head. And the green of his eyes was freakishly bright behind the glasses. Freakish in a good way, I mean. He wasn’t just some random boy who could be shoved into a category: cute, not-cute, sort-of-maybe-if-you-squint cute. He was Caleb. Just Caleb. Neat-freak, spacey, picky, persnickety, loyal, dependable, always-knew-the-right-thing-to-say-even-if-he-didn’t-always-know-how-to-say-it Caleb.
Without warning, Just Caleb gave me a lightning-quick kiss on the cheek. Then, face bright red, head down, he ran away to join his parents.
After two months, I was finally alone. (Unless you counted my parents. I didn’t.)
Did Caleb Schweber really just give me my first kiss?
Okay, not kiss-kiss. But…
I decided not to think about it. Not yet, at least. I would have plenty of time to figure things out. (And tell Sam and Mina about it. And overanalyze. And obsess over every single, tiny, potentially crucial detail.)
But not now. Instead, I grabbed my camera from my bag and started snapping pictures. Of the Kaplan-Novaks’ and the Schwebers’ cars pulling out of the lot, with Caleb’s and Dillie’s faces pressed to the glass. Of my parents, huddling over a California guidebook, trying to find some kind of wacky and real tourist attraction to distract them from the beach. Of the road that stretched away from the hotel, winding toward the desert.
Find a way to tell your story, that photographer in Roswell had told me. And suddenly I didn’t feel quite so alone. Maybe the summer was over; maybe Dillie and Caleb were gone. But my story—Lizard’s story—was just getting started.
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Enjoy this special sneak peek at
See You
Soon,
Samantha
by Lara Bergen
My mom rolled down the windows, and that unmistakable beachy smell filled the car: salt, sand, and even a little coconut oil mixed in. I took a deep breath. This beach road was a lot different than the ones in New Jersey that I was used to. Where were all the T-shirt shops and icecream stands? The amusement park? The arcade? All this place had were beach houses, as far as I could see.
“So, uh, where’s the boardwalk?” I finally asked my mother.
“Oh, I don’t think there is one, honey,” she said.
“No boardwalk? So what do kids do here?” I asked her.