Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (7 page)

“What’s wrong?” Adriel whispered, his pencil never pausing as he scratched out the answers to a calculus assignment.
The speed with which he was working was unreal, like he was just taking dictation rather than having to think about the steps to the problems.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I lied.
There was no way he could know what I was feeling, nor did I want to tell him the reason. Then I felt badly for behaving like a jerk. “You must have a lot to catch up on. Was it . . . your brother?”

“He’s having a hard time,” Adriel said.
His pencil continued to whip down the paper, transcribing the problems from the page and solving them at the same rapid speed.

“Isn’t that really your
parents’ problem?” I asked. “I mean, you shouldn’t miss so much school for that.”

“He’s
my brother, so it’s my problem, too.”

“Did you find him?”

The pencil stopping, Adriel looked at me carefully. “He wasn’t missing, Jessa. Autumn is just a hard time of year for him, for some reason. His behavior gets worse and even music can’t calm him down. I’m not going to pry my little brother off my shirt and leave him crying to come to school and sit in class. He needed me more at home than I needed to be here.”

Something about the way he said it made me feel
horribly self-centered. I flushed and looked down as class began. Mr. Rogers put on a sitcom to show an example of good character building and settled in his seat to watch it with us. Miserably, I stared at the screen. Adriel raced on with his work when I glanced over on occasion, finishing one assignment after another at insane speed. From calculus he went to science, from science to government, and the pages of his text turned at a pace even I as a speed-reader couldn’t hope to match. I entertained the thought that he wasn’t really reading, but then he unearthed a packet of fill-in-the-blank and paragraph essays about the chapter and finished it in short order.

Zakia was working outside at the other building.
Half of the planters around the school were rotted, since they were wine barrels sawn in half rather than concrete. And, rather than replace them with concrete, the school was just taking away the bad ones and putting new wine barrel halves in. A truck backed up and spilled a heap of soil to the ground, which Zakia shoveled into the new planters.

By the time the credits rolled on the
sitcom, which had made no impression on me, Adriel was essentially done with a whole week of work. I was smart, but he must have had an IQ of over two hundred. Wishing I’d never put my foot in my mouth about his brother, I said, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I know,” Adriel said with polite remove, and
listened attentively to the teacher’s lecture of the show. I looked out the window while class moved on in a discussion. The janitor came over with a second shovel. It had a much narrower blade than the one Zakia was using. He made Zakia switch with him. As the janitor walked away, Zakia shook his head and went back to filling the planters with a shovel that barely scooped up anything.

The bell rang ten minutes later.
I mustered up the civility to say to Adriel, “So, are you going to the party this evening?”

“No,” Adriel said while packing up his things.

Too upset to find anything else to say, I said, “Excuse me,” and pushed around to the aisle. Once outside I breathed deeply. The air in the classroom had been stifling.

I needed to get to the store, but I wanted to talk to Zakia first.
He rested on the shovel as I called, his wide smile drawing me in. How could anyone not be charmed by that smile? He was adorable. “Hey, Jessa.”

“Hey.
Your new shovel sucks,” I said.

“I know,” Zakia said, as warm
to me as Adriel had been cool. “It’s a trenching shovel. This really isn’t what it was made for. What can I do for you?”

“I didn’t know if you had heard.
There’s a party at the reservoir tonight. Would you like to come? You live right over there, don’t you?”

“Sure to both
,” Zakia said. “Just me, or can I bring my friend Shovel?”

“Just you,” I said.

“Oh, good.” He looked at the heap of soil and to the planters with a sigh. “All right, Shovel, I don’t like you and you don’t like me. Let’s just get through this together. See you tonight then, Jessa!”

I turned around, thinking of the errand to the store and how this boy could have
at least one normal school experience. Adriel was staring at us hard from the doorway to Mr. Rogers’ classroom. Smiling at him insincerely, I walked away to my locker. He followed me there, his blue eyes dark with temper. As I undid the padlock, he hissed, “You need to stay away from him.”

“Why?”
I asked.

“
Just trust me!” he said in fury. “Don’t get involved in Cooper business.”

Tartly as I switched textbooks, I said, “Adriel, welcome to the twenty-first century, where girls don’t have to do whatever you want simply because you want them to do it.
I know it’s hard. But be strong.” Leaving him spluttering, I walked to my scooter and rumbled off campus.

****

I really hadn’t been joking about my poor sense of direction. It was a joke with my parents how once I stepped outside my home, all bets were off where I’d end up. Downy and Taylor had known better than to expect me to remember where we parked the car when we went to the beach or shopping at the mall. That evening I turned onto Jacobo with some trepidation and tootled up it with three bags of chips in the bucket under my butt. Not knowing how safe this area was, I’d decided to leave my purse at home and just keep my wallet in my pocket.

Grandpa Jack
had warned me to be careful driving to the Gap since the roads were extremely winding and there were no guardrails to protect anyone from going down steep slopes. He had poked his fork suspiciously at the vegetables I made in the steamer for him to try. How he’d gotten to be this old without a decent diet was beyond me. Anyone else would have had a heart attack ten years ago.

Left on Sutter.
I kept looking for a sign but never saw one, and in time turned back once the city had fallen away. The second time down the road I spotted a little sign that had been adjusted with spray paint to read Butter. Clever. That had to be the correct turn. It occurred to me too late that while I was farther north, I should have checked my cell phone for service. Oh well.

Scant
minutes on twisting, pot-holed Sutter and the vegetables in my stomach were roiling. The tall hillside was eroding on my left. Great, jagged incisions had rent it apart. Some were filled with rocks to slow down the decay and others had washed out onto the shoulder and lanes. I bumped over stones and reduced my speed to get around potholes the size of hubcaps. Cars honked behind me, wanting to go faster, so I pulled over at every rest area to let them zoom ahead. The speed limit was thirty or less depending on how perilous the turn, but they were rocketing around them at fifty miles per hour or even faster.

Down the other side of the road was nothing but air.
It didn’t seem like it should be legal to not have guardrails when one inattentive moment behind the wheel could result in soaring over the side of these cliffs into space. The drop was growing greater with every turn of the scooter’s tires.

The view of the valley beneath me was beautiful.
Green treetops swayed in the wind, their tips turning gold from the setting sun. Fire had burned one crevice of this hill in the recent past, skeletons of trees standing up starkly over black earth, and that was beautiful in its own way, too.

The road split into three, one climbing up the hill, one going straight ahead, and one cutting down sharply with a sign that simply read GAP.
I turned and tightened my grip on the scooter in alarm at the drop. Soon I was among the trees and under a canopy so thick that the roads were dark even though the sun hadn’t set all the way yet. Another vehicle was coming up behind. I pulled off into a driveway to let a minivan full of shouting teenagers pass. Hands waved out the windows and I waved back, though I didn’t know the owners.

I was just supposed to stay on this road to the campgrounds.
Doing as I had been instructed, I followed the weaving road past houses and side streets. A wave of relief passed through me at a campgrounds sign. So I hadn’t gone the wrong way, nor was this some elaborate prank to lie about a party and send the new student out to the middle of nowhere. I drove into the campgrounds and past a house for a ranger to the parking lot.

Without
lines to demarcate spaces, cars were parked haphazardly everywhere. Thankful I had a scooter in case I wanted to leave, I parked it next to a motorcycle and got off. A fire was blazing down by the water, with three dozen people I barely knew from school gathered around it. Opening the bucket, I pulled out the chips. It wasn’t necessary for me to stay too long if this party blew; it was just polite to make an appearance and I could beg off with a curfew.

Logs had been placed around the fire to sit upon, and a folding card table overflow
ed with goodies. I added the chips to it as people yelled and laughed, music blaring from a stereo. No one called to me, and I hoped someone I knew was here. To kill time, I poured myself a paper cup of soda and drank while I watched over the rim. The line of portable restrooms strengthened my resolve to head home as soon as I could. Gross. I’d rather hold it if I had to go and wait for a real bathroom.

Nash and Diego appeared from a grove o
f brush with fistfuls of sticks. They called to me in greeting. A girl turned down the music a notch and asked if anyone had brought marshmallows.

“Vicky is bringing those!” some
one answered. A minivan with tinted windows came down the road to the parking lot. Since it couldn’t maneuver past the cars already parked, the driver stopped there and blocked everyone in. The back doors opened and I relaxed to see more familiar faces.

“We can’t park here
!” London was shouting bossily while getting out of the passenger seat.

“There’s n
owhere else to go,” Savannah fretted from the driver’s side. I went over to help with the paper bags they were unloading.

A boy slid out of the back and smiled to me with a big gap between his front teeth.
“Would you like a corndog, Los Angeles?”

“Leave her alone, Billy!” London demanded.

I hadn’t found anything offensive about his question, so I said, “What’s wrong?”

“A corndog is when they
push you into the water and then drag you out and roll you in sand,” Savannah said with a disgusted look to Billy. “Don’t be a jerk just because she’s new here.”

“Oh, come on,” the boy protested.
“She’s from L.A.! They spend their lives dodging bullets. A corndog isn’t nothing.” He walked away to the fire without bothering to take a bag.

“
I would have said yes,” I sighed to the girls. It would be wise to turn down offers of anything. How barbaric! “And we
don’t
spend our lives dodging bullets, not that any of you actually think that.”

“She’s not a unicorn,” London grumbled after Billy.
“He’s only ever been as far as Sonoma, forget L.A. or even just San Francisco.”

Nash
appeared among us. He bent down on one knee and offered me a stick lying horizontally across his palms. Bowing his head, he said, “This blessed spear I wrested from the Great Bush with terrible risk to my life and health and appendages. It is with honor I present it to you, maiden fair. Wield it well over the flames, Jessa. Wield it well.”

“Thank you,” I said, acutely attuned to Savannah and London around me.
These were their boys, in a way, and I didn’t want to be seen as an intruder. I shifted the bag to my hip and accepted the stick. “Surely there were more blessed spears you took away than this? We three ladies of the court should not have to share one spear.”

“Ladies of the court,” Savannah s
aid archly. “I like that.” London looked pleased as well, so I didn’t have to worry about Nash approaching me first.

“And cut your hair,” London added to Nash as
more sticks were passed around. “You look like a sheepdog.”

Offended, Nash said,
“It’s all the rage in L.A., isn’t it, Jessa?”

“That fad’s on the tail end,” I bluffed.
“Generally, the boys like to see where they’re going.” I walked off with the girls to the snack table to unload the bags. More chips, sodas, a bag of miniature candy bars, we jammed everything in, gored weenies on our sticks, and claimed a log.

This was such
quaint entertainment, but I had to admit it was better than sitting home alone. Although Downy would have rather sat home alone than do this! Our weekend parties were usually in someone’s mansion when the parental units were out of town. Everyone was dressed in their best and trying to out-cool one another, and they
definitely
were not hurling marshmallows over a blazing fire into one another’s mouths. Nash crashed down by our log in his efforts to catch a marshmallow, and smiled up to me with it caught in his teeth. I had the sinking feeling that he’d decided I was interesting. I couldn’t return it. This was a guy who had belched right in my ear at our first meeting.