Stuff We All Get (2 page)

What's with that group-think stuff? I wish I knew. It seems like the groups here are tighter than any I've seen. I
have
always made friends, but this time it seems harder. Mom has moved us, what? Five times in the past twelve years? I used to think it would be easier if Dad was with us. Back around the second move, he said he wasn't coming. He was into a theatre group in Montreal and claimed he needed more time there. He told us he would catch up to us later. That was seven years ago, and he still hasn't caught up. I don't think he ever will.

I'm getting blisters from digging and decide gloves would be a good idea. I drop the shovel and go inside, where I find Mom isn't painting. She's sitting at the computer.

“So.” I wave a hand. “Blisters here. How's it going for you?”

She gives me a look. “I'll finish the painting, Zack.” She points at the computer. “But I wanted to check out this hobby I heard about. Geocaching. I think we're going to like it.”

“We?” I ask.

“Yeah. It's pretty cool. You use a gps device to hunt down treasure.”

“Treasure?” I echo. “As in sunken pirate ships?”

“Not quite. Although who knows what we might find. See,” she says, tapping the computer screen. “People all over the world are doing this. They put items in a box, called a geocache, and they hide it somewhere, cache it. Then they post the gps coordinates online. Other people can use their gps devices and find it.”

“Yeah?” I say. “Well, I guess you'll have fun checking it out.”

“I want you to help,” she says.

“You think one of those boxes is hidden in our backyard?” I ask.

“No.” She gives me a wry look. “Listen. I know this move has been hard on you. And I'm going to try to make sure we stay put, at least until you graduate. But you punching that kid—that's not like you. I'm disappointed, Zack.”

“I can tell,” I mutter.

“Yes, and you know I can't let it go. There have to be consequences. Your punishment stands. But I won't make you work the whole time you're grounded. And you can leave the house with me. What do you say we take a break and go try geocaching right now?”

If it gets me out of digging, I'm all for it. But I squint at her and go for a different sort of dig. “Before I say yes, maybe I should get a few more
details
.”

Chapter Three

The geocaching website has hundreds of caches listed for Penticton. Mom picks one that's supposed to be easy to find. It's somewhere in a park she wants to check out.

She already has her handheld gps device plugged in and charging. With this, we can receive signals from Global Positioning System satellites orbiting earth. Our next step is to enter the coordinates for the cache we want to find. The coordinates are numbers that pinpoint a position on the planet where lines of longitude and latitude intersect. All we have to do is find that intersection, and we should be within thirty feet of the cache.

Twenty minutes later, we're on our way. I'm navigating.

I check the display on the gps device and see that we're picking up five satellite signals. Our current location isn't too far from where we want to go. But roads aren't built along the lines of longitude and latitude. As we drive, the road sometimes heads too far south, sometimes too far east. There isn't always a place to turn where we'd like, and sometimes I have to guess.

When we're on a road that follows the shore of Skaha Lake, Mom asks, “Are we close?”

“Closer than we were,” I say. “But I think we should have taken the last turn.”

She doesn't complain about me messing up. She just finds a place to turn around. Finally we're on a road that takes us uphill and ends in a parking area above the lake.

We get out of the car, and Mom is all smiles. “Look at that view.”

“Cool,” I say. It's a nice view, but I'm more interested in checking out the group of people on the far side of the parking lot. They look around my age. I'm hoping they're not kids from my school. I don't want to be seen hanging out with my mother.

“Okay, Zack,” she says. Loudly. “Where do you think the cache is hidden?”

The kids turn to look. I withdraw into my hood, hoping to hide my face. “I don't know,” I mutter. “You figure it out.” I hand her the gps.

I can feel her looking at me. Her voice is softer when she says, “I think we need to take that trail over there.”

Luckily the trail is in the opposite direction from the group. Mom strides off, and I shuffle after her. We walk for about five minutes before she says, “It's got to be right around here.”

“Yeah?” I don't see anything except dead grass, a few shrubs, pine trees and rocks.

“This is where our detecting skills come in,” Mom says. “If you were hiding a small package, where would you put it?”

“I've never thought about it,” I say. But I start searching. I can't help it. Something is hidden here, and I want to find it. I scan the ground for signs of tracks or disturbed earth. I don't see anything. I work my way up the hillside, checking shrubs and looking behind rocks. A few minutes later I spot a rotting stump. The top of the stump is covered with a chunk of log. I move the log aside and peer into the hole. “Got it.”

I fish out a black garbage bag and open it. Mom comes over and watches as I pull out a small plastic box. It's labelled with a sticker that reads
Official
Geocache
.

“What's inside?” Mom asks.

I'm curious too. I open the lid, and we start sifting through the contents. It's a big disappointment. There's a notebook with a pencil attached so we can record our names, and a bunch of kid stuff. I spot a Pokémon card, a little rubber ball and a plastic cow.

“Wow,” I mutter.

“It's not about the treasure,” Mom says. “It's the thrill of the hunt and where it takes you. I'll make a note in the logbook, and you go ahead and take your pick of the swag.”

“The
swag
?” I ask.

“That's what geocachers call the items in the box. It's an acronym for Stuff We All Get. But the rule is if you take something out, you have to put something back.”

“I don't have anything to put back,” I tell her.

“I do.” She grins and pulls a mini-calculator out of her pocket. “Don't look at me like that. The bank gave me this when I opened an account. Now go ahead and pick something.”

“Jeez,” I mutter. Sometimes I swear she thinks I'm still ten. “Let's see. Do I want the pen? The fish lure? Or how about this pineapple key chain?” I paw through the box and shake my head. “I don't want any of this.” Then something on the bottom catches my eye. It's a cd in a plain sleeve. It looks like a blank. But when I turn it over, I find one word written in felt pen:
Famous.

Huh. “I'll take this.”

“There you go,” Mom says. “Want to find another cache?”

“Um,” I say. “I'm actually pretty hungry. Maybe we could go eat instead?”

Chapter Four

The first few days of being grounded were bad. After a couple more go by, I feel like I'm losing it. I play around with my guitar sometimes, watching the colors, but I can only do that for so long. I'm not that good at playing and probably never will be since I only play alone. It's tied in with my synesthesia and that makes it feel private.

When I was little, I assumed everyone saw colors with music. But when I got older and talked about it in school, the other kids laughed or called me a liar. Even Mom was confused when I went home and told her about it. She took me to the doctor and had me checked out. When we got the diagnosis, the doctor said I had a special gift. I should simply enjoy it. I decided he was right, but I also decided to keep it to myself.

When I've had enough guitar, I try other things. But watching tv or playing on the computer alone is boring. I've never been seriously into gaming, but I played sometimes with a couple of buds from the last town. I miss them. We're keeping in touch online, but it's not the same as having someone hang with you. I'm lonely and getting this restless feeling in my gut. I need to move or I'll explode. But I'm not allowed to blow off steam by going out to shoot hoops or play street hockey.

I'm almost wishing Mom hadn't eased back on the chore thing. That's how bad it's getting. She stopped by the school and picked up my homework. I was so desperate for something to do, I finished it right away. By Wednesday I'm lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling and plotting my escape.

But where can I go? And who can I see? There's nothing and no one. I pound on my pillow, then look around my room. It's a worse mess than normal. I haven't finished setting it up the way I'd like since we moved. I remember seeing some old shelves out in the garage, the sort you hang with brackets. Maybe I could put them up on my wall? They could hold my books and cds. Most of my music is on my mp3 player, but sometimes I prefer the sound of cds. I don't know why, but the colors are different. Vinyl albums are different again. Live music is best.

I start sorting through the stuff on my floor, piling up clothes to make a work space. Under a pair of jeans I find the cd from the geocache.
Famous.
Huh. I'd forgotten about that. I decide it can't hurt to give it a listen. I stick it into my stereo and start stacking my other cds.

Whoa! The sound filling my room is amazing. I freeze and watch indigo swirling like dark blue smoke. Incredible acoustic guitar music pours out of the speakers. It's like nothing I've ever heard. It must be a twelve-string. The player knows how to work it for all it's worth. Blue swirls and ripples of deep green flecked with brown move in.

The cds I was holding fall to the floor, and I barely notice. And then this girl starts singing. Her voice is weak at first, a faded blue. But after a few bars her voice takes off and soars above the guitar. The blue I see now is a summer sky. I drop onto my bed to watch.

At first I'm so caught up in the sound I don't pay attention to the lyrics. But after a while I wonder what she's singing about. Lakes. Rivers. Traveling. The melody gives me the pink and gold of sunrises as she sings about taking off into the vast unknown.

When it ends, I need to hear it again. Now. But before I can move, another song starts. This one feels different. The guitar pauses between notes, building slowly. I see muted and misty shades of green, yellow and mauve—the colors of an old bruise. When her voice arrives, it's so uneven I can barely make out the words. I strain to catch them. The song is about loneliness. The vocals slip in and out of the guitar notes like they were supposed to be together but lost each other. It's as if the music is saying as much as or more than the words. I catch phrases about arriving alone, leaving alone. There's something about eternal solitude, about reaching for connection and always missing.

It's the saddest song I've ever heard.

There's an interval of static after the song ends, and I think that's the end of the cd. I get up to replay it, but then a third song starts. This one is jarring after the flow of the first two. The guitar strings aren't strummed and stroked. They're getting slammed. Purple and black form a backdrop for flashes of blood red. But again, the music fits the lyrics, because this one is about being used and lied to. It's about suspicion, about wanting to believe in someone. It's about wanting to trust and getting mocked instead. Feeling like a fool because everybody knew—except her.

It sounds like somebody messed her up. As the last guitar note fades to scabby brown, I hear a guy mutter, “Guess who.”

I don't know why, but that ticks me off. How could he say that to her? Was it him that hurt her?

And who is she?

I listen to the songs again. By the second listen, I think maybe she's from Penticton because she mentions Skaha Lake.

By the third listen, I know I have to find her. This girl understands me better than I understand myself. I could never put into words what loneliness feels like, but she gets it. She knows what it feels like to be mocked. She knows what it feels like to want to go. Just go.

That last bit worries me. What if she stashed her cd in the geocache box and left? I imagine her with her guitar and a backpack at the side of the highway, thumb out for a ride. She'd be brave enough to do that. Anyone who creates music like hers, with lyrics that are so honest and so real, has got to have courage.

I want to find her. But how?

I take the cd out of the stereo and examine it. No clues there. Just that one word:
Famous
. I check the plastic sleeve it was in, and, again, there are no clues. I think back to when I found it in the geocache. Was there anything on the ground nearby? Not that I can recall.

What about the logbook in the cache box? Everyone is supposed to record their name there. All right. There's no guarantee that she wrote her name, but it's possible. Only how will I know which name is hers? Maybe it'll be obvious. Maybe she wrote that she left a cd. Or I'll see a name that
has
to be her.

I realize there's another clue. The handwriting on the cd would match the handwriting in the logbook, right? Not bad, Zack. Not bad at all. Maybe having a cop Mom who nags about
the details
has advantages.

Thinking about Mom makes me check the clock. It's too late for me to head out—she'll be home any time now. I'm going to have to wait until tomorrow. I
am
going, grounded or not. All I have to do is wait until Mom leaves for work and, bam, I'll be out the door. It only took about twenty minutes for us to drive to the cache site, including that wrong turn. I should be able to bike there in under an hour, easy.

Chapter Five

Mom doesn't leave for work until almost noon. It's a long morning. But it's good, because it means she won't come home for lunch.