Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (2 page)

In reflex, I looked at my phone
to find the menu and reviews of Forks and Spooners online.
No service
. This was going to make me crazy. Who in their right mind had a vendetta against cell phones? Dad’s last text on the drive had relayed another warning I wished that I’d known earlier: the Internet was by dial-up, it was slow as molasses, and I shouldn’t use it too much because Grandpa Jack didn’t have another line.

I unpacked.
The dusty hangers in the closet were made of plain wire. After wiping them off with some toilet paper from the bathroom, I hung up my shirts. It hadn’t occurred to me to pack hangers of all things. My cell phone wasn’t good for much now but I could still make a shopping list.
Hangers
. Plastic sets for my regular clothes, satin-covered padded ones for delicates, wooden for my jackets and some with lock bars for my jeans. I didn’t believe in folding them into a dresser drawer. But there was no choice for now, since the weight of them bent the flimsy bottom wire of the hangers I had. The dresser drawers were empty, but I had to wipe those down, too. This room hadn’t been inhabited for a very long time, if ever.

On the empty shelf of the nightstand, I slid in my yearbooks from Bellangame.
Folded in the top pocket of my suitcase was the purple and gold school banner, and that I hung over the bed from two nails already there. Combing out the fringe with my fingers until it was perfect, I settled back on the foot of the bed and looked up to it. This tiny room was still so bare! It swallowed up my possessions somehow, so that even the clothes visible in the closet looked paltry, their vibrant colors dulled despite the little strains of light coming through the window.

Where did a person buy hangers around here?
I needed to get some school supplies as well. Again I looked at my phone, and then I moaned and flopped over onto the single pillow. That should go on the list under school supplies, one or two more pillows, and a desk lamp.

I was going to have to ask Grandpa Jack where to go shopping, or else wander around Jacobo and figure it out for myself.
School started the day after tomorrow, so I didn’t have time to procrastinate. And where was the high school? How irritating to have to ask rather than solve the matter for myself in five seconds on my phone!

The stairs began to creak.
I counted them by noise, creak-
squeak
-GROAN-hiccup-
squeak
-rattle, all the way until the disco music turned on. Grandpa Jack tapped at the door and called, “Dinner’s on.”

“Be right down,” I answered.
Disco-rattle-
squeak
-GROAN . . . He hadn’t visited Los Angeles once in all of my seventeen years. In the few times we’d been north in the last ten years, we’d met in San Francisco restaurants. He jingled the change in his pockets while we waited for a table and didn’t speak much unless Dad asked about fishing. Dad hadn’t grown up in Spooner but the more civilized city of San Marcos on the peninsula. But after Dad’s mother died when he was nineteen, Grandpa Jack retreated north to hideaway Spooner and rarely saw fit to leave.

I sure wasn’t going to spend nine months talking about fishing!
Opening my door, I ducked at the novelty fish to not trigger the sensor. Nine times thirty equaled two hundred and seventy days, and two hundred and seventy times at least two trips daily past the fish meant five hundred and forty disco serenades.

Dinner was beans and franks
, which seemed like exactly the sort of thing that people in Spooner would consider a meal. Set to the news, the television played on the kitchen counter as we ate. I studied my grandfather surreptitiously while he watched the screen. The first second he looked away, I said, “I really have to do some shopping. Where should I go around here?”

“Depends on what you need.”

Did he answer every question this way? I breathed meditatively, the way my yoga teacher instructed. “Some school supplies, stuff for my room. A box store like Hubbard’s would have everything.”

“There’s a Hubbard’s.
Take Jacobo up to Spring and turn east. You can’t miss it. Just past the library.” He refilled his bowl with franks and beans. “I can take you tomorrow. Got to pick up some things there myself.”

Once we
finished eating and had loaded the dishes into the washer, he flipped off the television and went into the living room. The television there suddenly started to play a Hot Poppers commercial. Then it muted and Grandpa Jack called, “The scooter is in the garage.”

Night was falling, so I’d
see this scooter in the morning. The dark out the kitchen window looked unwelcoming, full of spiders and creepy-crawly things. I finished wiping down the table and checked the clock. It was too early for bed, but I didn’t know what else to do. Claiming an old phone book from a shelf of cookbooks, I took it upstairs with me to find the high school.
Squeak
-rattle-GROAN-disco.

****

My first thought in the morning was that there were two hundred and sixty-nine days left of this misadventure. The bed was spotted with light from where it could eke in through the window, and all night I’d listened to the taps and scratches of branches along the glass and walls. While eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast, I poked morosely at my cell phone. The pipes rattled, Grandpa Jack showering upstairs.

I caught my reflection in the window
when I stood. My face looked drawn from the bad night of rest. Beyond my pale shadow was the backyard. It was neater than those homes on the outskirts of Spooner, but the grass needed mowing badly. Down a flight of steps were sagging wooden benches laden with long ignored flowerpots. Those I remembered from when I was seven, all of them still sitting in the exact same spots.

Letting myself out of the house, I circled around to the garage.
The door opened with a metallic screech of protest and caught three-quarters of the way up. Light filtered into the garage, full of cobweb-covered tools on the walls and a broken-down heap of a car that had probably been sitting there for twenty years. Beside it was the scooter.

Showing up to Bellangame High through junior year in an Incredula had earned me serious points.
I wasn’t going to get even a participation ribbon for showing up with this contraption. There was no other word for it than
dorky
. The steel chassis was aquamarine, and the helmet on the seat was fire engine red. I couldn’t imagine being seen on this thing, but tootling onto campus in an old mail truck was even worse. Already I could hear the catcalls, guys asking if I had a special delivery.

A new school.
That made me nervous. Everyone here would have known each other since kindergarten, and I was going to be the odd one out. As I ruminated on that, Grandpa Jack came up behind me. “Like it?”

I lied.
“Yes. It’s great.”

“O
nly five years old. Used to belong to Maybelle over on Pine, but her eyes are going. Good gas mileage. Maximum speed is forty, so don’t go taking it on the freeway. Pop the seat and it’s got a bucket for your things.”

I consoled myself that i
t was better than riding a bus to school, or for heaven’s sake,
walking
. No one in Bellangame ever had to know. “Thank you.”

I took a shower and covered up the circles under my eyes with cosmetics.
Then we left to do the shopping. At Hubbard’s, Grandpa Jack went to automotive and I to home furnishings and then school supplies for a notebook and pens. Mom and Dad had set up their bank account to enter some money into mine every month. Right now they must be on a plane flying to Port Ulsworth, ready to embark on their grand adventure. Sulkily, I indulged in the most expensive pens on the shelves. It had been so much fun telling my friends about the world cruise! Even though they came from wealthier families than mine, this trip was still out of the reach of their pocketbooks. There had even been an article in the local paper about the winner of the prize, with me posed by my parents like I was going along. Figuring out what to wear for that picture took twice as long as the interview and photography session combined.

There was a poster display of music groups, and my room was in need of decoration. Sliding out a rolled poster for BBG
since the band had two cute triplet brothers and a sister with a great voice, I added it to my purchases. Then I caught up with Grandpa Jack in the camping section, where he was talking to a teenaged boy slouched over a cart. When the boy turned at my arrival, I startled and blurted, “How are you here?”

“So you two know
each other?” Grandpa Jack asked in surprise.

The boy
looked at me questioningly. “I don’t think so.”

The bl
ood drained from my cheeks. This wasn’t possible. “Ten years ago on a visit here I was skating around town and got lost. You showed me the way back to my grandfather’s home, Jaden, but you look exactly the same!”

The boy’s face split into a
broad smile and he laughed, his cheer spilling through the aisle and drawing me in. It was the same laugh, the same languid posture and muscular build, but his curly hair was darker, and long enough for him to tuck behind his ears. Grandpa Jack chuckled and said, “Jessa, this is Zakia.”

“Jaden’s my older brother,” Zakia explained.
All of the blood to have drained from my cheeks rushed back to stain them. He laughed again. “Don’t be embarrassed, it happens all the time. I’ve got four older brothers and we look alike.”

“And how
many sisters?” Grandpa Jack asked. “I just knew Sage and now Lotus back from your aunt’s in Montana.”

“Five,” Zakia said.
“Lotus is the baby. And then there are all of our cousins, and half of them look just like us, too.”

I knew that I must look red as a beet still.
“So I guess I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

He had not lost his smile
, and it was really adorable. “No, the whole brood of us is home-schooled. But you’ll see me around the high school in the afternoons. I’ve got a part-time job tending the grounds.”

I couldn’t
get over how I’d missed the small differences. Zakia had an irregular black mole on his upper right arm, another difference from Jaden. But it had been ten years, and I was only a child at the time and terrified to be lost. Every curve of the road had revealed nothing I recognized. By the time I came across Jaden walking along, I was near tears. He had been very sweet. “How’s Jaden?”

“Oh, fine.
Split Spooner just like all of my siblings do once they turn eighteen. They won’t even come back for vacations. We have to go to them.” Footsteps made all three of us turn. A girl about twelve with a dark braid was staggering down the aisle with a basket full of books. The ones on top were totally inappropriate for her age, adult romances and thrillers, so I assumed they weren’t all for her.

Zakia nodded to me.
“Lotus, this is Jessa Bright, Jack’s granddaughter.” She looked up at me with a shy smile. Zakia hefted her loaded basket easily into his cart.

“Hi,” I said.
The only thing that came to mind was a joking comment that she must be sad to be headed back to school, but she wasn’t going. An employee came into the aisle to restock the shelves. We said goodbye and broke apart to finish our shopping. I cast one last glance over my shoulder, seeing Zakia walk away and still incredulous at how alike he and his brother were.

On the drive back, I said, “Are they really religious in that family?”

“The Coopers?” Grandpa Jack asked. “Nah. They just always homeschool their younguns, they and the Kreelings. A lot of homeschoolers live down there in the Gap. Just like to keep themselves to themselves. I go fishing with their grandfather Barney. He says there’s nothing they could learn at a desk that they can’t learn from nature in half the time.”

“They shouldn’t homeschool.
It just makes kids undersocialized.”

He tapped the steering wheel thoughtfully.
“Well, I’ll tell you, I haven’t ever spent two hours in the company of a Cooper kid with them on a cell phone. They look you straight in the eye and have something to say.”

It had been my last chance
to use it! I was going to see my grandfather for nine whole months, so two hours saying goodbye to my cell phone wasn’t anything to consider rude. And I hated having to argue when I was right. Homeschooling was weird. You couldn’t grow up normally when all you ever saw was your family. “It’s warped, Grandpa Jack! How are you supposed to function in society as an adult when you’ve never been exposed to it as a child?”

“They function fine, that bunch.
All of the big boys and two of the girls are off working cattle with their cousins in Montana. The other girls are working fish somewhere else with another branch of the family. Sometimes their cousins come for visits here to work in their little herb and niceties shop. Peas in a pod, every one, trading kids back and forth from the time they’re little. Huge family. I just ask: which Cooper are you?”

“That proves my point,” I declared.
“No college, any of them? No ambition? They don’t branch out past their family because they don’t know how.”