North of Nowhere

I need to write it all down. That’s the only way I’ll believe it’s true.

Spring break, eighth grade. All those incredible, impossible things. Did they really happen? I’ve tried a hundred times to tell myself that they couldn’t have. That none of it is possible. And I’m right; none of it
is
possible.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it is true. Everything
did
happen, exactly as I’m going to tell it now.

The day began like the first day of any other school holiday. Dad was in bed with a cup of coffee and the Saturday paper. Mom was on the phone to Gran. Jamie, my older brother, was at the music shop in town where he’s had a weekend job for the last two years. I was in my room, getting ready to go out to meet my friends.

For about another three minutes, the biggest concerns in my life were which belt went best with my new top and whether or not to put my hair up.

Then Mom finished on the phone and called me down to the kitchen. And that was pretty much the moment my life changed forever.

Not that I knew it, yet.

The first indication that things weren’t right was that Mom didn’t even use my proper name. Or, rather, she
did
use my proper name. That was the problem.

Amelia.

No one had called me Amelia for ages. When I began middle school a couple of years ago, everyone started calling me Mia. Then last summer, before eighth grade, I decided “Amelia” was officially banned. Everyone had called me Mia ever since. Even Mom didn’t use my old name anymore; she knew how much I hated it.

But she did today.

“Amelia, darling,” she called from the kitchen. “Before you go out, I’d like to ruthlessly destroy your life by taking you to the middle of nowhere, where you’ll die a slow death from boredom, loneliness, and a general lack of anything that makes life worth living.”

OK, to be fair, those weren’t her
precise
words. What she actually said was, “Amelia, pack a bag. We’re going to your gran’s.”

Which amounted to the same thing.

I opened my bedroom door and called down the stairs, “I’m going out with my friends!”

“Don’t shout down the stairs to me!” Mom yelled back, kind of forgetting that she was the one who’d started the whole shouting up and down the stairs thing.

Unfair!

It was on the tip of my tongue to shout back and say so, when I had a better idea. I’d recently developed a new tactic that I called the “Be Nice” approach. I’d used it a lot lately and had found it to be quite effective in emergency situations. And finding out that your spring break has been effectively canceled and replaced by a trip to the back of beyond would surely count as an emergency in anyone’s book.

I took a breath, practiced my “Be Nice” face in the mirror, and went downstairs.

Mom was hunched over the kitchen table, her head in her hands. I ran straight over, forgetting to put on a pretend face or come out with a rehearsed line.

“Mom, what is it?” I asked.

She let out a breath. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “It’s . . .”

I waited for her to continue. Running a hand through her hair, she shook her head. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said, forcing a bright smile onto her face.

The only problem was, I knew that smile. It was the one she used whenever Dad decided to give her a “treat” and make dinner. It was the one she used that time I came home from town with a tiny new miniskirt that I’d bought with my pocket money. And the one she used when Jamie brought home his new girlfriend who had a pierced nose and a ring through her eyebrow.

In other words, the one that was a total lie. Where do you think I learned my “Be Nice” trick?

“Mom, what’s happened?”

Mom stopped pretending to smile. “It’s your grandad,” she said.

Which changed things a bit. See, Grandad is one of my favorite people in the world. I wasn’t crazy about going to visit him and Gran, but that wasn’t their fault. It was just that they lived so far away, in Porthaven, a tiny town where there was absolutely
nothing
interesting to do, and where everyone was either a fisherman or a hundred years old or both.

Gran and Grandad had grown up there. Gran’s parents used to run the local pub. Gran and Grandad had moved down to live near us when Jamie was a toddler and I was a baby, but when my great-grandparents both died a few years later, Gran and Grandad inherited the pub. They hemmed and hawed for ages, but finally decided to move back to Porthaven and run it themselves.

The town had three shops and one pub, which I was only allowed into because it was Gran and Grandad’s. Other than that — nothing. No cell-phone signal. No public transportation. No satellite TV. There was barely
normal
TV; the reception was touch and go.

Up until last year, when I sat her down and explained it, Gran thought “broadband” was a wide piece of elastic. And she was typical of most of the people in the town. I once mentioned the World Wide Web to one of the fishermen down at the harbor. He gave me a funny look, then he laughed and opened his arms out wide toward the sea as if he could hold the expanse of the ocean in them. “That’s my wide world out there,” he said. Then he picked up his fishing net and added, “And that’s the only web I need for it.”

I gave up trying to explain the Internet to anyone else in Porthaven after that.

But Grandad was different. He understood me better than Gran did. It wasn’t that she and I didn’t get along; we’d just never found any common ground. My world was about being with my best friends, Jade and Ellen. It was about going to movies, hanging out at the mall, and checking out celebrities in all the trashy magazines. Gran’s world was about running the local pub in a tiny town, chatting with a few old fishermen, and making beds in the guest rooms they ran above the pub.

I suppose that was Grandad’s world too, but at least he always took an interest in mine. He’d ask me what the number one songs were, or if I’d watched anything funny on YouTube lately. It always made me laugh when he said it. Partly because he was quite old, and old people don’t really watch YouTube. And partly because they didn’t even have the Internet, so I knew he didn’t really understand what I was talking about.

But at least he made the effort. That was the difference between them. He tried to bridge the gap.

Well, I didn’t know it yet, but Gran and I would soon find out that our worlds weren’t quite so far apart, after all. We were about to discover exactly how much we
really
had in common.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We need to get back to the kitchen, because my mom’s eyes had started to water.

“Mom, what’s happened to Grandad?” I asked.

Mom turned to look at me. “He’s left,” she said.

“Left? What do you mean? Left what? Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It seems he and your gran had a bit of an argument a couple of days ago, and he’s gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean, gone? Gone where?” I knew I wasn’t asking very clever questions, and they probably weren’t helping, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Grandad — gone? She must have gotten it wrong.

“We don’t
know
where he’s gone; that’s the problem,” Mom said. “He left a note, but Gran says she can’t make heads or tails of it. To be honest with you, I could hardly even tell what she was saying between the crying.”

Crying?

OK, I haven’t told you that much about my gran yet, but here’s one thing that anyone who knows her will tell you: Gran does
not
cry. Ever.

I remember as a kid, watching the sappiest films in the world with her, sobbing my eyes out, and Gran would sit there looking like a wax model — no emotion. I used to wonder if she had feelings at all, or if she kept them buttoned up somewhere inside her, as though they were wrapped in a big coat that she never took off.

I turned back to Mom. “Gran was crying?” I asked, just to make sure I’d heard right.

Mom nodded.

Which was when I knew there was no point in arguing.

I squeezed Mom’s hand, and then I went up to my bedroom to pack.

“Why didn’t Jamie have to come?” I asked, ten minutes into the five-hour drive, as I fiddled with the radio to find a decent station.

“I’ve already told you,” Mom said. “Jamie’s sixteen, you’re thirteen. It’s fine for him to be in the house while Dad’s at work. And anyway, he’s working all week at the record shop.”

To be honest, I wasn’t all that bothered about Jamie not coming along. We argued most of the time anyway, so it would have just made the week even more difficult than it was already going to be.

I finally found some decent music on the radio. I closed my eyes and tried not to think about how much I was going to miss Jade and Ellen and all the things we’d planned.

And, more than anything, I tried not to think about how worried I was about Grandad.

“Drop off your stuff and come downstairs. Lynne, you can go in Room Four; it’s the one at the end. The first three bedrooms are taken. Amelia, you can have Room Five across the hall, as long as we don’t get any last-minute bookings. If we do, you’ll have to share with your mom. I’ll put the teakettle on.” Gran abandoned us on the landing and went back downstairs to the pub.