Any Red-Blooded Girl (2 page)

“So how much do you think we’d get for a good
picture?” my mom asked my dad.

“Geez, Louise, I don’t know.”

“You think a million? Could we get a
million?”

I could barely believe my ears. Apparently
our vacation had turned into a treasure quest, and our family
bonding time was for sale to the highest bidder. Plus, my parents
were delusional. I mean, even if Champ did exist, there was
absolutely zero chance we were going to be the ones to finally find
him.
Zero chance
.

“Boy, I need a potty stop,” my father
suddenly announced, derailing the conversation. “Two miles to the
next rest area. Who’s with me?”

“Uh-huh,” Will mumbled from the back row.

“I need to stretch,” my mother said.

“Count me in,” I agreed.

What the hell. Anything had to be better than
slowly frying to a crackly crunch in the back of the overheated
Maroon Monstrosity.
Anything
.

The I-87 rest area was pretty much the same
as all highway rest areas: obtrusive, commercial, and lacking
adequate bathrooms. And, of course, at the mere mention of pee, my
bladder started doing somersaults. So with my legs crossed at the
knees, I wiggled in place behind a Girl Scout troupe that seemed to
be peeing in slow motion. If I didn’t love their cookies so
much…well, who knows what I might have done.

And by the time I got back to the food court,
my parents had already ordered Chinese without consulting me. I
guess they thought I needed the MSG. “Is this mine?” I asked,
wrinkling my face in disgust at the plate that sat in front of the
empty chair beside Will.

“Yep-a-doodle,” my father responded with
undue glee.

“Gee, thanks,” I muttered, slamming my ass
into the grooves of the molded plastic seat.

Perturbed, my mother said, “Flora, must
you?”

“Well, no. It’s not imperative.”

Instead of picking through the icky mess of
food on my plate for something decent to eat, I decided to crack
open my fortune cookie. I mean, it was good luck, right? With a
quick snap, I yanked the thing apart and retrieved the slim,
red-lettered slip of paper.

Bad luck and ill misfortune will infest
your pathetic soul for all eternity
. I kid you not, that’s what
it said. My fortune basically damned me to hell on earth and then
some. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Was this a joke? I glanced around
to see if anyone was obviously laughing. Negative. Then I read the
stupid thing again, coming to the only logical conclusion: The
fortunes must have been switched. My
real
fortune had ended
up on someone else’s plate.

“Hey, hands off!” Will objected, as I plucked
the paper from the edge of his dish.

Your dynamic eyes have attracted a secret
admirer
. I checked Will’s eyes just be sure. Not dynamic. Was
this my fortune? A secret admirer sounded okay, but I’d rather have
a blatant one. And my eyes…not all that dynamic either.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” my mother asked,
pausing to wipe her mouth with a coarse paper napkin.

“I’ll take a bite if you let me see your
fortune,” I bargained.

She shook her head. “I don’t know about you,
Flora,” she said, setting the paper down beside my fork. “I just
don’t know.”

A small lucky package is on its way to you
soon
. Okay,
that
was vague. Was I expecting something in
the mail? I thought about it for a minute, but nothing came to
mind. The thing was a dud.

I pushed the fortune back to my mother’s side
of the table, shoveled a forkful of fried rice into my mouth, and
mumbled, “So, Dad, what’s
your
fortune say?”

“Well, aren’t you just a Curious George?” my
father said. He grinned and tossed the unopened package in my
direction. “Why don’t
you
read it to
me,
Flowbee?”

I ripped through the crinkly wrapper, snapped
the cookie, and nabbed the paper. “A thrilling time is in store for
you,” I read aloud.

“Lookie there, Lu-Lu,” my dad said. “It’s a
sign, doncha think?”

“It very well could be,” my mother agreed,
with one of those in-on-the-joke smiles. “Very well could be.”

On that weird note, I paused to consider my
options: a secret admirer, a lucky package, or a thrilling time.
Because obviously, a life of doom was out of the question. I mean,
I already had enough problems without a curse on my head.

The more I thought about it, a secret admirer
sounded lame too. After all, a hundred million guys could like me,
and if I didn’t know about it, it wouldn’t make a damn bit of
difference. A secret admirer was out.

And as intriguing as a lucky package sounded,
I couldn’t quite think of anything I’d be that excited to receive.
I mean, sure, maybe if I was waiting for college acceptance
letters, the lucky package fortune would’ve fit. But that was still
over a year away.

That left a thrilling time. And even though
it seemed pretty unlikely that anything thrilling could happen in
the presence of my parents (unless, of course, you counted the
possibility we’d all fall overboard and drown in Lake Champlain), I
was willing to keep an open mind.

“Can I have this?” my brother asked, stabbing
his fork through two pieces of my sweet and sour chicken.

I slid the whole plate over to him. “Yeah, go
ahead,” I said. I’d absentmindedly nibbled my way through most of
the fried rice anyway. Everything else was dog chow, as far as I
was concerned.

As soon as Will finished my meal, we tossed
our plates in the trash, made yet another bathroom stop, and
finally exited the luxurious somewhere-in-upstate-New York rest
area.

And I guess I hadn’t noticed when we’d gotten
out of the SUV, but apparently Mr. Tightwad had parked on Mars. So
in search of the rented behemoth, we passed row upon row of
vehicles. Vehicles of smart people. Vehicles of people who knew how
to identify an empty spot within a one-mile radius of their
destination. And just when it looked like we were about to crawl
over the guardrail into oncoming traffic, my mother finally spotted
the Maroon Monstrosity.

“Oh…there…it…is…” she sputtered, squinting
into the distance. Meanwhile, my dad and Will came to a dead stop
right in front of me.

Will ran his fingers through his shiny auburn
locks and muttered, “What the…?”

“Well,
I’ll be,
” my father said,
sounding awestruck.

I leaned around Will to see what all the fuss
was about. And from what I could tell, a caravan of hillbilly
vagabonds had set up their battered trucks and pop-up campers all
around our vehicle. And they’d set up like they were planning on
staying a while. To get out of there, we were going to have to
strut right through the middle of their cluttered compound. How
fantastic.

My mother drew a deep breath, then cracked
the verbal whip on us. “Let’s move, people. We’ve got places to go
and things to do.”

I must say, I was impressed. Apparently the
Mental Hygienist was going to lead the charge into hillbilly
territory. Following her lead, my dad, Will, and I plastered
stupid, dopey smiles across our faces and snaked through—single
file—as close to the Maroon Monstrosity as we could get. But the
weird thing was, the hillbillies didn’t seem to notice. For a
second, I even wondered if we were invisible—that was, until my
sneaker caught the edge of a folding table where two hillbillies
were playing cards, nearly flipping it over.

“I’m sorry,” I gushed, bending down to grab
the cards I’d spilled (and practically head-butting one of the
hillbilly guys in the process).

“It’s okay,” the guy mumbled. Still staring
at the ground, he took the cards from my hand and went right back
to his game like nothing had happened.

But
I
felt like a total dumbass.
“Sorry,” I said again, as I reached for the door of the SUV.

There was no reply.

So I was just about to climb into the
behemoth and disappear off the face of the earth, when an
interesting, unexpected thing happened: I caught the most exquisite
hillbilly boy staring at me from the bed of a rusty blue and silver
pickup. Trust me, I do not say this lightly, but this boy was the
most beautiful human being I had ever seen. Repeat,
ever.
His raven curls gently kissed his bronze forehead and perfectly
framed his emotional steel-blue eyes. And he was tall. Much taller
than me.
Man
tall. But the thing that attracted me most—in a
way I can’t fully explain—was his body. He had this lean, muscular
body that was all animal. And as if he weren’t sexy enough already,
his big, thick hands were kind of rough and dirty, which gave me
the chills.

“Flora!” my brother said, delivering a sharp
thwack to the back of my head from inside the SUV. “Wake up!”

I guess
I’d
started staring too. But
who could blame me, really? It was like having a front row seat for
the Aurora Borealis. I couldn’t look away.

The Maroon Monstrosity started up with a
rumble, and Will thwacked me again. “Hey, space cadet. We’re
leaving.”

I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell
the beautiful hillbilly boy he could have me, no questions asked. I
wanted to run away with him. But I couldn’t do any of these things,
because I was stuck wasting my life searching for a nonexistent sea
monster.

Bad luck and ill misfortune will infest
your pathetic soul for all eternity
. Of course.
Now
it
made sense.

With every bit of driving skill he possessed,
my father extracted our vehicle from the hillbilly compound.
Meanwhile, I pressed my face to the window and tried to send a
telepathic message to the boy of my dreams. It was like a scene
from a really sappy romance movie, where the young lovers are
separated by a cruel twist of fate—only, technically, my leading
man and I had never even met.

Three

AT the entrance to Wild Acres, my dad pulled
right up to the check-in shack and popped the SUV in park. And just
our luck, Check-in Guy was MIA.

“Why don’t you get out and look around?” my
mother suggested. “We’ll wait here.”

“Right you are.”

With the SUV still idling, my father slid out
the door on a mission. And only moments later, his voice echoed
through the Maroon Monstrosity again.

“Reservation’s under Vic Fontain,” he said,
“like the Star Trek character, but without the
e.
” He paused
for a response, but apparently Check-in Guy was stumped. “You know,
the holographic singer who ran the Vegas nightclub.
Vic
Fontaine.
”

Honestly, did my dad really think anyone on
earth but him would know the name of some double-imaginary lounge
lizard from the dorkiest TV show ever? Doubtful.

“Here it is,” Check-in Guy said, gesturing
toward a ragged clipboard (and ignoring my dad’s crazy talk).
“Fontain. Six nights. Site Tupelo-9.”

“Ooh, Tupelo. That’s a tree, isn’t it?” my
dad asked, as if our spaceship had just landed.

“Uh-huh. All the campsites are named after
trees. There’s Oak, Spruce, Elm, Birch, Pine, Tupelo, Maple…”
Check-in Guy said, stopping to bite his lip. “I think that’s all of
’em.”

My dad smiled and nodded, impressed with the
cleverness of the witty soul who’d christened the campsites after
trees. But just when he was about to ask another absurd question
Check-in Guy couldn’t possibly answer, someone in the truck behind
us honked their horn, which, thank God, kicked Mr. Tightwad back
into gear.

“Okay…Tupelo-9,” my dad muttered, as we
snailed past a massive log cabin labeled
The Clubhouse
. A
rustic sign nailed to a tree in front of the building read:

WILD ACRES FAMILY CAMPGROUND

HOME OF THE GIANT WIENER

EATING CONTEST

SINCE 1992

Honestly, the sign was wrong on so many
levels I couldn’t help laughing. And I guess my cackling must’ve
woken Will, because all of a sudden, he was rearranging every item
in his backpack with the delicacy of an elephant. Meanwhile, my
parents were at each other’s throats arguing over the shortest
route to Tupelo-9.

“Look,” my mother said, stabbing a finger at
the Wild Acres map. “It goes Pine, Birch, Tupelo. We’re in the
third section back on this side.”

Evidently my father didn’t believe her. “But
aren’t we near the lake? I thought the tents were on the
water.”

“None of the sites are on the water,
according to
this,
” my mother declared, exasperated. “It’s
beach, then restrooms and showers, then tents, then campers and
trailers. We’re two rows from the beach, in the third section
back.”

I stared out the window. What had my mother
said? Pine, Birch, Tupelo? From the looks of things, the campground
was massive. I mean, we’d only made it past Pine, and I’d already
seen about sixty tents. If the math held up, the place must hold
like a hundred and fifty of the things, not to mention all the
pop-up campers and RVs. All told, there must be like a thousand
people here, crammed together like subway passengers on a rush hour
train. And unfortunately my stop was still five days, twenty-three
hours and fifty minutes away.

“So what’s the plan?” Will asked, while I
fantasized about hurling myself off a moving locomotive.

Plans were my mother’s territory. “Well,
first we’ll pitch the tent, of course,” she said. “Then we’ll get
the rest of our gear set up. And then maybe we’ll go for a swim
before dinner.”

“Tupelo-9!” my father suddenly shouted, in
his just-hit-the-lottery voice. “Hot diggity! Put your party pants
on people!”

Party pants? Really? I have to be seen in public
with this freak? I was starting to appreciate the fact that we were
hundreds of miles from Punxsutawney. I mean, at least Mr. Tightwad
might not get the chance to embarrass me in front of anyone who
mattered anyway.