Camp Utopia & the Forgiveness Diet (9781940192567) (37 page)

Amber Gold. Amber Gold. Amber Gold. It was no use. She'd always be Hollywood to me.

70

THE 101

EVEN THOUGH JACKIE hated to wait, I'd have to make her wait. I didn't care for how long either. I barely heard a peep from her all summer, so if she thought she could just show up and carry me off, well, she could think again. I had plans. Gabe was supposed to pick me up an hour ago, but he got tied up trying to get his truck to start. This had delayed things. Now it was afternoon, and all the campers were gone except me and Cambridge and Liliana. Jackie wasn't here yet either, but when she got here, I'd decided, she'd have to wait some more. In my mind, I rehearsed what I'd say.

You see, Jackie, there's the guy and well. I'm waiting for my happy ending. We can't leave because this guy I met, well, my boy …

I was concentrating so thoroughly that when a Honda Odyssey chugged up the drive, I hardly noticed it. Considering it had a giant surfboard attached to the roof rack, I didn't give it a second thought. As the van approached, it started to look familiar. It was a little worn-out, sure, but it was definitely ours. After a series of stomach flip-flops, I fought the urge to run.

The three of us were sitting on the steps of MontClaire Hall. “That's my sister,” I said to Cambridge and Liliana. Together we watched Jackie pull into the circular drive and kill the engine. Ever so slowly, her door screeched open.

I knew I should be preparing to greet her, to offer one of the ten thousand apologies I needed to make on the endless ride from California to Baltimore. I should have been translating the words “I'm sorry” into every language known to man. Instead I steeled myself to tell her that things were running a bit behind schedule.
So, OK, Jackie. Don't get mad, but there's this guy, and he wants to go to the beach before I leave …

“Look at you,” said Jackie, walking toward me. “You look completely different.”

The new highlights in Jackie's hair dazzled like a crown. Instead of
I'm sorry
or
you'll have to wait
, “Nice hair,” were my first words. I separated from my friends and walked closer to the van.

“You like, huh?” When she flipped her head over, I could see her bikini string, a baby pink, tied behind her neck. “They highlighted underneath too.”

When she righted herself, her face was positively beautiful.

I looked at the van and barely made out Doug's profile behind the tinted glass.
I knew they'd get back together.

“San Francisco has salons better than Towson,” said Jackie. “The one I went to, Xanadu, did my color chart, and I'm a spring. All this time I thought I was a fall, and what do you know? I can wear pink and it's fine. I've been working at a dance school wearing a pink leotard. Lipstick? Pink as petals. Boots, too.”

Given our hellbent road trip, complete with the silent treatment starting in Ohio and ending in Utopia, I'd forgotten about Jackie's usual nonstop chatter. Her ability to sing everything from one topic to the next, tra-la-la-la, like a bird. Like my mom. She touched my cheek, and I pulled back.

“Wait, you're working at a dance studio?”

Freckles clustered across Jackie's nose and cheeks. So unfairly, God graced her with a beauty mark above her lip. “All summer.” She paused, counting on her fingers. “Seven weeks yesterday.” I cocked my head. A
job
?

“Here's what happened,” she began. “Remember I told you about the butterflies? The cocoon in the car?” I nodded and she continued. “Right after that, we were on the 101. I pulled over on the shoulder, and San Francisco was in the distance, you know. All foggy. So weirdly, though, the mist opened up right in front of the Bay Bridge.” She lifted my duffle bag, popped the trunk. “And I just knew it was over for me and Doug. So I told him so.”

I could not stop staring at this new Jackie, who was really the old Jackie. The old Jackie who talked my ear off, peed when she laughed too hard, never remembered which side the gas tank was on, and took ballet lessons long after I gave up. There was no reason for this except aliens. Aliens had abducted the new Jackie and put my old sister back.

“I wish I'd known it was over before, like a year ago, but I hadn't known then the way I knew it on the 101. So I gave him my phone to call for a taxi or whatever. I told him to keep it. Then, when I got to San Francisco, things started, I don't know, happening. I met a friend who needed a roommate, and then the old roommate was leaving her job.”

“You left Doug on the 101?”

“Pretty much. He did make it back to Baltimore though. I saw it on my phone bill.”

We loaded the Odyssey. Beach sand and seashells littered the back.

“But Doug,” I said.

She inhaled. Breathe, my mom had always told her. Breathe when you're telling a story.

“I was getting to that.” Picking up a pink seashell from the trunk, she studied its pearl underbelly. Jackie cleared her throat. “After your forgiveness jar, I was just hanging on to him. It was stupid.” Her eyes filled. “Anyway, it's over. He flew back weeks ago.” She pulled a curl of my hair and lengthened it. “True story.”

Jackie wore dark jeans and tall, pink furry boots. Her shirt was too tight and dotted with coffee stains. She looked wild again, colorful. She dragged a finger along my arm. “Nice dress,” she said, eyeing my ensemble. “It's different. Hey. Are these your friends?” She waved to Cambridge and Liliana, still sitting on the stoop. “Hi, I'm Jackie.”

Before she headed over to Cambridge and Liliana, I stopped her. “Jackie,” I began. “I need you to wait here for a bit. There's this guy and—”

“A guy? TJ?”

“No,” I replied.

A sly smile brightened her face. “That's fine,” she said. “But I need to tell you something first.” She pulled in a big breath. “I got an apartment in the city. I'm not going back to Baltimore. I'm staying in California.”

By
staying
did she mean relocating temporarily? Did she mean extending her visit for a week? A month. “For how long?”

Jackie folded her arms across her chest. “Indefinitely.”

“What?” Somehow in all my imaginings of fat camp finales, this ending never figured in. Not for one minute did I picture returning to a Baltimore without Jackie in it. “For real, Jackie? Does Mom know about this?”

“She knows I'm staying in California and no, she's not happy about it, but I can't go back there.”

My mind refused to process this. “You can't just stay here. What about home?” I realized I was whining. “What about me?”

We both inherited our dad's cratered chin, and hers trembled now. She reached her hands inside her purse, a tiny round thing about the size of a canteen. She pulled out a set of keys.

“You are the proud owner of,” Jackie said and plopped her ringly-dingly keychain in my hand, “a very used minivan. Mom's minivan. Then my minivan. Now yours. Take it. I don't need it. In the city, the BART goes everywhere.” Her pewter Virgo figurine, the photoscopes from Rehoboth, a tiny Old Bay spice shaker, and a photo of Doug in a heart weighed two tons in my hand. “I need to stay.” She closed her eyes and kissed my forehead. “I'm sorry.”

Even though I held real-live keys that fit into a real-live ignition, I didn't care. This was not the plan. Gabe was supposed to drive me to the beach, say goodbye, and then, predictably, I would drive home
with my sister.
Dammit, this was not my happy ending!

“You can't just
stay
here. Mom is going to plotz, Jackie. Get in the van. Come on.” When I grabbed my sister's elbow, she froze. The expression on her face told me everything I needed to know “It's not an option, Bee. I've rented an apartment. I have a patio.” She looked at me, and the tears spilled out. “And a washing machine in the basement. The whole complex is pink as an Easter egg. You would love it.”

She squeezed my hand around the keychain. “
Dad
is going to drive you back to Baltimore. The van will make it there. Don't underestimate it because it's old,” she said. “Dad just changed the oil and got new brake pads and filled it with premium gas. He'll drive it home, and once you get your license, it will be yours.”

Oddly enough, I wasn't thinking about the fact that I had a car, a fifteen-year-old Honda Odyssey minivan, but whatever. That's not where my mind was. My mind was stuck on the word
dad,
how it had fallen out of Jackie's mouth so casually, and that was when I knew that it wasn't Doug's profile behind the window. It was my father's.

His door opened. “Hi, Bee,” he said and laughed. He wore an orange Alcatraz shirt and shorts. California must have rubbed off on him, because he'd threaded a cloth rainbow belt through his belt loops. He seemed to have lost a few pounds too. “I'm really gonna miss it here,” he said and stretched like a lion in the sunlight. “But we'll be back, right? To visit Jackie? To surf?”

This was not the life I left. My dad never mentioned California. He did not wear rainbow belts. My sister's hair was never highlighted, and the minivan never guzzled premium gasoline.

“So Dad found me after you decided to stay at Utopia. He hung with me in San Francisco for a bit and helped me move into my own place. He surfed in the mornings and got pretty OK at it.”

My dad? On a surfboard? Was that what the gigantic board with the word INSIGHT angled down its fin was about? Someone freakin' pinch me.

My dad petted the surfboard. “You keep the van, and I keep the board.”

“What about your kids?” I asked. “Caleb and, and—”

“Cullen. They're fine. Penny got a nanny.”

I was reeling, dizzy. Around me the earth danced with wavy lines like in a movie right before a dream sequence. I looked to my sister and then my dad. This must be what it felt like. What it felt like to faint—to fall backward into space. Swaying, knees buckling, my brain stuttered and shifted. Suddenly it was 2003. Jackie was nine. I was five. We were in the basement of our old house in Silver Springs. It was snowing outside. See the striped hula hoop orbiting Jackie like a planet's ring? She could twirl that thing for hours. My dad and I were eating cheese and crackers on the sofa because Mom wasn't home to complain about crumbs. We watched Jackie twirl her way to the bookshelf. There she removed her favorite book the way a doctor might remove a rib. Eight-year-old Jackie stretched her
please
out like taffy. My dad had read this book approximately ten thousand times, but each time it was new. Every voice was just right. Every nuance executed. He cracked the spine. Cleared his throat. The snow clicked against the window …

“Hey,” I said, to both of them. The world tilted then righted itself. “Remember that book about the caterpillar that won't stop eating?”

Jackie smiled through her tears. My dad got that cloudy look like he was remembering it too. I had no idea why that memory came to me. Maybe it was because Jackie still looked like a little girl when she cried, pitted chin quivering. “I'll come back and visit, but I just can't do it,” she said and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I can't go back there, Bethany. I'm sorry.” I was pretty sure, though, I remembered this because this summer, Jackie had woken up with wings.

It took every ounce of strength not to grab a tangle of my sister's newly colored hair and shove her in the minivan and demand my father drive her back to Baltimore. I wouldn't do it. I couldn't do it. If I did, she'd get back together with Doug. Doug would grow weed in his mom's basement until someone, out of concern for Jackie, offered him a job. I didn't know when Jackie figured this out, but she did. So when she turned from me, I didn't stop her. When she walked away, I let her go. It was Miss Marcia who offered her a ride back to San Francisco, and before Jackie had even closed the car door, I knew she wouldn't be coming back to Baltimore for a long, long time.

71

YIELD

I WATCHED MISS Marcia's car until I had to squint my eyes. Then it disappeared. Of everything I had to let go of this summer, my sister would be the hardest. I looked to the minivan,
my
minivan, where Richard Goodman was tightening the straps that secured his surfboard.

“I promise to hurry back to Maryland,” he yelled to me. “It should take us about a week to get there. I brought you some books we could listen to. It might actually be fun. You ready to go?”

My roommates, both seated on the steps behind me, must have suspected a change of plan. Why did Jackie walk off with Miss Marcia, and why wasn't I following her? Exactly who was this old guy in an Alcatraz shirt sitting on top of the car anyway?

From the roof, my dad unfolded a map that spanned the width of his arms. “Haven't driven across the country in twenty-five years,” he said. “This should be an adventure.”

I didn't share his enthusiasm. To complicate matters, Gabe was now two hours late, and I was beginning to worry. “Do you think you can wait here for a bit,” I asked my dad. “I haven't said goodbye to Gabe yet, and I want to.”

My father checked the tires and blabbed about thermostats and air filters and said something that sounded like,
Go on and take your time. There's no hurry
. And he started to say something about southern routes versus northern routes—only I didn't hear the rest because all of a sudden there was this explosion, a sonic boom so frickin' loud it rattled the minivan. Then, in the distance, a black column of smoke began to rise.

Liliana shouted, “His truck! I think Gabe's truck's on fire.”

The three of us took off. Not power walking either. Running. We sprinted over hills and dodged pedestrians. All three of us charged toward Copernicus, fueled by some mad instinct; we huffed past buildings and park benches until we crested the hill that led to the parking lot behind Copernicus.