Like Mandarin (25 page)

Authors: Kirsten Hubbard

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Fiction, #General, #Family, #Family Life, #Siblings, #United States, #Sisters, #Friendship, #People & Places, #Schools, #Female Friendship, #High schools, #Best Friends, #Families, #Family problems, #Dysfunctional families, #Wyoming, #Families - Wyoming, #Family Life - Wyoming

BOOK: Like Mandarin

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“Look!” Momma exclaimed. “Pronghorns.”

She braked and pulled over to the shoulder of the road. Right away, I spotted them: about a dozen russet antelopes with splotches of white on their chests. They strolled through the autumn-colored grasslands, seemingly undisturbed by our car. I tried not to think about the three new replacement trophies I’d seen at the Buffalo Grill, along with the two recovered from a riverbend a couple of miles north.

“There’s a baby, Grace! Look.”

Momma pointed at a tiny fawn balanced on spindly legs, staying close to his parent.

“When they sense a predator and there’s no time to run, they drop,” she said. “Did you know? They just lie there, perfectly still, blended in with the grass. You can even approach them, stand right over them. They don’t budge until their mother comes back.”

We’d only been on the road a few hours. But the change in Momma had begun as soon as we’d merged onto the interstate. Like in the photos in the manila envelope on my lap, somebody had amped up the saturation of her face, the hue and contrast of her eyes and hair.

“It’s strange,” she had said. “I’d forgotten what it’s like.”

She couldn’t keep quiet, which wasn’t unusual for Momma, especially since she’d started working on “that cookbook I always wanted to write.” But instead of nervous prattling, her words were colored by amazement.

“Do you remember that time outside of the reservation in Riverton, when we saw that band of Indians crossing the road? They were all wrapped up in blankets, on horses. You were pretty small, Grace. I know you don’t remember much from back then—”

“I remember,” I said.

Momma was quiet for a moment. “Oops,” she said. “We just went over the state line. The sign’s behind us. Now we’re in South Dakota.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

I shook my head in wonder. No malicious spirits had halted our departure. No force field or cosmic electric fence. Not even the whirl and whoop of an alarm, like I’d imagined the day I ditched school with Mandarin. No barricade of Wyomingites with linked arms, protecting the border Red Rover–style.

“We’re getting close now,” Momma said. “We’ll reach the monument in an hour and a half.”

“President heads.” Taffeta spoke up from the backseat.

Momma and I glanced at each other. We thought she’d been napping. “We should have woken her up for the pronghorns,” I said.

“I saw the anter-lopes.”

“Then why didn’t you say anything?”

Taffeta shrugged. “I like listening.”

“So I thought we’d drive back up to Rapid City for supper,” Momma said. “We can get a motel in town. And in the morning … Where to next, Grace? It’s your trip.”

I looked out the window. So far, South Dakota didn’t look that different from Wyoming. “Keep heading east,” I said, putting my knees up against the dash.

I used to wonder what it would look like if all my footsteps were painted red: all the steps I’d ever taken in all the places I’d ever been. There would be one long tendril way out to Seattle, reflecting the time I’d visited my aunt. Scribbles all over Wyoming, from our assorted pageant trips. Everything would converge in Washokey, Wyoming. Footsteps traced and retraced so many times they’d become a dollop of red paint, or a heart in a rib cage of hills.

Maybe it sounded kind of creepy, but I liked the idea—that we left pieces of ourselves everywhere we went, coloring all our important places.

Even if Washokey was the center of them all.

Not long after we passed the state line, we pulled over at a gas station so my sister could use the bathroom. From the car, I snapped a photo as Taffeta reached for Momma’s hand.

Once they disappeared, I climbed out of the car and entered the station. It was exactly like the Sundrop Quik Stop in Washokey, except the key chains and lighters all said South Dakota.

I set the manila envelope on the counter and pried it open. It already bore the address Mandarin had given me on the phone a few days after school had ended.

“Would you like to mail that?” asked the man behind the counter.

“Just one sec.”

As I sifted through the photos—Mandarin lying in the grassy pasture with her hair spread out, hanging off the fence with her elbows on her thighs, wearing the contraband cowboy outfit in the shadowy barn—I wondered yet again where she’d go if it didn’t work out with her mother.

She was always west in my fantasies. Sometimes I pictured her in Hollywood, waiting tables between auditions. Or I imagined her modeling in San Francisco, posing against a postcard background of bridges and fog. In my darker daydreams, I envisioned her standing under streetlights in Las Vegas, leaning against doorways and into cars. Briefly, I had even imagined her lifeless body shattered by waves, or lost in some remoteness of the badlands.

But I didn’t believe it.

Because ever since my last beauty pageant, when Mandarin had caught my wayward lilac bloom and twisted it between her fingers, we’d been linked together. Now I felt her distance, but not her absence. And someday, we might be able to close that gap.

Before I tucked it back inside the manila envelope with the photos, I unfolded the revised version of my essay and skimmed it one last time.

Everybody says the winds in Washokey, Wyoming, make people go crazy. But Washokey isn’t the only place with crazy-making winds
.

In California, they’re called the Santa Anas, and they scoop the heat from the high desert and fling it at the coast. In France, they’re called the Mistrals, and they drove Vincent Van Gogh to cut off his ear
.

Some people say the ozone gets stirred up or reduced, and we’re breathing in the wrong sort of oxygen as a result. Maybe it’s this wildwind psychosis that makes us do things like put pronghorn antlers on jackrabbit heads and lipstick on little girls
.

But whether they’re crazy-making or just annoying, it’s not just the winds that make us crazy to leave. From pioneers setting out across the prairie to mustangs fleeing their Spanish masters, the most American thing about us is our itchy feet. We’re always itching to go, to move on, to escape. We convince ourselves we could truly be happy if only we were somewhere else. Or somebody else
.

While it’s smart to plan for the future, we won’t find real happiness if our eyes never leave the horizon. When we’re all rushing off in different directions, we miss the worthwhile places, and worthwhile people, already around us
.

But we can’t wait for them to chase us down—we’ve got to seek them out. Because for two people to meet in the middle, both have to take that first step
.

First and most, this book is for and because of my mother, Marcia, Californian and Wyomingite, who helped me find Grace (as well as armloads of rocks) in the Wyoming badlands.

I’d like to thank my twin sister, Danielle: muse, inexorable critic, and womb/soul mate. Michelle Haft, best friend and constant inspiration. The rest of my family, Hubbards and Allens and Cummingses, and my friends, who love me even when I’m being a writing recluse who doesn’t return calls for a month.

My brilliant agent, Michelle Andelman, who wanted more of “edgy, longing, magnetic” Mandarin half an hour after I crept into her slush pile.

My team at Delacorte Press, especially my editors, Michelle Poploff and Rebecca Short, expert story shapers who helped perfect my novel beyond its wildwindiest dreams.

For support, honest critiques, and hysterical laugher, my
alces alces
superwomen: Amanda Hannah, Kristin Miller, Kaitlin Ward, and Michelle Schusterman. Also, Hannah Wydey, Kristin Otts, Kody Keplinger, and the rest of the YA Highway girls.

My UCSD writing mentors Michael Krekorian, Brian Root, Eileen Myles, and Harriet Dodge, one of Mandarin’s earliest advocates.

Annie Proulx, for reawakening the landscapes of my own young adulthood and beckoning me back.

And last but never least, Bryson, love of my life, who doesn’t understand all this insanity but supports me anyway.

A travel writer and young adult author, Kirsten Hubbard has hiked ancient ruins in Cambodia, dived with wild dolphins in Belize (one totally looked her in the eye), slept in a Slovenian jail cell, and navigated the Wyoming badlands (without a compass) in search of transcendent backdrops for her novels. She lives in San Diego. Visit her website at
kirstenhubbard.com
.