Amy & Roger's Epic Detour (6 page)

“This musical,” he said. I noticed he pronounced “musical” like it was in a foreign language, like it wasn’t a word he’d said very often. “You were in it?” He sounded surprised.

“Yeah,” I said, turning to face him so he would stop reading my back. “I was, um, the lead.” I saw Roger’s eyebrows shoot up, and I looked back down at the plastic lid of my milk shake cup. I could understand his surprise. Even before it had happened, people had always seemed surprised to hear I was an actor. But I’d always loved the chance to become someone else for a few hours. Someone for whom the words had been written, every gesture and emotion plotted, and the ending figured out. Almost like life. Just without the surprises.

“So,” I said after a moment, “we should probably get back on the road, right?”

Roger nodded. “Probably.” He took a sip of his root beer and looked out at the freeway. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I don’t think it’s going to take us four days. Some friends of mine drove cross-country, and they did it in thirty-six hours.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. Though I don’t think they ever stopped—I think they just drove straight through. And they probably sped a lot,” he added.

“Huh,” I said, not exactly sure how to respond to that. It hit me that, while I didn’t want to do this, Roger probably wanted to do it even less. Why would a college almost-sophomore want to spend four days transporting a high schooler across the country? Maybe this was Roger’s way of saying that he wanted to get it over with as fast as possible.

“Have you ever taken a road trip?” he asked.

I turned to squint at him and shook my head, feeling very lame. I knew that he didn’t mean a family excursion to see a historical landmark. He meant a
road trip
, the kind that cool people took in college. “Have you?” I asked, even though I had a feeling the answer was yes.

He nodded. “Just in-state, though. Up to San Fran, down to San Diego. And I don’t know …” He paused and peered into the bag. He shook it hopefully, fished around inside, and came up with three fries. He took one and offered the rest to me. “Last two,” he said. “Go for it.” I took one, leaving one for him. He smiled and ate it, looking pensive. “I guess I just thought that this trip might be more of a real road trip,” he said. “I don’t know. More interesting places. And at least a route we could pick ourselves.”

I took a sip of my shake, hoping my relief wasn’t obvious. So it wasn’t
me
he had a problem with, just my mother’s version of the trip. Which was entirely understandable, given the places that she’d chosen for us to stop.

I thought about what I’d just reread in my father’s book. About going out and just driving, and how you can only do it when you’re young. For the first time, it struck me that this trip could be something worth recording in the scrapbook, after all. “Well,” I said, not entirely able to believe I was about to suggest this. “I mean, I guess we could go other places. As long as we’re there in four days, does it really matter which way we go?”

“Really?” Roger asked. “What about your mother’s reservations?”

I shrugged, even though my heart was pounding. It was a legitimate question. Knowing my mother, she’d probably be calling every hotel to make sure we’d checked in. But there was a tiny, reckless piece of me that wanted to be the difficult one for once. That wanted to make her worry about
me
for a change. That wanted to show her what it felt like to be left behind. “I don’t care,” I said. This wasn’t exactly true, but I liked the way it felt to say it. It was something Charlie would have done. And something Amy! would never do in a million years. And as I thought about the four hundred dollars in my front pocket, it occurred to me that we might be able to use it to buy just a little bit of freedom.

Roger blinked at me. “Okay,” he said. He turned to face me more fully and leaned back against the window. “So where should we go?”

“We’ll still get there by the tenth, right?” I asked quickly. My mother was not going to be happy we were ignoring her route, but I knew she would have a conniption if we took longer than the allotted time. “This is just a detour,” I clarified.

“Just a detour,” Roger agreed, nodding. He smiled at me, and I felt the impulse to smile back. I didn’t, but the feeling was there, for the first time in months.

The In-N-Out employee to our left suddenly raised her volume and began screaming at her soon-to-be-ex. Apparently, his name was Kyle, and he knew exactly what he’d done. Feeling like I was overhearing something I probably shouldn’t, I jumped to my feet and began to walk around to the front of the car when I saw that Roger hadn’t moved. He was still listening to the breakup with a slightly nauseated expression on his face.

“Roger?” I asked.

“Right,” he said quickly, getting up as well and crumpling the white paper bag. We buckled ourselves in, and Roger started the engine. “So if this is going to be a real road trip,” he said, backing out of the parking space and heading toward the exit, “we need to get some road trip essentials.”

“Like gas?”

“No,” he said. “Well, yes,” he amended, looking down at the gauge. “But there are two things that are absolutely necessary if you’re going to be hitting the road.”

“And what are those?”

Roger smiled at me as he paused at a stoplight. “Snacks and tunes,” he said. “Not necessarily in that order.”

“How do you feel about Billy Joel?” Roger asked, scrolling through his iPod. We were still sitting in the parking lot of the Sunshine Mart, as Roger insisted that we couldn’t start driving until there was a soundtrack. He’d offered to play one of my mixes, but I had put him off, letting him pick the music. Most of what was on my iPod was Broadway musical soundtracks or oldies, and it didn’t seem like Roger was a secret Andrew Lloyd Webber fan.

I looked up from the road atlas. “Fine, I guess.” I didn’t want to tell him that most of my knowledge of Billy Joel came from the musical
Movin’ Out
. I retrieved my snacks from the plastic bag, placed my cream soda in the back cup holder, and opened my Red Vines. Roger had loaded up on Abba-Zabas, telling me that they could only be found in California—making me wonder yet again why on earth anyone would ever choose to live in Connecticut. I pulled out his root beer and placed it in the front cup holder for him, then placed the snack bag behind me in the backseat.

“So Billy’s in,” said Roger, spinning his track wheel and clicking on the center button. “Excellent.”

I focused back on the map, tracing my finger over all the freeways that crisscrossed and bisected the state of California, which seemed impossibly huge. In the atlas, it took up five pages. Connecticut, I’d seen when I flipped past it, shared a page with Rhode Island. I turned to the page that covered central California, and as soon as I saw it, I knew it was where I wanted to go: Yosemite National Park. It was a six-hour drive from Raven Rock, and part of it had been founded by my ancestors on my father’s side. We used to go up every summer for two weeks—my father, Charlie, and me. We’d stopped going a few years ago, not for any specific reason. It just seemed like none of us had the time anymore. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it until I saw it on the map, just up the interstate, half a state away. “I think,” I started, then cleared my throat. Roger looked up from his iPod and at the atlas on my lap.

“Do we have a heading?” he asked, smiling.

“Maybe,” I said. I looked down at the map, at my finger resting on the blob of green that represented the national park. What if he didn’t want to go? What if he thought it was stupid? I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to go. Lately I’d been doing my best to avoid places that reminded me of things I didn’t want to be reminded of. But it was suddenly the only place I wanted to be. I took a breath. “Have you ever been to Yosemite?”

You ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine.
—Elvis Presley

N
INE YEARS EARLIER

“Are we there yet?” Charlie whined, kicking the back of my seat. I turned around to glare at him, slouched in the backseat and staring out the window.

“Stop it,” I said. “It’s annoying.” Charlie responded by kicking my seat again, and harder this time. “Daddy!” I said, turning to my father, who was driving.

“Yes?” he asked. He was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel in time with Elvis, totally oblivious to what was going on behind him.

“Charlie’s
kicking
me.”

“Is he really?” My father shifted his eyes to the rearview mirror. “That’s an impressive reach, son!”

“I mean,” I said, frustrated, “he’s kicking my
seat
.”

“Ah,” my father said. “Well, in that case, please refrain. Your mother isn’t going to want footprints on the upholstery.”

Charlie muttered something I couldn’t hear and, I saw in the rearview mirror, slumped even farther down in his seat. On these trips, I was always allowed to sit in the front seat, because when I was little I’d gotten carsick. I no longer did, but now it was habit. When my mother drove with us on long trips, she sat in the back with Charlie, and the two of them read their respective books the whole time, the only sound being an occasional burst of laughter from something one of them had read. I’d see Charlie pass my mother whatever he was reading at the time, his finger on the page to mark what had made him laugh, and I’d see my mother smile in return.

But when we were in the car, their private world of books didn’t bother me for once. Because my father and I had our own routine in the front seat, and I had responsibilities.

He had taught me to read a map about the time I was learning to read, and I was always the navigator. “All right, my Sancho Panza,” he’d say. “Tell us our course.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I didn’t care. I was important. I was in charge of making sure we were going the right way and, if there was traffic or a road closed, finding an alternate route. When a CD needed changing, I was in charge of putting in the next one. But it wasn’t like there was a lot to choose from. Generally, when my father was driving, it was all Elvis, all the time.

He’d put two packs of Life Savers in the cup holder, and I was allowed to have as many as I wanted, provided that when he held out his hand, I was ready to unwrap one and drop it in his palm.

Charlie kicked my seat again, this time a repetitive pattern that grew increasingly annoying. Rather than giving him the satisfaction of turning around again, I just stared straight ahead and helped myself to another Wint-O-Green.

Whenever it was just the three of us, Charlie became especially annoying. He was always more fidgety than I was, and reading was the only thing that had ever calmed him down.

The kicking grew harder, and I whirled around in my seat again. “
Stop
it!”

“Come on, son,” my father said, looking behind him. “Tell you what—you can pick out the magnet this time, how about that?”

“Whatever,” Charlie muttered, but he sat up a little straighter and stopped kicking.

“And do we see it approaching?” asked my father, turning down “Hound Dog” for the occasion. I looked out the window to my left, and there it was. Yosemite. There was the small wooden guardhouse, and the guard in his green uniform outside it, collecting twenty dollars from every car that passed through and giving them a permit and a map. Then he would wave us through the gate, allowing us to enter another world. I tipped my head back as far as it would go to look up at the trees.

“We see it,” Charlie called from the backseat, and I held my breath, waiting for my father to say what he always said when we passed through the gates.

“We’re back,” he said, “you glorious old pile of rocks. Did you miss us?”