The Graham Cracker Plot (7 page)

Graham looked at me and shrugged.

“Any green in there?” she asked.

“Nope.” I sighed. “No money.”

A few heavy raindrops plopped on the windshield. She leaned forward like she couldn't see and snapped at me, “Don't talk to me when it's raining!”

I kept quiet.

Finally we stopped at the little gas station on the edge of town, the one where Grandma buys cigarettes. Ashley filled the tank, and Graham and I went inside with my birthday money. A lady with gray hair and thick glasses stood behind the cash register. She wore a sweatshirt stitched with the words
St. Bridget Church
, and a long cross necklace dangled halfway to her waist.

“Pump one,” I told her and put the cash on the counter. I kept my hand on it, though.

She stared at Graham. “My goodness, young man, what happened to your hair?”

“Um … it's growing out because … it fell out.” He ran his fingers from his neck to the top of his head, and he looked like a peacock with very short feathers. “It fell out because … because…”

The lady did a little gasp. “Chemo?”

We nodded at the same time. She said, “Oh, you poor boy. Where—I mean, what kind of cancer is it, honey?”

Graham blinked a bunch of times and blurted out, “Ear.”

“Ear cancer?” she repeated.

“Yes,” I said as serious as possible.

“Why, I've never heard of such a thing!”

I put my hand on Graham's shoulder. “It's very, very rare and very, very bad.”

“Oh, dear.” Her face turned a little red. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—” Graham put his hand by his ear and interrupted. “WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU!”

“Tell you what,” she said, clutching her cross necklace. “You kids can take a donut from the case in the back. I recommend the ones with chocolate frosting. And it's on me.”

I grabbed Graham's arm to stop the donut leap and tapped the counter with my other hand. “Ma'am, lots of people offer to help. They say all kinds of nice things, but, I'm embarrassed to say this, nothing ever comes of it. They probably just forget about their kind offers. Thank you so much for your gift of donuts, but we actually can't have
donuts
. Carbs are bad for ear cancer. If you want to help, really help, then you could think about doing what Jesus would do and pay for our gas. Because our mom spends all of her money on co-pays and medicine.” Her eyes grew big, and her mouth kind of hung open. I continued, “We could cover an entire co-pay for the cost of that gas.” She tilted her head and I asked, “You're a grownup. You know what a co-pay is, don't you?”

“Yes, dear.” Her voice was tight. “Do you?”

“I sure do,” I said. “It's when the County stops paying your doctor bills because your mom gets a job, then your mom has bad insurance and every time you get a sniffle she has to write a check for the co-pay at the doctor, and it's usually just a virus anyway, not the real flu, and all that money is gone and you don't even have a prescription.”

Graham looked at me and said, “WHAT?”

“I told her we don't have a lot of money.” As I spoke, I moved my hands like sign language.

Graham nodded. “EVEN THE COUNTY WON'T HELP,” he said.

The lady's lips were small and puckered. She looked at the poor boy with cancer. She looked at me, sad, sweet, cute little me. I clutched my money.

Finally, she cleared her throat and said, “Perhaps I can help this one time.”

I tucked the birthday money in my pocket. On the way out the door, Graham and I each took a donut, plus one for Ashley.

 

DEAR JUDGE HENRY,

Graham told a whale-sized lie. Ear cancer! Sometimes he's so stupid. At least that lady had a job, and she could afford gas. That's probably what Graham was thinking when he started the lie. It wasn't my fault. I took over only because I knew his brain would freeze.

After we got gas, it rained harder. Because we were on the back roads, Graham sat up front with the map, and I sat in back. Ashley squeezed the steering wheel, leaned forward, and muttered to herself. Graham led us down country roads to avoid cop cars. The prison was only forty-five minutes away, and we'd spent at least that amount of time driving but getting nowhere. All Graham's directions were wrong. We passed the same barn three times.

Graham wouldn't admit he didn't know how to read the map. “It's not the same barn. The other one had a fence around it.”

“There was no fence,” I told him. “It's the same barn.”

Ashley pounded the steering wheel. “Your map is wrong!”

“The map's fine.” I leaned forward and got in Graham's face. “
He
can't follow a black line.”

Graham threw the map at me. “If you're so smart, you figure it out.”

“I'm definitely the brains of this operation.”

“More like the butt of this operation,” he said.

I wanted to smack his head. He's the one who said to use back roads, since the car burped smoke and Ashley didn't have the gift of driving the speed limit. The County is messed up. They gave
Ashley
a driver's license.

And now we were closer to lost than to Club Fed. I yelled at Graham, “You're the King of Stupid!”

“You're the Queen of Stupid.”

“Sooooo original! Can't imagine how you came up with that one,” I said.

“Daisy Bauer. Queen of Not Knowing the Difference in Barns.”

“Graham Cracker. King of Not Reading a Map.”

Then, like a mom yelling at us to “Stop it right now or else,” the sky exploded.
Boom. Bam
. Thunder and rain—rain so hard it sounded like a thousand hammers on the car's roof. The windshield looked like the shower door in my grandma's bathroom, blurry and white, with some shadows that could be the road and could be some trees.

Ashley put her hands over her face and screamed.

“Hey!” Graham reached over and took hold of the steering wheel. “Stop the car, Ashley.”

“I can't see.”

“It's generally recommended to keep your eyes open and your hands on the wheel.”

I didn't like Graham's calm. “Turn on the wipers!”

Graham clicked something by the steering wheel. The wipers ran fast, but they couldn't keep up with the gush of water on the windshield.

“I can't see,” she said. “We're gonna get hit. We're gonna GET HIT!” Her breathing came hard and fast.

I felt the car come to a stop. “You can't stop in the middle of the road.”

“It's a gravel road,” Graham said. “Nobody's out here.”

The car swayed in a blast of wind, and suddenly it was dark. Ashley wouldn't take her hands off her face. Her shoulders shook. “Driving in the rain is dangerous. It's bad. It's bad.”

Graham turned on the overhead light as a branch slapped the back window. “What should we do?”

“Turn on the radio. Push the button until you hear a weather voice,” I said.

Graham pushed the radio button. Country. Another push. Dance mix. Another push. More country. More dance mix. A jewelry store commercial. Finally, a weather voice. “… seek shelter immediately. Severe thunderstorms can produce straight-line winds and tornadoes with little warning. This path of super cells is traveling west-southwest at thirty miles an hour. If you do not have a basement, seek shelter in an interior room without windows…”

“Tornadoes?” Ashley grabbed the wheel, stomped the gas, and the car roared forward. “We gotta hide.”

“Turn the radio off,” I told Graham. “It's making her freak out.”

Ashley braked hard, and the car skidded and stopped. She took off her sweater and wrapped it around her head, over her eyes.

Graham whirled around. “Ashley's brain cells are flying outta her ears!” Damn if he wasn't right.

The wind turned to a howl. High-pitched and wobbly, like the pretend ghost noises you make during a scary story.
Whoooo
 …
whoooo
 … The wind was making fun of us.
Stupid, stupid kids.

“Now what?” I whispered.

I don't think Graham could hear me, but he wiggled around and pulled something from his pocket. He licked it and pressed his hand against his forehead. “The Idea Coin!” he shouted. He froze for a few seconds. Then he turned to Ashley. “Keep moving forward. Take it slow. I'll look out the side window.” She didn't take the sweater off her head and eyes, but she followed his commands. “Slower! No, faster than that! Good, good. A little more to the right.”

The car bucked and bolted, slowed and sputtered. Rain and wind beat the car.

“I think it's a house. Turn here!”

A turn, followed by more howling, a thump, and a bump. The car stopped. Ashley turned the engine off. Everything was silent for a moment—a second of nothing, no engine, no wind, nothing but breathing. Graham slipped the coin in his pocket. Then a blast of lightning and thunder rocked the car.

Ashley screamed. Graham screamed. I screamed. Suddenly the doors were open. Ashley had both hands on Graham's back because she couldn't see. He ran. She clutched his shirt and followed. I ran, too. The car was in a yard, about ten feet from a white house with a front porch. Graham banged on the door and tried to open it, but it was locked.

“Is it a house?” Ashley shouted through her sweater.

He banged some more. “Yeah, it's a house.”

I pushed the doorbell over and over. Nothing.

Then another crash of lightning hit so close, the hair on my arm tingled. Ashley screamed, “Break the window! Kick in the door!”

Graham pointed at a truck in the driveway. “Hold my arm, Ashley! Follow me.”

I had no idea why we'd get in a pickup truck, having just escaped a car, but Ashley did the clutch-and-run, and I raced behind them. He opened the truck's door, looked inside, and pressed a garage door opener. Sure enough, the garage door opened. We ran into the garage. Graham hit another button on the wall, and the garage door closed and shut out the storm.

We huddled together by a door leading to the house. The garage was stuffed with a rusty little car and a heap of junk: bikes, a picnic table, lawn chairs, a lawn mower, a tool chest, cardboard boxes, big recycling bins.

Graham raised his eyebrow. “So who's
not
the King of Stupid?”

I didn't answer. I wandered through the garage, shivering and checking for things that might help. There was a bow and arrow hanging from the wall. But none of us knew how to use it. A shovel. A shovel could help. I leaned it against the door. Hammer? Sure.

“Good idea.” Graham started poking through boxes.

A bowling ball? Maybe. Christmas lights? Not so much.

“I'm cold! I'm hungry!” Ashley's face was still covered with the sweater. The garage door rattled in the wind. We flinched when lightning walloped nearby.

“We need a safe basement,” Ashley said. “I'm cold. I'm hungry. I need a blanket.”

Graham turned the handle on the door leading to the house. The door opened, and the house invited us in. More or less.

 

DEAR JUDGE HENRY,

We called, “Hello? Can you help us?” No voice answered, but I swear there was a
feeling
. The house seemed to smile and open its arms and say, “Come. Be warm and dry and safe. Go to my basement.” If those people had been home, they would
not
have told two cute kids and a nice lady with a wet sweater on her head to stand in the lightning. You said yourself they are perfectly nice people who just happened to have the wrong house in the wrong place at the wrong time. Perfectly nice people would have said, “Come. Be warm and dry and safe. Go to our basement.” Besides, we dripped puddles on the pretty wood floor, and that was rude.

We found the basement right away—it was off the kitchen. I led Ashley down the stairs. The basement was old and dark and damp, but it had a laundry room and a faded couch against the wall.

“You can take that off now. We're safe,” I told Ashley. She unraveled it slowly. Rain had soaked right through the sweater. The black-bob wig twisted and clung to her head like a second skin.

“Graham, please get my suitcase from the trunk,” she said.

“Are you kidding?”

“No. I need different hair. Go get it.”

Even I didn't want Graham fried up by lightning. “Ashley, we'll get it after the storm, okay?”

She said, “It's not okay. I need hair. This wig is ruined. I need my hair. Graham, don't you understand? My suitcase has my hair.”

“Fine,” he said. “Give me the keys.”

“I think they're still in the car.”

He slouched up the steps. “Graham!” I said. “This is stupid. Get back here! I mean it!”

Graham acted like he didn't hear me. I wanted to rip Ashley's wig off her head and smack her with it. We shivered and waited. As long as he was risking his life, I hoped he'd remember to bring the backpacks. We had clothes for the Chemist, and I wanted to change, too. We could all buy new clothes once we crossed into Canada.

I'd never seen Ashley close up, except for when we hid under her table. I wasn't paying attention to her face then. I had the bigger job of convincing her to be our escape driver.

A long scar ran from ear to chin, like someone had drawn it with a red marker. I knew there were scars under the wig hair, too. Still, she was pretty, even with scars and fake hair.

I heard a thud and saw Graham's feet. He dragged the suitcase one thump at a time. He was re-soaked. Rainwater dripped down his face. With the suitcase leaning against his leg, he lifted his shirt and wiped his face, which only spread water around. The suitcase was black but covered with stickers. Peace sign stickers. Smiley face stickers. Sleeping Beauty stickers. Stickers that said, “Rock On” and “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”