8. Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
I’ve gotten used to the rhythm of towns, the way they grow and shrink as we pass them. They start as a sprinkling of weathered buildings and faded billboards, expanding to a cluster of houses and sheds on either side of the road, finally building to the tall spires of neon fast food and gas station signs. Then we’ll drive beneath an underpass and everything thins out in reverse order. We crossed into New Mexico more than an hour ago, and now clumps of juniper bushes take over the landscape after we blow past each little one-exit town.
I wonder if Tempe is like this. Could Seth and I already be looking at the same kind of landscape?
Gabe is slouched in his seat, intent on the road. Mia is half-asleep against her window. I check the time. I need to call Mom by noon. That’s how long it takes to get to Ward, where their grandma lives, from Adobe, and that’s when Mom will expect to hear from me.
“We have an hour max before we have to put your grandma on the phone,” I tell Mia.
“Grandma?” Gabe’s tone is pure disbelief. “Why do you need her on the phone? She one hundred percent will figure out how to get ahold of my mom and dad if she finds out what Mia’s up to.”
“You’re ‘up to’ this now too,” I remind him. “But no, not your actual grandma. A fake grandma. Someone who wants to make a quick twenty bucks by telling my mom that we made it to her cabin okay.”
“You’re going to find some random old Mexican lady and pay her to fake being my grandma?”
Mia leans over and gives his head a light push. “Maggie doesn’t know Grandma has an accent. It’s not going to surprise her that much if our fake grandma sounds like Mom.”
Dr. Sandoval speaks Spanish, but Mrs. Sandoval doesn’t, even though her grandparents immigrated from Mexico. I’m hoping it won’t send up red flags, but Mia and I already agreed we might be pushing our luck if we tried to find someone with a Spanish accent every time we had to put Mia’s “abuela” on the phone.
“You guys are idiots.” Gabe steps on the gas and sends the speedometer past eighty.
I ignore him and check the GPS. “We’ll be in Santa Fe soon, and it's big. Where do we find someone to be a fake grandma for twenty dollars? A fast-food restaurant? Gas station? Laundromat?”
“Gas station,” Mia declares. “I need to pee and refuel.”
“We’re fine on gas,” Gabe says.
“I meant my belly, not your Jeep. It’s time for snacks and Fake Grandma.” She taps on his screen. “Truck stop gas station right before you get into town. Perfect. Truck stops have the best bathrooms.”
“How do you even know that?” Gabe asks. “You haven’t driven farther than Boulder before.”
“Research, duh. I read at least a dozen Buzzfeed articles on road trip tips.”
“Of course you did,” Gabe and I say at the same time. For some reason, this embarrasses me, and even though I feel him glance at me in his side mirror, I refuse to meet his.
Before long, billboards appear advertising the truck stop twenty miles ahead.
I nudge Mia and nod at one. “Based on the number of exclamation points, we’re about to have the bathroom and snack experience of a lifetime.”
She reads the next one zooming toward us and shouts, “Nachos!”
Gabe flinches. “Don’t yell.”
“She has to. The signs must be read with proper punctuation,” I explain. The next billboard advertises lottery tickets in a font like an adventure movie poster, the forced perspective making the words start big and get small. “SCRATCH and win,” I say, starting loud and ending in a whisper to follow the font size.
“What do I have to scratch?” Mia asks. “There are limits to what I’ll do to win. Am I scratching a nose? Maybe. An itch? I don’t know. A butt? I won’t scratch.”
“It’s a card. You have to scratch a card.” Gabe’s voice is irritated.
Mia and I exchange looks.
“Gabe?” I say.
“What?”
“Duh.”
This cracks up Mia. “I forgot how fun it is to listen to Kendall school you. How come we haven’t all hung out in forever?”
I hurry to answer, not trusting what Gabe will say. “Because he went to college.”
“I guess. Remember when we used to all play Mario Kart?”
Like I’ll ever forget. We played it all the time when we were in seventh grade and Gabe was a freshman. Once he started high school, he ignored us altogether unless Mia bugged him to play Mario Kart. It was a full-contact sport for the Sandovals, up to and including wrestling away the steering wheel controller as revenge for being run off the track. One day Gabe wrestled it away from me, and somehow during the five seconds it took for him to pin my arms to my sides and tickle the steering wheel free, he went from being Mia’s brother to my crush.
He’d wrestled me before, same as he did Mia. I don’t know why it changed in that single instant, but when I learned about pheromones in biology last year, I decided that had to be it. He’d smelled . . . warm? And I still remembered the hard plane of his chest against mine as he’d held me down and stripped the wheel from my free hand. He’d hopped up like nothing happened.
But something had. Boom. Crush. Just like that.
And I mean crush . There were some days I thought the weight of my infatuation might flatten me. If I even heard him passing by in the hallway my cheeks would burn so hot it hurt. Sometimes I would get a chance to study him for long moments while he played a video game or watched football, something that took all his attention, and then my heart would bang so hard against my chest that I googled my symptoms to make sure death wasn’t imminent.
In the end, Gabe cured me. No, crushed me.
“Mario Kart rules,” Mia says, pulling me back to the present and cooling the warmth rising in my cheeks. “But we hadn’t hung out forever even before he went to college. Probably since our freshman year.”
I don’t want him to comment on that either, so I call out the next billboard. “Hot nuggets!”
Mia wrinkles her nose. “Nuggets of what?”
“That’s disturbing,” Gabe says.
“No, it’s my new swear,” I say. “Hot nuggets, I broke my nail.”
“Hot nuggets, I struck out,” Mia says with a thumbs-down.
“Hot nuggets, I dropped my phone.” I take it out to pretend to drop it, but it startles me by vibrating in my hand and I drop it for real.
I fish it from the floormat and check the screen. “It’s my mom.”
“Turn down the music,” Mia tells Gabe.
When he complies, I answer. “Hi.”
“You there yet?” Mom asks. Normally, she sounds distracted when she calls to check in on me, but right now she sounds more . . . tired? The kind of tired she gets after she closes on a huge deal.
“Still on the road.”
“Mia’s driving, right?” Sharp edges have replaced the blurry ones in her voice. “You’re not driving distracted, are you?”
“No, Mom. We’re being safe.”
“Pass me a Red Vine.” Gabe holds his hand back toward Mia. I smack it hard enough for him to grunt, but it’s too late; Mom heard him.
“Who was that?” she demands, and if her voice was sharp before, now it’s brittle.
“Who was who?” I close my eyes and thump my head against the back of the seat as soon as I say it. I shouldn’t have tried to pretend she didn’t hear anything. Mia looks horrified and leans over to smack Gabe in the back of the head.
“I hear a man’s voice.”
“A man?” I laugh, trying to play it off. “No men in this car. Just Gabe. He decided he wanted to go see his grandma too.”
Gabe meets my eyes in the mirror and mouths sorry.
“I didn’t know he was going with you,” Mom says.
I can’t tell how she feels about this development, but I try to head off any objections. “Yeah, I didn’t either. It’s not great. His taste in music sucks, but at least at the cabin he’ll have his earbuds in and spare us. He’ll probably sleep the whole time anyway.”
I want to paint a picture as clear as a photograph so that Mom doesn’t have to worry about the fact that a boy has now joined our trip.
“I thought you guys would be there by now,” Mom says again, apparently satisfied that Gabe is as boring as I made him sound.
“Gabe has some kind of stomach issue and there’s been a lot of emergency diarrhea stops.”
Gabe swerves slightly, and Mia claps her hands over her mouth to smother a laugh.
“Oh. That doesn’t sound good. Have him drink a lot of fluids. It’ll flush out whatever is irritating his bowels.”
“Drink a lot of fluids to flush out your bowels,” I tell Gabe. He answers by flipping me off over his shoulder. I swat it out of the way.
“All right, well, call me when you get there,” Mom says.
“Sure. Shouldn’t be long.”
We hang up, and Mia’s laugh bursts out. “Sorry to hear about your runs, Gabe.”
When we reach the gas station advertising “49 Toilets!” about fifteen minutes later, Mia flies out of the car with Gabe yelling after her, “Choose a good one!”
It’s funny because Mia is picky, dwelling over things like donut decisions and nail polish colors. But I’ve made it a point for years not to laugh at anything Gabe says, so I don’t react.
“Don’t you need to go take care of your irritable bowel situation?” I ask when he stays in the Jeep. Maybe I can annoy him into going inside. I need to call Mom from “grandma’s house,” and I have to do it from the Jeep so there’s no gas station noise to give me away.
He turns toward me, but since I’m sitting directly behind him, he can’t see me unless he wants to twist around completely and kneel in his seat to glare at me. He straightens and settles for giving me narrowed eyes in the mirror. “I owe you for that,” he says.
He’s taken off his sunglasses at some point. It’s been a long time since I saw his eyelashes so close. I forgot how thick and dark they are. They make his dark brown eyes even more intense, like they’re full of secrets, and . . .
No. Nope. Not doing this.
I use my phone as an excuse to break eye contact, looking down to dial Mom’s number. “We’re here,” I say, when she answers.
“Great, honey. How’s the cabin?”
“Pretty. It’ll be a nice week.”
“I’m glad. Can I talk to Mia’s grandma? What’s her name?”
“Um, it’s Mrs. Ramirez. She showed us to our room and went straight into the kitchen to cook something. I don’t want to bug her.”
There’s a soft snort from Gabe.
“She’s a mother,” Mom says. “She’ll understand. I want to thank her for hosting you all week.”
“Let me unpack first, then I’ll call you back.”
Mom agrees and we hang up. I drop my head back against the seat. “Hot nuggets.”
“You could’ve just told her my grandma only speaks Spanish,” Gabe says.
“My mom’s fluent.”
“Oh.” He sounds both surprised and impressed.
Only the two oldest brothers, Carlos and Adrian, are fluent in Spanish. Mia says Dr. Sandoval kind of gave up after them. English-only was easier by the time the third brother, Alex, came along.
“I need to go find Mia.” I’m already climbing out of the Jeep.
“Tell her to get me some Hot Cheetos while she’s in there,” he calls after me.
I stop and walk back a few steps. I hate being told what to do. Hate it. Maybe it’s because I’m the only person in my house for Mom to boss around, and I get sick of it. But I don’t take orders well. I stop by his window and give him a hard look. “Or you could ask nicely. I’ll tell her that’s how you phrased it.”
He leans farther out the window and gives me a long look. “ Now you’re into asking nicely? Good to know.”
It’s another reference to ancient history, even more pointed than the crack about the whiskey. The heat in my cheeks is immediate and intense, but I pretend I don’t know what he’s talking about and walk casually toward the food mart. Why does he keep bringing up that night? Is he trying to put me in my place because I called him free Uber?
I find Mia in the chip aisle. “Hey,” she says, spotting me. She waves a bag of Hot Cheetos from the shelf. “I’m getting these for Gabe. They’re his favorite, but I can’t stand them. Want to split some Doritos with me?”
I pluck two Big Grab sizes from the shelf. “I’ll splurge and buy you your very own.”
“Marry me.”
We turn onto the candy aisle where she gets a bag of peanut M&Ms like always. She also reaches for a Snickers. It must be Gabe’s favorite. These are the kinds of details about him that I used to hoard like a crow with a cache of shiny things. But I look away, determined to forget about the Snickers and everything else related to Gabe.
“Time to find your fake grandma,” I tell her.
“Uhh. . .”
We glance around, but it’s almost all dudes who look like they belong to the semis parked outside. There’s one older lady, but she’s Asian, and when she says something to the man with her, it’s not in English.
“New plan,” Mia says. “Don’t call your mom until later tonight. Tell her you forgot to call before my grandma went to bed. She’s always asleep by nine anyway.”
As if that true detail somehow justifies the enormous lie I’m already telling. But I don’t have a better plan, so I go with it.
I shouldn’t be surprised that trying to find a fake relative is as hard as trying to find my real ones. But I have to figure this out quick or this trip will end the same day it started.