spacious SUV into the world’s tiniest jail. And Brandon’s sick of it, too, like we knew he would be. He forces our Explorer on faster, practically tilting the vehicle onto two wheels as he careens off an interstate and onto an exit ramp. The SUV bounces down a gravel road like a rubber ball.
“Brandon,” Mom scolds from the back, gripping the headrest on the passenger’s seat behind me.
“It’s under control,” Brandon moans.
“You’ll miss our turnoff to the resort,” she warns. But Brandon just reaches for the volume dial on the radio. Music sharpens him, gives him the kind of focus that will tune out everything but the land the headlights lick. He forces the Explorer on even faster.
Over my shoulder, I catch Dad staring out the window, calm washing his face. He trusts Brandon. Completely. But Mom looks ready to climb into the driver’s seat and grab the emergency brake herself. When I stop staring into the back seat long enough to look through the windshield, my hands fly forward and my nails dig deep into the dashboard, anchoring themselves like camping stakes. “Brand? The tree!”
Brandon swerves, sending our luggage sliding across the back of the Explorer. A stack of duffle bags falls, landing with a hard thump. His finger jabs the volume. “What was that?” he asks, suddenly worried. “Annie’s okay, isn’t she?”
“Annie?” I ask. “Annie’s here?”
Annie. The name he’d wailed last month, curled up in his bed. “Annie,” he’d grieved, mumbling her name as he moped, slumped into the couch in his pajamas until noon. “Annie,” he’d doodled in his notebooks at the kitchen table, instead of doing his homework. “Annie,” as though it was a girlfriend who’d dumped him, not the name he’d given his Fender bass, which had been taken in for a repair to the bridge. “Aaaaa-nnnn-ieeee,” he’d wailed, even though the repair ticket said she’d be back in two days tops.
“What do you think you’re going to do with a bass you can’t plug in?” I ask.
“I brought the Marshall, too,” he says.
“The Marshall?” I repeat. “That stupid bass amp’s heavier than the entire rack of free weights at the Y.”
“So?” He frowns, his braces catching the moonlight.
“So, you can’t go three lousy weeks without trying to smash our eardrums?”
“Oh, don’t get after him too much, Chelse,” Mom says, turning her wiry little body around in the seat so that she can examine our fallen piles of luggage. “You’ll make me feel guilty for bringing my Cuisinarts.”
“Your—you brought food processors and muffin trays?” I ask.
“Still got to tweak a few recipes,” Mom replies joyfully. “If I don’t keep at it, we’ll never get this year’s book done on time.”
“The book,” I mumble. The White Sugar annual cookbook—a simple, spiral-bound collection of holiday baking ideas that Mom prints up every fall, then stacks on the checkout counter shortly after Halloween. The book that always sells out before Thanksgiving.
“What’s the point of even going on vacation?” I snap. “We could still be home for this.”
“Now, now, now,” Mom says, her voice muffled as she pushes herself deeper toward the back of the SUV, arms flailing about, undoing zippers and checking on the contents of the bags in a kind of clumsy, too-fast way. The way she bangs against the car walls kind of reminds me of a hummingbird stuck in a garage.
Only she’s not stuck. I am. The kind of stuck that makes me start to instantly envy Scratches, who’s back home with Mrs. Williams, our neighbor, getting spoiled with tuna and long naps on the woman’s cushy lap.
Some graduation gift this is turning out to be. Me watching everybody else rub it in my face that they still have the thing they love the most. Seems pretty callused, if you ask me. Suddenly in need of someone to scream at (or at least text), I pull my cell from my shorts. I have no reception here, though, as I haven’t for almost an hour. (I hate my bare-bones cell, but it’s not like I had any room to complain about Mom not wanting to spend a wad of money on a phone. After all the money I blew this year, I should be grateful to have anything more high-tech than a smoke signal.) But I realize, as I run my thumb across the useless buttons, that I won’t even have Gabe on this vacation. I feel like tearing every last strand of my hair out.
“We’re almost there,” Mom says, finally settling herself back into her