The Summer of Broken Things Read online

  “¿Y esta es la chica?” the man in the uniform says, pointing to me. I don’t quite follow that, either, but he’s looking down at the picture on my passport. “Ka-ee-la Boots?”

  It’s funny that he thinks the y should be pronounced separately in my first name. And funny that he doesn’t have any idea how to say my last name. But Mr. Armisted doesn’t correct him. He just says, “Sí.”

  The man hands back our passports and waves us through.

  “Well, Ka-ee-la Boots and Avery Armisted, welcome to Spain,” Mr. Armisted says, grinning as we walk toward the baggage claim beyond. “Thank you for not creating any international incidents.”

  He pronounces Avery’s name only slightly differently—more as if he’s faking an accent than anything else. But it jars loose some ancient memory from Spanish class in my jet-lagged brain.

  “Wait—would my last name really be ‘Boots,’ saying it in Spanish?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Mr. Armisted says. “Their U sound is always an ooo, not an uhh.”

  I’d rather be “Kayla” than “Ka-ee-la,” but to be called “Boots” not “Butts” . . . It’s like that man in the uniform just blessed me. It’s like he handed me a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s like he gave me permission to be anybody I want to be, here in Spain.

  Stephanie Purley was so, so wrong.

  I am not still “Butt-girl” in Spain.

  Avery, So, So Tired

  You know those posters some teachers keep in their classrooms when they want to pretend they understand kids? The ones that say, I DON’T DO MORNINGS, usually with a picture of a grumpy-looking cat or some other stupid thing everyone’s seen a thousand times as a meme?

  I never really understood I DON’T DO MORNINGS before now.

  This is a morning I really, really, really cannot face.

  I didn’t fall asleep until, like, five minutes before we were landing. Dad says this should feel like one a.m. to us, but I’ve stayed up later than that at sleepovers plenty of times, and I’ve never felt this fuzzy-brained. It’s just wrong that sunlight was streaming in the windows as we walked toward passport control—that sunlight totally confuses me.

  Now we’re at baggage claim, which doesn’t have windows, but it’s still too brightly lit, with yellowish-orange pillars everywhere. (Here’s something Mom and I would agree on: This place needs a better interior designer.) And it’s apparently going to take a hundred years for our suitcases to show up.

  “Avery, you’re asleep on your feet.” Dad laughs. “You’re swaying. Should I be ready to catch you if you fall over?”

  “I won’t fall,” I snap. “I’m awake. I’m . . . just going to text everyone that we’re here. You haven’t told Mom yet, have you?”

  I pull out my phone. I’m really planning to text Shannon and Lauren, to brag, Hola from España! I made it! Everything is bonita! Hermosa!

  They don’t need to know that I’ve only seen the airport so far, and it definitely isn’t beautiful. Eventually, maybe I’ll get around to also telling Mom we’ve arrived.

  But Dad puts his hand on my arm.

  “There’s no Wi-Fi here,” he says. “I already checked.”

  “Dad, I don’t need Wi-Fi to text!” I start to laugh.

  Then it hits me, one of the many ridiculous things about this Spain trip I was trying to forget: Dad refused to pay to unlock my phone for international cellular use. He says it’s too expensive, and it makes more sense on this trip for me and Kayla to carry around little burner phones, which he’ll pick up for us later today.

  So right now, without Wi-Fi, my phone is worthless. I’m like some poor kid who doesn’t even own a phone. I can’t connect to anyone.

  Somehow, being away from Mom makes me think more like her. She complains that even though Dad’s Mr. Financial Hotshot, he acts sometimes like he’s still that poor farm kid who arrived in New York City without a spare nickel to his name. I can hear her voice in my head, You want to economize now? About this? Remind me again—what’s your net worth?

  She mostly says that when she wants to redecorate, and he balks at the cost of the just-right flooring or window treatments, instead of cheaper alternatives. When she says our house has to look up-to-date and perfect all the time, so other people will hire her to decorate for them.

  My stomach churns, and it’s not just because I couldn’t face that dried-up breakfast sandwich or the half-rotten banana Dad wanted me to eat. I think about his credit card not working at the Columbus airport. I think about the defeated slump of his shoulders when he was on the phone with the credit card company.

  Credit card companies mess things up all the time, I remind myself. That was just a mistake. He was just annoyed. And this phone thing? It’s just Dad being stupid.

  As soon as my brain’s working again, when I’m not jet-lagged anymore, I’ll figure out how to talk Dad into unlocking my phone. I can’t be stuck with just a burner phone any time I’m away from Wi-Fi. I can’t live without texting.

  “I’ll text your mother, if you’re really that concerned,” Dad says. “But, you know, she doesn’t worry when I fly. She’s used to it. It’s one—no, two a.m. at home now. I’m sure she’s already asleep.”

  “It’s not just you flying this time—it’s her precious daughter, too,” I tell him, rolling my eyes. “Yo tambien.”

  I’m not sure I’m using the right grammar. Isn’t that how you say Me too in Spanish?

  Really, I shouldn’t have to remind him of stuff like that.

  Dad shrugs.

  “Would you let my mom know too?” Kayla says hesitantly. “She was going to wait up and keep checking the airline website until it said we’d landed.”

  Dad’s eyes soften when he looks at Kayla.

  “Of course,” he says. “I fly so much, I forgot what it’d be like for your family.” He holds out his phone to her. “Do you want to call and talk to her directly?”

  Kayla stares at the phone like she’s never seen such a thing before. Or like it’s never occurred to her that someone could stand in an airport in Madrid, Spain, and call back to Ohio.

  How stupid is she? I wonder. Some kinder voice in my head counters, Or . . . how jet-lagged?

  Kayla literally backs away from the phone.

  “No, thank you.” She’s using her tiny voice again, as if she thinks that could make her disappear. “It’d freak Mom out, to have the phone ring now. She’d think that meant the plane crashed.”

  An alarm goes off just then, but it’s only the signal that the conveyer belt for the baggage is starting up.

  “Finally!” I mutter as Dad hunches over his phone sending the message to Kayla’s mom.

  Kayla stares off into the distance, and I think of the insult Mom throws at Dad when she really wants to hurt him: Quit acting like some slack-jawed yokel who’s never been off the farm. I never really knew what “slack-jawed yokel” meant, but it’s like Kayla’s posing for the Wikipedia definition picture. Do I really have to spend the next eight weeks with her—while I can’t text with all my real friends?

  It would be so easy to start crying right now.

  “Dad, can I see my passport again?” I ask, because I need something else to focus on. “I want to see the new stamp.”

  “Can’t you wait?” Dad mutters, not looking up from his phone. “In a minute, we’ll have our luggage, we’ll be in a cab on the way to the apartment—when we get there, you can study your passport for hours if you want. I’ll be taking a nap.” His phone pings, and he sighs. “Correction, you two can nap, and I’ll need to head to the office right away. . . .”

  “That was a big plane—what if our bags are the last ones off?” I say. “This’ll just take a minute.”

  I unzip the side of his briefcase where he tucked all three passports. Dad sighs again, but he doesn’t stop me.

  I ease out the little blue book and flip it open. There’s my passport photo—hideous, of course. It’s from two years ago, when I still had braces, and I look like a
goofy little kid. My grin’s too big, so it must have been before Shannon took that modeling class and taught the rest of us the dangers of wide-smiling. How many hours did we spend practicing in front of a mirror, so we could look perfect even in pictures that weren’t selfies?

  I turn the pages, leafing through the foreign-country stamps. Aruba. Barbados. Jamaica. Mom really likes Caribbean vacations. There’s this cheesy old song called “Kokomo” that Dad always sings to Mom where he lists tropical destinations, and we’ve been to almost all of them. I think he customizes it to add in places we’ve been. I wince, remembering how the two of them started fighting over that song on our spring break trip, and Dad snapped at Mom, “What? Are the Beach Boys too declassé for you now?”

  I think declassé is French, not Spanish. I had to look it up. And by then, they’d gone from sniping at each other to giving each other the silent treatment, and talking extra-nice to me.

  Parents.

  On the bright side, I got a really expensive new bikini out of that, because they wanted to prove they hadn’t ruined our family vacation. But, I don’t know, every time I look at that bikini, it makes me feel a little sick to my stomach.

  It’s the most expensive swimsuit I’ve ever had, but I didn’t even bring it on this trip.

  I think Mom and Dad being apart for most of this summer will make them nicer to each other. I think it already has. I haven’t heard them fighting since . . . since that night they worked out the plans for me to come to Spain.

  The conveyor belt in front of me gives a little screech—it’s stopped.

  “Seriously?” I mutter. “Is there some Spanish union rule that lets baggage handlers take a break in the middle of unloading? Can’t they finish the job first?”

  “Avery,” Dad says warningly. “Don’t be rude. You’re making assumptions.” This is code for, Even when everyone around you is speaking a different language, you can’t assume they don’t understand English. And when you’re in another country, you always represent America. . . . There’s a whole lecture attached to it about respecting other people’s cultures.

  Which is ridiculous, because the whole reason Dad’s here this summer is that he’s trying to get the people working for his company in Spain to behave more like American employees. Which . . . mostly means not taking so many breaks. Being willing to work 24/7, if that’s what it takes.

  “Did they forget our suitcases?” Kayla whispers. “Look. We’re about the last people left.”

  She’s right. There’s one other cluster that might be some sports team—basketball, maybe? They’re all tall. (And cute. Hello . . . ) I can make out UNIVERSITY OF on one of their shirts. College men! The tallest guy, who’s on crutches, even seems to be looking at me. No . . . He’s looking past me, toward a group of very tall girls in University of South Florida athletic gear coming back from the bathroom. So . . . in college, do men’s and women’s teams travel together?

  One of the females laughs walking past me, and it makes me feel as young as my passport photo. It makes me wonder if my hair is sticking up, or if I’ve got sleep crud crusted in my eyelashes.

  It makes me wonder if she thinks I’m as pathetic as Kayla.

  Oh, yeah? Well, I have soccer teammates to hang out with, I want to tell her. They’re just . . . not here right now. And is the guy on crutches your boyfriend? What kind of basketball player is he if he’s already broken his leg, and it’s just the start of the trip?

  The female basketball players rejoin the male basketball players. They all pick up duffel bags from the floor and start heading toward the door.

  They’re obnoxious and they already have their luggage.

  Dad calls over a worker, who’s maybe a janitor. They both reel off a string of Spanish I can’t begin to follow, and the janitor gestures toward a desk at the other end of the room.

  “He says that’s probably everything for our flight,” Dad reports to Kayla and me. “We have to go to customer service to report our lost luggage.”

  “Lost?” Kayla repeats. “All my clothes, everything I brought—it’s just . . . gone?”

  “Not permanently,” Dad says. “I mean, I hope not. Odds are, it just didn’t make it onto our plane, because of the switched flights. We’ll fill out paperwork, and they’ll probably deliver it tomorrow.” He’s gazing sympathetically at Kayla again. “Not exactly a great first flying experience for you, huh? I’d like to tell you this is really unusual, to be delayed twenty-four hours and lose your luggage too. But . . . sometimes that’s just how things go.”

  “This isn’t my first flight,” Kayla says softly. “I’ve flown before.”

  She thinks we’re going to believe a lie like that?

  Oh, I guess she means the flight from Columbus to DC, I realize. Someday, somebody should tell her layover flights don’t count separately, but I’m not bothering now. I’m too annoyed that Dad’s all about making things easier for Kayla. I decide I need to razz him.

  “What this means is, Dad’s going to have to pay for another shopping trip,” I say. “Only bigger and better this time. European fashions, here we come!”

  Dad gives me a chilling look.

  “There’s a washer in the apartment,” he says. “All we have to do is wash our clothes from yesterday. Yes, young lady, you can do your own laundry.”

  This is something else Mom and Dad fight over. Our cleaning lady always does our laundry at home. But Dad says I’m old enough to do mine myself.

  “You want to prepare your daughter to be a maid when she grows up?” Mom sneers.

  “No—to be independent,” Dad says.

  Can this summer get any worse?

  We walk over to the customer service counter, and there’s a long line—I guess other people figured out way before we did that their luggage was missing. Time slows down. Maybe it stops entirely.

  I will spend the rest of my life in this customer service line, I think. I will never see anything else of Spain. I will never see my friends again. I will never play soccer again. I will never start high school. I will never . . .

  Just to have something to do, I go to the bathroom again. This one is out of toilet paper, so I have to use Kleenex from my backpack. I shake my hair out and pull it back into a neater ponytail. I still look too young, so I put on mascara—just a little, not the raccoon-eye approach Kayla uses.

  “There,” I say out loud. “Perfect.”

  But my face is too pale, and the mirror reflects an ugly, messy bathroom behind me, with every trash can overflowing.

  I go back to Dad and Kayla, and they’re still three people away from the front of the line.

  After approximately a hundred years, it’s finally Dad’s turn. I can’t follow the conversation, but the woman at the desk doesn’t seem to believe anything Dad says. He shows the baggage claim tickets. He shows the airline tickets on his phone. He and the woman use their Spanish like swords, back and forth and back and forth, their voices rising and falling, rising and falling . . .

  I put my head down on the counter, right by Dad’s elbow.

  A moment later—or maybe an eon—Dad shakes me awake.

  “Avery, where’s your passport?” he asks.

  “I—” I begin.

  I remember leafing through it while we were waiting on the luggage. Is it still in my hand? Did I put it down and pick it back up when I went to the bathroom?

  I’m so sleepy, I have to look to be sure: Both my hands are empty.

  Is it on the counter, where I had my head? Or in my backpack? Did I put it in my pocket?

  No and no. And no—I don’t even have pockets because I’m wearing yoga pants.

  Did I slip it back into Dad’s briefcase?

  I can’t tease out any memory of doing that. And Dad’s got everything out of every compartment of his briefcase. Clearly he looked there before he woke me up.

  “Did you put it down back where the bags came out?” Kayla asks in that annoyingly helpful voice people use when what they really m
ean is, How could you be so stupid?

  “Of course not!” I snap. “I wouldn’t have done that!”

  “Avery,” Dad says.

  “Perhaps you should step out of line and go to look for it,” the woman behind the counter suggests.

  She knew English all along. I hate her.

  Dad, Kayla, and I retrace our steps, all of us staring at the floor as if my passport’s going to magically appear. Kayla and I both look in the bathroom, but the sink counter is empty; the stall I used is empty. Kayla starts to look in the trash cans, but the overflowing paper towels are gone; the bathroom’s been cleaned since I was here before. Even if I accidentally dropped my passport in the trash, it’s gone now. We go back to Dad, and all three of us walk around the baggage claim conveyer belt again and again, in case my passport just fell from my hand and nobody noticed. We walk around the other conveyer belts and the line of locked baggage carts, in case someone accidentally kicked my passport to the side and it wedged under some random metal strip or cart.

  But I already know, because I can feel it in the pit of my stomach: My passport’s gone. I lost it.

  Just like Dad said I would.

  Kayla, Struggling to Stay Awake

  “It’s okay, honey,” Mr. Armisted is still telling Avery as we get into a cab to leave the airport. “These things happen. We’ll just have to work with the American Embassy to get a new passport.”

  “Somebody had to have seen it,” she says stubbornly. “I bet it was stolen. Maybe even right out of my hand while I was sleeping. I bet someone’s using my identity right now. Applying for fake credit cards. Stealing back into the United States.”

  I wait for Mr. Armisted to say, Don’t be ridiculous. You lost it. It wasn’t stolen. Or if it was, it’s your own fault. But he pats Avery’s shoulder and murmurs soothingly, “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.”

  I’m squeezed against the door on the other side of Avery.

  “Don’t new passports cost a lot?” I ask. Because how can Mr. Armisted not mention that?