The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys Read online

  But she didn’t say it. She didn’t say anything for a long time. She just looked at it, her eyes wide.

  “Wow,” she said finally.

  “I told you it’s not good,” I said.

  “Man, didn’t you hear her?” Jake said. “She thinks it’s awesome.”

  “People’d pay money for drawings like this,” she said.

  “I knew you always kind of doodled,” Jake said, “but I didn’t know you were this good. Who’s the guy?”

  “I told you, nobody.”

  “Come on, tell me. Is it your dad or something?”

  He said it with a laugh. I looked at him, and I knew I couldn’t hide my surprise that he’d guessed it straight off.

  “That’s it!” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “Wow, man. That’s cool. Your dad, he lives like on the other side of the country, though, right?”

  “Kind of,” I said. “He lives in Denver.”

  “Are you going to mail it to him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should.”

  “He wouldn’t like it anyway.”

  “I bet he would!” Laurel said. “I bet he’d love it!”

  “You should take it to him yourself personally,” Kari said.

  She hadn’t spoken in so long, I’d forgotten she was even in the room. She was actually looking at me, and it was unnerving, the way she stared. Her face was frozen, not even her hair moving; it made her look like one of those Russian dolls.

  The silence was getting awkward. I took the pad from Laurel, closed it, and stuck it into my backpack. Then I picked the things Jake had dropped off the floor.

  “Hey,” Laurel said, tugging Jake on the arm. “You want to come to my room for a while? I . . . got some new songs on my iPod.”

  Jake smiled. “Sure, babe,” he said.

  “We’ll be back in a little while,” Laurel said, and took Jake’s hand and led him out of the room.

  I heard her giggling in the hallway. Then a door shut. I stood next to Kari. She was still staring at me. I tried not to stare back, but I couldn’t take the drilling of her eyes for long.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re kinda cute,” she said.

  There was a fist-size lump in my throat, and I swallowed it away.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I mean, kinda bruised and all. But cute.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “You wanna make out?”

  “Um . . . no. No, that’s okay. Thanks.”

  “You can even touch my boobs if you want.”

  I was having a hard time meeting her eyes, but I looked at her to see if she was joking, and she didn’t seem to be joking. It was hard to tell, really, with Kari, but she definitely seemed to be serious. My heart was pounding, and I felt sweat on the back of my neck. It was like I’d been trying to bang down a door to a locked room all my life and now suddenly someone had just opened it for me and invited me inside.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh wow. Thanks . . . I, uh. . . no.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was saying. This girl had actually asked me to touch her boobs, and here I was saying no. She shrugged, doing her best to look like she didn’t care, but there was something about her eyes that made me think I’d hurt her. I didn’t want her to think I’d rejected her. It wasn’t about her. I didn’t know what it was about, but I knew it wasn’t her. She was definitely pretty, in a strange sort of way. If I was in the mood to touch a girl’s boobs, she’d be the first on the list. I thought about saying this, but then decided it probably wouldn’t come out right.

  “I could draw you,” I offered, and immediately regretted saying it.

  She looked at me again, her eyes brimming. “Really?”

  “Um, sure. Only if you want. You don’t have to do it. I mean, it wouldn’t be any good.”

  “I want to.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you want me naked?”

  I didn’t think I’d heard her right. “Huh?”

  “Naked. I know artists like to draw nudes.”

  “Um . . . no. No, that’s okay. You can wear your clothes.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “No, really, it’s okay.”

  “Okay. If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure, I’m sure.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your face. It’s all red.”

  I was sweating so much that it was running into my eyes. Now she was a big white-and-black blur. I knew I had the unfortunate habit of turning into a tomato when I was embarrassed. It was one of the things that I hated about me. There were lots of things I hated about me, but that was right at the top of the list.

  “Yeah, it’s a little hot in here is all,” I said.

  “Okay. Where?”

  “Huh?”

  “Where do you want to draw me?”

  “Well, here. In the room. Oh, right, you mean, where in the room. Okay. How about on the couch there. Just sitting there on the corner. I’ll—I’ll get my drawing pencils. Go ahead. Um. Sit down.”

  She went to the couch, perching on the edge. I watched her for a moment, then remembered I needed to get my drawing pencils. The room felt like it was rocking back and forth, like we were in the hull of a ship. If I wasn’t careful, I’d fall down. I riffled through the bag, found the pencils, then sat on the love seat across from her. She was staring at me blankly. I smiled weakly. She went on staring. I opened my drawing pad to a new page and got to work, starting with her general outline and then filling in her details.

  The whole thing was surreal. In the last few hours, I’d been beaten up in a fight, stolen the principal’s car, escaped from the police, been asked to make out by a girl, and now here I was, sitting in some strange house drawing a girl who’d offered to pose naked. It wasn’t me. The real me was back in Rexton, sitting in my room, feeling sore from Leo’s beating, wondering how I was going to make it through another day of high school. And yet, as much as I wanted to go home, there was part of me that was kind of enjoying it all, weird as that was. It was like trying on a new jacket that you thought you’d hate, but once you’d put it on, you wanted to wear it a little while longer. You still weren’t sure you liked it, but it was different, and different wasn’t bad.

  chapter six

  There is this place I go when I’m deep into a drawing, this place inside my mind where time doesn’t even pass. It passes on the outside world, but it doesn’t pass for me. It’s a nice place, a place where I’m alone and at peace, and for once in my life, totally free from all the doubting and worrying and second-guessing. It was the reason I liked drawing so much. Back then, it wasn’t so much about the drawing itself. It was about going to that place and staying there as long as I could.

  It seemed like I’d only been drawing a minute, but then I felt someone nudge me on the shoulder. I blinked a few times and looked up to see Jake smiling down at me. His blond hair looked tousled, and his T-shirt was rumpled. The light in the room had waned, the air dusky. I had a crick in my neck.

  “You with us, space cadet?” he said.

  Laurel stood in the doorway, smiling and dopey-eyed. Her red hair, once pulled back in a ponytail, was loose and looked like she’d just run a balloon over it, loose hairs sticking out with static in every direction. She wore a different shirt, a black Spider-Man tank top that was a bit too small. I had a good idea what she and Jake had been doing. Well, not exactly, since all that stuff was still a mystery to me, but an idea, anyway.

  There was also another guy standing next to her, a real skinny dude with short purple spiked hair and pink-tinted glasses. His goatee was purple too. I glanced at the couch, and Kari was still in the same position, as good as a statue.

  “Nice,” Jake said, nodding at the drawing.

  “Are you finished?” Kari asked.

  Laurel and the new guy came around to Jake’s side to examine the drawing. Laurel whistled her approval. I
wasn’t sure I was finished, but then Kari got up and came around to look. She stared a long time and didn’t say a word. I figured she was going to laugh or call it crap, which I figured it was, but then she did something I didn’t expect. She started crying.

  “Oh man, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll rip it up.”

  She sniffled. “You made me look beautiful.”

  “Huh?”

  “Can I have it?”

  Wordlessly, I tore out the drawing and handed it to her. I didn’t even think twice about it. I never gave my pictures to anyone, but there was no way I could say no to her after she had cried. She took it over to the couch and sat down, staring at the picture. She was smiling, the first time I’d seen her smile, and she looked almost like a different person when she did. We all watched her for a moment, as if waiting for her to do something else amazing, but she just went on staring at it.

  It was a feeling I’d never had before, watching somebody cry over something I’d drawn. I wanted to do it again. Maybe not make somebody cry, that would be kind of twisted, but make them feel something. Anything. All at once I understood why people still became artists when everybody knew, like my dad had told me lots of times when I was little, that artists always ended up living in their parents’ basements.

  “Well,” Jake said, “at least now we know how you can get girls.”

  “Excuse me, dudes,” the guy with the purple hair said. “I don’t mean to intrude on your situation, but if you want to come with me, I’d like to know.”

  “Go with him?” I said.

  Jake and Laurel exchanged glances.

  “Yeah,” Jake said, “that’s something we wanted to talk to you about. Gabe said we could hitch a ride with him in his van. We just have to chip in for gas.”

  “Hitch a ride where?” I said.

  “To Bend.”

  “Bend!”

  Jake nodded. “Yeah, for starters. Then maybe hitch a ride from there. Or hop a bus. He says there’s a Greyhound station in Bend.”

  This wasn’t making any sense to me. Bend was over a two-hour drive away, up over the Cascade mountains. I’d been there once as a kid, on a disastrous ski trip that ended up with me breaking my ankle, and I hadn’t been there since. “What do you mean, ‘from there’? What are you talking about?”

  He hesitated. “I’m talking about delivering that picture of yours in person.”

  “What?”

  Laurel chimed in, “To your dad!”

  “My dad! He lives in Colorado! That’s like over a thousand miles away from Oregon!”

  Jake shrugged. “So it’ll take a while to get there. Laurel and I got to talking about it, and I think it makes sense. I think it’s something you should do. And I’ll help.”

  The utter insanity of the idea was hard for me to even comprehend, and Jake was talking about it as if it was just going to the movies for the afternoon. “I can’t go to Denver!”

  “Why not? It’d be fun.”

  “Fun!”

  “Yeah. A road trip. Just the two of us.”

  I was waiting for him to laugh, to tell me he was joking, but he looked completely serious. “Jake,” I blurted, “we can’t go to Denver!”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because, because we’re high school kids, that’s why! Because we don’t have any money! Because I’ve never even been to my dad’s house! Because—because—because it’s stupid and insane!”

  He smiled. “You want to do it, I can tell.”

  “You’re insane!”

  “And I’ve got money.” He reached into the pocket of his jean jacket and pulled out a money clip full of a big wad of cash.

  “Where’d you get that?” I said.

  “From my piggy bank,” he said.

  “I’m serious!”

  “I am too. I’ve been saving for a while. It’s over five hundred dollars.”

  “We still can’t go!”

  “Aw,” he said, “come on. I know it seems nuts, but that’s why it’s so cool. Imagine the look on your dad’s face when you give him that picture. Just imagine. Priceless, baby. Totally priceless. And we’ll have a lot of fun getting there.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t you think our parents will miss us?”

  “Who cares? We’re doing this for us, not them.”

  “They’d send the police after us.”

  He laughed. “Maybe your mom would.”

  “Hey dudes,” Gabe said, “this is all very interesting and whatnot, but perhaps your commitment to this plan of action is not yet one hundred percent. I’m going to leave you to your discussions and return to packing.” He actually talked like that. I’d never heard a person who sounded just like him, like a cross between a surfer and a professor.

  “We’re going,” Jake said firmly.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Aw, come on, man. Do it! Take a risk. Don’t be such a pussy.”

  After everything I’d been through, I was starting to feel like maybe I wasn’t such a wimp, so his insult stung. “Screw you,” I said. I grabbed my bag and headed for the door.

  “Charlie—”

  “I’m going home.”

  I went out the screen door and down the deck steps to the grass, heading for the gate. The air had cooled since I was last outside, the sun low in the sky. The swings swayed slightly in the breeze. I didn’t care if the cops were still out there looking for me. I was going home.

  “Charlie,” Jake called to me.

  “Leave me alone,” I said.

  “What, are you going to walk home?”

  “If I have to!”

  “Come on, Charlie—”

  I turned and faced him. “Leave me alone!”

  He raised his hands, caught off guard by my anger. The thing was, I was scared, and it wasn’t because I didn’t want to go. It was because I actually did. Crazy as it was, I wanted to go to Denver and find my dad and give him the portrait. I knew I would probably end up in even worse trouble than I was now, that it was stupid and impulsive and bound to fail on every single level, but I still wanted to go. The only thing waiting for me at home was Mom, and her soon-to-be-husband, Rick, and Leo’s fists, and the whole school knowing about Tessa Boone, and a thousand other things that would make my sucky life even suckier when I got back to it. Going on a spontaneous road trip—it scared me out of my mind, but it was different. And I really wanted something different. I’d been wanting something different my whole life.

  I knew that if I stayed there any longer, I might just do something crazy like say yes, and I couldn’t let that happen.

  “I’ll see you back at school,” I said, and left through the gate.

  Every couple of blocks, I glanced over my shoulder to see if Jake was following, but he wasn’t. I didn’t see any cops, just some kids riding bikes and a father and son playing catch. I had only a vague sense of which way was home, but I figured if I kept ending up on bigger and longer streets, eventually I’d end up someplace where I could decide which direction I needed to go. I also figured, if it came to it, I could just ask to borrow somebody’s phone and call Mom and ask her to come get me.

  Go to Colorado. Give the picture to Dad.

  That’s what a little voice inside my head was saying. I tried to ignore it. Dad wouldn’t want to see me. Even if he did, there was no way we could get there on our own, even if Jake did have five hundred dollars. And even if we did manage to get there, it would take days, maybe weeks, and I couldn’t miss that much school. Mom would go crazy with worry.

  But I still wanted to do it.

  It was like the note I had written to Tessa Boone. I didn’t want to admit it to Jake, but I did write it. I had written it even knowing that she was Leo Gonzalez’s girlfriend. I had written it knowing that if it ever got to her, she would certainly give it to Leo. I’d been thinking about her for months, imagining her naked and giving me massages and that sort of thing, and the more I told myself that she was taken, that Leo would kill me, the more I
wanted to write her a note. It was the craziest thing. So I wrote it. I wrote it and then I carried it around in my notebook for weeks, planning all the different ways I might give it to her.

  The only strange part was, I didn’t remember actually giving it to her. I may have dreamed it, but I didn’t actually remember doing it for real. That’s what scared me. It scared me that I might do the same thing here, that I might blank out for a while like I obviously had with the note and agree to get into the van and go to Denver without even realizing I was doing it.

  Forget about the Ivy League. It wouldn’t be long before somebody checked me into a mental institution.

  I’d been walking for about ten minutes when I heard an obnoxious motor behind me, and I turned and saw an old Volkswagen van that was a motley green, as if covered with seaweed. It hadn’t been painted that way deliberately; it was just the uneven way the paint had chipped and faded over time. Sitting in the driver’s seat was Gabe, and next to him in the passenger’s seat was Jake. They pulled up beside me, the motor hacking and sputtering like an old guy with emphysema. The door slid open and Jake leaned out. He held a piece of paper in his hand.

  “Get in,” he said.

  “I already told you—”

  “I know what you said. But if you don’t do it, I’m going to do it for you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He turned the paper around. It was Dad’s portrait. I couldn’t believe it. I reached for it, and he jerked it away.

  “Uh-unn,” he said. “You gotta come with us to have it.”

  “How’d you get that?” I said.

  “My secret,” he said.

  “You took it out of my bag when I was drawing!”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t believe this. Give it to me.”

  “Nope. If you don’t come, I’m going to give it to your dad for you.”

  “I don’t believe this,” I said again.

  “Come on, Charlie. Let’s do it. It’ll be fun. An adventure.”

  “Why does it matter so much to you?”

  He shrugged. “Because I want to see his face. I want to see his face when you give it to him.”

  He said it as if he hadn’t put any thought into it, but I realized, right when he said it, it was exactly what I wanted too. It wasn’t so much about giving Dad the picture as seeing his face when I gave it to him. I wasn’t sure why exactly, but it seemed very important. I also knew that if I didn’t get into the van that very moment, I’d never give it to him. I would never be brave enough to do it myself, even if I was standing right across from him, and I would certainly never mail it. If I didn’t go, I was pretty sure it would gnaw at me for the rest of my life.