When the scream finally ended, a terrifying silence surrounded them, which felt as ominous as the eruption that had come before it. Where is Uncle Henderson? Izzy thought angrily. But then she pushed that thought away. She was the one sitting here next to Oliver—she would take care of him. A moment later the quiet was broken by gulping sobs that sounded as much like retching as crying. Oliver threw himself at Izzy like a wild, furious animal, and she tried her best to hold him together.
“I want my mother!” he screamed in her face. “I need her! Where is she? I want my family back!” His crying was half misery and half rage. It cut right into Izzy’s heart, and she didn’t think she could bear it. Oliver’s loss felt like her loss, and tears once again streamed down her cheeks. It wouldn’t be okay for Oliver, or for her either.
But Ben was there too, and his arms gathered them both in. It was too dark to see, of course, but Izzy felt Ben’s body shaking next to hers. He was crying too. They sat together like that for a long time. Oliver was the last to stop crying, his sobs gradually turning into a more regular kind of tears and finally becoming deep, heavy, choking breaths. Izzy felt sore all over, as if she’d been ripped apart and put back together incorrectly.
Still, they did not let go of each other. In the congested, waterlogged silence that followed, Ben whispered, “Oliver, this is your family. We’re your family.” And Izzy nodded because she couldn’t speak.
Then the three of them lay back down on the double bed, Oliver in the middle where they could protect him, and slept until morning.
Izzy and Ben woke up to the sound of Oliver blowing his nose. They all padded around the room silently, as if there were someone else still asleep they were afraid to wake up. They took turns in the bathroom without argument. Izzy showered off the stray yellow hairs from the previous night’s haircut and stared at her new, almost stylish appearance in the foggy mirror before getting dressed and limping back into the bedroom.
Ben and Oliver sat side by side on the bed, their backpacks ready to go. Ben looked at his phone and said, “Twenty-two text messages from my dad,” then turned it off and slipped it back into his pocket without reading them.
Izzy noticed the swelling had gone down on the stings on Ben’s arms, at least the ones she could see. While she was looking at his arms, Ben was looking at her feet.
“You’re still limping. Take your shoes off, and let me see.”
“It’s okay. I get used to it as the day goes on,” Izzy said.
“Let me see your feet,” he repeated.
She flopped onto the bed and kicked off her left shoe. “This is the worst one.” There was an oozing blister on her big toe, and the back of her heel looked a little bit like ground beef.
Oliver leaned over to take a look. “Yuck!”
Ben recoiled too. “God, Izzy! You can’t wear those shoes!”
“I ran out of Band-Aids. If we can stop somewhere and get a few, I’ll be fine.”
Their conversation was interrupted by Ellis’s knock on the door. He grinned hugely when he saw that Ben was okay.
“We’re gonna stop at my favorite diner on the way back to the garage. Breakfast’s on me.”
“We’ve got some money left,” Ben said. “You don’t have to—”
“Oh, yes, I do,” Ellis said. “I feel terrible about you gettin’ all stung up yesterday. And anyway, my wife told me I have to, so no arguments.”
Izzy and Ben each devoured a plateful of bacon and eggs, and even Oliver ate more than usual. A police cruiser pulled into the parking lot just as they were walking out the diner door. Izzy and Ben shot each other nervous glances over Oliver’s head, but the officers just nodded and said hello as they passed by. Their parents had obviously not called the police yet, but Izzy wondered if that would soon change.
When they got back to Ellis’s garage, the car was parked outside, ready to go.
“I filled your tank,” Ellis said. “And here’s twenty bucks back. I’m only charging you for the part, not my labor.”
“Really?” Ben asked. “Are you sure?”
Ellis grinned. “After what you went through with those dang hornets? I should be paying you.”
“Thanks, Ellis,” Ben said. “You’ve been a big help.”
“Don’t mention it. Nice meetin’ you all,” he said. “Not often I see a family where the kids get along as well as you three do.” Ellis stuck out his dirt-creased hand and they all shook it.
It was good to be back on the road again. In fact, Izzy thought it was better than good. Something had happened last night. Something awful and then something kind of great. They were a team now, the three of them, and today was the day they were going to find Uncle Henderson and bring him home.
They’d only gone a few miles when Ben turned the car off the highway onto a side street. Oliver noticed immediately.
“How come we turned? Is this the right way?”
“Don’t worry. We’re making a short detour. It’ll only take a few minutes.”
“How come? Where are we going?” he asked anxiously.
“Trust me,” Ben said, and apparently Oliver did because he sat back in the seat.
A strip mall appeared just ahead of them, and Ben turned into the lot. Okay, Izzy got it now.
“Are we stopping for Band-Aids?” she asked.
“Not exactly, but you’re close.” Ben’s lip turned up at one corner, as if he had a secret. He parked the car and pointed to the store in front of them. “We’re going in there.”
“A Goodwill store? Why?”
“Shoes.”
Ben jumped out of the car, and Izzy and Oliver followed. Izzy had gone with her mother to drop things off at Goodwill, but she’d never shopped there before. She was amazed to see the racks of sneakers, all arranged according to size.
“How did you know this place was here?” Izzy asked.
“I asked Ellis while you were in the bathroom at the diner. He noticed you were wearing stupid shoes too.”
While Izzy looked over the possibilities, Ben walked off and came back with a pair of purple socks. “Try them on with these,” he said. The second pair Izzy put on, dark gray with pink swirls on the sides, fit perfectly. She jogged up and down the aisle in them.
“They’re all broken in already,” she said. “And I even like the way they look!”
“Great,” Ben said. When she stopped moving, he reached down and pulled off the price tag. “Keep ’em on. You might as well throw those other torture devices in the trash.”
“How much are they?” Izzy asked.
“Six bucks. Plus another one for the socks.”
“That’s all? Seven dollars? I can’t believe it!” At which point Izzy realized that even though seven dollars wasn’t much money for a pair of socks and shoes, especially shoes that felt good and were kind of cute besides, she didn’t have seven dollars.
When she told Ben, he said, “I know. We’re using Uncle Steve’s money. This is an emergency, Izzy. We don’t have a choice here. You can’t spend another day ruining your feet with shoes that don’t fit.”
Izzy got quiet. Ben had said “we” didn’t have a choice, as if her feet were his business now, as if what hurt her hurt him too. Had anyone besides her mother (and maybe, a few years back, her father) ever felt that way about her?
“See, that didn’t take long,” Ben said, once they were back in the car. “Ten minutes, maybe.”
“Fifteen,” Oliver said. “Now no more stops!”
“Aye, aye, Captain Hook,” Ben said.
And suddenly the miles seemed to fly by, even though Ben wasn’t driving any faster than he had the day before.
“Do you ever listen to stand-up comedy?” Izzy was surprised she’d asked out loud the question that had been floating around in her head.
“You mean like Saturday Night Live?” Ben asked.
“Well, that’s sketch comedy, which I like too. But I mean the kind where one person does a routine they wrote themselves.”
r /> “Like Sarah Silverman or Chris Rock,” Ben said.
“Yeah, except they swear a lot, so I’m not allowed to watch them. My dad likes Jerry Seinfeld and Ellen DeGeneres because they work clean. I like them too, but actually my favorite comedians are Melissa McCarthy and Tina Fey, even though they mostly do movies and TV. But sometimes you have to start as a stand-up, and then when people know who you are, you get to do TV and movies.” God, Izzy, you’re blabbering, she said to herself.
Ben looked surprised. “I didn’t know you were such an expert on comedy, Izzy.”
“My dad wanted to be a comedian once. A long time ago. Before I was born.”
“That’s cool.”
“Yeah. I kind of want…” She stopped herself. Was this information that she’d regret giving him?
“You want what? You want to be a comedian?”
She looked at him cautiously, biting her lip.
“That’s awesome! Do you have a stand-up routine?”
She shook her head. “Not much of one. Not yet. I guess I’ve got the hair for it, though.”
Ben’s laugh was sharp. “I can see you being a comedian, Izzy. I really can. You have a way of saying things that’s really funny.”
“You think so?” Was that a compliment? From Ben?
Oliver leaned forward. “Tell him that joke about school, Izzy. The one you told me.”
“I didn’t tell you, Oliver. You were spying on me.”
“Okay,” Ben said. “Now you have to tell me.”
Izzy blew out a big breath. “I’m not sure I remember it. Gimme a minute.”
“It starts out, ‘What’s the deal with school,’” Oliver prompted.
“Okay, okay, I remember.” Izzy got the joke in her mind and thought of how Jerry would deliver it, very coolly. “So, what’s the deal with school?” Could she really do this in front of Ben Gustino? She took a deep breath.
“The first few years, sure: You learn to read, you count to a hundred, red and blue makes purple—that’s good stuff. But after that, it’s a big hassle! Every day you have to figure out what to wear so you’ll be inconspicuous enough not to be called on in class, but not so invisible that nobody sits with you in the cafeteria. You gotta do well enough on the test that your parents don’t freak out, but not so well that the teacher wants you to join the math team.”
Ben and Oliver both laughed, and Izzy felt like a helium balloon let go to soar into the sky.
“Because if you think you’re walking that tightrope now—,” she continued, a little giddy with her success, “you know, the one between ‘I can almost see popularity from here’ and ‘maybe if I shaved my head someone would notice me’—once you become a mathlete, once you sign up for mathletics, you might as well just go eat lunch with the school librarian, because you are a complete social misfit.”
Was that a good enough ending? Oliver was laughing, but what about Ben? She looked tentatively across the front seat.
Ben took his hands off the steering wheel long enough to clap. “Wow. I’m impressed, Izzy. You’re funny! You thought that up yourself?”
“Well, sure. You can’t use somebody else’s material.”
“I told you it was funny,” Oliver said.
“What else you got?” Ben asked.
Izzy shrugged. “That’s about it. It takes me a while to come up with funny stuff.”
“Let’s think of some more,” Ben urged her. “There’s lots that’s funny about school, right? The teachers, gym class. The cafeteria alone is worth ten minutes.”
Izzy stared out the window, and her mind started to click. When it sounded good in her head, she tried it out on her car audience. “Word travels fast around school when there’s something edible for lunch. Like, ‘Nachos today!’ ‘Yes! I love nachos!’ But then you get up to the front of the line, and the lunch lady spoons up a big ladleful of…bright orange glue and dumps it over a bowl of crushed-up chips. That is not nachos! That’s…cornflakes with squeeze cheese!”
Her audience laughed appreciatively.
“Squeeze cheese!” Oliver repeated, giggling.
“What about mystery meat?” Ben asked.
Izzy thought for a minute and then started, even though she wasn’t sure where she was headed. “You can hide anything on a bun and call it a hamburger. The lunch ladies figure if it’s shaped like a patty, we’ll eat it. Could be stale doughnuts with a little ketchup on top, some old CDs they wanna get rid of…” What else? You need at least three things. Move on. Keep the rhythm. “You take a bite and yum, it tastes like old carpeting you just wiped your boots on…And don’t you love a good veggie burger? There can be anything inside that hockey puck: turnips, Brussels sprouts…whatever was left over from yesterday’s salad bar—a rose bush is a vegetable, right? It’s all natural!”
“Yeah!” Ben cried. “Izzy’s on a roll.”
“A hamburger roll!” Oliver added.
“Mashed potatoes!” Izzy announced. “They take an ice-cream scoop, which gets your hopes up. You think something really tasty is about to plop on your wet, hot plastic tray—which has apparently just been to a sauna—and then splooch! That is definitely not ice cream. Looks kinda like…a wad of soggy toilet paper with a tablespoon of compost mixed in for flavor.” They giggled again, and Izzy felt unstoppable.
“And then there’s always fruit,” she continued. Fruit? What about fruit? “They give you a choice. You can have an apple left over from…” From what?
“From the War of 1812!” Ben said.
“Right!” Izzy said. “And if you don’t want the apple, you can have a banana that won’t be ripe…”
“’Until the next century!” Oliver shouted. He was so pleased with himself that he fell over sideways and clunked his head on the window, but he kept laughing anyway. Izzy hadn’t seen him laugh so hard since the night he and Ben watched Monty Python. Only this time, she had made it happen. And this time they were all laughing together, which felt so good that, for a moment, Izzy wished their trip never had to end.
Their big breakfast held them for a long time, but around one o’clock Ben pulled the car over, and they passed around the apples and the peanut-butter jar. The hilarity of the morning had tapered off and left them feeling comfortable and tired. Soon after they got back on the road, Oliver fell asleep in the back seat.
Izzy tried to make sense of Ben’s map and directions. “How much farther, do you think?” she asked.
“Couple hours. We’re almost past the Finger Lakes.”
“I didn’t see any lakes.”
“We’re south of them.” He yawned and swiveled his head around on his neck.
“Are you sleepy?” Izzy asked him.
“A little. Rough night last night.”
“Yeah.” They hadn’t discussed what had happened the night before, and Izzy was starting to wonder if they ever would. She could feel her heart speed up as she remembered their middle-of-the-night breakdown. Even if they never talked about it, she was sure none of them would ever forget it.
“Talk to me,” Ben said. “That’ll keep me awake.”
“Okay. Do you think we’ll find Uncle Henderson? I mean, will he be there at the lake?”
Ben sighed. “God, I hope so.”
“Me too. But what if he isn’t?”
“I guess we’ll figure that out when we need to.”
“If he’s not there, I think we should call our parents anyway. My mom must be really worried by now.” She wondered if her dad even knew she was gone. Was he worried too, or didn’t he care?
Ben nodded, but he didn’t look at her.
“Your dad’s probably upset too,” she said.
“I don’t want to talk about my dad, okay?” His grip tightened on the steering wheel and he sped up a little bit.
“Okay,” she agreed.
A few minutes passed in silence until Ben took his eyes off the road for a second and looked over at Izzy. “Still like your shoes?”
“I love them,??
? she said. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” It turned out, the more you said that word, the easier it got.
“You’re welcome.”
And then, for no reason at all, she said, “My dad and his new wife are having a baby. A boy. I just found out.”
Ben made a whistling noise. “That’s a big deal, huh?”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
“Sounds like you’re not too thrilled about it.”
“Why should I be? It’s just another excuse for my dad to ignore me.”
“Well, at least you’ll have a brother.”
Izzy sighed. “Big deal.”
“Well, maybe you don’t care, but the new kid might.”
Izzy hadn’t thought of that. “Maybe, but he won’t care for a while. He’ll just be a baby at first.”
“That’s true. And people make such a big fuss about babies.”
Izzy could just imagine it. Even if she did get to see her father once in a while, the new baby would probably be with them every minute. He wouldn’t be able to talk to her because he’d be too busy spooning pureed prunes into its dribbly mouth or changing its disgusting diapers. He’d be talking baby talk and smelling its head in that stupid way adults always did. She might as well not even have a father.
But as soon as that thought floated into her brain, she pushed it out again. It wasn’t true. She did have a father, even if he ignored her. It was Oliver who didn’t have a mother anymore, who didn’t even know where his father was, and that, she reminded herself, was infinitely worse.
“Hey.” Ben reached over and swatted her shoulder. She looked up.
“What?”
“Too bad the baby’s a boy, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“You probably wanted a sister. I mean, you’ve already got two brothers.”
Izzy was so surprised, she was speechless. Ben gave her a genuine smile—the second one in less than twenty-four hours. It was possible she’d never felt better in her life.
Izzy was just drifting off to sleep, her head resting against the window, when she heard Oliver say, “Ben, how come your mother left?” She kept her eyes closed and listened—this was information she was interested in.