Finding Paris

  I gape at him. But my brain is calculating because that’s what my brain likes to do.

  My mouth says, “Why are you doing this?”

  Max says, “Because if I drive now, I’ll fall asleep.”

  I frown. “Three-eighths,” I say.

  Max grins. “You’re smart, Leo Leonora.”

  “I know. I’m going to Stanford.”

  “Life is about backup plans,” Max says, looking at me and then away.

  I am not smart about all things. But I don’t need to hear it from him. Something close to anger swells, surprising me with its fierceness.

  “Is Vegas your backup plan?”

  He presses his lips together. This time his smile is as slanted as everything in this pyramid of a hotel. “I got into Rice. That was my first choice.”

  “And?”

  He shrugs, eyes darker than they had been. “Deferred for the year.”

  “Well, good for you.” I lower myself to the couch, balancing at the edge and then, after a few awkward seconds of glaring at him, scoot back. I know this signals that I’m staying. But plans can change.

  “I like sliced tomatoes, too,” he adds with no preliminary setup. “And chicken enchiladas and thin-crust pizza with mushrooms. Not together, obviously. And I didn’t always live in Texas. I was born in upstate New York. We moved when I was seven. Also, I like country music. And don’t make a face. It defines life. I have a whole set of theories. Also the original seasons of Star Trek. I bought the novelizations from some dude on eBay.”

  I raise an eyebrow. Who am I to judge someone’s passions?

  “I have a Captain Kirk impression,” Max says.

  “Everyone does that impression,” I tell him. But he does his Kirk voice anyway, reading the next math problem like he’s giving orders to the Enterprise.

  I bite my lip so I won’t laugh.

  “It’s a big hit at parties,” he says.

  “I’ll bet.”

  He does the voice again. This time I laugh. I can’t help it.

  Which is how I end up studying for the SAT retake in the lobby of the Luxor Hotel while fake Egypt does its fake Egypt thing around us.

  My sister has gone off to places unknown, probably LA. My heart stays jittery. Eventually I will find her even if it takes getting fired for missing work and driving across the desert to California.

  I text her from Mom’s phone while Max scribbles another equation on a cocktail napkin for me to solve, telling her that I’m coming to find her. To call me, please. Something. Anything. I dial her number and leave the same message on her voice mail.

  No response.

  Max hands me the sample problem. He’s ordered us Cokes from the bar, and he slurps a sip of his. “This one is probably too easy for you,” he says. “You’re really good at probability, aren’t you?”

  I see the answer before I’ve even finished setting up the equation.

  “You better come up with another one,” I say, stubby keno pencil riding swiftly across the flimsy napkin, showing off, just a little.

  He grins, squinting his eyes in a theatrical way to show me he’s thinking.

  “I’m not such a nice person either,” I say. “Just so you know.” I can tell he doesn’t believe me—even with all his ranting about human nature—because he stops the theatrical squinting for a few seconds to roll his eyes.

  Sometime after that, in the middle of another word problem, we lean our heads back and fall asleep. No one wakes us. Later I think we must look no odder than anything else in Las Vegas—two strangers studying SAT problems and drinking Cokes in the middle of the day while a few feet away, someone wins big at the poker tables.

  It’s the buzzing of Mom’s phone that opens my eyes.

  I blink, getting my bearings. Where the hell . . . Luxor. Bar. Math problems. Max—sleeping with his mouth slightly open on the couch next to me. My eyes feel gritty. What time is it?

  I wrangle the phone from my pocket. The time glares up at me. Impossible. It is almost 10:00 p.m. Shit.

  My sister has sent a text from my own missing phone to Mom’s.

  My insides contract.

  Go to LA, Leo. I’m waiting for you. Where we were happy, Leo. You’ll remember. Hurry.

  FOURTEEN

  I-15 FROM VEGAS TO LA IS A LONG LINE THROUGH THE DESERT, PUNCTUATED by a few towns here and there that maybe no one would care about except that people stop there to stretch their legs.

  We have changed clothes in the lobby bathrooms and bought supplies (translate: junk food) for our road trip. I have even brushed my teeth with a travel set Max got from the concierge.

  I am now wearing my Have a Blast T-shirt. From his duffel bag, Max has switched into a faded pair of jeans that hang low on his hips, a black T-shirt—fitted, not baggy—and old but expensive-looking deck shoes. He looks good. Very good. Even though I don’t want to, I think of the feel of his lips as they brushed briefly against mine. My heart skitters.

  We are really doing this. I am driving to Los Angeles with Max Sullivan to find my sister.

  “I can take you home still,” Max says as we settle into his truck. His eyes look weary, but he holds my gaze.

  “I know.”

  “Should I?” The question hangs between us, awkward as that air freshener tree.

  Yes, I think. Yes, you should. This is crazy. I am not a crazy person. I don’t do things like this.

  Which is why she took my money. To make sure I’d go.

  “No,” I say. “Let’s do this.”

  He hesitates, hand on the gearshift. Someone behind us honks loudly, a prolonged blare of sound.

  “Leo,” he begins. “I think maybe—”

  “You want me to get out?” My voice is sharp. The night sky feels like it’s forcing its way through the neon.

  Max shoves the truck in gear. “California, here we come,” he says. He flicks on the turn signal, and we join the line of traffic on Las Vegas Boulevard, the Luxor light shining into the sky behind us.

  An hour out down the highway, sitting next to Max in the Ranger’s small cab—two open cans of Monster in the cup holders between us—I am painfully aware that Max Sullivan has very specific preferences for road trip tunes.

  “Gotta be country,” he says as Garth Brooks sings about having friends in low places. “Or heavy metal. AC/DC is good traveling music. Metallica. And eighties rock ballads work. Eighties rock ballads got me from San Antonio to El Paso. But for long, lonely trips in the dark, nothing beats country.”

  “That is a well-defined opinion, Max.”

  Garth shifts to Carrie Underwood. I toss a handful of Apple Jacks—road trip snack of champions—into my mouth. A flimsy plastic sack of chips and jerky and bottled waters and Monsters rest at my feet. Also a six-pack of those tiny boxes of breakfast cereal—specifically the grossly sweet ones: the previously mentioned Apple Jacks (my favorite), Frosted Flakes, and Froot Loops. The ones you have to eat all of because otherwise they go stale as soon as they hit the air.

  Carrie Underwood bellows about letting Jesus take the wheel.

  “No offense,” I say, crunching cereal. “But I don’t get this song. I mean, it’s not literal, right? Because you wouldn’t be driving along, hit a patch of ice with your baby in the backseat, and then actually take your hands off the wheel, would you?”

  “Jerky,” Max says, and it takes me a few beats until I realize he wants me to hand him some, which I do.

  “So it’s a metaphor, then?” I rustle through the snack bag for a piece of jerky and work to unwrap it. We’re passing through Primm now and this roadside casino called Buffalo Bill’s. I can see the huge roller coaster that sits on the resort property.

  Max snorts a laugh.

  “Is it?” I hold the jerky out of reach, waiting for a better answer.

  He snatches the strip from my hand. “You want Starbucks? There’s one in Primm.” He chomps a huge bite.

  I look at him more carefully, with his one hand on the wheel, one
feeding teriyaki-flavored soft beef jerky into his mouth. “You drive this a lot?”

  Max finishes chewing. Swallows. “Now and then,” he says, voice casual. “And yeah, it’s a metaphor.”

  “But it’s a country song. Aren’t they like totally literal? I mean, I don’t think people are listening to Carrie and thinking, Gee, this is a metaphor for her giving up control to a higher power. I think they’re listening and thinking, Damn, she just took her hands off the wheel on black ice.”

  Max sighs. “So no to Starbucks?”

  I toss back the remaining Apple Jacks. “How often do you go to LA?”

  “Do you want me to change the music?”

  I think about this. “No.”

  Carrie finishes giving Jesus directions and begins that one about taking a Louisville slugger to her cheating boyfriend’s headlights and keying his four-wheel drive.

  “Chick is into cars, huh?”

  “Must be it.”

  “Do you believe that?” I slurp my Monster. Diet Monster tastes like shit, but it’s more effective than coffee.

  “Believe what?” Max looks at me, then back at the road. We’re passing another casino complex, this one called Whiskey Pete’s. “That Carrie Underwood likes vehicular songs?”

  I swig more Monster, chemical aftertaste washing down the cereal’s cloying sweetness. “Believe in giving up your problems to, well, whatever you believe in.” I leave it vague because I’m not sure what I believe in. Or if I believe in anything.

  Max’s grip tightens on the wheel, which I take as a sign. “Leo,” he says, “do you always ask this many questions on a road trip?”

  “I don’t go on many road trips.” Then I blurt, “I haven’t been much of anywhere really. Around California, mostly. Arizona once. Here.”

  “That’s it?” Max says, and I feel myself blush. He looks at me briefly, narrowing his eyes, then sliding his gaze to the road. “I mean, here is okay, too,” he adds quickly.

  I don’t think he means it. I suspect Max has been more places than just Texas and upstate New York. Right now we are not anywhere. Just traveling west.

  I could tell him all the trips I have planned in my head. A long list of places I would like to go and the things I will do when I get there. New York City and Paris, London and Rome. Italy in general, where I will eat pizza and gelato, and this place called the Amalfi Coast and then on to Spain and maybe even Portugal. I will wander the great museums and meet people and maybe I will even study abroad for a semester if I can figure out a way to afford it. Scotland maybe. Or Ireland. Stanford has a program where you can study at Trinity College in Dublin. I look at the pictures online and imagine myself walking the cobblestones and sitting in the pubs. I tell myself that one day I will really go.

  It is not only Paris who dreams of getting out of the desert.

  I want to go as far as I can. This is what I promise myself. I want more—much more—than hurtling through the night toward something over which I have no control.

  Max doesn’t answer the part about what he believes, and after a few more miles, I let it drop. What do I want him to say? Yes, Leo, I think we should give up our problems to our personal higher power of choice and everything will get solved and saved and wrapped all neat and tidy with a pretty pink bow?

  We drive through the night, traffic surprisingly steady on both sides, mountains deep shadows in the distance. Who are all these people, coming and going between Vegas and LA? Are they searching for someone, too?

  My insides constrict as I think about Paris. Why did she disappear last night and not the night before or the night before that? Why leave me these notes and messages in some strange scavenger hunt? Why LA?

  What’s underneath it all, at the core?

  Maybe nothing.

  A piece of paper is a piece of paper. Taking your hands off the wheel is taking your hands off the wheel. A physical motion. A movement through time and space. Nothing more.

  Maybe Max won’t answer my question because there is no answer. He works at the Atomic Testing Museum, not Yogiberry. Every day he shows people that movie with the mushroom cloud. People blow each other up. People unleash crap that can’t ever be taken back.

  What else is there to know?

  We pass the sign for Zzyzx Road. I think there are hot springs down there somewhere if you get off. Mostly I think someone named it so it would be famous. The road at the end of the alphabet or whatever.

  Max and I both make snoring sounds, mimicking the letters. We do this loudly so we can hear each other over Kenny Chesney wondering why he and a girl are not in love. I-15 is skirting the Mojave Desert now, a whole lot of empty punctuated by not very much. If we drove off the highway, we could lose ourselves in it.

  “I like the desert,” Max says abruptly as Kenny Chesney melds into the Band Perry, singing about not wanting to be lonely. “All that space.”

  I think about this as the truck bumps along, darkness pressing on each side of us.

  “I guess everyone’s something,” I say. “Ocean. Mountain. Desert.”

  “You’re ocean, right?”

  “Definitely ocean.”

  “Deep,” Max says, joking. But I think it’s true. The ocean hides stuff down deep where no one can see.

  About ninety miles out, I have to pee.

  “Baker’s not far,” Max says. He agrees it would be nice to stretch his legs.

  Two things are notable just off the highway in Baker: Bob’s Big Boy, with the statue of Big Boy himself holding that double-decker burger in his palm. And the World’s Largest Thermometer.

  I have no idea why someone decided to build a big-ass thermometer here in Baker, except maybe because it’s the last stop before you turn off into Death Valley. So maybe being hot was on people’s minds.

  But right now, it’s cold here, and there’s a wind rising off the Mojave. I shiver when I step from the truck and Max reaches behind him and fishes out a gray hoodie from where he’s tossed the duffel and the books and the rest of his traveling life.

  “Thanks,” I say, slipping it on. The inside is pilled from wear, but it’s soft and warm. It smells both slightly musty and slightly like Max. I hug it to me as the wind whips around us.

  In Bob’s Big Boy, Max orders two coffees to go. We use the bathrooms. The tired-looking waitress who hands us our coffees—for which I insist on paying—reminds me of Maureen at the Heartbreak.

  Then we walk outside, sipping our coffees and staring up at the huge thermometer across the street.

  “Impressive,” Max says.

  “It’s big,” I agree. “Weird, though, right? Someone thinking this up. Like someone had to decide, you know? I am going to build an enormous thermometer RIGHT HERE.”

  “It’s physics,” Max says, and I snort a quick laugh. But he adds, “Newton’s first law of motion, remember? We make shit up until something stops us. That’s the way it works.” He waggles a brow like he’s kidding, but his voice is serious.

  “Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it,” I say, going with it. He’s right, though. We move from place to place and build giant thermometers and fake pyramids and fake Eiffel Towers and casinos big enough to get lost in because that’s what we do.

  “Exactly.” He tilts his head back, eyes to the sky.

  Together, we stare some more at this freak of human construction. It makes as much sense for it to be here as anything else that’s been going on. I think that’s why I like science. Because science works to make sense of things. Science is not your sister leaving cryptic clues that make your heart pound but don’t add up.

  “Maybe some architect was running away,” I say, not even thinking about how it sounds until it’s out of my mouth. “And he got to Baker and decided this was the place to make his mark.”

  Max looks at me then, something sad and wistful crossing his face. Above us, the stars glitter like hard little diamonds.

 
“Doesn’t change things,” he says. “The running away.”

  I hesitate.

  “I don’t know,” I tell him eventually, and it feels like the truth. “Probably not.”

  Above us, some nocturnal bird swoops through the inky sky, dipping low and then lower, skimming over the desert until I lose sight of it in the dark. The vastness feels both dangerous and comforting, so huge after the truck’s small, cramped space.

  “Paris gets on these binges sometimes,” I say. “Since we were kids. Especially when things felt . . . not good. When Mom would move us to this place or that. Paris would get out her art pencils and draw picture after picture. They were like the stories I used to tell her. Two sisters living in a castle. With servants. And a moat. And some big dog with a slobbery tongue. Also a handsome prince for each of them. The one for the girl I knew was supposed to be me had blue spiky hair, a pointy chin, and anime bangs. In case you were wondering.” I manage a small smile. “It felt like—I don’t know. Like she could make it better somehow.”

  Max scrapes a thumb over his chin. Somewhere in the night, something howls, a thin, high-pitched sound. “You can’t always fix things.”

  We’re both quiet then, and I think about Paris and me and how we used to wander Santa Monica. Spend afternoons at that old movie theater, sitting together in the dark, laughing and watching stories spin out on the screen.

  “Watch out for each other,” Mom told us, as though in saying this, it got her off the hook. But she was looking at me when she said it, and I think what she really meant was more one-sided. That I had to watch out for Paris. That this is how it was for us.

  “You have to understand my mother,” I say to Max, surprised I break the silence first. Surprised I’m telling him. “She’s smart, but she likes someone to take care of her.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  I wait until I assess that he is serious. “You know how she met Tommy? In a restaurant parking lot in LA. Our car had a flat. She thought he was cute, so she asked him if he knew how to change a flat tire.”

  “That’s bad?”

  “She was the top salesperson at Harley Davidson. My mother can change a tire blindfolded.”