Prism (2 page)

Wednesday through Sunday: five glorious days without school even if it meant being stuck in a van with Zeke Anderson and Joy Tallon. So far, they were okay.

“I like your hair,” Zeke said.

I couldn’t tell whether or not he was being facetious. I gave him a close-lipped smile. “Thanks.”

“Was it always that way?”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“I don’t mean the color, I mean the style.”

I looked out the window. There was nothing but an
expanse of brown, tan, and beige spangled with small bursts of dark green.

“You mean long?”

“Long and, like, you know…” his voice faded just like civilization had done a few hours ago. The terrain was endless and desolate, and occasionally a wind-whipped dust devil swirled across the roadside. It was enough to make a person hallucinate.

Poor Mr. Addison—one of my favorite teachers—was stuck driving solo because Mr. Lahte, his codriver, had come down with the flu. The trip from our town was around ten hours of straight driving, but we had made a few stops along the roads. Our last oasis had been a general store somewhere near the Arizona/California border. I had purchased some Coyote Cream because my skin felt as dry as parchment. And now we were driving past nowhere and nothingness. We were scheduled to stop for the night somewhere near the New Mexico border, but we still had a few hours to go.

Zeke’s eyes were swimming-pool blue, custom designed to match his swim team status. He was tall and so long limbed that he verged on gangly. He was cute, not in the way mothers commented on, but in the way teenage girls commented on. He had a pretty girlfriend named Leslie Barker. She was thin but for two adorable rolls of fat on either side of her hips.

At the moment, Zeke’s aqua eyes were vacant, roaming around my face.

“My hair wasn’t always long,” I answered. “When I was younger, it was short and shiny. Now it’s a giant mess.”

“It’s not—”

I waved him off. “Yes, it is a giant mess. I like it like that…sort of.”

His eyes wandered from my face into the rearview mirror, where we could both see Joy Tallon sleeping, sprawling over three seats. There were two rows in back, and she occupied the row right behind the driver. She was wearing white K-Swiss shoes with brown stripes.

Zeke leaned over and knocked her feet lightly, but she remained asleep. I unbuckled my seat belt and leaned over her seat. She was turned over on her side and there was a red splotch on her face where her fist had indented her cheek as she slept.

“I’m not blind over here, Kaida!” Mr. Addison called from the driver’s seat. “Get down and put your seat belt on!”

“But you’re going about seven miles per hour!”

“It’s twenty-five, FYI, and even if we were going seven miles per hour, you’d still need to buckle up.” The wind buffeted the car. Mr. Addison swerved to overcompensate. “Seat belt on now!”

I slumped back in my row and clanked my seat belt shut. As I heard its closing click, I also heard the metallic slide of another seat belt opening.

Joy sat upright, her head appearing in front of Zeke and me like we had conjured it up magically.

“Ms. Tallon!”

“What?” she croaked groggily. It sounded like “whote.”

“Your seat belt!” Mr. Addison shouted back. He was a nice guy in his mid-forties. He had muttonchops that he should’ve shaved off a long time ago and wore a different hat each day to cover his bald head. In honor of the ride to the caves, he had on a Stetson cowboy hat. His age was revealed by the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. I liked these kinds of wrinkles. They meant he had smiled and laughed a lot.

“Sit here, Joy,” Zeke offered, patting the space between him and me.

“’Kay. You sure?” she grunted, but she was already up.

Zeke nodded.

“You sure, Kaida?”

“Of course.”

She climbed over the barrier and plopped herself between us and fastened her seat belt. Her short, smooth hair grazed the bottom of her earlobes. Joy had an edgy haircut, with blunt, straight-across bangs and no other layers. She probably hadn’t meant it to be cool, though. In her case, I figured that she hadn’t changed it since childhood.

I looked out the window. Evening was morphing into night.

“You guys hungry?” Mr. Addison yelled toward us.

“Are we hungry?” Zeke questioned Joy and me.

“Nah,” Joy responded.

“Not particularly.” I had stuff in my bag and it was within reach. “I have some snacks and sandwiches, Mr. Addison. I
can share. That way we don’t have to stop and get food from the trunk.”

“It’s fine with me,” the teacher answered. “Just keep yourselves buckled up. The winds out here are unpredictable.”

I unzipped my bag and took out a tomato and cream cheese sandwich.

“Yum,” Joy said.

“Here. Take it.”

“What’ll you eat?”

“I have a ton of stuff.” I passed my bag to her. “Take whatever you want.”

There was another identical sandwich, which I took. The rest of the food in my bag was mostly candy.

“What’re you allergic to?” Joy shook my bottle of Benadryl.

“Pollen and dogs,” I said. “It’s also a bit of a sleeping aid.”

“Got anything else nonsweet?” Zeke reached into my bag.

“Chips…pretzels. I’ll share my sandwich with you.”

“Me, too,” Joy told him.

After thirty minutes we had eaten half my food and it had turned dark.

“My mom also packed me Benadryl,” Zeke informed us.

“I think I’m going to take one. Sleep until we get there.”

“Same.”

Joy was already dozing off again, her round plump lips open. I looked out the window but couldn’t make out anything
more than lines and shadows. My eyes turned droopy. My skin felt fuzzy. I was falling asleep and I didn’t try to fight it.

I was jolted awake by such sudden force, I thought something had exploded. My eyes sprang open.

Bam!

Bump, bump, bump.

Bam, bam!

It hit so hard and fast and so immediately that I didn’t have time to think. Like a Chinese finger puzzle, the more I tried to pull out of it…to escape…the tighter everything became. Life seized up as if I were trying to run underwater. I was seeing things in slow motion…the collision, the tumbling of the van, the screams.

Suddenly it all stopped.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” Zeke was attempting to climb out of his seat, but he kept on running into bent metal. “I think we’re upside-down. We’ve got to get out…. Move!”

He was screaming at me. “I’m trying!” I screamed back. My hands were desperately trying to untangle the snarl of seat belts, and I was still drowsy from the Benadryl. My body felt as if each muscle was slowly reassembling itself. “Joy?” I shouted. “Joy, where are you?”

Suddenly, I felt heat stinging me, the metal walls of the car hot to the touch. A flush of sweat drenched my body. My nostrils flared at the acrid smell of gasoline. My eyes homed in on a small orange flame. Somewhere in my drugged consciousness,
I knew I had only seconds left…not minutes, just
seconds
. Still I moved like a turtle. I felt useless, like every time I tried to call a number on the phone I mixed up the order of the first three digits.

I spotted Joy crouching near the door, trying to open it to allow our escape. She yanked and yanked but nothing was happening.

I screamed to Zeke, “Help her!”

Zeke somehow managed to contort into an odd angle, stretching his long limbs until his spidery fingers wrapped around the hot door handle. He bit his lip and jerked the metal upward. The door slid open. I managed to grab my bag before we tumbled out.

Then we ran away from the van.

This was the type of running you can’t emulate through motivational speaking, through pushing yourself. Because this is the type of running that just comes, and after you’ve done it, you think,
How?
And of course, you have no answer.

I was shaking. The past hours melted through my system like a burned film reel. Someone was holding me. Who? Maria? Maybe even my mom? But when I pulled away, I saw no one around me. I was clutching myself, standing alone with nothing but unimaginable darkness starting to shroud me.

I heard sobs and looked around for the source. I made out the silhouette of someone shaking. I came closer and saw it was Joy, crying like she didn’t want to be heard.

“H-hey,” I murmured, and placed a hand on her elbow.

She wasn’t aware enough to acknowledge me. She just shook and shook and shook until Zeke appeared and pulled Joy into his wiry arms.

“Over.” He coughed. “All over.”

I admired Zeke, at least for a moment. He was no older than I was but was trying to act more adult. Then I thought of the one adult who should have been with us.

“Mr. Addison!” I yelled.

Zeke flinched and let go of Joy awkwardly. His voice was a deep bellow. “Mr. Addison?”

Sky and ground could barely be differentiated. The darkness around us was smoky and infinite. Still, once our eyes adjusted…I saw it first.

“Zeke! Joy!” I was pointing to a spot far into the distance. How this space was so long, how we had managed to run it so quickly…I couldn’t even begin to wrap my mind around it.

The orange flicker that I had witnessed from inside the van suddenly started feeding itself on spilled gasoline. Like an animal eating itself alive, it consumed and burned. And then the explosion! The noise it made…not like the crackle from a fireplace, but the roar of a feral beast. It was as if we were in an action film…some ridiculous he-man, macho piece of garbage that my brother would rent.

“
Mr. Addison!
” I cried out loud.

“N-n-no,” Joy stuttered.

“Mr. Addison! Mr. Addison!” I called out. “He has to be around somewhere!”

Joy’s teeth chattered, not that it was all that cold.

“It’s Zeke! It’s all of us! Mr. Addison where are you?” Zeke bellowed.

“Mr. Addison!” I yelled out.

“Mister!”

“Sir!”

“Jerry Addison!”

“Mister,” I shrieked, “Jerry.” I gathered up more air in my lungs, “Addison!”

We waited for a call back. We kept screaming until our voices were hoarse…until the futility of the situation dawned on us, although no one would articulate it out loud.

Zeke was sweating and shivering at the same time. “We should walk around and look for him.”

“How is it that we got out together and he got out somewhere else?” I asked.

“He didn’t get out,” Joy told us.

Her tone was monotonous, as lifeless as the night.

“He didn’t get out?” Zeke was in a panic. “What do you mean he didn’t get
out
!” He kicked the ground with desperate anger.

“You don’t know that,” I told Joy. “Don’t say that!”

“The car was completely mangled—”

“We got out!”

“Exactly,” Joy said. “We got out. So where is he?”

“He’s around here somewhere!” My tears were falling fast and furious.
Think, Hutchenson, think!
“Let’s back it up. Everyone just shut up a moment and let’s try to think!”

No one spoke, which made things even creepier. The only
thing that was now making noise was the fire—loud popping noises that expelled glowing embers upward like an erupting volcano. To drown it out, I started talking. “What happened exactly? I mean I know we crashed, but…how?”

“I’m pretty sure we hit something.” Joy’s voice wasn’t much louder than a whisper.

“What about Mr. Addison?” I continued. “Should we go back to the car and check? Maybe he got flung out and needs us and…”

“Did you see him?” Zeke questioned.

“No,” I responded.

Joy gulped. “I might’ve. I mean I think he was still in the car…or maybe between the car and a rock or maybe…Everything was getting hot and smoky.”

“Oh, God.” I felt sick.

“I—I really can’t be sure…”

I twisted my shoe into the dusty ground. The desert was vast and completely alien. It was dark but not black because of the fire and the overcast night, the cloud-covered full moon providing some visibility. I couldn’t make out any bugs or beasts, but we all knew that terrible things were out there. I felt an electric breeze run over my face, blowing my hair in all directions. Up above, the winds were pushing the clouds across the sky.

“Okay.” I drew a line in the dust of the desert. “Let’s think.”

They continued to breathe heavily and say nothing.

“Okay.” I rubbed my hands together and then clapped them, trying to signify something official. “Where’s everyone else from our school?”

“Driving miles ahead of us.” Zeke groaned.

“Or miles behind us,” I answered. “Our small van could have moved quicker than the big vans they were using. So maybe all we have to do is wait until they catch up.”

“Does anyone have a phone?” Joy inquired.

“Mr. Addison made us pack them in the trunk of the van so we wouldn’t be on the phone, blah, blah, blah.” Zeke sat down and banged his head against the fold of his arms. He was right. All of our luggage and provisions had been incinerated. I had my messenger bag and Zeke had his backpack. Joy had escaped empty-handed. Everything else was gone.

“Check your bag, Kaida,” Zeke prodded. “Just in case.”

I groped around, but my phone wasn’t there. “It’s freaking black.” Actually more like a subdued navy. I heard rustling and saw the faint outline of Zeke’s hands searching through his own backpack. A click sounded and a bright beam shone.

“Wow—” I shielded my eyes.

“Aha!” he shouted comically. “It works!” The light focused on me, then my bag. “Now look for your phone!”

I opened my beautiful, worn bag and sifted through my remaining possessions lovingly. I discovered I had a flashlight, too—thanks, Mom!—and quickly extracted it. I turned it on. “Let’s all go through our stuff. You know, to see how much food we have, etcetera.”

“Good idea,” Zeke agreed.

We sat down on the dusty ground and rifled through our bags. For the next two minutes, the silence of the desert was broken as we tore through items, hoped, waited, listened for some car motor or anything that signified salvation.

“No,” I stated dryly. “No phone.”

“What do you have, Hutchenson?”

“Where’s Joy?” I panicked. I hadn’t heard her voice for a few minutes.

“I’m here.”

“Stop pacing and sit down,” I told her. “We need to stick together.”

She sat. Her face was wet and she was still shaking. It dawned on me that she was walking to burn off all that nervous energy. “I didn’t bring my bag. That was stupid.”

“Who had time?” I told her.

“Did you find anything, Kaida?” Zeke asked me again.

“Yeah.” I focused my flashlight on the ground. Inside my bag was a thrift-shop sweatshirt that said
Dance! Dance!
in loopy black scrawl. I also had a poncho, the ugly yellow kind you beg your mom not to pack. Thank goodness Mom ignored my wishes. I had packed Benadryl, but it must have fallen out somewhere. Food-wise, I had pretzels, a bag of potato chips, and lots of candy, along with two bottles of water, which were now worth their weight in gold. I turned to Zeke. “How about you?”

Zeke gestured at his pack. There was another sweatshirt,
blue and crumpled. Another poncho, but his was red. He had some Cheez-Its and Doritos and another couple bottles of water. He also had a GPS, probably the most useful thing either of us had managed to bring. Suddenly I felt like I was suffocating and I began to cry.

“I feel like I’m in a bad movie.” Joy rubbed her arms. Then a small light flicked by her face.

I ignored Joy’s words and focused on the pinpoint of sparkling orange by her cheek. What was that? A firefly, maybe? The strong, shady scent of tobacco filled my nostrils, and I was absolutely baffled.

“Wait…” I stared at her. “You forgot your bag. You didn’t sneak in your phone. But you have a lighter and a cigarette?”

“It’s a disposable lighter. It costs less than a dollar. I had two smokes left in my pocket. I didn’t even know I had them.”

“A disposable lighter?” Zeke cried.

Joy blew out a cloud of smoke in response. I always wondered if people actually puffed out smoke rings in real life, or if actors just did that in movies.

“How many times can you use it?” he pressed.

She flicked it on and off several times. Nothing came out. “It’s empty…disposable.” In the dark, Joy’s face was shadowed. All I could see of her were the wispy ribbons of smoke veiling her eyes. “Who cares?” Her voice had become less quivery.

“We could have used that! Suppose we get cold—”

“Zeke,” I interrupted, “We’re not cold now…it’s over. Forget it, okay?” I rolled my eyes, annoyed with both of them.
“Our best bet is to wait by the side of the road. Back where the van is.”

Zeke said, “I’m not going back there. What if the van explodes again?”

I wanted to punch him. I had socked Iggy once and he said I packed a powerful hit. Zeke was strong, but he was also skinny. A string bean I could boil.

“Got a better idea?” Joy countered.

“Fine.” Zeke gave in. My flashlight found him and he raised his arms in the air. “Fine! You want to wait by the road? Fine. Whatever. I’m following you.”

The van was still in flames and gave us enough illumination, so we turned off our flashlights to save the batteries.

“If we need fire,” I said, “we got plenty of it there.”

“That’s toxic,” Zeke decided.

“Fire’s fire,” I insisted.

“That’s why you don’t make the honor roll, Kaida,” Zeke retorted.

I do make the honor roll, by the way. I was going to tell him, but what was the point? “I don’t know if that fire is or isn’t toxic, but it’s warm and I’m getting cold and unless you have any other bright ideas, just shut up, okay?”

“Mr. Addison is burning in that fire,” Joy muttered.

“I said, shut up!”

When no one spoke, the silence was worse than their stupid comments. Sometimes I wished my tongue would fall off. Joy started picking at her nails. Then she looked at the
ground. Then she looked at the fire. Then she looked at the ground again. Her attention span was erratic, but none of us was focusing too well. “We should get going,” I told the gang.

“Whatever,” Zeke repeated. He clearly liked the word.

He picked up his backpack and I picked up my messenger bag, and off we went.

“It’s probably like this,” Joy spoke into the velvet night.

“What?” I asked as we walked toward the road.

“Being homeless,” she replied.

“Jeez, Tallon, can you turn off the pessimism long enough for me to amass a grain of hope?” Zeke snapped.

Joy lifted her pointy shoulders in response. She looked like a muffin to me. Her jeans pulled at her belly, making her chub ooze out of her waistband. Her face was angular, her chin pinched. But her eyes were round, sort of doe-like, à la Audrey Hepburn. Her nose was sloped, with a bulb at the end of it.

“I think Joy’s comments were insightful,” I told him.

“Could you not be sarcastic for like five seconds?”

“I’m not being sarcastic. I don’t have the energy to be sarcastic.”

“Wrong. You’re always sarcastic,” Zeke said.

I don’t think he was trying to be hurtful, but it still made me feel bad. I didn’t want to be known as the world’s most jaded teenager. But that’s what my mom calls me sometimes…because of the things I say. The problem is she doesn’t hear the things I think.

“We feel like crap tonight, but homeless people always have
to feel this way,” I continued. “Maybe we could discuss Joy’s point together. We could expand on it like we do in English class, analyzing one measly quote. Maybe it would occupy us while we wait for some phantom car to toot along, pick us up, and save us from moldering in the Arizona desert…or maybe we’re in New Mexico already.”

No one said anything. I saw the road and pointed it out to the others.

“Right you are,” Zeke crooned. His charm, along with his hope, was turned on again. We trudged to the edge of the roadway and we stood very close to the asphalt ribbon. If we did that in L.A., we’d get plowed over, but there was nothing out here. Not even a scampering rodent, a slithering snake, or a bug. I’d never felt so alone.

We had walked some distance from the fiery van, but the air was singed with the smell of burning rubber and gasoline. It was making me nauseated.

Please, something move! Anything! How about a tumbleweed? Deserts have lots of tumbleweeds!

Thoughts drifted through my brain.

You’re going to die!

I felt more wind on my cheeks. It was stronger this time and it was kicking up dust and grit that stung my face. In the distance, things began to move. It was my tumbleweeds. They started to skitter over the desert surface.

The sky grumbled.

Uh oh!

The three of us looked at one another.

Abruptly the winds turned fierce. More grumbling skies, only it was getting louder and louder. I thought back to my earth sciences class.

Sudden storms often appear near the Rocky Mountains as air travels over the peaks, causing turbulence—

The skies cracked open! Lightning veins hit the ground not more than a hundred yards away. We all jumped and screamed.

“Oh, God.” Joy held her face with her hand.

“You’re kidding me, right?” I yelled to the sky. Rain started to drizzle down as if someone up there was salting us with water droplets.

Zeke growled out a slew of obscenities. He turned on his flashlight and so did I, hunting around for shelter—a tree, a rock, a cave—anything to prevent us from getting soaked. Then he said, “There’s something over there.” He homed in on the dark blob with his flashlight. It appeared to be a cluster of giant boulders.

We made a break for the area and we got lucky. It wasn’t just rocks, it was an entrance to a cave. That shouldn’t have surprised me—we were in cave country—but it did. We backed inside and watched as rain fell. First it was just big heavy drops, then the rain got thicker and denser until water cascaded down the mouth of our shelter.

We huddled together for warmth, and for a few minutes no
one spoke. But that wasn’t because we weren’t thinking about things.

After Iggy’s sister had left for college, he had inherited her room along with her canopy bed. Rather than destroying the canopy as any sane teenage boy would’ve done, he kept the pink bed—along with the canopy—and painted the rest of his room black. He hung up metal posters. I loved his pink canopy.
That’s where we are
, I told myself as we crouched together,
under Iggy’s pretty canopy
.

We shivered in silence. Then I realized Joy and Zeke were gripping my fingers.

“Gah!” Joy yanked her hand from mine.

“What?” Zeke and I asked frantically.

“Something’s leaking!” she cried. “I just got soaked!”

And then I felt a splotch of water on me. As I peered out of the cave, I was surprised to see what a downpour looked like. We had rain in California, but not this kind of rain. It really did fall in sheets. It looked like a big pane of glass ready to shatter on us.

“I thought this was a desert,” Joy shouted over the noise.

“Torrential downpour,” I quoted from Mr. Wren’s science packet, “common to the area.”

As if we were magnets, we banded together once again, our arms and heads finding the crevices of one another’s bodies.

“Let’s back up a little,” Zeke suggested. “It’s probably dry farther inside.”

And this was where we made our first mistake. We walked backward. We could have—we should have—turned around and walked forward, but in times of peril people panic and disregard their usual habits. So we backed up, going deeper into the cave.

Our second mistake was not using our flashlights.

Our third mistake was taking too big steps.

Joy Tallon had not taken the Benadryl. She should have been more alert. But in the darkness, none of that mattered. All we heard was Joy’s scream.

Joy had just made the fourth mistake.