Applewhites Coast to Coast

  Dedication

  For our family who went on ahead.

  See you on the other coast.

  The Cast of

  APPLEWHITES

  COAST TO COAST

  At Wit’s End

  E.D. (Edith) Applewhite—

  the only organized member of the Applewhite artistic dynasty

  Jake Semple—

  the bad kid who was sent to the Applewhites’ home school, the Creative Academy, when he was thrown out of every other school

  Winston—

  a basset hound

  Lucille Applewhite—

  E.D.’s aunt, a poet

  Archie Applewhite—

  E.D.’s uncle, a sculptor

  Destiny Applewhite—

  E.D.’s little brother, a talker

  Cordelia Applewhite—

  E.D.’s big sister, a dancer

  Hal Applewhite—

  E.D.’s big brother, a recluse

  Sybil Jameson—

  E.D.’s mother, an author

  Randolph Applewhite—

  E.D.’s father, a theater director

  Zedediah Applewhite—

  E.D.’s grandfather, a craftsman

  Jeremy Bernstein—

  a writer, the Applewhites’ biggest fan

  Melody Aiko Bernstein—

  the new girl, Jeremy’s niece

  Govindaswami—

  Aunt Lucille’s spiritual advisor and yoga master

  Wolfie and Hazel—

  two goats

  Bill Bones—

  a biker

  On the Road

  HADDOCK POINT, NORTH CAROLINA

  Simon Rathbone—

  an actor

  CLAYTON, TENNESSEE, AND VICINITY

  Marianne Quintana—

  head librarian

  Michael Lyons—

  assistant librarian

  Rabbit Girl—

  likes to bite

  Farmer—

  a farmer

  VALLEY VIEW, ARKANSAS

  Joe the Blacksmith—

  a sculptor, member of the Ozark Art Co-op

  Suzi—

  a dog, Winston’s new best friend

  SAUNDERS, NEW MEXICO

  The Organic Academy—

  competitors on the Education Expedition, including Michaela, Gary, Tyler, and the “French Fries”

  SEDONA, ARIZONA

  Madame Amethyst—

  a shaman and pilot

  RUTHERFORD ART CENTER, CALIFORNIA

  Larry and Janet Rutherford—

  creators of the Education Expedition

  Hector Montana—

  a TV producer

  Trudy—

  a mime

  Contents

  Dedication

  The Cast of Applewhites Coast to Coast

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Back Ad

  About the Authors

  Books by Stephanie S. Tolan

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  E.D. Applewhite could no longer put off confronting the problem of the Kiss.

  She had wakened early in the morning from an intense dream she couldn’t quite remember. All she knew was that Jake had been in it. Jake. She stared out her bedroom window into the thick canopy of trees, their late-summer leaves pocked with holes chewed by caterpillars, and sighed. What was she going to do about Jake?

  The art camp her family had run all summer was over. The campers had departed yesterday, amid hugs and tears and promises to come back next year. No one in the family had to teach or encourage or share with someone else’s children their own love of art anymore. Wit’s End, her family’s home and creative compound, was back to normal. Jake had come into her life only a little more than a year ago as the “bad boy from the city,” who joined the Applewhites’ home school because he’d already been kicked out of the whole public school system of Rhode Island for burning down his school, and then out of Traybridge Middle here in North Carolina, and had no place else to go. How could she possibly have known when he showed up with his scarlet spiked hair, his multiple piercings and black clothes and nasty attitude, that he would turn out to be the first boy to kiss her?

  But he was. And she’d kissed him back. She had most definitely kissed him back. And had been unable to get the whole evening out of her mind ever since. They had been alone on the porch of the main house, with the sound of the campers singing down at the campfire rising above the summer-night sounds of crickets and cicadas. There had been a moon. And a slight breeze. And then the hoot of an owl.

  Nothing had come of it, really. In fact, they’d both sort of pretended ever since that it hadn’t happened at all. But she was pretty sure Jake had no more forgotten it than she had. There had been moments now and then through all the rest of camp when they would accidentally make eye contact and she would feel a kind of shock, like static electricity. She could just tell he felt it, too. She had taken to looking purposely away whenever Jake came near.

  And now without the campers in their faces all the time, they would have to figure out what it meant, wouldn’t they?

  Maybe she was being silly, E.D. told herself fiercely. Maybe it hadn’t meant all that much to Jake. He’d probably had lots of girlfriends in his life. She could imagine flighty, hormone-ridden girls all over Providence, Rhode Island, throwing themselves at the scary guy with the crazy, spiked, dyed hair and eyebrow ring. Even with his current look—the rather more ordinary floppy brown Mohawk, cutoffs, and rock-band T-shirts—one of the twin eleven-year-old campers had developed an instant crush the day she met him. For Jake, what E.D. called the Kiss was probably a perfectly ordinary thing.

  Not so for E.D. Homeschooled since the age of nine, she’d had almost no opportunity even to meet boys, let alone kiss them. There was David, of course. Even thinking about David, the camper who had left yesterday proclaiming that he might consider coming back to camp to star in next year’s end-of-camp show, made E.D.’s cheeks burn with chagrin. She’d made a fool of herself over him just because he looked like an angel, and he had turned out to be the total opposite. Maybe this whole thing wasn’t really about Jake. She was thirteen, after all. Maybe the only reason she couldn’t get the Kiss out of her mind was that it had been her first.

  Nothing has changed, E.D. told herself. I’m moving on with my life.

  She got out of bed and headed for the bathroom. No one else seemed to be up yet. She thanked goodness, as she did every morning, that Jake didn’t live in the Applewhite main house, so she didn’t have to worry about running into him in her pajamas on the way to brush her teeth.

  Which remin
ded her that the whole situation was impossible! Her five-year-old brother, Destiny, regularly called Jake his “bestest brother,” a title their real older brother, Hal, never bothered to argue with. “I don’t like little kids any more than I like regular people,” Hal had told E.D. once. “I’m not nearly as useful a big brother as Jake.”

  The fact was, everybody treated Jake like a member of the family. And you just couldn’t date a member of your family! There were whole Greek tragedies written about that sort of thing.

  E.D. locked herself in the bathroom and stared at her reflection in the mirror. She might not be as gorgeous as her teenaged big sister, Cordelia, but she wasn’t all that bad, she thought. Her hair was bleached from the sun, and in spite of the sunblock she’d used every day of camp, her cheeks had the slightest tint of bronze. She smiled at herself, trying to look confident and grown-up. Moving on with my life! she thought.

  Suddenly the dream she’d wakened from flashed into her mind. She and Jake had been sitting together on his secret boulder in the woods. An owl had called from the trees above them. What was it with owls? Jake had leaned toward her and their lips had met. Just like the first time. Except that this time, he’d taken her into his arms and kissed her again. And again.

  Reliving that dream, E.D. squeezed toothpaste onto her toothbrush. Maybe it was possible. Jake wasn’t really her brother, after all. He was smart and talented and reasonably well organized. And even if she didn’t have anybody to compare him to, there was no doubt at all that he was a good kisser. She wrinkled her nose, grinned at her reflection, and stuck her toothbrush into her mouth. And gagged.

  She spat and spat, then turned on the water and lapped it into her mouth with her hand, but her mouth was still full of something nasty and oily. It tasted completely horrible! She turned her head and stuck her face right under the faucet, letting the water pour directly into her mouth. Little by little the taste faded and she dared to swallow.

  The tube lying there on the vanity wasn’t toothpaste at all. She’d covered her toothbrush with Hal’s zit cream instead!

  That’s it! she thought. This whole thing was totally impossible!

  Even thinking about having a relationship with Jake Semple had turned her brain to mush. She sloshed her mouth out with water one more time and spit again. She would just have to break up with him, that’s all. Could you break up if you didn’t actually have a relationship? Whatever. She had to tell him there was nothing—nothing whatsoever—between them and never could be, in spite of the Kiss. Right now! Well, not now, of course, but today. The first chance she got. She had her sanity to consider.

  Moving on with my life, she thought again. She saw that nobody seemed to be getting up to make breakfast. It was the end of August, nearly time for the Creative Academy home school to start its fall semester, and the schoolroom was still set up as Eureka!’s camp office. At the Applewhites’ home school, the kids decided for themselves what they wanted to study. E.D. usually spent the summer organizing her curriculum notebook for the fall, but here it was, almost September, and she hadn’t even thought about it. The least she could do was start gathering the school stuff that had been stored in the shed behind the barn for the summer.

  She was on her third trip from barn to office, puffing, sweating, and staggering under the weight of a massive carton of books, when she ran into Winston, the bassett hound. Right behind him, as usual, was Jake.

  He was wearing a swimsuit and T-shirt, with a towel over his shoulder. On the way to the pond for a swim, she thought. E.D. shuddered—she didn’t like swimming in water that could hide the approach of a snapping turtle. Then she pictured Jake stripping off his shirt and diving into the still, cool water, and almost dropped the box she was carrying. Totally impossible!

  “You want some help with that?” Jake asked, grinning.

  She kept walking. “I can manage.” Much as she wanted to get the necessary breakup conversation over and done with, she didn’t want to have it with Jake in a bathing suit.

  “Come on, you’re about to drop it.” He flipped his towel around his neck and took the box from her, hoisting it easily onto one shoulder.

  E.D. followed him up the side porch steps and into the office, absolutely refusing to notice the way the muscles of his shoulders moved under his shirt as he shifted the weight to open the door. He plunked the box down on the office counter next to the two boxes of supplies she’d already brought over, then looked around at the camp notes and messages that still covered the walls. “Camp’s over,” he said meaningfully, raising the eyebrow with the silver ring. “It’s just us now.”

  There was that little shock again as their eyes met. She looked away and stared fixedly at the map her brother Hal had painted of Wit’s End that occupied most of the schoolroom wall.

  Suddenly, without meaning to say a word, or planning anything, she heard herself saying, “There isn’t any us. I mean, even if there ever was, which there probably wasn’t—even if there was, it’s over. It should be, I mean. It has to be. It wouldn’t work. We’re practically family. It’s totally impossible.”

  And then she turned and ran out of the office.

  She didn’t dare look back and risk seeing the expression on his face. What if the Kiss hadn’t meant anything to him? What if he didn’t even remember it? Maybe he had no idea what she was even talking about. What if—she could feel her cheeks burn with the thought—what if right now he was laughing at her?

  E.D.’s only thought was to go back to her room and pull her sheets over her head, and maybe her pillow, too. But in the kitchen Aunt Lucille’s guru, whose name was Govindaswami and who was a frequent houseguest of the Applewhites, was standing at the stove, dressed in his usual voluminous pants and tunic, stirring something richly aromatic in the big frying pan. E.D. stopped. Moving on required sustenance, after all.

  Aunt Lucille and Uncle Archie were seated at the table now, steaming coffee mugs in front of them, and E.D.’s mother, Sybil, lured by the delicious smell, had come down to join them. Destiny, clutching the patchwork possum one of the campers had made for him, his face streaked with tears, appeared in the doorway just as Govindaswami said, “I am at work on a very special breakfast to celebrate the successful completion of a glorious camp experience.”

  At that Destiny burst into sobs, through which, after a moment, a few words could be made out—“gone” and “alone” and “never, never.” Finally, he threw himself on the floor and wailed, “All gone forever and ever and ever . . .”

  E.D.’s mother set her mug on the table and hurried to comfort him. “Destiny, dear, camp’s over, but you’re not alone,” she said. “You’re right here in the midst of your whole, loving family.”

  As she reached down for him, he kicked his feet on the tile floor, narrowly missing her ankles. “I don’t want to be by my ownself with just my family. I want the campers back! If I can’t have the campers back I’d rather be dead!” he shrieked. “Like Cimmamon’s possum!”

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, an engine roared up outside the house. A great klaxon horn sounded from the driveway, echoing across Wit’s End. Aaah-oooo-gah! Aaah-oooo-gah!

  A door slammed. “Yoo-hoo,” came a voice that E.D. recognized immediately. “Yoo-hoo, Applewhites! Anybody home?”

  Chapter Two

  After E.D. rushed out of the office/classroom, Jake stood for a moment, doing his best to breathe, and then sank to the floor, where Winston tried immediately to climb into his lap, licking Jake’s chin and slobbering on his neck. Jake shoved him off and wiped his face with his towel.

  He felt exactly the way he had felt one time back in his days as the Terror of Rhode Island. There had been a fight—not much of one, just some name-calling and shoving—between Jake and his tough-guy companions and some others who’d been smoking out back of the local mall, when out of nowhere a wiry, little shaved-head kid had socked Jake in the stomach. Hard. Really hard. Whump! And he’d gone down.

  Turns out, you didn’t have to ge
t hit to feel that way, Jake thought. Turns out, all it takes is for a girl, one you had started to let yourself think of as possibly, maybe, just maybe your first actual girlfriend, to tell you that she’s not. Whatever he’d been thinking might happen between them was over, she’d said. Before it even started. Whump! And down you go.

  Come on, Semple, he thought. Get up off the floor. Winston’s tail thumped against his leg. The bassett hound looked at him as if to say that there wasn’t any point just sitting there.

  So E.D. didn’t want to be his girlfriend. So what? A month or two ago the idea wouldn’t even have occurred to him. A month or two ago he would have thought it was ridiculous. Sure, he hadn’t liked it much when she had gone moony over David, but that was because David was a jerk. “This is just E.D. we’re talking about,” he said to Winston. “The one who never wanted me here to begin with.” Yeah. Just E.D., the girl he had been thinking about every day since that night on the porch. Just the first girl he had ever really kissed.

  With tremendous concentration, Jake sucked down a deep breath. Acceptance. That’s what Govindaswami told the campers in yoga class. How important it was to accept whatever was happening in your life no matter how it felt in the moment. Not to fix it, not to fight it. Accept it so you could move on. It was a “practice,” Govindaswami said, which meant you had to work at it.

  Jake would have to work on accepting that E.D. didn’t want to be his girlfriend. He forced another breath. Accepting that the moment he’d been looking forward to ever since the Kiss—when the campers would be gone and there would finally be time for him and E.D. to be alone and figure out what it was like to actually have somebody who wanted to kiss you—that moment wasn’t going to happen. The Kiss wasn’t going to end up meaning anything at all.

  He was breathing, but it didn’t help much.

  He patted Winston on the head. “No pond today,” he told him. He didn’t feel like swimming now. Or anything else.

  Aaah-oooo-gah! went an incredibly loud horn from the driveway. Aaah-oooo-gah!

  Winston leaped to his feet and tore out the door of the classroom, barking his furious anti-home-invasion bark. Jake sighed and pushed himself up off the floor. He didn’t want anybody to see this wimp of a Jake Semple who had let a girl get him down. He ran a hand through his Mohawk, pulled his shoulders back, said a couple of words that were longtime favorites of Paulie, Zedediah Applewhite’s potty-mouthed parrot, and went to see what was going on.