Applewhites Coast to Coast Read online

  There was a loud clinking of a spoon against a glass, and a sleek, elegant-looking man with white hair asked for everyone’s attention. People settled into instant silence. This, thought Jake, was somebody important. “Ladies and gentlemen, it has been the great pleasure of the Ozark Arts Co-op to cooperate with the Creative Academy these past few days. I’m sure you join me in wishing them the very best of luck in this competition. . . .” A smattering of applause and a general murmur briefly interrupted him. “As the founder and principal benefactor of this organization, which will—I’m not sorry to say—be getting some lovely national publicity from this event, I would like to offer the Creative Academy a complimentary day at my spa and resort if they can take tomorrow off before heading out to their next destination.”

  Cheers and more applause broke out. Jake looked at Archie, Lucille, and Zedediah, who were standing together at the refreshment table, to see what their reaction would be. They conferred in whispers for barely a second, and then gave the man a unanimous thumbs-up. There was yet another brief round of cheering. Jake felt a tug at his shirt and turned around to see Destiny looking up at him. “What’s a spa?” he asked.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The spa was the most elegant place E.D. could ever have imagined. It even had a “doggy day care” for the pets of resort and spa visitors, where Winston ended up getting his first-ever massage and dog pedicure. The Applewhites were greeted as if they were visiting royalty, and in short order everyone had found things to do. Destiny wanted to go for a horseback trail ride, but was traumatized when they told him he was too little to go by himself. “But it’s on my bucket list!” he cried. The idea of making a list of things he wanted to do before he died, or “kicked the bucket,” was something he had picked up from the old puppet maker.

  Zedediah said he didn’t have a bucket list, but he’d go along. “You gotta make one quick,” Destiny told him, “’cause you’re way closer to dying than me!”

  Sybil and Lucille suggested starting off with an “all-girl” mani-pedi. E.D. had never had either a manicure or a pedicure, and it took a while to get used to somebody holding on to her hands and feet and working on her nails and skin with an assortment of files, clippers, and lotions. She had first asked for a plain, clear nail polish, but Melody prodded her to “live a little,” so she’d finally chosen a sparkly, pearly pale pink. Melody chose deep purple.

  E.D. didn’t know where Melody had gone after the mani-pedi, but she herself was now alone in the sauna—the first sauna she’d ever had. She’d chosen it because nobody else was doing it and she wanted to be alone, and also because if she didn’t pour water on the hot stones, the sauna’s heat was dry and the spiral notebook she’d brought in with her wouldn’t get all damp.

  She was doing her best just now, to write (using a surprisingly hot ballpoint pen and stopping every so often to admire her pink nails) about what had happened last night and how she felt about it.

  The thing was, E.D. had never so much as thought about style in her life before. Whenever her mother or Aunt Lucille had taken her shopping for clothes, she had just chosen T-shirts in the colors she liked and jeans or shorts and shoes that were comfortable to wear. She hadn’t paid any attention to what anyone else would think of how she looked. After all, nobody in her family cared.

  She’d always known, of course, that Cordelia and Lucille dressed in a way that was very different from her or her mother. They were all about flowing skirts and bright colors. Sybil favored jeans or slacks and oversized shirts, except when she had to go someplace to be a famous author. Even then, she tended toward plain dark slacks and elegant jackets. Sybil owned nothing whatsoever that was flowery or flowing.

  “Style is way more than clothes,” Melody had said when she’d first pulled E.D. into that boutique in Valley View. “Your style is everything about you—the story you’re giving the world about who you are. Like an actor. You get the point of costumes, right? And playing a part?”

  But E.D. hadn’t fully agreed with the story thing when Melody said it, and even after all the research she’d done on the possible meanings of the word style, and what a great response their presentation had gotten, she didn’t quite agree with it now.

  Okay, she wrote in her notebook. It’s more than clothes, but it isn’t just costume, either. It has something to do with who you really are, too. Otherwise, she thought, Melody could not have pulled off wearing E.D.’s kind of clothes and come across nothing whatsoever like E.D.! She was still unmistakably Melody. What was that?

  On the other hand, E.D. wasn’t sure she had still been unmistakably E.D. when she dressed the way she had for their presentation. There was the very different way Jake had looked at her that night. And kept on looking at her now that she had taken Cordelia’s and Melody’s advice and learned how to manage her new hairdo and to put on some blush and some lip gloss when she got up in the morning.

  A weird thing had happened when she’d come to the door in the spa that led to the sauna—a door with a window in the middle of it. She had automatically stepped back to let the girl on the other side of the door come through, until she’d realized that girl was her own reflection. It had been an unsettling moment.

  Even Destiny had made a big deal about how she looked when she came to breakfast wearing one of the two new shirts she had bought at the boutique. When she’d tried them on, she’d hated looking in the mirror and being so horribly aware of her “bony” knees and elbows. But then Melody and Aurora, the boutique owner, had her get a bra that made her look somehow really different. How could those little bits of cloth and that tiny bit of padding make her same old body become something else? Since then, she’d suddenly become conscious of how she was standing. Or sitting.

  Even when she was trying to get David Giacomo’s attention back at camp, it somehow hadn’t occurred to her to change something about herself.

  When Jake showed up at Wit’s End with his scarlet spiked hair and his piercings and his black clothes, E.D. never thought of the way he presented himself as a “style” choice. She had just thought of it as him. She had disliked him on sight, but she knew it wasn’t just because of how he looked. How he looked fit what he’d done—burning down a school and getting kicked out of every other school that would have him. So what was the difference between a person’s style and who that person really was?

  Had Jake changed when he let his hair go brown and quit wearing that dog collar and those black clothes? Yes, but which came first? She didn’t think she would have wanted to kiss Jake looking the way he did at first. But the Jake she kissed didn’t just look different. He was different. Where could you draw the line between style and self? Jake had kissed her, she remembered, when she’d had no style at all.

  Now she’d changed herself, at least a little, and everybody seemed to like it. But how much of it really felt like her?

  As little as E.D. wanted to like Melody, there was something about the girl that was hard to resist. Something lively and particular and—intense. When the two of them started working together, E.D. had felt, maybe for the first time in her life, as if she had a real girlfriend, a person she could hang out and share stuff with. It felt like something more than just cooperation. “Between us, we’re gonna rock this challenge!” Melody had said. Like she really believed in E.D.

  But did she believe in E.D., or did she believe in what she thought she could turn E.D. into?

  Check the dictionary for the right word to describe Melody. E.D. sighed. There’s a whole lot more I need to learn about style. Stuff I probably can’t learn from the Internet. She closed her notebook. It was all complicated and horribly confusing.

  When the family gathered on the porch outside the spa’s dining room for dinner, where fountains were playing gently and musically over stones, and wind chimes were tinkling in a light evening breeze, E.D. noticed that her mother looked no different than usual. Her face appeared freshly scrubbed and her hair was damp, as if she might have washed away whatev
er the makeover person had done to her. Style, E.D. thought. Her own style and not somebody else’s.

  Destiny was chattering on about the new things he had put on his bucket list while he and Zedediah were horseback riding. “Taking a shower under a waterfall—the guide girl wouldn’t let me get off my horse and do it right then—and hang gliding. Did you all see those hang glider guys? They spooked Grandpa’s horse and it’s a good thing he used to be a cowboy or he might have got bucked off!”

  Everyone looked at Zedediah, whose face was impassive.

  “Cowboy?” Randolph said.

  “Cowboy?” Archie echoed.

  “Just because you’re my sons doesn’t mean you know everything about me,” Zedediah said.

  A waiter came to show them to a table. “How many will there be?” he asked.

  Lucille began counting noses. After a moment, she said, “Somebody’s missing.” She looked from one to another, her eyebrows knitted. “Where’s Melody?”

  Everyone looked at everyone else. Melody was not among them. “Where’d she go after our mani-pedi?” Sybil asked.

  “Don’t look at me,” E.D. said. “I was by myself in the sauna.”

  “We can’t go to dinner without her,” Lucille said. “We need to find Melody.”

  Five minutes later they hadn’t found Melody, but they had discovered that the Pageant Wagon was no longer in the fast-darkening parking lot. “She can’t have taken the Pageant Wagon,” Lucille said. “She doesn’t have a driver’s license.”

  “Um,” Jake said. “Um. Actually, she does.”

  “She can’t,” Zedediah said, “she’s only fifteen.”

  “I didn’t say it was a real one,” Jake said. E.D. furiously told herself that she didn’t want to know how Jake would know something like that.

  “Call the state police!” Randolph shouted. “She’s stolen my Pageant Wagon! She could drive it off a cliff! Or into a tree. We could be sued within an inch of our lives if something happens to that girl, to say nothing of the catastrophe of losing the Pageant Wagon!”

  E.D. looked around at the circle as everyone began yelling at once. She realized that, even accounting for Melody, there were fewer people than there should be. Finally, she realized who was missing.

  “Hey, everybody,” she called, loud enough to get their attention through the squabbling. “Where is Hal?”

  Nobody knew. Jake ran to check Brunhilda, but he wasn’t there, and his tent was still packed neatly in her lower storage compartment.

  “Well that explains it,” said Zedediah, looking mightily relieved. “Hal has his license, and he drove the buses around some before we left Wit’s End. They must have gone on an errand, or something.” He waved to the waiter, who came over to take them to their table.

  Randolph was still grumbling about “grand theft of a bus” but everyone else seemed willing to let it go. This is something about style, too, thought E.D., in a way that has nothing to do with clothes. As soon as they realized that Hal was along with Melody, they all immediately assumed that nothing too bad or dangerous could be going on. Looking at Jake, who actually seemed even more worried than he had before, she had to wonder if that was true.

  The waiter had just come to take their dessert order when Melody strolled casually into the dining room and over to their table. She was wearing a spectacularly hand-painted silk shirt—all colorful birds on a black background—that E.D. remembered her trying on at Aurora’s boutique, and a pair of ultra-skinny black jeans. She looked fantastic. In her hands she carried a box from Valley View’s gourmet bakery, tied with a shiny ribbon. “Wha’sup?” she asked.

  “Young lady . . . ,” began Zedediah sternly, but Sybil broke in before he got going.

  “Where is Hal?” she asked. “Isn’t he with you?”

  Melody smiled. “You betcha,” she said, whipping out Hal’s video camera, turning it on and aiming at the doorway to the dining room. “I am proud to present: Hal Applewhite 2.0!” She stepped back and gestured toward the entrance. Timidly, a figure stepped into the light.

  He came through the doorway wearing skinny jeans, ripped on one thigh, held up by a belt with silver studs. He had on a plain white T-shirt with a short-sleeved gray work shirt over it, and motorcycle boots. A wide black leather cuff circled one wrist, stamped with patterns around the edges and held together with three enormous snaps. His hair, now a deep, rich cherry black, was buzzed on the sides and cropped into a single long slash, hanging down over one eye. He stood still for a moment so that everyone could get the full effect, and then threw his head back and smiled a triumphant, confident smile. It was so unlike any look E.D. had ever seen on her brother’s face before that even though she knew perfectly well it was him, she could barely believe what she was seeing with her own eyes.

  Melody had taken away Hal, the cripplingly shy recluse and oddball, and had brought back this . . . this rock star.

  Maybe, E.D. thought, the word for Melody was witch!

  Chapter Sixteen

  “It was . . . I can’t even describe it.” Hal was holding up the video camera with the screen flipped around so he could see himself in it. He had invited Jake up to his penthouse tent on top of Brunhilda—which he insisted on sleeping in, even though all the others were in cushy lodge rooms inside. He was a contradiction in terms, Jake thought. A rock star hermit. “After the mountain biking I was so wiped out,” Hal explained, “that I snuck into the Pageant Wagon to grab a nap. I had a dream that I was caught in a landslide, and woke up to find the bus hurtling down a twisty mountain road with Melody at the wheel. She didn’t have any idea I was there. I think the most danger we were in was when I came out of Grandpa’s bunk—I startled her so badly she almost went off the road.”

  “So wait, go back,” said Jake. “Why did those kids help you again?” Hal had already explained that he got his haircut and his new clothes from a rough-looking pack of older teenage kids who had been hanging around the benches outside Valley View’s coffee shop. They’d taken him to one girl’s house, where they turned some music up really loud and the rest of them hung out while she cut his hair. Then another girl dyed it, and meantime two of the bigger guys had gone home to get some clothes they’d outgrown.

  “That’s the most amazing thing,” said Hal, his eyes wide. “She walked right up to them. Melody. Just went right up and said, ‘Hi, guys!’ like talking to these total strangers was the most natural thing in the world. Told ’em she thought they’d be able to help her help me out. And they all got into it. Because she asked.”

  Jake knew he should be happy for Hal, who was still staring at himself in the camera’s screen like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He knew he shouldn’t be jealous that Hal had had an adventure with Melody. He shouldn’t be.

  Hal was still talking and Jake realized he hadn’t really been listening. “When I was in school, Jake”—he shook his head—“it was . . . it was bad. That’s basically why we started the Creative Academy. I couldn’t handle school anymore. I never could figure out how to be around other kids. No matter where we went, it was like they knew they didn’t like me, before I had even said anything, or done anything.” He ran his hand through his hair, feeling the short sides and the long front, which fell right back down over his eye. “Dad said at the time it was because our creativity was being stifled, but they pulled us out of there and started homeschooling us because of me.” He looked at Jake. “Do you know what that’s like? To be hated, just on sight?”

  Jake nodded. Of course, in his “bad kid” days he had looked as scary as possible to have that exact effect, on purpose. Why did I ever want that? he wondered.

  “But these kids in town, they didn’t do that. They looked at me and it was like they were just looking at another person. Like there was nothing wrong with me at all.” Jake thought that was a terrible thing to say about yourself, but he kept quiet. “And she told them she wanted to help me out, with how I dressed and how I looked, and they just . . . they just did it!
They had fun! And they were nice to me.”

  Hal looked so solemn, wide-eyed, and serious, that Jake thought he looked a little bit like Destiny—or as if Jake could see in Hal the little boy that nobody had ever liked, peeking out from under the rock star haircut.

  “It was her,” Hal said. “Melody. She’s amazing.” He smiled at Jake. It was a tentative smile, Jake thought, but it was a nice one.

  And I’m not jealous, Jake told himself. Not at all.

  An hour later, everyone was gathered in Randolph and Sybil’s lodge bedroom for an Expedition check-in and planning meeting. Jeremy had told them to expect his call with their next destination. E.D. read his last e-mail: “‘You’ve moved up to third place in the standings, for what it’s worth. . . .’” Melody whooped and pumped her fist, then high-fived with E.D.

  Zedediah looked skeptical. “What did you send as your last video report?” he asked Hal.

  “It was our Art of Style presentation,” E.D. answered instead, looking unsure. Melody nudged her in the back and she continued. “Melody . . . I mean, we figured, it was accessible and that folks would like it.”

  “And it worked!” gloated Melody. “We jumped up to third place!”

  Jake could see what was coming, even if Melody couldn’t. By the way she stared at her toes, he suspected E.D. could, too.

  Zedediah was quiet for a while, but when he spoke, his voice was rumbling with suppressed anger. “This,” he said. “This is exactly what I did not want us to get involved with. This . . . popularity contest!” Melody opened her mouth and he held up a warning finger. “This is not open to debate,” he said. “We will maintain the academic standards of the Applewhites’ Creative Academy, which means we will not be creating our video reports so that people will like them. If you only included your own work, then you left out a tremendous amount of value from our stop in Valley View. It will not happen again. Our reports will be complete, and they will be academic.”