Applewhites Coast to Coast Page 15

  Hal climbed down from his tent and told them they’d received their next destination. As desolate as Saunders seemed, it did at least have cell service. “Sedona, Arizona, next,” he said, “after we’re done with the challenge here in Saunders.”

  Lucille positively shrieked at this news, startling Winston, who whuffed grumpily from under the table. He had been unceremoniously tied to the leg of the picnic table so he wouldn’t accidentally wander anywhere near any of the allergy-ridden French Fries, as Archie had started calling the kids from the Organic Academy.

  “I have always wanted to go to Sedona!” Lucille said, one hand on her heart, her face lit with enthusiasm. “It’s famous for its vortexes of spiritual energy—it’s got some of the best psychic vibrations in the world!”

  “What are we supposed to do there?” Randolph asked. “I intend to organize another reading no matter what it is!”

  “No challenge yet,” Hal said. He grabbed the cup of coffee Cordelia had poured for him and settled onto a bench as far away from Melody as he could manage. He had not, Jake thought, recovered from the Dark Ride. He wanted to tell Hal that his skill in editing the video logs, and the way he’d played the villain in Our American Cousin, said way more about who he was than that one embarrassing moment in the awful dark.

  “I, for one, intend to visit the vortexes and commune with the spirits of the place,” Lucille said, looking positively rapturous.

  Randolph gulped his second cup of coffee. It was earlier than he liked to start the day. “I’ll need to organize the next reading, and make plans to put a cast together. What the rest of you will do here in Saunders I have no idea. It isn’t as if we’ll have anything in common with this bunch of organic farmers.”

  “I doubt that they’re farmers,” Zedediah said. “They’re from Brooklyn.”

  “Urban farmers, then. Rooftop gardens of okra and chard. Why else would they name their school Organic?”

  “It’s irrelevant to me,” Sybil observed. “I shall be working on my final revision.”

  Just then, Tyler came ambling over from the Organics’ campsite. Melody elbowed E.D., Jake noticed, and E.D. sat up straighter, pulled off her jacket’s hood, and ran a hand self-consciously through her hair. E.D. was a sucker for a pretty face, he thought.

  “Excuse me for interrupting your breakfast,” he said, “but Michaela has asked if you could join us in half an hour for a joint conversation about what we’ll all be doing at Saunders Elementary. She’s organized it with the principal, but in the spirit of partnership, she would like your input. The videographers are setting up at the campfire circle now.”

  Videographers? Jake thought. That sounded like a lot bigger deal than just Hal with his lights and tripod. Maybe that had something to do with their being in first place.

  A few minutes into the rather chaotic “joint conversation”—which was being filmed by two of the Organic adults, who turned out to be professional filmmakers—Archie and Zedediah went off somewhere with Henry, the man who had invented the Green Machine’s windmills. Jake would have liked to go with them. Hal, he saw, was standing with one of the videographers. The two were carrying on a whispered conversation. Clearly, what Michaela called a conversation consisted of her talking and everyone else listening as best they could over the noise the children were making.

  “If you’ve been watching our videos,” she said, “you’ll know that the Organic philosophy at the heart of our academy is all about raising free-range children.” At the moment, Jake noted, two of the French Fries were dismantling the fireplace circle, dragging the rocks away and piling them into a heap. As far as he could tell, the philosophy actually meant that the adults never said no to the children, about anything.

  “Free-range parenting is actually quite a splendid movement,” Jake heard Lucille whisper to Cordelia, as a little boy began to use a bit of charred wood from the remains of a previous campfire to make black charcoal smears on the side of the closest of the buses, which happened to be the Pageant Wagon. “But they do seem to be taking it to extremes. . . .”

  Tyler hurried over and conferred with the boy for a moment, after which the child rubbed his hands on the charred end and then began making black handprints on his own sweatshirt instead. Jake saw Tyler catch E.D.’s eye, give her a thumbs-up sign, and grin. E.D., of course, grinned back.

  Michaela, standing in the sun that had begun to warm the morning air, her baby snuggled in his pod against her stomach, went on talking, undistracted by the children. Jake heard something about her epiphany on the way to New Mexico about their challenge, and something about the indigenous fauna of New Mexico. Her strange way of speaking, Jake thought, at least emphasized the most meaningful words.

  “What’s ind . . . indid-juh-nus fauna?” Destiny asked Jake. He had chosen to sit between Jake and E.D. in order to be protected on both sides from marauding small children.

  “The animals whose natural habitat is New Mexico,” E.D. told him.

  This led to a side discussion between E.D. and Destiny about whether New Mexico had any possums, so Jake missed quite a bit of the next part of Michaela’s talk. He did hear something about catching and something about cages.

  “There is such a rich biosphere here in the desert,” Michaela was saying now.

  “High desert,” E.D. said under her breath. “There’s a difference!”

  “And, of course, our children have been so focused on the creatures of the desert . . .”

  Jake remembered one of the children had been hollering about finding a lizard at the truck stop and right now one of the boys who’d been piling rocks had started stomping on ants.

  “. . . and it is so important to allow ourselves to be guided by the interests of the children. . . .”

  A cluster of French Fries had begun to sing a song about a bunny bopping field mice on the head, and even though Michaela raised her voice to be heard over the singing, Jake missed the next part of her one-sided conversation. Nobody, of course, hushed the children. Archie, Zedediah, and Henry came ambling back just as the kids finished their song, in time to hear Michaela’s triumphant conclusion, “So that’s my thought about our partnership challenge. We’ll call it the Zoo of the Desert!”

  Zedediah stepped into the circle. “A zoo? You expect us to create a zoo?”

  Michaela nodded. “For the students of Saunders Elementary. The principal said we could engage them in any project we chose.”

  “A zoo isn’t a little project, it’s a massive undertaking! The facilities required to care for animals, to display them properly . . .”

  Michaela waved her hand dismissively at Zedediah and he fell quiet, dumbfounded. “Not a zoo zoo, obviously, just a temporary one. A pop-up zoo, if you will. Catch them one day, display them one day, let them go the next. Then on to the next challenge.”

  “Excuse me,” Lucille interjected, “but if your philosophy about raising children is to allow them free range, doesn’t it seem a little—a little contradictory—to set out to catch and cage wild creatures?”

  Michaela again made that dismissive gesture. “Children’s inquiring minds are surely of greater consequence than the brief inconvenience of a few mere animals.”

  At the words mere animals, Lucille flushed pink, stood up, and left the campfire circle. Jake saw that her lips were moving, but he couldn’t hear what she was muttering to herself as she went. He suspected they had just lost another adult member of this so-called partnership.

  “The creation of this zoo will give all the children involved a greater appreciation for the diversity of nature,” Michaela went on, apparently unmoved by Lucille’s leaving, “and the videos will expand that appreciation to children across the country who might never have the opportunity to visit the desert!”

  “High desert,” E.D. whispered again.

  “Even a one-day zoo is still a massive undertaking,” Zedediah protested again.

  “Oh, I’m more than happy to leave the details to you”—she looked
him up and down, and then circled her hand in the air, including Archie and Henry this time—“you handy types.”

  The baby in the pod began to cry.

  “Who’s going to find and capture the specimens for this zoo?” Zedediah asked.

  Michaela was bouncing the baby now, and shushing it. She looked up, in apparent surprise at the question. “The students of Saunders, of course. They’ll know a lot more about where to look for them and how to catch them than any of us.” As the baby began to cry louder, she announced that she needed to feed it and she’d leave the organization of the rest of the project up to others. “My work here is done!”

  And everybody else’s is just beginning, Jake thought.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  High desert! E.D. thought again, as Michaela took her crying baby away and the meeting, such as it had been, broke up. The whole idea for this so-called partnership challenge had been invented and steamrolled into existence by a woman who didn’t know the enormous difference between desert and high desert!

  Hal was deep in conversation with the Organics’ videographers. Archie and Henry, having accepted the label of “handy types,” were talking about getting to a hardware store and what equipment they would need to build cages and habitats for indigenous fauna, and Zedediah had stuffed his hands into his pockets and gone off toward the Pageant Wagon by himself. Melody came over to E.D. and gave her a nudge with her elbow. “I saw that!” she said.

  “What?” E.D. asked, coming back from an impossible vision of cages full of coyotes and mountain lions and snakes. Anyway, little kids wouldn’t catch stuff like that.

  “The way Tyler Organic was showing off for you. I’m thinking it’s time you expanded your horizons. I know you have a thing about Jake”—E.D. opened her mouth to protest but Melody just held up a hand and kept right on—“but think about it. He’s practically your brother.” There it was again, E.D. thought. The practically-your-brother thing. “He’s also been following me this whole trip like a puppy.”

  It gave E.D. a pang not just to hear what she knew to be true, but to have Melody call Jake a “puppy,” as if she had no respect for him at all!

  “Your real brother’s been doing the same, which is totally not going anywhere, by the way. But at least Hal’s older.”

  It doesn’t bug me that Hal has a crush on Melody, E.D. thought. Just Jake.

  “Which brings us back to the topic at hand,” Melody said, reaching out to rearrange E.D.’s hair. “Cute little Tyler Organic!”

  Tyler was the first guy who hadn’t instantly become besotted with Melody, and E.D. was pretty sure Melody had noticed this, which was why she had called Tyler both cute, which he definitely was, and little, which he wasn’t! But Tyler was the first boy other than Jake who had paid any attention to E.D. at all.

  “So here’s my idea. We make Tyler your personal project—think of it as a sociology assignment. I’m going to show you how to hook this guy. He won’t know what hit him. Boys are real pushovers, and it’s high time you found out how to push ’em! Hell”—she punched E.D. on the shoulder—“you can write a report afterward, and give yourself a grade!”

  “Ow,” said E.D. Melody had punched her kind of hard.

  “And I know,” said Melody mysteriously, “what your final exam can be.”

  “Final exam?”

  “I went online to check the hype for the big awards ceremony out in California, and guess what they’re having after the winner’s announced! You know, after the celebrities and entertainers and all they’re doing to make sure people tune in to watch . . .”

  “What?” E.D. asked.

  “The Rutherford Arts and Education Ball. A great big dance!”

  E.D. had never been to a dance. The last grade she had gone to in regular school was third. Third graders didn’t have dances. The whole idea of it made her dizzy.

  “And here’s what you’re gonna do to get yourself an A on this sociology assignment. Before we’re done here in this friggin’ high desert, before the Applewhites go one way and the Organics go another, you are gonna get Tyler to ask you to go to that ball with him. Like Cinderella and Prince Charming,” Melody said, “except for the glass slipper and the midnight deadline.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Melody looked at her like a cat eyeing a mouse. “Trust me on this.”

  It was the second time Melody had told E.D. to trust her. But on this subject, E.D. thought, she pretty much could.

  “You’re good at learning stuff. You can learn this, too.”

  The next day, when Brunhilda and the Organic buses all pulled up outside a low, dust-colored public school building, Melody, camera in hand, stood for a moment before stepping out onto the gravel parking lot. “You ever noticed that most schools look like prisons?” she said to no one in particular.

  A small, thin, balding man wearing a suit and a bow tie—apparently the school principal—was coming out the front doors toward a baby-pod-less Michaela, who was advancing on him with her usual passionate intensity. She grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously. From the rather worried expression on the man’s face, E.D. guessed Michaela had already called him to explain her idea for the Zoo of the Desert.

  “I’ve checked the weather forecast,” he said, “and you’re in luck. This unusual warm spell is expected to continue for another week or so. Most years we’d be having hard freezes at night by now and most of our wildlife would have gone underground.”

  “We’ve taken that into account, of course,” Michaela said smoothly. E.D. suspected that was a bit of a fib. “Have you gathered your student body?” she asked.

  “The children and their teachers are waiting for us in the cafetorium.” He moved out of the way to let the videographers and their equipment through the doors.

  The French Fries had begun spilling out of the Organic buses, some of them carrying the butterfly nets Cordelia and the two other Organic mothers had made out of sticks and coat hangers and fabric. Cordelia had tried to get Lucille to help but she had utterly refused to have anything to do with catching and caging living beings. “No matter who, or what, or how small, they have as much right to live their lives as we do!”

  E.D. spotted a little boy with one of the rather lopsided cages she and Tyler had built, and she shuddered. That had been part of Melody’s plan for E.D. to get Tyler’s attention—she was supposed to act less capable than she was and let Tyler show her how to do things.

  She hated that and said so, but Melody assured her that it was only a starting point. “You can be your whole supergirl self later, once he’s well and truly hooked. Remember, this isn’t truth, it’s a useful story.” Even so, E.D. wished she’d built the cage herself. Tyler was no carpenter.

  The principal cleared his throat. “You did say this project might get us a mention on national TV?”

  “And all over the Internet,” Michaela said.

  “It would be quite a feather in Saunders’s cap. We’re a very small district.”

  Michaela was already heading toward the building, so he scurried to get in front of her to open the doors. Everyone else trooped along after them, except for Destiny, who had stayed with Winston in Brunhilda because there would be even more little kids at Saunders Elementary.

  After the introductions, Michaela launched into a full description of the Zoo of the Desert. “Your job during the school day today will be to gather as much information as you can about the sorts of animals you might search for and what they will need during their brief period of captivity. This is a pop-up zoo and they will be on display for only a day. After school you will begin collecting. And first thing tomorrow morning, you will bring in whatever specimens you have managed to capture. We are interested in all kinds of wildlife: reptiles, insects, even small rodents and other mammals if you are able to handle their humane capture. You will, of course, avoid capturing any major predators that are indigenous to this area, ha-ha.” None of the assembled students laughed with her. “We have brou
ght some nets you can use for the smaller, or winged specimens.”

  E.D. felt somebody come up beside her. It was Tyler. “They say you’re good at organizing stuff. I haven’t got a clue what we need to do.”

  E.D. could almost see the wall chart for the Zoo of the High Desert that was taking shape in her head. Less capable, she thought. She looked into Tyler’s pretty blue eyes, smiled, and gave her head a little toss the way Melody had shown her. “Between us, we’ll figure it out.”

  When they headed back to the campground later, Tyler rode in Brunhilda over Michaela’s protest that he was needed with the “little ones.” E.D. had thought they might talk about organizing the zoo, but Tyler asked her what her favorite books were. Every title she mentioned turned out to be one of Tyler’s favorites, too. Better yet, he knew some books by some of her favorite authors that she’d never heard of, and had one of them in his bus that she could borrow.

  Back at the campground, Tyler hurried off to find the book for her. E.D. noticed her grandfather heading for the Pageant Wagon, his phone in his hand. “E.D.,” he said when he saw her, “I’m thinking I owe you an apology.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I’ve always told you to follow your joy, and it has occurred to me that I haven’t been doing that myself.”

  “So,” she said after a moment. “You don’t like Michaela’s idea for a pop-up zoo?”

  Zedediah laughed, and E.D. realized she hadn’t heard him laugh in a long time. “The point is, do you?”

  “I kind of do,” she surprised herself by admitting. She was wondering what kinds of animals the kids would find, and whether some of them might be ones she’d never even heard of. In a world as different from North Carolina as this was, it wasn’t just possible, it was likely. And besides, there were zoos all over the world that were working to help save species that were endangered in the wild, and helping to make people care more about the wildlife around them. She wasn’t as sure as Aunt Lucille that the idea of a zoo was automatically bad. She nodded. “I like it. I really do.”