Applewhites Coast to Coast Read online

  “So now what?”

  “Now nothing, as far as you’re concerned. Take a little vacation.” She waved her hand around at the center. “It’s a great place to hang out. Better than that spa! And the Rutherfords pay for everything.” She blinked slowly a couple of times, batting her eyelashes. “We’re a shoo-in. I had Hal’s computer with me on the flight, and I made the thirty-minute ‘summation video’ the judges are going to see. Hector says he’s going to edit it a bit, to include the film of me watching the Real Melody video. And I guarantee you he’ll put in that stuff they got just now. I guess that’s technically cheating? But who’s counting! He knows winners when he sees them. You and me and the hug and the tears! Genius!”

  “Don’t you care about the rest of us at all? We worked really hard on this whole thing, and you just—you just took it over! What about Hal’s videos and E.D.’s tutorials? What did you do with them?”

  “They’re fine, they’re in a folder on the computer. Those dummies never changed the password on the e-mail account Uncle Jeremy used! And if you think I didn’t get that off him the first day, well then I really am hurt. Whenever Hal would send your videos, I’d log on to that account, folder them, and upload my own instead!” Melody finished her coffee. “What’s the problem? First of all, we win, which is what everybody wanted. And besides, you still have those videos. E.D. can collect all her ever-so-earnest educational tutorials and sell them to all the Creative Academy franchises. She’ll be rich and famous. Meantime, she’s learned it all! Mark my words, that girl’s going to get into Harvard someday. If she wants to go there. See? Everybody wins.”

  She reached out and put her hand on his. His heart didn’t go bump-thump at all. He reached across with his other hand, lifted hers off, and set it on the table. Then he got up and walked away.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  E.D. knew Jake was trying to get a chance to talk to her—alone—but the whole rest of the day went by without a single moment for them to go off by themselves. It had been a hectic and highly emotional day. When the TV crews came to do the human-interest interviews for the awards ceremony show, nobody could find Hal, or Destiny, or Winston. “They must be together,” Sybil said. “Winston’s gotten so out of shape on this trip that they won’t be able to go far. They’re bound to be back soon.”

  The TV people agreed to put Hal’s and Destiny’s part off till they showed up, but they were pressed for time, so the interviewer—a young man with the same sort of earnest focus Jeremy had when he first showed up at Wit’s End to interview Sybil—gathered the rest of them into Brunhilda. How this went would depend, E.D. thought, on what questions he asked. “The Creative Academy,” he began, speaking at the camera, “has the advantage of extremely successful and well-known artists taking the role of educators. You’ve been educating the Applewhite children—and Jake, here—successfully, for some time.” So far, so good, E.D. thought, catching Jake’s eye.

  The young man took a deep breath, then, and leaned in toward Archie and Sybil, who were crowded together with Cordelia on the couch. “So how does it feel to have your reputations destroyed by a fifteen-year-old girl you so generously included in your Expedition’s team?”

  The next forty-five minutes were a positive firestorm of Applewhite outrage, as Sybil, Archie, and Cordelia learned for the first time what Melody had done.

  It was then that Hal wandered in with a glazed look in his eyes and a goofy grin on his face. Hal? E.D. thought—with a goofy grin?

  “Where’s Destiny?” Sybil asked. “And Winston?”

  Hal seemed to wake up then. “Destiny? Winston? How would I know?”

  A search was organized, and after another hour of trauma and commotion, Destiny, Winston, Tyler Organic, and three of the French Fries turned up at Brunhilda’s door. “We been all the way to the beach!” Destiny shouted. “Tyler took us all. This ocean’s big, like Jake said. And pretty. And Winston doesn’t like waves.” He pointed to the French Fries. “These guys is Jack and Austin and Cricket. That’s a great name, huh, Cricket? These guys is my friends!”

  So it wasn’t until after a multicourse dinner in the center’s main dining room, where Melody sat with the television people rather than the Applewhites—and during which Archie and Sybil kept jumping up to make or answer a number of emotional phone calls—that Jake and E.D. finally were able to close themselves into Brunhilda’s bedroom for a few minutes to talk.

  Jake explained what Melody had told him about her fake confession and apology. And about the final video that was going to represent the Creative Academy in the judging, which Melody was so sure would be a winner.

  E.D. listened, aware that her mouth was hanging open in a way that would have been embarrassing on video. “She can’t. We c-c-can’t l-l-let her—” She was suddenly stammering, she realized. “Art didn’t fix her. What’ll we do?”

  “We could just let it go,” Jake said. “She’s right. We’ll win.”

  E.D. found herself rocking back and forth, her arms clamped around her middle. “But it’s all a lie!” She thought very hard for a moment, and then looked up at Jake. “I want to make our own final video. I want to put in the good stuff, all the stuff we worked so hard on. My tutorials from Valley View. And the salt mine. And Saunders! I did fifteen minutes of great stuff about the indigenous fauna! Really great stuff!”

  “You’ve got probably hours of tutorials,” Jake said. “It’s all good if it’s education they want. But we’ve only got thirty minutes! We’d have to include some good clips from the stuff that went well—the museums, and the shows, and the kids all working together at the Clayton library and . . .”

  “It’s supposed to be a summation, right? Giving just a sample of all the wonderful things we’ve been doing. Bits and pieces, all edited into a video collage. The fainting goats!” she said, then. “We can’t leave out the fainting goats.”

  Jake made a face. “Yes we can!”

  “Well, four seconds of them with their legs in the air, then. I want to record the truth. The amazing experiences we’ve had on this trip. How much we’ve learned. Us, not her. We could go to Hector Montana and make him trade our final video for Melody’s. We could tell him he’ll be sued if he doesn’t. . . .”

  “Melody’s right, though,” Jake said. “About people not really caring about education and art. This is television. People like drama! Ours wouldn’t have drama. Not Melody’s kind. It would just be kind of . . . nice.”

  E.D. felt her eyes filling up with tears. “Remember the great spangled fritillary?” she asked.

  Jake blinked a couple of times. “You mean that butterfly I found for your Butterflies of the Carolinas report?”

  “Remember how mad I was at you?”

  “I never really understood why.”

  “Because if I gave myself an A on that report, when I hadn’t found it myself, I wouldn’t really have earned it.”

  “So you didn’t give yourself an A?”

  “I don’t remember,” E.D. said. “That’s not the point. The point is that Zedediah was right all along—education isn’t about competition. Winning isn’t everything. Especially when the win is based on a lie. Melody’s is a lie, Jake! And the truth is we had a really good expedition, and we all learned stuff. Even Mom and Dad and Archie and Lucille. Everybody!”

  “Even Zedediah,” Jake said quietly. “He got his cowboy on again.”

  “See? He left the Expedition to stay true to what he believes. All we’ll get out of this if Melody’s video wins, is that. Just winning.”

  “And lots of money,” Jake reminded her. “Plus all of us would still have everything we learned! Just like you still have all your tutorials.”

  She sighed. “Yeah. I guess in a way, we’d be letting our family down if Melody’s right and our video can’t win.” But E.D. couldn’t get that fritillary out of her mind. “Let’s make it anyway. Just for us. Just so we know we did it.”

  “Okay,” Jake said. “Just so we know we did it.�
�

  So the next morning, early, they asked if they could have a place to work for a while, and one of the Rutherfords’ staff members provided a small technical studio, where they took Sybil’s computer. They looked for Hal, but once again he had disappeared. They looked everywhere they could think of, and then finally saw him, sitting on a bench under one of the big, twisted trees, his hoodie zipped almost all the way up, turned just slightly away from a girl who was also wearing a hoodie, a long braid sticking out from it, and looking straight out in front of her. E.D. started toward them, but Jake grabbed her hand and pulled her back.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t disturb them.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Look,” Jake said then. “Check out their hands!”

  E.D. looked. Though neither of them was looking at the other, and she didn’t think they were talking to each other, she saw that their fingers were entwined on the seat between them. Hal was sitting with a girl, holding hands.

  “She’s one of the mimes,” Jake said quietly.

  He was right, E.D. saw. What little she could see of the girl’s face was unusually white in the shadow of her hood. “Amazing!” she said.

  Three hours later, Jake closed Sybil’s computer. “Done. If we didn’t care about winning, this would be a terrific final video.”

  E.D. said nothing. She just looked at the closed computer. Then at Jake. Then at the computer again. “Let’s do it,” she said. “It’s noon. The presentations don’t start for another couple of hours. Let’s take it to Hector Montana and get him to trade it out.”

  “What’ll we tell him?”

  “The truth. We can say it’s the official Creative Academy summation.”

  “You think he’ll buy that? He seems pretty invested in us winning.”

  “I trust us,” E.D. said, “to figure something out. One way or another, we can make sure ours is the one the judges see.”

  “And then we lose.”

  “To quote a famous cowboy, winning isn’t everything.”

  E.D. held her breath, waiting for Jake’s answer.

  “Let’s do it!” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  If nothing else, Jake thought, he could feel good about how accurately he had predicted what would happen. Hector didn’t want their version of the final video. Not after he had spent all that time editing Melody’s and carefully including all the human-interest drama she had provided.

  But then Jake remembered that he was a kid who didn’t always follow the rules.

  And so, they waited until Hector disappeared back into the control booth, and took the memory stick with their final video to a frantic-looking production assistant who was clearly trying to get through a very long list of tasks on a clipboard. “Hector says it’s absolutely critical—urgent!—that the judges get this final video he just finished reediting,” E.D. said.

  The poor guy looked doubtful. “I dunno,” he said, “he gave me the one he said was final cut last night.”

  E.D. turned to Jake with big eyes, as if to say, What do we do now?

  So Jake stepped right up in the guy’s face, took a deep breath, and lowered his head like he was Wolfie about to charge the fence. “He gave you one last night? So you think the edits he made on it till two in the morning aren’t important?” He glanced dismissively at the assistant’s name tag. “Tell me, Dan,” Jake went on with icy calm, “do you want to lose your job today? What do you not understand about the word urgent? You want the judges to have the old one? You want the whole audience—the whole country—to see the old one?”

  With a shaking hand, the assistant took the memory stick.

  And that was how it came to be that Jake and E.D. sat, in the third row of the Rutherfords’ glistening, gleaming, state-of-the-art auditorium, trying not to look at Melody or Hector when their version of the final video played for the judges, the audience, and the television cameras instead of Melody’s.

  Jake could feel Melody’s rage burning from where she sat on the other side of Hal. But in the end she kept up appearances. She didn’t make a fuss about it.

  He supposed even Melody Aiko Bernstein knew when she was beaten.

  Their video was really good, he thought, his and E.D.’s. It was educational, it was touching, it was well put together, it was smart. It lost.

  The Organic Academy’s final video—on which their videographers really had outdone themselves—won with a unanimous vote from the celebrity judges, which meant, once all the standings had been tallied, that they easily won the Rutherfords’ Education Expedition, and all that went with it. As she led the entire Organics group up onstage to accept the award, Michaela didn’t even pretend not to gloat.

  Jake didn’t much feel like going to the big ball that night. Part of him just wanted to slink back to Brunhilda, curl up in a bunk, and go to sleep. Except, of course, he didn’t have a bunk and E.D. would be there, too, getting ready for the ball. Besides, he didn’t want Melody—or anybody—to think he was hiding. So, while E.D. was closed into the bedroom, muttering to herself as she dressed, he did his best to shake the wrinkles out of his nicest shirt, spiked up his grown-out Mohawk as far as it would go, and headed over to the ballroom. He wasn’t sure if Melody would show up at the dance, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to see her if she did.

  Hector Montana was outside with a film crew. Jake held his head high and went right over to him.

  “Jake Semple,” said Hector. “Ah, buddy, what could have been.”

  Jake just shrugged.

  “No, but I get it. You Applewhites. You’re artists.” The way he said it, Jake could tell it wasn’t entirely a compliment. “I could have done a lot with you guys. But you had to want it. And I guess in the end, you just didn’t want it.”

  I guess that’s right, Jake thought. Selling a story, putting on a show, living what people wanted to see. I guess we didn’t want it. In the end, only Melody really did.

  That gave Jake a thought, though. “Hey, Hector,” he said. “About Melody . . .”

  The ball was actually pretty fun. E.D. and Tyler Organic danced once or twice. He seemed unfazed and humble about their victory. Jake had worried that seeing them together would make him jealous, but it wasn’t as if they were all that romantic. Mostly they were just talking. Destiny and Cricket and some other French Fries formed a conga line and snaked their way in and out of the crowd, stomping and kicking and laughing. Hal and the girl from the mime troupe weren’t dancing, but they were sitting at a table together, with their hands on the table and just their pinkies overlapping. She was still wearing her white makeup with little black dots above and below her eyes, even though she was also wearing a very pretty little dress. They weren’t looking at each other or talking, but they both looked unbelievably happy.

  One of the little French Fry girls came over to him—a cute kid in a red velvet dress who looked about Destiny’s age—and asked him to dance. Laughing, he said yes, and she held his hands and stood on his feet while he rocked back and forth. She kept throwing her head back and giggling, which made Jake giggle, too. Suddenly there was a tap on his shoulder and he turned to see Melody, her jet-black hair covering half her face. “My turn,” she said to the little girl. She slipped her hand into Jake’s, her other one around his waist. She looked into his eyes, serious but amused, and then put her head down on his shoulder and started swaying back and forth in time to the music. Not knowing what else to do, he put his hand around her back and followed her lead.

  “Hector came and talked to me,” she said after a while, not looking at him, her head still on his shoulder. “He said he liked my style. He wants me to come to Los Angeles with him, for an internship. He’s going to get me a tutor so it counts as a home school, but mostly I’ll just be working with him and his crew. Making real TV shows.” A little shiver went through her body, but she didn’t stop dancing. “He said”—and she squeezed Jake’s hand—“you told him that’s what he should do.”

  Jake nod
ded, with his head against hers. “It didn’t take any convincing,” he said, feeling he needed to be straight with her. “I’m pretty sure he was already planning something like that.”

  “Well,” she said. “Thanks.” She stopped dancing and straightened up. It still annoyed Jake that she was taller than he was. Her eyes were bright and as intense as always. “You,” she said at last, “are a pretty good kid.”

  Jake laughed in spite of himself. “Yeah, thanks,” he said. He had to ask, he thought. “So. Mel.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “Melody Aiko Bernstein.” There was a time that holding her, saying her whole name, dancing with her, would have had Jake’s heart tap dancing all over the place. But he knew the bump-thump was gone forever. “That stuff you said in the interview. About never feeling loved. Was that . . . was any of that true?”

  She smiled radiantly. “As true as it had to be,” she said. But just for an instant—and then it was gone—he saw something flash behind her eyes. Something quiet, and still. And sad.

  Then, with a last squeeze of his fingers, she turned and walked away.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Something very loud and vaguely familiar intruded on E.D.’s dream and—whatever that dream had been—zapped it out of her memory instantaneously. Today, she thought, struggling to sit up in the dinette bed as a great roar continued outside, was the day after she and Jake had sort of cheated and let the Organics win. It was the day after the ball where she had danced with Tyler. It was the day after Hal had the first date of his life. The roar that had wakened her had faded away. Winston roused himself finally, and barked.