A Field Guide to Getting Lost, page 8
“We stick together. You carry the Benadryl, I carry the EpiPen—”
“And if we get separated, meet in the parking lot,” his mom finished. “But we don’t need to worry, because we’re going to be together the whole time.” She pulled into a parking space and turned around in her seat. “I think this will be good. Sutton will open up. Let’s give her a chance.”
It wasn’t like Luis really had an option. They were here. But he hoped his mom was right. If not, this was going to be a seriously long hike.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sutton
Sutton did not want to go hiking. But she was determined to make up for the MoPOP; she couldn’t risk pushing her dad any further away. And if she was going, she was going to be prepared. She checked the battery on her tablet again: full. There were maps on there. And navigational tools. And survival information, if the worst should happen.
Sutton was pretty sure the worst would happen.
“Sutton, honey?”
She met her dad’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “What?” It came out sharper than she meant it to. But they were almost there. She needed to go over the route one more time.
“Promise you’ll keep an open mind?”
Sutton nodded and followed the trail on her screen: through the park entrance, across a bridge, between two boulders, through a stream.…
Through a stream? How had she not noticed that before? Her dad had promised they would not get wet. She wanted him to be pleased with her attitude, but there were limits. Sutton pulled off her watch and stuffed it under the driver’s seat in front of her. Just to be sure. The watch had a GPS system built in, plus it could tell the time in any time zone, give the weather forecast, and could probably make Sutton’s bed, if she programmed it right. But the one thing it was not? Waterproof.
A few scattered cars dotted the parking lot. They pulled into a space near a cracked and faded map mounted under milky glass. Sutton hugged her tablet a little closer. Did anyone actually trust that map? It looked like it had been baking in the sun since before Sutton was born. A decade—maybe more!
Trusting a map that old was ridiculous. Nature was not fixed. It changed. Earthquakes and avalanches and floods. The globe got hotter every minute. That was why the emperor penguins had to find new migration routes. Whatever had been true when the map was first drawn couldn’t still be true.
That was just science.
“There they are!” Sutton’s dad pointed at a faded red car already parking in the lot. He twisted around in his seat to look at Sutton. “I’m really glad we’re doing this, pumpkin.”
Sutton nodded and slipped the tablet into its waterproof sleeve. She checked her backpack: rain gear, trail rations, water bottle, first aid kit, and bear spray.
“Are you sure you want to carry all that?” her dad asked. Again. “It’s only going to be a couple of hours.”
“I’m sure.”
Sutton climbed out of the car and immediately wanted to dive back inside. Something buzzed around her head. The sun’s rays would burn off the top level of her skin soon. But worst of all, she only had one bar of service on her tablet.
Her dad pulled a backpack half the size of Sutton’s out of the car’s trunk. He waved toward Elizabeth’s battered car. “Good morning!”
From across the parking lot, a cheery voice said, “Morning! Hi, Sutton!”
But Sutton barely heard Elizabeth’s sunny voice. If she lost service to her tablet, she wouldn’t only lose the trail maps. She’d lose the app with the pictures of poisonous plants, the first aid app, the build-a-campfire app, and the build-a-shelter app. Also, she wouldn’t have access to her coding program if making her way through the maze of woods gave her any great insights into programming her bot.
(Unlikely, but she was willing to take inspiration wherever it came.)
Then it happened. Her dad leaned down, took the tablet from her hands, and whispered in her ear, “Sutton, honey. People, not pixels.”
She huffed, but made her best attempt to keep her frustration under control. She had an open mind! She was making an effort! Plus, if she pasted on a smile, made eye contact, and answered questions with multiple words, she usually got her device back. Although if there was no service, it wouldn’t do her any good anyway.
“That’s quite a full pack you’ve got there,” Sutton’s dad said to Luis. “Sutton likes to be prepared too.”
Sutton peeked at Luis, who shifted his backpack on his skinny shoulders. It was full to bursting. Maybe he had a tablet in there.
“Like I told Sutton, it’ll only take us a couple of hours to make the full loop.”
Elizabeth laughed. “We’ve had the same talk. He’s not leaving anything behind. How was your drive?”
The adults drifted over to the faded map near the trail entrance. Sutton fidgeted with the straps that hung off her backpack. She squeezed her eyes shut when her father pressed a kiss to Elizabeth’s forehead.
“Science fiction can be based in real science,” Luis blurted.
She turned away from their parents to look at him.
“It seemed like… at the MoPOP…” He trailed off, but then gathered his thoughts again. “Have you read A Wrinkle in Time? I read an interview with a scientist who said that tessering is seventy percent based in real science.”
A Wrinkle in Time was sitting on Sutton’s bookshelf—one of many books her dad had given her, hoping she’d read.
“Okay,” she said. She’d never heard of tessering.
They both glanced over at their parents. Sutton’s dad had his arm around Elizabeth. He pointed to something on the map with the other hand. She laughed softly.
“You should read it,” Luis finally said.
“Okay.” Sutton paused. Maybe she would. A story based mostly in real science might actually be interesting.
“All right, my friends.” Sutton’s dad turned toward them. “How about we get this hike started?”
There was no way out now. Sutton was going to spend the next two hours in the not-so-great outdoors. Maybe three, depending how quickly they walked. Three hours was hardly anything. She designed her first 2-D platform game in less time than that.
“I understand you’re learning to code,” Elizabeth said as they stepped onto the trail.
Sutton didn’t want to brag. But learning to code made it sound like she was still learning how to read binary. “I’m programming my robot for obstacle avoidance right now.”
“Wow!” Elizabeth said.
Luis ducked a flying insect. “In The Book Scavenger, Emily and James pass coded messages to each other in a bucket between their bedrooms.”
“That’s not coding,” Sutton said.
“Well, sure it is,” said her dad. “Just a different kind.” He winked at Luis, but Luis didn’t see. Luis’s eyes were busy pinging back and forth, watching out for peanuts or gluten or stray shellfish in the forest.
“I research diabetes,” said Elizabeth. “No coding involved. But I know we couldn’t complete our current trial without SQL to mine the data. That’s related to coding, right?”
Sutton didn’t know what that was. She wanted to look it up on her favorite science website. But her dad still had her tablet.
“Whoa!” Luis stopped suddenly in front of an especially enormous tree. “Check that out! It looks like the World Tree from The Sword of Summer!”
Sutton’s dad strolled up behind Luis and admired the tree’s twisty roots. “Ah yes, Norse mythology, right? Each of those folds in the tree might just lead to one of the nine worlds!”
“The world of elves!” Luis said.
“The world of dwarves,” Martin added.
“The world of frost giants!” Luis reached his arms up to make himself look as giant as possible.
Sutton scowled. So Elizabeth was a scientist. And Luis and her dad both liked books. But that didn’t mean everyone was automatically going to be the best of friends.
Luis didn’t seem to have any problem with getting to know Sutton’s dad, though. He asked questions about being in the symphony. He mimed playing the saxophone. He seemed to have forgotten to be worried about surprise shellfish in the woods.
“How did you find out Luis is allergic to bees?” she asked.
Elizabeth shuddered. “That was a terrible day. He was in first grade, and when I got a call at work from the school office, I was sure he’d been exposed to peanuts at lunch. We learned about most of his food allergies when he was much younger.”
“Around two hundred people die each year because of food allergies.” Sutton immediately wished she could take that back. It was probably a terrible thing to say to a mom whose kid had food allergies.
Elizabeth nodded. “Yes, and peanuts are one of the biggest culprits. But when the school called, it was because he’d been picking daisies during recess and gotten stung! Thankfully, the school nurse knew what to do.”
Sutton knew too. When she’d gotten stuck with her bot the night before, she’d taken a break and looked up bee-sting allergies and peanut allergies. She wanted to be prepared.
What she didn’t look up was basic first aid, which might have come in handy. Because right then, Luis tripped over a root and fell, face-first, onto the trail.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Luis
Luis scrambled up, hoping no one had noticed his fall. He’d been distracted by a cool tunnel up ahead. Maybe everyone else had been distracted too. Though no one else would have recognized it as exactly like the tunnel on the Whitlow School’s grounds that was really an undiscovered portal into the headquarters of the Dark Force.
“Luis!”
No such luck. Martin was right there, and more footsteps slapped the trail behind him. “Oh, love!” his mom cried out as she caught up.
“I’m okay.” He’d only tripped. True, his forehead throbbed a little where he’d smacked the ground. And his knees were definitely skinned. He might’ve landed funny on his elbow, too.
Sutton stood apart from the others. “I have a first aid kit,” she said.
Luis had a first aid kit in his backpack too. So that was something they had in common—they both liked to be prepared.
“I’m okay!” He stood up and ignored the sting in his knees, moving past his mom so she wouldn’t look too closely at his scrapes. “Look over there!”
The parents kept hovering, but Sutton looked where he was pointing—at a narrow opening in a dense thicket of bushes up ahead.
“It looks like a secret passageway,” he said.
“Like it might lead to Narnia!” Martin added.
Luis wasn’t going to point out that if it were going to lead to Narnia, it would be inside an English professor’s country manor, and it would be a wardrobe, not a tunnel. Martin was playing along and the focus had shifted off Luis’s fall, so the details of classic fantasy novels weren’t really the main point right now.
“Yeah, like a portal! Let’s check it out.”
The girls hung back, but Martin joined Luis, ready to go have tea with a faun in the land of eternal winter. Unfortunately, Martin was thwarted by the fact that the tunnel was far too small for an adult.
“Oh man, I don’t fit,” he said. “But you do!”
Luis looked at the tunnel. He didn’t especially want to go in there by himself. Going through a portal to have an adventure with a traveling companion was one thing; going through a portal to fend for oneself in a foreign, magical land was totally different.
“Sutton,” Martin called. “Come here! Check this out.”
“She doesn’t have to—”
Martin clapped his hands and the sound bounced off the trees around them. “Oh! Or you know what else it’s like? Alice in Wonderland!”
That portal was at least outside, but it was more of a hole in the ground that Alice fell down. And it would probably not be the best way to get Sutton on board. She had already made clear what she thought of fantasy stories at the MoPOP. Luis decided he’d appeal to her scientist side instead.
“Maybe there’s a new species of plant to discover in there!”
“Discovery Park has existed since 1973,” Sutton said. “I’m pretty sure all the discoveries have been made.”
Luis was trying, even after Sutton had been so standoffish the last time they were together. But here she was, doing it again. Luis’s chest started to feel tight.
Martin frowned. “Sutton…”
“I know,” she said. “Keep an open mind.”
She said it like she’d heard it a million times but wasn’t convinced. (What kind of scientist made any discoveries without an open mind?) How mad had she been about coming if her dad had to tell her to keep an open mind over and over again? Luis didn’t really want an adventure partner who’d been forced to go along. But he didn’t want to go into the tunnel alone, either.
It wasn’t that he truly thought there was anything beastly lying in wait. But he had enough of an imagination to know it was a possibility.
“Here’s my hypothesis,” Sutton said. “This portal leads to a world where the kids have scratches, bug bites, and no way out”—she held up a hand to shush her dad’s objections—“but I like experiments.”
And she marched toward the portal.
“Wait!” Luis called, scrambling to catch up.
“Careful, Luis!” his mom called behind him.
“See you on the other side!” called Martin. “It looks like it lets out right around the bend.”
Luis caught up with Sutton at the entrance. “Can I go first?” he said. “It was my idea.”
“Sure,” Sutton said. “You do know it’s not really a portal to another world, right?”
Luis considered what he knew about science. Scientists like his mom made hypotheses, which was a big word for guesses. Then they gathered facts and did experiments to see if their guesses were right. They were really, really big on proof.
“Can you prove it’s not a portal to another world?” he asked.
Sutton opened her mouth to snap back a smart answer—not smart in the way they both knew she was, but smart in the way their parents always told them not to be. But no words came.
Luis didn’t wait for an answer. He started through the tunnel, pushing branches aside and holding them so they wouldn’t snap back and whomp Sutton in the face. Though if he was honest with himself, the idea of whomping Sutton in the face was not unsatisfactory.
“So what kind of science do you like?” he said. There had to be something they could talk about.
“All kinds. I won the Pacific Northwest Science Fair at the seventh grade level. When I was in third grade. Ow!”
Oops. He’d let one of the branches go too quickly. “Sorry. Wow, cool. What’s your favorite part about science?”
“The facts.”
This was a fact: Luis had thought the tunnel was a few feet long. The bushes hadn’t seemed that deep. But now he couldn’t see where it would end, and the branches poked and prodded on every side.
When Sutton bumped into him, they poked and prodded even deeper.
“Why’d you stop?” she said.
“Sorry.” Luis moved forward. But it was no use. Straight ahead, the tunnel ended with no opening. They would have to turn back. He tried to turn to face Sutton, who would have to lead the way back out. But a bramble caught the back of his shirt and dug into his skin whenever he tried to turn.
Sutton had been right. They shouldn’t have come into the tunnel. Luis was surrounded on all sides by branches. Some bees nested in trees or bushes. If something stung him in the middle of all these brambles, he wouldn’t be able to reach his EpiPen. Or his mom!
“Hey, are you okay?”
Luis was breathing fast. Too fast. “It dead-ends,” he gasped. “We’re stuck!”
“Hey!” Sutton grabbed his shoulder. “That’s a dumb way to breathe. The oxygen can’t get to your lungs like that. Breathe with me.”
She started breathing slow, noisy breaths. She sounded like Luis’s mom doing yoga. Luis pretended she was Mom doing yoga. He took a breath with her, and then another.
“Luis,” she said, her hand still gripping his shoulder. “It looks like a dead end. But it’s not. It turns. I can’t get around you. So you’re going to have to keep walking.”
Luis’s breath was almost back to normal. “It turns?”
“Well. It might.”
“It’s not a fact?”
“I guess it’s a hypothesis we have to test.”
“Okay.” Luis took another breath. “The thing is, there’s something caught on my shirt?”
“Hang on.” Sutton worked some magic (or, from her perspective, did something with a logical cause and effect) and freed Luis from the bramble that had him trapped. “Try now.”
Luis took a step. Then another step. He was free. And it was tight, but Sutton kept her hand on his shoulder. They tested the hypothesis. Sutton kept doing long, slow yoga breaths. Luis followed her breaths, while Sutton followed his steps.
When they reached the dead end, Luis gasped again—but this time in relief. Sutton’s hypothesis had been correct. It had been impossible to see before, but the tunnel turned. In a few more feet, they’d be out in the open.
“You were right!” Luis said. Where the tunnel ended, there was almost room for them to switch positions. “Do you want to go first now?”
“Nope,” Sutton said. “You can do it.”
She was right. Nothing had stung him. His fingers and toes weren’t numb. Luis made the turn and headed for the clearing. He wasn’t even thinking about magical lands anymore. He was too focused on getting out.
His shirt snagged on a branch again, just as he was about to exit the tunnel. Sutton reached around and snapped it free before he even had to ask. And then Luis was out, Sutton right behind him.
Their parents were nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Sutton
Sutton dropped her backpack. She would never admit it to her dad—even if he’d been standing where the tunnel let out like he said he would—but her shoulders were already starting to ache. She looked around the clearing.
