Breakdown Lane, The by Jacquelyn Mitchard

Author:Jacquelyn Mitchard [Jacquelyn Mitchard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061842092
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2005-09-08T05:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

Gabe’s Journal

I slept practically the whole first two days on the bus. When I woke up, we were entering the town of Pitt, Vermont. I’d stumbled onto the bus carrying a plastic bag in case I hurled, still sick as a dog.

Caro had fobbed Cathy off when she picked us up at six A.M., telling her I was “always like this in the morning.” But after sitting in the next seat for thirty hours, feeling as though she was sitting next to a toaster, even Caroline started to think we should stop in some big town, like Manchester, so I could go to a hospital.

But when I woke up from feeling sick, I woke up completely well. Purged, like. I was desperate for food, and immediately ate everything in both our backpacks. The driver stopped, I washed as well as I was able in the lobby of some Holiday Inn with paper towels and liquid soap. Then, I bought six bottles of orange juice and three plain bagels in plastic wrap from a machine, ignoring the internal voice of my grandma Steiner about the slimy way the bagels looked (“Oy, gevalt!”). I found out that I’d been asleep for so long I’d forced my sister to finish reading Andersonville (“And,” she said scornfully, “I hate literature!”). She grabbed two of the bagels and one of the juices. “We’re practically there! You ate everything but our socks!” she said. “Have you figured out what you’re going to tell them? The people there? About us?”

“I figure,” I told her calmly, “that if our father is there, he’s going to walk up to us and take us back to his little hut and we’ll figure it out from there, so there won’t be any problem.”

“Have you figured out how we’re going to get to the Crystal Grove or Cave or whatever from”—she consulted the gazetteer, the other thing besides her cell phone that Cathy had forced us to bring along—“there? From Marshfield?”

“Yes,” I said, “we are going to hitchhike.”

“That’s suicide,” said Caro. “We’re going to end up raped in a ditch.”

“Only in California,” I told her. “You can’t kill your hitchhiker in Vermont. It’s a state law.” I thought of the gun, wrapped in my sweatshirts. I could at least brandish it. No one was going to be tying us up and leaving us in a ditch.

No one was apparently going to be picking us up, either, we soon learned.

We sat for the next couple of hours in silence, watching minivans go past, the drivers doing the thing you do when you notice somebody who’s, like, handicapped, but you’re determined for them to think you didn’t see them. I grew considerably more conscious of how I’d sweated and dried in the throes of my virus or what have you. I longed for a hot shower and clean clothes, and pulled the parachute silk of my jacket hood more tightly around my face. I must have looked retarded or dangerous or both. I tried

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