Road Tripped by Pete Hautman

Author:Pete Hautman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

“Back to Black”

Amy Winehouse

4:00

That night in the little tent was the longest night ever. Tossing, turning, fantasizing about catching Bran, punching him in the face, getting my car back. . . . The sleeping bag too hot. I unzip it and doze off and wake up shivering. And the rain. Thunder at first, then lightning bright enough to light up the walls of the tent. A patter of fat raindrops followed by a deluge. Water leaking in through the flap, through the seams. Water everywhere.

I must have slept a little. I open my eyes, and one wall of the tent is lit up by the sun. I never undressed last night except for taking off my shoes and socks. The backs of my jeans and shirt are soaked. I wriggle out of my sodden sleeping bag and crawl outside. It’s cold. The sky is bright blue and cloudless. The wet grass is sagging from the rain. If it was any colder, the grass would be frosted.

Allie and Randy are trying to get the fire started. Allie is tearing pages out of a paperback book, one at a time, crumpling them. Randy adds the pages to a small pyramid of smoldering sticks.

Allie looks up at me and smiles. A giant asteroid could be heading for Earth; she’d look up at it and smile.

“Did your tent leak?” she asks.

I nod.

“Ours too,” she says. With a smile.

Randy ducks his head down sideways and blows on the paper and twigs; a small flame appears.

“More pages,” he says.

Allie looks at the book in her hands. “But we’re getting to the part I haven’t read yet!”

“Tear off the cover,” he says. She does so; he feeds it to the growing flames.

“I never thought of myself as a book burner,” she says.

I stand barefoot on the cold wet grass and watch them. Randy keeps feeding the fire little sticks that hiss as they touch the flame, then darken, smoke, and catch. He adds a chunk of driftwood and watches hopefully as the small fire dries the surface. I feel as if I should help, so I go over to the cardboard box where Allie stored some of the groceries. There is one bag of Funyuns left. I toss it to Randy.

“Funyuns for breakfast?” he says.

“For the fire. They burn great.”

He frowns at the bag, shrugs, and stuffs it under the driftwood. The bag bursts into flames. Randy quickly piles on more sticks and branches, and soon we have a real fire. I move in close, sucking up the heat.

“Cold wave coming,” Randy says. “Time to head south.”

We warm our hands at the fire. Eventually it burns down to a bed of glowing embers, and Randy puts the bedspring grill over it. Allie digs in the cooler and comes up with a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts. She lays all twelve of them on the grill, lining them up neatly, like cards in a game of solitaire. We all stare at the Pop-Tarts as they cook, hypnotized by the colored sprinkles on white frosting.

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