A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Joy McCullough

Author:Joy McCullough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Published: 2020-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Luis

After a restless night imagining what he might find in his dad’s sketchbooks, Luis was up early the next morning. He didn’t want to wake his mom, who had been giggling on the phone until late into the night, so he crept as quietly as he could out to the garage.

There was exactly enough room for the battered old Honda, and all around it, artfully stacked, were boxes and piles of stuff. He didn’t even know what it all was. He usually avoided the garage entirely and waited in the driveway for his mom to pull the car out.

There were boxes labeled BABY CLOTHES and FINANCIAL and one labeled CHINA, which Luis assumed meant fancy dishes, but his brain started to dance down a path where his mom had spent some part of her life in China and kept the memories of those weeks or months or years in that box in the garage.

Not everything was organized in boxes. A broken Crock-Pot, a shopping bag full of mismatched shoes, a winter sled, and an old-fashioned-looking steamer trunk were balanced in an artful pile. An exercise bike, several cracked and empty flowerpots, the car seat Luis outgrew years ago, and the crutches his mom needed when she sprained her ankle last fall made up another pile. At the top of that pile, Luis saw his treasure—a box labeled MATEO.

He’d once asked his mom what was in that box with his dad’s name on it, and she’d said old papers. But sketchbooks were paper.

The box was not, however, within reach. The exercise bike was tipped on its end, about as tall as Luis himself. He could reach the car seat and flowerpots where they were jumbled atop the bike, and the tips of his fingers could barely graze the bottom of the crutches, if he really stretched.

By using the box by his feet as a stepstool, he was tall enough to get a hand around the bottom of one of the crutches. And jostling the crutch should be enough to loosen the box he wanted and drop it into his arms.

It seemed like a good plan. Sort of. It seemed like a plan, anyway.

He stepped on the box, reached past the bike and the pots and the car seat, wrapped a hand around the crutch to jostle it—okay so far—and then it all went wrong.

His foot crashed through the box he was standing on. He lost his balance and went flying backward, his grip still strong on the crutch, as though it might somehow keep him upright even though it was also falling through the air. And then he was not only on his back, but an avalanche of stuff was falling down on top of him.

“Luis!”

His mom was in the doorway, her hair a wild halo, all giddiness from her evening chat with Martin washed away in an instant of terror.

It took a lot longer to get out of the pile of stuff than it had taken to get covered by it.

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