Uncharted by Kim Brown Seely

Author:Kim Brown Seely
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

The packing-list items James and I had stockpiled—towels, extralong sheets, shower flip-flops, hangers, winter coats and boots, a medicine kit—had been boxed up, addressed, and shipped to the wilds of upstate New York. All that remained to tend to were the few personal and precious things he’d take with him on the plane—his laptop, his lacrosse gear, his duffel bag, his guitar.

“Well,” Jeff said ceremoniously, opening the front door for all of us to exit, “I guess this is it.”

“Are you sure you’ve got everything?” I said to James, my high, strangled voice betraying my own uncertainty.

“Yep…let’s go,” James said. At over six feet, in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, he looked so tall and confident to me then, and at the same time, gangly and vulnerable, and so young.

James took one last look around the front hall of the house, patted our golden retriever, McCoy, goodbye, and stepped out the front door. The finality of his leaving felt like a kind of vortex we were all leaping into, blindly but hopefully. In mid-May a phone call from the lacrosse coach at St. Lawrence University had given him the confidence to accept the academic scholarship he’d been offered there.

“So, you want to come all the way out here and try out to play division three lacrosse for the Saints?” the coach had said. “Well, okay then.”

So instead of enrolling at Santa Clara University in Northern California with his older brother—his original plan—he’d be 2,846 miles away at St. Lawrence. To get there, he could fly from Seattle to Syracuse (changing planes at Chicago’s O’Hare), and then catch a two-hour shuttle van north, or fly to Ottawa, in Ontario, Canada, and catch a shuttle van south. Out of curiosity, James and I had Google-mapped the route: it stretched all the way across the continent of North America, unspooling from the far upper-left corner of the map to the upper right like a thick blue worm, its head nearly reaching the Canadian border. It would take forty-five hours to make it across all those rivers and plains and mountain ranges by car, without stopping.

“Maybe I’ll drive to school my sophomore year,” he’d said.

“Great idea!” I said, playing up the adventure.

“Are you kidding me? His car would never survive the trip,” said Jeff, always the realist. “That baby’s got a hundred and sixty-two thousand miles on it.”

“Maybe I’ll have saved enough for a new one by then,” James protested.

“Better start saving, bud,” Jeff said, laughing.

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