The next morning, our road turned a northward corner. Making a right angle to the direction we’d followed for so far, we took I-25, heading up New Mexico toward the Colorado border.
After we’d driven only ten minutes, Albuquerque—the city of answers—was already slipping over the horizon, its urban sprawl sinking away. Such a big city to hold nothing. I turned in my seat and stared out the windshield at the land that lay ahead. This was desert country. Empty and barren and desolate.
Yet if what Kason said was true, it might hold the truths that the city had lacked.
Kason was sitting next to Adam, challenging him to some kind of Tetris game on their phones, so I was alone at the table until Jaz made her way up from the back of the RV, clinging to walls and countertops as she lurched with the motion of the vehicle. I swallowed. I’d told Kason last night that he could tell Jaz the story. I’d wanted her to know but hadn’t felt like retelling it myself.
“Hey.” She dropped onto the bench seat next to me.
I could already tell from the empathy in her expression that she knew. I dropped my eyes to the scratch on the tabletop. “Hey.”
“So…Kason told me a lot last night.”
I kept my head down and nodded.
Before I could blink, she suddenly wrapped her arms around me in a hug that seemed to hold together all the broken pieces of my soul. Then she sat back and smiled at me. “It’s true about the eclipse. All the biggest answers come then. Kason says you’re definitely going on with us.”
“I am.” The option of quitting the trip had occurred to me. But I’d promised Kason.
“Good. That’s really good.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Answers are waiting for you, Jenna. I believe that.”
And I wanted to believe too, but—“I’m at a dead end.” I glanced around, but none of the others were listening. “I don’t have anywhere else to look.”
“Well, I didn’t mean about that necessarily.” Jaz hesitated, glancing out the window as if reading something in the boiling summertime clouds. “Sometimes we get answers bigger than the questions we asked.”
Which made no sense. I hadn’t come for answers besides the ones about my dad. But I nodded anyway.
All the way through the desert, with the burnt-out bushes and the heat that squirmed like snakes across the road, despair and hope took turns tugging at me. I had no logical reason to hope, not when I was heading farther from my city of answers with every minute. But just when I’d start to topple off the edge of despair, I’d remember the constellations. The stories.
The lines of light.
Maybe I could trust my own lines. The ones that had led me toward this place, that had linked me with new friends I’d never expected, that were drawing me toward the sky and sea and the moment when the sun would go dark. It couldn’t hurt to see where they led.
We’d been driving for about four hours—which feels like forty when you’re stuck inside an RV—when Kason suddenly jabbed a finger toward the window. “Guys! UFO observatory, next exit!”
“Oh my gosh.” Brooklyn rolled her eyes. “That’s going to be some trashy tourist thing.”
“Come on.” Kason leaned forward and raised his voice over the noise of the coach. “Hey, Blake? Can we stop at the UFO place?”
“What?” When driving, Blake was never in his best mood. “Are you kidding me? We have a nine-hour drive today if we’re going to hit Denver in time. And we still have to get fuel.”
“Problem solved.” Jaz raised her eyebrows at another billboard for the UFO observatory. “There’s a truck stop there.”
Which is no doubt the only reason I ultimately found myself following Kason out of the RV at the Perdido Gulch UFO Observatory.
“Call this a UFO observatory?” Brooklyn was standing in the meager shade of the RV with her arms tightly crossed. “Might as well call the desert Madison Square Gardens.”
I had to agree with her that the location wasn’t terribly impressive. The land was the same stale song—brown sandy soil dotted with spiky cacti and wilted grasses. The blue shadow of low hills rippled against the horizon, hazy in the heat-heavy air.
And the “observatory” itself was a rickety wooden platform on stilts, tottering next to a slumping building that appeared to be a mixture of convenience store, museum, and residence. And at the end of the array was the promised gas station, with chipping concrete and two pumps. A hand-lettered sign taped to one said OUT OF ORDER.
“All right, I’ve seen enough.” Brooklyn stomped back into the RV with a scowl. Blake drove around to the antiquated surviving pump—which looked as if it were probably older than Gran—and Adam stayed inside too.
Leaving Jaz, Kason, and me at the base of the rickety structure.
“What’s all this stuff?” Jaz pointed at a rusty chain-link fence snaking around the base of the platform. Heaped against it was a giant mound of—well, of a little bit of everything. License plates, socks and shoes, a pony bead bracelet, hair ties, dented beer cans, a teddy bear with stuffing coming from a hole, a pocketknife, one of those cheap pairs of sunglasses, a tube of toothpaste.
“Uh—” I nudged a baseball cap with my toe. The closest comparison I could think of was the public tributes I’d seen when celebrities died, but this was just junk.
Kason glanced down the row, where a skateboard was leaning against a plastic cooler. “It almost looks like—a shrine.”
“And so it is.”
We all turned at the raspy voice behind us. A woman with stringy gray hair tucked into a limp ponytail had apparently just emerged from the little building. She limped across the gravel to us, hands in the pockets of her fraying jeans. Her shirt was charcoal gray with red lettering that just said MORE TO SEE.
Kason cocked his head. “It is—”
“A shrine.” She gestured to the pile. “I always tell folks to leave somethin’ behind. That’s how the vibes work. You leave something, you might take the good energy with you.”
Jaz was wearing a distanced look I recognized as wariness. “Might?”
The woman coughed out a single raspy laugh, revealing teeth like broken piano keys. “Honey, ain’t no guarantees in the desert. Especially not here.”
“Are you the proprietor of this establishment?”
That’s how I knew Jaz was retreating into caution mode. She only broke out the four-syllable words when she was really getting nervous. And seeing Jaz nervous was enough to make me fumble for the brand-new pack of gum in my pocket.
“Yep. Me and Clint—my husband, Lord rest him—started this place in the ‘80s.” She shook her head. “Never knew how it’d take off, though. You wanna know something crazy? We get a thousand people a year here. A thousand of ‘em! And from all over. Had a couple from Hawaii back last August.”
“How come?” The question came out before I could stop myself.
“Cause they can feel it.” She scuffed her foot on the sandy grit. “This here is a land of power. The energy circles are humming along right under our feet. That’s where the good vibes come from. And that’s what brings the UFOs here.”
“Really?” Kason shaded his eyes, studying the woman.
“Oh, yes. Although I didn’t always believe.” She smiled again, her eyes crinkling at the corners as if she’d spent a lot of time looking into the desert sun. “When I first bought this piece and built that tower, I wasn’t too serious about it, y’know? Thought it’d maybe be a fun place for kids, families. But then we started having sightings!” She coughed that raspy laugh again. “First one I thought was too much sun. Second one I hoped was too much booze. Third one I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?’”
“So you’ve had documented sightings?” Kason was wearing that intense look again. The one that drew wonder from meteor showers and unnoticed details and apparently, now, from the rambling story of an old woman in the desert.
“Lord, yes. We’re at just under three hundred right now.” Pride shone in the woman’s face. As if the UFOs were part of her tourist setup. “Last one was about two weeks ago. Right at dusk. When the sun’s down but the land’s still holding the light, y’know? Desert does that. Anyway, I had a group up on the observation tower, and wouldn’t you know this cigar-shaped thing blipped through. Just zipped right over there—” she traced a finger across the parking area—“and clipped one of the gas pumps. Knocked it right loose at the base. That’s why it’s out of order.”
I wasn’t buying more than one word in twenty.
Jaz nodded politely. “That’s fascinating.”
Four-syllable word again, you notice?
“What happened to the UFO?” Kason was still—somehow—fully invested in her story.
“Just sort of shimmered out. Y’know? Here and then gone. Things do that in the desert, though.” The woman shrugged her bony shoulders. “It’s the energy, I tell you. It draws things in and sends them out.”
A phone suddenly jangled inside the building, shrill and insistent. The woman sighed. “That’ll be the doctor in Perdido. Been trying to reschedule my appointment all morning.” She scowled. “Cancer. That’s what they say I have. Liver and lymph nodes. Crazy, isn’t it? All these years walkin’ around carryin’ cancer and had no idea. Like this land. This land keeps to itself. Never tells you what it’s thinking. Well, as long as I’m buried here, I’ll be happy. Never could get away from the energy anyway.” Before any of us could think how to respond, she pointed. “Go on up the tower. Middle of the day’s not a good time, but see what you can find.”
The steps creaked complainingly under our feet as we climbed to the platform. Not much up there either. Splintered boards defaced with the juvenile graffiti of teenagers in love. A faded windsock snapping from a metal pole. And a couple of aging tower viewers. Kason put a quarter in one, but the flap over the lenses stayed stubbornly shut. He stepped back, shaking his head. “Huh.”
Jaz had been glancing back at the building since the woman had left, and now she moved toward the steps. “Hey guys, I’m gonna go look in the little store. You two come when you’re ready.”
Her feet clattered down the steps, and then all was quiet again. Only the restless shifting of the wind.
I glanced at Kason. “Did you really believe that woman?” Surely he’d seen the bizarreness of her story.
He shrugged one shoulder with that lopsided grin. “Crazy stuff happens in the desert.”
“Kason.” I shoved his shoulder. “Be serious.”
“Okay, then, I believe that woman.”
“Are you serious?”
“Well, I don’t mean that I believe her words, at least not all of them.” He took on his thoughtful look. “But I believe her. I believe that she’s wanting to believe.”
“But all this about a cigar-shaped thing breaking a gas pump—”
“We’ll ask Blake on the way out of here if there was stardust in the diesel.”
“Kason!”
“All right, all right. I believe—” He grinned suddenly and looked out at the desert as if sharing a secret. “I believe there’s more out there than we know. And some of that starts with telling stories. Even and especially the unbelievable ones.”
You know what I’ll always remember about that observatory? The sky. Right there next to Kason, I could see it, this enormous dome just over my head. Bold and beautiful and bursting with blue. A sky that could hold anything, arching in protection over a land that kept its own counsel.
There were stories that had no purpose other than the telling. There were truths that flew far above fact. There were things out there I would never know for sure.
And maybe part of my journey was to learn how to be okay with that.
We creaked back down the boards, Kason taking my hand to help me on the last section, and just as we came to the convenience store, I could see Jaz inside. But she wasn’t looking around at the tacky souvenirs. Instead, she was standing with head bowed, her hands on the woman’s quivering shoulders. She was—she was praying.
If Kason noticed, he didn’t seem surprised. He just headed back toward the RV, where I could see Blake waiting, waving at us.
“Come on! Load up!”
We were passing the pile of stuff. I paused. Did I have anything I could leave?
But then I thought about it. I’d seen real power. The kind that crackled in the lightning and danced in the campfires and drew the lines between a billion stars. Whatever good vibes lurked in this land were lukewarm by comparison.
I turned away from the pile of weather-beaten prayers. When I was almost to the RV, Jaz ran up behind me. “Yay! You all haven’t left me behind.”
“Not yet.” I studied her sideways. “You prayed for that woman.”
She just smiled and glanced up at the sky.
“Will it work?”
She stopped. Sighed. Then smiled. “Jenna, remember this.”
“What?”
“When you ask a question, you always get an answer. Always. It’s just not always the one you expect.”
Unexpected answers. I looked around, at the land that knew more was safe, the sky that poured itself over the power, the road waiting to lead me north.
Maybe the answers were there. Maybe I just needed to learn how to see.
#
Perdido was only the halfway point of our drive, which meant we still had five hours to reach Denver. At first I’d wondered why Blake hadn’t planned any stops for us in this section, but as the miles wore on, I could understand why. There was nothing here. Nothing except desert and heat and unchanging skies for miles and miles and miles.
“Excited for your first look at the mountains?” Jaz was sorting through her bag of rocks, examining each one and jotting something in a notebook.
“Yes.” I glanced out the window. Not even a wrinkle in the land. “Hard to believe there are mountains on the other side of this.”
She laughed. “I hear you. But you know, there’s always something waiting we don’t expect.”
“I guess so.”
She rolled a cloudy gray rock around in her palm. “The mountains are magical, Jenna. My mom has this friend who lives in Colorado—in Estes Park—and the photos she sends my mom are incredible. The paintings, too.”
“The paintings?”
“Yeah, she’s an artist.” Jaz smiled. “Ms. Skyla’s the one who got me into nature. Her husband’s cool too. They have a raptor rehab center together.”
No surprise that Jaz and Kason’s mom was friends with someone who sounded as unconventional as that. “Will we go through where she lives?”
“Mom asked me the same thing. Unfortunately not. Estes is about an hour and a half north of Denver.” She glanced toward the driver’s seat. “I’m assuming Blake won’t be wanting to make any more detours.”
She was right about that. I’d thought Blake’s outlook would improve as we put more miles behind us, but if anything, he seemed to become more irritable as the day went on. And—even weirder—Brooklyn wasn’t riding in the passenger seat. She’d seemed sort of quiet all day, but since Perdido, she’d been slumped on the couch at the other end from Adam, her head back and eyes closed.
I watched her, trying to read the heaviness in her expression. Her makeup was less than normal, allowing the shadows under her eyes to show through. She looked sick, maybe. Or just plain exhausted. Had something happened at Perdido? Or—did it go back farther than that? Maybe to that new-moon night in Albuquerque?
Regardless, she was none of my concern, but she looked so—helpless, sort of. Finally I gave in and leaned over to her. “Brooklyn?”
Her eyes opened slightly. “Hmm?”
“Are you—” What was I even asking? Why did I care? “Do you, uh, feel okay?”
“Oh.” Her eyes opened all the way, and she stared at me as if even she didn’t know what to do with the question. “I don’t feel good. I get carsick easily.”
The road had been fairly straight so far, but it was awfully hot in the coach. No doubt that had something to do with it. “Okay. Just checking.”
I had turned back to the window when she cleared her throat. “Hey, Jenna? Thanks. For asking, I mean.”
Had Brooklyn ever thanked me for anything? I shrugged. “Sure.”
She leaned back and closed her eyes again. The silence dragged on for several more miles before Blake called back to us. “Hey, Jenna?”
Blake was calling me? Across from me, Kason’s eyes lifted from the New Complete Guide. I ignored him and leaned across Jaz to call back. “Yes?”
“Can you get the navigation on your phone and come help me check our directions?”
Directions? We were on a straight stretch of highway between nowhere and somewhere. From the quick look Jaz darted me, she’d had the same thought.
What could I say? I shrugged. “Um—okay.”
I pulled up Google Maps on my phone and carefully worked my way to the passenger seat. As I passed Brooklyn, she opened her eyes and glanced toward Blake, then back at me. Her forehead creased, and she closed her eyes again.
I settled into the sacred shotgun seat next to Blake. A week ago I would have been elated. Now I realized these chairs weren’t as comfortable as I would have expected. “Okay.” I studied the little blue arrow on my phone map. “We just stay on I-25 all the way.”
“All right.” He flipped on his blinker, glancing in the side mirror before sliding into the passing lane. A little close to the car in front of us, but I didn’t say anything.
“This says no more turns for at least three hours.” I got up, but Blake’s eyes shifted to me.
“Hey, where you going?”
“Back to sit down.”
“You can stay up here if you want.”
What? I sank back down awkwardly. “Uh…okay.” What was wrong with me? I’d dreamed about this, hadn’t I? So why couldn’t I stop thinking about the shadows under Brooklyn’s eyes?
“You like the view from up here?” He had on a pair of reflective sunglasses. It kept me from seeing his eyes.
“It’s nice.” After the sideways view out the back windows, the windshield seemed like a panorama. Everything was so much closer. Almost too close.
“For sure.” He changed lanes without using a blinker. “Power, y’know?”
I didn’t know, but I nodded politely. “Yeah.”
Another mile. Blake appeared to be focusing totally on driving, content to let silence accumulate between us. Why had he asked me to stay up here just to ignore me?
Was it to make Brooklyn jealous?
I bit my lip. “So, uh, I guess we’re making good time?” The statement turned into a question on the way out.
“Pretty much.” He glanced at the clock and scowled. “Although we won’t get there when I hoped, since Kason had to stop at that stupid UFO tourist trap.”
I flinched.
“What about you, Jenna? You believe all that UFO stuff?”
How could I explain that it was complicated? That I might not believe in UFOs, but I believed in Kason? “Well—” It was hotter up here than in the back. My legs were sticking to the fake leather chair. “I think there’s more out there than what we can see. And some things we can’t prove.”
“Spoken like a true conspiracy theorist.” His tone was teasing, but the set of his jaw wasn’t. “What, Kason been rubbing off on you?”
Something in me was sparking hotter and hotter. A little longer, and it might burst into flame. “Kason’s not a conspiracy theorist.” I kept my voice low enough to not be heard.
“Yeah, well, he doesn’t live in the real world.” Blake made an irritated gesture. “Dude is stuck in the stars.”
A tractor-trailer barreled past us, close enough that I flinched. “He’s—” All that I wanted to say swelled against the back of my throat. How could I somehow tell Blake about all that Kason was, about the light that lived inside him? “He’s—really smart.” Lame. Not what I’d meant to say.
“Smart?” Blake rolled his eyes. “Book-smart, maybe.”
“He fixed the utilities. That first night in St. Louis.”
Blake’s lip curled slightly. “I would have. In just a moment. I was about to figure them out.”
So sure of himself. No room for doubt. At one time, I’d admired that about him. But now, I kept thinking about the reverent awe in Kason’s voice, the way he stood with open hands before what he didn’t understand.
“You know what I think? I think Kason’s watching you.”
Watching me? I stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“He likes you, Jenna.”
Heat rushed to my face, and a weird mix of emotions jumbled together in my stomach. Embarrassment and anger and—something else. Something fluttery that I quickly pushed down. “No way. We’re not–”
“Yeah, right. I can tell.” Again, there was a hardness under his smile. “He’s always looking at you.”
“He’s not.” My cheeks had to be all but glowing by now. Kason? Really? He was just Jaz’s brother. My friend, yes, but nothing more than that—
“Suit yourself.” Blake shrugged. “I think when he’s not chasing aliens, he’s chasing you.”
The fluttery feeling was there again, which was ridiculous. I crossed my arms and stared out the window. I wouldn’t even dignify Blake’s suggestion with a comment. For a guy who could supposedly see Kason’s nonexistent crush on me, he’d been pretty blind to my feelings for the last three years.
“You won’t catch me chasing aliens.” He seemed willing enough to move on from the idea. “There’s enough in this world to keep us busy. Lots ahead. Lots to look forward to. Lots to experience.” He glanced at me. “Don’t you think, Jenna?”
What was he asking me, really? I felt as if another conversation were taking place underneath ours. “I—I think there’s a lot out there, yeah.”
“Whole world is ours for the taking.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Restless. Always restless. Like the meteors that burned themselves out against the friction of space.
“I want to see it all. Experience it all. Not just get my feet wet, you know?” He reached for the Coke in the cupholder beside him, taking both hands off the wheel to unscrew the top.
“Yeah. Me too.” Although if he didn’t get his hands back on the wheel, the next thing either of us would experience was a crash.
“Hmm.” He took hold of the wheel again—thankfully. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll end up doing some of it together.”
And suddenly I knew what he was asking. What he’d been holding out his hand for the entire time. What he’d assumed, with a confidence too bulletproof to be genuine, I was ready to give him.
A speed limit sign flashed by. 60 MILES PER HOUR. A glance at our speedometer showed the needle at least ten miles past that.
Blake is driving too fast…
And for the first time I realized what Jaz meant.
“Blake?”
“Uh huh?” He was smiling now. Waiting for the answer.
I thought about Kason. I thought about me. And then I started laughing, the emotions tumbling together in a way I was powerless to stop. “Was there stardust in the diesel at Perdido?”
Before he could respond, I all but fled back to the dinette table and flopped down next to Jaz. She was still studying her rocks, squinting at a dark red one like a fortuneteller consulting a crystal ball.
“You back?” Her tone was distracted.
“Yeah.” I was watching Kason. His eyes were on the New Complete Guide, but I knew he was listening.
Kason, who didn’t have to identity every flying object. Kason, who saw dreams in this desert.
And suddenly I wanted to smile. Kason wasn’t interested in me, not the way Blake thought, and he was far from the type of guy who could fascinate me. But he was my friend. And that was more than enough.
“Blake wanted to know if I believed in UFOs.”
“Really?” Jaz tapped the rock with her pencil. “What’d you tell him?”
I waited for Kason to look up before I answered. “That there’s a lot of things we don’t see.”
And Kason’s smile brought my own.