Kickturn

1

At only ten years of age, one glorious decade on planet Earth, I gave up writing in my travel journal when I lost it at Zion National Park, but if I still had it I guess I’d make a note that said we finally arrived at Joshua Tree. “The Land of a Thousand Golden Hours,” as Mom calls it. From my bunk window on our skoolie, it looks like a bunch of endless reddish-tan rocks. Loads of gravel. Scrubby brush and, of course, those weird alien-looking Joshua trees.

Dad says they’re super-special and rare and we should be grateful we get to see so many in one place, but if you ask me (which Mom and Dad never do), I think the Joshua trees are nice but overall not that great. I like them, but they make me un-comfortable. They are spiky and look like each nook has a secret set of razor teeth and if you get too close you see them grinning. Row by row of teeth hiding in the trunks. Mom and Dad think I’m sulking on the bus, pouting, but I’m not. I just don’t want to see the trees.

I keep thinking they’re going to lash out and bite me because if any tree could bite, it would definitely be a Joshua tree. If I said this out loud to my parents, though--that I was worried a prehistoric tree would up and devour me, lacerate me to death with thousands of mini megalodon razor teeth--my mom would immediately say the same thing she always does, which is precisely this: “Oh, Lindy, you’re so weird.”

Our cat, Pookie, curls up next to me and I hug him. There’s not a lot of places to hide when you live on a school bus converted into an RV. I say it’s like an RV be-cause it’s similar but not quite. RVs are made for driving across the country on all different kinds of roads and surfaces, but an old school bus that should’ve been taken to a scrapyard ten years ago? Oh man, when the bus moves it rattles my joints loose. The skoolie was done up all super-nice though and it’s posh to glamp from one national park to another on a bus chock-full of the same finest amenities your average La Quinta Inn offers, but it gets old. At least, I find it gets old real quick. The bathroom is microscopic but you can always squat on top of the combi-nation toilet/sink like a lemur clinging to a tree in a rainstorm or curl up in a ball inside the corner shower.

“Why are you curled up in the shower?” Mom will say.

And I will say, “No reason.” And never: Because I’m pretending to be a nautilus fossil waiting inside the rock for the geologist to crack me free after millions of years and once the air touches my frozen exoskeleton, I will explode back into life and swim through the sky until I find salt water where I will plunge into the depths and finally look for actual mermaids. No, I’ve learned you can’t say that because then your mom thinks you’re dehydrated and starts loading you up with electro-lytes.

Sometimes I think the cat is the only one who understands me. My dad jokes that orange cats only have one brain cell, which is probably why we get along so well, me and Pookie. I stick my tongue out at my dad and we laugh.

I peek out the window and yup, they’re still taking pictures of Mom doing yoga poses on a rock. I pull open my iPad, wait for the satellite internet to zap me some GBs, and launch the newest video from the coolest person in the entire universe, Kentucky Jones.

She doesn’t always post every week, which is super-frustrating because then I wor-ry that she died in some tragic freak skateboarding accident where her board flew up and circled back like a boomerang and hit her in the head and then we’ll never know what happened because it’s hard to edit and post videos without a head, but usually most of the time she just forgot or she like broke her leg or something. Which is a bummer, but I guess that’s better than being dead or headless.

And I can’t really get enough of her clothes and her hair and everything. It’s why I wear a Band-Aid on my face as often as I can too, to be just like her. Like today, she’s talking about a road trip she’s gonna take with her friends and she’s wearing these pants that look like a recycled billboard that got mangled in a tornado. Even though she hasn’t mentioned anything about the pants, I feel like that’s exactly what they’re made of and I’m obsessed. I want tornado-ravaged billboard pants too.

Kentucky Jones’s video comes to an end. My heart closes up like a sad fist. “All right, friends, this is Kentucky Jones signing off for now but don’t forget to always stay D.U.M.B.--Driven Until Massive Breakthrough . . . Later, loves!”

The video ends and I almost don’t remember what it was about. I’m just happy she was there. I give Pookie a boop on the nose for good luck and plop down from my bunk. I check the clock on the dash and dang it! Mom and Dad have been shooting pictures on that rock for an hour. How many pictures does one #momlife #skoolie #lifeontheroad #familyiseverything #yogaislife Instagrammer need?

I open the door to our skoolie and hop out onto the chunky grit of the High Desert. “How much longer?” I yell at my mom from the front door. Mom perches on a rock in tree pose, the sun setting behind her and splashing every hair and floating piece of dust with golden light. “Until the sun goes down. We’re getting content for the next couple weeks’ posts.”

“Content . . . content . . . ,” I mutter to no one. “Always with the content.” I lean against the bus. “Mondays it’s the healthy pictures of food, never the McDonald’s wrappers in the trash. Tuesdays it’s the awesome times of traveling to the next place, never the hours of waiting for the bus to be fixed. Wednesdays it’s videos of me being super-happy to be next to some pebble, never how meh I feel when I see it. Thursdays it’s outdoor yoga and on and on and on . . .”

Mom hollers over to me. “Do you want to shoot your video now? Why don’t you change into that cute outfit from Polarcap Outfitters? They’re our new sponsor.”

“It’s eighty-two degrees and they sent me a fleece?”

“Just pretend you’re cold.”

“No thanks.” I stomp back onto the bus.

There’s an aisle running up and down the skoolie. To my left is the countertop, kitchen, minifridge, cooktop, drawers. To my right, the books and table forever taunting me to do schoolwork. That’s what I should be doing at least. Instead I grab a pencil and hold it for balance as I pretend to carefully tread the tightrope strung over the Grand Canyon. A hush falls over the audience. One wrong move and I will plummet to my gruesome demise in front of all these people. It’s so quiet I could hear a pin drop. A bird lands on the tightrope and my balance trembles. I hear the crowd gasp.

What they don’t know is that I’m preparing to jump straight up, up, up into the sky and soar right to the stars. Birds aren’t the only ones who can fly . . .

2

The camera bag thunks hard on the table and I crash back down to earth. “All right, kiddo?” Dad says loudly.

“Yeah.” I nod. No more flying over the Grand Canyon. Back to the bus. “Where to now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I just . . .” I gesture to the equipment all closed up and sealed away. “You got your videos and stuff. That’s usually the last step. I figured we’re on to the next place.”

Dad sighs and opens up his laptop. “Not sure.”

“What do you mean?” Dad is on a sabbatical, or as he calls it, a “saDADical,” ha-haha, because he was, as he put it, “melting down faster than a computer with no fan.” So he quit his job, sold the house, and now we all get to watch him try to deal with keeping a bus up and running one YouTube how-to video at a time. I watch him tap his finger on the table and stare unfocused at the screen. Does he not know where we’re going? I thought Mom and Dad had this all planned out. It’s un-like him to not be bursting with energy, scuttling around the skoolie locking every-thing down so we can hit the road without all the kitchen things falling down. The pep in his step is on empty. It’s a little weird.

Mom steps onto the bus and closes the door. She throws a sweatshirt on over her yoga gear and pulls her hair up into a messy bun. “We could go back to Sequoia,” she says.

“Or not,” Dad says, flat as a piece of paper.

“Maybe White Sands?” she tries.

“Or not.”

Both their faces look like mashed potatoes without butter, salt, and sour cream--all mushy and bland. I snuggle Pookie. “What’s going on? Is the bus broken again?”

Dad shakes his head. “It’s not broken.”

“Yet!” I add.

“Haha.” Dad snorts. “No, we’re just not sure where to go.”

Pookie nips me. He’s had enough snorgles so I put him down. “If we’ve been to all the national parks on the West Coast, why don’t we try the East Coast?”

“Too much hassle,” Mom says. “The East Coast is too congested, streets are too narrow in the cities. We’d have to park the bus and rent a car.”

I beam. “That sounds awesome! We could stay in a hotel, see some new things--it’d be great to see the Liberty Bell, visit the Smithsonian . . . can we go?”

Dad sighs. “To be honest, I don’t think the bus can make it to the East Coast.”

Neither of them has to say a single thing more because we all know the truth: the bus is on its last legs. If we try to push it too much, it’ll die and we’re done. All the days and hours lost to this thing, too many to count. The best we can do is loop around the West Coast forever, like a dead goldfish circling slowly down a flushing toilet. And there’s nothing we can really do about it. Dad and mom don’t know what to do or how to fix it. I mean, I certainly don’t know anything about fixing old school buses.

I give up. “I should do my homework.”

“Do you need help with anything?” Mom asks.

Yes, everything, I think. “No, I’m good.”

I go back into my bunk and slide the curtain shut. I flick on the light over my bed and open up the nearest book. Math. An introduction to fractions. Pizza and apples chopped up into pieces no one will ever eat. Why is it always pizza? And who eats only one-third of an apple? Would you cook only one-third of an egg? No, of course not. That would be ridiculous. Although if you used only the yolk, would that be one-third of an egg? Would the egg whites be the other two-thirds? Then I guess technically you could cook one-third of an egg. But what recipe needs only one yolk? Hmmm . . .

To the internets!

I pull open my iPad and wait for it to connect.

“It’s gonna be okay . . . ,” I hear Dad say.

Oh no-no-no-no-no, I hate it when this happens. I dive under my pillow, smashing down on it hard so I hear nothing. I don’t want to know, I don’t want to hear it, there’s nowhere for me to go, I’m forced to hear it all and I don’t want to. Not an-ymore. It’s always the same. Mom, the beautiful and all-powerful yoga mama, can’t handle it when her follower count drops, her sponsors don’t re-up, the viewer retention rate is always too short, and all this social media stuff goes wrong. How will we reach the universe and heal with love if no one watches the TikToks? And then she worries and gets upset and tries harder to get them back.

More beautiful pictures, more happy family shots, more videos of the spotlessly clean bus with a breeze blowing the crisp white curtains in slow motion next to an artisanal mason jar of sage and lavender wrapped in fairy lights at dusk. She’s tried it all and she gets so, so sad when nothing works.

I don’t know what she really wants.

I used to think she wanted “the adventure of the open road” and filling the planet with positivity, but now the only thing it seems she wants is likes and clicks and fol-lowers and subscribers. Sometimes it feels like those invisible people are more important to her than anything else. Including me.

I kick away my math book and ignore the one-egg-yolk recipes. There’s only one thing I need and I find it right away.

“Hey, daredevils, Kentucky Jones here and I’m at a drainage ditch outside an abandoned warehouse in Minnesota. Can I jump it on my skateboard or will I fall on my butt into the sludge? Let’s find out!”

3

On the road again!

I love when we visit places for the first time. That’s always fun. Although I would’ve sworn Marfa, Texas, looked a little different in my mind. Mom described it as artsy, folksy, and sweet. When we got there, I was confused because like yes, but no. It’s a super-cute place, but gosh it’s completely in the middle of nowhere. The. Middle. Of. Nowhere. The tumbleweeds have tumbleweeds. I guess they filmed an old movie here like a hundred years ago but when my dad turned it on last night, it was super-boring and I could barely understand what they were saying. It kind of kills it for me when I’m watching a movie my parents claim is super-great but then they explain every single sentence. Like, if you have to do that, it can’t be that good.

We wake up at a campground and immediately set out to do the thing that rules our life: film content. Mom wears the latest velour yoga hoodie on top of the latest in buttery-soft (Why is it always “buttery-soft”? Who is going around petting but-ter?) leggings and we head out in search of tremendous scenery for her to pose in front of.

She approaches me with some folded clothes. “Will you--”

“No,” I quickly say.

“Hear me out.”