Chapter 1: Cap and Gown

BEFORE WE GET STARTED, I might as well tell you, I’m a girl. I’m eighteen and tall and thin. I like sports, outdoors stuff like camping, and animals. Pop—my Grandpa—started calling me a beanstalk years ago when I started growing—up, not out. He said I was a real tomboy, too. Mam—Grandma—said I needed to grow tall just to contain all the good in me. I love Grandma Mam. She always has something kind to say about everything. Aunt Misty just said it meant I was strong and empowered—a real woman. I thought in any case, it would have been nice to have tits by the time I graduated from high school. Wasn’t to be.

Did you know thesaurus.com lists 385 synonyms for ‘beanstalk.’ And nearly every one applies to me. Angular, slender, gangly, skinny, lanky, lean ... You get the idea. I’m a tall, gangly, sometimes uncoordinated, pile of bones with a thin layer of meat and skin pulled over the top. I’m a scrawny, rawboned broomstick with a soaring attitude to match my statuesque height. You get the picture, right? I’m tall and skinny. But what the thesaurus doesn’t mention is that I’m deceptively strong from playing basketball, disk golf, soccer, volleyball, and track. And I have a wicked arm when I’m throwing a softball. I wear my basketball varsity letter, but I lettered in four different sports.

Being the kind of curious kid I’ve always been, I looked up ‘beanstalk’ in the urban dictionary of slang, too, and I found two completely different (in my opinion) definitions.

1) Being a plain annoying human being.

2) Someone doing something legendary.

I suppose I could be legendarily annoying and fit both definitions. Of course, those are just the top definitions. I like the last one on the page just as much.

3) The epitome of clitoral arousal. A clit erection. As in ‘Lick my beanstalk!’

Well, you get the idea. So, how tall is tall? Not that tall if you’re a guy. I’m 6’3”. If you want that in metric, I’m 190.5 centimeters. How skinny? 133 pounds naked. Not many have seen that, yet. Dan Blackwell saw most of it back when ... Well, you know. Oh, yeah. That’s 60 kilos. I’d be worth a fortune if I was cocaine. Yeah, baby. Like $1.8 million. In the right market. A lot more than I’m worth as a tall skinny girl. I’d have to play in the WNBA for, like, ten years to earn that much. So, I guess I won’t be getting rich any time soon.

I’ve lived with Mam and Pop since I was eleven. And Aunt Misty. She was just graduating from high school when I moved in. She never moved out. I got my mother’s old room. My parents? Don’t ask. We never talk about them. Looking at Mom’s room when I moved in, though, you’d never think she was the kind of person she turned out to be. I quickly adopted Misty’s words for her parents and they became Mam and Pop to both of us. It was so much easier than keeping track of whether we were referring to my grandparents or her parents. Might not be the same as everyone, but it made Misty and me feel even more like sisters.

Okay, a little bit of the backstory. Did you ever notice how country songs sung by men are all, like, “Hot girls in teeny tiny shorts, I will make you my wife, bear my children, front porch, family values, and casseroles.” Oh yeah, and “Poor me, my truck ran away with my dog.” While country songs sung by women are, like, “Oops! I killed my husband.” Well, now you get an idea about my dad and mom. She’s got another fourteen years before she’s eligible for parole.

Poor Mam and Pop were in their late fifties and thinking about retirement and maybe traveling around the world as soon as they could get Misty out of the house. Then I moved in. Now, they’re pushing seventy and still haven’t retired. Still hoping the youngest will move out so they can start traveling. I probably will, but I hate to leave Misty. She’s more like a big sister than an aunt. Maybe she’ll move with me. Oh, wow! The trouble we could get into together would be epic!

Not that I ever get into trouble, mind you. It’s just an expression. Sort of.

Like I couldn’t find a date for senior prom because Dan Blackwell already got Randi Bishop preggers, so he wasn’t going to take me. So, I bought a couple’s ticket and got Misty to go with me. It was easier for me to get a tux than a formal, so Misty got to wear the gown and go as my date. Mam about had a coronary when she saw my haircut. Slicked back and parted on the side. When she saw me in the living room in my tux and my neatly pasted on pencil-thin mustache, she thought I was my date. Oops!

Misty is almost a foot shorter than me, so we made a striking pair on the dance floor. It was almost halfway through the prom before anybody figured out who it was. You wouldn’t believe the number of guys who hit on my aunt. Or, for that matter, the number of girls who hit on me.

I kept my hair short and really look butch now. Not that I’m that way. I’d like some guy to get sweet on me. I’m just not interested in spending the effort to tame one. Probably end up like my mother. Misty, on the other hand, is very feminine and cute. Unfortunately, she depended on that in life and wasn’t that successful. She’s worked at Starbucks ever since she graduated. So, don’t go believing the tall tales you hear about the flirty barista who is suddenly swept off her feet by the rich handsome billionaire, or something. Misty’s still pulling shots. Maybe she set the bar a little high.

So, where’s this story going, anyway? Hell if I know. So, sometimes I’ll just talk to fill the void. I’d say it actually started at commencement. When I accepted my diploma from Principal Rogers, he looked up at me—short guy—and took my hand so we could shake for the photographers. Only in that minute, I could have walked around the entire stadium and counted every one of the two thousand people present. As they say, time stood still.

“I expect I’ll hear news of your great accomplishments, Jackie. You have a unique future before you. I’ve put your travel documents in your folder. Make us proud,” he said. Only it was like his voice was somewhere far away, even though I could see his lips moving, a little out of sync with what I was hearing. It was like his voice was on the other side of some canyon or something. Yeah, Mrs. Donahue would say the right word was ‘chasm.’ He spoke to me across a great chasm complete with an eerie echo. I paid attention in school. Then the camera flash went off and I walked off the platform—one of 300 students in my graduating class.

I’d like to say that was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me, but weirdness kind of follows me around like a lost puppy. Take that time soon after I got my driver’s license, for instance. I was driving Pop’s old Ford Fairlane 500. I know. Sounds weird already, but Pop bought the car new in ‘68 with money he’d saved all through high school. Then he was drafted and spent four years as a jungle rat in Southeast Asia. The car still only had a couple thousand miles on it at the time and so he just kept it in the garage and used some of his military pay to buy a motorcycle. Well, I won’t get into how he met Mam and packed her off on an around-the-USA motorcycle trip and they got back with my mom in the hopper and a smile on their faces.

But that’s how the fifty-some-year-old car happened to be in the garage when I decided to go shopping with Misty. I mean, Misty never learned to drive and never really went anywhere more than a bicycle ride away unless someone else was driving. She said driving was what boys were for, but she was happy enough when I offered to drive. She’s still a kid at heart and filled with delusions. We’d gone to the mall, had burgers at Wendy’s, and were headed back home. I decided to stay off the main roads because I wasn’t sure the Fairlane would go at freeway speeds even though it was in immaculate condition. I couldn’t remember it having been out of the garage in the past five years, though it had current plates. But we were driving along without a care in the world when this voice says, “Turn right at the next corner.”

All echoey like Principal Rogers’ voice I told you about. I won’t re-explain that. I looked over at Misty and she was just sitting there like she didn’t hear a thing, the brat. I’m not crazy, so when I got to the next intersection I turned right. I was listening for further instructions, which weren’t forthcoming, when I saw a dog in the middle of the road. I pulled to a stop and jumped out of the car, even though Misty was hollering “Be careful. Don’t let it bite you.”

Well, this poor mangy mutt wasn’t interested in biting. He wanted to lick me half to death. Faker. He got up and followed me to the car and when I opened the door, he climbed in the back seat and lay down like he owned it.

And that’s how I came to own Roadkill. Clever name, right? It’s also how I came to have three months of duty pulling the Fairlane out of the garage every Saturday morning and washing it, then vacuuming out the inside and using some of that ‘new car smell’ polish to go over all the plastic and vinyl in the car and leather conditioner for the seats. After three months, Pop declared the car free of the mangy dog smell at last.

Weird, huh?

But that dog never leaves my side except when I go to school. Hardly even had to train him, except to get him to stand still while I gave him a bath. Now, he even tolerates a ribbon in his hair if I get in a mood.

Mile 0

Where was I?

Commencement was over and I found Mam, Pop, Misty, and Roadkill waiting for me outside the stadium so we could take family pictures with me in my graduation gown and holding tight to my diploma. I never opened it up. They’d mail the diploma sometime this summer. I knew all they gave us at commencement was an empty folder. And travel documents? I wanted to figure out what these ‘travel documents’ were that Principal Rogers mentioned but decided I should do that in private. Then Pop did something I never in a million years would have imagined. He held up the keys to the Fairlane and dangled them in front of my face. He pointed across the parking lot where that red and black fastback was sitting with a bow tied to the radio antenna.

“It’s yours now. Drive it like you own it,” he said. Oh, I gave him the biggest, crushingest hug you can imagine and a kiss right on his cheek. Then I did the same to Mam, only I had to bend over a lot farther to reach her cheek. I turned to Misty and grabbed her hand and took off running toward the car, my cap and gown flying and Roadkill barking at our heels. The three of us piled into the car and I started up the 390 Thunderbird Special V-8 engine and felt the Fairlane come to life beneath my fingertips.

“Where are we going?” Misty asked. Always the practical one.

“I don’t know. Principal Rogers said my travel documents were in my diploma folder.” I handed it to her and a packet of papers fell out, including an old-fashioned AAA TripTik. How weird can things get? Like, was this all a scheme he cooked up with Pop? Old car and a really old map.