A Field Guide to Getting Lost

  For Joaquin—

  may you have many adventures

  and always find your way home

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sutton

  The robot had a mind of its own.

  Thankfully, the robot was the size of a golf ball and was not likely to overthrow the human race. At least not anytime soon.

  Sutton looked carefully at the code and tried again. But again the little robot refused to turn right when it was supposed to. Coding was always black and white—you wrote the code correctly and your program responded how you expected. Two plus two equaled four. Or, more to Sutton’s level, pi equaled 3.14159265359. There was no wiggle room, not like taste in books or music, which her dad was always telling her was subjective. Like that was a good thing.

  In her last email, Mom had asked Sutton if she’d managed to get the bot through the maze in under a minute yet. Sutton had been surprised her mom remembered the robot. Even when Mom was in town, Sutton did all her school stuff with her dad. (Which mostly meant he looked over Sutton’s proposed research topics and gave them a thumbs-up.) Thrilled by her mom’s interest, Sutton had fudged a little and told her the robot had passed the test with flying colors. Which meant she needed to be ready to demonstrate when Mom came home next week.

  When the robot refused to make the turn a third time, Sutton shoved her coding book off her desk. Somehow the loud thunk as it hit the ground helped release the tension that had been creeping up her spine. She picked it up and dropped it again.

  “Whoa there, pumpkin.” Her dad appeared in the doorway, dressed for work—black suit, shiny shoes. “What did that book do to you?”

  Sutton frowned. According to their synced calendars, her dad was not supposed to be at the orchestra tonight. “Why are you wearing your blacks? Is there a performance tonight?”

  He hovered in the doorway for a second. “Can I come in?”

  She nodded, and her dad sat on the end of her bed. “No show tonight. I have a date.”

  Now her dad was the one refusing to follow the expected route. “A fancy date,” she observed.

  A smile passed over his face, but he wrestled it back into a serious expression. “Yeah, you know I’ve been seeing Elizabeth for a while now. I thought it was time we stepped it up from hikes and coffee.”

  Her father had gone out with Elizabeth seventeen times so far. Five hikes, four coffee shops, two combo hikes/coffee shops, two daytime movies, three evening movies, and miniature golfing. It seemed like their relationship had been stepping up for a while now, but then what did Sutton know about dating?

  “We’re having dinner at Cielo downtown and then going to the opera. I talked to you about this at breakfast.”

  This was vaguely familiar. “Was I fully prepared to engage?”

  He chuckled. But it wasn’t funny. Sutton’s dad knew that until she had completed her morning routine—making hot chocolate, watering the apartment’s jungle of plants while her apple-cinnamon oatmeal cooked, then eating while she mentally recited the periodic table of elements and the United States presidents in chronological order and then alphabetical order—she was not fully prepared to engage. Anything he said during that time was unlikely to be processed. Neither of them were morning people—she thought he knew that.

  “My apologies,” he said. “I should have known better. But, pumpkin, before you go upstairs to Mrs. Banerjee’s, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  Sutton’s brain began to arrange the lines of code. Her dad was going on a fancy date with a woman he had seen seventeen times. He had forgotten their very well-established morning routine, which meant he’d been distracted, and he wanted to have a serious conversation with her.

  Forget guiding her robot through a maze in a minute—now Sutton needed to figure out how to turn back time! Back to a time before her dad ever met this Elizabeth Paz. Because dating was one thing, but this sounded like it was leading to a proposal and a ring and a wedding and—

  “Your mom called.”

  The lines of code scattered. “What? Why didn’t you let me talk?”

  “She was in a hurry.”

  “So she should have talked to me, not you!”

  Sutton was used to her mom being way down at the bottom of the southern hemisphere, but this time it had been almost a month since they’d talked. Between the time difference and questionable satellite phones at the research station in Antarctica where her mom studied emperor penguins, she almost never called.

  “The thing is, honey, she needed to talk to me. To make sure I had things covered here.” He reached out and squeezed Sutton’s hand. “Her return has been delayed.”

  Sutton snatched her hand back. She felt her ears getting hot and tears pricking at her eyes. Now she wanted to knock the entire bookcase over.

  “I’m really, really sorry, pumpkin. The migration patterns are changing, you know, so the penguins are unpredictable and she really has to stay to monitor them…”

  Sutton knew way more than she wanted to know about the stupid penguins’ migration patterns. But the only migration she cared about was her mom’s.

  “Maybe I should have waited to tell you. Do you want me to stay home tonight?”

  Of course she wanted him to stay home! He’d just ambushed her with terrible news, and on top of it, he was heading off on a fancy date that was leading nowhere good. If she showed him how upset she was about her mom, he’d stay home.

  But Sutton wasn’t a super big fan of showing her feelings.

  Also, logic said this course of action would only postpone a proposal. It wouldn’t stop it.

  Sutton’s chest tightened. There were too many feelings to keep hidden. If her dad kept sitting there, staring at her with puppy-dog eyes of concern, she’d burst. “You should go.”

  It wasn’t until after they had trudged upstairs to Mrs. Banerjee’s apartment, chased her yappy dog down the hall when the pup made a break for it, and said goodbye that Sutton had the worst realization of all: Her mom was going to miss her tenth birthday.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Luis

  Luis’s head was going to explode.

  Not in an angry way. In a throat-swelling, chest-bursting, racing-to-the-emergency-room kind of way. He had been so careful—he was always so careful—to eat only the food his mom had packed for his overnight at Sawyer’s house. And yet here he was, hurtling toward Seattle Children’s Hospital. Again.

  Every day, Luis lived with Mad-Eye Moody levels of constant vigilance around everything he put in his mouth. His food allergies were sensitive enough that he even had to care what other people were eating, hence the stupid allergy table in his school’s lunchroom. (There was no reason he needed to sit at a special table. He knew how to handle an allergen exposure. But stupid school policies are stupid school policies.)

  And now he was expected to analyze the diets of people’s pets, too?!

  Sawyer’s pet guinea pig had been so cute, with its quivering little whiskers and tiny pink nose. Luis had been happy and excited to be on a sleepover—his first—but also a little anxious. Then he’d seen the guinea pig. What better way to calm his nerves than to cuddle a bundle of fluff?

  When Luis asked if he could hold it, Sawyer had shrugged. “Piglet?” he said. “Sure, if you want.”

  And when Luis picked Piglet up and nuzzled him against his cheek, he felt better right away. For half a second, anyway. Then he looked closer at the cage and saw something in Piglet’s food dish that almost made him drop the wiggly creature. Peanut shells.

  Luis was disappointed, sure, but not all that surprised when his throat started swelling up and he broke out in itchy hives. It happened. Kind of a lot, honestly. He didn’
t have to eat peanuts to have a mild allergic reaction to them. He just had to be near somebody who’d been eating peanuts recently. Even if that somebody was a guinea pig. The littlest bit of peanut dust on Piglet’s fur, and Luis’s regular-kid sleepover was over.

  His mom would have sighed and given him some Benadryl and a lecture about being more careful. But Sawyer’s mom was running red lights and breaking traffic laws right and left. Now, that was kind of exciting. A lot more exciting than petting a guinea pig, anyway.

  A text alert went off in the front seat, and Mrs. Lawson chucked her phone back at them. It almost hit Sawyer in the head. “See who it is!” she shrieked, taking a corner like a race car driver.

  “Really, Mrs. Lawson, I’m fine—”

  “Your mom says she’s meeting us at the hospital,” Sawyer said, reading the text.

  Luis groaned.

  “What is it, honey? We’re almost there!” If possible, Sawyer’s mom sped up.

  Luis’s mom had plans tonight, which was why Luis was sleeping over at Sawyer’s. His mom almost never had exciting plans of her own. Sure, lately she’d gone on some dates with a new guy she seemed to like a lot. But tonight wasn’t just a hike or a movie. Luis had spent at least an hour helping his mom pick out what she would wear. (His mom thought the dress with the velvet trim was too fancy, but Luis thought a French restaurant and a night at the opera was exactly the time to wear the fanciest thing in one’s closet. Especially if one wore a dingy lab coat all day, every day.)

  Then she spent another hour going over all of Luis’s food allergies with Sawyer’s mom before she would leave. Luis had sworn everything would be fine—she should go and have fun.

  And now she would miss her fancy night—she would never be able to tell him what escargots tasted like!—because she was on her way to the emergency room. Again.

  The wheels screeched as Sawyer’s mom skidded to a stop in front of the sliding glass doors at the emergency room. She leapt out of the front seat.

  “You can’t park here, Mrs. Lawson,” Luis said when she yanked his passenger door open. “Only ambulances—”

  “Come on, Sawyer,” she barked as she pulled Luis from the car.

  “Ma’am,” said an orderly pushing an empty wheelchair back toward the hospital. “We keep this area clear for the ambulances—”

  “This child is on death’s door!” she shrieked.

  The orderly looked at Luis. Luis waved. “Hi, Jerome.”

  “Oh hey, kid,” he said. “Peanut allergy, right?”

  “Everything allergy, more like,” Sawyer muttered.

  Mrs. Lawson pushed Luis into the empty wheelchair and started to grab it from the orderly.

  “Ma’am,” Jerome said firmly. “I’ll take him inside. Park your car in the lot, please.”

  “It’s really okay,” Luis said to Sawyer’s mom, his tongue growing thick in his mouth. “I know Jerome.”

  Mrs. Lawson struggled with her conscience for a moment, but then an approaching siren wailed. “Get back in the car!” she yelped at Sawyer, and finally Luis was rolling through the sliding doors toward the familiar bright lights and antiseptic smell of the hospital.

  “Hey, sugar,” the woman behind the desk said with a slow smile when she saw Luis coming her way. “What was it this time?”

  “A guinea pig,” Luis said. Her eyebrows slid up her forehead. “I didn’t eat it! Just petted it! How was I supposed to know it had peanut breath?”

  She chuckled and waved at Jerome. “Bring him on through to triage.”

  Luis was getting settled in the little in-between room where they’d take his blood pressure and heart rate and stuff, when he heard Mrs. Lawson shouting in the waiting room.

  “I’ve got his insurance cards! I’ve got his identification info! His mother is on her way!”

  A young nurse in Star Wars scrubs stepped into the room. “Is that lady with you?” she asked Luis, her accent thick like his abuelo’s. She strapped the blood pressure cuff onto Luis’s arm as he nodded.

  “She thinks I’m going to die.”

  The nurse watched the numbers on the blood pressure cuff, then released the tight band from his arm. “Probably not today.”

  By the time Luis’s mom arrived, he’d been moved back to a little room where he’d gotten some medicine that was making him dopey. A Mariners game played soundlessly on the television.

  “Oh, love!” Her strawberry-blond curls had slipped out of the fancy twist she’d done for her date, and her normally serene blue eyes were wild.

  Luis hated that expression on her face; it always lurked right under the surface, waiting to burst through. She had that exact look way back in kindergarten, when Luis had been stung by a bee during recess and gone into anaphylactic shock for the first time. He’d been rushed to the emergency room then, too. He could have died. He almost did.

  Horrible expression or not, Luis froze his mom there in the doorway for a second, imagined sketching her, painting her, framing her. He’d always thought she looked like Anne of Green Gables, all grown up. His mother’s fair features were so different from Luis’s dark ones, inherited from his father, that people sometimes didn’t even believe they were related.

  He forced himself to stay awake. “I’m fine, Mom. You didn’t have to come.”

  “Of course I had to come!” She kissed his forehead, and her perfume smelled like the lilac tree in their backyard that only bloomed for a few weeks every spring but filled the whole yard with its fragrance while it did. “I wanted you to know I’m here. Now I’m going to track down the doctor.”

  She swept out of the room, but the lilac smell lingered. Only for a second, though. It was quickly replaced with the harsh smell of hospital cleaners.

  As usual, Luis’s allergies were messing things up. Only not just for him—this time for his mom, too.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sutton

  The robot maze was spread out on Mrs. Banerjee’s kitchen table, but there still hadn’t been any progress. Sutton had been hoping her upstairs neighbor could help. She was retired now, but she had been a computer science professor a million years ago.

  As soon as she’d seen Sutton’s face, though, Mrs. B had insisted on making her cure for everything—spices and honey stirred into warm milk, which bloomed a brilliant yellow when she added a spice called turmeric.

  “There’ll be plenty of time to get that robot through the maze,” she said.

  And now there would be. More time than she’d expected, anyway, since Sutton’s mom’s trip had been delayed. Stupid penguins.

  Mrs. Banerjee hadn’t even finished making Sutton’s golden milk before her dad returned from his date. “Knock knock,” he said, sticking his head inside way earlier than he should have returned home.

  A tiny seed of hope sprouted in Sutton’s chest. Maybe things had ended with Elizabeth? But then shame washed over her; she did want her dad to be happy, after all.

  The thing was, while her mom was off studying the tuxedoed creatures, Sutton’s dad was her very own emperor penguin—the papa bird who stayed and watched the baby while the mama penguin went off to do important things far away. That was how it had always been with emperors, and it was how it had been for Sutton and her dad for almost as long as she could remember.

  What would it mean for their little colony if Elizabeth came in and disrupted it all? A papa penguin who wasn’t focused on the survival of his chick was sure to lose it on the ice, where it would freeze or be trampled. Alone.

  “What are you doing here?” Sutton said at the same time that Mrs. Banerjee hollered, “Don’t let Moti out!”

  Dad jumped inside and slammed the door as Moti hurtled toward him, throwing herself at his legs. Sutton’s tiny robot spun in circles when it was supposed to be moving backward.

  “Everything all right?” Mrs. Banerjee asked as Sutton’s dad joined her at the kitchen table. “Would you like some golden milk, Martin?”

  “Sure, that would be great.” He look
ed at the spinning robot. “Still giving you trouble?”

  Sutton scowled, but then Mrs. Banerjee set a steaming yellow cup of goodness in front of her. The creamy golden milk was a miracle cure for the blues, and Sutton didn’t even believe in miracles.

  “My date was cut short,” he said. “Elizabeth’s son had an allergic reaction, and she had to rush to the ER.”

  “Oh dear.” Mrs. Banerjee placed a mug of golden milk in front of Sutton’s dad and cradled her own in her wrinkly hands. “If you want to join them at the hospital, Sutton is welcome to stay the night.”

  He sipped his milk. “I don’t think it’s as serious as all that. Unfortunately, seems like these hospital trips are a pretty regular occurrence for them. Since I’m suddenly free for dinner, I thought maybe my best girl would like to check out the new pho place on the corner.”

  Nothing quite like being someone’s second choice. Especially when that someone was the one parent who had always been there before.

  “I’m not hungry.” Sutton plucked the tiny robot off the maze and powered it down. Maybe it needed charging. Maybe she needed charging. But a good night of sleep wasn’t going to change the fact that her dad would have rather had dinner with Elizabeth tonight.

  And worse, her mom wouldn’t be home for her birthday.

  She tucked the bot carefully into its carrying pod and began to fold up the maze.

  “Sutton, I know you’re upset about your mom—”

  She stood quickly and knocked the edge of the table, splashing golden milk everywhere. “Oh, Mrs. B, I’m sorry!”

  Mrs. Banerjee made soft shushing noises as she gathered some rags and began to wipe up the mess. “Milk spills,” she said, like it was the most obvious fact. The Earth orbits the sun. Moti barks at anything that moves. Your parents have more important things to think about than you, Sutton.

  “Mom is so sorry about the delay.” Dad guided Sutton back down into her chair. “They’re so close to completing this study. It’s a really important piece of securing the funding—”