A Field Guide to Getting Lost Page 2

  “But it’s my birthday!” Sutton cried.

  Mrs. Banerjee sat down on her other side and took Sutton’s hand. “Your mama loves you so much.”

  Yeah, Sutton’s mom loved her. She knew that. But it was always going to be more important to keep tracking where the penguins waddled than come home to be with her daughter. And the worst thing was, Sutton knew the penguins were in trouble. Melting ice and limited food supplies meant lots of penguins were dying. And the ones that survived were trying to find new breeding grounds to hatch and raise their chicks, places with more food and better conditions.

  The penguins were kind of like her robot—trying to do what they were programmed to do, except something had gone wrong. Animal instincts were different from computer code, though. They could adapt to changes in their environment. They had to, in order to survive. And the scientists were doing what they could to help.

  If her mom was going to keep focused on her work, then Sutton would too. That was what scientists did. They stuck with the experiment and kept trying until they made their breakthrough, no matter what. At least the great ones, like Mom. Like Sutton would be someday. She would accept the extra time as a gift and make sure she got her bot through the maze by the time her mom got home.

  When she finally arrived, Mom would see the results of Sutton’s dedication and know that the whole time she’d been tracking penguins, Sutton had been doing her own serious work. Sure, they weren’t together, working on their projects, but if Sutton squinted at it sideways, it was like they were.

  Kind of.

  But she wasn’t going to make any progress here. Mrs. Banerjee and Dad were too caught up in all the feelings. And feelings were useless. Sutton needed to think like a scientist right now. Moti appeared at Sutton’s feet, nudging her shin.

  “I have to take Moti out,” Sutton said.

  “Well… okay, honey,” her dad said. “Maybe Moti could walk with us to the pho place and we could order takeout? Could we bring you something, Mrs. B?”

  “I need to be alone.” Sutton abandoned her robot and headed for the little rack by the door where Moti’s leash hung. “May I borrow Moti, Mrs. B?”

  “Of course.”

  “Sutton—”

  “We’ll talk later, Dad,” she said, wrestling a very wiggly Moti into her harness. “I need to brainstorm.”

  He’d understand that. Sometimes they’d be in the middle of dinner and he’d leap up and dive for his cello, consumed by a need to work out some little composition in his head. He wouldn’t argue with commitment to one’s work.

  “All right,” he finally said. “If you’re sure you’re okay.”

  Sutton wasn’t okay—yet. But she would be.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Luis

  Luis was never going to touch a guinea pig again.

  Or any animal with the peanut munchies. It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth the stress he’d caused Mrs. Lawson. Sawyer probably wouldn’t ever want him to come over again. It wasn’t worth the headache from the medicine they’d given him in the ER. It wasn’t worth the look on his mom’s face when she burst into the emergency room, half expecting him to be dead. And it definitely wasn’t worth the massive bill that would come from the hospital in a few weeks.

  To be on the safe side, he should probably never leave the house again.

  “Let me get into some pj’s,” his mom said as they walked in the front door. “And then we’ll snuggle up and read, okay? We left off on such an exciting part!”

  “I don’t feel like reading.” Luis went straight to his bedroom and collapsed onto his bed.

  “Sweetheart?” His mom hovered above him. “What’s wrong?” She held a cool hand to his forehead. Luis not wanting to read was an even more alarming symptom than when his head swelled up like a puffer fish.

  “I’m just tired,” he said, which wasn’t even a lie. “You can go change.”

  He was tired. Tired of messing things up. Tired of missing out. Tired of reading about adventures he would never have because so many things in the outside world could kill him. Or at least make him super itchy.

  He was still sprawled on his bed, glaring at his ceiling, when his mom came in a few minutes later, wearing her raggedy old UW sweatshirt and the brightly woven pajama bottoms she got on their last trip to Guatemala.

  “I’m making hot cocoa,” she said. “You sure you don’t want to read?”

  “Why?” he grumbled, kicking a stuffed narwhal off his bed. Good thing it wasn’t a real narwhal—he was probably allergic. “So I can read about all the things I can’t actually do?”

  “Oh, Luis.” His mom picked the narwhal up off the floor and stroked it like she wanted to stroke him but was afraid he would kick her if she did. “I know this was a disappointment. But there will be more sleepovers, I promise.”

  Luis looked at his mom skeptically. She would let him try another sleepover?

  She gave a sheepish smile. “In a couple of years, maybe. But you do lots of interesting things! I mean, you’re writing a book! How many ten-year-olds are writing a book?!”

  He curled up and faced the wall. “I’m still groggy from the medicine.” Which was also not a lie. But mostly, he didn’t want to talk about this anymore.

  After she tucked him in and left the room, though, Luis couldn’t sleep. For one thing, it wasn’t even dark outside yet. But also, now he couldn’t stop thinking about his book. His mom acted so proud of him, but why? He had scribbled in a notebook. He hadn’t let her read what he’d written so far, so she didn’t even know if it was any good. It probably wasn’t.

  From his bed, he could just reach the notebook on the corner of his desk. He’d spent a long time in the bookstore, picking out the perfect one. Some of them had really cool designs, like rockets or dragons or volcanoes. But he wanted to tell his very own story, and he didn’t want the cover of the notebook to influence what he wrote. So he’d picked one in a soft brown, with little curlicues engraved up and down the edges. It looked like the kind of book you might pick up in an old, dusty library, and there would be no way to tell what kind of story it held until you started reading.

  Luis opened the cover and looked at the first lines he had written almost a year ago: Penelope Bell didn’t look like a hero, with her knobby knees, frizzy hair, and too-thick glasses. And she wasn’t yet. But she would be.

  Luis had been inventing characters with his mom since he was in preschool. First it had been a mouse who lived in the cupboard above the refrigerator, where neither of them could ever reach. (This was, no doubt, heavily influenced by The Mouse and the Motorcycle.)

  Then there’d been a fairy-sprite character called Barnabus Twixley, who they used to blame when something went wrong. Oh, silly Barnabus forgot to pick up his wet towels! Or, That Barnabus! He knows he’s not supposed to put the rice milk container back in the fridge empty!

  But Penelope Bell was the first character who was all Luis’s own. She was the first character who faced real dangers, but went out and did things anyway. Important things. At first he only daydreamed about her, and then he started making little sketches, and finally he’d started writing bits of her story down.

  Like all good fantasy characters, Penelope Bell’s life had been miserable before she’d been invited to the Whitlow School for Extraordinary Children. Her parents were both dead (obviously), her guardian great-aunt treated her like a servant, and her only education came from a dusty set of books in her great-aunt’s attic.

  But then one day, while weeding her great-aunt’s vegetable patch, she’d been stung by a bee. Not just any bee. This bee had been sent by an evil force to make Penelope into a foot soldier in his drone army. Deprived of love, she was supposed to be easy to mold into a heartless force of darkness. What the evil force didn’t realize was Penelope had too much good in her heart for the evil to take root, and instead the sting awakened powers she never knew she’d had.

  And those powers got her a full scholarship to the Whitlow
School, which was filled with misfit kids like her, all sleeping and eating and living together in dorms, away from the guardians who would hold them back if they understood their full potential.

  It felt so great to write, at first. When Luis’s mom wouldn’t let him go to last year’s end-of-school party at Golden Gardens because there were likely to be bees buzzing around the picnic food, Penelope stood up to her great-aunt and gave a stirring monologue on how she wouldn’t be held back any longer. When he had to stare longingly at the rest of the cafeteria while sitting at the allergy table with two kindergartners, a second grader, and a sixth grader who always had earbuds in, Penelope became prefect and captain of the flyster team (a complicated sport involving fireballs, tightrope walking, and trained falcons).

  Penelope could even pet a guinea pig, if she wanted to, though she probably wouldn’t. She was more into birds of prey.

  But now Penelope made Luis mad. Sitting around writing words on a page was not anything like throwing a fireball to win a flyster match. How had writing ever made him feel better?

  It was fine to pretend that a girl like Penelope, with nothing going for her, could somehow out of nowhere be magically anointed by the bee sting that would change her life.

  But all Luis’s bee sting had gotten him was a mom obsessed with keeping him safe from the world.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sutton

  Moti tugged on the leash with a lot more force than seemed reasonable for her size. But Sutton was prepared—she and Moti were regular brainstorming buddies. She looped the strap around her hand as she pushed out of the apartment building and onto the sidewalk. Moti immediately lunged for a passing pit bull.

  “Hello, there,” said a tiny and extremely wrinkly old woman with wispy hair sticking out all over like a mad scientist’s. She was basically the human version of Moti, except a lot slower. While the pit bull, Frank, wasn’t officially a guide dog, Sutton was pretty sure he did most of the seeing for the two of them.

  “Hello, Mrs. Leroy.”

  Frank stood patiently while Moti charged in and around his legs.

  “Hello, Simpson.” Mrs. Leroy called Sutton a different name every time she saw her. It was always a name that was commonly a last name, and Sutton figured that was close enough. Names mattered, of course, but once a person got to be as old as Mrs. Leroy, their brain was probably full of too many names to keep straight.

  “Hey, Sutton!”

  She looked up to see Sabina and Sadiq, the twins who lived on the fifth floor, hurrying from the building to their mom’s waiting minivan. From the looks of their uniforms, they were off to soccer. It was always something sporty with them.

  She waved.

  Mrs. Leroy had been fishing around in her bag and now emerged with an enormous dog treat, which she held out for Moti. But she couldn’t bend over, and Moti couldn’t reach it, no matter how much she jumped. Besides which, the treat was bigger than Moti’s head.

  “I’ll give that to her,” Sutton said. “Thank you, Mrs. Leroy.”

  Frank led Mrs. Leroy away, and Sutton broke a small piece off the end of the treat for Moti.

  She watched Sabina and Sadiq’s minivan pull away from the curb. It was covered in stickers for the various teams the Khan twins played on. Sutton had gone to watch them in a volleyball tournament last month, sitting between their mom and dad, eating popcorn and cheering when they cheered. She liked the twins’ dedication to the sport. She did not like the gymnasium full of shouting people. And the whole time, she hadn’t been able to shake the memory that her mother hadn’t been there at the All-State Science Fair last year.

  If Dad was getting serious with Elizabeth, maybe he would be too busy to go to this year’s science fair. Then she’d have no one.

  Moti dragged Sutton to the crosswalk, and they headed toward the community pea patch across the street from the apartment building. Sutton preferred to tend her plants indoors, but the pea patch was pretty neat for the other apartment dwellers in the area who wanted a little plot of land to call their own.

  Sutton waved at Zadie, the college student who could almost always be found sitting on her bit of earth with a textbook. Right now, though, she was on a gardening break, weeding.

  Moti zoomed along the paths between the plots, and Sutton let her retractable leash unspool all the way. A siren wailed and Moti stopped suddenly, her head whipping around to track the sound. But then it faded out, and she was off again.

  Moti had been born into a litter of puppies. But she hadn’t seen her mom or littermates since Mrs. B brought her home from the shelter five years earlier. Did Moti remember them? If she saw them on the street, would she recognize them as her family?

  Probably not. But a human child who’d been separated from her parents as a baby probably wouldn’t recognize them years later either.

  Sutton hadn’t been a baby when her parents divorced. She’d been five. And she still got to see her mom, at least sometimes. She barely remembered when they all lived together. Their life as it was now was normal. She was used to it. If her dad married someone else, though, who knew what could change? Maybe they’d have to move again. Maybe they wouldn’t want Sutton to live with them.

  There was too much uncertainty in the whole situation. Sutton wanted to be able to write a code with a predictable outcome for how things were supposed to go. At the very least, she should be able to write the code to make a mini-bot go through a maze.

  If she couldn’t do that, she wouldn’t even have a shot at All-State Science Fair. Honestly, she was getting behind if she wanted to be a great kid coder. Sutton’s dad had shown her a magazine article about “top teenage coders,” but there was one kid featured who was eleven. The magazine article only featured boys, though, and Sutton had pinned it to the wall above her bed for motivation. She was going to be featured in an article like that one day. Maybe one day soon.

  It was an ambitious goal. But Sutton was an ambitious girl.

  Moti had reached the end of the retractable leash and was still tugging ferociously.

  “What are you hunting?” Sutton called after her. They often strolled through the pea patch in the evening, especially now during the Seattle summer, when it stayed light until nearly ten o’clock. They’d say hello to the regulars who tended their little bits of green in the middle of the city, and sometimes they’d sit on a bench near the drinking fountain to bark at squirrels. (Moti, not Sutton.)

  But this time Moti was on a mission. The little furball was so motivated, in fact, that she tugged hard enough to pop the leash out of Sutton’s hand, and it went clattering down the path as Moti ran, unrestrained.

  “Moti!” Sutton ran too. They were safe in the community garden, but it wasn’t all that big. If Moti reached the busy downtown street and kept running, something terrible could happen! There wouldn’t be enough golden milk in the world to fix that.

  Sutton reached the sidewalk on the other side of the garden. A city bus zoomed past, and she stumbled back a few steps. A dog barked, but it was howlier than Moti’s bark, and Sutton couldn’t see where the howl-bark had come from, anyway. Where was that little rascal?

  “Over here, Sutton!”

  She whipped around toward the pea patch and saw Mr. Wong waving his cane at her.

  “Moti’s here with me!”

  Sutton took a second to breathe, hunching over and wrangling her heart back to its normal rate. It still pounded even though Moti was all right. That was biology—her brain had sent the signal to the body that there was danger! Fight or flight! Even the sight of Moti safe and sound was not enough to turn off her body’s warning system so easily.

  But Sutton could admire the way the human body worked another time. She hurried over to Mr. Wong’s carefully tended plot of vegetables. He chuckled and pointed with his cane to the far corner, where Moti lay curled up with Mr. Wong’s cat, Freckles, nuzzling him like they hadn’t seen each other in years.

  Mr. Wong lived next door to Mrs. Banerjee. At first, M
rs. Banerjee and Mr. Wong had tried to keep their animals apart. Cats and dogs, after all. They feared a flufftastrophe. But Moti and Freckles were undaunted. Freckles would hop from his balcony over to Mrs. Banerjee’s and slip in whenever she opened the sliding door to water her plants. Or Moti would bolt out Mrs. Banerjee’s front door and run down the hall to claw at Mr. Wong’s door as Freckles yowled from inside.

  Finally their owners gave in, and the two animals were instant soul mates.

  Moti begged for walks whenever Mr. Wong and Freckles were out working in their garden. Maybe she had an uncanny sense that her feline friend had left the building. Or maybe she simply heard Mr. Wong’s cane tapping down the hallway and made a good guess where they were heading.

  If Mr. Wong ever moved to another building, Sutton would miss him a lot. For one thing, Mr. Wong always gave her money in a red envelope on Chinese New Year. And he never pestered her with questions when she came and sat near his pea patch plot with her tablet. Her dad would miss him too—Mr. Wong watched baseball with him and brought them fresh dumplings whenever he made a batch. But Moti would be the saddest of all if Freckles ever moved.

  Or maybe not. Maybe Moti wouldn’t sit around being sad. Maybe Moti would use her animal instincts to find her best friend, no matter where he had gone, like she had found Freckles and Mr. Wong in the pea patch when Sutton hadn’t even noticed they were there.

  Penguins had the same instincts, traveling up to seventy-five miles to their breeding ground, through a white, barren land covered in snow. And then returning on the same route back to the sea. It had to be a rude surprise to realize those routes that had always worked before didn’t work anymore. But the penguins were adapting, trying to find new breeding grounds, and going against the instincts they’d always followed.

  If the penguins could chart a new course, then surely Sutton could get her bot through a maze. Right now she needed to know something was going to turn out the way she expected it to.