“My sister’s all, hey, I need my driver’s license,” Archie said as Pamela glided down the Garrett street. “But, like, who needs one of those with cars like these?”
“Yeah,” said Rory. “Although this would probably get boring after a while because there’s nothing to do. So, Nick, can you make the car do anything interesting? Like, can you make it do donuts?”
Nick, still hanging over the back of the front seat, shook his head sadly. “I tried. I say, Pamela, let’s do some fishtails and she goes, no. I say, hey, Pamela, let’s do a bunch of donuts, she says no. I say, Pamela, let’s see what you can do. Can you hit a hundred? And Pamela says no.”
“I guess no means no with Pamela,” Rory lamented.
Nick nodded.
“So where’s the fun, then?” Archie asked.
“Seriously?” Nick said. “We’re out. In a car. On our own. If this were a real car, we wouldn’t be allowed to drive it for another four years. But with Pamela, we just tell her where we want to go and she’ll take us there.”
A slow grin spread across Archie’s face. “Will Pamela respond to anything I ask her?”
Nick shook his head. “No, just me. But if you’ve got something good, whisper it to me.”
Archie leaned forward, cupped his hand around Nick’s ear. Nick grinned. “Oh, I like that.” He cleared his throat. “Pamela,” he said crisply.
“Yes,” said Pamela in a voice that sounded exactly the same as Gracie’s.
“Please take us to Uranus.”
“Could you please repeat your destination?”
“Uranus. Let me say it more slowly for you. Your... anus.”
In the back seat, Archie and Rory were working so hard to stifle their laughter that they appeared to be having seizures.
“Do you mean Uranus Drive in Louisville, Kentucky? Or do you mean Uranus Drive in Cocoa, Florida?”
“I think I’m dying,” Archie said.
“No, just Uranus,” Nick said.
Rory said, “I’ve got another one.” He leaned forward to whisper it to Nick.
“Butt, Montana?”
Archie cackled. “You moron. It’s not Butt, Montana. It’s Butte, Montana, rhymes with cute.”
“Oh,” Rory said, his face flushing. “Are you sure?”
Archie rolled his eyes. “I think this explains your D in Geography.”
Nick quipped, “There is no D in Geography. I guess that’s why you suck at spelling.”
“I got one,” Archie said. “Let’s go to Intercourse.”
Rory blinked. “You’re kidding me. There’s no such place.”
Archie nodded. “You bet your ass there is. In Pennsylvania.”
“No way.”
Archie said to Nick, “Go ahead. Ask Pamela for some Intercourse.”
That got all three of them convulsing again. But Nick managed to calm down long enough to say, “Pamela, can you plot a course to Intercourse, Pennsylvania?”
“Calculating,” Pamela said.
“She’s probably building in time for a stop to pick up condoms,” Rory said.
“Depending on route selection,” Pamela said, “Intercourse, Pennsylvania, is between four hundred and nine miles, and four hundred and thirty miles, and will take between eight hours and nine minutes, and eight hours and thirty-eight minutes. But according to my calculations, a stop at a recharging station will need to be accommodated. Would you like me to choose a route where charging stations are located?”
“Uh, you know what, Pamela?” Nick said. “I’ve changed my mind. No Intercourse today.”
Archie was holding his stomach with both hands. Rory had tears running down his face. They were laughing so hard it took a moment before they realized a phone was ringing. Rory wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve and said to Archie, “That’s you, man.”
Archie composed himself as he dug into his pocket for his cell phone. When he saw who was calling, he cringed.
“My sister,” he said.
“Oooh, I like her,” Nick said. Archie glanced up from his phone long enough to shoot him a look. “I’m just stating a fact,” Nick said defensively.
The phone had rung six times. Archie had his finger poised over the button to accept the call while he had an inner debate about whether to take it.
After Archie’d taken off with his friends, Katie had stormed back into the house wondering what to do. She went into the kitchen and looked at the cell phone in her hand.
Should she call her mother? Rat out the little creep? God, Archie could be such an immense pain in the ass.
He didn’t use to be this bad. Before he turned twelve, he did what his mother told him, didn’t talk back to his sister. Well, not that much.
Then everything changed.
Back before it happened, it was rare that Archie got in trouble at school or on the home front. And when he did, it wasn’t usually anything particularly serious. There was that broken second-floor window when he crashed a friend’s drone through it. (It was his own bedroom; had it been Katie’s, she’d have accused him of trying to spy on her.) And there was the time he got tar on a brand-new pair of jeans and, even though he had never run the washing machine himself, tried to clean them himself rather than let his mother find out. That turned into a 1950s sitcom episode, what with Archie overloading the machine with a dozen soap pods and nearly filling the laundry room from floor to ceiling with suds.
When their dad got home, he couldn’t stop laughing.
It was a happier time, what with Dad being alive and all. It was funny, how you never know you’re in the good times until the shitty times kick in.
So why, Katie wondered, had Archie turned into an asshole when she had not? (She believed she was being pretty objective here in concluding that she was as wonderful now as she’d ever been.) Maybe, she wondered, losing a father was even harder on a boy. But that seemed pretty sexist. Didn’t she miss him as much as he did? Of course she did, but she had to concede that interests in the household tended to run along gender lines. Archie loved all things mechanical and could spend hours in the shop with his father. The two of them would often spend a Sunday afternoon there and return home grease-stained and smelling of oil. He was only twelve, but he could diagnosis any kind of problem in their gas-powered Lawn-Boy. It drove Katie nuts, when it was her time to cut the lawn and the machine conked out, that she had to get her little brother to get it going again.
Once, a few months after their dad had died, and his repair shop had been sold off, Archie disappeared. Sandra had been seconds away from calling the police when Katie suggested they check the shop, which, while sold, was still sitting empty while the new owners readied their plans to renovate it. Sure enough, it was where they found him. He’d busted a window, crawled in, and fallen asleep sitting at his father’s oil-stained desk, his head on the table.
Katie’s interests had always been more in line with her mother’s. Media issues, real estate. While Archie and Adam were in the garage, tearing apart an Evinrude outboard motor to see what made it tick, there was a good chance Katie and Sandra were going from one open house to another. Katie, at one point, had even floated the idea of taking some architectural courses in Boston.
But right now, what was most on Katie’s mind was getting her brother back home before he got himself into some kind of trouble with his dimwitted pals. Her first instinct was to call her mother, but she’d made it pretty clear before she left that this was a very big day for her. The last thing she wanted to hear was that Archie was up to no good.