A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Chapters 1–7

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.

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.

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.

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.

He knew how to handle an allergen exposure.

But stupid school policies are stupid school policies.

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.

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.

“Ma’am,” said an orderly pushing an empty wheelchair back toward the hospital.

Mrs. Lawson struggled with her conscience for a moment, but then an approaching siren wailed.

“Bring him on through to triage.”

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.

Dad jumped inside and slammed the door as Moti hurtled toward him, throwing herself at his legs.

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.

She gave a sheepish smile.

“I’m still groggy from the medicine.”

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.

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.

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).

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.

“Hello, there,” said a tiny and extremely wrinkly old woman with wispy hair sticking out all over like a mad scientist’s.

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.

Moti zoomed along the paths between the plots, and Sutton let her retractable leash unspool all the way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Penguins had the same instincts, traveling up to seventy-five miles to their breeding ground, through a white, barren land covered in snow.

Then his abuelos were gone, off in a faraway country, and all Luis had to remember them by were the Guatemalan handicrafts all around the house—mementos of the years his mom spent with her husband in his homeland before they settled in Seattle.

Inspiration was striking already, even before he’d gone to the museum.

Yesterday had been a frustrating blip, but it was all going to turn out all right!

“Not prepared to engage,” Sutton muttered, squeezing the buttons on the side of the bot to recalibrate it.

“You know, the Museum of Pop Culture? It’s by the Space Needle. That funky building with the colorful walls?”

Sutton’s life wasn’t perfect as it was, but the variables were manageable. She knew what to expect.

He looked at her skeptically, seeing that for the bald-faced lie it was.

Sutton had always thought Queen Anne homes looked like colorful confections in the window of a fancy pastry shop, all with their own yards and so different from Sutton’s shiny downtown apartment building across from a community garden.

The front yard had that weird no-plant landscaping that was mostly wood chips and whimsical garden sculptures, and the little house was a cheery bright blue, with a tidy front porch and solar panels on top.

“More than forty thousand people go to the emergency room every year due to bites from another human.”
Sutton had learned this while working on a project about the breeds of dog most likely to bite versus the breeds of dogs most likely to do damage when they bite. Since then, she had been extra wary around humans she didn’t know.