Where We Used to Roam Jenn Bishop (red white royal blue TXT) 📖

worrying, they’re crazy. In some ways, the distance only makes it worse.

The door to Sadie’s room is closed now, but I can hear her talking. Probably complaining to her friends about how her mom’s dragging her on a camping trip. She’s got music playing in the background, but every so often her voice cuts through the sound.

I close the door behind me and sit at the edge of my bed. I check my phone, as if somehow I’ve missed one of the many, many text messages coming from back home. I wish. What I wouldn’t give for a text message from Becca right now. Even an angry one.

No, Emma. Stop. Stop right now.

My eyes smart, but I stop myself short of giving in to a pity party.

The strange thing is, even though I hear Sadie’s voice coming from across the hall, somehow I can still imagine the knock on my door and my brother letting himself in, his hair damp from the shower. How I’d end up elbowing him as he made fun of me for something stupid.

Austin just talking to me. The way he used to. I want to hear it: his voice, his stories. The funny ones, the complainy ones, even the random ones that don’t really have a point.

What if that never happens again? No, really. I read all those stories online. About people whose moms or dads or brothers or sisters can’t ever get it together and float in and out of their lives. About how things seem like they’re okay for a while, and then—blam—they’re not.

Addicted to a cell phone?

As if it’s at all the same.

The inside of my cheek is firmly latched between my teeth.

No, no, no.

That can’t be Austin. It can’t. It won’t. I suck in a deep breath. And another. And another.

No, this rehab thing is going to work. Mom and Dad, they said it was the best one. They said how fortunate it was for Austin that a spot opened up just when he needed it. And they caught this early, right?

Thirty days off drugs is going to fix him. Help him go back to the person he was before. Like a reset. A rewind. All the way back to last fall, before any of this happened.

Maybe Austin can’t technically do his junior year over. Not at school, at least. But he can start over. He can go back.

God, he’s got to.

I reach for my backpack, pull out my sketchbook, and begin making lists about Austin, how he used to be. How he can be again.

And the objects that define him: the buffalo stuffed animal, his favorite UCLA T-shirt, that beat-up paperback of Slaughterhouse-Five he tore through last summer on the Cape and declared to be the best book he’d ever read.

And by the time I’m done, I feel better. Almost like I put all my worries about Austin in a box and shut the lid.

I put the sketchbook and buffalo book into my backpack and head upstairs to see what Delia’s up to and how I can help get ready for the camping trip.

When I ask Delia where the Bighorns are, she says they’re in the next town up the road. The next town. Close by, right?

Not in Wyoming. Turns out if you head north from here, the next town, Buffalo, is two hours away.

Two. Hours.

You drive that far in one direction in Massachusetts and, well, you probably won’t be in Massachusetts anymore.

By the time we reach Buffalo, at the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, Sadie has to pee. Delia’s favorite pottery store is having a sale so she wants to pop in and take a look, which is how I find myself in the general store, flipping through the postcard display by the register. Nearly all of them have bison on them, which I guess makes sense—that’s got to be where the town gets its name, right?

A buffalo with mist rising around him some cool morning. A buffalo backlit by the sunset. A whole herd of them. The store is having a sale: buy four, get a fifth for free, so I do. I figure I can send one to Mom and Dad, one to Austin, and the other three I can save for a shadow box.

Or to send to Becca.

I push that thought to the back of my mind. Send a postcard apologizing to Becca? For real, Emma? One: her parents might read it. Or worse: Bubbe. Or actually, the absolute worst: Becca just dumps it right in a trash can without reading it at all.

No, they’re better off being used for a shadow box. I hand the postcards to the clerk and pay. By the time I get outside, Delia’s already back at the car with a bag from the pottery shop. Sadie’s leaning against the hood, squinting in the sun. “What’d you get?” she asks before sitting up front.

I slide into the back seat. “Just some postcards,” I say, fanning them out.

“You really got a thing for bison, huh?”

I shrug, wondering if Delia remembers getting the bison stuffed animal for Austin when he was a baby. Does she know how much he likes them? That bison became his favorite animal? That maybe they still are?

“You know,” Sadie says, “I heard that the other week these Swedish tourists at Yellowstone took a picture right next to some bison that stopped by the side of the road. Like they’re not huge wild animals that could totally gore you to death. They’re lucky they just ended up on the news and not dead. All I’m saying is, I know they’re your favorite animal, but don’t try to pet them. They’re not exactly huge stuffed animals.”

No kidding, Sadie. “Wait—that really happened?” I ask.

“Sadly more often than you’d think,” Delia says. She pulls back onto the road. Bye-bye, Buffalo; hello, mountains. “Actually, that reminds me. Would you girls want to take a trip out there later this summer?”

“To Yellowstone?” Sadie asks.

“Yeah,” Delia says. “It’s been a few years since we’ve