“What about it?”
“It says here”—he practically stabs the flyer with his ribbon scissors—“that if you win first prize, they’ll haul you off to Las Vegas for the next round of competition, and then possibly New York City after that. It won’t just be one night then. Your mother would never stand for it, and I’d be a dead man for letting you get into this mess.”
“Who says I’m going to win first prize?”
Jonathan rolls his eyes. “One thing you don’t need to be is modest, Daphne. You and I both know you’ve got first place in the bag.”
“Well, I’ll never know if you don’t let me go.” I give him a teasing smile. “I might stink at singing and nobody in this tiny town knows the difference.” Ellis High School is so small, we don’t even have a real music department.
“Please, Daph. I’m from Manhattan. Don’t tell me I don’t know amazing singing when I hear it.”
“Then let me go and prove it to myself. If I win first, then I’ll bow out and take second place and the prize money.”
Jonathan takes a swig of Diet Mountain Dew from his ginormous Jersey Boys mug. I can tell he’s swishing the soda in his cheeks like he does when he’s contemplating a difficult floral design. He swallows hard. “Sorry, honey. No way, no how. Your mother would kill me if I let you leave Ellis and something bad happened to you out there.”
I wrap my fingers through the strings of the balloon bouquet I’d forgotten I was even holding until now, and bite back the urge to make a frustrated urrrrrrg.
“How were you even planning on getting to SUU in the first place? Don’t tell me you were planning on driving without a license?” Jonathan asks with an accusatory tone.
“No.” I’ve had a driver’s permit for over a year, but state law requires forty hours of driving time behind the wheel with a parent or guardian before I can apply for a license. Since Ellis is only 4.6 square miles and my mom won’t let me take the car out on the highway, it was taking an eternity to rack up the hours needed to get my license. There’s nowhere in Ellis you can’t get to on your bike, she always says, but I know she’s dragging her feet on the issue so she won’t have to fulfill her end of our bargain. And the more I point this out to her, the more excuses she comes up with for not being able to take me driving. At this rate, I won’t have a license until I’m eighteen and can get it without her consent. “There’s this new senior at school who has a boyfriend at SUU. She says I can hitch a ride with her to Cedar City and back. That’s why I need to get off early.”
A very cross-sounding tone comes off Jonathan. Telling him I am hitching a ride with someone I barely know isn’t helping the situation, but I don’t have many options. Most of my school friends haven’t had licenses long enough to be legal to drive with another teen in the car, and CeCe, who claims to be night-blind, wasn’t too keen on the idea of navigating the canyon roads after dark. Not that she’d be excited to drive me out of town in the daytime, either. I swear, it’s like half of the adults I know are just as reluctant to leave Ellis as my mother. Despite being from the big city, even Jonathan rarely leaves town other than his yearly pilgrimage to the designer outlets in Primm, Nevada. It’s, like, once people come here, they never want to go anywhere else. Mom calls Ellis an oasis in the desert and our own private paradise—hence the name of our shop—but at an average temperature of 105 degrees in the summer and the looming walls of red-rock mountains on every side, this town feels more like a stifling prison to me sometimes.
“But what if you took me instead? That way, you know I’d be safe. Maybe I could even get an hour of driving time on the way? We’ll tell Mom we’re going to movie night. She’ll never even know we were gone.” I smile. “I’ll let you give her the prize money. We’ll tell her you won it from a design contest or something.”
Jonathan shakes his head while making a nuh-uh-uh kind of noise, which reminds me of the way Frankie Valli sings. But behind the scolding tone, I catch something else. Just a hint of sympathy. Just a little bit of give, maybe?
That was something I could work with. I say in a singsong voice, “You’d be both of our heroes, Uncle Jonathan.”
A smile starts to edge at Jonathan’s lips as though he likes the idea of being a hero. Then he quickly shakes his head as if trying to get water out of his ear, and the happy look is gone. Along with the tone of sympathy. “Sorry, sister. Not happening.” He picks up his scissors and cuts a ribbon with a snip so abrupt that I know I’ve pushed it too far with that one.
I didn’t want it to come to this, but I know what tactic I need to try now. The truth.