Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus Read online

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  © 2017 Dusti Bowling

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  ISBN 978-1-4549-2346-6

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  Title page art: iStockphoto: © aklionka (plants); © wissanu99 (cacti)

  FOR BRONTE

  YOU CAN DO ANYTHING

  When I was little, a kid pointed at me on the playground and shouted, “Her arms fell off!” then ran away screaming in terror to his mom, who had to cuddle him on her lap and rub his head for like ten minutes to get him to calm down. I think, up until then, I hadn’t thought about the idea that my arms must have actually fallen off at some point in my life. I had never really thought about not having arms at all.

  My missing arms weren’t an issue for me or my parents. I never once heard either of them say, “Oh, no, Aven can’t possibly do that because that’s only for armed people,” or “Poor Aven is so helpless without arms,” or “Maybe Aven can do that one day, you know, if she ever grows some arms.” They always said things like, “You’ll have to do this differently from other people, but you can manage,” and “I know this is challenging. Keep trying,” and “You’re capable of anything, Aven.”

  I had never realized just how different I was until the day that horrible kid shouted about my arms having fallen off. For the first time I found myself aware of my total armlessness, and I guess I felt like I was sort of naked all of a sudden. So I, too, ran to my mom, and she scooped me up and carried me away from the park, allowing my tears and snot to soak her shirt.

  As she drove us home that day, I sat whimpering in my car seat and asked her what had happened to my arms and why they’d fallen off. She told me they hadn’t fallen off; I was just born like that. I asked her how I could get some new ones. She said I couldn’t. I wailed in despair, and she told me to stop crying because having arms was totally overrated. I didn’t know what overrated meant at the time because, like I said, I was really little and so was my brain. I kind of figured it out over the next few days, though, because my parents were constantly saying things like, “Coloring this picture with my hands is okay, but if only I could color it with my feet like Aven. Now that would be fantastic,” and “Eating spaghetti with my arms is just so boring. I wish I could eat it with my feet,” and “The only person I know who can pick their nose with their toes is Aven. She sure is a special little girl.” Dad even went so far as to ask Mom if there were any arm-removal services in the area.

  Growing up, I could do most everything everyone else with arms could do: eating cereal, brushing my teeth and hair, getting dressed, and yes, even wiping my own bottom. I know you’re instantly wondering how I do it, and maybe I’ll tell you later . . . maybe. Until then, you’ll just have to live in suspense.

  Sure, these things take longer for me. Sometimes they take a lot longer. Sometimes I have to use a special tool like a hook or a strap or something like that. And every now and then I want to scream in frustration and kick a pillow until the stuffing comes out because it’s taken me twenty minutes to get my pants buttoned. But I can button my pants.

  I think I can do all these things because my parents have always encouraged me to figure things out on my own—well, more like made me figure things out on my own. I suppose if they had always done everything for me, I would be helpless without them. But they didn’t, and I’m not. And now that I’m thirteen years old, I don’t need much help with anything. True story.

  When I started kindergarten, the kids were a little weirded out by my lack of armage. I got asked just about every day what had happened to my arms, as well as a billion other silly questions—like how do I make farting noises with my armpits when I don’t have arms or hands . . . or pits. And how do I play dress-up—which I tried showing them and ended up with a poofy pink tutu thing stuck around my head for about five minutes before the teacher finally noticed and helped me pull it down to my waist.

  I got so tired of telling them the same boring story about being born without arms that I started making stuff up. It was stinking hilarious. I knew from the first moment I told a girl my arms had burned off in a fire, I had found a great hobby: making up stories. I loved the way her eyes grew wide with shock and the way her voice went all high-pitched with excitement as she asked me a bunch more questions about my charred arms.

  Her: “What kind of fire accident?”

  Me: “A wild forest fire burning out of control!”

  Her: “Where?”

  Me: “In the mountains of Tanzania.” (I honestly didn’t know where Tanzania was or if it had any mountains. I think I had heard the name in an episode of Scooby-Doo or something.)

  Her: “How old were you?”

  Me: “Just a helpless baby. My mom barely rescued me in time. She pulled me from my burning crib and raced out of our flaming village, leaving a trail of fire all the way down the mountain as my arms burned to a crisp! They looked like two pieces of bacon by the time we got to the village hospital!”

  Another kid standing nearby: “Cooked or uncooked?”

  So I kind of traumatized her and had to have a meeting with my parents and the teacher later about my story. My parents squinted their eyes and pursed their lips and nodded their heads as the teacher told them, “Um, Aven told another child that her arms burned off in a wildfire in the mountains of Tanzania.” She peered at them over her glasses, frowning. “She also mentioned something about bacon.”

  I had never seen such serious looks on my parents’ faces before, like they were concentrating so hard on being serious, their heads might explode if they blinked. They said seriously they would talk to me about it and shook the teacher’s hand seriously and gave me serious looks as we walked seriously out of school. But I could tell they weren’t mad because all the way home one of them would softly snort and then the other would giggle and then the other would shake from laughing but trying not to laugh out loud and on and on like that all the way home.

  They later told me just to be truthful so I didn’t upset any other kids. And I did for a long time. But then one day in fifth grade, we had a new kid come to our school. (I had gone to the same school since kindergarten, so all my friends knew I was just born with no arms.) When I sat down at lunch with this kid, he said, “Whoa! What happened to your arms?”

  All my friends were looking at me, and what can I say? It exploded out of me like an overfilled water balloon. I told him this crazy story about how I had rescued a puppy that had been tied to the train tracks just in time before a train nearly ran over it—just in time for the puppy . . . but not for my poor, flattened arms.

  You should have seen the look on this kid’s face—priceless. My best friend, Emily, burst out laughing and my friend Kayla spit chocolate milk across the table. The new kid realized it was a joke and started laughing, too.

  Pretty soon everyone was constantly asking me, “Hey, Aven! Where’d your arms go?” And I would have a new story to tell. Over time my stories got more and more ridiculous: alligator wrestling in the Everglades in
Florida, freak roller coaster accidents, skydiving trips gone wrong. I made my stories as ridiculous as possible so people would always know I was joking.

  I grew up with those kids. I never felt out of place or anything like that. My armlessness wasn’t strange or weird to them because, like I said, I had always gone to the same school.

  I never imagined my parents would make me leave. I never thought they would make me move all the way to Arizona and go to a new school right after starting eighth grade.

  Then again, I never imagined I would save the Old West, perform for an audience in the desert, and solve a mystery. You’d be surprised at all I’m capable of, though. Even without arms.

  The day Dad told me he wanted to apply for a job as a theme park manager in Arizona, I thought it was quite possible aliens had taken over his brain—either aliens or the government. I knew from my great-grandma the government was capable of dreadful things. She was always saying stuff like, “If the public only knew what the government was up to, there would be a revolution!” and pumping her spotted, wrinkled fist in the air. I wasn’t completely sure why an eighty-six-year-old woman who lived in a trailer in Kansas was the only person privy to this top-secret information, but she clearly was. So I wouldn’t put it past the government to insert some kind of mind-control chip into Dad’s brain and force him to run a crumbling theme park in the desert.

  My parents discussed it with me one night over a dinner of buttered noodles, my favorite meal. Oh, man—I just realized they deliberately buttered me up with buttered noodles.

  “So I got an email from a guy by the name of Joe Cavanaugh,” Dad said over his noodles. “He owns a place called Stagecoach Pass.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, slurping up a noodle.

  “It’s this western-themed amusement park in Arizona. I guess he found my résumé on one of the job sites where I posted it. Anyway, he invited me to apply for the position of general manager at the park.”

  “He must have been impressed with your résumé, Mister-Big-Time-Restaurant-Manager,” said Mom.

  “Well,” said Dad, “I’m not really sure how managing a restaurant relates to managing an entire theme park, but I guess a huge part of their business is this steakhouse there, so that’s probably why he contacted me.”

  “Are you going to apply?” I asked.

  “It does sound interesting,” said Dad.

  I scowled. “Arizona is really far away.”

  “Don’t forget you were born there, Sheebs,” Dad said. “We spent a lot of time there during your adoption, and we really liked it. We even thought it might be a great place to retire one day. The winter was so beautiful—warm and sunny. I’m sick of icy winters.”

  “What’s the summer like?” I asked.

  Mom grimaced. “I’ve heard it’s kind of like the surface of the sun.”

  “It could be an exciting adventure.” Dad waggled his eyebrows at me. “Swimming and soccer all year long.”

  I glared at my noodles. “I don’t think I want to play soccer on the surface of the sun.”

  “Come on,” said Dad. “You’re such a pro, you could play soccer anywhere.”

  “Stop trying to entice me,” I said. “You haven’t even applied yet.”

  “Well, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to.”

  On the one hand, the thought of leaving Kansas, and the only home I could ever remember, sounded worse than anything. On the other, Dad had lost his job nearly six months earlier, when the restaurant he’d been managing went out of business. He really needed this.

  “It’s okay with me,” I mumbled, feeling like I might cry.

  Dad applied. And then he and Mom were invited to go to Arizona for an interview and to check the place out. And then they were invited to stay and run the theme park together. Turns out it was more of a two-person job.

  And so we sold off a ton of our furniture and donated the junk we didn’t need and packed the rest of our belongings into a giant pod that would magically disappear from Kansas and magically reappear in Arizona a week later. We drove our old car over a thousand miles westward across the country, praying the entire time we wouldn’t break down.

  We managed to make it in one single long day without stopping at a hotel until we got to Phoenix. By the time we arrived, Dad’s eyes looked like Atomic Fireballs and Mom’s hair looked like she’d taken a spin in a hairspray cyclone.

  Early the next morning, we drove by the giant covered wagon with STAGECOACH PASS printed on it in large brown block letters, and I saw the park for the first time.

  Then I knew for sure the government and mind-control chips were involved.

  We parked in the large dirt parking lot and got out of the car. I squinted from the bright, hot sun. Had the sun been this bright in Kansas? I didn’t think so.

  I looked around. I’d never seen so much brown before—not a patch of grass anywhere. Did grass even exist in Arizona? Again, I didn’t think so.

  We walked over the compacted dirt toward the entrance, which wasn’t closed up, even though the park wasn’t open yet—I guess they weren’t too worried about people sneaking in. A lizard skittered across the dirt in front of me, and I jumped back.

  The dirt. Never. Ended. There were no sidewalks or grass or paved anything at Stagecoach Pass—just dirt and old wooden buildings with old wooden steps and old wooden porches that looked like they might collapse at any time.

  “Good morning!” a cheerful, gray-mustached man greeted us from one of these porches. He wore a cowboy hat and held a mug of something steamy. Coffee? In this heat?

  “Good morning,” Mom and Dad said at the same time.

  “Nice to see you again, Gary,” said Mom. I looked at her. “He’s the one who interviewed us,” she whispered to me. “He’s the accountant for the park.”

  Gary walked down the steps. “And this must be Aven.”

  “Our one and only,” Dad said, squeezing his arm around me.

  I gave Gary a polite smile. He seemed nice enough, even though his gray mustache was awfully pointy.

  “Well,” Gary said, tossing his coffee on the dirt, where it dried in about two seconds, “I bet you’re tired after your long trip. I’ll take you up to the apartment.”

  As we trudged toward our new living quarters, which were apparently located right over the steakhouse, Dad asked, “So when do we get to meet Joe Cavanaugh?”

  “Oh, no one ever meets Joe,” said Gary. “Not around here much.”

  “That’s strange,” said Mom. “A business owner who doesn’t visit his own business?”

  Gary smiled and tilted his hat at her. “That’s why Joe needs good managers, ma’am.”

  Mom and Dad had described the apartment as a cozy but humble little place. They weren’t kidding about the cozy. Or the humble. Or the little.

  Gary and a few other men from the park (all dressed like cowboys), carried our stuff up from the car. After Mom and I finished putting away my suitcase of bare necessities, she said to me, “Why don’t you go out and explore, honey?”

  “What’s there to explore?”

  “Tons of stuff,” she said. “There’s a gold mine, and a gift shop, and a museum, and a soda shop. You could get yourself an ice cream.” She looked at her watch. “It won’t be open for a half hour, though.”

  So I went out and explored. For about five minutes. The heat got more and more intense with every second until I was forced into the air-conditioned museum.

  The museum was actually more like a room—just one room with picture-covered walls and a few “artifacts” in glass cases. These artifacts included a collection of stone arrowheads, some broken Navajo pottery pieces, a pistol from the 1800s, a pair of old spurs, and a genuine dead tarantula with an information board that shared facts like, tarantulas have no teeth, so they use their venom to liquefy their prey and suck up the liquid nastiness directly into their stomachs. How awesome is that?

  I scanned the framed photographs on the walls, the old wooden floor
boards creaking under my feet. Most of the pictures were black and white, taken a long time ago when Stagecoach Pass first opened. It looked like it was quite the place back then—crowds and rodeos and even parades on Main Street. Then I came to an empty space on the wall, where it seemed a picture had been removed. The nameplate beneath the empty space had been left up and said The Cavanaughs, Stagecoach Pass, 2004.

  I looked around at the rest of the photos and each of their nameplates, but I couldn’t find any more of the Cavanaughs. I thought about what Gary had said: No one ever meets Joe. And I wondered why.

  “There you are,” Dad said from behind me. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  I turned around. “Just getting some cool air.”

  “Don’t worry.” Dad wiped the sweat from his forehead. “It will cool down soon. Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “The rodeo arena is all closed down, so I thought we could set up a soccer goal out there and practice.”

  “That sounds great.”

  “You want to go kick the ball around now?”

  “Isn’t it too hot?”

  “Never. Plus, we can keep cool with ice cream.”

  “What if I get a sunburn?”

  “They have sunblock in the gift shop.”

  I smiled. “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”

  Dad put an arm around me and led me into the gift shop. “Of course. Didn’t you know that dads know everything?”

  I snorted as he picked out a small tube of sunblock from a rack. “I’d like to be there when you tell Mom that.”

  Even though the new school year had already started, my parents gave me a couple of days to settle in before sending me off to be tortured.

  Desert Ridge Middle School was only a few miles from Stagecoach Pass, and Mom drove me my first day. I sat in my seat, staring straight ahead, my heart pounding. When we turned into the parking lot of my new giant school, I thought my heart might just pound right out of my chest. My school back in Kansas only had about three hundred students. Desert Ridge was more than three times that size—a thousand kids who had never seen me before.