Stealing The Show (Such Sweet Sorrow Trilogy, Book One)

15

I PULL OFF the interstate and into the parking lot of a hotel in some town that looks kind of old but has sort of turned into a suburb. I think I'm near Sacramento somewhere. Probably about two hours from San Fran. 

And all of a sudden, I feel totally drained, dead exhausted. For days I've been guzzling caffeine and not sleeping, and it hasn't mattered until now. I drove all night last night while my friends slept, and all day today the worry about Jubilee was way stronger than any juice Red Bull would've given me. 

But it can't last. I can't even think straight enough to figure out a plan for Paps. I can't even pull out the letters he sent to see if there was an address, or a clue, or something in them.  

Surely a man who can send letters from the dead doesn't just want his ashes just anywhere in the city limits of San Francisco.  

So I do the only thing I can think of. I know they won't rent a high school kid a hotel room, so I drive around back and find a big moving truck that's already parked for the night, and I slip Eeyore in close to it. The great thing about Eeyore is that it's like driving two couches on wheels, so I move my bag to the front seat and lay down in the back seat and even though I can't stretch out, it doesn't matter. I pass out. 

In the dream, Paps and I are swimming, and we can breathe underwater. Mrs. McGee, my third grade math teacher, swims by, and it makes perfect sense in the dream. Then I'm in a play, where my line is, "The gentleman will NOT eat a burrito!" I walk off the stage and we're not underwater anymore, and I find Paps playing basketball--old Paps, in his nineties, and he jumps up and dunks it with two hands, and then we're sitting by a campfire. 

Fire. Something... Fire, ashes. I start to wake up. 

It's like somebody's stabbed icepicks all along my spine, but I manage to sit up. Fire, ashes... I grab Paps in his little cardboard box. I've just got to hold him, as morbid as that seems. It's still just the thick plastic bag in there, but I lift it out. And there's another envelope. 

All it has on it, when I finally manage to get control of my hands, is some address.  

It's still dark when I leave the hotel parking lot. The Count and all the other adults would call it a miracle that nobody caught me and I wasn't murdered in my sleep. By the time I get to San Francisco, the sun is coming up and the fog is kind of burning off the city. 

I use my phone to find the address--I'm sure I'll have to pay my mother back for every byte of data for this--but it isn't too bad. It's kind of scary how easy it is. 

San Francisco has a pretty chill vibe. For all he ever talked about it, Paps never really told me what it was like there--here, actually. I'm in the very place he called home, and something about that makes the city feel magical.  

I don't know how else to think about it, and I know I'm a freak, but that's how it seems. Magic. 

The address in the envelope is just a little house in a quiet neighborhood. All the streets are on these steep hills and the houses are all connected so there's no yards between them or anything. And if it wasn't the address on the paper with my grandfather's handwriting, I don't know that this one would have caught my attention at all. What can I say? It's a skinny blue house on a street that's a steep hill, tucked in between a bunch of other houses just like it.  

But why here? I start to wonder. What is it about this place that Paps sent me to? Whatever it is, he clearly wants me to spread his ashes here. There's a tiny little garden up near the front door, and some steps, and the sidewalk has a little grass beside it, so I figure with all of those I could probably spread them out enough that nobody would notice much.