Dead Air by Michelle Schusterman (best books under 200 pages txt) 📕

“What about that jar?”

Dad turned to me, and I swallowed hard.

“A jar of sand is pretty heavy,” the check-in lady added, her face suddenly uncertain as she glanced from Dad to me.

Dad lifted the jar out of my backpack. The three of us had been bringing it to the lake every summer since I could remember, adding a little more sand every time. It had been Mom’s idea. I was in charge of packing it for every vacation—I hadn’t thought twice about bringing the jar. Dad cleared his throat. “What do you think, Kat?”

“It’s just sand,” I said with a shrug. “Leave it.”

Dad nodded slowly. “Okay. If you’re sure.”

“Perfect!” the check-in lady chirped, and I saw that the weight had dropped to 49.6. “Now you’re ready to fly.”

She set the jar under her console as we picked up our stuff, and I wondered what she’d do with it. Throw it away, I figured. She probably thought we were weirdos, trying to bring a jar of dirt to Europe.

Once we’d made it through the crazy-long security line and the crazier-long Starbucks line, Dad and I flopped gratefully into a pair of black plastic chairs. I devoured two day-old blueberry muffins in about a minute. Dad burned his tongue chugging his latte and said it was worth it.

“This hair’s freaking me out,” he said, making little circles in the air as he pointed at my head. “I could’ve taken you to a barber, you know.”

I was trying to pick the blueberries out of my teeth. “It was a last-minute decision.”

“Mmm.” Dad stirred his coffee, eyeing me. “You didn’t leave all that hair in your room, did you? It’ll scare the new tenants.”

“Grandma took it,” I told him. “She said she’d donate it to some organization that makes wigs for cancer patients.”

Dad smiled. “That’s nice, Kat.”

“Hey, want to see something cool?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“I need your laptop.”

After a few minutes of trying to get his clunky old laptop to connect to the airport’s Wi-Fi, I opened the browser, typed in a URL, then turned the screen to face Dad. His eyebrows shot up.

“The Kat Sinclair Files?”

“It’s a blog!” I said. “It was Grandma’s idea. This way I can post stories about the haunted places we visit for her and Trish and Mark and . . . anyone else. Plus pictures and stuff like that, too.”

Dad laughed. “Very Nancy Drew.”

“And Hardy Boys,” I agreed, thinking sadly of all the boxes of books I’d left in storage.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll begin boarding flight 221 to New York in just a few minutes.”

A rush of nervous excitement flooded through me. Now that we were actually at the airport, this whole thing felt more real. When Mom took off last spring, I was convinced she’d come back. After all, she’d done this twice before—once when I was five, and again a few years later. Both times, she returned in less than two weeks, full of apologies and new promises.

Not this time, though. Two weeks passed, then three. A month later, she was still in Cincinnati.

That’s when things got weird. By the time school let out, I’d realized Mom probably wasn’t coming back. But I was still in a constant state of anticipation, waiting for something I knew logically wasn’t going to happen. And Dad started acting . . . restless. Like he needed a distraction, but nothing worked—not our traditional summer-slasher movie marathons, not a nighttime visit to Chelsea’s one and only supposedly haunted house, not even a visit to the paranormal museum on the other side of town. When I started school in August, Dad decided he was bored at Rise and Shine, Ohio! and started looking for anchor jobs at other networks, in other cities. After a few weeks, he posted something about job-hunting on his college’s alumni Facebook page, and Jess Capote left a comment:

P2P needs a new host! Want to chase ghosts with me? ;)

I still wasn’t sure if Jess had been kidding around. For all I knew, she was just as shocked as I was when Dad replied: Yes!

“An adventure, Kat!” he’d said in a hyperenthusiastic sort of way, already looking up plane-ticket prices. “Traveling all over the world . . . It’ll be an experience, visiting all these new places. Haunted places,” he added, beaming. “That’s where the best stories are, right? The haunted places.”

He went on and on like that. But I understood what he really meant. Yesterday at the going-away party my art teacher had given me, everyone kept asking about all the places I was going. And all I could think about was that I was finally leaving.

I mean, I loved my house, school was easy enough. And I’d definitely miss Trish and Mark, and Grandma, of course. But I still wanted to go. It felt like an escape. I knew Dad must feel the same way.

And secretly, I was hoping maybe the Thing would stay in Chelsea.

“If the plane has Wi-Fi, I might work on my blog,” I told Dad when the other passengers started boarding. “I bet I can find a cooler layout.”

“Sure.” Dad took a final swig of his coffee and tossed the paper cup into the trash can next to his chair. “I’m sleeping the whole flight. And the one after that.” He groaned, stretching his arms over his head. “And the one after that. Two layovers, bleargh.”

I bounced up and down, watching the line of first-class people form at the gate. “I don’t know how you can even think about sleeping,” I told him. But ten minutes after the seat-belt light went off, I was crashed out, facedown on the laptop before the drink cart even rolled by.

CHAPTER THREE

THE BOY WITH NO EYES

Post: Travel Is a Beating

Seriously, all I want is a shower and a bed.

That was my first blog post. No pictures, nothing else. I wrote it in Munich during our second layover. I didn’t think anyone needed to hear the details of the almost eighteen hours of boarding and unboarding I’d endured—squinting at airport maps, dragging