Tween Hobo Read online

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  For all my brothers and sisters of the road (and especially for my BFFL, E. R.)

  xoxo T. H.

  Ten of us bums up top o’ this boxcar—five on Team Edward, four on Team Jacob, one too hammered on moonshine to say.

  THIS BOOK BELONGS TO:

  Hobo Name:

  Age

  BFFL

  Fave Color

  Fave Animal

  # of Times You’ve Killed a Guy

  # of Times You’ve Frenched a Guy

  Stuff You Can Do with Origami

  Bugs You Hate

  Bugs You’re Cool With

  Do You Collect Dreamcatchers?

  Do You Believe in the American Dream?

  Would You Prefer Squirrel Meat or Vegan Option at My Bat Mitzvah?

  I got hobos (hobos) / in different area codes (area codes)

  Three wavy lines on the side of a Pullman car means two hobos got to third in there.

  Hobo Code

  On the road, hobos communicate through a system of code. They draw these signs and symbols on the sides of boxcars or water tanks or on the ground near the tracks. Or, if you’re a tween hobo, you might draw some on the sidewalk in pink jumbo chalk.

  See? They’re like emoji—but with dirt.

  I’ve pulled off heists, swindles, and emoticons.

  A Letter to My Future Daughter

  Pineapple Chloe Bieber, Age Negative 15½

  My darling Pineapple,

  Wassup, future daughter? If you are reading this, then everything went according to plan, and you just came back from competitive horseback-riding to find me and your father, Justin, making heart shapes with our hands to celebrate another sweetass year of being married. Congratulations and I love you, family is the most important thing to me.

  Now, I want to explain a few things about the book you are holding in your hands. First off, do you know what a book is? It’s this thing made of paper that used to exist, but now is only made of electricity (or something, IDK). In the future, when you are reading this, it’s probs downloading straight into your brain. So maybe you aren’t physically holding it. Regardless, I hope you have a pretty brain, Pineapple Chloe. I hope you have the prettiest brain in your class. And I hope you’re the kind of girl who seems like an outsider, but is actually just a sexy genius who tends to push people away.

  Anywayz: this book. This is my diary. A diary is a very old-fashioned thing, Pineapple. It’s kind of like a blog, but no one can see it. It’s a secret. That is until you get superfamous and you get a book deal to publish the whole thing, which is what happened to me. See, this diary is a bona fide piece of history in the making. This is the little book that I, your future mother, carried with me on my wild journey as a tweenage train-hopper all across the United States of America. Lots of #folks followed my #ramblings on the roads and rails of the USA as I tweeted about them on Twitter. But only now am I granting access to my supersecret diary as well. As my daughter, I hope you will treasure this book, in old-school or digital format, to be cherished and illegally bit-torrented for generations to come.

  In these pages you will learn of my adventures on the road, of the friends I made (and also the frenemies), of the hardships I faced (like getting shingles, or losing my rainbow scrunchie), and of my quest to find the truth about America. Pineapple, the truth about America is not simple. If it was, I prolly woulda just done my Social Studies homework and never hopped the rails in the first place. But now I’ve been from Poughkeepsie to Missoula, from Albuquerque to Ashtabula, and I can tell you this:

  I still believe in the American Dream: work hard and one day you’ll get Frenched by a vampire.

  Love 4-Eva,

  Your Kid-Age Mom from the Past,

  Tween Hobo

  I take life like I take my gummy bears: headfirst.

  January 7

  * * *

  Charlottesville, Virginia

  There comes a time in the life of every nine- to twelve-year-old girl when she has to make a choice. Is she gonna open up and swallow the so-called medicine society wants to spoon-feed her? Or will she raise a fist to that nasty stuff and strike out on her own, in search of her own cures—hell, her own poisons?

  For me, the crucial moment came yesterday. I was in Social Studies.

  My teacher, Mr. Brink, who I happen to know is twenty-eight and on Facebook and in a band and who I happen to have drawn little hearts all around in the yearbook, says it’s time to present our individual projects. We’re heading into month five of a yearlong “integrated interdisciplinary discovery module,” which is about as much fun as it sounds. (My school tries to get creative about everything, but it’s like, I don’t care if you put me in charge of this “bakery,” okay, these cupcakes are made of paper and it’s still math. Count me out.) Anyway this year the discovery module is called “What Makes This Country Great.” So they keep making us like, split into discussion groups and have “constructive debates” about the Trail of Tears. And now we’re supposed to unveil these individual projects. And of course Mr. Brink has to pick me to go first.

  * * *

  Before I go any further, I should tell you a little more about myself. I’m in fifth grade at James Monroe Upper Elementary School in Charlottesville, Virginia. My birthday’s in October so I’m recently eleven, which makes me one of the younger, and, I like to think, cuter, kids in my class. I play left wing in soccer, my favorite flavor is watermelon, and my sticker collection is fearsomely eclectic. My bat mitzvah has already been scheduled for a year and a half from now (I’m only half-Jewish, but I’m splitting the bill with another girl from my Hebrew school who’s also only half, so that makes one full Jew). I love kittens and puppies and all baby animals, even baby robot animals. I’m brave and strong and I’m super-responsible about my retainer.

  And yet I come from a deeply troubled home.

  My parents are, basically, zombies. They work all the time, and when they come home, they stalk around with their arms outstretched, unblinking, droning random phrases like “Homework . . . hooommmewooorrkkk” or “Veeegggeettabblleeezz . . .” They also literally never put down their phones. I could be lying on the kitchen floor writhing in pain from a very painful toe-stub and my mother would still be like, “Wait a sec, hon, I need to take this call.” This modern life has sucked out her soul and left her numb.

  My dad is something called a cultural commentator, which means he blogs a lot and sometimes goes on the news and discusses things like whether racism still exists. My mom is a psychologist, which means she’s very tricky. She has all kinds of theories about raising children, and when she does put her phone down for two seconds to talk to me, I never know whether she’s saying what she really means or if it’s some kind of therapeutic technique.

  Kids today hate Facebook not because our parents can see what we are up to, but because we are forced to see what our parents are up to.

  It used to be that the only person I could stand in my family was my big brother. His name is Evan and he’s five years older and he used to be supernice to me, like he would teach me how to do stuff and show me cool bugs and high-five me. I wasn’t even scared of worms when Evan was around. That’s how magnanimous he was. But all that started to change when Evan turned sixteen and started hanging out with the cool kids in his grade and shaved designs into the sides of his head and became a monster. He stopped letting me in his room. And then he went missing.

 
; Steve and Jody, my zombie parents, will not tell me where he went. All they say is he got caught doing some bad things with some bad people, and now he’s at a “facility” somewhere “out West” with no internet access and a lot of “guidance.” When I press them for more details, such as when the heck he might be coming home, their eyes glaze over, their hands rise up, and they start, like, treadmilling into the refrigerator. It’s terrifying living with zombies. And I don’t know if I’ll ever see my brother again.

  I like to sneak into Evan’s room and look at his stuff when he’s not there. Which, now, is all the time. On the ceiling of his bedroom he wrote, in permanent marker, “Life is pointless.” A few weeks ago, I went into his room and lay down on his bed and just read those three words, over and over. That’s about the time I stopped doing my homework.

  * * *

  But back to Social Studies and What Makes This Country Great. I’m supposed to have a big, superprofessional neon foam board all covered with “research,” like Tessa, whose board is plastered with pictures of lightbulbs because her report is on Thomas Edison which, okay, Tessa, that’s one fact. But when I flip my board around to face the class, it’s blank. Well, aside from one random reddish dot, which I think might be blood and if so is definitely American blood—but aside from that, I got nothing.

  Mr. Brink looks upset, like with his eyes he’s saying, You are not holding up your end of the parent-teacher-student triangle (which is a phrase that gets thrown at me a lot). Instead, with his mouth, he says, “Where is your project? You had all of winter break to get this done.”

  I go, “Yeah, but I didn’t know what to focus on.”

  He goes, “That’s not a valid excuse. This assignment was very open-ended. You only needed to pick one element of American society or history. Something you personally consider important.”

  I go, “Yeah, but Justin Bieber is Canadian. And One Direction is from England. So I kind of hit a wall.”

  Tessa goes, “What about the Jonas Brothers?” And I just glare at her like, bring it, Tessa. (Sometimes I can’t believe that girl is my second-best friend.)

  I look back at Mr. Brink, expecting to receive an encouraging hug, or at the very least a patient smile. But he just seems wiped out. And then the fire alarm goes off.

  So we all go outside and it’s legit freezing and I’m like, “Whaaaaaa . . . t?!?!” because I’m used to a pretty controlled climate and this is like, weather. And all the girls in my class are jumping around and screaming and videotaping each other on their phones and I look over at Mr. Brink and he’s not even attempting to supervise. He’s just standing off to the side, staring up at the sky.

  So I kind of sidle over to my teacher, just to, you know, protect him in case he’s in any kind of danger or distress. And when he sees me he goes, “What’s up, kid?” And I feel the little Nyan Cat in my soul go riding its rainbow Pop-Tarts double speed.

  So I’m like, “Sorry about class.” And he goes, “Yeah.” And I look at the ground. And he’s quiet.

  But then he goes, “Fire drills, huh?” And I’m like, “Yeah. They’re never real.”

  And then I realize that somehow we’ve backed away from the student body and are standing right on the edge of the woods.

  Now in the woods behind our school there is a creek. And just over the edge of that creek there’s a place where the ground dips down, and then it rises back up again, kind of steeply, and there’s a rusty old fence, and just beyond that fence are the railroad tracks. Freight trains come through Charlottesville all the time. They’re incredibly long and they take forever to go by. When my mom drives me to school, we have to cross the tracks at an intersection, and if we get there just when a train is arriving, my mom freaks out, because we’re already late, and now we have to sit there for twenty minutes as boxcar after boxcar passes in front of our windshield, and I’m missing most of our morning class. Which, I love missing school. So thumbs up, trains.

  Once I asked my mom, “Who’s on those trains?” And she goes, “Those trains aren’t carrying people. They’re just carrying stuff. All kinds of stuff that people need from coast to coast. Things like food and clothing. The trains go all over the country, delivering stuff.”

  I blinked. “Wait a second, So you mean, like, on those trains—there might be—some jeggings?”

  My mom laughed. “Hey, there might be. You never know.” Then she went back to checking her phone.

  But back to the edge of the woods, and Mr. Brink. So we’re standing there, and it’s kind of peaceful, like I can barely hear the other teachers squawking at all the kids to stay in line and “be civilized.”

  And then I see Mr. Brink has this weird, old leather string twisted around his left wrist, like supercasual, like it’s no big deal, when obviously it is a big deal when your twenty-eight-year-old teacher is wearing an accessory like that. So I go, “Cool bracelet. What is up with that bracelet? I like it. It’s somewhat awesome”—trying not to say too much, but at the same time wanting to give it the attention it deserves.

  And Mr. Brink goes, “Oh, this? My brother made it.”

  Now, I have scoured Mr. Brink’s Facebook page with the intensity of an OCD-riddled CIA agent, and I never noticed evidence of any siblings whatsoever. So I’m like, “You have a brother?”

  And Mr. Brink touches the leather string. “Well. I had a brother.”

  Terrified, I go, “What happened to him?”

  “He disappeared.”

  “Seriously?!” I said, stretching out the word so it included every letter, rather than the simple srsly?! I prefer to use in texts. I was about to say, My brother disappeared too!, but Mr. Brink spoke first.

  “Yeah. Pretty crazy. Went out West. And never came back.”

  Out West? That’s where my brother went. Out West. It had a certain ring to it. . . . I stared at Mr. Brink. “Why did he go out West? Did he get in trouble?”

  “More like he was looking for trouble. He hopped the rails, when we were kids. Never saw him again.”

  My eyeballs were basically spinning. “What does that mean—hopped the rails?”

  “He was a train-jumper. It’s kind of like hitchhiking, but with trains. You wait for a train to come by and then you run alongside it and catch on. You haul yourself up. And you ride. You can go all over the country, hopping trains. As long as you don’t get caught.”

  I stood very, very still. Then I go, “You can do that?”

  Mr. Brink snapped out of some moonlit place. He laughed. “Well, you can’t,” he said, attempting to ruffle my hair, though I ducked so he couldn’t, because my hair was already at the precise level of messiness that I wanted. “You’re—what? Twelve?”

  I go, “I’m eleven.”

  “Okay. So you can’t hop trains. You have to go to school.”

  “I bet I could get a better education hopping trains.”

  Mr. Brink laughed again.

  “No, seriously. I could see America. The real America. I could find out the truth about What Makes This Country Great. It would be hands-on learning. And”—I threw this in just to impress him—“I could write about it on my college application.”

  “You’re a little young to be worrying about college, don’t you think?”

  I nodded. “True. Plus I don’t even want to go to college. It’s too expensive. And in this economy . . .” I trailed off.

  Mr. Brink looked impressed. “For a kid who never does her homework, you sure know a lot. How do you know so much?”

  “The internet. Duh.”

  Mr. Brink shook his head. Then he lets out this big sigh. And he goes, “Man. Who knows?”

  “Who knows what?”

  “I shouldn’t be saying this to you. I could get fired. But you know—you might be right. You could learn a lot out there. Your head is full of all that Bieber nonsense. You’re failing school—or maybe school is failing you. In a crazy way, it could be good for you—to escape. To explore. To unplug.”

  In my head I was li
ke, Uh, yeah, right, cuz I’d never leave my phone at home, and if I do run away, it’ll be straight toward Bieberville, but I kept quiet and let Mr. Brink roll.

  He was shaking his head again. “Oh, but don’t listen to me. I don’t know what I’m saying. I mean—how could I? I never rode the rails. I never took that chance. I didn’t have the guts.” He shifted the twisted leather string one inch to the left. And looked sad.

  It would have been cool if at that exact second we’d heard the train whistle in the distance and a ginormous freight train had come thundering by. It would also be cool if there was a such a thing as Platform 93/4 and I could find it and get whisked away to Hogwarts. But this is real life, so what actually happened was, the principal took out her megaphone and told us the fire drill was over, and we all had to go back inside, and it was annoying because Social Studies was over but I still had to run back to the classroom to get my bag.

  But even then, even at that moment when I was shoving my way through the hall to get to the cafeteria for lunch, I knew that everything was different.

  I knew which way the wind blew.

  I knew I was going to go home that night and pack my bindle (which is what train-jumpers, or “hobos,” call their sacks on sticks, see Wikipedia), and the next morning, which was this morning, I knew that when the bus dropped me off at school, I’d fake that I had to go to the bathroom and run to the gym and out to the woods and skip over the creek and climb the fence— and I did. And now I’m here. In my purple jeggings. Waiting for the train.

  Not on the tracks, duh, but just shy of them. With my Hello Kitty sleeping bag rolled up tight, and a long stick with a hot-pink Gap pocket-T upcycled into a sack at the end of it, containing all my worldly goods for the journey ahead. And my diary, of course, a copy of which you’re reading now, cuz I’m basically the twenty-first-century Anne Frank, if Anne Frank had not died in the Holocaust but instead just peaced out and had a bunch of crazy adventures on the road.*