The Probability of Miracles by Wendy Wunder Read Free Book Online Page B

her thin-walled bedroom, wrapped in her down comforter, and have her mother bring her chicken soup until this was all over. But when she looked at her mom and Perry staring at her from the doorway, already wide-eyed and ecstatic in their altered road-trip reality, she knew this wasn’t just about her.
    â€œLet’s go, bitches,” she said in jest as she held up the crumpled bag. Alicia snatched it from her hand, and Cam said, “Maineward ho.”
    â€œWho’s Maineward, and why is she a ho?” asked Perry as they made the treacherous walk through the mangroves back to the car.

SIX
    â€œWE CAN READ THEM, PERRY. YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ THEM OUT loud,” said Cam.
    Perry had been sucked into her first roadside attraction—that friendly euphemism for “tourist trap.” They had been on the road for six long hours, and they were getting a little loca . Alicia had become obsessed with redialing the number for the ghost hotel in Promise, Maine—no one ever picked up—and Perry could not stop reading road signs. The South of the Border billboards had started in Georgia at about ten miles apart, and now, halfway into South Carolina, they were practically every ten yards. Cam’s personal favorite—SOUTH OF THE BORDER: YOU NEVER SAUSAGE A PLACE!—had a three-dimensional, fifteen-foot-long hot dog hanging from the top of it in the shape of a smile.
    Cam was actually grateful for the billboards. They gave her something to look at aside from the bleak landscape of America the beautiful. Beauty didn’t seem to be a priority for people anymore. If you had to judge from I-95, America had become cancerous clusters of cheap houses, replicating out of control. They were dropped into empty, treeless soybean fields and connected by strip mall after superstore after strip mall. People just needed places to collect their stuff. Each house had a swing set and a green lawn littered with plastic toys. No one even built a fence to hide the plastic toy habit. People were shameless about their consumption of plastic.
    It was no wonder the polar bears were drowning.
    They were getting close. Cam could see the lights of the sombrero tower blinking above the pine trees like a UFO. And when they rounded the next bend and Alicia drove Cumulus between the legs of an enormous neon Pedro—South of the Border’s offensive Mexican-guy mascot—all Cam could think was, Por qué?
    South of the Border was empty. (Hadn’t people seen the signs?) It was dusty, dry, and desolate. Just a few warehouses filled with schlock dropped in the middle of nowhere. Scattered throughout the compound were plaster-of-paris statues of animals from Africa. An orange giraffe; a huge, T-shirt-wearing gorilla. What these had to do with Mexico, Cam could not imagine. It cost a dollar to take the elevator to the top of the sombrero tower, where you could look at nothing for miles around.
    â€œWow, this place has really gone downhill,” said Alicia. She finally stopped dialing the Promise Breakers Hotel, took the phone away from her ear, and looked around.
    â€œRight. I’m sure it was very classy once.”
    â€œIt wasn’t this bad.”
    Cam was glad she got to see it at night, though, where the neon gave the place its special cache. South of the Border at night was quite a wonder. Sleazy, cheap, gaudy, garish, and filthy, except for the absence of any visible prostitutes, it almost compared to the real Tijuana. She put Tweety back in his cage and covered it up so he didn’t have to witness the vulgarity.
    â€œOkay, everyone gather round the stereotype,” said Cam. Her dad used to say that when Disney tourists asked to have their picture taken with him. Cam took out her camera and snapped a shot of Perry and her mom pinching the cheeks of a huge plaster-of-paris Pedro.
    Then she headed toward Gift Shop West, the city block–size store filled with, in Cam’s estimation,