The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club Read Online Free Page B

rain.
    Then it started to pour.
    And then it started to hail.
    “It’ll stop soon,” my dad said.
    “I have to go to the bathroom,” my other sister said quietly.
    We all looked at each other. The toilet was in the trailer, yes, but its location was not in what you would call a discreet spot. It was, in fact, under the cushion that acted as a bench on one side of the table, which also turned into a bed at night.
    “Now?”
my mother said. “You have to go
now
?”
    My sister nodded. My mother took the groceries off the tabletop, my father dismantled it, and the cushion was lifted.
    “Go ahead,” my mother said, motioning.
    “Make them go outside,” my sister insisted.
    “I’m
totally
not going outside,” I said irritably. “Forget you! For sure! Dream on!”
    “Everybody out,” my father demanded, and we stood in the downpour to give my sister some privacy.
    “This is getting ridiculous!” my mother said after ten minutes, as she knocked on the door, her cigarette wet and broken in half. “All right already!”
    My sister opened the door and returned to her spot on one of the beds, where she wasn’t doing anything but reading
People
magazine.
    After standing in four inches of water and mud, our shoes were soaked through, and my mom wouldn’t let us in the trailer until we took them off.
    “From now on,” she said, pointing a finger at all of us, “if you have to go to the bathroom, hold up a towel around you!”
    My father gathered up all of our wet shoes from outside and took our small hibachi out under a tree. After lighting a fire and watching it carefully, he placed our sneakers on the grill until he was satisfied they were dry. He was getting ready to bring the shoes back into the trailer when he realized the soles had melted so thoroughly that they had become one with the hibachi. He entered the trailer with the sentence, “I hope you guys brought a lot of socks.”
    For the next six days, we were confined to the trailer while the rain continued to pour down around us in sheets, all of us shoeless except for my sister. She read her
People
magazine over and over while my remaining sister and I fought. My father stared out the window looking at the rain, and my mother lay on the bed with her hand over her head.
    It was on that sixth day that my mother begged my father to get us out of there. “I can’t stand it anymore!” she pleaded. “I took the last of the Tylenol this morning!”
    My father explained that we were in the mountains, on an inclined dirt road that had by now seen a foot of rain. It was impossible, he said from behind the held-up towel; it would be too dangerous.
    “Then
you
just go see how the roads are,” she said adamantly. “I’m also out of cigarettes, you know!”
    My father got the keys to the Country Squire and headed out. “Get the kids a board game before I kill us all!” she shouted as he pulled away.
    “And this week’s
People
!” my sister yelled.
    He returned twenty minutes later, empty-handed and frustrated. The road was too muddy, he said. We’d just have to wait it out.
    Later that night, as I was sleeping on the toilet bed, my head over the bowl, I was awakened by a jostle. As I sat up, I felt the trailer move slightly, then move again. Another, more violent, jolt was the one that woke the rest of my family.
    “What is it?” my sister yelled.
    “It smells like doody!” my other sister cried.
    Another bump. I started to get really scared. Oh my god, it’s Bigfoot, I thought, sucking myself into a white, blinding panic. “It is so totally Bigfoot!”
    We heard movement around the trailer. To the right. To the left. In front. In back.
    “Dad?” my youngest sister asked. “Is a bear going to eat us?”
    “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s a bear!” my mother yelled. “It’s a bear! Run!”
    “We don’t have any shoes!” my youngest sister screamed.
    “It’s Sasquatch!” I heard myself yell. “It’s the yeti! Talk to it softly, and