“Your
mom
? God, how old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
Or close enough.
She gives an exaggerated groan and turns her attention back to the road.
“What's wrong?”
“Forget it.”
We drive the rest of the way without a word. She drives aggressively, speeding on the highway and zigzagging past other cars in the city. Fine with me. It's not like I care if we crash.
The university is a collection of old brick buildings, grassy lawns, paved courtyards. Still not talking, Nat leads me through a doorway and down a long corridor. She walks like she drives: fast, impatient, expecting others to get out of her way.
“Jayden! So good to see you!” Mel bursts out of his office and pulls me into a bone-crushing hug. “Wonderful, wonderful. Look at you! My, my. Been way too long.”
“Yeah, I know.” I follow him into his office, which is small and windowless, with stacks of files and papers piled on every surface.
“And Natalie. Thanks for picking him up.”
“No problem.”
“Why the frown, Nat?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing.”
Mel cocks his head to one side. He is ten years older than my mom but looks twice that. Leathery sun-browned skin, receding hairline, tobacco-stained teeth, a piercing blue-eyed gaze, which is now fixed on Nat. “Ahhh.” He gives a slow chuckle. “Did my nephew not live up to the fantasy?”
Nat's cheeks flame red. “Mel!”
“You had visions of trekking off with a handsome stranger, and instead you got a high-school kid, is that it?”
“No,” she protests. “But I don't think taking someone with no experience is a great idea. Someone who isn't even out of high school.”
“I'm out of high school now, aren't I?” I say.
Mel roars with laughter. “You sure are! You sure are!” He slaps his leg, cracking up.
I stare at him. It wasn't
that
funny.
Nat shakes her head. “I can tell this trip is going to be a blast.”
I'm slowly realizing something. “Uh, Nat? Are you coming on this trip too?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Of course.”
“My assistants,” Mel says, nodding. “Both of you.”
So Nat and I are stuck with each other. Just great. “And where exactly are we going?”
Mel grabs my shoulder. “Lake Disappointment, my boy! Lake Disappointment!”
I raise an eyebrow. Not the most promising name. Still⦓A lake? Cool.”
Nat snorts. “If you're picturing cottages and jet skis, forget it. It's not that kind of lake.”
Mel turns to the computer on his desk, sweeps a pile of papers off the keyboard and clicks a picture up on the screen.
“There you go. That's our destination.”
I step closer. The picture is a satellite shot, or maybe an aerial view from a plane. A vastness of desert, brown dry land in every direction, and in the middle of it an irregularly shaped blotch of gray. “That's it? Wow. Um, whyâ¦?”
He pulls up another picture. A close-up of a bunch of pale green shrubs growing in red dirt, with a pale whitish expanse shining behind it. I assume that's the lake, but it doesn't look like any lake I've seen before.
Mel points at the green shrubs. “That's why. New species, my boy, just waiting to be discovered.”
“Of plants?”
He shakes his head. “
Ctenophorus
nguyarna
. They can't be the only ones.”
I stare at him. “What did you just say?”
Nat takes pity on me and translates. “Lizards. Someone found a new species there a few years ago, and Mel thinks there must be others.”
“Okay,” I say. “Lizards it is. I like lizards.” All those cool frills and spikes and colors. Plus they sit still for ages, making them a photographer's dream.
Nat gives a little snort at my general cluelessness.
I ignore her. “So when do we leave?”
Mel grins, his cheeks creasing with deep lines. “A couple of days. We've just been waiting for you.”
“And those spare parts,” Nat adds.
“Got 'em this morning!” Mel says.
I try to rejoin the conversation. “Spare parts?”
Nat nods. “For the jeep. The four-wheel drive.”
“We're driving?” I'd assumed we'd fly. I step closer to the computer and look at the two photographs more closely. “Um, I don't see any roads.”
Nat starts to laugh. “You have no idea, do you, mate? No idea at all.”
That night at Mel's apartment, I look up Lake Disappointment online. Here's what I find out:
1.  It's not exactly what I think of as a lake. It's a massive saltwater basin in the middle of the desert. When there's water. Otherwise, I guess it's just a massive salt basin.
2.  It lies on one of the most isolated roads in the entire world. Actually, not even a road: a hundred-year-old track that was once used by cattlemen moving their stock animals across the desert.
3.  Once you are out there, you are seriously alone.
4.  If anything goes wrong, you are seriously screwed.
Nat was right: I had no idea. “Hey, Mel?”
Mel is loading specimen jars into a cardboard box. “What?”
“It says here that traveling on the Canning Stock Route isn't recommended in the summer months.” I clear my throat and read out loud: “
Extreme
heat and isolation.
You think maybe we ought to wait a bit?”
He shakes his head. “No. It's practically fall. Almost March.”
“It's still February, Mel. It's forty degrees here in the city.”
“You'll get used to the heat.”
“Why not wait until April, like they suggest? It says hereâ”
Mel cuts me off. “Because Ian and Polly Rizzard are going in April.”
“Who are they?”
“Herpetologists from Perth.”
I make a face. “Herpetologists?”
“They study lizards.”
“Ahh.” Not herpes then.
“There was a biodiversity conference up in Darwin a few years ago. Did you know that over eight hundred and fifty brand-new species have been found in the outback, living in underground caves?”
“No, can't say I did.”
“That was where I met Ian and Polly. Since then, they've been at every conference I've been to, rubbing my nose in their latest work, talking about some new species that is going to be named for them.”
“The Rizzard Lizard?” I burst out laughing. “You're kidding, right?”
Mel shoots me a dirty look. “Turns out there are more than twice as many species of lizard in Australia than were previously thought.”
“And that's why you want to go to this lake?”
“That's right, Jayden. Because every sign points to there being more new species of lizard there. And this time⦔ He thumps his fist on his chest. “This time,
I
am going to be the first to find them.”
Two days later we fly to Perth to pick up our rented four-wheel-drive jeep. Mel seems weirder than ever and Nat ignores me, but it still beats being back home. It beats trudging through the snow and sitting in classrooms under the glare of fluorescent lights and listening to teachers say how I could do better if only I would make an effort. And it beats sitting in class with Anna, avoiding her eyes and trying not to think of never touching her again.
Anna and I were together for almost two years, and I honestly thought we'd be together forever. We joked about how one day we'd be this old gray-haired couple sitting in our rocking chairs and doing crossword puzzles. When she broke up with me, it was like the whole world tilted on its axis and nothing would ever be okay again.
I'll always care about
you, Jayden, but I think we should just be
friends.
Every time I caught a glimpse of her in the school hallway, I felt a sharp pain in my chest, like my heart was squeezing tight as a fist around her words.
So even though I missed Anna like crazy, I couldn't be friends with her. It hurt way too much. If things couldn't go back to the way they were, it was easier to not see her at all.
Anna couldn't understand that. She actually called my mom and told her she was worried about me. So then Mom asked me if I was thinking about hurting myself.
Of course not,
I said.
Don't be
stupid.
The truth is, I thought about it all the time, but I hate seeing my mom worry about me. It just makes me feel worse.
Which is why, when I email my mom from Perth, I don't mention that we are heading into the outback. I don't mention that Mel seems crazier than ever, or that I'll be traveling across a desert in the heat of summer with a mad scientist and a spiky-haired girl who doesn't like me.
I figure that I've already given her enough to worry about.
We spend a couple of days driving to Wiluna, where the Canning Stock Route begins. Nat sits up front with Mel. Two days in a stinking hot jeep together hasn't made her any more friendly. I put my headphones on and crank up the tunes.
Wiluna is the smallest town I've ever seen. Just a few buildings in the middle of nowhere. We load up a few last supplies and pick up three coffees to go.
“Not thinking of heading out on the stock route, are you?” The man at the gas station leans close to Mel's window.
“No, no.” Mel starts the engine. “Just a short little drive.”
From the driving directions I've seen, Lake Disappointment is a lot farther than a short little drive. Three or four days, more like. Nat sticks her bare brown feet up on the dash and doesn't say anything.
“Wouldn't go out there this time of year, myself,” the man says. “You traveling in a convoy, at least?”
“Like I said, we're just going a few miles.”
The man eyes our fuel drums and waves the flies away from his face. “Lot of fuel for a day trip.”
Mel grips the steering wheel so hard that the tendons stand out on the backs of his sun-spotted hands. “None of your business, is it?”
The man shakes his head and takes a slow step backward. He looks at Nat, barefoot and sleepy in the passenger seat, and at me, hunched up in the back with my camera bag on my lap. “You take care,” he calls as we drive off. “Something goes wrong out there, you're on your own.”
Mel puts his foot on the gas. “Nosy bugger.”
Nat turns to him. “Why didn't you tell him where we're going?”
“Don't want anyone snooping around after us.” Mel glances over his shoulder like he actually thinks we might be followed.
I look around. Nothing but brown desert as far as the eye can see. Heat radiates in a shimmering slick mirage just ahead of us. A road-kill kangaroo lies decomposing in the red dirt, and a burned-out vehicle rusts at the edge of the road.
The place looks like the end of the world. I can't imagine anyone being crazy enough to follow us.
A yellow sign marks the beginning of the track.
Canning Stock Route
, it reads.
This
road is recommended for 4WD vehicles
only. There is no water, fuel or services
between Wiluna and Hall's Creek, over
1900 km in length. Motorists are advised
to obtain adequate supplies and spares
before venturing on this road.
I snap a photo of the sign through my open window. “Sure we have everything we need, Mel?”
“Course I am.”
Nat mutters something under her breath. I look at her inquiringly, but she just shakes her head.
The sign is wrong about one thing: Calling this route a road is a major exaggeration. It is a dirt track, bonejarringly rutted with deep tire grooves and corrugated like the metal sheets they make sheds out of back home. The jeep bounces and crashes its way along, through thick dust and over rocks and sand hills. Grassy shrubs cover the ground, and in places the track disappears beneath them and we have to slow almost to a stop to find it again.
We drive until the sun is low in the sky and the temperature is starting to drop. Finally we set up camp by an old well. “It's got no water in it,” I say, leaning over the semi-collapsed wooden beams.
“There are wells all along this track,” Mel says. “Built a hundred years ago. I wouldn't count on getting drinking water from any of them.”
“We have plenty though, right?” I look across the sand and shrubbery at our jeep and our two tents. They look very small and lonely under the huge darkening sky.
“Of course we do,” Nat says. “You don't drive in the outback without it.” She wraps her brown arms around herself and shivers. “Mel, you arranged for the fuel drop, right? At Well 23?”