Pirates were the thing we always had in common, even when we had different taste in most other things, from clothes (I like stripes and polka dots, she likes black) to movies. I loved Babe, the pig movie, but Ruth said animal movies were dumb and the moving mouths were unrealistic anyway. I still love it, but of course I’m not going to say that.

Ruth’s favorite movie is Edward Scissorhands. She says it has some of the best music and some of the best costumes. She made herself her own Edward Scissorhands suit for Halloween when she was thirteen, complete with carefully cut cardboard hand-blades. While a man with blades for fingers doesn’t seem any more realistic to me than a talking pig, I’m not going to say that either.

We both love pretty much any movie about pirates. Even the cheesy ones.

My job on this trip is to watch out for the signs. That’s my responsibility because I’m her sister. Ellie and Eddie know about things too, but I’m still the sister. That doesn’t mean, though, that I can’t take advantage of the situation. Because I mean, come on, pirate ships. Not every girl gets to go on a cross-country road trip in the loft of an RV, and I’m going to make the most of it. This is going to be one of the greatest trips of my entire life. I’m going to make sure of it.

My head is pressed against the window, where I can look at the lollipop sky and the passing trees and the tops of cars that look small from up here. I wish I could see it all at once, and never stop looking. I’ve got that whole stack of National Geographic magazines, but I’m so distracted by the looking and watching that I haven’t needed them very much yet. Even the telephone poles look beautiful today, and I can’t resist taking out my special camera and fiddling with apertures and shutter speeds and taking a few shots. If I set a wider aperture, more light gets in, which is good for inside the RV, where it’s a little bit darker. Then I play around with shutter speeds: faster for clearer images, slower if I want blurry things in motion. With my camera in one hand, Murphy next to my other, and my stack of magazines behind me, I could stay in my loft forever.