I turned toward the shower head. Having been in there for about half an hour the water was turning cold, so I spun one of the knobs. After a split second, the water got colder, so I spun it the other way. This time, the water was too hot.

I groaned. Deciding it wasn’t worth the trouble, I shut the water off and drew back the shower curtain. The humid bathroom air rushed over to greet me and I took in a deep breath.

I grabbed a towel and started drying off. Pale white steam curled around my arms and legs. I glanced at the watch sitting on the sink. It was just after eight a.m.

“It’s gonna be a long day,” I sighed.

I pulled on my clothes and glanced at myself in the foggy mirror. The long sleeve blue jean button-up shirt I wore looked good on me. It was my favorite. My usually light honey-blond hair looked as dark brown as my eyes. I rang my hair out a final time before exiting the room.

I hadn’t gotten more that a few feet from the door when I was approached by my cats, Spongy and Splat. Spongy was a black and white cat and Splat was a calico. The two of them began rubbing against my legs. I sighed again.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You getting skinny?” I walked into the kitchen and got both my cats their breakfast. My dogs - the black lab Tyrone and the collie-shepherd George - heard me feeding them and loped into the kitchen to get some breakfast of their own.

I fed Tyrone and George and made my way into the living room. I collapsed into my mom’s favorite spot and looked out the picture window before me. I still wasn’t quite sure what had woken me so early on a Saturday morning. I had been dreaming - and what had I been dreaming about? - and then I’d suddenly woken up. All I knew for sure was that whatever dream I had been having hadn’t ended. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recall the dream.

Lost in thought, I jumped when the phone rang. With a sigh, I glanced at the caller ID. Sherman, David, it read. I picked up the white cordless phone and pressed the talk button.

“MMMBop,” I greeted. So what? I was a Hanson fan. So was the person who had called.

I heard a small laugh from the other end. “Jaye, why can’t you answer the phone like normal people?” asked my best friend, Evie Sherman.

I grinned. “Haven’t you figured it out yet, Evie? I’m not normal people,” I told her. I glanced at the clock. It was nearly nine o’clock. Jeez, I thought, was I really thinking about that dream for that long? “So, why’re you calling so early?”

“For the sheer joy of it,” Evie replied sarcastically. “No, really, though. I just wanted to know when we were leaving for Texas?”

I groaned. I’d forgotten all about that.

Ten years ago, my family and I had lived in Arlington, Texas. We had moved, but not been able to sell the house. So, now we owned two houses - the one in Arlington, and the one we lived in, here in Michigan. Now, my family was planning on going back down to Texas to sell the house. I had managed to talk my parents into letting me bring Evie along with me.

“Hello? Jaye Morgan?” Evie sang. “Hello? Are you home?”

“Yeehaw. I’m here,” I told her. “We’re leaving at ten, remember?” I glanced at the clock. “ . . . And I should go wake everybody up . . .” I added, more to myself than to Evie.

“I told you, Dad!” Evie yelled on the other end of the phone. I heard Mr. Sherman mutter something, and Evie said, “I’ll be over in a few, k?”

I smiled at Evie’s anticipation. “K,” I replied. I hung up the phone and headed for my parents’ bedroom. I walked in and gently shook my mom and dad. My mom was the first to wake up.

“I’ll wake your dad,” she told me with a yawn. “Just go wake Lynn up.”

I nodded and started out of the room. I went upstairs and over to my little sister’s room. Her door was closed, but I could still hear her CD player pumping out “Where’s the Love” from Hanson’s Middle of Nowhere CD.

I opened my sister’s door and walked into her room. Asleep, with her blond hair spread over her pillow and her round face expressionless, twelve-year-old Lynn looked more like two-year-old Lynn. I smiled.

“Lynnie-Bear. Wake up,” I said, shaking my sister ever-so slightly. “We’re leaving for Texas in an hour.”

Lynn’s brown eyes - so reminiscent of my own - opened, and she looked at me inquisitively. “What?” she asked.

I smiled again. “Texas, remember? We’re going down there today.”

Lynn sat bolt upright. “Oh, yeah!” she cried. “I’d better get ready!”

I shook my head slightly and left the room. For only having lived in Texas until she was two, Lynn was sure anxious to get back.

I started downstairs just in time to hear a knocking on the front door. I jumped down the last two stairs and opened the door. A girl with blond hair pulled into a high pony tail and blue-green eyes stood on the porch, small black suitcase in her hand.

“Hey, Evie,” I said, opening the screen door and letting my friend in.

Evie grinned brightly. “I still can’t believe we’re going all the way down to Texas!” she squeaked. “This is gonna be great!”

“Are you on some cheap sugar high?” I demanded.

Grinning and nodding vigorously, Evie giggled. “I just can’t wait!”

Mom took the first driving shift. She drove for five hours straight. When she finally got tired at three o’clock, my dad took over. A lead foot by nature, in his six-and-a- half hours driving, he covered a lot of ground.

My turn to drive came at nine-thirty when my father pulled into a rest stop. Dad announced we were taking a break, so everybody got out of the van and headed for the rest rooms.

Evie groaned. “My legs are numb!” she cried when she walked up next to me at the sink.

“Mine too,” Lynn agreed, drenching her hands in liquid soap. Evie and I waited for her to finish washing her hands, and then the three of us started out of the bathroom. Even though Lynn was four years younger than I was, the two of us got along relatively well. We tried to hang out as much as possible, and Evie even got along with her.

“Where are we, anyway?” Evie asked, stifling a yawn.

I shrugged. “Dunno. But we can find out.” I led the way to the “You Are Here” map. “We’re in Missouri,” I told her.

“Jeez,” Evie said. “Your dad drives fast.”

I grinned. “He sure does. Now, we’d better get back to the van,” I suggested, starting out of the building.

The three of us walked back to the van. I slid into the driver’s seat and waited for everyone else to get situated. When everybody was buckled up, I started up the engine.

Dad looked doubtfully at the sky. It was still light out, but the sun was hanging pretty low. “Jaye, wake me when it gets dark,” Dad told me.

I nodded. “No problem.” I’d gotten my license about two months prior, but I still hadn’t gotten much night-driving experience. Before I started out of the rest stop, I put my Middle of Nowhere CD in the CD player.

My mom groaned. “Do we have to listen to these pre-pubescent he-shes?” she whined.

I laughed. “Just for that, yes,” I told her.

Evie got defensive. “They’re not he-shes. And their not pre-pubescent, either -”

“I don’t care,” Mom cried. I just laughed and started out of the rest stop.

I pulled onto the interstate and got up to the speed limit. When I was there, I put the cruise control on. I kept my eyes on the road, occasionally glancing in my mirrors. Traffic wasn’t bad at all. It was nearly ten at night, and not many people were on the road. I loved driving on the freeway - there were no stop signs to interrupt the flow of the cars.

About a half hour after I took the wheel, I felt a kind of twinge; like a shock of ice coursing through my arms, back, and legs. I took a deep breath. I glanced at the passenger seat. My dad was asleep. I sighed.

Five minutes passed. I took my eyes off the road momentarily to check my mirrors. When I looked back, I noticed something that didn’t seem quite right. We seemed to be traveling slower now than before. I glanced at the speedometer. Sure enough, the speed was falling. I stepped on the gas pedal. The engine revved, but my speed didn’t increase. “Uh, Dad,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. I glanced in my side mirror and got into the center lane. “Dad?” I asked. I glanced over to the passenger seat. My father still hadn’t stirred. I checked my mirror again and got into the right hand lane. “Dad!” I yelled, smacking his arm with as much force as I could manage.

My father opened his eyes and looked at me. “What?” he asked.

“I . . . I don’t know,” I told him, hearing the panic clearly in my voice. “The speed is falling and I tried stepping on the gas pedal but it didn’t work -”

“Pull over,” Dad demanded.

“What do you think I’m doing?” I cried. My heart was pounding a million times a second. I pulled the van onto the shoulder of the road and hit the brake. The van jerked to a stop. I jammed the gear into park and took the keys from the ignition. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold onto the key ring.

“Get out of the car,” Dad demanded. “Everybody, out of the car.”

I didn’t protest. I fumbled around, trying desperately to get a grip on the handle. Finally, the door opened, but I wasn’t the one who opened it. Evie looked up at me, smiling slightly. With shaking hands, I tried to undo my seat belt. I couldn’t manage to do that either. After a few seconds, Evie reached over and undid the belt for me. Then she offered me her hand to help me get down.

Once my feet were on the ground, I wrapped my arms around my friend’s neck. “Oh, Evie, that was so scary!” I cried.

Evie patted my back. “I know,” she said. “It’s okay now. Let’s go sit down.”

I managed to nod and Evie helped me to a spot about five feet from the back of the van and about ten feet from the road. Lynn came over and sat down next to us. My dad had the hood of the van up and was holding back as many curses as he cold, and my mom was standing a good three feet away from him, watching, but not wanting to be in the way.

The sky seemed to have suddenly darkened. There was just enough light still in the sky to see what was going on. However, I was too shaken to take in much anyway.

Looking down the dim highway in one direction and then in the other, Lynn smiled. “Hey, guys,” she said, looking from me to Evie and back again. “Y’know what this reminds me of?”

Heart still pounding, I paid little attention to her question. However, Evie decided to humor her. “What, Lynnie?” she asked.

Still smiling, Lynn said, “It started at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere.”

Evie smiled too. “Sitting beside me was a man with no hair,” she added, singing the line.

That did it. Lynn and Evie broke out into song. They began singing “Man From Milwaukee” off Hanson’s Middle of Nowhere CD. I smiled. My hands still hadn’t stopped shaking and my heart was still pounding, but Zac Hanson’s wacky lyrics somehow made me feel a little better.

Lynn and Evie ended their rendition of “Man From Milwaukee” just as another van pulled up behind my dad’s. A man with brown hair and a brown mustache stepped out of the driver’s side door. “Need any help?” he asked, approaching my father. My dad looked up at the man. I looked at the two of them. It was almost odd how their looks seemed to offset each other. My father had blond hair, a blond mustache, and blue eyes, and this man had dark hair, a dark mustache, and - from what I could tell - dark eyes. And he looked familiar somehow . . .

“Need any help, Dad?” called a boy’s voice.

The man looked back toward his van. “Zac, what part of ‘Stay in the car’ confused you?” he called.

“Um, the first four words,” the boy called back.

As he spoke, I looked at him. He had long blond hair pulled back in a pony tail at the base of his neck. He was wearing a bright green shirt and a pair of jeans. He looked familiar too. Then I poked Evie and Lynn in the sides. “Who does that look like?” I whispered.

Evie glanced in the direction of the boy who had spoken momentarily. “He looks like their brother,” she whispered back, motion with her head.

I looked to where Evie had indicated and all the doubt in my mind was erased.

Walker Hanson and his three oldest sons, Isaac, Taylor, and Zac, had stopped to help us.