Eleven-year-old Jace Baker had made a terrible decision by getting up fifteen minutes earlier than he had planned to on that lazy and hot summer Friday. Had he just waited around in bed a little longer, until noon perhaps, his mom might have told the visitor that he was still asleep, and to come back later. Which, given said visitor’s typical noncommittal reputation, could have equated to not returning anytime soon. And just maybe, that would have kept the whole adventure from starting in the first place.

Instead, he was ensnared at the breakfast table in the kitchen, after minding his own business and gulping down the all-natural, organic, no artificial coloring cereal his mom had gotten at the downtown Whole Foods market. Last week, it was blueberry. Today it was strawberry. While he thought about the spice of life and his mom debated on one or two sugar cubes for her coffee, Uncle Wesley broke in via the back door, a wide smile on his face, his anything-but brawny arm holding the door open dramatically.

“Luce!” Wes exclaimed, being suddenly full of life, yet looking as if he had just aged a little since his last known appearance. “Lucy! I need to take the boy camping this weekend! We gotta… We gotta do some uncle-nephew bonding, you know?”

“The hell…” she grumbled and stress-squeezed a sugar cube, breaking it apart into her morning joe. She turned and greeted him with, “Are you on drugs?”

“No. Of course not. Never. Just… All right, listen to me.” He closed the door and began a puppet show with his hands to emphasize his demands. “I just got back, from, uh, somewhere. T-the woods, yeah, that’s it. I’ve seen all the nature, Sis! Really perked me up after, well, all these years of working a crappy job, coming home to a crappy apartment, and then sitting alone in the dark all night.”

“So you went outside. Good for you.” She then looked at her son, who was lazily pulling at his pajamas. “You hear that, Jace? Your uncle’s just started his midlife crisis.”

“Come on, what’s he got to lose? Did he even go to any camps this summer? You know…” Wes put on his cheeky face. “If he stays cooped up in the house all of July, and then August, he’ll probably turn out just like me. I mean, the way I am now.”

Lucy compared the two, pinched and rubbed her upper nose, and sighed. “I have no idea why I still haven’t taken that emergency key away from you.”

“This is an emergency. Jace is wasting what remains of his youth! Look at the kid!” He put his elbow on his nephew’s head and dug it into his hair, eliciting a subdued, unnerved growl from the boy. “He’s about to enter the hell that is middle school. He needs a camping trip and some peace and quiet first. Just the weekend—he hangs out at my place today, I teach him some stuff, and we leave in the morning. That’s all I ask.”

“If you have to do something with me, take me to a movie, or King Arcade this weekend. I’m definitely not sharing a tent with you in some mud hole.”

“A tent? Nah. We’ll just be sharing a sleeping bag. Singular.”

“Mom!” Jace whined. “Don’t make me go!”

“He’s joking about the sleeping bag,” she assumed. “Okay, Wes. I’ll entertain the idea. Where are you planning on having this little excursion?”

“Not far from here. Not like I want to walk or do that much work. So, probably the state park just outside town.”

The adults watched as Jace, distracted from his cereal, took out his iPhone. Based on his gestures, he was likely looking at a map of Royal Valley and its surroundings.

“Tch. That’s all the way out in the boonies. Let’s just go to King Arcade.”

“You only want to go to the amusement park because it’s where all the Pokémon are. Holy crap, Jace, no one even plays Go anymore. It’s 2020. Get with the times.”

“They do to! And they just added over a hundred Pokémon in the latest update.”

“Big deal. We had a hundred and fifty-one of them back before smart phones were even around. And I had all of them. I told you about that, right? How I won a Mew in the contest Nintendo Power put out? Didn’t even have to push a truck.”

“I really don’t care about all the stupid shit you did in the 90s, dude.”

“Jace!” Lucy crossed her arms and glared. “How many times do I have to—”

“Sorry,” he apologized. “He just makes me so angry sometimes…”

“And Wes, if this is happening, no swearing, got it? His dad’s enough of a bad influence on him. At least you don’t drink. Or smoke. Or talk to women all night.”

“Hey, no problem. Wait, crap, I forgot—isn’t he with that loser this weekend?”

“He’s in Vegas, for some business expo. And he just bought Jace another new video game, too, so he really probably would have stayed inside his room for days.”

“Oh, awesome. What Mature-rated slaughterfest did he get for him this time?”

“It’s something I was actually looking forward to playing…” Jace groaned.

“Well, sorry, but it’s starting to look like all those achievements will have to wait. Complain all you want now, but by Monday, you’ll be thanking me for the friggin’ wicked weekend I’m about to dump on you.”

“Are you actually making me do this, Mom?” Jace pleaded.

“I’m afraid that I’ve kind of warmed to the idea pretty quickly, kiddo.”

“Ugh. I can’t believe this… Whatever. Fine. But I’m bringing my headphones and loading up my phone with songs so I can ignore my dumb uncle the whole time.”

Wes shrugged. “Fine with me. You put all of the gangster rap junk you want to on there. But if you drain the battery, I’m not giving you a recharge. Now go pack.”

“You guys just ruined my day, and my whole summer!” Jace proclaimed and stormed off to his room, leaving behind a bowl of cereal-stained beige lukewarm milk.

“Despite my best efforts, he’s reminding me more and more of you when you were his age,” Lucy remarked as she brought the leftover cereal to the sink.

“Doesn’t sound so bad when you say it like that. Hey, I was cool.”

“All right, maybe I’ll give you that, but he hasn’t really made many friends. And he had a rough final year in elementary school. He needs… something.”

“Eh, he’ll find it, whatever it is he’s good at and draws him in. He’s a Colton.”

“He’s a Baker.”

“Doesn’t matter that he’s kept his dad’s last name. Doesn’t change his genes.”

“He’s only a quarter of a Colton. Anyway, you need to take good care of him this weekend, maybe teach him a thing or two. I’ll send you his list of emergency numbers.”

“Luce, you have to back off a little before it’s too late. I’m no parent, but I get that between your helicoptering and his dad being an idiot, he’s angry and confused.”

“He does have a worsening temperament…” she admitted. “Hey, don’t you have to be at work today? It’s Friday.”

“I took it off. My boss complained about it, but I’m not afraid of that sociopath anymore. Besides, I just realized the importance of family bonding.”

“Are you sure you don’t have some ulterior motive here?” She looked at him questioningly. “You seem out of character all of a sudden. Almost… like a kid again.”

“Nope. Trust me. It’s all clean, and we won’t even leave the city limits.”

“Um, hold on, I just realized that Jace has never even been camping. I better go check that he’s actually packing anything, uh… useful.”

“Yeah. Yeah, good point.”

Wes followed his year-younger half-sister down the hall and into Jace’s messy room, where she knocked on the door but then opened it only a second later. As he did on every visit to the tween’s domain, Wes took in the sight of the posters on the wall, mostly of pop and hip-hop artists competing for the most tattoos and craziest hair.

Jace complained right away, “Get out! I don’t need help with packing!”

He was now in his standard wardrobe: some variety of khaki shorts, and a dark colored undershirt under his favorite long-sleeved blue light jacket. Unlike his loud tastes, he kept his ‘style’ simple and logo-free, to avoid unwanted social attention.

“Honey, are you getting the important things into that big backpack of yours?”

“I dunno, probably,” he said and crammed in another wad of socks.

“Underwear,” Wes advised. “Lots of underwear. You’ll need it.”

“Gross. I don’t even want to know why.”

“I’m just saying that we might be gone a little longer than you think. As in, like, it could be a long weekend.”

“It’s two days in some forest. Even if I’m bored out of my mind, it’ll still be over before I know it. And maybe you’ll get so bored that we’ll go to King Arcade anyway.”

“Geez, enough about the amusement park already. It hasn’t even been updated in years. It’s got rides falling apart. I know there’s only one reason you want to go there.”

“Jace, I really want you to enjoy this time with your uncle,” Lucy said with a forcefully optimistic smile. “This is your chance to really get to know each other.”

He looked at his mom, his uncle, and then longingly at his Xbox.

• •

While he navigated the empty late morning streets of downtown Royal Valley and passed between the city’s only four office towers that could be considered tall, Wes complained about various things involving the current state of Main Street. Jace, barely listening from the back of the old and beat-up 2009 Nissan Cube, kept his lazy gaze on the outside surroundings—though doing so only confirmed his uncle’s remarks.

“You see that corner?” Wes pointed out the gun and safe store near an alley where a homeless person was sleeping. “Charlie Pippin took on a dare to grab a handful of Dutch chocolate from that place, when it was a candy shop. Happened to be a cop outside that almost—came very close to grabbing him. Then he tripped while running away and dropped all of it into a storm drain, except for one piece. Saw the whole thing from the other side of the road with my friends. Kid brought it to school the next day and ate it in front of everyone. Then his dad burst into the cafeteria and dragged him out. He got sent to reform school, and we never saw him again past fourth grade.”

Jace rolled his eyes and tried to satisfy Wes with a, “Neat.”

“Getting old sucks. My classmates talked about that all year, and now, nothing. The story’s just gone, like the store, and it’s like that moment in time never happened. You gotta learn to appreciate the small stories, kid. Hell, even the Valley feels old now. It used to have streetcars going up and down Main Street. It used to command respect.”

“Uh, it still does have street cars. Not like people don’t drive on it.”

“That’s not what—ugh, Jace, little man, you gotta work on filling up the databanks up there. Streetcars, like San Francisco. Trolleys. Little trains that ran on those rails still dug into the middle of the road. There was a time when downtown was more than just pawn shops and hobos and maybe a single nice restaurant per block.”

“I don’t care about downtown, Unk. There’s nothing to do here.”

“There used to be. We even had the coolest little movie theater. Before the big chain multiplex opened up by the highway and ran it out of business. You’ll see what I mean,” he said and looked over to see if he had piqued Jace’s curiosity yet. He had not.

Wes turned on the street that led to the inner-city apartments, up on a hill that provided a panoramic view of Royal Valley. It could have been an upscale place, but its residents had long refused to submit to gentrification, and local politics were so mired in corruption scandals that the city barely ever made sweeping changes anymore.

Wes pulled into one of the shaded carports that he paid extra for, and under the summer heat, led Jace to his second-floor apartment. The building was in disrepair and its faded pink paint was closing in on a bleached coral color—not that the junkies and Californian muscle heads lingering around outside cared about their home’s appearance. Some of them eyed Jace’s overstuffed and expensive backpack. He hated visiting Wes.

Once they were inside his messy-but-not-dirty apartment, Wes locked the door in the four ways it was possible to do so, checked the Velcro strap on his closed curtains, and then did a quick scan to make sure the place hadn’t been broken into.

“Don’t worry, I’ll sleep on the couch tonight,” he said as he hurried from spot to spot, giving everything a brief examination. “Feels like forever since I was last here…”

“What’s going on with you?” Jace asked and dropped his backpack to the floor. “Is your home, like, bugged or something? Are you under surveillance?”

“No, no—of course not. Well, at least I shouldn’t be. It’s only been a few hours. Uh,” he turned to his nephew, “hey, I gotta admit something. We’re not really going camping. I don’t even have any gear. But I figured it’d be the best excuse to use on your mom for a shut-in like you, to get you out of the house.”

“Um, okay, whatever. If we’re just going to hang out here, in town, how about we do it back at my house? I could show you some of the sick new games I got.”

“No way, Jace. I still got plans for us. Big plans. I just… need a day to chill out and grab some things. Got a cool night in the works, too. Yeah. We’re gonna run some errands first so I can take care of a bunch of crap, but when we get back, guess what?”

Wes picked something from his collection of movies on the shelf under his big flat screen, and tossed it over to Jace, who barely caught it. The discs still spinning in the case, he looked at the front and back, and didn’t let his excitement levels budge.

“That’s the Back to the Future trilogy. We’re gonna watch it! The whole thing!”

“Aren’t these, like, old 1980s movies or something?”

“I’m guessing you’ve never watched them,” Wes said. Once Jace had shrugged his shoulders, he continued, “Classics, kid. And when we watch them, I want you to pay really close attention. Think of them as, mmm, homework—fun homework.”

“Whatever. I’ll do your dumb movie night—if you take me home tomorrow.”

“Okay. Have it your way. Now let’s get some lunch and do some boring stuff.”