“We’re home!” my mother announced cheerfully as our SUV passed the town sign: WELCOME TO PUTNAM, CONNECTICUT. SETTLED 1655. HOME OF THE FIGHTING PILGRIMS.

We were still twenty minutes away from our house, but after two weeks away—two weeks away on a boat—I appreciated the sentiment. We had gone on a family trip to the Galápagos Islands, in Ecuador, for spring break.

I’ll admit, when my parents first told me where we were going, I had been a little startled. I mean, Ecuador? For spring break? Who spends spring break in Ecuador? Besides, I mean, the Ecuadorians. Who live there.

But the islands were amazing—they’re completely uninhabitated by people, and were made famous when Darwin went down there and discovered the thing about the parrots’ beaks that made him realize that evolution, you know, existed.

We’d stayed on a small ship with about twenty other people—including a kind-of cute guy my age—sailing to the islands during the day and exploring them, taking lots of pictures of all the animals, and then going back to the boat to have bad food and sleep.

The animals didn’t have any fear, so you could get really close to the penguins, sea lions, and tortoises. All that had been pretty cool.

But.

I’d had to spend the trip in close proximity to my thirteen-year-old Demon Spawn brother, Travis, who at the moment was repeatedly kicking my ankle.

“Thank God we’re home,” I said, kicking him back, as I stared out the window at the spring flowers bursting into bloom all over the hillsides.

“Didn’t you have fun, Madison?” my mother asked as she turned around in the passenger seat to look at me. My father took this opportunity to change the radio station from my mother’s financial channel back to the sports report.

“Sean!” my mother said, turning around.

“Laura, I have to hear the scores,” my father said.

“Travis!” he yelled to my brother, who had not lifted his head from his PSP the entire hour-long ride back from JFK. “Write these down, okay?”

“I can’t hear you, Dad,” Travis said, obviously lying. Because he had to have heard the question, right?”

“Well, I have to hear the stock report,” my mother said, reaching to change the station back. “Trav, write down how the Dow did today, okay?”

“Well,” I said loudly to remind my mother that she had in fact asked me a question, “I thought the Galápagos were nice,
but—"

“But she missed her boyfriend,” Travis singsonged.

When both my parents turned around to stare at him—causing the driver in the left lane to swerve suddenly—he seemed to realize that his ruse of being temporarily deafened by his headphones had been foiled. “Crud,” he muttered.

“Travis, the Dow—“

“The Braves score—“

“I missed my friends,” I corrected my brother. But as my parents were back to fighting over the radio and not listening to me, I made a face at him and turned back toward the window. I was counting the minutes until we were home...where my laptop and cell, my connections to the outside world, waited.