Before Tomorrowland by Jeff Jensen

LEE BRACKETT took off his wool cap and wiped his forehead. It wasn't the just the heat getting to him. He'd told his mom, twice and clearly, to wait there for him, under the impossible-to-miss crystal clock suspended from the vaulted ceiling, while he got their luggage. Instead, she'd ditched him and gone off to God knew where. He should have expected her to resist him and go her own way like a stubborn little kid. Where could she be? She wasn't in the women's lounge with its peeling yellow wallpaper and screaming babies. She wasn't at the newsstand, where a vendor with an ink-smudged smock pinned the week's new comic books to a clothesline. Several dark scenarios cycled through Lee's mind, including what might happen if she didn't take the pills she'd needed to take an hour earlier. Normally, playing caretaker to his mom made him feel grown-up, but at that moment, Lee, age seventeen, felt as helpless as one of those infants in the ladies' lounge.

He sat down on the largest suitcase and forced himself to take a deep breath. Unfortunately, every time he tried to clear his head and compose himself, he just heard his father's voice ring louder and louder: This is a bad idea. Deep, discouraging, disapproving. Lee hadn't heard the sound of his father's actual voice in weeks, maybe months, but it echoed in every cursive scratch on the postcard from Scranton, Pennsylvania.