Free Driven by Emotions by Elise Allen Page B

Riley did love hockey, so she was bruised and scraped but happy.
    Then came the move to San Francisco, which is a major city where crime rates are far higher than those in our little Minnesota town, and where the percentage of dot-com people pretty much
guarantees that cybercrime will be a part of Riley’s life. Oh, and three more things:
    Earthquakes—Earthquakes—
EARTH­QUAKES
!
    Why would Riley’s parents want to live in a place where the very ground could break open and swallow them up?
    I didn’t have a say, though, so we left.
    And the result was far, far worse than I’d feared. Dad drove an average of ten miles above the speed limit the entire way to San Francisco, which exponentially increased our chances of
vehicular death. He and Mom wouldn’t let Riley open the window because they wanted to keep the air-conditioning in, even though recycled car air increases the likelihood of passing airborne
viruses from one passenger to another.
    Then we got to our new house, even though “new” was a misnomer, as the house had obviously been lived in by people who clearly didn’t clean up after themselves, and who could
have left any number of germs and viruses on every surface. Disgust and I were equally thrilled about that. The floors were also very creaky, and I’m fairly sure the house didn’t have
the superstructure to withstand…oh, an
earthquake
!
    Joy tried to make us feel better about the house, but when Disgust gasped, “Is that a dead mouse?!” I knew we were in the wrong place. Dead rodents can carry viruses that are
incredibly lethal!
    Once again, Joy jumped in and reminded us the place would look better with Riley’s things, and I could imagine that. I could picture her hockey lamp on her bedside table, tethered down so
it didn’t fall on Riley’s bed during an earthquake. And I could imagine her posters stuck on the walls with double-sided tape—not pins. Pins could become dangerous projectiles or
stick Riley’s fingers while she was using them. The more I thought about it, the less I hyperventilated, and that was good.
    Then Dad said the moving van was lost and wouldn’t show up for a couple days.
    Back to hyperventilating.
    “The van is lost?!” I wailed. “This is the worst day ever. San Francisco is terrible. And Mom and Dad are stressed out—even worse!”
    Then there was the pizza debacle. There’s nothing more frightening than finding a small tree on an otherwise perfectly normal plate of food, but that’s exactly what happened. Riley
and Mom went to the nearest pizza place and found
broccoli
on the pizza. I was terrified. If a pizza could have broccoli, it could have
anything
. It could have anchovies. Or
liverwurst. Or roadkill.
    Again, Joy calmed the rest of us down. She’s really good at that. That’s why she’s usually the one driving. She showed us memories of Riley and our trip, and I was especially
calmed when I remembered that Riley, Mom, and Dad all stayed securely belted into their seats the whole trip. That was important. But when the memory we were watching turned blue, I froze.
    Not literally. It wasn’t cold or anything, although there
is
a lot of fog in San Francisco, which is both cold
and
dangerous. What I’m saying is that I froze with
fright because I’ve never seen a memory turn blue before. And I don’t know about you, but I prefer only seeing things that I
have
seen before. That way I know if they’re
good or bad. New things are way too unpredictable and are far too likely to be dangerous.
    I turned around and saw that Sadness was touching the memory. “She did something to the memory!” I said.
    Joy did the right thing. She stepped in and took the memory away from Sadness, but the sphere stayed blue.
    “Oh…change it back, Joy!” I urged her.
    She tried to rub the blue off but couldn’t, which meant the memory would stay sad forever.
    Sadness never had that kind of power before. What did it mean? Had Sadness become a monster?