by Will Taylor
“Maybe that was your mysterious step eight,” Abby said, as we watched Charlene tell her new friends about her adventures with the moose. “Helping Charlene’s dreams come true.”
“Ooh, right!” I said. “I completely lost track of those steps in all the running around, but we can definitely check that off! That makes it all totally worth it.”
We’d barely gotten any time to ourselves to catch up, just the two of us, but we’d swapped the letters and cards we’d written, and we had the whole rest of the summer together to go over the details.
I reached up and picked at a splinter in Abby’s bunk. There was whispering all through the cabin, and I could hear the counselor joining in. It sounded like waves hitting the shore, and I smiled to myself, thinking of the island. What was happening there right now?
It was nice lying in bed at camp, knowing that somewhere out in the middle of the Atlantic was a secret island run by a mother-daughter team, guarded by a mechanical dolphin named Florence, and home to a brand-new pillow fort base where kids from around the world were forging new links. Looping together a whole new chapter.
And just getting started.
Epilogue
Abby
One Week Later
“Shh! Mags, not so loud!” I hissed.
Maggie was busy chiseling a piece of driftwood, and getting a little too carried away for where we were: sitting among the ruins of the Shipwreck Treehouse, ten minutes after midnight.
“Almost finished!” she said, blowing wood shavings off whatever she was making.
“Can I finally see it then?”
“No!”
I tsk-sighed and adjusted my headlamp. “Well, just keep it down. We really don’t want to get caught.”
I got to my feet, wiping pine needles off my pants, and looked up into the tree. Last time Maggie and I snuck out here, we’d been alone. Now the tree was packed with the best carpenters and knot tiers from the crew of the island, crawling silently from branch to branch, rigging the fallen treehouse back together. The floor was already set, and the driftwood wall was curving into life, wilder and more seaweed-curvy than before.
“Hey, Maggie Hetzger!” came a whisper-shout from above.
Maggie looked around. “Crescent!” she called back. I snorted.
The whisper-shouting crew member dropped a rope between us and slid down.
“What exactly did you say you wanted this thing to look like, again?” he asked.
“Like an octopus sea god temple that wandered up out of the ocean and decided to try being a bird’s nest for a while,” said Maggie.
“Oh. Okay. Fun.” He climbed back up the rope.
“I’m still not sure about this whole silent building technique,” I said, watching him go. “I mean, I know the planks-and-ropes thing works on ships, and on the Island Underneath, but do you really think Director Haggis is going to let anyone near it? There’s no way this is up to any sort of code.”
“Don’t worry about Director Haggis,” said Charlene, appearing out of the night pulling a rolly bin full of driftwood. “He’s a lot less worried about that sort of thing since he met the ghost moose.”
“Woo! Ghost moose club!” said Maggie.
“Anyway,” she went on, “when all the kids wake up tomorrow and see the treehouse was magically rebuilt overnight, I don’t think keeping them away from it is going to be an option. Especially our little letter writers, Maggie.” She turned to my best friend. “They’re keeping their eyes peeled for magic everywhere.”
“And now they’re getting it!” Maggie said, still chipping away at her mysterious driftwood.
Maggie and Charlene’s letter-writing, fort-building, anti-homesickness art project had been a huge success. Ms. Sabine kept pulling them from their regular activities to come give crash courses to every eight-year-old in camp. And the funny thing was, Maggie was thriving. She loved working with the little kids, and she was turning out to be really good at it, too. She and Charlene even had this whole odd-couple comedy thing going, and the kids ate it up. It was weird to say, but it was making me a tiny bit jealous.
“Yes, they are,” said Charlene. “And now I need to get these supplies up to the builders. Carry on, Cantaloupers.” She saluted and headed off, pulling the rolly cart over to the platform elevator the crew had rigged up with counterweights and pulleys.
“Hey, is this the party? Sorry we’re so late!”
Maggie yelped and dropped her driftwood as Matt and Mark appeared in the light from our headlamps, led by Kelly, her brand-new silver sunglasses perched on top of her head.
“What are you doing here?” I asked my brothers, after all the hugging and excited whispered greetings were over. “How did you two even get here?”
“Kelly!” said Mark. “She called to see if we had any spare pillows we were getting rid of in the move.”
“I was running out,” Kelly said. “I’m remaking my fort as a space station so I can run the west coast better. And your brothers were so nice, Abby! They gave me all these old floor pillows from their room. But I still need more.”
“Ugh!” I held up my hands. “One more reason we shouldn’t have gotten rid of that orange plaid sofa I totally loved. It would have been perfect for your space station, and we just gave it away.”
Matt and Mark grinned.
“What?” I said.
“Should we tell her?” said Mark.
“It was supposed to be a surprise,” said Matt.
“Tell me what?”
Mark shrugged. “I won’t tell Dad if you don’t.”
“Deal.”
“Will one of you please tell me what you’re not telling me before I scream?” I said.
Matt smiled. “The thing about that old sofa is we all knew how much it meant to you.”
“So we only pretended to donate it,” said Mark. “We actually put it in storage.”
“And Dad and Tamal are going to convert it into this sort of bunkbed-loft thing for you for your new room.”
“And have it finished before you get back from camp.”
“As a surprise.”
“Which we just ruined.”
“Surprise!”
Oh. My. Mammoth. I had the best family in the whole entire world. Ever ever.
“But that still doesn’t explain how you got here,” I said when I finished hugging them again. “I mean, which fort did you use to get in the networks?”
“Our own,” said Mark. “We made one after Maggie’s first call about how you were missing. Just in case. And when Kelly’s parents drove her over to pick up the pillows, she saw it.”
“And I got a token to them right away,” jumped in Kelly. “Then when I told them I was going to this treehouse-fixing party tonight, they wanted to help.”
“And she came and got us special permission from NAFAFA,” Mark said, “and we went from our place to Kelly’s space station, to the Hub, to your fort in the art cabin, Maggie, and now here we are!” He raised both hands over his head.
“And if you’ll excuse us,” said Matt, “we are totally going up in that completely awesome treehouse to help do some fixing right now.”
They turned, raced each other to the ladder, and scampered out of sight.
Maggie’s face had gone red. “Hey, so, what else has been going on, Kelly?” she asked, trying to pretend she wasn’t all flustered and smiley after seeing Matt.
Kelly turned out to be full of news. She still hadn’t picked out a name for her network, but her banner—cats in space, as predicted—was coming along well. The dimmer switch on the Hub chandelier had been properly installed. Samson was doing great, and was staying out of the networks for now like the good little King of France he was.
“And how are things on the island?” I asked. “How’s Antonia? And Helene? And the crew?”
“So good! Antonia comes up to the surface every day to make sure Ben and the other Continental reps are feeding the chickens enough Cheerios.
“S
he and Helene keep talking about how cool it is that the pillow fort networks happened by accident because of Captain Emily’s loops, and now after hundreds of years they’re both on the island. Helene says it’s the magic of the trees slowly pulling things back together, no matter how far apart they got.”
“Aw, just like us,” Maggie said, tipping her head back and giving me the world’s cheesiest grin.
“Only because I can’t get away from you, you menace,” I said. “And are you finally done with whatever that is, or not?”
“Yup!” Maggie hopped up, hiding her project behind her back. “Presenting my gift to the kids of Camp Cantaloupe’s future . . . the new trapdoor!”
She held out her hands. She was holding a tiny door the size of a paperback book, with one old hinge and a little hook latch holding it in its frame.
“What?” I said. “Is that a trapdoor for, like, squirrels?”
“It’s symbolic!” said Maggie. “I scrounged up the pieces of the old Oak Door. This was all that was usable.”
“Oooh! So does it still link to the First Sofa?” asked Kelly.
Maggie shook her head. “Sadly, no. But look—I carved our names on the frame.” She ran her finger along the edge, where From Maggie and Abby, Best Friends and the date were carved in choppy letters on one side, and Sorry we broke the old one on the other.
“Aww,” said Kelly as Maggie grinned again and I bopped her on the arm.
“What now?” I asked.
“Now we go up and install it!”
We took the elevator, since Kelly hadn’t had the chance yet, and she laughed and laughed as the platform creaked us up into the tree.
“Um,” came a voice from the tangled construction zone overhead. “Anyone know whose chicken this is?”
The elevator stopped, and our headlamps found Matt, his arms full of driftwood and a floofy white chicken with a sort of white floofy hat perched on his shoulder.
“Oh, that’s Ariadne!” I told him. “She’s from the island. She kind of goes wherever she wants.”
Matt angled his neck to look at his new friend.
“Huh,” he said. “Okay.” And he and Ariadne went back to work.
The three of us stepped off the elevator. “Yay, Abs, it’s looking so good up here!” Maggie said, bopping me on the shoulder. “Kelly, I don’t want to see you anywhere near the edge.”
I looked away and grinned. Maggie was sounding more like her mom every day.
The treehouse was bustling. Mark was hoisting in the surviving half of the old ship’s wheel on a rope on the far side; Charlene was attaching a new telescope donated by Antonia to a finished section of wall; and the crew danced all over, securing lines, tying the treehouse together, and balancing on the branches like they were solid ground.
“I think the new trapdoor should go here,” Maggie said, pointing to a gap near the trunk. “So kids won’t step in it or trip if the lock gets broken or something. Anyone want to give me a hand?”
A couple of the crew were swinging down to help when there was a loud bang. The remains of the old wooden steering wheel had slipped through Mark’s hands to the floor.
“Sorry!” he said as the entire treehouse shushed him. “This thing isn’t as solid as it looks. One of the handles just snapped right off!”
“Hey, what’s that, though?” said Charlene. She was pointing to the gap in the wheel where the handle had been. We all looked, and something metallic glinted back at our headlamps.
“Oooh!” Mark pulled his rope out of the way and Charlene crouched down to tug at the metal. It pulled free, and she held up a thin, foot-long tube. “There’s, uh, there’s a cap here,” she whispered, her eyes as big as the ghost moose’s.
“Open it, open it!” said Matt.
Charlene had to dig her fingernails in and scrunch up her face like Samson that time he ate a soap bubble, but she did it. The cap opened with a pop, and a long coil of paper slid out into the light.
Matt and Kelly stepped forward to help unroll it, and we all crowded around to see.
“Cantaloupe, cantaloupe . . .” I whispered.
“Moose, moose, moose,” finished Maggie.
It was a map. A perfect map, with a scale and a key and everything, showing a collection of islands off the end of an unmarked chunk of land. There was even a dotted line leading to an X. Right at the top, stretching from corner to corner, was a drawing of an enormous, gray-tentacled octopus. I glanced over at Maggie. Her mouth was hanging open. She looked like she’d been struck by lightning.
“How old was that ship’s wheel?” one of the crew asked, breaking the collective awed silence. “And where did it come from?”
“It was an original part of the treehouse,” said Charlene. “It washed up during the same big storm as the moose.”
Matt shook his head. “And it was hiding this for all these years. It looks like you’ve got a real treasure map here.”
“Woo! Treasure!” called one of the crew.
“Pity they spelled margins wrong, though,” said Maggie, suddenly.
I blinked at her. “What?”
“There, on the edge where it should say Here There Be Margins. The last word’s spelled wrong. That’s definitely not an M at the beginning.”
“Mags, it never usually says margins. That was the joke with our map last summer. Old maps like this say something else.”
Maggie squinted at the page in the clustered glow of our headlamps. “Well, I can’t read it. Anybody want to take a guess?”
Kelly leaned in, her nose right above the ancient paper. “Dragons,” she said, quietly. “It says Here There Be Dragons.”
There was a cool, dark, starry silence. The branches swayed around us in the saltwater-scented breeze. Charlene was clutching the steering wheel. Matt and Kelly held the map. Mark shifted his coil of rope, and Maggie hugged the trapdoor with our names carved into it to her chest.
I felt a sudden lurch in my stomach, like the Shipwreck Treehouse had caught the wind and set sail, and something heavy locked behind my ribs eased, floating up into the warm, glimmering summer night.
Ariadne burped softly, and as though we’d been waiting for the signal, everyone turned to look through the gap in the branches, out west over the sea. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw something huge and sleek and dark curve up into the starlight and roll away again under the waves.
“Well,” I said, looking around at my friends, my family, my crew. “We should probably go find them, then.”
Maggie shifted beside me, pressing her shoulder against mine. “Definitely,” she said. “Absolutely. No matter what. But hey, Abs? Let’s get through summer camp first.”
Acknowledgments
They say second books are harder to write than the first, and holy cantaloupe they were right! That means the person to thank first and foremost is the best editor in the world: Elizabeth Lynch. Thank you for your unbelievable support, encouragement, and patience. Thank you for slogging through those terrible early drafts, deciphering my convoluted linking and looping charts, and giving me the time I needed to stitch it all together. Thank you for believing in Maggie and Abby in all their silliness, and for believing in me. This book would never have happened without you.
Neverending thanks as always to Emily Keyes, for pulling Maggie and Abby out of the slush pile and getting this cast of characters a home on a bookshelf.
Thank you to my family, for always cheering me on.
Thank you again to Leanne Banton, for telling twelve-year-old me I could write, and to Karen Mikolasy, for making seventeen-year-old me sit down and learn how. Teachers change lives, and both of you are still changing mine.
High fives and fancy hats to my entire team at HarperCollins! Laura Kaplan, Megan Barlog, Renée Cafiero, and Jessie Gang, you are the best crew a pirate ship, secret island, or author could ever have. And Monique Dong, I don’t know how you keep creating covers that are so perfect they make me want to cry, but please never stop.
&nb
sp; Eternal thank-yous to Amber Casali and Lindsey Newman, for more than I can ever say. Dear ones, you are my Hub, my Palace, and my Island Underneath. I am grateful every single day to have you in my life. This book is for you.
And finally, thank you to Alex Kahler. You are my patchwork scarf, my scrap of First Sofa. I truly don’t know what I would do without you and your unerring ability to know when it’s time to get pastries. (It’s always time to get pastries.) There are oceans of adventures ahead, buddy. By our powers combined.
About the Author
Photo by Cynthia St. Clair
WILL TAYLOR is a reader, writer, and honeybee fan. He lives in a pillow fort in downtown Seattle surrounded by all the seagulls and nearly all the books. When not writing, he can be found hawking caramels for a local chocolate company or completely losing his cool when he meets longhaired dachshunds.
You can visit him online at www.willtaylorbooks.com.
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Copyright
MAGGIE & ABBY AND THE SHIPWRECK TREEHOUSE. Copyright © 2019 by Will Taylor. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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