Let's Mooove!
Page 1
Where on earth would you go in a magic camper?
“I’d go to the beaches of Hawaii, collect shells, and play in the ocean all day.” —Eli
“I would go to the Amazon rain forest.” —Haley
“I’d go to Uranus. But before I left Earth, I’d go to the park.” —Theo
“Florida because my grandparents are there.” —Gus
“Either Long Beach Island, New Jersey, or Pittsburgh. I can’t decide.” —Eleanor
Travel with Finn and Molly in
#1 Let’s Mooove!
#2 The Show Must Go On
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Courtney Sheinmel and Bianca Turetsky
Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2019 by Stevie Lewis
Excerpt from Magic on the Map #2: The Show Must Go On copyright © 2019 by Courtney Sheinmel and Bianca Turetsky
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks and A Stepping Stone Book and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sheinmel, Courtney, author. | Turetsky, Bianca, author. | Lewis, Stevie, illustrator.
Title: Let’s mooove! / Courtney Sheinmel and Bianca Turetsky; illustrated by Stevie Lewis.
Other titles: Let us mooove! | Let’s move!
Description: New York: Random House, [2019] | Series: Magic on the map; #1 | “A Stepping Stone Book.” | Summary: On the last day of second grade, twins Finn and Molly discover a magical camper in their driveway that takes them from Ohio to Colorado, where they must save a famous cow.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018035403 | ISBN 978-1-63565-166-9 (trade) | ISBN 978-1-63565-167-6 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-1-63565-168-3 (ebook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Cattle stealing—Fiction. | Recreational vehicles—Fiction. | Magic—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Twins—Fiction. | Colorado—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.S54124 Let 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9781635651683
This book has been officially leveled by using the F&P Text Level Gradient™ Leveling System.
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v5.4
a
For Joel E. Sheinmel
—C.S.
For Eli Turetsky
—B.T.
Contents
Cover
Travel with Finn and Molly in Magic on the Map!
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
United States of America Map
Chapter One: Driveway Surprise
Chapter Two: Magic Camper
Chapter Three: Buckle Up and Don’t Puke
Chapter Four: Holy Guacamole
Chapter Five: The Most Famous Cow in Colorado
Chapter Six: Howdy, Partner
Chapter Seven: The Weirdest Day
Chapter Eight: Follow That Cow!
Chapter Nine: Rogue Cowboys
Chapter Ten: Swing Your Partner
Chapter Eleven: Home, Sweet Home
Colorado State Facts
Colorado Map
Excerpt from Magic on the Map #2: The Show Must Go On
On the last day of second grade, Finn and Molly Parker came home to find a camper in their driveway. It was white with one orange stripe and one yellow stripe. It had a rounded roof and three windows on the sides.
The twins checked to make sure the school bus had let them off at the right house. Yep. This was 24 Birchwood Drive. With its hunter-green mailbox out front and purple Johnny-jump-up flowers in the window boxes. But you couldn’t see the window boxes now. They were blocked by the camper, which was as big as a boat!
Molly turned to Finn. “What’s this doing here?” she asked.
“How would I know?” Finn asked. “I just got here, same as you.”
Molly and Finn walked up the driveway slowly and carefully, as if the camper were a UFO. Finn was wearing his favorite baseball cap. It was from his Little League team, the Moonwalkers, and he never took it off.
Well, not never. He took it off at school because hats were not allowed during class. And he took it off each night when he had to shower before bed. But every other minute of the day, he wore it, even when he was sleeping.
Except right now, he took the hat off and shielded his eyes with his hand, peeking through the camper’s tinted windows.
Their dad jumped out of the driver’s side door.
“AH!” the twins yelled in surprise.
“Dad, you scared us,” Finn said. “What are you doing home?”
“And what’s this?” Molly added.
“It’s a camper! Isn’t it beautiful?” Mr. Parker said. He patted the side of the camper as if it were a new puppy. “Now we can take the trip I’ve always dreamed of taking.”
“What trip?” Finn asked.
“A family road trip!” their dad exclaimed. “We can go anywhere our hearts desire.”
“That’s not true. We can’t go to Bora Bora,” Molly said.
“Huh?” Finn asked.
“Bora Bora is an island in Tahiti,” Molly said. “It’s in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which means we can’t drive there. Anywhere we travel in the camper has to be on this continent.”
“That’s right, Mol,” their dad said. “Can’t get anything past you! But there are lots of other places these wheels can take us this summer! We can go anywhere in North America. Doesn’t that sound great?”
“I get carsick,” Molly said. “Remember the time we drove to Grandma’s house and I threw up all over Finn?”
“I remember,” Finn said. “It was so disgusting!”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Molly replied.
“But you didn’t have to do it on me,” Finn said. “Do you get camper-sick, too?”
“Probably,” Molly said.
“Gross,” Finn said, placing his cap back on his head.
“Kids, where’s that Parker family spirit?” their dad asked.
Just then, Mrs. Parker stepped out of the front door, her cell phone pressed to her ear. Her eyes widened at the sight of a camper in her driveway. “Carol, I’m going to have to call you back,” she said. She lowered the phone and shook her head. “What in the world…?”
“Family vacation, honey!” Mr. Parker said.
Mrs. Parker’s eyes scanned the driveway. “Where’s your car?”
“I traded with Professor Vega in the astrophysics department!” Mr. Parker exclaimed. “It was a steal of a deal! The car only sat five, and this camper sleeps eight!”
“Oh no,” Mrs. Parker said. “You have to trade back. This takes up the entire front yard. And it’s crushing my poor marigolds!”
“Phew,” Molly and Finn sighed with relief.
The camper would be returned tomorrow. Dad would get his regular old car back. Ev
erything would be normal again.
But that night, Molly couldn’t fall asleep. She tossed and turned until there was a faint morning light peeking through her window shade.
Molly put on her fuzzy bunny slippers and carefully tiptoed down the stairs. She wanted to look at the camper one last time, and maybe go inside it before Dad traded it back. She couldn’t get carsick (or camper-sick) if it was standing still.
She quietly slipped outside and opened the unlocked camper door. To her surprise, someone was already there.
Finn was in the back of the camper, dressed in his gray-and-blue pajamas, matching slippers, and, of course, his baseball cap.
“What are you doing here?” Molly and Finn asked at the same time.
Molly was going to say, “jinx,” but then Finn wouldn’t be allowed to talk, and she really did want to know the answer.
“I’ve never been inside a camper before,” Finn said. “I just wanted to see what it was like.”
“Yeah,” Molly said. “Me too.”
The twins didn’t look much alike. Molly’s long hair was reddish-brown and wavy. Her eyes were the color of chocolate Milk Duds, just like their dad’s. Finn had hair the color of dark chocolate, and it was clipped so short you couldn’t tell if it was straight or curly. His eyes were as blue as the ocean, just like their mom’s. But even though Finn and Molly looked different, and even though they liked different things, sometimes they were thinking the exact same thing at the exact same time. That was the case right now.
“Do you know what I’m thinking?” Finn asked his sister.
She nodded. “You’re thinking we should explore this thing.”
They walked the length of the main room of the camper. It was a kitchen, a dining room, and a bedroom all rolled into one. The furniture was squished close together and bolted to the wall. “I bet they did that so it doesn’t slide around when the camper is moving,” Molly said.
“I knew that,” Finn told her. He pulled a lever on the couch and it turned into a bed. The counter turned into a table. The cabinet turned into a TV.
“Everything has to be two-in-one because there’s not enough room for stuff to just be what it is,” Molly added. “The camper is bigger than a car but smaller than a house.”
“I knew that, too,” Finn replied.
In the very back of the camper, there was a bathroom the size of a tiny closet. Outside the bathroom, just above the sink, a bulletin board was bolted to the wall. A map of the world had been pinned up, just like the one in Ms. Gitty’s second-grade classroom. Molly undid the safety lock on the cabinet beneath the sink and found a container of multicolored pushpins. She took a red pin and pushed it right into where their town was on the map. Harvey Falls, Ohio. She and Finn had lived there all their lives.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Finn told her. “It’s not our property. At least, it won’t be as soon as Dad trades it back for the car.”
“I want the next people to know we were here,” Molly explained. She stared at her home state of Ohio. Her house and her town and her state had always seemed rather big to Molly. But on this world map, her state was the size of a wad of gum, her town was the size of a pinprick, and her house was too small to be on the map at all. Molly sighed.
“What’s wrong?” her brother asked.
“It looks lonely,” she said.
“The pushpin?” he asked.
“Yes.” Molly sighed again.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Finn told her. “Pushpins aren’t alive. They don’t get lonely.”
Molly knew that her brother was right. Besides, it was probably time to go back to bed anyway.
But Finn had moved to the front of the camper, where there were two big leather seats. One was the passenger seat and one was the driver’s seat. Finn had never sat in the driver’s seat before, but now was his chance to try. He sat down and put his hands on the steering wheel. His legs were too short to reach the pedals.
“Where to?” he called back to his sister. “If we go east, we could go to…to…what state is east again? I can’t remember.”
Molly sat down in the passenger seat and rolled her eyes. “Pennsylvania,” she said. “Didn’t you pay attention to anything Ms. Gitty said?”
Finn shrugged. It was hard to pay attention in class sometimes, especially during baseball season. “Or we could go west,” he said. “To whatever state that is.” He twisted the wheel right and left. “Or we could go to France!”
“France is another country,” Molly told her brother. “On a different continent.”
“Fine. We could go up to Canada, though. That’s our continent, right?”
Molly nodded. “Up north.”
“Or we could go way, way, waaaaay down, all the way to Mexico!” Finn said. “Vroom! Vroooooom!”
“You shouldn’t be playing around like that,” Molly told her brother. “Mom and Dad always say cars aren’t toys. A camper isn’t, either!”
“Relax,” Finn said. “We don’t have any keys. We can’t really go anywhere.”
He twisted the wheel some more. Molly fingered the blue-and-purple friendship bracelet on her wrist. That’s what she did when she was nervous. She’d made the bracelet herself, and she wanted to give it to a friend. She just hadn’t decided who that would be yet.
Finn pressed the button next to the steering wheel to turn on the radio, but nothing happened. “I wish we did have the keys,” he said. “It’s much more fun to pretend-drive when you have music to sing along to.”
He began to sing his favorite song out loud: “Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd…”
Molly examined the little TV screen in the middle of the dashboard. There were also red buttons labeled POWER and VOLUME, plus up and down arrows in blue.
“It’s weird that there’s a TV up here,” Molly said. “Drivers shouldn’t watch TV. It’s unsafe.” She pressed the POWER button, even though she knew that it wouldn’t work without the keys to turn the camper on.
But the strangest thing happened. The TV screen lit up, first a flash of white, then blue, and finally the word WELCOME popped up on the screen, each letter in bright red.
A deep voice came out of the speaker. “Hello,” it said. “Who are you?”
Finn almost fell out of his seat, and Molly actually did fall out of hers!
“Hello,” the robot-like voice called. “Hello, hello, hellooooo?”
Molly glanced up at her brother from the camper floor. “Finn…,” she said softly.
“Your name is Finn?” the voice asked. “Funny, you don’t sound like a Finn.”
The twins’ eyes moved to the same place: the keyhole on the right side of the steering wheel. The empty keyhole. Then they looked at each other. Their eyes were wide, and their mouths hung open in shock.
“How do you do, Finn?” the voice asked.
“I’m not—I’m not Finn,” Molly said, climbing back into her seat. “Finn is my brother.”
“Don’t talk to it, Molly,” Finn whispered.
“Why shouldn’t she talk to me?” the voice asked.
“Because you’re a camper!” Finn said. And then he clamped his mouth shut because he realized now he was talking to it.
“Young man,” the voice said, sounding slightly insulted, “tell me something. Have you ever talked to a camper before? Has a camper ever talked to you?”
“No,” Finn said. “That was my point.”
“Precisely,” the voice said. “That is because I am not a camper. I’m a Planet Earth Transporter.”
“Huh?” Finn said.
“You can call me PET for short,” the voice said. “I know every street, highway, parkway, freeway, cul-de-sac, interstate, dirt road, and wooded pathway there is.”
“My mom’s car knows all that, too!” Molly said. “It’s called GPS.”
PET made a harrumph noise. “GPS.
Big whoop. There’s nothing hard about being a computer that tells the driver to use normal roads. Normal roads have traffic, potholes, and stoplights. Any old machine can do that,” PET said. “But I travel using the internet.”
“You can’t travel on the internet,” Molly said. “You can only log on to look up information.”
“Why do they call it a superhighway, then?” PET asked.
“Because—because…,” the twins stuttered, but neither of them knew the answer.
“I can prove it,” PET said. “Just tell me where to go. Anywhere you want.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to training camp,” Finn said. “The major league baseball teams all train in Florida or Arizona, but that’s in March.”
“No way!” Molly said. “I’m not going to watch a bunch of boring teams in a boring game—”
“It’s not boring!” Finn said.
“Well, we can’t go,” PET said.
“I knew it!” Molly said. She turned to Finn. “Information travels on the internet, but people don’t!”
“Actually,” PET said, “since spring training is in March, and it is presently June, I’m unable to take you there. I am many things, but a time machine is not one of them. Maybe I should pick the first destination. We’ll start close by, practically in your own backyard.”
“Why do we need a camper to go somewhere in our backyard?” Finn muttered.
“Buckle your seat belts!” PET said.
The screen lit up. The camper started humming and shaking. Then there was a near-blinding flash of bright white light.
“Finn!” Molly shouted.
“Don’t puke on me again!” Finn shouted back.
“Don’t worry,” PET said. “We’ll be there in a jiff.”