The Map Trap
Page 7
There was another long pause.
Now the signals weren’t good. Alton saw her bite her lower lip, then her jaw muscles got tense. She reached one hand up and touched her hair—which was incredibly frizzy today.
Then she looked him in the eyes and smiled a little. “And about this brain map you made? Thanks for telling me about that, too. It was brave of you. It’s no secret that this is my first year as a teacher, and I’m probably still too sensitive about what others think of me. That little brother I mention so much? He still teases me all the time, especially about my hair—he calls me Fathead! And I don’t like teasing. But I hope I’ll get better about ignoring it—I think I’ll have to!”
Abruptly, she took her phone out of the drawer again and stood up. “So, I accept your apology. I’ve got to leave now. . . . Is there anything else?”
Alton was stunned—she wasn’t even going to mention the folder!
“Um . . . I . . . no . . . I guess that’s everything.”
He got up too, and as he did, Miss Wheeling stepped around her desk, stood in front of him, and held out her hand. Instinctively, he looked her in the eyes, took her hand, and gave her a strong, firm handshake, just like his dad had taught him to.
She smiled and said, “Again, thank you, Alton.”
But their handshake felt phony to him, and her smile seemed forced. It was more like half a thank-you.
He smiled back at her anyway and stammered, “Y-you’re welcome.”
She let go of his hand, walked quickly to the back of the room, and opened the closet where she kept her coat.
Alton picked up his backpack and headed for the door. He felt totally confused, but he did remember that he hadn’t gotten his jacket after eighth period. He went to his cubby, pulled it off the coat hook—and stared.
The folder.
Only an edge was sticking out from under some books and papers, but he recognized it instantly. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Miss Wheeling looking through her purse. He pulled the folder out and stuck it into his backpack.
As he hurried toward the door, Miss Wheeling looked up and smiled. “See you tomorrow, Alton.”
He nodded awkwardly. “See you tomorrow.”
• • •
Alton texted to let his mom know he’d had to stay at school, and then he waited in the office for the late bus—which gave him a good long while to think. The bus finally arrived, and fifteen minutes into the ride home, his phone buzzed—a text from Quint.
YO DUDE—WHAT’S UP?
DID U GO HOME?
NO. TALKED WITH MISS W.
WHAAAT?
DID SHE GIVE IT UP?
NO.
WHAAAT?!!
SHE SAID NOTHING.
SO THEN U JAMMED HER ABOUT EVERYTHING, RIGHT?
NO.
WHAAAT???
I APOLOGIZED, SHE ACCEPTED.
THEN I FOUND THE FOLDER IN MY CUBBY.
MAYBE IT WAS THERE SINCE TUESDAY.
MAYBE SHE NEVER EVEN LOOKED IN IT.
EXCEPT U KNOW SHE HAD IT!
CUZ U KNOW IT WASN’T IN YR CUBBY.
AND U GOT THOSE NOTES!
WHAT NOTES?
WHAAAT? DA NOTES!!!
FROM EL MAPNAPPO!
I DON’T HAVE ANY NOTES FROM HER.
DO YOU?
NO . . . WAIT—WHAAAT??
I’M NOT GETTIN THIS, DUDE!
IT’S OVER.
IT HAS TO BE LIKE IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.
AND I’M GOOD WITH THAT.
CLICK—GOTCHA.
SO . . . CAN I SEE THE REST OF THOSE MAPS SOMETIME?
MAPS? WHAT MAPS?
WHAAAT? IN YR FOLDER!
WHAT FOLDER?
OH—RIGHT. IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.
LATER, DUDE.
LATER—DUDE.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE REST OF THE WAY
November to June is a long time, but it didn’t feel that way to Alton. The rest of sixth grade went flashing past.
Quint Harrison turned out to be a real friend, the best one Alton had ever had. By the end of the year, Alton was using a lot more slang, and Quint was using a lot less.
The abandoned-railroads project ended up being a pretty big deal. The main part, of course, was a map, and the design Quint and Alton came up with did a great job of blending present-day hiking and biking information with the history of the old railroad companies. The map also showed how the railroads had changed the state’s economy and politics and how life had been improved for generations of farmers, miners, meat-packers, and factory workers. Mr. Troy thought the map was so good that he sent a copy to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. Three weeks later the department director herself sent a letter to Alton and Quint asking for permission to post a version of their map online for the public to enjoy—with both of their names on it. They said yes.
Mrs. Buckley stopped Alton in the hall one day near the end of January.
“You know, Alton, you never brought me that map about how much I said ‘um’—did you forget?”
Alton smiled and shook his head. “No, I remembered. But I think that map might never be seen again.” Which was true—mostly.
He had taken his folder of secret maps straight home that afternoon in October, but he couldn’t make himself rip them up. Instead he’d hidden them deep inside a box of his old second- and third-grade school projects that his mom had tucked away in the attic. He imagined that in five or ten years, they might be interesting to look at again. Just not anytime soon. And they would be seen by no one but him.
Before the principal walked away, Alton remembered something important. He said, “Um . . . there’s something else I need to tell you about that map. Remember the first fire drill back in October? I think Miss Wheeling got in trouble because I didn’t go outside with the rest of her class that day. Well . . . I stayed inside on purpose during the drill so I could hunt for that map, and bunch of other ones too. So it wasn’t Miss Wheeling’s fault. And I wanted you to know that.”
Mrs. Buckley frowned. “You should have told me about this sooner. Did you explain this to Miss Wheeling?”
Alton nodded. “Yes, a couple days after it happened.”
“Really?” Mrs. Buckley looked puzzled. “Because she never mentioned it to me.” Then the principal smiled. “Maybe that’s because Miss Wheeling didn’t want to get you in trouble. Well, I’m very glad to know about this, Alton—thank you. And I’ll get it all sorted out.”
March brought the annual crush of standardized testing, and after that, it felt like the days flipped by faster and faster.
Sometime in April, Alton decided that Elena was sort of cute, and he mentioned it to Quint one day.
He narrowed his eyes and looked at Alton. “So, talk to her.”
“But, like . . . what would I say?”
Quint thought a second. “I got it! Tell her that once upon a time she was on this map you made!”
The next day Alton did just that, and the two of them had a long conversation with a lot of laughing. Alton even got brave enough to tell Elena she’d been featured on that map because her perfume had seemed kind of strong to him.
On a Saturday afternoon in May he and Quint met up at the mall with Elena and Catherine to get pizza, and Alton noticed that Elena wasn’t wearing any perfume at all. He decided he kind of missed it. And he told her so.
Alton had stopped keeping a record of the things Miss Wheeling talked about. He even stopped thinking about her hair—and it looked like she had, too. She wore it the same way every day, pulled back into a tight little ponytail that was held in place with an industrial-strength rubber band.
Except Alton couldn’t help noticing that Miss Wheeling still went on and on and on about how great the metric system was, and how Americans needed to wake up and measure everything the way the rest of the world did. Alton decided she was right, and to do his part, every new map he made included both English and metric measurements.
An
d Alton Robert Ziegler did make new maps—plenty of them. While the ground was still frozen, he charted all the wetlands areas in and around Harper’s Grove, and when the weather warmed up, he used a sound-level meter app on his smartphone to rate how loud the spring frogs sang at each location.
In April he rode his bike up and down every single street in town, recording his cell phone’s signal strength each half-block, and then organized all the information on a color-coded grid.
And late one night he printed out all fifty-seven names and addresses from the contacts list in his phone, and located each of them on a map of the United States.
Then he realized that he was paying way too much attention to his phone.
And speaking of his phone, one day in late May he got a text from Heather. She said she had just scored a FTF—a “First to Find,” which is a big deal in the world of geocaching. She had spotted a mysterious geocache posting on an obscure website—a geocache that had been hidden by none other than SirMapsAlot. It had taken her a while to figure it all out, but the clues and the coordinates had led Heather to Mrs. Buckley’s office and to a chair just left of her desk. And Alton had grinned and texted back, CONGRATS! Because he remembered very clearly how he had stuck one of those little magnetic key boxes onto the bottom of that chair the day he and Quint had visited Mrs. Buckley. And inside the box he’d left a log—a folded yellow note card with the office coordinates written on it—along with some swag: three of his customized rubber bands.
Heather had texted again: SO HOW DID YOU GET THAT HIDDEN IN THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE??
And Alton had replied: IT’S A LONG STORY—ASK ME AGAIN IN FIVE YEARS!
For a while during the spring, Alton got stuck on the idea of using circles instead of rectangles as the main shape for his maps. One of his circle maps was the sixth-grade lunch period shown as a set of ten different-size circles, each with the same center, and the size of each ring indicated the noise level in the cafeteria at three-minute intervals. And how did he measure the sound intensity? With his phone, of course.
But mostly, Alton stayed away from making maps about school. There was a very large world out there, and it began demanding nearly all his attention.
Suddenly, it was June, and then it was the last half day of school.
Miss Wheeling and Mr. Troy had a party in the library for the graduating sixth graders. Standing around, eating doughnuts and drinking juice with Quint and Elena, Alton felt great about everything. It had been a terrific school year—the best one yet.
But all during the party, Alton kept hoping Miss Wheeling would quietly pull him aside and whisper, You already know this, Alton, but I was the one who sent you those notes, who made you stop wearing your map T-shirts for two days, and who sent you to ask Mrs. Buckley about her “um”-ing! And I’m sorry about that, and I really do forigve you with all my heart—for everything!
But it never happened. The party ended, and everyone went to back to their homerooms to do a final cleanout of the cubbies and to get their report cards.
Alton had heard that in the neighboring town of Wayview, the schools had stopped sending report cards home with kids—the parents were e-mailed or texted a code, and then they accessed their kids’ grade reports online. And sitting there, he thought that it would make an interesting map—to see which towns in the state had shifted to e-grades. . . .
He still liked the old system.
As Miss Wheeling handed him his sealed envelope, there was no special smile, no little wink, nothing to indicate that anything out of the ordinary had passed between them way back during that last week of October.
But something had . . . right?
• • •
The way it worked in his family, report cards didn’t get opened up until both his mom and dad were home. Alton was in no hurry, and he certainly wasn’t worried. He knew he’d been doing good work, and he was sure he had gotten good grades—in fact, mostly As.
And around five thirty, that was what he and his mom and dad saw.
“This is great, Alton,” said his mom. “We’re very proud of you!”
His little sister’s grades were excellent too—one check, and all the rest check-plusses.
His dad grinned at both of them. “This calls for pizza and ice cream and a movie—all in favor, shout aye!”
“Aye!”
“Great! Everybody in the car in exactly four minutes . . . from—now!”
“Wait a second. . . .” His mom frowned.
She was squinting at Alton’s report card, and she held it out to him, pointing.
“What in the world does this mean?”
On the back of the report card he saw a sketch, roughly drawn with pencil, but definitely the image of a brain—his brain! It had been divided up into five sections, from largest to smallest: MAPS, PIZZA, CELL PHONE, GIRLS, and near the bottom, a tiny little area labeled SCIENCE CLASS.
He grinned. “That’s just Miss Wheeling’s idea of a joke—it doesn’t mean anything.”
That was what Alton said, but it simply wasn’t true.
Nothing could have meant more.
Andrew Clements is the author of the enormously popular Frindle, and more than ten million copies of his books have been sold. He has been nominated for a multitude of state awards and has won two Christopher Awards and an Edgar Award. His popular works include About Average, Troublemaker, Extra Credit, Lost and Found, No Talking, Room One, Lunch Money, and the Benjamin Pratt & the Keepers of the School series, to name a few. Andrew Clements lives with his wife in Maine, and they have four grown children. Visit him at AndrewClements.com.
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Also by Andrew Clements
A Million Dots
About Average
Benjamin Pratt & the Keepers of the School
We the Children
Fear Itself
The Whites of Their Eyes
In Harm’s Way
We Hold These Truths
Big Al
Big Al and Shrimpy
Dogku
Extra Credit
Frindle
The Handiest Things in the World
Jake Drake, Bully Buster
Jake Drake, Class Clown
Jake Drake, Know-It-All
Jake Drake, Teacher’s Pet
The Jacket
The Janitor’s Boy
The Landry News
The Last Holiday Concert
Lost and Found
Lunch Money
No Talking
The Report Card
Room One
The School Story
Troublemaker
A Week in the Woods
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2014 by Andrew Clements
Interior illustrations copyright © 2014 by Dan Andreasen
Jacket illustration copyright © 2014 by Jim LaMarche
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Interior design by Mike Rosamilia, jacket design by Russell Gordon
The text for this book is set in Bembo.
The illustrations for this book are rendered in pencil.
0614 FFG
First Edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clements, Andrew, 1949-
The map trap / Andrew Clements ; illustrated by Dan Andreasen. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: Sixth-grader Alton Ziegler loves maps, and when his folder of secret maps is stolen, he begins getting notes with orders that he must obey to get the maps back but, with the help of a popular classmate, he just might succeed before his teacher, principal, or someone else learns he has been studying and mapping things about them.
ISBN 978-1-4169-9727-6 (hc.)
ISBN 978-1-4169-9729-0 (eBook)
[1. Maps—Fiction. 2. Cartography—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Stealing—Fiction. 6. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.C59118Map 2014
[Fic]—dc23 2014006821