Between Worlds

by Skip Brittenham

  Being a “Jackson” was a lifelong burden. Because Marshall’s parents behaved as though they were inherently superior to the other townspeople, they were generally despised, and the locals passed down their feelings to their children, some of whom hated Marshall on principle. A handful of classmates, led by Marshall’s longtime nemesis, Jim Campbell, had bullied him since grade school, solely because he was a Jackson. Fighting back only seemed to turn up the volume of their hostility, so Marshall had decided acceptance was his best option. This was the crummy state of affairs he’d grown accustomed to.

  His loneliness and melancholy were like a wet wool blanket encasing his soul. Social networks? Not for him. He’d almost thrown up after he sampled what some of his classmates were posting about him online, so he never went back. He had a recurring nightmare in which he was trapped on a human hamster wheel, doomed to spend eternity living his high school years in Eden Grove over and over.

  To keep his sanity intact, Marshall planned and executed clever pranks on his worst tormentors. For instance, he once broke into Jim’s locker and altered his midterm take-home math quiz by replacing Jim’s wrong answers with correct ones. Jim was terrible at math, and had been failing the course, so his teacher turned the dumbfounded fool in to the principal for cheating. He was suspended for a week.

  Never experiencing even a modicum of a viable high school social life gave Marshall ample free time, which he mainly spent playing World of Warcraft. He was an Undead Warlock, and led a bloodthirsty band of followers in the Horde to dozens of victories against the Alliance. Other players respected and envied his avatar’s leadership and fighting skills. Unfortunately, when Marshall passed through the school’s main entrance, he shed the mantle of superhero and became an outcast.

  CHAPTER 5

  SOPHOMORE YEAR, a bright bolt of lightning had struck when Mayberry transferred to his school. She seemed to dislike the other students as much as they disliked him, and she stood out like a brightly plumed peacock in a flock of pigeons.

  After discreetly watching her for a day or two, Marshall had finally introduced himself. Since she didn’t reject his company, he’d hung around, asking questions about her life in New York City and giving her the rundown on the school’s various characters. By the end of Mayberry’s first week, he knew he’d finally found a kindred spirit. A glowing buoy of hope named Mayberry Hansen floated by his side, parting the choppy waters of his loneliness.

  To him, Mayberry was the embodiment of the oddball cool kids he hung out with online. As they got to know each other, she introduced him to new and obscure music, and invited him over to watch somewhat bizarre nihilist movies. She even introduced him to wacky comics like Naruto and Tank Girl. He thought she was incredibly talented . . . and beautiful. His mindless classmates thought of her as just another off-center dork like him.

  Even though Mayberry was the first girl he’d ever really spent quality time with—and certainly the prettiest—she became his closest friend. It wasn’t long before he was always thinking about her. As the weeks passed, his attraction grew, getting harder and harder for him to conceal. His palms started to sweat and he felt a strangely unnerving pleasure in her presence. Even when they weren’t together, images of her were always popping into his mind. He’d never seriously considered having a girlfriend before, and knew telling Mayberry how he felt might ruin their friendship, but he couldn’t help wondering if she could ever see him as more than just a friend. For now, he’d decided it was safer to accept their friendship the way it was rather than risk losing it.

  CHAPTER 6

  MAYBERRY BURST through the front door and dumped her black patent-leather backpack on the floor.

  “I’m home,” she called out to the flowers that sat on the foyer’s end table. She pulled off her jacket and kicked off her shoes, then headed for the living room.

  Her mom was out in the field doing research. Her dad was sitting on the couch with his laptop propped up on some pillows. He pulled his legs down and patted the seat next to him.

  “Hi, kiddo,” he said. “How’d your audition go?”

  She shook her head, refusing his invitation. “An absolute joy, from start to finish,” she said. “You can’t even imagine.”

  He raised his eyebrows and wrinkled his nose. “Does that mean you got a part?”

  “I got what I deserved,” she said with finality.

  Life was always throwing her curveballs she couldn’t identify or hit. She certainly wasn’t batting home runs at school, and she was no domestic goddess, either. Her mom once joked that Mayberry risked burning down the house just trying to make toast. Nonetheless, she headed toward the kitchen. Chocolate chip cookies were her one and only specialty. Measuring, mixing, stirring, and rolling the tasty dough into neat circles gave her great satisfaction. Breathing deeply as the kitchen filled with the sweet aroma of cookies baking never failed to set her mind at ease. Plus, after only eight minutes in the oven, voilà! She had delicious cookies to eat, filled with extra helpings of chocolate.

  It was a win-win.

  CHAPTER 7

  MAYBERRY MUNCHED a fresh cookie while poring over the full-color satellite map that was pasted on the wall of her mother’s office.

  More than four feet wide by three feet tall, the map’s detailed photographs covered over a hundred fifty square miles of the area’s forests. The map was marked by numbered red dots that identified the sites her mother still wanted to explore, and an army of blue dots confirmed the ones she’d already visited. Most of the blue dots pinpointed locations that were miles away from Eden Grove, while the red dots represented the local forests she hadn’t visited yet.

  Mayberry had a knack for operating complex instruments that surpassed her mom’s talents, so she’d volunteered to act as her mom’s tech guru. This, coupled with her love for and understanding of science, made her a brilliant—and free—assistant.

  Marshall texted Mayberry: :/ You okay? Feel like company?

  Sure, she texted back. Come on over.

  The sheer tonnage of gear crammed into the workspace was enough to make a hoarder cry. There were no fewer than three high-speed computers, an electron microscope, a gas chromatograph, a mass spectrometer, and scores of more complicated equipment that would have been foreign to even a knowledgeable tech geek. Her mom’s pride and joy was a leased epifluorescence microscope that could identify and record the reflected glow of a single molecule. Stacked cardboard boxes of spiral notebooks filled with her mother’s scribbled notes crowded one corner of the room.

  Line after line of photos of individual aspen trees and groves were tacked to the walls and marked with numbered blue dots that corresponded to the dots on the satellite map. Also clipped to the individual tree photos were greatly magnified images of the cross sections of core samples taken by her mother and matched with the results of a DNA analytic program. The dozens of small metal specimen containers that held the core samples were stacked in the corner, numbered to match the appropriate blue dots.

  Mayberry cut careful cross sections from some untested core samples, took microscopic pictures, and methodically cataloged the photos. When her mom had time after all the data was obtained, she’d determine whether the aspens in this part of the country were healthy or diseased like so many of the aspen forests in the west.

  There was a rap on the front door, then the sound of her father answering. After some low murmurs, she heard someone clomping upstairs toward the office. Marshall stuck his head through the doorway and waited for her to wave him in. After she did, he grinned and strolled into the room. He knew her mom was a scientist, but had never seen the office before, and his eyes opened wider as he appraised the room’s contents.

  “What’s up with all this?” he asked, walking around in circles and clasping his hands together, as if to keep them from reaching out and touching the instruments. “And what are you doing with it?”

  Mayber
ry pulled off her white latex gloves and sat in the desk chair. “My mom’s studying local aspen trees to see how the recent changes in climate patterns have affected their health.”

  “Sounds interesting,” he said, looking at the dots on the satellite map and then the tree photos.

  “It’s pretty cool. She’s lucky I like science.” Mayberry glanced up at Marshall from under her long lashes, and her lips twisted into a barely discernable smirk. “Proving the effects of climate change is the priority, but she hopes to find the world’s biggest quaking aspen colony while she’s at it.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll explain. The most massive and maybe the oldest single organism on Earth is a quaking aspen colony that lives on the shores of Fish Lake in south-central Utah. It covers more than a hundred and six acres, and weighs more than thirteen million pounds. If my mom can find a bigger aspen grove that’s a single colony—meaning all part of one tree—she’ll be famous.”

  “That’s cool,” he said, crossing his arms and pulling his wool sweater off over his head. “But aren’t redwoods the oldest trees?”

  “Not even,” she said. “There are two really old trees in the Sierra Nevada Mountains—a giant sequoia that’s two hundred forty-seven feet high and at least three thousand two hundred years old, and a bristlecone pine that’s more than four thousand seven hundred years old. But biologists think some quaking aspen colonies may be over eighty thousand years old.”

  “Seriously? How do they get so old? And big?” Marshall said.

  “They’re big because the individual aspens you see above ground are actually offshoots of one tree bound together by a giant root system. They’re old because even when some of the grove’s individual trees or roots wither and die, they’re replaced by clones that are part of the larger underground organism, and they keep dying and being reborn again and again.

  “It’s a ton of extra work for my mom, though, because you can’t tell if it’s a quaking aspen colony by checking the DNA of just one piece of wood—you have to take samples encompassing the whole grove. If Mom actually finds a big grove, I’ll use the instruments in this room to figure out its age.”

  Marshall ran a hand through his hair. “Wow. I knew you were into science, but I had no idea you were this into science.”

  Mayberry blushed and shrugged.

  CHAPTER 8

  MARSHALL STROLLED BACK to the satellite map and pressed his index finger into a relatively big red-dotted aspen grove. “That’s the aspen grove the town council likes to call the Mystery Forest,” he said, looking down at Mayberry, who was standing beside him now. “It’s just outside of town.”

  Mayberry’s hands involuntarily shot out and grabbed Marshall’s wrists. “What?”

  “Consider yourself lucky that you haven’t heard the stupid stories about it millions of times.” He looked down at his wrists, smiling, and Mayberry let go. “The town council invented myths about it to attract tourists to the forest, but too many people got lost, so you need a permit to get in now. Basically, it’s just a really big aspen grove in the middle of a pine forest.”

  “Weird,” she said, frowning.

  “Exactly. The coolest myth they invented is about a tree that lives at the exact center of the forest. If you find it, and ask the right way, the tree will grant your wish. Now that we’re talking about it, it seems like I should have found it years ago and wished for a new life, ha-ha.”

  “That’s awesome. A Wishing Tree. Tell me more.”

  He pursed his lips, thinking. “Okay, one hiker disappeared and was never found. Not even a trace. And one dude who did get back—he’d had dark hair and it turned white in the forest, and he went completely nuts in there. And when I was in eighth grade, this kid in the class a year behind me went in and they eventually found him there in a coma.”

  “Whoa. That’s strange,” she exclaimed. “There’s got to be some kind of explanation for the myth. Maybe one tree is creepier looking than the rest of them, or just bigger. Forget the permits. Let’s go look for the magic tree this weekend. My parents are going to New York for work on Friday night. They won’t be back until next Thursday. Anyway, it’ll be fun for me because I’ve never hiked through a real forest.”

  Mayberry twirled winningly, and Marshall laughed.

  “If you want,” he said, a dubious expression on his face. He was no outdoorsman, but he couldn’t say no to Mayberry. Maybe his technology could save him.

  CHAPTER 9

  MARSHALL GOT UP EARLY on Saturday morning. He was excited about hanging out with Mayberry, but felt a general sense of anxiety about the trip. If they were caught in the restricted area, the Forest Service could fine each of them a thousand dollars, and he didn’t have a thousand dollars. He tried to channel his energy into preparing for the trip, throwing water and snacks in a backpack and finding the fancy GPS unit he’d got in exchange for helping some guy with his server.

  At around eight A.M., Mayberry texted, telling him she was waiting outside. He pulled on his backpack and shuffled downstairs.

  Mayberry was leaning on her pristine red mountain bike’s handlebars, waiting for him to mount his own dinged and dented green bike. She smiled and raised her eyebrows. “You ready, Marshall?”

  “Sure,” he said halfheartedly.

  “We don’t have to do this,” she said, picking up his dour mood.

  Marshall responded by gearing up and pedaling toward the forest.

  Mayberry had abandoned her usual school uniform of baggy blacks for a colorful hiking outfit: tight jeans and a snug yellow pullover, topped by a loose red puffer vest. Even though she was dressed fairly simply, she wasn’t trying to hide her body. The overall impact was—well—really great. Marshall’s heart beat harder as he looked at her. Don’t go there, he warned himself. So far their relationship had been totally cloudless, and he didn’t want to risk screwing that up.

  “What’s up?” she asked, pulling her bike up beside his.

  “Nothing,” he replied, waving vaguely at the scenery. “It’s just . . . really pretty here.”

  “This is going to be amazing,” she said, reaching out a finger to ding her bike’s bell.

  In another mile, they pulled onto the shoulder of the narrow dirt road to let a beat-up Chevy pickup rattle past. Soon after that they rode into a lot that was marked MYSTERY FOREST PARKING. It was crisp and sunny out, but the only vehicle there was a battered green jeep with a peeling Forest Service sticker on its door.

  They dismounted and slid their bikes under some bushes at the edge of the lot, just in case.

  CHAPTER 10

  A STRAIGHT-BACKED, wooden slat bench sat in the shade cast by the dilapidated log cabin overlooking the meadow. The park ranger was sprawled across it, snoring like a sawmill, and wearing a uniform he must have acquired sixty pounds ago. A paperback novel titled Shauna’s Romance was open and resting on his gut. Gracing the book’s cover was a heavily muscled man with long, blond rock-star hair, embracing a scantily clad woman.

  It would be laughably easy for Mayberry and Marshall to slip past him and head into the forest.

  “I can hardly wait to get in there,” she whispered to Marshall, reaching out to squeeze his arm. She felt like a city girl on her first field trip to the country.

  “Me too,” Marshall responded, a little lightheaded from her touch. This time he actually meant it.

  She read some of the signs facing the parking lot as she stretched the kinks out of her back. One noted that the Sioux Indians considered the Mystery Forest to be a sacred place from which their medicine man’s spirit could journey to another world. Another claimed that a special tree inside granted wishes to those with a noble heart. She had every intention of finding that giant aspen and trying it out, but as far as she was concerned, science always ruled. The real world was a bizarre enough place without bringing supernatural claptrap into it. She smiled gle
efully when she noticed the two yellow NO TRESPASSING signs posted by the ends of the fence. Forbidden Territory loomed ahead.

  Mayberry and Marshall climbed the fence, startling a herd of grazing mule deer. Marshall’s face broke out in a smile, and he shrugged as the deer darted away. After a short trek across the meadow, they reached a covered wooden bridge that spanned a narrow river. Leaves and other debris floated in the gentle current, and something splashed into the water as they stepped onto the bridge’s creaky timbers.

  Mayberry paused for a second to admire the stand of pines in the forest they were about to enter, then moved forward, zipping her vest tighter as she crossed into the shade of the trees. The temperature difference was vast—it was as if someone had whipped off her blanket on a cold winter’s night.

  “Let’s go that way,” Marshall said, pointing to a trail. He placed his palm in the small of Mayberry’s back and pushed her forward gently, and the two started up the trail at an admirable clip. Accustomed to exercising only her brain and typing fingers, beads of sweat soon broke on Mayberry’s forehead, and her leg muscles burned as they picked their way through the forest. The faint buzzing sounds of mosquitoes reminded her that she should have brought insect repellent.

  After ten minutes of walking, Mayberry leaned down and put her hands on her knees. “Can we . . . take a . . . break?” she panted. “Just for . . . a minute . . .”