The Good Egg

by Mariko Tamaki

  It is also NOT like most other libraries, in that it is also a ship.

  There were many rumors around camp about how it was that a very large ship came to be in the northern part of the camp, very near the camp director’s cabin.

  There was one rumor that the ship was built on a dare, by several scouts looking to get their Float Your Boat badge. The other was that it was dropped when a creature who was supposed to deliver the boat to the lake sneezed and, accidentally, released the ship from its claws.

  Apparently, after dropping the boat, the creature became embarrassed and flew away.

  That’s the rumor, anyway.

  Either way, this library, like any other library, was a place for any Lumberjane who was looking to learn something about something. Especially for those Lumberjanes who liked learning from books. Especially Lumberjanes who liked really OLD books.

  Which, to be fair, formerly, was NOT Jo.

  For a long time, Jo preferred databases to old books, because Jo used to think old books smelled funny (and databases did not).

  But then she became a Lumberjane and April introduced her to the beauty of yellowy pages and little scratches in ink and all the cool things people write in really old books, and Jo was won over.

  People can change.

  (Books cannot, but that’s another thing altogether.)

  That day, Jo was in the library looking up information on wiring, in preparation for the grand production of Goldi-Scout and the Three Bears, currently being rehearsed, which, thankfully, was still taking place on dry land, last time Jo checked.

  Jo was very very happy that she’d found a job working on the production elements of the play and not on the stage.

  The production elements of the play are actually just as important as the play, which you would know if you took all of them away and tried to watch a play without them.

  Which you would be doing, for one, in the dark, because LIGHTS are a big part of theater production.

  Which got Jo thinking about HOW she could light up the stage for the play.

  This is another good Lumberjane question, by the way: HOW?

  This led Jo down the path of researching the history of limelight, which, as a word, can be defined as a state of being under public examination and also as a way that people in the olden days lit up a stage, using limestone.

  Jo had done previous experiments with limestone as a child, as she had once imagined all children did until she met other kids and realized not everyone had a lab when they were three.

  Jo was wondering whether it would be worth trying to do something with limestone or if she should just invent some new, possibly solar-powered lighting mechanism when she stumbled upon something she wasn’t looking for.

  Which is what often happens in a library. Where books all hang out together in rows and are sometimes left on desks and tables.

  In this case, the thing Jo stumbled upon was a very old and very big book that someone had been rifling through earlier and then left open on top of a stack of other books.

  THE VERY BIG BOOK OF CURIOUS PEOPLE

  The Very Big Book of Curious People was a work in progress, part of the Lumberjanes Anthropolo-ME badge, which encouraged scouts to go out into the world and learn, again, ODDly, about the various peoples they discovered there.

  Researcher Miss Jane Petunia Massy Acorn Dale had committed several pieces to this big book, including a brief section on a community of very tall people passionate about three-day cruises and espressos.

  Jo, who was an Acorn Dale fan, did not know this.

  But still, the book was . . . curious to her.

  “Hmmm,” Jo said. “This looks interesting.”

  Prior to Jo’s arrival at the library, another person had been looking through The Very Big Book of Curious People very deliberately, as opposed to accidentally. This person had flipped to the back of the book to the index, which is a part of the book that lists which topics can be found where in a book.

  This book that you are reading, unfortunately, has no index, but if it did, it would read:

  EGG: 5, 7, 15, 16, 26, 30, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 54, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 78, 85, 86, 87, 88, 92, 93, 94, 95, 101, 102, 103, 105, 109, 112, 113, 114, 122, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 138, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 158, 159, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 203

  LIBRARY: 14, 40, 67, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103

  The Very Big Book of Curious People had three entries under EGG.

  The Egg on Your Face Society, a group of big-bellied biologists who became obsessed with the possibility of reversing the aging process with intensive yolk treatments.

  The Knights of the Round Egg, a group of knights who enjoyed sitting around tables shaped like eggs and playing cards (and not much else if we’re honest).

  And.

  The Order of the Golden Egg.

  This egg-oriented entry was the entry that the last reader had left the book open to, before camp duties had summoned them away. And so this egg entry was the first thing Jo saw, as she placed her stack of books, which was very tall at this point, down, and took a closer look.

  “The Order of the Golden Egg,” Jo read aloud, in a quiet, library-appropriate whisper.

  Jo tapped her chin. Hadn’t Bearwoman said something about an order?

  She closed her eyes.

  Yes. She had. “The Order has the egg,” she’d said.

  Above the entry was a photo of a bunch of very grim-looking people, all wearing what seemed to be white bands around their foreheads and some kind of long underwear.

  Underneath, the text read:

  The Order of the Golden Egg is a very curious society of egg enthusiasts who believe that golden eggs hold the ability to grant them wealth and power and make them popular with popular people. The members of the Order of the Golden Egg are renowned for their artisanal eggcups and infamous for their habit of stealing eggs, especially golden eggs, from nests in the wild. Also, they have terrible taste in clothes, music, transportation, and food. The Order was outlawed for their egg stealing, but literature on the power of the Golden Egg surfaced in the late 1900s, suggesting they have moved their activities underground.

  “Well, that is legitimately curious,” Jo said. “And timely.”

  Slamming the book shut, Jo dashed out of the library and was immediately shushed by Cornillia Sprint, the librarian.

  “Great Elizabeth Freeman,” she hissed. “This is a place of LEARNING! So, SHHHHH!”

  “Sorry,” Jo whispered as she slipped out the door and off to find Ripley.

  CHAPTER 16

  The process by which an idea becomes a play is complex and magical and also, at times, extremely frustrating.

  In the olden days, audiences would attend theaters with baskets of old and rotting fruit that they would throw at the cast if they were at all displeased with the performance.

  Which they often were.

  For most people involved in theater, though, this is nothing compared to the headache involved in just writing a play.

  Writing a play is like pulling something—an idea or even a whole world—out of your head, even when that thing isn’t in there in the first place.

  Which, truly, for April, was kind of the case in the case of Goldi-Scout. Writing a play was not like writing Mermaid mystery fan fiction and it was not like climbing a mountain. Nor was it like playing basketball or inventing a rocket ship, all things that seemed way more fun than Goldi-Scout.

  Which was NOT FUN.

  Shockingly.

  But it was the task given to April (by April), and so she did it. Because that’s what Lumberjanes do, April reasoned.

  Also, as Annabella Panache had said many times, “The SHOW must go on, YES!”

  And so, with everyone gathered for Theater Workshop, sitting just beyond the picnic benches on the green grass under a bright, hopeful
blue sky, April handed out copies of the script she had written to Hes and Wren.

  It was not her best script. It was not even the fifth best thing she had ever written, but at least it was something, and they wouldn’t get any further off schedule.

  “Oh, you wrote it already,” Hes said, taking the page. “Huh.”

  “Ripley has a stomachache, so I’ll play Baby Bear as well today,” April added.

  “Is she okay?” Wren asked, through a veil of purple hair.

  “She’s really sad about Eggie,” April said.

  Hes nodded. “Yeah, Barney told us. I hope they find it.”

  April sighed, flipping over the first page of the script. “Okay. So, this is ACT 1: A COTTAGE, where we set the scene . . . and stuff.”

  Hes looked down at the piece of paper in her hand. Then up at April. “So, um, what’s my motivation?”

  “Oh.” April looked at the script. “Well, someone’s broken into your house. And it’s your Bear house. So, it’s important. And you’re the Papa Bear, and you notice that someone’s been eating your . . . oatmeal . . . and . . .”

  It was a rare thing for April to hear herself talking and be completely unenthused by what she was saying.

  “Sorry, guys.” April sighed, dropping her pages with a FFLUP. “I’m maybe a little uninspired with this particular piece. Yes. I mean, I want this to be the greatest play ever and it CAN be, obviously, the greatest play ever I just . . . I thought it would be cool to make the play underwater, but obviously that’s too complicated and we would need a lot of water and that’s probably pretty wasteful and I totally get that but I guess I couldn’t think of a way to make this interesting if it’s not underwater which is not to say it’s not interesting I just . . . ran out of ideas.”

  Hes looked up at April to see if she was finished talking. Sometimes it was hard to tell. Currently, April was very still, her head down. Like someone had taken just a little too much air out of the April balloon.

  “Um. Okay. Well.” Hes grabbed a long piece of grass and put it between her teeth, chewing and thinking. “Maybe we can figure it out together. I mean, it’s a group thing, right?”

  Chewing on grass is how Heses think, incidentally.

  Hes looked at the script some more. “I think my Papa Bear is a stay-at-home dad.”

  April raised her head. “That’s a good idea.”

  “Sure.” Hes pulled a pencil out from her pocket and wrote some notes on her script. “So it’s even more messed up, right, that this scout came into my house, because I just cleaned up. And it’s hard for a bear to be a stay-at-home dad because it’s like, it’s not well understood as a real job in the bear community, right? Maybe there are other bears that don’t support my choices.”

  Wren, who had also come with a pencil, tapped hers against her lips. “I think Mama Bear is really dissatisfied with her job and so she feels like this is a chance to express her anger.”

  “Oh.” April looked down at her script, which had significantly fewer stars and hearts in the margins than usual.

  She took out a pencil and drew a little flower in the top corner of her page. “I mean . . . We could do that. We’re retelling, right? Just because the roles are written kind of boring, they don’t have to stay that way. Even if we’re not doing mermaids. Which I get, we’re not.”

  “So.” Hes tugged on her baseball cap. “Maybe this is just one in a bunch of frustrating days for the Bears, you know? Maybe we could play it that way.”

  April considered. “Yeah. And then maybe it’s a bad day for Goldi-Scout too! I mean, why else would she be going into some strange bear’s house? That’s super un-scout of her!”

  “Hey, what if Goldi-Scout doesn’t even want to be GOLDI-SCOUT?” Hes offered. “Maybe she wants to be, like, a PINK-HAIRED basketball-playing scout? Maybe she’s only in the bears’ house because she wants to find some people to play basketball with or something?”

  April smiled. “Yeah! Why not?”

  Wren looked at her script. “Why don’t we just improvise a scene? Improv is an acting thing, right? Like we could start with our motivations and then just see what plays out?”

  “That’s a great idea.” April grinned. “We need to give Baby Bear some stuff too.”

  “Yeah, Baby Bear.” Wren tapped her lips with her fingers. “I don’t really get her motivation. Other than finding Goldi-Scout . . .”

  “Baby Bear.” April looked at her script. “Is the Bear . . . that tells you . . . something is wrong . . .”

  Right then, Hen looked up and pointed. “Hey, here comes Jo. Wow. She’s running.”

  “Running?” April looked off into the distance. Jo was running. Sprinting, even. Jo, who was very tall and could walk very fast, rarely ran unless there was a reason to.

  “HEY!” Jo skidded to a stop next to the group. “Where’s Ripley?”

  April frowned. “She’s in the cabin with a stomachache.”

  Jo shook her head. “No, she’s not. The cabin is empty. Barney’s gone too. I think they’ve gone looking for Eggie, who I also think was kidnapped by this group of really tacky egg-obsessed people called the Order of the Golden Egg.”

  April clapped her hands to her cheeks. “HOLY Roberta Bondar!”

  “Okay.” Hes stood up, brushing grass off her jacket. “Let’s go.”

  “LET’S go?” April said, scrambling to her feet.

  “Right, I mean”—Hes frowned—“you guys are going to go do something to help someone, and it’s going to end up being cool and we want to help too.”

  “Yeah,” Wren nodded. “You guys are always the ones running off into the woods to do cool stuff! Plus, what if Barney needs our help?”

  “Sounds good,” Jo said, looking over her shoulder. “Okay. SO, I think if they’re anywhere, they’re back at that nest.”

  “Do you know where that is?” Wren asked, twisting her purple hair around her finger.

  “Yes, we do.” April nodded. “Looks like it’s Lumberjanes to the rescue!!”

  “Oh”—Hes raised a finger—“there’s one more thing we should probably grab.”

  CHAPTER 17

  By the time Ripley and Barney arrived at the nest, the ground around it was trampled to mush.

  “It looks like there’s been quite a few creatures here,” Barney said, consulting their Scouts Guide to Tracking. “Deer tracks, rabbit tracks, and I think these are Rosie’s.”

  Barney walked over to the west side of the nest and looked closely at the ground. “I think I can still see the tracks they followed away from the nest. Do you think we should follow them?”

  Ripley was standing in the nest, trying very hard to observe and not be upset.

  Which is hard, because being upset can be a very big thing to be.

  Ripley took a deep breath.

  Oh Egg Oh

  Where did you go

  Who took you away

  To my dismay

  Ripley turned and sang.

  You’re just an egg

  You don’t have a leg

  So

  Someone must have

  Carried you . . .

  (Not all songs have to rhyme.)

  As she sang, Ripley had a thought, which happens when Ripleys are singing. Maybe, she thought, part of observing could be not just looking at things but looking to see what was DIFFERENT from before.

  Ripley blinked. The nest was different, but not different from how it was the night before, when someone had sawed a chunk out of the front of it.

  What else? Ripley thought. What else is different?

  Hopping out of the nest, Ripley walked over to the east side of the nest, eyeing the ground, careful not to step on anything important, on anything that could be a clue or a sign, anything that could be something she hadn’t spotted earlier.

  As she stepped to the north side of the nest, she spotted it: a trail, not of tracks, but of broad flat leaves, leaves that didn’t look like they belonged around the nest and definitely weren’
t there the day before. They looked like leaves from the ferns that she had found Eggie in, laid down in what looked like a crisscross pattern, like the green tiles in her kitchen at home.

  It would have been hard to see them the night before, but now, in the daylight, it looked like someone had laid down a carpet of green leading from the nest into the trees.

  Ripley stepped carefully over and picked up one of the leaves. Underneath was a thin, razor-like slice in the dirt and a set of footprints, with the toes pointing toward the nest.

  “Hey, BARNEY! LOOK!”

  Barney jogged over, clutching their book to their chest. “What is it?”

  Ripley pulled back the leaves. “Tracks! Different tracks!”

  “Hmmm.” Barney squinted. “That long thin one? It looks like a tire. You think it’s our wheelbarrow from yesterday?”

  Ripley shook her head. “The wheelbarrow tire is really thick and it has big treads on it so it won’t slip. This track doesn’t have any nubblies on it.”

  Ripley looked up at the nest. “What if someone left the nest with Eggie, but they covered their tracks with leaves. They would do it walking backward, like this, right?”

  Ripley mimed what she imagined someone doing, stepping backward, putting a leaf down over the tracks, stepping backward again.

  “That would be a pretty great way to cover your trail,” Barney agreed. “Great observing, Rip!”

  Ripley shielded her eyes and looked to see how long the trail of leaves was. It looked long.

  “We just found this,” Ripley said. “And they’ve had a whole day to get Eggie far away.”

  “We’re going to need to move quickly,” Barney agreed. “If only we had some form of transport.”

  Just then, there was a snuffling sound. Like a big soft nose.

  Followed by an “AHEM.”

  Ripley and Barney looked up to see their cabinmates balanced on the back of the very large, chestnut-colored moose named Jeremy.

  “HEY!” Hes called down.

  Jeremy snorted again.

  April, Jo, and Wren waved. “HEY!”