Nature Girl

by Jane Kelley

  I turned my back on her to talk to Lucy. “You don’t care what everybody’s doing, do you, Lucy?”

  “I’m sorry, Megan, but my mom needs a hat,” Lucy said.

  I was getting upset. Since Lucy and I weren’t in ANY of the same classes, lunchtime was our only chance to be together. And now she had given up spending time with me just so she could knit. I knew Alison was sick and probably needed a present to cheer her up, but that didn’t mean Lucy had to knit a hat. “I’ll BUY her one!”

  “No. I have to MAKE it for her,” Lucy said.

  She was being stubborn again, just like when she wanted to practice saving people.

  Then Patricia Palombo leaned real close to show Lucy a picture in the magazine. “A hat is such a cool thing to make! Look at how cute they are! We can go to Knitty City by Columbus Avenue to pick out our yarn. Wait till you see the fabulous colors.”

  So I signed up for knitting too. What else could I do? Of course I was totally terrible at it. My yarn got tangled. I kept dropping stitches. Lucy had to slide them back on my needle. She even offered to finish my rows for me. But I didn’t want to be helped like I was a pathetic baby. I wanted to be clicking away like Lucy and Patricia Palombo, magically turning a long string into a fuzzy shape. So after two Wednesdays, I quit. I couldn’t take the humiliation.

  Lucy tried to talk me into staying, but Patricia Palombo said, “Why bother? May-gun always quits. Besides, now you’ll finally be able to work on your mom’s hat.”

  Needless to say, I HATE Patricia Palombo.

  But now I wish she were walking along next to me. Because if she were, then I could shout at her, “Ha-ha, Patricia Palombo! You think you know everything, but you don’t. Because look at me. I’m not quitting. I’m hiking the Appalachian Trail!”

  I pump my fist in the air.

  “No kid in my class ever hiked the Appalachian Trail, I bet. Not even Patricia Palombo. Probably no one in the entire school ever hiked it—including the teachers. But we’re doing it, Arp!”

  It’s like an episode on one of those shows. You know the kind. The main character is this totally cool kid who is an expert world-champion rock climber. And she journeys through the wilderness to save her dad, whose plane crashed on the wrong side of a mountain.

  Of course, sometimes in shows like that the main character is a fat, lazy, whiny misfit who must be saved herself. But that’s not the situation here. My legs don’t feel tired anymore. In fact, they feel totally powerful. I’m not just walking. I’m hiking!

  “Hey, Arp! I have an idea. You know how they always do those walkathons for diseases with names you can’t pronounce? Well, we’re going to do our hike for Alison. Since she can’t climb Mount Greylock, we will. We’ll call it the Hodgkin’s Hike.”

  I start going faster and faster.

  “Maybe it takes Trail Blaze Betty a few days to get to Mount Greylock because she’s got old legs. But we’ll get there quicker—especially if we keep going like this.”

  Then I hear a roaring sound off in the distance. I stop, because it isn’t like any of the other noises in the Woods.

  “Do you hear that, Arp?”

  He does. We both look all around, but we can’t see anything except the dirt path and the usual hundred million trees. The roaring gets louder and my heart throbs right along with it. “What is it?”

  I guess because of my recent experience with Matilda the Bear, I’m worried it might be another wild beast. Only the sound is coming from above my head. Could it be a monstrous vulture? Finally I realize it’s a helicopter. But what’s a helicopter doing in the Woods?

  “Are they reporting on a traffic jam on the Appalachian Trail? Seven-squirrel pileup by Elephant Rock.”

  Arp looks at me. He’s not laughing. Well, okay, he never laughs. But he knows that we shouldn’t be joking about the helicopter.

  “You think they’re looking for us?”

  I pick Arp up and bury my face in his fur. Suddenly I want to cry. Why does the helicopter have to come now? I mean, my hiking was going so well. I was even feeling good about myself for a change.

  “It’s that noise. It’s so loud that it’s making me upset.”

  Arp licks my face. That’s why my cheeks are wet. And maybe one or two tears.

  The roaring is extremely loud now. The whirring blades have stirred me up inside. All my bad thoughts come back to the surface. I remember how scared I was about being lost and seeing the Bear.

  “We can go home,” I whisper to Arp. “If we want to.”

  But I don’t climb up on that big pile of boulders to make it easier for the helicopter to see me. Instead, I carry Arp into a cluster of bushy trees.

  “If we get rescued now, no one will ever believe we were going to make it all the way to Mount Greylock.”

  I duck down under some very low, scratchy branches and hold Arp tight.

  “But we’re going to make it, aren’t we?”

  His tail thumps against my ribs.

  “We can’t quit now. Remember what Trail Blaze Betty said. The only way to fail is to quit. And I’m tired of quitting and failing, aren’t you?”

  The roaring gets so loud that the vibrations rattle my body. Arp is whining. But it doesn’t matter. Nobody could have heard him. I don’t dare look up. It seems like the helicopter hovers right over us for a very long time. I feel like I’m in this weird horror movie where gigantic insects hunt little human beings.

  Just when I can’t take any more and I’m going to run out of my hiding place screaming, “I give up! I surrender!” the roaring moves on. It gets quieter and quieter, until it fades in the distance.

  Now it’s just me and Arp, all alone in the wilderness again.

  I put Arp back on the Trail. If he could talk, would he say, “I can’t believe you turned down a ride in a helicopter!”

  I can’t believe it either. And now that Mom and Dad have sent a helicopter, I know how worried they must be about me. I really don’t like to think about that.

  “Well, I could call them if they had given me my own cell phone,” I say.

  Arp barks. I guess he’s had enough of my excuses.

  “So what should I do then?”

  Arp scratches his ear with his back foot.

  “If I go back to tell Trail Blaze Betty that I need to call my parents, she’ll know I lied and she won’t let me keep hiking.”

  The only thing I can do is leave Mom and Dad a note. So I rip a page out from my sketchbook. On one side, I put their names and our Vermont address. On the other side I write:

  Then I stop. I don’t know what to say. The main thing is I want them to know I’m not in trouble. So I just draw a picture of Arp and me, hiking. I make sure to put big smiles on our faces so they’ll know we’re all right. But Arp looks a little snarly like that, so I try to show his tail wagging. Then I sign it at the bottom.

  Unfortunately I don’t think we’ll be passing a mailbox anytime soon. The best I can do is put the note next to the Trail. I stack a few little rocks on the corners so it won’t blow away.

  “Someone will find it and send it to them.”

  I rearrange my sock inside my shoe so it won’t rub so much. I put on my backpack. Arp dashes off ahead of me on the Trail. His tail is wagging, just like in the picture. He looks so happy that I don’t tell him what I’m thinking. Now that we passed up a chance to be rescued, we better make it to Mount Greylock.

  9

  Dorks!

  We hike about a hundred miles through the same old green trees. Or at least that’s how it seems. So we’re shocked when we get to some enormous gray rocks. They’re so huge that they block the Trail.

  “Now what?” I ask Arp.

  Arp barks at them.

  “What are you doing that for? Yapping won’t make them move.”

  Then I remember what Trail Blaze Betty said. “Hey, Arp! One of those big rocks must be Elephant Rock. That means the spring is nearby.”

  That’s good news. It’s two o’c
lock—the hottest time of the day. I haven’t had any water since I spilled the rest of the second bottle hours ago. I start searching all around the rocks. But let me tell you, it’s hard to look for something when you don’t know exactly what it is. It’s kind of like that algebra stuff we’re going to learn in seventh grade. How can you find what X is when nobody knows what X is? Now I know that a spring is where water comes up out of the ground. But I can’t picture how that water would come up. Would there be a pipe and a faucet?

  “You’d think they could put up a sign.”

  Then I notice a blue splotch up on top of the first rock. “Look! That means we climb that way.” I feel very clever for having figured that out. Only Arp doesn’t want to stay on the Trail. He’d rather go around the rocks, chasing another chipmunk that he’s never going to catch.

  “Arp! You’re going to get us lost.”

  Does he care? No. I should just let him go, but I doubt he could find his way back, since I don’t think he understands about the paint splotches. So I follow him around the enormous gray rocks.

  I can’t see the chipmunk or Arp. And since I’m a human, I’m no good at following their smells. I’m just about to call him again when I hear laughing from further around the pile of rocks.

  “What’s that pile of fluff?”

  “Hey, Joey. That looks like your mom’s wig.”

  “Shut up!”

  “You shut up!”

  “No, you shut up!”

  Believe me, I don’t like hearing those teenage voices. As you probably remember, the last time I encountered Native Vermont Teenagers, I ended up with green slime in my hair. But then Arp starts barking, so I know I have to do something.

  I follow the sound until I get to a place that’s kind of like a room made out of rocks. There are five teenagers—two couples who are lying around on each other and one guy who is teasing Arp with a stick.

  “You leave him alone,” I say.

  They all turn to look at me: Stick Guy, Trucker Cap, Blondie, Boston Red Sox Shirt, and Big Pink-Striped Butt.

  Big Pink-Striped Butt says, “Oooh, Joey. Better do what she says. She looks mean.”

  “And crazy,” Blondie says.

  “She’s a wild girl,” Trucker Cap says.

  I smooth down my hair. I guess I probably do look a little wild.

  “She probably bites,” Big Pink-Striped Butt says.

  Boston Red Sox Shirt jumps up and dances around snarling and Big Pink-Striped Butt pretends to be scared.

  Then Arp barks. And Big Pink-Striped Butt pretends to be scared of him too. Only Arp doesn’t know she’s teasing him. He barks and growls. That makes everybody laugh even harder. I get really angry. I mean, it’s one thing for them to humiliate me. But they shouldn’t pick on a little dog.

  “Stop making fun of him!” I shout.

  “Should we make fun of you?” Trucker Cap says.

  I’m thinking of all these great things to say, like JUST TRY IT! Or maybe YOU WOULDN’T DARE!

  Then Big Pink-Striped Butt looks right at me and says, “I know you.”

  “Did you meet her in the psych ward?” Blondie says.

  “No! She’s that girl who got lost in the Woods,” Big Pink-Striped Butt says.

  “No I’m not!” I say.

  “What girl?” Boston Red Sox Shirt says.

  “It was all over the news this morning. This girl got lost in the Woods.”

  “I didn’t get lost,” I say.

  “They said she has a little white dog just like that one. They showed her picture on TV and everything. It’s definitely her. Only in the picture she had really weird hair. Part of it was all frizzed out. And part of it was twisted in these bumps,” she says.

  I hide my face in my hands. That was my sixth-grade picture. It was a complete disaster because Ginia talked me into doing something SPECIAL with my hair. I should’ve known better than to trust Ginia. I’m sure she deliberately made me look ridiculous. By the time I looked in the mirror, it was too late to do anything except go to school with a brown paper bag over my head. I can’t believe that’s the picture they put on TV! Why couldn’t Mom give them a good picture? Like that one where Lucy and I are sitting on the statue of that dog in Central Park. I always look better in pictures with Lucy because we’re laughing and I’m happy.

  Of course, there aren’t any happy pictures of us in sixth grade. Mom probably thought that one in the park was out of date. But still, she didn’t have to humiliate me by sending out that awful school picture. Now everybody will think that Megan Knotts is a lost wimp with bumpy, frizzy hair!

  “Is there a reward?” Joey says.

  “There is NOT a reward because I’m NOT lost!” I say.

  Then I whistle to Arp and start walking away.

  “If you’re not lost, then what are you doing all by yourself in the Woods?” Blondie says.

  “I’m hiking,” I say.

  “She’s hiking,” Blondie says in a singsong way.

  “Who’d want to do something like that?” Big Pink-Striped Butt says.

  “Joey would. Joey just loves to go off in the Woods and play with his little furry animal friends,” Boston Red Sox Shirt says.

  Then Joey jumps on him and he punches Joey and Joey grabs him and Big Pink-Striped Butt starts hitting Joey with sissy hands.

  I don’t wait to see what happens next. I grab Arp and run around the rocks. I know the Trail is somewhere toward the right. But the rocks are too steep to climb back to it, so I just keep going straight ahead through the Woods. I pass a blanket spread out on the ground. At first I think, Ew, gross me out, a love nest. But then I think, Whoa, a blanket! I put Arp down so I can gather it up, and this paper bag that’s lying on top of it. Then I really run.

  The mound of huge rocks gets smaller and smaller. I hope that when I can finally turn right, I’ll cross the Trail. And you know what? I do! There’s the wide path with the blue splotches on the trees. I’m so relieved to be back on the Trail. But even though I’m seriously gasping for breath, I keep on running. I need to get far away from those teenagers—especially since I’m borrowing their blanket.

  We come to the biggest gray rock of all. It’s separate from the others. I don’t pay any attention to why it’s off on its own—like it ran away too, maybe. But Arp stops right in its shadow and laps at a puddle.

  “This is no time to get a drink.”

  Arp doesn’t listen. His pink tongue goes in and out so fast, I can hardly see it.

  “Come on, Arp.” I’m really mad that I have to pick him up again, especially since he’s all wet.

  Then I realize—he’s drinking. He found the spring!

  I pet him and hug him for being such a smart Loyal Dog. But he’s too thirsty to appreciate compliments. I’m thirsty too. So I get both water bottles and fill them. I take a nice long drink. The water is so cool and refreshing; it actually tastes sweet. I just finish filling the bottle up again when I hear someone shout.

  “HEY, WILD GIRL! GIVE ME BACK MY CIGARETTES!”

  10

  Smoking

  “I DIDN’T TAKE YOUR CIGARETTES!”

  Don’t worry, I don’t actually yell that—I only want to. Instead, I quickly crawl into some bushes and lie down behind a log to hide. That log is rotten and full of bugs, but I don’t dare move, even after some uncomfortable dampness seeps into my shorts.

  The bushes are thick and the voices are pretty far away. Since they’re such Dorks, I hope they can’t see me through the leaves. But my shirt is yellow (even though it’s dirty from being on the Trail). My backpack is hot pink and their blanket is a hideous red and orange plaid. All the green and brown leaves are totally defeated by those brighter colors. Why didn’t I get that boring brown backpack Mom liked because it had lots of practical pockets and was on sale? I decide to do a better job of hiding, so I cover myself up with dead leaves.

  Unfortunately Arp digs up my legs as fast I bury them.

  “Stop it,” I hiss at him.
“You’re not being very loyal.”

  He whimpers and lies down. The next clump of leaves I pick up is gross and wet with actual worms crawling all in it. When those slimy worms touch my leg, it takes every ounce of my strength not to SCREAM.

  Meanwhile, the Dorks crash around, calling, “Wild Girl” and “Lost Girl.” Then, as they get madder, they change “Lost Girl” to “Loser,” which I really don’t like. Sometimes they say, “Give us back those cigarettes, or we’ll smoke you!”

  I know they can’t actually smoke me. But they’re getting very angry.

  I don’t know what to do.

  Now would be a good time for the helicopter to come back. Or maybe those little woodland creatures—you know, the chipmunks and rabbits—could all come together to defend me just like I defended them by not letting Arp catch any of them. Or maybe I should just give back the cigarettes and say it was all a big mistake. I only took their stuff by accident because their blanket looked exactly like a blanket I once had. Or something like that. Then, after I apologize, they’ll let me get back to my hiking. No harm done, right?

  The voices get closer and closer. I grab Arp so he won’t bark at them.

  Then I hear somebody shout, “What do you kids think you’re doing?”

  It’s Trail Blaze Betty!

  There’s silence. Then there’s a sniggery laugh.

  “You won’t be laughing when I call the State Patrol,” she says.

  “What for?” Joey says.

  “I warned you if I EVER caught you good-for-nothing kids messing around on my property again, I’d call the State Patrol,” Trail Blaze Betty says.

  “But we’re miles away from your stupid shelter,” Blondie says.

  “This is my property. The entire Appalachian Trail belongs to the hikers. And I am a hiker,” Trail Blaze Betty says.

  “We aren’t messing around. We’re chasing a thief,” Joey says.

  “This runaway girl stole our stuff. We’re only trying to get it back,” Boston Red Sox Shirt says.

  “You should be yelling at her, not us,” Trucker Cap says.

  There’s another silence. And I think, Uh-oh. What if she listens to them?