Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  With her microphone pointed directly into my face, it was impossible not to understand that she was talking to me. “What do you think, Gen?” she said. She was standing so close, I could see the line where her makeup ended and her neck began. “Do you like surprises?”

  I stared and said nothing. “Because, darling, you’re famous! And the question the entire country is asking is, ‘Are you okay?’ “

  “Um,” I said, shielding my eyes from the lights that were now shining directly at me. Green squares floated in my vision, and for a second I worried I was going to pass out. I was very, very warm. “I’m fine?” I said.

  The truth is, I don’t like surprises. In fact, I kind of hate them. “Um,” I said again, still squinting. This felt like being called on in class when you don’t know the answer—but a million times worse. “I think I’m okay,” I tried again.

  But I wasn’t okay. And I wouldn’t be until Rebecca turned the lights and the cameras off. What could I possibly do to make all of this go away?

  26

  Nothing. I could do nothing to make all of this go away. No matter how determined I was to ignore her, Rebecca was still there, talking into her microphone, pretending that she was telling me a story, but really speaking to all the people who were theoretically going to watch the show.

  “The company that hosts the blog keeps track of how many people visit your site each day,” she was explaining. “The first day your blog was up three people visited it. A week after that, it was regularly visited by about fifty. The day before you stopped updating it, there were twenty thousand visits, and last week, after we ran a brief piece on it, it hit five hundred thousand. Everyone wants to know where you are.”

  “Wow,” I said. I rubbed my eyes to make the green spots go away.

  Rebecca again pulled out the piece of paper from her pocket. “Listen to this, Gen,” she said, smiling and shaking her head. “There are nineteen thousand registered members of the Face-book group ‘Save Pumpkin.’ “

  “What?” I said.

  Rebecca’s eyebrows shot up. “The rooster?” she confirmed. I nodded. “There’s been a lot of discussion on your blog about whether you ought to be killing and eating him. Nineteen thousand say no. Isn’t that fun?”

  “Nineteen thousand?” I said. I wasn’t taking it in.

  “They all know about Pumpkin because of your blog,” Rebecca said again.

  “Her what?” Betsy said. “Her frog?” I could see her now, beyond the lights. Her hands were flapping on either side of her face, double time. She looked like someone at a revival meeting.

  “It’s not even my blog,” I said. “My friend Kristin made it. It was a project for her computer class. She used my texts.”

  “Well, Gen, I’m telling you, people love it,” Rebecca said.

  Okay, I thought, but I didn’t get much further than that. Okay, I thought again. “Are you sure there hasn’t been some kind of a mistake?” I said.

  I looked behind me, but the only people I saw were the familiar faces of the Camp Frontier families. Could they help me? What did they know about blogs? As I looked around, though, it dawned on me that they were all in the blog. The Meyer-Hincheys, with their sibling dynamic issues now made public. Susan Driver—I’d compared her to a dog just back from the groomer’s. I’d mocked Peter Driver’s s-l-o-w Southern accent. And the Puchinskis! Good Lord. They could now thank me that five hundred thousand people knew Anders had burned like a lobster and Disa’s muffins had made everyone think she was a mutant brownnoser from day one.

  As these thoughts were twisting and percolating in my head, other thoughts must have been twisting and percolating in Betsy’s. “So that’s…,” she said slowly, stepping toward Rebecca like she was finally figuring out how two mental-puzzle pieces fit together. “That’s why The Happy Morning Show is so interested in stories about animals at the camp?” She looked at me. “It was because of Pumpkin? And everything you wrote about this camp? And I suppose you were unhappy here, so you were—” She paused for a second to separate herself from the word she was about to use. “You were venting?”

  Her eyes grew wide with horror as the cameras zoomed in on her. She was oblivious to them. “Oh, gosh, Gen,” she nearly wailed. “What did you say?” She turned to Rebecca. “You must think we are terrible fools! This isn’t going to be any kind of publicity we want. This is going to be public humiliation on TV.” She paused for a second, then gasped for air like someone who has been brought back from drowning. “My mother watches The Happy Morning Show. My sisters. Oh, no, no, no.”

  Everyone started talking at once. Ron was comforting Betsy. Anders was shouting at Rebecca, “Turn those darn cameras off!” Susan Driver was demanding to know whether anyone had signed a release allowing themselves to be filmed for television. Ka was looking right at me, her eyes open wide, slowly shaking her head in sympathy. My mom was hissing, “Gen, this was a project? This was something Kristin did for her computer class?” And my dad was saying, “If she can put it up there, she can take it off. This isn’t right. You need to get her to take it down.”

  Nora was storming across the benches toward me, yelling, “You did it again, Gen!”

  “This isn’t my fault!” I shouted back. “You blame me for everything. And it’s just because you’re the one who hates it here. All I’m doing is saying what you’re thinking, and instead of admitting it, you try to turn everyone against me. And I’m sick of it.”

  “Girls, girls,” Rebecca interrupted, raising two fingers to her crew in a gesture I realized later was a signal to turn the cameras off. “This is not good. We’re not taping for Dr. Phil.” She laughed.

  “Do you know what I would love to see from you two though? I wonder if you could reenact the cow-milking incident. You know, Gen, when you pretend you know how to milk a cow? Nora, do you think you could do that for me? I’d love to get both of you in makeup first, of course. And I wonder, do you girls have any clothes that are a little cleaner… I suppose we should be grateful viewers can’t smell you through the TV.” She laughed her I-go-out-to-dinner-in-New-York-City laugh, which made it just so much worse that I probably smelled like pee and had bean stains on the front of my dress.

  “Are there really five hundred thousand people reading my blog?” I asked. “They like it?”

  “Like it?” Rebecca said. “They love it. Young lady, there are going to be book publishers falling all over themselves to get you into print, maybe even a movie. If you have anywhere near decent grades, this will be your ticket to Harvard. Yale. Whatever you like. You’re a writer, my dear, and a famous one at that. All before your fourteenth birthday.

  “After this, with your parents’ permission I’ll whisk you away for some interviews and meetings with literary agents and the like.”

  “Will we—” I hardly wanted to name it because it was too good to be true. “Will we stay in a hotel? With room service and indoor plumbing?”

  Rebecca nodded vigorously and smiled at whatever expression had appeared on my face.

  I had an image of me, standing in Times Square, which I have only ever seen on TV. In the image, I was wearing a big fancy hat and signing autographs. I thought about what it would feel like to have my English teacher stop in the middle of a lesson to say, “Gen? What does our very own real-life author have to say about this book?” I imagined myself in a pencil skirt like Rebecca’s. A good feeling had begun to creep into my body slowly, like sleep when you’re lying in bed, tired, waiting for it.

  Nora interrupted my reverie. “There’s no way you’re filming me, and I’m not doing anything else to help Gen Welsh become a celebrity,” she said. “She doesn’t know the first thing about this place. She’s a huge fake and has wanted nothing but to ruin it the whole time she’d been here.”

  “And what about you?” Rebecca said, turning to Nora now, signaling for the cameras to turn back on. “Don’t you hate it even more? Didn’t you say that if you had your choice, you’d put pesticide in the dr
inking water? Didn’t you say that time and place is important and you are missing out on the life you’re supposed to have?”

  “Nora!” Betsy said, pain drawing her voice down to a whisper.

  “You said those things?” Ron choked out.

  Nora blanched. Then her face turned gray. I felt an absurd kind of sympathy for her, understanding what it felt like to cause my own parents pain.

  But then Nora looked at me, her steely blue eyes snapping, and my sympathy vanished in the face of her anger. “Thank you,” she spat out. “Thank you for ruining everything in a way I hadn’t even imagined you could. The first time I met you, you made fun of me for helping my mother make dolls,” she went on. “You tried to turn my friends here against me. You lied to me. You accused me of things I didn’t do. It was your phone that got all of us in trouble and nearly wrecked the whole camp. And now you’ve hurt my parents by putting something I shared with you in confidence into your blog. You’re nothing but a chicken-loving phony. Go home, why don’t you. Or off to some fancy hotel. No one wants you here.”

  “That’s not fair—,” I began, but even as I tried to think of why, I knew that some of what she had said was right. Before I could figure out what that part was, I heard a voice ringing out somewhere behind me. When I turned, Gavin was standing on a bench, trying to get everyone to look at him.

  His little face was almost pointy with worry. “Listen!” he shouted. “I have something to say!”

  Rebecca made a gesture to the cameras, which turned on him—everyone’s gaze followed. “You wanted to know about Pumpkin,” he announced, and it was hard not to see that he had become a different person from the time we got here to now. Also, that he was trying to be solemn and not to smile, but it was basically impossible. “I will tell you right now we cannot kill Pumpkin,” he said. “Pumpkin…” He paused. “We kill roosters because they can’t lay eggs. But Pumpkin is not a rooster.” He waited for that information to sink in. “He has never been a rooster. Pumpkin is a hen. And he—I mean she—is about to become a mom.”

  There was absolute silence.

  I could do nothing but stare. At Gavin. Where in the world did he get the presence of mind to speak up to the whole world, in front of the TV cameras and lights, no less?

  And then I was thinking, “What is he talking about? How has he changed Pumpkin from a rooster into a hen?”

  Rebecca Cheney’s face was alive with interest. She fast walked over to Gavin, still careful about her heels, sticking the microphone in his face now.

  “What happened?” she said. The stationary TV cameras moved in to get a close-up.

  “Well,” Gavin said, puffing up with pride, not unlike a rooster himself. “It’s just that there’s a long time after they’re born when you can’t tell if a chicken is a rooster or a hen, and I think Ron and Betsy had thought Pumpkin was turning into a rooster—I read online that in the beginning it’s pretty easy to be wrong. Betsy hadn’t really seen much of him. He was living all by himself at our place before we even got here.”

  “But you knew?” Rebecca said. “You did rooster research before you got here?”

  “No,” Gavin said. “I didn’t care about chickens at all before I arrived. I was only interested when I was looking for a way to save Pumpkin’s life. I had a suspicion he—I mean she—wasn’t really a rooster,” he said. “In fact, I was pretty sure she was laying. We were getting too many eggs for it to have been Daisy alone. I remember Betsy saying that if you want to get a hen to sit on her eggs, you can put fake ones in the place where she likes to lay and she might take the hint. So I whittled fake eggs from wood and stuck them in Pumpkin’s box and it worked.”

  “A broody rooster,” said Nora, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “When?” said Betsy. “When did she start sitting?”

  “It wasn’t too long after we got here. Maybe it was the day after the first town meeting? Or that night. I did everything at night when I could sneak into the barn.”

  “You’re lucky,” Betsy said, shaking her head at the coincidence. “You can only move eggs under a broody hen at night. Did you candle the eggs?”

  “Yes,” said Gavin, nodding his head dutifully. What the heck was candling? I wondered. “I read about that online.”

  “Good,” Betsy said, and she put her hands together in a single clap. “Then you’ll have chicks!” She counted backward, under her breath. “Any day now. Are you hearing peeping?”

  “Yes,” said Gavin. “It’s crazy peeping.”

  “That means they’re almost ready,” Betsy said.

  “See?” Gavin said. “See why you should have listened to me about killing her?”

  “But…,” Betsy sputtered. “I didn’t know…” And suddenly Gavin’s face fell a little. I guess it wasn’t as fun to make your point with a dramatic flourish when the enemy you’re vanquishing is somebody’s bubbly mother who fed you cookies when your parents were in the hospital, and is also maybe the only person in the world as into raising chickens as you are.

  “Why did you wait so long to tell us?” my mom asked.

  “Because if you knew,” he said, “it just would have been another chicken who had to die—Daisy or Romeo or one of the others.” And suddenly my mom was hugging Gavin, and Betsy’s face twisted into a look of such happiness and pain, I didn’t know what to think anymore.

  Rebecca did, though. Her fingers were flying—she was signaling one of the cameras up onto Gavin and my mom, another to circle the crowd. Rebecca herself moved in with her microphone. “What do you mean, Gavin, when you say you went online?” Her voice was sly.

  Gavin’s face contorted immediately into an expression of panic. He looked all around, as if seeking help from the trees, from Erik, from Mom and Dad. Eventually, his eyes rested on Betsy.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I looked up all the information when Nora let us into the electricity shack that time.”

  “The electricity shack?”

  “Now, I don’t know—,” Betsy started.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “I wrote about it in the blog.”

  She looked at me hard. “What exactly did you write?”

  There was no point in trying to cover it up. She could read it for herself. So I told her. About finding Nora listening to my iPod and surfing the web. About how we drank Diet Coke and passed around deodorant and lip gloss and looked through everyone’s bag of contraband modernity.

  “I knew we should have torn that place down,” Ron said. “I knew it would get us into trouble, just like that time I used Roundup.”

  “You used Roundup?” Anders asked, able to communicate his shock in spite of his smoke-damaged larynx and lungs.

  “Actually, I wrote about that too,” I said.

  “And the whole world knows?” Betsy said. “The whole world knows this already?” Betsy took a deep breath. She held it for a minute, during which everyone in camp was perfectly still. Then she broke down. “We’re going to be ruined!” she said. “This is terrible!” She pulled out a lacy white handkerchief and blew her nose. Ron put an arm around her back with all the tenderness he would have used in laying a hand on a table or a chair. I had to wonder, at what point would he break down and give the woman a real hug?

  “Sorry,” Betsy said. “It’s just that with the bills and the taxes and Nora going to college soon, I don’t see how we’re going to make it out here without something good happening and I’d so hoped that being on The Happy Morning Show would be the good thing we need.”

  How was it that I, an ordinary thirteen-year-old girl from the suburbs looking for nothing more than a summer spent shuttling between soccer camp and the rec-center pool—how had I done something this enormously terrible? Nora was right. I had ruined everything—everyone’s vacation, her family’s livelihood, and now, apparently, her chance at a college education.

  I remembered what it felt like to want to hang Robby Brainerd by his ankles after I caught him throwing frogs at the slide in four
th grade. I’d known even then that for the rest of my life I’d be remembered as the girl who hung Robby by his ankles—and I have been—but at the time, I felt I had no choice but to save the frogs. Now heat was rising into my face, my fists were clenching of their own accord. I could feel it coming over me, the feeling that I had to take action. I was powerless to stop myself.

  I tried to call to mind the image of myself in Times Square, signing autographs in a fancy hat, but it was already fading. I fantasized about what it would be like to walk through the doors of my school and have everyone know I was famous. I’d be a hero. But even that felt unreal. And wrong.

  Then an idea came to me instantly. It was so obvious and also so simple, I knew I’d found the right answer.

  “Susan?” I said to Caleb’s mom. “They can’t use any of the footage from today if I say no, can they?”

  “Not unless you’ve signed a release,” she said. “If they release the footage without your authorization you would have standing to seek an injunction and damages in a court of appropriate jurisdiction.”

  “You’re saying they can’t do it?”

  “Basically, yes.”

  I turned to face Rebecca, though this was scary and a hard thing to do. “I won’t be on your show,” I said. “I won’t go back to New York with you. And I’m going to make Kristin take the blog down.”

  It was amazing, when you are only thirteen years old, to have this kind of reach, to be strong and good when only moments before you’d felt yourself buried under a slag heap of everyone else’s collective scorn.