Arlo Finch in the Valley of Fire

by John August

Indra and Wu exchanged a look. They seemed excited by a new possibility.

  “What are you doing tonight?” asked Indra.

  “I don’t know. Homework?” said Arlo, chewing his apple.

  “She doesn’t give homework on Tuesdays,” said Wu. “It’s Rangers night. You should come.”

  “You have to come,” said Indra. “It’s seven o’clock at the church.”

  Arlo wanted to ask which church, and what he should bring, and what Rangers actually did. But he didn’t want to risk asking a question that made him seem stupid or scared or unworthy of their interest. So instead he just swallowed and said—

  “Sure. I’ll be there.”

  4

  UNIFORM

  “THEY LET GIRLS IN RANGERS NOW?” asked Uncle Wade.

  Arlo shrugged.

  “You said it was a girl who invited you to come, did you not? I presume she was not asking you to join the Girl Rangers, but rather the Rangers proper, which is to say the Boy Rangers, which was never called that because everyone knew the real Rangers were boys and the Girl Rangers were girls. We had no need for adjectives because the names were self-evident.”

  “I don’t really know what Rangers are,” said Arlo.

  “Rangers are the best damn thing on Earth. Least they used to be. They probably still are. I’m just being stubborn.”

  They were standing in the dark and dusty basement, where Uncle Wade was sorting through the keys on his ring, trying to figure out which one might open the heavy trunk at their feet.

  “So I can go to the meeting?” asked Arlo.

  “What does your mom say?”

  “I haven’t asked her yet. Jaycee said I shouldn’t bother her with things that aren’t urgent.”

  “That’s good thinking. But she’ll say yes,” said Uncle Wade. “A boy who’s not in Rangers is a boy without friends.”

  Wade found the key that fit the lock. It made a piercing scrape as it turned. He popped the latches, lifting the lid to reveal a terrifying demonic face.

  “That’s just a Halloween mask,” said Uncle Wade, shoving it aside. The chest was full of random junk, from childhood toys to novelty pencils. Near the bottom of the chest, Uncle Wade found what he was looking for.

  First he found the pants. They were dark brown with cargo pockets on the legs. Arlo knew from a glance that they were way too long for him.

  “Yeah, you sew up the bottoms so they’re not so long,” said Uncle Wade, anticipating Arlo’s objection. “The waist adjusts too, so when you put on a few pounds, they’ll still fit.”

  He tossed the pants to Arlo and went back to digging through the trunk. The next item was a large piece of yellow cloth cut into a triangle. Isosceles, thought Arlo, remembering his math. It had a dark stain on it.

  “Is that blood?” asked Arlo.

  “Most definitely,” said Uncle Wade. “A Ranger’s gonna bleed from time to time. That’s life on the mountain. The neckerchief’s always handy for a bandage, a sling, a tourniquet. Though you’ll learn you shouldn’t use a tourniquet except if you’re bit by a gravel snake and it’s that or turn to stone.”

  From the term neckerchief, Arlo assumed the yellow triangle was worn around the neck. He didn’t know what a tourniquet was, but he pledged to avoid whatever a gravel snake was and thus never be bitten by one.

  The final item in the trunk was by far the most important. It was a button-down shirt covered in embroidered patches, each illustrating different symbols. The patches had been sewn on individually, and with great care. Down each arm of the shirt, small five-sided patches formed lines. Larger patches covered each pocket. Even the pocket flaps had their own patches.

  The shirt itself was very dark green—darker than the darkest green crayon in the box—and reminded Arlo of the uniforms he had seen soldiers wear at parades. It smelled musty from being in the trunk, but Arlo was surprised by how strong the fabric felt. He would never have guessed it was thirty years old.

  “You’ll have to take the patches off,” said Uncle Wade. “At least until you earn them yourself.”

  * * *

  Arlo sat at the dining room table, carefully snipping the threads that held the patches on the uniform.

  He started with the smaller patches on the arms. Each was slightly larger than a quarter and shaped like a pentagon. At the center of each patch was a different symbol. Arlo guessed the one with a fat red cross was probably First Aid or something like it. Another patch depicted a tent, so that might be Camping.

  But there were also patches with snakes and spiders and lightning bolts, and a larger one on the shirt pocket with an owl. He wanted to ask Uncle Wade what each patch stood for, but his uncle had already disappeared back into his workshop.

  Arlo set the patches aside for later.

  The shirt’s right pocket was home to a large circular patch for “Camp Redfeather.” It was more elaborate than the small patches, combining a dozen colors of thread to depict a towering purple mountain, a green forest and a deep blue lake. In the lake, Arlo could make out tiny canoes—but also a long appendage rising out of the water. He wasn’t sure if it was a tentacle or a neck, but whatever creature it belonged to looked big enough to smash up the canoes and eat the paddlers.

  With all the patches off, he tried on the shirt. He had expected it to be too big, but it fit perfectly.

  Next came the pants. They were at least four inches too long. Arlo cuffed them as best he could, but just walking around the dining room they unrolled and dragged on the floor.

  Uncle Wade had said they needed to be sewn. Arlo was sure he didn’t know how to do that. Taking off patches was one thing; it was unsewing. Actual sewing was a different thing altogether.

  Then Arlo had a flash of inspiration. He climbed the stairs, careful not to trip on the too-long pants.

  * * *

  Last winter in Chicago, Arlo’s sister had started wearing safety pins on her jacket. Not just one or two, but dozens, hundreds maybe, carefully arranged in stripes and boxes. She’d spent hours perfecting the patterns, adding new pins from a cardboard box she kept on her nightstand.

  Arlo was never sure if Jaycee was following a trend or attempting to start her own—he never really saw his sister’s friends—but for several weeks she was obsessed with safety pins and that jacket. She was clearly proud of it.

  Until one day the coat was gone.

  Jaycee told her mom she had left it on the bus. Since there were still two months of winter left, they bought a wool coat from Goodwill to replace it. This time, Jaycee left it unadorned and unpinned.

  But the safety pins were probably still somewhere, Arlo thought. He could picture the box they came in. So he quickly searched her room before she got home from school.

  It was late afternoon. The room was already fairly dark. He switched on the desk lamp, aiming it at the dresser, which he sorted through drawer by drawer. No luck.

  He tried the closet next.

  Jaycee had not even started unpacking. The moving boxes were still taped up. Maybe she doesn’t think we’re going to stay, Arlo thought. So why bother unpacking?

  If Arlo cut open the boxes, Jaycee would know he had been in her room. But how else was he going to find the safety pins?

  He decided to flip the boxes over and cut through the tape on the bottom. That way, Jaycee would be unlikely to notice his work. He opened the seam just enough so he could peek inside.

  That’s when he saw it: the jacket.

  It was the coat his sister had worn last winter, the one she claimed to have lost on the bus. Why was it here at the bottom of the box? Why had she stopped wearing it? Why had she kept it?

  And why had she lied about it?

  Arlo decided he didn’t understand his sister at all.

  Regardless, he no longer needed to find the box of safety pins. He could simply take a few from the jacket. Jaycee would never notice.

  * * *

  Back in his room, Arlo sat on his bed, pinning the cuffs of his Ranger pant
s. The fabric was heavy—thicker than denim jeans—which made it tough to wiggle the pins through. His thumbs had deep indentations from the effort.

  He could hear a car’s tires on the gravel driveway. Headlights swept across his room. After a few moments, two car doors opened and shut. His mom must have picked Jaycee up from the bus.

  The final pin was proving very stubborn. He wiggled it and pushed with all his might. It suddenly poked through—

  —right into his thumb.

  Arlo gasped, more from surprise than pain. He stared at his thumbprint and the tiny hole in the center of it. A pearl of deep red blood swelled out of it.

  That’s when things got strange.

  Arlo was still sitting on his bed, but he wasn’t in his room anymore. Or at least, he wasn’t just in his room. He was somewhere else at the same time, watching himself. It was like when he chatted with his dad on the computer, watching himself in the little rectangle in the corner.

  Arlo could see the drop of blood on his thumb, but he could also see a boy sitting on his bed in his underwear looking at his thumb. And he sensed he wasn’t alone. Someone was watching him.

  He looked at the window. In the reflection, where he should have seen himself, he saw a girl instead. He guessed she was about his age, with blond hair that fell behind her shoulder. She was holding a silver hairbrush in her hand, staring directly at him. She’s looking in a mirror, Arlo realized. She was brushing her hair, and suddenly she saw me.

  She seemed as confused as he was.

  “Who are you?” she asked. He wasn’t sure she was even talking. The words may have been in his head.

  “Arlo Finch,” he answered. Or maybe he just thought it. Regardless, she seemed to understand.

  “Are you in the Woods?”

  “I’m in Pine Mountain,” he said. “Do you know where that is?”

  A spark of recognition, and disbelief. She knew that name.

  As Arlo looked around, the walls of his room began to vanish, revealing a moonlit forest. Only his bed remained, and the frame of the window, through which he saw the girl. The world on her side of the glass was sparkling with silver and red and gold, like a palace made of autumn leaves.

  She looked off to her right. Someone was coming. Her words came in an urgent whisper: “If I can see you, they can see you. You’re in danger. Be careful, Arlo Finch.”

  “Who is ‘they’?” he asked. “Who are you?”

  The girl suddenly stood up, turning her back to the reflection. She was talking with someone unseen. And then—

  “Arlo!”

  With a jolt, he was back in his bedroom. The girl vanished as a new shape stood in the doorway behind Arlo, blocking the light.

  It was Jaycee.

  “Were you in my room?” she asked.

  Arlo sat in a daze. It was like waking from a dream—only he wasn’t sure he was really awake. The walls had returned, but Arlo himself felt stuck between two worlds.

  “Were you in my room?” she repeated, louder.

  “No,” he lied.

  He was sure she didn’t believe him, but her expression shifted. “Is something wrong?”

  They stared at each other for five seconds. Arlo nearly told her about Cooper the ghost dog and the Long Woods and the girl he had been talking to in the reflection. He nearly told her that they had moved to a strange place with magical beetles and jackalopes and ominous portents. He nearly told Jaycee everything.

  But then he remembered Jaycee’s warning about not upsetting their mom. How precarious their situation was. How he’d promised he wasn’t hearing voices anymore. So instead he said—

  “Everything’s fine.”

  They both knew it wasn’t true, but they silently agreed to leave it at that. “Stay out of my room,” she warned as she left.

  Arlo looked down at his thumb. The blood was already dry.

  5

  THE MEETING

  ARLO FOUND HIS MOTHER IN THE KITCHEN, trying to get the stove lit. She looked over, clearly noticing the uniform, so Arlo figured he might as well just ask: “Can I join Rangers? The meeting is tonight.”

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Really. Do you want me to shorten your pants?”

  “You know how to do that?” he asked. It was as if his mother had just revealed she was a part-time nuclear physicist.

  “I used to sew all the time when I was your age. I was pretty good. I made my own dresses.” The third burner on the stove finally lit.

  “Why did you stop?”

  His mother filled a pot at the sink. “I don’t know. It wasn’t like I decided to stop sewing. It was just something I did all the time until I didn’t. That’s sort of growing up, I guess. Forgetting the things you used to love.”

  * * *

  The First Church of Pine Mountain was also the Only Church of Pine Mountain. The building consisted of two tall triangles covered in wood shingles connected by a low brick rectangle.

  As they pulled into the parking lot, Arlo’s mother asked if he wanted her to come in with him.

  Arlo unbuckled his seat belt. “I’ll be fine.” But he hesitated with his hand on the door latch. He was suddenly aware of his breathing.

  “If they need me to sign any forms, you can just bring them home.”

  Arlo hadn’t considered that there might be forms. What if it cost money to join? They didn’t have any extra money. And what if Uncle Wade’s uniform was wrong, or outdated, and they needed to buy a new uniform? What if there was a test you had to pass to even join Rangers? Arlo was consistently terrible at tests. Once, in second grade, he misspelled his own name on a spelling test. What if …

  “Arlo?” his mom asked.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s okay to be scared, even if there’s nothing to be scared of.”

  “I know.” His parents used to say that a lot, often after nightmares sent him running to their bed. But then she said something altogether new:

  “I’ll tell you, as someone with a lot more years under her belt, most of the things in life I regret are the things I didn’t do. The chances I didn’t take. It’s easy to think of reasons to say no. It’s so much better to think of reasons for yes.”

  Arlo looked to the church doors, where he saw kids entering the building. It was too dark and too far to see exactly who they were, or if he recognized any of them from school.

  So instead he pictured himself among them, walking through those doors. He imagined a braver Arlo Finch who never worried about all the things that could go wrong and just plunged forward into the unknown. This imaginary Arlo Finch didn’t ask permission in the hopes of being told no. He was more grown-up, more confident, more self-sufficient.

  And he was waiting just beyond those doors.

  Before he could second-guess himself, Arlo got out of the car. He walked the unlit path up to the church and pulled open the doors. The lobby was empty, but he could hear kids’ voices rising from the stairwell to the right. As he walked down the steps, he felt himself becoming that other Arlo he imagined.

  But first, he had a lot to learn.

  * * *

  Pine Mountain Company consisted of twenty-seven Rangers divided into four patrols. Arlo was assigned to Blue Patrol with Wu and Indra, apparently at their request, and immediately decided it was the best patrol in the company and possibly the entire world.

  Blue Patrol was the smallest, with just six Rangers including Arlo. They were all sixth graders, except for their patrol leader, Connor Cunningham, who was in eighth but didn’t act like he was their babysitter or better than them. He shook hands with Arlo, looking him in the eye. (Arlo realized later he had never shaken hands with anyone who wasn’t a grownup.)

  The final two members were Jonas and Julie, twin brother and sister who were homeschooled by their parents. Julie almost never spoke, but Jonas more than made up for it, offering his opinion on every small injustice he witnessed. “All the other patrols get thr
ee tents. It’s unfair we only get two just because we’re the smallest. Even if we don’t need the third tent, we should still have it.”

  His rant came while the patrol was busy waterproofing the seams of their tents. Connor invited Arlo to grab a squeeze bottle and join in. As he worked, Arlo surveyed the room. Each patrol had its own corner and its own personality.

  Green and Red Patrols looked to be primarily seventh and eighth graders. Red Patrol was all boys, mostly jocks, the kind who hit each other for no reason. “Last summer, one of them brought beer on a campout and they were all put on suspension for six weeks,” said Wu. “They missed out on Sand Dunes, which is one of the best trips.”

  Green Patrol—the only one with as many girls as boys—was sitting in a circle, passing around maps. Their patrol leader, a girl with feathers woven into her hair, wrote their suggestions on a chalkboard. “That’s Diana Velasquez,” said Indra. “She’s in tenth grade, but only because she skipped a year.”

  Arlo hadn’t realized that some Rangers were in high school. That meant Jaycee could technically be a Ranger. He shuddered at the thought.

  The fourth corner of the room was reserved for Senior Patrol, consisting of older kids who had moved up from the other patrols. Arlo guessed they were all in high school. Wu pointed one of them out. “That’s Christian, Connor’s brother. He’s the marshal.” Indeed, Christian looked almost exactly like Connor but with an extra four inches of height and twenty pounds of muscle. “The marshal is the leader of the entire company. It’s a lot of responsibility.”

  It was only then that Arlo noticed the absence of adults. He asked Indra who was in charge.

  “The Rangers run the company,” explained Indra. “There are grownups—they’re called Wardens—but mostly they just drive us on campouts and make sure no one cuts off a finger. Which almost never happens.”

  “Except for Leo McCubbin,” said Wu.

  “I said almost never.”

  Arlo wanted to ask more about Leo McCubbin and his missing finger, but just then Christian blew a whistle three times. Everyone stopped what they were doing, slowly forming a large circle at the center of the room. Arlo followed Wu and Indra’s lead.