Nature Girl (10 page)

The moment I turn my back, he starts digging up the bags.

“Stop it, Arp. Whose side are you on?”

I carefully cover everything up.

“Weren’t you listening when I told Trail Blaze Betty how important it is?”

He looks at me like I must not have been listening either. The brownies have been eaten. So I bribe him with a peanut butter sandwich. Then I remind him, “The only way to fail is to quit, so let’s keep going!”

I don’t exactly know how the Trail can find out my secrets, but I don’t want to take any chances. For the next hour, I totally respect the Trail. I step over roots. I don’t whack trees or kick stones. I don’t rip leaves off branches. I try to keep Arp from lifting his leg right by the edge.

“Can’t you do that someplace else?” I ask him.

But he doesn’t listen. He’s having too much fun chasing after chipmunks and rabbits. Sometimes he doesn’t even see an animal; he just sniffs along a trail of stink that a wild creature left behind in the dead leaves. He really shouldn’t do that. What if the stink trail led to that Bear? Besides, then he always has to run like crazy to catch up.

“Arp, you’re wasting energy!”

Does he care? Of course not.

“We have a long way to go. And I’m not carrying you anymore when you get tired.”

It’s past twelve o’clock. I’m not hungry. Those eight brownies are a big lump in my stomach that won’t go away. Like a huge pile of guilt. I’m so hot and tired, all I want to do is lie down and take a nap. But I can’t. I have to keep going, because as you might remember, Trail Blaze Betty said that Mount Greylock isn’t just around the next bend—it’s a FEW DAYS AWAY.

The Trail is in a flat part and not uphill or anything, but my legs just don’t want to go. My muscles are saying, Excuse me, didn’t we do this yesterday already? How can you possibly expect us to do it again?

I drag my legs along the Trail like they’re paralyzed or something. I get another, bigger walking stick. It’s too hard to carry, so I drop it. Then I wonder if that’s respecting the Trail. Trail Blaze Betty is so crazy, she’d probably want me to put the stick back where I found it.

By one o’clock, I’m sure that Mom and Dad are back from Rutland. Ginia is saying, I thought she went with you. Mom is saying, I thought she was with you. Dad is calling whoever is in charge of finding lost girls. I hope that Ginia is in big trouble. I hope she’s sorry she told all those lies. The Trail would find out a lot about her, that’s for sure.

Only she’s not hiking the Trail. I am. At least, I’m trying to.

Arp and I stop and have a drink. I have to give him some water from the second bottle because there aren’t any puddles. Only when I’m giving him the water, he bumps the bottle and the rest of it spills and disappears right into the ground. Of course, when I spill water, it would be someplace where it doesn’t even make a puddle for Arp.

I slump down over the empty water bottle. Why did I ever think I could hike all the way to Massachusetts? Who am I kidding? I never did anything my whole life. It’s like Trail Blaze Betty said. The Trail will find out the truth about me. And the truth about me is that I’m a lying, lazy quitter.

The yucky voice says,
“You’ll never make it, so why even bother to try?”

And if I’m going to quit anyway, I might as well quit now. Wouldn’t that be the sensible thing to do? Wouldn’t that save a lot of energy? Because the further I walk now, the further I’ll have to walk to get back to Trail Blaze Betty so she can call my parents to come pick me up.

But how can I tell her that I’m not a hiker and the only thing I can do is doodle? What if she asks for the brownies back? Then I’ll have to tell her what a pig I was. She seems like the type who gets really mad about stuff like that.

“
She told you the Trail would find out your lies,”
the yucky voice says.

But it wouldn’t be a lie if I could just keep hiking. So I stand up. But Mount Greylock seems so far away. Can I do it? No.

I turn around and walk back toward the shelter.

Then I stop. Can I face Trail Blaze Betty? No.

I turn around again and walk toward Mount Greylock. All those miles, all those days. I’ll never make it.

I stop. I really don’t know what to do. So I say, “I wish Patricia Palombo were here.”

Arp looks at me like I’m nuts. He never met her, but he’s definitely heard me complain about her.

“If she were, then I’d know I’m doing the right thing, because Patricia Palombo never has doubts about anything. If she’s doing it, it’s wonderful. If she isn’t doing it, it’s lame. It’s that simple.”

I get so agitated, I continue walking again—toward Mount Greylock.

“And sometimes something like lunch clubs switches from lame to wonderful, just because she decides to do it.”

Does Arp care? Of course not. He’s a dog. He’s lucky. He doesn’t even know what lunch clubs are. You probably don’t either, because everywhere else in the world, sixth graders get to leave school for lunch. But in our middle school, the parents and teachers decided it isn’t SAFE to let sixth graders go out, because of this high school right next door. When we complained, the parents and teachers decided to give us lunch clubs for
enrichment. As if learning basket weaving or other activities suitable for senior citizens could make up for being deprived of our freedom.

Lunch clubs were voluntary. I mean, they couldn’t MAKE kids sign up. So nobody did. Then I noticed there was a club for doing comics. When I was little, Mom and I drew cartoons together. Mega Girl battled Ninja Ginja and saved the world! We did pages and pages. Until Ginia said my characters looked like vegetables and I got mad and quit. But if I drew comics at school, Ginia couldn’t make fun of me. So I said, “You know, a club might be okay if it was for something fun like drawing cartoons.”

Before Lucy could say what a good idea that was, Patricia Palombo said, “The only enrichment I want is a bigger allowance.”

After everybody laughed, I couldn’t say any more about it.

A few days later, when I got to the cafeteria, everybody was crowded around the sign-up sheets. First Patricia Palombo put her name down. Then five other girls did. And then Lucy did. I was totally stunned. But she hadn’t signed up for the comics club. She signed up for knitting!

I went right over to Lucy. “Why would you sign up for that stupid club?”

Patricia Palombo answered, even though I wasn’t talking to her. “Knitting isn’t stupid, May-gun.”

Patricia Palombo liked to make my name sound dumb when she said it.

She held up a fashion magazine. “Look. Knitting is totally cool. Everybody’s doing it.”

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.