Nature Girl Read online

  The author is extremely grateful for the wisdom

  and support of her agent, Linda Pratt,

  and her editor, Shana Corey.

  For Sofia, my very first reader.

  And especially for Lee, who always believed in me.

  CONTENTS

  1. The Hundred-Year-Old Maple

  2. Punishments

  3. Into the Woods

  4. The Appalachian Trail

  5. The Shelter

  6. Thank Goodness for Oreos!

  7. Trail Blaze Betty

  8. Saved!

  9. Dorks!

  10. Smoking

  11. Starving to Death

  12. The Lake

  13. Off the Trail

  14. Arp!

  15. Taking the Plunge

  16. The End?

  17. Not Done Yet

  18. Mount Greylock

  19. Journey’s End

  Author’s Note

  It’s not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.

  —Sir Edmund Hillary, who climbed Mount Everest

  1

  The Hundred-Year-Old Maple

  “Can you hear me now?”

  I creep a little further out along the tree branch.

  “Lucy, are you there?”

  I hear a little mumbling. I switch hands so that the cell phone is pressed against my right ear, six inches closer to my best friend.

  “Lucy, you’ve just got to be there!”

  My parents said the cell phone could only be used for emergencies. But this IS an emergency! My miserableness has swelled to monstrous proportions like the Barney balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Besides, since I’m hiding in a tree, my parents won’t even know I called Lucy until months from now when they get the phone bill. Then I won’t care how they punish me because I’ll be back home in New York City, far, far away from Nowheresville, Vermont.

  “LUCY!”

  I shouldn’t have yelled. I quickly look around to see if anyone heard me. But no one’s paying any attention to me—as usual. Mom is on the other side of the farmhouse, painting the barn. I don’t mean really painting it (even though it sure could use a new coat of red). No, she’s making a painting of it. “Trying to capture the essence of its heroism as it stands against the march of time.” I’m not kidding you. Mom actually said that. Dad is at the far side of the field, sketching the tumbledown pile of rocks at the edge of the Woods. Anywhere else in the world, people would immediately get rid of that useless safety hazard. But up here, everybody worships that rock pile because it’s an authentic Vermont stone wall.

  My sister, Ginia, is inside the farmhouse. Her name is really VIRginia, but ever since she turned sixteen, she has a fit if you call her that. She’s really good at drawing. She can draw just about anything—even galloping horses. But she’s probably doing another self-portrait so her squinty little eyes can be big and beautiful. She gets to spend hours mooning into a mirror and playing with her hair because my parents think that’s ART.

  I’m supposed to be doing ART too. Every morning, the time between nine o’clock and noon is dedicated to “creative pursuits.” That’s my parents’ idea of a fun summer. Can you believe it? Three whole hours—every day? I told them that I couldn’t do anything for three whole hours—not even things I liked. Dad just smiled and repeated one of his annoying sayings, “Practice makes perfect.”

  But he was lying. Practice won’t help my painting or drawing or anything else.

  The trouble is, I don’t have any important talents. That became really obvious last fall when I started middle school. The first thing that happened was all the sixth graders had to demonstrate how great they were at singing and dancing and painting and showing off. Then the talent teachers chose kids for their workshops. I was hoping I could be in the chorus with Lucy. But I didn’t get picked for that. I didn’t even get picked for drawing. In fact, I guess you could say I didn’t get picked for anything. I got put in photography with all the other kids they didn’t know what to do with. I mean, anyone can point a camera at something and push a button. Unfortunately they didn’t have a workshop for doodling and hanging out with your best friend. Because those are the only things I’m any good at.

  Maybe you think that doodling is drawing. They both use paper and pencil, right? I kind of thought that too. So on the first morning of ART time, I sketched myself standing next to the farmhouse. I can’t draw people, but you could recognize me by my frizzy hair. Then I made a swarm of mosquitoes attacking me. Only I didn’t actually draw them because they’re too tiny and complicated; I just covered the page in dots. Unfortunately Mom walked past while I was stabbing the paper with my pen. I tried to keep her from seeing what I was doing, but she looked anyway. She opened her mouth like she wanted to say something. Then she shut it again. Then she sighed. So I crumpled up the paper and threw it away.

  And that’s the difference. Drawing ends up in museums. Doodling ends up in the trash.

  Every day after that, I just wrote words like art and Vermont in my sketchbook and completely scribbled them out. Mom complained that I wasn’t creating; I was destroying. So I told her what Dad always says. ART is all about personal expression. And ripping the page with my pencil sure expressed my person.

  Summer vacation should NOT be like this. If I had known what my parents were going to do to me, I would’ve gotten such bad grades that they would have had to send me to summer school instead. But this is our first summer up here. I had never even been to Vermont.

  Besides, Lucy was supposed to be with me. Lucy has been my best friend since she taught me how to whistle in preschool. That’s almost two-thirds of our entire lives. If she had come, every bad thing would have been bearable. No cable TV? No Internet? Mice poop in the cupboards? A million bloodsucking insects? Who cares? Whatever happens, we roll our eyes and laugh about it. Because that’s what friends do.

  Only Lucy couldn’t come. Her mom, Alison, has Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Don’t bother asking who Hodgkin is. No one will tell you. They’ll just get mad at you for making jokes, when you really want to know. All they would say was that it was a good kind of cancer. And everybody was glad about that.

  So then I thought, Well, okay, maybe Lucy won’t come for the WHOLE summer. Maybe we won’t have the endless sleepover we planned. Maybe we’ll just be together for five or four or three weeks. But at the very last minute, Lucy told me she wasn’t coming to Vermont AT ALL.

  She and her mom are spending the summer with her grandmother. Mrs. T. has a summerhouse in Massachusetts, just about an hour’s drive from us in Vermont. So Lucy isn’t that far away. She could have come for a week or a day—or five minutes.

  Or I could have gone down there. Lucy and Alison were always planning to climb this mountain that’s practically in Mrs. T.’s backyard. Mount Greylock is really cool. It has a stone tower and a souvenir stand where you can get ice cream after you make it to the top. Now that’s my kind of mountain. So I said to Lucy, maybe I could come for a short visit and my dad could drive us all up there—even Alison. I thought that was a terrific idea. Only Lucy said her mom has a different mountain to climb this summer. And it isn’t the kind of mountain I can climb—even if I want to.

  So here I am. Stuck in Nowheresville, Vermont, without my best friend, being tortured by my family. I know you think I’m exaggerating but I’m not! This is what happened.

  Yesterday Mom made me go swimming for exercise. Only there aren’t any swimming pools up here. Oh no. Why would we want a clean cement bottom when there could be yucky gunk? We went to a big hole in the ground filled with mud. On top of the mud there’s maybe ten inches of water. On top of the water is a layer of floating green scum. And Mom expected me to swim in that!

  There were lots of oth
er kids and teenagers there—including Ginia’s new boyfriend, Sam, who lives up here ALL YEAR ROUND. They all jumped right in, like they didn’t know how gross that pond water was. Like maybe they had never seen an actual swimming pool. I sat on a rock as far away from the scum as I could get.

  Sam and these boys started teasing me. Why wasn’t I swimming? Didn’t I know how to swim? I told them, of course I did. Only I wouldn’t swim in that scummy cesspool. So they threw me in the water.

  Did Ginia save me? No. She laughed! Later, when I told Mom and Dad, Mom said it was a good thing. And Dad said someday I would look back on it and be grateful. GRATEFUL? That I was totally slimed by those jerks and humiliated forever?

  Since my family had NO sympathy for me, I begged them to let me call Lucy.

  But they wouldn’t because the cell phone is just for emergencies. Unless it’s the weekend, when there are free minutes. I was supposed to wait until Saturday! Then Mom suggested I write Lucy a letter. What century does she think this is? What’s the point of civilization if you can’t call the only person in the whole world who truly cares about you?

  This morning, my hair still smelled like gunk. I felt like I really would die if I didn’t talk to Lucy. I waited until my family were all off doing their ART. I snuck out to the car. I made believe I was looking for a pencil I dropped. Then I carefully opened the glove compartment and took out the little silver phone.

  I almost cried when I saw its shiny surface. You won’t believe this, but practically everything else in Vermont is made of cloth or pottery or wood. I slid the phone into my pocket. I got out of the car and held up the pencil to show anyone who was spying why I had gone over there. Then I casually walked across the yard to the maple tree.

  Mom and Dad love that tree. Every morning at breakfast they say, “Isn’t it wonderful that this syrup came from our very own Hundred-Year-Old Maple!” As if a little sticky sauce makes up for being deprived of every single thing I like to do.

  The Hundred-Year-Old Maple has boards nailed into its trunk. Not by us—oh no, we love the tree—but by whatever kids lived here before. The boards go up about ten feet to a branch that sticks out horizontally. I grabbed hold of a board and climbed. The boards wobbled, but I made it to the horizontal branch. I carefully stood up, holding on to another branch with my left hand.

  A brown bird was just a few feet above me. It cocked its head and gave me a look like, “What are you doing in my tree?” Believe me, I didn’t want to be up there. But I had to get high enough so that the cell phone signal could make it over the mountains and out of Vermont.

  As I punched the buttons with my right thumb, I worried that Alison would answer. I never knew how to talk to her anymore. You couldn’t say, “Hi, how are you?” to a sick person.

  Luckily Mrs. T. answered the phone. She usually loved to chat. But when I asked if she had seen any summer theater, she told me to call back later. Only I couldn’t call later. I was already in the tree! So I told her I had to speak to Lucy. It was an emergency.

  Then Lucy got on the phone and said, “What’s wrong, Megan?”

  Her voice sounded far away. When I said how good it was to talk to her, she didn’t say anything. That was when I started shouting, “Lucy, are you there? Lucy, you’ve just got to be there! LUCY!”

  Lucy isn’t answering. Something is wrong with the cell phone. I need to find a spot with a better signal. I inch way out on the branch. The bird flies away. The further out I go, the more the branch sinks from my weight. But I can’t worry about that now.

  “LUCY!”

  Finally she says, “Stop yelling, Megan. I can hear you. We’re waiting for Mom’s doctor to call. Mom’s really nervous.”

  Lucy sounds nervous too, like she’s having trouble breathing. I wonder if I should try to make her laugh. I love her laugh. It doesn’t come from her mouth or her nose; it comes all the way from her belly—especially when she laughs at my jokes.

  “Should I read you more of Ginia’s diary? Remember? ‘Oh how I love the hair on Sam’s knuckles.’” To tell the truth, I made that up. Ginia doesn’t even have a diary.

  “Some other time, okay, Megan?”

  “That’s okay. I can’t get it now anyway. I’m in a tree.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t worry. I haven’t turned into a Nature Girl. I came up here to call you. You won’t believe what happened to me yesterday. Mom took me to this pond to swim, but it was full of gunk and frog pee.”

  But she interrupts. “Grandma said you said it was an emergency.”

  “It IS an emergency.”

  “If it happened yesterday, it can’t be an emergency today.”

  Lucy gets all picky about stuff like that. It can be very annoying. So I get a little mad because she isn’t really listening to me. “It IS an emergency because I’m still suffering. You don’t know how I’m suffering. Nobody does. Nobody cares.”

  “Nobody cares because you aren’t really suffering!”

  “My hair stinks like rotten leaves! I’ll never get the slime out! Ever!”

  “At least you HAVE hair!”

  Lucy has hair too. Her hair is short and straight and shiny black. But Alison doesn’t have hair right now.

  There’s a big silence again. Only this time I know it’s not the phone.

  “Please don’t be mad at me, Lucy. I can’t help saying stupid stuff because I really am suffering. You don’t know because you aren’t here. But you should be. You should have come to Vermont with me like you promised!”

  I stamp my foot for emphasis. Then I hear a loud crack.

  There’s a moment when I think, Oh no, this can’t be happening. But I’m wrong. It is happening.

  The branch breaks and I fall smack to the ground.

  I guess I scream; I don’t know. I slam into the dirt so hard, the air is knocked out of my lungs. But it feels like more than that. It feels like my actual self whooshes out of my body and up into the sky. I hover over my old body. It looks really weird with its legs and arms sprawled in crazy angles on top of all these sticks and leaves. As I float higher and higher, I’m so happy that I’m finally getting away from Vermont.

  Mom and Dad and Ginia run toward my body, carrying their paintbrushes.

  “Megan, what happened?” Mom says.

  “Looks like she fell,” Dad says.

  Mom drops her paintbrush and kneels beside me. She brushes the hair back from my face and strokes my forehead like she used to when I was little.

  “Is she unconscious?” Dad kneels on my other side.

  They both look at me with worried faces. The past few weeks, their eyes were narrow slits that zapped me with laser beams of anger. But now their eyes are sympathetic and wide. They gently pat me all over, feeling for broken bones. After I slip back into my body, I try to smile at them. I feel really horrible and yet somehow better than I’ve felt since we came to Vermont.

  And then, out of the corner of my eye, I see Ginia pick up a small shiny rectangle.

  I gasp.

  “Did that hurt, honey?” Mom says.

  “Maybe her leg is broken,” Dad says.

  I send all kinds of sister messages to Ginia. Like, I will give you my allowance for a year and never tease you about Sam again and be your personal slave if only you put that little insignificant silver thing into your pocket and keep your big mouth shut.

  She smiles at me. I smile back. I’m so relieved. I love my sister.

  The silver glints in the sun as she holds out her hand. “Look what I found. I wonder how our cell phone got way over here on the ground?”

  From the phone, a little voice says, “Hello? Megan? What’s happening?”

  It’s Mrs. T.

  What happened to Lucy? She must be really mad at me. And that makes me mad. I jump up. “It isn’t my fault. I had to call. It was an emergency! None of this would have happened if you let me call Lucy last night. But you only do what you want. You never do what I want.” I stamp my foot.


  “I guess her leg isn’t broken.” Dad walks over to the tree.

  Mom sighs as she takes the phone from Ginia. “Hello, Mrs. T.? Don’t worry about Megan. She’s fine. How’s Alison?”

  I’m not fine. I’m shaking. My head hurts, my arm is scraped, my legs are scratched, and my favorite black T-shirt with the New York subway map on it is ripped. But I’m not lucky enough to be taken to a hospital where a nice nurse will fluff up my pillows and I can lie around watching cable TV. I have no broken bones to heal.

  Dad examines the tree limb. The part where it broke looks like a big angry mouth with jagged teeth. Dad lifts the branch. For a moment, the mouth is closed. But then he lets it fall down again and the mouth opens wider than ever.

  “I’m sure the doctor will have good news. Please give Alison our love. Let us know if there’s anything we can do. Good-bye.” Mom hangs up the phone.

  She doesn’t even ask me if I want to say good-bye to Lucy. But I can’t talk anyway; I’m trying so hard not to cry. I hate them. I hate them all. I limp toward the house.

  I only get about three steps before I hear Mom say, “Where do you think you’re going? We’re not finished here, Megan Knotts.”

  Let this be a lesson for you. As bad as you think things are, they can always get worse.

  2

  Punishments

  These are my punishments.

  First: no using the cell phone for the rest of July. This is especially painful because now I can’t call Lucy to find out if she’s mad at me.

  Second: reparations to the tree. Reparations are what Dad makes me do to try to fix things. I have to write a letter to the farmer we’re renting the house from. I have to pay for a visit from the tree doctor with my own money. And I have to write an Apology Poem to the tree and actually go outside and read it to the tree. Out loud.

  Third (and most horrifying): no TV for the rest of the summer. None. Not the news, not the PBS station, not even that awful yoga tape Kundalini Kids. No screen time whatsoever no matter how educational or boring.