Glass Girl (A Young Adult Novel) (8 page)

I didn’t see Henry after lunch or at all until the next day in Mr. Landmann’s class. He seemed okay. Mr. Landmann passed around a dirty John Deere cap with names of poems on pieces of paper. The poem we drew would become our major project for the year. We had to write a twenty-page paper that analyzed the poem, the poet, and the historical context. Mr. Landmann meant business. Papers weren’t due until late March, but he made the assignment early, hoping that kids would actually work on it between other projects.

When the hat came to me, I reached in and felt the scraps of paper like they contained some clue. Finally I just took a breath, grabbed one on top, and unrolled it slowly. “Home Burial”—Robert Frost. I’d never read it, but I’d written about Frost before, and I felt comfortable that I’d drawn an easier poem. Other students groaned as they got Eliot or Ginsberg or Stevens.

“What’d you get, Meg?” Tennyson whispered.

“Frost.” I wanted to apologize; there was no way she got anyone easier.

“Lucky. I got ‘I Am Vertical.’ Sylvia Plath. Didn’t she kill herself?”

“Yeah. Sorry. Good poem, though. ‘But I would rather be horizontal.’”

“What?” Tennyson said.

“Nothing.” I shook my head and laughed. “Just…read the poem. It’s good.”

I glanced at Henry. He smiled and showed me his paper. It was Langston Hughes’ “Mother to Son.” I showed him my paper and he rolled his eyes and nodded.

“Trade you,” he said.

“Not a chance. Frost is my favorite and my best.”

“I like Frost, too.” He rolled his paper up and tucked it in his pocket. “Hey, Meg, I’ve been thinking. I bet you’ve never been on a trail ride in the mountains. You should come out to our stables and let me take you into the foothills. The Owl Creek Range starts outside of town.”

“Really? How’s your hazard insurance? Because if there’s a way to get seriously hurt, I’ll find it, and we are a litigious family.”

He smiled crookedly. “I’ll make sure you sign a waiver. No, seriously, I won’t let anything happen to you.” He laughed softly. “We’re actually closing up for the season. We really do take tourists on trail rides. But the tourists are gone so it’ll just be you and me.”

Tennyson interrupted and put her arm around Henry. “You really should do that, Meg. It’s beautiful and if you don’t like the scenery, you can just watch Henry’s wranglers. They’re easy on the eyes.”

“Is there one in particular, Tennyson?” Henry said, ducking out from under her arm. “I could arrange a meeting.”

“Yeah, the one from Texas…what’s his name?”

“That would be Dylan. But he’s a nice guy and you’d break his heart. He dropped out of Texas A&M to come up here and saddle bum around with my horses year-round. Knowing your dad, I think you’d better be looking for a premed honors student.”

“Leave my dad out of this.”

Henry laughed, clearly amused by Tennyson. Maybe they had history no one had mentioned yet. “Anyway, Meg, think about it,” he said.

Later, as we were walking to our cars, Tennyson tore into me for details.

“Have you two been talking outside of school?” she said.

“Of course not,” I said.

“Well, it’s just weird, though, that he asked you to ride horses with him. I mean, that’s asking you out, right?”

“No.” I rolled my eyes, but inside, my heart fluttered with something like hope. “He’s a tour guide
.
You heard him. He’s probably hoping I’ll bring paying customers to him later.”

“He wasn’t using his tour guide voice, Meg. He was using his hot lover-boy voice.”

“I don’t know what conversation you were listening to. Anyway, I don’t know if I’ll be able to go. I have to work.”

Tennyson laughed. “He didn’t give you a specific time. You can’t just say you have to work every day, every hour. Go ride horses with the boy. And what are you doing tomorrow night?”

“Nothing, with some television breaks.”

“Well, now you have specific plans.”

I crossed my arms and smiled. “I do? Are they legal?”

“Is camping legal? Because that’s where we’re taking you.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Me—and Taylor and Sara, of course.”

“Have you been camping before?” The thought of my Pittsburgh friends camping seemed absurd, but these girls were tougher.

“Meg, we grew up in Wyoming. Of course we’ve been camping. It’s a state law. You just bring really warm clothes and a sleeping bag and come to my house at five o’clock on Saturday.”

“I’ll have to tell my parents where we’ll be.”

“Just say it’s off Highway 789. There’s a little place there.”

“Okay. Sounds like fun.”

She bounced toward her car like a girl with more to do after this and more after that. Tennyson was part of this world in a way I was not. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe I was the one with a firmer grasp on the possibilities and eventualities.

“Get some sleep tonight because you won’t sleep out in the woods.” She opened her car door and then said, “That is not a joke.”

***

On Saturday, I dug through boxes we hadn’t unpacked to find my old sleeping bag. I wasn’t sure it was exactly a camping quality sleeping bag—more of a sleepover quality bag. I picked off some old, stuck-on popcorn and remembered the last time I’d used it—Lydia Weller’s eighth-grade slumber party.

It was the first time I discovered that some girls actually sneak out of the house during slumber parties and meet up with boys. I would’ve never known if I hadn’t gone to the bathroom at midnight and caught Macy and Adrienne climbing through the bathroom window. They had on eyeliner, perfume, and cutoff shorts. Their only goodbye was a glare that promised retribution if I didn’t keep my mouth shut.

I put on my mom’s warm long johns and Canning Mills sweats. I added my old ski jacket and found some ratty mittens.

When I came into the kitchen, Dad laughed. “Ready for a blizzard?”

“Ha ha. Tennyson said to wear something warm. Do I look ridiculous?”

“No. You look cute. So, it’s you and three other girls and you’ll be off 789, right? Do we know if this is a public camping area? Possibly staffed by armed security?” He arched an eyebrow hopefully.

“I’m sure it’s an area where she’s camped with her family before. Tennyson wouldn’t do anything stupid. She’s in all my AP classes. They grew up here, so this is like going to the mall in Pittsburgh for us.”

“Strange and unlikely comparison,” he said.

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She’d set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I’d begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were fading and blending in with walls. She was shrinking. Or maybe her sphere of influence in the family was shrinking. My dad glanced at her, too, and then wrote something on a napkin.

He slid it across the counter to me—
Don’t worry. Come home in one piece. Have fun and act like a sixteen-year-old for a change.

I drove to Tennyson’s house on the newer side of town, next to the tiny, faux mall. Taylor and Sara laughed at my sleeping bag when I took it out of the trunk. I ignored them and helped Tennyson carry out bags.

“Shouldn’t we take my Jeep?” I said, thinking of its off-road capability.

“Do you have something against small Sentras?” Tennyson said. “Load it up, girl.”

I noticed we were putting in a bunch of snack food and sleeping bags for everyone. Lots of furry pillows were piled in, too. I didn’t see what I recognized as a tent.

Once we were on the move, we reached Highway 789 quickly. The rolling hills and grassland started to look an awful lot like pastureland. The cows watched us pass. We turned onto a private road with a gate, and Tennyson hopped out and pushed it open. Sara climbed into her seat and drove the car through while Tennyson shut and latched the gate.

I got a little worried that we weren’t supposed to be here. “So, whose property is this?”

“A good friend’s,” Tennyson said. “He lets us camp here.”

I caught Sara glancing sideways at Tennyson and they shared a slight smile. Taylor, in the backseat with me, grinned. I was being set up somehow. Were they driving me somewhere to sacrifice me as the only virgin they knew? I dug my fingernails into my hands to fight off my attacking nerves.

We drove down a narrow dirt road into an area full of cottonwood trees and aspens and parked on an open patch of dirt. We unloaded the car and carried everything under the trees. They unrolled their sleeping bags and laid their pillows down on the ground like they were in someone’s living room for a sleepover. They even fought over who got to lie next to whom. We were in seventh grade again, only now instead of the danger of stupid girl fights, we had the danger of bears.

I tried to work this out in my head. “Okay, guys, I’ve never been camping, but I know
this
is a little weird. Where’s the tent? We can’t just lie on the ground, can we? I mean there are things out here that we don’t really want to curl up with in a sleeping bag.”

Tennyson stared me down. “Meg, you’re a buzz kill. Help us find firewood and try to have some fun. Think of it as an episode of
Survivor.
We’re stranded in the wilderness and we’ve got to see if we’re plucky enough to make it, right? And maybe we’ll meet some half-naked male survivors who’ll take pity on us.”

I could tell I wasn’t going to win the argument, so I started looking for firewood. I felt like an idiot. I
knew
this wasn’t the way it goes. Once we’d dragged back a dozen large branches and broken them up, we arranged them into what looked like a decent campfire. Tennyson popped open a can of lighter fluid, soaked the wood down liberally, and lit a match. In an instant, we had fire.

“Look what I have ma-a-a-ade,” Tennyson screamed. No one laughed but me. “Ah,
Cast Away
guys,” she said. “It’s available today on Netflix!”

We jumped back to keep Tennyson’s creation from burning off our eyebrows. I had to give them credit—they did bring marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate to make s’mores. And they remembered hot dogs, but not buns. So we had dinner and dessert, with orange juice, which I think was actually supposed to be for breakfast, but it was all we had.

The wind blew gently. The pines whispered to us. The stars showed off and I found constellations without a chart for the first time in my life. The sliver of a crescent moon didn’t give us any light, so once the sun was down, it was implausibly dark.

In Pittsburgh, I never really saw true darkness. There were always lights on around us—blindingly bright at night. Mom used to bemoan that her children had never seen the stars. That’s not exactly true. We did vacation in areas where we could see them.

When the temperature dropped, we zipped up in our sleeping bags and huddled together next to the fire. No one thought to gather more firewood, though, and the fire died down to hot coals. We were too afraid to venture away where the wild things were so we suffered in silence.

Tennyson suggested that maybe she should’ve borrowed a tent from her neighbor. We all agreed, but none of us would’ve known how to put it up. They had misrepresented their camping acumen. They were more comfortable with malls.

A dog barked in the distance and it made me think of coyotes. I knew there were coyotes watching us. Did Tennyson not think of coyotes? And coyotes were probably the most innocuous animals in these woods at night.

The dog’s barks got louder and they were joined by the unmistakable sound of a horse.

“Exactly whose land are we on? Would it be someone who would confront trespassers?” My voice revealed my irritation and Tennyson looked a little hurt.

“The Whitmires’ ranch.”

“As in Henry Whitmire?”

“Who else? They own like a million acres out here. This is nowhere near their house, so they’ll never know.” She glanced at Sara and muttered under her breath, “And,
voila…
happiness ensues.”

A
s if he’d been summoned, Henry appeared on the back of the horse, bearing down on us from the pasture. The horse was a bay, if my memory of American Girl fiction was correct. Strange how your brain remembers meaningless details when you’re stressed.

Henry slowed his horse and stopped right at our feet. From this angle, he looked a hundred feet tall. Tennyson gave him a look of utter self-satisfaction.

Henry’s black and white dog seemed interested in me. He came straight to me and licked my face. Henry’s gaze took in our impromptu campsite—Tennyson’s car, our sleeping bags, the open sacks of food, the dying fire, and the missing tent. I could tell he was trying hard not to smile, but the effort of it was playing at the corners of his perfect eyes.

“
Huh
,” he said. “You girls having a little campout tonight?” His voice sounded gentle enough to hide the biting sarcasm behind it, but there was no mistaking that he found this scene incredibly entertaining.

“Yeah, what’s it to you, Henry?” Tennyson said.

He chuckled a bit. “What’s it to me
?
Well, first of all, my dad got a call a minute ago that there was a fire out here, and one of our ranch hands was locking some gates and noticed a little red Nissan.”

He paused like he was waiting for Tennyson to defend herself, and then he shook his head slightly and continued.

“I kind of thought I might find you here and that the fire might belong to you, but I didn’t dream you’d be crazy enough to sleep out here on the ground with no tent and a bunch of food open all around you.”

His voice got louder as he tried to make the stupidity of this sink into Tennyson’s hormone-addled brain.

“You’re asking to be eaten,” he said. “If a bear doesn’t get you, a wolf might or a panther, or a skunk will make himself known in the middle of the night. And you know there’s a burn ban, right? You understand that means no fires, at all, anywhere, especially not right under our trees and next to our pasture where our expensive livestock is just trying to enjoy the evening?”

“Henry, you’re just feeling your oats,” Tennyson said. “The gate wasn’t locked and this looked like a nice, safe place to introduce Meg to camping in the mountains.”

She smiled her sweetest smile at him. “By the way, which wrangler turned us in?”