Nature Girl

The author is extremely grateful for the wisdom
and support of her agent, Linda Pratt
,
and her editor, Shana Corey
.

  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

“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 other 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.