The Mapmaker and the Ghost(4)
For the first time in days, Goldenrod felt filled with a sense of purpose.
On Tuesday, Goldenrod got her backpack ready. She packed:
? a flashlight with extra batteries (those always seemed to come in handy in books or movies when anyone was going on an adventure)
? three fresh notebooks, one lined for notetaking, one unlined for sketches, and a third filled with grid paper for the map
? three sharpened pencils
? a pencil sharpener
? her pocket-sized atlas
? a ruler
? a measuring tape
? a clean and empty jelly jar (in case she ever needed to collect any specimens)
? a pair of tweezers (for the exact same reason)
? an old, rather dull pair of her mother’s gardening shears
? a set of green and brown face paints that she had saved from last Halloween
? a lunch box for which she was planning many different kinds of sandwiches
? her compass, of course
? a roll of duct tape (she had yet to find any use for this tape herself, but she had heard her father go on and on about its indispensability)
? and a very small, very dirty sock that probably used to be yellow. This was a sock she had worn as a baby and which, for some reason, she found comforting to carry around.
Wednesday and Thursday were spent thinking about how to get her mother to let her step foot outside of the four barriers that she had never been allowed to leave by herself before. The perfect mile-long and mile-wide square was marked on each end by the park playground, Pilmilton Woods, Joseph McKinney’s house, and the Pilmilton Science Museum on the corner of Sutton and Main. Knowing her mother, getting permission to explore outside of that area wasn’t going to be easy.
By Friday, Goldenrod was standing outside and watching her father happily bang away on the roof. She was making sure that he didn’t fall. This was called spotting and it was pretty boring, but Goldenrod had volunteered to do it because she figured that having Dad on her side when she talked to Mom would be crucial in her Barrier-Breaking Plan.
So there she stood in the front yard, her cheap daisy kiddie sunglasses (the only pair she could find) squishing against her temples and hurting her head without providing much protection from the glaring sun.
“You’re doing a great job, kiddo,” her dad called down with a huge grin. He was a slightly pudgy, dark-haired man and, at the moment, he was sweating profusely. “I feel safer already. Remember, two Morams are better than one.”
“Yup,” Goldenrod said as she imagined her perfect, detailed map embossed with a Legendary Adventurers logo (which, she realized, she would have to design). “You hungry, Dad?” she called up to him.
“What’s the special today?” he called back down, his face even more freckled than usual because of all the days working in the sun.
“Peanut butter on whole wheat toast with strawberries and Cheerios. For extra crunch.” Goldenrod was an excellent sandwich-maker.
“Mmmm. I’ll have one of those.”
Goldenrod nodded. “Birch!” she called to her little brother.
“What?” he called back from inside.
“Come take my place watching Dad for a sec.”
“I’m about to beat Level Three!” he yelled back.
“I’m making sandwiches,” Goldenrod said.
She heard a beep and a few seconds later Birch was outside. “For me too?”
“Of course,” Goldenrod said and then turned around to the direction of her mom, who was working in the farthest reaches of the front garden. “You want one, Mom?”
There was no response. Her mother was digging.
Goldenrod had to walk over to her and tap her on the shoulder before her mother heard a word she was saying.
In the kitchen, as Goldenrod prepared the four sandwiches, she thought about her backpack. She thought about her map. She thought about leaving the Barriers. She thought about a new school without Ms. Barf. And, most of all, she thought about Charla. It wasn’t going to be quite the same, being Lewis without Clark. But still, she knew her friend would be thrilled for her if Goldenrod really were able to become a Legendary Adventurer, make an extraordinary map, and hopefully find something no one even knew existed.
Goldenrod smiled as she plated the sandwiches. When she was done, she rummaged through the kitchen drawers and found a box of frilly toothpicks. She put one on each of the two slices of her mother’s sandwich before putting all the plates on a tray and heading back outside. Sometimes, the littlest things could put parents in a good mood. And she needed her mom to be in the best mood possible.
3
THE EXPLORATION BEGINS
It had taken a few days for Goldenrod to convince her mother to let her go through her impenetrable barriers. Eventually, she had had to pull the Charla card—telling her mother that the only way she could possibly make any new friends would be to leave the house and explore some new places. “Besides, it’ll be good for my sense of independence, Mom.”
“It’s true, Janine,” Mr. Moram had chirped from the roof. “Our girl’s got to learn to be self-sufficient sometime. Let’s face it, she’s a middle schooler now. She’s not going to find much adventure hanging around the backyard.” Goldenrod had smiled innocently, all the while giving herself a mental high five for planting those lines so perfectly in her dad’s head.