The Mapmaker and the Ghost (2 page)

But before he had the chance to, Goldenrod had stabbed the pencil right into the heart of his backpack. There was a great, loud pop, and suddenly a fountain of orange energy soda shot out of the top of Charlie's half-open backpack and showered down all over his head. Goldenrod, Birch, and Jonas got out of the way just in time. Kids in the hallway started to roar with laughter.

Goldenrod smiled. But the smile wouldn't last long.

“Goldenrod Moram!” a deep voice boomed.

Of course Ms. Barf had to have seen the whole thing. She was pointing a shaking finger at Goldenrod.

“Five minutes! Five minutes before the end of your
career here at Pilmilton Elementary, and
this
is how you choose to send yourself off. I don't know why I should be surprised. To the principal's office, you no-good hoodlum!”

Jonas was the one laughing now, though Charlie still looked too shaken up by his sticky encounter to fully appreciate what was going on.

Birch stared awestruck at Goldenrod. “What about Mom…?”

“Yeah, she's probably going to have to come pick me up now. You can tell her,” Goldenrod said softly as she followed Ms. Barf down to the hallway she knew so well.

As the first Monday morning without school dawned for hundreds of kids all over the town of Pilmilton, Goldenrod was stuck in her room. She was starting her summer vacation grounded for a whole week.

She didn't think that her punishment would have been quite so harsh if Ms. Barf hadn't personally called up her parents and used the words “hoodlum” and “lack of parental discipline” so many times. She had also made a point of calling Goldenrod's crimes “damage to personal property” and “attack with a sharp weapon” and then saying that she wouldn't be surprised if “the victim's” parents took legal action. The thought of Charlie Cookman and his muscles being a victim of anything other than a math test almost made Goldenrod laugh.

Almost, because although she could handle the other
kids being mean to her and she was even used to Ms. Barf's anger, what she really hated was hearing her parents say they were disappointed in her. Which is exactly what they did say before grounding her for a whole week.

So, as the sun shone brightly outside, Goldenrod spent that Monday lying belly-down on her bed, poring over her books—almost all of which were atlases—and thinking about Charla.

Goldenrod and Charla had always loved maps. They found an indescribable thrill in seeing all the possibilities of places to go laid out in front of them on a page, like they could be reached at any time. They loved maps that showed mountain ranges and valleys, and those that showed names of capitals and cities. They even loved the ones that told you which state produced the most sugar snap peas.

One day the previous year, while they were browsing the library for a book of maps they maybe hadn't come across before, Charla found a biography that was haphazardly shelved in that section. It was for two explorers named Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who, a long time ago, went on a three-year adventure across most of the western United States, making maps and discovering loads and loads of plants and animals that no one had ever known existed, and even getting accidentally shot in the leg while being mistaken for an elk by a nearsighted fellow explorer (well, one of them did anyway—Lewis). Before Lewis and Clark, no one knew that there was land past the Rocky Mountains
(which seemed preposterous to Goldenrod and Charla, who actually lived on some of that very land).

From that day forward, Goldenrod and Charla made great plans to be the next Lewis and Clark: explorers, adventurers, and mapmakers. Goldenrod particularly felt a kindred spirit in Meriwether Lewis, in part because he had had to deal with a name as equally ridiculous as her own; Charla was happy to take on the Clark role. Since Lewis and Clark called their crew the Corps of Discovery, Charla and Goldenrod had picked a name for themselves that they thought sounded just as mighty: the Legendary Adventurers. They decided that, along the way, they might have to add some more crew members, perhaps a Sacagawea type, who was the intelligent Native American woman who had been the Discovery Corps's guide and translator. For just then, though, they felt the Legendary Adventurers could flourish in the very capable hands of its two leaders.

The girls spent months training for their adventures. In case they ever needed to hide from a hostile animal, they practiced camouflage techniques, using everything from makeup to mud to stealth moves to blend in with their surroundings. In case they were ever captured by enemies, they practiced interrogation and deception techniques, learning the most effective ways to mislead their captors under pressure by acting out different scenarios and taking turns playing the roles of Legendary Adventurer vs. Formidable Foe. And, of course, they continually honed their map-drawing
skills by getting their parents to enlist them in art classes at the Y.

There was only one real glitch in their grand plans: neither Goldenrod nor Charla could think of a single area in the mile-wide radius around Goldenrod's house that called for discovery because, unfortunately, that was exactly as far as Goldenrod was allowed to go without adult supervision. This was definitely one of the drawbacks to being eleven (ten, at the time).

They had had one possible breakthrough: the previous August, Charla's mom had mentioned offhand that they might go camping in the fall and had told Goldenrod that she would be welcome to come if they did. Both Goldenrod and Charla agreed that this was excellent news. Camping meant a forest and trees—in other words, undeveloped land—and that was exactly the type of land that needed exploration.

They eagerly waited for Charla's mom to mention the camping trip again, and in the meantime started collecting some of the supplies they thought they might need. Goldenrod asked for a compass for her eleventh birthday, and Charla asked for
The Encyclopedia of North American Flora and Fauna
for hers.

But in late November, instead of mentioning what was to be the great important camping trip that would change the American landscape forever, Charla's mom announced that her job was moving the family to another state. By February, they were gone.

And now Goldenrod was left alone to look sadly at her books of maps and her beautiful, unused compass sitting in its case on her desk. She sighed and stared out of her second-story window, where she could see her mother in her straw hat and gardening gloves. Mrs. Moram was a very small woman with short, blond hair and tan olive skin that made a perfect contrast to all the bright flowers she was working against. She was joyously bent over her garden now, probably excited that her beloved dahlias and, eventually, goldenrods would soon be in full bloom.
My name could have been Dahlia
, Goldenrod thought to herself.
So much better …

BANG! CLACK! WHACK! She was shaken from her grumpy thoughts by the rooftop sounds of her father, a scientist who had taken a week off to pursue one of his favorite pastimes: fixing rain gutters.

And from downstairs came the beeps and wails of Birch's video game.

It seemed like everyone in the world was having a great time … except Goldenrod.

But then again, wallowing is not a good trait for a Legendary Adventurer to have
, she thought. In fact, she was almost certain that Meriwether Lewis would never have wallowed had he ever been eleven years old and grounded.

Goldenrod took out a pencil and a fresh sheet of grid paper and, looking out the window again, started to sketch a map of her mother's garden. Chrysanthemums next to the rosebushes next to the magnolia tree. A ring of
soon-to-be-blooming goldenrods surrounding it all—a ring that her mother had to take very special care of because her daughter's namesake flowers were the kind that would absolutely run rampant and take over the whole garden if they weren't carefully monitored.

Suddenly, as Goldenrod squinted out at the flowers, one of those brilliant a-ha ideas hit her as sharply as the sun's rays. What if her project for the summer was to make a map of Pilmilton? Not just any map, though. The most accurate map in the world. Every house, every tree, every shrub. Okay, so maybe it wouldn't be as grand or as long an expedition as the one Lewis and Clark went on, and maybe she would discover nothing new at all. But then again … maybe she would. And then she could take the best map and sketches of any new specimens she discovered and mail them to Charla. That way, she could still be like her longdistance Clark. Yes!

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?”