by Erin Teagan
Dad’s smiling, and Mom still looks peeved. “So, my Ali-Gator,” Dad says, clapping his hands. “You still reading those survival books?”
“Every one in the library,” I say, and it’s not an exaggeration.
Mom’s taxi pulls into the driveway.
“What do you say about putting all that reading into action and coming on set with me and Jake this week?” Dad says. “It’s our season finale. A big one.”
“What?” It’s Jake, still in his pajamas, touching all the doughnuts, a tiny Band-Aid on his arm that’s no longer in a sling. Typical Jake to make such a big deal about an injury the size of a paper cut. “She’s coming with us?”
My body feels like it’s on fire. I should be happy about this. It’s what I’ve always wanted, to follow in the shoes of the General and my dad. The first Survivor Girl. It’s in my blood, right? But the truth is, I’ve never actually eaten a grasshopper for breakfast or slept in a tent made of seaweed. And maybe I’ve never even started a campfire with a hair band and a nail file like I told all my friends.
“Aren’t there laws about kids on TV shows?” I say. “I wouldn’t want to break the law or anything.”
“Nonsense!” Dad says.
I look up at Harper’s bedroom window, the shades closed tight. If she’s mad at me for not telling her about my dad staying in a hotel for one night, she’ll ditch me for good once she finds out I’m a survivalist fake. So will all my other friends. “But, Dad, I’m only twelve—”
And before I even finish my sentence I know what he’s going to say. “I was only thirteen when I survived that boat accident off the coast of Australia with my parents and then got lost out at sea for three nights and two days and survived by befriending the hungry sharks and manta rays.” Because I’ve heard that story at least five thousand times, not to mention read it in about three hundred newspapers. Once, it was even reenacted in a Nat Geo special, Me and My Manta Ray. It’s basically how he got so famous.
Mom drops her wheelie bag. “Forget it. I’m staying home. You’re not going anywhere, Ali.” She strides over, taking me by the elbow.
I pull away from her. “No. Wait. I want to go.”
“Nope,” she says with a huff. “What if something happens to you out there?”
“She’ll be fine, Michelle,” Dad says, balling up another net and stuffing it into a bag. “She’s my Survivor Girl.”
“That’s not the only thing I’m worried about.” She stares at Dad meaningfully, and then they’re having some kind of telepathic fight with their eyeballs.
“Stop it!” I say. “I’m going with Dad.”
Mom leans into my face. “There are things you don’t understand, Ali. I’m just protecting you.”
Protecting me. It’s something she says all the time now. Protecting me from getting a stomachache, protecting me from bad skin, protecting me from an injury.
“No,” I say. “I’m going with Dad. I’m not a baby anymore, Mom.”
“Let her come, Michelle,” Dad says. “You can’t control everything.”
The taxi driver beeps his horn. “I’m not the one trying to control everything, George.” She turns to me after a dirty look to Dad. “I’m just saying, sweetheart, that you might not be ready for this.”
“Dad’s right. Stop being so controlling.”
Mom steps away from me. “Alison, you don’t even know what you’re saying.” I expect her face to be angry, lips pursed, eyes squinty mad. The way her face is almost all the time lately. But when I look up, she won’t even make eye contact with me.
“Well, I still love you, Mom!” Jake says, laughing, punching me in the shoulder like this is all some funny joke.
Mom clears her throat and picks up the handle of her suitcase. She tries to hug me again and I back away, even though I don’t mean to.
“Call me if you need me, Ali. Anytime. I love you.”
But I can’t find my voice to tell her I love her back. My stomach jumbled, I hear her walk to the taxi, one of the wheels of her suitcase squealing. Broken.
And then I watch the taxi drive past the Rickles’ house and the school bus stop. I watch until it turns the corner and heads toward the main road.
“What was that about?” Jake says too loudly. “Way to make Mom cry, Ali.”
“No I didn’t.” I pinch him on the arm.
“Yes you did.”
“No I didn’t!”
“FACT!” Dad says. “Mother-daughter relationships are as complicated as the wilderness.”
My body tingles with panic. The wilderness. My first appearance on Survivor Guy, and I’m going to blow it.
Dad’s jostling me around now like he used to when I was five, his face bright. “Cheer up! We’re going to have a blast.” He bangs me on the back. “Pack your bags! Great Dismal Swamp, here we come!”
“Great dismal what?” I say.
“Great Dismal Swamp!” he repeats. “Get ready to be SUR-viiiiiived!”
Harper’s face appears in one of her windows and she scowls. The tower of crates behind me shifts, wobbles, and collapses onto the driveway with a clatter.
Three
We spend the next hour packing our bags and organizing the Jeep, restocking the bug spray and filling tanks with water. My stomach gurgles with anxiety. In all of my survivor books, I’ve never come across anything about the Great Dismal Swamp.
Even worse, when I text Harper that I’m going away with my dad, she doesn’t even answer.
“What if I make a fool of myself in front of the camera?” I say.
“It’s just another swamp,” Dad says. “We were supposed to be going to Antarctica, but the guide got sick. Swamps are easy. If you can avoid the deadly critters, there’s plenty of shelter from the elements and food to forage.”
My friends think I’ve cooked a snake over a campfire and made a mattress out of leaves and moss. They think my dad takes me on crazy father-daughter expeditions over school breaks. Last Thanksgiving, when Harper went to her Uncle’s wedding in California and half our friends were gone visiting family, I told everyone he taught me how to navigate a sailboat by the North Star alone. And they believed me. Why wouldn’t they? I’m Survivor Guy’s daughter.
Dad’s picking bugs off the grill of his Jeep now, talking into his phone. The truth is, he’s so busy being a famous survivalist, we’ve never been on a father-daughter expedition. Not even one.
Jake stumbles out of the garage and tosses his bag into the Jeep. “I call the back.” He crawls in and splays across both seats.
“What kind of elements?” I say, looking at my own duffel bag, which is half the size of Jake’s.
“You’ll be fine, Alison,” Dad says. “I have everything you need.”
“I brought the chocolate raisins,” Jake says.
“Do you have snake-bite kits?” I ask. “Sunblock? Oh wait, I forgot something.”
Jake groans, then sits and buckles up. “Are you going to be like this the whole trip?”
Dad takes my bag and I run back inside. My room is still a mess from my sleepover with Harper, sheets and blankets everywhere. Empty wrappers from the butterscotch candies that we snuck from Harper’s house are crinkled on the floor. I hide the evidence in the trash, grab the General’s book from beneath my pillow, and rush back outside.
As I climb into the car, I look into the windows of Harper’s house. Does she see me? Does she know I’m being dragged off to a dismal swamp to survive with Survivor Guy himself for the whole week?
“Dad,” I say. “Maybe I should stay at Harper’s. Her dad’s taking her fishing, but they’d probably let me go along.” I clear my throat, my stomach seizing up as we pull away from my house with my books and my hermit crab called Sandy and my real bed not made out of spiderwebs and leaves. “I mean, I can’t let Harper spend her first week of summer vacation without me.”
Jake makes a baby-crying noise and I reach around my seat to cause him some serious facial damage, except Dad grabs my hand.
“Sit down,” he says. “You’re ready. You have the will and the knowledge and—FACT!—that is all you need to survive the elements. Plus, don’t you remember fending off that angry buffalo in first grade?”
“It was a golden retriever, Dad,” I say, and Jake snickers.
Dad pats me on the shoulder. “The details don’t matter much. You have the survivor instinct. It’s in your blood!”
In all honesty, I don’t have the will and probably not even the right kind of knowledge, and I certainly have never felt a survivor instinct of any sort.
“I don’t think I should be on camera, Dad,” I try, because if I get on camera, that means I will be on TV, and that means everyone will see me in all my survivalist glory. And by survivalist glory, I’m talking about stumbling into ravines or walking through a swarm of bees or throwing up when I have to eat my first meal of grasshoppers and frog legs. “I could, like, be your assistant off to the side or something while you and Jake make fires and leap canyons and stuff.”
“Why are we bringing her?” Jake says from the back seat.
Dad shushes him with a wave of his hand. “Sweetie. Stop worrying so much. You’re my Survivor Girl. You were born ready for this.”
I watch as we pass the ice cream place where Harper and I always get black-raspberry swirl with extra rainbow sprinkles. We pass the music shop and the thrift store that puts survival books aside for me at the counter. I don’t remind Dad that I got none of his survivor genes. That I’m allergic to mosquitoes and once when I got poison ivy raking leaves, I was bedridden for days. That I prefer air conditioning and cushy blankets and seeing the stars through my skylights rather than through the flap of a tent.
I definitely don’t tell him that I’ve convinced everyone at school that I’m the next Survivor Girl, that as soon as I turn eighteen I’m joining the show, or maybe even starting a new one that’s harder and more dangerous. Truth is, I don’t have any business going anywhere near a swamp. Dismal or not.
Four
“First stop!” Dad announces, swinging us into a gas station.
The place is crawling with people. An archway of balloons is set up next to the car wash, a sign—BRAIN DISEASE! RAISE AWARENESS! FIND A CURE!—hanging from its center.
“What’s this?” Jake asks.
“Looks like a ten-K run or something,” Dad says, hopping out and stretching. “Too bad we don’t have our running shoes, or we could join them.”
“Yeah, too bad,” I say.
Jake laughs. “Like you’ve ever run a mile in your life.”
“Yes I have.” And it’s not even a good comeback because it’s a lie. But I’m out of comeback practice since Jake’s barely home anymore either.
Dad’s taking an awfully long time pumping the gas, and the leather seat’s sticking to my legs and arms in the beating sun. I wonder if the Great Dismal Swamp is hot in the middle of June and pull out Grandpa’s guide. I’m reading the chapter on swamps when a guy wearing a T-shirt that says RUNNING IS MY LIFE! and a belt holding a bunch of little water bottles jogs up. “Are you by chance Survivor Guy?”
Dad turns to him. “Depends who’s asking.” He strikes a pose to match the giant sticker of himself on the side of the Jeep. And then they both laugh hysterically.
I fan my face with my book. Jake pushes against the back of my seat. “Get comfortable. We’re going to be here awhile.”
“I’ve always wondered,” the runner says, “on episode thirty-four when you face that grizzly bear and his fangs are showing and his vicious claws are like inches from your face, how did you know to whistle that way?”
Dad rocks back on his heels and lets out an ear-piercing whistle that almost makes me drop my book. The cluster of runners by the car wash go silent and turn around. “That’s the one!” the guy says. And then he mimes to the rest of the runners that Dad is in fact the real Survivor Guy. Even Dad looks alarmed as the entire clump marches over, phones ready to get a good picture.
I want to crawl into the back of the Jeep, but Jake has his rotten feet spreading foot fungus all over the seat next to him. I slump down instead, closing my guidebook.
“One at a time! One at a time!” Dad is grinning, pointing to the various Survivor Guy paraphernalia on the roof of the Jeep. “Yes, yes, that fishing spear is one hundred percent authentic bamboo from the legendary Hawaiian leper colony, Kalaupapa. Had to ride a mule down a cliff for that one.”
Jake rips open a pepperoni stick and the Jeep is filled with the smell of smoked meat. I gag and try to open the door. But fans are clustered all around us to take pictures with Dad. “Excuse me,” I call. “Survivor Girl coming through.”
There’s just enough space for me to suck in my belly and slide out the door. I push my way through to Dad.
“. . . and then the camel just took off and thank goodness I had that helmet cam on because . . .”
I pull on his shirt. “Dad? Don’t we have a timeline?”
“. . . and I found myself in the middle of the Sahara Desert with no water or . . .”
“Dad?” I pinch him in the arm. “I’m going to get some supplies in the store.”
He’s too engrossed in his story to notice me, so I pull his wallet out of his back pocket and weave through the crowd.
The blast of air conditioning feels as good as a black-raspberry swirl with extra rainbow sprinkles in the middle of August. I just soak it up until I hear the door jingle behind me as someone else comes in. First stop, slushy machine.
There’s no line, so I step right up to the orange fizz pizzazz and fill my cup, ignoring my mother’s voice in my head nagging me about the effects of sugar on my delicate complexion. I slurp the overflow around the edges and push the top on, spraying myself. I lunge for the napkin dispenser, orange fizz dripping from my hair, but someone’s in my way.
“Alison?”
It’s Brad Garrison, which is just plain fabulous.
“Hey, Brad,” I say, all cool like I don’t mind the orange slushy rolling down my cheek. I reach around him, manage to dislodge a stack of napkins two inches thick, and swipe at it.
“Are you here with your dad?” he asks.
“Yep, and my brother.” I dab some napkins onto my shirt, but the damage is already done. “Just getting this for him,” I say, holding up my slushy, “because, like, who drinks slushies at ten o’ clock in the morning, right?”
He doesn’t even hear me—he’s on tiptoes to see over the shelves of bread and hot dog rolls to my dad’s Jeep.
“So, are you running today in the race?” I ask. He’s wearing an Autumn Leaf Middle School tank top with a giant number pinned to his back. Twenty-three. “That’s my lucky number.” What am I even saying? I need to get out of here. Something about Brad makes me stupid.
“What?” he says, looking down at his shirt. “Oh, yeah, running.”
I grab a bag of trail mix and head for the cashier. “Well, I’ll see you later. Don’t want to be late to the shoot.”
Brad stops me. “You’re going on a shoot? With Survivor Guy?”
I nod. “I guess he needs my expertise on this one. I know a lot about surviving in the wild. As you probably already know.”
“That’s so cool!” he says. “You’re so lucky. I’d do anything to go on a trip with Survivor Guy.”
“It takes years of preparation.”
The cashier takes my money and I grab my stuff. Look at me, buying trail mix. A few chunks of walnut and some sesame seeds are all I need to survive in the wild.
“Where are you headed?” Brad asks, throwing his protein bar onto the counter. “A deserted island? The Canadian Rockies? I think my favorite show was when he parachuted into Death Valley.”
I cough and suck down some slushy, forgetting it’s supposed to be for Jake. “Confidential.” There’s no way I’m telling him I’m going to a regular old swamp in our own state. “You know, production and stuff.”
Brad pays and we walk back outside. There’s an even b
igger swarm of people around the Jeep now and Dad’s talking to a reporter who’s probably supposed to be covering the race. Jake stands next to Dad, and I realize that he looks like the real thing: safari hat, khaki Survivor Guy button-down shirt, and cargo shorts. I know he got the hat at the Dollar Depot, but still, he looks like Survivor Guy’s son.
“Well, good luck today,” I say, and peel away from Brad. I try to run my fingers through my hair, but they get all tangled in the sticky parts.
And then I hear Dad say something about the Great Dismal Swamp and I know Brad hears him too. I shove through the crowd and climb back into the Jeep. I bang my head against the door frame, just once, just enough to dislodge the image of Brad sitting around his family room with popcorn and twenty of his closest buds watching me make an idiot of myself. Why didn’t I tell everyone the truth to begin with? This is going to be a disaster.
By the time Jake and Dad finish signing autographs and taking pictures, I’ve eaten all the chocolate out of the trail mix and sucked down half of my orange fizz pizzazz. But I tell myself it’s okay. For the next week, it’s going to be grasshoppers and frog legs over a campfire for me anyway.
Five
Jake is snoring in the back seat. I pull out the General’s book and look for anything more I can find about swamp survival.
“Is that Grandpa’s book?” Dad asks. “You still have that?”
“Yep.” There’s a ton of information on mountain survival, which is ironic since Grandpa disappeared while climbing the Austrian Alps fifteen years ago.
“Greatest survivalist of all time,” Dad says, grabbing the book and smelling it. “Maybe one day when you’re old enough, we’ll go look for him.”
“In heaven?” I say, horrified.
“No, silly.” Dad hands me the book back. “In Austria, of course.”
