by Erin Teagan
I picture Harper and the rest of my friends watching my Survivor Guy episode and a tiny maybe-bubble swells in my belly. Maybe I’ve been worrying for nothing. Maybe I’ll look like a natural out here. Kicking butt in the Great Dismal Swamp. And maybe I’ll be a hero when I get home just like Dad and Jake, and everyone will ask me what it’s like to be a Survivor Girl. And they’ll want interviews and they’ll ask me how I got to be so good at being awesome in the unforgiving wilderness. Maybe it’s okay to let people believe what they want to believe every once in a while.
What’s so wrong with that?
Nineteen
Nobody else is up yet when I roll out of my bunk and put on my mud-soaked Survivor Girl clothes and slide my compass into my pocket, super-stealth silent so Jake and Dad don’t wake up. I tiptoe out of the camper and straight to the parked golf carts, grabbing the first one I see. I take a breath, reminding myself that if Adam is capable of driving a golf cart, then I definitely am too. When I turn the key in the ignition, the engine sounds loud in the early morning, and at first I can’t even figure out how to get it out of park. But then I find the right lever and I’m off, driving down the fire road like a pro.
I brake at the little red SURVIVOR GUY flag marking the spot and march through the bushes, not even stopping for thorns or possible spiderwebs. My tree and bog are still there, barely visible through the mass of swamp brush. It’s my last chance to defeat them. If Survivor Girl can drag a two-hundred-pound brother into Lake Drummond with barely any help at all, she can leap a mud pit and climb a branchless tree.
The bog is within reach now and the maybe-bubble in my stomach is solid. Maybe this is it. Maybe this time, I conquer. I don’t even warn my body, just launch into a running start and sail—Survivor Girl style—over the pit of mud. I splash down on the other side, landing on my feet. Steady. First try.
The tree stands ahead, mocking me with its tiny dewdrops glistening in the morning sun. It’s majestic, I’d give it that. Tall and thick, probably as old as Grandpa. Its trunk clean, slippery, the bark smooth and whitish brown, poking all the way up into a mist of early morning fog that hides its canopy of leaves.
Survivor Girls don’t back down from a challenge. I place a foot on the base of the tree and haul myself up so I can wrap an arm around it. I manage to keep hold long enough to swing a leg up and hug it with my other arm. It’s awkward and surely not pretty, but nothing an editor can’t fix in postproduction.
“What is it with you and trees?”
I yelp and fall backwards into a bush, my shorts getting snagged by a jagged thorn, ripping. It’s Ronnie and Theo. I bounce up like nothing happened, hiding the damage to my shorts. “Hey, guys! Where are you coming from?”
“Camp,” Theo says, waving in the opposite direction from the road. I take a breath of relief. No way they saw the golf cart, then.
“We’re looking for firewood,” Ronnie says, her arms already filled up with branches and twigs.
“Need help?” I say, picking up a small log.
“You can’t burn that!” Theo calls. “There’s poison ivy all over it!”
I throw it to the ground. “Good job, Theo!” I call back. “You pass the test on identifying dangerous plants of the swamp.”
He looks at me for a moment, then breaks into a grin. “Wow, thanks.” He nudges Ronnie. “Survivor Girl just gave me a test and I passed.”
“Want to see our camp?” Ronnie asks me.
“Uh . . .” It would be cool to see a real-life archaeology dig, but—
“You’re allowed,” Theo says. “The counselors are really cool.”
“Come on, we want to show you something.” Ronnie hefts a couple of branches from her arms into mine. “It’s just a little bit east of here.”
I struggle to look at my watch with my arms full and I see it’s only eight a.m. Breakfast won’t be served for another half hour and taping won’t begin until after that. “Is it far?” I ask.
They shake their heads and start marching toward the dense swampy forest.
“I only have a couple of minutes, okay?” I follow them, cracking a dead twig off a tree and adding it to my pile.
Theo gives me a thumbs-up over his shoulder and then holds a pricker bush back for Ronnie and me to pass by, juggling his own armful of firewood. It’s pricker bush after pricker bush out here and the trees are closer together, the ground going from wet dirt to mud puddles to little lakes of water we have to walk around. Ronnie and Theo take turns holding the biggest pieces of wood, passing them back and forth while I can barely feel my arms with my wimpy load of twigs.
“Almost there!” Ronnie says, as Theo pulls down a spiderweb with a stick to clear her path. And I wonder if they’re boyfriend-girlfriend or just best friends. Most of the boys in my class would push you directly into a spiderweb if they saw one. I trip over a rock, losing half of my kindling.
And then I realize I haven’t been paying attention at all to where we’re going. “Guys?” I fumble for my compass.
“We’re here!” Ronnie tosses her armful of firewood on the ground and collapses on a giant rock.
I push past a pine tree and there’s the camp, sleeping bags slung over branches, tents in a row, boots and waders and shovels strewn about. Kids are sitting on little chairs, barely more than a thin cushion keeping them off the swampy ground, eating oatmeal right out of the paper wrapper. My stomach grumbles.
“We have a visitor, everyone,” Theo says, and most of the kids look up from their breakfast. “This is Alison Kensington,”—he looks at them all meaningfully—“Survivor Girl.”
And it’s kind of cool being the celebrity for once because everyone hops up, oatmeals still in their hands, and rushes over, so happy to see me. Like I’m everybody’s long-lost best friend. And then there’s a thousand questions all at the same time about my dad and making shelters out of bat poop and eating mosquitoes for lunch.
“I’ve never actually eaten a mosquito,” I confess, but then their faces fall, so I add, “for lunch, I mean.”
Two adults stride over, also looking at me like I’m the president of the United States or something. “Welcome to Camp Dig,” one of them says.
“Hey.” I wave like all of this is no big deal. Like I do this all the time.
“We found her climbing a tree,” Ronnie tells them. “Can you believe it?”
“I really love climbing trees,” I say. “And so many other survivor-ish things.”
“What are you doing in the Great Dismal Swamp?” a girl with braids asks.
“Taping a show.” I gesture in what I think is the general direction of the set, though at this point I’m totally guessing. “Family fishing trip in the Great Dismal Swamp gone bad. That’s the theme.”
They think this is the coolest thing they’ve ever heard and—honestly—I’m getting why Dad loves this so much.
“Will you sign my Survivor Guy knife?” A kid whips out his pocketknife, the Survivor Guy insignia stamped on the side. One of the counselors hands me a marker and I’m signing knives and bear spray cans and fishing rods for what feels like an hour.
When a kid holds out a dirty undershirt for me to sign, my hand is throbbing and I look at Ronnie. And maybe Harper’s not the only person who gets my telepathic signals, because Ronnie jogs over.
“Survivor Girl probably has to get back soon,” she says, ushering the kid away, and then she pulls me from the crowd and shows me her tent.
“I bet you’d die for one of these about now,” she says, pointing to a tiny sleeping pad rolled out over a muddy tent floor. “Keeps me dry for most of the night.” She squeezes her sleeping bag, which is hanging in the sun outside the tent. “See? Almost dry. I don’t know how you sleep out in the open like you do.”
“Yeah, pretty rough,” I say, and I wonder what she would think if I told her I actually slept in a camper. Would she still want to show me all her stuff? Would she still want to be my friend?
“Even if I keep my tent zipped a
ll day, there’s still at least a few critters in here at night. Have to sleep with one eye open, you know?”
I’m horrified for her. “What kind of critters?”
“Mostly bugs. Have you seen those huge beetles yet?”
I wave casually. “Old friends by now.”
She shudders, pulling me past the rest of the tents to a tidy cutout of earth surrounded by a string fence, with two kneeling kids leaning over the side, dusting some rocks with a paintbrush.
“This is one of our dig sites. We’ve found evidence of an ancient fire pit.”
“Really? You guys found that?”
“And then over here . . .” She steers me to a huge tree, its roots sprouting out of the ground as thick as little tree trunks holding it up. It looks like the ones we saw growing in Lake Drummond, their long, branch-like roots keeping them above the water. Except we’re on dry land now. “This is where Theo and I’ve been working with one of the group leaders. It may be one of the oldest trees in the swamp, and she thinks it was actually used as a shelter at one time.” I peek around one of the roots and see a small space underneath. It’s a hideout made from nature.
“Shelter from what?” I ask.
Ronnie shrugs. “Anything dangerous, I guess. Animals, maybe? Or bad swamp conditions? So far we’ve only found a few animal bones, but she’s pretty sure if we keep digging, slowly, we might find evidence of people using this space.”
“Like what kind of evidence?”
“Pottery or glass. Really anything that doesn’t naturally belong in the dirt.” Ronnie bends down and picks up a shovel and some other tools that look more like dental instruments, putting them on a small towel next to the tree. “Anything we find goes to a museum and we get to put our name on it.”
“Cool.” I’m still looking, disappointed I don’t see anything mysterious or out of the ordinary.
“Want to go inside?” Ronnie crawls between two roots. “Come on. I’ll put the light on for you.”
She flicks on a flashlight sitting on the dirt floor, illuminating the dark space under the tree. Just enough room in there for two people. The flashlight flickers and Ronnie shakes it. “Needs new batteries.” She grabs my hand and pulls me inside.
I’m careful to avoid the spot where they’ve been digging, bordered with string like the larger area outside. I slide a shovel over and sit next to her.
“Do you ever get sick of being a celebrity?” she asks.
I laugh. “My dad is the celebrity. I don’t actually sign a lot of autographs normally.”
“I’m surprised,” she says.
“It’s the truth.” And, it must be all the talk lately with Jake and Adam about lies and reality, because I wish for a moment I could just tell her. How my dad is just an actor. How I had a doughnut for breakfast yesterday instead of grasshoppers.
“Just imagine the people who sat in here before us,” Ronnie says, looking around. “More than a hundred years ago. Cool to think about it, right?”
“How did you get into this?” I ask.
“My dad,” she says, shining the light up onto a smooth tree ceiling. “He’s an archaeology professor at a university. He also travels, all over the world, to different archaeology sites. He’s not home a lot.” She looks at me. “He’s not a Survivor Guy, but he’s kind of famous in his field.”
I sigh. “I know what that feels like. When your dad travels a lot.”
“I was thinking you would know about that.” She smiles, picking up a tool. “But, he got this for me before I left for camp. My first pickaxe. See?” It has her initials engraved on the handle.
“Oh,” I say. “Just like me. We’re both following in our dad’s footsteps.” I pat the sides of my shorts, looking for my compass to show her, but I don’t feel it. “Wait.” I’m on my knees, digging in my pockets. “My compass. I must have dropped it.”
Ronnie straightens, directing the light to the ground where I’m sitting, but it’s not there. I rush out of the tree. “It’s from my dad. I dropped it somewhere.”
“Alison?” Theo’s there, picking mud off a pail of tools. “Are you okay?”
“My compass.” I try to keep my cool with all of the kids watching, but it’s hard. Super hard when you’ve lost your most treasured possession. “It fell out of my pocket!”
And then everyone is searching for me, on hands and knees, with shovels and brushes. But there is nothing. It’s nowhere to be found.
Ronnie and Theo walk me back toward my branchless tree. We go slow and steady, searching the ground. “It’s brass,” I say. “With scratches all over it.”
We walk all the way to the little clearing, no one talking, all three of us sort of panic-searching together. There’s nothing at the base of the tree. Nothing in the bog, even though I plunge my arms in to feel around.
“It’s from my dad,” I say again, standing with them at the base of my tree. “So, it’s kind of special.”
Ronnie puts her arm around me. “We’ll keep looking back at our camp. I know how important it is.”
“We’re good at finding things,” Theo said. “Don’t worry.”
But I do worry, and I don’t tell them the biggest reason I need that compass back. It’s because the engraving says FOREVER MY SURVIVOR GIRL. And that’s a one-in-a-million promise. A promise I can’t lose.
Twenty
When I get back to the set and park the golf cart, I find everyone out of their tents and campers, walking around with coffees and clipboards and cameras. I scour the ground, hoping that somehow I dropped my compass before I left this morning, ignoring Isabel bouncing beside me. “I lost something,” I say. “Go away.”
I walk to our trailer and then back to the golf carts again, looking hard for a glint of brass in the sun. My heart throbs in my chest. The compass is nowhere to be found.
Adam and Isabel are looking into Lucy the alligator’s pen. I give up my search and stand a few feet behind them.
“. . . she’s probably not sad,” I hear Adam say. “She doesn’t know what it’s like outside of her cage and sometimes it’s easier to live without something when you don’t know how good it is.”
“She wants to be with the other alligators,” Isabel insists.
“You have a big heart for someone who’s just a tiny pipsqueak,” Adam replies, and then he tickles her, teasing. “And I mean tiny pipsqueak. Like the tiniest in the history of tiny.”
Isabel tackles him and Adam pretends to get flattened. It’s all very annoying, and shouldn’t he be helping me climb a tree or something?
“Toddler takedown!” he yells, and then body-slams her as she flails and giggles.
“Ali!” Rick calls to me from one of the walking bridges. He’s standing next to a girl who looks my age.
I limp over, having pulled at least one more muscle during my search for the compass.
“Meet Mindy, your stunt double.”
I’m so shocked I nearly stumble off the bridge, except that Mindy catches me. With one hand, but whatever.
“Wait! I thought we were going to retry the scene today.” I’m offended. Highly, highly offended. Doesn’t anybody have any confidence in me?
Rick crosses his arms and clears his throat, then coughs. Obviously he can’t think of anything to say.
“I was just practicing, actually.” I look at Mindy. “While everyone else was eating their breakfast. And I’m pretty sure I can climb that tree now. No problem.”
Rick taps his chin with a finger. Mindy is wearing a Sweet Treat Bake Shop shirt just like mine. Where did they get another one on such short notice? And it’s not like it looks better on her or even accentuates her rippled arm muscles or anything. Is she some kind of alien?
She eyes me, pulling her hair up into a ponytail like mine. “I wish I could get my hair to frizz like that.” She frowns.
Now that I look closer, I can tell she’s not actually twelve. She’s practically old. She’s had years and years more than me to work on her muscles.
“Welcome! Welcome!” Dad says to Mindy. “Wow, are those real muscles? Do we have these in the prop store?” She holds out a bicep and Dad gives it a good squeeze, turning to me. “You see these?”
“I thought I was going to climb the tree, Dad.”
“Watch this,” Rick says. He flicks a wrist toward the closest tree and Mindy scrambles up and waves from one of the branches.
“It was a challenge finding a stunt double that looks twelve, but I did it,” he boasts. What does he want? A trophy?
Mindy comes racing back, not even out of breath, bouncing on the balls of her feet like a boxer. “When’s the shoot?” She flexes her muscles again. “Do I have time for a quick workout?”
Jake pokes me in the shoulder, grinning.
“Shut up,” I mumble, poking him back, hard, and then announcing, “I’m going to breakfast if anyone cares!”
I start off toward the dining tent and nobody tries to stop me. They’re all piling into the golf carts to take Muscle Mindy to my bog and my branchless tree so they can ooh and aah over her climbing ability. It makes me sick. They didn’t even give me a chance.
The breakfast crew is just starting to clean up when I get in the omelet line. The ham and cheese omelets are gone, leaving only the veggie omelets: spinach, mushroom, and green peppers. The chef appears and hands me a pop tart. “I’ve been saving the last one for you. They’re just as good the second day.”
“Thanks,” I say, adding it to my plate and grabbing a chocolate milk box on my way out. I’m going to eat my breakfast in the complete and beautiful quiet of my camper. I’m going to watch a terrible TV show and try to get enough Internet to email Harper and tell her how much I miss her even if she’s still mad at me.
But when I step outside the dining tent, Isabel is there, holding a glitter-pink leash. “Want to take Pudding for a walk with us?”
Laura takes the leash away from her. “No kids allowed. Sorry, Isabel.”
