Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  He said, “Hey,” and then he drew his eyebrows together—he had nice strong eyebrows—and looked down, as if he had to check his legs and arms to make sure he was still there before he spoke. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I knew you’d be freaked out. Nora didn’t tell me you would be here. She said I was the only one who knew about this place.”

  At the mention of Nora’s name, I must have looked a little wary. He said, “Sorry, do you even know what I’m talking about?”

  “Um,” I said. “No?”

  He immediately blushed, which made him seem flustered and off center. His shirt was open as usual to show the braided leather necklace and his tanned throat, which looked strong and finely cut all at the same time.

  At last I said, “You scared the bejeezus out of me,” and we were both laughing again like this was some kind of long-standing inside joke.

  Even after we’d sort of stopped, I felt this happy kind of giggle climbing up through my throat and I was like, “Shut up, shut up, shut up” to myself.

  You know how I said before that there are times when I feel like there’s a happy, pretty girl inside me—someone like my mom—and I fully expect to see that happy, pretty person when I catch my reflection in the mirror? And then did I mention how it’s always surprising when I see it’s just plain old me? Well, just now, in those first few seconds of meeting Caleb, I was sure I would look in the mirror the next time and see not the plain girl dressed like she was working in some crazy history theme park, but myself as I always wished everyone could see me.

  It was Caleb making me feel this way. He did this thing with his eyes that made me feel like he was really listening. And then he started to tell me about himself as if he really wanted me to know.

  He told me that his family was from Virginia, just outside Washington DC, and that his dad is from the South, just like my dad is.

  “Did your parents force you to do this too?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Absolutely. When he said family camp, I was thinking Club Med.”

  “Me too!” I said. I was so happy to hear someone else saying the same thing as me I had to look away. I didn’t want to act like an idiot. “I’m missing soccer camp,” I said. “And sleepaway camp, and tryouts for travel team are this fall. I’m going to have to try out after not having played in two months.”

  “This is the last summer before my parents make me get a job,” Caleb said. “So it’s also my last summer of freedom, and this is how I’m spending it.”

  I wondered what he would do—would he be a lifeguard? A busboy in a restaurant? A server in an ice cream parlor? He was older than me. What if he had a car? I didn’t know anyone who could drive yet.

  “I miss sandwiches,” Caleb said.

  I laughed. “We have sandwiches here,” I said. “It’s one of the only things we do have.”

  “No,” he said. “I mean real sandwiches. Bologna and American cheese and bright yellow squeeze mustard.”

  “And bread that is the same size slice after slice.”

  “I even miss commercials.”

  “I miss carpet. I miss furniture that doesn’t hurt to sit on.”

  “I can’t believe how beautiful real swimming-pool water is,” Caleb said. “Just thinking about it makes me want to … I don’t know. Cry?”

  “I miss swimming too,” I said. “I love that feeling when you’re out of the water and you’re pretty much dried off but your wet suit is keeping you cool.”

  “I miss how sometimes when it’s really hot my friends and I will go to some movie just for the air-conditioning, and when I walk in, I feel my whole body start to wake up. It’s just so nice to be cold.”

  “You want to know why my family is here?” he asked.

  I nodded. There was nothing about him I didn’t want to know.

  “American Girl dolls,” he said. “My little sister is totally into them. My dad is too. He built Steph a dollhouse that goes all the way up to the ceiling in her room. My mom complains about the messages the dolls send, but she’s always at work.

  “Anyway, last spring, the case my mom’s been slaving away on the last six years finally settled and she took a week off work to spend time with my little sister. I don’t know what happened—there was a lot of shouting—but by the end of the week, my mom had stopped harping about how she wanted Steph to play more sports and she tracked down this camp. So here we are. I still haven’t figured out if she’s trying to make a point about how the dolls are unrealistic, or if she’s trying to make my sister’s dreams come true. All I know is I feel like our whole family has been shrunk down and we’re trapped inside that big dollhouse in my sister’s room.”

  “What about you? If your dad is busy with your sister and your mom’s always at work?”

  “Me? I just hang around the city center, lighting things on fire.”

  “Come on,” I said. “In these costumes you can’t tell who anyone is. What are you like at home?”

  “I don’t know,” Caleb said. “I hang out with my friends. We go to the movies a lot. My buddy Fred’s parents are never around and they have a big TV. I’m on the swim team.” He blushed. “And dance choir, though that’s not as lame as it sounds.”

  “Do you wear shiny costumes?”

  He nodded.

  “Jazz hands?” I said.

  He waved them, a sarcastic smile on his face, then went stony. “No.”

  “My mom said your mom was the first woman to make partner in her law firm,” I said.

  Caleb smiled ruefully. “The third woman,” he said. “But I always wished she was more like your mom. Into cooking and stuff.

  I rolled my eyes. “All my mom knows how to cook these days is beans. And she makes me do all the dishes. She was so excited about learning how to use the stove, and cooking and all, but I guess it’s harder than she thought.”

  “Her bread was great,” Caleb said.

  I said, “No, your chicken was great.”

  “My dad made the chicken,” Caleb said. “And my mom actually got mad at him about how well it turned out. She said it makes her feel that much worse that she isn’t this domestic goddess or whatever.”

  “You can’t be in here” were the first words out of Nora’s mouth when she came in and saw us. She spoke so fast it was as if she’d been waiting to say them to me for a long time and had just now found her excuse.

  But I’d been waiting too. “Why?” I said, standing up to face her. “So you can listen to my iPod and drink beverages that are a little bit outside your time zone?”

  “Coke was invented in 1886,” she said.

  “Well, I doubt you had twenty-ounce plastic bottles of it lying around the frontier,” I said. “And you’re drinking Diet Coke anyway. It is so not…” I knew that the word I was searching for was out there. It was a condemning word. It would finish the discussion about Coke, and make Nora feel as stupid and small as she always made me feel. But instead of saying something like “It is so not authentic,” the word I came out with was “fair.”

  “Nora,” Caleb stage-whispered from the floor where he was sitting, watching us go back and forth. “I think you’d better give Genevieve a taste of some of that non-1890 beverage while her cell phone charges. Or she’s going to let the cat out of the bag.”

  As if she had just realized Caleb was there, Nora turned, gave him a huge smile, and sat down right next to him. Suddenly, I felt really dumb. I mean, I didn’t have to be an expert in human behavior to recognize what the situation was—they’d planned to meet here. What was going on? If Nora and Caleb weren’t on some kind of date right now, why had she taken her hair down? She had, and out of the braid it was curly, reddish gold with blond streaks like she was a shampoo model.

  “Okay, fine,” Nora said. “Have a Diet Coke.”

  I didn’t want a Diet Coke. I don’t even like diet soda. But at that point, I knew that if I said no, I’d have to come up with some other reason to stay. And that’s how I ended up pa
ssing a bottle of Diet Coke around with Caleb and Nora, who it turned out had been meeting in the cabin every night for a week to do just that. In other words, I was a gigantic third wheel.

  But still, Caleb was talking to me. Maybe he was just being nice? “I like your music, Gen,” he said. “We’ve been listening to your iPod all week.”

  “I don’t care for it much,” Nora said. “I prefer Matt’s.”

  “But Ka’s …” Caleb paused. “That girl listens to some seriously scary stuff.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I used to think she was goth,” Caleb went on.

  “She is goth,” I said.

  “What’s goth?” Nora asked.

  Caleb looked at me and I looked at him, and he said, “It’s kind of hard to explain. But if you look at her playlist, Ka’s emo.”

  Can I just say how great it felt to be saying words like “emo” and “goth” out loud?

  “She listens to emo?” I said.

  “What’s emo?” Nora said.

  “Emo’s short for overemotional,” Caleb explained.

  “Like, crazy?” said Nora. “Ka doesn’t seem crazy.”

  “More like sad,” I said.

  “Ka’s sad?” Nora asked.

  “No, she’s not sad,” Caleb said. He grinned at me and suddenly, we had another inside joke between us. “She’s just emo.”

  “Emo sort of means sad,” I explained. “But it’s just kind of a sad style. Like, the way you dress. Black stuff. Leggings.”

  “But it’s really your music that makes you emo, or goth, or whatever,” Caleb said. “Ka has Dashboard Confessional, My Chemical Romance, Yellowcard.”

  “Those are band names,” I explained.

  “They’re classic emo,” said Caleb.

  “I really wouldn’t have thought that’s what she was listening to,” I said.

  Nora put her head in her hands. “I hate this,” she said. “I hate that there’s all this stuff I don’t know.”

  Caleb and I just stared. I mean, speaking of overemotional…

  But then Caleb put a hand on Nora’s shoulder. “It doesn’t really matter,” he said. “It’s just a time and a place.”

  “Time and place is everything,” Nora said.

  “It’s not that big a deal,” Caleb reassured her.

  I took another sip of Diet Coke and decided it was better not to say what I was thinking, which is that time and place meant more than Nora could even know. And also—that Diet Coke is awesome. Why had I never appreciated it before?

  “You know, I can remember TV,” Nora went on. “From before we came here. I remember watching Sesame Street. We had the movie of Aladdin when I was little. I had Disney Princess pajamas. We lived in a regular house.”

  “So what happened?” I said.

  “They always say they hated it,” Nora explained. “My mom and dad, they say we were lost in the modern world. My dad sold insurance. My mom was a secretary in a dentist’s office, and she really wanted to be a stay-at-home mom.

  “When my parents decided that living out here was what they wanted to do …,” she went on. “Well, it was my dad’s idea at first. I was five and my mom said she wanted to home-school me, so Dad found this place and decided to try farming. My mom said fine, but there was one thing she couldn’t give up, which is Diet Coke. She practically lives on it. This place—here—it started out as her Diet Coke storage unit. My dad gets it at Costco and brings it in by the case. And then my mom needed the Internet connection—it makes it so much easier to get lesson plans. But I know they sneak out here too. They e-mail their family. My dad plays solitaire. Sometimes I just think they come out here to avoid being surrounded by 1890 all the time. They want 1890 for me, but for themselves, sometimes they want to take a break. I’m not supposed to be out here. Ever.”

  “They don’t know you use this place?” Caleb asked.

  “My mom must know. I mean, her soda’s disappearing. But she doesn’t say anything because if my dad found out he’d probably tear the place down, and it would be ‘good-bye Diet Coke’ and ‘good-bye Internet’ forever.”

  “Why?” I asked. “I mean, why would anyone care that your parents sometimes take a break from their life? Doesn’t everyone?”

  “I don’t know,” Nora said. “My dad doesn’t even use a Web site to promote the camp, something people have been telling him to do for years. He has this crazy fear that if too many people found out that he was using a computer, it would be worse than the year he sprayed Roundup on the wheat field. He lost his organic certification for a season and some of the camp families totally got angry about the non-1890 farming practice. They didn’t care if we lost all our wheat.”

  “Roundup?” Caleb said. “What’s Roundup?”

  “You don’t know what Roundup is?” Nora said, the kind of “duh” in her voice that Caleb and I had carefully kept out of ours when explaining what emo was. “You know all that weeding you guys did?”

  “Yeah,” I said. How could I forget? It was two weeks out of my life. I was still sunburned from the days I spent in the field.

  “A few applications of Roundup—it’s a weed killer—and you wouldn’t have had to pull a single weed.”

  “Wow,” Caleb and I said in unison.

  “It’s poison, basically,” Nora said. “A pesticide.” She took a swig of her Diet Coke. “But I don’t care. Organic farming—1890 farming—it’s stupid. If this were my farm, we’d be drinking Roundup in our milk.”

  “Wow,” I said. “But I always thought you loved it here. You’re so good at all that milking and farming stuff.”

  She looked at me like I was stupid. “Just because I’m good at something doesn’t mean I like it,” she sneered. “And I’m not telling you this because I want you to finally understand the real me.” She stretched her arms up over her head like a cat, then poufed up her hair with her fingers. “I’m just explaining why you can’t come here anymore, Genevieve.”

  I didn’t register what she said, it came so out of the blue. I mean, hadn’t we just been talking? Almost like—I hated to even think it—friends?

  “It’s one thing for Caleb,” she went on. “But not you. And if you tell anyone you were in here, I’ll tell my mom and dad I saw you using a cell phone, and your whole family will be asked to leave.”

  I was staring at her, absolutely staring. I felt myself sputtering.

  This may sound ridiculous, but I felt tears in my eyes. I’d been so… comfortable.

  I looked over at Caleb. His whole face had gone red. “Come on, Nora,” he said.

  “Stay out of it,” she hissed.

  I thought about telling Nora how stupid Camp Frontier was, about how she really was missing out on real life. I thought of saying, “All the stuff you know how to do—milking cows or whatever—it doesn’t matter in the real world.”

  Why didn’t Caleb saying anything more in my defense?

  It took me a few tries to unplug the phone from the power cord and gather up the charger. I shoved it into my pocket, then put a hand on my iPod, where I’d put it down on the desk. At least I’d be able to listen to music now—I could hide the iPod in the Clearasil box in the barn with the phone charger.

  “No,” Nora said.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s mine.”

  “Camp rules,” she said. “If you take that iPod out of this shed, you’re going to have to explain to my mother why it’s missing. I might get blamed, but more likely, they’ll trace it to you.”

  “That’s not fair!” I shouted.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, and I couldn’t believe how cold and calm her voice was. I couldn’t even look at Caleb now, I was so embarrassed by what was happening. “You’ll be out of here in six weeks and it’ll be like you were never even here. It’s what happens to everyone. You’re not going to be any different.”

  She stood up and held the door open for me. I couldn’t believe it. I could get up and leave, or stay and literall
y fight her for my stuff. It wasn’t really the stuff I cared about, though. It was the feeling I’d had, so briefly, of being comfortable and clean and warm and liked. It was finally getting to talk to Caleb. And all of that was going to be gone.

  “This is crazy,” Caleb tried again, but Nora wasn’t listening.

  “Forget it,” I said, salvaging a last tiny scrap of pride.

  On the way home, I stomped through the woods, calling “Bear! Bear!” every few seconds, because as stupid as that made me feel, the woods at night were scary. I thought about Nora’s last words to me, about how I would be gone in a month and a half and it would be like I’d never even been here. They were intended to make me feel like I didn’t matter. Like I didn’t even exist. And they did.

  But I couldn’t deny that it was also exactly what I’d been telling myself every minute since I’d arrived.

  …

  When I reached our cabin, my dad was still splitting wood even though it was dark. He didn’t act surprised to see me. He didn’t even seem to have noticed that I’d disappeared without telling anyone where I’d gone. He said, “Hi Gen.” I waved. I remember thinking then for the first time that maybe he was losing his mind.

  Inside the cabin, my mom was sleeping. Her hair was down and spread out across the pillow, hiding any view I might have had of her face. Gavin was nowhere to be seen.

  I lay on my bed—and I know this will sound dumb, but I missed Gavin. Not his drool or his stinky mouth breathing. It was just that without him there, without my mom puttering around with some destined-to-fail frontier cooking project, the house felt empty. It was smaller than our garage, but now it felt like if I called out my own name into the rafters, I might hear an echo coming back at me.

  There was only one thing I could do to make myself feel better, and with my mom asleep, I could do it in bed. I pulled out my phone, opened up a new message, and started to type.

  Week 3 – Wednesday

  10:12 pm

  So… Nora? The poster child for Camp Frontier? You won’t believe what I found her doing tonight…

  It was a lot of typing, but I told them everything. And then, after I thought I was done, I sent one last missive.