Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  This was not good.

  19

  When Ron came by the next morning to talk to my dad about techniques for harvesting the corn—the cobs were lengthening now and it was almost ready—I was sure he would take me aside and tell me he’d found the phone. I wondered what it would mean if he did. Would he tell my parents? Duh. Would my parents take the phone away for good? Again, a foregone conclusion. What wasn’t clear to me was whether or not my family would get kicked out of the camp. Two weeks ago I would have been like, “Okay, bring it on.” Now I wasn’t so sure I wanted to go home.

  Was it just not wanting to face the humiliation of being asked to leave?

  Was it the feeling of holding hands with Caleb under the table?

  I mean, I didn’t like it here.

  Or did I?

  I laughed out loud at the very idea and wished I could text that question to Kristin and Ashley, so they could text something back like “Oh, puh-leez.”

  “Something funny, Gen?” my dad asked. Ron was talking, and I guess laughing had made me seem crazy, or rude, or both.

  “Just life as we know it,” I said with a shrug.

  Even after he was done talking about the corn, Ron didn’t say anything about the phone, or act any different than normal—which is to say he was weird, but not extra weird. I concluded that he hadn’t found my phone.

  Now I had no idea what was going on. Though I was sure the phone wasn’t there I had no better idea than to go back to the shack and look for it again. But it was hard to find an opportunity. My dad had us hauling wood all morning, and in the afternoon, my mom tried ironing again and needed me around for that. Before dinner, she made me sit on the porch shelling peas, which took forever. And then at night, she insisted we do a sing-along while my dad chopped wood. He joined us only to fall asleep on the porch. I was so tired, I fell asleep fast too, just like my dad.

  Friday morning I finally found a window of time when I could sneak away. But when I got there, the electricity shack was locked. I looked in the window and the room looked as it always had—the desk against the wall, the computer on top of it, the minifridge closed up tight. By standing on my tiptoes I could just see down to the power strip on the floor and, just as I’d seen before, there was nothing plugged into it but the computer.

  If my phone really wasn’t here, and Ron didn’t have it, who did?

  After lunch, I told my mom I needed to go find Nora. “There’s something funny about Jezebel’s milk supply,” I told her. “I think she’ll be able to explain it to me.”

  “It’s nice to see the two of you becoming friends,” she said.

  Since I couldn’t text my mom’s comment to Kristin and Ashley, I had to settle for turning my back on my mom and pantomiming gagging myself.

  I found Nora in her barn, scraping a bowl of food scraps to their pig. Who was named Pig. There was a cloud of fruit flies swarming the trough.

  “Gross,” I said.

  Nora lifted her head. “Oh, it’s you.” She gave the dish of scraps a firm bang with the base of her hand, shook it to get out the liquid, and then actually started to walk by me as if she hadn’t understood I’d come here to talk.

  This wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Wait,” I said, and she stopped. I jogged a step closer to her and looked up into the loft. “Is anyone else here?”

  “Come outside.” She walked without checking to make sure I was behind her. She always did that, and as always I had no choice but to follow her swinging blond braid that was framed in the upside-down U made by the sides of my sunbonnet. I don’t know how a braid could look smug, but it did. Nora stopped at the edge of the woods. “Never say anything important in a barn,” she said, as if this was something I should have already known. “Stand out in the open where you can see if anyone’s listening.”

  “Okay,” I said, grinding my teeth to keep from saying something rude.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “I want my phone back,” I said.

  “Your phone?” she said. She truly looked like she had no idea what I was talking about, but still, I didn’t believe her.

  “I left it in the shack the other night. When we were cleaning up. I forgot to grab it. And when I went back in the morning, it was already gone.”

  “You just left it there?” she said. “That was dumb.”

  “I know you took it,” I said.

  “I didn’t,” she said, and for a second, I believed her. During this interval, the sense of panic was instant.

  “Then where is it?” I spat out.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and her voice was so cutting, so “this is not my problem,” that I felt anger brewing up inside me—she was lying. She sighed and closed her eyes and looked at me only out of the bottoms of them, like the conversation was making her exhausted. How could anyone learn to be this mean without having gone to middle school?

  “I left it in your electricity shack,” I said. I spoke slowly, like she was deaf. Or stupid. “If your dad had found it, he would have said something. I bet you went in first thing in the morning before I got there and found it.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I went back, that’s true, but your phone wasn’t there.”

  It’s amazing how hard it is to tell someone you think they are lying. Even when you know they are. “Are you sure?” I said.

  “Maybe someone else took it,” Nora suggested, but she still looked so intentionally bored, I was convinced it was her.

  “Like who?” I said. “Who would take a phone?”

  “How about anyone?” she said. “You all hate it here. You all can’t wait to get back to your friends and your perfect little lives. Maybe it was Ka. She hates it here even more than you. She’s probably dying to get in touch with all her friends. The emo people or whatever.”

  “She’s not emo,” I said. “She’s goth.”

  “She hates this place like you do.”

  “I don’t hate it,” I said, surprising myself again.

  “You act like it.”

  “Besides, Ka’s my friend. She wouldn’t do something like this to me.”

  “And I’m not?”

  “Not what?” I said.

  “Not your friend?” Nora said.

  Was she serious?

  Of course she wasn’t my friend.

  She looked serious.

  And then she cracked up. “Oh, boo hoo, my summer’s ruined,” she said, laughing. “Gen’s not my friend.”

  “You know,” I said, “I could have been your friend. If you weren’t such a jerk to everyone, maybe people would like you more.”

  “Gen, I don’t want to be your friend,” she said, and I felt my face burning bright red.

  “Let me know if the phone turns up,” I said. Walking down the path, out of her hearing, I elaborated. “Let me know if it turns up, like, under your pillow.”

  I was so sure she had it I almost wanted to get Kristin or Ashley or someone to call her, and when she picked up, say, “Nora, I know it’s you.” Except I couldn’t get Kristin and Ashley to do anything anymore. If I didn’t find my phone, the next time I talked to them would be the day we went home. I hoped by then I would know what had happened to my phone.

  As it turned out: I didn’t have to wait that long to find out.

  As it also turned out: Nora wasn’t lying. She didn’t have it.

  Ron did.

  At the next Sunday meeting, once all the families were sitting on our benches—Ka joining my family as usual—our picnic baskets waiting in the shade next to Ron and Betsy’s porch, Ron reached into his pocket and pulled out my phone. He held it away from his chest, his arm perfectly straight, as if it were a dangerous lizard that might bite if it could reach its head around to get to Ron’s neck.

  Without thinking, I yelled out, “That’s mine!”

  Did I think he’d return it to me? That everyone would pretend they hadn’t seen it? That if I grabbed it from Ron fast enough my parents woul
dn’t know what it was? That maybe they’d think Ron was passing out cell-phone-shaped rocks and sticks?

  Yes, I did think that. And I also thought, “The phone is off. For all anyone knows, it’s been off all summer. If I can keep Ron from turning it on, my mom and dad won’t care that it’s here.”

  The word “stupid” barely covers this, I know. But still. The phone was more than just a piece of plastic with a microchip inside. It was a part of me. It was my connection to my friends. It was my friend. It was the only thing I could vent to.

  “I know it’s yours, Gen,” Ron said. His voice was quiet, almost gentle. Or was I imagining that? I started to stand. My mom and dad had turned to look at me with expressions of such open horror I had no choice but to ignore them. I knew what I needed to do. I needed to walk up in front of everyone and get the phone back. Then this would all go away.

  But the second I was standing, Ron’s voice lost any trace of gentleness it might have contained. “Sit down,” he said. He wasn’t shouting, but his tone was so stern, he might as well have been giving a command to a dog. I sat.

  “Gen?” my mom said. Though her voice was a whisper, I heard all the fear and anger in the way she said my name. I think that was the moment when I understood I wasn’t going to get my phone back. “Is that the phone I was going to give you?” She paused. “The phone I was going to give you when we got back?”

  This was also the moment when I understood that Ron’s confiscating my phone might just be the least of my problems. “You brought it with you?” my mom said. “You… you snuck it in?”

  My dad didn’t say anything, but he was looking at me with such a shocked expression, I actually raised my hand to my face to make sure I hadn’t grown a second nose.

  “She’s been using it the whole time she’s been here,” Ron said. “When I found it, it was on. Her last text message had been sent only hours before.”

  If he had pulled out a knife, the group reaction could scarcely have been more alarmed. There was a collective gasp. I heard, “Oh my gosh!” and “You have got to be kidding.”

  “In my opinion,” Ron said, his voice soft again, “using this phone in our camp violates the essential nature of the entire experiment. You’re all here willingly. This is not a prison. Why do it at all if you’re not going to do it right?”

  I was looking at my shoes now. And Gavin’s shoes that were next to mine. And Ka’s, on the other side. I tried not to notice that my mother’s shoes—her black leather boots sticking out from the bottom of her skirt—were shaking.

  “I’ve had a few days to think about how to handle this infraction,” Ron went on. “And I realized that it’s not up to me. It’s up to all of us as a community. This whole place won’t work if you aren’t genuinely interested in it. Maybe you think it’s okay to sneak the technology of today into 1890? If so, I’m sorry. Sharing the experience of the frontier—this is Betsy’s and my life’s work. We’re not getting rich off it. In fact, maintaining five small farms for ten months out of the year and training four novice farmers for the remaining two is not easy. I’m not going to add policing the rest of you to that list of jobs. I want our decision on how to handle this to come from all of us. Please—let me hear from you.”

  I almost groaned out loud when Anders Puchinski was the first to stand up. His brow was furrowed and he’d crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I don’t like it,” he said. “I don’t like it one bit. I came out here to get away from all of that and I thought that was the understanding with everyone. I don’t even let my kids have the darned things when we’re back home.”

  “I don’t either!” my mom piped up. She was looking right at me. “I’ve never liked cell phones. I don’t think kids should have them. Gen, you clearly shouldn’t. I want everyone to know this phone was brought to camp without my knowledge.”

  “Mom—,” I started. But what could I say to her to make her calm down?

  “Don’t even talk to me right now,” she said. Her eyes were beaded up into little slits.

  My dad had his head in his hands. His bandaged, blistered hands. Gavin was rubbing his knees with his palms.

  “Ron,” Caleb’s father said. His way of talking extra slow—he drew his words out like honey—calmed everyone down. He could have been a hostage negotiator or the guy sent in to defuse bombs. “We are all loving this experience just as it was meant to be,” he said. “We’re not all sneaking around using cell phones and checking our e-mail.”

  “Absolutely,” Ka’s new stepdad, Clark, agreed, but his crisp boy-band perkiness killed whatever calm Caleb’s dad’s words had started to disperse. “This is clearly a question of one bad seed.” Ka was sitting next to me and she rolled her eyes. But her little gesture of sympathy was powerless to counter Clark’s words: a bad seed? Really? Me?

  One time, at school, Ashley left a pair of underpants in a gym locker and when our principal, Mr. Weber, had his “fashion show” at the end of the year, holding up all the stuff from the lost and found so kids would come to the front of the auditorium and claim what belonged to them, he’d held up Ashley’s underpants, which were red and said “Saturday Night” on the back. She’d thought she could just stay in her seat, anonymous, but then Mr. Weber found one of the name tags Ashley’s mom had ironed into all of Ashley’s clothes for camp. “Ah, Miss Smith,” Mr. Weber had said. “I believe these are yours?” She’d almost died.

  This was worse.

  “I’d like to say something,” Ka’s mom, Maureen, began. “The whole challenge is to imagine yourself cut off. To rely on your family. But this is not easy for a teenager. It hasn’t been easy for Ka.” She shot a look at Clark. “It’s not even easy for me. I understand how this can be extra hard for Gen.”

  “I don’t think that it’s helpful to teens to make exceptions,” Clark rebutted. Were they fighting? “Everyone has to toe the line. Otherwise there’s no line. Do you know what I mean?”

  Maureen raised a hand in a “Fine” gesture. Wholesome blond freckles aside, I was starting to see that she had the capacity to be angry and sarcastic. Like Ka.

  One by one, all the grown-ups weighed in. Caleb’s mom, the lawyer, who I’d never heard talk in a meeting, used the words “aforementioned,” “previously agreed upon,” and “original conveyance of intent.” I don’t think anyone, including me, had the slightest idea what she was talking about. Anders stood up again. He clearly was angry. Others, like Caleb’s dad, were nice. But they all agreed that what I’d done was wrong and that it violated the whole purpose of the experience.

  “All right,” Ron said when the last person to speak was done. “I’m going to skip the progress assessments for now. Let’s take a week to think this through. We’ll reconvene next Sunday and decide as a group how we want to deal with an infraction of this kind.”

  My dad stood up. “I want something to be clear. I am sorry on behalf of our whole family. This is embarrassing for Gen, for Cheryl, and for me.”

  “I want something to be clear as well,” Ron replied. “Asking you and your family to leave will be one of the options on the table.”

  My dad sat down like he’d been slapped.

  After a painful silence, Betsy stood. “We still have to eat!” she said, her smile gushing open and then quickly getting swallowed by the rest of her rosy face.

  My mom literally threw the food she’d packed onto the blanket. “Hey, that bounced!” Gavin said as her first attempt at cheese ricocheted off the blanket and rolled to the edge. No one was listening. My dad paced around the outside of the blanket, with his arms crossed, which is what he does when he’s on a stressful work conference call on the weekend and is simultaneously watching the Miami Dolphins lose.

  “This is so not fair,” I whispered. My mom had set the blanket up far away from the others, but if we had spoken loudly they’d have heard.

  “Did you have the phone or not?” my dad said. This was a question he knew the answer to already. He just needed to hear me admit to w
hat I’d done.

  I looked away, but what I saw was maybe worse than meeting my mom’s and dad’s accusing gaze. The Drivers, the Meyer-Hincheys, the Puchinskis—they were all looking at me. They were whispering. I could imagine Anders giving Disa a lecture on why their children would never turn out as badly as I had. She was the only woman who hadn’t stood up to say anything in the meeting, but I could imagine what she thought. I could imagine Clark telling Ka that she wasn’t so bad compared to me. Caleb was probably already explaining to his mom and dad that he didn’t even know me very well, that he didn’t hang out with me, and that he wasn’t planning on starting now that I’d been caught so flagrantly violating camp rules. His dad was probably drawling, “Of course not,” while his mom was mumbling, “Any association previously acquired must heretofore cease.”

  “Answer me,” my dad commanded. “When I ask you a question I expect an answer. Did you have the phone or not?”

  “Dad,” I said. Why couldn’t he of all people understand how badly I had not wanted to come here? Why couldn’t he see that the phone had been the one thing making any of this bearable? “Mom,” I said, because I wanted to explain something, but I wasn’t sure exactly what.

  “Don’t ‘Mom’ me,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “Okay,” I said. I stood. And knowing that my family and the whole camp was watching, I turned my back on all of them and walked into the woods toward home.

  20

  That night, no one in our family spoke to each other. We didn’t eat. I milked Jezebel, Gavin sat for a long time fussing over the chickens, my mom put away the picnic supplies, and my dad walked out into the woods to work on chopping down trees. Eventually my mom joined him, and they went back and forth with a two-man saw until after Gavin and I had gone in to sleep.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to my mom the next morning, while I was washing dishes and she was mixing bread dough and boiling water for laundry. “I hope we don’t get kicked out of the camp.”