Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  I wondered where I would find the same good feeling I got from looking out at the mountains across the top of the cornfield. Not at soccer camp. Not at the pool.

  I could hear the wind blowing through the tops of the trees. The sun was warm on my arm, though it was on its way down into shadow. More corn behind me needed picking—before all the craziness, my dad had been talking to the Meyer-Hincheys about their helping us to get it all in.

  I knew I would never live anywhere like this again.

  When I saw Caleb coming out of the woods, I assumed he’d come to see the baby chicks, but he walked right past the entrance to the barn. My heart was pounding as he headed in my direction.

  “I guess I should be grateful we’re leaving,” I thought. Otherwise, I might totally humiliate myself, acting like I hadn’t given up hope when I knew very well now that Caleb had a girlfriend.

  Without even a “hey” or “hello,” Caleb climbed up to sit on the fence next to me. We weren’t touching, but I couldn’t have been more aware of his arm next to mine if we were. Okay, I thought. Get a hold of yourself.

  But I didn’t get a hold of myself. And even if I knew I should be grateful we were leaving so I wouldn’t make it obvious I liked him, I wasn’t grateful—not at all. Caleb could have ten girlfriends and it wouldn’t change the fact that sitting here on the fence with him together and alone felt perfect.

  “Look, Gen,” he said. “I just read your blog.”

  My eyes must have grown wide and round. I could feel myself blushing. Kristin, I guess, hadn’t gotten my text.

  “How?” I said.

  “In the electricity shack. Everyone’s been in there, reading it together.”

  “Really?” I said. I started to laugh. It wasn’t that I thought this was funny. I was laughing the way you do when you get caught passing notes about your teacher in class and are paralyzed by fear. But then, when Caleb burst into a smile, something happened inside of me. Instead of laughing, I started to hiccup. Hiccup and cough.

  “Gen?” Caleb said.

  “So what are they saying after they read the blog?” I hiccupped again. This was embarrassing.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Everyone was reading it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “That is, everyone who isn’t watching Nora lead Rebecca around by the nose on a tour of her life.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Rebecca asked her to estimate how many hours she’s spent shoveling poo, and Nora was like, ‘Including what you and I are doing now?’ “

  I smiled. Faintly. It was obvious how much he liked her.

  “Anyway,” Caleb said. “I saw your mom and dad talking to Ron and Betsy. Are you guys leaving?”

  “Okay,” I said back. I know this wasn’t an answer.

  “I came to say good-bye.”

  That’s when I started to cry. It’s embarrassing, but the idea that I would never see Caleb again, that all of it would be gone, and it was my fault, because of the phone, because of the blog…. It was too much.

  It was a miracle that he didn’t look at me. He didn’t make me say anything. And he didn’t move. He just started to talk. “Look,” he said. “When my mom read your blog…”

  “Yes?” I said, sniffling.

  “She said it made her feel like someone actually knew what she was going through. For the first time today she admitted that she hates it here.”

  I put my head in my hands. “Is your family going to leave too?”

  “My mom is one of the most stubborn people ever born,” Caleb said. “She’ll stay here if it kills her. I think it’s actually good, though, that she admitted that she hates it. It’s been like this elephant in the room, her pretending that everything’s fine. Maybe now that the swimming hole is done, my dad and I can help more with the stuff that my mom is doing. He was already talking about her taking on some of his field work, and his spending time in the kitchen once in a while.”

  “But what about—?” I could barely stand to say this out loud, it was so embarrassing. “What about all the stuff I put in about your mom’s hair? I mean—I basically compared her to a poodle!”

  He looked at me so straight I knew he was serious, but still, it was almost impossible to believe him when he said: “She thought it was hilarious.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah,” he answered. “My mom thinks it’s hilarious. Everyone thinks it’s hilarious. Even Ron. First time I think I ever saw him laugh.”

  “Are you kidding?” I was having trouble not shouting. I was having trouble not jumping off the fence. I did jump off the fence.

  “Get back up here,” Caleb said, and then, when I was sitting: “You don’t actually think anyone took that seriously, did you?”

  “No,” I lied, because suddenly I felt very, very dumb.

  “Yes you did,” Caleb said. And then he added, “You idiot,” and I can’t explain why exactly, but if he’d said, “You genius,” I couldn’t have felt any better.

  I looked down at the grass growing up long around the fence poles—the only place Jezebel didn’t get to when we let her out to graze. It was yellow and green all at the same time in the ending afternoon light.

  I almost didn’t understand what Caleb was talking about when he said next, “So you like my necklace?”

  I was thinking “Huh?” until I realized that I had texted Kristin and Ashley about it. Once. Or maybe a couple of times. Or maybe a lot.

  I felt my whole body flood with extreme and violent waves of shame.

  Oh, my God.

  I knew I should tell him how sorry I was, how stupid I felt. But mostly, I had to make him stop talking about the blog before any more stuff I’d written about him came up!

  I glanced at his face. He’d raised his eyebrows. I knew there was nothing I could say that would suck what he had read in my blog out of his brain. I was sure if I tried to speak, I would just choke. He looked so friendly, so kind, so full of humor. Surely, if he was being cruel I would see that in his eyes.

  He scooted closer to me on the fence. “I like your necklace too,” he said, putting a palm on the side of my neck and running his thumb gently across the hollow of my throat.

  “But I don’t have a necklace,” I think I said. Or maybe whispered. Or maybe I didn’t say it at all. It is hard to remember anything beyond the fact that he was looking into my eyes, and he was coming closer and closer.

  “Oh, right,” he said. “That’s too bad.” And then his hand slid to the back of my neck, and he pulled me toward him and kissed me. And I can’t describe what it was like except to say it made the whole summer—all of it: the mosquito bites and the beans and the twenty-five-pound dress—worth it. I was just thinking “Lucky, lucky, lucky” the whole time.

  “But,” I said, between kisses. “But, but, but …” I wasn’t really making sense. I couldn’t really breathe.

  He kissed me again. Every time, I couldn’t help but kiss him back. And I didn’t want to stop. But suddenly I had to.

  “What about—,” I said. I could barely bring myself to ask, “What about Nora?”

  “Nora?” he said like he hadn’t heard me. Then “Nora?” again, like he now knew what I’d said, but still didn’t understand.

  “Isn’t she—?” I stopped. “She said that you and she—” Nope, I couldn’t quite say it out loud.

  “What?” he said, and then he understood. “Me and Nora?” he said. “There’s nothing.”

  “Nothing?” I said. “She told me that you liked her, that it was a secret because of her parents.”

  “She did?” he said. “She said we were going out or something?”

  I thought back to my conversation with Nora. “I’m not sure she used that specific term,” I admitted. “But I’m pretty sure the term ‘secret boyfriend’ came up.”

  “She said I was her boyfriend?” He sounded outraged now, and his tone was triggering a tiny twinge of worry on my part. Had she said that? />
  “Actually,” I said. “Now that I think about it, she was kind of vague. I think I might have been the one who said the word ‘boyfriend’ and she let me think that was true without actually confirming it.”

  “I’m not her boyfriend,” Caleb insisted. He was smiling now, as if he’d just solved a problem he’d thought was going to be a lot harder to work out.

  “Why would she make me think that then?” I mused.

  “Hmm,” he said, and he kissed me again. We were in real danger of falling off the fence. “Maybe to make you mad,” he said. “Or maybe because she’s bored. At the beginning of the summer, there maybe was a little attraction between us. That is, until I met you. She’s so jealous of you it would take a blind person not to see it.”

  “Because of you?” He was starting to sound a little conceited.

  “No,” he corrected. “She doesn’t even care about me, except to want to keep you away. I think she’d like to be you.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “I’m not,” he replied.

  “How did she know that I liked you?”

  “She’s very intelligent,” he said, and now I felt myself frowning and blushing at the same time.

  “But you’re intelligent too,” he said. “And a good blog writer. And pretty. And you make me laugh. All the time you make me laugh. Which is important. And also you’re just so… strong.”

  “Strong?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You’ve been such a good sport about this place. You made it fun. You certainly kept me going out here. And when I see you in this…” He pinched a section of my skirt and let it fall. “It actually makes me understand why people used to think these dresses were sexy.” He stopped to kiss me again, and rub his hand along my cheek. I felt an electric current traveling down to my toes and back up, like he had lit a switch when he made contact with my skin. If this was my last night at Camp Frontier, this was all I wanted to be doing, kissing Caleb as new baby chicks were poking out of their shells twenty feet away in the barn.

  28

  It was Nora who explained it all to me later. Out of nowhere, she told me she had been reading my blog almost all summer long. She’d found it because she loves blogs—they gave her a window into the real world. “And that’s why I was so hard on you. I mean, no wonder! Every time I so much as brought you a chicken or showed you how to feed your livestock, you were going back to your little cell phone and writing down as many nasty things as you could, for all the world to read. I was so mad at you I wanted to spit. But I guess you should be grateful.”

  “Grateful?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she answered, like she couldn’t believe I was too dumb to understand. She narrowed her eyes, but I knew better than to let that get to me. Under the table, I squeezed Caleb’s hand. We were sitting on the benches in Ron and Betsy’s backyard, at a long table groaning with food. It was August 30, the last day of Camp Frontier. We’d just exhausted ourselves square-dancing and now it was time for our last meal. Soccer and September and school were about to start, although they felt as far away and unreal as Camp Frontier once had when I was fuming over the brochures before we came.

  We were eating a potluck meal. My mom brought beans with salt pork and boiled corn on the cob. The Puchinskis shared their amazing biscuits that split open at the touch of a knife—no one asked Disa what was in them and no one turned them down. The Drivers contributed potato salad. The Meyer-Hincheys made fried chicken (and it was so delicious we all suspended our understanding that we were eating something that had the capacity to be someone’s pet). Betsy had used up a lot of the fruit that was just starting to ripen to bake four pies: blackberry, apple, peach, and raisin/pear.

  Yes, we had stayed at Camp Frontier. At the end of that very long “chick birthday day,” my mom and dad came back from talking to Betsy and Ron, and told us what had happened. First: while Gavin and I were watching the baby chicks being born my mom and dad were standing outside the barn using the phone to read my blog. Maybe it was the accumulated tension of the past few days—or of the whole summer—but apparently they could not keep the stony aspect of parental disapproval on their faces as they read it. Initially it was my dad, all by himself, so it was easier for him to chortle and assume that no one would know. But when he’d gotten a few entries in, he brought my mother to join him. “Really,” he said. “Gen, I was so proud.”

  “You were proud?” I’d said. He told me all of this back at the kitchen table in our cabin, right after they’d returned from their conversation with Ron and Betsy, and after Caleb had gone home.

  “Gen,” my mom said, “of course we were proud. We know you disobeyed us, and that wasn’t right, but you’re such a good writer! We want you to be good at things. We want you to be happy. And the cow!” She burst out laughing again. She put a fist on the table. “I had no idea that day you came rushing in for a bucket that you were about to fly solo milking a cow.”

  That night, after they told Gavin and me that Ron and Betsy were not going to make us leave, we voted again just to make sure our decision remained the same—and though last time there had been three S votes and only one G from my mom, now we were unanimous. We counted out four votes to stay.

  “You want to keep trying?” my mom gushed. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “We made it a condition with Ron and Betsy, however,” my dad explained, “that you are allowed to continue updating your blog. You will only have access to the phone for an hour every day in the evenings, but we think this is an excellent project for you, and we don’t want to cut it off.”

  “Really?” I said. “You want me to keep doing this? I’m not going to be punished?”

  “No,” my mom said. “But if you lie to us like this again, hide things, or even simply act like we aren’t thinking of your best interest, I’m taking the phone away.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, yes, yes.” My mom was laughing.

  So we’d made it through the last weeks, and had nearly reached the end—this was our last meal, and tomorrow we’d all be going home.

  “Grateful?” I said across the table to Nora now, still fuming at the idea that she’d been reading my blog all summer long. “Why should I be grateful that you spent the whole summer hating me?”

  If she’d noticed my obvious agitation and surprise, she gave no sign. Except maybe there was a bit of something, some knowing look in her eye? Was it possible she was kidding? “You’re lucky I didn’t read the blog for the first time when everyone else was,” she said. “Think how much madder I would have been if the nasty things you wrote about me had come as a surprise.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You weren’t kind,” she went on.

  “You weren’t either,” I said.

  “At least I wasn’t stupid, though,” she answered back. “You should be more careful. I mean, who doesn’t know that something you put in a text could end up going somewhere you didn’t mean for it to go?”

  I looked down at the table. All during the last weeks of camp, there had been a silent truce between Nora and me. I thought it had gone like this: I had ended up with the guy; she got to be on TV. And the TV turned out to be pretty amazing. After Rebecca Cheney and all the camera guys left the camp, and the rest of us were sweating our way through the final grueling week of harvest—helping the Puchinskis thresh their wheat, cutting and hauling corn, bringing in the Meyer-Hincheys’ bean crop, climbing up Ron and Betsy’s trees to bring down the first of the fruit—Nora was reviewing her itinerary for the first show. She was going to be flown to New York. They were putting her up at the Plaza Hotel, escorting her to interviews at Columbia and NYU, bringing her to museums and Broadway shows, introducing her to fashion designers, etiquette experts, and even taking her on a shopping spree at the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. Sure, her parents wouldn’t allow her to use any of the cool stuff when she got home, but the idea was to prepare her a little bit for reality—for college and real life after. The lin
eup of other shows was equally over the top—in the winter, they’d feature her studying with her mom, snowbound for days at a stretch. And then they would take her skiing and shopping and to a spa in Vail, Colorado, stopping by the University of Colorado at Boulder for an interview. You get the idea.

  But now … now, I was feeling just about done with her. I mean, Nora had been reading my blog all summer and hadn’t told me?

  “You’re outrageous,” I said. “You deserve to be spending a long cold winter out here on the farm with no one to talk to but your parents!”

  “Oh, baloney,” she said, not even the least bit perturbed by my outburst. “I don’t have to justify anything to you.”

  “But, but—,” I said.

  “But nothing,” she answered. “You did what you needed to do and you’re all happy and transformed from your summer on the farm. I did what I needed to do and Rebecca’s going to help me get a scholarship for college, hopefully in New York.”

  I let out an angry sigh. “I’m not happy and transformed,” I insisted, but she was looking at me with her eyebrows raised. “You don’t know everything,” I spat out.

  “And neither do you,” she said, helping herself to a generous forkful of my mom’s beans.

  I hate Nora, I realized then. Sometimes I really do.

  Or at least I thought so.

  The next morning, as we were saying good-bye to Betsy over at her house, my mom invited Nora to spend a week with us over one of our school breaks. And in spite of her New York trip and the Vail trip—did I mention Paris? The Sorbonne?—Nora looked like visiting us was something she actually wanted to do.

  “Well, it won’t be the Plaza,” Nora said. “But Genevieve did tell me all about that trundle bed in her room.”

  And I was like, “Oh, my God, she actually might come.”

  “See, Gen?” my mom said in the van, traveling back over the dirt road away from Camp Frontier. “You and Nora did become friends. Once you give something a chance, you might be surprised at how things work out.”