The Baddest Girl on the Planet

by Heather Frese

  The trick to spying is to stay very flat behind the sand dune while not getting cactus stuck in you anywhere. Cactus is a very real danger, and I know this because once I thought I had a cactus needle stuck in my foot for an entire week until my mom looked at my flip-flop and found a nasty needle buried in the plastic. I clear a space in the sand with both my hands for where I want to spy tonight. I make two circles and I fan them out and make a big heart. Then I hunker down. I hold up my pretend binoculars with one hand and move aside a couple of green sea oats with the other. I peep into campsite A-14. A red tent. No people. I skulk forward, looking through my binoculars for rhinos. I’m on the vast plains of Africa, just like in The Lion King. I’ve been crossing this giant desert for two days, but the path to the oasis isn’t as short as I’d thought. I keep going when bam, from the corner of my eye I see not one, but three rhinos. They’re big, hulky gray things with mean, pointed horns, and they’re coming right at me. There’s only one thing to do when you come face-to-face with three rabid rhinos, and that is to RUN. I run and run, tearing through the hot African sand, and just when I think I’m close to safety, I come up against a wide, black river. The current is strong, but I swim with hard, quick strokes. I kick my feet, and then I hear a voice from the oasis. “Evie,” the voice yells. I can’t answer because I’m swimming for my life. Then again, louder, “Evie!” The mud of shore squishes between my toes, gooey, and I slush up onto the riverbank and collapse for a second, breathing hard. A shadow looms over me. Just when I thought the rhinos were the worst of my worries, I see the evil face of Emperor Shang, the jewel thief I’ve just recently escaped.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Emperor Shang says. He squints at me.

  “I won’t fall for your dastardly ploy,” I say. I try to dash back to the river—to H-E-double hockey sticks with the rhinos—but Emperor Shang grabs my arm.

  “You don’t even know what dastardly means,” he says.

  “I do too,” I say. I shake my arm away. Older brothers think they know everything. “It means wicked.”

  Nate strides toward our camper. I’m kind of hungry, so I follow him. “I don’t want hot dogs again,” I say.

  “Talk to the chef,” Nate says.

  But Aunt Fay is not a chef. I’ve never seen her wear an apron or a big poofy white hat like the chefs in my dad’s cookbooks, and she’s never made anything other than hot dogs and SpaghettiOs in the five days we’ve been here. I follow Nate to campsite B-8. Nate runs up the steps to the camper and slams the door. Aunt Fay’s standing at the grill, shooing away a seagull.

  “Filthy wretch,” she hollers at it. “No better than rats with wings.”

  Rats with wings. I get a real clear picture of that in my head. Rats with pointy yellow teeth and long slithery tails, wings flapping all around my head. I shiver a little. The seagull caws. “You took your shower yet, Evie?” Aunt Fay asks.

  I go up and look at the grill. Hot dogs. “Nope,” I say. “I couldn’t get to the oasis.”

  Aunt Fay nods. She has short black hair and sharp brown eyes. Her hair blows around her head in the breeze. “Rhinos?”

  “Three.” I sit down on the picnic bench and pick at the silvery wood, peeling up a long strip to fend off any rats with wings. I wave it in the air to test it out. “Mom says hot dogs are full of chemicals,” I say.

  Aunt Fay reaches for a paper plate and stabs the hot dogs onto it. She looks at me, and I get cold-pricklies in my stomach. “Your mom’s not here, is she?”

  My wood strip makes swish sounds when I slash it through the air. Nate bangs back out the camper door and swings his long legs under the table. He reaches for a hot dog bun. “She’s making a sacrifice for our family and our island,” I say. This is what my mom has told me. After all, it’s not everyone who gets chosen to be on a welcoming committee. I decide I’m hungry enough I want a hot dog. I reach for a bun, too.

  Nate snorts. He squirts ketchup in a long red streak and eats half the hot dog in one gulp. “You shouldn’t say things when you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nate says. He’s got hot dog bun crumbs on his face.

  I told you, older brothers think they know everything. “I know things just fine,” I say. In fact, I know things better than him. I think that part, but I don’t say it. He doesn’t deserve me fighting with him. What is he, anyway, except for a rotten old no-good jewel thief?

  One morning a ranger in a brown uniform comes up and tells Aunt Fay she has to move her camper. Rangers can be dangers if they try to tell the locals what to do, which they do all the time. Like moving our lighthouse; we didn’t want it moved at all, but the Park Service up and said, “Too bad, it’s getting moved or else it’ll wash away.” And then all the movers from Buffalo started coming to the island, and that’s when my mom met her friend Bob. I think maybe Bob got her the job on the welcoming committee; I don’t know. The ranger says Aunt Fay can only stay for fourteen days at a time, and they’ve overlooked that fact for five whole extra days and they can’t overlook it any more. Aunt Fay raises a fuss. She says it’s stupid that we have to leave when there are fifty empty campsites just lying around. But in the end the ranger wins. He says, “You just have to leave for a night or two, and then you can come back for another fourteen days.” I have to take all the towels down from the clothesline and pack them up, and then I have to take down the clothesline, too. Nate rolls the awning up, and Aunt Fay throws the lawn chairs in the back of the truck. It’s a gray old cloudy day, and I’m tired of camping. I’m tired of sand in my bed. “Why can’t we go home?” I ask Aunt Fay. She’s lying down underneath the camper, banging at the metal legs with a hammer to get them to fold up.

  “Frisco Woods will be a nice change,” Aunt Fay says. She says “nice” in the funny old way some people here do. Noice. She shakes some rust out of her hair. “All those trees for you to play under.”

  I roll my clothesline up into a giant clothesline ball. I don’t care if it gets tangled. “I hate trees,” I say. I throw the clothesline ball onto the camper floor. I want to go play with my friends. My friend Abigail had just gotten a new pogo stick when we left to go camping, and I hadn’t even gotten to hop on it yet. It looked like fun. It looked like being a kangaroo.

  Nate picks the stuff up off the picnic table and sets it in a bin. Palmolive soap. Clothespins. A big green sponge. My Mulan action figure that I got when we went up to Nags Head. “Do you have a looking problem?” Nate asks. He tosses Mulan at me. I miss the catch and she falls on the ground. “Do something productive,” he says.

  I stick out my tongue at Nate, grab Mulan from the concrete, and sit right down on the ground and stare at him some more. Then I make Mulan karate kick and chop the air. Hi-yah. Eventually Aunt Fay makes me get up and help, and we finish packing. She lets Nate back up the truck and hook the camper to the trailer hitch. I jump in the bed of the truck with the folded-up lawn chairs so I don’t have to sit beside Nate. I wrap my arms around my imaginary dog. He’s big and the color of red apple cider. His name is Jack, and he licks my face. I push his head to the side, but not in a mean way. “Stop that, Jack,” I say. His slobber smells like tuna. A breeze kicks up and blows his pretty red fur around. Above our heads, the gray clouds puff and scoot along.

  Nate sticks his head out the window. “Can I drive?” he asks Aunt Fay. Nate’s fourteen-and-a-half. He can’t drive.

  Aunt Fay opens his door and stares at him. If you ask me, she’s the one with the looking problem.

  I don’t really hate trees. I just hate trees I can’t climb. What’s the point of a tree being there if I can’t climb it? The trees at Frisco Woods are just okay. I can climb them, but they’re not very high. I climb every tree in our campsite, which is a nice spot beside the sound that smells piney. There’s a pool here, like a little spot of drip-drop blue glass. There’s a store, a laundromat, phones, a table to clean fish, and hookups for water and electric so we have lights in our camper and dishwashing water in our sink. Plus I saw kids running around
. I like it here fine, but Aunt Fay says it costs three times as much to camp here than in the National Seashore campground, so we can’t stay. I want to go swim in the pool, but it’s thundering, deep, fat, rumbles like an old man coughing, so I’m not allowed. I grab Mulan and call for Jack, and we run over to the sound. There’s this one tree with roots that grab into the water like claws, so we jump from one root to another while Aunt Fay and Nate finish setting up the camper. I make Mulan chop at the tree. She is one tough cookie. I hear shouting like kids playing, so we all get up to investigate. Jack trots behind me. He’s a good dog and very obedient. He doesn’t even have to wear a leash.

  Five campsites over I discover the source of all the ruckus. There are no sand dunes here, so I press myself up against the rough bark of a tree to spy. Through my binoculars I see a boy about my size running around firing a water gun at a little girl with red pigtails. She shrieks and squeals. They look like they came from my mom’s L.L.Bean catalog. I always wear a bathing suit in summer, since you never know when you’ll get to swim, and I never wear shoes, but these kids have on shirts with collars, stiff-looking khaki shorts, and tennis shoes. “Tennis shoes” was the last word I got wrong on my spelling test this year. I spelled it like it sounds—“tenna shoes”—but that was not right at all. It’s so dumb. People wear tenna shoes all the time, but they hardly ever play tennis. I’ve never played tennis before in my life, but I’ve sure worn tenna shoes. So I hate tenna shoes, and I never wear them anymore if I can help it. The boy with the water gun hollers and runs in a circle. I go up to him. “Want to play?” I ask. My mom always says it’s best to be straightforward and clear.

  The kid turns sideways and pow pows his gun. He has neat blond hair that’s cut like a bowl. It lays down on his forehead all soft and perfect. My own hair is stiff and salty because I haven’t washed it in three days. I don’t like washing my hair. “We’re playing bank robbers,” he says.

  Now, that sounds like just about the dumbest game I’ve ever heard. “We don’t have bank robbers on Hatteras Island,” I say. Then I tell them about some of the dangers we do have. I get up to the Portuguese man-of-war before the kid shoots me with his water gun.

  “We’re playing bank robbers,” he shouts.

  I sigh and say, fine, I’ll play. I run in a circle and dodge when he shoots at me. “I’m Evie,” I say. I karate chop a robber.

  “I’m Jack,” he says.

  “That’s the name of my dog.” Then I giggle because this boy has a dog’s name.

  “You have a dog?” the girl asks. She has two missing front teeth and looks just like Pippi Longstocking.

  That’s when I realize they might not understand Jack is a pretend dog. I look back at the boy-Jack. “Is she kin to you?” I ask him.

  Jack stops shooting and looks at me funny. “What?”

  “Is she kin to you?” I ask again. I point at the little girl.

  Jack puts his hands on his hips. Whenever I do that, my mom yells at me for sassing. “What are you saying?” he asks.

  I start to feel real stupid. “Kin,” I say. I say it louder than before so maybe he’ll get it this time. “Are y’all related?”

  But old bowl-head just makes an ugly face at me. “I don’t know what you’re saying,” he says.

  I decide this game of robbers is just too silly to play any longer. Besides, kids who constantly wear tennis shoes can’t be all that fun. “I think I hear my dog barking,” I say to the catalog kids. And I run back to my own campsite where at least people know what kin means.

  One afternoon a few days later I get ants in my pants. Not real ants—that’s what it’s called when I want to move and run around but can’t. It rains and rains. Another source of danger here can be BOREDOM. When it rains and there’s no beach allowed and no swimming allowed and no going out for sno-cones allowed, you could just about die of boredom. It’s a genuine source of danger. Nate sprawls like a starfish on the bed reading some dumb comic book, and Aunt Fay just plays solitaire and smokes cigarettes. I write a letter to my pen pal in Ireland. His name is Eamon O’Shea, and where he lives they drink tea every afternoon and eat something called clotted cream. It sounds gross, but Eamon says it tastes good. I tell Eamon all about the new campground, but when that’s done, I’m still bored. I draw him a picture of a starfish with googly eyes and put everything in an envelope, and then I am done with writing things. I try to think up reasons to go home. At least Jack and I could watch a video on TV or something. Finally I hit on a reason, and it’s not even a lie. I get up off my bed and go over to the little stand-up and take-down table where Aunt Fay is slapping out cards. “I forgot my summer reading list at home,” I say. I pick up a strand of my long, salty hair and use it to tickle her arm.

  Aunt Fay sets down her hand of cards. “Do you need it?” she asks.

  “It’s vital,” I tell her. V-I-T-A-L. I got that word right on my spelling test. “It’s vital that I read twenty books from that list this summer so we get a pizza party when school starts back up.” I shudder to imagine school starting back up.

  “I suppose you want to go after it?” she asks. Aunt Fay leans back against the bench. It’s red and your legs stick to it when you sit down. I wonder how bad her legs are going to stick since she’s been sitting there all afternoon.

  “It’s for my education,” I say.

  Aunt Fay says she’ll take me and, even better, Nate doesn’t want to go. So me and Aunt Fay drive up to our house. It looks funny to see it after being gone. Our house is little and brown and square, and it’s up off the ground on stilts. Nobody’s home. Aunt Fay pulls the truck in the driveway and says, “Run up and get your paper.”

  I open the door, but I dawdle. “I might have forgot a few more things,” I say. Rain spit-spats on my leg in little pings. “It might take me a minute.”

  I’m hoping Aunt Fay will come in with me, and then I can convince her to watch a video, but she just gets out a cigarette by going tap tap tap on the packet. She sticks the cigarette in her mouth and talks around it. “Do what you got to do,” she says.

  So I get out and dash up the steps like I always do, skipping steps three and eight. Nobody locks doors on Hatteras Island so I go right in. I stand very still for a moment. My house is quiet, just the soft pitters of rain on the roof and a squawk squawk coming from the fridge. Piles of dirty dishes cover the kitchen counter. I peek in the squawky fridge, but it’s just beer and more beer. I’m about to go in my room and look for my paper when I hear a car door slam and then voices. I run to the window, and there’s my mom, getting out of a blue car. I call Jack over and put my arms around him. Mom talks to Aunt Fay, and then my mom’s friend Bob comes out of the blue car and stands by my mom. He puts his hand on her back and sort of steers her toward the stairs and up into the house. I let go of Jack and run to the door.

  “Mommy!” I yell as it opens. I don’t usually say mommy because that’s for babies, but I’m excited. The last time Mom came to visit me and Nate was three days ago. She took us out for some Bubba’s ribs and told us about how they’re taking apart the lighthouse. Then we went and looked at it. It’s all dug out and bricks are everywhere. It looks naked. It made my stomach feel sick. Her friend Bob took us in closer than most people are allowed since he’s an important lighthouse mover from Buffalo, New York.

  Mom hugs me. “Hi, Evie-girl,” she says. She kisses my cheek and her lips are sticky with lipstick.

  Bob pats my shoulder. “You been having fun camping?” he asks.

  I step back and look at Bob. He’s a big, tall person with a bushy beard. I feel shy, and I don’t know why. “I guess,” I say. Jack sits beside me and I pat his head.

  Bob turns to Mom. “Mallory, why don’t you go ahead and get what you need.”

  Mom smiles at Bob and then goes into her bedroom. I don’t know what to do alone with this bushy-beard man. I look down at my toes. There’s dark sand around my toenails. Jack shifts his paw. The door bangs open and there’s Aunt Fay.


  “I believe you’d best be setting your boots outside of my brother’s house,” Aunt Fay says to Bob. Aunt Fay’s real little, and she only comes up to Bob’s chest.

  Bob raises his hands like Aunt Fay’s sticking him up. Give me all your money and nobody gets hurt. He waves his hands back and forth a couple times. “Hey now,” Bob says. “I don’t want to start anything.” He gives a little wave and then real quiet walks outside and down the stairs.

  “You could’ve fooled me,” Aunt Fay says to his back. She puffs on her cigarette even though Dad doesn’t allow smoking in the house. Then she points it at me. “Get your things, kid. We’re going home.”

  I don’t want to. “I want to see Mom,” I say. Then I run off into Mom’s room before anyone can stop me. I hear her rattling drawers around. I stand in the doorway. Mom’s got a whole big pile of clothes on the bed. Winter clothes with long sleeves and long legs and hoods. “Why do you need those?” I ask her.