The Mapmaker and the Ghost(10)
“Are you—”
In a flash, the man was gone.
Goldenrod stared and stared at the spot where he had been. She sat down right on the forest floor and leaned against a tree. There was certainly no tall, elegant see-through man there now. But there almost certainly had been just a moment ago.
She looked at all of her very scientific notes and her very scientific tools (well, minus the yellow sock). She went through how logically her day had gone until then. Cornflakes and bananas for breakfast. A kiss from her mother. A conversation with her brother in which she had to assert her older sister status. And then her map going precisely as planned. She was an explorer, a scientist. What she had just thought she’d seen was quite impossible. And yet, she was almost positive she had seen it.
Goldenrod didn’t get much accomplished the rest of the day. After a bit more thinking, and a written documentation of what had just happened in her Explorer’s Journal (the lined notebook), Goldenrod found that she couldn’t concentrate enough on the detailed measurements.
Around three, she left the forest with the hope that she would see the old lady on her way out. She thought that if there were anyone at all whom she could discuss her strange experience with, it would be her.
But the old lady was nowhere to be found. Goldenrod even went so far as to knock on her door, but got no answer.
Stuck with the disconcerting idea that she didn’t know whether to believe her own eyes, Goldenrod had no choice but to go home.
The man from the forest was staring at Goldenrod.
On a strong hunch, she had gone quickly to her room as soon as she had gotten home and pulled out her own copy of the Lewis and Clark biography. Right there, on page nineteen, was a portrait captioned “Meriwether Lewis.” A portrait that depicted the same gray hair and clear blue eyes that she’d seen, though positioned on a face that seemed rather more solid.
7
BOREDOM AND CURIOSITY
Birch was bored. Nearly three weeks had passed since second grade ended and in those three weeks he had beaten all of his video games, perfected mimicking the voices of every single one of his favorite cartoon characters, and tried every possible variation of Goldenrod’s peanut butter sandwich that he could think of. His last concoction of peanut butter, chili powder, and raw egg had left a very bad taste in his mouth, literally, and now his stomach gurgled in protest any time he got too close to the kitchen.
So now he was bored. And he missed Goldenrod. Every morning, precisely at 9:00 a.m., he watched as she set out with her green backpack, and every evening, at around 6:00 p.m., he watched as she walked back toward the house. When she had turned down his request to go with her, he hadn’t been particularly surprised. After all, the world as he knew it definitely involved an older sister’s right not to bring her eight-year-old brother along everywhere she went. He didn’t necessarily like it, but he hadn’t asked her again.
But, really, boredom can make a person do all sorts of things one would probably never do otherwise. Suddenly, one finds oneself acting mean or loud or absolutely, monstrously bonkers simply because one doesn’t have anything better to do. In Birch’s case, boredom had wormed its way into his head and made him act very un-Birchlike indeed.
Whatever Goldenrod is doing, he thought one day, it has to be more fun than this. And then, suddenly, he had decided that he wasn’t going to stand for it anymore. Take note, boredom. This was war.
At 8:00 a.m. that very next morning, Birch took his own purple-and-gold backpack and filled it with a notebook, a box of colored pencils, and the brand-new calculator he had received on his last birthday. He stashed the bag under his bed. Then he took out a Tupperware he had specially prepared the night before. Inside was a particularly odorous mixture of peanut butter, one raw egg, and a mashed can of chili beans. Now that it had settled in overnight, the gooey green-and-brown concoction looked—and smelled—perfect for his plans.
Still in his pajamas, Birch walked into the bathroom and proceeded to scoop out the goo all over the tiles closest to the toilet. He sculpted the mixture with the spoon to get it just right and then ran back to his room to hide the Tupperware. Within a few moments, he was back in the bathroom, performing a few convincing coughs and barfing noises, and then finally screaming “Mom!” in his best weak-with-dire-illness voice.
When his mother came, she found Birch grabbing his stomach and looking miserably at the mess on the floor. “I’m sorry,” he managed to say weakly before bringing his hand to his mouth.
Exactly as he had expected, Birch was led back to his bed, a thermometer was produced, and he was ordered to take a nap. While his mother cleaned the mess, he closed his eyes and steadied his breathing so that, when she came in to check on him at 8:45 a.m., he looked every bit like a sick little boy fast asleep.
At 8:55 a.m., on the other hand, Birch looked every bit like a determined boy with a very serious mission. Crouched behind the hydrangea bushes in his backyard, wearing an all-green outfit, his camouflage baseball hat and his purple-and-gold backpack cleverly tucked under a hoodie, he waited until he had heard Goldenrod say good-bye to their mother and then make her way down the road.
Then, as his mother pruned, he tiptoed out from behind the bush, quietly opened the gate, and briskly followed Goldenrod’s path.
For a week, Goldenrod had diligently mapped out Pilmilton Woods without further incident and found nothing to indicate that there had ever been any ghosts there, famous or otherwise.