Читать книгу Geogirl - Kelly Rysten - Страница 9

Chapter 3

Bam, bam, bam! I pounded on Twiggy’s dorm room door.

There was the sound of a chair sliding and stocking feet kicking things out of the way as someone came to the door. The door opened and there stood Skippy. Skippy was Twiggy’s roommate. He was a cross between an Old English Sheepdog and a giraffe. He was tall and thin but his hair was light blonde, fine and long. With all those qualities it tended to fly out from his head so he looked like a young, tall Albert Einstein. Or maybe he was a cross between Einstein and Stretch Armstrong.

“Is Twiggy here?” I asked.

“He’s in the shower,” he said.

“Oh,” I said looking down the hall. I wasn’t allowed in the men’s shower room. “Can you tell him I was looking for him? And tell him I’ll wait for a little while at Holey Moley?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“He’ll know where to go,” I said.

“Okay. You sure seem excited about something.”

“Don’t tell him that. I’ll just wait until I reach a stopping point in my book.”

“Okay.”

Holey Moley was the name of the geocache in the knot hole of the tree and the tree made a good reading spot. The only problem with reading there was that if a geocacher came looking for the cache they would think they couldn’t. Geocachers are not supposed to search for a geocache in the presence of non geocachers. If they do, they are not supposed to be obvious about it. They call people who don’t geocache muggles and if muggles were to see a geocacher geocaching they might think we were doing something suspicious and call the police. The police don’t like to find what they called “suspicious packages” because they have to evacuate buildings, call the bomb squad and blow up perfectly harmless containers that only held a small notepad and a few toys. It was kind of a waste of time and resources. So when I read at Holey Moley I watched for geocachers and if anybody eyed the tree disappointedly I would wave them over and tell them I was a geocacher and then they could look. And even though I had only found ten caches I still felt like I was a real geocacher, because I had an account and a geocaching name and knew how many finds I had. That made it official.

My geocaching name is Grabby Gabby, which my roommate somehow made into something crude and sexual but really it just meant that I “made the grab” when Twiggy and I went geocaching. I don’t know why I always found them before he did. He had much more experience at finding geocaches, but I still managed to find them first. I was beginning to think he really found them first but he wanted me to feel like I was doing well so he let me find them first. Holey Moley was the only one he found first and it was because he was taller. I could reach in the hole if I really stretched and stood on my tiptoes, but he didn’t even have to stand on his toes.

I settled down with my book and fingered the pages. Hmm, I only had about a hundred pages to go to the end of the book. Maybe I would wait a little longer than I told Skippy. Then I spent several minutes wondering why Skippy needed a nick name, too. I decided if he was anyone else’s roommate we would just call him Jake, but he was Twiggy’s roommate and Twiggy was the one constantly assigning nicknames to people. I wondered how Skippy got his name. It wasn’t a derivative from his real name. Then I remembered that Skippy’s family lived along a river and his dad had a motorboat and a sailboat. They used the motorboat for quick trips to the store and they sailed the sailboat out to the ocean and visited ports up and down the east coast. Maybe Twiggy considered Skippy a junior skipper? For a smart guy Twiggy sure could be immature.

I was maybe fifty pages into my book when Twiggy walked down the sidewalk in my direction. He walked like Ichabod Crane and he had large feet so it was easy to recognize him amongst the other students. They all looked very relieved that classes were almost at an end. Some of them carried boxes of belongings. I needed to think about packing up, too.

“Guess what!” I said.

“You didn’t really flunk your final and the coffee really did explode in your brain and you’ve lost ten million brain cells and you’re in need of a second brain. Well, here I am!”

“I got my mom to not say no!” I exclaimed.

He thought about that for a second. “But she didn’t say yes?”

“No, she didn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no and I said I’d be there for the party.”

“What does that amount to in your family’s language?” he asked.

“It means… I guess we better start planning!”

He wrapped his arms around me and lifted me clear off my feet, right there in the middle of the crowded sidewalk!

Ten minutes later we were back at the coffee shop.

“Okay, when is inspection?” he asked.

“The day after tomorrow.”

“Are you packed up?”

“No!”

“You better start packing.”

“I need boxes. It’s amazing how much stuff one person can accumulate in one semester!”

“What are you going to do with it after you pack it up? You’re not going home.”

“Oh shoot! I forgot!”

“My stuff fits in my car. If it doesn’t, I send a box on ahead and catch up with it later.”

“I think my mom would freak if my belongings landed on the doorstep via UPS.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know!”

“How much money do you have?”

“Maybe a couple hundred.”

“We could rent a storage space for the summer. If your stuff fits in your car and my stuff fits in my car then one storage unit ought to hold all of it.”

“What about the car?”

He frowned. Maybe we hadn’t quite thought this out enough.

“Well, we have to crawl before we can walk. So let’s crawl down to the store and get some boxes. We’ll pack up and research storage units.”

“What’s going on?” asked my roommate, Sarah Culverson.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Something’s different about you. You’re trying not to smile. You’re humming as you pack!”

“I’m just glad to have finals over,” I said.

“You’ve never been happy enough to suppress grins and hum before.”

“Then maybe I need to get out more.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Is your family going on a vacation together?”

“No, but my mom has a big party planned for Meredith’s birthday.”

“That’s so cool that your parents celebrate your Sweet Sixteen.”

“I guess.”

She huffed, frustrated that she was being left out of something that meant more to me than school ending or my sister’s birthday.

“Hey!” I said. “How did you get through the semester without getting a nick name from Twiggy?”

“I refused,” she said. “He tried to nick name me Pluto and I said, ‘no way!’ Then I just didn’t respond unless he called me Sarah.”

“You could have chosen what you want him to call you,” I suggested.

“I wanted to be called Sarah.”

Maybe Sarah was my parent’s kid and not me.

“Why did he choose Pluto?” I asked.

“Because I used to wear my hair in a French braid around the side of my head and he thought it stuck out like Pluto’s ears.”

I tried to remember, but I couldn’t recall how Sarah wore her hair at the beginning of the semester. I did agree that Pluto was a lousy nick name.

She got up and walked over to me. “So spit it out,” she said. “What are you so happy about?”

“You really want to know?”

“Naaaahhh, I keep asking you because I don’t want to know.”

“I’m going on a geocaching road trip with Twiggy!” I said. I couldn’t help but smile. I was going on a road trip!

“With a guy??” Sarah said.

“He’s not a guy. He’s my best friend!”

“Just in case you didn’t notice,” she said a bit sarcastically. “Twiggy… Ooo I hate nicknames. Tony is very much male. He walks like a guy. He talks like a guy. He drinks beer like a guy. He reacts to you like a guy.”

“He does?”

“Yes, he does, and do you know what males think about when they go on a road trip with a female?”

“Geocaching?”

“Sex!”

“Twiggy respects me enough to know we are just friends.”

“You… are… blind. Or ignorant.”

“Okay! I think it’ll be fun. He’ll teach me all about geocaching. I will double my find count! Wow, can you imagine? Twenty finds!”

“How many does Tony have?”

“Last time I looked he had over two thousand.”

“And you think twenty is a lot?”

“He’s been geocaching for years. I’ve only been doing it for one busy semester.”

“Wow,” Sarah said. “I thought you were going to get married at forty and never have kids and travel the world with your rich husband and now it looks like you’re here for your MRS degree!”

“I’m going geocaching! With a friend! I am not getting married. I am not having sex. I admit I don’t really want to wait until I’m forty to get married but I am not interested in Twiggy. We’re just friends who enjoy the same hobby.”

“And developing new ones all the time,” she muttered.

The next morning my cell phone blipped and I looked at the caller ID. Twiggy!

“Hey! I did it. I found a storage unit where the first month is free! We have to sign up for three months but if we split the cost I think we can do it.”

“Cool! I’m almost packed!”

“Remember you need hiking shoes. Remember your jacket.”

“It’s summer! It’s sweltering outside.”

“Okay, do what you want. Just be prepared to hear I told you so when you freeze.”

“Where are we going?”

“Wherever the contest takes us.”

I wasn’t sure what that might mean. So far I’d found the geocache in the tree on campus, a little magnetic key hider near the library, and a couple on lampposts. I told Twiggy we could skip those from now on. Those were so embarrassing. The cache was hidden under a square cover and no matter how careful we were it made a horrific screeching noise and everybody around looked to see where the noise came from only to see two people poking around underneath the lamppost skirt. I didn’t even know it was called a skirt and I was a little embarrassed when Twiggy called it a skirt lifter. I couldn’t think of any reason to bring a jacket to go geocaching.

“I’ll come for a load of boxes in a couple of hours and we can plan our strategy over lunch. I’ll buy.”

“I’ve got enough for fast food,” I said.

“It’s okay. I got it.”

When I answered my door two hours later, Twiggy stood there in shorts, a muscle shirt, and sandals. Thankfully, he wasn’t wearing socks. However, with his Ichabod Crane walk he looked like his legs were trying to escape the shorts. And he was smiling like a fool.

“You’re sure about this?” he asked.

“Of course!” I said. “I’m really excited about it!”

“Then let me see those boxes,” he said. “Moving man at your service.”

“Did you get a close parking place?” I asked.

“As close as possible. In other words… no. But don’t worry about it. We’ll have it done before you know it.”

“I’ll go ask about using the dolly,” I said. Each wing of the dorm had a dorm supervisor and the sup had a dolly that we could borrow. It was sometimes hard to get my hands on it, but it was worth asking about. It would move three or four boxes compared to lugging the boxes out one by one.

“After you ask Mavis for the dolly, I want you to sort. Keep your clothes, bedding and toiletries. I’ll put the rest in storage.”

“All my clothes?”

“Yeah. We don’t know how often we will be able to do laundry. Boy Scout motto, always be prepared. Works well for geocachers, too.”

I didn’t really know what I needed to be prepared for. So far geocaching had been a relaxing, yet interesting pastime; something to make a walk across campus more interesting.

We had to carry several boxes to Twiggy’s car but then the dolly was left at my dorm room door and I stacked the remaining boxes on it.

“You’re sure you saved anything you might need?” Twiggy asked.

“Yeah.”

“And you have good shoes and a jacket?”

“If I must.”

He nodded and pushed the cart out to the wheelchair ramp.

Good byes in a girls’ dorm were so uncomfortable.

“So… you’ll write?” Sarah sniffled.

“Yeah, and I’ll even remember that you collect stamps and I’ll send postcards, too.”

Sniff, “Thanks! You’re like a sister to me!”

“And I’ll see you next semester, too.”

“Call.”

“You, too.”

“Ohh! I can’t believe it is over!” she cried.

Twiggy walked up, this time dressed in jeans and a geocaching t-shirt. I didn’t even know they made geocaching t-shirts.

“Take care of my new sister!” Sarah cried.

Twiggy didn’t understand the tears at all. Actually, neither did I. It was just a summer. No big deal. My sights were set on the road trip. I wasn’t very well travelled and the prospect of seeing new places was more enticing than winning the contest. Sarah gave me a tight hug with more promises to write and call. Twiggy and I tried to look sorry for Sarah’s sake, but we eagerly squeezed into his Toyota and drove to the storage unit. I helped him unload and when we were through we were tired but one step closer to adventure.

One reason I didn’t have many friends was that I was content to stay home. When I lived with my parents I read a lot. I fussed over my room, rearranging the furniture and the things on the walls. I would go places if somebody asked me to, and I usually had a good time when I did, but I wasn’t inclined to go by myself. In high school I was asked out a lot but boys were mostly worried about my over protective father. So I guess I was at least attractive. I had wavy brown hair that I had to control in the wind. I was fair skinned so I was constantly nagged to wear sunscreen. I did not put on a dress to go to the store. My mom seemed to understand that kids these days were not as refined as kids when she was growing up. So my jeans were acceptable if I wanted to go shopping with a woman who looked like a lawyer or a pastor’s wife. To me dresses were uncomfortable. I was a comfy person. A snuggle down in flannel blankets with the dog kind of person. So Twiggy’s geocaching contest sounded wildly adventurous to me even if all we did was go from parking lot to parking lot looking for magnetic hide-a-keys and peanut butter jars placed in the landscaping.

At the storage facility we had to shell out big bucks for… space. I wasn’t used to spending money just to have a space to put things in, but if it meant going geocaching or not going geocaching I decided I had to make the sacrifice, so when we were through there I didn’t mind so much that Twiggy was buying my lunch. We sat at Donner’s, which was known for their chicken fried steak, and squinted at the screen of Twiggy’s laptop. Donner’s was near the university and they didn’t mind students coming in and nursing a cup of coffee all night while they studied or read. The only disadvantage to Donner’s was that they also didn’t mind if the students played the jukebox and the jukebox had internet access so there was no telling what kind of garbage might blare forth from it while students were trying to nurse a cup of coffee and read a book. It was terribly unnerving to be reading a romance novel to the tune from some Swedish rock band. Sometimes they didn’t even carry a tune. They just made noise. I guess college students think it makes them look cultured if they like foreign music. I heard a lot of Swedish, German, and Japanese music at Donner’s. I was used to the music my parents listened to and I hardly ever heard that at the diner.

“We’re right here,” Twiggy said as we squinted at the geocaching map. I couldn’t even recognize the city because of all the little boxes that represented caches.

“Zoom in a little,” I said.

“Nah, we know where we are, the thing is we have to fill in our Fizzy Grid before we get to the event.”

“Oh no!” I mockingly wailed. “I packed my Fizzy Grid. It’s in the box labeled Gwen’s bookcase.”

“No you didn’t. Your Fizzy Grid is online. And half your boxes were labeled Gwen’s bookcase.”

“I had three bookcases, a bed and a closet. What do you expect?”

He brought up my profile page and scrolled down. We came to a chart. I was good at charts. I even charted my tooth brushing routine.

“This is your grid. To fill in the Fizzy Grid we have to fill in all the combinations of terrain and difficulty ratings with a find. Right now you have mostly 1.5/1.5 caches. That’s normal under your circumstances.”

“Then why did you pick me as a partner? You should have picked somebody with more experience.”

“It not about the numbers,” he said. “It’s the journey. That’s what you haven’t learned about geocaching yet. It’s what you discover on the way to the caches that really makes it fun.”

“Then why do we have to find all these terrain ratings and difficulty ratings?”

“We don’t have to find all of them. It’s just that the more we find the more likely we are to win. I think we need to give you a crash course in geocaching. We’ll find some easier ones in places you aren’t used to searching to mark off some of these in between difficulties before we try for a five/five.”

“Oh, good. You know what they say, you can’t five/five until you three/three.”

“You could, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. I don’t know about you but I’d rather find interesting caches than just ones that fill the grid. So we need to do some research. We’re here. And we have five hundred miles of the good old USofA to use for a playground on the way.”

He traced a highway that went from where we were to the middle of the country.

“Uh, one problem,” I said. “We can’t save the very hardest caches for the town the event is in. Look, there is no hard terrain in the plains.”

“There could be,” Twiggy said. “If they make us hike ten miles to get to it.”

I frowned. “I think this will require some research.”

“And you’re just the girl to do it.”

“Show me how the program works.”

While he showed me the ins and outs of the geocaching site we ate lunch, dessert, had coffee, visited the restrooms, had another coffee, visited the restrooms, debated whether we were drinking too much coffee, argued that soda had just as much caffeine and more sugar than coffee, and then debated whether or not we should just stay for dinner. I thought I learned more sitting at Donner’s than I had in my whole semester of Geography 101. I learned how to find the caches in a given area, how to sort them by when they were found, when they were placed, who placed them, who found them, who liked them, how well liked they were… I really liked the idea of searching for them by the number of favorite points. That way we could weed out the ones nobody liked and concentrate on the ones that people thought were cool, fun, interesting, or in a good location. This was research I could get my head wrapped around! It was like planning a vacation around tiny mysteries! I jumped into the search with both feet, finding all the best caches in town, then I realized I had to find the best caches in each town between Franklinburg and the event. And when I looked closer at the map I found out the caches were everywhere! How could I find the right terrain and difficulty levels at locations along our route? Twiggy showed me an advanced search that would create a list for me, but I either came up with too many caches, or too few. And I didn’t know whether the caches it listed were good ones or not.

“Gabby, come up for air every once in a while,” Twiggy said.

“I think I need to just do it by hand,” I said. “I want to pick the best of the best. I want to explore underground and climb mountains. I want to be Sherlock Holmes searching for those itty bitty…”

“Nanos,” he reminded me.

“Yeah, those itty bitty ones. And I want to find a huge one too! How big is the largest cache you’ve found?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m guessing it was about four feet long and a foot in diameter.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“I think it was a mortar tube or something. It looked like it came from a military surplus store.”

“Wow! Can we find one like that?”

“You’re the planner and navigator,” he said. “Which reminds me, we need to go get our wheels.”

“But we have wheels,” I said. “I have a car and you have a car.”

“Do we really want to cram all your stuff and all my stuff into a two door sedan?”

“What are you going to do?”

“You’ll see.”

After dinner I got a surprise, one I wasn’t quite prepared for.

“Hey man! Thanks for trading! This’ll be so cool!” said a fellow student I had never met. He was talking to Twiggy and Twiggy had just traded his two door sedan for a very used, very old, Chevy van. A van? My mother would be horrified! She would say, “Do you know what men have in mind if they pick you up in a van?”

And I’d say, “Mom, I’m not stupid.” Except that I really trusted Twiggy and he had a point. My clothes wouldn’t even fit in his car. I looked at the olive green monstrosity and tried to think of it as a truck that holds more passengers. That idea quickly flew out the window when they flung open the sliding door and the walls were covered with zebra striped fake fur and the floor had a remnant of purple carpet laid from the back of the driver’s seat to the back door of the van. At least they removed the girlie magazines, I thought.

Twiggy tossed his keys to this other man and took the keys to the ugly, olive green machine I would come to call The Cacheamolé because it was used for geocaching and it was avocado green.

“See ya in August,” Twiggy said.

“Yeah, see ya,” the other man said.

Twiggy tossed all our belongings into the green van, slapped me happily on the shoulder and opened the passenger’s door up front so I could get in. My mom will never believe this, I thought as I climbed in.

“You traded your car for this?” I exclaimed.

“Just for the summer. Ned was tired of buying gas and I needed space. It was a win win situation.”

“Did you tell him your car gets lousy gas mileage?”

“It depends on how you drive it.”

“And how is Ned going to drive it?”

“We’ll tell him that later.”

“And what about this?” I asked. “We have to put gas in this thing for the summer.”

“No worries.”

One thing that I liked about Twiggy also irritated me to the point of frustration. He never worried about anything. Maybe I’m a realist. Maybe I inherited “proper” genes from my mom, but I thought if we were going on a 500 mile trip with several detours along the way we should make sure we would be able to pay for gas.

Chugga, chugga, chu…uuga went the van down the road and I began to smell something that I didn’t want to smell. I didn’t know what it was but it smelled like something in the engine was overheating. I didn’t say anything, because men like to notice engine problems on their own, but I rode along wondering if we would get back to campus without catching fire. When we did reach the parking lot of my dorm Twiggy jumped out of the van, threw open the sliding door on the side and said, “Now all we have to do is make this little beauty livable!”

Little beauty?

“It looks like a giant avocado got dropped into the zebra pen at the zoo,” I said.

“Aw come on. You’re a girl. You can make the van into a comfy little geocaching paradise.”

I thought he was nuts.

One thing there always is around a university campus when the students are going home for the summer is pillows and furniture that nobody wants to haul home. Frequently that furniture was picked up off the street anyway so it was no big loss to just leave it by a Dumpster for the incoming freshmen. Somehow with each semester of college the dorm rooms improved a little each time, unless you had parents who saw to your every need like I did. Our trip to the storage unit involved mostly boxes, because only boxes would fit into Twiggy’s car. But I still had a mushroom chair and there was a futon mattress and two pillows left by the Dumpster. I thought things were going a little too smoothly when I put all our boxes of clothes around the edges of the van, spread out the futon mattress and it fit perfectly. I wasn’t sure what to do with the mushroom chair but thought it couldn’t hurt to be able to slouch about occasionally so I put it against one wall of the van and stepped back. The pillows were a bit big for our needs but I decided if we were roughing it then big pillows weren’t much to complain about.