Geogirl - Kelly Rysten

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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

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