Green Mountain Academy, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Frances Greenslade
Tundra Books, an imprint of Tundra Book Group,
a division of Penguin Random House of Canada Limited
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Green Mountain Academy / Frances Greenslade.
Names: Greenslade, Frances, 1961– author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210351802 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210351837 | ISBN 9780735267848 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735267855 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS8613 R438 G74 2022 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23
Published simultaneously in the United States of America by Tundra Books of Northern New York, an imprint of Tundra Book Group, a division of Penguin Random House of Canada Limited
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021949258
Edited by Lynne Missen
Cover designed by John Martz
Cover art copyright © 2022 by Jon Mcnaught
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
a_prh_6.0_141032872_c0_r0
For Neil and Chase Greenslade,
who understand courage.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Acknowledgements
chapter one
Pitch dark, the kind of dark that’s so dark, colors swirl, pulsing before my eyes. I could be at the edge of a bottomless pit, for all I could see. A dank smell of old, old mud rose up. Sounds rolled like thunder in my ears, then the roar of my own blood beating stopped them altogether and the world dropped away. I was nowhere, anywhere, held up by emptiness. Was I falling or floating? The sting of my fall vibrated through my legs. I reeled forward, catching my hands in midair, but I was already on the ground. Under my knees, loose shale crunched.
My knees were probably bleeding. They hurt. But what hurt worse was that I didn’t make it. Again.
I took a deep breath. Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the blank darkness of the cave. A patch of something paler took shape, like a cloud forming. I crawled toward it. Then a crack of light opened above my head and a hand appeared, reaching down.
“Francie! Are you all right?”
Danny’s face appeared in the daylight and she grinned at me. I could see my headlamp where it rolled after I fell.
“I’m okay. But I didn’t make it. Obviously.”
“Okay, I’m lowering the rope.”
A snake of rope pierced the light, twisted down toward me.
“Have you got it?”
I picked up my headlamp and slung it around my neck. Then I grabbed hold of the rope. “I’ve got it.”
“I’m ready!” Danny shouted.
“Danny?” My voice sounded far away in the echoing cave.
“I’ve got you.”
“No. I want to try again.”
“It’s getting late. We’ve got to be back before supper.”
“I know. Just one more try.”
“Aren’t you tired? You probably shouldn’t try when you’re tired.”
“I almost had it. Once I’m past that ledge, I’m home free. And I was so close.”
“Okay. But remember, the higher you go, the more dangerous it is if you fall.”
“Danny?”
“What?”
“Are you going to tell me to be careful?”
She laughed. “I was thinking of it, actually.”
Danny hated it when I, or anybody, told her to be careful. She’d answer in her driest voice, “Actually, my plan was to be as reckless as possible and risk my own life and the lives of others.”
The rockface I was trying to climb was a few feet away from where Danny was. Our rope wasn’t long enough to tie to the only sturdy tree nearby and still reach the hole where I’d climb out—if I made it. So I was on my own. Another fall would really hurt. But I was determined not to fall again. My climbing skills were getting better; I just needed to find a way around the bulge of rock where I hadn’t been able to find any handholds. Last time, I’d made a lunge for one and missed. That’s how I ended up in the mud.
I shook out the jitters in my arms and legs and took a deep breath.
“It’s doable, Francie,” Danny called.
That was Danny in a nutshell. Most things were “doable” to her. It was one of the things I liked about her. I turned on my headlamp, then looked up at the rockface. It shone in the light, little trails of water snaking down and turning the black rock slick in places. It could be done, I was sure of it. I stepped onto the rockface, jamming the toe of my runners into a foothold. Then I had an idea.
I jumped back down and took off my runners and socks, shoved them in my jacket pockets. Then I tried again. My bare toes found the footholds in the cool damp rock. It was easier to feel them this way. My hands sought the familiar fingerholds, clung to them, and I swung myself up, covering the first part of the climb in just a couple of minutes. But I was tired.
I rested my cheek flat against the wet rock and let the jitters calm. My feet were losing feeling. Maybe bare feet hadn’t been such a great idea. After all, it was November and colder in these mountains than down in the valley.
“Don’t rest too long, Francie,” Danny called. “You’ll lose your strength.”
She was right. It was now or never. If I held on much longer, my legs and arms would turn to jelly and I might not have the strength to climb back down if I didn’t make it. And I didn’t want to fall again. With another burst of effort, I reached up and found an edge for the fingers of my right hand. If I could only get my leg up somewhere. But I tried a few spots and my toe slipped off each time. I tried to find a hold for my left hand. My fingers slid over cold stone. I stopped again, my hands burning and my muscles quivering. I could see the sky now, a washed-out gray, low cloud like fog skimming across it.
There was that small outcropping. But it was just out of reach, no matter how much I stretched myself. Lunging for it was how I’d fallen before.
“Francie?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s snowing.”
“Okay.”
“I think we should go.”
I ran my hand over the rockface once more, searching for somewhere to move. But there was nothing.
“Okay. I’m climbing down.”
“I’ll meet you at the other hole. Hey! Be careful!”
I smiled, lowering myself on stiff fingers and toes that had lost all feeling. Then I crawled along the ground to the other opening. My hands shook as I pulled my socks over my ice-cold feet, then slipped on my runners. It was hard to tie my shoelaces. My heart was still pattering like a woodpecker.
There was no need to climb this rockface. I’d discovered it when I’d deliberately climbed through the tunnel of rock, squirming on my belly in places, exploring, to see how far I could get and if there was a way out. What made me want to do it? Danny understood. Most of the time, she didn’t even try to talk me out of it.
After Ms. Fineday, who had been my teacher before—and me—no one else I knew loved being out in the woods as much as Danny. Danny’s great-uncle Charlie was a guide in their family’s traditional territory in northern British Columbia. He took people hunting and fishing and canoeing and hiking into deep wilderness, where grizzlies and wolves and eagles lived, and where making mistakes could cost you your life. Danny had been sure he’d hire her to work for him this past summer. She’d spent the summer before with him, learning to read a river, to understand riffles and eddies and runs, and she’d learned paddle strokes and how not to blow a stalk when following an animal in the woods. But instead he took on her cousin Rudy, a boy, she told me, who’d rather find his way through video games than the actual forest.
&n
I took hold of the dangling rope and with the last of my strength twisted my way up.
Danny gripped my arm around hers and hoisted me out onto the rock.
“Look at the sky,” she said. “We’re in for some serious snow. It’s going to get slippery in here very soon.”
Danny and I had made a secret trail down to this area we’d discovered about half an hour from our school, Green Mountain Academy. We called it the Sasquatch Caves. They weren’t proper caves; a field of huge boulders piled on top of each other formed a labyrinth of holes and passages, some of them big enough to be called caves. Danny said this was the kind of hangout Sasquatches liked.
It was treacherous walking through there even when it was dry. We had to watch we didn’t slip or take a wrong step into a crack that had no bottom. Then it was a scramble over the boulders to the base of a wall of rock to get back on the path we’d made. Once we climbed the wall, the bench of pine-forested land opened up and we would follow the winding track we called Secret Trail back to Fire Tower Trail, which led to the school.
Fire Tower Trail was the main trail around Green Mountain Academy. You could pick it up from the back yard, behind the clothesline and the compost area, and it led first to the old fire tower, a lookout about half a mile from the school. Then it made a circle route through the woods, across a big meadow, with a side trail down to Smoky Creek, then through more pine forest and back to the school.
No one knew about the path Danny and I had made to the caves except Danny and me and Ming Yue, an older girl we’d told because she’s a climber and we wanted advice. We’d found the caves late in September when we were exploring the woods. According to the school rules, we were supposed to stay within the bounds of Fire Tower Trail, but Danny and I figured that adventure meant sometimes going out of bounds.
The sign at the end of the driveway up to our school says Green Mountain Academy: Adventure School for Girls. How I ended up there is a long story and one I don’t like to think about if I can help it.
We pulled up the rope where we’d anchored it and I untied it, then put it in a garbage bag at the base of the tree. Then we picked our way across the boulders that were growing more slippery as the snow fell. In a couple places, we squatted and used our hands to move along.
It was an easy climb up the rockface, with jutting rocks that were almost like stairs. As Danny and I hurried along the path through the pine forest, things began to disappear. First, the sky melted away in the blur of fast-falling snow, then the trees ahead became a thickening curtain of white, and then our path petered out and one opening in the trees looked like every other one—snow-covered, windswept.
Danny, who was ahead, shouted something. The wind picked up her voice and carried it up and away through the trees. I caught up to her and grabbed her arm.
“Are you sure you’re going the right way?” I had to shout over the rising wind.
She stopped. “I lost the path a while back, but I’m pretty sure.”
“I didn’t bring my compass, did you?”
“No. I mean, we’ve come this way twenty times at least. If we keep heading this way, we should run into Fire Tower Trail. This seems right, doesn’t it?”
I knew that just because a direction feels right doesn’t mean it is right. Dad had walked into the Oregon wilderness in what seemed like the right direction. I still remember watching him in his yellow rain jacket, his pack hoisted on his back, as he disappeared into the rain. That was the last time I ever saw him.
Danny had set off again.
“Wait, Danny,” I called.
She stopped. “We’re going to be late for dinner.”
“If we get lost, we’ll be even later. Just stop for a minute. Let’s be sure about where we are.”
She huffed a little impatiently.
I’d known Danny now for less than three months, but I knew she didn’t like to sit still. She always had a new idea about places to hike, or rocks to climb, or forts to build. After lights out in the room we shared, she worked out her ideas out loud. Sometimes I fell asleep to the sound of her thoughtful voice, low and sleepy, as she weighed possibilities for new adventures.
I was the one who made sure we had the right equipment—ropes, flashlights, compass, water, food and extra jackets. I checked the weather forecast on the radio and then double-checked with the sky, since the forecast only really applied to town, and up here we had our own little weather system. This time, I’d only told Ming where we were going. Lill and Lucy, the owners of the school, were away, and I knew that Ms. Benito, who was filling in, would want us to stay close to the school. She was a good cook and all the girls liked her, but she had no sense of adventure.
Danny and I sat on a rock now and caught our breath. Wind drove the snow sideways, peppering our faces. Up higher, it roared through the treetops, stirring them crazily. The thick-falling snow had blotted out what was left of the day. Dusk descended quickly, and with it, the familiar dread. My heartbeat did little skips, like a bicycle chain catching in the gears. Ever since the days and nights I spent alone in the middle of the Oregon wilderness, I’d had to fight this feeling: that when dusk came on it wasn’t only the day that was over—everything was over.
“Hey,” said Danny. “You okay?”
“Just thinking.”
“It’s beautiful, though, right? I love the smell of snow, don’t you?”
I looked at Danny’s hands on her blue-jeaned knees. Her warm eyes studied me. Danny told me once that walking in the woods made the world disappear. I only realized at this moment that I’d never questioned why anyone would want the world to disappear. I just knew.
“It’s going to be a crazy storm tonight,” she said now. “It’ll be fun.”
“Only you would say that.” I smiled.
“Or you,” she said.
“Do you recognize anything?”
She looked around, then stood and made a circle, scanning the woods. “I think maybe…Look! Isn’t that the bent pine tree we usually pass?”
“I think you’re right.”
“Come on!” She grabbed my hand and we scrambled over fallen logs to the tree.
It was our tree, a ponderosa pine that had a large branch bent like a pointing arm in the direction of the caves.
“And, look, here’s our path,” said Danny. “We were a little off track.”
Just then a strange buzzing noise filled the air overhead, like a giant swarm of bees. It grew louder and then faded just as quickly.
“What was that?” I said, straining to hear it in the wind.
“It sounded like a plane.”
“Pretty low for a plane,” I said.
“Come on. Let’s hurry,” said Danny.
It was easier walking now that we knew where we were. We leaned into the rising wind that seemed about to sweep us off the trail. I followed Danny, happy to let her lead the way. After about twenty minutes, the bulky shape of the fire tower loomed out of the flurry of driving snow.
“We’re almost back. There’s the school.”
We crested the hill behind the school and saw the clothesline, frozen sheets still pinned to the line and twisting into bunches in the wind.
“Let’s grab these sheets!” Danny shouted as she ran ahead.
As we fought to free the sheets from the tangle of clothespins, Ming bounded out the back door, dressed only in a flannel shirt, jeans and runners.
“What took you guys? I thought I was going to have to cover for you at dinner. Everything’s on the table already.”
Danny dumped a pile of snowy sheets in Ming’s arms. “Things took a little longer than planned.”
Ming’s full name was Ming Yue, she’d told us on the first day, which meant “bright moon.” I thought that was the nicest name I’d ever heard. “It’s not bad,” Ming had agreed. “But I’ve been called Ming since kindergarten.”
At fifteen, Ming was older than us, but she was our best friend at the school—apart from each other. She loved to climb and had all the right gear—proper climbing shoes, a harness and rope, a helmet, and a whole bunch of orange and green and black carabiners. She spent her summers climbing at Skaha Bluffs and could climb grades of 5.10, which, apparently, was pretty hard. But she wouldn’t lend us any gear. Not that we’d asked, but when she found out we were climbing in the caves, she’d told us, “I’m not lending you gear because, until you learn to use it properly, it’s probably more dangerous than no gear at all.”
