Front Country, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Sara St. Antoine.
Half title page illustration copyright © 2022 by Sally Deng.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.
ISBN 978-1-7972-1563-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-7972-1841-0 (epub)
Design and illustrations by Jill Turney.
Typeset in Ashbury and True North.
Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
Chronicle Books—we see things differently.
Become part of our community at www.chroniclekids.com.
FOR ADELAIDE AND MARGOT
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter
1
Brooklyn spat the sunflower seed shell into her palm and flicked it into a paper bag without taking her eyes off the road. “You ever been to Montana before?”
“Only in my dreams,” I told her. Through the windows, sprawling fields stretched out like rolls of corrugated cardboard under the biggest, bluest sky I’d ever seen.
“Good dreams?” Brooklyn asked.
“Totally.”
“Cool.”
Brooklyn was broad-shouldered but compact. She held the steering wheel like she was driving a tractor, not a nine-passenger van. Even in an airport waiting area full of outdoor enthusiasts, it had been obvious that she was my trip leader. A stretchy red headband cinched her cropped brown hair; black wraparound sunglasses hung on a cord around her neck. “TrackFinders” was stitched into the shoulder of her fleece jacket, and her hiking boots looked like she’d just done jumping jacks in a dust field.
I wanted to ask her if she’d grown up on a ranch or a farm, but so far, when I’d asked her about anything other than the logistics of our drive, she’d given me the same response. “We’ll have time to talk about that at camp.”
It seemed to me we had plenty of time to talk now, too, but I let it go. I was happy enough just to stare out the window and think. There was so much room out here and bushels of air—like maybe enough to inflate a flattened heart. I was glad the windows were open. The air rushed in, oven-dry and tinged with the smell of the coarse yellow grass. Montana’s montañas hugged the wide horizon in a bumpy blue band.
We sped by ranches. American flags. Gas stations. I spotted a tennis court set at the end of an enormous open field whipping with dust. “That’s random.”
Brooklyn glanced my way. “You play, right?”
“Used to.”
“Oh, right.”
“How’d you know?”
She shot me a quick smile and reached for another sunflower seed. “We’ll talk about it at camp.”
I might have been more uneasy about the whole exchange except Brooklyn looked so absurdly reliable—like a cast-iron pot or a bowl of cornflakes in human form.
More flat fields scrolled past the window, but it was the mountains that had all my attention now. With every passing mile, they grew taller and new details emerged: folds, forests, shadows, dollops of white snow. I’d seen the Appalachians and climbed peaks in Vermont, but these were a whole different order of mountain—bigger and sharper, like the Earth had popped new molars.
“Wicked wildfire season last year,” Brooklyn said, gesturing toward a gray slope with spindly black trees. “Whole summer was freakishly hot and dry. Super hazy.”
My chest tightened with familiar dread. I fixed my gaze on the patches of white draped reassuringly over the highest ridges. At least there was still some snow.
The road began to ascend the first line of hills and we lost our view of the peaks behind them. My ears popped, though I couldn’t tell if it was from the flight or the drive. When we finally pulled into a small dirt parking area, I climbed out of the van and took in a long draw of air. I was actually here. This far from home. This fast. The shock and wonder of it made me light-headed.
“I’m going to give you some food to carry in, if that’s okay,” Brooklyn said, pulling some bags from a cooler in the back of the van. “We get weekly resupplies, but this will give Kai a little extra security. He’s my co-leader,” she added, finally willing to share an actual data point.
I’d signed up for this trip almost the moment I knew it existed. Mom had said camping. Mountains. A month in the wilderness. Dad had reminded me of the great Outlands trip my cousin once took. What wasn’t to love? TrackFinders was the organization’s newest program, so there weren’t any photos or testimonials posted for my trip yet. I figured it was straight-up backpacking with some animal tracking as an added bonus. And I’d created my own mental brochure: jelly bean–colored tents scattered across green mountain meadows, friendly teenagers in fleece jackets oohing and aahing over the local wildlife. It looked great in my imagination, but what did I know? I definitely hadn’t expected to be driven alone to a dusty parking lot by just one tight-lipped counselor.
We loaded our packs and began the two-mile trek to base camp, as Brooklyn called it. Our hiking boots thumped on a hard-packed trail along a streambed before we climbed up into a dense evergreen forest that smelled like vanilla and butterscotch. I took in one hungry inhalation after another. If air was a food, this was definitely dessert.
Brooklyn didn’t push the pace. She said my muscles and lungs needed time to adapt to the elevation, and she insisted on regular water breaks. It must have been late afternoon, Montana time, but my body was ready for dinnertime back in Massachusetts. Were Dad, Mom, and Vivian sitting around the table right now, missing me … or maybe enjoying their newfound peace? Reading my mind, or hearing my stomach, Brooklyn tossed me an energy bar and told me if we were lucky, they’d be prepping for an early dinner by the time we arrived.
“Are all the other kids here already?” I asked. When she didn’t respond, I sighed. “I guess I’ll meet them when we get to camp.”
“Yep,” Brooklyn said, without even looking back at me. She looked like a stolid pack mule. She looked like she never got tired.
We hiked on.
The scent of woodsmoke reached my nose just as a small figure appeared on the trail in front of us, holding his palms out like a traffic cop.
“Zombie or slime?”
“Er.…” I hesitated, not sure how to respond. Was this kid really old enough to be one of my tripmates?
The boy had close-cropped black hair and the tidy look of a kid on school picture day. He was dressed in green cargo pants and a gray Star Wars T-shirt that looked starched and almost bright against his brown arms.
“No tech talk, Elijah,” Brooklyn said, grasping his shoulders and guiding him forward for several steps.
The boy spun around and leaned out to face me, hands cupped around his mouth. “If you have a phone, hide it!”
“Knock it off,” Brooklyn said with a strained laugh.
Before I’d had time to process what he’d said, we reached the clearing. I stopped, confused.
This was not my imagined brochure.
Eight yellow-brown tents were lined up on the far side of the clearing, so low to the ground they looked like coffins. A fire burned weakly in the middle of a ring of rocks. Gray smoke and a feeling of lethargy—or even disappointment—hovered over the campsite. In the far woods, a youngish guy and four more teenage boys were collecting firewood, although the first guy seemed to be doing all the talking and most of the work. The boys shuffled along behind him at half speed. One sat under a tree, not moving at all.
Wasn’t there supposed to be a friendly welcome when a new camper arrived? Where were the jelly bean tents? Where were the girls?
“The second to last one is yours,” Brooklyn said, pointing toward the tents. “Next to mine. Go ahead and put your stuff away, get comfortable, take a breather if you need to. We’ll call out when we’re ready to circle up.”
I glanced at Elijah, who returned my gaze with the look of a stray puppy—half lost, half expectant. “Got it,” I said. But really, I didn’t get it at all.
Fortunately, my tent looked less coffin-like up close. I dropped backward onto the nylon floor and yanked off my boots. My feet were hot. I peeled off my wool socks and wiggled my toes, wrinkly and pink from the day’s exertions. Finally I pushed myself backward, all the way inside. I had a strong urge to lie down and chill out, but the ground was prickly under the nylon, and whoever had set up the tent hadn’t noticed or cared that there was a chunk of rock underneath the floor. I inflated my camping pad, hopeful that would help.
I was shaking out my puffy purple sleeping bag when I heard a cough outside the tent.
“Knock, knock.”
A tall kid with bleached-blond hair and dark eyes was standing outside. He was bad-boy handsome, and my first instinct, when he flashed me a smile, was that he looked like trouble.
“Name’s Maddox,” he said, offering a handshake. “It’s a pleasure to have you with us.”
Well, that was gentlemanly. A little tour-boat captain, maybe, but still gentlemanly.
“Thanks. I’m Ginny.”
“We’ve been summoned to Circle Time,” Maddox said, nodding across the clearing.
When I peeked over the top of the tent, I saw both counselors standing beside the campfire. The kids were gathered around them, hunched and listless as drugged herons.
“It doesn’t seem too lively,” I said.
“That’s why they need us,” he said, eyebrows flirty.
I stuffed my feet back into my boots and scuffed along behind Maddox. We took our places in the circle, and the second counselor beamed a welcome.
“So, wow. Here we are!” he said, clapping his hands. “I’m Kai. Welcome to TrackFinders.”
I smiled back. This was more like it. Kai was a round-faced guy in his twenties with a quick smile and an obvious eagerness to connect. He wore a down vest over a flannel shirt, gray techie pants, and black trail shoes just trim enough that he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a downtown coffee shop.
“Let’s start with introductions. I’d like you each to tell us who you are and where you’re from. And then share one thing you want everyone to know about you. Got it?”
“This is our first milestone,” Brooklyn added, looking up from her clipboard. “We call it Community by the Campfire.”
If eye-rolling had a sound, it would have been a somewhat noisy moment.
Kai turned to Elijah, the kid who’d greeted me on the trail. “Want to get us started?”
“Sure. I’m Elijah, and I’m from the Bay Area. San Francisco, I mean.” He scratched his shoulder, then his head. “Last month I got Horde of Hoofbeats.” He tried not to smile but it was obvious he expected us to be impressed.
I had no idea what he was talking about. The kid beside him snorted.
“Thanks, Elijah,” Brooklyn said. She turned to the snorting boy, a tall, round-shouldered kid with pasty skin and a bad case of bed head. Elijah looked like he was barely out of elementary school, but this kid looked big enough to drive. “I guess you’d like to go next?”
The boy sniffed like maybe he had a cold or maybe he used his nose for communication. There was a dinosaur that did that—I’d seen it on a kids’ cartoon. “I’m Dash. I’m from a suburb of Detroit you’ve probably never heard of.”
“And one thing you want people to know about you?” Brooklyn asked.
“What? Um. I know. TrackFinders sucks.”
“So, yeah,” Kai said, clapping his hands again. “Love the honesty. But this is a good time to remind everyone about language.” In quick succession he gave us about ten things to avoid bringing into our conversation, including any kind of swear words, put-downs, or aggrandizement of rule-breaking behaviors.
“What’s aggrandizement?” Dash asked.
“Showing off,” Brooklyn put in.
Showing off about breaking rules? I looked again at the faces around the campfire. What kind of community was this, exactly?
“So, Dash. Want to try again? Something about yourself?”
He stared blankly into the air. The pause grew awkwardly long.
“Or, if you …”
“No. I got one. I sleepwalk,” he said finally. “No joke. Like, one time I woke up on my mattress—on the basement stairs. Totally drowning in drool.” He snorted and scanned the group, checking for laughs.
“Something to keep an eye on,” Brooklyn said, jotting something in her notes.
So Elijah was a tech-obsessed baby and Dash was a sloppy snorter with unreliable sleep habits. This was not a promising start. I peeked over at the trailhead, wishing so much that a pack of cheerful girls would come bursting into view. Or two. Even two would be a major improvement.
“You’re up,” Brooklyn said to Maddox, the tour-boat bad boy.
“Cool. Name’s Maddox.” He gave the group a confident chin nod. “I was born seventeen and a half minutes before my brother here,” he said, gesturing toward Dash, “so you’ll have to excuse him. It’s a burden living under my shadow.”
A few kids chuckled.
So they were twins. I could see the similarities now, but they hadn’t been obvious. Everything about Maddox was clear and sharp—as if he’d been painted with a fine-tipped brush. A clean stroke of white-yellow for the hair. Two careful dots of brown for the eyes. A hard-edged line for the jaw. In Dash, it was as if too much water had been used on the portrait; all the same elements were there, but they’d gone loose and fuzzy. His hair was curlier, his face was whiter and wider, and his skin rippled with acne.
“We’re from Grosse Pointe, by the way,” Maddox said. “No shame in claiming it.”
“No shame at all,” Kai agreed. He nodded at the next boy, who was only an inch or two taller than me—reedlike and freckled, with watchful eyes. He had on an old wool plaid shirt, like something a grandfather would wear, over a black T-shirt and blue jeans.
The boy took his time responding. “I’m Greyson,” he said finally. “I’m from a one-traffic-light town in Kansas.” He glanced at the twins. “We don’t have suburbs.”
“Whut.” Dash seemed to register a challenge.
“You got trailer parks?” Maddox asked, blinking like it was an innocent question.
“I think he just means it’s really rural,” Brooklyn said quickly, in case it wasn’t friendly at all.
Greyson shrugged, leaving it to them to do the math. It was pretty clear he thought the whole exchange was stupid.
“And one thing about yourself?” Kai pressed.
Greyson looked at him calmly. “The male line of my family self-destructs by the age of twenty-eight,” he said, like it was fact.
“That’s a little freaky!” Elijah said.
Kai just looked rattled. He turned to the next kid. “Vidal?”
The last boy was wearing a loose camouflage hoodie and black track pants, but what was most noticeable about him was his hair. It was long in some places, shaved in others—like grass trimmed by a runaway lawnmower. He hugged his arms around his body, staring miserably at the ground.
“Can you introduce yourself?” Kai persisted.
Vidal whipped a stray lock of hair out of his face. His brown eyes were fringed with dark lashes. “I’m Vidal. I live on a base in Florida.”
“Military?” Maddox asked, dropping his voice a notch.
“My parents, yeah.” Vidal’s voice was strained. His whole body was strained.
“And what’s one thing you want us to know about you?” Kai asked.
A whirr of wings swept past our heads before he could reply, and we watched as a glossy black raven landed in a nearby tree, then bounced the length of the branch. It let out a loud squawk and Vidal looked at it with something like resentment.
“I hate nature,” he said.
“Yeah, who doesn’t?” Elijah asked.
“Um, me,” I said, not taking my eyes off the raven. It turned its head and regarded the group with curious, keen eyes. The bird was smarter than all of us, and it knew it.
“Well, that’s a perfect segue. Your turn,” Kai said to me.
I redirected my attention to the meet and greet. “Hi, guuuuyyys,” I said, drawing it out long enough for a laugh. “I’m Ginny. I’m from Lexington, Massachusetts. Birthplace of the Revolution and all that.”
Maddox winked. The other boys just stared.
“So …,” I glanced again at the trailhead. “Is this everyone?”
“That’s a question, Ginny,” Kai said. “What do you want us to know about you?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted them to know anything about me until I had a better sense of who these kids were and why they had signed up for a camp in the mountains if they didn’t even like ravens.
“Let’s just say that I’m pretty confused right now,” I said.
“That’s okay.” Kai smiled. “Some say confusion is the seed of wisdom.”
Dash snorted.
I gestured at the tents, the campfire, and our counselors’ all-weather gear. “Didn’t you guys know this was a wilderness adventure camp?”
“Try boot camp,” Maddox returned, giving me a knowing look.
“Rehab,” Dash added.
“Torture,” Elijah put in, squirming like he’d felt an ant on his back.
Vidal shuddered, and Greyson just stared into the campfire, apparently pretending he wasn’t even there.
