there something you’d like?” he asked.
“Well… I was thinking the bendy rabbit matched that green monster van we are using. Maybe he wants to go along.”
“Okay, here,” he said and pulled a keychain from our university out of his pocket.
“But that’s yours!” I said. “I don’t want you to give up something of yours.”
“I worked at the bookstore when the semester started. I got them cheap. I bought them to put in caches. So… add it and take the rabbit.”
“It’s probably been here since Easter. It needs rescuing.”
“Now you’re talking like inanimate objects have an opinion about what happens to them.”
We signed the log Team Twiggy, since it was Twiggy who was determined to win the trip.
“I’m hungry. I say we rehide this thing and go back to town,” he said.
“But we’re soaking wet. We have no place to change. We… we don’t have a shower! Or a bathroom! What are we going to do?”
“First things first. The cache needs rehiding at ground zero, where the sun don’t shine. Where did you find it?”
“I don’t know. I was poking through the hole with a stick and I knocked it loose. So I really found it floating in the river.”
“Gabby, this is not a river. This is a creek.”
“Okay, well, I found it floating in the creek.”
He turned the cracker tin this way and that.
“We know the mirror is meant to catch the light of a flashlight from below the bridge, so I say we find a spot at ground zero where the cache will be somewhat out of view, but where a flashlight beam might hit the mirror and when we log the cache we tell the CO what we did.”
“CO?”
“Cache owner.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“If he wants to check on it he can.”
We put all the contents back into the cracker tin, making sure the log book was securely wrapped in the little Ziploc bag. If it was going to take regular dunkings in the creek it needed that baggie. Twiggy gave me a hand up and stood there for a moment as if he wasn’t quite ready to go back.
“Was that worth a favorite point?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I think it would be better if the creek was lower and we had a working flashlight.”
“But did you have fun?”
I kind of got the impression he was asking a bigger question. So I kept him waiting a moment.
“Yeah, that was fun.”
“Even with the soaking wet search and the steep hill and falling and dancing away from catfish?”
“There wasn’t really a catfish, was there?”
“No, I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“It was fun even after all that,” I said. “And I even got a bendy rabbit.”
“I’m glad,” he said with a firm shoulder hug.
Chapter 5
“Morrison the Moving Moose,” Twiggy read from the website at lunch. “It wants to travel overseas.”
“Well, if you win that trip you’ll be going overseas,” I pointed out.
He hesitated before he said, “We shouldn’t hang onto it that long. It should be dropped off in a week or two unless we’re nearly finished traveling. It shouldn’t stay in one place very long.”
“Why?”
“Because Travel Bugs are sent out into the geocaching world to travel. It’s not nice to keep them a long time.”
“Do you think we should drop it off at the airport or the train station?”
“Nah, Morrison can travel with us for a little while. Oh, and surprisingly, he likes blue M&Ms.”
“Let me see that,” I said.
I read the web page and, sure enough, it said he liked to eat blue M&Ms.
“I get the brown ones,” I said.
“To match your eyes,” he said.
“Uh, I guess, though I just like the brown ones. You can have the other colors. If we have to buy M&Ms and he gets the blue ones and I take the brown ones that ought to leave enough for you.”
“Maybe.”
“Too bad there are no purple ones for the rabbit.”
After lunch we went to the nearest convenience store and bought a package of M&Ms. We took a picture of Morrison sitting on the dash of the van with his blue M&Ms. Then we shared the rest of the package.
“Whatcha doing for dinner tonight?” Twiggy asked.
“I don’t know, considering I am basically homeless.”
“Hey, you are not homeless. I’m here. You’re not going to go hungry.”
“I know. It’s just sort of humbling not knowing when I will ever see a shower again, or where my next meal will come from.”
“No worries. Repeat.”
“No… worries.”
“It’ll be all right.”
“Okay.”
We spent the afternoon in the university library downloading caches from the geocaching website. We sat shoulder to shoulder laughing at odd cache descriptions and the stories people had written when they logged the cache finds. Then we had fun writing the tale of our find at the bridge, making sure to note that the cache was safe and sound despite its trip down the river.
My mom would have been horrified to see me eating fast food on a futon mattress hunched over a computer, parked next to a business that advertised free wifi. It was cozy. Stinky and gaudy and cozy. It felt like a campout in a zebra striped blanket fort. And when night fell and we couldn’t really do anything because of the darkness we lay side by side wondering what was going to happen.
Would he come on to me? I could imagine the lecture from my mom. I didn’t need to hear it. I thought Twiggy respected me enough to not push, but I knew the subject would come up eventually, and how would I respond? How did I feel about spending the night with a guy? No, a man. I might still feel like a lost little kid but we were both old enough
