The Map Trap Read online

  For Joan Franklin Smutny,

  whose care and guidance helped me

  become a classroom teacher

  —A.C.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Ken Jennings for the enlightening first-person account in his book Maphead. Thanks also to the great cartographers, past and present, at the National Geographic Society, and to the many geniuses who have made GPS navigation available and understandable and practical. The blog “Strange Maps” by Frank Jacobs was a source of frequent inspiration about the unlimited possibilities of maps and mapping. With this book, as with many others, Caitlyn Dlouhy at Atheneum Books for Young Readers helped me find my way from a first draft to the final text, and I am deeply appreciative. Above all, I am grateful for my wife, Rebecca, who keeps me grounded and happy and moving forward.

  CHAPTER ONE

  BAD HAIR DAY

  When the fire alarm began to beep and blink on Tuesday morning, the first thing Miss Wheeling thought about was her hair. She’d been outside on bus duty forty minutes ago, and it was a bright October day, moist and windy—the worst kind of weather for her hair. Couldn’t the principal have put off this drill for a couple of days?

  It was free-activity time near the end of homeroom, and she clapped her hands sharply. “All right, everyone, this is a fire drill. Line up quickly, and I want you quiet! And don’t clean up, don’t do anything except get in line right now!”

  She wrestled a scarf around her hair, and then, clutching her clipboard, Miss Wheeling led her homeroom students down the hall, past the gym, and straight outside toward their assigned spot along the playground fence. She noted with pride that hers was one of the first groups out of the building—pretty good for a brand-new teacher! She hoped the principal would notice.

  She tried to remember the last time she’d been part of a fire drill, but she couldn’t get a clear picture. . . . It had probably been during high school—about five years ago, back when she was just Holly Wheeling, that girl who was crazy about insects.

  She heard some loud whispering behind her, but she didn’t need to look to know who it was. This class had a handful of very gabby kids.

  “Annie and Kelley? I asked you not to talk. A fire drill is serious business.”

  She still felt amazed every time she realized that now she was Miss Wheeling, the teacher. She looked young, she felt young—she was young, only twenty-three years old. In fact, her own little brother was twelve, the same age as most of her students. And she was very glad that her family lived in Cedar Falls, Iowa, instead of Harper’s Grove, Illinois—the town where she now lived and worked. The thought of being Carl’s teacher? It was enough to give a girl nightmares.

  The wind kicked up a flurry of dead leaves along the playground fence, and Miss Wheeling held the corners of her scarf tightly under her chin. But she knew it was hopeless. This was going to be a bad hair day—mega-bad. She’d been trying to set an appointment for a haircut for the past three weeks, but her first months as a new teacher had been insanely busy. Not that haircuts ever helped much. Her hair was very full, extremely curly, and almost impossible to style. She’d been fighting with it almost every day since she was about six years old. And losing.

  All the classes were outside now, and she saw Mrs. Buckley at the far side of the playground. The principal was moving from teacher to teacher, checking off each group.

  Miss Wheeling whipped her scarf off her head and stuffed it into the back pocket of her slacks. She looked at her clipboard and called out, “Billy Atkinson?”

  “Here.”

  “Jada Bartlett?”

  “Present.”

  “Carson Burr?”

  “Present.”

  Miss Wheeling hurried through the names as the principal came nearer, and finally called out, “Alton Ziegler?”

  Nothing.

  She called the name again. “Alton Ziegler?”

  The principal was close now, talking with Mr. Troy, the other sixth-grade teacher.

  Desperate, Miss Wheeling flipped to her attendance sheets . . . but Alton was definitely present today. She was certain that she’d seen him just half an hour ago, and she was sure—

  “Good morning, Miss Wheeling.” Mrs. Buckley smiled at her and then at the kids. “Is your class all accounted for?”

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry, but Alton Ziegler’s not here.” Miss Wheeling felt her face growing pale, and her hands were cold and clammy. She felt light-headed.

  The principal frowned. “Was he in homeroom when you took attendance?”

  “Oh . . . oh, yes! I checked him off, see?” Helplessly, Miss Wheeling held out her clipboard.

  Mrs. Buckley didn’t look at it. With a sharp edge to her voice, she said, “I’ll stay with your class. Go and find him. Right now.”

  Miss Wheeling half walked, half ran to the gym door, and she could feel the eyes of everyone in the school watching her—and watching the way her hair bounced around as she ran.

  Breathless now, she sprinted to her classroom door, but it was locked—and she didn’t have a key.

  As she started to turn to go find the janitor, she spotted something on the far side of the room, over beyond the desks, by the windows. Something on the floor.

  It was a shoe, a boy’s sneaker.

  Leaning forward, she pressed her nose against the glass and cupped her hands around her eyes and forehead to block the glare from the hallway lights.

  It was definitely a shoe—and also an ankle, plus six inches of a leg . . . wearing blue jeans!

  With one hand she banged on the door, still looking at that foot. She called out, “Alton? Alton . . . ? Is that you? Alton! Answer me!”

  The shoe, the foot, the leg—nothing moved.

  Miss Wheeling yelled down the hallway. “Mr. Sims? Mr. Sims! Can you hear me?”

  “I’m in the front hall,” he called back. “What’s up?”

  “An emergency in room forty-three! Bring a key, and hurry!”

  Miss Wheeling heard a sharp crack as a wooden broom handle hit the floor, and then jangling keys as the janitor came around the corner at a dead run. A moment later he unlocked her door and shoved it open.

  She dashed in, fearing the worst. Rounding the last row of desks along the windows, Miss Wheeling stopped—and stared.

  She had a clear view of the whole scene—shoe, ankle, leg . . . the entire boy. Alton Zeigler was propped up on his elbows in a patch of sunlight. White wires from a small iPod ran to his ears, and a large sheet of paper lay before him, with markers and colored pencils spread about. He held a red pen in his right hand, and he was humming a tune she didn’t know. Mr. Sims stood beside her.

  Miss Wheeling reached out her toe and tapped Alton’s foot, and he jumped like he’d been stung by a bee. He spun around, then smiled and pulled out his earbuds. He glanced from Miss Wheeling to the janitor.

  “Hi—what are you guys doing here?”

  Holly Wheeling had trouble finding words—all her fear had turned to anger. She wanted to shout, What are we doing here? What in the world are you doing here?!

  But that would have been pointless, because it was perfectly clear what Alton Zeigler was doing here.

  He was making a map.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MAKING OF A MAP NUT

  It wasn’t like there had been some kind of a master plan to try to turn Alton Zeigler into a map nut. In fact, lack of planning is sort of what started it all.

  Because if Alton’s mom and dad had planned better, they would have studied one of those “name your baby” books, and they would have had a name all picked out a month before their son was born.

  But they hadn’t done that.

  And therefore, as his dad was driving Alton’s mom to the hospital, she pulled
a coffee-stained Illinois road map from the pocket of the car door, unfolded it, and began reading aloud from the long list of town names.

  “. . . Alma, Alorton, Alpha, Alsey, Alsip, Altamont, Alto Pass, Alton, Altona, Alvan, Amboy—”

  “Wait!” his dad said. “That was it!”

  His mom made a face. “What—Amboy? That’s a terrible name for a—”

  “No, no,” his dad said, “Alton! Alton Zeigler!”

  “Alton Zeigler,” his mom repeated, and then she said it again slowly: “Alton Zeigler.” She smiled. “It sounds good, don’t you think? Alton—I like it!”

  “Me too,” said his dad. “And his nickname can be Al—it’s great!”

  “Al?” She turned and stared at him. “No, dear, not Al—never. His name is Alton—period.”

  Six hours later, Alton Robert Zeigler was the name they wrote on the new birth certificate.

  And six days later, his parents had framed that map of Illinois, coffee stains and all, and they put it up on the wall right next to their baby’s new crib.

  Every time little Alton was put into bed, he lay on his back, looking up, and the map was there. He would fall asleep, and when he woke up, there it was again, day after day after day.

  Of course, early on, Alton saw that map only as a big white-and-yellow blob, all crisscrossed with black, red, green, blue, and yellow lines. And he didn’t even have names for those colors, not in the beginning. But he looked and he looked, and he noticed everything.

  When the rest of the family learned how Alton had gotten his name, mappish things began to happen.

  His uncle Robert bought his little nephew an inflatable globe, sort of like a giant beach ball. Except it wasn’t for bouncing around. It was a night-light, lit from the inside by a small LED. And Uncle Robert helped Alton’s mom and dad hang it from the ceiling in the center of the nursery.

  The oceans were blue, the deserts were brown, the mountains were green, and the countries were all the colors of the rainbow. And everywhere, thin black lines ran side to side and top to bottom.

  Of course, little Alton didn’t understand any of what he saw—not at the beginning. But the globe was there every night, glowing in the dark sky of his room, and he looked and he looked, and he noticed everything.

  Grandma Susie out in Arizona heard the story of Alton’s name, and she looked online and found a pretty rug for his nursery floor—a rug that was also a map of the United States. It showed the name of each state and its capital city, plus a big blue star for Washington, D.C. And when Alton first got up onto his hands and knees, his mother called Grandma Susie and said, “Guess what, Mom! Alton just crawled all the way from Texas to Michigan!”

  Alton’s other grandparents lived in Connecticut, and they played a part in the map nuttiness too, but it wasn’t something they did on purpose. They had given a present to Alton’s mom and dad the first Christmas after they got married—a subscription to National Geographic magazine. And his grandparents kept on renewing the subscription, year after year.

  Alton was born five years after that subscription began, so there was already a full shelf of the bright yellow magazines in a bookcase in the family room. By the time Alton turned seven, there were more than a hundred different issues of National Geographic at his house.

  And one rainy Sunday afternoon, as seven-year-old Alton sat looking at some pictures of a temple in Tibet, he turned a page, and a heavy sheet of folded paper fell to the floor. He opened it and flattened it out, and stared down at a map called “China and the Forbidden City.”

  The map was big—even bigger than the old road map hanging on the wall in his room. He had never seen a map so colorful and so packed with facts.

  He picked it up and ran to show his mom and dad. “Look! This was inside that old National Geographic—isn’t it great?!”

  They helped him spread it out on the kitchen table, then leaned over it with him.

  After a minute his mom said, “It’s pretty amazing—I love the drawings of the palace, don’t you?”

  And his dad said, “Yeah, great map—and guess what? If you go look through the other National Geographics, I bet you’ll find a bunch more.”

  The hunt was on, and Alton whipped through those magazines like a tornado—first the ones in the family room, then the older copies on the shelves in the basement.

  Two hours later he called out, “Hey, come quick! I need help!”

  His dad got to Alton’s bedroom first.

  “What’s the—” He stopped. And stared.

  Alton’s mom finished the question: “Problem?” She was staring too.

  Every bit of wall space in Alton’s room had been covered with maps. And they weren’t just taped up all higgledy-piggledy. Maps about Asia filled half a wall, then to the left of them came maps about Europe. The other continents followed, from east to west and north to south. There was also a sprinkling of maps about the oceans and animals and natural resources, plus a handful that featured major historical events or ancient civilizations. Using about thirty maps, Alton had created a grand tour of the whole Earth.

  And now he stood on top of some books stacked on his desk chair. “I have to get these other ones up onto the ceiling.”

  Ten minutes later Alton and his parents were lying on their backs across his bed, looking up at maps about the moon, Mars, the solar system, and the whole universe, plus a really great map called “The History of Flight.” There was also one called “Planet of the Dinosaurs,” which didn’t really fit in with the other stuff on the ceiling, but it was about dinosaurs, so it had to go somewhere.

  This was a big event for Alton, a major map-quake, and it shook up his view of the world. It also taught him how maps could be used to show all kinds of different information—and it happened in October of his second-grade year.

  By October of his fourth-grade year, Alton’s collection of maps had grown to more than a hundred and fifty. Fourth grade was also the year he began to get serious about drawing maps of his own.

  He discovered that making a good map was complicated, much more complicated than he had ever imagined. And even though he didn’t like math very much, he made himself learn about fractions and measurement so that his maps could be as accurate as possible. He didn’t really notice it, but during fourth grade, maps began to turn him into a very precise thinker and a very careful observer.

  And by October of his sixth-grade year, Alton Robert Zeigler had become well known at Harper School as a complete geo-geek—the kind of kid who could get so wrapped up in drawing a new map that he wouldn’t even notice when his whole class lined up and hurried out of the room for a fire drill.

  Because when Miss Wheeling and Mr. Sims found him Tuesday morning, lying on the floor by the windows in room forty-three, that’s certainly the way things looked.

  But any good mapmaker knows that the way things look and the way things are can sometimes be different.

  Very different.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LIKE SWITZERLAND

  Once most of the classes were back inside after the fire drill, Mr. Sims went into the janitor’s workroom. He sat at his desk, then swiveled his chair toward his assistant, who was standing at the workbench.

  “Funny thing just happened.”

  Joe Herrin looked up from the valve he was fixing. “What’d you say?”

  “I said, a funny thing just happened.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “During the fire drill, that new teacher yelled for me—an emergency in her room. So I ran down there.”

  “Which teacher?”

  “The young one, with the big hair.”

  “Oh, right. And?”

  “Her door was locked, so I opened it up. And you know what the emergency was? That Ziegler kid—he was lying on the floor by the windows drawing a map, headphones stuck in his ears. She had to kick his foot to get his attention, and then he looked all surprised said, ‘What are you guys doing here?’ ”

  Joe grin
ned and nodded. “That is funny! I’ve always liked that kid.”

  Mr. Sims said, “Yeah, except that’s not the funny part. It was the way the kid looked at us. Because he wasn’t surprised to see us, not at all. A little scared, a little jumpy, but not surprised. Maybe that teacher can’t spot the tricks yet, but I know a fake-out when I see one. And that kid was faking like crazy.”

  Joe stopped grinning. “So . . . how come?”

  The janitor shrugged. “Beats me. But that kid was up to something. No doubt about it.”

  Joe thought a second. “You gonna tell Miss What’s-Her-Name?”

  Mr. Sims shook his head. “Nope. I’m neutral . . . just like Switzerland. Until a kid starts breaking windows or throwing snowballs in the gym, I’m neutral.” He stood up. “We’d better go sweep up the stuff everybody just tracked inside. Hit the west hallway when you’re done with that valve, okay?”

  Joe said, “Sure thing . . . Mr. Switzerland.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CONSEQUENCES

  The final bell had rung, and the school was beginning to get quiet. It was Holly Wheeling’s favorite time of day.

  “Um, Miss Wheeling?”

  She looked up from the papers on her desk, and when she saw who it was, her eyes narrowed and her mouth formed a small frown.

  “Hello, Alton.”

  Alton seemed tongue-tied, but Miss Wheeling didn’t help him out. She just waited. He looked right into her face, but then he blinked and dropped his gaze, his dark eyebrows scrunched together, almost touching. She had noticed his eyebrows did that whenever he concentrated on something.

  “Um, I . . . I’m sorry,” he said, looking at her again. “Sorry that you got in trouble because of me missing the fire drill this morning.”

  Miss Wheeling almost melted. His brown eyes looked so sad and sweet—a lot like the eyes of her golden retriever, Mr. Wiggles.

  But to just smile and say, Oh, it’s all right, Alton—I know you didn’t do it on purpose. . . . No, that would have been letting him off way too easy. After all, it was partly his fault . . . wasn’t it? And there ought to be consequences for him . . . right?