The Map Trap Read online

  Because there certainly were some consequences for her.

  She’d had a meeting with the principal during her afternoon preparation period, and Mrs. Buckley had asked her to review the school’s fire-drill procedures and then write up recommendations to insure that every child was accounted for at every moment.

  It wasn’t exactly a punishment, but that’s how it felt. Losing track of a student during a fire drill was bad. And for a first-year teacher? This incident would certainly get written up and be placed in her personnel folder. It might even be the kind of thing that could keep a brand-new teacher like her from getting a permanent job.

  Alton stood there, looking sorrier and sorrier.

  She knew that he really was a nice kid—sort of on the quiet side, and definitely too crazy about maps . . . but that wasn’t a crime, right? Kids got super-interested in lots of things—dinosaurs, NASCAR, video games, soccer, pop music stars, baseball . . . it was a long list. Not too many years ago, she could remember being completely nuts about everything concerning the wreck of the Titanic. She’d watched a dozen movies and documentaries about it, practically memorized the names of everyone who died, and had even tried writing letters to the grandchildren of some of the survivors. And before the Titanic, it had been glaciers, and before that, cheetahs, and before that, beetles. So it didn’t seem weird that Alton was so hooked on cartography.

  Today Alton was wearing a T-shirt with a map of the Illinois State Fairgrounds on the front.

  He always wore jeans and a T-shirt, and the shirt always had some kind of map on it. She’d asked him about his shirts once, and he told her that he searched online for most of them, and that his relatives were always sending him new ones too. He really was a cute kid . . . a lot like her little brother—except Carl teased her a lot. And she knew for a fact that Carl’s teachers thought he was a major smart aleck. And Alton wasn’t like that.

  “So, um . . . that’s all I wanted to tell you,” he said, sort of shrugging a little. “That I was sorry.”

  Miss Wheeling gave him a smile—she couldn’t help herself.

  “It’s all right, Alton. Go on and catch your bus now. Have a good night, and I’ll see you tomorrow. And you’ll have to show me the map you were working on today, okay? And I forgive you—I know you didn’t miss the fire drill on purpose!”

  Alton managed a polite nod, and said, “Thanks. See you tomorrow.”

  He still looked miserable, and Miss Wheeling was surprised that he didn’t brighten up a little or even smile. But sometimes boys were more sensitive than they let on—she remembered that from a child development course she’d taken last year.

  Miss Wheeling had read Alton’s face correctly: He really did feel miserable as he left her room—even worse than before he had apologized.

  But she never could have guessed why Alton felt so bad.

  Miss Wheeling didn’t know that what she had just said to him kept replaying in his mind: I know you didn’t miss the fire drill on purpose!

  Because the truth was, he had missed it on purpose. Completely.

  And the reason?

  Like almost everything else in Alton’s life, the reason had something to do with maps.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FOLDER

  Alton frowned as he looked out the bus window at the blur of cornfields, brown and almost ready to harvest. His house was only 2.214 miles due west of the school parking lot, but the bus stopped seventeen times before it got there. So the ride home was a good time to think.

  This whole situation? It’s my own stupid fault!

  And really, he was right about that.

  About a week ago, he had started trying to be friends with Quint Harrison. Quint sat right behind him during social studies, and he always watched Alton draw and doodle during class. Mr. Troy talked a lot, so there was usually plenty of time for drawing.

  “Yo, Al—that is so awesome!”

  That was what Quint would whisper over his shoulder.

  Or sometimes he’d say, “Excellent! Really, dude, that is wicked cool!”

  Alton hated slang. And he had to keep reminding Quint that his name wasn’t Al—it was Alton.

  Why did I think I could be friends with a guy who sounds like he escaped from a 1980s TV show?

  Why? The truth was hard to admit, but Alton faced it: When Quint had begun to compliment him, he’d felt flattered.

  Quint always hung out with the popular kids, and Alton never did. Quint seemed to really like Alton’s drawings and diagrams—even when Alton knew they were nowhere near his best work. And somewhere in the back of his mind, he started thinking about what it would be like to have Quint say hi to him in the halls or joke around with him during lunch or maybe even hang out with him after school—and do things like play video games or watch movies . . . or whatever the popular kids did when they weren’t being wicked awesome and totally cool at school.

  And as Alton kept imagining the good times he could have with his new friend, in another corner of his mind he heard his mom asking him, “Did you make any new friends at school?”

  She said that a lot.

  Which seemed pretty stupid to Alton, because he already had friends—Christopher, for example.

  Chris’s parents and his parents vacationed in rented cabins at Lake Mendota in Wisconsin every summer, and he and Chris had been friends ever since they were three years old. Just this last summer they’d gone swimming or fishing or hiking almost every day for two weeks. And then Alton went home to Illinois, and Chris went home to Indiana. The other fifty weeks of the year, they e-mailed whenever they wanted to—usually once or twice a month.

  Now, if Chris had been his only friend? Then his mom bugging him would have made some sense. But he had other friends too—like Heather and Val.

  They both lived right here in town and they both went to his school. The three of them had met last June in Maple Park near the post office—each of them had been searching for the same geocache.

  Geocaching was one of Alton’s favorite things to do with his map skills. It was a geeky kind of sport, and it had started in 2000—right after really accurate satellite Global Positioning System information became available to anyone with a GPS receiver. Someone got the bright idea that it would be fun to hide little boxes or tins or bottles or jars, and then publish the GPS coordinates of these geocaches on a website. It was like a global game of hide-and-seek, and rules developed quickly. Most geocaches included a closed container with a log—a small notebook or paper—so a finder could sign it; and a lot of geocaches also contained little toys or trinkets called “swag”—bits of stuff that finders could take, and also add to.

  Alton had a shoebox loaded with swag he had collected over the past two years—coins, a plastic clothespin, a little whistle, a braided key chain, a dog ID tag, a rubber spider—all kinds of small things. And whenever he took something from a geocache, he always left a blue rubber band behind—his own signature swag. Each rubber band was about a quarter of an inch wide and one inch around without being stretched. And on each rubber band, it looked like there was a black smudge. But stretch the band far enough, and a message would appear: SWAG COURTESY OF SIRMAPSALOT—which was Alton’s geocaching nickname—his “handle.” Alton got his hidden message onto the rubber band by stretching it to three times its length and then writing on it with a fine-point permanent marker.

  Geocaching had gotten really popular very fast. And today? Within twenty-five miles of Harper’s Grove, there were more than seven hundred geocaches, all of them hidden just in the last three years. And by one estimate, there were more than two and a half million active geocaches worldwide! Alton liked knowing that he was one of more than six million geocachers all over the world, fellow map nuts—including Val and Heather.

  And in Maple Park on that day in June, the three of them had exchanged e-mail addresses and then, over the next few weeks, they’d decided to form a geocaching team to both hide and seek geocaches together. And during the summer
, they’d become friends.

  Except . . . they were all constantly competing, too. Because team-geocaching is like that—sort of like being crew members on the same pirate ship. Yes, you worked together to hunt for that next prize, but when it came down to sharing treasure, it was pretty much everyone for himself . . . or herself. Heather had made it clear from the start that she was as tough as any geo-pirate out there. Because if she got to a new cache before he or Val did, she didn’t hand out any free clues. She’d just smile and say, “Go find it yourselves!”

  So, yes, Alton already had some friends.

  Still . . . he knew that a friend like Quint would be different.

  And that was why Alton had decided to show Quint some of his best maps. Because if the guy thought some little doodles and sketches were so epic, then the maps he’d really worked on would probably stun him—maybe Quint would be so amazed that he would stop using slang for a minute or two.

  And also, maybe then he’d have a new friend who lived in town and who went to his school—and who wasn’t a map nut. Because he knew that was what his mom meant by her questions about finding new friends. She thought he spent way too much time messing with maps and geocaching and GPS devices—and he thought she spent way too much time watching funny cat videos on YouTube.

  But when making friends with Quint started to feel like a very big deal—that was when Alton had gone that one stupid step too far. Because suddenly he wasn’t just going to show Quint some of his best maps. No, he had decided to show the guy his folder of secret maps.

  The folder itself wasn’t fancy—just an ordinary pocket folder that would fit inside a school notebook. And the maps in the folder weren’t even big—the largest one was eleven inches high by seventeen inches wide with one fold down the middle. The rest of the maps were the size of ordinary printer paper.

  He kept this folder hidden behind the bookcase in his bedroom, where his mom or dad or his little sister would never think to look. He got it out only when he had a new map to add to it, and he always kept the folder at home.

  Until yesterday morning.

  And yesterday during social studies, he’d turned and looked Quint right in the eye and whispered, “Can you keep a secret?”

  “A what?”

  “Shhh! A secret—can you keep a secret?”

  Quint’s eyes had opened wide, and he’d nodded. “Yeah, totally!”

  Alton said, “Okay, get a pass to the library for after lunch, and I’ll meet you there. I’ve got something that will astonish you!”

  He wasn’t sure if Quint would even know that word, but apparently he did, because the two had met up around twelve fifteen. They went to a table near the back of the library.

  Quint whispered, “Yo, I am so stoked, like, wicked psyched!”

  Alton opened his folder and pulled out one of his favorite maps: “Miss Wheeling’s Brain.”

  Which nearly caused a disaster, because Quint took one look and began laughing so hard that Alton was afraid his head would explode.

  Which was an exaggeration, and Alton hated exaggerations almost as much as he hated slang.

  But it truly was a huge blast of laughter, and it required a jab in Quint’s ribs from Alton plus a frown and a very loud “Shhh!” from Mrs. Lomax to get Quint halfway under control again. Some sixth-grade girls at a nearby table turned and stared at them, curious about the commotion.

  But Alton hadn’t been surprised by Quint’s reaction: a good map delivers a lot of information almost instantly, and if that information happens to be funny . . . Boom!

  Still snorting a little, Quint had gasped, “This is totally ill—like, completely sick! How did you make this stuff up, dude?”

  That question had forced Alton to give a short lecture: “Mapmakers don’t make stuff up. They present facts. Because a map isn’t really a map if it doesn’t deal with facts.”

  And the fact was, after observing Miss Wheeling in class five days a week for the past two months, Alton had collected strong evidence that GOLDEN RETRIEVERS occupied a large portion of her mental territory—followed by CUPCAKES and her little brother, CARL—who also loved golden retrievers. Then came the CHICAGO BEARS, the METRIC SYSTEM, and HAWAIIAN VACATIONS.

  One of the funniest parts of the drawing was the way he had surrounded the image of her brain with frizzy, puffy hair—obviously Miss Wheeling’s hairdo. She had very curly hair, and Alton had seen her trying to comb it out when she came inside after recess or bus duty, especially when it was rainy or windy. She never looked happy about it.

  Miss Wheeling was pretty good at her job, even though this was her first year of teaching. So, of course, mostly she talked about science and math, as Alton had explained in the legend on the map. As a bonus feature in the legend, Alton had included a short list of topics that Miss Wheeling had never mentioned in class even once: a boyfriend; a hobby; a book she liked; a TV show she liked; a movie she liked.

  As he’d had to explain to Quint, the legend lays out the limits of what a map presents. And within those limits, Alton was confident that this map gave an accurate peek into Miss Wheeling’s twenty-three-year-old mind.

  Quint had instantly agreed by laughing like crazy.

  And . . . Quint’s reaction was why Alton had kept this folder hidden away. Because his secret maps weren’t about geography or politics or the environment. They were mostly about the kids and teachers at Harper School.

  A couple of the maps were just silly, like the one that charted the popularity of Nike versus Reebok versus Adidas versus Converse versus Keds, and also high-tops versus low-tops. And he’d made a timeline-style map that showed what color shirts kids wore most on different days of the week—which was also kind of silly.

  For maps like that, it wouldn’t have mattered much if others knew about them—except, once those maps were out there? Then every kid and teacher would have figured out that Alton wasn’t just studying his schoolwork every day—he was also studying them. And that would make collecting data in the future more difficult for him—which is why his maps about shoes and clothes and how often kids got haircuts, and his map of the location of twenty-nine different smells in the school went right into his secret folder.

  But there was also a whole other category of maps—including “Miss Wheeling’s Brain.” These maps charted more personal stuff. Such as which girls liked which boys, and which boys liked which girls, and which girls hated which girls for liking certain boys. And how many sixth graders had parents who were divorced. And how often certain teachers smiled or frowned or got mad or yelled. And which tests kids cheated on the most—spelling, math, science, or social studies. And how many times Mrs. Buckley said “um” when she read the morning announcements over the PA, and which days of the week she said “um” the most. Alton had used Venn diagrams to make a popularity map of the cafeteria during sixth-grade lunch. And using contour lines like the kind on a hiking map, he had made a topographical height map of the sixth-grade class—from the lofty peak of Mount Wilson where Emma Wilson stood at five feet, eight inches, to the surrounding terrain where heights ranged from five feet, four inches, to four feet, six inches, and then down to the lowlands of Virden Valley—four feet, one inch, above level ground—which was where Cal Virden stood all by himself.

  The maps were clever and accurate, and they were beautifully drawn. And some of them were sort of funny, and a few were really funny.

  But Alton knew that the way he presented some of this more personal information? Some people would feel embarrassed—or maybe even feel like he was attacking them. Because some of these maps were more like cartoons than regular maps. Yes, he was still presenting facts, but by combining these particular facts with these particular drawings? Some people were definitely going to think he was trying to be mean—which wasn’t what he’d been aiming for, not at all. He was just trying to be creative, trying some experiments with different kinds of map formats, trying to blend some ideas. These maps were like an artist’s sketchbook, a pl
ace to mess around with new ideas. And he had meant to keep them private, like a diary.

  Which is why he had always kept these maps hidden away—until yesterday, when he had used them to try to impress Quint . . . who had laughed so hard after seeing the very first map that Mrs. Lomax had immediately kicked them both out of the library.

  And after school yesterday, when he’d gone to his cubby and discovered that the map folder was missing? For a few seconds there, Alton had felt like he was going to throw up. Right away he’d realized Quint must have taken the maps. Except, he didn’t want to just walk up to the kid out at the bus lines and accuse him, not without proof. So Monday after school, he’d done nothing.

  But late Monday night, as he lay in bed imagining those maps getting out for all the world to see, Alton had decided that he had to do a really careful search of both sixth-grade classrooms. Because maybe he had somehow left the folder in the desk he used in Mr. Troy’s room today after lunch, or maybe he’d left it somewhere else—he didn’t think so . . . but he had to check.

  Lying there in bed, he knew he had to find a way to search Mr. Troy’s room, and especially Quint’s cubby. That would be risky, but if he found the folder, it would be worth all the dangers.

  And then came the unannounced fire drill during homeroom on Tuesday. When that alarm sounded, Alton knew in a flash that this was his opportunity. And when everyone else hurried to line up, he dropped low to the floor over near the windows. In thirty seconds he was alone in the room, and a minute later the whole school was empty.

  Fortunately, Mr. Troy had left his classroom open during the fire drill, but Alton’s quick search of both sixth-grade rooms on Tuesday morning had turned up absolutely nothing.

  So now he was still stuck with that queasiness in the pit of his stomach . . . plus a guilty feeling from having tricked Miss Wheeling—and having gotten her in trouble with the principal.