Ten Miles Past Normal, page 1
ten miles past normal
ten
miles
past
normal
frances o’roark dowell
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Frances O’Roark Dowell
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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Book design by Debra Sfetsios-Conover
The text for this book is set in Scala and Scala Hans.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dowell, Frances O’Roark.
Ten miles past normal / Frances O’Roark Dowell. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Because living with “modern-hippy” parents on a goat farm means fourteen-year-old Janie Gorman cannot have a normal high school life, she tries joining Jam Band, making friends with Monster, and spending time with elderly former Civil Rights workers.
ISBN 978-1-4169-9585-2
[1. Farm life—North Carolina—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Bands (Music)—Fiction. 6. Civil rights movements—Fiction. 7. North Carolina—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.D75455Ten 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2010022041
ISBN 978-1-4169-9587-6 (eBook)
For Amy Graham and Danielle Paul —
high school would have been so much cooler with you guys along for the ride.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Caitlyn Dlouhy and Kiley Frank; as always, they did most of the heavy lifting. She greatly appreciates Alison Velea and Valerie Shea, who made the copyediting process a joy, and Debra Sfetsios-Conover and Elizabeth Blake-Linn, for making the book look so beautiful. She is eternally grateful to Clifton, Jack, and Will Dowell, and to Travis, the best dog ever. She owes a debt of gratitude to Jenna Woginrich, whose book Made from Scratch inspired her to take up the fiddle and to write a book with chickens and goats in it.
Finally, the author would like to go on record as saying that if she ever ends up down on the farm, it will be thanks to Wendell Berry, who, as far as the author is concerned, rocks.
You’re all invited to the hootenanny.
Chapter One
More Tales of the Amazing Farm Girl
No one can figure out where the terrible smell is coming from, but everyone on the bus this morning can smell it and has an opinion.
“Dude, I bet we just ran over a skunk!” yells out Stoner Guy No. 1 from the back of the bus. “That happened to us when I was a kid. We had to get rid of our car, ’cause the smell was, like, permanent.”
“No way, dude,” comes the reply from his compadre, Stoner Guy No. 2. “That’s not skunk. That is definitely fecund matter we’re smelling.”
“Fecal, dude, fecal,” Stoner Guy No. 1 corrects him.
“That’s what I’m saying, dude.”
As it turns out, what we’re smelling is my shoe. Or, more to the point, the fecund matter that has attached itself to my shoe.
Goat poop.
The general din that erupts around me when the source of the terrible smell is traced to my left foot mostly consists of hooting, jeering, and a collective plea for me to throw the offending ballet flat out the window.
“No throwing anything from the windows,” Steve, our bus driver, yells out from the front. “I don’t care how bad it stinks.”
All the kids sitting near me move to the back of the bus, cramming in three and even four to a seat, so I’m sitting alone in a sea of empty rows. Not just my face, but my whole body, has turned hot lava red.
Farm Girl strikes again.
I mentally retrace my smelly steps to the bus stop, back down the driveway to the house, in through the front door, out through the back door, and all the way to the goat pen. Milking the goats every morning is the first chore of my day, and on school days, when I’m running late, I sometimes risk wearing my civilian clothes, careful not to squirt or spill any goat milk on my jeans, and very, very careful to avoid the fragrant goat poop pellets.
This morning I was running later than usual and milked the girls at warp speed. I recall being proud not to have gotten any milk on myself or even on the ground. Clearly I should have focused less on the goats’ milk and more on their other bodily excretions.
As soon as the bus pulls up to school, I make my escape and sprint to the girls’ bathroom on the second floor by the art room, hoping it won’t be as populated as the more conveniently located first-floor bathroom. I find two girls huddled by the radiator grille, one crying, the other comforting her. They appear to be the only people in here. The comforter glares at me for invading their space, and I smile back lamely, holding up my shoe.
“Unfortunate incident,” I explain, sounding possibly even dumber than I feel. “Just ignore me.”
The sobbing girl sniffs the air and gasps, “What’s that smell?”
I grab a wad of paper towels from the dispenser. “My shoe. Sorry. I stepped in some goat poop this morning. It must have been really fresh, too, because usually goat manure doesn’t stink that much. The pellets are generally pretty dry.”
Sobbing Girl’s eyes widen in recognition. “Aren’t you in my PE class? Didn’t you, like, one time have this horrible rash on your legs? From hay or something?”
“It was actually this organic fertilizer my dad was trying,” I explain, trying to pretend we’re having a perfectly normal teenage girl conversation. “Turns out I’m allergic to worm castings. But I’m not actually allergic to worms. Go figure.”
The girls stare at each other a second and crack up. “Wow!” Sobbing Girl says. “That’s the most insane thing anyone has ever said to me! You are totally weird.”
Gosh, I’m glad I could cheer her up.
The girls leave, still giggling, and I scrub my shoe until there is only the faintest whiff of goat matter left. I slip the shoe on my foot, grab my backpack, and hurry out the bathroom toward my locker, eyes downward. With any luck, nobody from my bus will be around, and if they are, they won’t notice me.
“Nice shoes!” someone yells out from a group of jocks huddled around a locker. “You oughta bottle that smell. Eau de Crap!”
I breathe in deeply through my nose, an exercise I read about in my best friend Sarah’s yoga magazine. Breathe in, focus deeply on an image you find pleasing and relaxing, breathe out.
My rebel brain immediately envisions the farm on a summer morning, the air already hazy, butterflies floating across the wildflowers. I see the house with its wraparound porch, fresh white paint, cerulean blue shutters. I hear the slam of a screen door, the peaceful clucking of chickens.
Ah, yes, our farm. How relaxing to meditate on the place that has made me the laughingstock of the ninth grade and probably the biggest loser in the entire school.
And to think it was my idea to live there in the first place.
Chapter Two
A Brief History of How I Ruined My Own Life
Like all fourteen-year-olds, I used to be a nine-year-old. In retrospect, I was an annoyingly perky and enthusiastic nine-year-old. In fact, I’ve been enthusiastic my entire life, up until this fall, when high school sucked every last ounce of enthusiasm right out of me.
For the big fourth-grade field trip that year, we rode in a rattling yellow school bus out to the country to visit an organic farm. The farmers were a young couple with a baby, a flock of chickens, and four goats. They talked a lot about growing vegetables in an environmentally friendly way and evil factory farms where the cows were very, very unhappy. What I liked about the field trip was the goat cheese and the homemade bread the farmers served after we finished touring their farm. I remember having some sort of profound thought like, “Boy, farmers sure do eat good,” and suddenly my mind was made up: I wanted to live on a farm for the rest of my life.
Like I said, I was an enthusiastic kid. I was always coming up with new ideas—Let’s keep a horse in the backyard! Let’s adopt a homeless person!—and my parents were always rejecting them. So when I suggested we’d all be happier on a farm raising goats and baking bread, well, I meant it, but I didn’t expect to be taken seriously.
We were sitting at the dinner table, eating a Stouffer’s frozen lasagna that hadn’t quite gotten heated all the way through (“Think of it as lasagna sorbet,” my mother suggested, and I was so young and enthusiastic at the time that I actually tried to think of it that way), when I told my parents we should move to a farm and raise goats. I listed the many benefits of this plan (free goat cheese being number one on the list ; I forget now what number two was) and sat back, waiting to be rejected yet again.
But instead of shaking her head and saying, “I’m sorry, Janie, but I just don’t think that’s going to work for us as a family right now” (which is what she said about the horse and the homeless person), my mother got very quiet. She looked at my father, her eyes sort of glimmering, a dreamy expression on her face.
“Daddy and I used to talk about living on a farm all the time,” she said after a moment. “Didn’t we, honey?”
“Before we had kids,” my dad agreed. “Back before life got so crazy.”
“Life wouldn’t be crazy on a farm,” I insisted. “It’s very peaceful on a farm.”
I had no idea what I was talking about. My farm experience consisted of one field trip and approximately two hundred picture books about Old MacDonald and Chicken Little and cows that typed. But clearly my suggestion struck a chord with my parents, who started talking about how great it would be to get out of the suburbs, to grow our own food, to raise chickens and have fresh eggs every day.
“You guys could quit your jobs,” I told them. “You could be outside in the fresh air. It would be good for your health!”
“Well, I don’t think we could quit our jobs, cowgirl,” my dad said. “In fact, I don’t want to quit my job. But it might be nice to live farther out in the country.”
I sat back in my seat, dazed. My parents were actually taking one of my ideas seriously! It made me feel important, almost grown-up.
“It’s a wonderful idea, Janie,” my mom declared.
My dad grinned at me. “A humdinger of an idea.”
Now, it did occur to me that if we lived on a farm, my best friend, Sarah, would no longer live across the street. Megan Grant, who had spent the last four months trying to steal Sarah away from me, would have full access to her while I’d be out collecting eggs in the countryside. Alone. By myself.
On the other hand, maybe my parents would finally get me a horse.
Bonus.
“Well, if you guys think so,” I said modestly. “I do think farms are nice. Especially farms with stables.”
Eight months later, we were farmers. I remember the day we moved out to the farm, the excitement I felt as I ran like a maniac up and down the stairs of the farm house, built circa 1892, with its windows that rattled with every breeze and broad oak floors that groaned in the middle of cold winter nights. I was Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anne of Green Gables; I was a girl who lived on a farm. Outside, the honeysuckle was just beginning to bloom and the whole world smelled sweet.
And the kids at school? They thought it was cool we’d moved to a farm. We had the fifth-grade end-of-the-year party out by our pond, and the sixth-grade fall festival took place in the barn. Being Farm Girl meant social bonus points.
High school changed all of that. For one thing, no one I met in high school had fond memories of hanging out in our barnyard and feeding corn to the chickens. For another, no one thought it was cute that half the time I smelled like the barn I spent the first thirty minutes of my morning in.
They thought it was weird. They thought I was weird.
And suddenly I realized that living on a farm was weird. Milking goats and pushing a chickenmobile around the yard every morning, dumping eggshells and coffee grounds into the composter every night after the dishes were done. Knowing way too much about manure and fertilizers and the organic way to grow bok choy. What kind of normal teenage girl lived this way?
The people at school were right—I was weird.
And I only had myself to blame.
Chapter Three
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch . . .
Saturday morning I’m awakened at an absurdly early hour by Ty Cobb, our rooster, who doesn’t know from weekends. Every day is a day to get up with the sun, in Ty Cobb’s opinion.
“I think Ty Cobb would taste good for lunch, don’t you?” I ask my dad when we meet in the hallway, both of us yawning. “You can eat roosters, you know. Some people have rooster for Thanksgiving instead of turkey.”
My father heads downstairs. “We need Ty Cobb. Without him, we don’t get baby chicks. You like chicks, remember?”
I clomp down the staircase after him. “No, that’s Avery who likes baby chicks. Or at least she likes flushing them down the toilet.”
I learned very early in my farming career not to get too attached to the smaller animals. There are always predators like Avery around who will break your heart by flushing away the livestock.
“That was years ago,” my dad points out. “I can’t even think of the last time Avery put a chick in the toilet.”
“Dad, we’ve only lived here five years. It’s not ancient history.”
We arrive in the kitchen, where my mom and my eight-year-old sister, Avery, are digging into their scrambled eggs. Farm-fresh scrambled eggs, my mom would be the first person to point out.
I would be the first person to point out that we don’t actually live on a farm. It’s more like a farm-ette. A mini-farm. No, make that a wannabe farm.
I am the only person in my family who has these sorts of thoughts.
“Avery and I are going to the flea market after chores this morning,” my mom informs me at breakfast. “Do you want to come?”
“I’m going to go to Sarah’s,” I say, pouring myself some juice, my tone making it clear that even if I had no plans, my answer would be Not a chance. “We’ve got work to do on our project.”
“I need your help this afternoon, don’t forget.” My father is standing in the doorway, coffee mug in hand, about to head out back. “It’s Mr. Pritchard today.”
I sigh but make an honest effort not to roll my eyes. “Okay. But can we not stay out there all afternoon?”
“I thought you liked Mr. Pritchard.” My dad sounds vaguely hurt, like he can’t understand why I’m not doing cartwheels at the thought of spending yet another weekend afternoon helping him gather data for his latest academic adventure.
“I do, but the last time we went to see him, we were there for, like, five hours.”
“He’s a fascinating old guy.” My dad grabs his pink Al’s Garage cap from its peg and shoves it on his head. “And he won’t be around forever.”
I have to admit this is true. We’ve gone to visit Mr. Pritchard four times now, and each time he’s seemed a little bit smaller. It’s possible that one day he’ll simply disappear into thin air and never be heard from again.
After breakfast, I pull on my Official Farming Jeans, which are jeans that are never worn for anything else but outdoor chores, so I don’t worry about what kind of muck gets on them. In fact, I hardly ever wash them, because why bother? It’s true they’ve developed a distinct odor that even Avery, Miss “I’ll Take a Bath Once a Month, but Only If Absolutely Necessary,” wrinkles her nose at, but to me that’s the point. If you’re going to give me chores that result in goat poop on my pants, you’re going to pay the olfactory price.
Next, I don my Official Farming Shirt, a blue plaid flannel shirt missing the bottom two buttons, which I wear over the “Rednecks for Peace” T-shirt my dad gave me for Christmas last year. He keeps asking me why I don’t wear the T-shirt so everyone can see it, and my answer is pretty simple: I’m not a redneck. I’m not a rural person, a country girl, or just plain folks. I’m doing my best to be a normal teenage girl here, people. That I’m for peace is entirely beside the point.
In the mudroom, I pull on my work boots, which are brown and lace up to mid-shin and could not be uglier. But when you’re stomping around in the mud, pretty foot-wear isn’t exactly a priority. In fact, as I learned so well yesterday, it should be avoided at all costs.
Now it’s time to enter Farm World with my mental mixed bag of feelings. The farm is beautiful! (It smells.) It’s natural! (It makes me smell, naturally.) It’s environmentally friendly! (It’s an environment that produces teenage girls who are shunned by their peers for smelling like their environment.)
“You used to love it here,” my mom says now when I complain about living miles away from civilizing influences, such as shopping malls and best friends. “You used to say living on a farm was the best thing ever.”
