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.