There's No WiFi on the Prairie Page 3

  I look at Ethan with wide eyes. His eyes are just as wide as mine, which confirms what I’m thinking: We’re in big trouble.

  Yup, big trouble. Ethan and I broke the fence (thanks, Ms. Tremt!), and since we happen to be the only people in what looks to be about a thousand-mile radius, we’re the ones who’ll be accused of being horse thieves!

  My mind starts racing, trying to remember everything I learned in history class about life on the prairie back in the 1800s. Didn’t they throw horse thieves in jail back in 1891? Who knew I’d have to remember all this stuff one day to save my neck on the Minnesota prairies?

  Panicked, I look at Ethan. Why did he do this to us? He knew that the stupid time-travel book was real! And he let Ms. Tremt send us back in time without having any idea what would happen! I’ve got to get away from him. He’s in cahoots with Ms. Tremt. He’s paying me back for stealing his MineFarm cows!

  Instinctively, I spring to my feet and start running away from him, straight for the cornfields. It’s the only available place to hide around here, as there seem to be no trees and I’m pretty sure they’d find me hiding behind the petticoats on the laundry clothesline.

  My feet pound against the grass. I’m hoping to make it to the tall stalks of corn before the family—my ancestors!—see me. I’ve got to get to a safe spot so I can look up the GPS on my phone and figure out how to get home. Maybe I can take an Uber.

  I hear an ominous thudding behind me and look nervously over my shoulder, only to see that the cow is following me. Honestly. Does it contain the spirit of a dead relative or something? Why does it like me so much? I mean, I appreciate it, but this is not the time to have a two-ton dairy cow following me around. Behind the cow I see Ethan, looking anxious and running fast. Apparently he also knows that the penalty for stealing someone’s horse is a big deal.

  Once I’m safely hidden in the corn, Ethan catches up with me. I glare at him and make a hissing noise like a cat. “Get away!” I tell him. “You’re not my friend! You’re trying to get me thrown in jail!”

  Panting, he holds a hand up to stop me from talking. “Just listen,” he says, trying to catch his breath. He needs to spend more time on his scooter and less time on his MineFarm. I feel fine and I just sprinted the same distance. “Don’t panic, and keep your voice down. Ms. Tremt knows what she’s doing, and we’re only here for three hours. It’ll be fun! And there must have been a reason she sent us back here to this time and this place.”

  “You said that time travel relies on positive energy and that mistakes happen.”

  “Yeah, but that was before I knew it was your great-great-great-grandmother’s house! That’s not a coincidence, Ava. That’s deliberate. So let’s figure out why we’re here! It’s a few hours, that’s all. Not forever.”

  I want to run away from him again, but there’s nowhere for me to go. A few hundred yards away, I can hear the Pedersen family looking for us. Is this really happening? I don’t even know how to travel back through the book like he does. I’m totally stuck! Unless I can get Ethan to see reason.

  “Listen, Ethan, maybe you’re really into all this, and that’s fine, but I’m not. Today is my big chance—my big opportunity to land a TV job and move to L.A..” I explain all about my audition and what it would mean to me to be able to do it. I make my voice soft and pleading. It’s good acting practice for my audition later.

  “Does your mom know you’re planning to audition for this show and then move to L.A.? Won’t she be upset?”

  I shake my head. “No, of course she doesn’t know. I’ll tell her after I audition, if I get the part. Which I will. Because I can memorize scripts in, like, five minutes.”

  Ethan sighs. “Ava, that’s not a good idea. And it’s not like you at all! You have a great family! Why would you want to change everything and move?”

  “You don’t understand, Ethan. Your house is so nice and organized and calm. Mine is a disaster every day! I have too many siblings. My mom works too hard. I have too much responsibility. I’m sick of it! And I never get any attention at home. I’m just a pair of hands to help with the little kids or put away laundry. No one cares about me, or asks about me. I want to start over in California, with my dad.”

  “Maybe things would be better at home if you tried harder to help out more, Ava. You could do more around the house to help your mom and your brother and sisters. That is, if you really wanted to.”

  I narrow my eyes at him. “Are you saying I’m lazy? Because I’m not. You have no idea how much responsibility I have. You don’t know what it’s like. Now I’m going to go and find a way out of this . . . whatever it is and go home. Don’t follow me.”

  I turn and start marching deeper into the cornfields, away from the Pedersens. Ethan doesn’t follow me.

  Who do Ethan and Ms. Tremt think they are, anyway? They think they know what’s best for me. They don’t know anything! No one does.

  I keep walking in what I think is a straight line, only walking in a cornfield and keeping your sense of direction is totally impossible. There’s nothing but rows and rows of corn, taller than my head. I don’t even know which way I came from now, because I’m too far in to see Ethan.

  Who does this librarian think she is? I wonder. Stranding two kids in the middle of the 1800s! At least she gave me my phone. I dig my hand into my pocket to pull it out and check its GPS.

  I press the button to call up my location, but nothing happens. There are no service bars at the top of the phone. “NO SERVICE?” I shriek. “That’s impossible! How can there be no WiFi on the prairie?”

  • • •

  BOOMF!

  Ouch. My temples are aching, like a headache is about to start. Time travel is really hard on the head. I blink a few times and look around. I realize I’m back in my school library, in the back room. Instead of smelling the sweet prairie grasses, I can smell the day-old odor of a cow having been here.

  Phew. No jail time for me. And I probably have plenty of time to make it to my audition too. But what about Ethan? Even though I am still mad at him, I’m worried about him being left back in time all by himself.

  The door opens and Ms. Tremt comes in, shutting it quickly behind her.

  “Okay, Doctor Who,” I say to her. “You’ve got some ’splainin’ to do. I might have to vote you off the island.”

  “What?” asks Ms. Tremt, who doesn’t seem to catch any of the very funny TV show references I just made.

  I rub at my temples. “You really need to watch some TV, Ms. Tremt.”

  “No, Ava dear, you need watch less.”

  “Moo!” I look up and somehow the cow has materialized beside me. How did that happen?

  Ms. Tremt smiles. “Amazing. That cow followed you again. You certainly have a way with animals,” she says.

  “I guess I do. Is Ethan going to appear now too?” I ask. “We were in a bit of, uh, trouble back there on the prairie.”

  She nods. “Yes, I know. When you pulled out your phone, you left him in the past, Ava, to be captured by Mr. Pedersen. You can’t take smartphones back to 1891. You’ll terrify everyone! Time travel simply does not allow you to reveal modern inventions to the past. If you try to, The Book of Memories brings you back to the present.”

  Confused, I say, “But you gave me my phone! You put it in my pocket yourself. How can I trust you? I don’t know what to think.”

  “Of course I did. I set this all up! It was the only way I could get you to cooperate.” She fiddles with her scarf and smiles at me mysteriously.

  “You tricked me!” I say. “That’s it—I’m looking you up online. I’m going to find out what you really are.”

  I grab my phone again, relieved to see four bars of service. It feels like a warm hug. I never knew how much I loved cell service. I do a quick search for Valerie Tremt and find . . . zero search results. Zero. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

  What is going on? How can a grown woman who has lived thirty or forty or fifty years (it’s hard to tell with Ms.
Tremt) have no results?

  “Not everything you need to know can be looked up on your phone, Ava. Some things you need to learn the old-fashioned way,” says Ms. Tremt. She goes to the corner of the room and opens a brown box. Leaning over, she digs around inside and pulls out a pile of dowdy brown fabric decorated with white flowers. She brings the pile to me.

  “What is that stuff you’re holding?” I ask. It smells like mothballs.

  “Your period costume, of course,” she says. “I want you to go back and save Ethan, who is in terrible trouble, by the way, and help your ancestral family,” says Ms. Tremt. “I think it’s just the adventure you need at the moment.”

  I don’t like this idea one bit. She sent me back to 1891 without telling me, and tricked me into using my phone to come back. How do I know what she’s really up to? How can anyone trust a librarian who’s really a time traveler? And she dragged poor Ethan into the whole thing too, knowing I’d leave him there! That’s pretty crummy.

  I lift my chin and glare at her. “And what if I don’t feel like going back?”

  “Then you don’t get your phone back,” Ms. Tremt says, her hand shooting out and quickly confiscating my phone. “You’re not allowed to have this during the school day anyway.”

  “My phone! Ms. Tremt—no!”

  “If I were you, and I thought of myself as a good friend, I’d be pretty worried about Ethan right now. Don’t you think you owe it to him to go back and help? Horse thieves are not well liked in the nineteenth century. Or any century, really.”

  She has a point there. If I abandon Ethan, I’ll be the worst friend on Earth. And Ethan has always been my buddy. He would go back and save me in a minute.

  And maybe it’d be cool to meet my great-great-great-grandma for a second. It’s not like many people get the chance to do that.

  “Won’t my teacher wonder where I am for the field trip?” I ask.

  “I can take care of all that,” Ms. Tremt says. “I really am on your side, Ava. I promise. Now go get Ethan before he’s carted off to jail. And when you come back, you’ll see your life very differently.”

  “Oh, all right,” I agree, still somewhat reluctant. I’m not looking forward to wearing a period outfit.

  I dress myself in the long calico dress, apron, and cap. It’s hot and uncomfortable. And then Ms. Tremt tells me I should wear the nano-scarf she gave me earlier on top of it all.

  “Just in case,” she says.

  “This is ridiculous,” I grumble. “How do people move in these long dresses? The skirts are totally in the way. And they’re hot. How come Ethan doesn’t have to wear a silly outfit?”

  “This isn’t his trip.”

  “Well, then, how come he got to go to his dream basketball game on his trip, and I’m headed off to the wilderness?”

  Ms. Tremt crosses her arms at her chest and drums her fingers impatiently. “Ethan wasn’t the one attempting to audition for a TV show without a parent’s permission,” Ms. Tremt says.

  I gasp. “How do you know about that?”

  “I’m a librarian. I know everything. Now, your five-minute modern-device penalty is up. Back you go.”

  She makes a shooing motion at me and waves her blinking pen. I manage to grab the rope around the cow’s neck just as the world around me suddenly dissolves.

  BOOMF!

  “Thief! Vandal!”

  I hear these words and some others that must be Swedish and probably not very nice, as I find myself on the ground once again with my head hurting. This time, luckily, I seem to have landed behind a pile of hay, so I’m not out in the open.

  An angry man, probably Mr. Pedersen, is yelling now. “You destroyed our fence, stole our cow, let our horse loose, and broke the trough! How could you do so many terrible things to our family?”

  Very, very slowly and carefully, I peep around the hay and look for Ethan, who must be getting reamed somewhere nearby. I finally see him sitting on the grass, his hands and feet trussed up with ropes like a chicken about to be roasted in the oven. The Pedersen family is standing around him in a semicircle.

  He looks very unhappy and I don’t blame him. For a second I’m grateful to Ms. Tremt for making me come back to get him. I’d been thinking about leaving him here to fend for himself, since he’s the one with The Book of Memories and knows how to get back. But I suppose it’s hard to do that when you’re tied up and being yelled at by my angry pioneer relatives.

  Ethan is red-faced and shaking his head. “I didn’t steal anything, honestly! And the fence was, well, I don’t quite know what happened to that,” he says feebly. I know he’s thinking it’s probably not wise to explain we fell from the sky because we came through a time-travel portal. That might not go over well.

  “You did steal our cow! And we nearly lost the horse, too, because of the broken fence! Shame on you.” Now it’s Mrs. Pedersen yelling and shaking her finger. She sounds a lot like my own mom.

  I wonder why they think Ethan stole the cow. I look around and realize it came back through the portal with me just fine and is munching some grass nearby. But it was missing just now. For how long, I don’t know. And yesterday when it was outside (and inside) our school library. And then when it came back today, it was in the fields with me as I was running off. So I guess to them it might seem like the cow has been gone since yesterday.

  Oh boy. That’s bad. In 1891, one of the worst crimes imaginable was stealing livestock, especially the kind people relied on for food, like dairy cows. The Pedersen family must need it for milk, cheese, butter, et cetera. Thank goodness I watched so many Little House on the Prairie reruns that time I had the flu, or I wouldn’t know any of this. But how come I can’t remember what the penalty is for stealing a cow or a horse? I’ll have to look that up on my phone.

  I instinctively reach for my hip pocket, then remember that (a) I’m wearing a long pioneer dress and (b) Ms. Tremt took my phone. I’m completely on my own.

  The cow, which is grazing lazily, wanders over to me and gives me a friendly lick, then begins chewing on my apron strings. I don’t know if they taste good or if it’s just the cow being friendly.

  “You’re causing a lot of trouble,” I whisper to the cow. The cow looks kind of like she’s shrugging and shakes her head. Then she stamps one foot on the ground and looks me straight in the eyes. A long, unblinking stare.

  “You’re right,” I tell her. “We need to save Ethan. But how? What can I say to get the Pedersens to believe he meant no harm?”

  “I’m going to have to ride to get the sheriff,” Mr. Pedersen says loudly. “You watch him, Laura. Don’t let him move a muscle.”

  I plant my face in my palm. This is it. Ethan needs my help. Now.

  I decide my only chance is an elaborate act. After all, I have the costume. And I need to be able to act on demand if I’m going to change my life forever and become a famous child star. I might as well start rehearsals now.

  “Oh, there you are, Ethan!” I yell, making sure to sound relieved, as I come strolling around the side of the mountain of hay. I’m glad to be wearing this ugly old brown dress now. Costumes help build an actor’s confidence. “At last I have found you.”

  The cow, which is clearly one of the smartest cows on the planet, follows me, as I’d hoped she would, and casually grazes beside me. She lets out a soft “moooo,” as if to show everyone she’s in good spirits and hasn’t been harmed.

  “Why, hello there!” I call out to the Pedersens, as friendly as anyone can possibly be. “We’ve been looking for the owner of this delightful cow. My brother, Ethan, and I found it wandering out on the prairie yesterday, and we knew someone must be missing it. So we’ve been walking for miles and miles, trying to find its owners and do our duty as good, honest citizens. Are you the owners?”

  Mrs. Pedersen looks overjoyed to see the cow. Even Mr. Pedersen breathes a huge sigh of relief. “Why, yes, we are, miss. But how in the world did our cow get miles and miles away?”

  I shru
g casually, as if not particularly worried about how. “Oh, you know, it must have trampled the fence and trough and stormed out. It happens on our farm all the time.”

  Mr. Pedersen scratches his head. “But the fence wasn’t broken until after the cow was gone,” he says. “At least, I think.”

  “And the cow is usually out on a picket line during the day,” says Mrs. Pedersen. “Not in the stable yard. How could it get loose from the line?”

  I glance at Ethan, whose eyes are bugging out because he’s so glad to see me. But I can tell something else too—he’s impressed. I’m carrying it off. I really am an actress!

  “Well, this is quite baffling,” I say. “A real mystery. But I’m so happy to be able to reunite you and your cow. And that must be your beautiful chestnut mare over there.”

  Mrs. Pedersen squints at me. “Yes, that’s our horse.”

  “Now, can I ask why my poor brother is tied up? Did you do that?” I ask Mr. Pedersen, who is still mystified, looking back and forth between me and the cow. Their eldest daughter, who must be Martha, is watching me carefully, while holding two babies in her arms.

  No one answers me, so I ask, “Can you let him go, please?”

  “Your brother broke our fence. And trough. I think. And stole our . . . well, didn’t steal, I guess.” Mrs. Pedersen is looking slightly confused now too. I seem to have made everyone question whether or not the cow did the damage to the fence. And since the cow and the horse are both present and accounted for, no one really stole anything.

  “Of course we can untie him,” says Martha. She places the little boys carefully in the grass and then stoops to untie Ethan’s knots. As she’s doing it, I can’t help noticing she looks at Ethan shyly, a small smile on her lips, almost as if she thinks he’s . . . cute? What? How could my great-great-great-grandmother think that my friend Ethan is . . . Oooff. I can’t even say it.