The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. (4 page)

“The dog game?” Dad asks.

“It’s a game we started a couple of years ago, where we assign everybody a dog,” I tell him.

“Like the kind of dog they’d have for a pet?”

“No, the kind of dog they would
be
if they were a dog,” Zig tells him. “Take me, for example. I’m a border collie.”

I nod. “Shaggy hair, super intelligent, and a loyal companion.” Zig smiles, proud to be a border collie.

“And you?” Dad looks at me.

“Irish setter. The American Kennel Club says I’m friendly and amusing.”

“I won’t argue with that.” Dad sneaks a cookie while Nonna’s rinsing the mixing bowl. “Have you assigned me a dog yet?”

Zig gives me a sideways look, and I try hard not to laugh.

“Well?” Dad puts his hands on his hips.

“Basset hound,” Zig says. “Sorry.”

Dad’s gaze drops to the gut hanging over his belt, and he frowns. “Come on.”

“You have to admit . . .” I pat him on the belly. He puts his cookie back.

“I don’t think I like the dog game.”

“That’s okay because the dog game just became the tree game,” Zig proclaims. “Same thing, only with trees.” He points to me. “You’re a sugar maple because they’re colorful and fluttery. I’m . . .”

“You’re that big tall brown tree in front of the school!” I get it now.

“The oak?” Zig says. “Why am I an oak?”

“Because you’re not all showy. But you’re important, and . . . stable.”

Zig taps his chin with his finger. “Okay.” He nods. “I’m an oak. But I want to be a red oak. White oak leaves are all loopy and weird looking.”

“Fine,” I tell him. “Hold on . . . I’ll be right down after I get dressed.”

“I thought we’d hike Great Bear Mountain,” Zig calls up after me.

“Sounds good. Is your mom waiting for us in the car?” I ask from upstairs.

“Nope,” Zig answers. “She had to work. I figured we could bike there.”

“Bike!” I come downstairs and expect to see the I’m-just-kidding look on his face. Nope.

“It’s only eight miles.”

. . .

Only eight miles.

Ha.

It may be eight miles, but the eight miles from our house to the trailhead are not regular miles. They’re eight miles up and down every hill in the Green Mountains. Running didn’t prepare me for this. By the time Zig and I get to the trailhead, my mouth feels like I’ve just eaten a full bag of cotton balls. I sucked up every drop from my water bottle in the first five miles.

Zig catches his breath first. “Ready to hike?”

I wipe my face on the shoulder of my T-shirt and hope my cheeks aren’t hideously red. It’s bad enough that half my hair has escaped from its ponytail and is curling out in frizzy little explosions around my ears. I wonder what kind of tree has scraggly edges and shiny cheeks.

By the time I catch up to Zig, he’s already stopped at a tree with low branches, squinting up at the leaves through his thick glasses. They’re held together on the side with duct tape again.

“Zig.” I point to the sticky gray mass of tape. “You look like a bad cartoon of a nerd.”

“This will be in style soon. I’m a trendsetter.” He laughs and pushes up the glasses. “Besides, frames are expensive.” I look down at my sneakers. Zig’s dad left before I met him, and his mom works two jobs.

“Here.” Zig pushes the leaf key into my hands. “You follow the key and ask me the questions, and I’ll let you know which answer to go with.”

I ask, he answers, and I turn to whatever page the book says to go to. It’s pretty easy.

“Okay, are the leaves simple or compound?” I try to sound official.

“Simple.”

“That doesn’t look simple to me.” I frown and look over his shoulder at what appears to be a pretty fancy leaf.

“They’re simple.” He elbows me back onto the trail. “That means they’re not compound—with more than one blade attached to a single stalk. Remember?”

I nod, even though I don’t. The leaf key says turn to page 4.

“Are they alternate or opposite?”

“Opposite.”

“Opposite of what?”

Zig sighs. “Each other. They’re across from each other on the same twig.” He points to the spot on the branch where they’re attached.

“Okay, hold on.” I try to flip to page 6 like it says, but I end up dropping the booklet. It lands at the edge of a puddle.

“Sorry.” I rescue it and wipe the mud onto my shorts. Zig says the leaves have five lobes with a palmate arrangement, smooth edges with few teeth, and rounded sinuses, whatever that means, so I turn to page 9.

“Okay, when you break the stalk that connects the leaf blade to the twig, is there a milky sap?”

“Let’s see.” Zig snaps off a whole branch so he can see more clearly, and I lean in to check for sap. My cheek brushes against his shoulder, and he jumps back as if I’ve shocked him.

I step forward again, careful to stay in my own space this time. “Any milky sap?” I ask hopefully.

“No.” He frowns and seems sad about this.

“Are you sure?” I squint at the leaf. No sap, milky or otherwise. Maybe he did it wrong. “Try another leaf.”

“Nope, no milky sap there either.”

“Huh.”

“Gianna?”

“Yeah?”

“The key?”

“What?”

“The key. What does the key say if there’s no milky sap?”

“Oh!” I forgot about the key. It didn’t occur to me that we could go on without milky sap, but we’re in luck. We can turn to page 12.

“Do the leaves have five lobes without a downy underside, or three lobes with a downy underside?”

“Five. Not downy.”

“Okay.” The guide says to go to page 16 now, and I’m wondering just how long this is going to go on. Maybe we’re on one of those reality TV shows, and it’s just going to keep having us turn pages all afternoon, with people watching from a hidden camera to see how long we’ll stay at it. I turn to page 16, and finally, there are no more questions.

“It’s a sugar maple!” I yell. I do a little maple dance to celebrate. “A sugar maple! We found a sugar maple!”

“Cool.” Zig takes two plastic Baggies from his backpack and puts a sugar maple leaf inside of each. He labels the bags with a permanent marker and hands me one.

“Thanks,” I say. “Phew! I guess we can get moving now.” I tuck the leaf and the guide into my backpack and climb on up the hill, leaves crunching under my feet.

“Gee?”

“Yeah?” I feel much better now that our leaf is identified.

“You still need to collect and identify twenty-two more leaves.”

It’s going to be a long afternoon.

. . .

It takes us three hours to reach the summit of what’s usually a forty-five-minute hill, and I’m happy enough to cheer when I finally see the sky open up over the tree line. I stop for a second to take in the gentle curves of the hills below us, the flat mirror of Lake Champlain beyond, the Adirondacks looming, purplish gray on the other side.

“Over here.” Zig points to a flat stretch of rock next to a craggy pine tree.

By the time we plop down on the warm rock, we’ve identified a grand total of six leaves. Out of twenty-five.

“This is child abuse,” I whine. Zig pulls a big bag of M&M’S from his backpack and rips it open. He shakes a bunch into his hand, picks out the blue ones, which he’s done ever since he read
Chasing Vermeer,
funnels the rest into the bag, and hands it to me. I take a big fistful of rainbow colors and pop them into my mouth all at once.

“We’ve already had two weeks to work on it, though,” Zig says through blue lips. “This last-minute stuff kills you, Gee. How come you always do this to yourself?”

“I don’t know.” I sigh and lean back on the flat rock. I close my eyes, and the sun beats right through them so I see red. It could be August, it feels so warm today, but October in Vermont can be tricky. One minute, you’re sunbathing, and the next minute, it starts snowing like crazy.

“It’s not that I don’t plan to do the work.” I open my eyes and pick at some moss growing out of a crack in the rock. “It’s just that I’m always busy with cross-country and stuff. Then when it gets to be almost the due date, and things are . . . well . . . urgent, I get all stressed out.”

I’ve made a little mound of crumbly dry moss hair on the rock. Zig puts his hand over mine and frowns. “Stop picking at that,” he says. “It’s protected.”

“The moss is an endangered species or something?” I laugh. The laugh comes out funny, though. My hand is all tingly, where his warm hand covers it. Maybe my hands are just cold. Before I can figure it out, his hand is gone. I guess he was only worried about the moss.

“It’s not endangered, exactly, but it’s protected. It only grows in an alpine habitat, which only exists at the tops of mountains around here. This one, too.” He scoots over a few rocks and points to a delicate pink flower with dusty leaves that seems to be growing right out of the rock. Amazing.

I lean down to smell the flower but can’t catch any scent. I run my fingers over the smooth rock where its leaves are resting, all gray and feathery.

When I look up, Zig is leaning over a different rock, with his forehead almost touching it. “Check this out.” He waves me over. I squat down next to him but can’t see what he’s looking at.

“Isn’t it awesome?” He leans in closer.

“Well, it’s a nice rock. Kind of like that one I was sitting on over there before you called me over here. They’re all really nice rocks, I guess.”

“No.” He motions me in closer. “Look.”

I scrunch way down and squint at the rock like he’s doing, and then I see it. Tiny little seashells in the stone. Ocean shells. On top of a mountaintop that feels like it’s miles in the sky. I look up and see Zig’s grin.

“They’re fossils. From when this whole valley used to be part of the ocean, millions of years ago, before the mountains formed.”

I run my fingers over the lines of the fossils and feel like I haven’t been around very long.

A flock of Canada geese flies past, heading south along the lake, honking like crazy. They sound like they’re arguing about which way to go.

Honk, honk! No, we were supposed to take a left at that tall
mountain back there!

A left?! Honk! I thought it was a right.

When the geese grow quiet and so small I can’t see their wings flapping anymore, Zig starts packing up.

“Let’s go. It’s going to get dark, and we want to head down while there’s still enough light to collect leaves.”

I put the empty M&M’S bag in my backpack and take a last look over all the shades of red and gold. It feels like I could fly off the mountain, leap onto one of those patches of color, and land like I’m on Nonna’s big patchwork quilt over the down mattress.

The rocks don’t feel like Nonna’s quilt, though. As usual, I try to go too fast and fall on the way down. I land at the base of a tree with smooth brown bark and kind of striped leaves.

“Hey!” I shout to Zig. “We don’t have this one yet!”

“It’s an American beech.” He barely looks at the leaves.

“What about the key? How do you know?”

“Don’t need a key for this one.” He pulls down a branch so I can reach to pluck off two leaves. “When Grampa was alive, he used to take me out to his camp, and we’d see these all over. They’re the last trees to lose their leaves in the winter. You see, none have fallen yet.” He points to the ground at the base of the tree, bare and brown except for a few bright red maple leaves that have blown over, another tree’s litter scattered in the wind. “Stubborn old tree.”

“Nonna,” I say, rubbing a sturdy leaf between my fingers.

“Huh?”

“It’s a Nonna tree.”

Zig nods. “Nonna’s an American beech for sure. And here’s the best part.” He bends down to pick up a small brown nut. “Beechnuts.”

“Do you eat them?”

“People don’t usually eat them.” He smiles. “But bears love them.”

“Not here.” I laugh. “Bears don’t hang out this close to the main road.”

“No?” Zig smiles. “Then who do you suppose did that?” He points to a spot on the tree about two feet above my head, where four deep claw marks have left trails in the bark. How big would a bear have to be to reach up that high with his claws? And more importantly, if he’s the one who made all these nuts fall at our feet, when is he coming back for his snack?

“Let’s go!” I grab Zig’s sleeve and give a quick tug before I start off stumbling down the hill again.

“Slow down. Bears won’t be out now with all the noise you’re making. And besides, you miss all the good stuff when you go that fast.”

Zig puts out an arm to stop me. Dry leaves rustle in front of our feet.

“Look,” he whispers.

A black-and-gold garter snake stretches out on the rock in the sun about three feet in front of us. I would have stepped right on him. His warm, shiny scales gleam smooth and black as the marble counter in our bathroom. His eyes are beads of glass, and his tongue flicks out so long and thin, it’s like a needle tasting the air. We stand and watch for a minute before I try to take one step to get just a little closer. When I do, the snake pulls itself off the rock into the leaves at the side of the trail. The point of his tail is the last to disappear into a pile of yellow-brown leaves that I recognize.

“Paper-tree leaves.” I scoop up a few. They’re damp underneath and smell like the earth when I hold them to my nose.

“It’s a birch.” Zig looks up at the tree’s cool white bark.

“I know. We had one in the yard when I was little, and I used to peel off the bark and draw on it.” I reach out to touch a little piece of bark that’s peeling off the tree and squint at the sun setting through its leaves. Some of the branches are drooping so low they almost touch the ground, so it’s easy for me to grab a couple of leaves and add them to my collection. I drop my backpack and jump up to catch a branch that’s just begging me to hang on it for a minute.

“Gianna Z.” Zig looks up and smiles. “Swinger of birches.”

“Huh?” I cross my eyes at him, get swinging, and flip a leg over the branch so I’m sitting on it. It dips lower but doesn’t break.

“ ‘Swinger of Birches.’ It’s a Robert Frost poem in our English book. I read ahead.”

“Of course you did.” I drop a leaf in his hair.