"MELLIE AND THE NAG"

“I’m with who?!” we shouted in unison.

“Mel, Nat, you will be partners for the scavenger hunt.”

The two of us stood on either side of Miss Teresa, staring each other down like outlaws before high noon. What the heck was she thinking, setting me up with the Nag? All she’d do was hold me back!

The Nag echoed my sentiments: “You can’t put me with her! She’ll just hold me back!”

Miss Teresa drummed her pen against her clipboard. “I’m sorry, girls, but you two are the only ones without partners, yet.”

Gee, I wonder why. It was no wonder why the Nag didn’t have a partner; the real wonder was why I had to get stuck with her.

“Miss Teresa, I refuse to scavenge anything with Mel!” pouted the Nag.

“Yeah, how ‘bout you pair up with the Girl Scout manual, instead? You and that book are like Siamese twins: conjoined under the armpit and sharing a brain.”

Miss Teresa’s eyes rolled up towards the blue yonder. She could pretend all she wanted, but she’d gotten sick of our bickering a long time ago. The sooner she could send us off, the better. “All right, Nat. If you don’t want to team up with Mel, I won’t make you.”

The smug smile that wove into the Nag’s lips quickly crumpled when Miss Teresa added, “You can choose to sit out of the game in the arts ‘n’ crafts tent, instead.” I didn’t like the way her half-lidded eyes shifted towards me, her pen jabbed in my direction like a condemning plastic finger. “Same goes for you too, Mel.”

I glanced down at the ground, biting my lip. Man, the only thing worse than scavenging with the Nag was sitting in the arts ‘n’ crafts tent with a tub of beads—and the Nag—while everyone else did all the scavenging. I was never the loser who sat out of anything; I refused to be that loser now, especially not over the Nag. She never sat out of an activity, either, but that was because if she did, she couldn’t preach to the others how to “do it right,” namely, by the stupid manual.

The Nag’s hand cuffed around my wrist, cutting off the circulation. “I’m stuck with the troop maverick: lovely,” she hissed. “Fine, but I’m taking the lead.”

“You, take the lead? As if!” I ripped her fingers off of my wrist. “How can you see where you’re going when the book’s always in your face?”

We only canned it then and there because Miss Teresa started to give us the Discip-Look: the one warning face away from the arts ‘n’ crafts tent, no questions asked.

Her Nagginess didn’t keep it canned for long, though, as soon as we slipped out of our troop leader’s view. She wanted to go left to find the fern when right was obviously the right direction.

“What makes you so sure that’s left, anyhow?”

“Because I have a compass. See?” She fished it out of her pocket and held it up like it was the Holy Grail, the glass surface glazed by the pillars of sunlight pouring down through the cracks of the treetops.

Pointing to the hovering needle, the Nag said, “The needle moves by the magnetic forces of the earth, and always points north.”

“I’m not asking about the north; I’m asking about the left. Besides, there’s no metal in the woods; just dirt and rocks and wood. Your compass must be broken…or it might be your brain.” Me? I go by the gut. The guts never let me down.

When we did eventually find the fern, I started to fold the leaf up in my pocket when the Nag dove in again. “Don’t do that, you’ll damage it! Stick it in the book where it’ll be safe.” She always looked to the book for help.

“Hey, if you don’t like my way of doin’ things, then get your own fern!”

The Nag pouted. “That’s probably the smartest thing you’ve said all day. With you on the team, I’m going to need spares.” We weren’t a team; I was cool with that.

Overall, it took us almost two hours just to find fourteen of the fifteen items on the list. I’m a lot faster than that, really, I am, but that just proved that the Nag was holding me back, after all. Each of us had our own stash because I had no reason to trust her, or her, me. She had the book; I had my pockets.

At that point, I had lost hope in finishing first in this scavenger hunt, but I couldn’t return to home base without having found everything. The last on the list was a bird’s nest. Luckily, I had the eyes of a falcon. While she pulled out her stupid compass and murmured gibberish to herself, I spotted a little twiggy one tucked away in the hollow of a limb too high to reach. It seemed empty, so I tried to knock it down.

Plunk! Plunk! The rocks bounced off the tree’s trunk like tennis balls, tantalizingly close to my target, but never close enough.

That was when the Nag lunged up from behind me, screeching in my ear like a harrowing school bell: “What’re you doing?”

Yowch. I couldn’t help but flinch a little, but when I recovered, I turned to give her the Evilest Eye I could muster. “What’s it look like? I’m trying to get the last item on the list.”

The Nag looked ready to whack the book over my head. “You’re supposed to look for an empty nest on the ground, not knock one out of a tree! Hundreds of bird species are going extinct because ijits like you throw rocks at their nests! You call yourself a Girl Scout?”

Man, she made me smoke worse than a campfire weenie! I’d show her who called herself a—

If there was one thing I had that the Nag didn’t, it was fox-like reflexes. With mine, I ripped that stupid book out of her hand, tossing it with all the muscle power in my arm! Nag didn’t even know what hit her until her precious manual made—plunk!—impact with the trunk, inches above the bird’s nest, before tumbling down to the base of the tree like a shot duck.

You should’ve seen her face: white and crumpled like the pages of the manual that lay sprawled on top of a gnarly root. That got her off my back for sweet seconds that were too few to count while she dashed in to pick up the other half of her brain.

She groomed it as best as she could, then fired an Evilest Eye of her own in my direction. Teeth clenched, she stormed up to me to jab a finger in my chest, sputtering, “You—you—“

She slouched over in exasperation. “No. You’re not worth it. You’re not worth winning this scavenger hunt. We’re probably dead-last by now, anyway.”

I took my stance and leaned my face into hers. “Whose fault is that?”

“Yours!” The way we kept talking in unison really irritated me…and kind of creeped me out.

The Nag pulled away and stared up at the patches of washed-out blue leaking through the canopy. “Ugh, we’re wasting time. It’s getting late; we got to go back.”

“You can quit, if you want. But I’m not going back looking like the jerk who couldn’t find a lousy bird’s nest.”

“Aw, drop it, will you? We’re not going to win, either way.”

I waved her away. “Hey, if you want to go, go! It’s not like we’re joined at the hip or anything.” Thank goodness for that, I thought as I started searching the ground for a nest, at least until the Nag would scamper back to camp.

It sure took her a while to move it. She held the battered book to her chest like a breastplate, cheeks sucked into her head. “N—as much as I’d love to do that, we’re not supposed to…to split up. What if you—“

I turned away to turn over a rotting log. “Got lost? Phhht, I’ll just find my way back.” I wasn’t afraid of getting lost. I had a record of doing that, as my parents and Miss Teresa and every teacher I’ve ever had will testify. I always found my way back, though, and I never needed a stinking manual or cheap compass.

“Yeah, but if you got lost, I’d be responsible. I won’t be responsible for your irresponsibility, Mel.” Weird, how her voice started to quiver, all of a sudden.

“Don’t be; I don’t want it. See ya.” I waved at her again, expecting to hear her feet crunching through the sheet of twigs and leaves. I got silence.

Only out of curiosity, I darted my eyes back to her. She was still there, swerving her head right and left as if she was about to cross a hectic intersection. Her face was as red and crumpled as an old sheet of construction paper, her lips pursed so tightly that they looked like dried glue stick streaks. What was her problem, besides everything? “What’s the matter, Nag? Can’t find your own way back to camp?”

She scowled. “Shut up, I’m surveying our environment!” It looked more like frantic flipping through her book’s pages to me, pausing to steal random glances of the woods around us. The trees snickered at her as a light breeze teased their branches. Somewhere in the distance, an owl hooted. I would’ve joined them, but for some reason, I didn’t. My only guess why is that she looked so pathetic, it wasn’t really worth wasting a good laugh. Nag never left the group. She was the type who held on to Miss Teresa’s hand wherever, whenever the troop traveled.

I rolled my eyes. Oh, boy. Better step in, Mellie. Show her how a professional does it.

Dusting the dirt off my knees, I got up and pointed towards a rock sitting some feet away. “Hey. You see that rock?”

She paused. Her eyes followed my fingertip until they rested on said rock. “What about it?”

“Duh, retrace your steps! Take the way we came, but in reverse. Does your Bible not have anything like that written in there? That there is where we made our last turn.”

Naturally, the Nag doubted me. “How would you know we passed that rock?”

I smirked. “A rock that looks like you is pretty hard to forget.”

“I’m surprised you’d pay any attention to your surroundings,” she huffed.

Don’t get the wrong idea; I didn’t come with her because I felt sorry for her or anything. Still, I would have to get back to camp before dinner. Besides, if I retraced my steps, maybe I could still find a bird’s nest that I might’ve missed? I marched on ahead of her, beckoning her to follow me.

As she trounced up to me, she panted, “Mel, I swear if you get us even more lost, I’ll—“

“Have to eat me to survive? Not if I eat you first. And who said we were lost?”

That shut her up for a while. At least, until we reached the Nag-like rock. From there, I propped my foot on it and squinted. Before the rock, I remembered the creek that we’d crossed—or more like, tried to push the other into.

My hand jetted out ahead of me. “This way. The creek was this way.”

“You mean south?” Sure enough, the Nag had her compass out again. The needle quivered around her hand.

“How can you tell that’s south when that needle’s always pointing north?”

“I can figure out the other directions that way, ijit. The needle points north, while that over there must be west.” She gestured up towards the sun, which was beginning to roll lazily down the vault of the sky.

“If east is opposite of that, the only direction this could be is south.”

It settled into a kind of pattern, after that: I would remember the things we had seen, and the Nag would look at her compass to find the direction. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t such a cheap piece of garbage, after all? I still wouldn’t use one, though.

Strangely enough, it took us less time to retrace our steps than it did to take our steps in the first place. It was probably the most civil we’d been towards each other all day, in all of living memory, really.

I snapped my fingers the instant I could see the cabins tucked among the foliage on the horizon. A thick, glossy patch of bushes blocked the way.

“A-ha! See, Naggie? Told ya I knew what I was doing! You need to get lost more often!” I would’ve bolted right through that bush if a hand hadn’t caught me by the collar of my vest, making me flip on the ball of my heels.

“What’re you doing?” she hissed in my ear. “Don’t run through the bush! That’s poison ivy, ijit!” She held the book in front of my face to a page with a picture of the bush’s leaves. “Don’t you know poison ivy when you see it? Leaves of three, let them be!”

I wasn’t looking at the picture of the bush, though. No, I was peeking above the book, underneath the bush itself. Something small and twiggy lay there, a stray twig beckoning me to venture underneath the lethal foliage.

I glanced up at the Nag, a smile creeping through my lips. “You are so very right, Nag. In fact, can I have the book, just for a second?”

She peered down at me with eyes squinty with doubt, which softened a little when she said, “You’re not going to throw it again, are you?”

“Oh, no. I have something better planned,” I said, tugging the book out of her hand by its spine. I flopped down on my knees, pressed against the ground as her book acted like an extendable hand, scraping underneath the toxic plant as it raked up the bird’s nest out into the open.

I held the nest over my head like a trophy. “Jackpot!” We may not have won the scavenger hunt, but having found everything on the list was enough to help me rest in peace.

That horrified construction-paper look returned to the Nag’s face. “Mel, you moron! Now it’s got poison ivy all over it! I might never be able to read it, again!”

I wiped the sweat off my brow with my forearm. “Fine. If you don’t want it, I’ll take it off your hands.” I hightailed it around the bush before she could even do a double-take.

“What? Mel, get back here! That’s still mine!”

We weren’t a team. We were never a team, and we probably never would be.

On the other hand, maybe the manual’s not quite so useless, after all?

END