Free Girls Rule! by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Page B

thought. Surely, if they stayed in Buckman, they would look at other houses for rent before they chose one with termites.
    He turned his attention to the last project for school—where would he choose to be plane-wrecked?He thought Caroline Malloy had chosen Australia, but she could always change her mind, especially if she found out he had chosen the North Pole. So what should he choose? Africa?
    He imagined himself in a jungle. He imagined himself sitting under a banana tree. He imagined looking up and seeing Caroline swinging toward him on a vine. Nope. Not Africa.
    The Sahara Desert, maybe? He imagined himself crawling up a sand dune looking for water. He imagined himself reaching the top and coming face-to-face with Caroline, crawling up the other side. Scratch the desert.
    He could not imagine Caroline at the North Pole, however, so he decided to stick with that.
    When he got to school the next morning, some people were checking maps at the front of the room. Some were looking through books at the back of the room. Others were going to and from the library.
    Wally went to the library and spread out a map of the Arctic. It was very white. It was very empty. No roads, no cities, no lakes, no rivers. He closed his eyes and waved one finger around and around above the map, then let it drop.
    There. Right there was where his two-engine plane would crash, about two inches from the spot marked NORTH POLE.
    Wally decided he would use his hatchet to dig out blocks of ice and build himself an igloo. Unlike the boy in
Hatchet,
however, he would find a box of matches inthe airplane. He could not see himself trying to start a fire without matches at the North Pole. And maybe he’d have a ham sandwich and a blanket, too.
    First step: Get out of the plane in case it was going to explode.
    “Hey, Wally!” a boy said. “I’m going to be shipwrecked off the coast of New Zealand. Want to be shipwrecked with me?”
    “No!” Wally said emphatically. Too close to Australia.
    “Well, don’t get your britches in an uproar,” the friend said. “I was just asking!"
    The more Wally thought about Caroline, however, the more afraid he was that on the last day of school, she would announce that she had been plane-wrecked in the same place he had. Then everyone would say, “Oh,
Wal
-ly! How’s
Car
-oline?” the whole rest of the summer. Or worse:
    “Caroline and Wal-ly,
    Sitting in a tree,
    K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”
    It seemed that every time Wally unfolded a map, Caroline Malloy walked by his chair. Every time he got a book off the shelf, Caroline saw what it was. She was probably only pretending she was going to Australia, he thought. Whatever place he chose, he had to keep secret.
    An
island
. That was the only place Wally could escape her, he was sure. He got a magnifying glass from the librarian, held it over a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, and chose Banaba, one of the smallest islands he could find. It was so small, in fact, that Wally couldn’t find out anything about it at all, and that suited him just fine.
    Rainfall in the Pacific Islands varied from a few inches to many feet per year. Some islands were merely mounds of sand on a reef. Some were volcanic lava. Some had mountains and some had thick jungles. Wally decided his island could be anything he wanted it to be. But whenever he unfolded a map of the Pacific Ocean, he hid it beneath a map of the Arctic, just to fool Caroline. He absolutely would
not
go all summer with friends teasing him about being in an igloo with her, which was exactly what they would do if both he and Caroline chose the North Pole.
    “Hey, Wally!” they would say. “Was it cold enough for you, or did
Car
-oline keep you warm?”
    After school that day, the boys stayed behind a few minutes to help the music teacher load some instruments into her van. By the time they finished, the Malloy girls had already left, so the Hatfords walked home alone.
    “Hey, Josh,” Wally asked. “If you were