Free Bear by Ellen Miles

CHAPTER ONE
    “Look — look — look!” The Bean was pointing and shouting.
“B!
I see a
B! B
is for Bean!”
    Lizzie had to smile. Her little brother was getting really good at his letters. He could always spot
A
for Adam (his real name, not that anyone ever called him that),
B
for Bean,
C
for Charles (Lizzie’s middle brother), and, of course,
L
for Lizzie, who was the oldest. “That’s good!” she said, noting that the car passing them also had a
D
and a
Y
in its license plate. Excellent! The Bean wasn’t so good at those letters yet, but Lizzie needed both of them for her bingo card.
    The Petersons were piled into the family van, and they were driving north. Lizzie liked the sound of that: It was adventurous, like anexpedition. So what if they weren’t going all the way to the North Pole, or even as far north as Canada? “Will there still be snow, even though it’s March?” she had asked when she first heard they were going to Vermont. Lizzie loved being outside, even in winter.
Especially
in winter! She loved sledding, building snow forts and snowmen, and even helping Dad shovel the driveway. The only thing she wasn’t so sure about was whether she would enjoy cross-country skiing as much as Dad thought she would.
    Lizzie had gone to a ski resort once with her best friend, Maria, and Maria’s father. She had been scared of riding the chairlift, a million miles above the snowy hill. She had worried about getting
off
the chairlift (how exactly did that work?). And she had been
terrified
of zooming downhill on the two planks that felt stapled to her feet.
    Lizzie was strong. She could do twenty pull-ups and she could run fast, but sports that took a lot of coordination were not exactly her specialty.
    Thankfully, Mom and Dad said that the resort type of skiing was way too expensive for a family vacation. And Dad kept telling her that cross-country skiing was a lot less scary. “It’s just like you’re walking through the woods, only on skis,” he said again now, as they drove north.
    That sounded easier — but it also sounded like a lot of work, trudging through the deep snow. Oh, well. Lizzie was willing to give it a try.
    Dad also kept promising that there would be lots of snow in Vermont. “In fact, I heard they had a big snowstorm last week, and there might be another while we’re there!” He sounded excited.
    “Snow? Where?” The Bean stared out the window.
    Lizzie looked too, hoping to see snow on the ground. But all she saw were rocks and dead-looking grass. “We still have two hours to go!” she told her brother. The Bean groaned, but Lizziedidn’t mind. She actually liked car trips, the longer the better.
    She liked to watch out the window. She liked the special snacks Mom packed, like cheesy crackers and baby carrots. And she liked how her family played games like Twenty Questions, I Spy, or — her new favorite — Dog Breed Bingo, which she had made up. She and Charles were playing it right now.
    After a while, Lizzie looked back at the card in her lap. PEKINGESE, BULLDOG, POODLE, HUSKY, SHAR-PEI, it said. Lizzie had crossed off all the letters she had seen as they drove: the E’s, the S’s, and the O’s. She had spotted a
K
at a gas station, an
H
on a hotel sign, and an
R
at a railroad crossing, and crossed those off, too. She glanced at Charles’s card. His read: DACHSHUND, ST. BERNARD, LABRADOR, DALMATIAN, BEAGLE. He had a lot of letters crossed off, but not as many as she did. She had a good feeling that she was going to bethe first to cross off all the letters in one of her breeds. Yay!
    As she watched, Charles crossed off all three of his B’s. Eek! Thanks to the Bean’s help, he was getting closer. Lizzie crossed off her B, too, then stared out the window, concentrating hard. All she needed was a
U
and she’d win.
    Then a big truck rumbled by. LABORATORY SUPPLY said a big sign on its side.
    “Husky!” yelled Lizzie, one second before Charles yelled,