I glared at the cleaning rag that I was holding. Why me? Why do I have to do all the cleaning? OK, so maybe not all of it, but I have a life...
If you're going to read this, I better tell you who the "I" in this story is. Don't you hate stories where you get through to whole thing, and never find out who the "I" is? Anyway, "I" am Kathleen Keynes. I wish. I'm really Kathleen Martin. Mar-tin. Not Mar-shin. I'm 13 years old and I live in ... well... Podunk Ville, Iowa. I have three brothers and sisters, and of course, a mom and a dad. I hate it here. It seems that I have to do everything, just because I'm the oldest. My only escape is my friends, who I don't see very often, other than at church. But there is one other way we correspond. The forest tree. "What the...?" you may be thinking. I guess I'll have to describe it to you. The forest tree is a place which only a few know about- and that would be us- us being Rachel, Liz, Elisa, Katie, and I. We call ourselves "The Five Musketeers." Anyway, the forest tree is a HUGE tree, with a little tree house in the topmost branches. The reason I say "correspondence" instead of "seeing each other" is because we don't exactly see each other there. Basically all that is in the small tree house in the top of the Forest Tree (we just call the whole thing the Forest Tree or the FT) is posters on the walls, a BB gun, a sword, and a bow and a few arrows. There are also shoeboxes with names on them and a whiteboard. We leave private messages written on paper in the shoeboxes, and "public" messages on the whiteboard. We each have a poster that we personally picked out and the BB gun, sword, bow and arrows we pooled our money for and bought. Nobody other than the Five Musketeers know about the FT. For some reason no body else has found it, and we have always felt inclined to tell no one. Why? We have no idea. How we found the FT is another complete story in itself, which I will tell briefly later.
Its 11:56... when will I get to go to lunch? That was supposed to be at 11:30! Mom probably forgot that I was cleaning the house today. I cleaned until 12:34, when I just got fed up and went to find my mom and ask her for a break and a portable lunch. She said, "You can make your own sandwich if you don't want anything that fancy!" So I ran out, dropped the rag I was still holding, and quickly stuffed a PB&J sandwich and chips and a Coke in a small backpack. I took my backpack, hurried up to my room, glanced outside, put on my SBR hoodie, got a pen, a little notebook, and a flashlight and stuck them in the backpack also. I walked downstairs, then to the back door, and ambled nonchalantly across my back lawn to the large, thick patch of trees, to small to be called a forest, but to big to just be a random patch of trees. I knew that nobody would notice me going in unless I was running at top speed. Why not? As always, we don't know. Maybe it's some magical protection.
As usual when I walked past the first tree, it got suddenly dark. I imagine that is why nobody else really ever goes in there, other than, of course the Five Musketeers. I opened my backpack and retrieved the flashlight, carefully placed to the side so it was easy to find in the dark. I switched it on and looked at the tree next to me. Yes! I was in the right place. The marking on the tree next to me told me so, so I continued walking carefully thorough the trees, following some invisible path that only a few people knew. The flashlight only shined about a foot and a half in front of me, but that was enough for my purposes. It was about 15 minutes that I walked, (Some was in circles, but what the heck? That's the only way to get there!) following the markings on the trees, to the Forest Tree. That was the most difficult part about going to the FT- getting up. The FT was the biggest tree I'd ever seen, that is except when my family went to the Redwood Forests in California, but that doesn't count. I started the swing or climb or jump or step or walk or whatever is the appropriate word up the tree.
It took about five minutes to reach the top. When I finally got there, I had a strange feeling that someone was there. Oh well, it just had to be one of the Five Musketeers playing a joke on me. I slowly opened the little door into the FT and crawled in. I jumped and screamed when somebody else screamed from the corner. It wasn't Katie, or Rachel, or Liz, or Elisa. "Oh my Gosh!" I said aloud.