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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Novel
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Novel
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Novel
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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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From international bestseller Stephen King, a classic story that engages our emotions on the most primal level, a fairy tale grimmer than Grimm but aglow with a girl’s indomitable spirit.

What if the woods were full of them? And of course they were, the woods were full of everything you didn’t like, everything you were afraid of and instinctively loathed, everything that tried to overwhelm you with nasty, no-brain panic.

The brochure promised a “moderate-to-difficult” six-mile hike on the Maine-New Hampshire branch of the Appalachian Trail, where nine-year-old Trisha McFarland was to spend Saturday with her older brother Pete and her recently divorced mother. When she wanders off to escape their constant bickering, then tries to catch up by attempting a shortcut through the woods, Trisha strays deeper into a wilderness full of peril and terror. Especially when night falls.

Trisha has only her wits for navigation, only her ingenuity as a defense against the elements, only her courage and faith to withstand her mounting fear. For solace she tunes her Walkman to broadcasts of Boston Red Sox games and the gritty performances of her hero, number thirty-six, relief pitcher Tom Gordon. And when her radio’s reception begins to fade, Trisha imagines that Tom Gordon is with her—her key to surviving an enemy known only by the slaughtered animals and mangled trees in its wake.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherScribner
Release dateJul 15, 1999
ISBN9780684835839
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Novel
Author

Stephen King

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly, Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

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Reviews for The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Rating: 3.470418995234182 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

2,434 ratings88 reviews

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  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Slow story with some switching between perspectives. Also some issues with enough detail to know what author was talking about.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Typical Stephen King suspense/horror book. I liked it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved this book. I am not a Stephen King fan...his books are a little too frightening for me. But this was just wonderful. I would read it again and again.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Like all of Stephen Kings book, it was very well written. That's why he's the master. I thoroughly enjoyed the story. Right from the start you were pulling for Trisha to find her way out of the woods. The adventure she endured would have broke many of us, but the resilience of a child never ceases to amaze me. I gave this a 4 stars, if I could have, I would have said 4.5 stars.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This novel had little dialogue and LOTS of descriptive prose. Most of the time I do not like books written this way. This book was OK, but not one of my favorite King novels.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Stephen King's Grimm fairy tale of nine-year-old Trisha lost in the woods, failed to hold my interest despite that promising premise. The story meanders rather than propels forward. Trisha's words and inner thoughts often seemed far too knowing, advanced, and smart-alecky for a child that age in such a harrowing situation. This novel contains not nearly King's usual level of horror, blood, and gore, but as assuredly this still is a nighmarish tale, he does convey some appropriate sources of terror, such as marauding, bloodsucking mosquitos; and clouds of minges and noseeums delivering outsized bites.Though not noted anywhere, I'd guess that King's inspiration for this story may have been the true-life survival adventure of twelve-year-old Donn Fendler, who in 1939 was separated from his family and was lost on Maine's Mount Katahdin until rescued nine days later (and sixteen pounds lighter).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved every minute of this book! I have to admit, not being a sports person, I had no idea who Tom Gordon was. When I found out he was a ball player, I hesitated, thinking that I didn't want to read about baseball. I am so very glad that I decided to take a chance and dive in anyway and the baseball part didn't put me off in the least. I was pulled in, rooting for Trish all the way, and thanked my lucky stars that I have never come close to being lost in the woods. I'd have never made it!. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon could be one of my favorite Stephen King books ever!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a slow book with a mixture of survival and adventure. First Looking over this I expected it to be a little more thrilling. Although this book didn't have the creepy stereotypical plot expected from Stephen King, it still gave a great sense of adventure. This book taught me a few helpful skills to help live out in the woods, but it still didn't have the detail I was looking for. This book had a fairly quick start, Trisha wonders of the trail to go to the bathroom, this is when she decided to take a shortcut, little did she know this move could kill her. Trisha didn't care what happened to her at the time, she felt like she was hated. If it wasn't for this girls huge amount of knowledge, and baseball that kept her moving she would surely be dead. By the end of the book she realizes she was loved, and that her mother would rather die herself then lose her own daughter.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not terribly frightening story about a nine-year-old girl lost in the woods. Well-written and suspenseful.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A quick read, but it really displays how well King can write from the perspective of a child.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a great content nice one liked it a lot
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Amazing short read. Trish is tough as nail but as a father, it still deeply hurt me reading what she goes through. Also, SK constantly plays with his constant reader as to the presence of the supernatural, creating a delectable fantastic moment.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Haven't read hardly any Stephen King, as I'm not into horror. I was given this so would not have read it otherwise.
    It is not to bad, there is not much suspense, just a general feeling of unease and disquiet that the little girl feels and she stumbles through the woods and into more and more danger.
    It is not a fully believable story as I do not think a nine year old would last that long alone.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I've read this twice and both time I had a hard time getting through it.
    I don't even know why! It wasn't awful.

    This book makes my very itchy.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    i love this book so far
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Didn't love this book...not one his best.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The suspense keeps your attention at all times, had to force myself to take breaks. I read this book once when I was younger, around 11 or 12, I'm 18 now and I fell in love with this book all over again.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent book. I would've liked a little more in the end of the book. The life of Trisha after being rescued. Nevertheless, it was a great book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book is about a girl who gets lost in the woods during a family hiking trip. As she struggles to survive her ordeal in the woods she draws strength both from her idol Tom Gordon and from her Walkman that allows her to listen in on her favorite Red Sox games.I was impressed by the tenacity and skill that Trisha shows surviving in the woods for as long as she does. The story does get a bit slow at points and I kept waiting for something to happen...aside from the normal disasters you would encounter wandering around in the woods. There is also a lot about baseball in here; I am not even anywhere close to being a baseball fan and many of the baseball references were lost on me.Overall an okay read. If you are interested in survival stories with a very light element of horror to them you might like this. I did enjoy some of the survival elements here and the book is a quick read. I didn’t enjoy this nearly as much as some of Stephen King’s other books though.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was the first Stephen King novel I read and I picked it because it was his shortest. I've read several since then and this isn't his best work. I didn't think that girl would ever get out of the woods.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not bad survival/horror story. Strange bear / demon creature turns up at the end. Mostly enjoyed it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I enjoyed this one. Its a pretty quick read, and King proved with this one that not all of his books have to be epic to be enjoyable. This is also a little more ambiguous with the supernatural, which is interesting. King's books always the supernatural elements that were terrifying, but he also had downright awful humans who were just as scary. But in this book he uses nature to be both beautiful and terrifying. He tells the story of a 9 year girl, big for her age, who gets lost in the woods and uses her will to survive. She has to forage for food and water, fend off insects and animals, and try to keep her wits about her. But, somewhere along the way, she starts to lose her mind a bit, and that's where the supernatural takes off. Did it happen, or was it all in her head? I'm like Mulder in that regard, where I Want To Believe, but the ambiguity is also scary. All I know is, the next time I go hiking, I'm staying on the path.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Juni 1998.Patricia "Trisha" McFarland på 9 år er på en udflugt med sin mor Quilla Andersen og sin storebror Pete McFarland. Forældrene blev skilt for et år siden. Quilla har lært Trisha visse basale regler om hvordan man overlever på egen hånd i naturen og det viser sig praktisk, da Trisha går lidt for sig selv og forvilder sig bort fra stien. Hun bliver skræmt af en slange, falder og mister orienteringen. Det skulle bare være en kort udflugt, så hun har gummisko og nogenlunde fornuftigt tøj på, men ikke noget af det udstyr man ville tage med på en dagslang tur i ødemarken. Trisha er vældig glad for baseball og for sin far, og dem tænker hun meget på, mens hun følger en strømmende flod nedad og ud af skoven. Desværre er hun også hurtigt ude af det område, der bliver eftersøgt.Hun er ikke helt tabt bag en vogn, så hun spiser bregner (fiddleheads) og smører mudder på myggestik og senere over det hele for at slippe for flere bid og stik. Men hun drikker også af vandet i floden og får diarre og opkastninger som tak. Hun synes også at hun bliver forfulgt af noget, måske en stor bjørn. Hun finder checkerberries og beechnuts og får fra nu af følgeskab af en imaginær Tom Gordon. Feber og lungebetændelse følger.Imens er forældrene ved at miste håbet som dagene går uden at hun er fundet.Til sidst kommer hun ud af skovene, desværre med en bjørn/uhyre/gud i hælene. En krybskytte skræmmer bjørnen væk og redder Trisha.Hun bliver genforenet med forældrene på hospitalet og alt er godt.Udmærket roman, men handlingen kan stå på et frimærke.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Trish McFarland, a nine-year-old girl goes hiking with her mother and brother. While these two are engaged in conversation, Trish leaves the trail and becomes hopelessly lost in the woods. The more she tries to find her way out, the more upset and injured she becomes. Meanwhile, there’s something or someone who keeps watching her. As Trish’s physical state deteriorates, she imagines (or was it really her imagination) that Tom Gordon is giving her hints for survival.Not too much happens in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Where’s the imaginative story I’ve come to expect from the author? This book was rather boring. I couldn’t wait for Trish to get out of the woods. That wasn’t from fear, but rather from the tedious story. It was neither funny nor frightening. I think the author can do better. I must add, though, that I liked the author’s postscript. As a matter of fact, I liked it better than the novel.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    That’s it exactly – a fairy tale. I read some reviews on Amazon.com that cited the utter unbelievability of this novel and that’s right if you forget that it’s fiction. As fiction it works fairly well. Tricia is separated from her family and gets lost. She has her lunch and a bottle of soda but that’s it. She remembers from somewhere that certain things are edible and survives on those too. The water she drinks though, makes her sick and she vows to never tell anyone that when she had diarrhea she fell right over into it. The presence of the monster though it what was impressive. King has gone the way of Lovecraft in crafting this monster. We never really get to see it. We see evidence of it – trees ripped up, disemboweled corpses of deer and the creepy, watched feeling that Trisha has sometimes. Once, she fell asleep and woke up with a circle around her that was scraped into the earth. I liked the effect.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Definitely one of the better Kings I've read - short and sweet, just walking the line between realism and King's brand of cosmic supernatural, and plenty realistically terrifying. It kinda makes me wish I liked baseball.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nine year old Trisha gets lost in the woods. But these aren't just any old woods. These are the woods of Stephen King, and of course, that means something spooky has to be in there too! And it is! But Trisha's love for the Boston Red Sox, and their closer Tom Gordon, keeps her going and going. I had fun reading this and I totally geeked out by using an actual Tom Gordon baseball card as my book mark!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Not as exciting as the other books I've read by Stephen King. This one is a very mild read, and the creepy, scary bit might not be so creepy depending on how you interpret it. If you want a fast, easy Stephen King book that won't give you nightmares, this is a great pick, but if you are looking for the thrill of his darker work, this one may be very dull. I enjoyed the wilderness survival aspect of this book a lot, but the baseball references got a bit hard to follow. I'd have liked just a bit more narrative assistance to help me understand the baseball stuff as it applied to the story, cause otherwise those segments were just meaningless filler for me as someone who doesn't follow baseball and know the jargon.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    It was a short book but it took my months to finish because I had to force myself to keep reading it and I just couldn’t get into it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Amazingly my stepdaughter gave me a Stephen King book, that I haven't read, for Christmas. A nine year old girl gets totally lost while hiking. Her Mom and older brother were too busy arguing too notice. We get to experience her struggles including what's going on in her head. One of her coping mechanisms is to invoke Tom Gordon, her favorite Red Sox player along for the ride. She encounters all sorts of terrain, including bogs and rocky hills. She scrounges for whatever she can find to eat and water to drink with some horrendous digestive consequences! And, oh yeah, there is that unidentified monster stalking her along the way. It is always a treat to experience the character's thoughts and join them on a familiar yet not so normal journey that Mr. King is so good at describing! You just never know where he'll take you next!

Book preview

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - Stephen King

This is for my son Owen, who ended up teaching me a lot more about the game of baseball than I ever taught him.

JUNE 1998

Pregame

THE WORLD had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. Trisha McFarland discovered this when she was nine years old. At ten o’clock on a morning in early June she was sitting in the back seat of her mother’s Dodge Caravan, wearing her blue Red Sox batting practice jersey (the one with 36 GORDON on the back) and playing with Mona, her doll. At ten thirty she was lost in the woods. By eleven she was trying not to be terrified, trying not to let herself think, This is serious, this is very serious. Trying not to think that sometimes when people got lost in the woods they got seriously hurt. Sometimes they died.

All because I needed to pee, she thought . . . except she hadn’t needed to pee all that badly, and in any case she could have asked Mom and Pete to wait up the trail a minute while she went behind a tree. They were fighting again, gosh what a surprise that was, and that was why she had dropped behind a little bit, and without saying anything. That was why she had stepped off the trail and behind a high stand of bushes. She needed a breather, simple as that. She was tired of listening to them argue, tired of trying to sound bright and cheerful, close to screaming at her mother, Let him go, then! If he wants to go back to Malden and live with Dad so much, why don’t you just let him? I’d drive him myself if I had a license, just to get some peace and quiet around here! And what then? What would her mother say then? What kind of look would come over her face? And Pete. He was older, almost fourteen, and not stupid, so why didn’t he know better? Why couldn’t he just give it a rest? Cut the crap was what she wanted to say to him (to both of them, really), just cut the crap.

The divorce had happened a year ago, and their mother had gotten custody. Pete had protested the move from suburban Boston to southern Maine bitterly and at length. Part of it really was wanting to be with Dad, and that was the lever he always used on Mom (he understood with some unerring instinct that it was the one he could plant the deepest and pull on the hardest), but Trisha knew it wasn’t the only reason, or even the biggest one. The real reason Pete wanted out was that he hated Sanford Middle School.

In Malden he’d had it pretty well whipped. He’d run the computer club like it was his own private kingdom; he’d had friends—nerds, yeah, but they went around in a group and the bad kids didn’t pick on them. At Sanford Middle there was no computer club and he’d only made a single friend, Eddie Rayburn. Then in January Eddie moved away, also the victim of a parental breakup. That made Pete a loner, anyone’s game. Worse, a lot of kids laughed at him. He had picked up a nickname which he hated: Pete’s CompuWorld.

On most of the weekends when she and Pete didn’t go down to Malden to be with their father, their mother took them on outings. She was grimly dedicated to these, and although Trisha wished with all her heart that Mom would stop—it was on the outings that the worst fights happened—she knew that wasn’t going to happen. Quilla Andersen (she had taken back her maiden name and you could bet Pete hated that, too) had the courage of her convictions. Once, while staying at the Malden house with Dad, Trisha had heard their father talking to his own Dad on the phone. If Quilla had been at Little Big Horn, the Indians would have lost, he said, and although Trisha didn’t like it when Dad said stuff like that about Mom—it seemed babyish as well as disloyal—she couldn’t deny that there was a nugget of truth in that particular observation.

Over the last six months, as things grew steadily worse between Mom and Pete, she had taken them to the auto museum in Wiscasset, to the Shaker Village in Gray, to The New England Plant-A-Torium in North Wyndham, to Six-Gun City in Randolph, New Hampshire, on a canoe trip down the Saco River, and on a skiing trip to Sugarloaf (where Trisha had sprained her ankle, an injury over which her mother and father had later had a screaming fight; what fun divorce was, what really good fun).

Sometimes, if he really liked a place, Pete would give his mouth a rest. He had pronounced Six-Gun City for babies, but Mom had allowed him to spend most of the visit in the room where the electronic games were, and Pete had gone home not exactly happy but at least silent. On the other hand, if Pete didn’t like one of the places their Mom picked (his least favorite by far had been the Plant-A-Torium; returning to Sanford that day he had been in an especially boogery frame of mind), he was generous in sharing his opinion. Go along to get along wasn’t in his nature. Nor was it in their mother’s, Trisha supposed. She herself thought it was an excellent philosophy, but of course everyone took one look at her and pronounced her her father’s child. Sometimes that bothered her, but mostly she liked it.

Trisha didn’t care where they went on Saturdays, and would have been perfectly happy with a steady diet of amusement parks and mini-golf courses just because they minimized the increasingly horrible arguments. But Mom wanted the trips to be instructive, too—hence the Plant-A-Torium and Shaker Village. On top of his other problems, Pete resented having education rammed down his throat on Saturdays, when he would rather have been up in his room, playing Sanitarium or Riven on his Mac. Once or twice he had shared his opinion (This sucks! pretty well summed it up) so generously that Mom had sent him back to the car and told him to sit there and compose himself until she and Trisha came back.

Trisha wanted to tell Mom she was wrong to treat him like he was a kindergartener who needed a timeout—that someday they’d come back to the van and find it empty, Pete having decided to hitchhike back to Massachusetts—but of course she said nothing. The Saturday outings themselves were wrong, but Mom would never accept that. By the end of some of them Quilla Andersen looked at least five years older than when they had set out, with deep lines grooved down the sides of her mouth and one hand constantly rubbing her temple, as if she had a headache . . . but she would still never stop. Trisha knew it. Maybe if her mother had been at Little Big Horn the Indians still would have won, but the body-count would have been considerably higher.

This week’s outing was to an unincorporated township in the western part of the state. The Appalachian Trail wound through the area on its way to New Hampshire. Sitting at the kitchen table the night before, Mom had shown them photos from a brochure. Most of the pictures showed happy hikers either striding along a forest trail or standing at scenic lookouts, shading their eyes and peering across great wooded valleys at the time-eroded but still formidable peaks of the central White Mountains.

Pete sat at the table, looking cataclysmically bored, refusing to give the brochure more than a glance. For her part, Mom had refused to notice his ostentatious lack of interest. Trisha, as was increasingly her habit, became brightly enthusiastic. These days she often sounded to herself like a contestant on a TV game show, all but peeing in her pants at the thought of winning a set of waterless cookware. And how did she feel to herself these days? Like glue holding together two pieces of something that was broken. Weak glue.

Quilla had closed the brochure and turned it over. On the back was a map. She tapped a snaky blue line. This is Route 68, she said. We’ll park the car here, in this parking lot. She tapped a little blue square. Now she traced one finger along a snaky red line. This is the Appalachian Trail between Route 68 and Route 302 in North Conway, New Hampshire. It’s only six miles, and rated Moderate. Well . . . this one little section in the middle is marked Moderate-to-Difficult, but not to the point where we’d need climbing gear or anything.

She tapped another blue square. Pete was leaning his head on one hand, looking the other way. The heel of his palm had pulled the left side of his mouth up into a sneer. He had started getting pimples this year and a fresh crop gleamed on his forehead. Trisha loved him, but sometimes—last night at the kitchen table, as Mom explained their route, for example—she hated him, too. She wanted to tell him to stop being a chicken, because that was what it came down to when you cut to the chase, as their Dad said. Pete wanted to run back to Malden with his little teenage tail between his legs because he was a chicken. He didn’t care about Mom, didn’t care about Trisha, didn’t even care if being with Dad would be good for him in the long run. What Pete cared about was not having anyone to eat lunch with on the gym bleachers. What Pete cared about was that when he walked into homeroom after the first bell someone always yelled, Hey CompuWorld! Howya doon, homo-boy?

This is the parking lot where we come out, Mom had said, either not noticing that Pete wasn’t looking at the map or pretending not to. A van shows up there around three. It’ll take us back around to our car. Two hours later we’re home again, and I’ll haul you guys to a movie if we’re not too tired. How does that sound?

Pete had said nothing last night, but he’d had plenty to say this morning, starting with the ride up from Sanford. He didn’t want to do this, it was ultimately stupid, plus he’d heard it was going to rain later on, why did they have to spend a whole Saturday walking in the woods during the worst time of the year for bugs, what if Trisha got poison ivy (as if he cared), and on and on and on. Yatata-yatata-yatata. He even had the gall to say he should be home studying for his final exams. Pete had never studied on Saturday in his life, as far as Trisha knew. At first Mom didn’t respond, but finally he began getting under her skin. Given enough time, he always did. By the time they got to the little dirt parking area on Route 68, her knuckles were white on the steering wheel and she was speaking in clipped tones which Trisha recognized all too well. Mom was leaving Condition Yellow behind and going to Condition Red. It was looking like a very long six-mile walk through the western Maine woods, all in all.

At first Trisha had tried to divert them, exclaiming over barns and grazing horses and picturesque graveyards in her best oh-wow-it’s-waterless-cookware voice, but they ignored her and after awhile she had simply sat in the back seat with Mona on her lap (her Dad liked to call Mona Moanie Balogna) and her knapsack beside her, listening to them argue and wondering if she herself might cry, or actually go crazy. Could your family fighting all the time drive you crazy? Maybe when her mother started rubbing her temples with the tips of her fingers, it wasn’t because she had a headache but because she was trying to keep her brains from undergoing spontaneous combustion or explosive decompression, or something.

To escape them, Trisha opened the door to her favorite fantasy. She took off her Red Sox cap and looked at the signature written across the brim in broad black felt-tip strokes; this helped get her in the mood. It was Tom Gordon’s signature. Pete liked Mo Vaughn, and their Mom was partial to Nomar Garciaparra, but Tom Gordon was Trisha’s and her Dad’s favorite Red Sox player. Tom Gordon was the Red Sox closer; he came on in the eighth or ninth inning when the game was close but the Sox were still on top. Her Dad admired Gordon because he never seemed to lose his nerve—Flash has got icewater in his veins, Larry McFarland liked to say—and Trisha always said the same thing, sometimes adding that she liked Gordon because he had the guts to throw a curve on three-and-oh (this was something her father had read to her in a Boston Globe column). Only to Moanie Balogna and (once) to her girlfriend, Pepsi Robichaud, had she said more. She told Pepsi she thought Tom Gordon was pretty good-looking. To Mona she threw caution entirely to the winds, saying that Number 36 was the handsomest man alive, and if he ever touched her hand she’d faint. If he ever kissed her, even on the cheek, she thought she’d probably die.

Now, as her mother and her brother fought in the front seat—about the outing, about Sanford Middle School, about their dislocated life—Trisha looked at the signed cap her Dad had somehow gotten her in March, just before the season started, and thought this:

I’m in Sanford Park, just walking across the playground to Pepsi’s house on an ordinary day. And there’s this guy standing at the hotdog wagon. He’s wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt and he’s got a gold chain around his neck—he’s got his back to me but I can see the chain winking in the sun. Then he turns around and I see. . . oh I can’t believe it but it’s true, it’s really him, it’s Tom Gordon, why he’s in Sanford is a mystery but it’s him, all right, and oh God his eyes, just like when he’s looking in for the sign with men on base, those eyes, and he smiles and says he’s a little lost, he wonders if I know a town called North Berwick, how to get there, and oh God, oh my God I’m shaking, I won’t be able to say a word, I’ll open my mouth and nothing will come out but a little dry squeak, what Dad calls a mousefart, only when I try I can speak, I sound almost normal, and I say . . .

I say, he says, then I say and then he says: thinking about how they might talk while the fighting in the front seat of the Caravan drew steadily farther away. (Sometimes, Trisha had decided, silence was life’s greatest blessing.) She was still looking fixedly at the signature on the visor of her baseball cap when Mom turned into the parking area, still far away (Trish is off in her own world was how her father put it), unaware that there were teeth hidden in the ordinary texture of things and she would soon know it. She was in Sanford, not in TR-90. She was in the town park, not at an entry-point to the Appalachian Trail. She was with Tom Gordon, Number 36, and he was offering to buy her a hotdog in exhange for directions to North Berwick.

Oh, bliss.

First Inning

MOM AND PETE gave it a rest as they got their packs and Quilla’s wicker plant-collection basket out of the van’s back end; Pete even helped Trisha get her pack settled evenly on her back, tightening one of the straps, and she had a moment’s foolish hope that now things were going to be all right.

Kids got your ponchos? Mom asked, looking up at the sky. There was still blue up there, but the clouds were thickening in the west. It very likely would rain, but probably not soon enough for Pete to have a satisfying whine about being soaked.

I’ve got mine, Mom! Trisha chirruped in her oh-boy-waterless-cookware voice.

Pete grunted something that might have been yes.

Lunches?

Affirmative from Trisha; another low grunt from Pete.

Good, because I’m not sharing mine. She locked the Caravan, then led them across the dirt lot toward a sign marked TRAIL WEST, with an arrow beneath. There were maybe a dozen other cars in the lot, all but theirs with out-of-state plates.

Bug-spray? Mom asked as they stepped onto the path leading to the trail. Trish?

Got it! she chirruped, not entirely positive she did but not wanting to stop with her back turned so that Mom could have a rummage. That would get Pete going again for sure. If they kept walking, though, he might see something which would interest him, or at least distract him. A raccoon. Maybe a deer. A dinosaur would be good. Trisha giggled.

What’s funny? Mom asked.

Just me thinks, Trisha replied, and Quilla frowned—me thinks was a Larry McFarland-ism. Well let her frown, Trisha thought. Let her frown all she wants. I’m with her, and I don’t complain about it like old grouchy there, but he’s still my Dad and I still love him.

Trisha touched the brim of her signed cap, as if to prove it.

Okay, kids, let’s go, Quilla said. And keep your eyes open.

I hate this, Pete almost groaned—it was the first clearly articulated thing he’d said since they got out of the van, and Trisha thought: Please God, send something. A deer or a dinosaur or a UFO. Because if You don’t, they’re going right back at it.

God sent nothing but a few mosquito scouts that would no doubt soon be reporting back to the main army that fresh meat was on the move, and by the time they passed a sign reading NO. CONWAY STATION 5.5 MI., the two of them were at it full-bore again, ignoring the woods, ignoring her, ignoring everything but each other. Yatata-yatata-yatata. It was, Trisha thought, like some sick kind of making out.

It was a shame, too, because they were missing stuff that was actually pretty neat. The sweet, resiny smell of the pines, for instance, and the way the clouds seemed so close—less like clouds than like draggles of whitish-gray smoke. She guessed you’d have to be an adult to call something as boring as walking one of your hobbies, but this really wasn’t bad. She didn’t know if the entire Appalachian Trail was as well-maintained as this—probably not—but if it was, she guessed she could understand why people with nothing

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