Geogirl. Kelly Rysten

tunnels of mice. Maybe someday we will actually see a bat! So many tunnels, so few bats.

       Cache on!

       Other books by Kelly Rysten

      Kelly Rysten is also the author of the Cassidy Callahan Adventure Novels. Cassidy Callahan is a young woman who grew up on a quarter horse ranch. Given free run of the local hills she developed an eye for tracking, and with the help of Detective Rusty Michaels, she joined the local search and rescue team to track lost hikers. Unfortunately she is also a terrible trouble magnet, and her job brings her into contact with more trouble than the police can keep her out of. One adventure follows another as Cassidy tracks her way from one mishap to another.

      The books are:

       Triple Trouble

      Published 2009 – ISBN 978-1-926585-41-3

      

       Car Trouble

      Published 2010 – ISBN 978-1-926918-03-7

       A Cache of Trouble

      Published 2011 – ISBN 978-1-926918-87-7

       A Double Dose of Trouble

      Published 2012 – ISBN 978-1-77143-025-8

      

       A Shot of Trouble

      Published 2013 – ISBN 978-1-77143-107-1

       Chapter 1

      What do you do when you’re in college, school’s about to get out for the summer, you’re up at two a.m. the night before a final, and a friend comes into the university library and says, “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but there’s this HUGE geocaching contest and the winner gets to take somebody on a four day cruise to the Bahamas.”

      Well, I can tell you what I did. I tried to think of how to study exponential equations and set up a coffee IV drip at the same time. When I realized I had no coffee, no needles or tubing or a bag to put coffee in I began trying to figure out how to get Twiggy to get me some.

      Most people would hear a name like Twiggy and immediately think of the skinniest girl they knew and take off about twenty pounds. Twiggy was thin, but he wasn’t that skinny. He mostly got his name from being all elbows and knees. He was like one of those bugs that look like a walking stick. He was good at coming up with harebrained schemes and running out for coffee. Or vodka. But I’d never had vodka and tonight called for coffee, so I rubbed my eyes and said, “Coffeeeee,” in a desperate sounding voice.

      He just stood there, arms folded across his chest and said, “You’re pitiful.”

      “Thank you, now go away, or at least help me with this problem. I don’t see how they got from point A to point 62B to the negative 7^th.”

      “You’re still pitiful. Let me see.”

      He took my book and my page of incorrect notes and squinted at it.

      “How many weeks did you sleep through class?” he asked.

      “I don’t sleep in class. I don’t even sleep at night!”

      “You, dearie, need help. You need to take a week off as soon as school gets out and go with me to find little boxes hidden in weird places. After your mind is clear of the sheer numbness of college classes you can think about changing your major again.”

      “I change it every semester, but it doesn’t help the classes get any easier. It just means I know how to talk about anything from astrophysics to art in the seventeenth century.”

      “That might be a useful skill,” he said. “Did you know there is a spot on Mercury that looks like the Mona Lisa?”

      “Wrong century. That was the sixteenth century.”

      He closed my book and held out his hand. “Coffee, or sleep. You need one or the other. Do you want to hear about the contest or not?”

      “I don’t want to flunk my final.”

      “What’s your average?” he asked.

      “Three point seven, but I…”

      “The final won’t bring you up to an A and flunking it won’t lower it to a C so forget about point A and point 62B to the negative 7^th.”

      Just the fact that he could remember my gibberish proved he was smarter than me. I staggered after him hoping he was going to the nearest coffee shop. I tripped over a student who had fallen asleep with his face in a book and his legs stretched across the walkway. Taking an exam with a crick in your neck is a bad way to start off a day of finals.

      “I can’t go with you on this contest,” I said. “My mom expects me home for my sister’s birthday. It’s her sweet sixteen and I’m supposed to do her hair.”

      “Hair shmair. She’s going to have hair whether you do it or not, right?”

      “Right.”

      “So, she’s a big girl now. Let her do something daring like dye it blue and cut it like a rock star.”

      “Do you really think my mom would let her do that? My mom who wears dresses to the grocery store, who goes on a date so she can make out with my dad without ‘exposing’ the kids?”

      “Okay, you’re right. When is your sister’s birthday?”

      “The middle of July.”

      “Perfect! We have to finish the contest by July tenth anyway!”

      My given name is Gwendolyn Amelia Brody, but this being a university full of eccentric and brainy people, they have to make an acronym out of everything, so my friends took GAB and decided I was to be Gabby from then on. Well, Twiggy did that. I can’t say I have a lot of friends.

      Twiggy’s real name is Tony, not Anthony. It really is Tony. He is named after Tony Hawke, the snowboarder. So, let’s see if I remember this right. Tony Van Yancy. The name Van came from Van Morrison. So you can see Twiggy’s background is a little different from mine. His parents got divorced when he was four and his dad tried making a living racing cars but he sunk more money into cars than he ever won. Next he tried being a golf pro but ended up running the shop at the local golf course. He wore Bermuda shorts and polo shirts. He had tried going to college just like Twiggy but he majored in booze and drugs, so he strongly discouraged Twiggy from following in his footsteps.

      My parents are proper. That’s about the best description I can think of, which is really strange because in Creative Writing 101 I was the one who liked making up fictional, fanciful creatures and filling my stories with things the reader couldn’t even imagine. So I only got a C. Luckily this story only contains real creatures. Or maybe that isn’t lucky. Maybe what’s lucky is that we survived.

      I had been geocaching a few times with Twiggy. I thought it was fun and somewhat adventurous. To think there are containers hidden all around us and normal people walk by them all the time without knowing they are there is kind of mysterious. I felt like I was part of a secret society because I knew that the knot in the tree outside the Biology classroom concealed a little box hidden in it and if you reach up and in a little bit you can find it, but only if you know it’s there. Geocachers carry a mystery with them everywhere they go!

      “I want a large Super Charged Caffeine Torpedo,” I said to the barista. The barista at the campus coffee shop was used to working nights during finals week. The Super Charged Caffeine Torpedo was so named because it would explode in your brain and cause massive damage, or at least keep you awake long enough to study. University students have a way of over naming just