The Nerviest Girl in the World Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Melissa Peterson

  Cover art copyright © 2020 by Risa Rodil

  Interior illustrations copyright © 2020 by Mike Deas

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780375870385 (trade) — ISBN 9780375970375 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780375989025

  The illustrations were created digitally.

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  For Scott, forever my leading man

  If I’d been a dainty little thing like Mary Mason, I would never have found myself in such a predicament. Mary was the kind of kid they always pulled in for deathbed scenes—sometimes she was in the bed, managing to look deathly pale and burning with fever all at once; and other times she was the devastated young daughter, crying her big old eyes out as Father or Mother murmured a last goodbye before croaking. Mary could turn on the waterworks as easily as shrugging. The second the director hollered “Action!”—instant Niagara Falls.

  Me, on the other hand. I couldn’t cry on cue to save my life.

  But you’d never catch Mary Mason climbing out of a hot-air balloon forty feet above the ground.

  I stared down at the patchwork world far below the swaying basket of my balloon. Jeepers. I was beginning to think that, this time, I might have bitten off more than I could chew. I was probably about to plummet to my death. Mr. Corrigan, the director, would probably just rush Mary in to blubber over my corpse while the light was still good.

  “Go ahead, kid!” he yelled from his nice comfy spot on the ground. “It’s now or never!”

  “Never” sounds pretty good to me, I muttered, but only in my head because no matter how terrorstruck I was up there in that balloon, the thought of ruining a shot was eighty times more terrible. I took a big gulping breath of air—probably my last one ever, I figured—and grabbed hold of the anchor rope coiled on the floor of the basket. I heaved it over the side and braced myself for the lurch that would come when the anchor stretched the rope to its farthest point. I peered over the lip of the basket, but the rope was dangling directly below me and I couldn’t see if the anchor had touched ground or not. It didn’t feel like it. Too much sway.

  “Now just shinny down the rope!” shouted Mr. Corrigan. Even through his megaphone I could barely hear him, that’s how high up I was. Far beneath me the scrub oaks danced on the yellow grass. A couple of crows zoomed past below, flicking their wings with effortless confidence. Show-offs.

  “Just” shinny down, my aunt Fanny. Easy for him to say from his nice safe perch on the ground. But there was no getting out of it now. I had to get down from this balloon somehow. It was shinny down the rope or live in this basket for the rest of my short life.

  I grabbed hold of the rope, scratchy on my sweaty palms, and said a little prayer in my head. I should have asked my grandmother who the patron saint of sliding down an anchor rope from a hot-air balloon was. Quit stalling, I told myself sternly, and flung a leg over the side of the basket. The only good thing about being so high above the ground was that nobody could see up my petticoats, but flashing my underthings to the crew was the least of my worries. My hands felt so slick they might have been coated with oil. I wrapped a leg around the swaying rope, clung hard with my hands, and yanked the other leg over the basket.

  The balloon lurched again, harder than before, and I nearly lost my grip. I squeezed hard and felt the heavy rope bite into my hands.

  “Attagirl!” blared Mr. Corrigan. “Now give a good look around and then slide on down.”

  That good look around nearly killed me. Somehow the ground seemed twice as far away now that I was out of the basket. The nice safe basket where at least I wouldn’t die from an overabundance of palm sweat. But there was no going back to that rickety little nest. My only choice now was to scooch down the rope and get to the ground as quickly as possible.

  Well, maybe not that quick, I corrected myself. Falling to my death was probably the quickest way down.

  Hand under hand, I inched down the rope. I could have sworn it took me an hour at least to make my way down that blasted rope, but I found out later it was only a few minutes. By the time I felt the anchor with my feet, I’d lost most of the skin on my hands, I had a big stripe of rope burn across my cheek, and my heart had burst with terror a good seven or eight times.

  “Now, Pearl,” shouted Mr. Corrigan. “You look down and notice the anchor didn’t reach the ground. Give us a good look at your face—you’re fearless and determined, remember—and then just jump the rest of the way.”

  There he was again with that just. I’d just like to see him jump down from the top of a tree with a fearless expression. I had to be six or seven feet off the ground still.

  “She’ll break a leg!” called the camera operator.

  She’ll break her neck is more like it, I thought, and let go of the rope.

  No one in my family had any thought of going into the pictures, not at first. We were ranche
rs—cattle and sheep, mostly, plus the ostrich enterprise. I heard about moving pictures from kids at school, but I never saw one myself until after I’d played parts in half a dozen different reels. By then my brothers were on their way to becoming stars—the Daredevil Donnelly Brothers, a Death-Defying Cowboy Trio. Which of course was a lot of piffle. Death-defying, my eyeball. They’d been racing horses across the chaparral since before any of them wore shoes—nothing death-defying about doing it on camera. Not compared, say, to leaping out the window of a burning building. But that’s jumping ahead.

  We lived outside Lemon Springs, California, in the eastern part of San Diego County. Our part of the county is thick with cottonwood, sagebrush, and yucca—heaven for rattlers and the occasional tarantula. My mother taught me to sit a horse at age three because she said it was safer than running around barefoot in snake country. By the time I was nine, I could ride as well as any of my older brothers, and I never had the benefit of trousers and spurs. I just hitched up my skirt and rode astraddle in bare feet. Why, I could ride standing up on the horse’s back, holding on by my toes and the reins, if the terrain was pretty level—as long as I was well out of range of my mother’s line of sight.

  My big brothers’ riding prowess is what got them noticed by the Flying Q director. They were working cowboys, and I don’t think any of them ever imagined a life in the limelight. Once or twice a year they rode in local rodeos and usually snatched up most of the prizes; that was about as much fame as any Donnelly boy ever expected to experience. And then one day, a month after my eleventh birthday, a portly man in riding boots and breeches strode up to my oldest brother, Bill, after a calf-roping exercise, shook his hand, and said, “Son, how’d you like to pull that same stunt in a moving picture?”

  “Huh?” replied Bill in his typically eloquent fashion.

  “Name’s Thornton Corrigan,” said the man. He had a confident mustache and a kind of fierce snap in his gaze. “I direct moving pictures for the Flying Q Film Company. I’m looking for a couple of good riders for a Western we’re shooting next week.”

  “Shooting?” echoed Bill.

  “What’s it pay?” asked my brother Ike, elbowing in. He was sore at Bill for taking first prize. Bill always took first in the roping events, but if there were a prize for getting straight to the point of a discussion, Ike would have taken it every time.

  Mr. Corrigan didn’t bat an eye at Ike’s directness. “We pay handsomely for real talent,” he answered smoothly. “I need fellas who can ride like the blazes and do some rope tricks on film—real showy stuff, plenty of panache.”

  “On film?” exclaimed Bill. “Like in the pictures?”

  “That’s right,” said Mr. Corrigan.

  “But we ain’t actors,” chimed in my brother Frank. He was sixteen, with one pitiful mustache hair for each year, more or less. I could see he was mighty impressed with Mr. Corrigan’s bristle brush.

  “I’m not looking for actors, son,” replied Mr. Corrigan. “I’ve got actors crawling out of my ears.” (I couldn’t help but dart a glance at his ears then, even though I knew he was only being poetic. They appeared undisturbed.) “I need real cowboys. I pride myself on the authenticity of my pictures.”

  Au-then-ti-city, I repeated silently in my head. It was what my father would call a five-dollar word, and I had no idea what it meant, but I liked it. It sounded like a place I’d like to visit.

  By the end of that conversation, Mr. Corrigan had gotten himself invited to dinner at the ranch. By the end of that dinner, he’d talked my father into giving the boys a day off their cattle work to do some rope tricks in front of a Flying Q camera. By the end of the week, all three of my brothers were roped into the motion picture business just as firmly as any calf Bill ever lassoed with his eyes closed, and my father had to advertise for some new ranch hands.

  Everyone around here thinks of life in two sections, like a two-reel picture: before Flying Q and after Flying Q. My mother tells me stories about how her family moved from Fletcher, Colorado, to San Diego, California, when she was a little girl, about as old as I was when the studio set up operations in Lemon Springs. She says all her memories are divided into Before The Move and After The Move. I guess it’ll be the same for me, only it’s Before The Movies and After The Movies. We stayed put on our same old ranch, and I still have to get up and do my ostrich chores before breakfast, same as ever, but just about everything else in my life is different since Flying Q swooped in. I guess when I’m old like my mother, I’ll be telling my kids before-and-after stories, too. Assuming I don’t break my neck jumping onto a moving train first—or get kicked in the head by an irked ostrich.

  Our ranch runs mostly to cattle, but we have one big pen beyond the kitchen garden for the ostriches. We raise some for meat and some for eggs, and all of them for their big plumy feathers, which fetch a pretty penny. Mama sells them to a hatmaker in San Diego every year after molting season.

  We keep six or seven birds at a time, most of ’em females because we rely on the eggs. One ostrich egg makes a scramble big enough to feed our whole family. Chicken eggs taste a heap better, though. My grandmother says chicken-egg scrambles are for fancy folk who have time to spend all day cracking shells. But I notice it doesn’t take her all day to crack chicken eggs when she’s making a cake. You’d have to make ten cakes if you wanted to use an ostrich egg. The only catch is that ostriches, unlike chickens, don’t lay eggs year-round.

  Here’s what your morning’s like when you’re the youngest kid in the family, meaning you’re the one stuck tending the birds. They aren’t like other ranch stock—no chummy nuzzles like you get from horses, or placid indifference like cows and sheep. No, ostriches are nasty-tempered she-demons who’d as soon crack your skull as look at you. At least, that’s what my father says. He won’t go near the birds. “They’re my wife’s enterprise,” he always says. She grew up ducking kicks from the she-demons, just like me—After The Move, that is. That means she got kind of a late start, compared to me. I started feeding the birds and collecting their eggs when I was six years old. They mostly ignore me now. Ike says I’m so gangly and long-legged myself that they just think I’m one of ’em.

  But I still have to look sharp when I open the gate to their pen or Jezebel will charge me. She’s the meanest she-demon of the bunch. The trick is to fill their food trough first, then unhook the latch to their coop with a big stick poked through the fence, and then, after they’ve thundered out to bury their heads in breakfast, I creep around to the pasture gate and open it while they’re occupied. After they eat, they stampede out to pasture and I use my stick to shut the gate behind them. Then I can clean the coop and, in egg season, check for eggs in peace and quiet. Well, quiet at least. It’s hard to feel exactly peaceful when you’re shoveling fresh ostrich dung.

  When I’m finished, I carry the eggs into the kitchen, where my grandmother takes them over. I get sent to wash up before breakfast. Nobody wants to sit down to a meal next to the girl who cleans the ostrich pen.

  It all goes in reverse in the evenings, except for the egg-gathering and poo-shoveling parts. Mama still makes me scrub my arms, face, and feet before I’m allowed to sit down for dinner. I used to think I must be the cleanest kid in San Diego County. Then I got to know Mary Mason. She bathes as much as I do (more, since her baths are long soaks in a tub instead of hasty scrub-downs with a rough towel like mine), and she doesn’t get herself stunk up doing ostrich chores in between.

  From our ostrich pen you can look east over the valley to Bittercreek and the mountains beyond. The sun shoots over those mountains in the morning right in time to jab my eyeballs with rays when I’m tending the birds. It sets over the Pacific Ocean, but we’re almost twenty miles from the coast and our ranch is too flat for a view. Once, when I was six or seven years old, my father took my brothers and me to the top of Mount Caracol, a smallish mountain a little northeast of t
own, and we took in the view to the west, past Lemon Springs to San Diego and, beyond that, a glittering stripe of ocean. Papa lifted me onto his shoulders so I could see even farther. I remember how far away everything seemed—the ocean, the tall palm trees, the hills; even my brothers standing beside us seemed a long way down from my perch.

  From our ranch the westward view is mostly just pastureland and scrub. In the mornings a fresh, clean smell of sage sweeps across the chaparral, and the comfortable sound of cattle drifts across the pastures. Every spring the spiky yucca plants send up tall shoots of big white bell-shaped flowers. Grandma calls them our-Lord’s-candle plants. My brother Ike calls them hell’s bells, because the yucca leaves are sharp as needles and will slice your arm if you get too close, walking by. (But he never calls them that around our grandmother.)

  Until Mr. Corrigan appeared in our lives, I didn’t think much about the world beyond our ranch and Lemon Springs. My world was ostriches and horses, and the rumble of cattle and the bleating of sheep, and school in the village, and Sunday Mass at the white stucco chapel. It felt pretty big to me, back then—before Mr. Corrigan sent me up in a hot-air balloon and I saw our ranch way down below, looking about as big as a quilt square.

  When my brothers started riding horses in Flying Q’s one-reelers, no one (least of all me) ever dreamed I’d wind up in pictures myself. I would bet a nickel my mother would have shut me in a closet before she’d ever let me near Flying Q, if she could have foreseen the crazy things I would wind up doing. I might have shut my own self in a closet if I’d known I’d wind up climbing out of a hot-air balloon forty feet above the ground.