Chick Grit: The All-True Adventures of Chloe, Dudette of the West: A Chloe Crandall Adventure, #1

By Geraldine Burrows

"Burrows employs a witty narrative voice and a unique setting that informs readers about the 1830s frontier and the world of avid historical reenactors...An often clever and tightly paced YA romp." -- Kirkus Reviews 

Finalist, 2021 Book Buyers Best Contest, Young Adult Category

Fifteen-year-old Manhattan teen Chloe Crandall is spending her summer in retro hell.  

Her history professor parents drag her along to a living history campground in North Dakota so they can relive the Era of the Fur Trader and the Mountain Man—even though Chloe doesn't wear fur and doesn't date mountain men.

She is also disastrously inept at mastering frontier skills, and she flunks her ox-droving license test. An oversized, hatchet-wearing junior mountain man throwback wants her for his mountain mama, and rejecting him could be awkward since his sister, a girl blacksmith, is her one and only friend. All the other kids in the campground's Teen Activities Group dis and dismiss her as a gritless asphalt brat.

Chloe's an unhappy camper until she meets Zach, a hot boy in buckskins with a matching horse. It's crush at first sight for Chloe, and she's determined to prove to Zach and his friends that city girls do have grit. Chick grit.

But when a natural disaster strikes the campground, will Chloe's chick grit be enough to save a child's life—and her own? 

81,000 words

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glenarvon Press
• Release date: Nov 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393566854

Geraldine Burrows

Geraldine Burrows is the author of nine novels, including the Chloe Crandall YA adventure series.  She lives with her husband in a coastal village in Rhode Island.

Book preview

1

So what do you get when you cross a nerdy male history professor with a nerdy female history professor?

Give up?

The punch line to that joke would be me—Chloe Victoria Crandall, daughter of Drs. William and Victoria Crandall, two American history professors who decided to mate within their own academic subspecies.

Now, you’d think I would have inherited my parents’ love of history and their brainiac DNA. You’d be wrong. I was so not into history, and as for the brainiac DNA...well, let’s just say Mensa won’t be adding my name to the Crandall family membership plan.

But I was okay with that because my self-esteem wasn’t based on grades or IQ scores. My self-esteem was based on actual, real-world achievements:

Like passing for seventeen at the movies.

Like keeping up with the class stylistas in my environmentally responsible, upcycled, visibly mended, thrift store refashions.

Like being the social director who got my BFFs out to fun places even though our Adult Overlords wanted to keep us in lockdown until we were eighteen.

In fact, I, Social Director Chloe, was about to pull off my biggest real-world achievement ever. I had plans—big plans—to spend an awesomely unsupervised summer partying with my friends in a cool Tribeca loft.

But sometimes, even the best-laid plans of social directors get canceled. That’s what happened to me when the doom of the Dooleyville Black Powder Rendezvous descended upon me and condemned me to a summer in retro hell.

I got the bad news one Sunday afternoon in March.

I’d just finished babysitting the Kowalski boys, three little Wii Sports hustlers who tried to game me out of my babysitting money before I even got paid. By the time their parents got home, I’d spent four looong hours Wii-ing everything from darts and javelins to baseballs and footballs. But at least it kept the little hoodlums occupied so they wouldn’t kill each other. Or me.

My Wii smackdown with the Kowalski kids had left me in serious need of two aspirin and some downtime. But when I walked into our apartment, I found my parents sitting together on the sofa like they were just waiting for me to come through the front door.

Not a good sign.

Dad looked up at me and cleared his throat. Chloe, sit down for a minute. We want to talk to you about where we’re going for the summer.

I didn’t like the sound of this. You mean you want to talk about where we’re going for two weeks out of the summer? Right?

Wrong. My parents exchanged looks that were ominous with parental meaning.

Then my mom goes, This is something your father and I have wanted to do for years. We told the department not to schedule us for the summer session because...

She trailed off, giving my dad one of those You-be-the-one-to-tell-her looks.

Dad took the hint. Because, he continued, we’re spending the summer in North Dakota at the Dooleyville Black Powder Rendezvous.

Now, most normal people would think a black powder rendezvous was a meetup of Goth makeup artists. But I knew better, thanks to my majorly abnormal parents.

I knew that black powder was the old-time name for gunpowder. I also knew that a black powder rendezvous was a living history campground where retro crazies like my parents reenacted frontier life right down to the grittiest, grimiest, most disgusting little detail. (Think washing with lye soap in a wooden bucket, using grizzly bear grease for styling gel, and wearing the latest fashions from the fall of 1830.)

I knew all this because my parents had been talking for years about going to one of these rendezvous. And now, this year of all years, they were actually going to do it. And they were going to make me go with them. I just knew it.

Nooo! Please don’t make me go too!

It was the cry of an anguished soul. But did my parents care about my soul and its anguish? Nope.

Dad just folded his arms and looked authoritarian while Mom waved a brochure under my nose. Could you at least read this before you get upset?

So I took it and read the headline, which said: RELIVE THE ERA OF THE FUR TRADER AND THE MOUNTAIN MAN.

Okay, I’d read enough. A rendezvous was no place for me. I didn’t wear fur, and I didn’t date mountain men. How could my parents do this to me? The word upset did not even begin to cover how UPSET I was even though Mom kept trying to convince me that going to retro hell would be fun, fun, fun.

It’s a family-oriented event, so there’ll be lots of young people your own age. Once you get there, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

Yeah, right, Mom. And you are seriously delusional. But that was my mom for you—always looking at the world through cheery mom-colored glasses.

And now Dad jumped in, all professorial. Your mother and I need to do this for our academic development. We don’t want our subject matter to get stale.

"It’s history, Dad! It’s supposed to be stale."

Well, it shouldn’t be. And that’s why your mother and I want to go to a place where we can live and breathe what we teach.

"Fine. You go live and breathe in North Dakota. I’ll stay with Aunt Maura."

Mom wasn’t having it. Your Aunt Maura is a divorced woman with three children. She’s already got her hands full. She doesn’t have time to be your frontal lobe too.

This frontal lobe stuff was my mom’s No. 1, all-time, most annoying parental putdown. She got it from a Developmental Psychology book that said parents had to serve as their teenagers’ frontal brain lobes until their kids’ brains matured. Mom just loved to throw my immature frontal lobes up to me every chance she got.

But my frontal lobes must have been amped up for once because all of a sudden I had a really mature idea. Why can’t I stay with Amy’s and Ja’nell’s and Cara’s families? They could take turns having me so nobody gets stuck with me for too long.

My parents exchanged another one of those looks, and I knew instantly they weren’t going to go for it. They probably thought farming me out for the summer would be BAD PARENTING (Oh noes!), and they’d never want to be guilty of that.

Because they were the kind of stalk-your-life parents who would get a gold star from Dr. Phil. They were the kind of parents who made a big deal about relationship stuff like the three of us eating dinner together.

Of course, I knew the real reason my parents thought family dinners were such a good idea. They were hoping that while I was under the influence of a food high, I’d blurt out all my guilty adolescent secrets over the dinner table.

As if.

Because I was very good at keeping secrets—like the fact that Amy’s big sister was spending the summer in London. Which meant that Amy would get the key to her sister’s loft so she could water the plants. Which also meant that Amy and her best friend, Social Director Chloe, could throw some cool loft parties.

Except it was beginning to look like there’d be no partying for me.

Because Dad was saying with death sentence finality, Your mother and I are not foisting off our fifteen-year-old daughter on the neighbors while we go clear across the country.

It’s only for two months, Mom added, so please try to make the best of it.

The Adult Overlords had spoken. There was no appeal, no escape, no Get Out of Jail Free card. My fate was sealed. I was going to be spending my summer with a bunch of retro crazies, and it didn’t take a Mensa genius to see what kind of summer it was going to be.

Worst. Summer. Ever.

And so to North Dakota we went.

Well, actually, my parents went. Shanghaied against my will would be a more accurate description of my travel arrangements.

Strangely enough, all the people who worked at the Bismarck airport seemed mighty doggone happy to be from the nowhere that was their home state. The car rental lady couldn’t have been nicer.

Of course, she had no idea who she was handing over that shiny new rent-a-car to. She had no idea that my parents didn’t own a car, so they only drove about once a year, and whenever they did drive, they almost always got lost.

And boy, was there a lot of North Dakota to get lost in. A whole lot of nothing with nobody home. That was North Dakota.

We’d only been on the road for an hour, and already my eyes were dying for the sight of a tall building, or a Jersey barrier, or an intersection flooded by a broken water main, or a drunk in an alleyway—anything to break the monotony of those endless miles of cornfields.

Just look at that view, Dad enthused as we stared out the car windows at even more acres of cornfields.

And there’s no traffic at all, Mom chirped.

She was right about that. There wasn’t another car in sight, which was a relief because driving with my parents was like a multicar pileup just waiting to happen. Except I now realized there weren’t enough cars in the entire state of North Dakota to produce a good multicar pileup.

With that load off my mind, I decided to tackle my summer assignment for our school newspaper, the Student Call. Everyone on the staff had to write a feature article about what they did over summer vacation. It had to be turned in on the first day of school so our advisor, Mr. Jacoby, could pick the best one for publication in the back-to-school issue.

If I won, it would put me in the running for managing editor in my senior year. Plus, Mr. Jacoby would enter the article in all the statewide high school journalism competitions.

I’d tried to explain to my parents that my whole future career as an investigative reporter depended on this article, but they didn’t want to hear it. And now that we were actually in North Dakota, I decided I’d mention it one more time. Just in case they forgot.

You know, it’s super important that I get to be managing editor in my senior year. Because if I do, I’ll be able to get into a good college journalism program. It won’t matter that I got a C in freshman algebra. It won’t matter if I get any more Cs either.

Yes, it will, Mom said grimly.

Anyway, I went on, Mr. Jacoby is always telling us to write what we know. But I have to write about a place where I don’t know anything or anybody. And I’m the only kid on the staff who can’t use a laptop for practically the whole summer. So I’ll be at a big disadvantage.

Dad didn’t even bother to take his eyes off the road. Computers are against the rules. Sorry, it can’t be helped.

But he didn’t sound sorry that he was putting my journalism career in jeopardy. He didn’t sound sorry that I was going to have to work my fingers to the bone writing everything out the oldfangled way. And I was also going to have to spell check with my own brain cells. And my good friend Google couldn’t help me either.

Mom glanced over her shoulder. Have you decided what kind of article you’re going to write?

Oh, I’d decided, all right. I’d decided that I was going to write a gut-wrenchingly realistic first-person account of my ordeal entitled The Drooleyville Horror: Or How I Spent My Summer Vacation at the Little Outhouse on the Prairie.

Not that I said that out loud. It would just cause eye-rolling in the parental eye sockets, not to mention another lecture about how this summer was going to a) broaden my horizons, b) increase my knowledge of history, c) deepen my understanding of humanity, and d) pad the extracurricular activities section on my college applications.

By now, we were miles from civilization. There were no road signs anywhere, and what would they say anyway? WELCOME TO NOWHERE, NORTH DAKOTA. THIS IS WHAT DEATH IS LIKE.

There were no buildings and no people except this one old farmer guy in bib overalls, walking along the road. He stopped to watch us drive toward him, and he turned around to watch us as we drove away.

I twisted around in the backseat and watched him watching us until we were out of sight. We probably made his day just by driving by and giving him a different car to look at.

More driving finally got us to a gas station sitting at the edge of yet another endless cornfield. Dad went inside to pay, and Mom headed for the restroom.

I walked to the back of the parking lot where the drink machines were set up under an aluminum awning. I wasn’t thirsty, but since this was probably the last vending machine oasis for the next hundred miles of cornfields, I decided I’d better take advantage of it.

It wasn’t until the can clanked down like metallic thunder that I noticed how quiet the surroundings were. Eerily quiet compared to the constant crowd noise of New York. And eerily empty because in every direction there was nothing but an endless panorama of waving, rustling cornstalks. There wasn’t another car on the road or another person in sight anywhere.

It was then that I realized how huge this parking lot was and how far away I was from my parents’ car, which I couldn’t even see because it was hidden by the gas station building. Even if I screamed as loud as I could, my parents would never hear me inside those cinderblock walls.

The wind gusted, whipping those never-ending cornstalks in my direction. It almost looked as if human figures were creeping through the rows between the stalks. Right towards me. And now I really, really wished I hadn’t watched all those old Children of the Corn horror movies on the Science Fiction Channel.

I grabbed my soda and started to walk—very fast—across that endless parking lot. Before He Who Walks Behind the Rows could jump out of that cornfield and get me.

Once we were back on the road, I did my best to calm my freaked-out city girl nerves. It wasn’t easy, though. I was completely out of my element here. It was scary how different North Dakota was from what I was used to. It was like I’d been transported to some weird alien Bizarro World.

And Bizarro World North Dakota just kept getting weirder and weirder.

Without warning, the road we were driving on suddenly turned into a dirt track. As our car lurched from rut to rut, Dad said we must be getting close to the field where we could park our car so it wouldn’t be seen.

I could not believe this. "Why do we have to hide our car? You make it sound like it’s a crime to have a car."

"It is a crime in the historical sense, Dad explained as he pulled to a stop among all the other criminal cars, trucks, SUVs, and mobile homes. All these motor vehicles are out of historical context, so they have to be hidden. That’s why everyone has to park so far away from the campsite."

And, Mom added as she slid out of the front seat, that’s why the tourists are bused in along a different route. It would spoil the atmosphere to have a parking lot as the first sight they see. They’d probably feel they weren’t getting their money’s worth.

I stared at her across the roof of the car. You mean they actually let tourists pay money to come here and watch us?

Only on weekends when the special events take place. The rest of the time, it’s just the rendezvous members and their families.

I wasn’t comforted in the least. I was definitely not down with being gawked at by tourists, even on weekends only. It’s like we’re animals in a zoo or freaks in a circus. Why didn’t you tell me this before?

We did tell you, Dad pointed out. You were too busy feeling sorry for yourself to pay attention.

We also mentioned, Mom added in an I-told-you-so voice, that you should wear sensible shoes. We still have to walk two miles to the campground.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to go hiking in a pair of hot pink, peep-toe, three-inch platform espadrilles even if they did coordinate perfectly with my hot pink T-shirt.

But those espadrilles had meaning. I’d scored them in a thrift shop in the Village and hand-dyed them myself. They were my personal fashion statement about the real me, the Chloe from the City me. I was proclaiming my personhood here.

And that person was most definitely not a hiking boot-clomping, edible weed-chomping, dead animal hide-tanning, bear claw necklace-wearing retro girl who wanted to waste the only fifteenth summer she would ever have in her whole life at a black powder rendezvous.

Mom sighed and shook her head. We can’t do anything about your shoes now. You’ll just have to make the best of it.

Come on, Chloe. It’s march or die, Dad said, doing his best to be not funny.

So I had no choice except to slog along with them as we trekked our lonely way across a field, through a woods, around a bunch of boulders, and then up a hill and down a hill and then up another hill. There were no people anywhere, just a lot of hills.

Despite their sensible shoes, Mom and Dad were getting winded.

I always pictured North Dakota as nothing but flat prairie, Dad panted.

Mom was lagging behind. I didn’t expect this many hills either.

And those hills probably had eyes and were crawling with cannibal mutants. I didn’t say that out loud though. I was too short of breath.

We plodded around more boulders, across more rocky fields, through more woods until finally, puffing and perspiring, we reached the top of the highest hill yet.

From there we looked down into the Land of the Retro Crazed.

2

It was like looking into a time warp. Or standing at the entrance to a lost world.

The prairie that unrolled beneath us was dotted with hundreds of tipis, their cookfire smoke rising upward in lazy curling plumes. Beyond the tipis were rows of white canvas wedge tents. (No green tents allowed. They hadn’t been invented yet). I also spotted a couple of furry lean-tos that looked like they were made out of bearskins.

Off in the distance was Fort Dooleyville, an old fur trading post that had been restored by the local historical commission.

Mom and Dad were already hurrying down the hill. They couldn’t wait to start playing with their new playmates, the Black Powder People. That’s what the retro crazies who camped here liked to call themselves. They thought it made them sound like real frontier folks instead of just a bunch of modern people who liked to fool around with costumes and playhouses.

Once we got down to the campground, I couldn’t believe how many people were here. Everyone was in costume: fringed buckskin jackets, beaded doeskin dresses, long skirts and linen kerchiefs, canvas pants held up by leather suspenders, and coats that looked like they were made from blankets. (No cowboys though. They hadn’t been invented yet.)

Not only did the Black Powder People dress historically, they talked historically. As we walked through the crowd, I tried to make sense of what the passersby were saying to each other.

One long-skirted woman to another: This here dumpling dust makes the larrupin’ best gordos you ever put in your meat bag.

Bearded fur-trapper guys greeting each other: Bijou, you old hoss, what you know good? Nothin’ much, Ephraim. You bring that dog face of yours down to my camp and we’ll unwrap a carrot. Sure thing, Bijou. You watch your topknot now.

I soon realized I was hopeless when it came to rendezvous speak. I hardly understood any of it—mostly because I’d refused to waste my time studying the glossary of black powder terms my parents had given me. I just hoped I wouldn’t end up having to take a remedial class in Frontier English.

I’d probably have to take spelling lessons, too, because not only did these people have their own way of talking, they also had their own way of spelling. Every sign we saw had RONDY VOO on it. Apparently, nobody bothered with the correct French spelling, r-e-n-d-e-z-v-o-u-s, and I guessed the same would probably be true for all the other French terms.

Oh well. A whole year of French language torture with Ms. Patnoid, completely wasted. It figures.

The campground’s main signpost bristled with fence pickets that had various destinations painted on them. We’d just decided to head for the RONDY VOO HQ when a trio of mounted men wearing buckskin clothing reined their horses to a halt right in our path.

They surveyed us slowly from head to toe. Wal, lookee what we got here, Rawhide, one buckskinner said to the buckskinner next to him. Looks like there’re some new pilgrims in town.

Yup, sure does look like it, Ricochet. Is that what it looks like to you, Curly?

It sure enough does, agreed Curly, the third buckskinner.

Mom and Dad seemed thrilled that real Black Powder People were actually talking to us newbies. Talking smack, as it turned out.

Them pilgrims sure do dress comical, Rawhide observed to the loud yups of his two buddies. You ever see the like of the spectacles this little missy is wearing?

This was obviously a shot at my sunglasses, my very expensive sunglasses that I’d bought with my hard-earned babysitting money. Who did these guys think they were? The Fashion Posse?

Ricochet leaned over his reins. You folks ain’t gonna last long rigged like that.

Rawhide nodded in agreement. You better get yourselves into some decent harness, he warned, or somebody’ll be reportin’ you to the Booshway.

Dad made a lame attempt to play along. Aw shucks, fellas, he fake drawled. Don’t y’all go gettin’ yourselves in a lather. My womenfolk and me, we come such a fur piece that we had to have our gear shipped separately. We got everything cached over at the blockhouse, and we was just a-goin’ to fetch it.

Oh puh-leeze! I groaned inwardly.

As embarrassing as Dad’s aw shucks routine was, it seemed to satisfy the three buckskinners, who yipped out a few yee-haws before riding on their way.

This was my first introduction to the Black Powder People aka the Bizarro World People. And now my parents were turning into Bizarro People too. They actually made me take off my sunglasses because they didn’t want any more trouble with the Fashion Posse.

Sheesh! Talk about living in a police state. We should have just checked into a penitentiary for the summer. It would have been cheaper.

Mom and Dad didn’t see it that way though. They had gone completely over to the bizarro side. They were now skipping around the Fort Dooleyville encampment as happy as a couple of kids at Disney World.

Just look at that! Mom was practically jumping up and down with excitement as she pointed to a group of men wearing weird stocking hats and white shirts with long blousy sleeves. They’re Canadian rivermen, she explained for my benefit. They transported furs in canoes before the roads were built.

Dad, meanwhile, had gotten sidetracked by a frontier skills demonstration that showed how to carve animal bones into useful items like whistles, pins, or knife handles. He dragged Mom and me over to the bone carver’s booth to see if we wanted to buy anything.

Craft projects using dead critter bones weren’t usually my thing. However, I did see something I thought was pretty cool. So I let Dad buy me a pair of those hair combs that Spanish ladies