Chapter 1The sound of rain on our metal roof is so loud I can barely hear the instructor tell me how to paddle my canoe. I focus instead on watching her right hand, and twist my wrist so my paddle can curve just like hers . . . when the power goes out. Canoeing doesn’t usually require electricity, but when you’re standing in your room watching a tutorial on YouTube, it does.
“Addy?” Mom calls up the stairs. “Is it out for you, too?”
“Yeah,” I call back. I stow my paddle under my bed with my other Survival Camp gear and head out to the hallway, which is pretty dark, considering it’s the afternoon.
When I get to the round window at the end of the hall, I kneel down on the window seat and peer out, trying to see past all the rain and trees to where our only visible neighbors live. I’ve never been inside their house, but there’s always a light on in one of their upstairs windows, even when they go on vacation. And I know all about their vacations because I’ve gone to school with Caleb, the boy who lives there, for most of my life. He was the one who first started calling me Batty Addy after my show-and-tell about bat anatomy, and lots of other kids in our class were quick to join in.
But at least if he’s thinking of calling me Batty Addy right now, he’s doing it in the dark, because their always-on light is out.
“It looks like the Tollands lost power, too,” I call as I head down the stairs. I find Mom in the kitchen, digging through our miscellaneous drawer like she’s in a wrestling match with it.
“I could have personally willed this outage into existence,” she says when she sees me. “That Zoom meeting was full-on torture.”
She’s trying to make a joke, but I see the familiar twitch of her forehead, like a rumble of thunder in the distance, the sign that her anger is getting ready to make an entrance.
Grief is funny like that. In lots of books, when someone dies, everyone’s just sad. But in real life, there’s a lot of anger, too. I still remember my mom hurling books at our wood floor, each one sounding like a loud slap. It had been years since the accident, but that didn’t matter. I also remember her sitting on the edge of my bed afterward, apologizing and telling me about how sometimes emotions are so big they start controlling us rather than the other way around. She promised to do whatever it took to find her way through those emotions until she was back in charge.
“The generator won’t start up again.” She slams the drawer shut. “And I can’t believe I bought the wrong flashlight batteries!”
Mom prides herself on being prepared for anything, so I get why she’s angry at herself.
She leans over the counter, eyes closed, and I recognize the now-familiar breathing method her therapist taught her. Mom works hard. Not just at chopping all the wood we need for heat in the winter, but in ways like this, too.
“Maybe it won’t be out for long?” I venture, glancing again at the rain outside. It’s technically just a tropical storm, but it’s been raining for four days straight. No wind or hail or other exciting stuff.
Mom lets out a long breath and opens her eyes. “I need to go to the store to get the right batteries, and once I get to cell reception, I’ll check if they have an estimate for how long it’ll take. But we should expect that it could be out for a while. They don’t exactly prioritize the tiny towns.”
Going to the store isn’t a quick out-and-back for us. Not only do we live on the edge of town, but our town doesn’t have any stores, unless you count the car mechanic shop. And we’re tucked so deeply into the Green Mountains of Vermont that it takes forty minutes to get to Windhaven, the town downriver that’s big enough to have multiple grocery stores. That’s also where the big regional 7–12 school is, where I finally get to go at the end of this month (no more Gillsboro Elementary for me!), and where Survival Camp will happen next week.
I’m hoping to find my people at Survival Camp. Specifically, people who are NOT the kids from Gillsboro Elementary and have never called me Batty Addy. Plus, Survival Camp is where my parents met back when they were twelve, so basically I owe my entire existence to it.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Mom says, grabbing her keys. “And don’t open the fridge. We want the food in there to stay cold as long as possible.”
Immediately I want a giant glass of milk, but I nod.
She pulls on her raincoat and jams her feet into her muck boots. The rain is pounding against the door.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” I ask.
Mom pauses with her hand on the doorknob. “Can you bring up some emergency water from the basement?”
“Oh . . .” It’s going to be seriously dark down there, and our basement isn’t like most other people’s basements with a floor and stuff. It’s dug out of the earth, and all this very wet summer there’s been a small stream running right through the dirt like a snake, carving out a path like it belongs and we don’t.
But my mom is still doing her special breathing pattern to stay calm. We weren’t supposed to have the wrong flashlight batteries. Our wood for the winter is already stacked even though it’s August. We have a pantry where everything has its place, and when you take the last of something, you immediately write it on the grocery list. Mom’s been trying to find the time to organize that miscellaneous drawer for years, but between her job managing pharmaceutical drug trials and everything else, she hasn’t. I’d bet anything all the batteries will be categorized and sorted as soon as we get power back.
“Of course I can bring up the water,” I say.
We also have a system of socking away a gallon of water every time we finish a gallon of milk, because when you lose power and you depend on a well with an electric pump and have an old, unreliable generator, you lose water, too.
After Mom flips on her hood and heads out, I stand for a long time in the kitchen. Then I open the door to the basement stairs and try to convince myself this is something I can do.
It’s not that I’m afraid of the dark, which is good, because the bottom of the stairs looks like it decided to switch to the setting “fade to black.” And I’m not scared of whatever mice or spiders might be hiding in there, either.
I grip the banister and go down a few steps, and then I hear it.
The sound of rushing water—and not a small stream anymore.
Is a river flowing through our basement? I’ll have to check it out later when we have flashlights. But we need the bottles of water now in order to drink and to flush the toilet, and fortunately they are on a shelf right near the stairs.
And so, with one hand gripping the banister, the other covering one ear, and with my mouth shouting as manyloud and random words as I can think of—“Bears! Beetles! Blueberries! Bumblebees! I’m not scared!”—I feel my way down to the shelves of gallon jugs. As quickly as I can, I move them to the stairs two at a time—“Banisters! Bananabread! I’m not scared!”—until I have four of them and call that “GOOD ENOUGH!” Then I hightail it up the stairs with two in my hands and two stuffed under my arms.
I burst into the kitchen, yelling about BEAVERS! When I come face-to-face with my mom, her eyes are as wide as mine.
“Why are you back already?” I ask.
“The river,” she says breathlessly. “It’s crested over the bank. And it’s raging. Taking everything in its path. Addy . . .” She swallows. “The bridge collapsed.”
“It what?” My mind is swirling. “But that means . . .”
“There’s no way for us to leave.”
No bridge. No batteries. And just six days to go before Survival Camp.
And Survival Camp is
my bridge out of this town.
I need that bridge.
Copyright © 2025 by Ann Braden. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
