in your own activities.
Thanks to the planning session on Sunday, he’d brought along Ginny’s floor chair so she could sit with the other girls. By the time he’d gotten her settled, Grace was back with a disgusted Connor. The boy’s hand was bandaged from fingertips to elbow.
“Did you get in a fight with a bobcat?” Rob winked at him. “They’re mean critters, aren’t they?”
Connor narrowed his eyes. “There are bobcats around here?”
“Not really. What did you do to your hand?”
But Connor wasn’t volunteering an answer. He turned his head away, just as Valerie officially started the meeting.
“I’m glad to see all of you at our first Girls Outdoors! meeting. I’m Ms. Manion, your leader, and this is Mr. Warren. He’ll be my assistant leader.”
“I didn’t know men could be leaders,” said a little blonde across the circle.
A dark-skinned girl spoke at almost the same time. “I didn’t know men could be assistants.”
Valerie grinned. “Well, according to the rules, men can be GO! assistant leaders. Mr. Warren was a Boy Scout and earned his Eagle award, so he knows lots of stuff about the outdoors he can share with us. Now, let’s go around the circle so each one can tell us her name and one interesting outdoors fact about her. Grace, can you start?”
Rob saw Grace flush, and her eyes looked a little bright. But she knew what to do. “My name is Grace Manion and I like bird-watching.”
Around the circle they went, learning names and hearing about girls who liked soccer or swimming or tennis, who camped with their families or sailed or spent a week at the beach. As the girls spoke, Connor started scooting away from the circle, pushing with his feet and sliding on his backside in an attempt to escape. Rob watched with a smile as Valerie grabbed the leg of the boy’s jeans just before he moved out of reach and pulled him back to sit beside her, all without even glancing in her son’s direction.
Just then, Ginny’s turn to talk arrived. “I’m Virginia Warren,” she said. “I like to ride horses.”
One of the girls on the other side of the circle said, “You ride horses? I don’t believe it.”
“I do ride.” Ginny’s face turned red. “I take lessons, too.”
On Rob’s left, Valerie nodded. “There are riding programs for people with all sorts of abilities. And there are GO! badges for horseback riding, among lots of other things. Open your books right now to page one hundred seventy—that’s the HorseCare Badge. To earn that badge, you have to do six of the activities listed on these pages. And when you do them all, then I can give you a little circle which looks just like the picture. You sew your badges on your vest and everyone can see all the interesting things you’ve done when you wear your uniform.”
She took them through the book as she had planned, pointing out the soccer badge, the swimming badge, the shell-collecting and bird-watching awards, plus cooking and camping and a myriad of other activities. “What you’ll need to do is to look through and decide which badges appeal to you the most. Some you can earn on your own, and some we’ll earn as a troop.”
Valerie got to her feet. “As a matter of fact, we have a couple of badge activities to do this afternoon. On page one-thirty-nine is the hiking badge.” She walked over to the table and took one of the compasses out of the bag. “Anybody know what this is?”
A couple of hands went up, including Grace’s. Valerie called on a different girl. “That’s a compass.”
“Right. And what’s it used for?”
Grace and several others raised their hands. “To find directions,” someone said.
“And which of the badge requirements does using a compass satisfy?”
All heads bowed low over the handbooks, each girl trying to read fast and be the first to answer the question. Grace put up her hand a minute before anyone else. Ginny was next.
“Tell us, Ginny,” Valerie said.
“We’re supposed to use the compass to make a path from one place to another place.”
“Right.” Valerie smiled. “So let’s all get up and Mr. Warren will start teaching us how to do just that.”
Rob thought he’d planned out his twenty allotted minutes very carefully, but he hadn’t counted on the silliness of third-grade girls. His time was up long before he’d gotten everyone to understand which way to point the compass, let alone how to change directions.
Valerie grinned at him as she raised her hand for quiet. “Looks like we’re going to need more than one meeting to understand orienteering. For now, all of you can put your compasses back into the bag, and then sit down at the table for snacks.” The girls stampeded toward Rob as he held the bag, then rushed to the table to jostle for their places. Grace and Ginny brought up the end.
“I understand,” Grace said quietly. “My mom and I have worked with compasses before.”
“I could tell,” Rob told her with a smile. “I saw you trying to help the others. I appreciate the effort.”
Her eyes shone at the praise. “You’re welcome.”
“Excuse me.” Ginny’s voice was at its most impatient. “I want some snacks before it’s all gone.” Grace stepped aside and went to sit at the end of the table.
Rob eyed his daughter with disapproval. “That was not polite.”
“Was I supposed to wait forever?”
“You—” He swallowed the reprimand. “Have a seat so everybody can eat.”
After snack came the craft segment, which had to do with making paper chains to represent the food chains in nature. Ginny’s fingers didn’t maneuver scissors well, so Rob spent most of his time cutting out the pictures she wanted from the pages of animals and plants Valerie had provided.
The meeting ended at four-thirty with another circle, standing up this time. “Link hands,” Valerie said. “Like this.” She crossed her arms and reached for the hands of the girls on either side of her. Everyone else followed suit…except Ginny, who couldn’t hold her crutches and cross her arms.
“Just take my hand,” Rob told her. “Don’t worry about it.” But he could tell by the set of her mouth that another storm was brewing.
As they all held hands, Valerie taught them a song about friendship. “This is how we’ll close every meeting,” she told them. “As friends and as a troop. Remember the GO! motto—All for one, and one for all!” At the words, she turned in place, uncrossing her arms as she did so. The girls—except for Ginny, and Rob—followed suit.
Then there were parents arriving to pick up their daughters, book bags to gather and chains to collect, and more excited chatter than Rob had ever imagined.
Finally, the room grew quiet, with only three children left to deal with. Ginny had made her way to a chair and sat there twirling her paper chain around her wrist. As Valerie packed up her supplies, Grace gathered trash from around the room and under the table where girls had let their scraps fall.
Connor had subsided onto the bench of a table and put his head down on his unbandaged arm. “What did happen to his arm?” Rob asked Valerie. “Is he okay?”
She put the last of the construction paper away. “He and another boy got into an argument at school on Monday. When the other boy teased him from behind a window, Connor…” She closed her eyes, then shook her head as if she still couldn’t believe it. “Connor punched his fist through the window.”
“Ouch.” Rob winced. “That had to hurt really bad.”
Valerie nodded. “He’s winding down on the pain medicine now. He didn’t damage