Apple Rock

Chapter One

Hey there, Reader!!! It's me, Green Gerbil, here to tell you the story of Apple Rock.

Apple Rock fit its name quite well; it was a small, rocky island in the middle of the ocean. There were only two interesting things about the island. One was the apple tree that grew from the tallest point of the island, and the other was the cave.

The apple tree was a wizened old tree that clung with every ounce of its strength to the tippy-top of Apple Rock. Its branches spread out over almost the entire island, providing the inhabitants with fresh, juicy fruit every fall. In the spring, it showered Apple Rock with fragrant petals.

The cave was... well, it was a cave. Y'know, a big hole in the ground. For reasons unknown to everybody, there was an enormous pile of stuff in the cave; everything from gold coins to a magical harp to a bag of shriveled leaves.

And that was about everything on Apple Rock; well, besides the citizens, of course.

Copper White had been on Apple Rock for as long as she could remember. Her parents, wealthy fishermen, had lived there for a while before realizing that fish generally don't like to swim around large piles of pointy black rocks, at which point they left, leaving Copper in the care of... well, nobody. At thirteen, Copper was wilder than ever.

Pineapple Volkswagen was a more recent addition to the tiny population of the rock. He was a sixteen-year-old who insisted that he was a "nosy pamphlet". (Copper could never quite figure out what that meant; all she knew was that Pineapple had a bad habit of unearthing all her deepest secrets.) He had arrived on Apple Rock by way of the sole mail delivery that the island had ever received. He refused to tell Copper where he came from, no matter how hard she begged.

And that, my friend, is the cumulative population of Apple Rock.