I pause halfway across the sandbar, lifting my face to the sun as I wait for the others to catch up. It’s such a treat to be outside! I spend most of my days cooped up in Lower Lodge with Felicia, teaching music. Not that I mind, really. Despite my cousin’s bossiness, I’m having a lot of fun. The campers are great, and they’re really enthusiastic about the Camp Chorale I’ve formed. Still, I have to admit that my favorite part of the day is free period, when I get to work with the Junior Naturalists.
Junior Naturalists are another camp tradition, and one of the electives the campers get to choose for free period. It’s just basic outdoor science stuff—bird-watching, exploring habitats, that kind of thing—but it’s right up my alley. The main thing is, it takes advantage of all the natural beauty at Lake Lovejoy.
The water is shallow here on the sandbar, and warm, and it laps against my calves as I watch the girls splashing toward me. Hearing a series of low, tuneless toots coming from the deck of Lower Lodge, I smother a grin. My cousin decided to offer sackbut lessons during free period this week. One lone camper signed up. I’m guessing she’s sorry she did.
There are other sounds drifting over from camp too—the rhythmic clatter of tap shoes from the dance platform on the Hill; the roar of the water ski boat and shrieks of glee as Cassidy and Brianna take a group of girls out wake tubing; and the welcome clash of pots and pans from the kitchen, signaling that dinner isn’t far away.
Camp Lovejoy has a rhythm to its days as distinct as music and as predictable as a math equation. This suits me just fine, and over the course of the last week I’ve slipped effortlessly into the routine. Unfortunately, that has not been the case with a number of the younger campers—especially the ones in Nest and Balsam.
Emma and Felicia’s cabin has been struck the hardest, since their little seven-year-olds have never been to sleepaway camp before. Emma says she’s gone through four entire boxes of tissues already. Bedtime is the most difficult, as that’s when missing home seems to hit the girls the hardest.
Becca and Megan are struggling too, especially with the utterly adorable Amy Osborne, who is quite an accomplished violinist for someone so tiny, and Harper Kennedy, who’s here with me this afternoon. I glance back, hoping that Harper remembered to put on extra sunscreen. Like so many redheads, she has pale skin, and it’s already blooming with a new crop of freckles.
So far, Cassidy and I have been pretty lucky on the homesickness front. We have the nine-year-olds, and two of them are gung ho seasoned campers: Brooklyn Alvarez, a boisterous charmer who actually is from Brooklyn, and Carter Stevens, whose mane of loose Afro curls gives her a distinctive flair, and who’s almost as devoted to fashion as Megan. The first couple of days with our other two—newbies Frederica and Monica Simpson, sandy-haired twins from St. Louis—were a little rocky, but Cassidy is really experienced dealing with kids, thanks to her work with Chicks with Sticks, plus she’s so funny that she manages to get the twins, who go by the nicknames Freddie and Nica, laughing whenever they start to droop.
I’m keeping an eagle eye out to make sure that the other two girls in our cabin don’t shut them out. The whole clique thing drives me nuts. I’m supersensitive to it, because I remember only too well how miserable my life was for a few years back in middle school, thanks to the Fab Four, as we used to call Becca Chadwick and her posse. That was a long time ago, of course, and Becca is a completely different person now—she’s one of my closest friends, in fact—but still, those memories resurface now and then, and they can still sting.
“Almost there, girls!” I call to the flock following me, and we all wade on toward the island’s shore.
Jennie Norris, a cheerful counselor-in-training who’s been assigned to help me with the Junior Naturalists, brings up the rear with little Tara Lindgren. Tara is one of Emma’s campers, a timid girl with a pixie haircut who has to be coaxed into having fun. She lives in Manhattan and doesn’t spend much time outside. According to Emma, Tara’s idea of the great outdoors is sitting at a sidewalk table at a coffee shop.
“The stuff she comes up with!” Emma exclaimed this morning as we were heading to our early staff meeting in the Grove. “I try so hard to keep a straight face, but I can’t help laughing.”
“Like what?”
“Well, the first night she was here, she heard a loon and thought it was a moose, and she cried because she was scared. Then, last night at bedtime, she had a total meltdown. ‘I miss New York!’ she kept sobbing. ‘I miss skyscrapers and smog and . . . and pretzels!’ ”
I had to laugh at that. “Well, those pretzels are pretty good.”
Emma grinned. “Yeah.”
“You’ve got to write that stuff down and use it in a story.”
“Already in my notebook,” she told me smugly.
Emma is going to be a writer someday. She already is one, in fact—she had a picture book published a couple of years ago, and she sold a poem to a literary magazine right before graduation last spring.
“Okay, everybody, put your shoes back on and we’ll get started,” I tell my group as we clamber onto the rocky beach. I rummage through my backpack for my sandals. It’s amazing how much stuff I have to haul around with me on these little excursions, even though we never leave camp property. First aid kit, emergency whistle, extra snacks—not to mention a counselor-in-training.
So far this week, Jennie, the CIT, and I have taken our Junior Naturalists on bird walks, spent time identifying trees and leaves and flowers, searched for crawfish with nets along the shore by the boathouse, and hunted for newts and salamanders in the bog at the top of the hill. For our grand finale this afternoon, I promised them a scavenger hunt.
Yesterday was my day off—counselors get one night and one day off every week—and I spent most of it scouting the island, planting a few surprises for the girls to find. It’s going to be fun.
“Same two teams as before,” I tell them. “Chipmunks, you line up over by Jennie, and Squirrels, you all come join me. If you have questions, remember that Jennie and I both have guidebooks to all the New Hampshire flora and fauna. Who remembers what those words mean?”
A hand shoots up. It’s Holly Andrews, the oldest girl on my team. She’s in Farther, one of the cabins up on the Hill. “Flora is Latin for all the plants that grow in a particular area, and fauna are the animals.”
“Way to go, Holly!” I’ve been sneaking in as many Latin names for things as I can this week, hoping some of them will stick. “Flora was the Roman goddess of flowers—isn’t that perfect? And Fauna was the sister of Faunus, the Roman god of the forest.” I love making these connections. It’s part of why I think science is so cool.
I hand out the checklist of things they need to look for, along with a paper bag for each team to carry what they find back to Jennie and me. “First group to gather all the items on the list gets a prize. Ready? Let’s go!”
Jennie and the Chipmunks trot off on the path that hugs the shoreline, while the Squirrels follow me into the woods. My girls find the first few items easily—a pinecone, a fern, some moss—and then it gets harder. It takes a while for them to spot anything edible (I discovered several stands of wild blueberry bushes on my scouting trip yesterday, so I steer them discreetly toward one), and they’re stumped briefly at lichen, and have to consult a guidebook.
“There’s some!” says Harper, squatting down and pointing to a patch of it on a boulder, after carefully examining the picture.
“Good job!” I tell her.
Brooklyn Alvarez frowns at the checklist. “I haven’t seen a single feather.”
“We’ll have more luck with those closer to shore,” I promise.
She nods, consulting the list again. “Hairbrush plant? What’s that?”
“It’s the plant the island is named for,” I tell her, somehow managing to keep a straight face.
“Really? What does it look like?”
“Kind of like that plant over there,” I reply, pointing across the clearing.
The girls all turn around, then burst out laughing when they spot a pair of pink hairbrushes sticking out of the ground.
“What?” I ask, feigning innocence. “It’s Hairbrush Island, right? They grow in the wild here.”
“You’re teathing uth, Jeth!” cries Pippa Lovejoy. Pippa is the youngest girl at camp this summer. She’s in Nest with Emma and Felicia, and along with her cabinmates Tara Lindgren and Meriwether—Meri to her friends—Milligan, has quickly become one of the camp pets. It’s pretty hard to resist Pippa’s pink sparkly glasses and strawberry-blond curls, plus she’s missing her two front teeth, which gives her the most appealing gap-toothed smile. Despite being not quite seven, Pippa hasn’t suffered the slightest pang of homesickness. Probably because she’s from nearby Pumpkin Falls, which her ancestors settled—they named a bunch of stuff around here, including Lovejoy Mountain and Lake Lovejoy. Plus, Pippa’s older sister Lauren is here for the summer too.
I put my arm around her shoulders and give her a squeeze. “You think so?”
We’re all still laughing when it happens. A counselor’s worst nightmare—screams from the other side of the island.
I grab Holly. “You’re in charge! Stay here and don’t let anyone move a muscle. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Heart racing, I dive into the underbrush, bushwhacking my way toward what has now escalated into full-blown wailing.
“I’m coming!” I holler, fumbling for my emergency whistle. My imagination kicks into overdrive, churning out vivid pictures of all the horrible scenarios that might be awaiting me. I trip over a root and fall, dropping my whistle and skinning my knee. As I scramble to my feet, a branch slaps me in the face and another one grabs at my hair.
I finally reach the shore path, where I spot Jennie and her charges. “What?” I shout. “What is it? Who’s hurt?”
“I don’t want to look for bears!” shrieks Tara. She’s cowering behind the CIT, who is trying in vain to comfort her. “I want to go home!”
“We tried to tell her it’s just a joke,” Jennie says helplessly.
“No bears!” Tara shrieks again.
My surprise has backfired, big-time.
I kneel in front of the wailing camper. “Tara, listen to me,” I tell her, using the same quiet voice I use when comforting an injured animal. “We’re not looking for real bears.”
“I want to go home!” Tara wails again, gulping back sobs.
I fish a tissue out of my backpack and hand it to her. “Sweetie, I was just kidding—it’s teddy bears we’re looking for, see?” I point to a nearby tree that’s leaning out over the water. Nestled in its branches is one of the stuffed bears I planted on the island yesterday. He’s posed with his arm in the air, as if he’s waving at the campers.
Tara regards it suspiciously. She wipes her nose on her sleeve, and her sobs begin to subside.
I retrieve the bear, hand it to Tara, and then—sticking to the path this time—lead the Chipmunks back to where I left my group.
Which now contains not one but two crying campers: Harper and Pippa, who may not be homesick but who still has her limits, apparently, especially when it comes to wilderness adventures.
“We were thcared you wouldn’t come back for uth!” she sobs.
“I thought I heard wolves!” wails Harper.
I take a deep breath. “The scavenger hunt is over for today,” I say as brightly as I can. “How about a cookie break instead?”
Things calm down a bit after everyone has had a snack, but it’s a subdued group that I lead back across the sandbar.
“More tears?” mutters Felicia as I deliver Pippa and Tara, who is still clutching my teddy bear, to the doorstep of Nest. “I swear, it’s like the plague around here this summer.”
Trust my cousin to find an appropriate medieval metaphor.
“What happened over on the island?” demands Sergeant Marge, intercepting me a few minute later as Cassidy and I lead our campers into the Dining Hall for dinner.
She shakes her head when I finish explaining. “First of all, you should never, never, never, under any circumstances, leave campers on their own,” she tells me sternly. “Do you realize what a risk you took?”
“But I put Holly—” I start to protest.
“And second of all,” the head counselor continues, barging ahead, “well, second of all, Gwen should have taken my advice about not hiring inexperienced counselors.” She spins on her heel and stalks off.
Now I’m the one who feels like crying. Hairbrush Island is so small it barely qualifies as an island, and the girls were with a perfectly capable teenager and out of my sight for what, five minutes, tops?
“You look like you swallowed a lemon,” says Cassidy as I join her at our table. “What happened?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I mutter.
Fortunately, our campers are too busy rehashing their afternoon activities to notice how quiet I am. While our cabin may not be suffering from the homesickness plague, we’re not without our own drama, which today centers on swim lesson placement. I had no idea nine-year-old girls could be so competitive.
“I’m going to be a Shark by the end of the summer,” boasts Brooklyn.
“You’re all gonna be Sharks by the end of the summer,” Cassidy promises.
Cassidy is the queen of competition, and she’s been fanning those flames like crazy ever since our campers arrived. She put up charts on the walls of Twin Pines to track our cabin’s progress. There’s one for inspection—the cabin and cubie house with the highest tidiness score at the end of the summer win banana splits from the General Store in Pumpkin Falls, and after the fiasco with the Dreamboat relay, Cassidy is determined to win that—and another for each of the sports our girls are involved in, to help record everyone’s athletic progress.
“I don’t think Nica and I will be Sharks,” says Frederica sadly. “We’re only Minnows.”
Her sister nods in agreement.
Freddie does most of the talking for her twin, who’s on the shy side. I know all about that. I used to be so shy I was practically mute.
Last Monday’s swim test determined each camper’s swim level: Guppy, Minnow, Sunfish, Dolphin, and Shark. There’s also Junior Lifeguard, Senior Lifeguard, and Water Safety Instructor, but those are mostly for the older campers in the cabins on the Hill.
“You guys just keep practicing, and you’ll see,” Cassidy assures her. “All my girls are winners.”
A CIT comes by just then with a basket of breadsticks, and Cassidy grabs one in each hand. “Let the carbo-loading begin!”
I poke at my lasagna, which I’m guessing is on the menu for everyone planning to run in this weekend’s Four on the Fourth road race over in Pumpkin Falls. A lot of campers and counselors have signed up for the traditional Fourth of July race.
Dessert is brownies and mint chip ice cream, one of my favorites. I still have no appetite, so I shove my plate over to Cassidy, who happily scarfs it down.
“Attention, girls!” says Gwen. “Tonight is our first Cabin Night, and your counselors will tell you shortly what they have in store. First, though, I’d like to ask all cabin counselors to join me at the Director’s Cottage for a brief staff meeting.”
My stomach lurches. A staff meeting? I don’t think I can stand it if Gwen scolds me in front of everyone. It’s bad enough that Sergeant Marge bawled me out.
“Campers, you’ll remain here in the Dining Hall, where the CITs will lead you in a sing-along until your counselors come back for you,” Gwen continues, and we leave the Dining Hall to the strains of “Make New Friends, but Keep the Old.” Emma tucks her arm through mine, humming along as we follow Gwen down the path toward the Director’s Cottage. I tell her about the disastrous afternoon and my run-in with the head counselor.
“One is silver and the other gold,” Emma sings softly. “That’s you, Jess—you’re gold. Don’t pay any attention to Marge the Barge.”
“I don’t feel very golden at the
moment,” I retort. To be honest, I’m worried that maybe I’m going to get fired. I need the money from this summer job—even with the scholarship and grants that I was awarded, Juilliard is expensive.
Emma gives my arm a squeeze. “It’ll blow over. And hey, tomorrow is our night off, remember?”
I give her a half smile. “Yeah.” We’re both really looking forward to that. Not that there’s much to do around here, but still, it will be nice to spend some time together.
The breeze has picked up, and Emma and I dart inside Cubbyhole to grab sweatshirts from our cubies. Approaching the Point, we jog the last stretch to the Director’s Cottage.
Inside, a fire is snapping in the living room’s stone fireplace. Emma and I make a beeline for the last empty armchair beside it, squeezing into it together.
“I could totally live here,” I announce, looking around. The cabin is rustic, with plain, unpainted wood paneling, and windows on three sides that look out over the Point and the gazebo and the lake beyond. Red-cushioned window seats flank the fireplace, and cozy red sofas and armchairs are bathed in the warm glow of a scattering of lamps.
Emma nods. “It’s like the keeping room at Half Moon Farm,” she says, referring to the snug family room off the kitchen that’s my favorite spot at my house back in Concord. Well, besides my own bedroom, that is.
Ironically, I’m suddenly struck by a pang of homesickness myself. My parents are probably out in the barn right now, getting the animals settled for the night. I can picture Led and Zep, our big Belgian horses, quietly munching their hay, and all the goats bedding down for the night, and even the quiet burbling of the chickens as they head sleepily to their roosts.
“I want to go over the plans for our busy weekend ahead,” says Gwen once everyone has arrived and taken a seat. If Sergeant Marge gave the camp director an earful about what happened on Hairbrush Island this afternoon, Gwen doesn’t show any sign of it. She doesn’t single me out at all, in fact, although she does bring up the subject of homesickness.