Carmen looked over her shoulder to check on Pittman. Then she took a big step my way. She was close now—really close. That snake tattoo was practically hissing at me.
When she leaned in even farther, I got goose bumps on my goose bumps.
“Just so we’re clear,” Carmen said in this little whisper. “You may be cute, but I could put you in the hospital if I wanted to, and we both know it. So don’t ever tell me what to do again.”
Huh. Before she said all that, I actually thought Carmen was about to kiss me. Yes, I’m that dumb.
I mean, I’ve never kissed anyone. Not like that, anyway.
Honestly, I didn’t know if I wanted her to do it or not, but it wasn’t really up to me anyway. The only kiss I got that day was the kind you get from a snake.
And that’s the kiss of death.
Up and at ’Em
I spent the rest of that night doodling in my “shelter,” thinking about my empty stomach and whatever happened with Carmen. The campfire wasn’t exactly the happiest place on earth, even though building it did earn us our second tags. So the next morning, when Sergeant Fish woke us up at the crispy crack of dawn, I wanted to be miserable about it.
But I just couldn’t. I had one word running through my head, and that’s all it took to eject me out of that tent like a piece of toast from a nuclear-powered toaster.
Okay, I didn’t think I was waking up to blueberry pancakes and extra-crispy bacon, but that didn’t even matter. The point is, I was waking up to FOOOOOOD! BREAKFAST!
Back in the real world, what we woke up to was Sergeant Fish’s morning breath, and not much else.
“Good morning, cockroaches!” he said. “Anyone hungry?”
“Anyone not hungry?” D.J. said.
“Well then, let’s get right to it,” Fish said, and my stomach started doing a happy dance all over again. “You’re going to need some water for boiling,” he told us.
“No problem,” Burp said, and we started heading down to the stream.
“Hold on! We’re going to need a fire for that water,” Fish said.
“Okay,” Thea said, and some of us broke off and turned back toward the fire circle.
“What—you think that fire burns itself?” Fish said. “You’re going to need dry wood, and lots of it.”
I was starting to get the idea about how much Fish liked messing with us. But that doesn’t mean he was lying about all the work. I guess that’s why we had to get up at a quarter past zero in the morning—so we could have breakfast sometime before lunch.
But we did it. We split up, peeled bark, gathered wood, started the fire, boiled some creek water, and even cooked the food ourselves, once Fish and Pittman told us how. And when we finally, finally got around to the eating part, it was just two scoops of the lumpiest, grayest, lukewarmest, most unbelievably delicious oatmeal I’ve ever had in my life.
You know how they say everything tastes better outdoors? Well, everything tastes even better-er when you’re outdoors and all you’ve had for the last twenty-four hours is water, spit, and air.
And I don’t even like oatmeal.
“I want you all to remember something,” Pittman said while we were sucking down that glop. “Most kids who go to bed with empty stomachs don’t know where their breakfast is coming from either. So keep that in mind the next time you think you’re hungry.”
Nobody said anything to that, unless “mmmm” and swallowing noises counted.
But I heard what Sergeant Pittman said. I definitely appreciated breakfast in a whole new way that day. In fact, I’d say it was just about the happiest twelve to fifteen seconds I’d had in a long, long time.
More Than One Way to Play
As soon as we were done eating, D.J. got up and started collecting everyone’s dirty dishes. I didn’t think too much about it until Sergeant Pittman gave him a big smile.
“Thank you, D.J.,” she said. “You can wash those down at the stream. And here’s this too.” Then she reached into her pocket and handed him a blue-painted metal washer. Another tag!
“Pay attention to D.J., roaches,” Fish told us. “Taking on jobs without being asked is worth something around here. Don’t think we forgot how many tags each of you still needs to pass this course.”
I’d almost forgotten—this wasn’t just a week of torture. It was a kind of game too. The kind you start losing as soon as you forget you’re playing it.
I’d been sweating plenty about food, and Carmen, and Fish, and falling off a mountain, but if I didn’t start worrying more about earning those tags, none of the rest would matter. I’d be out robbing banks with my good friend Rocco before you knew it.
In other words, I needed a strategy to get all of those tags. And the first thing I could think of was to talk to the kid who was playing the best game so far. So I picked up a couple of extra spoons lying around and carried them down to the stream where D.J. was washing up.
“You did that on purpose, right?” I asked, squatting next to him.
“Well… if you want to be nosy about it—yeah.”
“It was a pretty good move,” I told him. “You’re the only one with three tags now, and all the rest of us still have two.”
D.J. looked down at the string around his neck. “Oh, that?” he said. “Yeah, that was cool too. But I just wanted the bowls.”
“The bowls? What for?” I said.
“ ’Cause I’m still starving,” he said. He took the first one off the stack and licked it all the way around the inside, burying his face in as far as he could.
“And that’s what you call seconds!” he said, and reached for another.
D.J. did know how to play this—but just not in the way I thought.
“Go ahead if you want,” he said, and pointed at the other bowls. “You can have three, but I get the other six, ’cause I thought of it.”
I looked into one of those bowls, and there were at least a couple of good-sized lumps still sitting there. My stomach whispered hello at them.
Besides, those lumps were food. Food was energy. Energy was what I needed to earn those tags. And like I said, those tags were what it was all about.
In other words—strategy.
“Well, maybe just a little taste,” I said. And neither one of us headed back up to camp until every one of those breakfast dishes was sparkling clean.
After my talk with D.J., I decided it was time to put my game face on. I had to get organized.
Bad News Buds
Everyone circle up, shut up, and listen up,” Fish said after breakfast. “It’s time to think about hitting the mighty Arkansas River.”
“Yes!” I said. I only kind of regretted it when I looked around and everyone was staring at me.
This was the one thing I was kind of looking forward to. White-water rafting sounded awesome to me. And I needed to show everyone that I could be something besides Weak Link.
There was only one thing missing for my grand plan.
“Where are the rafts?” I said.
Fish reached out with his pointer finger and toink-toinked me on the forehead. “Right in there,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Welcome to obstacle number two, cockroaches. You’re going to be figuring these rafts out and building them for yourselves.”
“With some instruction,” Pittman said. She was already drawing something in the dirt with a stick.
“We’re going to need a donkey load of wood for this,” Fish said. Which I guess made us the donkeys. “Me and Sergeant Pittman have already scoped out the area, and there should be enough usable wood here for two rafts. So pair up with your same buddy from yesterday and start working.”
That meant me and Carmen. Again. She was already looking at me like I was some kind of after-breakfast snack.
So while everyone started getting ready, I went over to where Sergeant Pittman was packing up her gear.
“Sergeant Pittman, can I ask you something?” I said.
“I don
’t know—can you?” she said.
“I was just wondering, how long are we sticking with our buddies?” I said. “For the whole week, or—”
“Why? Is there a problem?” she said.
“Well…” I said.
“Yeah, Rafe, is there a problem?” someone else said behind me.
Gulp.
I turned around, and Carmen was standing right there with her arms crossed. She didn’t say any more, but I could still hear her (and her snake friend) loud and clear: KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT OR I’M GOING TO PUT YOU IN THE CHOPPED MEAT SECTION.
And I was pretty sure she could too.
“No,” I said. “No problem. Why would there be a problem? I was just, you know… curious.”
“We done here?” Sergeant Pittman said, and I could feel the two of them looking at me from either side, like some kind of double whammy.
“I guess so,” I said.
“Come on, Rafe,” Carmen said. When she put an arm around my shoulder, I flinched. “We’ve got work to do,” she said.
But you and I both know what she meant.
She meant I had work to do. Enough work for two.
Trouble Magnet
Anyone who’s read my other books about my middle school “experience” probably knows a couple things about me:
1. I get into a little trouble once in a while.
2. Okay, a lot of trouble. More than once in a while.
3. Sometimes it’s my own fault.
4. BUT SOMETIMES IT’S NOT!
And really, it’s number four on that list that I don’t get. You ever feel like you’re walking through life with a big KICK ME sign on your back? I do. All the time. It’s like I’m some kind of trouble magnet, and I can’t do anything to stop it.
Like for instance, I knew exactly why I got stuck in The Program. That was (mostly) my own fault. But I had no idea why Carmen picked me as her own personal dartboard. She just did.
That’s kind of the point.
Was I afraid of Carmen? Yes, I was. But that wasn’t the main reason I kept my mouth shut in front of Sergeant Pittman.
I was doing whatever I had to do to earn those twenty tags and make it all the way to the finish line. In the meantime, I’d deal with what I had to deal with—especially Carmen.
Besides, it was only for a week. At Camp Wannamorra, I had to deal with Doolin and the Bobcats for over a month. And at HVMS, I had Miller the Killer making my life miserable for NINE months.
A week was nothing. I could put up with anything for that long.
At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.
Over, and over, and over again.
All the Work and Half of the Credit
We spent the next bunch of hours looking for fallen trees the right size…
… and pulling them all into a pile…
… and laying them out in rows…
… and getting crosspieces…
… and tying them together with knots that Pittman and Fish showed us…
… until it actually started to look like a couple of real live rafts.
And when I say “we,” I mean everyone but Carmen. She spent most of her time telling me what to do, and what not to do, and looking busy whenever Pittman and Fish came around to inspect the rafts. All I know is, I never stopped moving.
Still, you can bet Carmen was first in line when Pittman started giving out that next round of tags.
“Good work, guys,” she said. She handed me an orange washer, and Carmen got a purple one.
The real surprise came about a second later, when everyone else was starting to make lunch. That’s when Fish clamped one of his big Fish hands on my shoulder.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said.
I didn’t like the sound of that.
“What did I do?” I said. “Am I in trouble?”
“Not exactly. We just have to talk,” he said, which isn’t the kind of answer you want when someone like Fish is marching you off into the wilderness.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“Just keep walking,” Fish told me.
The next thing I knew, we were heading up into the woods away from camp. Even worse, he was walking me away from Pittman and all the other kids. Also known as potential witnesses to whatever horrible punishment was coming my way.
And all I could think now was—Uh-oh. Dead kid walking.
Fish Talk
As soon as we were out of earshot of everyone else, Fish got right to it.
“Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Do you have a crush on that girl?”
I don’t know what I was expecting him to ask, but that wasn’t it. And since I didn’t have a good answer, I tried stalling him a little.
“What girl?” I said.
“Cockroach…” Fish said, which sounded a lot like We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way. I knew who Fish was talking about, and he knew I knew it.
“Oh? Carmen? No, sir,” I said, with my best innocent face. “No crush there.”
“Then why are you picking up the slack for her all the time?” Fish said.
“Huh?” I said. This whole thing kept changing faster than I could keep up. “Hang on. You know about all that?”
“It’s kind of hard to miss,” Fish said.
“So then why are you letting her get away with it?” I asked him.
Fish reached over and toink-toinked me on the forehead again. “You don’t get it, do you?” he said. “This isn’t middle school, kid, and I’m not your homeroom teacher. Out here, you live with your own choices. You want to walk around with someone else’s footprints on your back? That’s up to you.”
Uh…
This is the part where I reach into my pocket and pull out one of my Official Free Passes. It’s like a Get Out of Jail Free card. I hand it over to Fish, he lets me walk away, and we both forget this conversation ever happened. Yeah, in my dreams!
And since that wasn’t an option, I tried one of the oldest tricks in the book. Changing the subject.
It doesn’t always work, but it’s always worth a shot.
“Shouldn’t we be getting back?” I said, trying to be as smooth as possible. “I’ll bet they have those rafts on the river by now.”
And guess what? It worked! Fish actually cracked a real smile and everything.
“You think that dinky little stream back there is the mighty Arkansas River?” he said.
“It’s not?” I said.
“Come here,” Fish told me.
Instead of heading toward camp, we started going deeper into the woods. After a minute, Fish ducked us under a bunch of pine branches, and we came out onto this big open piece of rock.
“Now that’s what you call a river,” Fish said.
And all I could say was…
I took a step back from that edge and tried not to look down.
“So then, why did we build the rafts in the woods?” I said. “Why didn’t we do it down there?”
But I was learning quick, and I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.
“That would have been too easy,” Fish told me. “Plus, the wood we needed wasn’t by the river. And by the way,” he said, “changing the subject doesn’t change the fact that you’ve got some thinking to do. Understand?”
“Yeah, I understand,” I told him. What else was I going to say?
“Good,” Fish said. “Now let’s go, cockroach—back to camp! Time for your next obstacle. Move, move, move, move, MOOOOOOVE!”
A (Very) Quick Dip
The next obstacle was kind of like the way Pittman described the whole program. It wasn’t that complicated. All we had to do was take our new rafts and bring them down a path to the river. But it wasn’t easy either. That trail was S-T-E-E-P. And those rafts were H-E-A-V-Y. By the time we carried them all the way down to the mighty Arkansas, I’d sweated a whole river of my own.
But at least I got another tag out of it. That, and the one I got for digging latrines, pu
t me at five—halfway to the ten I needed before sunset the next day. Not too shabby. It finally felt like things were looking up.
For about a minute, anyway.
The place we came to was called a put-in, because that’s where people PUT their rafts IN the water. (I guess raft people don’t have much imagination.) There was a parking lot with a couple of trucks, some trailers with kayaks on them, and a big storage locker with life vests, wet suits, paddles, and I don’t know what else.
Even though you could see some rapids way downstream, the water by the put-in was calm, like a swimming hole. “Can we jump in?” I asked Pittman.
“If you want to,” she said. “But that river’s pretty cold.”
“Sounds good to me,” Arnie said. We already had our shoes off, and everyone headed right for the water. “Last one in is a rotten—”
In case you were wondering, that was the sound of eight kids screaming all at the same time.
When Pittman said the water was cold, I thought she meant it was just regular cold. Like coming-out-of-your-faucet cold or nice-cool-drink-of-water cold.
How was I supposed to know she meant eighty-below-zero, turn-you-into-an-ice-cube, hurts-just-to-touch-it, deadly-freezing-frozen cold? That water was chillier than Mrs. Stricker’s heart sitting on top of the North Pole on a cloudy day. Another half degree colder, and we would have been there for skating instead of rafting.
Let’s just say it was the world’s shortest swim.
By the time we got back on dry land, all you could hear was chattering teeth.
“We’re s-s-s-supposed to go r-r-r-RAFTING in th-th-that?” Diego said.
“Technically speaking, you’ll be rafting on the river, not in it,” Pittman said. “Besides, that’s what the wet suits are for.”
“How about dry suits? You got any of those?” Burp said.