My shoulders were growing toasty in the sun. Right now the heat felt good, but I knew how quickly that could change. I leaned back on my palms, pulled my feet out of the water, and pushed myself into a standing position as gracefully as I could, tricky to do without scooching my fanny on the rough concrete. But fanny-scooching was death to a bathing suit, as I knew from experience.
Well, fanny-schooching was death to the sort of standardissue girl’s bathing suit I was wearing. My suit was a blue one-piece, and it was in great condition, without any nubbly spots or loose elastic. But it was only June. By August, who knew what state it would be in?
I glanced around for the board-shorts girl. She was sitting on the opposite side of the pool, chatting with a cute boy and swishing her feet in the water. Swish, swish, swish, not seeming the slightest bit concerned by what all that swishing might be doing in terms of bathing suit damage.
Maybe that’s why she wears board shorts, I thought. So she doesn’t have to worry about ripping her suit.
The boy laughed, and something glinted in his ear. It was an earring. The girl wasn’t wearing jewelry, but he was. I smiled.
“Come on, buddy,” I said, reaching out and pulling Ty up.
A large lady walked past us. Ty followed her with his gaze, and this time he beckoned for me to lean in.
“She has a mole, and it is vehwee, vehwee big,” he whispered.
I looked.
“It sure is,” I whispered back.
“It’s not her fault, though.”
“No, moles aren’t anyone’s fault.”
“Do I have any moles?”
“Not yet, although you might grow some. Especially if you eat too many Sour Skittles.”
His eyes widened, then narrowed. “Nuh-uh. You just want my Sour Skittles. But guess what? I don’t even have any Sour Skittles!”
I still had the two dollars Mom gave me, and I displayed them to Ty. “Snack bar?”
His face lit up. Then he frowned. “But—”
I was way ahead of him. “We’ll tell Mom they were out of popsicles—which they are.” I didn’t know that, but I didn’t not know that, either. It was summer. Freezers broke, popsicles melted.
I kept hold of Ty’s hand as we strolled to the snack bar. “So let’s review what we’ve learned. What do you think that frilly Erica girl would have said about the girl wearing board shorts?”
“That she wasn’t allowed?”
“Yup. What about the man in the Speedo?”
“What’s a Speedo?”
“The man whose bathing suit was like the bottom half of a bikini,” I clarified.
“Um . . . not allowed?”
“Correct again.” I squeezed his hand. “So is Erica right about things, and I’m wrong? Or am I right, and she’s wrong?”
“You’re right, and so am I, and she is a poo-poo-head,” Ty said. “After we have our snack, will you play in the little kids’ pool with me?”
“Absolutely. You can be a dolphin, and I’ll be your trainer, and if you do your tricks right, I’ll reward you with Skittles.”
“Only we’ll say they’re fish,” he said. We got into line at the snack bar. “And if we see that mean Ewica, then she can just . . . just . . .”
“Fluff the ruffles on her bathing suit?”
He grinned. “Yeah!”
His Dusty Rose toenails sparkled in the sunshine, calling to mind seashells and dolphin treats and all things summery, splashy, and fun-with-a-capital-fuh.
July
I was so mad at Amanda that I could cry. My tears would be as hot as the hot Georgia sun, and I would collect them in ajar and . . . do something with them. Pour them on Amanda’s head, maybe, so her beautiful blond hair would burn to a frizzle.
Only I would never do that, so fine.
Instead, I kicked Bearie, my stuffed animal bear that I loved. Ow. That Bearie was a Very Heavy Bear. He was stuffed with rice, was why, and if the urge fell upon me, I could microwave him and he would get toasty-warm and extra-cuddly. In the winter, I shoved him under the sheets to the bottom of my bed, and he kept my feet cozy while I slept.
Today he made my foot unhappy, that bad bear. Except it wasn’t his fault, since I was the one who kicked him, and that was mean of me, too. It made my heart unhappy.
I scooped him up and clutched him to my chest. “I’m sorry, Bearie,” I said. My voice wobbled, and I was tempted to go get a hand mirror so I could watch myself be sad. Then I remembered that I wasn’t sad. I was mad, and not at Bearie, but at Amanda.
“Winnie, get down here now,” Mom called from the foot of the staircase. She was exasperated with me for being draggy and slow on the first day of summer camp. But guess what? I was exasperated, too.
“I can’t find my boots,” I complained.
“They’re in your closet. I put them there on purpose.”
Perhaps she did, but after I tried them on last night, I kicked them off on purpose. They’d arced through the air and landed humble-jumble by my beanbag chair, but I chose not to acknowledge their existence.
“Grab them and come on,” Mom called. She and I were the only ones in the house, as Sandra was with Ty at the park and Dad was at work.
I didn’t grab them. I didn’t do anything.
“All right,” Mom said. I heard the jangle of keys. “I’m leaving. I hope you decide to come with me, because otherwise, you’re on your own.”
“Fine,” I said.
“And I’ll be taking the cost of the nonrefundable camp tuition out of your bank account,” she added. “The camp that you begged me to sign you up for, I might add!”
I heard her open the back door. I heard her shut the back door. Then I heard nothing.
“Oh, mustard,” I cursed, scrambling for my boots. “Wait! I’m coming, sheesh!”
I sat in the backseat of the car even though I was allowed to sit up front when Sandra wasn’t along.
But today I didn’t want to. Today I fastened my seat belt, tucked my legs beneath me, and curled up next to the door. I wished I were anywhere but here, being forced to go to Wilderness Survival Camp ALL BY MYSELF for an entire week. It wasn’t sleepover camp, so I’d get to go home at the end of each day. But, still. Mom didn’t understand that the only reason I’d begged to be signed up was because Amanda and I would be going to camp together. Surviving in the woods? Eating hot dogs and possibly even worms, if we ran out of food and it was either eat worms or starve? What could be more awesome?
Then Amanda backed out, and her mom, unlike mine, said, “Sure, honey, go right ahead.” And why? So she could go to cheerleading camp instead! Grrrr.
“Winnie, you’re going to be fine,” Mom said when we pulled up to the camp drop-off. We’d ridden in silence, me with my arms crossed over my chest the whole time and my head turned determinedly away. “You’re going to be more than fine. You’re going to have fun, honey.”
“No,” I said. “Not without Amanda.”
Mom laughed, which made me even madder. She was laughing at my pain!
“You don’t even care, do you?” I said.
“Winnie,” Mom said, unbuckling and twisting in her seat. She put her hand on my leg. I jerked away. She stretched farther and put her hand on my leg again, and, so, fine. I left it there.
“I do care, and I’m sorry I laughed. I wasn’t laughing at you, though.”
“Oh, were you laughing with me?” I said sarcastically. “I wasn’t laughing, in case you didn’t notice.”
She squeezed my knee. “Let me try again. Maybe I was laughing at you, but I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, and if I did, I apologize. I was laughing because Winnie, you make friends more easily than anyone I’ve ever met.”
I sideways-looked at her. “I do?”
“You don’t need Amanda to have a good time,” she said. “Amanda is wonderful. I love Amanda.”
“So do I,” I said.
“But her dropping out of camp shouldn’t ruin it for you. And I know it won’t??
?that’s why I laughed.”
I glowered at her, but it was a somewhat less glowery glower than it could have been. It was a glower that meant Hmmph. I might forgive you, but only because I’m so nice.
“What if no one talks to me?” I said.
“Then you talk to them,” she said. She didn’t laugh, choosing this time to tease me by being overly serious. “Now, I know being chatty is hard for you—”
“Mo-o-o-m.”
“And I know you’re very shy—”
“Mo-o-o-m!”
“But just try, sweetie. And if, for whatever reason, you can’t get past your paralyzing fear of telling jokes, being silly, and doing monkey impressions—”
“I don’t do monkey impressions,” I said, giggling despite myself. Then I mooed, and I sounded exactly like a cow, because I did do an excellent cow impression. “That’s the interrupting cow, Mom. Sheesh.”
“Right. Of course. But my point is the same: If you find yourself without any cows to interrupt—”
I rolled my eyes.
“—then fake it till you make it. That’s all.”
“Sure, sure. That’s all. Easy for you to say.”
“You’re going to do great. I have complete and udder faith in you.”
“Did you just say you had udder faith in me?”
She smiled. “You inherited that charm and wit from someone, you know.”
“You mean Dad? Dad’s not charming and witty. He’s just weird.”
“Bye, Winnie,” she said, chuckling. She gave me a final knee squeeze. “I’ll see you at three, and you can tell me all the fabulous things you did.”
By lunchtime, I had yet to reach a verdict, as the only semi-fabulous thing that had happened so far was getting to take off our shoes and tromp around in the river, looking for good skipping stones. Yes, that was fun, but was it fabulous? I wasn’t yet ready to go that far.
I guess being here wasn’t horrible, though. The counselors were nice enough. One was named Jake and the other was named Lily, and they told us they were both in college studying to be forest rangers. They didn’t seem like the type of people to pick favorites or be randomly mean to kids, which was good.
They were very excited about leaves and bark and animal droppings, and I heard one girl camper whisper to her friend that they were “nature geeks,” but I didn’t mind that one bit. In fact, I thought it said more—in a bad way—about the whispering girl than it did about Jake and Lily. Ever since I was Ty’s age, Sandra had drilled into me that being geeky was definitely better than being snobby.
“Plus, you can be geeky and still be cool,” Sandra had often pointed out. “If you’re a snob, you’re a snob, and snobs are stupid.”
So the counselors were cool, and so was the schedule of activities they’d planned for us. Like, tomorrow we were going to break open owl droppings and see what was inside. I’d have to wait and see, but that might qualify as fabulous.
The camp itself was cool, too, I suppose. It was at the Chattahoochee Nature Center, so there was lots of nature around. If Ty was here, he’d be cramming rocks and feathers and sticks into his pockets like crazy. Then, when he got home, Mom would grab him before he entered the house and say, “Whoa, buddy. Nature stays outside.”
Thinking about Ty made me lonely, though—and also pointed a big blinky arrow at the one part of camp I didn’t like. Without Amanda here, I didn’t know a single soul. I’d possibly seen one of the girl campers at Garden Hills Pool, but I wasn’t sure. Either way, I’d never officially met her.
If Mom was here, she’d tell me to skip over and say, “Why, hi there! Do you have a red polka-dotted one-piece, and do you wear a nose plug when you swim?”
But I didn’t, and anyway, Polka Dot had plenty of friends already, so she didn’t need me. There were eleven kids in the survival camp—six boys and five girls—and Polka Dot was part of a foursome made up of all the girls but me. The four of them clearly knew each other outside of camp, which I deduced from multiple clues:
All four girls wore matching ensembles: cute shorts, white T-shirts knotted at the small of their backs, white tube socks pulled up to their knees, and sneakers of a matchingish variety. Meaning, their sneakers weren’t identical, but they were certainly in the same shoe family. Me? I had on my hand-me-down hiking boots from Sandra.
Also, all four girls thought bugs were gross and said ew w w w when Jake showed them a grasshopper in his cupped hand.
Also times two, they were all obsessed with some boy who worked at Starbucks, and they talked about him almost constantly. I’d learned already that he was gorrrrrrgeous, that he played the guitar, that he was “emo, but not really,” and that he had a girlfriend who didn’t deserve him. I even knew his name, which was Ian. I knew Ian’s name, and yet I hadn’t managed to nail down the girls’ names, because they didn’t call each other by their names. Instead, they went by “Silly” and “Spaz” and “Bootylicious” and “Sugar Booger.”
Personally, I would not want to be called “Sugar Booger.” I would not want to be called “Bootylicious,” either. In fact I highly disapproved of anyone—especially a girl my age!—being called “Bootylicious.”
So in my head, I thought of them as the Polka Dots. The Polka Dots went EVERYWHERE with their arms linked, even the narrow nature trails, and even when it meant bumping into low-hanging branches.
And behind them? Me. I was the cheese, like in “The Farmer in the Dell.” I found myself humming it all day long. The humming was out loud, but I sang the words silently, and only to myself. The cheese stands alone. The cheese stands alone. Hi-ho the derry-o, the cheese stands alone!
Day two of Wilderness Survival Camp was a repeat of day one, except with different activities. The best activity was learning how to make a fire—and I admit it, that part was fabulous. At home, we made a fire by turning on our fireplace. With a switch. The logs weren’t real and neither were the flames. They were made of gas, and at the bottom, they were blue.
But Jake and Lily taught us how to start a real fire. First they split us up into groups of three, and my group consisted of me, one of the Polka Dots, and a boy named Connor. The Polka Dot in my group sighed a lot and looked yearningly at the other Polka Dots. Basically, she was boring.
Connor was nice, though. He had long hair—the longest hair I’d ever seen on a boy my age—and he was good at listening to directions. While the Polka Dot sighed, Connor and I did everything Jake and Lily told us to.
First we gathered some dry moss and broke it into pieces. That would be our “tinder,” Lily told us. Then we collected lots of different sized sticks. We used the smallest sticks to build a teepee around the moss, and then, with Lily right nearby in case of a forest fire, Connor struck a match and poked it onto the pile of moss.
The moss caught on fire like that. It was awesome! You couldn’t have a fire made only out of moss, because the moss burned too quickly, but the flames lasted just long enough to catch the small sticks on fire.
“Sweet,” Lily said. “See how the sticks on the outside fall inward to feed the fire? Now start adding bigger sticks. Perfect, you two. You’re naturals!”
Connor and I grinned at each other. His face was flushed, and his long hair had grown sweaty, but I didn’t care. Anyway, my hair probably looked sweaty, too.
The Polka-Dot member of our group wasn’t sweaty or dirty at all, and her hair was still in its perky updo, decorated with about fifty clippies. But she didn’t know how to build a fire, now did she?
On Wednesday morning, I didn’t complain when it was time to head off for camp. In fact, I was ready before Mom was.
“So you are having fun, huh?” Mom said.
“No comment,” I said cheerfully.
She smiled and kissed the top of my head. “I’m proud of you, sweetie. I knew you’d make it work.”
That day, we hiked to a place called the Raptor Center. A volunteer gave us a tour and told us it was a hospital for birds of prey that’d been wounded
. She showed us a falcon with a broken leg, a hawk missing a chunk of her wing because someone shot her, and a bald eagle that landed on a power line and got slightly electrocuted.
“Poor thing,” I said.
“Yeah,” Connor said. “How’s an eagle supposed to know what a power line is?”
He and I talked the whole way back from the Raptor Center, mostly about animals. Connor said he was an animal rights activist, which I didn’t know kids could be.
“Sure they can,” he said. “It just means you care about animals and don’t think people should do cruel experiments on them.”
“Oh. Then I’m an animal activist, too.”
“Cool,” he said, holding out his fist. I touched my knuckles to his and giggled.
“Do you have any pets?” I asked.
“A dog,” he said. “She only has three legs, because before we got her, someone tied a lit firecracker to her tail.”
“And it blew off her leg?”
“She’s fine, though. She can still run around and play fetch and stuff.”
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Lucky,” he said.
I laughed without thinking. Then I clapped my hand over my mouth. “Omigosh. Omigosh, I’m so sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. She didn’t die, so she is lucky.”
“Plus she gets to live with you, so there’s one more reason.”
He smiled and kicked the dirt trail.
Ahead of us, the Polka Dots launched into a Rockettes routine. Earlier in the week I might have thought something like, Ugh, really? A high-kicking routine at Wildnerness Survival Camp? Why, in case a bear comes along and you need to kick it in the nose?
But they looked like they were enjoying themselves, so I didn’t.
If a bear did amble out of the woods, however, I would not leave my life in the hands—or high-kicking feet—of the Polka Dots. Nope, I’d climb a tree and yell for Connor to follow me. We’d pelt the bear with pinecones, and if that didn’t work, we’d both be interrupting cows and moo as loudly as we could, until the bear fainted dead away out of pure confusion.