I ate some mac and cheese and pondered how to get out of this without hurting her feelings.
“No guarantees,” I finally said, with a shrug.
“Well,” Ruth said. “Then you’re going to have to find some other boob to loan you their car. What about Dave? I saw him giving you the eye at the pool this morning.”
I straightened up. “You did?” I thought he’d been giving
Ruth
the eye.
“I sure did. You should go for it.” Ruth nibbled on a piece of chicken. “Hey, maybe we could double. You know, you and Dave, and me and—” I saw her gaze dart over toward Scott’s table, then skitter back toward me. She swallowed. “Well, you know,” she said, looking embarrassed. “If things work out.”
If things worked out between her and Scott, she meant. She took it for granted things would work out between me and Dave. Ruth seemed to forget that I already liked someone, and it wasn’t Dave.
Or maybe she wasn’t forgetting. Ruth did not exactly approve of my relationship—such as it was—with Rob Wilkins.
Dave Chen, however, was acceptable. In a big way. I’d overheard him telling someone he’d gotten a near perfect score on his math PSATs.
I was sitting there, wondering why it felt wrong, somehow, to drag a guy like Dave into my problematic existence, when I had never thought twice about dragging Rob, whom I like a whole lot better than I like Dave, into it, when Ruth suddenly went, “Don’t you have your first tutorial this afternoon? Shouldn’t you be, oh, I don’t know, practicing, or something?”
I took a bite of my pizza. Not bad. Not as good as my dad’s, of course, but certainly better than that sorry excuse for pizza they serve at the Hut.
“I prefer for Monsieur Le Blanc to hear me at my worst,” I explained. “I mean, you can’t improve on perfection.”
Ruth just waved at me irritably. “Go sit with your little hellions. They’re calling you, you know.”
My little hellions were, indeed, calling to me. I picked my tray up and joined the rest of the Birch Trees.
“Jess,” Tony said. “Get a load of this.”
He belched. The rest of the Birch Trees tittered appreciatively.
“That’s nothing. Listen to this.” Sam took a long swallow of Coke. He then let out a burp of such length and volume, diners at nearby tables glanced over in admiration. Although pleased by this, Sam modestly refused to take total credit for his accomplishment. “Having a deviated septum helps,” he informed us.
Seeing that Dr. Alistair, the camp director, had glanced our way, I quickly steered the conversation in another direction—toward the new Birch Tree Cottage theme song, which I soon had all of them singing heartily:
Oh, they built the ship
Titanic
To sail the ocean blue.
They thought it was a ship
No water could get through.
But on its maiden voyage
An iceberg hit that ship.
Oh it was sad when the great ship went down.
Chorus:
Oh it was sad
So sad
It was sad
It was sad when the great ship went down
To the bottom of the—
Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives
It was sad when the great ship went down
Kerplunk
She sunk
Like junk
Cha-cha-cha
Everything was going along swimmingly until I caught Shane, between verses, shoveling down all of Lionel’s ice cream—the one food item of which there were no second helpings served at Camp Wawasee, for the obvious reason that, without this restriction, the campers would eat nothing but mint chocolate chip.
“Shane!” I bellowed. He was so surprised, he dropped the spoon.
“Aw, hell,” Shane said, looking down at his ice cream-spattered shirt. “Look what the lesbo made me do.”
“That’s three, Shane,” I informed him calmly.
He looked up at me bewilderedly. “Three what? What are you talking about?”
“Three strikes. You’re sleeping on the porch tonight, buddy.”
Shane sneered. “Big deal.”
Arthur said, “Shane, you dink, that means you’re going to miss out on the story.”
Shane narrowed his eyes at me. “I am not missing out on the story,” he said evenly.
I blinked at Arthur. “What story?”
“You’re going to tell us another story tonight, aren’t you, Jess?”
All the residents of Birch Tree Cottage swiveled their heads around to stare at me. I said, “Sure. Sure, there’ll be another story.”
Tony poked Shane. “Ha, ha,” he teased. “You’re gonna miss it.”
Shane was furious.
“You can’t do that,” he sputtered at me. “If you do that, I’ll—I’ll—”
“You’ll do what, Shane?” I asked in a bored voice.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “I’ll tell,” he said menacingly.
“Tell what?” Arthur, his mouth full of fries, wanted to know.
“Yeah,” I said. “Tell what?”
Because of course I’d forgotten. About Shane barging into my room the night before, and catching me with Taylor’s photo. I’d forgotten all about it.
But he wasted no time reminding me.
“You know,” he said, his eyes slitted with malice. “
Lightning
girl.”
I swallowed the mouthful of pizza I’d been chewing. It was like cardboard going down my throat. And not just because it was cafeteria food.
“Hey,” I said, attempting to sound as if I didn’t care. “Tell whoever you want. Be my guest.”
It was a feint, of course, but it worked, taking the wind right out of his sails. His shoulders slumped and he studied his empty plate meditatively, as if hoping an appropriate reply would appear upon it.
I didn’t feel the least bit sorry for him. Little bully. But I wasn’t just mad at Shane. I was peeved at Lionel, too. How could he just sit there and let people pick on him like that? Granted Shane outweighed him by fifty pounds or so, but I had bested far bigger adversaries when I’d been Lionel’s same age and size.
After lunch, as we were walking toward the music building, where the kids would continue their lessons until free play at three, I tried to impress upon Lionel the fact that, if he didn’t stand up for himself, Shane was just going to keep on torturing him.
“But, Jess,” Lionel said. He pronounced my name as if it were spelled Jace. “He will pound on me.”
“Look, Lionel,” I said. “He might pound on you. But you just pound him back, only harder. And go for the nose. Big guys are total babies when it comes to their noses.”
Lionel looked dubious. “In my country,” he said, trilling his
r
‘s musically, “violence is looked upon with disfavor.”
“Well, you’re in America now,” I told him. The other Birch Trees had disappeared into their various practice rooms. Only Lionel and I remained in the atrium, along with a few other people.
“Look,” I said to him. “Make a fist.”
Lionel did so, making the fatal error of folding his thumb inside his fingers.
“No, no, no,” I said. “Hold your thumb outside your fingers, or you’ll break it, see, when you smash your knuckles into Shane’s face.”
Lionel moved his thumb, but said, “I do not think I want to smash Shane’s face.”
“Sure, you do,” I said. “And when you do, you don’t want to break your thumb. And remember what I said. Go for the nose. Nasal cartilage breaks easily, and you won’t hurt your knuckles as much as if you went for, say, the mouth. Never go for the mouth.”
“I do not think,” Lionel said, “we have to worry about that.”
“Good.” I patted him on the shoulder. “Now go to class, before you’re late.”
Lionel took off, clutching his flute case and looking down, a little warily, at his own fist. From the other side of the atrium, I heard applause. Ruth, Scott, and Dave were standing there with, of all people, Karen Sue Hanky.
“Way to discharge that volatile situation, Jess,” Ruth commented sarcastically.
“Yeah,” Scott said with a snicker. “By teaching the kid to throw a punch.”
Dave was feigning thoughtfulness. “Funny, I don’t remember them teaching us that particular method of conflict resolution in counselor training.”
They were joking, of course. But Karen Sue, as usual, was deadly serious.
“I think it’s disgraceful,” she said. “You teaching a little boy to settle his problems with violence. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
I stared at her. “You,” I said, “have obviously never been the victim of a bully.”
Karen Sue stuck out her chin. “No, because I was taught to resolve my differences with others peacefully, without use of force.”
“So in other words,” I said, “you’ve never been the victim of a bully.”
Ruth laughed outright, but Scott and Dave both put their hands over their mouths, trying to hide their grins. Karen Sue wasn’t fooled, though. She said, “Maybe that’s because I don’t go around
aggravating
people like you do, Jess.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” I said. “Blame the victim, why don’t you?”
Now Scott and Dave had to turn toward the wall, they were laughing so hard. Ruth, of course, didn’t bother.
The tips of Karen Sue’s ears started turning pink. The way I noticed this is that she was wearing this blue headband—which matched her blue shorts, which matched her blue flute case—and the headband pulled her hair back over her ears, so that it fell into these perfect curls just above her shoulders. Oh, and it also showed off her pearl earrings.
Have I mentioned that Karen Sue Hanky is kind of a girlie-girl?
“Well,” she said primly. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to my cottage now to put my flute away. I hope you enjoy your tutorial with Professor Le Blanc, Jess. He told me that I play exceptionally.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Exceptionally crappy.”
Ruth elbowed me.
“Oh, please,” I said. “Her flute isn’t even open hole. How good can she be?” Besides, Karen Sue had already flounced out. No way she’d overheard me.
Scott, still chuckling, said, “Listen, Jess. Dave and I had an idea. About this ghost story thing of yours. What do you say to teaming up?”
I eyed them. “What are you talking about?”
“Like our cabins could get together after Pit tonight, and you could tell them all another one of those ghost stories. You know, like the one you told last night, that had your little guys so scared, they wouldn’t get out of bed afterwards.”
“We could bring our guys over,” Dave said, “around nine-thirty.”
“Yeah,” Scott said, glancing shyly in Ruth’s direction. “And maybe your girls would want to come, Ruth.”
Ruth looked surprised—and pleased—at the suggestion. But reluctance to subject her girls to the likes of Shane overcame her desire to spend quality time with Scott.
“No way,” she said. “I’m not letting any of my girls around that little nightmare.”
“Maybe Shane’d behave himself,” I ventured, “if we threw some estrogen into the mix.” It was an experiment they’d tried during detention back at Ernest Pyle High, with somewhat mixed results.
“Nuh-uh,” Ruth said. “You know what that kid did during all-camp rehearsal this morning?”
This I hadn’t heard. “What?”
“He opened a trumpet’s spit valve all over some Frangipanis.”
I winced. Not as bad as I’d feared … but not exactly good, either.
“And it wasn’t,” Ruth went on, “even his instrument. He’d
stolen
it. If you think I’m letting my girls near him, you’re nuts.”
I figured it was just as well. It wasn’t like I had a ghost story on hand that I could tell in the presence of a couple of guys like Scott and Dave. They’d know I was plagiarizing Stephen King right away. And how embarrassing, to be sitting there telling some story with my would-be boyfriend Rob as the hero, in front of those guys.
Dave must have noticed my reluctance, since he said, “We’ll bring popcorn.”
I could see there was no way of getting out of it. And free popcorn is never anything to be sneered at. So I said, “Well, all right. I guess.”
“Awesome.” Scott and Dave gave each other high fives.
I winced again, but this time it had nothing to do with Shane. Dave had jostled me so that a sharp corner of Keely Herzberg’s photo, tucked into the back pocket of my shorts, jabbed me into remembering that I had a little something else to do tonight, too.
C H A P T E R
8
“P
aul Huck was a guy who lived down the road from me.”
I had figured out a way to not embarrass myself in front of Scott and Dave. I’d abandoned the rehashing of an old Stephen King story and opted for a ghost story my dad used to tell, back when my brothers and I had been little and he’d taken us on camping trips to the Indiana backwoods—trips my mother never went on, since she claimed to be allergic to nature, and most particularly to backwoods.
“He wasn’t a very bright guy,” I explained to the dozens of rapt little faces in front of me. “In fact, he was kind of dim. He only made it to about the fourth grade before school got too hard for him, so his parents let him stay home after that, since they didn’t put much stock in education anyway, on account of none of the Hucks ever amounting to anything with or without having gone to school—”
“Hey.” A small, high-pitched voice sounded from behind the closed porch door. “Can I come in now?”
“No,” I shouted back. “Now, where was I?”
I went on to relate how Paul Huck had grown into a massive individual, stupid as a corncob, but good at heart.
But really, I wasn’t thinking about Paul Huck. I wasn’t thinking about Paul Huck at all. I was thinking about what had happened right after I’d agreed to allow Scott and Dave have their cabins stage a mini-invasion on mine. What had happened was, I had gone for my tutorial with Professor Le Blanc.
And I had ended up nearly getting fired.
Again.
And this time, it hadn’t been because I’d been making personal use of camp property, or teaching the kids risqué songs.
Then why, you ask? Why would the famous classical flutist Jean-Paul Le Blanc attempt to fire a totally hip—not to mention talented—individual like myself?
Because he had discovered my deepest secret, the one I hold closest to my heart… .
No, not that one. Not the fact that I am still very much in possession of my psychic gift. My
other
secret.
What happened was this.
Right after Scott and Dave and Ruth took off, I sauntered over to the practice room where I was supposed to have my lesson with Professor Le Blanc. He was in there, all right. I could tell by the pure, sweet tones emanating from the tiny room. The practice rooms are supposed to be soundproof, and they are … but only if you’re in one of the rooms. From the hallway, you can hear what’s going on behind the door.