The boys all stopped when they saw me and stood there, blinking through the lenses of their glasses, which were fogged up on account of the humidity. Their parents, who were helping them with their luggage, looked like they were longing to get as far from Camp Wawasee as they possibly could—preferably to a place where pitchers of margaritas were being served.
I hastened to say the speech I’d been taught at counselor training. I remembered to substitute the words
birch tree
for
frangipani
.
“Welcome to Birch Tree Cottage,” I said. “I’m your counselor, Jess. We’re going to have a lot of fun together.”
The parents, you could tell, couldn’t care less that I wasn’t a boy. They seemed pleased by the fact that I clearly bathed regularly and could speak English.
The boys, however, looked shocked. Sullen and shocked.
One of them went, “Hey, you’re a
girl
.”
Another one wanted to know, “What’s a girl counselor doing in a boys’ cabin?”
A third one said, “She’s not a girl. Look at her hair,” which I found highly insulting, considering the fact that my hair isn’t
that
short.
Finally, the most sullen-looking boy of them all, the one with the mullet cut and the weight problem, went, “She is, too, a girl. She’s that girl from TV. The lightning girl.”
And with that, my cover was blown.
C H A P T E R
2
T
hat was me. Lightning Girl. The girl from TV.
Lucky me. Lucky, lucky,
lucky
me. Could there
be
a girl luckier than me? I don’t think so… .
Oh, wait—I know. How about some girl who
hadn’t
been struck by lightning and developed weird psychic powers overnight? Hey, yeah.
That
girl might be luckier than me. That girl might be
way
luckier than me. Don’t you think?
I looked down at Mullet Head. Actually, not that much down, because he was about as tall as I was—which isn’t saying much, understand.
Anyway, I looked down at him, and I went, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Just like that. Real smooth, you know? I’m telling you, I had it on.
But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all.
One of the boys, a skinny one clutching a trumpet case, said, “Hey, yeah, you
are
that girl. I remember you. You’re the one who got hit by lightning and got all those special powers!”
The other boys exchanged excited glances. The glances clearly said,
Cool. Our counselor’s a mutant
.
One of them, however, a dark, delicate-looking boy who had no parents with him and spoke with a slight accent, asked shyly, “What special powers?”
The chubby boy with the unfortunate haircut—a mullet, short in front and long in back—who’d outed me in the first place smacked the little dark boy in the shoulder, hard. The chubby boy’s mother, from whom it appeared he’d inherited his current gravitationally challenged condition, did not even tell him to knock it off.
“What do you mean, what special powers?” Mullet Head demanded. “Where have you been, retard? On the little bus?”
All of the other boys chuckled at this witticism. The dark little boy looked stricken.
“No,” he said, clearly puzzled by the little bus reference. “I come from French Guiana.”
“Guiana?” Mullet Head seemed to find this hilarious. “Is that anywhere near Gonorrhea?”
Mrs. Mullet Head, to my astonishment, laughed at this witticism.
That’s right. Laughed.
Mullet Head, I could see, was going to be what Pamela had referred to during counselor training as a challenge.
“I’m sorry,” I said sweetly to him. “I know I look like that girl who was on TV and all, but it wasn’t me. Now, why don’t you all go ahead and—”
Mullet Head interrupted me. “It was,
too
, you,” he declared with a scowl.
Mrs. Mullet Head went, “Now, Shane,” in this tone that showed she was proud of the fact that her son was no pushover. Which was true. Shane wasn’t a pushover. What he was, clearly, was a huge pain in the—
“Um,” another one of the parents said. “Hate to interrupt, but do you mind if we go ahead and go inside, miss? This tuba weighs a ton.”
I stepped aside and allowed the boys and their parents to enter the cabin. Only one of them paused as he went by me, and that was the little French Guianese boy. He was lugging an enormous and very expensive-looking suitcase. I could see no sign of an instrument.
“I am Lionel,” he said gravely.
Only he didn’t pronounce it the way we would. He pronounced it Lee-Oh-Nell, with the emphasis on the
Nell
.
“Hey, Lionel,” I said, making sure I pronounced it properly. We’d been warned at counselor training that there’d be a lot of kids from overseas, and that we should do all “we could to show that Camp Wawasee was cultural-diversity aware. “Welcome to Birch Tree Cottage.”
Lionel flashed me another glimpse of those pearly whites, then continued lugging his big heavy bag inside.
I decided to let the boys and their parents slug it out on their own, so I stayed where I was out on the mosquito-netted porch, listening to the ruckus inside as the kids tore around, choosing beds. Off in the distance, I saw someone else wearing the camp counselor uniform—white collared short-sleeve shirt with blue shorts—standing on his porch, looking in my direction. Whoever he was lifted a hand and waved.
I waved back, even though I didn’t have any idea who it was. Hey, you never knew. He might have owned a convertible.
It took about two minutes for the first fight to break out.
“No, it’s mine!” I heard someone inside the cabin shriek in anguish.
I stalked inside. All of the beds—thankfully, not bunks—had belongings strewn across them. The fight was evidently not territorial in nature. Little boys do not apparently care much about views, and thankfully know nothing about feng shui.
The fight was over a box of Fiddle Faddle, which Shane was holding and Lionel evidently wanted.
“It is
mine
!” Lionel insisted, making a leap for the box of candy. “Give it back to me!”
“If you don’t have enough to share,” Shane said primly, “you shouldn’t have brought it in the first place.”
Shane was so much bigger than Lionel that he didn’t even have to hold the box very high in the air to keep it out of the smaller boy’s reach. He just had to hold it at shoulder level. Lionel, even standing on his tiptoes, wasn’t tall enough to grab it.
Meanwhile, Shane’s mother was just standing there with a little smile on her face, carefully unpacking the contents of her boy’s suitcase and placing each item in the drawers in the platform beneath her son’s mattress.
The rest of the boys, however, and quite a few of the parents, were watching the little drama unfolding in Birch Tree Cottage with interest.
“Didn’t they ever teach you,” Shane asked Lionel, “about sharing back in Gonorrhea?”
I knew rapid and decisive action was necessary. I could not do what I’d have liked to do, which was whop Shane upside the head. Pamela and the rest of the administrative staff at Camp Wawasee had been very firm on the subject of corporal punishment—they were against it. That was why they’d spent four hours of one of our training days going over appropriate versus inappropriate disciplinary action. Whopping campers upside the head was expressly forbidden.
Instead, I stepped forward and snatched the box of Fiddle Faddle out of Shane’s hand.
“There is no,” I declared loudly, “outside food of any kind allowed in Birch Tree Cottage. The only food anyone may bring into this cabin is food from the dining hall. Is that understood?”
Everyone stood staring at me, some in consternation. Shane’s mother looked particularly shocked.
“Well, that sure is a change from last year,” she said, in a voice that was too high-pitched and sugary to come from a woman who had produced, as she had, the spawn of Satan. “Last year, the boys could have all the candy and cookies from home they wanted. That’s why I packed this.”
Shane’s mother hauled up another suitcase and flung it open to reveal what looked like the entire contents of a 7-Eleven candy rack. The other boys gathered around, their eyes goggling at the sight of so many Nestlé, Mars, and Hershey’s products.
“Contraband,” I said, pointing into the suitcase. “Take it home with you, please.”
The boys let out a groan. Mrs. Shane’s many chins began to tremble.
“But Shane gets hungry,” she said, “in the middle of the night—”
“I will make sure,” I said, “that there are plenty of healthful snacks for all the boys.”
I was, of course, making up the rule about outside food. I just didn’t want to have to be breaking up fights over Fiddle Faddle every five minutes.
As if sensing my thoughts, Shane’s mother looked at the box in my hand.
“Well, what about that?” she demanded, pointing at it. “You can’t send that home with
his
parents—” The accusing finger swung in Lionel’s direction. “They didn’t bother coming.”
Uh, because they live in
French Guiana
, I wanted to say to her. Hello?
Instead, I found myself saying possibly the stupidest thing of all time: “This box of Fiddle Faddle will remain in my custody until camp is over, at which point, I will return it to its rightful owner.”
“Well,” Shane’s mother sniffed. “If Shane can’t have any candy, I don’t think the other boys should be allowed any, either. I hope you intend to search their bags, as well.”
Which was how, by the time supper rolled around, I had five boxes of Fiddle Faddle, two bags of Double-Stuff Oreo cookies, a ten-pack of Snickers bars, two bags of Fritos and one of Doritos, seven Gogurts in a variety of flavors, one bag of Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies, a box of Count Chocula, a two-pound bag of Skittles, and a six-pack of Yoo-Hoo locked in my room. The parents, thankfully, had left, chased off the property by the sound of the dinner gong. The goodbyes were heartfelt but, except on the part of Shane’s mother, not too tearful. Somewhere out there, a lot of champagne corks were popping.
As soon as the last parent had departed, I informed the boys that we were headed to the dining hall, but that before we went, I wanted to make sure I had all their names down. Once that was settled, I told them, I’d teach them the official Birch Tree Cottage song.
Shane and Lionel I was already well acquainted with. The skinny kid who played trumpet turned out to be called John. The tuba player was Arthur. We had two violinists, Sam and Doo Sun, and two pianists, Tony and Paul. They were pretty much all your typical gifted musician types—pasty-skinned, prone to allergies, and way too smart for their own good.
“How come,” John wanted to know, “you told us you aren’t that girl from TV, when you totally are?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “And how come you can only find missing kids with your psychic powers? How come you can’t find cool stuff, like gold?”
“Or the remote control.” Arthur, I could already tell, was going to make up for his unfortunate name by being the cabin comedian.
“Look,” I said. “I told you. I don’t know what you guys are talking about. I just look like that lightning girl, okay? It wasn’t me. Now—” I felt a change of subject was in order. “Shane, you haven’t told us yet what instrument you play.”
“The skin flute,” Shane said. All of the boys but Lionel cracked up.
“Really?” Lionel looked shyly pleased. “I play the flute, too.”
Shane shrieked with laughter upon hearing this. “You would!” he cried. “Being from Gonorrhea!”
Now that his mother was gone, I felt free to walk over and flick the top of Shane’s ear with my middle finger hard enough to produce a very satisfying snapping noise. One of my other issues, on which I’d promised Mr. Goodhart to work during my summer vacation, was a tendency to take out my frustrations with others in a highly physical manner—a fact because of which I had spent most of my sophomore year in detention.
“Ow!” Shane cried, shooting me an indignant look. “What’d you do
that
for?”
“While you are living in Birch Tree Cottage,” I informed him—as well as the rest of the boys, who were staring at us—“you will conduct yourself as a gentleman, which means you will refrain from making overtly sexual references within my hearing. Additionally, you will not insult other people’s countries of origin.”
Shane’s face was a picture of confusion. “Huh?” he said.
“No sex talk,” John translated for him.
“Aw.” Shane looked disgusted. “Then how am I supposed to have any fun?”
“You will have good, clean fun,” I informed him. “And that’s where the official Birch Tree Cottage song comes in.”
And then, while we undertook the long walk to the dining hall, I taught them the song.
I met a miss,
She had to pi—
—ck a flower.
Stepped in the grass,
up to her a—
—nkle tops.
She saw a bird,
stepped on a tur—
—key feather.
She broke her heart,
and let a far—
—mer carry her home
.
“See?” I said as we walked. We had the longest walk of anyone to the dining hall, so by the time we’d reached it, the boys had the song entirely memorized. “No dirty words.”
“Almost dirty,” Doo Sun said with relish.
“That’s the stupidest song I ever heard,” Shane muttered. But I noticed he was singing it louder than anyone as we entered the dining hall. None of the other cabins, we soon learned, had official songs. The residents of Birch Tree Cottage sang theirs with undisguised gusto as they picked up their trays and got into the concession line.
I spied Ruth sitting with the girls from her cabin. She waved to me. I sauntered over.
“What is going on?” Ruth wanted to know. “What are you doing with all those boys?”
I explained the situation. When she had heard all, Ruth’s mouth fell open and she went, her blue eyes flashing behind her glasses, “That is so unfair!”
“It’ll be all right,” I said.
“What will?” Shelley, a violinist and one of the other counselors, came by with a tray loaded down with chili fries and Jell-O.
Ruth told her what had happened. Shelley looked outraged.