They spread fast. Faster.
“Bail!” I shout as I back out the door. “Everybody bail!”
“Wrong bloody way, You,” Mary barks.
She shoves somebody, and all of a sudden, I’m in the cabin with the girl she named Ew. I think her actual, for-real name is Tammi, and the only reason I’m thinking about that is because the swarm washes toward us. There are so many of them, they scramble and climb over each other. There are dunes of bugs. Ripples. Waves.
The second I stop thinking about Ew’s real name, my brain goes hog wild. The mass hasn’t reached me yet, but it’s close. There are just seconds until I have centipedes in my hair, roaches in my ears. Ants marching into my nose and beetles rushing down my throat.
For a moment, I’m dying, choking to death on spiders that scrabble across my tongue and ticks that pierce my throat. It’s way too easy to imagine them skittering over my whole body, devouring me to the bones.
That’s what bugs do to bodies. They eat us. They eat us down to the skeleton.
I gag and yell, “Mary!”
“Ew!” says Ew before her eyes focus.
When they do, she lets out a shriek. It’s impressive, because she’s way tiny and that scream is way big. Her high-pitched howl doesn’t scare the bugs away. In fact, the black wave moves faster. It’s like the sound excited them. Attracted them.
Tiny bodies spill on the floor and swarm up the bunks.
They’re coming for us.
They’re coming right at us.
Without thinking, I turn and shove Ew out of the cabin. I’m right on her heels, and the two of us crash into Scary Mary.
“Close the door,” I say with authority and not a spot of terror in my voice. Nope. None. Not at all. “It’s full of bugs!”
This sets Scary Mary off. She seems to double in size when she takes a gigantic, T-shirt-stretching breath. Then she starts screaming.
“It’s camp, you nitwit! You’re gonna see a bug! Guess what: you might also see a speck of dirt and a blade of grass! If that’s not okay with you bloody princesses, I suggest you gather up your tiaras right now and head back to your mummies to live in one of those plastic bubbles!”
Okay, then, don’t close the door, Scary Mary! And since she doesn’t, I bail, like, just full-out book it to escape. That’s when Braids and Hairspray see the massing, gleaming sea of black and brown heading right for them.
Their shrieks meld with Ew’s. They’re a siren, ringing out again and again.
Then, much to my satisfaction, Mary takes one look inside our cabin. She turns a pale, mossy green and bolts.
Her scream follows her down the path, flip-flops flapping on her callusy feet. I’ve seriously never seen anybody run that fast in flops. It’s like Roadrunner had a speed baby with the Tasmanian Devil and that baby went for a pedicure.
Bending down, I pick up a big old rock and wing it at the cabin door. A cloud of dust explodes when it hits the wood at the corner. The door slams shut.
Are we safe? Probably not.
But is it better?
Way, yeah.
Tez
Halfway through unpacking our stuff, the British girls’ counselor comes huffing into our cabin.
She looks us over with disdain, really English disdain. Like somebody used the wrong fork at dinner and it’s killing her not to say something, because saying something would be even ruder than using the wrong fork.
“Where’s Gavin?” she finally asks, her nostrils curled.
We’ve been at camp for thirty minutes; we can’t possibly smell bad yet! Although to be fair, the walk up the west side of the lake lasted for seventeen minutes, thirty-four seconds, according to my new watch. It wasn’t a short jog.
Also, I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to have girls in our cabin (100 percent sure; it’s on page fourteen of the Camper’s Guidebook.) I don’t know if that applies to counselors, but it seems like it should.
Nevertheless, Nostrils points outside. “Out back. Taking a nature break.”
She rolls her eyes and disappears. Not a minute later, Gavin comes through the door. Now he’s annoyed, and his disdain is more like an angry soccer coach’s. Or a football coach’s, to be perfectly accurate, since he probably calls soccer football.
“Drop what you’re doing and come on,” he barks, then walks back outside.
We follow the command, because what else are we going to do? It’s not like we’re that excited about putting our shampoo in the cubbies.
As soon as I realized there were no dressers, I made my summer plan. Half the suitcase for dirty, half for clean, carefully rotated. Fresh socks on the top, always. Mom wants me to change socks at least twice a day.
According to Dad, she’s worried about trench foot. When he said that, Mom gave him a dirty look, and he laughed, so probably there was something else going on there.
(Trench foot, by the way, is an immersion syndrome. That just means it’s something that happens when your feet get wet and stay wet. First you get blisters, then sores, then the flesh on your feet starts to rot, and you can lose all of your toes. In fact, you can lose your whole foot if you get gangrene! Well, you don’t just lose it. Somebody has to cut it off. It doesn’t fall off on its own, like your toes do.)
We march down the main trail, then branch off onto a smaller path. There, we’re greeted by the camp director. I know this for a fact because she claps her hands when she sees us and she says, “Hello, boys! I’m your camp director, Mrs. Gladys Winchelhauser!”
She’s one of those medium ages, where I can’t tell if she’s young or old. Her hair is blond or maybe sort of gray. A deep smile shows off either perfect teeth or perfect dentures. The clapping and enthusiasm are undatable; they go with her uniform of khaki shorts and camp T-shirt.
She points at us and gestures down the path. “Hup, hup, hup! We need all your big, strong muscles to help us move the girls from Group C to the empty cabin in your group.”
“Why?” I ask.
Mrs. Winchelhauser’s smile does not fade. But her voice is less cheerful. “We thought it was ready for campers, but it’s not quite there yet. We’re reopening after a . . . hiatus. Thus we’re still working out a few kinks.”
As I try to figure out how a cabin can be broken, the path widens and opens into C Group. There are two cabins here. One is pretty run down, and I can see why they wouldn’t want to put anybody in there. But the other one looks fine. In fact, it looks a little nicer than ours.
Just as I’m about to point this out, I see the girls grouped in the middle of the clearing. Including one I recognize. I break into a smile, a sparkly kind of lightness lifting me from the inside.
Throwing up a hand, I wave and call out, “Corryn!”
All four girls turn to look at me at the same time. Three of them seem suspicious, but Corryn smiles. She doesn’t wave back. She’s too cool for that. She throws a thumbs-up.
Wow! I don’t know what happened to her cabin, but it’s good luck for me! If we’re in the same group, we’ll share most of our activity times. Potential first friend at camp: back in action!
“If you gentlemen would be kind enough to help these young ladies with their bags, they can hurry and settle in before our first activity.”
Mrs. Winchelhauser’s voice is upbeat and sunny, like it’s perfectly ordinary to move a whole cabin on the very first day of camp. Also, it seems to me like the girls carried their own bags to camp in the first place. They should be able to carry them from one bunk to another, but okay. Maybe this is one of those “unspoken social rules” my dad says we all need to learn.