Camp Dork
Page 13
Holding a chocolate chip cookie up to toast, I clinked it against Sam’s oatmeal raisin. “To us!” I said.
The word “us” seemed to echo in the night air. More bricks stacked on our wall.
“Do you feel that?” Sam asked.
I shoved the cookie in my mouth.
“I feel like every time we get anywhere close to talking about feelings,” his face scrunched up like the word tasted like curdled milk, “things get weird between us.”
I shoved another cookie in my mouth.
“Listen.” He grabbed my wrists and lowered them from my face. Globs of cookie fell out of my mouth. Please don’t kiss me! Please don’t kiss me! I don’t think I’d recover from another bad kiss. Sam laughed instead. “You’re a total mess.”
“I know,” I garbled around the cookie.
He sighed. “Please just listen and don’t get all weird on me.” He cocked an eyebrow like he just remembered who he was talking to. “Weirder than usual,” he amended, dropping my wrists. “I don’t want a girlfriend. I want a friend.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Again, a stone soup of happy and sad gurgled in my belly.
“But if I wanted a girlfriend, which I don’t, I’d want her to be you.”
The stone soup was happy. Just happy. Sam bumped my shoulder. I bumped him back.
The wall of awkwardness shattered, each brick blasted away.
Did we howl? Of course we did.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, Mom and Dad, for sending me to summer camp when I was ten. I know I never actually said these words to you—or any words at all, in fact, for several hours after you picked me up. Back then, I was consumed with figuring out what I had done to cause you to send me to “live like a pioneer” for two weeks. Maybe I still was in mourning for what would’ve been the world’s greatest mountain pie but, thanks to a sudden downpour dampening the campfire and my culinary dreams, it became just soggy bread with cheese and tomato sauce. Or perhaps, now that I was in the tight quarters of our car alongside my equally sullen, stinky sister, beginning the leg of our five-hour drive home, I was too busy regretting not opening that pack of soap you had slipped into my suitcase.
How could I have known then that someday that mosquito-filled forest of awkwardness would provide the inspiration to create Camp Dork?
So, now that your fateful words (“Someday you will thank me for this experience, Beth”) have come to fruition, here you go: You were right.
Be sure to check out other books by Beth Vrabel from Sky Pony Press!
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When Alice moves across the company to a new town, her albinism, and the blindness that goes with it, is truly a disability for the first time. But she’s set on proving to her family, her friends, and her town that there is more to her than just a blind girl with a farting dog and walking stick.
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Available wherever books are sold