For Alex. This is all your fault.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Thank You
About the Author
Teaser
Copyright
I was sitting in my family’s Honda Odyssey, heading toward my destiny, but the GPS kept rerouting. Maybe I should’ve taken it as a sign. Was a higher power trying to tell me something? That I should turn back? That my fate was not, in fact, to be found in the Catskills of Upstate New York? Even if a higher power wasn’t trying to dissuade me from going to summer camp, the higher power in this minivan definitely was.
“Gregor, I just do not understand why you are going to a camp for at-risk teens,” my mother said. She was in the driver’s seat and sneaking glances at me through the rearview mirror.
“It’s a camp for activist teens,” I said. “And I’m going because this might be the most important thing to ever happen to me.”
Even as I said it I knew it sounded melodramatic, but I really did believe that. And not only because it was going to look amazing on my college applications. Camp Save the World was a brand-new summer camp started by Robert Drill, creator of DrillTech. Not only was he one of the richest people alive, he was also one of the most philanthropic, donating nearly 90 percent of his billions to worthy causes. I’d read his autobiography nine times, and each time the message was clear: Life was about doing good. Robert Drill didn’t want to be remembered for the way he changed the tech world, he wanted to be remembered for making the world a better place. He was a personal hero of mine.
So when he started Camp Save the World this year, a summer program for teenagers who wanted to utilize their strengths and talents to make a lasting impression on the world, I had to sign up.
“What will you kids even be doing there?” Mom said. “Are you all going to sit around and make protest signs?”
Honestly, that sounded pretty awesome. “I’m sure there’ll be normal camp activities. Swimming. Canoeing.”
“So you’re just going to sit in a canoe, holding a protest sign? Shouting at people? You could drown!” my mother said. “Did you pack extra underwear?”
“I won’t drown, and yes, I did,” I said. “Did Dad not explain any of this to you?”
“I tried, son,” Dad said. He was in the passenger seat, and while he may have been talking to me, all of his attention was taken up by the enormous, crinkly map in his hands. Dad was sure we’d get there just fine with the paper map, even though Mom already had a GPS mounted on the dashboard. Not to mention the backup GPS app I kept sneaking glances at on my phone. Dad’s eyes volleyed from the map to the view out his window, squinting at the unfamiliar country terrain. My father had always lived in a city, first in Mexico as a kid, and then in New York. Upstate was a totally different world than he was used to. “I think we need to take the next right.”
I checked my GPS. “Actually, stay on this road,” I told my mom. She listened to me, and my father did not protest.
“I told your mother: If this camp is good enough for Ashley Woodstone, then it is good enough for our son. Do you have a crush on Ashley Woodstone, Gregor? Is that why you wanted to come to this camp?”
I hated rolling my eyes in front of my parents. I hated giving them any ammunition to brand me a petulant teen, but my eyes were legitimately in pain from the strain it took not to roll them right now. Thousands of civic-minded kids ages fourteen to eighteen had applied to be campers at Camp Save the World, and I, Gregor Maravilla—a thus far admittedly unremarkable sixteen-year-old from Sunset Park, Brooklyn—had been one of the lucky one hundred to win a spot. So of course all anybody wanted to talk about was Ashley Woodstone.
“I don’t have a crush on Ashley Woodstone.”
“Are you sure?” Dad said. “She’s quite the actress. Katrina’s a big fan.”
In an effort to get in touch with the mysterious dealings inside my little sister’s brain, my father had taken up watching TV and movies with her. My dad, as creepy as it sounded, was probably an expert on all things Ashley Woodstone. Even though there was no way Katrina was a big Ashley Woodstone fan.
“There’s no way Katrina is a big Ashley Woodstone fan,” I said. “I don’t think she started liking Ashley Woodstone until she found out that I’d be going to the same camp as her.”
“That is totally not true,” Katrina said. She was sitting to my right, and now she elbowed me in the side. “I have always been a huge fan of Ashley Woodstone.”
“Fine,” I said, deflecting her jabs. “Good for you. Can we stop talking about Ashley Woodstone now?”
Katrina pulled out her phone and held it up to my face. The screen was a frozen still from the video I’d gotten in my welcome email from the camp. I’d seen the video once. I did not need to see it again.
Katrina pressed play.
“Hi there, I’m actress, activist, and altruist Ashley Woodstone,” came the voice on the video. “I just want to congratulate all those who won a spot at Camp Save the World. Ever since I heard about Robert Drill’s new idea for a camp, I knew I wanted to be a part of it. As you probably already know, when I’m not making movies and winning awards for those movies, I’m out there in the real world, trying to better the lives of others.”
The screen transitioned to images of Ashley Woodstone in destitute locations, surrounded by tearstained children.
“I’m there,” Ashley said in voice-over, “wiping tears from children’s faces, and offering them all of my old belongings.” More footage, this time of Ashley Woodstone handing a little girl a pair of pink sequined boots, and a little boy an iPhone. “And I said to myself, ‘Hey, I’m a teen, and I’ve got a campaign to help Save the World too!’ That’s why I contacted Robert Drill, and I’m happy to announce that the lucky teens who have won spots to the camp will get to join me there. I’ll be a camper too!”
Thankfully, Katrina stopped the video and put down her phone. There were a million reasons why I was excited to go to Camp Save the World. The fact that megastar Ashley Woodstone would be there was not one of them. I may have only seen her in one movie, but for reasons that I really did not want to dwell on, I did not like Ashley Woodstone.
“You get to go to camp with Ashley Woodstone and you’re being a jerk about it,” Katrina said. “Do you have any idea how totally lucky you are?”
“Not that I’m going to try to meet her or anything, but what if she turns out to be awful?” I said. “Would you like me to tell you if I meet her and she’s a total snob?”
“If she’s mean it’s probably because you deserve it, because you’re an idiot who hates everything.”
“Mom!” I didn’t want to resort to asking my mom to intervene, but seriously, what the hell was this? My twelve-year-old sister didn’t get to call me an idiot in fr
ont of my parents and get away with it.
“Gregor, be nice to your sister.”
I needed to get out of this car. I needed to get to camp already, even if Ashley Woodstone was there.
“If I do meet Ashley Woodstone,” I whispered to Katrina, “I’m not going to mention you at all.”
“If you do meet Ashley, she’ll hate you just as much as I do,” Katrina said. “You wanna know why, Gregor? Because you’re a loser. You’re a bigger loser than Anton.”
“She’s not wrong,” Anton said. My older brother sat to my left, taking up way too much space, as usual. “I’m pretty weird, but you’re definitely weirder.”
“Who asked you!” I said. “What the hell are you even doing here? You’re nineteen! You’re in college!”
Anton shrugged and watched the passing foliage out the window. Technically he was on summer break, but that still did not explain his interest in seeing me off to camp. “I thought you could use some brotherly advice. Instructions on being cool.”
Anton was greasy, pasty, and inconvienent. Easily mistaken for a human-sized zit. I seriously doubted he would have anything helpful to say on that front.
“Look, this camp is a big deal,” I announced to the car. I clicked through my phone until I found the article I was looking for. “Buzzfeed even wrote about it. ‘Five Reasons Why We Wish We Were Young Enough to Attend Camp Save the World.’”
Anton whipped out his own phone. “Funny. I found another article on that site, only this one’s called ‘Five Ways Robert Drill Could’ve Spent His Money That Would’ve Been More Productive Than Spending It on a Camp for Entitled Teenagers.’”
“It does not say that.” I looked over at Anton’s phone. I was sure he was joking. He wasn’t.
“An entire camp for social justice warriors.”
“‘Social justice warrior’ is a derogatory term,” I said.
“Which is why I used it in a derogatory manner.”
“It’s a camp for young humanitarians.”
“You’re a sixteen-year-old going to camp as a camper,” Anton said. “Most people your age go to camp as counselors. How does that make you feel?”
I didn’t need Anton to tell me that going to summer camp as a teenager wasn’t something one would necessarily deem “cool.” But spending the summer with a community of people who thought like me—who were passionate at a young age about using their skill sets to make the world a better place—was better than how I usually spent every summer: stocking the shelves at Mom’s grocery store and going home to watch old episodes of The Golden Girls.
“Don’t tease your brother about camp,” Dad said. “Anton has his YouTube videos and Katrina is the best speller in her grade, but Gregor doesn’t have anything like that in his life yet. And he’s obviously looking to this camp to find himself and make us proud. This camp and Ashley are obviously very important to him.” It was always impossible to tell if my dad was being sarcastic through his accent, but then again, I was pretty sure my dad didn’t know what sarcasm was.
“Okay, I’m just going to state this openly right now so that everyone can hear me,” I said, my voice appropriately raised and hopefully authoritative. “I do not care about Ashley Woodstone. I’ve barely seen any of her movies. I think her being at Camp Save the World is weird and probably the result of nepotism and it distracts from what we’re really there to do. I will be avoiding her.”
Dad smiled at me and then at Mom. “He has a crush on Ashley Woodstone.”
“Oh, honey, you have a crush on a movie star?” Mom said. “Just make sure not to get your heart broken if she ignores you. Did you pack the Band-Aids?”
I slumped down in my seat.
“Rule number one for not being a total ass in front of Ashley Woodstone,” Anton said. “Now listen carefully, because this advice will alter your existence and open up entire worlds for you.”
I had given up on protesting, which I guess Anton mistook as me listening.
“Don’t. Be. Weird.”
“Great advice,” Dad and I said at the same time, though our tones were totally different.
“If I know you at all, I know that you packed your Superman poster,” Anton continued. “Don’t put it up.”
My Superman poster was in fact at the bottom of my trunk, carefully folded in half. Putting it up was the first thing I planned to do when I got to camp. “What’s wrong with my Superman poster?”
“What’s not wrong with your Superman poster? First off, you’re not seven years old.”
“Superman has gotten really dark in the past few years,” I muttered.
“It’s bad enough that you chose to wear a Superman shirt on your first day of camp,” Anton said.
“There’s a boy in my class who likes Superman too,” Katrina said. “He eats his own snot.”
“How much longer until we get to camp?” I asked my parents.
“According to this map we’re about one hour away, son,” Dad said.
I looked at my GPS. We were only ten minutes away. Good.
“I don’t know why you have to go all the way to the wilderness to learn how to help people,” my mom said. She would not let this go. “Why can’t you do something like your brother? His YouTube videos help so many people, and he doesn’t even have to leave the basement to do that.”
“Anton isn’t helping anyone with his YouTube videos. They’re just him playing Minecraft.”
“And he makes so much money from the ads,” Mom said.
“Face it, Gregor,” Anton said. “I’m something you will never be: famous.”
“You’re famous on the internet.”
“So you admit it.”
I’d officially had enough. I tried to make my mind go blank, tried to picture green pastures and kickball and people coming together to save the world. Because there was more to life than being famous. “There are children in the world who are starving!”
The car erupted in groans. It was the worst possible response to that statement. And exactly the sort of mind-set I needed to change. I needed to make people care about hungry children. This—right here—was the reason I was going to Camp Save the World.
“Gregor, please don’t talk about such things right now,” Dad said. “You’ll upset your grandfather.”
“¿Qué?” Grandpa Maravilla said from the back. The minivan was big enough that my entire family had crammed into it to see me off. Including my grandfather.
“Nada, Papa, los niños te quieren mucho,” Dad said. “Isn’t that right, kids?”
“Sí,” we all said.
“You’d be smart to take my advice,” Anton whispered. “Out of the two of us I’m the only one with a girlfriend.”
Darcy. Anton’s girlfriend. She was premed, so she was more ambitious than Anton was about anything. I didn’t know much about Darcy because she wasn’t much of a talker. It was impossible to see her without a stack of notebooks in her hands, furiously flipping pages or taking notes, making more crinkly paper noise than actual verbal noise. Her ponytail was forever coming undone, no matter how many pencils she stuck into her hair. “There’s just the minor issue of your girlfriend paying more attention to her studies than to you,” I said.
“She’s here, isn’t she!” Anton barked back.
I turned in my seat and looked over the back of it. Darcy had been so quiet this entire ride that I’d almost forgotten she was there. Her face was, naturally, obscured by a book. It should’ve surprised me that my brother’s girlfriend would want to see me off to camp even though she’d hardly ever said a word to me, but the truth was, it didn’t. My family did things together, despite how I felt about it.
“Okay, forget Ashley Woodstone for a second,” Anton said. “This camp is going to be full of other girls. Girls who might actually talk to you about hungry kids or dying antelope or whatever if you play your cards right.”
I was listening.
“For five weeks you’re going to be bunking with these girls in a sleepa
way camp, away from parental supervision. Have you even given any thought to that?”
Weirdly, no. I’d only been thinking of how great camp was going to be. I’d thought of the camaraderie between people with similar interests and life goals, the friendships that would inevitably form, the great “meeting of minds” between me and the other campers. But I’d not given any thought to one of the things that would undoubtedly contribute to that greatness.
“Girls,” Anton said, lowering his voice so our parents couldn’t hear. “You know what camp is good for? Firsts. First kisses. First times. First bases, if you catch my drift.”
I stared at Anton, and not because he was being weird, but because he was probably right.
“Dude,” Anton said, his voice so low I was basically just reading his lips at this point. “Everybody gets laid at summer camp.”
I didn’t like talking to my brother about getting laid, but still, my mind lingered on what he’d just said. On girls. Specifically on girls in summertime, which presented them in a hazy, rosy glow. But the idea of “firsts” was just as appealing as the idea of girls. There were so many “first times” of things I’d yet to experience. Camp could change all that.
The road was narrowing, the woods getting fuller, so I knew we were getting close to the camp. I looked out the window. I still couldn’t see the camp, but up ahead, there was a kid standing on the side of the dirt road, clad in all black and holding a picket sign. I couldn’t make out what the sign said until we got much closer, only a few feet from him. And then I read it.
DOWN WITH CAMP!
“Turn back!” the kid shouted at us. “Camp is for fascist conformists!”
“What was that?” Mom said. “Why was that boy yelling at us? I don’t know if I like this camp, Gregor.”
But before I could tell her again that this was likely going to be the best place on earth, we were driving under the big archway with huge letters spelling out my destiny.
CAMP SAVE THE WORLD
There was an excitement bubbling up in me—butterflies and swelling music and all that. The car hadn’t even fully stopped before I was reaching across Katrina to open the door. “Come on, come on,” I said. When the car did stop, I practically pushed my way out. I grabbed my duffel and trunk from the back and looked around.
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