Camp So-And-So

by Mary McCoy

  As if she could read her thoughts, Robin interrupted her own monologue and turned to face the girl with beads in her hair.

  “There’s something I need you to do,” she said. “When we get to where we’re going, Cabin 1 is going to be there. They ended up with one of the more normal stories. No beasts, walls of fire, or anything like that. They might not be prepared for what happens.”

  “What’s going to happen?” asked the girl with beads in her hair.

  “I just need you to stay with them, keep them from doing anything stupid,” Robin said. “The winner of the All-Camp Sport & Follies is being announced tonight. Almost everyone will be there, and the last thing I need is one of the campers panicking.”

  As the girl with beads in her hair wondered what the All-Camp Sport & Follies was, they came to a ladder, which they climbed, and a trap door, which they opened. Robin went up first, then thrust out a hand to help the girl with beads in her hair clamber out into a small round room. Robin opened another door, and the girl with beads in her hair discovered that the room they had been inside was a windmill that she was certain was not located on the grounds of Camp So-and-So. She was on Robin’s turf now, and even if she’d wanted to turn back, she doubted the doors that opened to Robin would open to her.

  The girl with beads in her hair wondered where the rest of the girls in her cabin were right now, if they were safe, if they were together. She hadn’t been afraid when the kelpie dragged her beneath the waters of Lake So-and-So—it had happened too fast and she’d been fighting too hard—but she was afraid now.

  What kept her moving forward was the reason she’d chosen to come with Robin in the first place. She wanted answers, she wanted the truth, and whether it was a mistake or not, she wanted to see her quest through to the end.

  But first, she wanted to find the girls from Cabin 1.

  CABIN 4

  SOUL MATES

  [SCENE: Outside the soul mates’ cabin, VERITY stands between her cabinmates, who have just witnessed what Verity thought was a private kiss, and ERIN, who has just stormed inside.]

  Her cabinmates wore a thousand questions on their faces, but Verity was too angry to answer any of them. They’d spied on her! They’d spied on her, and now Erin was gone. All Verity could think about was going after her, apologizing for her stupid cabinmates, explaining how she hadn’t known they were in the bushes. She hoped Erin would listen to her.

  She hoped that was why Erin had run away—not because she wished she had never kissed Verity at all.

  “We’re sorry, Verity,” Alix said, inching toward the steps, her hand outstretched like Verity was a feral cat who might dash off. “We were just surprised, is all.”

  “We just got here, I swear,” Amber added. “We didn’t mean to barge in on you.”

  “Please, don’t be mad,” Annika said.

  Verity wanted to believe them. She did believe them, but the thought of losing Erin without even getting a chance to explain was unbearable.

  “I—” Verity stammered, unable to find the words for what she was feeling, for what she wanted to say. “I have to go,” she said, scrambling to her feet and following Erin through the cabin door.

  Inside, it looked nothing like their cabin. It was bigger, for starters. Verity couldn’t even see the back of it from this first room. Skateboards, guitar cases, and comic books lay on the floor, along with half a dozen pairs of shoes.

  It was only when Verity was through the first room that she realized that she had seen Addison standing with the rest of the girls from Cabin 4 at the edge of the clearing just seconds before.

  It couldn’t have been her imagination, but it couldn’t have been possible either. How could Addison be in two places at once?

  She froze in the hallway, realizing that everything Erin had told her was true. Addison had been split in two, just like the soul mates, and now half of her was outside the cabin and half was somewhere else. She’d never doubted Erin’s word, but it was a different matter to see it for herself. She thought about turning back just to make sure, but then she heard Erin’s footsteps ahead of her and followed them.

  She ran through the living room, which was furnished with lumpy couches and wagon-wheel tables. A half-finished game of Life was laid out on one of them. There was a dining room, a boys’ dormitory, and two bathrooms. Finally, Verity reached the last room. She peeked around the door frame and saw that Erin had thrown herself belly-first on one of the beds and buried her face in a pillow. Not wanting to seem like a sneak, Verity called attention to her presence by rapping on the door frame with her knuckles.

  Without looking up, Erin said, “You shouldn’t be here. I mean, you really shouldn’t be here.”

  “I don’t care,” Verity said. “Are you okay?”

  Erin didn’t answer right away, which Verity understood. Given the circumstances, it was a complicated question.

  While she waited, she studied the handful of artifacts Erin had pinned to her wall. There were a few comic book covers with ripped edges, a pretty red maple leaf, and a single photograph of Erin and another girl with wispy, blonde hair that stuck out around her head like dandelion fluff. They’d both painted their fingertips with an array of monster faces and had been wiggling them at the camera when the shot was taken.

  Verity felt a pang of jealousy, which she knew was stupid.

  Don’t assume things, she told herself. Besides, you’re here because you’re worried about her. She doesn’t owe you any explanations.

  Finally, Erin rolled over on her side, and Verity saw that her eyes were puffy.

  “You can come in if you want to,” she said.

  Verity came in and took a seat on the rag rug next to Erin’s bed.

  “I feel different,” Erin said at last.

  Verity understood, or at least she thought she did. Talking to Erin, holding hands with Erin, kissing Erin—it made her feel confident and right, and even though the kiss had ended like it did, the feelings stuck around. Verity’s heart was light, her mind easy. Even her skin felt good.

  “I feel different, too,” Verity said.

  Erin shook her head. “I wasn’t talking about that.”

  “Oh,” said Verity, feeling dumb and also a little bit hurt. Erin’s tone was brusque in a way it hadn’t been out on the cinder-block step.

  “What I mean is,” Erin explained, “I feel like myself again. The way I used to be.”

  Verity remembered what Erin had said before about feeling like a part of her had been hollowed out, about feeling lonely all the time.

  “Isn’t that a good thing?” she asked.

  Erin nibbled her bottom lip as she turned over the thing she was trying to say.

  “Have you ever hated a food, then one day, you eat some by mistake and realize you like it? Like olives—one day you hate olives, the next, you’d eat them on everything. And it’s weird, because it’s not like you set out to like olives and trained and built up a tolerance to them. You just changed without knowing you’d done it.”

  Verity wondered what Erin was trying to tell her. Was it that she’d changed her mind? That kissing her had been a mistake? Something seemed different about her, but only in the smallest ways. Only in ways you’d only notice in someone you’d known for years.

  Some of the sweetness and joy had gone out of her face, replaced by something more no-nonsense and serious. She still talked like someone who said what was on her mind, but she seemed more patient, less likely to wander off in search of someone better to talk to.

  Verity shouldn’t have noticed these things, but she noticed them anyway.

  “Back home, my best friend was always trying to get me to read those Isis Archimedes books, and I never wanted to. Then I came here, and I swear, I must have read the first book seven times. I loved it, I memorized whole paragraphs of it, and now, I feel the way I used to. Like, reading that book no longer seems like something I want to do with my time.”

  “You don’t want to read Isis Archimed
es anymore?” Verity asked. She had no opinion about olives, but was stricken to hear Erin dismiss the Isis Archimedes books so casually. More than anything, though, she was confused. “Are you talking about what happened back on the steps? With us? Or are you talking about something else?”

  “I’m talking about everything,” Erin said, sitting up and swinging her legs over the side of the bed. “Don’t you get it, Verity? This is me. The whole me. The put-back-together-again me.”

  In the hallway, they heard a stampede of feet, and then Addison, Annika, Alix, and Amber were standing in the doorway.

  “Where’s everyone else?” Amber asked, looking a little disappointed to find only Verity’s soul mate inside the cabin.

  “Never mind that,” Annika said. “Where’s Addison? The real one.”

  The changeling really did look exactly like Addison. She had the same springy, blonde curls, the same wine-colored birthmark on her neck, the same ropey volleyball player’s body. However, when Annika, Amber, and Alix had stumbled upon this version of Addison in the woods without Verity, her explanations had proven entirely unsatisfactory.

  They had been best friends with Addison since the fourth grade. They knew she ate her string cheese by biting right into it rather than peeling it apart, and that she had a lucky bra that had been washed so many times it was practically gray. They could tell the difference between when she said she was okay and wasn’t and when she said she was okay and was. They even knew that she always checked the underside of a toilet seat before sitting down on it because she was afraid there’d be a spider.

  The moment Addison joined them in the clearing and opened her mouth to explain what had happened, they knew she was a different person.

  Annika and Alix explained what had happened when they’d been lost in the woods and how they’d found the soul mates’ cabin. Then Erin explained about the camp and how the soul mates—and now, their friend—had been split apart, one half to be sent back to the real world, and one to remain at camp forever, or until Tania tired of them and dispatched them.

  “We should go get her,” Alix said.

  “You can’t just go pick her up,” Erin said. “They’d stop you. It’s too dangerous.”

  “I don’t care,” Alix said.

  “And even if we did find Addison, there’d still be two of her,” Annika added, looking discouraged. “And neither one of them would actually be her.”

  While they argued about what to do, Amber listened and pored over the pictures on the wall over Erin’s bed. It wasn’t that she was a snoop exactly. Amber had a puppyish curiosity about her, and a habit of going through other people’s jewelry boxes and glove compartments and peeking in open windows when she went for walks, not because she was looking for anything in particular, but just because she wanted to see what was there.

  “I’ve seen her before,” she said, pointing to the girl with dandelion-fluff hair and monsters painted on her fingertips. “She’s here at camp.”

  Erin jumped up from the bed so roughly, the springs rattled. She ripped the picture off the wall and shoved it in Amber’s direction.

  “This girl? This year? Are you sure? Are you positive?”

  Amber pushed the picture away and wrinkled her nose.

  “Yeah. I saw her getting into a black town car with a bunch of other people over by the stables this morning.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” Verity asked, getting caught up in Erin’s fervor.

  “It didn’t seem like a big deal.”

  “Shhh, I’m trying to think,” Erin said, pacing from one side of the rag rug to the other.

  “I heard them say something about going across the lake to use the horses at the other camp,” Amber added.

  Erin stopped pacing and gripped the sides of her head.

  “Oh no no no no no,” she muttered, then met Amber’s eyes. “Are you absolutely sure that’s what you heard?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  Without offering any kind of explanation, Erin dashed out of the bedroom and into the hall.

  Addison, Annika, Alix, Amber, and Verity followed after her. They saw her unlatch a door, open it, and disappear down a dark set of basement stairs. They followed her there, too, and when Erin saw that she was not going to be able to outrun them, she said, “I told you. You can’t go there. It’s too dangerous.”

  “But that’s where Addison is,” Annika said.

  “That’s where everyone is,” Erin said. “It’s the All-Camp Sport & Follies. I’m supposed to be there, too.”

  Annika was perplexed, never having heard of the All-Camp Sport & Follies until that moment; however, Amber honed in on the crucial bit of information at once.

  “Everyone is there?” she asked.

  She exchanged glances with her friends, and without speaking a word, knew they were all in agreement. “I’m not leaving here without getting to meet my soul mate,” Amber said.

  “Or without Addison,” Annika added.

  That settled it. There was no argument Erin could offer that would sway them, and so she led the way from the dormitories into the secret network of tunnels that connected the grounds of Camp So-and-So with the Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp. When they came out on the other side, they followed a trail from the windmill to the English rose garden and, at last, into the theater.

  Every few paces, Erin would shush them or tell them to walk more quietly, or would halt their entire procession in its tracks because she thought she saw a flash out of the corner of her eye. However, they came to the theater doors without being stopped, without even seeing another soul. Before going in, Erin gathered them together for a briefing.

  “The lights will be turned down and the show will be going on, so we should be able to sneak in without attracting any attention. Once we’re inside the theater, we find the door to the light booth along the back wall. We go up to the light booth, take whoever is working up there by surprise, and knock them over the head with something. Then we should have a good view of the audience and we’ll be able to find Addison and the rest of them.”

  “What do we do after that?” Verity asked.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  Since no one else had a better plan, they followed Erin into the deserted theater lobby. They paused, momentarily dazzled by the ornate chandeliers and wood paneling. But soon, they came back to their senses and the task at hand, and they stole across the room on tiptoe until they came to the door, which Erin opened just a crack.

  Inside, they could hear singing.

  CABIN 5

  SURVIVAL

  [SCENE: In the NARRATOR’s cave, WALLIS directs the girls from Cabins 2, 3, and 5 to their battle stations.]

  They drew up a map of Camp So-and-So, dividing it into a grid.

  “First, we clean up. We gather intel. We plan. And then we attack,” Wallis said.

  Wallis sent the girls from Cabins 2 and 3 out to disarm traps and gather supplies, marking the sectors where these things could be found with the information she gathered from studying my screens.

  She also set out to learn as much as she could about Cabins 1 and 4, who were already on the other side of Lake So-and-So. Neither Shea nor the girl with the upturned nose was in any shape to go out in the field, but both wanted to be helpful, so Wallis found a few particularly useful screens and told them to soak up as much as they could. The girl with the upturned nose sat with her fractured leg propped up in front of her, filling Wallis in on the final event of the All-Camp Sport & Follies, which was about to begin. Meanwhile, Shea not only located all of Cabin 4’s soul mates—she was also able to figure out that Addison liked the lumberjack, Annika liked the bodybuilder, Alix liked the skateboarder, Amber liked the guitar player, and Verity liked the girl who read Isis Archimedes books (or used to read them).

  However, it was the girls from Cabin 5 who landed the most interesting missions.

  First, Wallis sent them to the basement of the mess hall, wh
ere they found rope, a cinder block, and a grappling hook just where Wallis said those things would be. They loaded everything into the wheelbarrow, then set off down the long, unnecessarily winding road until they came to a blind curve in the road, a spot where the guardrail had nearly rusted away. There, hanging by its rear wheels on the precipice, was the 1989 Toyota 4Runner. Pam, the counselor from Cabin 4, was slumped over, unconscious, in the driver’s seat.

  It was a delicate operation. First, they braced the wheels with the cinder block. Then, they created a human chain, leaning out over the guardrail to open the door of the truck and hook the rope to Pam’s belt loop. There was no other way to reach her, and none of them was strong enough to heave her out of the truck with only one arm.

  It would take all of them. They would have to be strong, and they would have to be quick. They would have to pull the counselor from the seat of the truck and lift her out of harm’s way before the shifting weight sent the truck careening over the edge.

  Wallis might have sent another cabin on this mission. The girls from Cabin 5 had been lacerated by thorns, scorched by flames, choked by ashes. Of all the cabins, they were the most exhausted, the most worn down, and yet, Wallis knew the grit that had helped them escape made them exactly the right girls for this job.

  They took their positions behind the guardrail, they dug their sneakers into the dirt, they counted to three, and in one swift motion, they pulled.

  CABIN 1

  THE ALL-CAMP SPORT & FOLLIES

  [SCENE: As the curtain goes up on the final contest in the All-Camp Sport & Follies, KADIE, CRESSIDA, and DORA hatch a daring plan.]

  Backstage, Dora and Cressida had put the finishing touches on their props and their harmonies. On the other side of the stage, they could just make out the soft shuffling of feet and hushed whispers of their competitors.