“Permission to transfer?” I call down, and Aaron calls back, “Permission granted.” I clip my harness to one of the safety ropes that slides along the track at the top of the vine walk, then unclip the belay rope and send it down. I love being up here in the trees all alone, and I lean against the platform railing and listen to the wind rustle through the trees as I wait for Twizzler to join me.
He takes his sweet time going up the ladder, but he seems totally comfortable on it, and he’s not winded or sweaty at all by the time he gets to the platform. “You’re that girl from Willow,” he says as he clips into the safety ropes on the other vine walk.
“Yeah,” I say. “And you’re that guy from Wolverine.”
“Yup.” He gives me what’s probably supposed to be an evil smile, but combined with his face full of freckles and the way his ears stick out, he just looks kind of goofy. “You guys are going down,” he says.
I shrug. “We’ll see about that. What’s with the Twizzler thing, anyway? That’s not actually your name, is it?”
He snorts. “No. It’s Josh. Stuart gave everyone nicknames last night.”
It makes sense—Josh is tall and skinny and red, like a Twizzler. “Why did he call your friend Beans?” I ask. “Does he really like beans or something?”
“No, it’s beans like coffee beans. He was whining about how only counselors can get coffee in the mess hall. We got off easy, honestly. Nick showed up wearing a Hungry Hungry Hippos T-shirt, so now he’s Hippo. And Sebastian was trying to get some of the guys to do that Bloody Mary thing in the bathroom mirror with him last night, so now for the next four weeks, he’s—”
“Bloody Mary,” I finish, and Josh nods.
“Is this a ropes course or a tea party?” Aaron calls up. “Less chatting, more racing!”
Josh and I move toward the edges of our platforms and get ready. “I hope you know you don’t have a chance of winning,” I tell him. “I was second fastest in my entire camp last year.”
“I hope you’re prepared to feel like an idiot, because I was the first fastest here last year,” Josh says.
“Ready . . . ,” Aaron shouts from the ground, “set . . . go!”
I face away from Josh so he can’t distract me, grab the first knotted rope, and scootch out onto the cable. The first few seconds without anything solid under my feet are always scarier than I expect, and a rush of nervous adrenaline sweeps through me as the cable bows and sways. I take deep breaths and remind myself I’m safe, that I can’t possibly fall. I bend my knees and try to keep my feet shoulder-width apart for maximum stability as I shuffle to the left and pass the ropes over my head from hand to hand. A gust of wind pushes at me from behind, and I almost tip over when one of my feet slips off the cable, but I’m able to pull myself back upright. I’m a little more than halfway across now.
“Go, Twizzler!” shouts Beans from the ground, and Josh whoops in response. It sounds like he’s close by, but I can’t tell if he’s behind me or ahead. I wish I’d faced toward him instead, so I could track his progress.
About three quarters of the way across, I hear a yelp and a swear from behind me. I peek over my shoulder to see what’s happening, and out of the corner of my eye I spot Josh dangling from his safety rope and one of the handholds. He’s lost his footing entirely. “Hook the cable with your toe and give yourself a swing,” calls Aaron from the ground, and I smile to myself as Josh mutters, “I know, jeez.”
I want to shout something witty at him, but I can’t think of anything good, and I don’t want to lose my focus now. So I turn back around and concentrate on inching closer to the end platform. It would be pretty embarrassing if I stopped to laugh at him and fell myself.
Only ten feet to go . . . then five . . . and then I’m there.
I pull myself up onto the solid wooden platform, pump my fists in victory, and shout, “Done!” Josh has managed to right himself, but he’s still about twenty feet behind me.
“Izzy wins with a time of three minutes and thirty-six seconds,” Carl calls from the ground.
There’s a peal of laughter, followed by Beans’s voice. “Oh man, Twizzler, you got your butt kicked by a girl.”
Josh’s freckled cheeks are flaming pink, and he looks at me with slitted eyes. He looks a lot more evil now than he did before, but I’m not worried. I shoot him my best angelic smile.
“Yup,” I say. “And you better get used to it.”
CHAPTER 6
I cross my fingers that Mackenzie will be in my second activity—we’ve never gone this long at camp without having a conversation, and she’s probably freaking out by now. But the only people I know in Boating and Canoeing are Roo and Ava. I figure I’ll be able to bond with them a little more now that they’ve heard my fantastic prank idea, and at first things seem to be going well; they’re polite to me as we clip on our orange life jackets, and Roo helps me push my banana boat into the water. But once we’re out on the lake, they paddle in the opposite direction, and it feels weird and stalkerish to follow them. I guess I shouldn’t expect things to change overnight. I spend the next hour hanging out with two girls from Aspen and trying to flip each other’s boats, which is pretty fun, but not nearly as fun as it would’ve been with Mackenzie. Last year we tried to set a Sweetwater record for how many times we could flip our boats in a row, but we gave up after twenty-seven because we were too dizzy.
I finally spot her when I get to lunch, and I run up and hug her before she can get to the Maple table. My bathing suit is soaking through my T-shirt, and she squeals and pushes me away. “Gross, you’re all wet,” she says, but I can tell she’s happy to see me.
“I can’t believe we weren’t together all morning,” I say. “What do you have after lunch?”
“Arts and Crafts.”
“Me too!”
Mackenzie gives me a huge, relieved smile. “Thank god. I’ve been dying to talk to you, ’cause I’ve got another really good idea for you know what. I thought maybe you could—”
A hand lands on my back, and I look up to see Val. “Hey, Iz, how was your morning?”
I love that she’s already shortened my nickname to another nickname; I’m pretty sure that means she likes me. I smile up at her. “Good. It was fun.”
“Excellent. You ready for some grilled cheese? It’s my favorite thing the kitchen makes. They use, like, triple cheese. It oozes right out the sides.”
“Sounds great. I’m starving.” But then I notice the way Mackenzie’s face has fallen. “Oh no, did you get your dairy-free thing worked out with the nurse? I can talk to someone if—”
“No, it’s fine,” she says. “I’m sure they’ll give me peanut butter or something.”
“We can talk about the thing right after lunch, all right? Meet me by the door and we’ll walk over to Arts and Crafts together.”
“Yeah, okay.” Mackenzie gives me a little smile before she heads over to her table, but it looks kind of sad. I guess I’d be pretty upset too if I had to eat boring peanut butter while everyone else had triple grilled cheese.
I claim a seat next to Val at the table and tell her all about how I kicked some Wolverine butt on the ropes course this morning. When I repeat my snappy comebacks for her, she breaks into this huge belly laugh where she throws her head back and opens her mouth so wide I can practically see her tonsils. I wish my laugh sounded like that instead of the stupid giggle that always sneaks its way out of me. I wonder if I’d look dumb throwing my head back that way; I’ll have to give it a test run in front of the mirror later.
The sandwiches are as delicious as Val promised, and she spends the whole meal telling us stories about mortifying things that happened to her when she was a camper, like the time her wraparound skirt got caught in the cabin door and all of Porcupine Lodge got a good look at her rainbow-striped underwear. Unlike last night, we’re all laughing together, and I totally feel like part of the conversation. It’s amazing how much things can change in one day.
I’m fee
ling pretty great by the time Mackenzie and I head to Arts and Crafts. She asks to see my schedule, and we hold our papers up side by side as we walk across the field. Next week we have archery together first thing in the morning, and week three we have nature together. The fourth week our schedules don’t overlap at all. “It’s not a lot, but at least we have something together almost every day,” I say. Hopefully by week four, she’ll finally be comfortable enough here that she won’t mind not seeing me during activities.
Mackenzie sighs. “I just wish it could be like at Camp Sweetwater, when we had all our activities together. Everything was better there. Don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” I say. But honestly, there are already some things I like better here. If someone told me I could transfer to Sweetwater tomorrow, I’m not positive I’d want to go, since it would mean giving up the prank war. And Val. And the possibility of beating Twizzler Josh on the ropes course again tomorrow.
The Arts and Crafts lodge has one long table in the center, and Hannah’s already sitting on one of the benches when we arrive. I know I should probably be a good Willow and sit with her, but she actually looks pretty happy for once, and Mackenzie and I need to talk privately about prank stuff. When I smile at Hannah and then sit down at the other end, she doesn’t seem to mind. The back wall of the room is covered in rickety-looking wooden shelves crammed with construction paper and clay and markers and glue and paint. There are several industrial-size containers of glitter balanced precariously on top. I’m kind of afraid to touch anything for fear it’ll all come crashing down.
When everyone has arrived, the counselor in charge gives us each a big lump of grayish clay and tells us to make whatever we want. Then she perches on a stool in the corner and opens one of those magazines with a cover story about how to get the perfect bikini body. I don’t get the point of those articles. Any body is a bikini body if you put a bikini on it.
Mackenzie and I start rolling our clay into long snakes so we can make coil pots, and while we do, she fills me in on her brilliant new prank idea. It’s classic Mackenzie—hilarious, subtle, and a little scary—and I’m reminded again how lucky I am to have her on my side. She finds a piece of paper and a marker on the supply shelf, and we abandon our clay for a while and make a supply list. Some of the stuff we can probably get right here in Arts and Crafts, but I might have to get my parents to send me something from home again. I hope they don’t mind going to the post office over and over.
We’re so absorbed that it seems like barely any time has passed when the counselor looks up from her magazine and calls, “Five more minutes!”
I look down at my sad half-finished pot. “Will we have time to work on these tomorrow?”
The counselor snaps her gum. “I guess,” she says. “Whatever.”
When I glance over at Hannah, I’m surprised to see that she’s made an impressively realistic skull out of her clay. “Whoa,” I say. “That’s really good.”
She smiles shyly. “Thanks. I’m going to paint it glossy black with neon green teeth and maybe a little bit of blood coming out of the left eye socket and the mouth.” I think about her evil laugh last night during cabin group; seems like there’s more to Hannah than I thought.
“Ooh, blood coming out of the eye sockets. Nice. I’m going to do that too.” A boy at the end of the table holds up his project, a creepy doll with a long, pointy nose and snakes for hair.
Mackenzie wrinkles her nose. “What is that?”
“It’s the Sea Witch, obviously.”
“What’s a sea witch?” I ask. “Like Ursula in The Little Mermaid?”
The boy’s eyes widen. “How do you not know about the Sea Witch? Everyone knows about the Sea Witch!”
“She’s new,” Hannah says.
“Ohhhh,” he says. “Okay. So, a long time ago, there was this beautiful blond counselor—”
“And every night, after it got dark, she’d go down to the lake to swim all by herself,” a girl with two long braids cuts in.
The boy shoves her. “Shut up, Ally! I want to tell it!”
“We can both tell it!”
“I’m the one who made the Sea Witch. I get to tell it.”
This seems like it might go on for a while, so I say, “What happened to the counselor?”
“One night,” the boy says, “a camper from her cabin went down to the lake after dark because she’d left her backpack—”
“It was her towel,” interrupts Ally.
“It doesn’t matter! She went down to the lake to get it, and she saw someone swimming. But the swimmer didn’t look like a pretty blond counselor anymore, because she’d changed into her true form—the Sea Witch.”
“She had black sunken eyes and a craggy nose covered in warts, and her hair was made out of snakes, all coiling around and hissing,” says Ally.
“But the counselor was still wearing the clothes she’d had on earlier, so the girl recognized her and figured out what had happened.”
“Why was she swimming in her clothes?” I ask.
“And why is she the Sea Witch?” Mackenzie adds. “Shouldn’t she be the Lake Witch?”
The boy rolls his eyes. “I don’t know, that’s how the story goes! The point is, the camper tried to run back to her cabin to tell everyone what she’d seen. But the Sea Witch couldn’t let her secret get out, so she grabbed the girl with her long, pointy, witchy nails, and she dragged her into the lake and drowned her.”
“They found her body the next day, floating in the water with a snake coiled around her neck,” says Ally. She wraps one of her own braids around her neck for emphasis and sticks her tongue out.
“And of course the pretty blond counselor pretended to be super upset, so nobody suspected it was her. The rest of the summer was normal, and the counselor didn’t come back the next year. But in the middle of the summer, another camper was found drowned with a snake around his neck!”
“And that’s because the Sea Witch was still there in a different body. She can take any form she wants. And that’s why you never know where she is. She could be anyone. She could be me!”
“So don’t go down to the lake at night unless you want a snake around your neck,” finishes the boy. He shoves his Sea Witch doll in Ally’s face and makes a growling sound, and she screams and laughs.
“I hate that story,” Hannah says. “It’s so creepy.”
Ally rolls her eyes. “Says the girl who made a skull.”
“Skulls aren’t creepy. Everyone has a skull.”
The boy turns back to us. “So anyway, the night before Color Wars every year, we have this huge campfire at the fire pit near the dock, and Doobie tells that story. And then one of the counselors comes out of the water dressed as the Sea Witch and pretends to kidnap a camper, and that person is the first Color Wars captain.”
The greatest thing about being best friends with someone for almost your whole life is that you can look at each other and know exactly what the other one is thinking. And now, when I turn and meet Mackenzie’s eyes, I know we’re having the same exact idea.
Sounds like the perfect opportunity for a prank.
CHAPTER 7
The rest of the first week goes by quickly. Josh challenges me to a race on the vine walk each morning, and I leave him in the dust every time. Mackenzie and I spend Arts and Crafts and Free Time planning pranks for “Tomás” to suggest, and sometimes it almost feels like we’re back at Camp Sweetwater. It’s not that I don’t like plotting with her, but part of me wishes my best friend were more interested in exploring our new surroundings. We could be going on trail rides or walks in the woods or canoeing excursions during Free Time, and I’d like to try them all. But Mackenzie still seems really uncomfortable at Camp Foxtail, and she’s obviously happiest when we’re sprawled under a tree with her notebook. I tell myself those activities can wait until she’s ready, but the thing is, she doesn’t seem to be making any progress. I rarely even see her talk to anyone but me; every time I glance ove
r at the Maple table during meals, she’s silently picking at her dairy-free food. I get that she’s shy and everything, but I feel like she could be making a little more of an effort to fit in, like I am.
As the days pass, the Willows become increasingly paranoid about the Wolverines pranking us, and soon all of us are checking our sleeping bags every night and shielding our eyes before we open our drawers, in case something horrible pops out. Hannah refuses to go into the bathroom stalls or the shower unless Summer checks them for her first. But nothing happens, and nothing happens, and nothing happens. In a lot of ways it’s actually worse than a prank, since it allows our imaginations to run wild, and I wonder if the boys are holding out on purpose so we’ll freak ourselves out. Then again, they’re probably thinking the same thing about us.
And then on Thursday the care package from my parents finally, finally comes. Lexi has mail call that day, and she arrives at dinner with my package, her eyes wild with excitement. We all rush back to our cabin before the all-camp activity—a massive game of capture the flag—and the Willows gather round and watch as I tear the box open. I pull out a pen shaped like a fish, new stationary, a stuffed hedgehog, a travel Boggle set. And then I finally get to the important thing: a six-inch-tall plastic Santa toy. I hold it up with great ceremony.
A crinkle appears between Roo’s eyebrows. “Wait, that’s it?”
“Just watch.” I flip the switch on the bottom of the toy, stand it up on the edge of my dresser, and clap a couple times right in front of Santa’s face. He comes to life immediately, raising and lowering his arms and twitching his hips from side to side, and a recording of my dad singing “Feliz Navidad” really off-key comes out of the speaker on the bottom.
“Santa shouldn’t wiggle his butt like that,” Petra says. “It’s just wrong.”
“It’s noise-activated,” I explain. “You can record any message you want. My dad did that one, but we can record over it.”
“So we can make it say, ‘Wolverines are the scum of the earth’ or something?” asks Lexi. She has a huge smile on her face, but then she glances sideways at Roo, like she’s looking for permission to be excited.
Willows vs. Wolverines Page 5