“Does everyone always sing off-key around here?” a voice said behind them, and Jenna turned to see Blake standing next to Adam and Simon and wearing a look of slight annoyance on his face.
Karen saw him at the same time and froze mid-stanza, gave a little shriek of embarrassment, and dove for a marshmallow to hide her reddening cheeks.
“We sing however we want to,” Alyssa said with a shrug.
Jenna smiled at that. Leave it to Alyssa to say whatever was on her mind. Jenna had always liked that about her, and she was relieved to see that Blake hadn’t cast his spell on everyone . . . yet.
“That’s the great thing about camp,” Jenna said. “Nobody cares how bad we sound when we sing.”
“Until now,” Blake said, then broke into his easy smile, so that no one could be entirely sure whether he was insulting them or just kidding around.
“Wait until the final banquet,” Nat said. “The whole camp sings the Lakeview Camp alma mater so loud that the windows in the mess hall rattle.”
Blake yawned indifferently. “Yeah, well, we’ll see if I’m still around for the final banquet.”
“What do you mean?” Tori asked. “Everybody goes to the final banquet. This year will be my first banquet ever, and I can’t wait.”
“Yeah,” Adam said to Blake. “You’d miss out on all the great food and fun if you didn’t go. Besides, the longer you stick around camp, the better chance you have of seeing some of Jenna’s pranks.”
“Pranks?” Blake repeated.
“Last year Jenna let all the animals out of the nature shack and into the mess hall at the camp dance,” Adam explained. “She’s the master prankster in these parts.”
“Retired master prankster,” Jenna corrected. “No more big pranks for me, not after Dr. Steve threatened to kick me out of camp.”
“That’s so my uncle.” Blake rolled his eyes. “He just doesn’t know how to have a good time. Which is why I’m giving this camp thing a trial run before I decide whether I want to stick around or not. I can call my dad’s driver to come pick me up whenever I feel like it.”
Jenna rolled her eyes and leaned over to whisper to Nat. “How about he calls that driver right now?”
Just then, Simon walked over to Nat. “Is this seat taken?” he asked her.
Nat giggled. “It is now,” she said, taking his hand as he sat down beside her.
Jenna sighed, scooting over to make more room for him. If Nat got any more cuddly with Simon, Jenna was going to lose her appetite. So she grabbed another marshmallow while she still had it.
Even though Nat was too lost in her own world to notice it, the next half hour just confirmed for Jenna what she already thought was true. Blake sat down with Adam near Alex and Brynn, but he refused to roast any marshmallows or sing any songs. When Brynn told a spooky ghost story that gave Jenna chills and made her huddle closer to Alyssa and Perry, Blake just rolled his eyes.
“That was lame,” he snorted, standing up from the fire. “I hate to break up the party, but I’m going to find my uncle and see if I can head back to the bunk. It’s, like, two o’clock in the morning in Italy right now. I’m still on Lake Como time.”
“You need to find Kenny, our counselor, first,” Adam told him. “He needs to know where we are at all times.”
“Nah.” Blake shrugged. “Uncle Steve’s right over there,” he pointed to where Dr. Steve was helping supervise some of the younger campers roasting marshmallows. “He’ll let me leave. No problem.”
“Nothing like a little favoritism,” Jenna said, watching as Blake talked to Dr. Steve and then wandered off toward the bunk alone. She couldn’t believe Blake was getting special treatment from Dr. Steve, but at least he was gone for the night. That was a relief.
As counselors started ushering campers off to the bunks, Jenna grinned at her friends. “Hey, I’ve got a fresh candy stash back in the bunk, if anyone’s interested.”
“You just ate five s’mores!” Chelsea gasped.
“Exactly.” Jenna patted her stomach. “That leaves room for at least two of my mom’s homemade brownies.”
“Count me in!” Nat said.
“Me too!” Alyssa added.
“Will you allow a couple of campers from the bunk next door to crash the party?” Alex asked as she walked over with Brynn and Grace.
“As long as no one mentions boys for the rest of the night,” Jenna said with a smile.
“Deal!” Alex said, and the rest of the girls chimed in.
“And as long as Andie and Mia say it’s okay,” Jenna added. She looked at Mia and Andie expectantly, hoping they’d say yes.
“Give us a sec,” Andie said, motioning Becky, the counselor from 4C, over. The three girls talked, and then all nodded in agreement. “You guys can hang out in our bunk for a while, but you’ll have to wait for a half hour before you come over,” Andie said. “Because we’re all assigning final electives now.”
Alex and Brynn squealed with excitement, and Grace grinned. “That’s worth waiting for,” she said. “Besides, the casting list just got posted for the camp play. Becky said we could check it out before we go to the bunk. We’re doing Into the Woods this year.”
At the end of every summer, a big drama production was put on for all the campers on the night of the final banquet. Last year, the play had been Peter Pan, and Grace had played the best Wendy that Jenna had ever seen. Grace and Brynn both loved acting, and they were really great at it, too.
“I’ve never seen that play before,” Jenna said.
Nat clapped her hands. “It’s not a play. It’s a musical, and I love it! It’s the one that has all the fairy tales rolled into one show. That was one of the first shows my parents took me to see on Broadway.” Nat and Tori were both in drama with Brynn and Grace, but Nat had decided not to audition for the show this year because, she said, she preferred acting serious drama parts instead of musicals.
“And I saw it when it came to L.A.,” Tori said. She’d auditioned for the part of Little Red Riding Hood, and she was practically jumping up and down with excitement now, too. She turned to Andie. “Oh, Andie, can I please go look with them?”
Andie laughed. “Sure. Just be quick, okay?” she said, but Tori was already racing away with Grace and Brynn.
“So, I’ll see you after we get our electives,” Alex said to Jenna, heading toward her bunk. “Wish me good luck so I’ll get sports.”
“Good luck,” Jenna called out. “To both of us!”
She waved good-bye, making a silent wish as she walked back to her own bunk that she and Alex would both get the electives they’d asked for.
Once everyone got settled back at the bunk and Tori reappeared, breathlessly exclaiming that she’d gotten the part of Little Red Riding Hood in the play, Andie took out her clipboard for the final elective assignments. Jenna and the other girls all rushed over to Andie, hovering over her to view their assignments.
“I won’t be able to give them out if you suffocate me first!” Andie laughed, but the girls were already looking for their names on the clipboard.
“Sports and boating,” Jenna cried when she saw the electives next to her name. “Yes!”
“Are you ready to take on nature again?” Alyssa teased Nat as she looked at the clipboard.
“Not yet. I think I need until next year to mentally prepare myself for that,” Nat said. Last year, Nat had nature as one of her first electives, but everyone knew that the closest she wanted to get to nature was painting her nails by the lake under a tree. “I got newspaper and drama.”
“Um, Andie?” Tori asked hesitantly. “I know I already requested drama and art, but, um, do you happen to know what electives Blake signed up for? I thought maybe I’d be able to switch mine.”
Andie shook her head. “Sorry, Tori. I don’t think Blake’s been given anything yet. Dr. Steve wanted to see how many empty spots were left in each elective before deciding where he might fit in.”
“Oh.” Tori’s face fell,
but then she brightened. “That’s okay. Maybe he’ll end up in my art class anyway.”
“If he does, he probably won’t want to touch the paints for fear of getting his Hugo Boss glasses dirty,” Jenna said.
Just then, there was knock on the door, and Alex stuck her head around it. “Can we come in?”
“Yup,” Andie said. “We just finished with electives.”
“Us too!” Alex said, coming in with Brynn and Grace.
Jenna caught Alex’s eye, and Alex gave her a thumbs-up sign and a big smile. That was all Jenna needed. She knew they had both gotten their first choice, and now they could play sports together for an extra hour every day.
“We have more big news,” Brynn said with a grin after the girls had finished talking about who got what electives. “Grace and I got our parts for Into the Woods.”
“And?” Nat asked expectantly.
Grace beamed. “I’m Cinderella.”
“And I’m the witch!” Brynn said, raising her hands like claws and hissing in a villainous way.
“Congrats!” Jenna said. “You guys both get extra brownies and so does Tori, aka Little Red. The chocolate will help you all remember your lines.”
“What?” Chelsea cried. “Since when does chocolate improve your memory?”
Jenna grinned. “As far as I know, there’s not much that chocolate doesn’t improve,” she said, making everyone laugh.
As Jenna dug into her candy stash, she smiled and promised herself that nothing was ever going to distract her from her friends or from the soccer field and basketball court—particularly not some fancy schmancy guy from the Hamptons. Camp was almost over, and she was going to make the rest of her time there unforgettable.
chapter TWO
Jenna sat on the sidelines of the newly mowed sports field and took a deep breath of the pine- and grass-scented air. These were the kinds of camp days she lived for. The sun was shining, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and even though the air was already muggy and hot, it was still a perfect day for soccer. Jenna smiled as she pulled on her soccer shoes. In twenty minutes a bunk scrimmage between 4C and 4A would start, but Jenna and Alex had both gotten the okay from the counselors to meet at the field early to practice and warm up.
Jenna pulled her hair into a ponytail to ward off the heat and was bending down to stretch when she heard Alex calling her name. She glanced up to see Alex walking toward her with Adam and Blake. Adam and Alex were walking comfortably close together and every once in a while their hands brushed against each other ever so slightly. But as soon as that happened, both of them would take a step away from each other, blushing shyly. Adam had this goofy grin on his face, and he kept sneaking side glances at Alex.
Oh brother. Jenna tried not to grimace, but there was something deeply disturbing about watching Adam attempt to flirt. Sure, she knew he’d liked Alex for a while last summer, too, but this summer was different. He seemed more serious about her this time. And there were just certain things a sister was never supposed to see her twin do, and flirting was one of them.
“Hey, Boo—er, I mean, Jenna,” Adam corrected himself when Jenna cringed and threw him a dirty look. Boo was the nickname her family had given her when she was a baby, but Jenna hated it now that she was older. Of course, Adam still sometimes forgot not to call her that. “Alex told me you guys were playing, and I thought I’d take a few pictures for the newspaper before Blake and I head to free swim. And I just wanted to wish you luck.” He ruffled her hair. “You’ll need it.” He broke into laughter, and Blake joined in.
Jenna fumed. Brothers could be such a pain sometimes. “Very funny, bro,” Jenna said. “Just remember who wears the cleats in our family. I could run circles around you and your camera any day of the week.”
Over the past two summers, Adam had turned into an amateur photographer. He tried to get photography as his elective as often as possible, but even when he didn’t take it as an elective, he always had a camera strapped around his neck to take candid shots.
Blake laughed at Jenna’s dig at Adam, and Jenna smiled at him. So he had a sense of humor. Well, that was a start.
“How was your first night at camp?” she asked, her smile growing wider as she watched him scratch a line of red bites on his arm. It looked as though the mosquitoes had worked their magic on him overnight. Maybe he’d try some bug spray now.
“Great,” Blake said sarcastically, “for the bugs who made a home in the Waterford down pillows and comforter my mom shipped here in advance. I had to throw all of it out this morning and call my mother to send more.”
“You threw them away?” Jenna cried. “We have a laundry room here, you know. Why didn’t you just wash them?”
“Waterford is dry-clean only,” Blake said dismissively, as if it were a fact that everyone in the universe knew, except Jenna. He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. My mom can have another FedExed here by tomorrow morning.”
“They’ll just get more bugs,” Jenna said.
“We’ll see,” Blake said. “She’s also sending a mosquito net . . . an unscented one. And some ear plugs, too,” he added. “Between Kenny’s snoring and the chirping racket outside the window, I didn’t sleep a wink.”
“We call that chirping racket ‘crickets,’ ” Jenna said, giggling in spite of herself. This guy was unbelievable. Annoying, sure. Stuck-up, definitely. But Jenna was starting to find his tirades so ridiculous that they were actually funny. “Don’t they have those in East Hampton?”
“Not on beachfront property,” Blake said simply. “The only sound we have is the ocean waves, and I love that. I spend a couple of weeks every winter break in the Caymans with my dad and brothers on our yacht.”
Alex’s jaw dropped, and Jenna elbowed her to close it. She couldn’t believe her ears. Was there anything that Blake didn’t have?
She opened her mouth to say as much, but Adam gave her a warning with his eyes and jumped in with, “That’s cool, Blake. Let’s have a seat in the grass for a few minutes while Alex and Jenna warm up, okay? Then we’ll head for the lake.”
With that, Jenna kicked the ball into center field, relieved that she didn’t have to spend one more second around Blake, at least for now.
Jenna grinned at Alex as they passed the ball back and forth to each other, working their way toward the goal at the far end of the field. This was more like it. Just her, Alex, a soccer ball, and a wide-open field. No boys to worry about, especially the annoying kind. Or so Jenna thought, until Alex suddenly asked, “What does Adam think of me?”
Jenna nearly tripped over the soccer ball but caught herself just in time. “Think?” she asked, giggling. “Adam doesn’t think at all. Unless it’s about food.”
“Oh,” Alex said, her face falling. “Okay, then. Forget I said anything.”
Alex’s mouth drooped a little more, and Jenna sighed. She wasn’t used to having these kinds of talks. Nat and Tori were good at analyzing guys, but she was much better at analyzing soccer plays. And the last thing she wanted to do was talk to one of her best camp friends about her own brother. Eeeuw. She hadn’t realized until now how Alex’s little leftover crush from last year seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds.
“Listen,” Jenna said. “Just because he hasn’t mentioned anything to me doesn’t mean he doesn’t like you. I saw you guys talking to each other the other day, and he looked really into it. And hello, he was here taking pictures of you today.”
“Not just me,” Alex said. “You too.”
“Please.” Jenna rolled her eyes. “He didn’t come here to photograph his own sister.”
“So maybe he thinks I’m cool,” Alex said, almost more to herself than to Jenna. “That’s good, right?”
Jenna nodded. “Yup. I think so.”
“Cool.” Alex grinned and gave the ball a strong kick straight into the goal. She motioned over her shoulder to where the girls from both bunks were walking toward the field. “So, what do you say we play some ball?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Jenna said.
Life didn’t get much better than this. Jenna jumped into the air as she watched the ball soar toward the goal. Sarah, the appointed goalie that day for 4C, dove for the ball but missed by an inch or so. The ball sailed sweetly between the goal posts and fell against the net. Yes! Jenna did a victory dance for her third goal of the game.
“Great going, Jenna!” Andie and Mia yelled from the sidelines.
“Awesome!” Nat said, giving her a high five.
“Now all we need is a tiebreaker,” Jenna said gleefully, checking the scoreboard as both teams headed to the sidelines for a halftime break. The score was 6-6. Alex was the big scorer for 4C, but she and Jenna were neck and neck, goal for goal. All Jenna had to do now was make sure her team could score again to win the game. The way her teammates were playing, though, that was going to be easier said than done. Sure, it was hot enough to fry an egg on the field right now, but that was no excuse for how 4A was performing out there.
For the first half of the game, Nat and Tori had been hanging back, afraid to touch the ball. Nat had gotten into kickball at the beginning of the summer, but was still pretty anti-sports at heart. Alyssa, Perry, and Anna, though, had all been making a real effort. Alyssa had even shot two goals on her own, which was impressive, considering that she didn’t usually get into sports that much either. But Lauren and Jessie had had to sit out for the rest of the first half after they both went for the same ball and knocked heads. Andie had assured Jessie that she showed no signs of a concussion, but Jessie was still worried about it. Jenna had glimpsed her sitting on the sidelines, first closing one eye and then the other to check if her vision was blurring. And Chelsea and Karen? Well, they were a disaster of an entirely different sort.
Over & Out Page 2