We grabbed our towels and wrapped them around our waists as we slid our feet into our flip-flops.
“Doesn’t it make you mad?” I asked.
“What can I do about it? It doesn’t really have anything to do with me,” Gina answered. “It’s her problem, not mine. I got enough other stuff to worry about.”
Just then, “Walking on Sunshine” blasted through the woods, letting us know free time was over.
“Let’s go!” Gina said. “I’m freezing!”
And we danced and sang, “Walking on sunshine, yeah, yeah,” as we hurried back up the hill toward the cabin.
Dear Ms. Marcia,
I wonder what other stuff Gina has to worry about.
And I wonder where her mom is.
I don’t think she’d mind if I asked her about it, but if I did ask her, she might start asking more questions about me.
I know you might like that, Ms. Marcia, but I wouldn’t.
Julia
PS Wondering about Gina makes me think even more about all the things I’ve been wondering about.
13
“Or what?” Gina said. “You won’t hang out with me? You won’t tell people we’re cousins? You won’t be my friend? You don’t scare me.”
“I don’t scare you, but a piece of craft gimp does?” Vanessa yelled.
We had all just been sent back to the cabin during the obstacle course competition, because when Gina was crawling through the tube, she thought there was a snake in her hair. She went crazy—rolling around on the ground, flailing her arms, and yelling, “It’s a snake. A snake! It’s got me! It’s got me!”
Because of that, we lost the relay—and then Vanessa went crazy.
Avery tried to calm her down. But then Becca started yelling at Avery for getting mad at Vanessa, and finally Tori sent us all back to the cabin.
“Would you guys just be quiet!” Avery yelled. “We’re already in trouble!”
“Yeah, we’re in trouble all right,” Vanessa said. “Because we have the worst cabin at camp!”
“That’s it, girls!”
It was Tori.
“No more talking. At all. And I want you in your bunks in five minutes for cabin devotions.”
All of us started getting ready for bed, kicking off our shoes, changing into our pj’s, and brushing our teeth. In about three minutes, we were lying in our bunks waiting to hear what Tori had to say to us.
When she came back into the cabin, she read some verse in the Bible about a house divided amongst itself falling down. We didn’t have to be Bible scholars to know that she was talking about us. I thought that if all the girls in White Oak were actually a house, we wouldn’t just fall down; we’d probably explode into a million pieces.
While Tori lectured us about getting along, I played with the piece of yarn from my baby blanket that was tied to the zipper on my Bible case, wrapping and unwrapping it around my index finger. Avery and Becca waved their Chinese fans at their faces to stay cool. Gina scratched at her mosquito bites with a brush, while Vanessa glared at her. And Meredith looked bored while she examined the tips of her hair for split ends.
Tori didn’t ask a lot of questions and try to make us talk like she usually did. I don’t think she wanted us to talk, but Avery spoke up anyway.
“Though I see the point of this verse, I can think of a few instances in which it really would not be true.”
“I bet you can,” Vanessa muttered to Meredith.
And that’s when Tori demonstrated the expression “the last straw.” She didn’t scream. She didn’t scold. She just closed her Bible so slowly and carefully that we heard the pages flutter. She got up from the edge of Becca’s bunk where she’d been sitting and walked toward the door of the cabin.
Before she walked out, she flipped off the lights and said, “Good night, girls,” so quietly that I wasn’t sure if I’d only imagined hearing her voice.
The screen door banged behind her, and we all lay in the dark. Tori hadn’t even given us a chance to put our Bibles away. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the night all around me as the quiet cabin filled with the sound of chirping crickets from outside.
“What is her problem?” Vanessa whispered as soon as she knew Tori was far enough away that she wouldn’t hear her.
“You’re her problem!” Gina hissed.
“Just shut up!” Vanessa growled back.
“Just stop it, you guys,” Avery whispered. “We’re going to get into even more trouble.”
“Oh, we should be fine now,” Vanessa said. “We have the snake charmer on our team.”
Meredith muffled a giggle in her pillow.
“Vanessa, stop being a jerk,” Gina said.
“You stop being a jerk!” Vanessa said, almost sounding like she was spitting.
Next thing I knew, I heard snoring. It was Becca.
“How could she fall asleep in the middle of this?” I asked.
“Technically, the body at rest can fall asleep quite quickly when one’s mind is no longer interested in its surroundings,” Avery said. “Which means…”
“Which means she fell asleep because she got tired of hearing you talk like you’re a walking website of worthless information.”
Meredith laughed out loud and then smashed her face into her pillow, but it was too late.
“White Oak, quiet down in there! First warning!”
And now, besides everything else, we were in trouble with the bulldog—the counselor assigned to sit outside by the picnic tables in the middle of the cabins to make sure all the campers kept quiet and stayed in bed after lights-out. One more warning, and we’d lose three points for our cabin.
Vanessa let out a huge sigh and whispered, “This cabin is hopeless.”
No one else talked or laughed or made any kind of noise. There was nothing left to say. Vanessa was right. White Oak was hopeless.
Dear Ms. Marcia,
If there’s really a red thread that’s supposed to connect us to everyone we meet, this cabin’s red thread is in a big, fat knot—and every day that knot is getting tighter and tighter and tighter, and that thread is getting thinner and thinner and thinner.
Actually, I think it might be just about ready to break.
Julia
14
“Hey, where’s my stuff?” Gina asked, rummaging around in her cubby.
Tori had just woken us up, and even though she said we didn’t have much time before flag raising, I lay in my bunk one more minute, not wanting to leave the comfort of my sleeping bag.
“How should I know?” Vanessa asked. She looked at Meredith and smiled a sneaky smile.
“Maybe a snake moved your stuff,” Meredith said, laughing.
“Very funny,” Gina said.
“Can’t you just find your stuff later?” Avery asked. “We don’t want to be late again.”
Becca came out of the bathroom rubbing her head with a towel. She must’ve gotten up early just so she could get in the shower before Vanessa.
“How much more time do we have?” Becca asked.
“Less than fifteen!” Tori yelled from her little counselor room.
“Well, we’re not going to make it if somebody doesn’t tell me where my stuff is,” Gina said, moving around a small bottle of shampoo and a travel-sized tube of toothpaste. “This stuff isn’t mine!”
I slid out of my sleeping bag and jumped down from my bunk.
Gina emptied everything from her cubby and laid it on her bed.
“Hey, that looks like my stuff!” I said, as I saw her toss my comb and brush on the bed. “How did it get in there?”
“Let me take a wild guess,” Gina said. “I bet my stuff is in your cubby.”
“That must’ve been one sneaky, smart snake to switch your stuff like that,” Vanessa said laughing.
“You’re the snake!” Gina said, rushing across the room toward Vanessa.
“You guys, c’mon,” Avery said, jumping in between them. “We don’t have time to fight! Let’s just get ready!”
“Julia and I have to straighten out our stuff first,” Gina said.
“Just do it later,” Becca said, pulling on a T-shirt over her wet hair. “We can’t be late again.”
“Let’s go, girls!” Tori said, coming out of her room. “We should be heading down the hill right now.”
“Get dressed quick,” said Avery, digging through a pile of clothes on top of my suitcase and tossing me a shirt.
Then she grabbed a shirt of Gina’s that hung over the end of Gina’s bed and threw it to her.
Gina and I peeled off our pj’s and pulled on the T-shirts, then dug around for some shorts.
“We still have to brush our teeth,” Gina wailed. “I’m not going if I can’t brush my teeth.”
“Just go do it!” Avery said. “But hurry up!”
Gina and I grabbed our toothbrushes and headed into the bathroom. We brushed and spit as if we were in a relay race. But we shouldn’t have gone quite so fast because as I was tossing my toothbrush back into my cubby I said, “Oh no!”
“What?” Gina asked.
She still had her toothbrush—or what she thought was her toothbrush—in her hand, and I pointed to it. That’s when she realized what I had just realized.
“We used the wrong toothbrushes!” she wailed.
“Eeeeeeewwww!” the other girls squealed.
“Less than five minutes, girls!” Tori called to us from the porch where she was putting on her shoes.
There was no time to worry about it.
“Let’s! Go!” Becca yelled.
And we all headed out the door for the flagpole, hoping we’d make it on time.
Dear Ms. Marcia,
This morning at breakfast, Donnie’s Thought for the Day was about being thankful for the people in our lives who mean the most to us. Sometime during the day, we’re supposed to say a prayer of thanks for those people.
Donnie’s “thought” made me wonder about something I had never wondered about before. If there really is a red thread that connects us to all the people we meet, that must mean there’s one that connects me to my birth mom.
Could that really be true?
And if it is, what does that mean?
Julia
15
“Julia, do you and Gina want to go on a hike with Becca and me?” Avery asked, as we walked down the steps of the mess hall.
All around us, girls were making plans with their cabinmates to canoe or swim or play four square during free time.
“No thanks. We’re going down to the arts-and-crafts room to make one of those twig-covered picture frames,” I said.
We’d seen the frames on display in the arts-and-crafts room the day before, and both Gina and I had talked about how cute they were.
“We’ll see you guys later,” I said, hurrying to pull Gina toward the woods near the mess hall, so we could collect some twigs for our projects.
I didn’t want to give Avery the chance to change her mind about the hike and come with us. Working on a craft might be the perfect time for her to start yakking about the Ms. Marcia project, and that wasn’t how I wanted to spend the morning.
By the time Gina and I got downstairs to the arts-and-crafts room, a counselor already sat at the front table helping three younger campers make coin purses with pieces of leather and plastic lacing.
She pointed us to the corner table where the supplies we needed were all laid out, so Gina and I took the twigs we had collected and headed that way.
“I was talking to Avery yesterday, and she told me you and she and Becca all came from the same orphanage in China,” Gina said as we organized our twigs into piles according to their length.
I had a feeling this was only the beginning of a whole bunch of things Gina wanted to ask me. I had ditched Avery so I wouldn’t have to talk about stuff like this, but maybe spending time with Gina was going to be just as bad.
“Do you ever want to go back to see it?”
“Not really,” I said.
“It must be sort of cool that you guys were together in China as babies and now you’re here together at camp,” Gina said as she glued the first twig onto her picture frame.
“I guess.”
I concentrated on my piles of twigs and hoped Gina would get the hint that I was here for the craft, not for the questions.
“I don’t know anyone from when I was a baby,” Gina said, looking up.
Maybe Gina wasn’t as interested in talking about me as I thought. It sounded like she wanted me to ask her questions.
“So you’ve been in foster care since you were a baby?” I asked.
“No, but my mom and I moved around a lot when I was really young. I guess we never stayed in one place long enough to make any friends, because I don’t remember having any.”
“Is that why you’re in foster care?”
“No, you don’t go to foster care just because you move a lot. My mom got caught shoplifting a couple times. Well, actually more than a couple times, and then there was some other stuff too, but she’s working on getting me back now. It just takes a long time sometimes.”
“Have you been with Vanessa’s aunt the whole time?”
“Just the last two years,” Gina said, squirting glue onto another twig. “I’m glad. Ms. Lena’s really nice.”
“Do you ever see your mom?” I asked, peeling a piece of dried glue off my index finger.
“Sometimes,” Gina answered. Then she stopped gluing and turned to look at me, and I looked at her. “But I wish I got to see her more.”
We kept looking at each other without saying anything else for a few seconds, and then we both turned back to our craft, gluing and pressing twigs to our wooden frames.
We were quiet for a few more minutes, and then Gina asked another question. A question that had been rattling around in my head ever since Mrs. Fillmore had first talked about her famous fifth-grade heritage report.
“Do you ever wonder stuff about your birth mom?”
And maybe once you’ve used someone’s toothbrush you have some special kind of bond with them, because I actually said, “Yes,” to Gina’s question and admitted out loud that I really did wonder.
But I didn’t go any further than that. I didn’t tell her the one thing I wondered about my birth mom that made me ache inside.
Dear Ms. Marcia,
Did my birth mom love me?
All Mrs. Fillmore’s “research this” and “research that” didn’t answer that question. So because I don’t have an answer, I hold on to that baby blanket and pretend—not just that the blanket came from my birth mom, but that before my birth mom brought me to the orphanage, she hugged me and kissed me and then wrapped me in that blanket.
Julia
16
“What is wrong with you?” Vanessa screamed at Becca as she got her third penalty of the game for going out of her lane.
“White Oak, that’s a warning!” the ref yelled.
We were in the middle of a huge game of lane soccer with Red Maple.
In lane soccer, painted lines run lengthwise on the field, and players cannot cross the lines of the lane they are assigned to. It’s a variation on soccer that makes it impossible for any one player to hog the ball. I was pretty sure White Oak was the reason we were playing lane soccer instead of regular soccer.
I would’ve preferred regular soccer. What did I care if Vanessa, Meredith, and Becca hogged the ball? At least that way, Vanessa wouldn’t yell at me. She had already gotten mad at me for missing a pass, but she was yelling at everyone, even Meredith, so I was beginning not to care.
B
ecca ran down the field again after her penalty, barely staying in her lane, and blocked the ball as a player from Red Maple kicked it toward the goal.
“Awesome!” Vanessa yelled.
“Way to go, Becca!” Meredith wailed.
Becca’s block ricocheted the ball off a different Red Maple player, slowing it way down. It rolled toward Gina, who was playing goalie. Gina pretended to run in slow motion, acting like she couldn’t get to the ball in time. And while she “pretend ran,” she turned to Vanessa and mouthed in slow motion, “Oooooh noooooo!” But Gina was looking at Vanessa instead of watching where she was going, so she actually stepped right on the ball and tripped. She fell facedown in the grass. The ball continued to roll toward the goal. And crossed the line.
Red. Maple. Went. Crazy!
They cheered for their team like they’d just won the World Cup.
White Oak went crazy in a different way.
It was pretty much like how I imagine the eruption of the geyser Old Faithful. An explosion coming from somewhere very, very deep inside the Earth. The kind of explosion that could easily blow a house divided against itself into a million pieces.
I ran over to Gina and crouched next to her to make sure she was okay.
Vanessa ran over to Gina and stood looking down at her and yelled, “Why would you goof around like that? In the middle of a game!”
Gina rolled over and lay on her back spitting grass out of her mouth.
Avery, Meredith, and Becca ran over to the goal too.
When I stood up, Vanessa got in my face and said, “And you! How did you miss that perfect pass I kicked right to you?”
All of a sudden I cared again that Vanessa was a yeller.
Gina stood up and put her face even closer to Vanessa. “It’s a game, Vanessa! It’s supposed to be fun!”
“It’s competition,” Vanessa snarled. “You’re supposed to try!”
“Everyone is trying,” Gina said. “Why don’t you stop acting like you’re better than all of us.”
Just Like Me Page 6