Horse Camp

by Nicole Helget

  I’ve been so ticked off about it that I’ve been hatching plans of revenge all morning while I paint this little building Uncle Stretch calls the pump house. It’s boring work, made even boring-er by the color I have to paint it: white. Come on. If you’re going to paint something, at least use some color. The whiteness makes me twitchy, which makes me really want to think of a magnificent revenge for Penny. During a water break, I even ask Elle if she has any ideas, but of course Elle doesn’t talk back—she just stands there in her rubber swimsuit, refusing to drop the arm that’s covering her breast and chewing her fingernail.

  Back at the pump house, I decide I need to set a trap for Penny … something that will embarrass and scare her. She really deserves it. As I brush the white paint back and forth, back and forth across the pump house siding, I compose a mental list of things that annoy me about Penny.

  1. She has no respect for others’ privacy.

  2. She wastes all her time trying to decide who to blame for Mom and Dad’s problems. First, for a long time, it’s all Mom’s fault. Then it’s Dad’s. Then back to Mom. Back to Dad. Mom. Dad. Mom, Dad, Mom, Dad. Momdadmomdadmomdad. Who cares whose fault it is! Move on!

  3. She thinks she knows how to interpret the Bible when it’s obvious no one really knows how to interpret that book—I mean, it’s like two thousand pages long!

  4. She thinks she’s like Jesus but then is mean to people like Sheryl and June Bug just because she’s jealous they look way better than she does. I’m more like Jesus than she is, just based on my humbleness alone. And I don’t talk about Jesus stuff all the time like she does. Do you think Jesus went around talking about himself all the time? He would have irritated a lot of people.

  5. She is always living in the past. Percy, do you remember that time in Africa? Percy, do you remember that time in the Philippines? Hey, Penny, remember that time you were supposed to shut up?

  6. She is taller than me.

  7. She is a couple of minutes older than me.

  8. She is not a boy. At least most twins get a twin who looks and acts like them.

  9. She’s very uncoordinated and will never be good at sports.

  10. The sound of her voice is like one of those swings at a park that squeaks because it’s all old and worn-out. EEK! ERK! EEK! ERK! Imagine what Penny’s voice will sound like when she’s old! EEEEK! ERRRRRK! EEEEK! ERRRRRK!

  All this thinking about Penny’s voice actually makes me cover my ears, and when I do that, the paintbrush drips a bunch of white paint onto my cheek. I drop the brush and use my shirtsleeve to wipe the paint off my face. I decide I need to start drawing out these plans instead of thinking. Thinking stresses me out. Drawing relaxes me. I slap some paint on the last side of the pump house, duck my head under a stream of cool water from the nearby pump, and then run to the granary. I grab up my sketchbook and begin to draw out some ideas.

  The first plan I draw is for a water balloon launcher that will launch about thirty water balloons at one time from my window in the granary right in through her window in the house. It’s about half a football field away, so the balloons would have to go a good fifty yards. They would drench Penny, and if she was wearing her nightshirt, the water would soak her enough that you could see right through the material, and anyone who was watching would pretty much see her naked. But I don’t have any wood and a metal spring like I need to build the right kind of launcher. Plus, it would take too long to build. Next, I draw a plan for her to step in a rope and get swooped upside down so she would be hanging from a tree branch. If she was upside down long enough and swinging by her foot from the rope and wearing loose enough clothes, her shirt and shorts might get pulled off by gravity, so that people watching could see her naked, or at least her underwear or stupid bra, which she doesn’t even need, by the way, but is always trying to talk about. If she got swooped up when was wearing tight clothes, which she does a lot, it wouldn’t work that well. I move on to drawing a blueprint of the bathroom, where I could plant secret cameras in strategic places and then just press record on the cameras and let them run for twenty-four hours. But then I suppose it would record Pauly and Uncle Stretch and Sheryl, too, and I definitely would not want to see any of their bare nakedness. I really don’t want to see Penny’s at all, either. I just wish she wouldn’t have seen mine! I start on a new idea dealing with stealing all her clothes and cutting holes in them, when Pauly walks into my room with a football in his hands.

  “How many times have I told you to use the secret knock before entering this room?” I say.

  “Hey, P.P.,” he says. “I hohd Penny saw you doing a funny naked dance and singing like cwazy into yoh toothbwush like it was a micwophone when you woh in fwont of the mih-woh in the bathwoom.”

  “What are you talking about?” I say. “That’s not true!”

  “She told all of us at the bwekfast table she saw yoh ding-a-ling, dude.”

  “She didn’t see a dang thing!” I yell. “Now get out of my room!”

  “It’s not weally yoh woom, P.P. It’s the gwain-o-wee.”

  “Leave!” I say.

  He walks toward the door, then turns around. “You shoh you don’t want to play some catch?” he says, tossing the football from hand to hand.

  “Where did you even get that football!”

  “Stwetch gave it to me. It’s one of his old ones.”

  “Get out!” I scream. I jump off my bed and move toward him like I’m going to cream him, and he runs out of there.

  Boy, one thing is for sure. Penny is going down. Forget embarrassing her. I’m going to make her miserable. I’m going to make her wish I was the only one born on our birthday.

  I spend nearly all afternoon trying to catch one of the rabbits in this rabbit family I’ve seen behind the granary the past few weeks. I’ve got a cardboard box propped up by a stick that has a long piece of string tied to it, which I’ve been holding, ready and waiting, for when one of the rabbits looks under the box at the stack of carrots I’ve piled up to lure it. I didn’t even go into the house for lunch because I need to get my vengeance as soon as possible.

  Catching a rabbit is part two of my plan. There are three parts. Part one was finding just the right Bible verse to use to slam Penny for her sins against me. It didn’t even take long since my personal Bible has this appendix in the back that shows you where to find verses based on any word. You can even choose a word like lamb or sexuality or homosexuality, or murder, and it will give you the perfect choice of verses. When I chose vengeance, I just looked at the first verse they suggested, and bingo, there was a real good one. I have committed it to memory.

  Part three involves a big wad of bubble gum.

  Out in the yard, one of the rabbits has gotten close to the box a few times, but right before it goes in for the carrots, it looks right at me and—even though I am completely silent and frozen stiff—it’s like it can smell me or something because its nose starts twitching. It knows something is up, and it hops away.

  After a while, Pauly comes up and asks what I’m doing.

  “Quiet, you idiot!” I whisper fiercely. “Obviously, I’m trying to catch a rabbit.”

  “Sowwy,” says Pauly. He hunches down beside me. “Why awe you twying to catch a wabbit?” he whispers, or I should say sort of whispers since he’s too uncoordinated to really whisper correctly.

  “None of your business.”

  He sits there with me a while, since I decide not to kick him out of there because I’m thinking of using him to trap the rabbit. It takes a little extra thinking, since trying to catch wild animals means you usually have to be smarter than them. I tell this to Pauly and he whispers, “These wabbits awe pwobably smaw-toh than you, P.P.”

  “Well,” I say, “a worm is smarter than you. Even the dumbest worm around.”

  “That doesn’t both-oh me,” he says. “I don’t weally cay-oh because I like wohms. They’oh pwetty fun to play with, actually.”

  That gives me an idea. “Okay, her
e’s the plan, Worm Boy,” I say. “You need to sneak back to the house and get some of those gross granola bars Uncle Stretch keeps in that one cupboard. You know what I’m talking about?”

  Pauly nods his head yes. “I think those gwanola baws are pwetty tasty.”

  “Whatever,” I say. “Just grab a couple and hustle back here. And be quiet! Now go!”

  He crawls off on all fours. I don’t know why he thinks he has to crawl—what can I say, he’s not a smart guy—so it takes him extra long to make it across the yard to the house, but in a few minutes, he’s back with the granola bars. I open them and tell him to go sit next to the box and crumble the granola bars into his lap and quietly wait for the rabbits and then try to lure them under the box.

  It doesn’t take five minutes before three squirrels are creeping up on Pauly. The dummy doesn’t even see them at first because he’s looking off into the clouds, spacing out about something moronic, I’m sure. Before I know it, all three squirrels are scurrying around Pauly, eating the granola he’s spread out. He looks at me and smiles. I give him a thumbs-up and then make a gesture for him to trap one of them under the box, but the confused look on his face shows that he doesn’t get what I mean. Two rabbits even pop up out of nowhere and start hopping close to Pauly, but the squirrels see them and one of them starts squeaking a bunch of gibberish. It’s pretty funny, because the squirrel’s chattering gets louder and louder, and I bet if I could speak squirrel, I would hear some filthy squirrel language with tons of swear words. Whatever the squirrel says makes the rabbits turn right around and hop away. Pauly is chuckling and petting one of the other squirrels as it greedily chomps away at the granola.

  I decide that a squirrel will work just as well as a rabbit, and I make my move. With the stealth of a Greek warrior, I sneak up next to Pauly and the squirrels, pick up the cardboard box that’s hovering over the pile of carrots, and slam it upside down over one of the squirrels. The other two squirrels jump and scatter, one of them climbing right up Pauly’s shirt and then jumping like a madman off Pauly’s big, old, stupid head. But the one under the box is trapped. I’ve got my wild animal!

  “Hey!” yells Pauly. “What awe you doing? I was going to twain them to be my pets!”

  “Pauly,” I say, “you fulfilled your duty, and for that I thank you.”

  “But that one in the box is pwobably weally scay-ohd.”

  Pauly is probably right, since the box I’m holding over the trapped squirrel is being thumped and scratched against. I have to make Pauly help me transfer the squirrel into a more secure cage without letting it get away.

  “Pauly,” I say, “I’ll let you keep Nutty to train as a pet if you help me do one little thing first.”

  I don’t even have to explain what the thing is before Pauly says, “Okay.”

  Penny’s life is pretty dull. I should know, because after I put the squirrel in the cage, I started spying on her. All she’s done is read a book outside, by a tree for about an hour, go into the house to get an apple, go back outside to the same tree she was sitting by before, read the same book some more, eat the apple, stare up into the clouds for a while, and then go into her room to write in her notebook. Lucky for me she also has the radio on because Nutty the squirrel, who I now have trapped in a smaller shoe box—an operation that took Pauly and me quite a while to pull off after I was done spying—is clawing at the cardboard, making a tiny racket. I wait a couple of more minutes before I decide that now is the time for action. I push the door open, hiding the shoe box behind my back.

  When she sees me, she gets a big smile on her face. “Hey,” she says. She covers her mouth to stop a chuckle. “Make up any new dance moves since this morning?”

  “Have you ever read Isaiah 34:8?” I bellow.

  “What?”

  “Isaiah chapter thirty-four, verse eight. ‘For the Lord has a day of vengeance,and a year of retribution, to uphold Zion’s cause!’ ”

  “What are you talking about?” she says. “And what’s in your mouth and what’re you hiding behind your back?”

  “I’m talking about vengeance,” I say.

  “If this is about me accidentally seeing you naked this morning, you should just get over it, Percy. We were naked together in the womb for nine months.”

  “I don’t remember that, and neither do you!” I say.

  “Actually, I think I do remember some of that time.”

  “That’s a bunch of Horse Camp, Penny!”

  “No, it’s not. What’s Horse Camp is you denying our bond and acting like we’re strangers half the time.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think you might have some prepubescent issues you need to deal with about the advent of body changes,” says Penny. “It would probably be healthiest for you to take a proactive approach to reconciling the coming changes, both mentally and physically, otherwise you could find yourself acting out without even really understanding why you’re doing it.”

  I don’t know what to say, so I just repeat my verse more loudly this time: “ ‘For the Lord has a day of vengeance, a year of retribution, to uphold Zion’s cause!’ ” I then yell a loud “Ha-ha!” and release Nutty the squirrel by presenting the shoe box from behind my back and flipping open the top.

  It’s better than I could’ve dreamed. Nutty takes a flying jump out of the box and lands on Penny’s bed. Penny screeches and the squirrel does, too, as he scrambles across her lap and—I swear—runs right up her wall. He flips upside down in the air and lands on her dresser top, where he knocks over a bunch of perfume and junk. Penny screams again, and it’s at this point that I take the big wad of bubble gum I’d been chewing—all five pieces from a pack of watermelon Hubba Bubba—out of my mouth and mush it deep into her hair before repeating my verse one last time at the top of my lungs, slipping out of the room, and blockading the door with a chair before running down the stairs and out of there.

  I do a victory leap. I have tamed a wild beast and executed my mission of revenge. I have upheld the cause of Zion and defended the rights of my personal privacy. Now I just hope the squirrel is so scared he poops under her bed and that then it takes her, like, another two weeks to figure out where that bad little smell is coming from. Vengeance is truly mine. Ha-ha!

  Chapter 10

  Penny versus Percy

  DEAR OKONKWO,

  I’M ENCLOSING A PICTURE OF ME WITH MY NEW HAIRCUT. DO YOU LIKE IT? I MEAN, IF I WERE A GIRL IN YOUR VILLAGE, WOULD YOU STILL THINK I AM PRETTY OR ATTRACTIVE? DO BOYS IN YOUR VILLAGE CARE ABOUT LOOKS THAT WAY OR DO YOU JUST MARRY THE GIRL WHO CAN MAKE THE BEST YAM PASTE OR PEANUT SOUP? IN THE VILLAGE I LIVED IN, THE MOST MARRIAGEABLE GIRLS WERE THE ONES WHOSE FATHERS OWNED LOTS AND LOTS OF GOATS. NOW THAT YOU HAVE YOUR OWN GOAT, YOU PROBABLY DON’T WORRY ABOUT THAT TOO MUCH AND ARE MORE INTERESTED IN THE PRETTY GIRLS.

  DID YOU KNOW THAT IN THE UNITED STATES, MOST BOYS PREFER GIRLS WITH REALLY LONG HAIR? I IMAGINE THAT SINCE YOU’RE SO POOR YOU CAN’T AFFORD A TV OR INTERNET TO DISCOVER THINGS LIKE THAT. IF YOU CAN’T, DON’T FEEL BAD. I DON’T REALLY HAVE A TV RIGHT NOW, EITHER. NOT ONE THAT I CAN WATCH, ANYWAY, SINCE IT ONLY GETS TEN CHANNELS THAT ARE ALL LOCAL AND SHERYL BASICALLY HOGS IT THE WHOLE DAY.

  SHERYL IS MY UNCLE’S GIRLFRIND, WHO BASICALLY LIVES HERE AND TRIES TO BE MY MOTHER. I SUPPOSE IT’S KIND OF LIKE IN YOUR COUNTRY WHERE THE MEN HAVE SIX OR SEVEN WIVES AND THE KIDS HAVE TO LISTEN TO ALL OF THEM, NOT JUST THEIR REAL MOTHER. WE HAVE SOME STATES HERE WHERE A MAN CAN MARRY A MAN, TOO. DO YOU HAVE THAT IN AFRICA? I USED TO THINK THAT KIND OF MARRIAGE WAS A BIG SIN, BUT I’M NOT SO SURE ANYMORE.

  HOW’S YOUR GOAT?

  PENELOPE PRIBYL

  Dear Diary,

  Sheryl gave me a haircut, which actually turned out pretty nice, even though I miss my long, long, nice hair that everyone used to compliment and want. Everyone always told me how pretty it was, and now I’ll probably only get compliments about my eyes or something like that.

  You’re probably wonde
ring why I cut my hair if it was so nice in the first place. Well, I did it because Percy’s turning into a complete psycho, all because I accidentally saw him dancing and singing naked in the bathroom. If Percy doesn’t want people seeing him naked, he should do what I do, which is to undress and dress as quickly as possible and always have your next outfit or towel ready before you strip naked. Also, when I’m in the bathroom, I put the heavy footstool against the door, which Percy definitely did not do.

  I hardly even saw any part of him at all, but I told the rest of the family that he was standing there buck naked in front of the mirror, holding a toothbrush like a microphone, and singing into it. He can’t even take a little joke and took it way too personally and got me back twice, which is not fair. First, he told everyone that I don’t even need a bra, which is definitely a lie because I do, and he told everyone that I put cotton balls in my bra to make my chest look bigger, which I did only once, just to see what it looked like. I don’t know how Percy could even know that unless he was being a creepy spy, which wouldn’t surprise me at all. So that was the first way he got me back.

  The second way he got me back was worse. He trapped this squirrel and released it in my room. It could easily have had rabies and bitten me and then he’d be guilty of killing, too. He’s totally lucky that I don’t turn him in to the authorities for attempted murder. If I had, he’d be in juvie hall sharing a shower with like a hundred other people, all staring at each other’s privates. And then what would he do? Come up with crazy plans with squirrels for everyone who saw his privates? Every day? There aren’t enough squirrels in the entire state of Minnesota for that.

  One time when Mom got mad at Daddy and yelled at him and called him all kinds of foul insults like liar and manipulator and thief and wolf in sheep’s clothing, he smiled at her real nicely and said, Rage is a sin, but I forgive you. I wish I had remembered to say that when Percy smashed that gum in my hair. Instead, I screamed, and who can blame me? I couldn’t stop screaming. I’m embarrassed about all that screaming, but I couldn’t help it at all. When I went to Stretch and Sheryl, it was like they didn’t know what to do about it. Sheryl covered her mouth and said, “Oh, honey,” and Stretch just rubbed his chin. If I get the opportunity, I am going to tell Percy that rage is a sin but I forgive him just like Dad told it to Mom. I think Percy definitely inherited Mom’s rage, but I’m not holding a grudge. One nice thing about forgiving someone is that it gives you the upper hand and makes you the better person.