The ramshackle shack smack-dab in the center of camp was going to be my home for the next thirty days. It housed all the in-betweeners. We weren’t the youngest boys on the block, but we were nowhere near the oldest guys here, either.
That made us—The Middle Kids.
A banner was slung over the door, upon which that maple-leafed moose head proclaimed:
OUR HOME IS YOUR HOME AWAY FROM HOME!
“Here goes nothing.” I took a puff from My Little Friend before stepping inside.
A row of bunk beds were positioned along one side. Their musty mattresses were thin and worn-down with time. A handful of hay with nails mixed in would probably have been more comfortable. The whole cabin had a mildewy smell to it.
Nothing like a little mold to aggravate my asthma.
Campers were unpacking, and unrolling their sleeping bags over their beds. I eavesdropped on the conversation as I dragged my suitcase across the floor.
“Did you sneak a peak at Ali Lombardi on the girls’ bus?”
“What about her?”
“I’m telling you, she’s grown two cup sizes since last year.”
“You’re lying.”
“See for yourself. Two bucks says she’s a C-cup before summer ends.”
As I passed their bunks, each boy quickly slid his hand over their mattress.
“Already taken.”
“Taken.”
“Keep moving, kiddo.”
The broken record continued down the aisle, blocking me from their bunks.
“Taken.”
“Taken.”
“Taken.”
I found a bed at the very back of the cabin, tucked far away from the rest of the boys. The bottom bunk was empty.
Looking at the mattress, I realized why.
A large yellow stain radiated out from its center.
Please let that be lemonade.
I leaned over and took a quick whiff.
Definitely not lemonade.
Looking up at the top bunk, I came face-to-face with a kid clutching his suitcase—still unopened. Slightly overweight, his cheeks looked like they were stuffed full of food. Was he squirreling away a month’s worth of meals for the summer or something?
“Guess you’re stuck with the bed-wetters bed,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Should I even ask?”
“At the end of every summer, we pick one mattress and pee on it. When we come back, the last one to the cabin has to sleep in dried pee.”
“You pee on it…on purpose?”
“Yup,” he nodded and smiled. His cheek muscles flexed, bulking up beyond the normal proportions of a human being’s mouth.
I hefted my suitcase onto the bottom bunk and gave a sigh. I would have been better off simply sleeping on the floor.
“First year, huh?” he asked, slightly easing his grip around his suitcase. “This is my third. Technically, it’s my fourth, but I had to leave early last summer.”
“What happened?”
“I bit one of the counselors.”
“You…what?”
He smiled warmly. “Broke the skin and everything! He needed six stitches.”
I’m sharing a bunk with a human badger.
“The doctors gave him a tetanus shot,” he kept going. “Can you believe that? A tetanus shot! Like I had rabies or something.”
“Do you?” I couldn’t help but ask.
He pondered the question for a moment. “I don’t think so….”
“They allowed you to come back?”
The kid shrugged his shoulders. “Got nowhere else to go.”
I unzipped my suitcase. There, on the other side of the flap, Sully’s well-worn black-and-white missing flyer stared back at me.
My bunkmate leaned his head over the edge of the bed. “Who’s that?”
“Just somebody I used to know.”
I slipped her flyer into the wooden framework of the upper bunk.
“My name’s Charles,” my bunk-badger interrupted.
“Hey,” I mumbled. I wasn’t in the mood for making friends.
All I wanted was to stay out of everybody’s way.
“Looks like somebody wet his bed already,” someone said over my shoulder.
I looked up to discover Brace-Face standing at the foot of our bunk. Scanning his hands, I saw that his knuckles were laced with a fresh set of scrapes.
How many fistfights has he gotten into today?
“This is the middle kids’ cabin,” Charles said. “You’re up with the older kids this year.”
“Mind your own business,” Brace-Face muttered. “I just wanted to pay a visit to our fresh fish here, and see how he was getting along on his first day.”
He leaned in and peeled his lips back to reveal those thick train-track braces. Flecks of food were still stuck to the brackets. I got a good whiff of his breath.
Not pleasant. Personal hygiene wasn’t a top priority for this kid.
Brace-Face cupped his hand behind his rear end and farted into it, then brought it back up for me to shake.
“My name’s Capone. What’s yours?”
“Holden Caulfield,” I said, opting out of taking his hand.
“Rude, isn’t he?” Capone said. “That’s no way to make friends on your first day at camp.”
“I think I might’ve touched some poison oak earlier,” I lied. “Don’t want to spread any itchiness around, you know?”
Our cabin was suddenly full of older campers. They waltzed in without an invitation, sifting through suitcases to see if there was anything worth taking.
Before I knew it, I was boxed into my bunk.
“Check out all the books,” one older camper said. It looked as if one of his eyes had latched on to my open suitcase while the other stared me down.
It took me a couple blinks to realize he had a lazy eye.
He was right. I had packed more books than clothes.
Lazy Eye slipped his hand into my suitcase and snatched my copy of The Outsiders. It happened so fast, I had to do a double take just to make sure I had actually seen him take it.
“Hey!” I sprung out from my bunk. “Give that back!”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll…”
Before I could retaliate with some quick-witted quip, Charles, teeth bared, leapt off the top bunk and landed directly on Lazy Eye, snapping at his face.
Lazy Eye lifted his arm up to protect himself, and Charles didn’t think twice before sinking his teeth into Lazy Eye’s forearm.
“Get him off me!”
Capone grabbed Charles’s head and slipped his fingers around his lower jaw, prying his mandibles apart. He snaked his pinkies into Charles’s nostrils for traction.
“Can’t hold on for long,” he strained. “I’m losing my grip!”
Capone’s fingers slid down Charles’s jaw, until…
SNAP!
Capone screamed at the top of his lungs. “Yeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaa!”
That was all the invitation my cabinmates needed to start punching.
In a flash, the whole cabin was in on the fight. What had started as a scuffle between four kids quickly grew. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Older campers pounded on the in-betweeners, punching and kicking just for the fun of it.
There was blood in the water now, which only lured in more sharks to this free-for-all. The whole camp was here, and everybody was happy to pitch in a fist.
The Piranhas rushed in and immediately swarmed around the first camper they found. One second, this kid was standing on his own two feet—the next, he was enveloped by eight gnashing adolescents, all of them gnawing on a different limb.
“Yummyyummyinthetummyyummyyummyinthetummy.”
Don’t get involved, Spencer, I thought. Don�
��t do something you’ll regret.
I pressed my back against the wall and surveyed the room, taking in the tumult.
That’s when I saw something that froze the air in my lungs.
There. On the other side of the cabin.
An acne-addled camper was full-on eye-knifing me.
I know this kid, I said to myself.
A name popped into my head. A name I hadn’t spoken out loud in months.
Compass?
It couldn’t be. The last time I laid eyes on him, he had just laced Greenfield Middle’s lunch with enough funky fungus to create a tidal wave of diarrhea.
Impossible.
Doctor Lobotomy would call this “the transference of figments of my imagination onto others.”
I’d say I was seeing things.
I squeezed my eyes shut until I saw stars behind my eyelids.
This had to be a hallucination. There was no other explanation. I had taken a dose of my medication that morning, and the fog had washed over my head for the whole bus ride.
Now, from somewhere deep within that dense cloud, my fevered mind had conjured up this blast from my past.
Fight the fog fight the fog fight the fog fight the fog fight the fog…
I counted to ten before opening my eyes.
Compass—or whoever he was—was gone. In his place, I found Capone standing directly in front of me.
“Peekaboo,” he said as he grabbed my collar and yanked me into the fracas. His braces budded from his lips as he pulled his fist back.
“Hey, hey, hey!” A scrawny guy with two or three whiskers on his chin popped through the door. He wore a New Leaf T-shirt, emblazoned with a maple-leafed moose head. He was too old to be a camper. His wire-rimmed glasses suggested he should be checking out library books.
“Break it up, break it up!” he shouted.
Capone wasn’t listening. Nobody was.
This pencil pusher forced his way through the vortex of violence, clasping Capone’s fist before it could connect with my face, and tried to pull him off of me.
“Enough, Capone!”
When that didn’t seem to work, he plucked up the silver whistle hanging from his neck and gave a good blow.
The fight instantaneously stopped.
Capone let me go and everyone stepped back, out of breath, ever-so-slightly relieved to call it quits.
“Come on, guys,” the counselor started in. “This type of behavior is really unacceptable. Let’s focus that aggression on something more productive, okay?”
“Like smashing your face in!” Lazy Eye spat at Charles.
Another round of combat erupted. Lazy Eye kicked Charles in the shin, sending him buckling over. Charles sank his teeth into Lazy Eye’s ankle.
“Whoa, Thomas, whoa.” The counselor blew into his whistle and waited for the campers to calm down. “Got that all out of your system? You sure? Good. Most of you know who I am. For those who don’t, I am Stan the Man. As in, I am ‘The Man.’”
Nobody seemed convinced.
“You’ve got two minutes before we meet in the amphitheater. I don’t care how many years you’ve been here, you’ve gotta hear George go through the rules again. Remember—Rules are signposts that help us navigate our way down the highway of life. So get a move on!”
Charles was on the floor, clutching his shin. I held out my hand.
“You okay?”
“Everybody’s got to show off on the first day,” he said, taking my hand. I pulled him from the floor.
“Be careful,” I said. “Looks like you took some pretty big licks there.”
Charles gave me his best puppy-pit-bull eyes. “Do you think maybe you and me could go to the amphitheater together?”
“Look, kid…” I sighed. “I don’t know how to say this nicely, so I’m just gonna tell it to you straight: just because we’re bunkmates doesn’t make us friends.”
“Why not?”
“I’m bad news. Trust me. You’re better off making friends with somebody else here.”
Charles shook his head and grinned. The grin grew, until he bared his teeth.
“You don’t get it yet, do you?” he asked. A bit of blood glistened on his lips. Whose blood was anybody’s guess.
“What’s there to get?”
“Everybody’s bad news here,” he said. “Most of us are worse news than you.”
FILE #16: SALVATORE “CAPONE” GRIMALDI
Capone is Camp New Leaf’s resident lunkhead. The counselors have been stuck with him every year since he was ten. His parents can’t stand having him around the house, so they dump him here each summer.
Capone has what you would call a “habitual pattern of maladjusted behavior.” Excessive aggression. A fondness for destruction. He broke every window in his house with his bare fists simply because his mother told him to turn off the TV and go play outside. He was six at the time.
There’s a rumor going around camp that Capone has beaten up three different counselors during his tenure at Camp New Leaf. He supposedly broke one’s nose. Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen, but most counselors seem to keep their distance from Capone at whatever cost.
Medication: Chlorapentaline, Verchlonodine, Titmouzium
DAY ONE: 1400 HOURS
he amphitheater was a dug-out crater with a fire pit at its heart. Five concentric rings of logs circled around the sloping sides of the cavity.
I had a bad feeling about this place right away. This had to be where the counselors made their offerings to the summer solstice gods.
All the campers squeezed together on their logs while the Piranhas turned the amphitheater into their personal racetrack.
“Comingthroughwatchoutheadsupherewecome.”
You could tell who was new. They kept to themselves.
Like me.
I kept my eyes open for Compass. His pockmarks would make him hard to miss. That’s if I had even seen him in the first place. I was weighing the possibility when the hairs on the back of my neck sprung up. I slowly turned my head to find nothing but a canopy of pine trees. Their leaves rustled in the wind like cheerleader pom-poms.
Charles squeezed in next to me. “Is this log taken?”
“Is now, I guess.”
“Who?” Charles turned his head and looked over his shoulder.
“Uh—you.”
“Oh, yeah.” He laughed, finally getting it. “Right. Sorry.”
Charles smiled at me, as if he were simply happy to have somebody to share a log with. I caught a glimpse of his razor teeth and wondered if I should be worried.
George stood before the fire pit and cleared his throat. A whistle attached to the lanyard around his neck gleamed like some kind of magical talisman. He was flanked by Stan the Man and three younger counselors.
I was sitting close enough to the front to overhear one of the counselors—the one with a patch of peach fuzz stretched across his upper lip—grumbling.
“I can’t believe I’m stuck babysitting again,” Peach Fuzz muttered. “You want to trade off with me?”
“Not a chance,” Stan the Man said. “Cabin two’s all yours, man.”
“I’m slipping valium into their marshmallows all summer long.”
George scanned the crowd before blowing into his whistle.
“Helloooooo, campers!”
Everyone responded snarkily, as if this were a well-rehearsed routine that they were all bored with—“Helloooooooo, George.”
“Welcome to Camp New Leaf! I see a lot of familiar faces here, which is great. Glad to have you back for another summer. And I see a few new folks here, too. What do you say we give a big ol’ Camp New Leaf welcome to all the newbies out there? Helloooooo, newbies!”
“Helloooooo, newbies.”
Newbie
s. No matter where I go, I’m always going to be the rookie.
“One of our goals here at New Leaf is to work toward strengthening your sense of self-worth,” George continued. “We want to challenge you with new and exciting experiences. We want to help develop your courage and confidence. Build up your self-esteem and leadership abilities, while exploring the wonders of nature.”
Translation: Camp New Leaf is a touchy-feely therapeutic camp for kids who would snap your finger in half if you point at them.
“Camp New Leaf is over three hours by car from the nearest city. That’s over one hundred fifty miles from civilization! That means we can leave our city lives behind and immerse ourselves in the wonders of nature.”
Translation: There’s no point trying to escape.
“There’s only one phone at camp and it’s in my office,” George continued. “All campers can call home once a week on Sundays or in case of an emergency.”
It was quickly dawning on me how cut off from the rest of the world we were.
And I thought house arrest had been bad. For the next thirty days, I was completely stranded.
“At New Leaf, we want to give you a summer you’ll remember. The memories you make here will last you a lifetime. Heck—most campers will beg to come back!”
“Beg to?” Capone said under his breath. “More like they’re forced to.”
Took the words right out of my mouth, Capone….
“Camp New Leaf is situated alongside Lake Wendigo,” George said, ignoring Capone. “We are separated into ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ camps.”
At the mention of our sister camp, a chorus of ooooohs rose up.
“Rule one: Don’t bother the girls’ camp. Got me? If you’re caught sneaking out for a little kissy-kissy, you’ll get…”
“Booted?” I interrupted, full of hope.
“Sorry—no one gets the ‘boot’ here.” George scanned the crowd to pinpoint who’d said it. “This lake’s big enough that we can all call it home.”
Then, there it was again. That feeling.
I couldn’t shake the sensation I was being spied on. I would’ve sworn there was someone out there in the woods watching me.
No. From across the amphitheater.
An older camper.
Where had I seen those crazy eyes before?
Camp Cannibal Page 4