Clone Camp!

by B. A. Frade

  Samantha came to join her sister.

  “Do these kids look sick to you?” Sydney asked.

  Samantha nodded, while the kids themselves shook their heads.

  “Well then,” Sydney told her sister. “They have to go where sick kids go.”

  “Not the infirmary!” The girl from my cabin put her hands on her hips. “I refuse to go to the infirmary!”

  Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had heard that rumor about kids never coming back. I didn’t believe it, but from where I stood, I could see that my cabin mate Becky clearly believed every word.

  Samantha signaled one of the fifth-grade counselors. He was a big guy, much bigger than Becky, and she wasn’t small. She had a round face and a tough build, yet he picked her up as if she weighed nothing and carried her out over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She smacked at his back and struggled against him the whole way, screaming.

  After that, the other kids by the mural didn’t argue. They followed another counselor, quietly and without protest, toward the nurse’s office.

  Six kids were gone, but what was going on with the other 142 campers and 25 counselors who all seemed to be part of the madness?

  Where was the administrative staff who ran the camp? Where was the director? The cute couple who did maintenance—where were they?

  Not here. And clearly, they weren’t coming.

  That meant that Noah and I were now the only ones not participating in the chaos. Only, no one was shouting his name.…

  Seeing a lull in the action, I rushed to the kitchen. Surely the cook could stop this insanity.

  “Cook?” I ran through the swinging doors so fast that one swung back and hit me on the shoulder. “Oww.” I sucked in the pain and shouted louder, “Cook!”

  No answer.

  I checked the big pantry. The walk-in freezer. I looked out the door to see if she was taking a break.

  Where was she? Dinner wasn’t over. She couldn’t have left!

  I needed one sane adult—someone, anyone—who didn’t want to pelt me with carrots!

  Unsure what to do, I turned my anger on the next person who stepped through those swinging kitchen doors.

  NOAH!

  “This has your fingerprints all over it!” I said, still able to hear the chants, which had now morphed to “Clean up, Katy.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Noah insisted.

  “You’re lying!” I shouted at him over the ruckus. “I should never have trusted you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Noah asked. “I’m trying to help.”

  I picked a carrot slice out of my hair. “You broke your deal, so now I’m breaking mine. I wouldn’t help you unmask the Scaremaster if you were the only other kid at camp!”

  That ability to read Noah’s face, which I was so proud of before, backfired. I couldn’t trust my own instincts.

  “This is your fault.” I pointed back at the dining room. “I don’t know when you talked to Samantha and Sydney and I don’t know how you got the other kids to join in, but I’m positive that you are the mastermind behind this joke.” I opened the kitchen door that led outside. “It’s not funny, and I’m leaving!” I didn’t turn around when I shouted, “You can clean up all by yourself.”

  I stomped out, around the building, past the dumpster, and toward the woods. Since I was in such a hurry to escape, I didn’t really have a plan for where I was going, which wasn’t my style.

  There was a narrow path that led between the camp offices/staff lounge toward the director’s cabin. I started down that path, but hearing footsteps behind me, I veered off, swerving around trees, going deeper into the woods. I had never been this far away from the center of camp, and in the dim of sunset, the trees cast long dark shadows across the ground.

  A few more feet forward, and the trees opened to a small clearing where wildflowers grew next to white berries on stems and leafy green plants. I stopped. Being alone in nature calmed me down. It was quiet here, far from the dining hall and the chants. I wished I could just stay in this little meadow forever, or at least until the end of summer.

  Feeling a little better, I reached out toward one of the plants, when a voice behind me shouted, “Katy, STOP!”

  I swung my head around, instinctively pulling back my hand.

  “Don’t call me that,” I told Noah. “Go away.”

  “I didn’t do anything.” He crossed a finger over his heart. “On my honor.”

  “Right,” I said. “And I am a queen from a faraway island, posing as a normal camp kid.”

  “It must be true, then.” He bowed low. “Your Highness.”

  “Cut it out, Noah.” I shook my head. I was on the verge of tears. Camp was nothing like I’d expected. It hadn’t even been a full week, and here I was, ready to go home. My parents would say, “We told you so.” They’d say it was an experiment that failed, and they’d want to keep me close for the rest of my life.

  I turned around so as not to face Noah with my reddening eyes.

  I looked back at that green plant. Some of the leaves had bright red edges, and the whole plant looked shiny, as if it has just been dipped in fresh wax. I wanted to focus on something other than my own jumbled emotions. Once again, I reached out to touch—

  “What the—”

  Noah body-slammed me to the ground, pinning my hands beneath me.

  “What part of ‘stop’ did you not understand?” he asked, refusing to get off me. “Listen, that’s poison ivy. The leaves are pretty, but they are covered with urushiol oil, which you don’t want on your skin. It’ll itch and burn.” He moved aside with the knowledge I wasn’t going to touch it. “You’ll end up in the infirmary. And I highly doubt you want to go there.”

  I sat up and curled into myself, as small as I could be, just in case there was something else nearby that I shouldn’t touch. “How do you know about dangerous plants?” I asked, then answered it myself. “Oh, the tree huggers.” I’d nearly forgotten about his parents’ obsession with nature.

  Noah stood. He wandered in a small circle pointing at plants. “This one has leaves that can be brewed for tea. This one causes severe allergies—in everyone.” He stooped by a berry bush. The little fruit was white with a little black “eye” on a long red stem. “If you eat these berries, you’ll…” Raising one eyebrow, Noah finished, “Let’s just say it’s a fate worse than slipping on Jell-O.”

  “What’s worse than dead?” I asked, recalling his death performance.

  Noah shuddered like it was too horrible to consider.

  “No antidote?” I wondered.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Those plants really shouldn’t be at camp,” I said.

  “You left camp property back at that mossy boulder,” he said, pointing back at the boundary.

  “Oh,” I said, staring at the rock as though it was a magical portal.

  Noah held out a hand. “Let me help you up, Your Highness.”

  I sighed. He’d just saved me from a night of rash-covered, itchy, burning skin. If he did that, then maybe he was on my side. Maybe he was telling the truth all along.

  “I’m not really royal,” I admitted. “Though you can still bow to me, if you want.”

  He smiled, bowed low, then said, “The last prank I pulled was drilling holes in the boat. I promise.”

  I pinched my lips together. I stared at him. I looked back at the poison ivy. And just like that, my frustration slipped away.

  “So what do we do?” I asked him.

  Noah stood there for a long moment. Turning back toward the camp path, he said, “We do what we were always gonna do. We clean up. Then we get the strange book from the trash. And we find out who the Scaremaster really is, because if you ask me, I think he’s behind what happened in the dining hall tonight.”

  “The Scaremaster might be a she,” I said, thinking about the cook with the shifting eyes who had now disappeared.

  “True.” Noah ran a hand over his ha
ir. “All I know is that we need to find out.” He clarified, “I can’t do this without you, Katy.”

  I lowered my eyelids and gave a small grunt. “Ugh.”

  “Kaitlin,” he immediately corrected. “I can’t do this without you, Kaitlin.”

  I wasn’t ready. “I can’t go back there. Not with the craziness in the dining hall. I’d rather take my chances here, surrounded by poisonous plants and dangerous leafy things.”

  “Everything should be okay now,” Noah said. “When I left the kitchen to follow you, I went by the staff lounge. Through the window I saw that some of the staff were hanging out with a few counselors. Director Dave was there.” He gave me a serious look. “I swear I saw Samantha and Sydney sitting on the couch watching TV.”

  “You’re positive?” I asked. Hope surged through me. “How could they possibly move so fast? One minute they were in the dining hall and, a few minutes later, watching TV?”

  “I wondered that too, but I am one hundred percent sure,” he said. “I took a long look. I saw your counselors, and mine, plus some others, taking a break.” He added, “I bet they sent the campers to the cabins with CITs to shower and get ready for bed. No more food fight.”

  The CITs were counselors-in-training. High-school-aged campers who weren’t old enough to be counselors yet but helped out.

  “Okay. I’ll go back,” I told him. And I agreed to help. “Cleanup’s going to be a nightmare, but the faster we do it, the faster we find that book and put an end to whatever this is.”

  Noah smiled at me. “This is going to be as simple as stealing all the toilet paper from the girls’ bathroom!”

  “What?” I turned toward him. “You did that?” I thought back to the panic the first night of camp.

  “Oops.” He gave me a small smile and hurried toward the dining hall.

  We got to the dining hall and went in through the kitchen door. A second later, I knew things were not going to be as easy as we’d expected.

  The cook was still missing. I felt like there should have been a rule that an adult should always be in the kitchen.

  But worse, there was a lot of noise coming from the other side of those swinging doors.

  “What is going on in there?” Noah asked. I slid up next to him so we could both see through the crack between the two doors. Inside the room, the scene was just as bad as when we’d left. There was no more food to throw, so now campers and counselors were slipping around in what was already on the floor, playing made-up messy games and food-fingerprinting on the walls.

  In the center of the room, my counselors, Samantha and Sydney, were cheering the kids on—still chanting my name.

  “They must have come back,” Noah told me.

  “I’m not going in there.” I shook my head.

  “I’m with you,” Noah agreed.

  We slipped out the back of the kitchen and hid by the flagpole at the center of camp until finally—hours later—the dining hall was quiet.

  Chapter Four

  “Lemonhead, you’ll take Junkyard and Turtle to the art shack.” Samantha had called a cabin meeting. We were all sitting on the floor in front of her bunk. No one had names anymore. Everyone had nicknames, and I was stuck with Katy. “The three of you will meet up with Cricket and Scar.” I glanced over at Courtney and Shandra, who seemed to dislike their new names as much as I did mine. I’ll admit I was starting to feel like Katy was pretty tame compared to the others. At least it was sort of related to my own name by more than the first letter.

  “The paints are in glass jars, stacked neatly on a shelf.” Sydney took over the meeting. She held up a hand-drawn map of the art cabinet. “Red, orange, yellow… like a happy rainbow.” She chuckled. “But when you leave the shack, they’ll all be brown, brown, and brown.” Her laughter spread to her sister, and the two of them gave each other high fives, then laughed so hard their voices combined into one mighty giggle.

  I barely heard the stone hit the window. I had to cup my ear to hear it the second time.

  While Samantha and Sydney announced the names of the group that would be letting air out of all the inner tubes by the lake, I turned to find Noah’s face pressed up against the dirty glass. He was behind the cabin, his face half-covered in the shadow of an all-night safety light, looking very much like a horror-movie zombie.

  “Kaitlin,” he mouthed, crooking a finger as if to say, “Come here.”

  I refused. Cleaning up the dining hall had been the grossest thing I’d ever done in my life, and I still had two more days of KP. I couldn’t risk getting in any more trouble.

  I totally understood that my excuse made no sense at all considering everything my counselors were planning for tonight’s cabin activity was both after curfew and horrendous. They had a list of ways to sabotage the camp’s planned programs for the following day—mixing up the art paints and deflating the inner tubes were just two items on a long list of ways to get us all in big trouble.

  What was I supposed to do? After Becky was taken away in the dining hall ruckus, another girl protested that she didn’t want to be part of the group assigned to steal all the helmets from the ropes course. Samantha sent her to the infirmary too!

  Simply put, I was scared to get in trouble for not doing things that would get me in trouble.

  Logic was no longer welcome at Camp Redwood Vines.

  The next time Noah rapped on the window, I ignored him and instead listened for my name to be called. I hoped I’d get an easy task like standing guard while the others let the horses out of the stable or even better, I could stay in the cabin and make sure none of the other cabins raided us.

  “Katy Wang.” Samantha called my name. My heart raced. I was about to get my assignment for the night.

  I looked up slowly.

  “There’s someone at the window,” she said, instead of telling me I had to switch all the saltshakers with sugar or something like that.

  I kept a neutral expression. “I know.” In this upside-down world, I wasn’t sure how else to respond. Could I get in trouble for Noah causing trouble? Wait. Yes. That was how I ended up in KP in the first place.

  My brain hurt. I was getting a headache.

  “Don’t you want to see why that kid’s here?” Sydney asked. She went to the window.

  “No,” I said. I really didn’t. Whatever it was couldn’t be good.

  “I’ll find out.” Sydney cracked the window open a little and talked to him through the slit. “He snuck out of his cabin,” she reported to us all.

  “Let’s hear it for Noah! Job well done.” Samantha stood and applauded. Everyone, except me, followed her by clapping. They were scared not to. I held back, hoping there wasn’t a not-clapping punishment.

  “He wants Katy to sneak out with him,” Sydney said. “Something about a book.” She stepped back. “You should talk to him, Katy Lady.” And there it was, my nickname was morphing into something worse. I shuddered at the thought of where it might end up.

  I turned toward Noah. What was he doing here?

  When we went back to the dumpster, after scrubbing every last lettuce leaf off the dining room walls, it was so late that the dump had been emptied. The book was gone.

  Tales of the Scaremaster was off to some massive trash landfill in some other part of the state. No more investigation necessary. That was the end of the Scaremaster’s story. Once I was done with KP, I’d be free to enjoy camp, like every other camper. That’s all I ever wanted.

  And yet… I glanced over my shoulder at my cabin mates—by the expressions on their faces, they didn’t seem to be enjoying camp at all. They all looked like they were being forced to do things they didn’t want to do.

  I stepped over to the window. It was too high to climb out of but low enough that I could see Noah from the neck up. “This is a bad time,” I told him. “I’ll see you in the kitchen tomorrow morning.” Maybe the cook would come back too? We hadn’t seen her at all after dinner was served. From what I knew, KP didn’t normally
include preparing the entire meal. Plus, I wanted to ask her a few questions about the book. Maybe she knew the Scaremaster or something about his book.

  “Look.” Noah held up the leather-bound Scaremaster’s journal. I could see the scratch marks in the cover, so I knew it was real.

  “Where—?” I started.

  “In my trunk,” he blurted out. “My counselors were preparing us to raid your cabin tonight. You had such a hard day already, I decided to write a note warning you.”

  I had to admit, that was nice of him. Not that it would make a difference on how badly the night was turning out, but still it was nice.

  Noah held the book high in the moonlight. “When I opened my trunk for paper and a pen, this was in it.” I couldn’t tell by his expression if he was more scared or shocked that the book had mysteriously returned to him.

  The opening in the window wasn’t very big, so he leaned forward to stick his face as close to mine as he could. “The trunk was locked, Kaitlin. I’m not kidding.” I decided his expression was a mix of shock and fear because I was having both those feelings too.

  He held the book at arm’s length, by the tips of his fingers, as if it might be dangerous.

  That headache I had grew stronger. The book came back? How was that possible?

  Noah said, “There’s more.” He moved into the dim glow of the security light and cautiously opened the first page. The story we’d seen was gone. There was new writing on the page.

  “Can you read it to me?” I asked. My brain was so messy inside. It felt like it was about to explode.

  “‘You can’t get rid of me that easily. My story is just beginning.’”

  This was a lot to process. If I gave in to this headache, I’d be joining the others in the infirmary. I fought the feeling and held it together. “Is that all?” I asked.

  “Sort of.” Noah closed the book and reported, “Under ‘Tales of the Scaremaster,’ there’s one more line. It’s a title: ‘Doubles Causing Troubles.’”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “The original story said something about doubles too,” Noah reminded me, and a little light pierced through the darkness in my head.