Drum Roll, Please

by Lisa Jenn Bigelow

  The four of us teamed up to hang our mosquito netting. Shauna and Toni were experts. When we were finished, it looked like we each had a green gauze cage suspended over our beds.

  “Hey, weird question,” Olivia said as we rolled out our sleeping bags. “Where are all the boys? Did they get abducted by aliens on their way from auditions?”

  Toni and Shauna burst out laughing. “I wish!” Toni said.

  “Their units are on the other side of camp,” Shauna explained. “Trust me, you’ll see plenty of them at practice, meals, activities. It’s actually really nice to get a break from them.”

  I was just as glad. Not that I had anything in particular against boys, but I’d seen too many movies where boys sneaked into girls’ slumber parties to steal their underwear. Plus, I didn’t want to risk boys seeing me wearing my pajamas with no bra underneath. It was bad enough that our bathroom was so far away. Bathrooms were supposed to be down the hall, not down a hill.

  “Why?” Toni asked. “Are you looking for loooooove?”

  “Of course not!” Olivia said. “I’m here to play music, like everybody else.”

  We all turned at a knock on our tent pole. A head of blue hair popped inside. “All set?” Blair asked. “We’re meeting in the fire circle in two minutes.”

  “We’ll be right out,” Shauna said. “Ready, sisters?”

  She reached out and linked elbows with Toni, who linked elbows with Olivia, who linked elbows with me, and suddenly I was being towed out of our tent into the pine-scented sunshine. I’d never had a sister before—never even had someone call me sister. But even though I’d known Shauna and Toni less than half an hour, it didn’t feel as weird as I would’ve expected.

  Four

  The afternoon was total information overload. Poppy and Blair led us in a name game. We each had to make up a jingle to help everyone remember our names. Let’s just say when your name only rhymes with jiggly words like belly and jelly, it’s bad news.

  The rules came next, about bedtime and wake-up time, about keeping our tents clean. Not feeding woodland creatures, not flushing nonflushable items down the toilets, not climbing trees, not setting things on fire except in the fire circle under adult supervision. I started to wonder what catastrophes had prompted someone to write these things down. It all seemed like common sense. But maybe common sense isn’t all that common.

  Finally it was time to go to the lodge for dinner. Instead of going straight there, though, we stopped in a clearing dominated by a wooden sculpture shaped like a giant electric guitar. The guitar’s white body was marked Unit. The colorful neck, where the frets and tuners of a real guitar would be, was labeled with different locations: lodge, library, lake, and so on. The entire thing was covered with little hooks.

  Olivia and I had passed it earlier, on our way to Treble Cliff, but I hadn’t thought too hard about it. I figured it was somebody’s bizarre choice of lawn ornament. Maybe the director with the bad handwriting and the bad puns, Damon.

  “Welcome to the Fretboard,” Poppy said. “As you’ve probably gathered, Camp Rockaway divides up campers by age. Treble Cliff is the junior high girls’ unit, but we’ve also got units for high school and younger girls. Same goes for the boys.”

  Blair jumped in. “The younger kids do most of their activities with their units, but you’ve got a lot more freedom. There are certain times you’re expected to be certain places, like meals, lights-out, or band practice. Beyond that, it’s up to you. You want to shoot hoops? Knock yourself out. You want to get in some extra practice in the stalls? Go for it. But with great power comes great responsibility, am I right?”

  “We’ve got some Rockaway veterans here,” Poppy said. “Who can explain to our newcomers how the Fretboard works?”

  I was sure Shauna would volunteer, because she seemed to know something about everything, but instead Taxi Girl stepped forward. I felt stupid for not remembering her real name from the game. Allison? Annabelle? There were only twelve of us girls in Treble Cliff, plus Poppy and Blair. It should’ve been easy. But it was lost in the flurry of everything I’d been trying to absorb.

  “Thanks, Adeline,” Poppy said.

  That’s right: Don’t call me Madeline, I’m way too gladeline, just call me Adeline! Her smile, twinkling with braces, seemed to prove it.

  “Okay,” she said in a loud, clear voice, “you’re all going to get a guitar pick with your name on it. It’s got a hole drilled in it so you can hang it on the board.”

  Poppy fished in her pocket and pulled out a handful of picks. “Our picks are yellow,” she said. “The other units have other colors to set them apart.” She gave me one with my name written in extra-fine-point Sharpie.

  “So, I’ve got my pick,” Blair said. “How do I decide where to hang it?”

  “If you’re with your unit, you can leave it on the body of the guitar, where it says ‘Unit.’ That’s home base,” Adeline said. “But if you’re doing your own thing, you need to flip your pick to the right place along the neck. That way if someone needs to track you down for any reason, they’ll know where to look.”

  “And we call this monstrosity the Fretboard, why?” Blair asked.

  Adeline’s grin widened. “So you don’t fret about where we are.”

  Olivia said, “And because Camp Rockaway never, ever walks away from a terrible joke.”

  “You’re catching on already,” Blair said proudly. “Go hang up your picks.”

  Dinner was hot dogs on the lawn outside the lodge, with all the usual things you eat with hot dogs: potato chips, pasta salad, watermelon, chocolate chip cookies. Adeline was ahead of me in line. I noticed her taking her hot dog from a separate, smaller tray. When I got up there, I saw the tray was marked Veggie. Apparently vegetarianism went along with being into peace and love and killing fascists.

  I took a regular hot dog, feeling a little guilty, and then feeling silly for feeling guilty. I’d never felt guilty about eating meat before. Was I afraid of what Adeline thought? Why should I care, anyway?

  I sat in a sunny spot with Olivia, Toni, and Shauna. It seemed like most people were sticking with their bunkmates. As we munched our hot dogs, Olivia asked, “So, when do we get our band assignments?”

  “Right after breakfast tomorrow,” Toni said.

  Olivia groaned. “I don’t think I can wait that long.”

  Shauna said, “The teachers get together tonight and compare notes.”

  “How do they choose who goes with who?” Olivia asked, shifting closer to me. Not that we had any reason to be worried. We’d put on our applications that we were coming to camp together. As long as we had each other, it didn’t matter who else we were put with.

  “Partly by instrument, of course,” said Shauna. “Like, each band gets a drummer.”

  “Except there’s always too many guitar players,” Toni said. “That’s just a fact of life.”

  “Tell me about it,” Shauna said. “Oh, and there’s always some random violinists or accordion players. They get sprinkled in at the end.”

  “Accordion players?” Olivia said.

  “It happens!”

  “It’s also by your type of music,” Toni said. “Like, if I’m into Beyoncé, they won’t stick me with a bunch of Beach Boys wannabes.”

  “Basically, band assignments determine your future at camp,” Shauna said. “Whoever you end up with, you’re going to spend a lot of time with them. Which can totally rule or totally suck, depending.”

  “What about how good you are?” I asked, nibbling nervously on my watermelon rind. “What if they put you in a band and you, um, you can’t keep up?”

  Shauna and Toni looked at each other, obviously thinking, Uh-oh, don’t put me in a band with Melly.

  But Toni said, “I wouldn’t worry about that. Damon tries really hard to keep Camp Rockaway—what’s the word he uses, Shauna?”

  “Cooperative, not competitive,” Shauna said. “It’s true, Melly. The prodigies are up the road at
Interlochen. There’s a lot of talent here, but it’s more about having a good time than anything else, you know?”

  “Right,” Toni said. “The music stuff’s great, but let’s be real, I can form a band anywhere. But I can’t see the stars at home in the Detroit ’burbs. I can’t canoe on a lake. I can’t make s’mores over a campfire.” Her eyes shone.

  Olivia told Toni, “You ought to do ads for this place.”

  She flashed her enormous grin. “Why, thank you. I’ve often thought if music doesn’t work out, I’ll go into marketing.”

  As dinner wound down, Damon stood on a folding chair outside the door of the lodge. He looked a little younger than my parents, with thinning strawberry blond hair and a big beard. Tiny round glasses glinted over his pink cheeks. His Camp Rockaway T-shirt strained against his belly. He could be Santa Claus in another fifty years.

  “Good evening, rock stars!” he bellowed. “Did you enjoy your meal?”

  An earsplitting, rock-concert-quality cheer, complete with hooting and whistling, rose from the lawn. If anyone hated hot dogs, they weren’t going to spoil the mood by admitting it.

  “Fantastic. We’ve got a real treat for your first night at camp. Your staff is going to be working you hard the next couple of weeks, pushing you to your musical limits. But if you’ve played in a band before, you know it’s not just about playing your instrument well. It’s about working together. It’s about give and take. That stuff isn’t easy, and we know it.”

  Damon paused and pushed his glasses up his nose.

  “That’s why tonight we’re giving you a demonstration of our skills, so you can see we’re not talking out of our behinds. All of your staff are terrific musicians on their own, yet many of them met each other for the first time this summer. You’ll get a sense of what can be accomplished in a short time if you go into this experience with dedication and an open mind. And, of course, we hope you’ll have a blast. Thank you, and welcome to Camp Rockaway.”

  Damon stepped down from his chair. Counselors began weaving among the campers, telling us to finish up and herding us into the lodge. The four of us stood and threw away our trash.

  The lodge was a large building with stone walls and exposed wooden beams. Inside, all the dining tables and chairs had been folded up and pushed aside to clear space in front of a stage, a real one, wired up with lights and mics and amps and cables coiled neatly on the floor. I counted a drum set, a keyboard, and several guitars—electric, acoustic, bass—in stands. A saxophone, a trumpet. A banjo, a mandolin. I lost track.

  The musicians took the stage. Damon sat behind the drums—I don’t know why that surprised me, but it kind of did—and Poppy stepped behind the keyboard. My breath caught as the counselor who’d auditioned me, Donna, pulled the strap of an electric guitar over her head. And there were half a dozen more. By the time they’d all taken their places, the stage was packed. The houselights dimmed, Damon clicked his sticks together, and the bright, joyful intro to “Walking on Sunshine” blasted through large black speakers.

  They were good. Like, really good.

  Nobody needed an invitation to dance. Well, I sort of bounced nervously. But the crowd was so thick, boys and girls, little kids and teenagers and counselors all mixed together, it didn’t really matter. A dopey smile hung off my face. Here we were, miles from the nearest gas station, the nearest grocery store, the nearest school or mall or anything at all—in the midst of a live rock show.

  “You know why they do this, right?” Shauna shouted as she whirled by.

  “Damon said it’s to prove the counselors practice what they preach,” Olivia yelled back.

  “That’s the official line. But really it’s to wear us out so we sleep tonight!”

  It was working. Looking back at the day, it was hard to believe that just this morning Mom had informed me Dad was staying in Kalamazoo to hunt for an apartment instead of driving me to camp. I was suddenly exhausted, and a little bit queasy. It was weird. Part of me wanted to obsess over the trouble at home. Part of me wanted to be miserable, to pick at the wound so it wouldn’t have a prayer of scabbing over. And the tireder I got, the bigger that part of me grew and the harder I had to fight it.

  I was relieved when the music finally ended and the lights came back up. Olivia and I gathered around Poppy and Blair with the other girls from our unit and began the hike back to Treble Cliff. Darkness hadn’t yet fallen, but everything had turned smudgy. Smudgy trees, smudgy sky, the color sucked out of the scenery until nothing was left but shades of gray. Our group bustled with leftover excitement, but the farther we walked into the woods, the quieter we got—as if the gently blowing leaves were telling us shhh, shhh, and we were listening.

  The buzz and hum of the afternoon had gone, but still my ears rang. I thought at first it was from the show, which had been loud enough that Mom would’ve run for her Excedrin, but no. It was different: chirping, trilling. I fell behind the rest of the group as I peered into the trees, searching for the source.

  “It’s the frogs,” someone said.

  I jumped—speaking of frogs—and felt ridiculous. It was Taxi Girl. Adeline.

  “Tree frogs and tree toads,” she said. “And peepers, down by the lake. There’s crickets in there, too, probably. But mostly the frogs drown out everything else.”

  “I thought frogs said ribbit,” I said.

  “That’s just the Hollywood frog.”

  When I laughed, Adeline said, “I’m serious! I mean, it’s really the Pacific tree frog. But that’s what you always hear in the movies, because it lives right in Hollywood. Now everyone thinks all frogs say ribbit—in America, anyway.”

  “What do frogs say in other countries?” I asked.

  “I have no idea. I’m still trying to learn what all the American frogs say.” She laughed. “I love the tree toads especially. Have you ever taken a stick and run it along a picket fence? That’s what their call reminds me of.”

  I listened hard, trying to pick out the sound of the tree toads from the rest.

  “It’s like when you listen to a song for the first time, and everything sounds like a jumble,” Adeline said. “But the more you listen to it, the more you can pick out the different instruments, the harmonies.”

  “It’s different from what I’m used to,” I said. “Back home, you hear cicadas and traffic and kids playing in the street. Sometimes a train.”

  “It’s just a different song,” Adeline said. “Trust me, you’ll fall in love with it.”

  I was pretty sure it was already happening.

  “Hey! Melly!” Olivia had stopped on the path ahead. “You’re going to get lost if you don’t stick with the group. And I heard a rumor there are bears in these woods.”

  I called back, “It’s okay, I’m with—” But Adeline was already jogging past Olivia to catch up with the others. Her white shirt faded in the deepening darkness.

  “Everything okay?” Olivia asked, her eyebrows drawn together.

  “Of course,” I said. “Adeline and I were just talking about—”

  I stopped. The next word should’ve been frogs, of course, but I didn’t want to say it. Maybe because it sounded stupid, and I didn’t want to remember the conversation that way. It was just a couple of minutes long, but it felt like a big deal. Most people don’t go out of their way to talk to shy people. Besides Olivia, I didn’t have many other friends, and those I did have I’d made slowly. Today had been a revolution—first Shauna, then Toni, and now Adeline, who was friendly and funny and knew things about frogs. I didn’t want to risk spoiling that memory.

  So instead I said, “The show.”

  “Oh,” said Olivia. In her voice, I could hear the words she didn’t say: Is that really all?

  “Come on,” I said, taking her hand and pulling her along. “We don’t want to get left behind, do we? I hear there are bears in these woods.”

  Five

  The tension at breakfast was as thick as the sticky gray oatmeal lumped in our
bowls. Everyone was speculating about band assignments—counting up the different types of musicians in each age group and comparing favorite artists. But nobody could know for sure until the names were read.

  It occurred to me they made Monday oatmeal day for a reason. Everyone actually ate it in hopes of getting to the announcements faster.

  Finally the tables were cleared and wiped, and Damon took the stage with one of Camp Rockaway’s endless supply of clipboards. “Good morning, rock stars,” he said, his voice carrying through the lodge without the need for a mic. It helped that we were completely silent, waiting breathlessly. “The moment you’ve been waiting for: band assignments!”

  He began with the youngest campers. “Because they have the shortest attention spans,” Shauna said. The room rippled with excitement as they learned who they’d be playing with and which instructor they’d be working with.

  Then Damon moved on to our group, and Olivia gripped my hand so hard my knuckles ground together. “This is it, Melly,” she said.

  Toni was assigned to the first group, in Uluru. Shauna was put in Zuma. Then Damon said, “With Chad, in Gibraltar, at ten thirty. From Bass Cliff, Bret and Noel. From Treble Cliff, Olivia and Candace.”

  Not Melly. Candace. I couldn’t remember a face—or even a jingle—to go with the name, but when I looked around the hall, it was obvious she was the tall girl with wavy chestnut hair, beaming. Olivia didn’t let go, but her hand went slack around mine. My stomach curdled.

  “No,” Olivia said. “That can’t be right.”

  Damon kept reading names, filling up Plymouth and Guatapé without mentioning my name. Then finally, “With Donna, in Trolltunga, at ten thirty. From Bass Cliff, David and Caleb. From Treble Cliff, Adeline and Melissa.”

  He moved on to the oldest campers, leaving Olivia and me stunned.

  We were a team. A rhythm section. We had a whole system of communication—different nods and eyebrow wiggles. Olivia was the only bassist I’d ever played with, and the thought of working with someone new scared me. I’d screw up everything. After my lousy audition, Donna must be regretting that she’d ended up with me. I was going to make her even sorrier.