by Jamie Gilson
“Well, then, don’t worry about hospital corners.” I hopped down and tried to stuff the sheets in any old way. “It’s no big deal.”
“Room check in ten minutes,” Mr. Star shouted as he walked down the hall. “I want those beds so I can bounce a quarter on them.”
“Why would he want to bounce a quarter on a bed?”
“To show it’s tight like a trampoline. That’s supposed to be good. My dad says—” I told him, and suddenly remembered that my dad had hardly eaten anything or said anything at supper the night before, and he’s a big eater and a big talker. I didn’t know why I hadn’t figured it out before. Lisa said her folks were talking about a divorce. I never knew that before, either. Probably, I decided, there were a lot of things I didn’t know.
“I’ve got to call home,” I said. “I forgot something.”
“That’s against the rules,” Rolf told me. “What’d you forget?”
It was twelve fifteen and nobody would be home anyway except the cat, and he was probably somewhere in Ohio crying in the top of a tree. I shrugged. “I guess it’s no big deal.”
“They all smell like this,” Nick said, rushing in and vaulting onto his bed. “We’ll just have to open the windows.”
Eugene dragged his suitcase in, plunked his things on the bed under mine, and went silently to work while Rolf watched him spread, tuck, and fold.
“I never made a bed before,” Rolf explained to Eugene and Nick. “Don’t tell anybody.” I think he wanted us to feel sorry for him and make it ourselves.
“Well, you better do it now or Mr. Star will send you home,” Nick told him.
“Really?” Eugene asked brightly, dumping his pillow back out of its case.
“No, not really, but we can’t eat till they’re made, and I’m starved.” I watched him stuff the hairy hand and a flashlight under his pillow.
Rolf spread his sheets and blanket kitty-corner on his bed, tucked some in, and then pulled a bag of stuff out of his suitcase and set it on the crumpled blanket.
“You want to see clever?” Rolf asked us. “I decided to beat last year’s guys and their fat-fish-in-the-bed trick. You know that list they gave us, ‘Articles To Bring’ and ‘Articles To Be Left at Home’?” He whipped it out and said proudly, “I brought all the Articles To Be Left at Home.”
He waved a cellophane-wrapped package of peanut butter and crackers at us. “Number one. Food.” Then he opened up a small sack and poured out a heap of Hubba Bubba. “Number two. Gum.” He flopped out an Archie. “Number three. Comic books.” An Archie! “Number four. Radios.” He turned a switch on something that looked exactly like a Pepsi can, only it crackled with static and a faint echo of music. “Five. Money.” He flipped two quarters onto the bed. They didn’t bounce. “And I’m counting the plastic spreader in the peanut butter and crackers as number six, knives. The only thing I didn’t bring was number seven, a tape recorder, because I don’t actually have one. Good stuff, huh?”
We were still deciding how to answer that when Mr. Star blasted through the door. “What ho!” he said. “This may well be the messiest room on my beat. And what’s more, I believe I see an entire stack of contraband. I shall confiscate it and return it to its rightful owner when we arrive home.” He scooped it up and dumped it all into its original sack. “Yours, I presume, Rolf?”
“Mine, Mr. Star,” he sighed.
An enormous cackley laugh rang out as a bell from the mess hall down the hill called us to lunch. It was Mrs. Bosco’s laugh. And it was close by.
“Oh, I’ll keep an eye on them. Don’t you worry,” she was saying. “They won’t put anything, anything over on me.” And she cackled again. Mrs. Bosco was in the room next to ours, no doubt about it. On the boys’ floor. Mrs. Bosco was keeping her eye on us.
4
RIP
“Yuck, this stuff looks like imitation Central School food,” Tracey groaned as she plopped the bowl of macaroni casserole on our table. She wore a white chef’s cap, which meant she was our table’s “hopper,” the one who goes to the kitchen for food.
“It looks like a lovely dish,” Miss Hutter said when it was passed to her, still untouched. She lifted a heaping spoonful onto her plate. There was probably tuna in it. For sure there was celery.
“That’s what I meant,” Tracey said. “Lovely.”
Dishes of chocolate pudding and a plate of carrot sticks were already on the table when we sat down, so most people ate pudding first, even though Miss Hutter pointed out that it wasn’t a good appetizer.
“Pass the peanut butter, jelly, and bread,” R.X. called when Tracey arrived with them. She had to go back for thirds for the p.b. and j., and R.X. must have eaten a whole loaf of bread. But the casserole just sat there with one cave in it. Even Miss Hutter didn’t take seconds. I couldn’t swallow anything. The fuzzy creatures in my stomach had taken up tap dancing.
“Hey, Hobie,” Rolf whispered from the next table, “you practicing up for your fancy schmancy lunch Thursday?” He pointed at Miss Hutter and laughed behind his hand. Big deal.
Out the mess hall windows we could see across Lake Lindaloma and the rows of big old houses on the other side. Two orange pontoon boats bobbed in the waves at the dock. I guess it was too early for water skiers.
Soon Mr. Star stood up, raised his hand, and shouted, “OK, friends. I can’t talk unless everybody is listening. So let’s cease conversation.”
At the next table Molly stopped nibbling carrot sticks long enough to lean over and ask Miss Ivanovitch, “Have you ever noticed how mean Mr. Star can be? It’s something you realize the longer you know him. He’s basically a very mean person.”
“OK, friends,” Mr. Star went on, “when you finish, pass your plates to the hopper, who’ll clean the table.” Groans from the hoppers. Laughs from everyone else. “Those of you who are laughing will get your chance. And when you get back to your room make sure your bed is well made, because you’ll want to collapse on it when we come back from the cemetery. It’s a long way.”
“Cemetery? Is he kidding?” a kid from 4A asked me. Miss Hutter stared him down. Mr. S. had warned us about the walk to the cemetery.
“And make sure you go to the bathroom. There aren’t any toilets along the way to the graveyard.”
Nick and I were the first ones out. We ran from the mess hall by the lake back to the lodge and swept through the girls’ rooms upstairs, where we saw pink rabbits, Paddington bears, little heart pillows, one large stuffed donkey, a gray cat with a red ribbon, and a nightgown printed with “Numero Uno.”
Rushing down the steps before the teachers or Mrs. Bosco came, we climbed fast into our top bunks so if they said, Was it you on the girls’ floor, we’d say, No, I’m asleep. Nobody asked, so we played catch with the hairy rubber hand until it was time to leave.
Mrs. Bosco and Miss Hutter didn’t go with us to the cemetery. As we left, I heard Mrs. Bosco shout to Miss Hutter, “I’m glad I’m not going with them right after lunch. When they eat, all the juices go straight to their little stomachs, you know, leaving their brains completely empty. Completely empty. It’s a scientific fact.”
The cemetery was almost a mile away, and we set off down the side of the road single file, in four big groups, each group with a teacher-type leader. Mine got Miss Ivanovitch. Or she got us, I’m not sure which. She called our group the Scotch Tape because, she said, she wanted us to stick together. That’s better than being called the Lindalomas, which is what Ms. O’Malley’s was. Mr. Star’s kids named themselves the CIA, for Central’s Intelligence Agency, and Mr. Plate’s group was the Bowls. Seven of the Scotch Tape were from Mr. Star’s class: Nick, Marshall, Eugene, Molly, Lisa, Aretha, and me. The others were 4A: Lynda, Elizabeth, Cindy, Stewart, Vince, and Glen.
About seven hundred fifty years later we got there. Two dogs had snarled at us, and a black-and-white cat followed us when we said, “Here, kitty, kitty.” I wondered who Fido had followed. Ms. O’Malley passed word back that if we
touched the flags on the outdoor mailboxes we would be committing a federal offense and probably spend six to eight months in the penitentiary. And Lisa’s new shoes had rubbed blisters on her heels, so the Scotch Tape had to walk slow to keep back with her.
Miss Ivanovitch kept jogging ahead and waiting. “Come on, Tape,” she called from the cemetery gate. “These folks can’t hurt you… .”
Eugene sat down inside the entrance and refused to budge.
It was spooky. Dark clouds were rolling over, and so was a thin layer of fog. We crept slowly around, trying to fill in all the blanks on the mimeographed sheets they’d given us asking who was buried in the oldest grave and which stones were made of granite, which of sandstone, and whether there were families that died all at once. (There was one—the Needlings whose last dates were all June 14, 1879, only it didn’t say why.) Stars stood for people who were killed in wars.
And there was a baby angel on a gravestone, a cherub Miss Ivanovitch liked. The stone read “Luella Winston, Died April 4, 1858, 3 weeks, 4 days old.” Miss Ivanovitch sank to her knees in front of it and called, “Jack, this is the one I want to do a rubbing of. This one will be perfect for our new hall.”
“Aha,” Nick said. “Our new hall.”
Mr. Star gathered all four groups around and handed out big sheets of white paper and black crayons. Ms. O’Malley explained how to rub the crayon flat on the paper to get the gravestone’s picture to appear. I’d done it before lots of times, rubbing a pencil over a paper-covered penny, so I knew what she was talking about.
Miss Ivanovitch told us not to get crayon on the gravestones and set to work on her cherub. When Nick and I said we didn’t know what to rub, she told us to find letters from different tombstones and spell out our own names. But that got to be pretty eerie when we thought about it.
We had sat down on two humps that were dead people when Nick spotted Molly and Lisa heading our way. We hid behind big stones marked Beucher, making ourselves as small as possible and quiet as corpses. Balancing on our toes, we waited, ready to leap out and grab them by the ankles as they passed.
But just at the instant we were going to pounce, we got grabbed ourselves—by the ribs. Michelle and Jenny had seen us hide and crept up as silent as Indians. We weren’t afraid, of course, it’s just that when you get grabbed by the ribs, you naturally yell.
But they wouldn’t let it go. “Scaredy cat, dirty rat, don’t know what you’re looking at!” They danced like spirits in the night, waving their rubbings and howling like werewolves. And just then the wind whipped up the rain in little misty drops. We could hear it on the leaves before we felt it. I zipped my jacket up and half wished I hadn’t left my cap in the room.
“Look at this,” Miss Ivanovitch said proudly, her hair blowing like a big black bush around her head. She held up her rubbing of the angel, and it was good. She hadn’t moved the paper as she rubbed like we did, so nothing was smudged. You could see the baby’s smile, and all the letters were clear. “Hold this for me while I get organized, will you?” she asked, handing up the rubbing and scrambling to her feet.
I grabbed and Nick grabbed and we both got it. I got one half and he got the other. The damp paper split right down the middle.
Miss Ivanovitch’s face lost all its joy, and we knew that our “I’m sorry’s” weren’t going to help.
“Why did you have to do that!” she said, tilting her head both ways to look at the damage. “I really wanted it and I was pleased with the funny grin the angel had and …” She tried to pull her hair back from the wind. Nick gave her his half of the rubbing. She shrugged, rolled it up, and stuffed it into her raincoat pocket.
I was going to hand her my half too, but a blast of wind lifted the paper away, flipped it past an evergreen, and plastered it flat against Albert, son of M. and S. Matfield, died April 5, 1849.
“Oh, just toss it in the trash,” she said, and ran to join the other teachers. I felt awful. She was really mad. When Miss I. showed them the torn paper, Mr. Star put his hand on her shoulder and looked really pained. He didn’t turn to chew us out, though, so she must not have told him how it happened.
The girls went crazy when he touched her.
Miss I. and Mr. S. walked together on the way back, a row of girls lined up to trail behind them. Nobody cared about groups anymore.
Aretha stopped, picked up a long stick from the side of the road, and wrote in the damp dirt, “J.S. + S.I.” Jenny, who was walking with her, drew a heart around it.
“He’s tall and she’s short,” Molly announced. “He’s blond and she’s got black curly hair. He’s nice and she’s dwerpy. Their children would be freaks.”
“My father’s blond and my mother’s brunette,” Jenny said.
“That’s what I meant,” Molly answered, shuffling through the heart like she was doing a war dance.
I rolled the torn angel up with the rubbing I’d made of my name. “Think we could stick it together with tape?” I asked Nick.
“You got any?”
I shrugged. “She said she wanted it for her new hall, too.”
“Our new hall, that’s what it was. And who do you think ‘our’ is?” he asked with a grin like he knew who.
“You mean you think she is going to marry Mr. Star?”
“Looks like it. He carried her suitcase.”
“That’s because she had to run ahead to hand out sheets and towels.”
“Maybe,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “You know what I think we ought to do?” he asked. “I think we ought to make another rubbing for her—for them.” One of the dogs who’d growled at us on the way ran up to sniff our feet. “Would they let us go back to the cemetery now?”
“No, it’s going to rain too hard.” The sky rumbled as if to say, That’s right, fella.
“Tomorrow?”
“They’ve got stuff for us to do all day.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“In the dark?”
“It gets dark at night.”
“We could take turns rubbing. And give it to them as a wedding present.”
“We’d better take a good look around at how to get there if we’re going to go back at night.” It was one straight road. No way to get lost.
We were the last of the line. Even Lisa and her blisters had moved on ahead because she was carrying her shoes.
The black-and-white cat padded up behind us, going, “Me-owl. Me-owl.”
Nick kneeled down to it and said, “No, dummy, you no owl. Owls go hoot in the night. You cat.”
“Me-owl,” it said again, not believing Nick for a minute.
I scratched the owl cat’s neck the way Fido liked me to do, then picked it up and carried it back to the lodge under my jacket. It was warm and had a purr so loud I sounded like I ran on batteries.
As we got to the porch the sky filled with a white-blue flash, and the thunder began to rumble through our bones. Mr. Plate, who was in charge of a crate of apples in the big front hall, handed us each one. In their rooms kids were talking and laughing.
We bit into our apples and listened for a minute at the bottom of the girls’ steps. If we’d really wanted to, we could have dashed to the top like we had after lunch. Mr. Plate was leaning out the front door, taking deep breaths of the electric air and watching the storm move in. We could have. But we didn’t. Instead, I opened my jacket and let loose on the girls one black-and-white cat who thought he was an owl.
5
ZAP
The rain held off, with the clouds growling a lot but not biting, so they marched us back outside to play matching games with a batch of rocks that all looked the same to me. Molly matched her granite with my granite, which I thought for sure was quartz. And then we played kickball two games at a time on a wide, wide, open field with no fences. The ball kept lifting off and drifting away with the wind, no matter how it was thrown or kicked, and Miss Ivanovitch made two freaky home runs. Back at our playground a ball couldn’t go spinning off like t
hat into the middle distance. But then, at school teachers didn’t play kickball, either.
If we’d been at school, really, it would have been out and I would have been at home watching TV before supper. Camp Trotter didn’t have a TV. For sure I wouldn’t have been matching rocks with Molly Bosco or listening to Lisa Soloman talk about how this darling lost cat took a flying leap into her upper bunk.
The later it got, the more like home it wasn’t.
“Icky chicken,” Tracey said when R.X., who was supper hopper, brought a bowl of it to our table. Tracey said she never ate green beans because they gave her a rash, and she took only a mound of mashed potatoes, which she raked with her fork. Some kids who had treated lunch like an art project wolfed down supper. Graveyards and groundballs make you hungry. I even ate some, trying not to think about the night ahead. R.X., though, was gross. He stuffed whole pieces of bread into his mouth and chewed puff-cheeked, yawning now and then to make the kids across from him sick. When Miss Hutter looked, he always tried to have his mouth shut and his eyes staring up at the ceiling, innocent.
“R.X., I can’t believe you eat this way at home,” Miss Hutter told him. He smiled, his lips sealed.
After supper some of us walked down to the lake and tried skipping a few stones—granite, marble, rubies, whatever. The waves, pushed high by the wind, ate all the stones before the third skip, even Marshall’s, and he threw like a pro.
On the way back to the lodge the rain began to fall—sideways, because the gusts were so strong. We ran, crunching pebbles under our feet.
When the hoppers were all back from cleaning and scrubbing the tables, we gathered in the big recreation room upstairs on the girls’ floor. One wall was windows looking out over the lake. Another was stone—wall-stone probably—with a fireplace in it filled with logs that weren’t burning.
Ms. O’Malley was showing off a batch of the day’s rubbings. But a lot of kids were rolling around on the floor, shrieking, so she and Mr. Star tried to organize us into our groups again. They made us sit with no talking at all for one whole minute by the clock on the wall. Mr. Plate grinned like it was really funny, but a minute is a long time. The clock said seven-seventeen when we shut our mouths and seven-eighteen when we could open them again. In the first fifteen seconds I thought about how my bike was out in the back of my house, rusting away to crust. In the second fifteen seconds I could see Fido soaked to the skin, crying for me. By thirty seconds I was watching my mother wave goodbye forever to my father, an umbrella keeping the lightning away. The mashed potatoes in my stomach had turned to plaster.