by Jamie Gilson
“I don’t want to talk to Mrs. Bosco about it.”
“Then you’re going to have to hang in there.”
On the floor near the phone the snack box had an apple left in it from the afternoon. I reached over, grabbed it, and fled back to the room.
All the kids who’d tried to go to bed earlier when the lights were out were up now, wandering the rooms like it was morning.
“What took you?” Rolf asked. “I had to borrow Nick’s flashlight.”
“I was starving, so I stole an apple,” I told him, stuffing it in my mouth whole, like I was a roast pig.
Nick was pressing something against the ceiling light.
“It’s a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee,” he said. “My flashlight wouldn’t charge it enough.”
Eugene wasn’t there.
“He went whimpering off to Mr. Star,” Rolf said. “What a baby.”
“Really?” I asked, wondering if my eyes looked all red and my cheeks striped.
Mr. Star, Mrs. Bosco, and Mr. Plate were all calling, “Lights out.”
“Again?” I yelled. “We’re just getting used to them.”
Eugene hurried back in, staring at his feet, so I couldn’t look for tear streaks.
“Did he give you your baby bottle?” Rolf asked.
“No,” Eugene said, breathing funny. “He gave me my pills.”
“You do drugs?” Nick asked, giggling.
“They’re for asthma,” Eugene explained, climbing into bed. “I can’t help it.”
Mr. Star strolled in, plucked the apple core from my hand, and said, “The creatures of the night might smell this delicacy and decide to attack. I’ll drop it in the garbage for you.” Then he turned to Eugene. “How’re you doing, friend?”
“Fine,” Eugene said, rasping. As he turned in bed, I could see that under the Camp Trotter blanket there was another one. It was blue with bunnies.
He is a baby, I thought. Rolf’s right. That kid really is a baby. Baby Eugene, I said to myself. Baby, baby Eugene. I’ve got stuff to worry about, is all, and that’s why I’m feeling so bad. But this kid is a total loss.
Mr. Star pressed the switch and it was dark again, but not too dark. The hall lights stayed on and we could see in the dim. We threw the glow-in-the-dark Frisbee back and forth between Nick and me and Rolf. Eugene even flung it a couple of times when we let him. But then Mrs. Bosco barged in and took it away.
“Boys, boys, boys, it’s bedtime, bedtime, bedtime,” she boomed, more like a cannon than a lullaby. And baby Eugene probably needs a lullaby, I thought, laughing to myself.
In the dark we talked about lots of stuff. About the storm, about the monkey’s paw, about Mr. Star and Miss Ivanovitch getting married. Eugene and Rolf were surprised, but they liked the idea. Eugene was even laughing about how Molly Bosco was silly, thinking Mr. Star would ever marry her. That’s when we heard the strange noise, a kind of buzzing near the floor. I stuck my head over the side and saw Rolf, lying on his back with his mouth open, really chuffing out the snores. It’s a wonder he wasn’t waking himself up. We took turns shouting at him, thinking that would put a stop to it, but he snored on, turning over on his side and pulling his knees up to his chest.
Eugene took a flashlight from under his bed and turned it on Rolf’s bunk. Rolf never had tucked his sheets and blanket in. It looked like he was sleeping in a clothes dryer.
“He’s out,” Eugene said. “Boy, I wish I could get to sleep that fast.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t tonight,” Nick told him, flicking his flashlight on. “I decided that tonight we’d truck the first guy who went to sleep.”
“Truck? What’s truck?” Eugene asked, laughing nervously.
“You haven’t been to camp, have you?” Nick said. I didn’t know what trucking was either, but I didn’t say so.
“What you do is this,” Nick explained. “Eugene, you grab your pillow.” Eugene grabbed. The top of his baby blanket hung over the edge of his bed.
“Hobie and I’ll get our flashlights out and what we do is this: Eugene, you hit Rolf over the head with your pillow. Hobie and I will stand about two feet apart and we’ll shine our flashlights at Rolf and then we’ll all yell, ‘Truck! Truck! Watch out for the truck!’ so when he wakes up he’ll think our flashlights are headlights coming straight at him.”
“And he’ll have a heart attack,” Eugene laughed.
“Somebody did it to me last summer,” Nick said, “and I’m still alive.”
“Did it scare you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “spitless.”
Somebody was walking down the hall in shoes, which meant it was an adult type, still dressed and checking. We lay still for a few minutes until there were no more hall sounds. There was only Rolf, ripping the air with his snores.
“He deserves it, you know, for keeping us awake,” Eugene said, climbing out of bed with his pillow.
I got my flashlight. Nick got his, and we started on tiptoe, shoulder to shoulder, flashlights even, walking straight from the door toward Rolf. We were a huge semi tooling down the highway at ninety miles an hour.
“Now!” Nick called.
“Honk!” Eugene shouted, pounding Rolf with his pillow, really smashing him one.
“Truck!” Nick yelled, and we drove straight at Rolf.
“Truck! It’s coming straight at you,” I shouted. “Truck!”
Rolf stopped snoring, sat up in bed, and stuck his arms out like he was trying to stop whatever was going to crash into him. Ducking, he rolled out of bed and onto the floor.
We laughed like crazy, Eugene most of all.
Mr. Star stuck his head in the doorway. “I’ve had just about enough of this foolishness. We can hear you clear at the other end of the hall.”
“Sorry,” we all mumbled, all but Rolf.
Rolf was foaming.
“You hit me,” he told Eugene when Mr. Star had left. “I felt you hit me.”
“It was just a pillow,” Eugene said, crawling back into bed, still laughing. “It couldn’t have hurt.”
Rolf stood up and walked over to Eugene. “Don’t you dare laugh at me, Eugene Kim. Don’t you dare.” He didn’t say it loud enough for Mr. Star to hear, just low and mean. “You may have scared me out of my sleep, but at least I don’t go around scared all the time, afraid to leave my mommy and my daddy. And I didn’t need a huggy-poo from Miss Hutter when the mean, bad, old lightning flashed. And,” he said, leaning over and giving a sharp yank, “I didn’t have to bring a baby blanket from home to suck my thumb with.” He waved the blanket over his head to make Eugene reach up for it.
“It helps me sleep,” Eugene said softly.
Rolf didn’t seem mad at Nick and me, even though we were the truck that almost smashed him.
“I think I’m going to sue you,” he said to Eugene. “Like at school. Only I’ll sue you for waking me up.”
“I wasn’t the only one.”
“Maybe, but you hit me and I didn’t do anything to you. You’re just the baby who wants his baby blanket.” He threw the blanket to me and I held it. It was soft and smelled sour.
“You admitted you did it, so you’re guilty,” Rolf went on. “And you aren’t even sorry, because you were laughing.”
“The one who sues you can’t be the judge,” Eugene told him. And we knew from school that was true.
“In this court he can,” Rolf said.
“It was just a joke,” I explained to Rolf. “It’s something called trucking. You were supposed to be scared silly, that’s all.”
“It wasn’t funny. He hurt my head.” He turned back to Eugene in his bunk. “You are guilty and I fine you—”
“I didn’t bring any money with me,” Eugene said, eyeing his blanket and breathing again with a wheeze. “They said not to.”
“OK. No money. Nick, got any ideas for a punishment?” Rolf asked, laughing suddenly, as though this was really just a big joke. “You got something to scare him silly?”
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br /> “Sure,” Nick said, laughing with him. I think we were both glad Rolf wasn’t going to lash out at us too. “Make him go up and steal a teddy bear from the girls’ floor and sleep with that tonight instead of his blankie.”
I didn’t say anything. I guess I could have, but I didn’t.
Rolf put on his official judge’s voice and said, “I find you, Eugene, guilty of waking me up by hitting me when I hadn’t done anything to you. Your punishment is to go get some dumb toy from the girls’ floor.”
Eugene started to say something, but Rolf went on. “If you don’t, we’ll take your baby blue blanket to breakfast tomorrow and pass it around to show everybody the bunnies.”
“Give it to me,” Eugene begged.
“When you come back,” I told him. “After you’ve done it, you won’t be afraid anymore.”
Maybe he believed me, because he crawled out of his bed and left the room.
“I bet,” Nick said, “he’s on his way to tell Mr. Star on us.”
“You think so?” Rolf asked. “That would be a rotten thing to do.”
We walked to the door quietly, all three of us, and looked down the lighted hall, but Eugene wasn’t anywhere. In the room next to ours we could hear Mrs. Bosco rumble like small thunder.
“She’s snoring!” Rolf whispered, giggling. “How gross!”
Nick and I looked at each other and laughed. Rolf didn’t even know he’d been snoring too.
“I tell you what. Let’s truck her,” Rolf whispered, and we all laughed without making a noise.
We went back into the room though, and waited.
“Maybe he ran away or something,” I said after a few minutes. “Maybe we were too mean.”
“Mean? What’d you mean, mean?” Rolf laughed. “You’re the one who told him it’d be good for him. We’re just building his character, right?”
I picked the blue blanket off my bunk and folded it over Eugene’s pillow. Then I climbed up and sat cross-legged on my bed.
When he finally ran in, Eugene was heaving like he’d been swimming a mile. He hadn’t been telling on us or running away, though. In his hand was a gray stuffed kitten with a red bow around its neck. He flung it at Rolf.
“Here,” he said. “You sleep with it.”
Climbing into bed, he turned his head to the wall. I looked over the edge of my bed, but I couldn’t tell if he was crying or just mad. Nobody was laughing.
I got up and went to the bathroom, because I’d forgotten to before when I tried to call home. As I was washing my hands, I looked up and saw a printed sign I hadn’t noticed there before. It said “The Most Dangerous Animal in the World.” The sign was over a mirror. And in the mirror was me.
7
CROCS IN THE GRASS, ALAS
“Syrup! Hopper, more maple syrup!” R.X. demanded, like he was master and I was slave. He stuffed half a slice of bread into his mouth and passed the pitcher back. Sure enough, it was empty. French toast floated in pools of syrup on plates all around the table, but at least two kids hadn’t gotten any yet.
“People, you are wasting food. I don’t like it one bit,” Miss Hutter said sternly. “And I want to see you cutting your food into smaller pieces.” R.X. looked up at the ceiling. Would she let me dip my french fries in catsup if I went to that lunch I’d won? Fat chance. Maybe I could wiggle out my back tooth just at noon on Thursday, and suffer too much to go.
Everybody was quiet, looking down at our French toast islands. But the pitcher did have only a spoonful left in it, so I tilted my white chef’s cap on my head and went to the kitchen for more.
After breakfast was over and I’d scraped all the sticky plates and taken the last sweep with the sponge, I went outside with Molly, who’d been hopper at the next table. It was sunny, and so warm we didn’t even need jackets. We inspected an oak tree next to the front steps. It had a white slit down the side where lightning had torn the bark away.
“Who won your scavenger hunt last night?” Molly asked as we hurried back to the lodge. Inspection was in fifteen minutes and I hadn’t made my bed.
“Scavenger hunt?” I asked.
“You know,” Molly said impatiently, “the one I gave Eugene my gray cat for. Who won it?”
“Oh, that scavenger hunt.” Eugene, you fox, I thought. That wasn’t bad at all. I’d wondered why a posse hadn’t come cat hunting. “Eugene won,” I told her. “He won because of your cat, but Rolf slept with it, so you’ll have to get it back from him.”
“You’re kidding!” she said. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t care if Rolf likes me or not. He’s not cueshee. We thought the rest of you would be coming, you know, looking for more cats. And we waited for you. Actually,” she said as we got to the lodge, “we were waiting on both sides of our door with pillows ready to smash you over the head. But we laughed so much that when we whammed our four pillows at the first guy who walked through the door, it was Miss Ivanovitch checking on the noise. She got such a blast it probably made her even shorter.” Molly giggled.
“What’d she do?”
“She said if we weren’t quiet, she was going to drag her mattress into our room and camp out on the floor. So we shut up and went to sleep. That would have been pure poison.”
Our room did not win inspection. We didn’t even come close. Mr. Star stood with his arms crossed while Rolf stuffed his pajamas into a drawer and tucked in his sheets, sort of. And when Mr. Star pulled Molly’s red-bowed cat from under Rolf’s bunk, nobody claimed it.
Mrs. Bosco yodeled, and we gathered on the front porch in our four sections. Miss I. explained that what her group was going to do first was called the log jam, which sounded pretty weird. We followed her up the hill, through the woods, and into a clearing, where there was a genuine log on the ground.
“OK, Tape,” she said. “All aboard.” It wasn’t a very thick log—only about a foot across—though it was so long it could have held at least twenty kids.
We climbed on it and stood there like thirteen bumps.
“One thing about being human,” Miss Ivanovitch said, “is that you can think. It isn’t just instinct that makes us tick. This is a kind of puzzle to see if you can get yourself out of a mess by using your heads.” The thirteen of us teetered on the log.
“The mess you’re in now,” she explained, “is that on all sides of that log you’re on there is quicksand, and if you step off the log, the quicksand will suck you under. Got that?”
I looked down at the solid ground and imagined it was something oozy, like oatmeal.
“This is creepy,” Lisa said.
“So, here is the puzzle.” She pointed with a stick to a place between Molly and Eugene, roughly in the middle of the log. “The six of you on one side of this middle line have to exchange places with the seven on the other side without falling off into the mire.”
We stood there for a minute, rocking.
“Is this a trick question?” Molly asked.
“If we were grasshoppers, no problem,” Marshall said.
“It’s not possible.”
“How do we do it?” Eugene asked her.
“That’s the question,” Miss Ivanovitch said. People started talking all at once, with nobody listening. And no matter what we tried, we fell off.
If that quicksand had been a little oozier, we’d all have been sucked into the center of the earth. “Let’s do something fun,” Cindy from 4A moaned.
“It can’t be done,” I said.
“Of course it can. But you’re going to have to help each other, instead of fighting. You may even have to touch each other,” Miss Ivanovitch explained.
“Me, touch her?” Nick said, poking Cindy in the ribs. She jumped to the front, yelled, “Cooties!” and poked him back. He fell into the quicksand. It was useless.
“I know!” Lisa said. “I’ve got an idea. One half kind of squats down, like—”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Molly yelled. “All we’ve got to do—”
; “But if we—”
“Listen to Lisa,” Marshall said.
“I have an idea,” she began again.
“Then say it,” Molly told her impatiently.
“OK,” Lisa began for the millionth time, “my team, spread out so there’s, like, a foot or so between each person. And then squat down very low. The other team can just step over us … sort of like leapfrog.”
“Then we’ll have changed sides. She’s right, you know,” Marshall said. A few of us fell off anyway, but it worked better than anything else we’d tried. So we collapsed on the ground that was no longer quicksand.
“Was it the right answer?” Lisa asked.
“It worked,” Miss Ivanovitch told her. “Congratulations, Lisa,” and Lisa beamed.
“That was easy,” Molly said. “Let’s do something else.”
We did a whole batch of People Puzzles. In one we had to crawl through triangles of rope that were supposed to be electric fences. We ran through a maze of tires and climbed over a slippery log that was lashed about six feet off the ground between two trees. That wasn’t any piece of cake. I was dangling with my head and arms over the log, desperate for help, when Nick yelled up, “It’s OK, Hanson. If you fall, I’ve got this great little graveyard for you.” Marshall, who was sitting up on the log, grabbed me by the belt and pulled me over safe.
The last puzzle we did was using two planks to get all of us across five tree stumps. Molly kept trying to boss us, but her ideas didn’t always work. So, when Aretha said, “We’ve got to cooperate, you guys,” Molly asked her if Sesame Street was her very very favorite show. Aretha was right, though. It never worked when we were arguing.
“Watch out!” Miss Ivanovitch yelled whenever we stumbled. “There are crocs in the grass, alas.” By the time we were through, we’d each had at least one toe bitten off by the crocodiles who were supposed to be starving underneath the tree stumps. We were tired, too.
“You’re clever,” Miss Ivanovitch said. “No doubt about that. I’ll keep that in mind. Now, if you can make it with all your wounds, we’re going to capture some small creatures and have a race.” And she started off in the direction of the lodge.