Escape from Camp Boring

by Tom Mitchell

  ‘But what if it’s an emergency?’ said Alexa.

  ‘What if the customers are injured?’ added Ellie.

  Alexa flashed her a glance that meant one thing: stay out of this.

  ‘All we’re asking is that we four minors sit silently in the back of your bus so we can be safely delivered home to our loving parents. We were camping, but the storm blew away our tent. There was an incident with a bat. And one with a llama. We are in danger.’

  The driver stared. Her eyes narrowed to slits.

  ‘It was very rainy,’ she said, and it was at that point that I knew we’d won. ‘Woke me up and everything. And I’ve had run-ins with that llama myself.’

  I asked if the bus stopped near Mantle Street. It did.

  Five minutes later we were on board, the bus was moving, and we were all giving Alexa silent, subtle high-fives, mouthing ‘wow’, our eyes wide with amazement. Because, to be fair, nice, quiet Alexa had played a blinder.

  ‘I just imagined what I’d write in an email,’ she said.

  ‘Hey,’ said the driver, watching us through the rear-view mirror. She’d obviously been thinking about what Alexa had said – both about how we’d (supposedly) spent the night and our threat to complain. ‘I’ve got a phone if any of you want to call home. Technically I’m not meant to give it to passengers but …’

  We glanced from face to face, all feeling like someone on a diet who’s been offered ice cream. Typically Ellie went first, slipping from her seat and heading up the aisle to where the driver’s arm stretched.

  ‘The passcode’s “one-one-one-one”. It’s the company’s, so knock yourselves out.’

  Ellie took a seat two rows down from us, her back turned. She raised the phone to her ear. As she did so, she looked over her shoulder. She frowned when she saw that we were all staring.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ said Ellie, turning back. We could make out a bass grumble on the other end, but no words. ‘Yeah, no, sure. I know it’s early. Of course I’m ringing from the camp phone. No, I’m surprised too. Yep. Yep. Look, I have been wanting to tell you since the first day here, but the reason I’m calling is because … it’s not a tennis camp. There’s not even a single court. Yeah. Right? Exactly. How am I supposed to …?’ She paused as the bass increased its rumbling. And you could tell she wasn’t enjoying what was being said; she slipped down her seat like she was dissolving. ‘I do have friends,’ she said, turning her head to the window, her reflection a ghost. ‘I do have friends,’ she repeated quietly. ‘No, I don’t. Hardly ever.’ Pause. ‘No, you don’t understand. Yes. Sure. See you, then. Bye.’

  She took the phone from her ear. She turned.

  ‘Any of you want this?’ she said, her arm stretching towards us across the back of her seat.

  Nobody moved. The smell of the forest rose from our clothes. Ellie’s eyes watered.

  Alexa stepped from her seat and went to sit next to her. Zed and I moved to the seats behind her.

  ‘You okay?’ asked Zed.

  ‘He knew it wasn’t a tennis camp,’ said Ellie. ‘All along. He said I spend too much time in my room on my laptop. Like he even knows what I do.’

  ‘That sucks,’ said Alexa. ‘If you’d like, I could …’

  She was probably going to offer to email but thought better of it, especially as Ellie, turning to face the wrong way in her chair, put an arm round Alexa’s shoulders and round mine all the way to Zed’s and pulled us close. My neck hurt a bit and our cheeks almost touched.

  ‘I’m sorry we argued earlier,’ she said.

  I mean, yes, it was all a bit weird but, I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t totally unpleasant – something like a tactics talk at the start of a sports match. (‘Sports match’! That shows you how athletic I am.)

  ‘Because I kind of like you guys.’

  When she’d finished hugging us, she withdrew to explain that her dad had read about ‘rewilding’ courses in The Economist and thought it’d be a great experience for his daughter, especially as she’d be able to work on strategies for making friends. He’d said that it was a tennis camp because he knew she’d refuse otherwise.

  ‘I should have told him the truth about today. Like not only do I have three friends but we’ve also escaped together. He could have stuck that in his—’ Ellie broke off and groaned. ‘Then again he just told me he’s stopping my allowance if I cause any trouble. I think this definitely counts as trouble. Ugh. So lame.’

  ‘Yeah, Zed’s not sure he thought this all the way through. If I turn up at my parents’ house this morning, they’ll go mad.’

  ‘Same; my dad will send me right back to camp,’ muttered Ellie. ‘And take away my allowance. No offence, Will, but I’m not sure I ever actually believed we were going to get to town. Now we have, I don’t even know what to do.’

  ‘So I was thinking,’ said Alexa suddenly, ‘let’s all sneak back together with Will. It’s early. Everyone will still be sleeping. We’ll hide in our bunks and your dad and Faulkner and everyone will never know what’s happened! It’ll just be our thing. And nobody gets in any trouble! Right, Will? New York and T-Cue and everything?’

  ‘Q-Tip,’ I said.

  Ellie smiled. You could see that she liked the idea of knowing something her father didn’t.

  ‘Zed’s up for that,’ said Zed. ‘Not entirely sure why I left in the first place, not gonna lie. Sometimes Zed wonders if his “will it expand the mind” approach to decision-making is all that.’

  ‘But how will we get back fast enough?’ said Ellie.

  I sighed as I tried to calculate how much more likely things were to go wrong now that we were all returning together. Still, we’d got this far.

  Wishing that maybe, just for once, everything could go as planned, I said, ‘Robbie might help. I was hoping he might drive me back.’

  I just hoped my brother didn’t explode on realising that I was the cause of his missing hard drive.

  ‘So it’s a plan?’ said Ellie. ‘We’re doing this?’

  I said, ‘It’s a plan.’ And followed up with a quick ‘Go, team!’

  They stared at me like I was a whale-sized idiot.

  I pressed the stop button. I noticed that it was positioned in the handrail like a knot in a plank of wood. (I’d been in a forest too long.)

  ‘This is it,’ I said, voice wavering only slightly, because the next stop was MY FUTURE HAPPINESS/Mantle Street.

  Briefly the bus had been a safe space for us, a bubble now breaking against the surface: reality. I was the last to get off. Everybody said thanks as they stepped out. Mum would have been proud. The driver was more smiley now that we were someone else’s problem and hadn’t smashed up the bus like you hear the youth do.

  In the undeniable concrete of suburbia the storm felt like yesterday and the sticky humidity was long gone.

  ‘What time is it, please?’ I asked.

  ‘Just past seven,’ said the driver.

  I stepped out. The bus drove on. I checked my pocket for about the seventieth time since the incident with the llama. Dropping the hard drive and not noticing had troubled me. I understood why professional smugglers swallowed their contraband – there’s no better pocket than your stomach. Still, I shouldn’t have worried – it was there.

  ‘Does anyone else feel like they’re naked without the trees?’ asked Zed. ‘Is that weird?’

  I almost understood what he meant but now wasn’t the time to be distracted.

  ‘It’s seven,’ I said.

  Alexa gasped, her mouth a perfect circle of shock. ‘Is seven bad?’ she said eventually. ‘Seven’s bad, right? Is seven bad?’

  ‘We need to get back before breakfast,’ said Ellie.

  ‘We can skip eating. Have a big lunch,’ Zed said, missing the point until his mind had caught up with his mouth. ‘Oh.’

  A polite grin smudged across Ellie’s face. ‘It’s the breakfast register that I’m worried about, Zed. Not the porridge. They take it at eight. That means we’ve go
t an hour. To get to Will’s brother, return the hard drive, then return to the camp without being caught.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, traffic buzzing on the road behind me. ‘Yes,’ I said again. And I wasn’t sure why I was repeatedly saying ‘yes’ because actually I was thinking about Dad driving his car to work. However unlikely it would be for him to take this road; it wasn’t impossible for him to be motoring past.

  ‘We’ve got this far,’ said Alexa. ‘We’ll manage.’

  There sounded a long, loud, angry car horn. It was never too early for road rage.

  She turned to me. ‘So what’s the plan, Will?’

  I don’t know whether she asked me because I’d truly become the leader of the team, but the question had the effect of jolting me from my paralysing fear of Dad. I cleared my throat.

  ‘Let’s get to my house,’ I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt, knowing that, despite Robbie being super chill and super nice, it was still possible that he might want to spend the morning beating me up for almost ruining his life.

  ‘Let’s go, then, people,’ said Ellie. ‘I’m psyched. God, I’m glad to feel pavement under my feet.’

  I looked her up and down. I did the same with Zed and Alexa too. They resembled damp zombie scarecrows. Mum wouldn’t have been impressed, not being a fan of anything that didn’t have a long and intimate relationship with an iron. It was a good job she’d not be seeing us. If everything went according to plan, that was.

  We brisk-walked the path stitched into my memory, a route I’d taken so many times I reckon I’ll still dream of it when old enough to be in a mobility scooter. (Hopefully they’ll have invented hover versions by the time I’m an OAP.)

  Past the cracked grey bollard that stood sentry at the top of the cut-through path to the toddler playground, past the house with the faded Union flag outside, over the spilt blue paint on the pavement, shaped, I always thought, like a bear, and past the great green privet hedges of Dr Morris, a woman we never talked to but who somehow was known by Mum and Dad by name and qualification.

  Until, there (almost too soon!), was our house, with Mum’s dented Ford parked outside – the very vehicle that if everything went well would be our ride back to camp, our white stallion.

  The house looked both alien and familiar that morning. If that makes sense. There was a kind of purple tint to the light and I felt weirdly like a stranger, like I were visiting from the future or reliving a memory.

  Or maybe I was overtired.

  My thinking was grounded soon enough by the anxiety that comes with having friends over. It’s not a big house. But not every family has money, Ellie. It’s just, and this is embarrassing, okay, but I’d recently begun to think that the front looked like a sad face.

  When friends visited, I felt like they were cursed to have a bad time simply by entering the sad house. It was something to do with the windows. And the front door was off to the side and the window to the front room looked like a grimace because of the colour of the bricks round its bottom half. The two upstairs windows, one for Mum’s room, the other for Robbie’s, were sad eyes. Maybe it was the colour of the faded blue curtains. The roof was like a frown, I swear. I’d only realised all this after Dad had moved out. Go figure.

  Today, at least, the others wouldn’t be going inside. That was something to hold on to. They’d not see the thin carpets and awkward posed pics of tiny me and tiny Robbie in old school uniforms, framed images that followed the stairs and saw the dust grow and our age shrink the higher they got. Pictures of Robbie with his certificates and prizes. Whiter spaces of wallpaper breaking the run of pictures, marking where Mum had removed any images of her with Dad.

  A brown battered fence. A gate. A patch of forever dying, never quite dead, grass. Never mowed but never needing to be. Our front door, paint peeling off in the top left corner.

  ‘What now?’ whispered Ellie. (She hadn’t sneered!)

  I realised we were all standing at the gate in front of my house and pretty much begging to be caught. Had we learnt nothing?

  I waved them aside, back on to the pavement behind our fence. They didn’t move. They were frozen by questions. And stupid ones too.

  ‘Do you have a key?’ asked Alexa.

  ‘No,’ I hissed back, opening the gate silently, which was impressive as it usually had a creak that sounded like a dying toad, I swear.

  ‘Can’t you post the hard drive through the letter box?’ asked Ellie.

  ‘What about his brother giving us a lift back?’ said Alexa.

  Sure, they were trying to be helpful, but they were also being super annoying. More intensely now I waved them back again. As they went (THANK YOU, TREE GODS) I explained, whispering, that being silent meant making absolutely no sound and that included talking.

  As I stepped forward, mind emptying, the girls stepped back. Zed, however, followed me through the gate into the tiny front garden, the scene of Robbie’s victories in tennis-ball football. And he had something in his hand, something I’d not seen him pick up. He indicated that he wanted me to look at what he had. He held it with his palm open and, in different circumstances, he might have been offering a sweet.

  It wasn’t a sweet. I only wish it had been. The opposite of a sweet: destructive rather than nourishing, the anti-sweet. Specifically: a stone, a piece of gravel that had probably once lived peacefully on Number 13’s drive. And, thinking back on it, I realise how appropriate that number was, considering the dread stone’s destiny.

  Instantly I understood what he had planned and so my spine turned to ice. Because you’ve seen the movies, right? An American kid wakes another American kid by throwing gravel against their window – the tapping sound is enough to get them up. Obviously this form of communication was sadly lost due to the growing popularity of mobile phones … until now.

  ‘Whose bedrooms are they?’ asked Zed, not making any effort to reduce his volume. ‘Is one your brother’s?’

  I don’t know why I answered. Maybe it was the intensity in Zed’s eyes, like he’d trapped a little of the storm there.

  ‘The one on the left is Robbie’s,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ said Zed.

  ‘No!’ I hissed. ‘Left!’

  Zed didn’t wait for permission. I’d learnt by then that he wasn’t really a waiting-for-permission kind of Zed. He moved quickly, leaning back like a javelin thrower and shooting the stone from his hand with the speed of a sling. I tried stopping him but managed only to nudge his arm. This altered the path of the stone. The window was one largish square of glass. The stone shot straight through it. And silently too. And I swear that for a brief second there was a tiny hole in the glass and it seemed like maybe there wouldn’t be huge smashing or consequent crashing.

  The hope didn’t endure.

  What happened next seems unbelievable but I was there; I experienced the full horror. The windowpane broke like thin ice. In seconds the stone’s bullet hole attracted jagged cracks from the four sides of the square. And when these met in the centre, the glass fell into itself and smashed, like my dreams, falling backwards against the blue passive curtain and into Robbie’s bedroom.

  Comedy glass smashing sound effect.

  Zed looked at me. Like a terrified mouse. I looked at him. Like a terrified mouse. We looked at the house. Like terrified mice.

  The light in Mum’s room turned on: the cue to scarper. Our trainers screeched against the flagstones of my front path and we followed Ellie and Alexa down the road and hid behind Dr Morris’s hedges.

  Honestly, I wasn’t even angry. By now I was resigned to everything always going wrong. Even if somehow we weren’t caught, Mum would eventually trace the damage back to me. She was bloodhound-like in her ability to sniff out my mistakes. She’d probably get DNA off the stone and trace Zed and torture him until he gave up my name.

  ‘Well, nobody could have slept through that, so …’ said Ellie.

  It wasn’t the end of the world, I guessed. Nothing is. Apart f
rom the actual end of the world. It seemed the best option now was to surrender to my fate.

  I couldn’t help but smile, despite the circumstances. We’d made a good team. Kind of. A shame it had to end here, but everything finishes at some point. Even double biology with Dr Andrews.

  ‘It was good while it lasted,’ I said, not mentioning the many things that had gone wrong in the short amount of time since leaving the camp.

  I expected the other three to speak. To persuade me against surrendering. To thank me. But no. They said nothing. They didn’t even look at me. Instead their focus was over my shoulder. I turned my head, thoughts of friendship fading like the morning mist.

  ‘Will?’ It was Robbie. My brother. In running gear. Standing there. (I noticed he didn’t have any earphones in.) ‘What the frog* is going on?’

  (* He didn’t use this word.)

  There wasn’t time to answer before another voice cracked through the morning.

  ‘Who broke my bloody window?’

  It was Mum. Shouting. And she didn’t sound happy. She didn’t sound happy at all.

  Robbie had never seemed so tall. He wore tight black activewear, an unbranded superhero. The sweat on his forehead looked like the morning dew. I couldn’t speak. My jaw jumped up and down but no words emerged. I was broken.

  ‘Will accidentally took your hard drive with all your art stuff on it,’ said Alexa. ‘He knows you’ve got to hand in your work today and he loves you.’

  The l-word! I squirmed with embarrassment. And as I squirmed, I coughed. This was at least some kind of mouth noise.

  ‘And he’s escaped from this terrible anti-tech camp, where they don’t even let you play tennis, to return it to you,’ said Ellie. ‘I was, like, doesn’t your brother use the cloud?’

  Robbie gawped, focus moving from one speaker to the next.

  ‘And he made Zed smash your bedroom window. Sorry,’ said Zed with a wink.

  ‘Wha—’ said Robbie, not even finishing the word, struck dumb by the strange band of kids bundled between Dr Morris’s hedges.