by Will Taylor
“Nope,” said Charlene.
“Yup.”
“Can you prove it?”
Shoot. She knew I couldn’t. I kicked the air again.
“I’ll take your silence as a no,” Charlene said, sounding satisfied. “But what were you doing, running from tree to tree like a frightened bunny? It looked really weird.”
My cheeks grew warm in the darkness. Of course she’d been watching.
“I was using advanced evasive maneuvers,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand. Now are you going to stand there interrogating me all night, or are you going to help?”
Charlene went silent again, leaving me feeling totally vulnerable. My future at this camp was in her hands. Along with my only hope of ever getting Abby back.
For one terrible moment I was certain she was going to leave me there, trapped. But then the window gave a screech, and the pressure on my back lifted. Freedom! I tumbled into the cabin with a thud that made the paint cans rattle. I got to my feet.
“Thanks,” I said, testing my cranky ankle.
Charlene was still holding the window up. “No problem.”
There was an awkward silence.
“So, yeah,” I said. “Bye.”
“Oh, no,” Charlene said. “I’m your buddy. I’m coming in with you.”
“What? No, you can’t . . . I’m only—”
But Charlene did a little hop, threw one leg over the sill like she was climbing on a bicycle, pulled herself neatly through, and dropped silently to the floor. The window slid shut behind her, as smooth and soft as velvet.
Dang, that looked pretty cool. Why was Charlene Thieson good at sneaking through windows?
We faced each other in the darkness. A thin line of moonlight sliced along the floor between us.
“So. What are you here for?” asked Charlene. Her blond bob cut floated eerily above the heather gray T-shirt she wore to sleep in. It was weird seeing her without her Safety Monitor sash.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You snuck out of bed, used ‘evasive maneuvers’ across the field, and broke into the arts and crafts cabin in the middle of the night for nothing?”
I nodded.
“Okay,” said Charlene. “Well, here’s the thing: either you tell me what you’re doing, or I start screaming my head off until every teacher and counselor in this camp comes running. And what do you think will happen then?”
The moonlight inched a little farther between us.
She had me. I’d never win if it came down to her word against mine. She could say she woke up and saw my empty bunk and came looking for me and found me breaking into this cabin. She could say I was sabotaging art projects or stealing glitter and tempera paints. She could say anything she wanted, and Director Haggis would believe her. She could get me sent home. She’d probably even get an award for being such a good buddy and checking up on me.
And if I did get sent home, my mom would have to fly back from her medical conference early, and she’d hear the news about Abby and insist on contacting Mr. Hernandez—the real one—and he’d cut his honeymoon short and fly home too. And Abby would be stuck where she was forever, because I’d never get a proper chance to rescue her.
Charlene had me cornered. And what was worse, she knew it.
“I was just . . . coming here to . . . work on my collage?” I tried. “No, no, you’re right!” I held up both hands as Charlene, clearly not buying it, opened her mouth wide. “I’m here to . . .” Half-truth time again. A tiny plan was slapping itself awake in my brain. “To build a fort!”
“A . . . fort,” said Charlene, suspicion drenching her voice.
“A pillow fort!” Time to employ some character-based deception. I made my voice wobble just the tiniest bit. “’Cause I don’t know anyone here besides Abby, and I’m, you know, not good with new people. And everyone hates me for what happened with the treehouse. So I was just gonna build a pillow fort in here tonight and curl up and pretend everything was okay for a while.”
I bit my lip, worried I was overdoing it. Although it was all mostly kind of true. The best secret agents and spies always based their stories in truth. It made the untrue bits harder to see through.
“I believe you, actually,” said Charlene, eyeing me. “Abby said you built pillow forts last summer. Seems like that’s your thing.”
“When did she tell you that?” I asked. Warning, warning! Alarm bells started clanging in my head.
“During camp. You wrote and told her about it in one of your postcards, didn’t you? I remember ’cause I thought it was weird how much mail she was getting. I made her read me some of them.”
That sounded like exactly the sort of thing Charlene would do.
“So, a fort,” she said, stepping over the line of moonlight and clapping her hands. “Where do we start? Do we grab a bunch of pillows? Or find a blanket and make a circle of chairs? What do we need?”
“We?” I said. “There’s no we in this project.”
“Oh, there definitely is. As your buddy, I’m supposed to help you transition into the camp experience. That’s what Director Haggis told me. And if I’m stuck being your buddy, I’m going to be the best one possible, even if that means missing out on sleep to help build this pillow fort for you to be sad in.”
Ugh. Why was Charlene so . . . Charlene?
Although this might turn out to be perfect. I needed two forts to make the link anyway. “Well, I guess,” I said. “But if you’re staying, you have to build your own place. I’m not sharing.” Charlene rolled her eyes, but she nodded. “Cool,” I said. “Then we start by taking the cushions off the sofas. . . .”
It was dark in the back of the cabin, even with the moonlight, but of course Charlene knew where to find a safety flashlight kept by the door. We used it as little as possible in case someone saw, but it made the building process much easier. I built a simple symmetrical fort and tucked in the patchwork-quilt scrap I’d hidden during class, while Charlene slapped together a lopsided pillow monstrosity draped in a paint-splattered sheet. In a matter of minutes, we were done.
“Welcome to Fort Buddy, buddy!” said Charlene, sticking her head out from inside her fort, which was glowing softly from the flashlight. “Your forts always have names, right?”
“I am so not calling it that,” I said, tugging my backpack of supplies into mine.
“Well, what’s yours called? Maggie’s Gloomy Place?”
“Ha, ha.” I pulled a pen from my pack and threw it across to her. “Here, in case you need it. Every fort should have a pen.”
Charlene tossed the pen over her shoulder without looking at it. I smiled. She didn’t know it, but she’d just accepted a token from my fort, which meant we were linked. And that meant it was time to find the link and start attracting NAFAFA’s attention.
“So, Maggie,” said Charlene, propping her chin on her hands. “Now that you’re safely in a pillow fort, do you want to talk to your camp buddy about why you’re feeling sad?”
Ugh. Really? I was here for a rescue mission, not a therapy session.
“No, I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, shifting the pillow to my left and feeling around. There was sofa behind it. “Do you want to talk about why you were driving that golf cart through the woods by yourself?”
“No. And you still can’t prove you saw that.”
“Okay, then.”
Charlene frowned at me, then peered up at the dark ceiling. “You know, I never got sad my first year,” she said thoughtfully. “I was eight, and I loved sleepaway camp from day one. I don’t think a lot of the other kids were as confident as me, but I helped them through it.”
“Mmm,” I said, checking the next pillow, and the one beside that. No link yet.
“Not everyone is good with people like I am, of course.” Charlene seemed totally unconcerned that I wasn’t responding to her terrible pep talk. “Abby almost is. She wasn’t scared on her first day either. Or homesick. It was weird—all of us were talking about it,
how she just seemed to fit right in. It was like she’d been coming to Camp Cantaloupe forever.”
I twisted around to check behind the second-to-last pillow, silently praying to the First Sofa to do its thing before I was stuck at this camp with my Safety Monitor buddy forever. And there it was: a square of Charlene’s pillow fabric. Finally!
I knocked the pillow over.
“Uh-oh,” said Charlene, looking over her shoulder. “My fort’s collapsing already. Good thing you’re not in here or it would be a complete wreck like the treehouse!” She laughed at her own joke and sat up to repair the damage. I felt the pillow reappear under my hand.
I knocked it over again.
“Hey,” I heard Charlene say. “What?” She reset the pillow.
I knocked it over.
“Is there a problem?” I called.
“It’s this pillow—it won’t stay put!”
Hello, pillow.
Goodbye, pillow.
“Uh-oh,” I said, echoing Charlene’s tone. Before she could put the pillow back again, I pushed myself through the link right into her fort, inches from her face. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Charlene screamed.
“Wait,” I said. “I am wrecking your fort. Sorry!” And I pulled back into mine, spun around, and gave her a sarcastic salute from the entrance.
It took Charlene several minutes to calm down.
“How is this happening?!” she said over and over. “What did you do?” In the end I had to crawl out and sit against one of the tables, waiting patiently as she went back and forth, back and forth, testing out the first link of our brand-new network.
“Okay,” she said finally, propping herself up in the entrance to her fort. “Okay, okay, okay. You have to tell me how this works.”
Briefly, I told her. I told her about the First Sofa, and the scraps of First Sofa fabric, and the rules and mechanics of networked pillow forts. She didn’t look nearly as sure of herself when I finished. She looked a lot like Abby reacting to the news we were all going to have our cantaloupes confiscated.
“So this was why you snuck out here,” she said as I returned to my new base. “You weren’t just building a fort because you were sad. That was all a cover story for . . . this.”
“Guilty,” I said.
Charlene frowned. “But what was the point? Why did you want two forts that are . . . linked . . . so close together?”
I considered my answer. Telling her the rest would mean telling her Abby wasn’t actually camping somewhere in the woods trying to get rescued by the ghost moose. It would mean telling her about the trapdoor in the treehouse, and how we got the key, and above all, it would mean admitting I had no idea where Abby was now, and that I was building these forts in order to ask someone else for help.
And I was feeling too smug about Charlene’s astonishment to admit that just yet. So I told her part of the truth.
“I needed two forts because I’m trying to get someone’s attention,” I said. “There are kids who monitor linked-fort activity, and they have answers I need. I can’t go to them, so I built these forts to make them come to me.”
“What kids?” asked Charlene.
Right on cue, a pillow to my right flopped open, and a young girl poked her head into the fort.
It was my turn to scream.
It was Kelly.
Twenty
Maggie
“Will one of you please stop squealing and tell me what’s going on?” Charlene demanded as Kelly and I hugged for the hundredth time.
We broke apart, grinning. I couldn’t believe how good it was to see a friendly face. Even one I’d just seen before leaving for camp. Honestly, after everything that had happened since, it felt like years.
“This is my friend Kelly!” I said. “But what are you doing here? When did you get into the networks? And how?”
“The day you left,” laughed Kelly. She looked awesome. When Abby and I had met her in her hospital-room fort last summer, Kelly was a friendly nine-year-old with wide eyes, a big heart, and even bigger plans to become an astronaut and bring hundreds of cats with her into space. And as we’d kept visiting her into the school year, and celebrated with her when she got to go home, and hung out with her at least once a month since, Kelly had only gotten louder, and happier, and more excited about pretty much everything. It was glorious. “And you’ll never guess how I joined NAFAFA!” she went on, whapping me on the arm. My heart twinged. She’d picked up that habit from Abby.
“How how how?”
“It was after you and Abby dropped off Samson and all his stuff. I put Creepy Frog in my pillow fort for him, and I was moving things around so he wouldn’t get his snagglepaw caught so much, and one of the pillows fell down and there was another fort! And this kid with a clipboard showed up right away, and then there were lots of other kids, and everybody was talking at once. They wouldn’t let me through until they figured out how I was linked in, and it turned out it was—” She paused dramatically. “Creepy Frog!”
“What?” I goggled at her. “Creepy Frog couldn’t have linked you anywhere. He’s not a token, he’s just a stuffed animal.”
“That’s what I told them! But then they checked and found out there was a feather stuck in him. And Miesha remembered how she was covered in feathers from the big Hub pillow fight when she came over to give you the key last summer, and she says one must have gotten stuck to Creepy Frog while you all were chasing that rat out of your fort!”
Ho-ly. Shipwreck. That was incredible! I caught a glimpse of Charlene beside me, her entire face from her bangs to her chin set on utter disbelief.
“And your new link led where? To the Hub?” I pressed on.
“Yeah!” said Kelly. “Right there!”
“So all this time we could have gotten back to the Hub just by building another pillow fort and putting Creepy Frog in it?”
“Totally!”
That was some serious news. Abby had taken her fort down in case any new kids we met at school thought it was immature or something, but I still had one in my bedroom, and so did Kelly. What a missed opportunity. We could have been running our own network all year!
Although, actually, we never did find out what happened with the NAFAFA election after we got cut off. Last I knew, Noriko was aging out as head of the Council, and Miesha was using us as leverage to get Ben’s vote for her. I didn’t even know if the west coast was still up for grabs, or who got elected leader. That could make a big difference in whether being linked in to NAFAFA would be fun or not.
Plus, if we’d shown up in the Hub during the school year, Ben would definitely have insisted we give the Oak Key back. And then we would have had to let everyone in on our discovery about the matching lock at Camp Cantaloupe, and I bet anything they would have insisted on coming here with us and taking over the whole mission.
Hmm. Maybe getting cut off had been a blessing in disguise. Maybe everything had worked out perfectly. Apart from the current situation with Abby missing, of course.
“So do you have your own new network, then?” I asked Kelly. “Are you running the west coast?”
Kelly shook her head. “Nope, I’m in Ben’s network.”
“Ugh! So he did get it. I’m sorry. He must be super smug.”
“He is. But Miesha’s head of the Council now, so she’s been keeping him mostly under control.”
“Yay, Miesha! And whew. What’s Ben’s new mega network called?”
“The Really Enormous Great Plains-Pacific Sofa Realm. You should see his banner in the Hub. It’s kind of amazing.”
“Well hey, why don’t we go see it now?” I said. “Why are we just sitting here talking through the link?”
“Maggie, I’m so sorry, but I’m only here to say hi. They said in my training we’re not allowed to bring anyone into the Hub without an okay from the Council. It’s part of the new rules they set up after last summer.”
“Why? What happened last summer?”
“You and Abby!”
“Oh. Right.”
“They call it the . . .” Kelly screwed up her face, thinking. “The Hernandez-Hetzger Protocol. You two kind of caused some problems.”
“Ha. That’s fair. But look, Kelly, I really, really need to talk to Miesha and the rest of the Council. Abby’s in trouble, and I need their help. And if you’re saying we can’t come into the Hub, then how am I supposed to—”
“Oop!” said Kelly, looking back over her shoulder. “Hang on, here comes someone else.”
She scooched to one side, and a small boy in silver sunglasses appeared beside her in the gap.
“Maggie Hetzger!”
“Ben,” I said, my heart sinking. Of course I’d reach out to my friends in NAFAFA and end up talking to my only enemy.
Charlene was spluttering behind me. I continued ignoring her.
Ben had grown a little in the last year—he was, what, ten now?—but he still looked like a character from a kids’ book, overalls and all. And he was still carrying around that clipboard, stacked so high with papers that the clippy part looked ready to fall off. He was even pinker in the face than I remembered and breathing hard, like he’d just been running.
“Where,” he hollered, his shiny sunglasses fixed on me, “is my key?”
“Firstly, hello to you, too,” I said. “Secondly, it’s not your key. The Oak Key belongs to everyone.”
“Not to you!” Ben shouted. “You’re not even a member of NAFAFA!”
“And thirdly,” I pressed on, deciding I might as well get the big news over with, “I don’t have it anymore. It’s lost.”
Ben’s face locked in frozen horror, then drooped like a melting ice-cream cone.
“Lost? Wh-where did you lose it?”
I filled him and Kelly in on our adventures, right up until Abby fell through the open trap door when the fort collapsed, taking the key with her into the dark unknown.
Charlene had found her voice by the time I was done.
“So Abby wrecked the Shipwreck Treehouse?” she said. “And you’re letting everyone at camp think it was you?”
“We both wrecked it,” I said, annoyed. There were bigger issues than my camp reputation to think about here. I turned to Ben. “The important thing is, Abby and the Oak Key went through that door without me, and now it’s smashed to pieces. I don’t know how to figure out where she went, so I need you to let me into the Hub and help me find her.”
