Lights, Camera, DISASTER!

by Gordon Korman

“Why are we turning around, Miss Scrimmage?” asked Cathy. Diane and the other girls looked nervous.

  “This is definitely the wrong way!” she said, flustered. “The road to Montreal is a big highway! This is just two lanes. It looks awfully rural —”

  “Maybe we’re taking the northern route to see more of the countryside,” suggested Diane hopefully.

  Miss Scrimmage stopped dead. Behind them, the Camaro screeched to a halt again, eight centimetres off the van’s back bumper. The driver stuck his head out the window. “What are you — crazy, lady?”

  Miss Scrimmage scratched her head. “Well, perhaps that was my thinking,” she mused over the din of the Camaro’s horn behind them. Finally she reached a decision and wheeled the van hard about, just as the Camaro attempted to drive around her. Both vehicles stopped, facing each other head-on, front bumpers a centimetre apart.

  Now it was Miss Scrimmage’s turn to honk. “Sir, you are blocking my path,” she called out the window. “What is more, you are on the wrong side of the road.”

  Face flaming, the other motorist emitted a stream of insults and abuse.

  Miss Scrimmage never got beyond “You lunatic …”

  “Well, I never!” she exclaimed, wheeling around the Camaro and tearing off down the highway at breakneck speed. She began a lecture to her girls on the ladylike way to deal with “a horribly abusive ignoramus who was probably born in a barn and drives unsafely besides.” She was eighty kilometres down the road before she realized that she didn’t know where she was going.

  The van screeched to a halt in a cloud of burning rubber.

  “What’s the problem, Miss Scrimmage?” asked Diane.

  The Headmistress looked haunted. She peered through the windshield as though hoping to spy Montreal waiting right around the next bend. Instead, she got northeastern Ontario, lots of it, as far as the eye could see. “We can’t go this way,” she said softly.

  Cathy spoke up. “Well, can we go this way?” She pointed back in the direction they had come from. Miss Scrimmage looked in the rearview mirror. The scene was almost exactly the same. “No,” she barely whispered.

  Cathy leaned forward and patted the Headmistress sympathetically on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Miss Scrimmage. We know where we’re going.”

  Miss Scrimmage put the van in gear.

  * * *

  “Well, sure, it’s sort of an okay raft, I guess,” said Calvin, “but how come you didn’t use my tree?”

  “Yours was too small,” said Coach Flynn.

  “Too small?!” roared Calvin. “It was the mightiest tree in the forest!”

  That got a big laugh.

  “You cut it down with the scissors on your Swiss Army knife,” Wilbur pointed out.

  “It was a colossus!”

  “It was a twig.”

  The SOS raft was now finished, and all the boys were pretty proud of themselves. It was made up of saplings about ten centimetres in diameter, tied together with twine from the survival kits and measured a little more than three metres square. On one end Bruno had scratched the inscription S.S. Drown-in-the-Woods II.

  Bruno, Boots and Jordie were hard at work cutting the letters H, E, L and P out of Wilbur’s bright-red long underwear. They would secure these to the top of the raft with pine gum, as Jordie had done in last summer’s blockbuster movie Marooned in the Swamp.

  “You should have done SOS,” grumbled Wilbur. “You might run out of material with four letters, and you’re not getting my T-shirt.”

  Bruno emitted a bark of laughter. “Are you kidding? We could put Assistance Required as Soon as Possible and still have enough stuff left over to cut out all our names!”

  “Very funny.”

  Once finished, the raft would go out into the middle of the lake to shout its message to the sky and, with luck, to rescuers. If that didn’t work, Calvin was still volunteering to paddle to Greenland, and no hard feelings.

  “What if it doesn’t float?” asked Pete nervously.

  “Then it’ll sink,” said Larry. “At least it’ll have a lot of company down there.”

  “Of course it’ll float, Anderson,” snapped Flynn. “Wood floats.”

  “Hey, Elmer,” piped Boots, “how about that one?” He was referring to a loud hissing sound that seemed to come from the woods all around them.

  “Cicadas,” said Elmer. “Probably the first ones of the season. They don’t usually appear this far north until June.”

  Ever since the night of the birdcalls, it had become a game around camp to see if Elmer could identify every single noise the forest had to offer. So far, the genius hadn’t been stumped once.

  “Are you sure he really knows all that stuff?” Jordie whispered to Boots. “If he made it up, we wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “You just don’t know Elmer,” Boots replied. “He’s smart enough to know that junk and a hundred times more, but he doesn’t have the imagination to fake one answer.”

  The chirping call of a bird rang through the clearing. All eyes turned to Elmer.

  “Blue jay,” supplied the crew-cut genius. “Adult male.”

  Sure enough, a bright blue bundle of feathers flashed briefly out of the trees, then just as quickly disappeared.

  “See?” laughed Boots. “He’s always right.”

  * * *

  Miss Scrimmage screeched the van to a halt diagonally across Route 60. “I can’t turn left here!” she exclaimed, staring in consternation at her directions. “That’s a dirt road! Catherine, are you sure the man at the gas station said this was the right way?”

  Cathy nodded positively. “This is it.”

  The Headmistress was totally distressed. “But Montreal is a large city with buildings and people and delightful little shops where they serve butter croissants! Where are they?”

  “Maybe they’re at the other end of this road,” Diane suggested.

  “Maybe,” said Miss Scrimmage dubiously. But she was terribly upset. And as the road became bumpier and muddier, her agitation grew. “We’re lost! Oh, my stars!” She stared at her typed directions, ransacking her mind for a missed turn, a wrong highway number, a left where a right had been called for — anything that would indicate where Montreal might be.

  For twenty minutes of jouncing through ruts, she agonized in total confusion as the situation got worse until, with a screech of brakes, she stopped at the end of the road, totally distraught.

  “Oh, girls!” the Headmistress whimpered. “This is a terrible dilemma! I’m in a quandary!” She turned back to face them and cried out in astonishment. The five members of the Baking Club were gone, leaving nothing but empty suitcases and discarded blouses and skirts. The girls stood beside the van, dressed in jeans and warm jackets, lacing their boots and shouldering their duffels.

  The Headmistress was dazed. “Girls! Girls! Why are you dressed like that? Come back! This isn’t Montreal!”

  “Surprise!” chorused the five. Miss Scrimmage just gawked.

  Cathy handed over a large silver-wrapped package, festooned with ribbons. “Miss Scrimmage,” she chided gently, “did you honestly think you could reach fifty years of teaching without us doing something special?”

  Bewildered behind the wheel of the van, Miss Scrimmage was suddenly all smiles. “I don’t deserve you girls!” she exclaimed emotionally. “Oh, this is so exciting!” She tore at the paper to reveal a gift box from a store called “The Outdoorsman.” Inside were hiking boots, jeans and a heavy wool cable-knit sweater.

  Miss Scrimmage was even more confused than before. “This is — uh — exactly what I needed,” she stammered.

  The girls all cheered.

  “Try them on, Miss Scrimmage!” crowed Wilma Dorf.

  “Oh, yes!” cried Cathy. “You haven’t even heard the best part yet! We’re taking you on a camping trip!”

  The Headmistress was thunderstruck. “But — but — what about the shops with the butter croissants?”

  Five faces fe
ll. Eyes became misty. Lower lips trembled.

  Cathy spoke up, voice shaky. “We thought it would be a happy surprise for you, Miss Scrimmage. Don’t you like it?”

  If there was one thing Miss Scrimmage couldn’t bear, it was the sight of her girls in any kind of distress.

  “I love it!” she said without reservation. “You’re all the dearest things! Now just let me step into the van to change into my new wardrobe, and we’ll be ready to start off on our happy adventure.”

  Ten minutes later, looking surprisingly youthful and spry in her stylish jeans and sweater, Miss Scrimmage led, or thought she led, the Baking Club into the woods of Algonquin Park. Touched that her girls would go to such lengths to do her honour, Montreal and butter croissants were the last thing on her mind.

  * * *

  “… and to make a long story short, I quit taxidermy school and became a talent manager.”

  The “short” story had taken place over the last three hundred kilometres. Now the blue Ford was heading northeast on Route 60, past the main town, into the heart of Algonquin Park.

  Mr. Sturgeon had tuned Goose Golden out hours ago and was concentrating with some alarm on his rearview mirror. It seemed like the same line of cars had been behind him for the whole trip. Surely everyone wasn’t going to Algonquin Park. It didn’t make sense. No one had turned off anywhere else; no one had passed him. It was as though he were being followed.

  Rounding a wide curve, he suddenly recognized one of the vehicles. Four cars back, sitting tall and hunched over the steering wheel, was that red-headed reporter in his Volkswagen. It all made sense. When the Headmaster of Macdonald Hall and Jordie Jones’s manager had driven off together early in the morning, and obviously in a big hurry, some of the media people had gambled that the real story lay at their destination. The Ford had picked up — he counted rapidly — eight tails. He had not avoided the circus; he had taken it on the road. Now the wilderness survival trip would be subjected to even more disruption.

  “There are reporters following us,” Mr. Sturgeon announced with distaste.

  Golden looked back in alarm. “Oh, no! Seth isn’t going to like this!”

  “Well, he’s bound to understand how it happened,” said the Headmaster reasonably. “And when he hears that you and I left this morning, he’ll put two and two together and realize that we’ve set out to Algonquin Park to bring back Jones.”

  There was a long silence, then, “He might not know that,” said Golden in a strangled voice.

  Mr. Sturgeon glanced at him sharply. “You did tell him that Jones is with my boys?”

  The manager flushed. “Well, I was going to — but I kind of fell asleep.”

  The Headmaster was livid. “Do you mean to tell me Dinkman still thinks Jones is missing?”

  Golden shrugged. “Only inasmuch as he doesn’t know where he is.”

  “Spare me your Hollywood doubletalk. You’re going to call and explain exactly where we are and what we’re doing.”

  But Dinkman wasn’t answering his cell phone, and the film company’s line was perpetually busy — probably with incoming inquiries about Jordie’s disappearance. As they approached the wilderness of Algonquin Park, the cellular signal faded to zero and the Headmaster gave up. Soon they came to the dirt road, and the Ford was jouncing along, its worn shocks protesting each bump and trough. Then, just as Golden pronounced himself officially carsick, the road ended.

  The Headmaster stared in perplexity at the red minivan parked there on the grass. “If I didn’t know better,” he mused aloud, “I’d swear that was Miss Scrimmage’s vehicle.” He opened his door. “Come along, Golden. If we hurry, maybe we can lose the reporters in the woods.”

  No sooner was the manager out of the car than he planted one pristine white doeskin loafer into a mud puddle, which sucked his foot in up to the ankle.

  Mr. Sturgeon smiled in grim amusement. “Welcome to Die-in-the-Woods.”

  * * *

  Seth Dinkman stormed across the Macdonald Hall campus to the south lawn, glowering with rage. A radio reporter with a portable tape recorder leapt out at him from the bushes.

  “Do you have a comment on the Jordie Jones case, Mr. Dinkman?”

  “Yeah! Mind your own business!” roared the director. He grabbed the tape recorder, hurled it twenty metres away into a flower bed and marched on. The crew had been forced to shut down filming because of the swarm of reporters. The phone lines were tied up with media calls, so that even if Jordie were trying to get through, his only response would be a recorded message. Goose had disappeared off the face of the earth. And now Sturgeon was not in his office, and no one had seen him all day. Dinkman was going to get to the bottom of this if he had to tear the campus apart.

  He leapt onto the Headmaster’s front porch and pounded on the door.

  Mrs. Sturgeon answered it. “Good afternoon, Mr. Dinkman. What can I do for you?”

  “Hi. Is your husband home?”

  “Why, no,” she replied. “He’s driven up to get Jordie.”

  “What? Where’s Jordie?”

  “Don’t you know? He seems to have joined a group of our boys on a wilderness survival trip.”

  Dinkman reached up and grabbed two handfuls of his hair. “How come the director is the last to know? I’ve been worrying myself sick over that rotten kid, keeping Goose from falling to pieces, lying my head off to every reporter in town — and it’s ‘Hey, don’t tell Seth! He’s only in charge of the whole project! What does he need to know for?’”

  Mrs. Sturgeon clucked sympathetically. “Let me make you a cup of tea.”

  “No time!” roared Dinkman. “Where are they?”

  She shrugged helplessly. “The campsite is in Algonquin Park, just north of the main highway, on one of the little lakes. William knows which one it is this year, but I’m afraid I don’t. Please come in and I’ll show you the general area on a map.”

  “Algonquin Park — north of the highway — little lake,” the director repeated. “I’ll find it. just tell me — where’s the closest place I can charter a helicopter?”

  * * *

  The Baking Club trip to Montreal/Fifty Years of Teaching camping celebration slogged happily through the underbrush, Miss Scrimmage still in the lead.

  “Girls, I feel twenty years younger!” the Headmistress gushed, hopping athletically over a large exposed root. “This is ever so much better than a trip to Montreal! The fresh air, the physical challenge, nature all around us, why, even these clothes! I can’t remember ever being so comfortable!”

  The girls exchanged hilarious glances. Cathy had known they’d be able to manoeuvre her up to Algonquin Park, and even entice her into the woods, but no one had expected her to be so thrilled about it. It was a bonus. For all her craziness, Miss Scrimmage was popular among her students, so everyone was pleased that she was having such a good time.

  “How much longer before we get to Jordie?” whispered Diane.

  “That depends on how lucky we are,” Cathy replied. “They’re camping at the lake just north of here. Once we hit water, we have to circle around until we find their campsite. It could be an hour; it could be three.”

  “It’s worth it!” decided Ruth Sidwell, nodding fervently. “I can’t believe we’re going to meet Jordie Jones! I mean, we sort of met him at the dance, but that doesn’t count because he was disguised as that prince guy.”

  “And the dance was too crowded and too hectic,” added Vanessa Robinson. “This time it’ll be a small group.” She looked nervous. “What are we going to say when we see him?”

  Cathy laughed delightedly. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going to say, and I quote —” She brought her fists together in front of her and emitted an earsplitting, bloodcurdling, bone-chilling shriek that echoed through the woods in all directions.

  “Catherine!” exclaimed Miss Scrimmage in horror. “That is definitely not ladylike!”

  “Sorry, Miss Scrimmage,” said Cathy. “It’
s just that every time I hear the name Jordie Jones, I kind of freak out.”

  “Good gracious,” the Headmistress sniffed. “One would think that, if you’re fond of a young man, you wouldn’t want to frighten him to death by screaming his head off.”

  “Pssst,” whispered Diane. “Jordie Jones.”

  It tore an identical screech from Cathy’s throat.

  * * *

  “Okay, Elm,” said Bruno, “how about that one?” He was referring to a distant cry that could just barely be heard over the sounds of the forest.

  Elmer was pop-eyed behind his glasses. Slowly he stood up. “No,” he said finally. “I must be mistaken.”

  “Come on,” said Jordie. “Let’s have it.”

  Elmer flushed. “It was very faint, and I only heard it for a second.”

  “Ha!” crowed Jordie. “We finally stumped you.”

  “Hey, Elm,” said Bruno. “You’re slipping.”

  “I hope so,” said Elmer cryptically.

  They were interrupted by Wilbur’s bellow from the waterfront: “Somebody’s pretty stupid!”

  It awoke the snoozing Coach Flynn, who propped himself up on his elbows and called, “Walton, you want to check that out?”

  Bruno, Boots and Jordie ran to the slope and peered down to where Wilbur and his crew were attempting to launch the S.S. Drown-in-the-Woods II. It was instantly clear what the excitement was about. The raft sat in shallow water. The red underwear letters so painstakingly cut out and glued to the logs read:

  H E E P

  Bruno and Boots turned to each other. “I thought you were making the L,” they said at exactly the same time.

  “No one’s going to rescue us with this,” said Pete sadly.

  “Why?” asked Larry. “Don’t the illiterate deserve to be saved?”

  “Well, what if they rescue us and then dock us on our English grade?”

  “I don’t take English, remember?” grinned Mark.

  Wilbur bunched both fists. “If you don’t stop filming this raft, that video camera is going to the bottom of the lake, and you’re going with it!”

  “Just trim the stupid E,” called Bruno.

  In the distance, another fierce screech sounded, a little louder this time.