by Mary McCoy
Text copyright © 2017 by Mary McCoy
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCoy, Mary, 1976– author.
Title: Camp So-and-So / Mary McCoy.
Description: Minneapolis : Carolrhoda Lab, [2017] | Summary: “Twenty five girls are invited to attend the mysterious Camp So-and-So over the summer where they work with their cabinmates to compete in the All-Camp Sports & Follies” —Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016006371 (print) | LCCN 2016024758 (ebook) | ISBN 9781512415971 (th : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781512426939 (eb pdf)
Subjects: | CYAC: Camps—Fiction. | Summer—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Sports—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M43 Cam 2017 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.M43 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016006371
Manufactured in the United States of America
1-39945-21395-8/22/2016
9781512434286 ePub
9781512434293 ePub
9781512434309 mobi
To Patricia:
friend, champion,
and
Head Counselor
of
Camp So-and-So
PROLOGUE
The letters went out in mid-February, when the weather had been so cold and so gray, and everything had been so buried in snow for so long, and the idea of riding a horse or rowing across a lake seemed so impossible, the brochures might as well have been promising magic.
There were twenty-five letters in all. They went to girls who lived in apartment buildings in cities and farmhouses in the country and condos in the suburbs. Each letter invited its recipient to spend a week at Camp So-and-So, a lakeside retreat for girls nestled high in the Starveling Mountains, on a merit scholarship. Each letter came with a registration form, a packing list, and a glossy brochure with photographs of young women climbing rocks, performing Shakespearean theater under the stars, and spiking volleyballs. Each letter was signed in ink by the famed and reclusive businessman and philanthropist Inge F. Yancey IV.
By the end of the month, twenty-five applications had been completed, signed, and mailed to a post office box in an obscure Appalachian town.
Had any of these girls tried to follow the directions in the brochure and visit the camp for themselves on that day in February, they would have discovered that there was no such town and no such mountain and that no one within a fifty-mile radius had ever heard of Camp So-and-So.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
KADIE
CRESSIDA
DORA
VIVIAN and KIMBER
SHARON, their counselor
ROBIN, a counselor-in-training
TANIA
RON
Their MINIONS
CABIN 1
THE ALL-CAMP SPORT & FOLLIES
[SCENE: As they arrive at Camp So-and-So, campers are assigned to their cabins.]
Up the long, unnecessarily winding road to Camp So-and-So, the narrator (who, I should mention, is me) watched them come. I watched as they traveled around the hairpin turns, and past the spots where the guardrails had fallen into disrepair and next to nothing prevented the cars from dropping fifty feet into the carpet of treetops that stretched as far as the eye could see.
It was nearly suppertime when Kadie Aguilar arrived. She was the first camper to check in with Camp So-and-So’s counselor-in-training, Robin, and though the sun hung low in the sky, the air was still hot and sticky.
A Note from the Narrator: As counselor-in-training, Robin was assigned all the jobs no one else wanted to do and, as a result, more or less ran the place.
Robin had stationed herself in front of the mess hall, a ramshackle building with high ceilings and hewn lumber beams that also housed the camp director’s office and the nurse’s station.
“Aguilar, Aguilar . . .” she said, tapping her clipboard with the tip of her pencil.
“It’s probably at the top,” Kadie offered. “With the A’s.”
Robin looked up from the clipboard, annoyed. Kadie eyed her cargo shorts and athletic sandals, which looked like she might have been wearing them for at least five summers, and wondered if she was a former camper. She didn’t seem that much older than Kadie, but Kadie didn’t remember her from last year.
“Here you are. Kadie Aguilar. Cabin 1.”
Kadie’s eyes brightened. She’d been in Cabin 1 the summer before, and hearing Robin say she would be there again opened up a floodgate of memories: the musty bunks, the sound of raindrops on the cabin roof, the secrets she and her cabinmates had whispered to one another after lights out.
Robin opened Kadie’s backpack for inspection. “It says here you’re a return camper, so I take it you know the rules?”
Kadie nodded as Robin put on a pair of latex gloves and swept her hands through the contents of the bag, looking for contraband. Once she was satisfied, she waved Kadie to the side and called for the next person in line.
There was no one more excited to be at camp than Kadie was. She had hardly slept the night before, but she wasn’t tired. She was in her favorite place on earth. Mrs. Aguilar looked considerably less enthusiastic. She chewed a handful of antacids as she opened the station wagon hatchback and helped Kadie unload her other bags She didn’t remember the drive being this harrowing last year.
As Kadie looked in vain for Cabin 1’s counselor, more cars pulled up. Two friends wearing thick liquid eyeliner drawn out past the corners of their eyelids and tight black jeans hitched low on their hips slouched out of the backseat of an SUV. As their respective parents hefted their many pieces of luggage from the back of the car, piling them in the gravel in front of the mess hall, the two huddled together, sharing a pair of earbuds. When Robin asked for their names, which were Vivian and Kimber, they pretended not to hear her, leaving their parents to sign them in.
When Kadie heard Robin assign them to Cabin 1, she bounced up and cheerfully introduced herself, ignoring all the warning signs. At home, Kadie was involved in team sports and extracurricular activities, and was forever being thrown in with groups of relative strangers to write a mock resolution curbing nuclear proliferation for the Model UN or to put on a production of Into the Woods. More often than not, Kadie found, people wanted the same things in the
se situations. They wanted to like each other because they were all there for the same reason, and if they got along, it was likelier that they’d do well.
“Can either of you ride a horse?” Kadie asked.
Vivian and Kimber regarded her with stony silence.
“Sorry, that was weird,” Kadie said with a self-deprecating smile. “Horsemanship is an event in the All-Camp Sport & Follies, and I’m not any good at it. Archery, either. I hope someone in our cabin is halfway decent with a bow and arrow.”
The girls’ lips curled in identical contempt, and Vivian turned up the volume on the song she and Kimber were listening to.
“Excuse me,” Robin called out to them, an irritated look on her face, a curling iron cord dangling from her fingertips. “Didn’t you read the brochure? You’re not allowed to have this.”
Grumbling, Vivian and Kimber turned their backs on Kadie and shuffled over to the registration table, where Robin continued to confiscate items from their bags. The list of items forbidden at Camp So-and-So included phones, curling irons, hair dryers, razors, and nail clippers, all of which Vivian and Kimber had tried to smuggle in.
Ostensibly, the policy existed so the time that campers would otherwise have spent grooming themselves or staring at screens could be devoted to having enriching experiences and creating memories. Kadie supposed this made sense, although the list itself was strangely arbitrary. Manicure tools of all kinds were forbidden, but nail polish was not. Campers weren’t allowed to wear jewelry but could use any eyeliner, perfume, or lotion they wanted. Maybe girls hadn’t worn eyeliner or used lotion a hundred years ago, or whenever the camp had instituted the policy, Kadie reasoned.
More cars drove into the roundabout now. More girls unloaded their bags, met their cheerful counselors, and were spirited up the steps to the mess hall, their bags now stacked in piles outside by cabin number. Kadie’s stomach growled, and she wondered again where Cabin 1’s counselor was.
The next Cabin 1 camper to arrive was Dora, though Kadie almost didn’t notice. Dora was the kind of girl whose hair, skin, eyes, and clothes were a forgettable sort of tan, like the wallpaper in a dentist’s office. When Kadie introduced herself, Dora mumbled a hello that was directed more at the tops of her shoes than at Kadie.
Each cabin held five girls, which meant Kadie only had one more chance of landing a decent bunkmate.
Please, she thought, let it be someone nice.
Instead, it turned out to be Cressida.
If Dora blended into the scenery, Cressida stood out. Even from my vantage point, I noted the translucent, faintly bluish cast to her skin, her watery eyes, the baby-fine wisps of blonde hair, scarcely enough to cover her head.
“I hope you brought a hat,” Vivian said, while Kimber chuckled unkindly.
“I hope you brought a shit for me to give,” Cressida shot back.
Kadie recoiled at Cressida’s voice, which was not unlike the sound of a circular saw on sheet metal—insistent, raspy, and shrill all at once.
“I’m Kadie,” Kadie said, giving Cressida a smile that she hoped would defuse the hostility already brewing between her cabinmates.
“Good for you,” Cressida said, pretending to study the map of Camp So-and-So that had been carved into a giant disc of tree trunk and was mounted in front of the mess hall.
Kadie watched as two girls from Cabin 3—a tall, sticklike goth girl and a girl in an orange hoodie—went into the mess hall together, conspiring like old friends, and let out a sigh.
“I don’t recognize anybody from last year,” Kadie said. “I think I’m the only one who came back.”
A Note from the Narrator: This was partly true, but also not true at all.
“Should we go in for dinner with the others?” Dora asked.
Kadie was startled. She had forgotten Dora was there.
“Maybe that’s where our counselor is,” Kadie said hopefully.
The five of them left their bags in a pile, climbed the mess hall stairs together, and peered in through one of the screen windows. Some of the other counselors had decorated their cabins’ tables with streamers or balloons or little signs that said things like “CABIN 2! 4-EVER!” but Cabin 1’s table was bare and empty.
“Hot dogs,” Kadie muttered under her breath. “Lame.”
“It’s camp,” Cressida said. “That’s what you’re supposed to eat at camp.”
Kadie glared at her. Camp was her thing, and she was not about to let some Camp So-and-So virgin tell her how things were and were not supposed to be. Besides, none of the other campers seemed terribly enthusiastic about the grayish hot dogs either, and the peppy centerpieces their counselors had made did little to distract from the grim lighting and dusty tabletops.
“The Welcome Campers dinner was better last year,” she said. “They had a carving station with prime rib and hot rolls and a salad bar and everything.”
“Probably not the only thing that was better last year,” Cressida said, glaring at Vivian and Kimber, who were pacing the mess hall porch as though looking for an escape hatch that would take them away from this place.
Dora shrugged and said, “I’m not hungry anyway. Should we take our stuff to the cabin?”
“We might as well,” Kadie said. “Maybe our counselor’s there.”
She remembered where their cabin was and led them from the mess hall. They stopped to pick up their bags on the way. Kadie, Cressida, and Dora slung camping packs over their shoulders while Vivian and Kimber half-wheeled, half-dragged their roller bags about a quarter of a mile down a wooded path into a clearing where they saw five cabins situated in a semi-circle around a fire pit. When the girls saw the cabins, all of them but Kadie wailed in dismay. They were squat wooden platforms built up on stilts. Four posts supported the roof, but the cabins had no walls—only vinyl tarps that could be rolled down and secured in a rainstorm.
Inside was no better. Here they found low wooden bunks with mattresses so lumpy their backs ached just looking at them—and Sharon.
Sharon was their counselor, and she made it plain that they were beneath her contempt. She did not remove her headphones or look up from her handheld game console when they went inside the cabin. She grumbled her name from beneath a nest of hair so dirty it was impossible to tell its original color, then said, “Leave me alone, entertain yourselves, and don’t start any trouble, or I will end you.”
It was the only thing she would say to them during their entire time at camp.
They dropped their bags by the bunks, then stepped out into the semi-circle of girls’ cabins and shuffled their feet in indecision.
“Should we go back to the mess hall?” Dora asked.
“Gah!” Cressida exclaimed. “If you want to go back, go back. Nobody’s stopping you. We don’t have to do everything together just because we’re in the same cabin.”
Vivian and Kimber nodded in agreement and started to wander toward the fire pit. Dora turned away to hide her disappointment and headed back inside the cabin.
“I forgot,” she called over her shoulder. “There’s something I need to get out of my suitcase.”
Kadie’s heart sank. This was not how things had been last year. By the end of the first day, her cabinmates had already seemed as close as sisters. Their counselor had been trained in the theater and taught them show tunes and how to modulate their vibrato. They’d lost the All-Camp Sport & Follies, but it had been close, and besides, they’d had fun doing it.
Even if she hadn’t done a very good job of keeping in touch with them, she still thought about her friends from last summer all the time, and she’d been thinking about coming back to Camp So-and-So all year. Of course you didn’t have to do every single thing with the people in your cabin, but if you didn’t do most of the things together, what was the point? Cressida hated everyone, Vivian and Kimber didn’t think the others were cool enough, and now Dora said she was “getting something out of her suitcase,” but Kadie knew she was probably hiding in the cabin to
avoid Cabin 1’s toxic stew of meanness.
A Note from the Narrator: Dora’s feelings were a little hurt, but she really was getting something out of her suitcase—her grandfather’s steel pocket watch, which she carried in her pocket and squeezed with her fingers whenever she needed a little boost of confidence or bravery. Timepieces such as this one had been listed as contraband on the Camp So-and-So packing list, but Dora couldn’t see the harm in it and, in an uncharacteristic act of rule-breaking, had smuggled it into camp inside a pair of socks.
“Wait,” Kadie said, hoping to intervene before the bond between her cabinmates was irreparably damaged. “I know where we can get better food. And where there are boys.”
Vivian and Kimber stopped and turned around. Dora, who had come out of the cabin, looked willing, and at least Cressida didn’t say no. Kadie breathed a sigh of relief. It was desperate, but she knew that if she didn’t keep her cabinmates together now, they’d never achieve the bond, the trust, the communication you had to have to compete in the All-Camp Sport & Follies. Once they got to know the camp for themselves, they’d understand. They’d love it like she did. She would have her team.
They went back the way they’d come, back toward the mess hall. The girls from Cabin 5 waved to them when they met on the path, but only Kadie and Dora waved back to them. They headed east until they reached the banks of Lake So-and-So, the kidney-bean-shaped lake that stretched from the camp’s northernmost point to its southernmost tip two miles away, with me, your humble narrator, following from a discreet distance. They headed north along the shore with Kadie pointing out landmarks along the way—Campfire Pavilion, the art barn, the boat house, the equipment shed.
“This is where we’ll be spending most of our time for tomorrow,” she said, grinning like the dismal cinder block structures were Malibu real estate.
“Why?” Cressida asked, wrinkling her nose.
