by Mary McCoy
Kimber hadn’t missed the target after her first try, and Vivian actually managed a bullseye. They’d even figured out how to put the arm guards on by themselves.
“Do you think we can do this?” Vivian asked, as the Inge campers poured out of the town cars, immaculate in their matching vests, visors, and sunglasses.
“You’ll be great,” Kadie said.
“Besides,” Kimber said, tossing her hair as she drew back the bowstring, “just look at us.”
They did cut a striking figure with their bows and tight jeans and chunky black boots. The Inge F. Yancey campers noticed it. There was no question that Tania noticed it, and despite looking Vogue-ready in her mod white sunglasses and vest, she was not about to tolerate any sort of challenge to her fairest-of-them-all title.
She whispered something to her minions that made them laugh hysterically. Then she shouldered her bow and drew back the string while aiming in the direction of Vivian’s head. Kimber had already tackled her friend and pulled her to the ground before she realized there was no arrow loaded in Tania’s bow.
Tania let out a peal of laughter and let go of the string.
Kadie shook her head in disgust and helped Vivian and Kimber to their feet. Why had she loved this place so much last summer? She wasn’t sure she liked it now, and it wasn’t the girls in her cabin who were the problem.
Something was different. And wrong. And possibly unsafe. It dawned on Kadie that if something bad happened, she had absolutely no idea who to ask for help. Certainly not their counselor, but who else was there? If Tania’s bow had been loaded when she aimed at Vivian’s head, was there anything they could have done about it?
As Kadie thought about this and Vivian and Kimber wiped the dewy grass clippings off their jeans, the last town car pulled onto the shoulder of the road. A peculiar-looking trio lurched from the backseat.
“Don’t just stand there,” Ron said, snaking a possessive arm around Tania’s waist and glaring at a small group of her minions. “See to our judges.”
Three boys scurried for the car and offered their elbows, then walked the judges across the meadow and presented them to Tania.
Standing there together, they resembled candles in a candelabra, waxy-skinned and melted down to different sizes and shapes over the years. In the center stood a tall, gray-haired woman who wore a prim, black suit and gloves and a veiled hat, looking as though she’d been transported from another time.
A Note from the Narrator: Which, as a matter of fact, she had been, fifty years earlier when she’d been sent by the bank where she worked to investigate an accounting matter at the camp, accepted a cup of tea from her hosts, and never thought to leave.
To her right was a woman in a sleeveless, floral-print dress with a flouncy skirt and pumps. Her hair was honey-colored and hung halfway down her back, and it was only after you looked at her for a few minutes that you realized you couldn’t tell whether she was twenty years old or forty or sixty or a hundred and two.
On the other side of the woman with the veiled hat stood the third judge. If it was difficult to place the age of the second judge or the time of the first one, it was unclear whether the third judge was, in fact, human. He (or she) was small and lumpen and eccentrically dressed in a purple suitcoat with green piping at the lapels. It was difficult to make out the face beneath the thicket of black hair that swept over the judge’s eyes, but what bits did show through seemed too pale to belong to a person.
“Welcome,” Tania said.
The judge in the black, veiled hat looked up and down the line of girls from Cabin 1 and sniffed.
“It’s their camp,” she said. “Shouldn’t they be doing the welcoming?”
However, all the girls from Cabin 1 found themselves quite incapable of speech, except for Cressida who had fixated on a finer point.
“You brought your own judges?” she asked Tania, her cheeks turning pink with agitation.
Tania strode up to Cressida, her paces graceful and measured as a dancer’s. Cressida only came up to her collarbone.
“In what universe is that fair?” Cressida said, taking a step back. Her voice quivered, though Kadie couldn’t tell if it was because she was angry or because Tania intimidated her.
“I’m sorry,” Tania purred. “Is that a problem? Did you have someone else lined up?”
Now Cressida was at a loss for words, as they had not encountered a single adult on the premises of Camp So-and-So except for their counselor, Sharon, who would probably take a baseball bat to their kneecaps if they asked her to serve as a judge at the All-Camp Sport & Follies.
She was about to shake her head in frustration when she heard footsteps approaching and turned around to see Robin, the counselor-in-training, cutting across the meadow.
“What about her?” Cressida asked.
“What about me?” Robin asked, planting her hands on her hips as she joined their little party.
“They want you to judge the All-Camp Sport & Follies,” Tania told her.
All the girls from Cabin 1 looked at Robin to see what she would say.
A Note from the Narrator: Except for Dora, who kept her eye on Tania and, in doing so, realized two things: a) Robin may have worked for Camp So-and-So, but she answered to Tania, and b) under no circumstance did Tania want Robin judging the All-Camp Sport & Follies. Dora thought this strange, but kept her observations to herself.
“Inge F. Yancey and Camp So-and-So are owned by the same person,” Robin explained, never taking her eyes off of Tania. “This is the board of directors, and I assure you, they are entirely impartial.”
“If they’re so impartial, where’s my town car?” Cressida complained.
The judge in the floral-print dress wrinkled her nose. “I suppose it’s a good thing you’re not being judged on your manners,” she said.
A crackle of static erupted from the walkie-talkie hooked to the waistband of Robin’s cargo shorts.
“Can I get an assist with a carcass in the woods near the pony trails? It’s a big one.”
The voice was monotone, as though this sort of thing happened every day at Camp So-and-So.
“You were supposed to clean that up hours ago,” Robin barked into the walkie-talkie before reholstering it at her waist and turning back to the girls from Cabin 1 with a shrug. “You can work this out amongst yourselves, can’t you?”
Kadie nodded. What choice did she have? As Robin headed west across the meadow toward the woods and whatever kind of carcass was rotting there, Kadie yanked Cressida back into the line of Cabin 1 campers and whispered at her to keep her mouth shut. Then, tucking her hair behind her ears and straightening her shoulders, she stepped forward and nodded to each of the judges and Tania. If Camp So-and-So was to host the All-Camp Sport & Follies, then they would manage it with at least some measure of dignity and class.
“Welcome, campers, judges, competitors, and guests, to the first day of the All-Camp Sport & Follies,” Kadie said, turning to Tania. “As your hosts, we offer you first choice in our first event. Will you shoot first or second?”
Tania considered for a moment, and said, “Second.”
The judge in the black, veiled hat cleared her throat.
“Then we are underway. First archer, come forward.”
Vivian stepped up first, and Kadie could tell right away that she was still rattled from earlier. She kept looking back over her shoulder, as though Tania still had a bow trained on her head. Perhaps loaded this time. Vivian’s first arrow barely hit the target at all, and the second was no better.
Before she took her third shot, Kadie raised her hand and called for a time-out.
“She can’t do that,” one of Tania’s minions protested.
After conferring for a moment, the judge in the purple suitcoat stepped forward.
“Sixty-second time-out granted to Camp So-and-So. No further time-outs to be granted during this event.”
Kadie leaned in and whispered in Vivian’s ear, “Inhale when
you draw back. Exhale when you let go. It works, I promise.”
And it did. Over the next four shots, Vivian’s arrows found their way back to the target, and she shared the advice with Kimber when she handed off the bow. However, Kimber was even more nervous than Vivian, so it did her little good. Her mind was muddled when she pulled back her bow, and her hand shook. Her first arrow went wild and clattered off the windshield of one of the Inge F. Yancey town cars. Her fingers slipped, her release points were off, and her next two arrows flew in a slow, wobbly trajectory like drunken bumblebees and fell short of the target. By the end, she’d improved somewhat, and the first Inge F. Yancey camper’s shooting was only fair, but Tania would have to fail tremendously for them to have any chance at all of winning.
Tania stepped up to the target and removed her sunglasses, surveying them all with a look that said she wondered why she’d even bothered to show up. She drew her bow and fired six arrows in quick succession so they formed a perfect circle around the inner target ring, then shot a seventh exactly in the center. That accomplished, she dropped her bow on the dewy grass, slipped her sunglasses back on, and got into the backseat of one of the town cars. A driver, unseen behind the tinted windows, put the car in gear and drove up the winding dirt road toward the art barn, where the next event in the All-Camp Sport & Follies would take place.
The judges and the rest of the Inge F. Yancey campers followed suit, and one by one the town cars departed, leaving the girls from Cabin 1 standing in the meadow alone. The sun was barely up, and they were already behind.
“Who’s supposed to clean all this stuff up?” Dora asked.
Kadie handed Dora a quiver and started pulling arrows out of the targets.
“Who do you think?”
Inge F. Yancey: 1
Camp So-and-So: 0
They left Dora to lug the archery supplies back to the equipment shed while they hiked back up the hill to meet the rest of the Inge F. Yancey campers at the art barn. The art barn had been constructed many years before by someone who had despised art and wanted to ensure that campers spent as few happy hours there as possible. It was made entirely of poured concrete and allowed no natural light save what could enter through a poorly fitted garage door on the front. While the Inge F. Yancey campers loitered in fashionable, bored poses around the perimeter, Kadie wrestled with the door until it slid up, releasing the old, wet, and rotten odors that had been pent up inside for an entire year.
Tania held her wrist up to her nose and said, “We can’t possibly work in there.”
Cressida glared at Tania with such rage that her left eyelid twitched. Kadie sympathized. It was infuriating enough to be beaten by the Inge F. Yancey campers without their contempt and sneering piled on top.
“If you think it’s so awful, why don’t you host the All-Camp Sport & Follies?” Cressida asked.
“Because I don’t want you and your friends putting your grubby fingers on all my nice things,” Tania said, peering over the tops of her sunglasses. “Besides, you’d probably steal anything that wasn’t nailed down.”
The candelabra of judges took their places atop a fallen log that was upwind from the art barn. The judge who wore the sleeveless, floral-print dress and could have been forty or a hundred and two cleared her throat and said in a warning tone, “Now, ladies . . .”
Cressida and Tania took a step back from one another and stood at attention with the other campers.
“Artists, step forward,” said the judge in the veiled hat. “The next event in the All-Camp Sport & Follies is about to begin.”
A pair of witchy-looking twin girls from Inge F. Yancey peeled themselves off the rock where they’d been sheltering from the sun. Both wore their long brown hair parted over their ears like a pair of lute-playing princesses at a Renaissance Faire.
From Camp So-and-So, Kadie and Cressida stepped forward. Kadie had taken metal shop at school and Cressida said she could draw a little bit, making them Cabin 1’s most accomplished artists. Vivian and Kimber hung back, but Dora returned from putting archery targets away in the equipment shed in time to give them a small but enthusiastic round of applause.
The judge in the purple suitcoat produced a fistful of matchsticks, broken into different lengths.
“We’ll draw straws to determine the artistic medium for this event.”
“What’s a medium?” Kimber asked, as Kadie and one of the witchy-looking girls drew and compared their straws. Kadie’s was shorter by two inches.
The witchy-looking girl pressed her lips together smugly and said, “We choose textiles.”
“Very well,” said the judge in the purple suitcoat. “You have one hour to create a textile-based craft. The team that makes the best craft wins the event for their camp. Your time starts now.”
Kadie and Cressida dashed inside the art barn and tripped and stumbled through the dark to the rack of supplies. They rummaged through shelves of crusty paint brushes and waterlogged crepe paper and dried-out pots of rubber cement, looking for any supplies that could possibly be applied to fabric. What had her cabin done last year? Kadie struggled to remember last year’s camp craft event, but couldn’t. It wasn’t that the memory was fuzzy or dim. It wasn’t there at all.
“What’s wrong with you?” Cressida asked, giving her arm a tug, and Kadie realized that she’d frozen in the center of the art barn, staring at the shelves of art supplies.
“Tie-dyed t-shirts,” Kadie said, forcing herself to snap back into the moment. She pointed at a stack of plain white t-shirts on one of the shelves that didn’t look too water-stained.
“Let’s do it,” Cressida said, and together they filled a basket with shirts, stencils, Rit powder dye, and rubber bands. An hour wasn’t much time, but they could certainly manage some tie dye, a classic camp craft if ever there was one. Cressida mixed the buckets of dye while Kadie started twisting rubber bands around the fabric to make swirls and stripes and rosettes. Nearly half their time had passed before either of them realized that the witchy girls from Inge F. Yancey had not followed them into the art barn.
“I guess they meant it when they said they couldn’t possibly work in here,” Cressida said.
“But they don’t have any supplies or anything. It’s weird. I’m going to see what they’re up to,” said Kadie, removing her dye-stained gloves and walking toward the light.
A moment later she was back, grimly picking the rubber bands out of her designs and shaking the wrinkles out of her shirts.
“What are they making out there?” Cressida asked.
“They’re knitting,” said Kadie.
“Is it better than ours?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
At the end of the hour, they had three good-enough t-shirts to show for their effort. One was a rainbow spiral, one was blue and red starbursts, and one was lilac and teal stripes with a row of skulls stenciled in white across the front. They brought the still-damp shirts outside and laid them out on the concrete steps in front of the art barn. It was only then that Cressida looked up and saw what the Inge F. Yancey campers had done for their camp craft.
They hadn’t needed supplies from the art barn. They’d brought their own.
Each girl grabbed two corners, and together, they unfurled an ivory sleeping bag that looked so soft it might been knitted out of clouds.
“It’s qiviut,” said one of the witchy girls. “We thought about using cashmere . . .”
The other one finished her sentence. “. . . But that seemed common.”
“Besides, qiviut is much more functional. Eight times warmer than wool, you know. Eight times more expensive, too.”
Tania touched her cheek in mock astonishment. “I did not know that. Fascinating.”
Even though she’d gotten a sneak preview, Kadie was still gobsmacked by what she saw. How had they knitted an entire sleeping bag in an hour? She’d tried knitting once, and it took her an entire week just to make a potholder. Kadie forced herself to stop a
dmiring the impossibly even and tiny stitches.
“And now, let’s see what Cabin 1 has for us.”
Chin held high, Cressida picked up the t-shirt with the skulls, still damp and wrinkled, and held it up to her chest.
“We decided to go with 100 percent cotton,” she told the judges with a defiant gleam in her eye. “Polyester blends just seemed so . . . common.”
Inge F. Yancey: 2
Camp So-and-So: 0
It was barely nine a.m. when they finished cleaning up the dye, but the art barn was already sweltering. Mosquitos swarmed around their heads as they trudged along the dirt road toward the north shore of Lake So-and-So, where the rowing event was about to begin. Kadie was in a foul temper, still upset about the t-shirts. They should have pushed themselves harder, been more creative. Of course they were never going to win with something stupid like a tie-dyed t-shirt.
Winning wasn’t just about getting to stay at the Inge F. Yancey camp, where she was sure the art barn was well-ventilated and the cabin mattresses were free from vermin. How could you look at their smug faces and not want to beat them at something? Cressida could make wisecracks about polyester blends, but to Kadie there was nothing funny about it.
Fueled by clench-fisted rage, Kadie had pulled ahead of the judges and the rest of the girls in Cabin 1, who lagged fifty yards back, shuffling their feet in the dead leaves and dreading whatever the next event held. Kadie was sure that even though the Inge F. Yancey campers had driven up ahead of them in their town cars, they’d be fanning themselves in the shade while the girls from Cabin 1 hauled the canoes out of the equipment shed and lowered them into the water.
When she rounded the corner in the road, though, that wasn’t what she saw. Kadie resisted the urge to call out and ask the Inge F. Yancey campers what they were doing and, instead, ducked behind a tree to watch. Their town cars were parked in a line next to the equipment shed. The Inge F. Yancey campers had already changed into their rowing gear. They had gotten two canoes out of the equipment shed and laid them out on the dock. They were all gathered around one of these canoes in a way that made Kadie suspicious. She looked around, but there was no sign of the judges’ car. Perhaps the three timeless, shapeless, ageless oddballs had fallen back, opting to walk instead.
