Mother-Daughter Book Camp

by Heather Vogel Frederick

  “If you bake whoopie pies every day, you definitely will,” I promise her.

  The rest of my day off passes swiftly. I meet up with a couple of other Camp Lovejoy counselors for lunch and a hike, and afterward we hang out at one of the lake’s public beaches, swimming and lazing in the sun.

  “We ran into some guys from Pinewood at the General Store this morning,” Brianna tells me. “They have the day off too, and they invited us to meet them at the drive-in tonight. Want to come?”

  I feel a pang of nostalgia. We used to have a drive-in theater back in California when I was little, and my dad took me and my sister Courtney to the movies there often. “Wish I could, but I have other plans,” I tell them. “Maybe another time.”

  Jess and Emma are eager to get started with the book club. Plus, it’s Felicia’s night off tonight, so the timing is perfect.

  “You’re back early,” says Sergeant Marge as I sign in at the office. She holds out her hand for my cell phone.

  “Yeah,” I tell her, turning it over reluctantly. I still haven’t had any luck reaching Tristan. “I’m going to call it a night. I’m still kind of tired from yesterday’s run.”

  I leave quickly, before she can call me “sport” again, and head back to Twin Pines. It’s in an uproar.

  “I had to let them in on the secret, since we’re hosting,” Jess explains. “They’ve been pinging off the walls since dinner.”

  “Girls!” I say severely, doing my best imitation of my mother in displeased Queen Clementine mode. The cabin instantly quiets down. “The whole camp is going to know something’s up if you don’t settle down,” I continue in a whisper.

  “When will everyone be here?” Carter whispers back.

  “Soon,” I reply. “Now you two get on up there,” I tell her and Brooklyn, pointing to Brooklyn’s top bunk at the rear of the cabin. “And Freddie and Nica, you two double up on Freddie’s bunk underneath. We need to make room for everyone.”

  Balsam is the first to arrive, scuttling over to join us as soon as the on-duty counselor finishes her first patrol around Lower Camp. I hold the door open as the girls dash inside. Megan brings up the rear, arms piled high with extra blankets and comforters.

  “Good idea,” I murmur.

  She nods. “Gotta keep everyone cozy.”

  As Jess sorts the campers onto bunks, another tap on the door signals that Nest has arrived. Emma’s girls cluster around her like ducklings, staring at the rest of us with round eyes. Tara is clutching Jess’s teddy bear. Jess has pretty much given up on trying to get it back.

  “Ith it a party?” asks Pippa.

  “Kind of,” Emma tells her. “You’ll see.”

  Jess leads the little trio over to the last empty bunk, and they take their places on it obediently while Emma tucks some of the extra blankets around them.

  “Snug as bugs in a rug,” she tells them. Giggling, their feet bounce under the blankets in excitement.

  “So,” Jess announces, as Megan and Becca sit down on my bed and Emma perches at the foot of Jess’s, “we’re going to start a book club!”

  Meri’s dark ponytail swings back and forth as she looks from me to the other counselors. “What’s a book club?”

  “It means we’re all going to read the same book at the same time,” Jess explains, holding up a copy of Understood Betsy. “This one. And then we’ll get together once a week and talk about it.”

  “I thought this was going to be something fun!” groans Grace Friedman.

  “Reading together sounds like school,” says her friend Mia, and Kate Kwan nods too. Tara is looking as if she might cry. But then, she always does.

  “There will be snacks,” I assure them, and the campers perk up at this. All except Amy, whose forehead puckers in concern.

  “But we’re not allowed to have food in the cabins,” she whispers. “It says so in the rule book.”

  “So don’t tell anybody, okay?” I hold my finger to my lips.

  “We’re all in a book club back home, and we always have snacks,” Megan explains. “At our kickoff meetings, we usually go out for ice cream.”

  “Ice cream!” squeals Meri, and Emma shushes her.

  “Okay, enough about the snacks, it’s time to talk about the book,” says Jess. “Your counselors are going to take turns reading it aloud to you during rest hour, and then, when we have our book club meetings, we’ll all talk about it together.”

  “And have snacks, right?” Meri sounds anxious.

  Emma looks over at Megan and Becca and me and bugs her eyes at us in mock exasperation. “Yes, and have snacks.”

  “During rest hour?” Tara asks.

  “No, just at our meetings,” Emma tells her.

  “Can we have our thnacks now?” asks Pippa.

  Emma sighs. Becca and Jess are biting their lips, trying not to laugh. Megan shakes her head in disbelief. I just grin. None of them have little sisters. This is totally the way Chloe thinks. She has a one-track mind, especially when treats are involved.

  “Why not?” I say, getting up and pulling the box with the pumpkin whoopie pies out from under my bed. “No time like the present. And speaking of presents, Pippa’s aunt sent along our snacks for tonight.”

  “My aunt True? I love her!” cries Pippa, and Meri clamps a hand over her cabinmate’s mouth to shush her.

  While I’m passing around the whoopie pies, Emma hands out pieces of paper. “This is a Fun Fact sheet,” she tells the girls. “We do this in our book club back at home, too. It’s so you girls can learn a little something about the author.”

  “Emma is turning into her mother right before our eyes,” I whisper to my friends.

  FUN FACTS ABOUT DOROTHY

  1) Dorothy Canfield Fisher was born Dorothea Frances Canfield on February 17, 1879, in Lawrence, Kansas.

  2) She was named for a character in a novel: Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Her family called her “Dolly” when she was growing up.

  3) Her father was a professor and her mother was an artist and writer.

  4) Dorothy spent summers at her grandparents’ home in Arlington, Vermont, and would later move there permanently with her husband.

  5) When she was ten, she moved to Paris for a year with her mother, who was pursuing her art studies.

  6) Dorothy took fencing and boxing in high school, as well as swimming and diving.

  “Sounds like a kindred spirit,” I say approvingly when I read this.

  7) She flatly refused to wear a corset.

  “Definitely a kindred spirit,” I add.

  8) Dorothy once said: “A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.”

  “Great quote,” I tell Emma. “It sounds like something my mom would say.”

  “Yeah,” she replies. “Mine too.”

  “I love it that she was named after a character in a novel,” says Jess. “Just like you and Darcy, Emma.”

  Emma’s mother is a Jane Austen nut, and she named Emma and her brother after characters from a couple of Jane Austen’s books.

  “Everybody ready for me to start the story?” Jess asks, and our campers all nod. “Okay, here we go then: Understood Betsy, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher.”

  “When this story begins, Elizabeth Ann, who is the heroine of it, was a little girl of nine, who lived with her Great-aunt Harriet in a medium-sized city in a medium-sized State in the middle of the country; and that’s all you need to know about the place, for it’s not the important thing in the story; and anyhow you know all about it because it was probably very much like the place you live in yourself.”

  I lean back against the cabin wall and close my eyes. I actually really like being read aloud to. I always have. My dad used to read to me when I was little, and sometimes now when my mother is putting Chloe to bed, I go in and sit on the floor and listen while she reads to her. My little sister loves bedtime stories. She’s especially crazy about the silly ones that Stanley makes up for h
er—especially the dorky ongoing adventures of this character he calls “the fastest little weasel in the forest.”

  All of a sudden our cabin door flies open with a loud bang.

  I jump, startled, and our campers all shriek and clutch one another.

  Felicia is standing in the doorway. Sergeant Marge is right behind her.

  “I came back early from my night off, and I couldn’t find you!” Felicia says accusingly to Emma. “I was worried, so I went and got Marge.”

  “What’s going on in here?” the head counselor demands.

  “We’re, uh, reading,” says Jess.

  “Doesn’t look like that’s all you’re doing.” Sergeant Marge’s eyes narrow as she spots the whoopie pie box. “Is that food?”

  “Um,” I say, sliding the evidence under the bed with my big toe. “Maybe?”

  She glowers at me, an expression I’m beginning to know all too well. “You know the rules. No food in the cabins, no exceptions.”

  Tara starts to cry. Amy Osborne quickly follows suit, and one look at Freddie and Nica tells me they’re on the verge.

  “I want to go home!” Meri whimpers.

  So much for the homesickness cure, and so much for getting our counselor-camper book club off to a good start.

  Final score? Sergeant Marge and Felicia: one. Cassidy? That would be another big fat zero, sport.

  Megan

  “Elizabeth Ann had never had anything to do with children younger than herself, and she felt very pleased and important to have anybody look up to her.”

  —Understood Betsy

  “This is the life!” says Becca, leaning back in her chair on the Art Studio deck and lifting her face to the sun. We have ten minutes before the next group of campers descends, and we’re making the most of it.

  “No kidding.” I lean back too. Closing my eyes, I listen to the breeze rustling through the branches overhead and the lazy lap of water against the shore a few yards below. I’m more of a city girl than an outdoors girl, but even I have to admit this is a pretty fabulous place. “So,” I continue, “what are we going to do about Amy?”

  Becca whooshes out her breath.

  Little Amy Osborne is still our problem camper. At least she’s not crying herself to sleep every night like she did the first week she was here. But she’s still scared of everything in sight, and she’s still homesick. Having Sergeant Marge burst in on our first book club meeting didn’t help either.

  Plus, somehow Amy has convinced herself that her parents are going to move away while she’s here in New Hampshire.

  “This isn’t ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ ” I’ve assured her over and over. “You haven’t been dumped in the forest to fend for yourself. Besides, you just got a letter from your parents, remember? Same return address. And didn’t they tell you they’re planning to come for Parents’ Weekend?”

  I sympathize, really I do. Amy is an only child, like me, and she’s used to being part of a tight family unit. Plus, she’s never been away from home for this long. But anything outside of her comfort zone, which pretty much means anywhere beyond her violin, is intimidating and requires lots of hand-holding and pep talks. The swim test was a huge deal; so was her first hike. Water skiing and wake tubing are out of the question, of course. Even our super-fun Cabin Night canoe bubble bath last week—which was a big hit with all of our other campers—drove Amy to tears, thanks to a run-in with a drowned June bug.

  “How do you solve a problem like our Amy?” sings Becca softly, to the familiar tune from The Sound of Music. “I don’t know what else we can do, Megs. Just continuing doing what we’re doing, I guess. Gwen says campers are like plants, remember? We need to give them—”

  “Plenty of water and sunshine, I know.”

  Encouragement and love, Gwen keeps telling us, are the water and sunshine that campers thrive on, and the secret ingredients to being successful counselors.

  Gwen totally saved our bacon after the book club fiasco.

  Sergeant Marge was breathing fire after she spotted the whoopie pie leftovers. Leaving Felicia with all of our campers, she hauled the rest of us over to the Director’s Cottage for a showdown. I guess she figured Gwen would bawl us out, and maybe even fire us. In fact, I think she was secretly hoping for that. But after Emma and Jess finished explaining what we were doing and why, Gwen had just smiled.

  “Brilliant!” she’d said. “We told you girls to be creative, didn’t we, Marge? I can’t think of a more creative cure for homesickness than this one.” She’d looked over at the head counselor, who was still clearly unhappy with us, and lowering her voice to a stage whisper, added, “I think we can stretch the rules this once.”

  Gwen made the book club official, and told us we could use Hilltop Lodge for our meetings. Hilltop is just down the path from the Art Studio, and it’s smaller and cozier than Lower Lodge. Plus, it has a woodstove. One night a week, our three cabins will have it all to ourselves. We’ve got everything figured out—each of us will take a turn hosting a meeting, and then during the last week of camp we’ll have a big end-of-the-summer and end-of-the-book party.

  Shrieks of laughter pierce the quiet, signaling that the next group of campers are on their way. Becca and I haul ourselves out of our chairs and go back inside, where two tables are already prepped with supplies for the craft we have planned for second period: Popsicle stick keepsake boxes.

  For the next hour, I’m up to my elbows in glue guns and glitter, shells, sequins, tiny pinecones, acorns, beads, fabric rosettes, and paint. Becca and I make our way around the tables, instructing and offering suggestions. It’s not as easy as it sounds. There’s a wide age spread among the campers, and some of the younger girls are struggling.

  “Mine is stupid,” grumbles Meri, gazing with envy at the turquoise perfection of a painted box belonging to one of the girls from Outback, the cabin on the Hill for the oldest campers.

  “No it isn’t.” I hand her a small blue jay feather. “Here, why don’t you glue this to the lid, right there between the acorns? It matches your pretty eyes.”

  She gives me a shy smile, and I move along to Carter Stevens from Cassidy and Jess’s cabin. Carter is carefully stenciling the outline of a leaf on the lid of her box. “Nice,” I tell her, nodding. “Is it for you?”

  She shakes her head. “It’s a present for my best friend back at home.”

  “Maybe you could paint a message for her inside,” I suggest. “You know, as a surprise for when she opens it.”

  Carter’s face lights up. “Sweet!”

  No one is quite finished by the time the lunch bell rings, so the girls place their projects on one of the studio’s many shelves.

  “You can come back any day this week and finish up,” Becca tells them.

  The two of us do a quick tidy-up after the campers leave, then head down the path to the Dining Hall.

  “I’m having fun so far,” says Becca, linking her arm through mine. “How about you?”

  I nod.

  “Still regretting not going to New York?”

  I laugh. “I’ve hardly had time to even think about New York!” It’s true—being a counselor is all-consuming.

  “Flash said they’d let you do the internship next summer, right?”

  “Yeah,” I reply. “I made Wolfgang promise.”

  “Fabulous, darling!” Becca’s voice swoops dramatically in a Wolfgang impression.

  I have to pinch myself sometimes, to think that I’m actually friends with one of the top editors at one of the top fashion magazines in the world. Wolfgang and I have known each other since I was in sixth grade. He took me under his wing, encouraged my interest in fashion, and even hired me to cover Fashion Week in Paris as a teen correspondent for Flash a couple of years ago.

  He also helped me with my blog. Fashionista Jane got me in a lot of trouble for a while there, thanks to an excess of what my mother calls “snark,” but I’ve had a lot of fun with it these past few years. It’s temporarily on ho
ld for the summer, since there’s not much to blog about anyway, fashion-wise, between sleepy Pumpkin Falls and a camp full of girls in uniforms. I can’t wait to fire it up again this fall, though—in New York! I already have the title for my first post: “Fashionista Jane Takes a Bite of the Big Apple.” It will be fun to record my first impressions of life in the city through the eyes of my slightly snarky alter ego.

  Tuna melts are on the menu for lunch—not my favorite sandwich, but I’m hungry enough to eat just about anything. For some reason, I’m starving almost all the time here at camp. So is Becca. She says it’s all the fresh air and exercise we’re getting, but I’m not sure about that, because really the only exercise I’m getting is walking back and forth to the Art Studio. And to the Biffy, and the Dining Hall, and the Lower Lodge, and—okay, maybe she’s right. That’s a lot more walking than I usually do.

  As I’m wolfing down my lunch, Cassidy Sloane–style, I notice Amy and Harper toying with their uneaten sandwiches.

  “You know the rules, girls,” I remind them, watching as Amy pokes at the tuna in disgust. “Two bites.”

  They both grimace at me. Amy and Harper hate this rule. We’re supposed to strictly enforce it, though. It’s part of the whole “Broadening Horizons for over a Century” thing.

  “Girls.” I try to sound firm without being stern. Stern makes Amy cry.

  Harper holds her nose and forces herself to take a bite. Amy slowly follows suit, swallowing with painful effort.

  “I don’t like tuna melts,” she whispers, her big dark eyes filling up with tears.

  I don’t either, I want to tell her, but I don’t. “Camp is about broadening your horizons, remember?” I say cheerfully instead, channeling Gwen. “That means trying new things—even tuna melts.”

  “What’s the most fun thing you did this morning?” asks Becca, in an attempt to distract them.

  Harper brightens. “I passed my float test in swimming.”

  I reach across the table and slap her a high five. “Wow, that’s great! You can go out to the big float now!”

  Becca turns to Amy. “How about you, Amy?”