At the mention of a dance, everyone started talking over him. “Quiet down, people! A few last things.” He glanced at his sheet. “I’m missing medical information from some of you.” He listed their names and with a more serious tone, he said, “Blake Jones, I need a word with you privately as soon as you finish breakfast. Please meet me in my office.”
Mallory sat up straighter and felt her pulse quicken. Something was wrong. With a feeling of dread, Mallory followed Fozzie back to his office and sat down in the chair opposite his desk.
Fozzie gave her a penetrating stare. Had he realized she wasn’t Blake? She couldn’t imagine any other reason for her to be in trouble. Trying to keep herself from panicking too much, she took a deep breath.
He shook his head and said, “Blake, I’m very disappointed that we’re already having a conversation in my office. I thought I made my expectations very clear. While the toilet paper mess is more silly than serious, you are on a tight leash. I thought you understood that.”
What? Her mouth dropped open in shock. Why would he think it was her? “Sir, I didn’t do that.”
He didn’t even blink. “Some of the other campers saw you. Given your record, I’m inclined to believe them.” Fozzie wrinkled his forehead and tapped the top of his desk. “I want to give you another chance, though.”
“But I didn’t do it! I was in my bunk all night!” Mallory wanted to scream, but she knew that wouldn’t help. This was so unfair. First someone dyed her hair orange and now they blamed a TP mess on her. She didn’t know how to convince him that it hadn’t been her, especially when Blake’s word didn’t count for that much.
Fozzie’s mouth flattened into a grim line. “Okay. Maybe it wasn’t you.”
Mallory breathed an audible sigh of relief.
“You’re not getting off scot-free, regardless.” He stopped and chuckled. “Isn’t that a brand of toilet paper?”
How could he crack jokes at a time like this? She was being falsely accused of totally immature pranks, and someone had wrecked her hair. Mallory had no words.
Fozzie filled in the silence with punishment for the crime she had not committed. “I want you to clean up all the toilet paper.”
“All of it?” How she was going to get it out of the trees?
“You’re a resourceful girl. I’m sure you’ll figure it out. I’d like it if it was cleaned up by the time I get back from Costco.” Mallory was willing to bet he was going on a toilet paper run.
After swallowing her pride, Mallory threw on sunscreen and a ball cap—because she didn’t need any more freckles than she already had—and set to work. Holding an armful of toilet paper, she had to wonder if she really understood the rules of being Blake. She might have to revisit her previous assumptions because this was not going to plan.
A chuckle made her glance up over her armful of toilet paper. It was Ben, walking by at a leisurely disaster-appreciation speed. Mallory glared. He was definitely getting an eyeful. Between the orange hair and the streamers of toilet paper, she was a full-on catastrophe. The smile plastered on his face was smug, and he had the nerve to call out, “Nice hair, Blake.”
Before she could think of a smart retort, Cook Betsy, a no-nonsense woman with a head full of familiar orange-colored hair poked her head out of the kitchen. “That shade does look lovely on you, dear.”
Mallory almost died when she saw that Cook Betsy sported the exact same shade of orange. Whoever pranked her must have stolen Cook Betsy’s supplies, which was just sad. Mallory sucked in her pride, though, and complimented Betsy. “Thanks so much. I love your hair, too.”
Based on his expression, Ben found this exchange highly amusing. He stuck around a few seconds too long, though. Betsy said, “Young man—Benjamin, is it? Why don’t you scurry up the tree and help this young lady clean up the top branches. She’s been hard at work all morning.”
Ben only looked slightly sullen before he agreed.
Mallory would have laughed and pointed if Betsy hadn’t still been standing there. Then, Ben had the gall to say, “I was going to offer anyway. I’m pretty sure Blake can’t even climb a ladder.”
She volleyed back with the best smart retort she could think of: “Oh, I can climb a ladder, Ben. In fact, I can climb a tree.” The minute it came out of her mouth, she wanted to kick herself. She couldn’t climb a tree. At least she’d never tried. But he was so arrogant. She wanted to make him eat his words.
When he scoffed at her boast, she had no choice but to climb the tree. After a quick prayer, she grasped the lowest branch and started to pull herself up. It was the most unnatural thing she’d ever done in her life. If she hadn’t already committed, she would have given up, but now that he’d seen her awkwardly hoist herself onto the lowest possible branch, she was in. Trying to act casual, she unwrapped the toilet paper from the one measly branch and flashed a smile, just to let him know he needed to eat his words.
When she looked down, she saw that she had Ben’s attention. He was gazing up with the expression of…was that concern?
Bravely, she climbed up even higher and pulled down a bunch of TP. When she was ready to come down, she realized that she wasn’t so sure how to get out. To avoid moving, she cleaned up every tiny square inch she could reach from that branch, feeling more and more nervous. If only he would just leave for a minute, to use the restroom or get a drink of water, she could call out and ask someone else for help.
Ben must have noticed her dilemma because he held his hand up. “Let me help you.”
Channeling Blake, Mallory stared at him imperiously. “I can get down just fine by myself, thank you very much.”
He didn’t look convinced, but how hard could it be to get out of a tree? She stepped from where she was onto the lowest branch, thinking she could just sit down and then hop off like she was getting off a couch.
“Uh, I wouldn’t do that—” Ben started to say.
Her idea was fine. She’d wipe that skeptical look right off his face—there was more than one way out of a tree. On the count of three, she’d just slide down the branch. “One, two—”
“No! Lower yourself down fir—”
Like she was going to listen to him. Three.
The moment she jumped, Ben shouted, “No!” and stepped in front of her, either to catch her or stop her. It was hard to tell.
Whatever he’d intended, he became the thing she jumped out of a tree onto. She launched herself from the branch onto Ben. His arms were out, as if to catch her, but he failed. Essentially, she clobbered him and knocked him into a bush.
“Why did you do that?” Mallory shouted from her spot sitting right on top of him.
He lifted his head up a little and groaned. “How much do you weigh anyway?”
She propped herself up on her elbows. “Are you calling me fat?”
He snorted. “No. That was a solid flying tackle, though.” He rubbed his head.
Even if he dyed her hair orange, Mallory didn’t want him dead. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. I just thought you were going to break something. I thought I could catch you.”
Mallory glanced over her shoulder. True. It was a little high. That was nice, but dumb.
“You’re okay, really?”
“Yep,” he said. “Fine.”
That’s when she really noticed that she was lying on him. The horrible guy who’d made her whole morning total hell, but also a guy. She’d never been pressed up against a guy, let alone an attractive football player. He didn’t seem like the type to wear cologne, but he smelled amazing. Her brain went haywire. Instead of being suspicious and mad, she suddenly wanted to press her face into him and inhale. She wanted to tell her pulse to slow down because he was a stupid jerk, but it kept on racing.
When she took in Ben’s expression, his dark eyes looked even darker. Knowing Ben, it was probably an idea to torture her. But for a moment everything fell away and she could feel nothing but the two of them pressed up against each other. It made her
breathe too fast.
For a few seconds too long he seemed speechless. When he shook it off, his voice a little softer, a little less caustic, he said, “You don’t look too bad in orange hair, Jones.”
Was that a compliment or… From the look in his eyes, she decided it was a jab. The spell was over.
When she scrambled to her feet and brushed some stray leaves and sticks off her clothes, Derek, one of the counselors, trotted over. “Nice tackle,” he said. He gave Mallory an obvious up-and-down look and said, “I’m having a bonfire later on tonight, if you’re interested.”
She was. This was exactly the kind of thing she’d been hoping for—acceptance! As Mallory, she never would have been invited to a party. Maybe her Blake charade wasn’t going as poorly as she had thought. She looked over her shoulder to make sure Ben was fully aware of her success.
Clearly, he was trying to look unimpressed, but she thought he looked a little sulky, just a smidge.
As an afterthought, Derek glanced at Ben and said, “You can come, too. If you want.”
Ben gave a perfunctory, “Thanks, dude.” He didn’t look impressed by the invite.
Hopefully Ben disliked Derek enough to stay away from the party. She’d never had so many things go wrong in her life. It had been a whole lifetime of quiet and—Bam!—two days of complete chaos. Pretending to be Blake was part of the problem, but not all of it. If she had to assign blame, she would say, 60 percent Ben and 30 percent Blake (for causing the problems to begin with), and 10 percent her for going along with it. That meant, if her math was right, avoiding Ben would make her life 60 percent less chaotic and confusing.
Chapter Eight
Too Pretty to Trust
Ben
Damn. How could he despise Blake one minute, break her fall from a tree the next, and then fight the impulse to run his hands up her…well, all over? It was just a natural physical reaction, he told himself. She was an attractive girl. She was on top of him. It was only natural. His inner monologue was going full-blown Ms. Shapiro, the uncomfortably-open-about-everything sex ed teacher who passed out condoms by the bagful. God, he hated nothing more than talking to middle-aged women about sex. It was disturbing that his sworn enemy could reduce him to a horny idiot by simply falling on him.
He scooped up another armful of TP streamers and put them in the waste bin. Now that he’d been roped into cleanup, the TP prank had lost some of its luster.
“Ben and Blake,” Fozzie called out, as if they might dart. Ben had to admit, Fozzie only stopped to talk to him if he had a job in mind.
As they stood waiting for his orders, Fozzie slowed down and did his name justice with a big stretch and a belly scratch. He looked like he’d just emerged from hibernation. “I was hoping to round up two senior campers and here you are.”
Fozzie gave them their marching orders. The only benefit to scavenger duty—they were momentarily excused from toilet-paper duty. “If I remember right, there’s a box of orange flags in that storage shed somewhere.” He gestured to a shed behind the mess hall. “Grab them and plant them in spots around the area, places the younger campers can find. Don’t stray too far. We don’t want to send them out into the woods by themselves.” As if he just remembered, he said, “And don’t forget to write down where you leave them. I always forget that part.”
“I’ll grab the flags,” said Ben. He’d seen them last night when he was snooping around in the shed. In addition to a basket of flags and sports equipment, the shed in question contained twenty or so years of unclaimed lost and found items. It was a clown car of an outbuilding. Last night he’d made a few discoveries, including one bottle of sherbet hair dye, obviously Cook Betsy’s. It must’ve fallen out of her bag and been placed in the shed-shaped black hole that passed for lost and found. When he’d combed through the pile, Ben had felt himself getting the garage sale high his mom got. One promising sale and she was all dilated pupils, low impulse control, and euphoria. It usually ended in a cat-shaped cookie jar or a broken sewing machine.
After grabbing the flags, he found Blake at the edge of the woods. Instead of checking her phone obsessively like normal, she was staring into the trees, almost like she was interested in nature, but there was no way. With her cut-offs, T-shirt, and ball cap, she looked as down-to-earth as she did pretty. He knew that Blake wasn’t down-to-earth. His mind was just messing with him. He needed to scrub that memory of her pressed against him from his mind. Condoms taped to car. Fetal pig rumor. Strip-o-gram—that’s what he needed to focus on. Thinking about Blake in any other way totally weirded him out. The less time they spent together, the less time he’d have to get confused. Gruffly, he barked, “Let’s hurry up this scavenger hunt.”
“Aren’t you cranky all of a sudden.”
If only she knew. Ben shrugged and followed the beacon of Blake’s Day-Glo orange head to the wooded area. Technically, the color was sherbet, but it did have a Day-Glo look about it.
Blake, still focused on the task at hand, said, “Let’s stick a flag here.” She pulled out her phone. “I’ll take pictures so we remember where we put them. Dammit,” she said, looking at her screen. “My phone died. Can I borrow yours?”
“No.”
“Seriously? I just want to take a picture.”
He shook his head. “I’ll do it. Last time I loaned my phone to a Bellevue brat, they cracked the screen and laughed.” It felt weird to be so argumentative, but he absolutely couldn’t let his guard down around her. Kissable lips or no, she was not trustworthy.
With an icy stare, she said, “That’s probably because you were a jerk first.”
He held up his phone. “Do you know how much this cost?”
“Enlighten me, Oh Wise One.”
“This is like a month’s worth of bussing tables for me.” He looked at her pointedly. “My daddy doesn’t foot all my bills, unlike some people I know.”
“You talk about ‘Bellevue kids’ like we are one person. I think you’re prejudiced.”
Ben threw back his head and laughed. “That is funny.”
“Look up the definition of prejudice in the dictionary. Someone broke your iPhone and now you hate the whole school.”
It was more than that, though. It was the fact that nobody at Bellevue had to earn anything. They just expected to be taken care of. Ben started at the school a year ago. His mom worked two jobs just to pay for stuff like the electricity and food. The kids at Bellevue used iThings like they were paper plates and paid for everything on someone else’s credit. Blake had spent more on that strip-o-gram than his family spent on monthly rent.
In the beginning, he had legit tried to fit in. He paid to get his phone fixed and spent the rest of his limited cash on burritos with the guys after football practice, but it wasn’t sustainable. There was no way he could earn enough money with after-school jobs to keep up with the Bellevue crowd. Every day it was something new. It would start with burritos—$10. Next, they might all want to play paintball—$20. Then, they’d be like, “let’s see a movie”—$15. Then, it was “Want to go to Aspen with me over break?”—a bajillion dollars. It was better not to even try.
His mom saved extra ketchup packets from McDonalds to use at home, and most of the furniture was vintage, a.k.a. stuff from the side of the road or the thrift store.
Blake scrunched her nose like she was thinking. “Well, if we can’t take pictures, how are we going to remember everything? I don’t have any paper. Is it worth walking back?”
Blake had a point. He’d take pictures. As he pulled his phone out and was swiping over to get the camera, Blake grabbed it. “Wha—?”
Before he knew what had happened, the phone slipped through her fingers and landed on a big rock. What the hell had she been thinking?
Blake was frozen, her eyes silver-dollar big as she waited for him to react.
“I told you I didn’t want to—” he started to say.
“Did it break?” she cut him off in a soft voice as if talking any
louder would make it worse.
It had broken. There was a big old crack going through the center of the screen. He shook his head. “Dammit.”
Her hand went to her mouth. “I’m so sorry. That was my fault.”
They’d been alone five times since camp started. The first time, she’d stabbed him. The second time, she’d tackled him. Now, his phone was broken. If he was keeping score, which he was, it was 4:1, with Blake in the lead. The question: was she playing or was she truly the biggest klutz in the world?
Blake held out her hand. “Let me see.” After a quick inspection, she said, “I’ll pay to fix it.”
His mouth sagged open. First she broke the damn phone. Then she offered to pay to fix it. There was something weird going on. Maybe it was opposite day and he was the only one who didn’t get the memo. This girl had him so confused.
A few hours later, Ben and George were enjoying “Quiet Time” on the front porch. The heat was baking the smell right out of all the dirty laundry hanging over the railing. Ben figured they probably wouldn’t even have to wash the old clothes after they let UV rays bake all the bacteria out.
Ben cracked open Spite, Malice, and Revenge. The authors advised that he create a file on his target. After today, he felt like that wasn’t a bad idea. He was clearly missing part of the picture. He couldn’t decide whether it was very international spy of him or grade school-ish, but either way, he was taking notes. “George, I’m going to start a file on her.”
“You mean Blake?”
“Obviously.”
Ben wrote down some facts and showed the paper to George. “Whadya think?”
Biographical Data
Name: Blake Jones
Age: 16
Siblings: none
Jerk father: lawyer. Family tobacco money
Mother: a trophy wife who flaked out and skipped town. Possible mental breakdown. Rumored to be a Vegas showgirl now
Boyfriend: Luke Culpepper, possibly
Totally superficial
Breaking the Rules of Revenge Page 6
