Yours Till Niagara Falls, Abby
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
A night before camp disaster
Ma was sewing one last name tape onto a pair of green camp shorts. “Calm down, honey,” she said. “You look like you’re going to jump out of your skin.”
“I can’t help it.” Abby distractedly crammed the T-shirt into her overstuffed suitcase. “I’ve waited so long and now it’s almost here—my super-fantabulous, perfectly perfect summer.”
Right before dinner, the phone rang.
“It’s me.” Merle’s voice had a funny echo.
“I know that,” Abby said. “Where have you been?”
Merle sounded like she was taking a deep breath. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said quickly, “but I’m at Lenox Hill Hospital. During dance class, I fell and broke my ankle.”
“BROKE YOUR ANKLE?” Abby stared into the phone.
“I’m going to be in a cast for at least four weeks.”
“FOUR WEEKS! You poor kid.” That was a shocker! But there was a bright side. “Hey, now you won’t have to worry about any of the sports stuff at camp!”
There was an uneasy pause. “Abby, don’t you see? ... I can’t go.
PUFFIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Hastings House, Publishers, Inc., 1979 Published by PaperStar, a member of The Putnam Berkley Group, Inc., 1997
This edition published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2008
Copyright © Jane O’Connor, 1979 All rights reserved
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HASTINGS HOUSE EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
O’Connor, Jane.
Yours till Niagara falls, Abby.
SUMMARY: Abby faces two months of summer camp without her best friend.
[1. Camping—fiction. 2. Friendship—fiction]
I. Apple, Margot. II. Title
PZ7.0222YO [Fic] 79-19782
eISBN : 978-1-101-07832-7
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
http://us.penguingroup.com
For my mother and father
1
NEVER IN ALL her life had Abby Kimmel been so filled with a sense of purpose. Her best friend was in trouble and she was coming to the rescue. It was that simple ... or almost.
It had started yesterday. After school Abby raced over to Merle’s apartment. Blood of the Vampire was on the 4:30 movie and they’d both looked forward to watching it all week.
The Diamonds lived on the top floor of an old New York City brownstone and Abby never liked standing alone in the dark, creepy hallway. She pressed hard on the doorbell.
There were footsteps inside and in a second Merle’s mother opened the door looking flustered. “Abby! Sweety. Am I glad to see you.” Mrs. Diamond was puffing away on an unlit cigarette. “I’m frantic. Honestly, the way Merle’s carrying on! But she’ll listen to you. ... She’d go to the moon if you told her to.”
Abby rushed in to find Merle sprawled face down on her bed, crying with abandon. “Merle? What’s the matter ?” She had never seen Merle so upset. Usually she was so calm and unexcitable. It was Abby who was always facing one crisis after another.
“Oh, Abby I can’t believe they’re doing this.” Merle sat up and hiccuped loudly. “They’re sending me away this summer—to camp!”
“Wow, you at camp!” Abby exclaimed. “No offense—I’ m not exactly Tracy Austin myself—but you’re hopeless at sports. ”
“I know, I know,” Merle said miserably, hiccuping again. “Only Dad’s going to be in summer stock on Cape Cod—”
“So? Can’t you just go, too? You got to go to Disneyworld when he did that TV special.” Abby thought Merle was incredibly lucky to have an actor for a father. She got to go to so many neat places. Abby’s father was just a tax lawyer and the one time she’d been taken along on a business trip she’d eaten a rotten eclair and thrown up for two days.
“I’d love to go to Cape Cod,” Merle sniffed. “Only Mom has got it into her head that I’m going to turn out warped or something from spending so much time around actors. She wants me to have a normal summer outdoors with kids my own age. She says I’ll be enriched by the experience.”
Abby groaned in sympathy. “She makes you sound like a slice of Wonderbread, for God’s sake!”
“You’ve just got to think of some way to get me out of this.” Merle reached over to her night table and handed Abby a brochure for Camp Pinecrest. The soggy, tear-stained pages were checkered with photographs of girls playing softball, playing basketball, playing hockey. There were girls sitting cross-legged around a campfire, girls weaving rather lopsided-looking baskets and girls waterskiing while they waved enthusiastically at the camera. And every single one of them was grinning from ear to ear. Just looking at all those smiles almost made Abby’s jaws ache. But the girls sure looked like they were having fun.
Abby stared at those smiles for a minute. “I hate to tell you,” she said, “but I honestly think this place looks kind of nice. The kids in the pictures don’t exactly look like they’re suffering.”
Merle snorted contemptuously. “That’s easy for you to say.”
“No, Merle. I mean it,” Abby said thoughtfully. “After all, camp can’t be just sports. Look here,” she pointed at the brochure. “I bet you get to sleep in little tents and tell ghost stories and roast marshmallows.” Abby plopped down on the bed and leaned against the wall. “I bet it’s more fun than staying in some rented house at some dumb beach every summer. All I do is get sunburned and listen to Ma yelling that I shouldn’t swim out past my ankles. And there are never any kids around. Just Emily.”
Now it was Merle’s turn to groan sympathetically. Merle disliked Abby’s sister Emily, who was four and a half and horrible, almost as much as Abby did.
Suddenly Abby sat bolt upright. “Hey, wait a minute!” She clutched the brochure tightly and the look in her eyes became feverish. “What if we could go to camp together ... ”
“Together!” Merle sat up. “Oh, Abby! If you were with me, it would be okay.”
“Okay!” Abby said. “I think it’d be great—like one long sl
eepover!” And it struck Abby that all her truly spectacular ideas seemed to come to her this way. In a flash. “Now shhh. I want to read this brochure more carefully.” Abby cleared her throat. “ ‘Camp Pinecrest, pearl of Lake Pocahontas,’ ” she read aloud. “‘Are you a happy, healthy, fun-loving girl between the ages of eight and fourteen?’ Yes, of course. ‘Are you looking for eight weeks of unforgettable fun?’ ” She looked at Merle and shrugged her shoulders. “Sure, why not? ‘Are you ready to explore new horizons?’ ”
“No!” said Merle emphatically. “That sounds scary.”
Abby rolled her eyes. “Don’t be such a poop.” But actually that question had stopped her too. She liked to think of herself as adventurous. And to the outside world Abby knew she appeared bold and confident—“spunky” was what Grandma called her—because she wisecracked so much. But down deep Abby wondered whether she was brave at all or just had a big mouth. After all what “exploring” had she done? She’d gone to the same school since kindergarten, lived in the same apartment all her life, known all the same kids for as long as she could remember. And she was happy that way. She liked counting on things to stay exactly as they’d always been. Like her friendship with Merle. That was one thing that would never change, for sure. Abby smiled at her friend. “Merle, don’t worry about that part. Look, I’d be petrified too if I had to go alone, not knowing anybody. But if we both went, then that wouldn’t be a problem.”
Merle seemed to see the logic in that. “But do you think they’d ever say yes? Your parents, I mean.”
Abby pushed away Merle’s worry with a careless wave of her hand. “Of course they’ll say yes. They’ll think it’s a terrific idea. Ma especially. She’s always saying how she’d love to see what I’d do without her around to pick up after me and keep track of all the stuff I forget.” Abby jumped off the bed. “Listen. Just leave everything to me. I’ Il talk to Ma and Daddy tonight and I’ll write for more brochures.”
Merle managed a grateful watery smile. “Abby, I knew you’d come through for me. What would I ever do without you?”
Abby socked her in the arm affectionately. “If you can’t count on your best friend, who can you count on?”
“I feel better already,” Merle was saying as she led Abby to the front door. “Listen, I’ll come over tomorrow right after my dance lesson. The original Dracula is on ‘Monster Matinee.’ ”
“Vonderful,” Abby crooned, imitating her idol, Bela Lugosi. “Duhn’t be late.” She rolled her eyes and swooped out the door. “I vill be vaiting.”
2
THE KIMMELS’ apartment was on the fourth floor of a big, red brick building overlooking Central Park. With a sinking feeling in her stomach, Abby looked out the living room window and watched Merle, punctual as always, hurrying up the block. Abby had the front door open by the time Merle got off the elevator.
Immediately Merle pounced on her. “What’d they say?” she shouted, practically shaking Abby.
“They said no,” Abby admitted lamely.
“Doomed! I’m doomed,” Merle wailed while she hung up her parka. That was Merle: even in times of stress, she was neat.
“Now don’t get upset. I’m not giving up.” Abby swung a protective arm around Merle’s shoulders. “Nobody nudges like I nudge. So just give me time. Ma and Daddy will come around.” She steered Merle into her room and put up the Do Not Disturb sign which, unfortunately, had never yet kept Emily from barging in.
“So give me the gory details,” Merle said, slumping in Abby’s rocker.
“Well,” Abby sighed, “first Ma said she was very sorry you were unhappy about camp but that was no reason for me to go—just to cheer you up.” She paused. “But if you ask me, the big problem is they don’t take me seriously. Daddy kept bringing up all my other ideas that didn’t turn out like I thought. Like the trumpet lessons.”
“No offense but that’s true.”
Abby frowned. Merle had the irritating habit of being totally objective. “How was I to know you needed lungs like King Kong to play that instrument?”
“Yeah but you quit Brownie troop, too, right away.” Merle pointed out, rocking maddeningly back and forth in the squeaky rocker. “And remember last spring when you got me to chip in on those lemons with you? We only had our lemonade stand two days before you decided it was boring. We lost a fortune! And—”
“Okay, okay,” Abby broke in impatiently. She turned up the TV volume. “Whose side are you on anyway ?”
Abby scowled at the television screen. Of course it was true some of her ideas hadn’t been perfect. But if a plan didn’t work out like you expected, why bother to stick it out? That wasn’t being a quitter, like Merle and Daddy made it seem. That was just being smart. “Anyway,” Abby said defensively, “going to camp together is different. It really is a great idea. I just have to convince Ma and Daddy.”
Then she shut up. A ghostly apparition floated across the screen followed by a blood-curdling scream. “Monster Matinee” was starting.
In answer to Abby’s special delivery letter, an envelope from Camp Pinecrest arrived the next Monday and Abby immediately went to work scattering brochures in strategic places—under her parents’ pillows, on the mail table in the front hall, even inside the refrigerator.
“You should see,” Abby whispered to Merle during study hall. “I practically wallpapered the apartment with those brochures. And I’m gonna leave little poems for them to find. Here’s one I just thought up.... ‘Be a buddy, Be a champ. Send Abby Kimmel to Pinecrest Camp.’—Not bad, huh?”
“I pray it works,” Merle whispered from behind her math book.
“It’ll work,” Abby assured her and then began doodling in her notebook so the study hall monitor would think she was studying.
That night after dinner Ma fished into her knitting bag and came up with a brochure instead of the mittens she was making for Emily. “Now honey, I thought we’d been through all this,” Ma said to Abby. “And stop smiling at me that way—I’m not as big a pushover as you think.”
Abby draped herself over the back of her mother’s chair and said sweetly, “But I’m just trying to prove this isn’t a whim—that I’m really serious about camp, that I’m—”
“An impossible itch,” Daddy said, coming into the living room and giving Abby a friendly swat on the rear. “Now drop it, Ab. The case is closed.”
Her parents weren’t budging. Not an inch. For two weeks Abby tried reasoning; she tried pleading; and then she tried whining even though she knew that was a big mistake. “Everybody my age goes to sleepaway, camp. It’ll be the Hartman twins’ third year at tennis camp.” But her arguments fell on deaf ears.
Merle was growing morbidly philosophical about the situation. “After all, what’s one miserable summer?” she said as they slogged through the snow one morning on their way to school. “Mom says I’m too dependent on you anyway and that it’ll be better for me to be on my own.”
Abby stopped right in her tracks. “That’s ridiculous,” she protested. “We depend on each other.” She clasped Merle’s wet, snowy mitten in her bare hand and they continued walking. “Only I let you down when I kept saying I wouldn’t. I feel awful.” Abby was all set to launch into a long attack on parents in particular and the unfairness of life in general when she glanced at the bank clock on Broadway. “Eight-fourteen!” she gasped and they both ran the last two blocks, raced up school steps, and collapsed in their seats just ahead of the late bell.
3
IT WAS ALMOST midnight. Abby had sneaked into the kitchen where she quietly dialed Merle’s number. She prayed Merle’s parents wouldn’t pick up and they didn’t. “Hey, it’s me,” Abby whispered into the receiver. “Have I got great news!”
“I could use some. Dad sent in the check for camp.”
“Cheer up.” Abby glanced down the hall to make sure her parents weren’t coming. “I overheard Ma and Daddy talking tonight and guess what? They’re coming around. They were saying how maybe camp i
sn’t such a bad idea after all.”
“No kidding! Do you really think there’s a prayer—”
“I just know everything’s going to turn out exactly like we planned,” Abby crowed into the phone. “But it’s weird. It’s like those Chinese handcuffs I have. The harder I tried with Ma and Daddy, the less I got anywhere. Now when I give up, suddenly things go my way. OOPS! I hear Ma. Gotta go!”
Abby’s parents sprang the good news—a surprise, they thought—during Saturday morning breakfast.
“You won’t ever regret this decision,” Abby said hugging them both.
“I should hope not,” Daddy grumbled good-naturedly, “for what it’s costing.”
In celebration Abby and Merle had lunch at Mel’s Pizza, then saw two Boris Karloff movies.
“Can you believe it?” Abby remarked once again when they emerged from the theater, blinking at the daylight. “Can you really believe how everything turned out so perfectly?”
“Yeah,” said Merle. “It was neat the way they got the mad scientist in the end.”
“Dodo, I mean about camp. A whole summer together! ”
“Yeah, that part is neat. Only I still can’t get worked up about playing softball for eight weeks.”
“How many times do I have to tell you?” Abby said impatiently. “It’s not going to be that way—you’ll see when the camp director comes.”
Matilda Terwilliger or Aunt Tillie, as she said all the campers called her, arrived at the Kimmels’ on a Saturday afternoon. Everyone—Merle and her parents, Ma and Daddy, even Emity—was on hand to greet her. Loaded down with a slide projector and slides, Aunt Tillie marched into the living room. She was very short and plump with cottony white hair, but jolly was not a word Abby would have picked to describe her. There was something about Aunt Tillie that made Abby feel as though she’d better sit up straight and behave. And she had a sharp way of speaking, as if she were snipping off the end of each sentence with a scissors.