Best (Boy)friend

by Melissa J Morgan

  “Count me in!” Nat said.

  “Me too!” Alyssa added.

  “Will you allow a couple campers from the bunk next door to crash the party?” Alex asked as she walked over with Brynn and Grace.

  “As long as no one mentions boys for the rest of the night,” Jenna said with a smile.

  “Deal!” Alex said, and the rest of the girls chimed in.

  “And as long as Andie and Mia say it’s okay,” Jenna added. She looked at Mia and Andie expectantly, hoping they’d say yes.

  “Give us a sec,” Andie said, motioning Becky, the counselor from 4C, over. The three girls talked, and then all nodded in agreement. “You guys can hang out in our bunk for a while, but you’ll have to wait for a half hour before you come over,” Andie said. “Because we’re all assigning final electives now.”

  Alex and Brynn squealed with excitement, and Grace grinned. “That’s worth waiting for,” she said. “Besides, the casting list just got posted for the camp play. Becky said we could check it out before we go to the bunk. We’re doing Into the Woods this year.”

  At the end of every summer, a big drama production was put on for all the campers on the night of the final banquet. Last year, the play had been Peter Pan, and Grace had played the best Wendy that Jenna had ever seen. Grace and Brynn both loved acting, and they were really great at it, too.

  “I’ve never seen that play before,” Jenna said.

  Nat clapped her hands. “It’s not a play. It’s a musical, and I love it! It’s the one that has all the fairy tales rolled into one show. That was one of the first shows my parents took me to see on Broadway.” Nat and Tori were both in drama with Brynn and Grace, but Nat had decided not to audition for the show this year because, she said, she preferred acting serious drama parts instead of musicals.

  “And I saw it when it came to L.A.,” Tori said. She’d auditioned for the part of Little Red Riding Hood, and she was practically jumping up and down with excitement now, too. She turned to Andie. “Oh, Andie, can I please go look with them?”

  Andie laughed. “Sure. Just be quick, okay?” she said, but Tori was already racing away with Grace and Brynn.

  “So, I’ll see you after we get our electives,” Alex said to Jenna, heading toward her bunk. “Wish me good luck so I’ll get sports.”

  “Good luck,” Jenna called out. “To both of us!”

  She waved good-bye, making a silent wish as she walked back to her own bunk that she and Alex would both get the electives they’d asked for.

  Once everyone got settled back at the bunk and Tori reappeared, breathlessly exclaiming that she’d gotten the part of Little Red Riding Hood in the play, Andie took out her clipboard for the final elective assignments. Jenna and the other girls all rushed over to Andie, hovering over her to view their assignments.

  “I won’t be able to give them out if you suffocate me first!” Andie laughed, but the girls were already looking for their names on the clipboard.

  “Sports and boating,” Jenna cried when she saw the electives next to her name. “Yes!”

  “Are you ready to take on nature again?” Alyssa teased Nat as she looked at the clipboard.

  “Not yet. I think I need until next year to mentally prepare myself for that,” Nat said. Last year, Nat had nature as one of her first electives, but everyone knew that the closest she wanted to get to nature was painting her nails by the lake under a tree. “I got newspaper and drama.”

  “Um, Andie?” Tori asked hesitantly. “I know I already requested drama and art, but, um, do you happen to know what electives Blake signed up for? I thought maybe I’d be able to switch mine.”

  Andie shook her head. “Sorry, Tori. I don’t think Blake’s been given anything yet. Dr. Steve wanted to see how many empty spots were left in each elective before deciding where he might fit in.”

  “Oh.” Tori’s face fell, but then she brightened. “That’s okay. Maybe he’ll end up in my art class anyway.”

  “If he does, he probably won’t want to touch the paints for fear of getting his Hugo Boss glasses dirty,” Jenna said.

  Just then, there was knock on the door, and Alex stuck her head around it. “Can we come in?”

  “Yup,” Andie said. “We just finished with electives.”

  “Us too!” Alex said, coming in with Brynn and Grace.

  Jenna caught Alex’s eye, and Alex gave her a thumbs-up sign and a big smile. That was all Jenna needed. She knew they had both gotten their first choice, and now they could play sports together for an extra hour every day.

  “We have more big news,” Brynn said with a grin after the girls had finished talking about who got what electives. “Grace and I got our parts for Into the Woods.”

  “And?” Nat asked expectantly.

  Grace beamed. “I’m Cinderella.”

  “And I’m the witch!” Brynn said, raising her hands like claws and hissing in a villainous way.

  “Congrats!” Jenna said. “You guys both get extra brownies and so does Tori, aka Little Red. The chocolate will help you all remember your lines.”

  “What?” Chelsea cried. “Since when does chocolate improve your memory?”

  Jenna grinned. “As far as I know, there’s not much that chocolate doesn’t improve,” she said, making everyone laugh.

  As Jenna dug into her candy stash, she smiled and promised herself that nothing was ever going to distract her from her friends or from the soccer field and basketball court—particularly not some fancy schmancy guy from the Hamptons. Camp was almost over, and she was going to make the rest of her time here unforgettable.