“Pass the food around,” Bob Worm said. “Let’s divvy it up.”
Then Sam noticed something. The others noticed it, too. Mr. Puffin had walked off a little distance and he had broken down. He had started crying, his shoulders rocking up and down, his grief, his anxiety, broken open and left for anyone to see.
Bob Worm ate four cookies, but the thing that surprised him most was the taste of the clementine. It was remarkable. He had only received half a fruit, maybe six tiny sections, but the flavor from the citrus was beyond description. He ate each section carefully, letting it slip and explode softly onto his tongue. He decided that he would eat a clementine every day of his life from this point forward. It was hands down the best thing he had ever eaten.
They sat around the last little bit of fire. No one had had the willpower to go back into the magazine. It didn’t matter how cold it was. They burned everything they could find and didn’t conserve anything.
Finally Harry said softly, “Here it comes.”
Bob Worm looked toward the mainland and he saw the boat coming toward them. Rather, he saw the wake spreading out and spinning white against the gray-green ocean. A blue light turned on top of the boat, so Bob guessed it was probably Coast Guard. It came at a good clip.
“Whooo hoooooo,” Sandy yelled, standing and wiggling her hips.
“Shut up, Sandy,” Mary said.
But Sandy kept dancing. Bob couldn’t say if he blamed her or not.
He felt a weird combination of emotions. Seeing Mr. Puffin crying had gotten them all twisted. It should have been fun and lighthearted — they were being rescued, after all — but it didn’t feel that way. It felt clunky and strange, and though he didn’t blame Sandy for celebrating, he also knew he couldn’t join her. No way. He felt too upside down for that. He kept thinking of Azzy and Ms. Carpenter. Somehow while they were marooned on the island, the two deaths didn’t seem quite real. They were part of this absurd adventure, and though he felt grief and sadness at their fates, he also felt he had to put it aside in order to survive.
But not anymore.
Now the full weight of what had happened hit him. It hit everyone, he guessed. They had created a sort of island morality, or island attitude, that now seemed hollow and strange. Bob couldn’t get his thoughts straight. He only knew that people were coming who would ask a lot of questions. Who would spend time digging up rocks and searching the currents for an old leaky boat.
“Guess we should get ready,” Mr. Puffin said. “Grab whatever you like.”
But Bob knew, everyone knew, there was nothing to grab. When the time came, they pushed dirt over the fire and walked empty-handed toward the boat.
Harry left the island last. He hadn’t meant to, then he did mean to. He had milled around the back of the group, letting people help them onto the boat. The guys who had come to rescue them were some kind of Delta Force, for goodness’ sake. They hit the ground with blankets and hot soup, speaking with sharp commands, taking everything over. Way over. Harry was surprised to find himself resenting their treatment. It was good treatment, no mistake, but it was clinical and exact and it bothered the heck out of Harry. It felt like he was inside a drill.
Easy, easy, easy, he wanted to tell them.
He wasn’t sure what he would have preferred, but it had something to do with pace. He wanted to mark the transition from the island to the boat, not merely let himself be swept away. He saw the same concern on Mr. Puffin’s face. They had hit him hard with questions, firing one after another, and Mr. Puffin, shocked, had hardly been able to respond. Naturally the rescue team wanted answers, but the answers were not simple, and Mr. Puffin did not give a good account of himself in trying to answer them.
Leave him alone, Harry wanted to say. But he didn’t.
So finally some muscle-headed guy with a broom mustache held out his hand and offered to pass him on board. As easy as that. Harry smiled. Then he turned back to the island and he wanted to make some sort of significant gesture, to say something memorable, but nothing came to mind. In the last glimmer of sunlight, pale and soft, he saw the tongue of stones sticking out toward him. Then he felt tears and a wild, crazy beating in his heart, and he ran up to where he had left the seal spear and he chucked it as hard as he could at the tongue of stones. It landed like a cheap stick, clanking a little, and one of the rescue guys clicked his tongue.
“Okay?” the guy asked when Harry returned to the boat.
“Okay,” Harry said and he climbed on the boat.
The first thought Albert “Flash” Edwards, sixty-three, had when he felt the Milk Truck dying underneath him was, I told you so. He had told everyone he could think to tell that the Milk Truck, the van purchased from the St. Paul’s School District at least a quarter of a century before, was too darn rickety to trust. Vans were well made, he knew, especially Fords, but all machines made by human hands had an earthly limit. That’s what he thought. He had told the bosses of Camp Summertime, Dave and Margaret Waters, that the van needed to be junked and a new one bought. But did they listen? Of course they didn’t. They told him the Milk Truck was a tradition and a part of camp lore.
No one listened to Flash Edwards. That was fact.
But, as usual, he was right about what he knew. He didn’t pretend to know everything, but he knew engines, and he knew the Milk Truck better than any engine around, and he knew it was dying when they had turned onto Hundred Mile Road.
He heard one of the kids make a mocking sound — probably Tock, the troublemaker — when the van began to shake, and he glanced in the mirror quickly to tell him to knock it off. The Milk Truck had dignity, he wanted to say, and everything would get old one day, even them, but what good did it do to try and reason with spoiled kids? He shook his head and tried to lift the gearshift into a soft second, but the bus kicked and complained and began to grind.
His second thought was: We’re a lot of miles from somewhere, and a few miles from nowhere.
The Hundred Mile Road wasn’t called the Hundred Mile Road for nothing, he knew. That was another thing he would have told Margaret and Dave Waters if they had been standing in front of him. He would have said, you’ve got a girl here, Olivia, who has to get to California. You have another one, Maggie, who is going from here to LAX, then on to Japan for some sort of special exchange. Two of the boys, Preston and Simon, are heading out to the East Coast. You do not send a bus filled with kids hurrying to make a connection over the Hundred Mile Road and expect to wave good-bye and hop in your fancy Otter aircraft and head toward the Outer Banks as the Waterses did every autumn. You did not lock up the camp, lower the security gate behind the Milk Truck, and wave them off. No, you gave them first-class transportation and you supervised their travel and you made sure the itinerary made human sense. But not the Waterses. That wasn’t how they saw the world. That wasn’t the way things went at Camp Summertime.
“Hey!” someone yelled from the back of the bus. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“Mind your knitting!” Flash said.
“What does that even mean?” Maggie asked.
“It means it’s too hot to listen to you kids. Mind your own potatoes.”
He didn’t know for sure if he was talking to them or to himself or to the Milk Truck.
He gently put the gearshift back into first and tried to even her out with gas. But the Milk Truck started to shudder even harder. Then it wheezed and bucked and he knew the party was over. He eased the truck over to the side of the dirt road. Not that it mattered if he put her on the side of the road, he reflected. They were the last vehicle coming this way until the snowmobiles took it over in winter. Gates blocked the road from either end — that was steadfast rule the Waterses had instituted many years before — so that no drifters or joy riders could make it out to Camp Summertime and steal whatever they could carry. He had the key to both gates, and it was his job to take the last group out and lock the door behind him.
He gave the van one more squirt of gas, then l
istened to it pop three times in quick succession. He turned it off quickly and silence suddenly filled in the empty places. Then the van jerked a little to the right and the front tire crumpled on the shoulder of the road. A few trees dragged their bony fingers over the roof of the van and the forward momentum of the vehicle grinded them into a dull, teetering halt. They weren’t going fast enough to cause any real damage, but the van sank a little on its axle as if it had settled down to die.
Then the kids began to clap.
“Do you people have any brains in your head?” Flash asked, his anger at the phony applause rising up him as quickly a bead of mercury in a thermometer. “Does even one person here have a particle of brain?”
It was too hot for this nonsense. Way too hot. He stood next to the steering wheel, his eyes moving over the passengers. He was tired of kids, he realized. It happened by the end of every summer.
JOSEPH MONNINGER lives in New Hampshire. He is the author of the young adult novels Baby, Hippie Chick, Wish, and Finding Somewhere.
Copyright © 2014 by Joseph Monninger
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First printing, April 2014
Cover art by Dave Seeley
Front cover design by Natalie C. Sousa
e-ISBN 978-0-545-56353-6
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
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