But I had forgotten I wouldn’t have a phone!
Was Buck’s new no-electronics policy going to ruin Shoshi’s summer?
Just before the camp bell rings, there is a faint sound like a warning. I had not remembered this sound till that moment when I heard it again—the distant creak of the wooden tower responding to the first tug on the bell rope.
Then . . . ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong!
The first full day of camp had begun!
I threw back my sheet and got out of bed. I went into the white tiled bathroom. I washed up. I brushed my teeth. I came back out. I put on Levi’s shorts and a plaid short-sleeved blouse, which is like a camp uniform on days you don’t go riding. At home it would be a tank top, but in the sun here, sleeves are better.
I folded my pajamas and put them away. I made up my bunk.
I did all this quickly and quietly, keeping out of everyone else’s way.
Meanwhile, Hannah had to wake up Lucy three times.
And Olivia had curled up in a ball and moaned, “I am never coming back to this horrid, horrid place!”
Emma sat down at the foot of Olivia’s bunk and consoled her: “You’ll feel better when you’ve had some orange juice.”
On the way to breakfast, I could not help it. I was grinning. It was a normal morning in Flowerpot Cabin. I was really back at camp.
• • •
When the bell for start of activities rang at nine a.m., Lucy looked at Hannah. “What now?” she asked.
“We covered this at breakfast!” Hannah said.
“Riding assignments and sign-ups,” Emma told her. “We can walk over together, okay? But first you should put on more sunscreen.”
At camp, your riding assignment—either morning, afternoon, or evening—is a big deal because which of the other activities you can do depends on it. Like, there is no photography if you get morning riding because photography only happens in the morning, and there is no archery if you ride in the afternoon because archery only happens in the afternoon.
We had all submitted our riding requests from home, and now the assignments were posted on the side of the barn. By the time we got there, other kids were already clustered around the printed sheets, trying to find their names.
Vivek was not one of them.
“I got morning!” Olivia pumped her fist. “Yes!”
“Me too.” Emma grinned. “What horse did you get?”
Olivia looked back at the sheet. “Shorty. Huh. Who ever heard of a horse called Shorty? My boots will be dragging in the dirt! What riding did you get, Lucy?”
“Afternoon,” she said.
“Me too,” I said. “And my horse is Katinka.”
“Oh, I had her last summer,” said Emma.
I remembered something about Emma’s horse last summer. “Is she the one that bit you?”
“Only once, and it wasn’t her fault,” said Emma.
“What do you mean it wasn’t her fault? Did she think you were a carrot?” I asked.
Emma laughed. “You just have to watch out when you saddle her.”
Emma is too nice, I thought. If you ask me, one bite is one bite too many. But it’s tough to switch horses. Maybe Katinka had learned better manners since last summer.
Activity sign-ups took an hour. I picked leatherwork and—it was Lucy’s idea—watercolor painting. After that, we had a hydration break, which is how they say “juice boxes” at camp. Then it was time for me and Lucy to go out to North Corral to meet our horses, and for Emma and Olivia to go to the pool for the mandatory swim test.
If you are getting the idea that Moonlight Ranch is almost as organized as school, you are getting the right idea. This is why my parents like it. It is not possible to laze away your summer at Moonlight Ranch.
To get to North Corral, you go to the campfire pit and keep going. Then you turn left up a steep path till you come to a big flat place surrounded by aluminum fencing, and that is it. You are there.
That afternoon, about fifty campers were making the short hike. None of them, if you are wondering, was Vivek. Apparently, “soon” meant later than right now, late morning on the first full day of camp.
The sun felt powerful on my back, but I knew it was not nearly as powerful as it would be later in the day. The sky was as bare of clouds as the corral was of plants. The horses had gnawed to nothing any green that had ever dared sprout here. All of us—kids and counselors—were wearing hats and carrying water.
Ten counselors met us. In charge of them was Cal. I remembered him from last summer because he was tall and a real grown-up, not a college student like most of the others. Even so, he had chubby cheeks like a baby.
“Hey,” he greeted me. “It’s Grace, right? Good to see ya back again.”
Cal had never been my leader for anything, but I was not surprised that he knew my name. There are some Indian-American kids at camp (Vivek, for example), but I am the only girl who looks like me, and I was the only one last year too. Here at camp, I am used to being memorable.
Meet-Your-Horse works like this. Each counselor takes five campers and, one by one, finds and halters their horses. I had only ridden a few times before I came to camp last year, but I had learned a lot in one summer. Now I knew how to catch a horse, bridle it, groom it, saddle it, and ride it. I knew the parts of the horse, the parts of the saddle, and the parts of the bridle.
When I put my mind to something, I am usually good at it.
Cal put a halter on Katinka and brought her over. She turned out to be a red paint, which means a white horse dappled with strawberry-brown markings. She was fourteen hands high, Cal told me. One hand equals four inches, and fourteen of them is small for a horse, but that meant we fit. For an almost eleven-year-old, I am small too.
Katinka greeted me by dipping her nose and flicking her ears forward; she was interested but not annoyed. I rubbed the velvet softness around her nostrils, and she snuffled at me, probably hoping for oats or a carrot. I thought of bringing up the biting thing, but Katinka and I had just met, after all. I didn’t want to be rude.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Grace
By lunchtime, all of the cabin flags had been hung up on cords suspended between the ceiling beams in the mess hall. The doors opening and closing created drafts that made the flags flutter. Even with so many tarantulas, the room seemed festive.
Flowerpot Cabin’s giant chocolate chip cookie was in the center of things—right over the silverware caddies. It looked excellent. Some real country should use the cookie symbol on its flag someday. Who wouldn’t be happy to pledge allegiance to a cookie?
The horse-poop flag—ewww—had been hung in a far corner.
Olivia and I arrived at lunch at the same time. Hannah wasn’t there yet. I had just sat down and was thinking about sandwiches when—at last!—I spotted the back of Vivek’s head. It was attached to the rest of him and sitting three tables away with the other boys from Silver Spur Cabin.
Did I feel relieved? Did I feel happy? Did my heartbeat speed up a little?
I cannot say for sure because I did not have a chance to think. Right away, Olivia saw him too and elbowed me. “Grace! Look!”
“I know—shhhh! Don’t stare, O!”
“Go talk to him!” She practically shoved me off the bench.
“That’s okay. I don’t have to—,” I started to say.
“Is that Vivek?” Emma sat down and leaned over me to get the mayonnaise.
“Grace refuses to go talk to him,” Olivia said.
“That is not true! I just do not want to bother—”
“Here he comes!” Olivia announced.
My stomach clenched, which was not my fault; it was Olivia’s. She was making such a big deal out of everything.
I did not look up. I did not want to see him and smile too wide, or worse, act all jittery and embarrassed. Instead, I concentrated on a blue bowl full of peanut butter set out in the middle of the table, and I waited to hear Vivek’s voice over th
e hum of talking and eating noises in the mess hall.
He would say, “Hi, Grace,” and I would be casual, “Oh, what a surprise, Vivek. It’s you.”
But that’s not what happened. I didn’t hear Vivek’s voice at all. Instead, it was Olivia again. “Oh, never mind. He’s talking to Lucy.”
“Wait . . . what?” My gaze left the bowl of peanut butter fast and found Vivek and Lucy, standing by the milk station and laughing about something. Then Vivek went back to his table, and Lucy came over to ours with her glass of milk.
Vivek never even looked in my direction.
Olivia pounced the second Lucy sat down. “Why didn’t you bring him to say hi? Someone”—she nodded at me—“is dying to see him!”
Lucy seemed surprised. “Vivek? He just got here.” She started to make herself a peanut butter sandwich. “I’m starving. Has everybody done Meet-Your-Horse? Mine’s called Spot ’cause he’s a pinto. It’s not a very original—”
“Lucy?” Emma interrupted. “I think Grace has been kind of curious about why Vivek’s late getting to camp. Do you know why?”
Lucy said, “Yes.”
I said, “Emma, it’s okay. I can speak for myself.”
“So in that case”—Olivia looked at me intensely—“why don’t you, Grace, ask her, Lucy, to tell us why Vivek was late getting to camp. Okay?”
Most people think of me as quiet and nice—shy, even.
But most people are wrong.
I have what my father calls a “volatile” temper. It means that when I lose it, I go the tiniest bit ballistic. It does not happen often. Last year at camp, it did not happen at all. . . .
Which explains why my friends were so shocked when I suddenly stood up from the lunch table and said: “WOULD YOU PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE ABOUT VIVEK? IF I WANT TO TALK TO HIM, I WILL!”
Since no one else in the mess hall happened to be speaking loudly at that moment, everybody in the mess hall heard me. This was unlucky.
Another unlucky thing was how I knocked over my glass when I pushed away from the table, and milk splashed everywhere, and then the glass rolled off the table’s edge and fell to the floor and broke—crash!—into a million sharp and tiny pieces.
Now everyone at lunch was looking in my direction, even Vivek.
It was five or six minutes later that the full force of embarrassed hit me. By then I had stomped through the main doors and out of the mess hall and into central camp, where I was pacing under the cottonwood trees—ten steps right turn, ten steps right turn, ten steps right turn, ten steps right turn—making perfect squares.
Why was I such an idiot? Why was Olivia such an idiot? Why did she have to make such a big deal out of everything?
Because of her I was hungry and alone, and I could never face Vivek, ever—not if we were the last two people on Earth, or at Moonlight Ranch, either.
CHAPTER NINE
Vivek
It was funny how my new bunkmates were impressed that I knew Lucy.
They had all seen the clip of her from the TV, the one where she sounded all extra-humble the way a superhero always does before she (or he) suits up. Anyway, we were at lunch, and my counselor, Lance, had just introduced me around to my new bunkmates, and I got up to get milk and ran into Lucy, and she asked why I was late getting to camp, and I told her, and then I sat back down again, and the guys were all like, “Dude! You know her?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, feeling the tiniest bit cool about it. “We’re friends.”
“It’s brave what she did,” said Jamil, who is almost as tall as Lance and skinny and from Cleveland. “Plus, she’s hot.”
Hot? I had never thought about Lucy that way. In my mind, “hot” is a word that goes with singers and models, not people you actually know.
“If you say so,” I said, and then Zach changed the subject.
“Sorry you got such a lousy bunk,” he said, “but Jamil here—he insisted on the single, and Lance let him have it.”
“I’m claustrophobic,” Jamil said. “Can’t stand being closed in by the ceiling or a bunk above my head.”
“Poor, poor baby,” said Zach.
I started to say I didn’t care what bunk I got, but before the words left my mouth, Grace stood up and yelled at Olivia, then everybody turned to look.
At first I didn’t even didn’t realize my name was part of it—then Jamil said it was and added, “So I guess that Asian girl’s your friend too, right? And I guess she’s crazy?”
“I never used to think so,” I said.
If that sounds lame, please consider that I was really sleepy at the time. I had taken a night flight from Pennsylvania to D.C., and then a red-eye to Phoenix. That was all my dad could get when he changed my ticket. A van had picked me up early in the morning at the airport and brought me here. When I arrived, there was just time to throw my bags in Silver Spur Cabin and come to lunch.
I had been looking forward to seeing Grace, actually. Now I looked over again, and saw she was going out the door. Was she okay? And where was their counselor, anyway? On the first day of camp, counselors usually eat with their campers. I could see Lance at the salad bar right now—going wild with the bacon bits.
I might’ve gotten up to ask about her . . . except I had just constructed for myself a cheese and tomato sandwich that could only be described as epic.
And I was so-o-o-o hungry!
My mouth watered as I prepared to take the first bite.
Whatever was up with Grace, the girls would sort it out.
CHAPTER TEN
Olivia
So Grace put on quite the performance in the mess hall, and after it all of us sat still for several seconds, brains blank, mouths open. Since when did quiet, perfect Grace throw tantrums?
Let me just say, it was more than my mind could fathom!
At the same time, there was one thing I wanted to make perfectly clear: “You guys,” I said, “what happened just now, you know it wasn’t my fault—right?”
Lucy aimed her big unblinking eyes at me. “You shouldn’t tease Grace about Vivek,” she said.
“I wasn’t teasing!” I protested. “I was encouraging.”
Emma had stood up from the table by this time. Where was she going? “You were bossing her, O,” she said. “And no one likes to be bossed.”
This was more than I could take. “Seriously, Emma? That is pretty amusing coming from you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Emma asked.
“Only that you’re the biggest boss of all!” I said.
“Hoo boy,” said Lucy, under her breath.
I fight with my brother, Troy, all the time, and he fights back. Now I expected Emma to do the same, but she didn’t. Instead, she turned toward the kitchen and walked away.
“What the heck!” I looked at Lucy. “Do my armpits smell? Everyone is abandoning me!”
“Only Grace abandoned you,” said Lucy. “I’m still here, and Emma just went to get stuff to clean up the spill. See?”
Lucy was right. Emma was coming back. She had a broom, a dustpan, and a rag. Her face was all pouty. Without looking at either Lucy or me, she started sweeping up broken glass. I wondered where Hannah was, anyway. Cleaning up seemed like a counselor kind of job.
“Look, Emma,” I said, because apparently more clarification was needed. “I am sorry to be the one to tell you, but you are bossy. It might be that you can’t help it, but still it is a fact. Jenny says when you recognize a character flaw in yourself, you should take the opportunity to correct it and become a better person. So maybe that’s what you should do, Emma. No offense.”
“Jenny is your housekeeper, right?” said Lucy.
“Wow—good memory,” I said.
“Sometimes good, sometimes bad,” said Lucy. “What do housekeepers do exactly?”
Emma answered before I had the chance. “They clean rich people’s houses.”
“Hey, you take that back,” I said.
“Which part?” Emma asked
.
“Which part of rich people’s houses do they clean?” Lucy said.
“Not that,” I said. “The part about rich people. And also everything else, Emma. Besides, Jenny doesn’t clean our house. She cooks and takes care of us.”
Emma had swept up the last of the glass. “I am not taking anything back—except for this broom to the kitchen. Then I am going to see about Grace. Remember her? Who wants to come with me?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Grace
On a scale of one to ten, my surprise at opening the door of Flowerpot Cabin to find Hannah there crying her eyes out rated ten.
Hannah is our counselor! She is the one with all the answers!
She is calm, beautiful, kind, and smart.
And now she was standing by the one lonely desk in the room, staring into the wastebasket on the floor, and sobbing!
What could our calm, beautiful, kind, smart counselor who was twenty years old—a grown-up!—possibly have to cry about on the second day of camp?
We hadn’t even done anything bad yet!
Maybe there was something dead in the wastebasket. One time last year there was a mouse running around Flowerpot Cabin. Could it be a dead mouse in the wastebasket? Would a dead mouse be enough to make Hannah sad?
Or what about a tarantula—like the ones on the flags? Except I am not sure that a dead tarantula would be that sad. Speaking for myself, I’d be more likely to scream if I found a dead tarantula.
As these thoughts raced through my head, I stood paralyzed in the doorway. Hannah hadn’t even noticed me yet. Maybe I could turn around quickly and get away before she did.
But what if she needed help?
I wished it was Emma who had found Hannah like this. Emma would have known what to do. Emma would have given Hannah a hug, or said just the right thing.
At last, Hannah looked up. “Oh, hi, Grace.” She wiped the snot trail under her nose and sniffled. “Oh, sorry.”
My face must’ve looked as surprised as I felt because Hannah laughed at me through her tears. “It’s not that bad, honey. I’ll live.”
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