Church Camp Chaos

by Annie Tipton

  “I think that was even less than a second!” he panted. “A new record!”

  “Eaaasy, buddy,” Dad said, putting Isaac in a headlock and rubbing his head with his knuckles. “You need to keep the crazy to a minimum when you’re coming down that pole.”

  “You guys ready to see what I have for the tree house?” Mom’s eyes were bright with excitement. “I’ve been working pretty hard, so I hope you like them.”

  “Show us!” EJ said, grinning.

  “Marmalade, what is it?” Isaac said, pulling himself out of Dad’s headlock and stepping toward Mom to try to look in a bag.

  “First, something to add a little homeyness to your new place.” Mom revealed a set of window curtains—with cartoon dinosaurs on them. “What do you think?”

  “Excellent!” Isaac’s eyes widened. “Those will go great in the Dino Den!”

  “Those are really … nice, Mom.” EJ tried to sound happy about dinosaur curtains but was failing miserably.

  “Oh, really?” Mom said, sounding skeptical. “I thought you might like these better.” With a quick tug on the fabric, Mom pulled the curtains inside out to reveal red fabric with gold and silver stars that shimmered in the sunlight—not a single dinosaur in sight!

  “Oh man!” This time it was EJ who was amazed. “Mom! Those are cool! How did you do that?”

  “I’ll show you how to switch curtains once I install these bad boys,” Mom said. “And since you couldn’t come up with a name that would work for both of you, why not have two names?”

  Mom held up a wooden nameplate on a string that she had painted herself. One side said ISAAC’S DINO DEN and the other side said EJ’S STAR PALACE.

  “You can hang it on the nail that’s next to the front door,” Mom explained. “And I have one more surprise….” Mom pulled back the big plastic bags to reveal what was inside: two oversized beanbag chairs, one covered in Isaac’s dinosaur material and the other in EJ’s red-with-stars material. “Homeyness plus comfyness! What do you think?”

  “I think we may never see our kids in our own house anymore,” Dad said as EJ and Isaac plopped down into their new chairs with big smiles on their faces. “On second thought, this tree house is going to be so rad that maybe I want to move out here, too!”

  EJ laughed. “No, Dad! Kids only.” Then she added, “Well, adults can come—but by invitation only.”

  Dad had a far-off look in his eye, still imagining living in the tree house. “I’d call it the Dad Cave. Yeah, that has a nice ring to it.”

  “That paint job on the shutters looks great, David,” Foreman EJ says as she observes one of her best employees. “Think we’ll be ready to hang them on time?”

  “Yes ma’am,” David says, raising his paintbrush to his forehead in a salute, leaving a smudge of green paint on his hard hat. “Right on schedule.”

  EJ nods and encourages David to keep up the hard work. This is the biggest, most important house construction she’s ever overseen, and so far everything has gone according to plan. The only strange thing is that nobody knows who is actually going to live in the house. The whole job was commissioned anonymously, but since the payments keep coming, EJ has found no reason to complain or even question who is behind it.

  Ten thousand square feet of living space, complete with a bowling alley and driving range in the lower level, a forty-seat state-of-the-art movie theater (with plush reclining seats), an Olympic-size swimming pool in the backyard with eight waterslides emptying from the house’s second floor into the pool, a full arcade with video games and skee-ball (EJ’s favorite), eleven bedrooms, and fifteen bathrooms—EJ wouldn’t mind living in this house once it’s all done.

  EJ walks into the living room to check on the interior decorator named Tabby, who is installing curtain rods and curtains.

  “Looks amazing,” EJ says, admiring her work. “Do you know who is supposed to be moving into this place when it’s done?”

  “All I’ve heard is that it’s some kind of famous inventor,” Tabby says, adjusting the curtains so they hang evenly across the window. “Whoever it is must be extremely rich, so I’ll be interested to hear what he invented.”

  A young boy walks into the room, sipping from the juice box in his hand and dragging a beanbag chair behind him. “Hi!” he says between sips. “Is the arcade ready yet?”

  “Excuse me, but this is an active worksite,” EJ says, making sure that her “foreman” name tag on her chest is visible. “You need to have a hard hat on. And by the way, who are you?”

  “I’m the owner,” he says. “This is my house.”

  “Wait a second,” EJ says, not believing him even a little bit. “What did you invent that made enough money to build this house?”

  The boy holds up his juice box and pulls the straw out. “Bendy straws,” he says. “Just think about how much better they make our lives. Kids love ’em. Adults love ’em. There’s all kinds of money to be made in bendy straws.”

  “Oh Isaac, I never know what you’re going to come up with when someone asks you a question.” Mom laughed as she used a power screwdriver to finish putting up the last curtain rod.

  “My genius brain surprises me sometimes,” Isaac said, sitting in his beanbag chair and slurping the remaining juice.

  A few minutes later, EJ and Dad were hanging shutters—EJ in the tree house, with her head and arms sticking out the window, Dad standing on a plank of wood that was lying across the rungs of two stepladders. They were halfway done when Dad’s cell phone rang in his pocket.

  “Hi, Steve!” Dad held the phone to his ear with his right shoulder while he checked to make sure the shutter was level. “Right now? Yes, I know it’s hard to get everyone together. Sure, that’s no problem. Give me ten minutes and I’ll be there.”

  EJ’s heart sank. As a pastor, Dad sometimes got phone calls at home that meant he had to leave quickly—an accident or a sudden sickness of someone in the church and he’d need to rush to the hospital. Sometimes he could just be a calming person in a situation, and he loved people so much that he was happy to do it; he said it was part of his calling. And EJ loved that Dad loved people so much. But that didn’t make it any easier when he had to leave in the middle of something fun like finishing the tree house.

  “Hey, hon?” Dad called up to Mom, who was painting the railing on the front porch with Isaac. “The guys on the church board want to meet to talk about some stuff … about the thing. Shouldn’t be long.”

  Stuff … about the thing? EJ’s mind immediately went back to the teary prayer circle between Mom, Dad, Nana, and Pops. All this secretive talk reminded EJ of when she was four and her parents would spell things in front of her so she didn’t know what they were actually talking about, which would sometimes result in confusing conversations:

  Dad: Tab, I’m thinking we should get some I-C-E C-R-E-A-M tonight.

  Mom: But I have C-O-O-K-I-E-S for tonight, dear.

  Four-year-old EJ: No! I don’t want to take a nap!

  “Dad, why are you meeting with the church board?” EJ asked, trying to sound casual. “Aren’t your normal meetings the first Tuesday of the month?”

  “Nothing you need to worry about, EJ,” Dad said, hopping off the makeshift scaffolding to the ground. “Adult stuff. Boring.”

  Dad’s answer didn’t satisfy EJ’s curiosity. If anything, it made her wonder even more.

  “Be back in a jiffy, and we’ll fire up the grill for hamburgers for supper.”

  “We’ll finish up that last set of shutters,” Mom said. “EJ, can you show me the ropes once I finish this coat of paint?”

  “Yeah,” EJ said absentmindedly as she watched Dad walk to the garage. She made a mental note similar to the ones she made in her notebook as EJ Holmes:

  1. Mom crying

  2. Unscheduled meeting with church board: stuff … about the thing.

  What was going on?

  Chapter 7

  THE BAD WINNER LOSER

  July 11

/>   Dear Diary,

  Macy and her mom are coming to our house this morning. Our moms have started clipping coupons together, and they seem to think it’ll be good mother-daughter time if Mace and I help them. Cutting and organizing coupons sounds like the number one most boring thing I could possibly be forced to do. But I figure once Macy and I help for a while, they’ll let us go play outside, and I can show her the tree house!

  Tonight after supper we have a family game night planned, with all of our favorites: Chickenfoot (a game played with dominoes where the pieces are arranged in a way that looks like a bird’s talons), Uno (the best card game there is), and Mouse Trap (a crazy board game that ends up with a chain reaction in which you try to capture other players’ mice in a cage).

  And I’m pretty much the best at all of them.

  Here’s something you should know about me, Diary: I love playing games. Well, actually, I like winning DOMINATING games. Mom and Dad are always trying to get me to be a better winner, and I tell them I’m a great winner—I win all the time! But I guess that’s not what they mean by “better winner.”

  The truth is, Diary, it feels so good to rub the loser’s (Isaac’s) nose in his loss! Anyway, aren’t adults always saying that losing builds character or something like that?

  EJ

  EJ stuck out her tongue while she concentrated on cutting out a fifty-cent-off coupon for dish soap.

  “EJ, you don’t have to worry about the edges being perfectly straight,” Mom said as she filed a coupon in her binder.

  “I’m trying to make my coupons as perfect as Macy’s,” EJ said, breaking her concentration when the paper caught in the scissors, ripping the coupon in half. “Oh rats.”

  Perfectly cut coupons were just the beginning of the differences between EJ and her best friend. EJ wished she knew Macy’s secret to looking and acting so cool, calm, and collected. Macy’s shoes were always tied (EJ usually tripped over her shoelaces), Macy’s coffee-colored hair always lay perfectly in its adorable bob (EJ’s unruly not-quite-straight-but-not-quite-curly hair had a mind of its own).

  “I just try to take my time,” Macy said. “It doesn’t have to be perfect, though.”

  Macy laid a precisely cut paper rectangle on her stack of coupons on the Paynes’ kitchen table. EJ looked at the hot mess of paper in front of her and wrinkled her nose.

  “Will these still work even though they aren’t cut straight, Mrs. Russell?” EJ asked Macy’s mom.

  “As long as we can still see the complete scanner code, they’ll work just fine.” Mrs. Russell picked up the two halves of the ripped dish soap coupon in front of EJ. “This one just needs a little tape and it’ll be good as new—there!” She added the mended coupon to EJ’s pile.

  “You girls have been a big help cutting out the coupons,” Mom said. “Thank you.”

  “We’re done?” EJ looked at Mom expectantly. “Does that mean we can go outside and play?”

  “You may,” Mom said. “I’ll call you in when lunch is ready in a bit.”

  “Have fun in the new tree house, girls!” Mrs. Russell called as EJ and Macy made a beeline for the backyard.

  “That cloud looks like a snail—see its shell?” Macy pointed to the fluffy cloud through the tree house’s open sky hatch. The girls were lying on their backs in the beanbag chairs, looking for interesting clouds.

  “Good one!” EJ said. She pointed to a smaller dark cloud to the right of the snail. “I see a hummingbird there.”

  “This tree house is so great, EJ,” Macy said, sitting up and looking around the room. “I think I could live here.”

  “So, Miss Russell, what will it take to get you into this house today?” Realtor EJ smiles at her potential home buyer—a young gymnast and Olympic gold-medal winner looking for her very first home away from her parents’ house.

  “Well, I’m not sure I need quite so much living space,” Macy says, looking uncertain. “It’s just me who will be living here. But I do really like this skylight that’s in the bedroom.”

  “Perfect for stargazing,” EJ says. “Let’s go take a peek at the gym. Surely that’s a must-have for every athlete.”

  The two walk downstairs to the fully furnished gym—uneven bars, pommel horse, balance beam, tumbling floor, and trampoline.

  EJ sees Macy’s face brighten and the wheels turning in her brain.

  “If this was my house, I could give lessons to boys and girls who might not have enough money to pay for lessons,” she says, already imagining a dozen little kids practicing their tumbling on the padded floor. Macy thrusts her hand toward the Realtor. “I’ll take it.”

  “I would be awesome at selling houses,” EJ said, mentally adding Realtor to her list of possible career options.

  A rumble of thunder sounded in the distance, and a few moments later EJ felt a sprinkle on the top of her head. She reached up to tug on the rope that pulled the sky hatch closed.

  Macy stood up and looked out the window as big raindrops fell from the sky. “If I had a tree house just like this, then maybe I could move there instead of Milwaukee,” she said.

  “Oh yeah! Living in this tree house would be aweso— Wait. What?” EJ said, sitting up, hoping she had misunderstood what Macy said. “Did you say move to Milwaukee?”

  “Yes. We might be moving there.” Macy didn’t make eye contact with EJ but instead fidgeted with the star curtains. “I found out last week.”

  “How’d you find out?” EJ asked, still soaking it all in.

  “Mom and Dad had been acting funny the past few weeks.” Macy looked at her toes. “Dad left unexpectedly for a business trip, and when he got back it seemed like he and Mom had a secret between them—a couple of times when I walked into the kitchen and they were in the middle of a conversation, they’d start using code words for what they were talking about.”

  Secrets? Code words? Macy’s explanation reminded EJ of the phrases she had been trying not to think about: “Situation … opportunity …” “Some stuff … about the thing …”

  “Then last week, I caught Mom crying while she was making salad for dinner,” Macy continued, “and I couldn’t take it anymore—I had to ask what was going on.”

  Mom—crying. Things seemed awfully familiar to EJ. Suddenly a terrible thought popped into her head: We’re moving. Maybe Dad is being called to another church—a new ministry far away. That has to be it.

  “That’s when she told me Dad’s getting transferred to Milwaukee for work,” Macy finished miserably.

  “But … Mace, but you can’t move!” EJ willed herself to stop thinking about her own problems and focused on her friend. “We’re going to be in the same class next year!”

  Macy looked at EJ, her eyes swimming in tears about to spill onto her cheeks. “I didn’t want to tell you, EJ—because when I say it out loud it makes it feel even more real.”

  EJ’s mind whirred. She wanted so desperately to change what was happening—to fix the problems. But even though she could order off of the adult menu now, the fact was that she was still just a kid, and these things had to do with adult decisions.

  She suddenly felt very helpless.

  “I don’t want to leave my friends—but I especially don’t want to leave my best friend!” Two streams of tears forged their way down Macy’s face. EJ wasn’t used to seeing her friend out of sorts like this. It was usually EJ who was having some kind of drama and Macy was the one with the calming words.

  EJ’s perfect summer was turning out to be way less than perfect. She didn’t know what to do but give Macy a hug, so that’s what she did.

  “Don’t worry, Mace.” EJ tried to make her voice as encouraging as she could, even though she felt crummy, too. I’m worried enough for the both of us, she thought.

  Sea Fleet Naval Commander EJ Payne glances at the blinking lights on the radar screen. The enemy has been particularly hard to engage in this battle, and she’s beginning to feel the pressure.

  She picks up a glass of ice wat
er, and her hand shakes a bit, causing tiny ripples to form on the surface of the water.

  “Take it easy, Payne, “she whispers to herself. “You’ve done this a hundred times before.”

  EJ presses the glass to her forehead and enjoys the coolness, closing her eyes for a moment.

  “Where are yoooooou, Commander Payne?” an evil-sounding voice mocks EJ over the console speaker. The person behind the voice is Sea Fleet’s biggest enemy—a bad guy known simply as “The Invader.”

  “Your move, Commander … unless you want me to just go ahead and destroy you now and end your misery—”

  “No!” EJ shouts back. “Just give me a second to think.”

  “Tick-tock,” the voice sneers.

  EJ rubs her eyes with her fists and tries to focus on the screen in front of her. The Invader has already destroyed four of her ships. One more hit to the final ship—the aircraft carrier that she is currently aboard—and the battle will be lost.

  EJ takes a deep breath and says “E-nine,” her voice sounding more confident than she actually feels.

  Silence.

  Hope spreads across EJ’s chest—but just for a second.

  “Miss!” The Invader’s laugh cackles through the speaker. “Miss! Miss! Not even close!”

  “Big ol’ stinky miss!” Isaac pumped his fist and jumped up from his spot on the living room floor before shouting triumphantly, “B-six!”

  EJ scowled and crossed her arms over her chest. There were few things in this world she hated more than losing, but losing to Isaac was the worst.

  “You have to say it,” Isaac said, grinning a toothless grin and pointing a finger at her. “Or it doesn’t count.”

  “Then it won’t count.” EJ shrugged and sat back against the couch pillows. “I don’t care.”

  “Moooom!” Isaac bellowed toward the kitchen, waking up Bert, who was snoozing in the recliner.