Tag, You’re It

Well, that was pathetic!” Sergeant Fish said. “My great-grandma could have gotten farther than you cockroaches, and she’s been dead for twenty years.”

I was barely listening. I just lay there flat on my back, feeling like my lungs were two squashed watermelons. I could start to make out grumbles from the other kids. And I was thinking, WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

It’s not like I was afraid of heights. Or at least, I didn’t used to be. But as soon as I looked down from that tower, my brain turned into Jell-O.

Now Fish was yelling about how we’d all messed up, and everyone else was basically murdering me with their eyes. They didn’t have much trouble getting down once they had the box. If I’d had a nickname in that place, it would have been Weak Link.

Sounds like the world’s worst superhero, right? Yep, that’s me.

“Well, the good news is, you made an effort,” Sergeant Pittman told us. “And for that, you all earned your first tags. Good for you.”

She held up something that looked like a bunch of shoelaces.

“What are those?” Burp said.

“Something to eat, I hope,” Arnie said.

“Even better,” Sergeant Fish told us. “You could survive all week out here without food. But these?” He and Pittman started passing them out. “These you can’t live without.”

Pittman handed me a string. It was just a piece of leather with one painted metal washer on it. My washer was orange. Thea’s was green. Arnie’s was white. I had no idea what the colors were for.

“By the end of day three—that’s sundown on Tuesday—you need to earn ten tags. Not eight, and not nine-plus-a-good-effort. I mean TEN TAGS. Anything less than that sends you packing,” Fish explained.

“WHAT?” I said, along with almost everyone else.

“But I have to finish!” D.J. said. “I go to juvie if I don’t.”

“Me too,” Burp said. “I can’t get kicked out.”

“Well then, make sure you don’t,” Sergeant Pittman said. “And there’s more. By the end of day six, you need to have earned twenty tags. Only those of you with twenty tags by sundown on Friday will be allowed to run the last day of this course. It’s called the Ten, Twenty, and Out Rule.”

Of course it is, I thought. More rules. What a surprise.

“You earn tags by running obstacles,” Fish said. “You earn tags by doing your assigned work around camp. You earn them doing unassigned work too.”

“And most of all, you earn tags by showing us you can be a team player on the trail,” Pittman said.

“Dudes!” Diego said. “This is so not fair.”

“Duly noted,” Fish said.

And just like that, the hardest week of my life had just gotten harder.

Like, ten or twenty times harder, depending on how many days I lasted.