Camp Pizza

When Fish said we were having something called camp pizza for dinner that night, I got pretty excited. We all did.

But if you’re thinking, Don’t get your hopes up, Rafe, then you’re one step ahead of me. I had to find out the hard way.

Camp pizza is made of saltines and tomato soup. You dip the saltines in the soup, and when you eat it, you say, “Mmm, pizza.”

Yeah, right. Camp pizza tastes like pizza the way licking a cow might taste like a hamburger.

I didn’t even care. I just wanted get inside my sleeping bag, stick my head on a balled-up T-shirt for a pillow, and go to sleep for the next eighty-two hours. I think Thea was already asleep in her soup. And Burp looked like he’d been awake since he was born.

“I’m ready to pass out right now,” D.J. said. “Food or no food.”

“I hear that,” Carmen said, because I guess she was so tired from all that goofing off.

“Paddles in at oh seven hundred, people,” Pittman said. “That means wet suits on at six thirty and chow at six.” Which really meant we had to get up at five if we wanted to make breakfast in time.

But meanwhile, all I had to do was sleep. I didn’t have to build anything, carry anything, learn anything, or even listen to anyone until the sun came up again. The ground under my sleeping bag may have been hard and lumpy, but after that long day we’d had, it felt like I was checking into the MegaLuxe Hotel.

And I thought, Ahhhh! Best part of the day!

And then it was more like zzzzzzz… because I was out like a broken headlight.

Right up until the world’s biggest thunderstorm came to town.