A Celebration of Sorts

I guess everyone else wrote actual letters too, because that night, we had a celebration. Of sorts. That’s what Fish said, since we weren’t done yet. But they brought out the graham crackers, marshmallows, and real live actual Hershey bars from wherever they’d been hiding them. Then we had the best s’mores in the history of the universe of s’mores.

We even had this dinky little ceremony around the fire. Fish and Pittman said we’d all earned the right to run the last day of the course, and handed out our twentieth tags.

Right before they made us give all our tags back.

“You don’t need them,” Pittman said. “It’s the memories you’ll keep. Those are more valuable than anything.”

I guess that meant Captain Crowder was too cheap to buy new string, washers, and paint every time.

But who cared? Not me. We were this close to being done. That meant no more tags to earn. No more shelters to build. No more “Move-move-move-move-MOOOOOOVE!” in the morning. I felt like I was home free.

Even if I wasn’t. Not yet.

We kept asking Pittman and Fish what the last day was all about, but they weren’t telling.

“I’ll say this much,” Pittman said. “You all need to be ready for anything.”

“It’s the last day, not a free day,” Fish said. “Just the opposite, cockroaches.” He even smiled when he said it, which sent a chill down my spine.

I don’t know why I thought anything was going to get easier around there. Maybe it was those s’mores, making me sugar crazy or something. But I was dead wrong.

If anything, it was going to get s’more worse before it got s’more better.