It was rest hour, which was exactly what it sounded like: one hour of quiet cabin time after lunch to rest, write letters, play cards or jacks, or do some other non-noisy activity with your counselors and bunkmates.
Carly was reading on her bed, which was the top bunk directly above mine, and Jaida A and Jaida C got permission to visit their camp sisters in Daisy. Their camp sisters were identical twins, so the Jaidas were competing to see who could master telling them apart first. Jordana was busy applying a cleansing charcoal face mask in the bathroom, and Chieko was on her bed in the counselor room, also reading.
I was about to write my first letter of the summer to Jamie when Carly popped her head down over the side of her bunk.
“Wanna make a bed tent?”
“Do you even need to ask?” I jumped off my cot to stuff my stationery back into my cubby as Carly climbed down from her bunk. We pulled out the extra-long sheet and blanket from her bed so they hung down like walls around my bottom bunk, and then we tucked them under my mattress to hold them in place. We crawled in through the short end where my pillow went, then propped my pillow and hers in that space to make another wall.
“Perfect!” Carly decided.
“Super cozy,” I agreed, looking at the walls of white sheet and blue blanket wrapped around us like a hug.
“Do you remember our first bed tent?” Carly asked, her eyes twinkling the way they did that day we met four years ago in Violet.
“Dori called us out for ‘excluding others,’” I mimicked our old counselor.
“But then everyone copied, so every bunk bed in the cabin turned into a bed tent!”
“It was pretty awesome,” I admitted. “How did we even think of it? Was it my genius mind at work?”
Carly rolled her eyes and explained, “I was telling you about that book I loved, The Maggie B., about the girl and her little brother alone on a boat at sea, and you said you could turn our bunk bed into a boat.”
“Yep, I was a nine-year-old genius,” I bragged.
“Yeah,” Carly agreed, then crinkled her eyes at me. “What happened?”
I shoved her and she fell into the sheet, knocking it out of place.
“Hey, you butt-butt!” Carly righted herself and shoved me back.
“Oh my God—butt-butt! Who could forget Mean Melanie?”
Melanie was a counselor for one of the intermediate cabins, but she was also a swim instructor, so we saw her every day that first summer. We had third-period swim. The early morning cold was usually gone by then, but there was one random day in the first week of July when the bite in the air made it impossible for Carly and me to drop our towels and plunk ourselves into the lake with everyone else.
“Let’s go, girls. You’re holding us up,” Melanie scolded us. She turned to the rest of our Violet bunkmates, all ten girls frantically bobbing up and down in the water to warm up, and ordered, “Everyone grab a kickboard.”
Carly and I shuffled closer to the edge of the dock. I dipped my toe in and shuddered at the icy spark it sent up my leg. Carly hadn’t even touched the water but was already shivering in her bathing suit.
“I can’t,” she whispered to me. “It’s so cold. I just can’t.”
“It’s too cold to swim,” I declared, speaking up for both of us.
“It’s not too cold for them.” Melanie pointed at the girls in the water.
“Jaida C’s lips are blue,” I said.
“Which one is Jaida C?” Melanie asked, scanning the group.
“The one with the blue lips,” I answered. I never would have answered a teacher at school like that, but this wasn’t school. This was camp. The counselors were technically adults, but they were young adults. They were all college students. Only Brenda and Earl and Steven, the head chef in the dining hall, were real adults.
“Don’t be sassy,” Melanie snapped at me.
“But I am sassy,” I replied immediately, feeling less cold the bolder I got. “I’ve always been sassy. Are you telling me not to be myself?”
“That’s enough out of you,” Melanie barked at me. “Get in the water like everyone else. Now!” She turned away from us and blew her whistle at my shivering bunkmates in the lake.
“But . . . but,” Carly stammered, panic clouding her eyes.
Melanie swung back around. “Did you just call me a butt-butt?”
“No!” Carly shook her head with all the energy her small body could muster. Melanie glared like she didn’t believe her, so I came to Carly’s defense again.
“She didn’t. I don’t think anyone has ever called anyone a butt-butt in the whole history of the world.”
“Get into the water or go to Brenda’s office. Those are your choices,” Melanie practically spit at us.
“Can I go to Brenda’s office?” Jordana pleaded from the lake.
“Me too?” Jaida A echoed. “Can I go?”
Jaida C just hugged herself, her blue lips clamped together, the tops of her shoulders shaking violently above the gray-blue water.
Melanie ignored them, blew her whistle again, and instructed, “Pick a lane and line up for backstroke.”
Jordana crossed her arms over her chest and pouted.
“So . . . office?” I asked Carly.
“Will we get in trouble?” she asked back.
“I don’t know. Maybe. But we’ll be warm. And dry.” I raised my eyebrows at her.
Carly smiled, then nodded. “Okay. Office.”
We linked arms and marched in sync the whole way there.
“She really was mean,” Carly remembered.
“Not counselor material at all,” I said. “I know for a fact Brenda didn’t invite her back.”
“But the whole camp schedule changed because of her,” Carly declared.
“It changed because of us,” I corrected her. “You and me.”
Carly smiled wide. “And we didn’t even get in trouble.”
Since junior campers were the youngest and smallest, Brenda decided they should only have to face the lake during the warmest part of the day, which was the afternoon. It fixed the rest of that summer for us.
But it was killing us now that we were in senior camp. There were three periods each morning between breakfast and lunch, and Brenda thought senior campers were the ones hardy enough to handle water activities in the morning. So our schedule as Yarrows this year was:
First period: swim
Second period: boating (canoe, kayak, sail, paddleboard)
Third period: tennis
Every single day.
The afternoons had three periods also, filling the time between rest hour and dinner, but those periods changed daily. Fourth, fifth, and sixth period were a random mix of arts and crafts, nature hut, water-ski, soccer, archery, volleyball, basketball, bocce, canoe, dance/aerobics, and drama. As senior campers, we could sign up for electives for fifth period on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays each week, but that hardly made up for first-period swim.
Brenda was right, though—you sure didn’t need coffee to wake up in the morning when you had the brisk lake water of New Hampshire waiting for you. One dunk and every cell in your body jumped to attention.
“Our morning schedule this summer is the worst,” Carly complained.
“It’s the spirit of Mean Melanie getting us back,” I said.
“Go away, Mean Melanie!” Carly yelled, and she pounded her fist into my mattress. “Ouch,” she said, pulling her fist back up and cradling it in her other hand. Our mattresses were so thin that she pretty much just punched a metal coil.
“Well, we do have Mean Melanie to thank for your personal swear word,” I said. And then in unison we cried, “Long live butt-butt!”
“You guys are so weird,” Jordana’s voice answered us.
We peeled back one of our sheet walls to find her standing there looking at our tent. She had just come out of the bathroom, her face covered in a dark gray paste, thin lines cracking around her eyes and mouth like tiny roads on a map.
“Would you like to enter our bed tent?” Carly invited her.
“Nah,” Jordana answered, then changed her mind and said, “Sure,” as she sprinted at us at full speed. She dove onto my cot in one swift motion, ripping the sheet down with her by accident.
“Hey!” Carly yelled.
“What a delicate flower you are, Jordana,” I said as we all climbed out together to reassemble the sheet wall.
“A delicate butt-butt,” Carly mouthed at me with a smile.