Day 5—Wednesday

By the time Wednesday rolled around, we all needed rest hour for actual rest. Four mornings in a row of ripping ourselves out of bed to run from flag to breakfast to bunk cleaning to swim to boating to the cabin to change out of wet clothes to tennis and to the cabin again to clean up for lunch really wiped us out, even though Brenda built in a lot of time between periods to get where we needed to go. It definitely wasn’t like school, where you had to plot the shortest possible route and then race like a maniac to get to your next class before the bell rang, or face an after-school detention if you didn’t make it. We never got in trouble at camp if we were late. That was the cool thing about Brenda—she was totally on our side. I wished my middle school had more teachers like her.

Carly was half reading, half napping on her bed, and Jaida A was writing letters of protest to SeaWorld while Jaida C practiced French-braiding her own hair. Jaida C was amazing at hair, which made sense since her mom owned a salon in New York City, where they lived. Jordana was painting her toenails while wearing earbuds that plugged into nothing, the cord hanging like a long loose thread. Her device had been confiscated that morning when Brenda showed up unexpectedly for inspection. Fortunately, all our beds were made and the bathroom wasn’t a complete disaster, so we got a good cabin score, but Jordana hadn’t hidden her iPod well and it took just one quick glance inside her cubby for Brenda to spot it. Jordana was now singing every song from the Hamilton soundtrack from memory.

Carly won the bet. I hadn’t thought Jordana would make it past the first day.

I looked at the stationery in my lap, lemon-yellow lined paper with gold and silver stars in three of the four corners. Just as I was about to write Dear Jamie, the loudspeaker turned on with a high-pitched squeal and Brenda’s voice announced, “Vic Brown, please report to Chicory. Vic to Chicory.”

Carly lifted her head off her pillow long enough to say, “Camp sister alert,” and then rolled over on her side and shut her eyes, her book cradled to her chest like a favorite stuffed animal.

The moment I stepped outside Yarrow, a familiar stillness washed over me. Earl’s golf cart was parked in front of his cabin in its usual spot, reliable as a compass pointing north, and the air held the lingering smell of the yeasty baked rolls and chicken noodle soup served at lunch. Everyone was tucked away in their cabins—even Brenda and Earl were out of sight, probably working in the office. It was easy to feel like I had the whole place to myself. I crossed the soccer field and headed up the hill to junior camp.

As I walked, the ground evolved from lush grass to packed-down dirt to old tree roots bumping out of the ground like a nature-made obstacle course. Birds flapped from branch to branch high in the trees and chipmunks scrambled around tree stumps, stopping to chew furiously before scurrying off again. The sun was high and the sky was blue, and I started to wonder why I hadn’t wanted to spend my summer in such a perfect place.

But then I remembered why I was here.

The laptop on my mom’s desk, the email she was writing, the words on the screen carved into my memory like a scar that wouldn’t fade.

I shook my head side to side to knock it away, at least for now. Vera needed me, and I was on my way.

I stepped into Chicory’s camper room to find Vera sitting on her cot, her blanket smoothed pancake-flat and tucked in tight enough to bounce a dime on. The other cots in the room had blankets with images of Disney characters or big-eyed kittens or butterflies swirling over rainbows, but Vera’s blanket had a picture of a large frog and the words Museum of Science printed smack in the middle of it.

“Vic, you’re here! Thank you for coming.” Her braids were lopsided and there were small tufts of blond hair sticking out of them, as if she had slept on them overnight.

“I’ll always come when you need me, Vera. How’s everything going?”

“Fine, and also not so great.”

Eleven pairs of six- and seven-year-old eyes looked at Vera and then landed on me.

Vera barreled ahead. “I like my cabin and I like my bunkmates and I like my bed even though it’s not very comfortable, but I’m still feeling homesick. Sometimes I want to cry, but I’m trying not to because I haven’t seen anyone else cry yet and I don’t want anyone to think I’m a baby. Because I’m not a baby. I’m just experiencing feelings of nostalgia in the amygdala part of my brain, which is the area responsible for strong emotions.” She lowered her voice and finished, “Which can lead to crying.”

“Umm, do you want to go outside, Vera?” I asked. “To talk? Privately?”

“All right,” she agreed, but then continued, “I also think I have a dermatitis starting on my ankles, and I forgot to pack a pencil sharpener, which is a problem because I also forgot to pack my mechanical pencils. I just have the regular kind, and I write a lot.”

“Of course you do.” I took a deep breath and smiled at the other campers. “Come on, Vera.”

Vera got off her bed, walked past me out of the camper room, through the counselor room, and out the screen door without looking back.

I followed her.

We sat side by side on the bottom step of her cabin, our legs stretched out in front of us on a patch of worn earth. Vera’s ankles had a weird pink color crawling up both of them.

“So, which thing do you want to address first?” Vera asked.

“Well, for starters, I wouldn’t announce all your problems right in front of the other kids,” I began.

“Why not?”

“Why would you?” I answered back.

“To fix a problem, you have to name it. That’s a fact.” Vera sounded so sure of herself that I couldn’t think of any way to argue it.

An image flashed in my mind then of my mom sitting at our kitchen table, her hands cupped around a mug of tea, steam floating up in a misty cloud in front of her face. Her tea bags had small square labels attached to the strings with sayings printed on them, like fortune cookies. I could imagine one saying this: To fix a problem, you have to name it.

Vera was seven and had no trouble naming her problems in front of a whole room of strangers. I was thirteen and I hadn’t named my problem to anyone, not to Jamie at home, not to Carly here, and certainly not to my mom, even though it was all her fault and I should have confronted her the moment I saw her email.

I bet Vera would have.

But I didn’t.

“Hello, Vic! Earth to Vic!” Vera waved her hands in front of my face.

“Sorry.” I gathered myself. “First of all, there’s no way you’re the only kid in there who’s homesick. I can guarantee you that. And I get why you might not want to cry in front of the other girls, but trust me, it’s really okay if you do. You definitely won’t be the only one to cry this summer—I can guarantee that, too.”

Vera’s face relaxed immediately.

“Now, to deal with the homesick bit, it helps a lot if you stay busy. And it’s great if you can find a good friend, like a best friend. Start by finding someone you have something in common with. Like, if you love arts and crafts, find out who else loves arts and crafts, or if you love canoeing, find out who else loves canoeing. And then try to do that thing with them. You have to go out in pairs in the canoes anyway, so that would be a good time to talk and get to know each other.”

“But I don’t love canoeing.”

“That was just an example.” I sighed.

“Okay.” She nodded.

“Okay. So what do you love to do?”

“I love to research.”

“Research?” I expected a teasing grin on Vera’s face. But no—her face was serious. “For real?”

“For real.”

“What kind of research? Because I think that might be hard to do at an outdoorsy camp with no computers.”

“Any kind. If I don’t know something, I like to research it. For example, did you know chicory is a perennial wildflower with blue or purple flowers, and that you can eat the leaves and the root and the flowers?”

“No, Vera, that’s all news to me,” I admitted.

“The leaves are very bitter, so people blanch them first in boiling water. And the flowers only open on sunny days. When it’s cloudy out, they don’t open at all, which is kind of symbolic for human behavior, like not wanting to get out of bed on a rainy day but popping right up when the sun is out and the sky is bright and shiny.”

“That might not be symbolic, Vera,” I said. “That might just be science.”

“And did you know you can dry chicory roots, grind them up, and then roast them to make coffee?” Vera shook her head in total exasperation at this fact. “Coffee is an adult drink, so I don’t understand why they would give a coffee plant name to the youngest bunk in junior camp. We are the last people who would drink coffee.”

“I don’t know, Vera.” I sighed heavily. “I just know the youngest cabin has always been Chicory because that’s the name the owner gave it a gazillion years ago when she opened this place. Every cabin is some kind of wildflower that grows around here, and that’s all there is to it.”

“You’re in Yarrow.”

“I know I’m in Yarrow.”

“Did you know yarrow is one of the most medicinal wildflowers known? It can heal wounds and relieve pain. It’s good for treating fever, the common cold, hay fever, and diarrhea. It’s especially powerful as an herb for menstrual cycles and cramping. But it’s full of contradictions, too, because yarrow can cure nosebleeds but it can also cause nosebleeds.”

“Where do you get all this, Vera?”

“I told you—research. I tapped resources before camp started,” she said in a very matter-of-fact way. “It’s very important to have resources. It makes all the difference.”

“In what?” I asked.

“In life,” she answered slowly, somewhat irritated that she had to explain it to me.

“Oh,” I said.

“Plus, my mom’s a shrink, so I know a lot about psychology and human development.”

“Which is why you can name the emotional center of the brain?” I asked.

“Yep,” she conceded, and she kicked at the ground until a puff of dust rose, then landed back on her shoe like a fine brown powder. “I sound like a know-it-all sometimes. I’m aware of that.”

“I think it’s cool that you know so much. School must be a breeze for you.” She started nodding before I even finished the sentence. “But I also think you need to get in a canoe with someone and spend some time listening.”

Vera took a deep breath and let it out slowly, doubt on her face.

“Just try it,” I urged.

“Okay,” she gave in. “I’ll try it. I’ll canoe.”

“And after dinner tonight you should go to clinic and get your ankles looked at. They can give you a cream for that.”

“Okay.”

“And did you mention the pencil thing to Brenda? I know she has a sharpener in her office, and I bet she’ll let you use it whenever you want. Or maybe she’ll even let your mom mail up your mechanical pencils.”

“Duh. I forgot about the office,” Vera said, rolling her eyes at herself.

“Wait—so you just used the words ‘amygdala’ and ‘duh’ in the same ten minutes,” I observed.

“What? Lots of kids say ‘duh.’ I’m only seven, you know.”

“Exactly, Miss Amygdala. You’re only seven.”

“Oh. Ha.” Vera smiled, then leaned into me and rested her head against my arm. “You said I can see you, right, whenever I want?”

I thought of my little brother, Freddy, then, new at Forest Lake, maybe sitting alone on his own junky cot this very minute, wishing for the friends he had back home. I hoped he had nice counselors, someone he could go to who would help brush the loneliness away.

“Yeah, Vera. I’m here for you. Whenever you want.”

And then the bugle rang again, announcing the end of rest hour like a kick to the head.

“You missed elective sign-up!” Jordana shouted gleefully at me the moment I walked through the door.

“Where’s the board?” I asked, panic filling my chest.

“It’s by the door—you just walked past it,” Jaida A said.

Only senior campers had the privilege of signing up for a fifth-period activity on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. There was a short list of choices and a number limit for each, and it was a first-come, first-serve system.

A system that was about to bite me in the butt.

I scanned down the list to find my name.

“Who put me in farm?” I read out loud. “And what the heck is farm?”

“Sorry, Vic.” Carly walked over to explain. “I tried to sign you up for volleyball with me, but Brenda was here and she said we could only sign ourselves up. And Aster and Marigold got to pick before us, so there were hardly any spots left.”

“Am I the only one who got farm?” I asked, skimming over the chart.

“My first choice was riding, but that was full, so I didn’t get what I wanted, either.” Carly tried to make me feel better.

“But you already rode this morning. First period. You missed swim to ride.”

“Well, I wanted to ride again,” she explained, “and I won’t get to.”

“But I got farm!” I couldn’t process. “We don’t even have a farm.”

“I think it’s new,” Carly said.

“It’s part of that farm-to-table thingie they’re starting,” Jaida C explained. “I asked Brenda.”

“Switch to farm with me,” I begged Carly.

“I can’t. Brenda said we can’t. The numbers are all worked out the way it is.”

“Brenda is displaying dictator tendencies,” Chieko said as she strolled past us to the bathroom.

Carly shrugged and squeezed my arm in sympathy.

“Thanks,” I told her, “for trying.”

“And it’s for three days in a row,” Carly said, regret in her voice.

“Are you kidding me? Since when do we sign up in bulk?” It was getting worse by the second.

“Since today,” Jaida A said.

“That’s not how it worked last year! It’s supposed to be three days, three different choices.”

“It’s been streamlined, baby,” Chieko called from a bathroom stall. “Now it’s three days, one choice. Love it or leave it.”

“Can I leave it? Please?” I asked.

“Not a chance.” Chieko let out an evil cackle and followed it with the sound of a toilet flushing.

Jordana slid a pair of mirrored sunglasses onto her face and announced, “I’ll be thinking of you all later when I’m at water-ski, suckers!” She threw a towel over her shoulders and sauntered out the door.

I saw my reflection in her glasses as she passed—dark brown hair frizzing out of my ponytail, sad brown eyes, cheeks and forehead tinted pink, a shade that would soon turn tan. But mostly the reflection I saw was the face of someone who had to spend fifth-period elective without a friend at farm.

“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” I called after Jordana, a sneer in my voice. But I doubt she heard.