Vivian was completely and totally bummed out. After weeks of dreading camp, she’d only just begun to convince herself on the bus there might be some benefit to being here. Finally she could be the one running things, not just the little lackey, like she’d been at school with Margot before she got blamed for everything that happened. But now, thanks to that boy’s warnings, those hopes were dashed.
It figured. She never should have let herself get excited. Being enthusiastic about stuff only ever ended badly for her.
As she approached the pile of luggage she considered her options—all dismal. She could call her parents and beg them to let her come home, but she strongly doubted complaining that the camp was too strict would do her any good.
She could try to break enough rules to get kicked out, but that came with risks too. If she got shipped home then they’d just find another camp to send her to—they weren’t going to take her to China, especially not if she got in trouble yet again. Vivian wasn’t the kind of person who normally had regrets, but this year, she definitely had a few.
“There really has to be a better system for this,” she said to no one in particular as she shoved past a slow-moving nine-year-old to reach her own black rolling bag, which she spotted near the back of the enormous, disorganized pile.
“Yeah! I know! Totally!” a voice said from behind her. Vivian’s heart sank. “Oh, hi! It’s you again!” the voice said.
“Hi,” Vivian said, without turning around. She already knew who it was.
“It’s me! Sasha from the bus! Did you get your bunk assignment yet? You’re going into seventh grade, right? I think all the girls from seventh are in the same cabin? Which maybe means we are bunking together? That would be awesome!”
“Maybe,” Vivian said. She clamored over a small girl who was laid out flat on her back in the dust panting from the effort of trying to find her stuff, and sidestepped two boys who were shoving each other in a heated dispute over a sleeping bag. Counselors stood around the huge pile with clipboards like scientists watching a horde of hungry jackals trying to attack an elephant. And behind them all, pacing back and forth, was a woman with the fiercest expression and the biggest clipboard Vivian had ever seen.
Just the sight of her scowling at the campers grappling for their luggage was enough to make even the most self-confident kid’s blood run cold.
Vivian didn’t know it yet, but that was Ms. Hess (better known as Miss Hiss) the camp director, and she wasn’t happy. Then again—and Vivian didn’t know this, either—Miss Hiss was rarely happy. It was one of the reasons why so few campers ever returned to Shady Brook, once they filled their parents in on what really went on there. Those who did return were usually the kids who had few, if any, other options. You could see their resigned faces here and there as they trooped off the bus, little pockets of gloom amid the excited energy of the new campers.
“Okay, campers, gather your things and line up to get your bunk assignment and to hand in all electronic devices, including cameras! Come on, people! This shouldn’t take all day,” Miss Hiss bellowed over the throng of voices rising from the shoving, clamoring children.
The kids who already had their luggage snapped to attention and began to line up. Miss Hiss had one of those voices that demanded to be obeyed. But there was one boy who seemed oblivious to the shouting camp director—instead he stood perilously close to her, texting on what seemed to be a conspicuously nice phone.
Miss Hiss glared at the boy, and when he still didn’t notice her, she marched over, seeming to grow in size as she walked. Around her, small children cowered like they would from an approaching dragon.
“DIDN’T YOU HEAR ME THE FIRST TIME?” she roared right in the texting boy’s face. He jumped, and dropped his phone, which fell to the rocky ground with an unfortunate sounding thump.
A slow smile spread across Miss Hiss’s face, which only made her look more terrifying, and her voice got lower. The children had stopped collecting their bags and stood in silence so they could hear every word. “You need to get one thing straight, young man. When I speak, you listen. When I say jump, you jump. And when I say HAND OVER YOUR ELECTRONIC DEVICES, you do that without question. Am I perfectly clear?”
The boy gave a sharp, worried-looking nod, but then he couldn’t help shooting a quick glance down at the phone that still lay at their feet. Miss Hiss was faster than he was, though, and snatched it up. “Oh, what a shame,” she said with fake concern. “Oh dear.”
“What happened? Is it broken? Is the screen cracked?” The boy’s voice was panicked. “That phone is brand-new!”
Miss Hiss held the phone out of his reach and then, with a quick motion, stuck it in the pocket of her jacket. “I guess you’ll need to wait until the last day of camp to find out.”
“But that’s a whole week away!” the boy pleaded. “Please tell me if it’s busted! My mom is going to kill me!”
His words had no effect. Miss Hiss turned away with a satisfied smile and headed back toward the main building, as all around her, kids pulled out electronics from their pockets and bags and handed them over as quickly as possible to the nearest counselor.
Despite the scene that had just played out in front of her, Vivian had no intention of giving up her camera. It was a very nice one her parents had bought her back when they actually trusted her to come on trips with them, and while she was sure there would be nothing worth photographing in this desolate place, she didn’t want any of these other kids to get their grubby hands on it. She was glad she’d stowed it safely away in her toiletries kit, deep inside her luggage. She made a mental note to find a good place to hide it once they were allowed into whatever miserable structure would pass as their cabin for the next few weeks.
After the electronics were collected, the counselors began to line up in front of the main building and corral the kids for their cabins. Each counselor had writing on the back of their clipboards, which they held up so the kids could see—Age Nine Girls, Age Nine Boys, and so on. At the far end of the line was a young, tiny woman, shorter than some of the boys in Vivian’s class at school. Her clipboard said Age Twelve Girls.
And standing next to her was Sasha-from-the-Bus and two of the other girls Vivian had impressed with her travel stories during the ride—the girls she’d been looking forward to scamming this summer, before that silly boy fouled up everything with his talk of rules and punishments.
Sasha was jumping up and down and waving madly. “Vivian!” she called. “Vivian!” Then, when Vivian didn’t wave back, “Vivian?”
Reluctantly Vivian rolled her suitcase over to the group. Might as well get it over with.
“I’m Janet,” the tiny counselor-type woman said nervously, slapping at a mosquito that seemed intent on biting her right in the bend of her elbow. “Are you twelve?”
“Yeah,” Vivian said.
“Well, okay, then,” the woman answered, looking around. She heaved a big sigh, deeper and louder than you would expect from such a tiny person. “I think you’re the last one.”
She glanced at the ten girls standing around her. “Are you sure you guys are just twelve? You seem . . . bigger than I expected.”
“Well, I’m definitely twelve,” Vivian said. “My birthday was in March.”
For some reason—and it couldn’t have been Vivian’s tone—Janet smiled at her and added, almost like they were friends, “I’ve got to say, I wasn’t expecting to be assigned to the big kids so soon . . . I thought they’d start me out with the nine-year-olds or something, since I’m new. Oh well. I guess we’ll have to make it work.”
Little Miss I Went to Paris, who was standing with Sasha, gave a wicked grin and said loudly to the girls standing nearest her, “Well now, ladies. Looks like we got a pushover.” Sasha laughed nervously and then looked around to see if anyone had noticed.
Janet must have heard the comment but chose to ignore it. “Okay, I guess we’re all here. We should probably head to our cabin. Let’s go, Rainbow Smelts!”
All ten girls gaped at her. So she sighed again and said, “Rainbow Smelt is the name of our cabin.” Then when the girls kept staring, she added, “The cabins are named after local fish. It’s a . . . Camp Shady Brook thing.”
Vivian wondered if everything they called “a Camp Shady Brook thing” would be something she’d dislike as much as being known as a Rainbow Smelt. At this point it seemed highly likely.
Janet led the group of twelve-year-old girls away from the ongoing luggage scrum and down a shaded path toward a row of dank cabins that, up close, looked even worse than Vivian had imagined in her darkest daydreams about the horrors that awaited her at summer camp.
Even the normally overexcited Sasha-from-the-Bus seemed to deflate as Janet walked them past all the cabins, each one more run down and moldy than the last, to the final one in the row. “We’re supposed to stay . . . here?” Sasha wondered quietly to herself. “Like, all of us? Together?”
“Welcome to your new home for the next week!” Janet said as they all gathered in front of the small, dark building. She spoke loudly, almost too loudly, but without any real enthusiasm. “Let’s check it out!”
Janet walked up the rickety steps that protruded from the front of the building like an afterthought and tugged on the door, which was really just a wooden frame with a tattered screen and a thin crosspiece holding it together. As the sad excuse for a door slammed open against the decaying wood exterior of the cabin, one of the hinges popped off and the whole contraption dangled uselessly to the side. “Guess I’ll have to get the maintenance staff to fix that,” Janet said helplessly, looking at the broken pieces of wood and netting. “Oh well, we should go inside and pick out bunks.”
The girls pushed past the broken door and into the dark room. Janet flicked a light switch, and a single unadorned bulb came to life in the middle of the ceiling, emitting barely enough light to show the dark shapes of the bunk beds that circled the cabin.
“I call top bunk!” Sasha-from-the-Bus shouted, running toward a set of bunk beds next to the far window and hoisting her luggage on top. “Lily, come share with me!” she called to Little Miss I Went to Paris, but the girl ignored her and chose a bunk on the opposite side of the room, locking arms with another girl as they marched over to their new bunks together.
“Vivian?” Sasha said, sounding defeated. Vivian reluctantly dragged her suitcase down the aisle between the beds and put it on the bunk Sasha was waving from. Sharing a bunk with Sasha wasn’t her top choice, but then again, none of this was even close to being her choice at all.
As she half-heartedly opened up her suitcase, she sighed. If this was just the first day, it was going to be a very long summer.