Friday dawned, the last full day of the first week at Camp Shady Brook, and the infamous Field Day.
Rumors had flown all week about the fun prizes campers hoped would be presented to the winners in each category: T-shirts, and not the cheap-looking free ones they all got the first day, but the nice ones that didn’t itch. Candy. Gift cards to the camp store and a million other places. The stories about what kids might win grew more over-the-top each time somebody talked about it, as though the campers were trying to convince themselves there had to be some reward at the end of such a dreary week of swimming in muddy Lake Joyless and unsuccessfully avoiding the camp’s killer mosquitoes.
Vivian hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to the preparations, other than half-heartedly agreeing to partner with Sasha in the games. She was too busy absorbing everything she could from Archie.
She begrudgingly admitted he was pretty good at this stuff. And she knew that her window for learning it all might be coming to a close, once he figured out she’d lied about staying only one week. Archie didn’t know it yet, but she still had a trick or two up her sleeve. He wasn’t the only one who knew how to play this kind of game.
If she had any regrets about ruining all the fun they’d been having together, she wasn’t about to admit them now.
The most surprising part of Archie’s camp persona revealed itself one day outside the camp store. A small boy, maybe nine years old, was sitting on the steps looking dejected. “What’s up?” Archie asked, and the boy’s eyes went wide—that was the effect Archie had on the younger kids at Shady Brook, who all viewed him as some sort of celebrity.
“Nothing,” the boy said. “It’s just . . . well, all my friends are in there getting ice cream and I don’t have any money, and then my one friend said I couldn’t come with them because of that.”
Archie smiled, and then bent over toward the boy. “Tell you what, here’s a few dollars,” he said, pulling some cash out of his pocket. “You go in there and buy any ice cream you want. Get two ice creams. And tell that ‘friend’ of yours Archie Drake said to leave him alone.”
The boy jumped up, going from almost completely listless to full of energy in a matter of seconds. “Thanks! Wow!” he said, his eyes darting between Archie and the money in his hand. He gave them a huge smile and then ran up the stairs to the camp store two at a time.
“What was THAT all about?” Vivian asked. She was honestly so shocked by the scene, she hadn’t been able to say much of anything during the whole interaction.
“Just a scholarship kid who needed a little help,” Archie said.
“How did you know?”
“Oh, I can tell,” he said, giving an out-of-character self-conscious shrug, and then walking off. She stared after him in wonderment. Sometimes it was hard to tell if he was a hardened criminal or Robin Hood. Maybe he was a little bit of both.
• • •
“OMG, it’s actually Field Day! I’m so excited!” Sasha said as soon as they woke up from their fitful and bug-infested slumber. Throughout the week Vivian’s bunkmates had attempted increasingly desperate measures to keep the mosquitoes from eating them all alive at night, so that now almost every surface—from the windows to the bunks themselves—was draped with various items of clothing and bedding doused in insect repellent in a fruitless attempt to keep the bugs away. “Maybe we’ll win one of the prizes! That would be so cool!”
Vivian shook her head at Sasha’s enthusiasm and scratched at last night’s crop of bites. She couldn’t believe she was voluntarily hanging out with someone who actually said the letters “OMG” as an exclamation. But then she remembered she had a job to do, so she rolled out of bed and gave Sasha a weak smile. “Great,” she said. “I can’t wait.”
Field Day, despite its name, wasn’t held in an actual field, since Camp Shady Brook didn’t have anything that could remotely qualify as one. Instead, it was a series of events held all over the camp, including an egg-in-a-spoon race in the dusty bus parking area; a few swimming and canoe events at the polluted lake; and, most disgustingly to Vivian, a “pie-eating contest” that entailed campers pushing their faces into pie tins filled with whipped cream sprayed out of a can and trying to eat as much as possible in one minute. Just thinking about it made Vivian want to hurl.
“I am not doing that, I’m telling you right now,” she informed Sasha as they were guided through the various events by Boring Counselor Janet, who as usual, seemed to have very little information about what was actually going on, and even less enthusiasm. Like the campers, Janet had also spent most of the week fending off a feeding frenzy from the local bugs, and had welts up and down her arms and across her face to prove it. She’d coated the ones on her face with some sort of pink lotion that was flaking off in a distracting way as she talked about the plans for the day.
“I think this is not actually pie?” was Janet’s only comment when they visited the setup for the pie-eating contest in the mess hall. “I mean, it doesn’t look like pie to me. More like a pile of whipped cream in a pan. I guess I’ll have to check.” She heaved a sigh as though merely finding out the answers to some questions about the events was more work than she could bear to take on.
“Come on, Vivian, it’ll be fun!” Sasha said, continuing her attempts to get Vivian to act remotely excited about any of it. “And you don’t have to do the pie-eating contest. There’re tons of other things. Don’t you want to win one of the prizes? I heard they’re giving out iTunes gift cards!”
Vivian was pretty sure they were not giving out gift cards or anything else actually worth winning, but she managed a small smile anyway. Because whatever the prizes were, she really did want one. Not to win one, of course, but to scam one off someone else. If only to prove to Archie she was as good a con artist as he was.
At arts and crafts, before the Field Day events started, Sasha was ebullient as she made friendship bracelets alongside the rest of the Rainbow Smelts. “I’m so glad we’re doing this!” she confided in Vivian as her hands moved so fast, weaving embroidery floss in and out, they were almost a blur. Vivian herself had no interest in making bracelets. She’d half-heartedly picked a few colors of floss and tied them together, but spent most of arts and crafts time lost in thought, trying to figure out the best way to con one of the kids out of their prize. If this was Archie’s idea of a test, well, she was going to pass with flying colors, whatever it took.
“Me too,” Vivian said without enthusiasm. They were sitting at a long table in the arts and crafts cabin. The dingy, unfinished wood walls were decorated with paintings campers had done over the years.
“I wonder why they don’t let us use the good paints?” Sasha asked, looking admiringly at the painting nearest their table. It was, unsurprisingly, a picture of Joyless Lake. The lake and trees were pretty much the only things worth painting at Camp Shady Brook. But it was nicely done. The nameless former camper—his or her signature long ago faded in the corner—had painted the lake with the sun setting over it, and it almost looked pleasant, the way you might imagine a camp like Camp Shady Brook would look if you’d never actually set foot on the premises. “I love painting, but I didn’t bring my stuff because I thought they’d have some here! But Amanda”—she nodded in the direction of the arts and crafts counselor, who was trying, with zero success, to get Lily and her friends interested in doing anything other than chatting with each other in the corner—“said there isn’t enough for everyone so it’s not fair? But I don’t get that, because not everyone wants to paint anyway? Oh well, at least I like making these!”
She held up the bracelet she’d woven with breathtaking speed. It was a wide band of purple and gray and black.
“Nice,” Vivian said, since she felt like she should say something.
“Do you like it?” Sasha asked. “Well, great, because you can have it!”
Vivian was taken aback. “No, that’s okay, I don’t need to take your bracelet.”
“But I made it for you! It’s all your favorite colors, or at least the colors of all your clothes?”
It was true, Vivian did wear a lot of black and purple. Huh, she thought. She never imagined anyone at camp was paying that much attention to her and what she liked and didn’t like. Even Sasha. Or maybe especially Sasha, since she didn’t seem to be doing it for any other reason than to be nice.
“Besides, it’s going to take you all summer to finish one at that rate!” Sasha said, pointing at Vivian’s own pathetic excuse for a bracelet. She’d been so busy ruminating about her con plans, she’d barely finished one row.
“Well, thanks, I guess,” Vivian said. She held out her hand to take the gift, but instead of handing it over, Sasha grabbed her wrist and then deftly tied the finished bracelet on with a few quick knots, then cut the dangling extra strings with a pair of scissors.
“Now you look like a real camper!” Sasha said. “And it just proves that we are friends . . . though don’t worry, you don’t have to make me one! I can tell you don’t like doing it!” She gave Vivian a wide, kind smile.
Vivian examined the bracelet on her wrist and felt an odd sensation. Almost sort of like gratitude. It had been a long time since someone other than her parents had done something nice for her. But she shook that thought away, gave Sasha a quick, perfunctory smile, and stood up. “I need to get back to the cabin to get ready. It’s almost time for lunch.”
“And then Field Day!” Sasha said happily.
“Right,” Vivian replied. “Field Day.”
Friendship bracelets aside, she had a job to do.