17

A few days later Joe stood up at lunch and tapped his glass with the edge of his knife. “All right, all right, all right,” he said. “It’s another beautiful day here at camp. We’ve got one important schedule change for the afternoon.”

Schedule changes were a good thing. They meant afternoon ice cream sundae bars in the dining hall, movie nights on the center field, a day off from cabin chores.

Bells leaned over and whispered to me, “Probably cabin skit night.”

I didn’t know what that involved, but it sounded fun.

I turned to Shira, who was sitting on the other side of me, and repeated the news to her, even though she’d been to Camp Famous before and probably already knew. Ever since our cabin meeting with Carly, I’d been making an extra effort to include Shira in everything. It seemed to be working. Shira smiled at me and wiggled her shoulders in excitement.

“Instead of afternoon activity,” continued Joe, “you’ll meet as a cabin to start planning your performance for skit night, which is Friday night, just five days away. For our new campers, skit night is a time for your cabin to get up on stage and show us what you’ve got. I want to be clear that this is not a competition. There are no winners and there are no losers here at Camp Famous. This is just a time to celebrate the end of camp with lots of fun, fun, fun.”

There it was. The first official reminder that camp would be ending soon.

Camp days had nothing in common with regular days. There were no quizzes or assemblies or PE classes that required remembering sneakers to mark one day from the next. But I’d arrived at camp on a Saturday, which meant camp ended on a Saturday.

Joe sat down. The clanging of forks and spoons replaced his words. But I was suddenly not hungry.

“It’s not entirely true,” said Bells as she took a sip of water.

“What’s not?”

“The whole winners and losers part. The counselors won’t admit it, but according to my brother, if they’re undecided about who should get the cabin plaque, they give it to the person who comes up with the skit idea. Frederick came up with his cabin’s idea every year. Obviously.”

I’d been wondering how Carly was going to choose. None of us were perfect. Shira complained the most about chores, but Willa’s space was the messiest. Hazel was forgetful and always late to things. Bells and I had hurt Shira’s feelings.

If coming up with a skit idea would push me closer to going home with the plaque, then I was going to give it my best shot.

“Can the skits be about anything?” I asked.

Bells nodded. “As long as they have to do with our cabin.”

My brain began to spin. How long were the skits? What were they usually about? Did we need costumes? Songs? Jokes?

“Don’t worry,” said Bells, as if reading my mind. “I already have some really good ideas.”

At rest hour, instead of writing about my day in my notebook, I tried to think of ideas. When nothing came to mind, I began to read through all my old entries. By the time Carly called an end to rest hour and we gathered as a cabin on the porch, I still didn’t have anything good.

Neither, it turns out, did anyone else.

“We could do a winter-in-summer theme and be snowflakes,” said Willa. “I could choreograph the perfect dance for us.”

“Or we could pretend to be molecules with a magnetic pull,” said Shira. “Something that shows we’re stronger together than we are apart.”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel. “Winter seems . . . brrr. And I’m sorry, Shira, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Think about your strong friendships, girls,” suggested Carly. “That’s what Cabin Tranquility is all about. That’s what we need to show to the rest of the camp.”

How do you show strong friendships? I knew how kids did it at school. With matching jewelry and playdates . . . an idea popped into my head!

I thought about the day when Quinn had brought her Polaroid camera to school. Quinn, Marin, and all their popular friends had posed on the front lawn of school, taking a whole roll of film in barely ten minutes. As each picture dropped from the camera, Quinn handed out the images to her friends. Every girl with a picture slid the photograph into the plastic cover of her school binder.

They kept them there all year long. Sometimes they would trace the white edges of the Polaroid picture with their fingers. Other times they would seem to forget about the pictures entirely.

I never forgot. Every single school day, I was reminded of not being invited to join.

“Maybe we could be the pictures inside a Polaroid camera,” I suggested. “We can make a big picture frame out of cardboard and paint it white. We could act out scenes of all the things we like to do together. It’ll show that we want to remember our friendship forever, like a picture.”

“I like that,” said Shira.

“Me too,” said Willa.

Neither Hazel nor Bells said anything. Hazel continued scratching her fingernail into the wood floor, and Bells fiddled with the edge of her shorts.

But every other idea had immediately been dismissed, so I took their silence as a good sign. I even glanced up at the cabin plaque, imagining it hanging over my bed at home.

Then Bells said, “I have another idea.” She’d already suggested three, and now she wanted to take a song from a musical that no one else had seen and change the words to use memories from camp. “I guarantee everyone will have our cabin’s song stuck in their head for the rest of the summer. The musical is only in previews. It’s very exclusive.”

Bells began to hum the song. It was catchy. It was also clear that Bells kept losing the beat a few lines in. I wanted to point out that Bells’s idea would mean somehow finding the real words, learning the actual beat, and then coming up with an entire new song. How would we do that when there were no electronics allowed at camp?

Except that Bells wanted to win the plaque just as much as I did. Objecting to her idea would risk hurting her feelings, which is why I’d kept quiet when she’d proposed her other ideas. But saying nothing would risk losing the cabin plaque. I thought back to all the conversations about fame that I’d heard over the past two weeks. A lot of them involved taking pictures.

“You know,” I said, “we always say it’s annoying that everyone thinks they know us just because they see our pictures everywhere.”

Shira cleared her throat like a grown-up.

“I mean, not me and Shira, obviously,” I continued. “But Hazel, your mom takes pictures of you all day long and shares them without your permission. And Willa, the worst part of your movie audition was when that photographer took photos of you so the director could decide if he liked the way you’d look on a poster. And Bells, what about the royal ceremonies where you have stand like a statue for hours while people wait in line to pose with your family? My skit idea uses pictures for a good reason. To show who we really are.”

Hazel stopped scratching the wood, and Willa nodded in agreement. I sensed they were with me. Maybe there was something more I could say to convince Bells and Shira?

I had to think fast. This was my chance.

“I wrote a book about this, actually. It was about a group of popular girls and every morning they took a picture with all their popular friends. And if you weren’t in the morning picture, you weren’t allowed to hang out with them. There was this one girl whose feelings got really hurt. And yeah, the story kind of went on from there with revenge and all that.”

“What happened?” asked Shira, leaning toward me. “How did she get her revenge?”

“Oh, she formed a group with some other left-out girls. I can’t say too much. The book hasn’t been published yet. It’s coming out after I get home.”

I bit my lip. Maybe it seemed like I was letting the words sink in, but I was actually trying to stop talking. I had no idea how that girl got revenge! If I had known, maybe I would have tried to do something similar in real life.

“Please tell me it involves either vampires, werewolves, or zombies,” said Shira. “Any of them will do.”

I squeezed out a forced laugh. “You’ll have to read the book to find out.”

Bells squinted her eyes. “I don’t know if people will get it, Abby. Especially since the book hasn’t come out yet. And what do pictures have to do with zombies getting revenge?”

I had begun to explain that there were no zombies in this particular book when Carly stopped me. “Come on, girls, we’re getting offtrack. This skit is supposed to bring us together, not tear us apart. Why don’t we combine the two ideas? We can sing Bells’s song from inside Abby’s picture frame. What do you guys think? The best of both worlds, right?”

The rhythmic pounding of the tetherball and the sound of splashing from the lake broke our silence. The other cabins had already decided their skits and were free to enjoy their afternoon.

“Good idea,” said Willa, jumping to stand. “Now can we go swimming? I’m roasting.”

“Broiling,” agreed Shira.

“Melting,” added Hazel.

“Yes,” said Carly with a clap. “Sounds like we have a decision. That’s enough skit talk for one day. Let’s all go down to the lake to cool off, okay?”

Was it a decision? I wasn’t sure. Carly acted as though she had clapped all the tension away. But I could still feel it floating in the air like dust mites—nearly invisible, but also everywhere. No one spoke as we changed into our bathing suits. Bells left the cabin with Shira, her towel draped over her arm. Hazel, Willa, and I followed behind.

The split made sense. This part of the path wasn’t wide enough for five girls to walk side by side.

But as I watched Bells from behind, her head tilted toward Willa, my heart lurched like Shira’s burping slime.

“Do you think Bells is mad at me?” I asked Hazel and Shira.

“She shouldn’t be,” said Hazel.

“We’re doing both your ideas,” said Shira. “And anyway, who cares?”

Shira had a point. We were doing both our skit ideas. So technically both of us had won. Neither of us had lost. That was good, right?

When we reached the lake, I draped my towel over the fence, just like always. I followed my friends onto the dock. We walked in a row: Willa, then Shira, then Bells, then Hazel, then me. Willa grabbed Shira’s hand. They walked to the far end of the dock, counted to three, and dove into the deep water to swim out to the slide. Hazel called for them to wait up and dove in after them.

It had been so many free swims. So many hours spent floating on Majestica and Bob. So many falls off their slippery plastic backs and so many failed attempts to climb back on. So many conversations. So much laughter.

I assumed Bells would stay back with me.

But Bells kept walking, not even glancing back at me as she raised up on her toes, sprang into a perfect dive, and stroked toward the deep-water slide.

As she swam, my hopes for a best friend went with her. Both of them too far away to reach.