My mom and Grandma Dotty drove me and Georgia up to camp for the first day.
“You sure you have everything we packed? Everything you need?” Mom asked us about ten times from the front seat of our smoking—and I mean smoking in a bad way—eighteen-year-old family van.
“I’m sure!” Georgia said. “And in fact, I’m sure that I’m sure.”
Georgia had packed about eight weeks in advance, checked her list forty times, and then made a copy of the list to make sure she wouldn’t lose it… and double-checked that too. My sister may be smart, but she’s also nuttier than a squirrel’s nest on the first day of winter.
“Rafe, what about you?” Mom asked, because I’m kind of the opposite of Georgia. “Do you have everything you need?”
“Um… I guess so,” I said. “Y’know, like I said last time you asked. Three minutes ago.”
The good news was that we had a whole lake between the boys’ side of the camp and the girls’ side. If I was lucky, I’d hardly see Georgia at all for the whole eight weeks. It almost made the summer-school thing worth it. (I said almost.)
When we drove onto the camp grounds, we got to the boys’ side first. I pulled out my stuff from the back and tried to make a clean getaway, but Mom’s pretty mushy about this stuff. She needed to get in a few hugs before I could go.
“I know it’s school, but it’s camp too,” she said. “I think you just might have a good time. I really do!”
“Assuming you don’t get eaten by a bear,” Grandma said. She was looking at the camp brochure. “Or lost on Snake Hill. Or—”
“Snake Hill?” Georgia said from the backseat. “There’s a Snake Hill here? What does that mean? Like… real snakes? Really?”
I love Grandma Dotty, but sometimes she says stuff without thinking about it. “So long, kiddo!” she said. She reached over then and hugged me too, really tight, the way she always does. “You’re either going to love it, or you’re going to hate it here. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.” (My grandma says stuff like that all the time.)
Anyway, I was kind of nervous. It’s one thing to be a nobody at school, when you can go home at the end of the day. It’s another thing to get dropped off in the middle of the woods, with a camp full of total strangers who you’re going to be living with, eating with, and sleeping with for the next fifty-six days and nights (or so I thought at the time).
“Come on, Jules,” Grandma said. “Camp doesn’t start until the parents leave. We need to drop off Miss Georgia and skedaddle!”
“Georgia? Rafe?” Mom said. “Do you want to say good-bye to each other?”
“Not really,” Georgia said.
“Whatever,” I said.
“Well, do it anyway,” Mom said.
Okay, one more little bit of truth here. It was true that I couldn’t wait to get away from Georgia, even if we would just be on two sides of the same camp. But now that Mom and Grandma were about to take off, some teeny, tiny part of me was glad that Georgia would be around. I don’t know why. I just was.
And for the record, if you ever tell her I said that, I’m going to hunt you down and put fire ants in your sleeping bag.
You’ve been warned.
