Spells & Sleeping Bags #3 (3 page)

When we return to the bus, Janice has already wiped up the mess and now looks more nervous than ever. She's also chewing a brand-new black pen. If this one explodes, she's going to look like a bruise.

Head down, Miri squirms into her new seat in the second row. “Please stay up front with me?”

Aw. First it was panic, then it was hot water and salt. Now guilt washes over me. How can I abandon my sister on her first day of camp? Though in all fairness to myself, camp hasn't officially started, since we're not there yet. Nevertheless, I take the seat next to her. And then I look back—forlornly—at my new friends in the middle.

And we're off again. Off to a not-so-magical start.

2
BAD TIGGER

Miri stares longingly out the window. “I wish I could poof myself off the bus.”

Unfortunately for her, she can't. The one and only spell Mom has cast in the past month is a location charm that keeps Miri and me shackled to camp. It's essentially an invisible anklet made of distilled vinegar and cactus essence that works like a high-powered magnet. All we know is that we can't take it off without Mom's permission. Mom wants to keep us from zapping ourselves to Africa (Miri) or the Caribbean (me) when she's not around to monitor our comings and goings.

“No broom flying or transporting for you,” I say.

Miri looks back at all the girls and her shoulders tense. “I should have refused when Dad said he was sending us to camp.”

“Too late now,” I say.

“It's so unfair that Prissy gets to come for only two weeks, and we have to stay all summer. Why can't they have a starter session for older kids too?”

My poor, socially inept sister. “Unlike Prissy, you're not six. Anyway, Mom is going to be in Thailand with Lex for most of August and it's not like she'd let us stay home alone.” It's weird that my mom is suddenly so serious about Lex. I'm happy for her, of course. But what if I need to get in touch with her while she's away? Shouldn't she be at my beck and call 24/7?

She'd better bring me back some exotic clothes, or some hair chopsticks or something.

Miri kicks the railing. “It's like I'm in prison.” Her eyes start to tear up. She has pretty much the same eyes as mine, big and brown, but her eyeballs are really white and sometimes they glow in the dark. Not in a creepy way. More like the moon.

I tickle my sister's arm. “You're going to love camp. I promise.”

Eventually, Miri curls into a ball and falls asleep with her head on my knee. Through the window I watch the passing of mountains and lush green trees, counting the seconds until we get to camp. I can't believe I'm going to be away from home for seven weeks and one day.

Fifty days without chores! Fifty days without having to watch my mom make out with Lex! Fifty days without my stepmother calling me every five seconds to discuss her plans to get pregnant! Fifty days without having to bounce back and forth between my mom and my dad!

Fifty days
with
Raf. Single, unattached Raf.

“Did you hear?” my best friend, Tammy Wise, asked me ten days ago when we sat down at two empty desks for our math exam.

“About what?”

“About Raf and Melissa.”

My heart leaped straight out of my chest, hit the ceiling, then bounced back in. Okay, not really, but it felt like it. Melissa Davis, my redheaded nemesis, had started dating Raf after Raf and I broke up back in April. Not that we'd really been going out, more like quasi going out. You know, him looking at me that way, me looking at him that way—there was a whole lot of
looking
going on. And one almost kiss (code for closed lips with no tongue action). “No, what?”

“They broke up!”

Yes! Yes! Yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss! “When?”

“Saturday night!”

“What happened?”

“He broke up with her, and she's none too pleased.”

My heart was hammering; my fingers were dancing; my legs were spasming. It was like I was on an upside-down roller coaster, only I wasn't moving. “I need details, Tammy. Details!”

“Apparently he told her that it's because he likes someone else.” Her eyebrows went into overdrive.

The moderator flicked the lights off and on. “Please turn over your test booklets.” And that was when I felt the tingling. The raw will. The rush of cold. More specifically, the back window flew wide open.

“What the . . . ,” said the moderator as he rushed to the back of the room. “Who did that?”

I did. Did I?

The lights started flickering; the teacher's desk flipped smack over; the window slammed shut. It was as if a poltergeist had taken over the classroom. And I had the twitchy yet sure feeling that I was responsible, or more precisely, my fantabulous powers were.

I did some yoga-like breathing exercises to calm myself and tried to focus on the formulas in front of me. Thank goodness this was math, a subject I knew like the back of my hand.

Unfortunately, from that moment on, I noticed that whenever I got overstimulated, my magic tended to get a bit . . . unruly.

For example, while chomping Mom's cheese-and-tofu ravioli, I began picturing moonlit walks with Raf, canoeing with Raf, kissing Raf . . . and my heart started beating faster, and suddenly a ravioli square went soaring off my plate, bounced off the ceiling, and landed in my mother's carrot juice.

My mom dropped her fork in midchew. “What was that?”

If my mom knew I'd done that, I'd be eating tofu ravioli for the entire summer. Quick! I needed an excuse. A scapegoat. “Bad Tigger! Bad, bad Tigger.”

Our cat, who was curled up in his favorite corner nook of the kitchen, licking his paws, narrowed his little yellow eyes as if to say
Are you kidding me?

My mom jumped up to clean the mess. “Bad Tigger,” she said, and I exhaled in relief.

I'm sad to admit that during the past week, I've started blaming Tigger for pretty much everything. Chair knocked over? Tigger. Lights flickering? Tigger. Toilet paper roll unraveled all over the apartment? Tigger.

Okay, that last one
was
him, but it was because he was so pissed off at me.

I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I hear is Janice's nervous voice.

“We're here, girls. Everyone ready?”

My eyes shoot open. Our bus has pulled onto the side of a dirt road, behind a row of already-parked buses. A few feet away is a wooden bridge crossing a murky pond. Beyond the bridge is a winding road that leads into thick trees.

We're really here. Watch out, world! Miri, my socially inept sister, and I, a newly minted witch, both of us in swirly tie-dyed Oodle Wamp Ack psychedelic pajamas, have arrived!

And let's not forget Glinda and Bobby.

Kids are already streaming out of the buses, and I peer ahead, looking for Raf. Still no sign of him. I take a few slow breaths to calm myself. After all, I wouldn't want the buses to rise into the sky and fly off to another planet, E.T.-style.

That's something I couldn't possibly blame on Tigger.

“All right, girls,” Janice says. “Since you all sent your duffel bags earlier in the week, they've already been brought to your cabins.” A Camp Wood Lake van picked up the bags at our apartment, which was a lot easier than carrying them ourselves. There must be a lot of campers from Manhattan. But I only care about one.

“In bunk two,” Janice continues, “we have Jenny Boland, Heather Jacobs, Jessica Curnyn—”

I zone out for a few names before I hear “and Miri Weinstein.”

Miri squeezes my hand.

“Hey, look, there's Natalie!” Trishelle announces. “The Canada bus must be here already.”

“Cana-bus?” Miri whispers to me. “What kind of place is this?”

“Canada bus, you dork,” I whisper-enunciate back.

Janice continues listing. “And in bunk fourteen,” she says five minutes later, “we have Morgan Sweeney, Jan Winters, Carly Engels, Rachel Weinstein, and Alison Blaichman.”

Yes! Alison
is
in my bunk! I turn back to her and wave.

After listing the names of the girls in bunk fifteen, Janice says, “If you have your sun hats or baseball caps with you, please put them on before leaving the bus.”

I hate hats. I don't mind them on other people, but they always make me feel like I'm wearing a cardboard box. My baseball hats are all stiff. I'll just pretend my mother didn't force one into my backpack.

Miri pulls hers out and slaps it on. “Aren't you going to put your sun hat on?” she says rather loudly.

“Shhh! Come on, let's go.” Since we're at the front of the bus, we're the first ones off, and since we have no idea where we're going, we huddle together to wait for instructions. Janice said she would show us the way, but she is deep in conversation with some of the counselors. Great. Now what? Wander around until the summer ends and we're buried in snow?

“Bunk two sounds awfully far away from bunk fourteen,” Miri says, her voice all shaky.

“Come on, it can't be that far.”

“Hi again,” says a voice behind me. Hurrah, it's Alison, my new BFF.

“Hi,” I say with relief.

“Lost?”

“Just a little.”

“Follow me.” Alison is much taller than I am and therefore takes bigger steps.

“Did you meet my sister, Miri?” I ask while practically running to keep up.

“You guys look alike,” Alison says as we follow the trail over the bridge and onto a narrow gravel road lined with tall green pine trees.

“Is that a bunk?” Miri asks, pointing to a small white building peeking out on our left.

“No, it's the camp office. Colton! Hey!” she squeals, waving at a guy up the road.

“Howdy, Al-ison!” he hollers back in a thick Southern drawl. “How was your year?”

“Not bad!” she yells, and then says to me, “Colton's our age, too.”

“He's cute.” He has dimples and a buzz cut. “Where's he from?”

“Houston, I think.”

Funny, I feel like I'm in Texas. The sky above us is still overwhelmingly bright and blue even though by now it must be at least four. I take a deep breath. It smells dewy and clean. Kind of like the air freshener in our bathroom back home. But, um, real.

As we continue along the road, the trees clear and we pass through a shopping center–sized massive field, behind which are postcard-perfect lush green mountains. Grass! Trees! Hills! Sky! I have never seen so much nature in one place.

There'd better not be bears here. Or any wild animals, for that matter. After six hours of online searching (fine, procrastinating studying for finals), I learned all about how bats, raccoons, and foxes carry scary diseases like rabies, Lyme disease, and plague. I didn't know plague still existed, but apparently lots of rodents up here are teeming with it.

And let's not forget mosquitoes. Those little monsters are bursting with West Nile virus. But they're not getting me. No way, no how. I packed about ten gallons of mosquito repellant.

“This is Upper Field,” Alison says. “There're the baseball field, the kitchen staff housing, the soccer field, the Upper Field showers, and back there are bunks sixteen and seventeen, where Colton and some of the other Lion guys live.”

“What does
Lion
mean exactly?”

“The oldest unit at camp. People finishing grades seven, eight, and nine. Koalas are the youngest and Monkeys are in the middle.”

Ah. I scan Upper Field, wondering if that's where Raf sleeps. My heart makes like a deer and gallops. (Deer do gallop, right? Hopefully, I will never have the occasion to meet one to find out.)

“Here we are,” Alison announces, pointing with a flourish to a large green and white cabin on our right. “Bunks fourteen and fifteen are in this cabin.”

Phewf. At least it's a cabin. A tiny part of me was concerned that I would be spending the summer in a tent. That would be way too much nature for City Rachel.

Two girls, a blonde and a redhead, are standing on the long porch, and when they spot us, they begin waving madly.

“Poodles! Morgan!” Alison shrieks. “You're here!” She scurries up the hill and the cabin's steps and throws her arms around the girls.

Poodles? People bring their dogs to camp?

“Check it out, Alison,” the redhead squeals. “Poodles got a butterfly tattoo on her ankle and I finally got tits!”

Did she just say the T word? I hate that word. It's so vulgar.

“You're blocking the way,” someone says. I turn around to see a thin, glossy girl glaring at me. She looks me up and down and flips her black hair. Then, without a word, she pushes past me, nearly knocking me over. Her hair storms behind her, and without so much as an “excuse me,” she heads up the hill to the cabin.

How rude. I hope she's in bunk fifteen. But I know better than to whine about someone on my first day at camp. I wouldn't want to end up the picked-on girl. There's always one in every crowd, the girl nobody likes. It's terrible the way some kids gang up like that on one specific person, but I have to admit, I'm terrified of becoming that person myself.