Firing off a few more words into the radio, he lowered it at his side and started marching in my direction.
“What’s up?” I asked, sliding a step back when he stopped right in front of me.
“There’s a kid missing at camp.” His voice matched his expression—pissed off.
“Really? Who?” I took another step back because I’d guessed where this was going.
He took another step closer. He was trying to make me uncomfortable. It was working. Then he threw his arm in the direction of Harry, who was still hustling circles around the meadow. “Your little brother.”
Busted.
Big-time. Those permission slips were kind of a big deal. Especially when the note Harry had taped to the fridge had fallen and gotten wedged underneath before our parents found it.
How two of the most self-absorbed beings on the planet noticed that their son was missing and practically sent out an Amber Alert was beyond me.
Once everyone figured out where Harry was, it was cool. My parents signed the slip so Harry could take part in “safe” activities on his own and disappeared into Cabin #13 before we made it back from the hike. Their concern was overwhelming.
So the ’rents had moved past it, just like everyone else at camp had, save for one person. My trainer. I’d let him down and I knew it….I just didn’t know how to make it right.
When we made it into camp by afternoon, Callum kept with the whole silent treatment he’d been dishing my way ever since the meadow incident, and other than a shake of a head when I asked him if he needed help with anything else, that was all the response I got from him. I didn’t know when my next shift was or what kind of adventure I’d be tackling. I wasn’t even sure if I still had a job after what I’d done.
So I was a little distracted all day. That was no different in the dinner line. I noticed with a groan when I looked down at my tray and saw a couple of barbecued drumsticks, a sweet potato wrapped in foil, a grilled ear of corn, and another roll. A few problems with all that: I didn’t eat dark meat, sweet potatoes were an insult to the potato family, and I was against corn on all levels based on the evidence that it had little to zilch in the nutritional value category. Looked like dinner was going to consist of a roll tonight.
Luckily, I wasn’t really hungry.
It was kind of hard to feel anything but gut-wrenching shame after the day I’d had.
“Hey, Phoenix. You want to come sit with me and my friends?” Harry had been in front of me in line, and he’d started for one table while I’d absently moved toward the one we’d sat at the night before.
I glanced in the direction of his friends’ table. It was a long one—the boys clustered together in the middle while who I guessed were their families were staggered on the ends. I wasn’t sure where I’d fit into that equation.
“Thanks for the invitation, but I’m going to park myself here tonight.” I set my tray down on the empty table and gave Harry a smile. It was strange—him looking after me. It might have only been an invitation to come sit with him and his friends, but I knew why he was doing it—he didn’t want me to be alone.
“Ya sure? I don’t mind, and my friends would be cool with it, too.”
I cleared my throat to keep from smiling. Our roles in the looking-after department might be shifting. “I’m sure, but thanks.”
He gave me a good look, probably doing what I did to him and assessing if what I’d said was more a truth or a fabrication, before nodding. “Okay, but I’ll come back when Mom shows up.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “I thought we’d settled that last night.”
“Yeah, but she said she was really coming tonight. For sure this time.”
Instead of arguing with him, I changed the subject.
“Go have fun with your friends. You know where to find me if you need me.” I waved at him as I slid into my seat. By the time I looked up a half second later, Harry was already across the dining hall.
I didn’t know how long I’d watched him mixing it up like the social butterfly I hadn’t known he was, when someone slipped into the seat across from me and set her tray down.
“Sorry I’m late. I was waiting for your dad…hoping he’d want to…” Mom’s voice trailed off as she distracted herself by looking around the hall for Harry.
I would have pointed at where he was if I wasn’t so shocked at her presence.
When she was still searching the room a minute later, her forehead folded with concern, I pointed in Harry’s direction. “He’s over there. With that big group of barbarians looking and sounding like they’re having some kind of burp-off.”
Mom found Harry just as he stood up on his seat, chugged a can of soda, and let out a belch that echoed through the room.
I smiled as I picked at my roll. He totally owned that burp-off.
“Harrison?” she whispered, like she couldn’t process the boy waving his arms in the air in victory across the cafeteria with the boy she’d spent the past ten years pretending to raise.
When Mom looked like she was about to go stop him, I grabbed her hand. “Don’t. Please. He’s having fun. Just let him, okay?”
Mom looked down at where my hand was clutching hers. Something I couldn’t read settled into her face. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d touched my mom. I couldn’t recall the last time she’d touched me back.
“I wasn’t going to go ruin his fun, Phoenix. As hard as I know you find it to believe, I’m not the fun police all the time.” She must have noticed my reaction, because she added, “Okay, fine. Just most of the time.” Was she smiling?
“Other than your brother going missing”—she cleared her throat—“how was the rest of your day?” She picked up her fork and lowered it to her baked beans. “It was your first day as an official camp counselor, right? How was it?”
“Eh, yeah. It was.” I picked another hunk of my roll to pieces and crumbled them over my drumsticks.
Mom set her fork down. “It was a bad day, then.”
I wondered why now, when I wanted to forget about the whole thing, she’d decided to pick up the concerned-parent baton again.
“It wasn’t a great one, that’s for sure,” I mumbled.
“What happened?” She gave me the Mom Brow.
“Other than my parents going nutso looking for Harry when they should have known he was with me…and lying to my trainer, Callum, about you guys signing Harry’s permission slip for camp?” I mumbled around a sigh. “That didn’t go over so well.”
Mom was quiet for a minute, watching me. “You made a mistake. One you’ll hopefully learn from. And thankfully Harrison turned up and was okay. That’s what matters.” She picked her fork up, but it stayed frozen above her tray again. “Who’s Callum?”
It took me a minute to catch up. I didn’t want to talk about Callum with her, but I really didn’t want her to know I didn’t want to talk about him with her. “He’s just another camp counselor here. He’s the one Ben assigned to train me for the next few weeks.”
She nodded, but I knew—she could tell I was hiding something. Moms were especially skilled in this area.
“Where’s he sitting?” Mom casually scanned the hall.
“I’m not sure,” I started, searching the hall like she was, pretending I didn’t have a clue where he was. “Probably with the other camp counselors.” I waved my finger at the tables reserved for the counselors. Two tables were packed and noisy with conversation, and the third quiet and empty except for one.
“Which one is he?”
“Huh?”
“Callum. Which one is Callum?” When she looked at me, I knew she’d seen right through my whole Huh?-I-forgot-who-we-were-talking-about act.
Tucking my leg beneath me, I pointed at him. “That’s Callum.”
She studied him for a moment, then turned her attention back to me. “Have you heard much from your friends?”
Yes. And no. They were busy enjoying their summers. I was busy pretending to enjo
y mine.
“Emerson and I have been texting, but you know, everyone’s busy, and I’ve only been gone for two days.” I stabbed at my potato, almost like it was a voodoo doll and my fork was the pin. It was surprisingly therapeutic.
Mom nodded. “Well, I’m sure everyone’s thinking of you.”
“I’m sure.”
How much longer was she going to sit here and grill me? How much longer should I sit here before I could bail without being too obvious?
“I know we haven’t gotten much of a chance to talk about this…but how are you doing with the whole Keats thing?”
Okay, Mom bringing up the ex topic? A wince didn’t even begin to cover just how not okay this was.
“The Keats thing?” I shoved my tray away. “By thing, do you mean his way of breaking up with me? Because I don’t know your definition of a thing, but what happened was more than that to me.”
“Phoenix—” Mom reached her arm across the table, almost like she was trying to calm me down or something, but I’d had it. Too much parental interference for one night.
“You know what, Mom? You have my permission, blessing, and encouragement to pretend to parent when it comes to Harry. He’s young and still innocent enough to not see this whole mother-of-the-year thing for the act it is.” I flew out of my seat. “I made it through the past two years without a mother pretending to care. I can make it one more year before I’m out, so save it for Harry. I’ve believed enough of your and Dad’s lies for one lifetime.”
Her face remained calm, eerily calm. Her eyes didn’t even flicker in anger. Other than the way her chest was moving faster now, there was nothing that gave away that she was getting lectured by her teen daughter in front of a room full of people.
Instead of getting up and walking away, Mom looked me in the eye. “I know,” she said, and then she finally took a bite of her dinner.
I’d failed my first assignment as a counselor-in-training on yesterday’s hike. I didn’t want to carry that trend into day two—rafting.
I woke up before my alarm went off at five that morning, images of campers falling from rafts and being pulled down rivers racing through my head. I couldn’t erase Callum’s voice, either—the words he’d said to the campers on the lawn the afternoon I’d arrived, instructing what to do if and when disaster struck.
That nervous pit opened up in my stomach the longer I lay in bed thinking about it, so, early or not, I threw the covers off and headed out for my morning run.
I might have messed up yesterday, but I wasn’t going to repeat that today. Nope, I learned from my mistakes, and I was going to be the best damn counselor-in-training Camp Kismet had ever seen.
I was supposed to “rendezvous” with the other counselors behind the dining hall at seven. The campers would show up an hour later once we’d had time to get all the rafts and equipment ready. The schedule was planned like it was some Navy Seal mission, which did nothing to calm my nerves.
When Dad had brought up Ben’s offer, I’d pictured a camp counselor leading songs around a campfire and making beaded bracelets and taking kids on snipe hunts. If I’d known what it was really like, I might not have jumped at the job how I had. Being responsible for people’s lives was more than I’d bargained for, all while trying to learn the ins and outs of the job.
Like yesterday morning, I showed up ten minutes early, my wet hair steaming in the cool morning air and my bare legs covered in goose bumps. Okay, so I’d really needed to steal my mom’s blow-dryer in the morning and throw on my fleece jacket, because this was the second morning in a row I’d spent shivering.
“Layers. You should give them a try.” His voice surprised me right before an object sailed through the air toward me. An oversized, heavy flannel, a lot like the one he’d worn yesterday morning, landed in my arms. It was soft—the kind that could only be achieved from being washed a few hundred times.
This time when I shivered, it wasn’t from the cold. “Thanks?” I said as he came closer, looking every bit as blurry-eyed and messy-haired as he had the morning before.
“Don’t mention it.” His voice was the same cool, removed one I’d quickly gotten used to, making me wonder if I had made up the fun, light side of Callum.
“Are you sure you don’t want to wear it? I’ll be okay.”
He didn’t look up at me while adjusting the Velcro straps of his sandals, but he tensed when I moved in his direction. Yeah, so he pretty much hated me. From making jokes one morning to certifiable loathing the next—way to go, Phoenix. Way. To. Go.
“If I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t have given it to you.” He stood up and started for an old truck that had a trailer stacked with four rafts hitched to it.
“Do you need any help?” I had to jog to keep up with him. When he didn’t answer, keeping his back to me as he double-checked the straps tying down the rafts, I cleared my throat. “What do you need me to do?”
Callum kept moving around the rafts. “Just stay out of my way.”
I sighed to myself—clearly he wasn’t the “forgive, forget, and move on” type. Not that I couldn’t identify…
“Okay, why don’t you just say what you need to say and get it over with?” I held my arms out. “Let me have it.”
I followed him around to the other side of the trailer and watched him check and tighten the straps over there. “You lied to me. You looked me in the face and lied.” He gave a hard yank on the strap he was working on. “What else is left to say?”
“Don’t you think ‘lied’ is a bit harsh?”
That earned me a sideways look. Well, a sideways glare. “What would you call it? Fudging the truth?”
“I didn’t tell you my parents signed the waiver to betray your trust, but to keep Harry’s.”
He spun toward me, his eyes aiming directly at mine. “Well, that plan backfired.”
“Obviously.” I looked him straight on. “What’s your point? Besides me being a terrible person for making a bad decision in a tough situation?”
“If I can’t trust you, you might as well just hand in your notice now.” He didn’t blink.
“Yeah, well, maybe I will. Especially if this is the way you’re going to treat me every time I mess up.”
He yanked a little harder than necessary on the next strap. “Listen, there are rules for a reason. For good reasons. If you can’t follow them, then, yeah, you should quit.”
The more he kept telling me to quit, the more I wanted to keep my job. “You’re telling me a signed permission slip is that important?”
I noticed the way his throat moved when he swallowed—like he was trying to swallow a whole apple. He was trying to be patient with me. I was trying to return the favor. “Keeps us from getting sued, keeps parents from losing their shit when they can’t figure out where their kid disappeared to, and lets us be ready if that kid has any special medical concerns. Like asthma. Or a life-threatening allergy.” His eyes cut to mine. “So, yeah, that permission slip is that important. Along with all the other rules we have here.”
I stalled just long enough to give myself a second to think. “Oh.”
“Oh,” he echoed, looking at me like he knew what he’d said had clicked.
“I’m sorry.” I bit my lip, feeling like a terrible person. I’d really screwed up—without even trying to. “I didn’t think. I didn’t get why it was so important.”
“You had my trust yesterday. Today you’re in the red,” he said. “What are you going to do about that?”
I shifted. “Earn it back?”
He studied me for a second. I studied him back. This morning, in this kind of light, his eyes looked more green than brown. “Okay, then. Lucky for you I believe in second chances.” He waved at a pile of paddles leaning against the shed. “Why don’t you load those paddles into the bed of the truck?”
“On it,” I said, going into action. Had he really just let me off the hook? Was he really willing to just take my word for it and hand out a redo? I wasn’t go
ing to hang around for him to change his mind.
There were at least a few dozen paddles to get loaded up, so I got started. I’d barely grabbed the first one and the entire stack of them clattered to the ground. Great.
“Why does camp hate me?” I groaned, wondering if Callum was right and I should just hand in my notice now. I couldn’t seem to do anything right anyway.
I was expecting some kind of sigh or lecture from him when I heard something else. Laughter.
Was he laughing at me? When I turned around to check, I found him covering his mouth like he was trying to hide it. “You’re a jerk for laughing,” I hollered back at him.
“I know.” He kept laughing.
The sound of crunching gravel caught my attention. Callum lost the smile.
“Is everything okay over here? I thought I heard laughter,” someone shouted.
“Or cries of torture,” a different someone replied.
Callum nodded at the others coming toward us. Their shirts gave them away as fellow counselors. “Same difference.”
“What do you say, New Girl? Is it a laugh or a cry of torture? Is a cry of torture a laugh?” one of the two guys asked, nudging the third counselor, a girl who was almost as red-eyed and tired-looking as Callum.
“I’m going to play it safe and plead the fifth,” I said, tugging at one of the straps like I knew what I was doing.
“Stop giving her a hard time, guys,” the girl said around a yawn and a stretch. “She answers one way, she pisses off her boss; if she answers the other way, she’s going to alienate herself from us. Give her a break. It’s barely seven in the morning.” She shot me a tired smile, like we’d somehow wound up on the same side. “I’m Naomi, by the way. And this guy, who was beat with the ugly stick so many times it actually broke, is Evan, and the even uglier one beside him is Ethan.”
Naomi was one of those boho-chic girls. The kind who looked like she was planning on saving the world by day and walking the catwalk by night—striking hair, striking smile, striking everything…but not in an in-your-face kind of way. I liked her already.