Not a Happy Camper by Mindy Schneider Read Free Book Online Page A

was broken by a sudden, thundering noise. The motorboat!
    â€œHey, lookit! Think I see someone!”
    â€œWhere?”
    They were men’s voices, yelling, and they were heading my way. It flashed across my mind that it might be Jacques Weiss or Saul Rattner, coming to get me for being out of my bunk in the middle of the night. Saul would throw me out of camp and send me home to my parents and my parents would be furious. Even if they let me out of the house, I’d end up spending the rest of the summer at the Springfield Pool with my bathing cap on my head,watching my little brothers, while fat women in muumuus and shower caps hogged the shallow section when they announced it was time for the Ladies’ Daily Dunk.
    I ducked down, so no one would see me as my canoe rocked from side to side in the wake created by their boat.
    I wondered if Kenny would miss me if I left. I hoped so.
    â€œNah. Don’t see nobody,” I heard the second man shout as the motorboat zipped away. Close call, but I was undetected. They didn’t sound like Saul or Jacques and I didn’t care who they were as long as I wasn’t in trouble. I made it back to Girls’ Side in what seemed like both an eternity and a matter of seconds, jumped out of the canoe, pulled it ashore, and ran back to my bunk. I tiptoed quietly up the creaky front steps, slipped in through the creaky porch door and slid into my creaky metal army cot.
    Betty Gilbert sat up and looked at me.
    â€œGoing to be late for swim instruction,” she said.
    â€œBut it’s the middle of the night...”
    Betty Gilbert not only talked in her sleep, she also got up and did things. In this case, she went over to her cubbyholes, pulled out a bathing suit and put it on over her clothes. And then she got back into bed and pulled the covers over her head. She was in for a surprise when she woke up the next morning. Meanwhile, a heavy rain began to fall, wiping out all other sounds, and I drifted off as well.
    At breakfast a few hours later, the girls from the oldest bunk, the Junior Counselors who lived up the hill, were not in attendance and no one knew why. It crossed my mind that they might have heard about my adventure and now they were off at some secret meeting, some chic restaurant where sixteen-year-olds go, drinking black coffee, smoking Virginia Slims and laughing behind my back:
    â€œDid you hear about Mindy?”
    â€œWent to Boys’ Side last night.”

    â€œTo see Kenny. What a dope!”
    â€œAs if some boy would like her.”
    â€œAs if Kenny would like her!”
    â€œCan I bum another smoke?”
    Was it narcissistic to think people were talking about how
un
important I was?
    After breakfast, it was time to go to Boys’ Side for services, which now seemed like the last thing I wanted to do. Walking around the lake mid-morning was not the same experience as walking there at night. As we paraded by, the sunburned townies at the Public Beach glared at us, inadvertently calling up the opening scenes from
Deliverance
. And then there were the bees. One of the cottages was owned by a beekeeper and during the day his little pets were out in full force. A swarm had descended upon the dirt road just a few feet ahead and we stood there, eighty-five of us, frozen. “Just walk slowly,” the man in the head-to-toe protective beekeeper’s uniform told us. “They’re really friendly.”
    I’d had encounters with bees before. At Camp Cicada I’d managed to accidentally step on a hive while on an overnight in the woods when I was hunting for a marshmallow stick. I figured the eight stings were due punishment, since my plan was to rip a live branch from a tree in order to toast calories I didn’t really need. My counselor said it was no big deal and I should cover the stings with mud. By the next day, my whole leg swelled up. Now, on the road to Boys’ Side, I was facing hundreds, maybe