The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved by Joey Comeau Read Free Book Online Page A

half hidden in the woods, with their roofs peeking out from under the overhanging branches into the sunshine. Chip walked ahead of the Cabin Seven boys, but he kept turning around and walking backwards to talk to them.
    “We’re going to be in one of the old cabins,” Chip said. “The girls all live in the new ones.” He pointed to the cabins closest to the main building. They didn’t look like cabins at all. They weren’t even a bit rustic, all made out of cement, bright lights inside.
    “Air conditioning, plumbing, the works,” Chip said, still pointing to the girl’s cabins. “We just built them this year. There are plans to build more after the season’s over, but for now the boys have got the same cabins as always.” He winked at Martin and said, “That’s what camp is all about, if you ask me. Haunted cabins and having to run through the woods in the middle of the night to pee. You aren’t afraid of ghosts, are you?” Chip said, winking again.
    Martin gritted his teeth. People look so stupid when they wink.
    But Martin did like the old cabins better, wooden and broken-down-looking, set back in the woods. They blended in with the trees around them and looked like they really could be haunted. They were exactly the kind of cabins where a ghost would feel at home. Or a serial killer. They had big windows, the perfect size for a killer to throw a body through. Cabin Seven was the second-to-last cabin.
    “Pick your bunks, guys,” Chip said, and Martin turned to the boy nearest to him.
    “I think he wants us to each select a bunk,” Martin told him.
    The guy nodded at Martin. “Yeah,” he said. “He just said that.”
    He wasn’t off laughing or slapping the other boys on the back, either. Maybe he was okay. Martin gave him a closer look. The other boy had brown hair that hung down over his ears. He was skinny, too. And he had weird teeth.
    “I’m Martin,” Martin said, offering his hand to shake.
    “Hey,” he said. “I’m Ricky.”
    The two boys shook hands and Chip grinned at them from the door. He gave them a thumbs up, and Martin could practically hear Chip’s thoughts. Camp was all about making friends.
    “You can have any bunk you want,” Ricky said. “Except this one’s Adrian’s, and that one in the corner on the bottom is mine. You should take that other corner bunk so I don’t have to sleep near a weirdo. You get some weirdo kids at summer camp. They let anyone in.”
    Martin walked to the other corner bunk and set his suitcase on the bed.
    There was nowhere for him to unpack his clothes. His shirts were going to have to stay folded in the suitcase, which was unacceptable. There were no closets here, no drawers. Nowhere to hang a hanger. The glass in the window wasn’t just smudged, it was broken. There was a long crack down from the top to the bottom corner. Martin took a deep breath and let it out. This was where he was now. A cabin in the woods.
    There weren’t supposed to be drawers in a cabin. The windows were meant to be broken and ragged. Get in the spirit, Martin told himself. Think of it like a horror movie. A haunted cabin, like Chip said. Don’t worry about your clothes. Worry about who’s going to die first. Who will find the body? Will it have all its limbs? Think about an axe cutting through the air.
    This was an adventure. Martin closed his eyes and tried to think about axes and ghosts.
    His shirts were going to get creases.
    Outside, Ricky showed Martin the Flying Fox near the playground equipment. It was a wire tied between two poles. One of the poles was short so the wire was just above their heads, and the other pole was five feet higher and twenty feet away.
    You climbed up a ladder to the higher pole and took hold of this metal bar. Then you jumped and held onto the bar like your life depended on it, and you went flying along the wire toward the shorter pole. At Martin’s school they just called this a zip-line. Here it was the Flying Fox.
    “There was