Ten (9 page)

So in my head, I thought of them as the Polka Dots. The Polka Dots went EVERYWHERE with their arms linked, even the narrow nature trails, and even when it meant bumping into low-hanging branches.

And behind them? Me. I was the cheese, like in “The Farmer in the Dell.” I found myself humming it all day long. The humming was out loud, but I sang the words silently, and only to myself.
The cheese stands alone. The cheese stands alone. Hi-ho the derry-o, the cheese stands alone!

 

Day two of Wilderness Survival Camp was a repeat of day one, except with different activities. The best activity was learning how to make a fire—and I admit it, that part was fabulous. At home, we made a fire by turning on our fireplace. With a switch. The logs weren't real and neither were the flames. They were made of gas, and at the bottom, they were blue.

But Jake and Lily taught us how to start a real fire. First they split us up into groups of three, and my group consisted of me, one of the Polka Dots, and a boy named Connor. The Polka Dot in my group sighed a lot and looked yearningly at the other Polka Dots. Basically, she was boring.

Connor was nice, though. He had long hair—the longest hair I'd ever seen on a boy my age—and he was good at listening to directions. While the Polka Dot sighed, Connor and I did everything Jake and Lily told us to.

First we gathered some dry moss and broke it into pieces. That would be our “tinder,” Lily told us. Then we collected lots of different sized sticks. We used the smallest sticks to build a teepee around the moss, and then, with Lily right nearby in case of a forest fire, Connor struck a match and poked it onto the pile of moss.

The moss caught on fire
like that.
It was awesome! You couldn't have a fire made
only
out of moss, because the moss burned too quickly, but the flames lasted just long enough to catch the small sticks on fire.

“Sweet,” Lily said. “See how the sticks on the outside fall inward to feed the fire? Now start adding bigger sticks.
Perfect
, you two. You're naturals!”

Connor and I grinned at each other. His face was flushed, and his long hair had grown sweaty, but I didn't care. Anyway, my hair probably looked sweaty, too.

The Polka-Dot member of our group wasn't sweaty or dirty at all, and her hair was still in its perky updo, decorated with about fifty clippies. But she didn't know how to build a fire, now did she?

 

On Wednesday morning, I didn't complain when it was time to head off for camp. In fact, I was ready before Mom was.

“So you
are
having fun, huh?” Mom said.

“No comment,” I said cheerfully.

She smiled and kissed the top of my head. “I'm proud of you, sweetie. I knew you'd make it work.”

That day, we hiked to a place called the Raptor Center. A volunteer gave us a tour and told us it was a hospital for birds of prey that'd been wounded. She showed us a falcon with a broken leg, a hawk missing a chunk of her wing because someone shot her, and a bald eagle that landed on a power line and got slightly electrocuted.

“Poor thing,” I said.

“Yeah,” Connor said. “How's an eagle supposed to know what a power line is?”

He and I talked the whole way back from the Raptor Center, mostly about animals. Connor said he was an animal rights activist, which I didn't know kids
could
be.

“Sure they can,” he said. “It just means you care about animals and don't think people should do cruel experiments on them.”

“Oh. Then I'm an animal activist, too.”

“Cool,” he said, holding out his fist. I touched my knuckles to his and giggled.

“Do you have any pets?” I asked.

“A dog,” he said. “She only has three legs, because before we got her, someone tied a lit firecracker to her tail.”

“And it blew off her
leg
?”

“She's fine, though. She can still run around and play fetch and stuff.”

“What's her name?” I asked.

“Lucky,” he said.

I laughed without thinking. Then I clapped my hand over my mouth. “Omigosh.
Omigosh
, I'm
so
sorry.”

“No, it's okay. She didn't die, so she is lucky.”

“Plus she gets to live with you, so there's one more reason.”

He smiled and kicked the dirt trail.

Ahead of us, the Polka Dots launched into a Rockettes routine. Earlier in the week I might have thought something like,
Ugh, really? A high-kicking routine at Wildnerness Survival Camp? Why, in case a bear comes along and you need to kick it in the nose?

But they looked like they were enjoying themselves, so I didn't.

If a bear did amble out of the woods, however, I would not leave my life in the hands—or high-kicking feet—of the Polka Dots. Nope, I'd climb a tree and yell for Connor to follow me. We'd pelt the bear with pinecones, and if that didn't work, we'd both be interrupting cows and moo as loudly as we could, until the bear fainted dead away out of pure confusion.

Imagining the two of us mooing from up in a tree made me giggle.

“What?” Connor said.

“Nothing,” I said. “But I do have a joke for you. Wanna hear it?”

“Okay.”

“Knock, knock,” I said.

“Who's there?”

“Interrupting cow.”

“Interrupting cow—”

I interrupted him, of course.
“MOOOOO!”

 

On Thursday, we went canoeing in the Chattahoochee River, and Connor and I shared a canoe. He kept splashing me, so I splashed him back, and we both ended up drenched.

On Friday, we did a community service project, which was to clean up trash from a nearby public park.

The Polka Dots didn't like this, and they turned into Grumpy Dots.

“We shouldn't have to pay to do chores,” complained the girl I might or might not have seen at Garden Hills Pool. “Especially on our last day of camp.”

“Yeah,” the others chorused.

I felt sad for a second, thinking about how it really was the last day. Once camp was over, I'd never see Connor again—not unless we ended up going to the same college, or if we randomly ran into each other at Baskin-Robbins, say.

Then I shook that gloomy thought away. The fact that it was our last day meant we should enjoy it, not be gloomy or grumpy about it.

“Come on, you guys,” I said to the Polka Dots. “It won't be that bad. Plus, we'll be doing something good for the earth.”

“Wh-hoo,” the shortest Polka Dot said sourly.

“Well,
I
think it'll be fun,” I said, and I wasn't just saying it. I was excited because we'd been given special tools to use called Trash Gators. They were long poles with a handle at one end and a snapping mouth at the other end. If you squeezed the handle, the mouth would clamp down on whatever you wanted to pick up: beer cans, potato-chip bags, anything!

I headed off toward Connor, squeezing the handle of my Trash Gator experimentally.

The Garden Hills Polka Dot grabbed my arm and said, “Wait a sec. We have a question for you.”

I turned back. All four Polka Dots gathered close.

“Do you like that boy?” one of them asked.

I furrowed my brow. “Who?
Connor?
”

“Yeah,” the Polka Dot from my fire-making group said. “Do you think he's cute?”

Well, huh
. I guess I did, but I saw no reason to share this with the Dots. “He's okay.”

“But do you like him?” the Garden Hills Dot pressed. “Like,
like
him like him?”

“We're just friends,” I said, because I hadn't reached the boy-crazy stage yet. I knew girls who had—for example, the Polka Dots with their Starbucks crush—but not me.

The Dots looked disappointed.

The shortest Dot stepped closer and said, “Well, we think his friend is
totally
crush-worthy.” She used her chin to indicate a boy wearing a Braves ball cap. “Don't you?”

I glanced at the boy she meant. I hadn't said a word to him the whole week—well, other than
thanks
when he handed me a crayon I needed. We'd been doing leaf rubbings. He had the burnt sienna, which had always been one of my favorite crayons.

“Isn't he adorable?” Short Dot said.

“
So
adorable,” Fire-Making Dot said.

“We call him Mars Bar,” the roundest of the Dots said, making all the Dots giggle.

“Mars Bar?”
I said. “Why?”

“Because we aren't sure what his real name is,” Short Dot explained.

“Ahhh,” I said. “But why Mars Bar?”

“Because Mars Bars are yummy,” Garden Hills Dot said, which led to more giggling. “And because his name is something like that.”

“Something like
Mars Bar
?” What name sounded something like Mars Bar?!

“Not the
whole
Mars Bar,” Short Dot said. “Just the Mars part.”

Round Dot nodded. “Yeah. It's like
Nars
, or
Sarge
, or something.”

“Maybe it's Plars,” Fire-Making Dot said.

Plars
, I thought, my lips twitching. Maybe the Dots weren't as bad as I'd thought.

“Or Jarz,” I suggested. “With a
z
.”

“Well, of course with a
z
,” Fire-Making Dot said. “What other way is there?”

“Girls!” Lily called. “More trash collecting, less gabbing!”

“Coming!” I called back. Again I started off, and again Garden Hills Dot stopped me.

“If you find out his name, will you tell us?” she asked.

I grinned at them. “Sure.”

 

Connor and I had a blast picking up litter. We made up a game we called Gator Grab, which involved grabbing aluminum cans and using our Trash Gators to try and toss them into the park's recycling bins. It would have been easier to walk over and drop the cans into the bins, but it was more fun to try to lob them in from several yards away.

It took finesse, it took precision, and it took excellent timing, skills that neither Connor nor I possessed. One of Connor's cans flew so high that I cried out, “Aaah! You're going to hit a little birdie! Fly, little birdie! Fly for your life!” Another time, I released the handle grip too late, and the Coke can went sailing
behind
me and clonked our counselor Jake on the head.

I cringed. “Sorry!”

Jake rubbed his head. Connor cracked up. I did, too, once Jake wasn't looking.

As for Mars Bar, I did make a stab at finding out his name. I didn't want to ask Connor, because that would have been weird, and what if Connor thought
I
had a crush on him? Which I didn't, of course, but the thing about crushes was that once somebody—
any
body—mentioned them, the whole subject became . . . like . . . explosive.

I didn't want Mars Bar
or
Connor exploding on me, so I played it cool. I strolled toward Mars Bar with the thought of saying, “Hey, I'm Winnie. It's the last day of camp, and I still don't know what your name is. Isn't that weird?”

But I totally blew it. I said, “Hey, I'm—” And then I froze!
I totally froze!

I froze because the Dots were right. Whatever his name was, he was adorable. His brown hair curled up from beneath his Braves hat, and his hazel eyes glinted in the sun.

But he was more than just adorable. He was . . .

Well, I guess
one
way to describe him was . . .

Ag
. I had never had this happen to me, and certainly not with a boy. But there I stood like a frozen corn dog until he broke the silence, saying, “Hey back. And you're what?”

I wiggled my jaw and got it to work. “Huh?”

“You said, ‘Hey, I'm . . .' ” He circled his hand. “But you didn't finish. So, what are you?”

I stared at him. I didn't know what I was. It was the strangest thing.

Mars Bar smiled, but he was clearly perplexed. He tugged at his ear.

“I'm . . . um . . . picking up trash!” I said. “Yes! Yay, trash!” At Mars Bars' feet lay a piece of crumpled newspaper, and I aimed my Trash Gator at it. I came away with a chunk of the lawn. Clumps of dirt fell on my boot.

“Okay!” I chirped. “Bye now!” I spun on my heel and took my hunk of grass to the Dumpster, where I rose onto my tiptoes and dropped it in. Only I missed, and dirt and grass rained down all over me.
Oh my goodness gravy!

The Dots, who'd witnessed the entire scene, giggled.

I could feel how bright red I was, but I giggled, too. What else
could
I do? I just hoped to the heavens above that if I ever had a MOMENT WITH A BOY like that again, it wouldn't be until I was ready for it. Like, when I was sixtyeight or even eight-six. Because it was freaky being slackjawed and marshmallow-brained like that! I had
no
desire to experience that sort of freakiness ever again.

Fortunately, Connor was just a normal boy, so I rejoined him and put Mars Bar out of my head. I Gator-grabbed the bottom of Connor's T-shirt and shook him like a dog would shake a dog toy.

“Hey!” Connor cried. He tried to Gator-grab my shirt, and on his third attempt, he succeeded. Now we both had each other in a pincer grip. We circled each other, laughing.

Lily came up behind us and exclaimed, “Winnie! Connor! What in the world are you guys doing?”

“
I'm
not doing anything,” I told Lily. I shuffled to the right and didn't let Connor go. “But as you see, there is a wild thing latched onto me.”