Acting Out (4 page)

She sure was a lot nicer than Alex. “Will you be teaching it?” I asked.

“No, but don't worry. One of us on the swim staff will be.”

She told me I could get out and dry off, but I said I had to do one more lap. “I was goofing around before the test, and Alex got a little mad.”

Libby smiled at me. “Well, that shouldn't be a problem for you.” I took off across the lake again, going even faster this time. Partly it was to get back at Alex, but partly I was showing off. Even if I didn't do the class, it was still pretty cool that she was amazed by my awesome swimming skills.

By the time I made it across the lake, the Cabin 2 girls were just jumping in for their test. I climbed the ladder at the end of the dock and shook myself off. Alex kept her eyes on the girls in the water. “Can I go now?” I asked, trying to be polite. I'd caused enough trouble for a while. She nodded and didn't look at me.

I was walking away to get my towel when she blew her whistle. I thought she was after me again, but when I turned around, she was on her knees, yelling at someone. “Are you okay? Do you need the flotation?”

Now everyone was rushing over to see what was going on.

“Everyone out of the water!” Alex yelled. I could see one girl trying to keep her head above water, but she was definitely panicking. She went under and came up again, coughing like crazy. It was Isabel, the quiet one on Side B. The rest of the girls climbed up the ladder at the end of the dock, one by one, watching Isabel the whole time.

“Girls, move it!” yelled another counselor. She'd run up with this big red foam thing and she tossed it to Alex, who threw it out to Isabel. By now, everybody at the lake was watching.

Isabel grabbed the floaty thing, and Alex pulled her over to the dock. Then she grabbed her under the arms and sat her on the edge of the dock. Isabel sat there and coughed while Alex leaned over her. “Why'd you jump in if you can't swim? You should've told me you can't swim!” she shouted.

It took every ounce of energy I had to keep from running over to Alex and pushing her into the lake. How could she be so mean? It was bad enough that the poor kid had to be rescued, but did she have to embarrass her in front of everyone? Poor Isabel.

Alex turned around, and her face was as white as a new pair of gym socks. She looked pretty freaked out, but that still didn't give her the right to yell at Isabel.

Katherine had her hand over her mouth, snickering. “What a loser!” she said to Mei.

“Shut up, or I'll push you in,” Mei hissed at her. I liked that girl. She was tiny, but she had the personality of a firecracker.

I wrapped myself up in my towel, then sat down on a big rock to wait for the other girls to finish. I finally saw Natasha, sitting about twenty feet away with the girls from her cabin. Isabel came and sat beside me on the rock. She wouldn't look at me.

“Don't worry about it,” I told her. “Just shake it off.”

Isabel nodded but kept staring at her toenails.

When the other girls finished their test, we all walked back to the cabin together.

“Wow! You were amazing,” said Amber. “Way to show up Alex!”

“I told you I made enemies on the bus. Looks like I've made one more!”

“Thank you so much for admitting you were the one who yelled that,” Lauren said. “I thought she was going to bust all of us.” Her blond hair looked even whiter when it was wet and the sun was shining on it.

“Look, there's something you guys need to know about me,” I explained. “I'm always causing trouble. Trouble is my middle name.” I said it like I believed it.

“I thought it was Delilah,” said Amber.

“Nah, I was just kidding about that. JD really stands for Juvenile Delinquent!” They all laughed. I couldn't believe it. If getting in trouble got me this much attention, it was worth it. If I could keep this up all month, my personality makeover would be a huge success. It was only the first day, but already I felt more like JD than Judith.

“Prevention, fitness, response, leadership, professionalism.” Alex held up one finger at a time and ticked off the five areas she wanted us to remember. “Those five areas will be our focus for the next four weeks.”

Off in the shallow end I watched the nice counselor Libby with her advanced beginner class, working on back floats. They were mostly Juniors, eight or nine years old, and then poor Isabel, stuck with all the little kids. Isabel had been so embarrassed about having to be rescued yesterday, but right now I wished I could switch places with her.

There was a long silence, and I looked up to see why Alex had stopped talking. She stared at me with her arms crossed, and the rest of the class was looking at me too.

“Do I have your undivided attention now?” snarled Alex. I nodded and wrapped my towel more tightly around my shoulders. Boy, she really hated me, but the feeling was completely mutual. I almost died when I found out
she
was teaching the Guard Start class. Why couldn't it have been Libby?

Alex kept talking and I tried to listen. Six of us had signed up for the class, and I was glad that most of them were from my cabin: Courtney, Mei, and Lauren. Besides us there were two other girls, Claudia and Shelby. We were all huddled up with our towels wrapped around us like blankets. It was only nine thirty, and it was freezing out here. Okay, maybe not quite freezing, but it was probably in the sixties at least. When we woke up this morning, the cabin felt like a refrigerator, and we'd all worn jackets and sweats to breakfast. I had no idea the mountains got so cold at night.

“I have to warn you that the final test will be really demanding,” said Alex. “You'll have to tread water for two minutes without using your hands, swim five hundred yards without stopping, and retrieve a ten-pound object from a depth of ten feet.”

Courtney poked me in the ribs, and I glanced at her. Her eyes widened, and I raised my eyebrows. It did sound pretty hard. Five hundred yards—that was like swimming five football fields.

“I have another Guard Start class with Senior girls who are thirteen and fourteen, but most of you are twelve. So you're all a little young.” She paced back and forth and locked her eyes on each one of us as she talked. “I fully expect that some of you won't be able to hack it, and you'll drop out. A few of you might get all the way through the class, but maybe you won't pass the final test. If you do pass, your next step will be taking a lifeguarding class when you're fifteen.” She stopped in front of us and crossed her arms.

“You'll also be expected to complete thirty service hours—helping out with swimming lessons for the little kids. So this class is going to be a lot of hard work. Anyone who's not ready to give it her all should leave now.”

I jumped to my feet and waved to everyone. “I guess this is good-bye! Have fun!”

Alex stepped aside to let me pass, but I felt someone yank my towel from behind. It was Courtney. “She's just kidding.” She and Lauren pulled me down and made me sit between them. Courtney held on to my towel like she didn't trust me to sit still.

I could have easily walked away. Who needed this? I didn't even want to be a lifeguard, so this class was a complete waste of time for me. I'd wanted to go to the climbing tower this morning, but Courtney and Lauren had dragged me here instead. They thought the class sounded cool, and then Mei wanted to do it too. So I came along, mostly to be with them. They seemed like the type of girls Chloe would be friends with.

Alex was staring me down. “You're welcome to go. Why don't you leave now before you waste another minute of my time?” Courtney gripped my towel tighter, so I kept quiet and didn't move.

“Are you staying or going?” Alex asked, boring a hole through me with her blue death-ray eyes.

I shrugged. “I might as well stay. I'm dressed for the part.” I opened and closed my towel really fast. Mei bit the edge of her towel to keep from smiling. Alex turned away and started blabbing about the five areas again.

It felt scary being the troublemaker. But if I was going to try this out, camp was definitely the place to do it. I'd thought about it a lot since Alex had yelled at me yesterday. What could she do to me? What could any of the counselors do to me? It wasn't like school, where you got called to the principal, or got detention, or got a note sent home to your parents. The worst thing they could do to me was send me home, but I'd have to do something major, like set the cabin on fire, to have
that
for a punishment. And I wanted to be a comedian, not an arsonist.

When Alex finished jabbering, she gave us all workbooks, and we did exercises in them called “Safety First” and “Know Your PFD: Personal Flotation Device.” Then she told us all to get into the water to swim laps. “Four laps, ladies. Across the lake and back, two times.” Then she pointed to me and said, “JD's doing five laps today. Just to show me how committed she is to the class.”

Alex blew her whistle and we lined up to dive in. I went second after Lauren, and when I came up for air I was gasping from the cold.

“How is it?” asked Mei from the dock, her arms folded across her chest and her shoulders hunched. If she was cold now, the water was really going to wake her up.

“Fr-freezing!” I yelled. The water was so frigid it made my head ache.

“Colder than yesterday?” asked Courtney.

“Yes!” Lauren and I shouted at the same time.

Alex blew her whistle at us. “Stop complaining and start swimming!” One by one, the others dove in. After everybody had screamed and groaned and gotten over the shock, we all started across the lake.

“I'm never going to make it,” said Courtney when she came up for air. Her teeth chattered, and her lips were pale.

“Sure you will. It's not that far,” I told her.

“No, I mean everything. This class. There's no way I'll ever pass it.”

“Me neither,” said Mei, bobbing up beside us. Her black hair looked like it was painted on. “I thought I was a good swimmer, but she scared me to death back there.”

I looked back at Alex standing on the dock with her whistle between her teeth, ready to blow it if we made a wrong move. “Hey, Alex. Instead of sucking on that whistle, why don't you swallow it instead?” Of course she couldn't hear me, but everyone else could. They all laughed at my joke, so I kept going.

“I think Alex needs a nose ring,” I said. “Then she could hang her whistle from it. Wouldn't that be a nice fashion statement?”

“JD, stop!” gasped Lauren, treading water just enough to keep her head up. “I can't swim and laugh at the same time!”

“No, don't stop,” Courtney said, blowing water out of her nose. “It'll take our minds off how cold we are.”

“These are the five areas we'll be working on this summer: Marco Polo, belly flops, cannonballs, handstands . . .”

“That's only four,” Mei pointed out.

“And making Alex so mad she swallows that whistle!”

Just then we heard the whistle blow. “Stop horsing around out there!” Alex called across the lake.

Everyone cracked up, so then I said, “Hey, guys, let's all turn around and neigh at her. C'mon, on the count of three . . .”

I counted to three and then spun around in the water and neighed at Alex on the end of the dock, but we were so far away from her now, there was no way she heard me. No one else did it, but the others sure laughed their heads off.

“This class is going to be fun with you in it,” said Claudia, the girl who'd looked bored when Alex was talking and who'd kept checking her watch the whole time.

“Yeah, I was about to leave when she went on and on about how hard it was going to be,” put in Shelby, a skinny girl with bangs covering her eyes. “But when you stood up and made a big joke of it, I decided to stick it out.”

“I fully expect half of you to drown before the class ends,” I said, making my voice growly like Alex's. “And the rest of you better be willing to dedicate your lives to this class or I'll shoot you at sunrise.”

“That's just how she talks!” Mei laughed.

“Somebody better tell her this is
summer
camp, not prison camp,” I yelled. It was so much fun to laugh at Alex while we were on the other side of the lake. She couldn't reach us out here.

“You should tell her that,” Lauren suggested. “It would be so funny if you got out of the water and said that to her!”

“Yeah! Do it!” everybody else was telling me.

“Maybe I will,” I said.

“No, don't, JD. You've made her mad enough for one day,” warned Courtney. “She'll kick you out, and we all want you in here with us or we'll never make it.”

“Okay, fine. I'll try to be good, but it won't be easy.” I put my face down and swam faster because I didn't want the rest of them to see my big, goofy smile.

It was working! Boring Judith Duckworth had disappeared, and I was JD, the funniest girl in the class now. But what if I ran out of jokes? I just hoped I could keep up this act forever. Or at least till camp was over.