Applewhites at Wit's End (2 page)

Chapter Two

W
hen Jake had first come to live at Wit's End, he had been determined to get away as soon as possible. Having been kicked out of the entire public school system of the state of Rhode Island, then out of Traybridge Middle School after he was sent to North Carolina to live with his grandfather, he had expected to get himself kicked out of the Applewhites' Creative Academy in a matter of days. The first problem with that had been that the Applewhites weren't the least bit bothered by his multiple piercings, his scarlet spiked hair, his black clothes, or his cursing—all the things that established his identity as the bad kid from the city. The second problem was that he really had no place else to go. His parents were both serving time in minimum-security prisons for having attempted to sell their home-grown marijuana to an off-duty sheriff's deputy, and there were no foster families back home in Providence willing to take him in. E.D. had almost gleefully pointed out that his only alternative was Juvie. So he'd been forced to stay.

It had turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. Becoming a musical-theater star in a matter of weeks had surprised Jake as much as it had surprised the Applewhites. He'd never suspected that he had a talent for singing and acting until Randolph recruited him to play Rolf in
The Sound of Music
. The show had been a success and Jake had gotten good reviews, but that hadn't been nearly as important as his discovery of what the Applewhites called a “creative passion.” Never in his life had Jake been anywhere near as happy as he was onstage, in front of an audience, becoming a person quite different from himself. He loved singing. He loved acting. And later when Randolph cast him as the Artful Dodger in
Oliver!
, he'd found out that he loved dancing, too. Everything about musical theater, in fact, turned Jake on.

Because the Creative Academy was a home school, he had been able to take off the whole month of February to be in
Oliver!
; and not only that, he'd been able to get school credit for doing it. He was theoretically in the seventh grade with E.D., but he didn't have to be stuck all the time doing what she did and being shown up by her obsessively organized, determinedly academic, and viciously competitive version of education. This was a girl who drove herself relentlessly toward perfection and couldn't bear the thought of getting (actually, thanks to the way the Applewhites did home schooling,
giving herself
) less than an A in anything. She and Jake might be very nearly the same age, but they were wildly and impossibly different. Thanks to the Applewhite philosophy of life, which passionately celebrated individuality, that was completely okay.

Randolph's end-of-the-world announcement had scared Jake clear down to his toes, though he'd done his best to hide it. What would suddenly poverty-stricken Applewhites do with
him
? He himself had no money. His grandfather was providing him with a small allowance so he could pay for clothes and a few incidentals, but otherwise he'd really been taken in as if he were a family member. He wasn't. He was another mouth to feed. Jake couldn't stand to lose his place here—it would mean losing himself. His new self. The only one he'd ever really known or cared about!

The morning after that dark and stormy night he'd worked up the nerve to ask Archie and Lucille—it was their Wisteria Cottage that he lived in—if they thought it was going to be possible for him to finish the school year.

“Don't be silly, Jake!” Lucille had proclaimed, “You're a full-time student. Of
course
you'll finish the year.”

But as time went on and the austerity measures the Applewhites had adopted began to really pinch, Jake had started worrying about what would happen in the summer. Like regular schools, the Creative Academy's year ended in June. There'd be no reason to keep him here after that, so he figured they would probably send him to the grandfather he barely knew, a grandfather who had no clue about creative passion and who had only seen one musical in all his life:
The Sound of Music
last October at Wit's End Playhouse.

So when Randolph announced his idea for
Eureka!
, Jake had mostly held his breath until he heard the words he'd been hoping for: that he was to have a job to do at the camp. He didn't care that he didn't have the first clue about how to be a singing coach. He only cared that he wasn't going to be sent off to spend the summer alone on a ramshackle farm outside of Traybridge with his grandfather. Whatever camp turned out to be, it had to be better than that! He figured he was the happiest person in the room when the rest of the family had finally agreed to it.

Now, the very next night, the family was gathered for their first planning session. “What are we going to do with these kids all day?” Archie asked.

“Workshops, of course!” Randolph said. “Each of us, as I said in the first place, will share our own creative passion. We'll give them the whole spectrum of creative and artistic possibilities. I will do a theater workshop, of course, with an emphasis on acting.”

“I can't teach twelve children how to make sculptural wood furniture in eight weeks,” Archie protested.

“Well, then—how about Sculpture with Natural Materials?' Randolph said. “They can gather whatever they need from our own woods and meadows—thus saving a fortune on materials. You can certainly teach that.”

Archie shook his head. “I don't want to teach! I want to do my own work.”

Sybil quickly agreed.

“We're talking about saving our
lives
here!” Randolph reminded them. “There will still be plenty of time for each of you to do your own work. It isn't as if you'll have the campers the whole day!” Then he looked at Sybil. “You don't even
have
your own work, remember? A fiction workshop shouldn't be any problem at all. You
do
it so well, how hard could it be to teach?”

“I shall be in my element,” Lucille said. “That poetry workshop I did at Traybridge Middle School was a disappointment—one hour every other week. How can anyone instill a love for the sound and imagery and
soul
of poetry in five disconnected hours? Imagine having twelve young poets to mold and encourage on a daily basis for eight whole weeks, twelve young poets to introduce to the vast wealth of American contemporary poetry! I'll have them write every day, of course. We'll put out an anthology at the end of camp—or a journal of their work at the very least!”

“Children are not going to make fine wood furniture,” Zedediah said.

“Of course not, Father! You can teach them the principles of design, the use of tools.”

“No kids are going to get near my lathe—it would be a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

“So have them make something simple. Wooden toys. Birdhouses. Focus on design. You know yourself that's the most creative part of what you do.”

“I'll teach them ballet! Maybe a little modern dance,” Cordelia said. “We can work up a presentation for the end of camp. Maybe a contemporary version of
Swan Lake
down by the pond.”

Randolph turned to Hal. “With Archie doing sculpture, you can do a painting workshop. We've already got plenty of paint and brushes. And as short a time as you spent focused on painting, you must have a lot of canvas left over. We'll make Sweet Gum Cottage into an art studio.”

“I can't do it,” Hal said. “Twelve kids? No way!”

Jake tried to imagine Hal in Sweet Gum Cottage surrounded by twelve kids. He was such an introvert that Jake hadn't even laid eyes on him his first few weeks at Wit's End. When the whole family had decided to go on Facebook as an experiment in interacting with their fans, Hal had refused to friend anyone except himself.

E.D. spoke up then, counting off the workshops on her fingers. “Theater, dance, poetry, fiction, wood design, natural material sculpture, singing, and painting. If the workshops are an hour each—”

“Theater needs to be at least two hours. You can't get any momentum going in an hour!”

“So that's nine hours, not counting meals, rest periods, any kind of sports—”

“This is a creativity camp, not a sports camp!”

“Randolph,” Lucille said, “these are children! They have to have physical activity of some kind.”

“
Dance
is physical activity!” Cordelia said.

Lucille nodded. “True . . .” She thought for a moment and then smiled. “I can teach them yoga—perfect for balancing body, mind, and spirit. We'll start the day with it. Meditation first, then yoga—before breakfast.”

“I've got the credentials to be a lifeguard,” Archie said reluctantly. “I suppose we could offer swimming.”

“Gross!”
E.D. said. “Swimming in the pond? There are frogs and snakes and snapping turtles!”

“And muck,” Jake added. Every time he and Winston went to the pond, the dog got covered with mud up to his stomach.

“Archie's right,” Randolph said. “A camp should definitely have swimming. We can anchor a diving platform in the middle. The pond will make a wonderful picture for the brochure.”

“Brochure!” Lucille said. “Yes, we have to let people know about us. We can replicate the advertising campaign we did for
The Sound of Music.
It worked splendidly!”

“Too expensive,” Randolph said.

“Then we'll do most of it online,” Archie said. “We'll need a
Eureka!
website.”

“Somebody has to design a logo!”

E.D. was counting on her fingers again. “Swimming, yoga and meditation, meals, rest time, and all those workshops . . .”

“Campfires!” Sybil said. “Don't forget campfires. Toasting marshmallows—”

“S'mores!” Lucille added.

“Singing and storytelling,” Sybil said. “We'll have to make a fire circle—over in the barn parking lot maybe.”

“Don't forget free time,” Zedediah said. “The creative spirit needs plenty of unscheduled time.”

“There aren't enough hours in the day!” E.D. protested.

“Well then, they won't do everything every day,” Randolph said. “You'll figure it out. You're a genius at calendars and scheduling.”

Jake smiled to himself. His summer was secure. The Applewhites were off and running.

Chapter Three

W
ith a jolt, E.D. realized she had fallen asleep over the computer keyboard. Again. She had been doing her online math course when the numbers had begun running together and she'd drifted off. Now she looked around at the ever-growing chaos of what had been the Creative Academy's schoolroom and sighed. Like just about everything at Wit's End, it was now partly what it had always been and partly something else. It was eleven o'clock in the morning on May seventh, almost exactly two months after Randolph had first brought up his plan, and she was the only one here, the only one still accomplishing anything that remotely resembled school. Jake was off in the woodshop with Archie building a diving platform for the pond. She had no idea what either Cordelia or Hal was up to, but she was certain it had to do with
Eureka!

This was going to become the camp office, so the schoolroom's furniture and materials had been shoved to one side to make room for a somewhat dented metal desk, a threadbare swivel chair, and two enormous file cabinets that Archie had found at a used furniture store. Three of the school desks had already been carted off to the storage rooms in the bottom of the barn because nobody was using them. She was the only student at the Creative Academy who was determined to finish every single thing she had planned for spring semester. Everybody else had substituted camp preparations for most of their schoolwork. Math, which all of them took online, was the only part of regular school that went relentlessly on for Hal, Cordelia, and Jake, and all three of them complained bitterly about it. With final exams approaching, they were pretty much forced to keep up.

E.D. absolutely refused to let
Eureka!
derail her. Since that first planning meeting, she had finished three research papers (for science, history, and current events), read four books and written book reports (for language arts), kept up her vocabulary study, and maintained a steady A average in math. If camp was supposed to save their way of life, she didn't see how it could do that by destroying hers! So even though she'd been up late the night before creating the fifth—
fifth!—
version of a weekly schedule that could include all the camp activities everyone thought were absolutely necessary, she was still managing to stay on her own daily school schedule—except for occasional accidental catnaps.

She swiveled her chair around to look at the list she'd posted on the wall by the door. It was a list of all the things that needed to be done to make the camp happen, and it stretched from very near the ceiling all the way down to the floor. Everyone in the family had contributed to the list, including Destiny, who wanted them to build tree houses for the campers to live in, to bury play money all over Wit's End, and then to make pirate costumes for treasure hunting. Those, at least, didn't actually have to be done. Her father had added an enormous number of
absolutely necessary tasks
and then headed cheerfully off to Pennsylvania to direct another play. “Just like you,” her mother had complained to him, “leaving the rest of us to do all the work!”

“
All
the work? Don't be ridiculous,” he'd said as he stowed his suitcases in the trunk of his Miata. “I'll be back in plenty of time to help with the most difficult job of all: winnowing the hundreds of applications we get to find the best possible candidates, the cream of the creative crop. Everything that needs to be done between now and then will be an exhilarating challenge for the whole family! Don't think of it as work; think of it as stretching boundaries, galvanizing energies. Meanwhile, I'll be all by myself in Pennsylvania, slaving away in the theatrical salt mines to keep the mortgage paid.”

E.D. had thought about her father's words quite a lot in the weeks after he'd left. It had been a challenge, all right. By now a lot of entries on the to-do list had been crossed out, but there were still an unsettling number to go. Hal had designed the camp logo, and Uncle Archie had built the website. Randolph had
driven
to his directing gig in Philadelphia instead of flying, as he normally would have, so they could use the money he'd saved on airfare to finance the advertising campaign.

There hadn't yet been leaves on the trees when the brochure and website deadline had arrived, so Lucille couldn't take any new pictures. She'd gathered photographs of Wit's End from family albums and then spent days on end Photoshopping in images of happy campers she'd found on the internet so they appeared to be frolicking in what the brochure called “the summer glory of
Eureka!
's natural setting.”

Then there had been the problem of creating the camp application. “It needs to give us a sure way to determine who belongs to that ‘cream of the crop' Randolph wants and who doesn't,” Sybil pointed out. “We'll need a form for basic information, and lots of supporting materials, too—like samples of the children's creative work.”

“We should require recommendations from teachers and coaches . . . ,” E.D. had added.

“And an essay from the child explaining why he or she wants to attend,” Lucille added. “I want to see something of their thought process.”

“Not everybody likes to write,” Archie had protested. “We need to let them send a video instead—let them talk if they want.”

There had been several major arguments and three revisions before Zedediah was able to put the forms and instructions up on the website and cross “application” off the list.

When the advertising budget ran out, Sybil managed to get free publicity with some small stories printed in various newspapers around the country and on a great many parenting blogs. Apparently there were millions of parents across the country who believed they were raising creative geniuses, because the news of
Eureka!
quickly went viral. The
Eureka!
website's e-mail account was deluged with inquiries from parents. The trouble was that almost all of them asked for—or demanded—scholarships for their prodigiously talented children. “I don't understand it!” Sybil moaned. “We don't mention
scholarships
anywhere!”

“Yes, but we did mention the fees,” Archie said. “Astronomical fees!”

“Tell them the
Eureka!
scholarship fund has already been exhausted,” Zedediah said dryly. “Like the advertising budget.”

As the application deadline approached, Lucille, who'd been put in charge of collecting the applications, reported that two had arrived, then a third. “Three? Three total?” Sybil said. “From all those thousands of inquiries? This is a disaster!”

Aunt Lucille dismissed Sybil's concerns. “You know how creative people are. They put things off till the last minute. We'll get an avalanche of applications the week after the deadline.”

E.D. turned back to her math now. It was the last schoolwork she was likely to get done today. Her father had arrived home last night, grumpy from the long drive. He had dragged his suitcases in from the car, kissed her mother, and gone straight up to bed, saying he couldn't possibly deal with anything
Eureka!
until he'd had a good, long sleep. The meeting to catch him up on their progress and begin winnowing applications was scheduled for this afternoon.

“Seven? What do you mean
seven
?” Randolph roared when Lucille set the basket of applications on the table where the family had just finished lunch.

“Seven, seven, seven!” Paulie repeated quietly from his perch in the corner.

“She means that we have received a total of seven applications,” Zedediah said. “Period.”

Lucille nodded. “Think of it this way. At least we don't have to spend the whole afternoon winnowing.”

There was a considerable period of silence.

E.D. thought of all the effort that had gone into creating the application. They could have just asked for names and addresses and been done with it.

“We'll just have to accept all of them then,” Randolph said. “We needed twelve campers to pay the mortgage off entirely, but I think we can survive with seven.
Barely
.”

There was another silence. “What?” he said. “Why is everybody looking at me?”

“I'm not looking at you, Daddy!” Destiny said from his stool at the end of the table. “I'm drawing Pooh and Piglet in the woods!” Destiny had recently become entirely obsessed with drawing.

“You might want to look at that first application on the top of the pile,” Sybil said.

Randolph picked up the sheaf of paper-clipped pages and scanned the top sheet. “Priscilla Montrose?
That
Priscilla Montrose?”

“You think there's another in Traybridge?” Archie said.

“Oh, no. No, no, no! Absolutely not! We are not having that child at our camp.”

E.D. sighed. It was Randolph's utter refusal to cast Priscilla Montrose in
The Sound of Music
last fall that had led Priscilla's mother, the president of the board of the Traybridge Little Theatre, to cancel the production he had been hired to direct. That had led the Applewhites to turn their barn into a theater and create the Wit's End Playhouse so the show could go on. As successful as that show had been, Randolph had not forgiven Mrs. Montrose for canceling it in the first place.

“That child has less talent than a sea slug!” he said now. “She not only isn't the cream, she isn't even the
skim milk
of the creative crop! I will not have Priscilla Montrose at
Eureka!
under any circumstances whatsoever.”

“Maybe you should consider that this is a child who really
needs
us!” Lucille offered.

“And it could certainly be argued that we need her,” Zedediah added.

“Clearly,” Archie said, “we can't afford to be choosy.”

Randolph looked at the application again. Then he leafed through the pages. “We couldn't take her anyway,” he said. “Not from this application. Look at this signature!” He pointed to the line where the parent was supposed to sign the form. “Priscilla has quite obviously forged her mother's signature.”

“Think of it as a sign of independence!” Sybil said.

“This is not a valid application. The child has gone behind her mother's back. I'll make you a bet she was
forbidden
to apply. That hateful, spiteful, vengeful woman would never allow her child to spend the summer with us!”

“I was afraid you'd take this stand,” said Sybil with a sigh.

“We can survive with six campers,” Randolph said. “We'll just have to cut a few corners, that's all. Be a little more frugal.”

E.D. shook her head.
Frugal
had been another of her vocabulary words: “characterized by thriftiness and avoidance of waste,” it meant. They'd had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch—for the third time that week. She didn't think they could be any more frugal than they already were.