Second Time's the Charm (2 page)

“I guess we just have to deal,” Alyssa said, pragmatic as always. “Are Nat and I in the same bunk?”

Jenna nodded, clearly happy to finally be delivering some good news. “Yeah, in 4A, with me. We're with Karen and Jessie, too. And some new girls.”

“That sounds cool,” Natalie said. “Wait—” she paused, realizing. “Did Chelsea come back?”

“Yup,” Jenna confirmed. “She's with us, too.”

Natalie groaned. Chelsea was a difficult camper at best. Spoiled and petty, Chelsea loved to give her bunkmates the hardest time possible. They tried to reach out to her, but their efforts almost always back-fired. Meanwhile, over the winter, Chelsea's father had been very sick. The girls of 3C had banded together during the weekend of the Lakeview reunion to show Chelsea how much they cared about her, but even that hadn't gone off without a hitch. They'd gotten through to the prickly girl, but it wasn't any sort of big, fuzzy lovefest. And there was no telling how Chelsea was going to behave now that they were back at camp.

“Well, supposedly her dad's doing much better,” Jenna said. “Which is awesome. And could go a long way toward improving her mood.”

“That'd be nice,” Alyssa said absently. “Let's get our stuff and go over and find out the bunk assignments. Jenna can fill us in on the way. Look, Nat, there's your duffel.” She pointed off toward the side of the bus, where, indeed, Natalie's enormous pink oversized bag was being tossed out from the bus's underneath storage compartment. “Um, did you pack, like, your entire bedroom? I mean, most of our stuff was supposed to be shipped here separately a week ago. And that looks like more than ‘most' to me.” She smiled to show that she was semi-teasing, but Natalie wouldn't have been offended, anyway.

“Maybe half my bedroom,” Natalie admitted. “I mean, you never know what you're going to need.”

“Or who you're going to see,” Jenna teased. “Like, maybe someone whose name rhymes with
lymon
.”

“Ha-ha,” Natalie said, ignoring her friend but still not exactly disagreeing with her, either. She was dying to see Simon, and there was no attempting to hide that from her friends. “Anyway, I get the hint, Alyssa. Let's grab our bags and head over to the bunk. I mean, we should make the best of this situation. It's not the end of the world for us all to be separated. It'll be fun to meet new people this summer.”

“That's the spirit,” Alyssa said, clapping Natalie on the back. “And you know what else will be fun?”

“What?” Natalie asked.

“Watching you carry that bag all by yourself,” Alyssa cracked.

At that, Natalie could do little more than giggle. And grit her teeth as she prepared to hoist The Bag That Ate New York all the way from the bus to the bunk area.

“And then Alex, Brynn, Valerie, Sarah, Grace, and Candace are in 4C,” Jenna explained as the girls made their way up the front steps of their home for the summer. “With, um, you know that girl Gaby from bunk 3A last year?” She wrinkled her nose. Gaby was known for being sort of a bully, and she and Grace had had kind of a falling-out the summer before.

“I'm sure Grace is super-thrilled,” Natalie said, slightly sarcastically.

“Well, Grace always gets it together to be cheery and make the best of a situation,” Alyssa said.

“That's the understatement of the year,” Natalie replied, thinking of Grace's endless good humor and wacky, dramatic flair. “Yeah, if anyone will be fine dealing with Gaby, it'll be Grace. Anyway”—she squared her shoulders, taking in the slightly saggy front porch of the bunk—“this cabin's not half as rundown as 3C was.”

“I will reserve judgment until I see the showers,” Alyssa quipped.

“Good call,” Natalie agreed. “Ugh. I'm dying. Can we
please
go inside so that I can put this bag down once and for all?”

Alyssa nodded. “But let that be a lesson to you,” she said, waving grandiosely toward her own smaller, wheeled, and overall much-more-practical duffel.

Natalie shook her head and followed her friends into Bunk 4A.

The upshot to being a fourth-division camper was easily apparent. For starters, as Natalie had noticed, the building itself was in moderately better condition. Nothing to write home about, but still. There weren't any visible holes in the window screens or anything like that, which was a step up, to be sure. Second of all, each of the girls got double the cubby space that she'd had last summer. This was great news, particularly in light of the size of Natalie's duffel bag. Nat would have liked it if, like the fifth-division campers, they could have been allotted more single beds, but since she knew Alyssa would take the top bunk, anyway, it really wasn't an issue. The top bunk was fun to hang out on, but Natalie had a deathly—if irrational—fear of falling out of bed in the middle of the night. She didn't know what would happen if one were to fall out of the top bunk, but she also wasn't in any rush to find out anytime soon.

“Wanna go check out the bathrooms?” Alyssa asked, prodding Natalie in the side and breaking her reverie.

Natalie shook her head no. “It's bound to be bad news, and I'd rather prolong the inevitable. Ignorance is bliss.”

“Smart move. I learned the hard way about daddy longlegs with their own zip code.”

Natalie looked up to see a stunning blonde standing before her, holding up a lip gloss palate that Natalie knew for a fact had just been released from Sephora online the day before. “
Where
did you get that?” she asked, willing herself not to drool. “Barneys isn't taking advance orders for another week.” This girl obviously had connections. Highly not fair.

“Fred Segal,” the girl said, shrugging somewhat apologetically. “I'm from Los Angeles.” She pointed at her tank top, which was baby blue and indeed read “LA SURF SHOP” right across the chest in white stenciling.

“Oh,” Natalie said, mildly disappointed, both about the lip gloss and about her sure-to-be-new-friend's origins. “I thought you totally had to be another New Yorker. So the lip gloss hit the West Coast before the East?”
Big-time
not fair.

“Not really,” the girl explained, smiling. “I mean, you were right when you said it wasn't out yet. My mom is a beauty editor for an online magazine out in California. She gets to test everything out in advance. I mean, everything. So I've got lots and lots of junk lying around. You're welcome to borrow it,” she said, as though it were no big deal.
Which, to her, it probably isn't
, Natalie thought incredulously. To have access to any beauty product you wanted—even in advance of the rest of the world? To Natalie, that would be heaven. She only hoped this girl—whose name was still a mystery—had some idea of how lucky she was.

“You're from California and you came all the way out
here
for camp?”

Natalie would have recognized that saccharine-sweet tone anywhere. “Hi, Chelsea,” she said, thinking,
Way to make a new camper feel right at home.
Though, come to think of it, a crash course in Chelsea 101 was probably a good idea.

If the new girl was fazed by Chelsea's rudeness, she didn't show it. “Well, yeah. I mean, my mom and dad are out in L.A.—he's an entertainment lawyer—but my mom grew up in Philly and used to come to Lakeview, like, forever, when she was growing up. So once they decided I was old enough for sleepaway camp, there was no question that I was coming here. I'm Tori, by the way,” she said, grinning and exposing the gleaming white teeth of a genuine California beach bunny.

“You're plenty old enough for sleepaway camp,” Chelsea grumbled, wandering off toward her bed to unpack. Clearly she was bored with the conversation.

Natalie rolled her eyes in Chelsea's direction, hoping to make the point that the sourpuss was not to be taken seriously. “I'm Natalie,” she said, extending a well-manicured hand for a shake. “And I'm
really
excited to use your lip gloss.”

Tori laughed. “Seriously, anytime,” she said. “But here's my question . . .”

“Shoot,” Natalie said, thinking back to when she'd first arrived at Lakeview, totally overwhelmed. She was 150 percent ready to help Tori get the lay of the land—and she knew Alyssa would be, too.

Tori swept her gaze across the dusty floor and rusty bedsprings. Her aqua eyes sparkled in good-natured dismay. “Is this really where we . . .
sleep
?”

Natalie cracked up. After all, she could totally relate. Totally. “It is,” she confirmed. She giggled again. “But don't worry. You get used to it.”

Bunk 4A's counselor for the summer was Andie, a short, bubbly girl with auburn hair, friendly brown eyes, and a smattering of freckles across her nose. Their CIT, or counselor-in-training, Mia, was tall and athletic, with straight, sun-streaked blond hair, deep emerald eyes, and very tanned skin. She had been a lifeguard at her pool for a few weeks before the summer started, she explained, as if she needed an excuse for looking like a refugee from
The OC
. Andie and Mia were both new to Lakeview, which Jenna assured the other girls was good news since they'd be, in her own words, “more pushover-y.” Nat wasn't so sure, but they both seemed very nice, anyway.

As Jenna had explained, Jessie and Karen were both in 4A, as well as Perry, Anna, Lauren, and, of course, Tori. Perry, Anna, Lauren, and Tori were all new.

After everyone had arrived and mostly unpacked (Nat noted with relief that Karen had apparently left the bulk of her considerable stuffed animal collection at home this summer), Andie held a quick bunk meeting, where they introduced themselves more formally. Everyone knew that the real “getting to know you” would take place at the division-wide cookout that night, with icebreakers and the real treat: s'mores. Nat grinned to herself just thinking about s'mores. You could get them at certain funky coffee shops in New York City, but she wouldn't want to. They were such a total camp thing.

“Girls,” Andie shouted, clapping her hands together in a burst of enthusiasm, “lunchtime!”

Alyssa groaned. “What are the odds that the food improved since last summer?”

“Slim to none,” Nat replied quickly. “I mean, really.” She turned to Tori. “Stick with us,” she warned the new girl. “You'll need the moral support.”

Tori's eyes widened. “That bad?”

Natalie nodded. “Trust us.”

“Got it,” Tori said. She ran her fingers through her hair quickly. “Am I a mess? Do I need to, I don't know, do something?”

Alyssa shook her head. “You're totally presentable. Red-carpet ready.”

“Oh, no,” Jenna whined, chiming in. “Are you another one of those? All into makeup, and hair, and clothes, and . . .
boys
?” She asked this last bit of her question as though it were the worst possible accusation. Jenna was a major tomboy and could not for her life understand her friends' interest in the opposite sex. She tolerated their crushes . . . but just barely.

Tori shrugged. “Guilty as charged.”

“Of course. Just what we needed: a Natalie 2.0.” It was Chelsea, of course, always needing to insert her own two cents.

“Whatever, Chelsea,” Natalie said. She obviously couldn't care less what Chelsea thought of her.

But . . .

On the one hand, it was awesome to have someone around who was from a big city, and who understood the finer subtleties of beauty products—she bet that Tori had an awesome stash of teen mags hidden away somewhere, too—but on the other hand, being the chic, sophisticated urbanite was sort of Natalie's. . .
thing
. She wasn't totally sure that she was ready to share it.

Whatever.
As quickly as the thought had popped into her head, she willed it gone. Tori seemed cool, and Natalie was psyched to get to know her. Natalie totally wasn't the jealous type. That would be ridiculous.