Second Time's the Charm (8 page)

“Tell her not to get her hopes up,” Chelsea grumbled. “Jenna's all
reformed
and whatever this summer.” She managed to make the word “reformed” sound like “criminally insane” and she looked seriously annoyed.

“Jenna's parents will kill her if she gets into any more trouble this summer,” Alyssa cut in. “That's probably why she hasn't really planned anything for 4C. And if you're her friend, you won't encourage her—she'll get sent home if she gets in trouble, like she did last summer. Hey, here's a thought: Why don't you pick up the slack, Chelsea?”

Chelsea rolled her eyes. “Right. 'Cause I
so
want to be the next Jenna Bloom.” She sighed dramatically. “I'm going to go catch up with Karen. I need her
Seventeen
for free swim.” She ran off toward the front of the group, where Karen and some others were clustered together with Andie. Mia was already at the mess hall, setting up for breakfast. Natalie did not envy the CITs their double-duty jobs.

The girls filed into the mess hall and took their seats at the long benches that served in place of chairs. Natalie flicked her bleary eyes across the table. Bug juice, burned toast, semi-melted packets of butter that sweat greasy trails out of their foil wrappers. Yum. Once the group was sitting, Mia rushed out of the kitchen carrying a large plastic platter heaped with a runny yellow substance.
Scrambled eggs
, Natalie thought. She'd pass.

Suddenly Natalie was snapped out of her morning daze by the sounds of loud, piercing shrieks. She practically flipped over backward on her bench. She—and just about everyone else in the room—snapped her head around to see what the cause for all of the hysteria was.

At first, Nat could barely locate the source of the noise. Slowly, though, she honed in on the locus of the chaos.

It was 4C's table.

Now, Natalie could make out words forming above the din. “Barf . . .” “Gross . . .” “We almost
ate
that. . . .”

Suddenly, a loud whistle resonated, quieting the room. For a breathless beat, the echo of the whistle bounced off of the walls. No one said a word. Then, Sophie's voice cracked through the tension. “They're fake.”

Natalie turned to Alyssa, who shrugged her shoulders.
Fake? What's fake?

“I'm not eating them!” It was Gaby, the bratty girl who had been such a bully to Grace the summer before. “I don't eat eggs that have been touched by insect feet!”

“Gaby,” Becky interrupted, trying to soothe the girl before she could get any more worked up. “They're plastic. Look.” She took the platter of 4C's scrambled eggs and held them out to Gaby, who was scowling furiously. She pushed a heap of yellow-and-white gunk aside to reveal a nest of rubber—but realistic-looking, at least from where Natalie stood—flies.

“I don't know how those got in there,” Sophie said, sounding puzzled and mildly fretful. “I'll get a new platter right away.”

“Forget it,” Gaby said, wrinkling her nose.

Sophie whisked back into the kitchen with the offending eggs, and slowly the tenor of the room reverted to its usual state of low-level hyperactivity. Natalie, Alyssa, and Tori were tucking into their own breakfast—no eggs, thank you—when Alex marched over from her table, a stern look fixed upon her face.

“We know it was you guys,” Alex said, pointing a finger accusingly.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Alyssa said breezily. “How would we even have contaminated your breakfast, anyway? Assuming we even
wanted
to.”

From her seat at the opposite side of the table, Jenna coughed loudly into her fist. “Sorry,” she rasped, after her choking had subsided. “Bug juice went down the wrong pipe.” She glanced away.

Oh, Jenna
, Natalie thought, even though deep down she was pretty impressed by this prank. How
had
Jenna managed to get that close to 4C's breakfast, anyhow? “Yeah,
we
don't know what you're talking about,” she said loyally.

“What
ever
,” Alex said, clearly not buying it. “I don't eat eggs, anyway.” Alex was a diabetic and very fanatical about what she put in her body. The one time she had given in to the urge to pig out, she'd gone into diabetic shock, and she wasn't about to let that happen again. She leaned in closer, practically throwing herself across the table at Jenna. “But I'll tell you this, Bloom,” she said. “You'd better watch your back.” She cracked a small smile, then marched back to her bunk's table.

The girls watched Alex retreat, then burst out into giggles. “Jenna, you are too much!” Tori said. “I can't wait to tell my mom about this.”

“Seriously,” Jenna said, her eyes wide now. “It wasn't me.”

The murmurs around the table indicated that no one believed her.

Natalie turned to Chelsea, who was frowning and generally pretending to be miles above all of this immaturity. “Still think Jenna's so lame?” she teased.

To her credit, Chelsea didn't bother to dignify the comment with a response.

“Now, folks, it's really important that you brush every last speck of clay with the glaze before it goes into the kiln. If it's not totally, completely glazed, it may crack in the heat. Then you'd have to start all over again, and that's frustrating.”

Natalie glanced down at the candy dish she was making. It was painted orange and black to look like a basketball, which was Simon's favorite sport. She planned to wrap it up with a mother lode of white chocolate Hershey's Kisses for him and give it to him as a surprise on the last night of camp. Which meant that it absolutely, positively could not be cracked. She surveyed the dish again, bending down to peer at it from all angles.
Better safe than sorry
, she thought, dipping her brush back into the pot of glaze and applying another liberal layer over her dish.

“I think you've got it, babe,” Helene, the ceramics instructor, told her gently. “Another coat and you'll tip the whole clay-to-glaze ratio way out of balance.”

“Right. Done,” Nat said, resting her brush on the newspaper-covered table and stepping backward away from her work. “Finished.”

“Looks good,” Alyssa called to her.

“Not as awesome as yours,” Nat said earnestly. Her friend was creating a very elaborate flowerpot thing with a Jackson Pollock motif.
Only Alyssa,
Natalie thought.

“Seriously,” Tori broke in, looking up from her simple coffee mug. “There's a boutique on Melrose that sells that sort of stuff, like funky housewares and whatever. You could totally sell your vase there. It's that good.”

“Aw, shucks, you girls,” Alyssa said, blushing a little bit. Natalie knew that her friend had total confidence in her amazing artistic abilities but didn't really like being the center of attention.

“We can say we knew you when,” Natalie joked.

“No, I'm not kidding. My mom's friend owns the shop—Astrid Landon? You know, that model? My dad does her contracts, and that's how she became friends with my mom.”

“You know Astrid Landon?” Given that her father was pretty much a megastar, Natalie didn't usually get weird or celebrity-struck. But Astrid Landon was a different story. Astrid Landon was, like, her father's arch-nemesis.

Her father tried to be discrete about these things, but Nat had gotten the story out of him over one Fourth of July weekend several years ago. Tad's long-time girlfriend, Josie McLaughlan, had been on the short list to play against him in one of the
Spy
sequels, but at the last minute, Astrid's agent had pulled some strings. . . . Josie was a good sport, of course, but she'd been terribly hurt. In the long run, the movie had done modestly at the box office and the whole incident was forgotten, but Tad had sworn he wouldn't work with Astrid again. And now Tori's family was, like, best friends with her?

That wasn't something Nat could hold against Tori.
Was
it?

No, those sorts of things happened in Hollywood all the time, Natalie knew. It wasn't Tori's fault she was on the wrong side of a celebrity-feud. It was just . . . annoying.

“Yeah, she's great,” Tori gushed. “I wish they would let us keep our cell phones up here. I'd take a picture of that vase so I could show it to Astrid when I get back home.”

“I know. When I first got here last summer and they took our phones away, I thought I was going to go into withdrawal. But you get used to it,” Nat said. Part of the whole “embracing the great outdoors” thing and all.

“Maybe
you
can,” Tori said. She sighed. “You're just more . . .
rustic
than I am, I guess.”

Natalie bristled. She knew Tori didn't mean it as an insult, and she knew it was silly to compete. It was
especially
silly to compete over who was the bigger princess. But.

Silly or not, Natalie couldn't help feeling that her new friend, the one she had been so excited to induct into the cult of summer camp, was stealing her shtick.

Ridiculous.

“Maybe I just need a hottie trail guide,” Tori went on. “You know, someone with great eyes. Like Simon.”

“Huh?” Natalie said, feeling clumsy and inarticulate.

“Simon. I'm sure that getting lost in the woods with him helped you develop a new appreciation for nature, right?” Tori winked.

“Yeah, and, um, he's taken,” Natalie said. “Sorry.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Natalie realized how much harsher they'd come out than she'd meant. What was wrong with her? So Tori was friends with a model; she was from L.A., Natalie could understand that—probably better than anyone. And Tori was getting along with Alyssa—that was a good thing. Camp was for chick-bonding; the more, the merrier, Nat and Alyssa always said. And so what if Tori thought Simon was cute? He was, that was for sure. She could hardly be blamed for noticing.

Tori chuckled lightly. “Of course he's taken, Nat. I was just kidding.”

Natalie cleared her throat. “Right,” she said quickly. “Me too.”

But deep down, she wasn't so sure.

chapter
SEVEN

“You were born in San Francisco? I had no idea!”

“Yup, my parents were big-time hippies, back in their day.” Simon smiled at Natalie, then shuddered. “It's very disturbing to think about my mom in a miniskirt with ironed hair.”

“We can move on,” Nat replied, laughing.

“Don't you think you've done enough probing for one afternoon?” Simon teased. “You've got my favorite color, my career goals, the name of my first pet—”

“Dearly departed Peanut—” Nat cut in, mock-somber.

“And now you know where I was born. You've got enough data for an
E! True Hollywood Story
.”

“I just want to be thorough,” Natalie replied.

“I really want to run a piece in the Visiting Day newspaper issue, and this interview is like my audition. It has to be great.”

“I just hope Jesse thinks I'm as fascinating a subject as you do,” Simon joked.

“Who said I think you're fascinating?” Natalie quipped.
I mean, I
do,
but . . .

“It's written all over your face, Goode,” Simon said.

“It's nice that you're so confident,” she said, trying to recover. She glanced at her watch. “Oh! Free choice is almost over. I want to go grab Alyssa before swim.”

“Sure thing,” Simon said easily. “Get ready for next week, when the tables are turned and you are subject to my inquisition.” He put his index finger to his chin in a Thinker sort of pose. “I'm going to catch up with Ben and Gabe.”

“Sounds fun!” Natalie chirped. It really did. Mainly because it was fun just being around Simon, no matter what they were doing.

She tucked her notebook and pen under one arm and wandered over to where Alyssa and Tori were sitting. It looked like Alyssa was interviewing Tori, even though Tori wasn't on the newspaper. It must have been just for fun.

But if it was just for fun, what was that slight echo of jealousy churning in Natalie's rib cage?

“Favorite flavor of jelly bean would have to be . . .” Tori drummed her fingers against the table and stared off at an imaginary point on the horizon. “Ooh—I love that buttered popcorn one. I mean, it really tastes like buttered popcorn!”

“Well, Alyssa won't go for that,” Nat cut in, grinning. “She likes to keep her salty and sweet separate.”

Alyssa raised an eyebrow at Natalie. “You don't know
everything
about me, you know,” she said somewhat pointedly.

Nat swallowed. Alyssa hadn't said anything rude or especially harsh, but, for some reason, a sudden chill had come over Nat. Of course she didn't know every last little thing about Alyssa. But they
were
best friends. That in itself meant that Nat knew a lot. More than a lot.