Tug-of-War (12 page)

“We're coming up to a bend!” yelled Michelle from the lead canoe. “Remember to stay to the inside.”

“I think we need to move a little more to the port side,” I told Maggie.

I'd gone out of my way to hurt Devon. I'd made a point of saying something I knew would humiliate her. Telling her that she was only saying “armpits” and “ice cream
.
” My ears felt hot when I thought about it. She must've felt so stupid. And if there was one thing Devon hated, it was to feel dumb over something.

I
knew
that. I'd picked the one thing I could think of at that moment to make her feel bad about herself.

We'd made it around the bend in the river, and a stretch of calm water was ahead of us. We passed a field with tall green grass where some cows were feeding. One black cow looked up, turning her head to follow us as we drifted past. She chewed thoughtfully the whole time she kept her eyes on us.

Maggie mooed at her and slapped her paddle playfully against the water.

“Hey, Maggie . . . do you think I'm a mean person?”

Her head turned sideways a little, and I could see she was smiling like she couldn't believe I'd ask such a crazy question. “Of course not. You don't have a mean bone in your body.”

Oh, yeah? How did she know that? The third metatarsal on my left foot was mean. And my tibia could be downright cruel sometimes.

Yo soy bilingüe y tu no eres.
I'm bilingual and you're not.

I'd never done that before. Said something mean in Spanish to someone who spoke only English. Just to make her feel stupid because she wouldn't know what I was saying.

“Well, what if I did something mean to you. Would you forgive me for it?”

“Sure, I guess so. If you apologized and I knew you didn't really mean it.”

Apologize.

Apologies had a way of getting stuck in my throat. They wouldn't come out. I couldn't say them. Something about apologizing made me feel like all my skin was being peeled off. I just couldn't stand to look someone in the eye and say, “I'm sorry. I did something wrong.”

Maybe I could write a note. Try to make it funny, but still basically say I was sorry.

But then she'd better be ready to apologize to me, too. I never would've said those mean things if she hadn't been such an
habladora
—chatterbox.

Because she was the one who started it all. So she should be the first to apologize. Maybe I would say I was sorry if she'd say it first.

“Do you think Devon and I should try to make up?” I asked Maggie.

“Well, in some ways, it's kind of nice to have Ghosty Girl out of the way,” Maggie admitted. “Can you imagine having her along right now? You'd be back in the stern and she'd be up here with her nose stuck in a magazine. You'd crash right into a rock!”

I laughed. It felt good to actually laugh about something again. “There is no way Devon would ever have come on a river trip!”

Maggie had a good point. I hadn't planned it that way, but fighting with Devon did give me an excuse to spend all my time with Maggie now.

At least I still had one best friend.

“Oh good, you're just in time,” Laurel-Ann said when Maggie and I walked into the cabin. “The laundry's here, and I want everyone to help me sort it, but Boo said to just get my own stuff out and leave everyone else's alone. I think I should—”

“Stick a sock in it!” Boo yelled at Laurel-Ann, throwing a pair of my striped socks at her head. The two of them were on Side A, and the big canvas laundry bag with everyone's clean clothes was sitting on the floor by Wayward's bed.

Devon was there too, lying on her bed, reading. She hadn't even looked up when Maggie and I walked in.

I'd tried writing her a funny letter yesterday. I was going to apologize for everything I'd said after the
dance. But I lay there on my top bunk, staring at the blank piece of paper. I ended up scribbling out everything I started to say. It was hard to concentrate, knowing she was lying on the bunk below me.

I didn't feel so mad at Devon anymore. Now I was worried. The longer we went without speaking to each other, the worse things got. I just needed to apologize. But what if she wouldn't accept my apology?

“Nobody wants you touching their underwear, Hyphen,” Boo was saying. “Just let everyone find their own stuff.” Boo scooped armfuls of clothes out of the bag and dumped them on Wayward's bed.

On Sunday afternoons, every cabin would stuff all their dirty laundry into these big bags, and then a few days later, the clean clothes would come back. It was a lot easier for ten people to throw all the dirty stuff together than it was to sort the clean stuff out into ten separate piles.

Maggie and I went over and began rummaging through the pile of clean clothes, along with Boo and Laurel-Ann. Meanwhile, Devon hadn't moved. Maybe if I found some of her clothes, I could take them to her. Would she thank me? Ignore me? We'd barely made eye contact for the past three days.

There had to be some way I could start talking to
her again. The note idea was a great one, but I couldn't write anything half as good as Devon had written me. If I couldn't think of the right words to put down on paper, how could I ever come up with the right words to say?

I grabbed my pink shorts and purple sweatshirt from under the bottom of the pile. I saw a pair of black jeans, but I wasn't sure if they were Devon's or not.

“There's my Camp Crockett jersey,” said Maggie. She pulled it out of the stack and let out an earsplitting shriek.

Laurel-Ann screamed too. “It's alive!” Something black and fuzzy was stuck to Maggie's jersey. “It's alive, it's alive!” Laurel-Ann took two big bounces and landed on top of Maggie's nearby trunk. She wouldn't stop screaming.

“My gorilla socks!” Maggie held the red jersey up over her head. Dangling from the armpits were her furry black gorilla socks.

“Hyphen, shut up!” Boo yelled. “It's not alive. It's a pair of socks.”

Laurel-Ann collapsed on the trunk. “I thought there was a rat in the laundry bag! It was furry and black and horrible!” She sat on the trunk, making little whimpering noises and tugging nervously on her braids.

Maggie gave one sock a tug. It didn't budge. She held it up for a closer look. “Hey! They're
sewn
on! Somebody sewed my gorilla socks into the armpits!”

The next thing we knew, Maggie fell to the floor and curled up in a ball. She was laughing so hard she couldn't even breathe. Her face turned beet red and her whole body was shaking.

Boo was laughing too. She grabbed Maggie by the shoulder and shook her. “Breathe in! You need oxygen!”

Maggie took one long, shuddering gasp. She beat on the wood floor with both fists. “That is the FUNNIEST thing I've ever seen in my life!”

Even Devon had sat up by now and was looking at all this over the top of her book. I smiled in her direction, but she looked right through me.

Just then Betsy pushed the screen door open and came in. She glanced around and sighed. “Okay, what'd I miss this time?”

Maggie sat up, panting. “Oh! Oh! My stomach hurts! I think I ruptured my liver or something.”

I took the red jersey out of her clenched fists and held it up for Betsy to see.

“Interesting,” was Betsy's only comment.

On her hands and knees, Maggie crawled across the cabin floor to the edge of Devon's bed. “That was brilliant.
Even better than your stuffed body. Up high!” She held her hand up for Devon to high-five her, but Devon wouldn't even look at her.

“What? You think I did it? Why would I bother?” was all she said.

Maggie sat cross-legged on the floor by Devon's bed. “To get me back. Even though I wasn't the one who got you in the first place. I guess we're even now. Although since I never got you, maybe
I
need to get
you
back now.” She clutched her head in her hands. “This is so confusing!”

Devon sighed and tossed her book on the shelf. “Let's make something clear. If I'd played this little immature prank on Beefaroni here, I'd be the first to take credit for it. I can't sew, don't even know how to thread a needle, thank you, and I wouldn't waste my time.”

I tried smiling at her again, but she still acted like I was completely invisible.

“Hold on, hold on!” Laurel-Ann piped up suddenly. “Maggie's shirt was in the laundry bag, and the laundry has been gone for the past two days, so that can only mean one thing. Nobody in our cabin could've done it; it must have been one of the laundry ladies. But why?”

Boo spun around and looked at her. “One of the laundry ladies came across Maggie's red jersey and Maggie's
black furry socks, and said, ‘Hey, I know. I'm going to sew these into the armpits'? That's it! Laurel-Ann has solved the mystery!” Boo applauded and whistled.

“Laurel-Ann, whoever did it got to the clean laundry before any of us,” I told her. “They took the shirt and socks out and sewed them together, then put them back into the bag. Someone in
our
cabin, not the laundry ladies.”

It could easily have been Devon. She'd probably been here alone in the cabin all afternoon. Maybe she did believe Maggie had stuffed her “body” that day, and she'd been waiting for the right time to get her back.

Devon was like that. She was the type to be patient and sit back until just the right opportunity came along. Maybe she'd started looking for her own clothes in the laundry bag, came across those socks she hated so much, and hatched her brilliant plan.

But then she was also the squeamish type. She probably wouldn't want to lay a finger on Maggie's furry socks, even if they had just come back clean from the laundry.

“They're sewn in with just a few stitches of black thread,” Betsy said, examining the shirt up close. “Anybody got some scissors? One snip, and they'll be loose.”

“No!” Maggie jumped up. “I'm gonna wear it this
way from now on.” She took the shirt away from Betsy and slipped it over her head. Then she flapped her arms up and down. “I love it!”

Maggie spun around in circles, jumped up on Wayward's bed, and bounced from the top of one trunk to another. “I can fly!” She raised one arm up over her head and peeked at the fuzzy sock dangling from her armpit. “Anybody got a razor?”

“Anybody got a needle and thread?” I asked. “Who was sewing on a button the other day?”

“Maggie has a sewing kit,” said Betsy. “Remember? You let me borrow it when I lost my button.”

“That means Maggie did it!” said Laurel-Ann. “But why did she do it to herself?”

“I didn't do it! You guys give me way too much credit,” said Maggie. She was climbing up to her top bunk. “You think I'm the one who thought up Ghosty Girl's prank. You think I'm the one who thought up this hairy armpit prank. I'm not that clever.”

She leaned out from her bunk and grabbed onto one of the rafters over her head. “I'm part gorilla, remember?” She swung off her bed and hung from the rafter with both hands, making chimp noises while the rest of us cracked up at the sight.

Gloria walked in the door at that moment and gasped.
“Get down from there! You want to break a leg?” It was the most authoritative I'd ever heard her be.

Maggie dropped to the floor and stood up. “I'm okay.”

Gloria held a hand to her chest. She looked truly panic-stricken for a minute. “Sorry, I didn't mean to yell at you, Maggie.”

Maggie crossed both hands behind her head so the socks were in full view. “Hey, no problem.”

None of us could stop laughing at Maggie. Boo told Gloria everything she'd missed.

“Maggie's the only one with a sewing kit,” said Laurel-Ann, plucking at the rubber bands on her braces thoughtfully. “But Devon's her mortal enemy. Did Maggie do it to make us think Devon did it, or did Devon do it to make us think Maggie did it?”

Maggie went over to her shelf and picked up the little sewing kit. “Yeah, but it's right here in plain sight. Anyone could've borrowed it. And I don't know how to thread a needle either.” She gave Devon a toothy grin while scratching herself under one arm.

“Believe whatever you want,” Devon said, picking up her book and hiding behind it again. “It doesn't matter to me.”

“I don't think Devon did it,” I said. I could feel her looking at me.

“Did you do it, then?” asked Maggie, turning to me.

“No! Why would I do it?” I glanced at Devon, but she'd already turned away.

I wanted her to look up and thank me for defending her. I wanted to sit on the end of her bed and ask her about the book she was reading now,
The Member of the Wedding
.

Last week, before we'd fought, she told me it was great and she'd let me borrow it when she was finished. Maggie had asked her if she was planning her wedding, and Devon had told her she had no concept of great literature.