Age:
High School
Reading Level: 3.9
Chapter 1
Thoughts kept exploding in Nick’s mind like asteroids in a computer game, making it hard for him to fall asleep. I wonder what the camp looks like? Will I like horseback riding? Maybe riding will be the one thing I’m good at. I never had a job before. Now I’ll be a junior counselor doing dishes three times a day. But we’re supposed to have plenty of free time between meals to swim and fish and play ball.
At least I already know one of the JCs, Rob – sort of. Not many seniors pay attention to freshmen. Will I look weird wearing the garage-sale riding boots Mom picked up for me? My size 9 foot in a size 13 boot? I had to cut two inches off the tops so I could bend my knees. But there won’t be any girls around an all-boys camp anyway, so who cares? I’ve never been away from home before. I wonder if I’ll get homesick?
An arm flopped across Nick’s face. He shoved it away and rolled to his left. Another brother began enthusiastically sucking his thumb right next to Nick’s ear to a full accompaniment of swallows, gurgles and grunts.
Naw, I’m not going to get homesick for this, he thought.
“Knock it off, Pauly!” he hissed, half-pushing, half-punching the annoying lump that suddenly disappeared from the edge of the bed. In the moment before the falling body thumped, Nick predicted the next two minutes: a moment for Pauly’s surprised awakening; a righteous whine; the “I’m telling” threat; indignant footsteps to the parents’ bedroom; then dad yelling, Pauly whimpering, and back in bed.
The parental blast came right on cue.
“Nicky! Cool it!” his Dad hollered.
Nicky – why don’t you call me Nick, like everyone else? he shouted in his head. You expect me to act like a grown up. Why don’t you call me a grown up name? Nick. My name is Nick. You’re always telling me, “Look after the kids while we go out for a while. You’re in charge.” I don’t want to be in charge. That’s your job. What if I do something wrong? What if something bad happens?
“Ma says to quit hasslin’ me too,” Pauly mewed as he crawled back into bed.
“Don’t worry,” Nick said. “Starting tomorrow, I won’t be bothering you for ten whole weeks. I can’t wait to get out of here.” He savored the thought of escaping to north country. Up north. It sounded so good he could almost taste it. Up north. Away from Detroit, away from this cramped house, this crowded bed.
Pauly snuffled loudly until Nick relented and laid his arm over the six year old’s shoulder – gently. With that, the crying stopped and Nick resorted to an old trick that never failed to put his younger brothers and sisters to sleep: he took deep, regular breaths, as though he himself were sleeping. Soon he was sleeping as well.
Chapter 2
Nick spent a week in the back seat of a van slowly inching its way toward Gaylord. Wedged in the jumble of suitcases and trunks, he felt marooned in a balcony watching a class reunion of the returning camp counselors.
Rob, a wide receiver on his high school football team, sat directly in front of him. Nick couldn’t help admiring the arm draped along the back of the seat. The muscles stood out, hard and heavy as a marble statue’s. His nutcracker jaw was shadowed by a recently shaved blue-black beard and his voice penetrated like the bass keys on a piano.
Just as Nick gave up the dream of ever looking and sounding like the model in front of him, Rob giggled. A high pitched screech like a rusty tricycle.
Well, we can’t all be perfect, Nick thought with a silent sigh of relief. But he still wished his skinny arms would look something like Rob’s by the time he was a senior.
“So then they called my play in the huddle, a post pattern, on third and two,”Rob bragged to his captive audience.
And another thing I wish, Nick brooded while he pounded against a duffel bag to make a better pillow, I wish I could be good at some sport. I barely played Little League for one season when I was nine. Hockey costs way too much, and soccer – my dad was always working, and we only have one car, so how could I get to soccer? And anyway, I guess I’m not much of a jock.
“Just two more miles,” Jerry, the head counselor, announced as they climbed a steep hill. The circle of pink skin on his balding head peeked over the headrest every time they hit a bump in the road. “Turtle,” as the JCs called him, didn’t seem to mind the reference to his padded gut and short neck.
The van chugged and lurched, slowed to a crawl, then died.
“We just got it overhauled,” Turtle explained as the car coasted to a stop on the shoulder. “Sounded like it wasn’t getting gas. Maybe it’s the fuel filter...”
Nick crawled over bags and hopped out the back to stretch his cramped legs and look around. Pine trees. Steep, sandy hills. Something felt good. What was it?
The air. The air was different. It smelled cool. Piney. Not like crowded city air. It smelled open, like he would have room to run and ride and swim.
“Who wants to hoof it to camp and tell Mack to send out the pick-up truck?” Jerry asked. Nick and Rob volunteered, starting off at a slow jog to release the day’s pent-up energy.
Chapter 3
Twenty minutes later they crested a hill to find the camp spreading off to the left like a landscape for a model train. A massive, sandy hill held center place. Northern pines and chocolate colored log cabins seemed glued in a random pattern along the top and sides of the giant mound. White stones arranged in eight foot letters spelled CAMP WA–TONKA on the face of the hill.
Nick hurried over the flat land of ball diamonds and volleyball courts and slowly trudged up the steep incline to the mess hall and flag tower on the summit. He was sure that the climb would be repeated, over and over, all summer long, criss crossing like a worker ant from beach, to stable, to bunk house.
It was almost dark by the time Nick lugged his suitcase and duffel bag to the JC cabin on the far edge of the hill. The walls and ceiling reflected warm, amber colors in the light of his flashlight. Names and dates – carved with pen knives, drawn with markers, scrawled with pencil – covered the flat boards of the slanting roof. Six steel frame bunk beds stood three to a side, heads to the opposite walls. All the beds sagged in the middle like hammocks. But he didn’t mind, as long as he could sleep alone in his own private bed. All the beds were made-up except one: top bunk, far right corner. Obviously his.
He propped his flashlight on the small shelf next to the pillow and rummaged in his duffel bag for sheets and blankets. It was much cooler up north than it had been in Detroit.
Soon after Nick snuggled deep in his covers, the rest of the JC’s stomped in. Cozy and excited, Nick had ringside seats as the older counselors told one camp story after another.
Rob was recognizable by his booming voice and distinctive laugh, “You guys,” he began, “remember the time Otis shoved those horses into the trailer?”
“Who’s Otis?” Nick asked.
“The cook,” Rob replied, annoyed that his story had been interrupted. “Anyways, these two guys – I guess they used to be campers way back when – showed up with their own horses to ride around the place for old time’s sake. But when they were done, the horses didn’t want get back in the trailer. So there they were in the parking lot, next to the mess hall, making a heck of a racket right when Otis was trying to take his afternoon nap.”
“Where does he sleep?” Nick inquired.
“Shut up and listen,” Rob snapped. “You’re worse than my little brother – always asking.”
“He stretches out on a bench like Snoopy on his dog house,” a voice in the dark answered.
Another voice that Nick didn’t recognize joined in, “And he wears this white apron that barely covers his humungous gut. And when he lays in front of the window he looks like a snow-covered mountain in National Geographic.”
“And then when he starts snoring,” another unidentified voice laughed, “it’s like a volcano getting ready to blow.”
“Hey, who’s telling this story?” Rob demanded. “So, Otis is in the middle of his nap, when all the racket starts down below. Bang! The screen door slams. We all look up. Everything stops for a second. Otis sees what’s going on. He goes, ‘Aargh!’ and barrels down the hill, yanks one of the poles from the hitching post. Then he lines up behind the horses, grabs the pole in the middle...”
“Was he pointing at them, or sideways?” Nick asked.
“Sideways – shut up, would you? – like one of those guys on a tight rope. So where was I? Oh yeah. So he charges. Man, he caught both those horses right under their butts with this pole, and then lifted them up – no lie – and shoved them into the trailer. They never knew what hit ‘em. And old Otis, he just wiped his hands on his apron and went back up to finish his nap.”
“That’s not how you’re supposed to get horses in a trailer, is it?” Nick asked.
“Naw,” someone answered, “you just lightly touch a rope across the back of their legs. You might have to criss-cross two ropes if they move their butts to one side. But it works a whole lot easier than playing Otis the weight lifter.”
Easy banter circled the cabin, soothing, comforting. Nick thought, I’m going to like it here, surrounded by all these big brothers. I’ll get to play little brother for a change. Someone else can be in charge.