Look, I’ll admit it: I’m warm for the guy’s form. Anybody here have a problem with that?
And it was really nice, sitting there in the shade with him, listening to the shrill
whirr
of the cicadas and the birdsong from the treetops. It seemed as if there wasn’t another human being for miles and miles. Above the trees, clouds were gathering. Soon it was going to rain, but it looked as if it would hold off for a little while longer—besides, we were somewhat protected by the canopy of leaves over our heads.
If it had been dark enough, it would have been a perfect make-out spot.
Well, if Rob didn’t have this total prejudice against making out with girls sixteen and under.
It was as I was sadly counting the months until I turned seventeen—all eight and a half of them; Douglas could have told me exactly how many days, and even minutes, I had left—that Rob reached out and put his arm around me.
And unlike when Pamela had done the exact same thing, I did not mind. I did not mind at all.
“Hey,” Rob said. I could feel his heart thudding against my side, where his chest pressed against me. “Stop beating yourself up. You did the right thing. You always do.”
For a minute, I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Then I remembered. Oh, yeah. Keely Herzberg. Rob thought I’d been mulling over her, when really, I’d just been trying to figure out a way to get him to make a pass at me.
Oh, well. I figured what I was doing was working so far, if the arm around me was any indication. I sighed and tried to look sad … which was difficult, because I was sort of having another one of those epiphanies, what with the breeze off the lake and the birds and Rob’s Coast deodorant soap smell and the nice, heavy weight of his arm and everything.
“I guess,” I said, managing to sound uncertain even to my own ears.
“Are you kidding?” Rob gave me a friendly squeeze. “That woman told her kid that her father was dead.
Dead
! You think she was playing with a full deck?”
“I know,” I said. Maybe if I looked sad enough, he’d stick his tongue in my mouth.
“And look how happy Keely was. And Mr. Herzberg. My God, did you see how stoked he was to have his kid back? I think if you’d have let him, he’d have written you a check for five grand, right there and then.”
Jonathan Herzberg had been somewhat eager to offer me compensation for the trouble I’d taken, returning his daughter to him … a substantial monetary reward I had politely turned down, telling him that if he absolutely had to fork his money over to somebody, he should donate it to 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU.
Because, I mean, let’s face it: you can’t go around taking rewards for being human, now can you?
Even if it does get you fired.
“I guess,” I said again, still sounding all sad.
But if I’d thought Rob was going to fall for my whole poor-little-me routine, it turned out I had another think coming.
“You can forget it, Mastriani,” he said, suddenly removing his arm. “I’m not going to kiss you.”
Jeez! What’s a girl have to do around here to get felt up?
“Why not?” I demanded.
“We’ve been over this before,” he said, looking bored.
This was true.
“You
used
to kiss me,” I pointed out to him.
“That was before I knew you were jailbait.”
This was also true.
Rob leaned back, propping himself up on his elbows and gazing out at the trees across the water. In a month or two, all the green leaves he was looking at now would be blazing red and orange. I would be starting my junior year at Ernest Pyle High School, and Rob would still be working in his uncle’s garage, helping his mother with the mortgage on their farmhouse (his father had split, as Rob put it, when he was just a little kid, and hadn’t been heard from since), and fiddling around with the Harley he was rebuilding in their barn.
But really, if you thought about it, we weren’t so different, Rob and I. We both liked going fast, and we both hated liars. Our clothing ensemble of preference was jeans and a T-shirt, and we both had short dark hair … mine was even shorter than Rob’s. We both loved motorcycles, and neither of us had aspirations for college. At least, I didn’t think I did. And I know my grades didn’t exactly leave a whole lot of hope for it.
Our similarities completely outweighed our differences. So what if Rob has no curfew, and I have to be home every night by eleven? So what if Rob has a probation officer, and I have a mother who makes me dresses for homecoming dances I’ll never go to? People really shouldn’t let those things get in the way of true love.
I pointed this out to him, but he didn’t look very impressed.
“Look.” I flopped down on top of the picnic table, turned toward him on one elbow, holding my head in one hand. “I don’t see what the problem is. I mean, I’m going to be seventeen in eight and a half months. Eight and a half months! That’s nothing. I don’t see why we can’t—”
I was lying in just such a way that Rob’s face was only a couple of inches from mine. When he turned to look at me, our noses almost bumped into one another.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you,” Rob asked, “that you’re supposed to play hard to get?”
I looked at his lips. I probably don’t need to tell you that they’re really nice lips, kind of full and strong-looking. “What,” I wanted to know, “is
that
going to get me?”
I swear to you, he was a second away from kissing me then.
I know he said he wasn’t going to. But let’s face it, he always says that, and then he always does—well, almost always, anyway. I swear that’s why he avoids me half the time … because he knows that for all he says he isn’t going to kiss me, he usually ends up doing it anyway. Who knows why? I’d like to think it’s because I’m so damned irresistible, and because he’s secretly in love with me, in spite of what it says in the
Cosmo
quiz.
But I wasn’t destined to find out. Not just then, anyway. Because just as he was leaning over in the direction of my mouth, this unearthly siren started to wail …
… and we were both so startled, we wrenched apart.
I swear I thought a tornado alarm was going off. Rob said later he thought it was my dad, with one of those klaxon things old ladies set off when a mugger is attacking them.
But it wasn’t either of those things. It was a Wawasee County police cruiser. And it whizzed by the campground we were parked at like a bullet… .
Only to be followed by another.
And another.
And then another.
Four squad cars, all headed at breakneck speed in the direction of Camp Wawasee.
I should have known, of course. I should have guessed what was wrong.
But my psychic abilities are limited to finding people, not predicting the future. All I knew was that something was definitely wrong back at the camp … and it wasn’t my psychic powers telling me that, either. It was just plain common sense.
“What,” Rob wanted to know, “have you done now?”
What
had
I done? I wasn’t sure.
“I have,” I said, “a very bad feeling about this.”
“Come on.” Rob sighed tiredly. “Let’s go find out.”
They didn’t want to let us in at the gate, of course. Rob had no visitor’s pass, and the security guard looked down his nose at my employee ID and went, “Only time counselors are allowed to leave the camp is Sunday afternoons.”
I looked at him like he was crazy. “I know that,” I said. “I snuck out. Now are you going to let me back in, or not?”
You could totally tell the guy, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, had tried for the local police force and hadn’t made it. So he’d opted to become a security guard, thinking that would give him the authority and respect he’d always yearned for. He sucked on his two overlarge front teeth and, peering at Rob and me, went, ” ‘Fraid not. There’s a bit of a problem up at the camp, you know, and—”
I put down the face shield of my helmet and said to Rob, “Let’s go.”
Rob said to the security guard, “Nice talkin’ to ya.”
Then he gunned the engine, and we went around the red-and-white barrier arm, churning up quite a bit of dust and gravel as we did so. What did it matter? I couldn’t get more fired than I already was.
The security guard came out of his little house and started yelling, but there wasn’t much he could do to make us turn around. It wasn’t like he had a gun, or anything.
Not that guns had ever stopped us before, of course.
As we drove up the long gravel road to the camp, I noticed how still and cool the woods were, especially with the coming rainstorm. The sky above us was clouding up more with every passing moment. You could smell the rain in the air, fresh and sweet.
Of course it wasn’t until I was about to be kicked out of there that I’d finally begun to appreciate Camp Wawasee. It was too bad, really. I’d never even gotten a chance to float around the lake on an inner tube.
When we pulled up to the administrative offices, I was surprised at how many people were milling around. The squad cars were parked kind of haphazardly, and there was no sign of the cops who’d been driving them. They must, I figured, be inside, talking to Dr. Alistair, Pamela, and Ms. John Wayne.
But there were campers and counselors aplenty, which I thought was a little weird. If there’d been some sort of accident or crisis, you’d have thought they’d have tried to keep it from the kids… .
… And that’s when I realized that they couldn’t have kept it from the kids, even if they’d wanted to. It was five-thirty, and the kids and their counselors were streaming into the dining hall for supper. The dining staff prepared meals at exactly the same time every day, crisis or no crisis.
All of the kids were staring curiously at the squad cars. When they noticed Rob and me, they looked even more curious, and began whispering to one another. Oddly enough, I saw no members of Birch Tree Cottage in the crowds… .
But I saw a lot of other people I knew, including Ruth and Scott, who made no move whatsoever to approach me.
That’s when I realized I still had my helmet on. Of course no one was saying hi. No one recognized me. As soon as I’d dragged the heavy thing off, Ruth came right over, and, as Rob pulled his helmet off as well, said, very sarcastically, “Well, I see you managed to find that ride you were looking for.”
I shot her a warning look. Ruth can really be very snotty when she puts her mind to it.
“Ruth,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever formally introduced you to my friend, Rob. Ruth Abramowitz, this is Rob Wilkins. Rob, Ruth.”
Rob nodded curtly to Ruth. “How you doing,” he said.
Ruth smiled at him. It was not her best effort, by any means.
“I’m doing very well, thank you,” she said primly. “And you?”
Rob, his eyebrows raised, said, “I’m good.”
“Ruth.” One of the residents of Tulip Tree Cottage pulled on Ruth’s T-shirt. “I’m
hungry
. Can we go in now?”
Ruth turned and said to her campers, “You all go in now, and save a place for me. I’ll be there in a minute.”
The kids went away, with many glances not only at me and Rob, but at the squad cars. “What are the
police
doing here?” more than one of them asked loudly of no one in particular.
“Good question,” I said to Ruth. “What
are
the police doing here?”
“I don’t know.” Ruth was still looking at Rob. She had seen him before, of course, back when he and I had had detention together. Ruth used to come pick me up, so my parents wouldn’t find out about my somewhat checkered disciplinary record.
But I guess this was the first time she’d ever seen Rob from close up, and I could tell she was memorizing the details for later analysis. Ruth’s like that.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I demanded. “The place is crawling with cops, and you don’t know why?”
Ruth finally wrenched her gaze from Rob and fastened it onto me instead.
“No,” she said. “I don’t know. All I know is, we were down at the lake, having free swim and all, and the lifeguard blew his whistle and made us all go back inside.”
“We thought it was on account of the storm,” Scott said, nodding toward the still-darkening sky above us.
It was at this point that Karen Sue Hanky strolled up to us. I could tell by the expression on her pointy rat face that she had something important to tell us … and by the unnatural glitter in her baby-blue eyes, I knew it was something I wasn’t going to like.
“Oh,” she said, pretending she had only just noticed me. “I see you’ve decided to join us again.” She glanced flirtatiously at Rob. “And brought along a friend, I see.”
Even though Karen Sue had gone to school with Rob, she didn’t recognize him. Girls like Karen Sue simply don’t notice guys like Rob. I suppose she thought he was just some random local I’d picked up off the highway and brought back to camp for some recreational groping.
“Karen Sue,” I said, “you better hurry and get into the dining hall. I heard a rumor they were running low on wheatgrass juice.”
She just smiled at me, which wasn’t a very good sign.
“Aren’t you funny,” Karen Sue said. “But then I suppose it’s very amusing to you, what’s going on. On account of it all being because of you telling that one little boy to hit that other little boy.” Karen Sue flicked some of her hair back over her shoulder and sighed. “Well, I guess it just goes to show, violence doesn’t pay.”
Overhead, the clouds had gotten so thick, the sun was blocked out almost entirely. Inside the dining hall, the lights had come on, though this usually didn’t happen until seven or eight o’clock, when the cleaning crew was at work. In the distance, thunder rumbled. The smell of ozone was heavy in the air.
I stepped forward until Karen Sue’s upturned nose was just an inch from mine, and she stumbled back a step, tripping over a root and nearly falling flat on her face.
When she straightened, I asked her just what the heck she was talking about.
Only I didn’t say heck.
Karen Sue started talking very quickly, and in a voice that was higher in pitch than usual.
“Well, I just went into the administrative offices for a second because I had to make sure the fax from Amber’s doctor had come—about how her chronic ear infections prevent her from taking part in the Polar Bear swim—and I just happened to overhear the police talking to Dr. Alistair about how one of the boys from Birch Tree Cottage went to the lake, but no one saw him come out of it—”