Cheesie Mack Is Cool in a Duel Page 3

  I looked around. Uncle Bud’s golf cart (we call them campmobiles) was parked in front of Cabin A, the littlest kids’ cabin.

  “C’mon!” I yelled, and ran uphill. Georgie dropped his bags and trotted after me. He was only halfway there when I got to Cabin A. I almost slammed into Uncle Bud as he came out.

  “Georgie isn’t … He and I aren’t … We’re not in either F or G!”

  Uncle Bud stepped back a bit, gave me a calm-down look, and peered at his clipboard. “You’re in H.”

  “H? We’re in H? We’re with the Big Guys?” Cabin H was for twelve-and thirteen-year-olds. “No, no, no, that’s not right! We’re Little Guys. We—”

  Georgie arrived at my side.

  “Georgie was late in applying,” Granpa said. “Remember? We were full up. I had to move kids around to make room. I knew you wanted to be together, so I put you both in H. It’s no big deal.”

  I was stunned. No big deal?

  “Georgie’s bigger and older anyway. And you’re a clever kid. You both can handle it. End of story. I’m too busy to argue.” He got into the campmobile.

  “But, Granpa, we’ll barely ever see our camp friends.”

  “What’s done is done.” He pressed the pedal, rolled forward a couple of feet, then stopped. “Sorry,” he said, then drove off.

  Georgie’s eyebrows were waggling up and down, and I stood with my mouth hanging open. We had been at Camp Windward for less than an hour, and our summer was already ruined!

  The Toilet on the Wall

  We walked back to Cabin F in silence. Robbie, Evan, and Lenny had already gone inside to unpack. Georgie and I picked up our bags and trudged to Cabin H. Sure enough, our names were on the roster tacked to the door. And if I’d looked all the way to the bottom of the alphabetical list, I would have realized why things were going to get ten times worse. We stepped inside …

  And there was Kevin Welch, glaring at me.

  “Get out of our cabin, Runt.”

  “Cool it,” Georgie said. “This is our cabin, too.”

  “Oh, save me!” Kevin whined in a high voice. “The babies are here to hurt us. We’re done for, Ty,” he said to the boy next to him.

  Ty shot me a super-unfriendly look. Remember Ty? He was the guy who, after I hit Kevin with a spitball, smiled at me malevolently (muh-LEH-Voh-lent-lee … it means “really evilly” and was also in my first book). I looked around the cabin. Eight bunk beds. There were kids unpacking at every bunk bed except the one way in the back. That top bed had a suitcase on it. The bottom bed had a sticky note on it: Georgie Sinkoff. I didn’t see a note with my name on it anywhere.

  Everyone was looking at us. Although I knew most of these kids from previous years when they were Little Guys like me, I wasn’t pals with any of them. This was not good.

  Just then a guy walked in. I had never seen him before.

  “Good afternoon, boys,” he said in a soft voice. “I guess I’m the counselor for Cabin H. My name is Ronald Lindermann.”

  “You’re a newbie,” Ty said.

  The new guy didn’t say anything at first. We all stared at him.

  “A newbie?” Lindermann finally said. “Yes. Camp Windward. This is my first summer.”

  Lindermann had glasses, was only a couple of inches taller than Ty and Kevin, and looked like sports were not his favorite activity. He coughed once, looked around nervously, and continued.

  “I’m twenty. I’m a junior at MIT. I’m studying how the brain works.”

  He paused, but none of us said anything. I knew about MIT (em-eye-tee = Massachusetts Institute of Technology). It’s a very famous university for really smart students.

  “I’ll be your science counselor this summer. Computers. Biology. Pond scum. Things like that.”

  No one spoke, so Lindermann walked to the bunk above Georgie’s, pulled his suitcase down, and began unpacking it into the built-in cabinets near each bed.

  Ty whispered to Kevin, “What a nerd.”

  Kevin turned to me and whispered, “What do you think, Ronald Mack? Makes sense that he’s a nerd, right? His name is Ronald, the nerdiest name in the world.”

  I was trying to think of something to say that would combine Kevin’s name with pond scum when two short trumpet blasts came over the camp loudspeakers. That meant dinner. Georgie and I walked to the back of the cabin. He put his gear on the one empty bed. By the time we turned around, all the other kids were out the cabin door.

  “What’re your names?” Lindermann asked.

  “I’m Georgie.”

  “I’m Ronald,” I said. “Like you. But everyone calls me Cheesie.”

  Lindermann shook our hands.

  “Where do I sleep?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Lindermann said. “You’re the extra kid. Uncle Bud’s your grandfather, right?”

  I nodded.

  “In there.” Lindermann pointed at the back wall. Every cabin had a storage closet for extra bed frames and junk. The door had been taken off this one.

  I leaned into the closet. It had been cleaned out and set up with a single bed and a small dresser for my clothes and stuff.

  “Come on. Let’s get to dinner,” Lindermann said.

  He walked with us up the hill toward the dining hall. But he didn’t say much, and neither did we. Three feelings were all mixed up inside me:

  1. I was really upset that Georgie and I weren’t going to be with our camp friends.

  2. I really wanted Dutcher as my counselor.

  3. Georgie and I were going to be sleeping in enemy territory.

  Our dining hall sits near the edge of a straight-down cliff above Bufflehead Lake.

  Don’t worry. There’s a guardrail. And if you’re imagining that it’d be cool to jump into the lake from up there, forget it! It’s a thirty-foot drop, the water is only a couple of feet deep, and there are rocks.

  One wall of the dining hall is almost all windows, so while you eat there’s a terrific view of the lake.

  Windwarders and Leewarders enter the dining hall from opposite ends. We eat at the same times and have the same menu, but except for the kitchen window where servers pick up food platters, the boys and girls are entirely separate. In fact, because the kitchen is in the middle, the boys almost can’t even see the girls, which is fine with me.

  You eat with the guys from your cabin, so when Georgie and I went in, we waved to our camp friends from Cabin F and went to the Cabin H table.

  Lindermann pointed at me and Georgie and said, “How about you two serve.” Georgie and I moved quickly to the food window (if you’re slow, you’re last in line). The food at camp is really good, but the first dinner is extra special.

  Mookie, the only kitchen worker I actually know, was handling the serving window. “Hey ya, Cheeseman. Welcome back. Here you go.” He handed me a platter of fried chicken. Georgie got a bowl of mashed potatoes. I beat him to our table, plunked the plate down, and zipped back to the window just as the kitchen staff was pushing out the salad and the bread. I was hungry and moving fast.

  My strategy, because I know that the boy servers and the girl servers come to the window from opposite directions, is always to move into the empty space between the two groups and squeeze forward. This puts me ahead, but also right next to the girls, which usually is not a problem. This time, however, as I got a bowl of green salad and turned to go, there stood Lana Shen. I was trapped.

  “Hi, Cheesie. Could you please pass me some bread? I can’t reach.” I handed her a basket. She gave me a too-big smile.

  Mookie grinned from inside the serving window like he knew something I didn’t know. I zoomed away.

  Interesting fact: Mookie told us that the boys are always messier, but the girls are always louder.

  After dinner we were supposed to have a campfire, but it started to rain, so everyone went to the Barn. It’s not actually a barn. It’s a regular building where we watch movies and do plays and talent shows … and where we gather when the weather’s
bad. The girls have an exact same building on their side of the Border Line, except they call theirs the Ballroom.

  When we entered the Barn, it was obvious that no one had expected rain. Chairs weren’t set up. Everyone was sitting on the floor.

  “Look!” Georgie said, pointing to the far wall. “That’s weird.” The Barn has a stage at one end, with doors on both sides of it. One leads backstage. Georgie was pointing to the other door, which leads to a bathroom.

  Attached to the wall right above the bathroom door was Aunt Lois’s newest sculpture: an old-fashioned toilet, the kind with a separate tank and pull chain. The bowl was about as high as a basketball hoop. The lid and the seat, painted fire-engine red, were up.

  Aunt Lois is an extremely creative person. She is also very strange.

  (Later in the summer I found out she attached a similar toilet to the wall of the Camp Leeward Ballroom, except theirs has the toilet seat down.)

  Suddenly Kevin and Ty put their arms around Georgie and started pulling him toward the other guys from Cabin H.

  “C’mon, Georgie, old pal. Lose that loser,” Kevin said, dismissing me with a wave.

  Georgie jabbed out both elbows and spun away from them. He looked ready to fight. Ty laughed. Kevin grinned. Anybody could tell they weren’t really trying to be friends with Georgie. They just wanted to torture me. Ty and Kevin sauntered (walking like they thought they were super cool) over to where Lindermann and the rest of the Cabin H boys were sitting. At campfires, you have to be with your bunk mates, so we followed, but sat as far away from Kevin and Ty as possible.

  Uncle Bud walked onstage. Everyone cheered. The first campfire (even if it has to be inside the Barn with no fire and no way to roast marshmallows or make s’mores) is always a big welcoming. He took the microphone off the stand and started just like always: “Hello, Windwarders!”

  “Hello, Uncle Bud!” all the kids and counselors shouted back, not exactly in unison.

  Then he began to tell a joke.

  He tells this same joke every year, so every returning camper knows it by heart. And just before he gets to the end, we always interrupt by yelling out the punch line and laughing hysterically. (The joke is on my website, but I warn you, it’s only funny if you’ve heard it a million times.)

  “What?” Uncle Bud shouted. “This is the way you treat an old man who’s just trying to make you laugh?” He stomped around the stage, shaking the microphone and waving his fist in the air, which made the kids hoot and yell and laugh even louder. Finally he raised both arms, and we all quieted.

  “Okay, then. You lose,” he said. “No more jokes for you guys!”

  All the kids cheered in approval.

  Uncle Bud made a mad face, then broke into a big grin, waved his arms like an orchestra conductor, and started singing “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” He sings loudly, which somehow makes it easy for everyone to sing along.

  About three songs later, my shoe got yanked off.

  It was Kevin! He had crawled near me while I wasn’t looking. I grabbed at my shoe, but he passed it to Ty, who passed it to kids from another cabin, and in seconds it was all the way on the other side of the room. I lost sight of it.

  I don’t know how Uncle Bud got it, but when the song ended, he held up my shoe and asked, “Who lost a sneaker?”

  I stood up and limped one-shoe-on, one-shoe-off through more than two hundred seated kids. Uncle Bud gave it to me, along with a squinty-evil-eye. I put it on and walked back to my group.

  Dutcher took the microphone. “Hey, guys. Want me to tell you about how I bicycled across California?”

  Instantly the Barn was filled with “Yes!” and “Sure!” and “Go for it!”

  Dutcher waited until we quieted. “Okay. The Tour of California is a very long bike race. It starts in Nevada City, which is actually in California.…”

  It was a great story, with dangerous zooming down mountains, exhausting sprinting to the finish, and lots of stuff about teamwork. He’s especially excellent at describing gory crashes and blood and stuff. I was sitting on the floor, completely relaxed, but as he spoke, I realized I was actually breathing heavily, just like I was one of the guys pedaling. And that was when Kevin snatched my shoe again.

  This time it ended up with Dutcher. He stopped in the middle of his story, held it up for everyone to see, and announced over the microphone, “Will the owner of a white and green, somewhat smelly cross-trainer please come to the lost-and-found? Will the owner of …”

  Everyone laughed.

  Then Dutcher looked straight at me. “Cheesie? Is this yours?”

  Everyone laughed harder as I limped to get it again.

  When the non-campfire campfire ended, the rain was really coming down. Most kids ran to their cabins. Georgie and I walked.

  “Kevin and that Ty guy are really bothering me,” I said.

  “They hate you,” Georgie said. “And they hate me, too. Because they know we’re best friends.”

  Even though it was a warm night, the rain gave me shivers. Georgie walked with his head up and his mouth open, catching raindrops on his tongue. We were sopping wet when we reached Cabin H.

  After lights-out, I lay in bed thinking. Because my closet was sort of a bump attached to the rest of the cabin, I decided to call it the cove. It had a small, high window that let in the moonlight. I couldn’t see anyone because of where my bed was, so I closed my eyes and concentrated on using my hearing.

  After a few moments of listening to the rustling of sheets and the squeaking of bedsprings, I realized I could tell whether the noise came from the bunks on the north side of the cabin or the south side. I was musing (MYOOZ-ing is a very good word to use in school … means “being deep in thought”) about bats and how they use echolocation (even if you don’t know that word, you can easily guess what it means) to find their way around in the dark. That was when Kevin—my ears located him on the south side—broke the silence.

  “Hey, Lindermann. How about you tell us a ghost story? Something scary.”

  “I don’t know any ghost stories,” Lindermann said.

  My ears located Lindermann and Georgie on the north side, in the bunk beds closest to the cove. Of course I already knew where everyone’s bed was, but it’s amazing how accurate your hearing can be when you ignore everything else and use it as your only sense. You should try it. It really works.

  “But on my next day off,” Lindermann continued, “I could go to a library or bookstore and get a book. How about ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’?”

  You’ve probably heard of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” It’s the story that has the headless horseman in it. If you haven’t read it, you absolutely should. It’s spooky. It was written by Washington Irving early in the nineteenth century. It’s been made into movies, cartoons, plays, and picture books. The original has lots of hard words, but some of the children’s versions are really good. And because it’s a short story … it’s short!

  “Not out of a book,” Ty said. “We want a real story.”

  If it’s from a book, it’s not a real story? I thought. Ty is a dope.

  The way Ty’s voice came into my ears told me that he was in the bunk above Kevin’s.

  “I think ‘Sleepy Hollow’ would be great,” I said. “It has a headless horseman.”

  “Shut up,” Kevin said.

  And that was the way my first night in Cabin H ended.

  Little Big Guy

  My second day as a member of Cabin H started out terribly.

  Lindermann had already left for flag-raising duty, and while I was in the bathroom doing whatever and brushing my teeth, I heard Kevin yell, “Cheese-Runt wet his bed!”

  I stuck my head out the bathroom door. Kevin, Ty, and a couple of other guys were looking into my closet cove, pointing and laughing. I pushed my way through. There was a big wet spot on my bed.

  Georgie shoved his way to the front. “It’s water! You poured it.”

  Kevin took a swig from a plastic
water bottle. “Nuh-uh. Smell it. I dare you!”

  “Don’t bother, Georgie,” I said.

  I was pretty sure no one believed them, but it was still hard not to get embarrassed.

  On the way to breakfast, Dutcher snuck up behind me and Georgie and growled like some sort of monster. We jumped, and Lenny shouted, “The Abominable Snowman!”

  Dutcher laughed. “Last night I told them about when I was in the Himalaya Mountains and the Yeti”—his voice got mysterious—“came out of the mist. He was big. Bigger than two men. He came closer. I was hanging on to the side of Mount Everest—”

  “You never went to Mount Everest!” I said.

  “Maybe not,” Dutcher said in his normal voice. “But last night’s story did.”

  “Our counselor stinks,” Kevin said as we reached the flagpole. I looked back. There were at least twenty-five kids between us and Lindermann. He couldn’t hear. “Our counselor, Ronald …”

  He made that name sound poisonous.

  “… Lindermann. He says”—Kevin’s voice got all whiny—“ ‘I don’t know any ghost stories.’ ”

  Dutcher gave Kevin a stern look. “Give the guy a chance, Kevin.”

  I didn’t like agreeing with anything Kevin said, but Ronald Lindermann was definitely not as good a counselor as Scott Dutcher. But then again, I thought, as I put my hand over my heart for the morning pledge, who was?

  At breakfast I was still on server patrol, so I walked to the food window. Normally I’d move faster, but I was musing about other names for the Abominable Snowman, like Yeti, Sasquatch, and Bigfoot. (If you know something about Bigfoot, please put it on my website.) I almost bumped into a platter of scrambled eggs that Lana Shen was holding out toward me.

  “Take it,” she said. “I’m paying you back for helping me last night.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, wondering how long she’d been standing there waiting for me. I walked back to the Cabin H table and set it down. I was really hungry. I watched the platter go around the table. When it got back to me, I scooped the last of the eggs onto my plate and noticed both Kevin and Ty were staring at me and grinning.

  “Why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last longer,” I said.