Again, I wondered what this had to do with me. It's true I have two brothers, but if Pamela was thinking either of them would make a good camp counselor, she'd been getting a little too much fresh air.
"So I was wondering," Pamela continued, "if it would upset you very much if we assigned you to the cottage Andrew was supposed to have."
At that point, if she'd asked me to kill her mother, I probably would have said yes. I was that relieved I wasn't being fired—and I'd have done anything, anything at all, to get that arm off me. It isn't just that I have a thing about people touching me. I mean, I do. If you don't know me, keep your damned mitts to yourself. What is the problem there?
But you'd be surprised how touchy-feely these camp people are. It's all trust falls and human pretzel twists to them.
But that wasn't my only problem with Pamela. On top of my other "issues," I have a thing about authority figures. It probably has something to do with the fact that, last spring, one of them tried to shoot me.
So I stood there, sweating copiously, the words "Sure, yeah, whatever, let go of me," already right there on my lips.
But before I could say any of that, Pamela must have noticed how uncomfortable I was with the whole arm thing—either that or she'd realized how damp she was getting from my copious sweating. In any case, she dropped her arm away from me, and suddenly I could breathe easily again.
I looked around, wondering where we were. I'd lost my bearings in my panic over Pamela's touching me. Beneath us lay the gravel path that led to various Camp Wawasee outbuildings. Close by was the dining hall, newly refinished with a twenty-foot ceiling. Next, the camp's administrative offices. Then the infirmary. Beside that, the music building, a modular structure built mostly underground in order to preserve the woodsy feel of the place, with a huge skylight that shone down on a tree-filled atrium from which extended hallways leading to the soundproof classrooms, practice rooms, and so on.
What I couldn't see was the Olympic-sized swimming pool, and the half dozen clay tennis courts. Not that the kids had much time for swimming and tennis, what with all the practicing they had to do for the end-of-session orchestral concert that took place in the outdoor amphitheater, with seating for nine hundred. But nothing was too good for these little budding geniuses. Not far from the amphitheater was the Pit, where campers gathered nightly to link arms and sing while roasting marshmallows around a sunken campfire.
From there the path curved to the various cabins—a dozen for the girls on one side of camp and a dozen for the boys on the other—until it finally sloped down to Camp Wawasee's private lake, in all its mirror-surfaced, tree-lined glory. In fact, the windows of Frangipani Cottage looked out over the lake. From my bed in my little private room, I could see the water without even raising my head.
Only, apparently, it wasn't my bed anymore. I could feel Frangipani Cottage, with its lake views, its angelic flutists, its midnight-gabfest-and-hair-braiding sessions, slipping away, like water down the drain of … well, a steam table.
"It's just that, of all our female counselors this year," Pamela was going on, "you really strike me as the one most capable of handling a cabinful of little boys. And you scored so well in your first aid and lifesaving courses—"
Great. I'm being persecuted because of my knowledge of the Heimlich maneuver—honed, of course, from years of working in food services.
"—that I know I can put these kids into your hands and not worry about them a second longer."
Pamela was really laying it on thick. Don't ask me why. I mean, she was my boss. She had every right to assign me to a different cabin if she wanted to. She was the one doling out my paychecks, after all.
Maybe in the past she'd switched a girl counselor to a boys' cabin and gotten flak for it. Like maybe the girl she'd assigned to the cabin had quit or something. I'm not much of a quitter. The fact is, boys would be more work and less fun, but hey, what was I going to do?
"Yeah," I said. The back of my neck still felt damp from where her arm had been. "Well, that's fine."
Pamela reached out to clutch me by the elbow, looking intently down into my face. Being clutched by the elbow wasn't as bad as having her arm around my shoulders, so I was able to remain calm.
"Do you really mean that, Jess?" she asked me. "You'll really do it?"
What was I going to say, no? And risk being sent home, where I'd have to spend the rest of my summer sweating over trays of meatballs and manicotti at Joe Junior's? And when I wasn't at the restaurant, the only people I'd have to hang around with would be my parents (no thanks); my brother Mike, who was preparing to go away for his first year at Harvard and spent all the time on his computer e-mailing his new roommate, trying to determine who was bringing the minifridge and who was bringing the scanner; or my other brother, Douglas, who did nothing all day but read comic books in his room, coming out only for meals and South Park.
Not to mention the fact that for weeks now, there'd been a white van parked across the street from our house that didn't seem to belong to anyone in the neighborhood.
Um, no thanks. I'd stay here, if it was all the same.
"Um, yeah," I said. "Whatever. Just tell me what cabin I'm assigned to now, and I'll start moving my stuff."
Pamela actually hugged me. I can't say a whole lot for her management skills. One thing you would not catch my father doing is hugging one of his employees for agreeing to do what he'd asked her to do. More like he'd have given her a big fat "so long" if she'd said anything but, "Yes, Mr. Mastriani."
"That's great!" Pamela cried. "That's just great. You are such a doll, Jess."
Yeah, that's me. A regular Barbie.
Pamela looked down at her clipboard. "You'll be in Birch Tree Cottage now."
Birch Tree Cottage. I was giving up frangipani for birch. Story of my damned life.
"Now I'll just have to make sure the alternate can make it tonight." Pamela was still looking down at her chart. "I think she's from your hometown. And she's a flutist, too. Maybe you know her. Karen Sue Hanky?"
I had to bite back a great big laugh. Karen Sue Hanky? Now, if Karen Sue had found out she was being reassigned to a boys' cabin, she definitely would have cried.
"Yeah, I know her," I said, noncommittally. Boy, are you making a big mistake, was what I thought to myself. But I didn't say it out loud, of course.
"She interviewed quite well," Pamela said, still looking down at her clipboard, "but she only scored a five on performance."
I raised my eyebrows. It wasn't news to me, of course, that Karen Sue couldn't play worth a hang. But it seemed kind of wrong for Pamela to be admitting it in front of me. I guess she thought we were friends and all, on account of me not crying when she told me she was moving me to a boys' cabin.
The thing is, though, I already have all the friends I can stand.
"And she's only fourth chair," Pamela murmured, looking down at her chart. Then she heaved this enormous sigh. "Oh, well," she said. "What else can we do?"
Pamela smiled down at me, then started back to the administrative offices. She had apparently forgotten the fact that I am only third chair, just one up from Karen Sue.
My performance audition score, however, for the camp had been ten. Out of ten.
Oh, yeah. I rock.
Well, at playing the flute, anyway. I don't actually rock at much else.
I figured I'd better get a move on, if I was going to gather my stuff before any of the Frangipanis showed up and got the wrong idea … like that Camp Wawasee was unorganized or something. Which, of course, they were, as both the disaster with the sign—the one I told you about earlier—and the fact that they'd hired me attested to. I mean, had they even run my name through Yahoo!, or anything? If they had, they might have gotten an unpleasant little surprise.