Lucas stands up on the other side of our tiny camp, and I narrow my eyes, imagining his wide shoulders sending Tyler flying. I know nothing about soccer, but you don’t have to be an expert to know Tyler went into that game a star forward senior with dreams of a full ride. Then newcomer junior Lucas showed up. One collision later, Tyler’s leg snapped. Senior season over and sainthood secured.
Lucas meets my eyes across camp like he can sense me thinking about him. I turn back to my tent. My boots squish with every step, and the collar of my T-shirt is wet enough to chafe.
I tug the tent cover out of Emily’s pack, and she starts pushing in the poles to lift this mess of canvas off the ground.
“I officially hate camping,” I grumble. Every breath fills my head with the smell of wet tent and hard rain. Another damp night awaits, with rocks digging into my shoulders and mosquito bites keeping me squirmy and miserable. At least it will be dry inside the tent. My eyes linger on a rivulet running down the canvas. Dry-ish at any rate.
Emily gasps, and I look around the side to see her holding the broken string of one of the tie-downs. I sigh and start toward her, and she stumbles back desperately, her face chalky.
“I-I’m sorry,” she says.
I laugh. “It’s fine. Did you see what I did to the tent stakes?”
Across the camp, Lucas snarls something at Jude, and Emily flinches again. The girl’s a nervous wreck.
“Poor Jude, huh?” I say.
Emily’s mouth draws tight, her shoulders shifting under her poncho. “There’s nothing poor about Jude.”
I lift my brows, surprised at her candor. True enough though. Jude’s super rich. He’s also super talented on the cello. I used to roll my eyes when he’d talk about Julliard, but then I heard him play. He’s the real deal. It might be cool if he weren’t an elitist, antisocial tool.
I shift our tent poles to straighten them as best I can, and Emily swishes the tent cover around. It’s a little lopsided, but we get it upright. I hold one hand out wide, giving Emily some jazz hands. “Ta-da!”
“You’re pretty good at this.”
I shrug. “We had tents in the background of one of our summer plays. I spent three nights a week setting them up on stage.”
Emily helps me straighten the tent, locking the poles for security. “I thought you were a director or something now.”
“I am. Usually. Which means you do all the jobs that don’t get finished. Tent assembly included.”
A snap-cracking in the woods to the south tells me Mr. Walker is returning from the creek, where he’d stayed to direct Ms. Brighton. There he comes from stage left, hands tucked under his backpack straps and a deep furrow over his brows. I try to imagine what lines will be his.
Except this isn’t a stage, and there won’t be an intermission or flowers after the curtain call.
“Are they OK over there?” I ask.
“Ms. Brighton’s plenty capable of getting them through the night.” He says it convincingly, but his eyes are too squinty. I don’t believe him.
“Should we call for help?” Emily asks, pipsqueak soft.
“No signal,” he says, and his grin has a hard edge. “I told you girls not to bother bringing your phones. It won’t kill us to handle this crisis. Might even build some character.”
I’m not sure how wringing out my bra or dying of hypothermia will build character, but I nod automatically.
“They don’t have water, but they have a filter bottle in one of the packs.” He frowns, and I can tell he’s sorting supplies in his head. “I’ve got the bottles we filtered at our lunch stop.”
Ah, those were good times. During the first hour of the downpour, all eight of us clustered around the river, trying to cover the filter with ponchos to protect it from rain contamination. Because the only thing that would make this trip more special would be a case of the trots.
Mr. Walker’s smile goes even tighter. “Bad news is Ms. Brighton’s got most of the food.”
I shrug. The smell of wet leaves and mildewed canvas isn’t doing much to whet my appetite anyway.
“I see you got your tent up without me tonight,” he says, putting on an expression that makes me think of dry-erase markers and trigonometry homework. He’s all teacherly pride and confidence, and as much as I want to gripe about how cold and hateful I feel, his words from sign-up week are still rattling around in my head. You’re such a leader, Sera. I’d love to have you on this project.
So here I am. My friends are repainting the town rec center, and I’m here in hell, collecting enough mosquito bites to contract malaria.
Still, I keep my shoulders back and my smile pasted on. “We’re regular survivalists. It’s all good. Emily helped me wrench this baby into shape.”
“I broke a string,” Emily admits, sounding like she might cry over it.
“Great teamwork,” Mr. Walker says. He moves around to fiddle with our work, shifting a couple of poles and tugging on the fabric here and there. Before I can fully figure out what he’s trying to do, our whole tent is perfectly centered on the poles and tidily covered. He digs around in his pack and hands me a box of Whoppers and a bottle of water for each of us.