Read Camp Confidential 06 - RSVP Online

Authors: Melissa J Morgan

Camp Confidential 06 - RSVP (16 page)

BOOK: Camp Confidential 06 - RSVP
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“Are these supposed to be trick questions?” Chelsea demanded.
Alex said, “I got it!”
“You would. You’re such a brain,” Chelsea grumbled.
Ignore it, be nice to her,
Alex reminded herself. “Thanks,” she told Chelsea. She said to Grace, “It’s
Little Women.
”
“Bing!” Grace imitated a bell. “That’s correct!”
“That was too hard,” Chelsea groaned.
“Okay.” Grace pushed on, reading off the next clue. “This book is about the god of jewelry.”
The girls frowned at Grace. Not one pencil moved. This time Alex was stumped, too.
“
The Lord of the Rings
!” Grace smiled weakly. “Get it?”
Chelsea rolled her eyes and shook her head.
Grace looked down at her list. Brynn shifted restlessly. Natalie stifled a yawn.
“And that’s all the time we have for the Book Club Quiz!” Grace said, flinging open her arms.
“Yay!” Chelsea cried.
Alex winced at Chelsea’s rudeness. She could see that Grace had prepared a lot more questions, and that she had stopped the quiz early. She was probably disappointed that it hadn’t gone very well.
As if Grace had read her mind, she winked at Alex and wadded up the papers into a ball. She tossed it into the air a couple of times and said, “Time for a soda.”
“I’ll get you one,” Alex offered.
“Cream soda, please,” Grace said. “And thanks!”
“You’re welcome,” Alex said warmly as she got up and walked into the kitchen.
Natalie and Alyssa caught up with her.
“I’m trying so hard to be nice to you-know-who,” Natalie said to her two friends as they got the sodas. “But it’s really difficult.”
“I know,” Alyssa said. “I’m afraid to say anything. She takes it all wrong.”
Natalie popped open a root beer. She leaned against the counter and took a sip. “I just want to stay in here for, like an hour. I’m totally on edge. It seems like the nicer we are to her, the meaner she acts.”
“I know,” Alex said. “It’s nerve-wracking.”
“But we have to be nice,” Alyssa reminded them. “No matter what.”
“You’re right,” Natalie said. She took another sip of root beer and sighed. “Well, I can’t hide out in my kitchen during my own sleepover. I should go back out there.”
“No, you can’t hide, but you can take a moment to regroup,” Alyssa said loyally. “You’re under a lot of pressure, Nat. And whether she means to be a pain or not, Chelsea’s not helping,” she added.
“You guys are really sweet,” Natalie told them, giving them both big hugs.
The three friends walked back into the living room. Chelsea glared at them and said, “Secrets are not cool at sleepovers.”
Natalie’s face tingled. Feeing guilty, she said, “No secrets, Chelsea.” She looked around the room at the rest of the bunk. People seemed unsure what to do next. “Hey, why don’t we all get our sleeping bags out and change into our pajamas? Then we can relax.”
“It’ll be good to relax,” Candace said.
Jessie and Karen walked over to the pile of sleeping bags. Chelsea waited a moment, and then she did, too.
As Chelsea approached, Karen looked nervous. She was hugging her sleeping bag; and Natalie wondered if she didn’t want to sleep next to Chelsea. The other girls were standing around, too, as if no one wanted to be the first one to put down their bag.
“We’re going to be crammed together,” Karen said, sliding a glance toward Chelsea. That confirmed it for Natalie: Karen wanted some space—literally—between herself and Chelsea.
“Crammed,” Candace agreed.
“Why don’t you sleep next to me, Chelsea?” Sarah offered.
“Or me,” Natalie said quickly.
Pretty soon everyone was half-fighting to get Chelsea to sleep next to them. It had to be obvious that they were being overly nice.
“Just so long as no one has BO or bad breath,” Chelsea drawled as she held onto her bag with one hand and fanned her face with the other. “I mean, it was bad enough at camp, inhaling everybody’s stinky foot odor, and we had lots of room between our bunks. Got any room deodorizer, Natalie? Because we sure need some!”
Jenna dropped her sleeping bag on the floor.
“I have had it with you!” Jenna cried.
She stomped over to her laptop, picked it up, glared at Chelsea, and hit a button. Gaby’s recorded voice filled the room.
“Knock it off! Knock it off!”
Chelsea gasped. So did everyone else.
Chelsea dropped her sleeping back and raced out of the living room, down the hall, and into the guest bathroom. The door slammed shut and the stupid motion-detector singing fish began to warble. The sound overlaid Jenna’s laptop as it continued to blare, “Knock it off! Knock it off!”
“Turn it off!” Natalie implored.
“I’m trying! I’m trying!” Jenna cried. She frantically punched buttons, but nothing happened.
Anxiously, Jenna put the laptop into the “Fun Shack” and closed the trunk lid. It only served to muffle the sound a little.
“Knock it off! Knock it off!”
Jenna tried to open the trunk back up. “It’s locked!” she cried.
“Get the key!” Natalie told her.
“There is no key!” Jenna rattled the handle. “We lost it on our family vacation to Idaho!”
“Oh, great. Then let’s get it out of here,” Grace told her. She pulled the decorations off the trunk and began to push it out of the living room. Jenna assisted her, guiding the wheels over the carpet.
“Put it in the kitchen,” Jessie suggested.
Natalie put out her hands. “Or in my mom’s office. Then we can at least shut the door!”
While Grace and Sarah handled that, Jenna said to Natalie, “I have got to go apologize to Chelsea. I feel so stupid. I just lost it.”
“I’ll come with you,” Natalie offered. “I’ll turn off the fish.” She said to Alex, “You guys get Chelsea’s present ready, okay? We’ll get her to come out and then we’ll give it to her.”
“Got it,” Alex said.
Natalie and Jenna hurried together to the bathroom door. Their approach signaled the fish to flap and sing all over again, until Natalie hit the “off” switch. Then she knocked softly on the door.
“Chelsea?” she called. “It’s Natalie.”
“And Jenna. I’m so sorry!” Jenna said through the door. “It was supposed to be a joke!”
“You are so lying, Jenna Bloom.” Chelsea’s voice was muffled. She sounded as if she were crying.
“Please come out,” Natalie said. “We have something for you.”
“Uh-huh, what is it, a ride home?” Chelsea snapped.
“No, it’s something we made,” Natalie assured her. “And we made it for you. All of us.”
“Another thing you did behind my back! You just love doing stuff like that, don’t you, Natalie? It makes you feel really important.”
Natalie flushed. She turned to Jenna. “I don’t know what to do.”
Jenna made a face. “Your mom’s coming home at midnight, right?”
“Oh, we can’t spend the whole sleepover like this!” Natalie cried. She knocked a little more loudly on the door. “Chelsea, please come out!”
“Go away!” Chelsea cried. “Go away and leave me alone!”
Natalie was stumped. What were they going to do?
chapter
THIRTEEN
What a disaster!
Alex thought as she faced her bunkmates and everyone just kind of stared at one another. Grace and Sarah had wheeled the trunk with the laptop into Ms. Goode’s office, but she could still hear it faintly saying, “Knock it off! Knock it off!”
She wondered how long it would be until the battery ran out.
“What should we do?” Karen asked her.
Alex thought a moment. Finally she said, “We all know that Chelsea is upset about her dad.”
“Because he’s sick and stuff,” Jessie said.
“Yes.” Alex nodded.
“Which is why she’s acting like a total jerk,” Grace huffed.
“Yes.” Alex nodded again. Then she thought back to when she had gone into diabetic shock at camp.
Chelsea had been the one to stand by her. It had been Chelsea who had rushed off to get her insulin kit. And Chelsea who had told them that she had a cousin who had juvenile diabetes, and what a horrible disease it was.
Alex had been grateful not only that she had physically helped her, but that Chelsea, alone of all her bunkmates, understood that having diabetes was really awful. Chelsea was the one who had talked about it the most honestly, instead of just trying to cheer Alex up.
“She’s not getting a chance to talk about it,” Alex said slowly, beginning to understand. “She’s been acting really bad, and we’ve been ignoring it because we feel sorry for her.”
“That’s right,” Grace snapped. She narrowed her eyes and crossed her hands over her chest. “We have totally been letting her get away with it.”
“That’s not what she wants,” Alex told her.
As Natalie and Jenna walked back into the living room, Alex addressed them all.
“Through the summer, and leading up to now, each one of us has had a problem. And the others have tried to pitch in and
help
. We’re just putting up with Chelsea. We’re not helping her.”
Candace opened her arms wide. “But she won’t
let
us help her,” she said.
“I know about being sick,” Alex said. “I know she’s scared.” Alex looked at each bunkmate in turn. “She has a right to be scared. Things might not go well for her dad. There’s no way to know.”
“I get it,” Natalie said. “Chelsea needs to be
heard
. We’ve all been so busy trying to act like she’s not being a totally rude jerk or cheering her up that Chelsea hasn’t had a chance to be one of us—a bunkmate who needs her friends.”
Alex raised a staying hand, then walked alone to the bathroom door. She knocked softly and said, “Chelsea, it’s me, Alex. I’m alone. May I come in?”
After a few seconds, the door slowly opened.
Chelsea stood in front of Alex. It was obvious she had been crying. But she kept her mouth pursed in a tight line and stared hard at Alex.
Swallowing, Alex said, “We’re really sorry about your dad. Whatever happens, we’re here for you. You’re part of Bunk 3C, and we care about you.”
Chelsea remained silent. But she didn’t go back into the bathroom.
Alex walked her back to the living room. Everyone was standing—Grace, Natalie, Brynn, Jenna, Karen, Candace, Jessie, Alyssa, and Sarah.
Brynn was holding their gift for Chelsea, a large object about the size of two school notebooks and three times as thick. It was wrapped in sparkly pink paper.
“This is for you,” Brynn said, holding it out to Chelsea.
Chelsea hesitated. “What is it?”
“Open it and see,” Natalie urged her, stepping toward her.
Studying the faces of her bunkmates, Chelsea reached out and took the present. As she slowly unwrapped it, Brynn explained, “We made this for you because we care about you. Not to go behind your back.”
As Chelsea tore the paper away, the gift was revealed. It was a large scrapbook-style journal, with
Chelsea’s Book
written in silver gel pen on the black cover.
“What . . . ?” Chelsea said, her voice cracking.
Brynn sat her down. “It’s a journal for recording your thoughts,” she said. “And expressing your feelings, and remembering that you’re not alone in all this.”
As Chelsea turned the pages, Natalie took up the thread. “We personalized it just for you. There are pictures of all of us at camp, and essays about different things we wanted to share with you.”
“I wrote a haiku,” Alyssa said.
“I made a magazine collage,” Natalie added.
“Oh my God,” Chelsea murmured as she kept looking through the journal. There were photos and pictures cut out of magazines, arranged into intricate collages. Tiny envelopes held little notes, and stickers of flowers and angels decorated the borders of each page.
Chelsea’s eyes welled with tears. “You guys worked so hard on this. For . . .
me
.”
“Yes. For you,” Alex concluded.
Chelsea broke down. Weeping, she covered her face with her hands. Grace opened her mouth to speak, but Alex touched her arm and shook her head.
“When he got sick the first time,” Chelsea said hoarsely, “I was so . . . I was
mad
. I wanted to be like you guys, worrying about nail polish and horoscopes and boys, but what if he . . . then he got sick again . . . and I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t know what to do!”
Chelsea cried and cried. And the girls of Bunk 3C cried with her, and each one in turn held her tightly.
BOOK: Camp Confidential 06 - RSVP
13.97Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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