Applewhites at Wit's End Read online

  “That child has less talent than a sea slug!” he said now. “She not only isn’t the cream, she isn’t even the skim milk of the creative crop! I will not have Priscilla Montrose at Eureka! under any circumstances whatsoever.”

  “Maybe you should consider that this is a child who really needs us!” Lucille offered.

  “And it could certainly be argued that we need her,” Zedediah added.

  “Clearly,” Archie said, “we can’t afford to be choosy.”

  Randolph looked at the application again. Then he leafed through the pages. “We couldn’t take her anyway,” he said. “Not from this application. Look at this signature!” He pointed to the line where the parent was supposed to sign the form. “Priscilla has quite obviously forged her mother’s signature.”

  “Think of it as a sign of independence!” Sybil said.

  “This is not a valid application. The child has gone behind her mother’s back. I’ll make you a bet she was forbidden to apply. That hateful, spiteful, vengeful woman would never allow her child to spend the summer with us!”

  “I was afraid you’d take this stand,” said Sybil with a sigh.

  “We can survive with six campers,” Randolph said. “We’ll just have to cut a few corners, that’s all. Be a little more frugal.”

  E.D. shook her head. Frugal had been another of her vocabulary words: “characterized by thriftiness and avoidance of waste,” it meant. They’d had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch—for the third time that week. She didn’t think they could be any more frugal than they already were.

  Chapter Four

  Once it was clear there was no application winnowing to be done, Archie left the meeting to go pick up the swimming pool ladder he had bought from Craigslist for the diving platform. He took Destiny with him and told Jake he’d need some help when they got back. Meantime, Jake was eager to hear who the campers were that he was going to have in his singing workshop.

  Lucille and Sybil had spent a long time going over the applications and were now taking turns presenting the campers to the family. It occurred to Jake halfway through Lucille’s presentation of the first one—a thirteen-year-old boy named Quincy Brown—that he hadn’t really thought this whole camp idea through. There had been some vague image in his mind of a bunch of little kids he could get singing with him, the way he’d done with Destiny. Little kids. Not somebody almost his own age who had won so many talent shows that he was paying for camp himself from his winnings!

  When Sybil began talking about the next two—a pair of eleven-year-old twins named Ginger and Cinnamon Boniface—Hal began to hyperventilate. He excused himself and went up to his room. “He’ll get used to the idea by the time they come,” Lucille assured everyone. “It’s only six kids.”

  After Sybil and Lucille finished talking about all of them—three girls and three boys—Jake felt a headache coming on. He’d taken a few notes so he could fill Archie in, but E.D. was going to make up a booklet of camper bios so everybody could have a copy. “It’s important for all of you to memorize the bios,” she said in her usual bossy way, “so you’ll be ready to handle the campers.”

  Jake didn’t see how memorizing all the great accomplishments these kids had put on their applications would help him get ready to handle anybody.

  “One of them is the son of rock stars!” he told Archie later as he held the ladder Archie was attaching to the diving platform.

  Destiny was sitting on the floor pounding nails into a board Archie had given him. “Rock stars?” he asked. “You mean those guys E.D. has pitchers of on her ceiling?”

  “Not those rock stars,” Jake said. “The kid’s parents have an indie rock band called Dragon’s Blood.”

  “They have a cult following among high school and college kids,” Archie said.

  “Yeah. His mom’s the lead singer; his dad is lead guitar.”

  Destiny stopped pounding. “He gots a guitar for a dad?”

  “His dad plays the guitar. The kid’s name is Harley—he was named for his father’s motorcycle.”

  Archie groaned.

  “His mother wrote a note on his application that she hopes the camp will give him a new outlet for his creative abilities. Right now he’s into photography, but he only takes pictures of dead things.”

  “Eeeww,” Destiny said. “Where’s he get dead things?”

  “She didn’t say. Then there’s Quincy Brown,” Jake said, “who calls himself Q. He’s thirteen and the only African American. He’s won something like ten talent shows. He sings. He dances. And he’s been in more musicals than I have.”

  “Feeling a little intimidated, are you?” Archie asked.

  “A little?” Jake said. “Besides those two there’s David. He’s fourteen! My age. He’s had professional coaches—singing, dancing, and acting coaches—since he was three! Plus, he wrote a play that was done at his private school in Virginia last semester—with him in the lead. According to his mother, David is a genius: God’s gift to all things creative.”

  Archie finished screwing in the ladder. “That’s his mother talking. Remember Mrs. Montrose. Don’t believe what a mother says about her talented kid. Not till you meet him and see his work.”

  “Okay, but how am I going to be singing coach for dudes my age who’ve had more experience than I’ve had and real, professional coaching? What makes me any different from the campers?”

  Archie laughed. “What makes you different? You’re you and they’re them! Think about what my dear wife says about you, Jake: you are a radiant light being. Lucille is never wrong.”

  Jake frowned. “Yeah, but she’d say that about the campers too. She thinks that about everyone.”

  “Am I a light being?” asked Destiny.

  “You’re practically blinding!” Archie told him. “So, Jake. There are plenty of ways to show your individuality. Why did you get all those piercings and dye your hair red and spike it all over your head? So you’d stand out, right? So you’d scare off the people you didn’t want to deal with!”

  “I don’t know. I guess. Is that why you got your tattoos?”

  Archie looked down at the anchor on one forearm and the dragon on the other, and laughed. “Just the opposite. When I decided I wanted to work my way around the world on a tramp steamer, I was a skinny high school dropout with a ponytail who wore Birkenstocks and tie-dyed T-shirts. I wasn’t sure I could even get a shipboard job, but if I did, I figured the rest of the crew would give me no end of trouble. So I worked out for a couple of months to build up some muscle, got myself a crew cut, and then went to a tattoo parlor down by the docks. I had the guy there give me his two most popular designs.”

  “And it worked?”

  “Yep. By the time I got back to New York a couple of years later, the look had come to feel like me. So I’ve kept it ever since. Funny thing is that it was like camouflage on the ship—I blended into the background. But now it pretty much guarantees I’ll stand out in an art gallery. It’s not just the look that counts; it’s the context. If you want to separate yourself from the campers, you could just go back to your old look.”

  Jake shrugged. “The hair was a pain to keep up—the dye and the gel and all.”

  Archie looked at Jake’s dark brown hair—nicely grown out from the buzz cut he’d had in the fall for The Sound of Music. “You know Lucille cuts my hair—she’s a whiz with the clippers. She could give you a Mohawk. You wouldn’t have to do much with it—maybe a little wax—and I guarantee that, with all your piercings and a Mohawk, you’ll at least look plenty different from the campers.”

  “What’s a Mohawk?” Destiny asked. “Can I have one too? Does it gots colors?”

  “No colors,” Jake said.

  “And no Mohawk for you,” Archie added. “Would you please go find Hal and ask him to help us get the platform anchored in the pond?”

  Destiny put down his hammer and folded his arms across his chest, his lower lip sticking out. “Not unless I gets to have a
Mohawk like Jake.”

  “Tell you what,” Archie said. “If your mother says yes, Lucille will cut your hair too.”

  “Yay, I’m gonna gets a Mohawk!” Destiny said, and ran out of the woodshop.

  Jake and Archie went out on the porch to wait for Hal. “The thing is,” Jake said, “not looking like the other campers doesn’t mean I can be their singing coach!”

  “You have an advantage over them. You’ve seen their applications and know what they’ve done. In the camp publicity you’re billed as a prodigy, and that’s all they’ll know. If you act like you know what you’re doing, they’ll just assume you do. So tell me about the girls.”

  “A pair of eleven-year-old identical twins—one’s a poet.”

  “Lucille must be thrilled. What about the other one?”

  Jake thought for a moment and then shrugged. “I don’t remember. The third girl—Samantha—is into visual arts. The portfolio she sent looks like a set of illustrations for a fantasy novel. Lots of elves in the woods.”

  “It promises to be an interesting eight weeks,” Archie said.

  “Yeah, interesting.”

  Chapter Five

  It was June 27. The first day of camp. E.D. swiveled the desk chair and looked around what had been the schoolroom. Nothing was left of the Creative Academy except the clock on the wall, now reading 10:14, and the old computer table made of a door resting on a pair of filing cabinets. The computer and printer were still there, but instead of random piles of books and papers, the door now held a used copier and a laundry basket containing brightly colored plastic water bottles from the dollarstore in Traybridge. Her father had decreed that every camper needed to have a water bottle at all times in case of dehydration or heat prostration. They’d bought extras on the grounds that creative kids were scattered and forgetful and would probably lose them frequently. There was a stack of canvas bags on which Cordelia had painted the Eureka! logo, because Lucille had decided that all of the campers needed some way of carrying a notebook, pens, and whatever else they might need as they moved from workshop to workshop during the camp day. Bags, notebooks, and pens had also been purchased from the dollarstore.

  A counter made of scrap lumber and painted somewhat randomly in Destiny’s favorite primary colors (by Destiny) now stretched across most of the room a few feet inside the door. On that counter were a sign saying CAMP OFFICE and a vase of silk flowers. The used office furniture was arranged in the space behind the counter, and the dented desk at which E.D. was sitting now held a new and complicated-looking telephone as well as the first-week schedules she had been stapling together for the campers. A large and rather fanciful map of Wit’s End that Hal had drawn covered much of one wall, and the rest was taken up with a densely filled-in calendar with today’s date circled in red, plus copies of all the materials that had been sent to the campers’ families and the schedule for the day. The original to-do list had been taken down, even though several entries hadn’t yet been crossed off.

  Between two and five this afternoon, the campers would arrive and Eureka! would start, whether they were ready or not. And of course, E.D. thought, they were not! The dining tent, rented from a discount wedding supply house, was supposed to have been delivered two days ago but hadn’t come till this morning. Uncle Archie was out behind the house with Jake now putting it up. He should have been in the woodshop instead, helping to finish the dock Zedediah had designed for the pond to keep campers from having to tromp through the muck to get into the water.

  Jake appeared in the doorway, his dark brown Mohawk standing up down the center of his otherwise newly shaved head. His eyebrow ring and all of his earrings were in place, and he was gleaming with sweat. He held out a stack of army surplus blankets. “Your mother wants these on the beds. Do you have a few minutes to help me?”

  “What’re you doing here?” E.D. asked him. “You’re supposed to be helping Uncle Archie put up the dining tent!”

  “It’s up. Archie’s gone back to helping your grandfather with the dock.” He wiped the sweat from his face on the sleeve of the official Eureka! staff T-shirt Lucille had designed. “I don’t know why Sybil thinks the campers are going to need blankets. It’s freaking hot out there already.”

  The phone rang. E.D. picked it up. “Good morning, you’ve reached Eureka!, the unparalleled summer experience for creative kids.”

  She listened for a moment, put her hand over the mouthpiece, and groaned. Why hadn’t she checked caller ID? The grating, heavily North Carolina–accented voice was unmistakable. “It’s Mrs. Montrose,” she mouthed silently to Jake as she punched the phone’s speaker button.

  The woman’s voice filled the room. “I demand to speak to Randolph Applewhite! Who is this?”

  Jake set the blankets on the counter.

  “This is E.D. Applewhite, Mrs. Montrose,” she said, her voice as neutral as she could make it. “I’m afraid my father is not here at the moment.” Her father and Destiny had left fifteen minutes earlier for the airport in Greensboro to pick up the two campers who were coming as unaccompanied minors. She would have had to lie otherwise, of course. This was not a day for Randolph Applewhite to talk to Mrs. Montrose. “How may I help you?”

  “You tell your father, young lady, that I would never have allowed my daughter to apply to his so-called creativity camp if I had known she was doing it. As far as I’m concerned, the man has not the slightest understanding of the sensitive psyche of a highly creative child—”

  E.D. shook her head. Highly creative children were the only ones her father understood.

  “There should be some sort of law to keep that man from interacting with anyone under the age of thirty,” the irritating voice went on. “My daughter went behind my back to fill out the forms and gather the required teacher recommendations. She submitted that application entirely on her own. But once she did so, proving to me how strong is her wish to make a career in the arts, I was naturally compelled to support her. Your father had the audacity to reject her application! My daughter’s self-esteem has been irreparably damaged by his callous disregard for her talent and potential.”

  E.D. rolled her eyes at Jake.

  “Refusing to cast her in The Sound of Music last autumn was inexcusable,” the woman continued. “But rejecting her camp application was an act of pure vindictiveness. I am quite certain he only did it to get back at me. Her talent is unquestionable. I recently sent him letters from experts in three—three—separate fields of creative endeavor recommending that he reverse his decision and accept my daughter. If any child belongs at a camp for highly creative children, my Priscilla does! But he has refused.”

  E.D. hadn’t heard about any expert recommendations. Probably her father had simply thrown them away.

  “I hold your father solely responsible for the fact that Priscilla has been crying herself to sleep every night. She’s devastated! She had been absolutely counting on a summer of companionship with other creatively gifted children. You tell him he has not heard the last of this.”

  “I’m terribly sorry for Priscilla’s distress, and I’m certain my father is as well.” E.D. took a breath and then went on. “But really, there was nothing we could do. By the time those expert recommendations were received, the camp was completely filled up. All the places were taken within a week of the application deadline.”

  Jake began to laugh and hurriedly put a hand over his mouth.

  “Thank you for calling, Mrs. Montrose,” E.D. said. “I’ll be sure to give my father your message.” She hung up. “Thank goodness we didn’t take her kid. Imagine that woman hovering over us all summer. Listen, I don’t have time to help with the blankets. Just put them on the ends of the bunks! I bet the campers won’t use them a single time all summer.”

  After the success of The Sound of Music last fall, the family had decided to air-condition Wit’s End. But they had only finished the main house, Zedediah’s and Archie and Lucille’s cottages, the woodshop, and the dance studio before
the end of the world. The campers were going to have to depend on North Carolina breezes to cool their cottages. “Roughing it” is what Randolph called it.

  “At least your new haircut ought to be cool,” E.D. said.

  Jake ran a hand through his hair and grinned. “Cool and easy. Destiny’s having fits because your mother won’t let him get a Mohawk too.”

  E.D. sighed. Jake was an appalling role model. She had been hoping to help her little brother avoid the curse of the creative flake by instilling in him habits of organization and good sense while he was still young enough for them to stick, but the moment Jake came into their lives that hope had turned to dust. She divided her life now into BJ and AJ: Before Jake and After Jake. Until he came, E.D. had thought there were basically two kinds of people in the world: chaotic creatives like everybody else in her family, and normal, stable, sensible people like herself. Jake didn’t fit into either camp. He had both an Applewhite-esque creative streak and a genuine ability for organization and follow through. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the organization and follow-through side of him that appealed to Destiny.

  Just then Winston began his hysterical “terrorists coming, terrorists coming” combination of howling and barking outside. Most of Winston’s terrorist alarms were figments of his imagination caused by the occasional vehicle that happened to pass Wit’s End on the road out beyond the driveway. But this time the alarm was followed immediately by the sound of a car on the gravel driveway.

  “Who could it be?” E.D. looked at the clock: 10:27. “It’s way, way too early to be a camper!”

  By the time E.D. and Jake got out onto the front porch, the driver of the shiny black Mercedes with heavily tinted windows that was parked in front of the main house was leaning on the horn. The sound was driving the dog into ever more frenzied howling, though by now he was backing slowly but purposefully toward the porch, the fur on his neck and back standing straight up.