Applewhites at Wit's End Read online

  Before E.D. could answer, they heard, out beyond the bushes, a car turning into the driveway. Two o’clock, E.D. noted. Whoever this was, they were impeccably on time. Aunt Lucille and her mother took their seats behind the registration table. An ancient, battered Volkswagen bus came around the curve of the drive and pulled to a stop in front of the porch with a squeal of brakes. The driver’s door opened, and a woman in cutoffs and a tank top, with a long brown braid reaching halfway down her back, jumped out. E.D. had never seen anyone like her. Except for her face, every square inch of visible skin was covered with brilliantly colored tattoos. There were horses with flowing manes and tails ridden by figures that could have been humans or spirits, warriors or elves. There were dragons and flowers and strange, calligraphic symbols. The woman was a walking art gallery.

  “Out, Harley!” the woman called. “I have to be in Asheville in time for setup.”

  This, E.D. realized, was Marlie Michaels, lead singer of Dragon’s Breath and mother of Harley Schobert, age twelve. The other door opened then, and Harley slid down from the passenger seat. He had medium long, medium brown hair and a medium face on a medium body. He was wearing blue running shorts, a plain white T-shirt, and sneakers. In a crowd of kids—any kids—this boy, E.D. thought, would completely disappear. Marlie Michaels and Harley Schobert, mother and son. It was as if a starling egg had been slipped into a bird of paradise nest by mistake.

  As Harley and his mother went up the porch steps to the registration table, E.D. heard another car on the driveway. This would be David Giacomo, she thought.

  A dark red sedan pulled up behind the van. The woman who emerged from the driver’s side—dark hair perfectly styled, wearing a yellow-and-white sundress and white, strappy sandals—was staring at Marlie Michaels with an expression of horror. E.D. wondered whether she might be at that very moment changing her mind about leaving her son at Eureka! That was to be the last rational thought that went through E.D.’s mind that afternoon. Because just then David Giacomo stepped out of the car.

  The photo he’d sent with his camp application had shown him to be good-looking. But this kid was not good-looking. This kid was—E.D. searched for a word that fit—awesome, that was it. Not the way her friend Melissa used it, for everything from a lipstick color to a hamburger, but for what the word really meant: “inspiring amazement and respect, combined with a feeling of personal powerlessness.” That was it exactly. His longish, wavy, blue-black hair framed a face with a straight nose, high cheekbones, full lips, and large, wide-set eyes—eyes that were startlingly blue. She had seen a face like that somewhere before, but where?

  David Giacomo was tall. He was slim. Ethereal. Absolutely awesome! There was a kind of glow around him—like an angel. Suddenly she knew where she had seen a face like this before: in the research for her spring semester paper on Renaissance art. David Giacomo was a Botticelli angel! E.D. felt like a little pile of iron filings, pulled inexorably toward a magnet.

  He was fourteen. But he looked older. She reminded herself to breathe. Then she hurried to the registration table, picked up a canvas bag and a water bottle, and took them to him. She was aware that the adults were talking, that David was answering a question. His voice was soft and smooth and resonant. She handed him the bag. As he took it, his long fingers brushed hers, and a tiny electrical shock traveled all the way down to her toes.

  “E.D.! E.D.! Your phone!”

  Her mother’s voice penetrated her consciousness, and E.D. became aware that the cell phone in her shorts pocket was playing Reveille—her father’s ring. “Excuse me,” she said. “I should take this.” A moment later she found herself behind the house, out of earshot, though she didn’t remember walking away from the porch.

  “Disaster!” her father yelled the moment she answered. She held the phone away from her ear. “Complete catastrophe! Quincy’s plane has been delayed. Some nonsense about an equipment malfunction. Do they expect me to believe there is only one plane they could possibly send here from Atlanta?” With the image of David Giacomo filling her mind, E.D. found herself listening to her father’s rant with surprising calm.

  “The idiot agent I was talking to actually called security on me. They accused me of shouting, if you’d believe it. All I did was very calmly and entirely rationally mention the possibility of a lawsuit. They threatened to kick me out of the airport. If Destiny hadn’t started crying, they might have done it. They left one of the security guards to keep an eye on me. They say it’ll be another three hours at least! Samantha’s finished her book. And what am I going to do with Destiny? He’s talking to the guard now. Asking questions. You know how Destiny can get on a person’s nerves—the man has a gun, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Take Destiny to the gift shop,” E.D. said. “Buy him a new sketch pad. Maybe some new markers.”

  Before her father could say anything else, she told him a camper was arriving and she had to go. She flipped her phone shut. Her father was a grown-up, she thought. He could surely cope for a few more hours.

  By the time she had hurried back around to the porch, the van had gone and her mother was deep in conversation with David’s mother. David himself had disappeared, as had Harley. Her heart sank. “Where did he—they—go?” she asked Aunt Lucille, an odd quiver in her voice.

  “Jake came and took them off to the boys’ bunk. I’m going to go up and see if I can pry Hal out of his room.”

  “I’d better go make sure everything is okay over there,” E.D. said.

  The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur of images with David Giacomo in the center. There were two more frantic phone calls from the airport. Later, Cordelia, Ginger, and Cinnamon appeared with a bucket of homemade bubble mix and a handful of enormous wands they had made out of wire coat hangers, and challenged the boys to see who could make the biggest bubbles. David could, it turned out. Of course, E.D. thought. She remembered David’s application. Zedediah had called him a “Renaissance man.” David, apparently, could do anything.

  At some point Cordelia organized a scavenger hunt with the rule that no one was allowed to go near the pond. “As if!” said the green twin. Cordelia had neglected, however, to warn the campers about the goats. So the scavenger hunt had been interrupted by a hysterical chase, first Wolfie chasing campers and then most of the Applewhites chasing Wolfie. David ran not only extremely fast, E.D. noticed, but with the grace of a dancer.

  The campers were just bringing the last of their scavenger hunt finds to the Lodge porch when Randolph finally drove up in Sybil’s station wagon.

  Destiny bounded out of the car the instant it stopped. “Daddy almost gotted put in jail!” he shouted. “I was scared for a little bit, except the guard guy was really nice. He’s got goatses at home, just like us, but no dog and no parrot. And then Q came—his name’s really Quincy, but he calls himself Q—and you know what he did?” Destiny didn’t so much as take a breath before he answered his own question. “He gotted everybody dancing. Practically everybody in the whole airport!”

  Randolph, Samantha Peterman, and Quincy Brown had gotten out of the car now as well. “Not so many,” Quincy said, flashing a 500-watt smile. “The flight attendant just asked me to show what I did in Atlanta after they announced the delay.”

  “Destiny’s almost right,” Randolph said. “He even got that security guard dancing. Show them, Q.”

  The boy began stomping his feet on the gravel drive, slapping his hands on his legs, and clapping in an intricate pattern, slowly at first, then picking up speed.

  “It’s called Step!” Destiny said. “Isn’t it great? I can do the hands and the feet both! He showed me while we was waiting for the suitcases to come!” He joined in now, stamping and slapping and clapping.

  “In Atlanta, when they said they didn’t have a plane for us, people started to get ugly,” Quincy said when the routine was finished. “My grandfather says Step is good for cheering people up, so I started to do some. Pretty soon a couple of guys joined in. An
d then some more. People started coming to watch from whole different concourses! By the time they’d found us a plane, there were old ladies clapping and stomping and a whole traveling baseball team using the trash cans for hand drums. The guys from the airline said they never saw people so happy about a delay in their lives! Somebody videoed it with his phone and said he’s gonna post it online!”

  As everyone else hurried over to greet the newcomers, E.D. found herself edging closer to David, who remained where he’d been during Q’s performance, leaning elegantly against the porch railing, his arms crossed, a half smile on his face.

  Chapter Twelve

  At dinner, which was more than an hour late thanks to the plane delay, the boys all sat at one picnic table in the dining tent—except Hal, who took his food and sneaked off to his room—and the girls at another. Samantha brought a book with her and read steadily while she ate. Ginger, Jake noticed, kept her eyes fixed on him. Whenever he glanced that way, she broke into a toothy grin.

  Destiny, at the boys’ table, asked question after question, barely giving the guys time to answer before he was on to the next. He wanted to know where Q had learned to do Step. How come he lived with his grandfather instead of his mother and father and whether they had a cottage like Zedediah’s, or a parrot. How many floors there were in his apartment building. What it was like to live where you had to ride in an elevator to get home. Q just kept eating and answering till Destiny switched to Harley.

  He wanted to know how come Harley was wearing a camera around his neck and was he going to take pictures of everything they did at camp and how come he didn’t like taking pictures of people and why wasn’t he eating any of Aunt Lucille’s best-brownies-in-the-whole-world-ever.

  When he started on David, David didn’t answer. So Destiny just asked louder, till finally David told him to shut up and let him eat. This was surprising, Jake thought. People were almost never rude to Destiny. But Destiny was undaunted. “You don’t gots to stop eating. It’s not polite to talk with your mouth full, but it’s okay to listen.”

  David was the only one at the boys’ table who didn’t find that funny.

  The tour of Wit’s End that was supposed to have happened before dinner had been postponed until afterward. If Jake had known Ginger was going to be at his heels the whole time, he would have excused himself and gone to hide out in his room, like Hal. Every time he turned around, there she was, staring up at him. Twice he practically stepped on her.

  It was almost nine, and Destiny had been sent, protesting, to bed, before they finally gathered everybody together at the campfire circle for the Opening Ceremony. The fire and marshmallow-toasting part of the plan had already been canceled because of heat and lack of time, and Zedediah had asked that all the welcoming speeches be cut as short as possible.

  Again, as the campers went to find seats on the logs around the circle, the girls headed one way and the boys another. But as soon as Jake sat, Ginger scurried over and sat beside him—very, very close beside him. The night was hot enough, but she was like a little radiator. He could feel the sweat running down the middle of his back.

  Zedediah spoke very briefly about the critical importance of creativity in human civilization and the intention for Eureka! to become a “true creative community—one for all and all for one.” Randolph, however, took nearly half an hour to extol the virtues of theater—“the single art that includes all the rest.” Jake wondered what his talk might have been like if he hadn’t been asked to cut it short. Hal, on the other hand, was done in about ten seconds. He stood up, said he would be doing visual arts with an emphasis on painting, and sat down again.

  Jake was after Hal. As he moved to get up, Ginger grabbed for his hand. She pressed a folded piece of paper into his palm, closed his fingers over it, and let go. Now what? Jake thought. He stuck the paper in his pocket and went to the center of the circle. “I’m not much for speeches,” he said, “but I’ll be leading the singing workshop. Who here knows ‘Doe a Deer,’ from The Sound of Music?” When they raised their hands, he started the campers singing it. Unlike the Applewhites, the kids could carry a tune. Q sang every bit as well as he danced. David was good, too, but he sang louder than the others instead of trying to blend in with them. The only camper he couldn’t tell anything about was Harley, who had sat bent over his camera through the whole thing and didn’t sing at all. When the song was over, Jake went to the other side of the circle and sat next to Archie instead of where he’d been before.

  By the time the campers were dismissed to their bunks to get ready for bed, it was 9:55, so Jake went to the Lodge, where a staff meeting was supposed to begin at ten. Nobody was in the living room when he got there. He pulled the paper Ginger had given him out of his pocket and sat down on the couch.

  MY SAVIOR, JAKE SEMPLE

  Nearly sucked to my doom

  In the foul-smelling gloom,

  I was crying, crying, crying,

  Nearly dying, dying, dying!

  But Jake came along

  With his muscles so strong

  And lifted me free,

  Saving me, saving me!

  Before camp could start

  Jake had captured my heart.

  It was printed in red marker and signed Your FF, Ginger Boniface. There was an entire row of x’s and o’s across the bottom. Jake groaned and stuffed it back into his pocket. He had no tools for dealing with something like this.

  A few minutes later, Sybil came in to call Jake outside to the dining tent. “There’s been an insurrection!”

  The campers, it turned out, had flatly rejected the idea of roughing it. David, citing extreme sensitivity, announced that if he and Quincy—David insisted on using Q’s full name—didn’t get a fan in their room, he would “die in the night from suffocation and heat prostration.” Extreme sensitivity! Jake thought. Sure. David had made a fuss at dinner because there was no vegetarian option. As much attention as Q got just being his incredibly outgoing, incredibly positive self, David was probably just trying to get somebody besides E.D. to notice him. She’d been practically drooling over the kid all day. Jake couldn’t imagine what she saw in him.

  After that, of course, everybody demanded fans, including Hal and Cordelia. Jake and Archie were sent to the barn to see whether there were any fans left over from before air-conditioning. They located four, which were provided to the campers. Archie had to promise Hal and Cordelia that he would drive to town first thing in the morning to get two more.

  Then there was the issue of whether individual reading lights could be kept on after lights-out, which Samantha Peterman insisted was absolutely necessary (no) and whether campers could listen to their personal music with earbuds after lights-out (yes—after Randolph, who maintained that it led to deafness and interfered with brain waves, had been argued down by Zedediah).

  After that there was another uproar because the twins had discovered that the Wi-Fi in the Lodge didn’t reach the cottages; not only did their phones not work, but they couldn’t get online in their room. Cinnamon once again demanded a telephone to arrange to be taken home. Sybil, who by that time had lost whatever patience she’d been able to muster, informed her that only emergency phone calls could be made after ten and when Cinnamon claimed that this was an emergency, made up a rule on the spot that an emergency required a fever, severe bleeding, or vomiting.

  Finally there was the question of whether, if they kept the lights out, the campers could stay up talking and maybe hang out in the living rooms of the cottages (most definitely not). Whether the campers talked in their rooms or not (quietly—in whispers—with no singing and no loud laughter) was up to them, but they were to be in their beds at the stroke of ten with all lights out—except for this first night—and they were to stay there till wake-up call at 7:30 A.M.

  Jake was nearly asleep on his feet by the time Randolph called the staff back to the Lodge for the staff meeting.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Everyone still had t
heir official name tags on, E.D. noticed, when they were finally settled in the living room of the Lodge. The only staff members missing were Hal, Visual Artist/Counselor, and Cordelia, Dancer/Counselor, who were in the bunks watching over the hot, tired, and grumpy campers.

  Randolph Applewhite, Camp Director, beamed around at the others. “All in all, an auspicious beginning. Eureka! is off to a brilliant start!” This was a stretch even for an Applewhite. E.D. had been expecting something more like “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

  “I would hardly call it brilliant,” Sybil said. “Dinner was a catastrophe. The twins demanded whole wheat buns for their barbecue, and Harley doesn’t like chocolate. What kind of kid doesn’t like chocolate? David is a vegetarian and can’t stand Kool-Aid, and—”

  “You should have put a question on the application about food issues,” Randolph said.

  “We did!” E.D. said.

  “David apparently only decided he was a vegetarian the day before yesterday! We’ve got to redo all the menus and go shopping again. Whole wheat buns? Whatever happened to kids who live on hot dogs, peanut butter, and chicken nuggets?”

  Her mother had only agreed to share the job of cooking with Aunt Lucille, E.D. knew, because she’d been shamed into it by Randolph.

  Jake Semple, Singing Coach, stifled a yawn. Even stifled, it was contagious. E.D. yawned and so did her grandfather. It was now well after eleven. Archie Applewhite, Sculptor, sitting on the couch with his head on Aunt Lucille’s shoulder, appeared to have fallen asleep. Paulie stood on one foot on his perch, his beak tucked under his wing, Winston was snoring noisily at Jake’s feet, and Destiny Applewhite, Camp Mascot, was surely doing the same in his bed upstairs. E.D. envied them.