Applewhites at Wit's End Read online

  Zedediah gathered the campers in the dining tent to give the part of his Opening Ceremony talk he’d originally had to cut, while Cordelia, Hal, Jake, Destiny, and E.D. fanned out over Wit’s End to search for Cinnamon. Lucille and Sybil worked on lunch as if everything was completely normal, and Randolph insisted that Archie go back to town to buy walkie-talkies. “If Lucille had had a way to communicate with the rest of the staff, someone could have been sent to get the girl right away!” he said. “This must never happen again!” He had gone to the office, with coffee and a triple-chocolate brownie, “to man the command center,” as he said.

  E.D., thinking of Cinnamon’s threat to go home, had headed into the woods that bordered the county road. The others had started their searches calling the girl’s name, but E.D. didn’t bother. This was not a kid who’d accidentally gotten lost and would be grateful to be found. It was altogether possible that Cinnamon had set out to hitchhike back to New Jersey. She might even now be riding in the back of some local farmer’s pickup truck, heading north.

  E.D. kept to the shade of the woods, peering out at the road over the patches of poison ivy and blackberry briars that grew thickly along the shoulder. She wiped the sweat from her face. Even here in the shade the humidity made the air feel almost too thick to breathe. Just ahead the woods ended and the meadow began, separated from the road by an old, sagging, barbed wire fence. It would be much worse to be out there in the direct sun. She stopped for a moment before heading out into the unsheltered meadow. And heard the sound of someone crying.

  “Cinnamon?” she called. “What’s wrong?”

  The sobbing stopped with a gulp and was replaced by loud snuffling, but no answer. E.D. pushed her way gingerly between a blackberry bush and a honeysuckle-draped shrub and found Cinnamon, kneeling on the shoulder of the road, next to the newly dead body of a possum. The girl looked up, her crimson face wet with tears. She wiped her cheeks, leaving streaks of dirt. Her feet, in her blue-sequined flip-flops, were filthy from walking in the dirt at the side of the road. Her cell phone lay on the ground by the corpse. For a moment neither of them spoke.

  “Are you okay?” E.D. asked.

  “What does it look like? Stupid road,” Cinnamon said. “Doesn’t anybody ever drive on it?”

  E.D. looked at the dead possum. “Somebody did, obviously. Last night, probably. Possums freeze in headlights, you know. What were you doing out here?”

  “Looking for some place my stupid phone would work. Or a ride to town. As if!”

  “Let’s go back. It’s nearly time for lunch.”

  Cinnamon picked up her phone and pushed herself to her feet. “I thought maybe it was just pretending. ‘Playing possum,’ you know. But it’s really, really dead.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Stupid animal. Stupid, stupid, stupid animal!” Then she leaned down and touched its fur, patting it gently, as if it were still alive. “You’d think it could cross a completely deserted road without getting itself killed!”

  All the way back to the house, Cinnamon muttered about the stupid road, the stupid possum, and her stupid phone.

  Chapter Sixteen

  So far, on this first full day, camp was a whole lot like babysitting Destiny, Jake thought as the two of them walked toward the pond in their bathing suits with towels around their necks. Jake was carrying the life jacket Destiny would wear when they went swimming.

  “Does all the campers have to go in the water?” Destiny asked.

  “Yes. They have to take a swim test before they can have free swim.”

  “Betcha they won’t all! The green twin says she isn’t going in the water ever again. She says the Death Pond tried to pull her in and just about drownded her. She says if you hadn’t saved her, she’d be dead now and you’re a superhero.”

  Jake sighed. Ginger had sat next to him at lunch—the only girl at the boys’ table—and had given him another poem. She had brought him a handful of Queen Anne’s lace. And she stared at him all the time. The girl had become some kind of stalker. “She wasn’t drowning. She just got stuck in the mud, like Winston does sometimes. The dock’s there now, so she won’t have to go anywhere near the mud.”

  “Mommy says the twins are ’dentical. Isn’t that s’posed to mean they’re just exactly alike?”

  “Pretty much. These two are, for sure. If they didn’t wear different colors, we couldn’t tell which was which.”

  “That’s silly. Except for how they look, they’re not the same at all. Cimma—Cim—the blue twin’s sad and the green twin isn’t. The blue twin’s really, really sad.”

  “Seems to me she’s mad most of the time.”

  Destiny shook his head solemnly. “Nope. Sad.” He started humming “Twinkle, Twinkle,” and stopped suddenly. “Did you know possums gots fingerprints, Jake?”

  “What?”

  “Fingerprints. Possums got beautiful, star-shaped paws and fingerprints just like us. And beautiful fur, too. The blue twin says they just get a bad rap ’cause of their tails. That’s what the blue twin says. She’s just like Aunt Lucille about aminals—she talks to ’em.”

  “What possum? Destiny, what are you talking about?”

  “The blue twin and the possum that got killded on the road. She wants to make a funeral for it. She really, really wants to. Can she do that? It would make her feel better.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “She was crying on the porch of Dogwood Cottage during rest time.”

  “Where was Cordelia?”

  “With everybody else learning walkie-talkies.”

  “Cinnamon should have been in her room. The campers are supposed to have their feet on their bunks for rest time.”

  Destiny shook his head. “She didn’t want her sister to see her crying. But I saw her. So I went to see what was the matter. The possum was the matter.”

  Amazing, Jake thought. He would have to tell Lucille about the possum funeral. Maybe Harley, who had so far had only dead bugs to photograph, could take pictures of the deceased. And the funeral too, for that matter.

  They had reached the pond now, where the campers, in swimsuits, were all lined up on the dock. Archie was out on the diving platform, a whistle on a lanyard around his neck. Q and David were jostling each other, threatening to throw each other off, while the others did their best to stay out of their way.

  Dragonflies buzzed purposefully back and forth across the water, changing direction suddenly, occasionally having what appeared to be a dogfight near the reeds on the far side of the pond. Hal and Cordelia, looking even more stunning than usual in her swimsuit, were stationed on the ramp, cutting off the only route of escape should a camper decide not to participate. Ginger, at the back of the line, had her arms folded across her chest and held her head in an unmistakable attitude of defiance, but clearly the only way she could avoid going into the water would be to jump off the dock sideways and brave the muck.

  Archie blew the whistle. “Okay, we’ll do this one at a time,” he called to them. “Q, you’ll dive—or jump—in, swim over here and touch the platform, then swim back to the ladder and climb out. As soon as he’s up on the dock, Samantha, you dive in and do the same thing. And so on. When everybody has swum from the dock to the platform and back, we’ll have free swim. Got that?”

  “When do I gets to go in?” Destiny asked Jake. “I’m hot!”

  “Me, too. But not till free swim. You have to put on your life jacket first.”

  “They don’t gots life jackets,” Destiny said.

  “They know how to swim.”

  “I do too! Paddle and kick. Paddle and kick!”

  “Okay, Q,” Archie called. “When I whistle, you go.”

  Q crouched as if for a racing dive, and when Archie blew the whistle again, he launched himself into the water.

  “See, Jake? Paddle with your arms and kick with your feet,” Destiny said. “I can do that!”

  One after the other, the campers dived in, swam to the platform,
returned, and took their places at the end of the line until only Ginger was left, standing next to the ladder, her arms still folded. Harley had already climbed out of the water, and the rest of the campers were standing behind her on the dock, waiting to be allowed to go in again. Destiny wasn’t the only one who wanted to get into the water.

  Archie whistled. Ginger didn’t move. “Come ahead,” he called.

  Jake could feel the sun getting hotter and hotter on his shoulders.

  “I wanna swim!” Destiny said. He kicked off his flip-flops and picked up his life jacket. “I said, I wanna swim!”

  Jake buckled him into his jacket. “Just wait. As soon as Ginger goes, everybody can swim.”

  “She’s not going,” Destiny protested. “I told you she wouldn’t. You go, Jake. She’ll get in if you do, I betcha.”

  Jake shook his head. “Let Archie handle it.”

  Destiny suddenly ran toward the dock, pointing into the sky. “Look, look, look!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. While everybody was looking up to where a turkey vulture was circling over the pond, its wings in a steady V, Destiny pushed past Hal and Cordelia and the campers, grabbed Ginger by the arm, and launched himself off the end of the dock, dragging her, shrieking, with him. Jake rushed after him and reached the end of the dock as Ginger and Destiny came up through the cannonball splash, water streaming down their faces. “Paddle and kick!” Destiny hollered as Ginger sputtered and began to tread water. “Paddle and kick! Like me. You can do it!”

  And so, of course, she could. While Destiny bobbed cheerfully up and down in his life jacket, smacking the water with both hands and repeating “paddle and kick, paddle and kick,” she swam to the platform, touched it, and swam back to the dock.

  “I’ll get you for this,” she said to Destiny as she grabbed hold of the ladder. Then she saw Jake and broke into a smile. She reached up for his hand, so he pulled her up. “Thanks,” she said, her face radiant with stalker passion.

  Jake groaned.

  From the diving platform, Archie’s whistle shrilled again. “Free swim!” he called. “When I call ‘Buddy check,’ grab hands with your buddy and raise them so I can see!” The campers cheered and flung themselves back into the pond.

  “I guess we’re buddies,” Jake called to Destiny. He held his nose and jumped. The water was wonderfully cool and surprisingly clear. As he came back up, he could see Destiny’s feet kicking sporadically beneath the red cylinder of his life jacket. The moment Jake’s head broke the surface of the water, Ginger Boniface did a cannonball off the dock that swamped him and Destiny both.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was a few minutes after noon on Eureka! Day Three, and everyone except Hal (and Randolph, who probably wasn’t up yet) had gathered in the dining tent for announcements. E.D. had chosen to sit with Aunt Lucille, Uncle Archie, and her grandfather. As usual the boys and Ginger were at one table and the girls and Destiny, who sat next to Cinnamon, were at another. Watching Q and David, E.D. couldn’t help but think of all the nature documentaries where lion cubs or wolf pups or young hyenas were constantly wrestling and chewing on each other. The two of them were at each other every minute.

  Obviously, David—however powerful his aura—was not an angel. But knowing that did nothing to change the effect he had on her. It was possible it made that effect even stronger. As good as David was at everything, even E.D. was beginning to see that Q was better. She thought about David’s application, and how full it was of obvious successes. He was used to being the best. Suddenly, he wasn’t. He must feel the way she did last fall when Jake had found the great spangled fritillary—the very last butterfly for her Butterfly Project—the one she’d been looking for for weeks. She’d been furious at him. Hurt and furious!

  Jake, as a staff member, ought to at least try to stop the roughhousing, she thought now. But he didn’t. In fact, he tended to participate. If somebody punched him, he invariably punched back. What had the family been thinking of to make their resident juvenile delinquent a member of the staff?

  Sybil rang the temple gong Lucille had donated for the purpose of getting everyone’s attention. She had to do it twice more before it got quiet. “You may be glad to know that from now on all meals will be served buffet style.” After several food insurrections, she and Lucille had given up trying to invent menus that would please everybody. “There will be a variety of foods laid out in the kitchen, and you can choose whatever you like—”

  “Or whatever you don’t hate,” David said. David, exercising what leadership he could, had started most of the insurrections.

  “In any case,” Sybil went on, “your choices will be entirely up to you. As you see on the schedule E.D. gave you this morning, the Required Workshop this afternoon is once again Poetry, which will be held at the pond, because today’s subject will be Images of Nature.”

  “Do we need to bring our journals?” Ginger asked.

  “Of course. And something to write with.”

  David raised his hand.

  “Yes? Do you have a question?”

  “On Monday Zedediah said individual passion is the source of all creativity.”

  “Yes—”

  “Well, see—I don’t have a passion for poetry. I’m pretty good at it, but it definitely isn’t a passion.”

  Q nodded. “It’s not exactly my favorite, either… .”

  “It’s my passion,” Ginger said. “I love poetry!”

  “I hate it!” Cinnamon said. “It’s Ginger’s thing. I don’t do it, and I’m not going to do it!”

  Samantha looked up from the fantasy novel she was reading. “If Cinnamon won’t, I won’t, either. My passion, besides reading, is art. Painting—and sculpture.” She went back to her book.

  E.D. thought of all the hours, all the days, she’d spent figuring out the best way to schedule the workshops. Nodes of chaos, E.D. thought. That’s what these kids were. Nodes of chaos! E.D. loathed chaos.

  “I think poetry’s actually pretty stupid, if you want to know the truth,” David said. “Hardly anybody reads it. And you can’t make any money at it!”

  Lucille rose from her seat, her face drained of color, a hand at her throat. She looked, E.D. thought, as if someone had suggested using poison on her garden or weed killer in the yard.

  “It’s nothing against you!” Q said hurriedly. “Your poetry’s great!”

  E.D. waited for David to agree. He didn’t. His aura, she thought with a pang, was fading fast.

  Instead, David said, “Of all the things I’m good at, it’s just singing and dancing and acting that I have a total passion for. You can get to be rich and famous doing those things, if you’re good enough! I don’t think there should be required workshops. If you really believe what Zedediah says, we should get to follow our passions.”

  There was a moment of silence. Nodes of chaos, E.D. thought again.

  Harley, who had been taking a picture of something on the ground next to his feet and seemed not to have been aware of what the others were saying, looked up then as if the silence had suddenly registered with him. “Instead of poetry,” he said in a small and tentative voice, “I’d rather have a workshop in photography, if that would be all right.”

  Lucille, tears glistening in her eyes, sat back down, and Archie patted her hand comfortingly.

  Zedediah stood then. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “There is only one camper who wishes to continue focusing on the art of writing poetry, is that correct?”

  Everybody nodded.

  “It’s my most favorite thing in all the world!” Ginger said.

  What happened next was something E.D. should have expected the moment Zedediah had first used the word passion. She wanted to leap up from her seat and insist on keeping the schedule the way it was. There was such a thing as exploration, as learning. Such a thing as discipline! People ought to be required to do things whether they had a passion for them or not! But she knew she was the only Applewhite who thought that
way.

  So she sat there, unable to do anything about it, as the whole camp schedule came crashing down around her. Zedediah asked the campers to take some time after lunch to rank the workshops in the order that most interested them. It would be like the lunch buffet, E.D. thought. They would not be required to attend any workshop they didn’t want to attend. Lucille, somewhat recovered, agreed then and there to work with Harley on photography.

  “Flexibility,” Zedediah said before sending everyone in to get their lunch, “is also essential to the creative life!”

  All well and good, E.D. thought, but Grandpa didn’t have to schedule flexibility!

  After lunch when the campers had gone off to put their feet on their bunks and create their lists of priorities, E.D., whose Community Service was kitchen cleanup, mentioned to her aunt her thought about the value of exposing the campers to a few things they didn’t choose for themselves. “Don’t you think that would be good for them?”

  Lucille, who had been wiping the counters, straightened up and shook out her cloth. “Nonsense. It would thwart the very essence of who they are. We are not about thwarting essence!”

  On her way out of the kitchen, E.D. nearly collided with her father, who had never made it to lunch at all. His hair had not yet been combed, and he looked even more stressed and preoccupied than normal. In one hand he held the usual collection of Applewhite mail: assorted catalogs and advertising circulars, and a few bills. In the other he clutched a crumpled piece of paper.

  “What’s the matter?” E.D. asked.

  “Hmmm? What?” He looked at her abstractedly for a moment and then made a visible effort to collect himself. “Oh, nothing. Nothing important. Nothing at all.”

  Right, E.D. thought as she headed for the office. Nothing. That was because he hadn’t been there to see chaos take over Eureka! Whatever was stressing her father, she couldn’t think about it now. She had to come up with something to do with five campers this afternoon instead of poetry.

  Chapter Eighteen