Camp Confidential 09 - Best (Boy)friend Ever (7 page)

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Authors: Melissa J Morgan

BOOK: Camp Confidential 09 - Best (Boy)friend Ever
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“It’s the day of the D.C. trip, you guys!” Grace insisted. “How can you stay in bed?”
“I can’t. I want to check my suitcase one more time to make sure I put in all the essentials,” Valerie said, throwing off her covers.
“I thought you already packed everything you own. Plus some of my stuff,” Sarah joked.
Priya sat up in her bunk and yawned. She’d slept for about five minutes. She’d spent the rest of the night trying to figure out how to deal with the Jordan crisis. And she still had no clue.
Becky stepped around from the sectioned-off area of the cabin where she and Sophie slept. “I see I’m not going to have to use my crowbar to get anyone out of bed today.” She grinned. “Is something special happening?”
“D.C. trip!” Grace, Sarah, Abby, and Valerie yelled.
“Woo-hoo!” Alex added.
“Oh, right,” Becky said. “Speaking of the trip, here’s the deal with the hotel. Our bunk is dividing into two rooms. Sarah, Brynn, Alex, Priya, and Valerie, you’ll be in 704 with Sophie. And the rest of you will be next door in 706 with me. Everyone from camp will be on the same floor.”
“Cool, we’re going to rule the place!” Alex pumped her fist in the air.
“Yes, we are,” Becky agreed. “But we’re going to do it without disturbing the other guests.” She glanced around the room, making sure to look every girl in the eye.
Priya didn’t have to worry that. The only way she might disturb anybody is if one of the extreme challenges accidentally got a little loud. But there wouldn’t be any challenges on the trip unless she could somehow figure out a way to make everything normal with Jordan again.
“You should all have signed up for your activity choices by now,” Becky continued. “Some of the activities have tour guides, but guides or not, there will always be at least two Lakeview chaperones with every group. Sometimes you might have me or Soph, but if not, there will always be someone from camp with you if you have any problems. I don’t have to tell you to listen to them like you listen to me.”
“And maybe a little better than you listen to me!” Sophie added as she joined the group.
“So, it’s breakfast, then bus—” Becky began.
“Then Washington, D.C., here we come!” Valerie yelled.
Priya had been looking forward to this trip since the minute it had been announced. But now when she thought about D.C., she thought about a situation she had no idea how to deal with. A big, icky, and, yeah, scary situation.
Priya climbed on the bus. The bus to the big icky scary.
Her mother was big on self-help books and Dr. Phil to help her deal with her problems. Priya didn’t have any self-help books on her, and Dr. Phil wasn’t on the bus. But Natalie was, and Natalie had been going out with Simon since last summer. Two summers with the same boy. That had to make her a relationship expert, right?
Priya didn’t know Natalie that well. But Priya was desperate. She rushed down the aisle, threw her backpack in the overhead rack, and threw herself down in the seat next to Nat.
“Hey, Priya,” Natalie said, sounding a little confused. “Actually . . . I was kind of saving that seat for Simon.”
“I know,” Priya answered. “I mean, I figured. But I need help. I need you to be my Dr. Phil.”
Natalie laughed. “Should I start pulling out a bunch of my hair? Or can I be your Dr. Phil without the almost-bald part?”
Priya forced herself to smile, even though nothing seemed funny to her today. “All I need is the good advice part.”
Simon headed toward them. “Can you find someplace else to sit—just for a little while? Priya and I need to talk,” Natalie asked.
“Okay.” Simon continued past them and grabbed a seat a couple rows back.
“Thanks,” Priya said.
“Hey, I love to give advice. What’s more fun?” Natalie joked. “It’s a lot better than getting it. So what’s the up?”
“The up is that Jordan wants me to be his girlfriend,” Priya said, without taking a breath, without giving herself time to wimp out. “So what am I supposed to do?”
Natalie raised her eyebrows. “Well, what do you want to do? Do you want him for a boyfriend or—”
“No. No, no, no. Never in a million years,” Priya interrupted. “He’s like my brother. Almost.”
Natalie held up both hands like a traffic cop signaling cars to a stop. “All righty then. Question answered. Now I have another one. Did he come right out and tell you he wanted to be your boyfriend?”
“Not exactly,” Priya admitted. “I hinted around—’cause I had to, had to, had to know or I was going to go insane. And he hinted back. But it was totally clear.”
“Totally clear hint. Mmm-hmm,” Natalie repeated. “Did you hint that you wanted to be his girlfriend?”
“Wait, here he comes.” Priya watched as Jordan headed toward them.
“Want me to save you a seat in the back?” Jordan asked her.
“No. Nat needs some advice. I better stay here,” Priya said. She hoped that by the time Simon wanted his seat back, the seat next to Jordan would be filled. Then she could sit—anywhere that wasn’t near Jordan. “Sorry,” she mouthed to Natalie as Jordan walked away.
“So, did you give him any kind of indicator of how you felt?” Natalie asked when Jordan was out of earshot.
“I don’t know.” Priya frowned. “I tried not to give him any indicators of anything.”
“Head count complete,” Becky called.
“Let’s roll,” Evan, the counselor for Bunk 4D, told the bus driver.
The front door of the bus wheezed shut. It sounded like the bus was giving a huge sigh, the kind of sigh Priya felt like she had trapped inside her. “So what am I supposed to do now?” she urged Natalie.
“You’ve got to tell him the deal. Flat out. No hinting,” Natalie answered firmly. “Jordan’s your friend. You owe him that. Don’t let him suffer.”
Priya stood up. She realized she hadn’t needed a self-help book. Or Dr. Phil. Or Natalie. She’d known what the right thing to do was all along. She just didn’t want to do it. It was too hard.
But she would. Like Nat said, she owed Jordan the truth.
“So you’ll do it, right?” Natalie looked Priya in the eye.
“Yes. Definitely. Just not on the bus. It’s a conversation where you gotta have some privacy,” Priya explained.
And a conversation where you needed some time to figure out exactly what to say. And even more time to find the guts to say it.
She shot a super-fast glance at the back of the bus. No open seats next to Jordan. Yes!
Priya spotted an empty place next to a cooler full of drinks. Perfect. She didn’t want to talk right now. To anyone.
“Don’t you think it’s weird that they call it a mall?” Priya asked Jordan as they pedaled their mountain bikes down the trail that ran beside the Potomac River. “I don’t see one Cinnabon place or a multiplex or anything.”
She knew she shouldn’t be rambling about proper word usage or whatever. But she didn’t think she should tell Jordan that she didn’t
like him
like him while he was on a moving bike. He might crash. He was wearing a helmet. Everyone on the Sites on Bikes tour had to wear a helmet. But still . . .
“Yeah. Mall. That’s weird,” Jordan answered, without looking at her. Not like you usually looked at the person you were talking to when you were riding bikes. But he hadn’t looked at her when they were picking out the bikes and putting on the safety gear, either. He’d mostly talked to the ground.
Priya and Jordan pedaled in silence for a few moments. She wished they’d stop somewhere, so she could just tell him and get it over with. This was worse than waiting to get a cavity filled.
“Three points if you sit on Lincoln’s lap when we get to the memorial,” Jordan burst out.
Hey! That was so the old Jordan. Even though the boy on the mountain bike next to her looked like the new Jordan. Well, except for the shoes. He was wearing his old sneakers for the bike ride, although they looked a lot cleaner than usual. Priya thought he might have actually used shoe polish on the white parts. Shoe polish. On sneakers. That was so wrong.
Priya shook her head. “Can’t. Becky would probably lock me in the bus until it was time to go back to camp if I tried scaling Lincoln.”
“First stop, coming up,” their tour guide, Amber, called out. “Park your bikes in front of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.” Sophie and Kenny, the counselors chaperoning the trip, repeated the info until they were sure all the campers who’d signed up for the tour heard it.
“We won’t be able to get off our bikes at every monument and memorial in the Mall,” Amber said when she had the group gathered around her, “but you need to pay a visit to Mr. Lincoln. Let me tell you a little bit about the memorial before you go up.”
Amber swept her arm out, grinning proudly, like she had sculpted the marble statue of the president herself. “Henry Bacon, the New York architect who designed the memorial, modeled the building that surrounds the statue after a Greek temple. There are thirty-six columns, one for each state that was in the Union when Lincoln died. Parts of the memorial are made from limestone from Indiana, granite from Massachusetts, and marble from Colorado, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Using materials from all these different parts of the country symbolizes Lincoln’s preservation of the Union by bringing together resources from the North, South, East, and West.”
The tour guide kept talking. But even though the facts were pretty cool, Priya couldn’t pay attention. It was time to step up. She hadn’t wanted to tell Jordan how she felt when they were on the bus. Or while he was operating a bike. But there was no reason not to tell him while they climbed up the stairs to the memorial. It wouldn’t be that hard to make sure no one was listening. And even though the steps were big and made of stone, it’s not like Jordan was going to be so shocked that he was going to lose control of his feet and go falling down them.
Plus, Honest Abe would want me to do it here
, Priya thought.
’Cause of the Honest part.
Jordan waved one hand in front of Priya’s face. “You waiting for Abe to send down an invitation?”
Uh-oh. Priya realized that Amber had wrapped up her spiel. “Nope, not waiting for anything,” she told Jordan. “Let’s go.”
Everyone else was already climbing, except Amber, Sophie, and Kenny, who were staying behind to guard the bikes.
This is good
, Priya told herself.
It’s the perfect time to tell Jordan how I feel without anybody from camp eavesdripping
. That’s what her aunt always called it—dripping. It sounded a lot nastier than dropping, somehow.
“I keep thinking about . . . about what we were talking about last night in the kitchen,” Priya said as they started up the stairs. “About the liiiiking. Maybe without all the
iiii
.”
“I keep thinking about it, too,” Jordan admitted, eyes on the steps, as if he was talking to them. “It’s all I think about.” He finally looked up and pointed at her. “Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing,” Priya promised. She
so
wasn’t laughing.
“There’s something I have to ask you,” Jordan said, eyes on hers.
Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. She couldn’t let him. He was going to ask her to be his girlfriend. And that was going to make it so much worse for both of them.

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