Lights Out! (6 page)

As Mrs. Wing turned, her cotton jacket swished through the air with a tinkling noise. The bottom edge of it was sewn with little metal beads.

“Good night, campers!” Mrs. Wing called out, shutting the screen door behind her. The glare of her flashlight lit up the front stoop of the cabin.

“What is this, the Girl Scouts?” Ivy cracked as soon as Mrs. Wing had gone. “This trip is a joke.”

Madison ignored Ivy’s comments and opened her duffel to get ready for bed. Other girls did the same.

Plink, plink, plunk.

Raindrops hit the roof of the cabin one by one building up to a steady drumbeat.

“It’s pouring,” Lindsay said.

“WAIT A MINUTE!” Ivy screeched. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“So?” Aimee said. “Go!”

A few girls giggled. Ivy was not amused.

“I can’t go to the bathroom in
this
,” Ivy said, pointing outside. “I’ll get wet.”

Madison nodded. “Yes, that’s what rain does, Ivy.”

Almost as quickly as it started, the rain began to slow down again. The breeze was cooler now. The storm had swept through in mere minutes. Everyone in the cabin watched through the screens as the showers stopped.

Whoo, whoo.

“What was
that
?” Rose asked.

Everyone was getting jumpy.

“Is it darker out there now or is it my imagination?” Stacey asked.

“Definitely darker. Pitch-black,” Aimee said. “But now that the rain has stopped, you can go to the bathroom, Ivy.”

Ivy made a face. “Excuse me?”

“Yeah. Have fun,” Madison said.

Ivy looked angrier than angry. Her bottom lip stuck out like she wanted to yell, but nothing came out. For the first time in a long time she was totally speechless. It was certainly the first time on the trip that something had shut her up.

Madison listened for sounds from outside. Was there a giant owl lurking out there? Had the rain really stopped? What other creatures lived outside the door of their cabin in the middle of the woods?

“I don’t have to go anymore,” Ivy said. “Isn’t that funny?”

Aimee laughed out loud.

“Don’t be rude,” Joan snapped.

Aimee laughed again.

Ivy said she would rather wait until sunrise than risk walking through the dark, wet woods to use the bathroom.

“Why doesn’t one of your friends just go with you?” Madison asked.

Rose and Joan looked over at Ivy and then back at Madison. This was getting interesting.

“Hey, I don’t have to go,” Rose said quickly.

“Me neither,” Joan said.

Aimee laughed again. “This is perfect.” She sat on her bed, leaned back, and crossed her ankles.

Ivy rifled through her bag, acting distracted. But everyone’s eyes stayed right on her. Madison could hear the sound of heavy breathing. It was the sound of a crowd watching the enemy on the edge of…embarrassment.

Madison loved every moment. She knew something had to be done.

“If you really have to go, Ivy,” Madison said suggestively, “don’t wait. I’ll go with you.”

Aimee shot Madison an evil stare. Fiona even gasped a little.

“Excuse me?” Ivy said.

“Let’s go,” Madison said, pulling on her sneakers and grabbing her flashlight and toothbrush. She strolled over to the cabin screen door. “I’m not afraid to go, are you?”

Ivy shook her head. “Of course I’m not afraid. Duh!” She grabbed Rose’s wrist. “And neither are they.”

“But we don’t need to go… We told you….”

“You know what? I’m going, too,” Aimee said, joining in on the fun. She leaped off the bed where she was sitting and pulled on her rain jacket.

Fiona, Lindsay, and Stacey grabbed their stuff, too.

Whoo, whoo.

“Did you hear
that
?” Ivy asked.

Madison shrugged. “An owl,” she said plainly.

“Oh yeah, of course,” Ivy said. “Fine. We’ll go.”

Madison stepped out into the damp woods first. Everyone else followed closely behind. The owl hooted again. Half the girls screamed.

“Shhhhh!” Madison cautioned. “Mrs. Wing will come back if we don’t keep quiet.”

“Who put you in charge?” Joan said in a gruff voice.

“OUCH!” Lindsay cried. She’d stepped on a rock.

Slowly the members of Maple cabin shuffled through wet leaves and pine needles down toward the outdoor facilities a few hundred yards away.

Madison could see the one bare light bulb in the bathroom swinging in the wind.

“How far is it?” Aimee whispered, shivering a little.

“Yeah,” Ivy barked. “How far, Maddie?”

Madison looked around. Trees groaned around them like dark monsters. She wondered how she got here—and why
she
was leading the pack.

But it was definitely too late to turn back.

“W
OW,” FIONA SAID. “LOOK UP.”

The group stopped momentarily to gaze at the speckles of white and yellow in the night sky. The stars were bright, even through clouds. Madison tried to spot a constellation like the Big Dipper but couldn’t find it. The moon was like a giant, white, round egg. She could even see the craters.

“Are we going or what?” Ivy said.

Another tree groaned and a few girls jumped again.

“My heart’s beating a thousand beats a minute,” Fiona said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

“Oh no!” Aimee wailed. “Look!”

“WHAT?” someone else said with a start.

She pointed up to the light in the bathroom. The gray paint on the ceiling had peeled half off. Bugs were everywhere—big ones, fat ones, and wormy ones. Some were dead. A dirty cobweb woven years ago from the corner of the ceiling still hung there, glued together after all this time with a thick layer of camp dirt. No one has cleaned this place in centuries, Madison thought.

“Do you guys smell that?” Aimee asked.

Madison pinched her nose. “What
is
that?”

Everyone looked at the bathroom stalls and showers. The air was musty and damp. Mosquitoes buzzed at everyone’s ears. Stacey opened a stall door and bravely stepped inside.

Poison Ivy opened another stall. “It doesn’t look so bad,” she said, closing the door behind her. “It’s fine in here….”

Madison smiled at Aimee and Fiona. They loved watching the enemy squirm.

“AAAAAAAAH!” Ivy screamed. “Get it OUT!”

Rose and Joan banged on the door. “What is it? What’s wrong, Ivy?”

Ivy’s voice trembled. “A spider… It’s huge…. Oh my…”

Everyone backed away.

“You guys?” Ivy’s voice cracked. “Are you out there? What am I supposed to do? You guys?”

“Kill the spider,” Madison said.

“No…I can’t…move…” Ivy said. “It’s near my HEAD!”

“It’s okay, Ivy,” Joan said. “Just open the door and we’ll shoo it away. How big is it?”

Ivy sounded like she was about to faint. “BIG!”

“Open the door, Ivy,” Joan said.

“Yeah, open the door,” a bunch of girls echoed.

All at once, the stall door burst open and Ivy pushed out, shaking herself off and jumping up and down. She nearly knocked the flashlight right out of Madison’s hands.

“Get it off me!” Ivy squealed. “GET IT OFF!”

“Shhhhh!” Madison said. “Stop screaming. Where is it?”

Joan poked her head into Ivy’s stall. “It must have crawled away. It isn’t here anymore.”

“Is this the spider?” Stacey asked. She held open her stall door and pointed to the wall. On it, a fat brown spider measuring about half an inch crawled down a pipe. “I guess he crawled in here when Ivy screamed,” she said.

Ivy shook her head. “That can’t be him,” she said. “He was way bigger than THAT!”

Stacey reached over and the spider walked onto her finger. “I like spiders,” she said. Everyone gave her a funny look. She held it out to Ivy.

Ivy jumped backward. “Get that away from me,” she howled.

“We’d better get back to bed. Lights-out was almost a half hour ago,” Fiona said. “And we have to get up early tomorrow.”

The group left the spider behind to eat up some of the bugs. They slipped and slid in the mud on the way back to the cabin, sidestepping fallen branches.

Once they were inside, the girls removed their muddy sneakers and wet pants, changed into their pajamas, rolled out sheets or blankets (those who had them), and unzipped their sleeping bags. Madison had brought an old, army green sleeping sack that Dad had given her when she was in third grade. She noticed that Ivy had the same one. Their dads had probably shopped together back then, back when Maddie and Ivy were still friends.

After good-nights with Aimee, Fiona, and Lindsay, Madison pulled on some wooly socks and crawled into her sleeping bag with her orange notebook and flashlight. It was a little hot under the covers. Sleepy hot.

File: Lights-out

Rude Awakening:
Why do they call it the great outdoors? What’s so great about mud and bugs? This field trip is like a head trip—especially when Ivy acts like she’s queen of the wilderness.

Madison stopped writing. Her eyes were getting heavy.

She dozed off about two minutes later.

The camp staff canceled the bird walk for the next morning, just like Mrs. Wing said, so everyone woke up early, dressed, and headed directly to the snack shack for breakfast. Madison and her friends pulled on their fleece jackets. The air was nippy. The ground was still a little wet, too, from the rain the night before.

“How did you guys sleep?” Madison asked.

“My sleeping bag smells,” Aimee complained. “It’s Billy’s and it stinks like feet. Sick, huh?”

“I kept dreaming about that spider,” Fiona said, shuddering.

“That was scary,” Madison said. “But the look on Ivy’s face was worth it.”

“I think Ivy snores,” Aimee joked. “Or one of the drones does. I heard them in the middle of the night.”

Fiona and Madison giggled.

Farther along the path to breakfast, they ran into the boys. Fiona lit up when she saw Egg. Everyone walked into the snack shack together.

The room was like a school cafeteria but with different decor: wood beams, screened-in windows, long wooden tables. There was no orange table like at FHJH, but the group found a place to sit. There were no chairs, either, just benches, which meant squeezing together.

Madison jockeyed for position so she’d be near her crush. But Hart sat with Dan and Chet, not Madison. She was stuck between Aimee and Drew.

“My brother Doug was here just two years ago and he said the food is gross,” Aimee said.

“Everything is gross to you,” Madison teased.

On the table was a stack of bowls and little mini-boxes of cereal like Chex and Special K. There were also pitchers of orange juice and water, and assorted fresh fruit.

“What’s gross about cereal?” Madison asked. “Although I wish they had Honey Loops.”

“Or Frosted Mini-Wheats,” Drew said, chomping on an apple.

“Well, all of this doesn’t really matter anyhow,” Aimee went on. “Doug and Dean both told me that the activities they have us do are really fun. It’s like this total bonding experience for the seventh grade, especially climbing the Tower.”

“The Tower scares me,” Madison admitted.

“It’s not scary! Doug says we’ll all have a good time. Try it before you say anything bad,” Aimee said.

“You sound like Mrs. Goode,” Drew said.

“I do
not
,” Aimee protested. “I’m only saying it because it’s true and it’s what my brothers said and they should know. I mean, what do YOU know about this place, Drew? Have you ever been here before?”

“No,” Drew said simply. “I’ve been to camp, though, and this is just like camp everywhere. Don’t you think so, Maddie?”

Madison smiled. “Sure,” she said.

“But you’ve never been to camp, Maddie,” Aimee said.

“Technically, no,” Madison said. She started to explain how she
wished
she had been to camp, but then the conversation took a left turn. Drew and Aimee got into an argument about what the
K
stood for in Special K.

Madison glanced across the table at Hart, Dan, and Lindsay, who were having a three-way bubble-blowing contest in their small cups of milk. Chet looked like he was asleep; he was leaning on his hand to keep his head up. Egg and Fiona were talking. They looked like a couple, Madison thought. Or at least they looked like what Madison thought a couple should look like.

“ATTENTION!” Mrs. Goode stood up at the front of the room, coffee cup in hand. “Good morning, boys and girls. Welcome to your first morning at Jasper Lodge. How did everyone sleep?”

Half the kids cheered. The other half groaned.

Madison whirled around to find Ivy and her drones. They were sitting a table away but at the other end of the room. Ivy saw Madison look and made a sour face. She was probably still fuming about the spider-in-the-bathroom incident.

“Should we start the morning with a little stretch?” Coach Hammond asked. He was the FHJH gym teacher—but with a New Age twist. He always asked for meditation moments before practices and adopted all these funky stretching routines in gym. He wanted to bring yoga and Pilates to school.

Benches creaked and a few plates and cups were dropped as the room got to its feet. Kids grumbled as they raised their arms. Madison yawned. When she stretched, she realized that her T-shirt was on inside out.

“Anyone here know what makes a rainstorm?” Coach Hammond asked the room.

A few kids said, “Yeah!”

Aimee squealed, too. “Cool! We’re gonna do a rainstorm. This is the best.”

Madison had no idea what Aimee or Coach Hammond was talking about.

Coach pointed to one corner of the room and asked each kid there to rub two fingers of one hand on the palm of the other. Then he asked the members of another table to rub their palms together. He instructed Madison’s group to clap two fingers on the opposite palm. Ivy’s table was told to clap hands. All the teachers were in charge of foot stomping. Slowly, starting with table one, he added actions and noises until the room sounded so much like a rainstorm it felt
wet.

Madison wondered if all campers did was learn weird songs and games and sing them before, after, and during meals. And why were they singing a song about rain when it had rained the night before?