Nerd Camp (12 page)
Authors: Elissa Brent Weissman
Jenny looked at Gabe and Wesley. She pulled her lips back and forth in consideration. Then she looked at Nikhil with his masking-taped shower cap and started giggling. “Can I have a minute to consult with my lawyer?” she asked.
“Okay,” said Gabe. The boys got up and walked a few feet away. They quizzed one another on various digits of Pi until the girls called them back to the table.
Amanda said, “My client would like to make a deal. In exchange for her information, she'd like three books, two Twizzlers, and a Snickers bar.”
Gabe let out a low whistle. Wesley threw his arms up. “
Three
books! How do we even know if her information is good?”
“It's good,” said Jenny.
Nikhil whispered, “Let's do it. I don't
think
they'd cancel Color War because of the lice, but we have to try to get rid of them, just in case. Besides, this masking tape hurts.”
Wesley whispered, “But I'm down to my second-to-last Snickers.”
“Two books,” said Gabe firmly. “Two Twizzlers. No Snickers.”
The girls looked at each other.
“Deal,” said Amanda.
“Let's go,” said Jenny.
The boys looked at one another.
“Where are we going?” asked Nikhil.
“The place I went in the three days before I caught lice again. Come on.”
She led them through the woods, across the field, past the bunks, and to the front of the science building.
“You're not supposed to be in classrooms during free time,” said Nikhil.
Jenny ignored him. She opened the door and walked inside. The others hurried to catch up with her. Up the stairs, down the hall, and around the corner, she stopped at a door between rooms 222 and 224. Unlike the classroom doors,
which had large windows on top, this door was solid wood. Jenny put her finger to her lips. The five of them stood silently. Gabe closed his eyes, and he could make out muffled noises from behind the door.
Something top secret is going on in there,
he thought.
“You guys move over there,” Jenny whispered. She straightened her bandanna. Then she raised her fist and knocked in a beat:
Tap.
Pause.
Tap-tap.
Pause.
Tap.
A secret-code knock
, Gabe thought.
This I definitely have to tell Zack.
There was some shuffling behind the door, and the boys waited, Gabe and Wesley with eager anticipation, and Nikhil with a combination of curiosity and fear. Finally, the door opened just enough to let a single eye peer through the crack and see Jenny. Then the door opened halfway and a hand waved Jenny in. She beckoned the rest of the group to follow her and said, “Come on, guys.”
They walked inside what seemed to be a deep janitor's closet. Piled on the floor were buckets and cleaning supplies. A few janitor uniforms were hanging from hooks along the left wall. But it was what was along the right wall that made Gabe's eyes widen behind his glasses. There was a long table,
but all the cleaning products were pushed together far from the door. In their place were two microscopes, an array of petri dishes, and a pyramid of glass jars labeled with black marker.
Gabe was so absorbed with the makeshift lab that he didn't even notice the other person who was in there until he spoke.
“Uh, Jen,” the guy said. “What are you doing?”
Gabe looked at this guy and wondered if his thick glasses were deceiving him. He was one of the older kids, but he wasn't just any older kid. He was Calvin Chin, C
2
.
Everyone knew C
2
. He was the smartest of the smartest of the smart kids at Smart Camp. He had skipped third grade and then sixth. So now, at thirteen, he had already completed one year of high school and was smart enough to be starting college. But he had lots of friends in his current grade, and his parents wanted him to have a normal teenage life, so he wasn't going to skip any more. That made him the best combination: a thirteen-year-old who was college smart and high school cool. He was a legend! And talk about cool: His nickname represented the hypotenuse of a right triangle
and
the speed of light.
Zack would
think that's nerdy
, Gabe thought,
but C
2
wouldn't even care.
C
2
was wearing a white lab apron and, like Nikhil, a shower cap. But unlike Nikhil, he somehow managed to make the shower cap look so good that Gabe wished he had one himself.
“Guys,” said Jenny, “this is my brother Calvin.”
Brother!
Gabe thought.
Of course!
Why hadn't he put it together that Jenny Chin and Calvin Chin were brother and sister? If he had known Jenny was related to C
2
, he would have tried to hang out with her more, and even with Amanda.
C
2
said, “Hey,” and lifted his chin at the group to acknowledge them. Then he looked back at his sister. “I told you not to bring anyone here.”
“Yeah,” she said, “but they were investigating the lice thing, and we made a deal. Besides, I'm tired of lice. I told you, if you don't shut it down today, I'm going to tell my counselor.”
C
2
sighed and shook his head.
“What is all this stuff?” asked Wesley.
“It's the Double L,” C
2
said proudly. “The Lice Lab. Some friends and I got it going. We got specimens from this girl's hair, and then we set it up to do some experiments.”
“What sorts of experiments?” asked Gabe.
“Just looking at them on slides, breeding them in jars, seeing how they act if you feed them different things. That sort of stuff.”
“Cool,” said Gabe.
“Do the teachers know?” asked Nikhil. “How'd you get the microscopes and stuff?”
“We took the petri dishes and jars from a few science rooms, and we've been bringing the microscopes back and forth from one of the labs.”
“You mean, you stole them?” asked Nikhil.
C
2
shrugged. “It's in the name of science. But it's probably a good idea to shut it down and disinfect all the equipment now, anyway. Now that everybody knows and tons of people are coming here to look,
Jenny.
”
“Whatever,” said Jenny. “You're the one
breeding
lice and feeding them to keep them alive while the rest of the camp is trying to kill them and wondering why they keep coming back.”
Free time was almost over, but before they went to line up for dinner, C
2
gave them a tour of the lab and let them look at the lice through the microscope. The lice were intricate little bugs with six claws, like tiny, hairy crustaceans.
Between
solving the mystery, hanging out with C
2
, and seeing a real louse under a microscope
, Gabe thought,
this was officially the best free time ever.
C
2
kept his wordâhe shut down the lice lab the next day during free time. But Nikhil still made sure Jenny told her counselor, who then sent the nurse to make sure everything was sterilized. C
2
and his friends got in some sort of trouble for operating it illegally, but part of the punishment was to go present to the science classes about what they found. By the end of activity time the next night, everyone at camp knew about the lice culprits.
“Well,” Gabe said that night in their bunk, “Combman and the Shampolice helped crack the case.”
“But Jenny totally tricked us,” said Wesley. “She got those books and Twizzlers even though we would have found out.”
“That was pretty smart,” Nikhil granted.
“Figures,” said Gabe. “Her brother is C
2
!”
“And
we
hung out with him during free time,” bragged Wesley.
“And did you see what he was wearing?” Nikhil said with a grin. He ran his fingers along his head, where he still had a red mark from the masking tape. “That guy's got style!”
Problem: Am I a nerd who only has nerdy adventures?
Hypothesis: No.
Proof:
THINGS I CAN TELL ZACK | THINGS I CAN'T TELL ZACK |
1. I'm going to sleepaway camp for six weeks! | 1. It is the Summer Center for Gifted Enrichment. |
2. My bunkmates are really cool, and we became friends right away! | 2. They like learning digits of |
3. The food is bad, just like at camps in | 3. We fixed it with lemon juice to kill the bacteria. |
4. I'm being stalked by an annoying girl! | 4. She is in my Logical Reasoning and Poetry Writing classes. |
5. I creamed Amanda in a sing-off! | 5. We sang all the countries of the world. |
6. We put music and sports pictures on our walls. | 6. They are of Beethoven and the rules of badminton. |
7. Wesley says amazing things in his sleep! | 7. He solves math problems. 7a. and brainteasers. |
8. I tried some cool hairstyles that lots of girls said looked cute. | 8. One is named for Julius Caesar. |
9. Vampire lice are sucking the blood out of people's heads! | 9. We learned all about the Pediculus humanus capitis and their life cycle. |
10. I discovered a top secret operation! | 10. It was an operation to study the science of lice. |
11. I hung out with the coolest guy at camp! | 11. His nickname is C |
ALIEN INVASION
Dear Eric,
It is two days past when our algorithm predicted that Color War would break. We only have one week left of camp now. I wish it would break the very last day and then they would extend camp so we could have it. I wish that because I am having so much fun and don't want to leave. I think thinking about going home soon is making me have weird dreams lately. But I know from Logical Reasoning that it's not logical for Color War to happen after camp is supposed to end.
Here is something funny about Logical Reasoning though. One property that you use in a logic proof is called Modus Tollens. Modus Tollens is not a person, it's a mathematical theorem. But here is the funny thing: Today, during our break, a girl in my class wrote “Modus Tollens wuz here” on the white board. HA HA HA HA! It was so funny that then this other kid and I tried to put her name and Modus Tollens in a heart on a tree, but we didn't have anything sharp enough to carve it.
In case you're wondering, here's an example of how Modus Tollens really works:
Given:
If our algorithm is right, then Color War would
break on Friday.
Color War did not break on Friday.
Therefore, because of Modus Tollens:
Our algorithm was not right.
Gabe fell asleep quickly, but he kept waking up between weird dreams. In one, he and Amanda were on the
Titanic
,
and his old babysitter was trying to teach them how to dance the fox-trot. In another, he was in his cabin, but it was really the cereal aisle of the supermarket, and he had been assigned to do a book report about the Rice Krispies box, but he was completely unprepared. In a third, his mom, who looked like his swimming coach, was trying to convince him that they should get a pet ferret.
So, when a white light swept over the bunk windows and people began waking up, it took Gabe a few minutes to realize that it wasn't just another strange dream. The boys in other parts of the cabin were whispering, but Gabe could hear them.
“What is it?”
“I don't know. Go wake up David.”
“You wake him up.”
“No, you do it.”
Gabe rubbed his eyes and put on his glasses. The Indiglo on his watch made him squint. It was 4:02 a.m. He groaned, put his glasses back beside his bed, and closed his eyes. But the light swept across the bunk window again, illuminating the darkness behind his eyes, and he opened them again.
“There it is again,” said one of the boys from the area next to Gabe's.
“Shh, do you hear that?” said another.
“Hear what?”
“Shh!”
Everyone who was awake or, like Gabe, semi-awake, listened. There was a faint hum, like someone had started the air-conditioning in another room.
Above Gabe, Wesley stirred. “Police!” he said as he turned over.
A boy gasped. “Police!” he repeated. “The lights!”
“It could be a helicopter,” someone else said. “Maybe someone escaped from jail and they're looking for him.”
“What
time
is it?” asked someone groggily.
