True Blue by Deborah Ellis

Author:Deborah Ellis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pajama Press
Published: 2012-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

August, 28 - 31

Day 6 - 9

It is all-out war now. We divide to try to conquer. One of us takes the seven good kids and one of us stays close to Stephanie. We try to move as a group. We try not to let it show that one of us is always on Stephanie-watch, but she figures it out anyway. And she enjoys it.

I hate it. I hate being in charge of the seven good kids, because it takes too much effort to keep them entertained. And I hate being in charge of Stephanie, because that takes even more effort.

And it doesn’t really work. She still manages to give us the slip. Casey is right—the kid is brave. She even crawls under the cabin to hide, where there are spiders and weeds and probably garter-snake nests.

Other counselors watch out for her, and so do the adult staff, marching her back to us when they find her off where she’s not supposed to be. She gets lectures, she gets warnings. She does as she pleases. Casey’s microscope turns up at the back of the mess-hall broom closet. It’s smashed into pieces. Stephanie smiles and says, “Prove it.”

She keeps stealing. Flashlights, hats, shoes, whatever she wants. One night she tries taking Casey’s praying mantis hair clip again, crawling right up into Casey’s bunk to get it while Casey is sleeping. Casey wakes up with a jolt, just in time, then Stephanie starts yelling that Casey almost made her fall off the top bunk and hurt herself. It takes a lot of work and a lot of patience to get the cabin quiet again. Kids get upset about one thing and they suddenly remember they are upset about a lot of things, and there are tears and tantrums and all kinds of chaos.

Casey and I get dirty looks from other counselors.

“If you can’t control your cabin, maybe you should go work at Burger World,” they say. I hate them all. I sneak into the Director’s office while she’s eating supper and call the aunt myself. All I get is an answering machine. I ask her to come and get her niece. But I don’t hold my breath.

We talk about canceling the sleep-out. In fact, we do decide to cancel it. We have a hard enough time keeping track of Stephanie in the enclosed space of the cabin. We could not possibly control her in a dark field some distance away from the main camp.

But then, just as the last days of camp approaches, she seems to calm down. She still disappears, but not for long. She’s already stolen everything she wants to. We are worn out and just want the camp to end. She decides to almost-behave.

And we decide to have the sleep-out after all.

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