Code Name Cassandra

1-800-WHERE-R-YOU

Code Nome Cassandra

Jenny Carroll

Many thanks to Beth Ader, Jennifer Brown, John Henry Dreyfuss, Laura Langlie, Ingrid van der Leeden, David Walton, and especially Benjamin Egnatz

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

About the Author

C H A P T E R

1

I don't know why I'm doing this.

Writing this down, I mean. It's not like anybody is making me.

Not this time.

But it seems to me like somebody ought to be keeping track of this stuff. Somebody who actually knows what really happened.

And it isn't as if you can trust the Feds to do it. Oh, they'll write it down, of course. But they won't get it right.

I just think there needs to be one truthful account. A factual one.

So I'm writing it. It isn't a big deal, really. I just hope that someday somebody will actually read it, so I won't feel like it was a complete waste of time … not like the majority of my endeavors.

Take, for example, the sign. Now that's a classic example of a wasted endeavor if I ever saw one.

And if you think about it, that's really how it all started. With the sign.

Welcome to Camp Wawasee

Where Gifted Kids Come to Make Sweet Music

Together

That's what the sign said.

I know you don't believe me. I know you don't believe that in the history of time, there was ever a sign that said anything that stupid.

But I swear it's true. And I should know: I'm the one who'd painted it.

Don't get me wrong. I didn't want to. I mean, they totally made me do it. They handed me the paint and this giant white cotton sheet and told me what to write on it and everything. Their last sign, see, had met with this very tragic accident, in which someone had folded it up and stuck it in the pool house and some noxious chemical had dripped on it and eaten through the fabric.

So they made me make a new one.

It wasn't just that the sign was stupid. I mean, if you got a look at the kids standing under the sign, you'd have known right away that it was also probably libelous. Because if those kids were gifted, I was Jean-Pierre Rampal.

He was this famous flutist, by the way, for those of you who don't know.

Anyway, I had seriously never seen a whinier bunch of kids in my life. And I've been around a lot of kids, thanks to the nature of my, you know, unique gift and all.

But these kids … Let me tell you, they were something else. Every last one of them was all, "But I don't want to go to music camp," or "Why can't I just stay home with you?" Like the fact that they were going to get to spend six weeks away from their parents was some kind of hardship. If you had told me, at the age of ten or whatever, that I could go somewhere and be away from my parents for six weeks, I'd have been like, "Sign me up, dude."

But not these kids. I suppose on account of the fact they were gifted and all. Maybe gifted kids actually like their parents or something. I wouldn't know.

Still, I tried to believe in the sign. Especially, you know, since I'd made it. Well, with Ruth's help. If you can call Ruth's contribution help, which I wasn't so sure I would. It had consisted mostly of Ruth telling me that my lettering was crooked. Looking at the sign now, I saw that she was right. The letters were crooked. But I doubted anyone but me and Ruth had noticed.

"Aren't they cute?"

That was Ruth, sidling up beside me. She was gazing out at the children, looking all dewy-eyed. Apparently she hadn't noticed all the screaming and sniffling and cries of "But I wanna go home."

But I sure had. They were kind of making me want to go home, too.

Only, if I went home, I'd be stuck working the steam table. That's how you spend your summers when your parents own a restaurant: working the steam table. There was even less of a chance of escape for me, since my parents own three restaurants. It was the least fancy one, Joe Junior's, that offered the buffet of various pasta dishes, all of which were kept warm courtesy of a steam table.

And guess which kid traditionally gets put in charge of the steam table? That's right. The youngest one. Me. It was either that, or the salad bar. And believe me, I had had my fill of deep-sea diving into the ranch dressing tub for stray cherry tomatoes.

But the steam table wasn't the only thing back home that I was trying to avoid.

"I hope I get that one," Ruth gushed, pointing to a cherubic-faced blonde who was standing beneath my sign, clutching a pint-sized cello. "Isn't she sweet?"

"Yeah," I admitted grudgingly. "But what if you get that one?"

I pointed to a little boy who was screaming so loudly at the idea of being separated from Mommy and Daddy for a month and a half, he had gone into a full-blown asthma attack. Both of his frenzied-looking parents were thrusting inhalers at him.

"Aw," Ruth said tolerantly. "I was just like that the first year I came here as a camper. He'll be fine by suppertime."

I supposed I had to take her word for it. Ruth's parents had started shipping her off to Camp Wawasee at the ripe old age of seven, so she had about nine years of experience to draw upon. I, on the other hand, had always spent my summers back at the steam table, bored out of my skull because my best (and pretty much only) friend was gone. In spite of the fact that my parents own three restaurants, in which my friends and I can dine any time we want, I have never exactly been Miss Popularity. This might be on account of the fact that, as my guidance counselor puts it, I have issues.

Which was why I wasn't so sure Ruth's idea—of me putting in an application to be a camp counselor—was such a good one. For one thing, despite my special talent, child care is not really my forte. And for another, well, like I said: I have these issues.

But apparently no one noticed my antisocial tendencies during the interview, since I got the job.

"Let me just make sure I got this right," I said to Ruth, as she continued to look longingly at the cellist. "It's Camp Wawasee, Box 40, State Road One, Wawasee, Indiana?"

Ruth wrenched her gaze from Goldilocks.

"For the last time," she said, with some exasperation. "Yes."

"Well," I said with a shrug, "I just wanted to make sure I told Rosemary the right address. It's been over a week since I last got something from her, and I'm a little worried."

"God." Ruth no longer spoke with just some exasperation. She was fed up. You could tell. "Would you stop?"

I stuck my chin out. "Stop what?"

"Stop working," she said. "You're allowed a vacation once in a while. Jeez."

I went, "I don't know what you're talking about," even though, of course, I did, and Ruth knew it.

"Look," she said. "Everything is going to be all right, okay? I know what to do."

I gave up trying to pretend that I didn't know what she was talking about, and said, "I just don't want to screw it up. Our system, I mean."

Ruth rolled her eyes. "Hello," she said. "What's to screw up? Rosemary sends the stuff to me, I pass it on to you. What, you think after three months of this, I don't have it down yet?"

Alarmed at the volume with which she'd announced this, I grabbed her arm.

"For God's sake, Ruth," I hissed. "Zip it, will you? Just because we're in the middle of nowhere doesn't mean there might not be you-know-whats around. Any one of those doting parents over there could be an F-E-D."

Ruth rolled her eyes again. "Please," was all she said.

She was right, of course: I was overreacting. But there was no denying the fact that Ruth had gotten seriously slack in the discretion department. Basically, since the whole camp thing had been decided, she'd been completely unable to keep anything else in her head. For weeks before we'd left for counselor training, Ruth had kept bubbling, "Aren't you excited? Aren't you psyched?" Like we were going to Paris with the French Club or something, and not to upstate Indiana to slave away as camp counselors for six weeks. I'd kept wanting to say to her, "Dude, it may not be the steam table, but it's still a job."

I mean, it's not like I don't also have my unofficial part-time career to contend with as well.

The problem was, Ruth's enthusiasm was totally catching. Like, she kept talking about how we were going to spend all of our afternoons on inner tubes, floating along the still waters of Lake Wawasee, getting tan. Or how some of the boy counselors were totally hot, and were going to fall madly in love with us, and offer us rides to the Michigan dunes in their convertibles.

Seriously.

And after a while, I don't know, I just sort of started to believe her.

And that was my second mistake. I mean, after putting in the application in the first place.

Ruth's descriptions of the campers, for instance. Child prodigies, she'd called them. And it's true, you have to audition even to be considered for a place at the camp, both as camper as well as counselor. Ruth's stories about the kids she'd looked after the year before—a cabin full of sensitive, creative, superintelligent little girls, who still wrote her sweet funny letters, a year later—totally impressed me. I don't have any sisters, so when Ruth started in about midnight gossip-and-hair-braiding sessions, I don't know, I began to think, Yeah, okay. This might be for me.

Seriously, I went from, "It's just a job," to "I want to escort adorable little girl violinists and flutists to the Polar Bear swim every morning. I want to make sure none of them are budding anorexics by monitoring their caloric intake at meals. I want to help them decide what to wear the night of the All-Camp Orchestral Concert."

It was like I went mental or something. I couldn't wait to take mastery over the cabin I'd been assigned—Frangipani Cottage. Eight little beds, plus mine in a separate room, in a tiny house (thankfully air-conditioned) that contained a mini-kitchen for snacks and its own private, multiple-showerhead and toilet-stalled bathroom. I had even gone so far as to hang up a sign (with crooked lettering) across the sweet little mosquito-netted front porch that said, Welcome, Frangipanis!

Look, I know how it sounds. But Ruth had me whipped up into some kind of camp-counselor frenzy.

But standing there, actually seeing the kids for whom I was going to be responsible for most of July and half of August, I began to have second thoughts. I mean, nobody wants to hang out next to a steam table when it's ninety degrees outside, but at least a steam table can't stick its finger up its nose, then try to hold your hand with that same finger.

It was as I was watching all these kids saying good-bye to their parents, wondering whether I'd just made the worst mistake of my life, that Pamela, the camp's assistant director, came up to me and, clipboard in hand, whispered in my ear, "Can we talk?"

I'll admit it: my heart sped up a little. I figured I was busted. . . .

Because, of course, there was a little something I'd left off of my application for the job. I just hadn't thought it would catch up with me this quickly.

"Uh, sure," I said. Pamela was, after all, my boss. What was I going to say, "Get lost"?

We moved away from Ruth, who was still gazing rapturously at what I would have to say were some very unhappy campers. I swear, I don't think Ruth even noticed how many of those kids were crying.

Then I noticed Ruth wasn't looking at the kids at all. She was staring at one of the counselors, a particularly hot-looking violinist named Todd, who was standing there chatting up some parents. That's when I realized that, in Ruth's head, she wasn't there underneath my crappy sign, watching a bunch of kids shriek, "Mommy, please don't leave me." Not at all. In Ruth's mind, she was in Todd's convertible, heading out toward the dunes for fried perch, a little tartar sauce, and some above-the-waist petting.

Lucky Ruth. She got Todd—at least in her mind's eye—while I was stuck with Pamela, a no-nonsense, khaki-clad woman in her late thirties who was probably about to fire me … which would explain why she'd draped an arm sympathetically across my shoulders as we strolled.

Poor Pamela. She was obviously not aware that one of my issues—at least according to Mr. Goodhart, my guidance counselor back at Ernest Pyle High School—is a total aversion to being touched. According to Mr. G, I am extremely sensitive about my personal space, and dislike having it invaded.

Which isn't technically true. There's one person I wouldn't mind invading my personal space.

The problem is, he doesn't do it anywhere near enough.

"Jess," Pamela was saying, as we walked along. She didn't seem to notice the fact that I'd broken into a sweat, on account of my nervousness that I was about to be fired—not to mention trying to restrain myself from flinging her arm off me. "I'm afraid there's been a bit of a change in plans."

A change in plans? That didn't sound, to me, like a prelude to dismissal. Was it possible my secret—which wasn't, actually, much of a secret anymore, but which had apparently not yet reached Pamela's ears—was still safe?

"It seems," Pamela went on, "that one of your fellow counselors, Andrew Shippinger, has come down with mono."

Relieved as I was that our conversation was definitely not going in the "I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go" direction, I have to admit I didn't know what I was supposed to do with this piece of information. The thing about Andrew, I mean. I knew Andrew from my week of counselor training. He played the French horn and was obsessed with Tomb Raider. He was one of the counselors Ruth and I had rated Undo-able. We had three lists, see: the Undo-ables, like Andrew. The Do-ables, who were, you know, all right, but nothing to get your pulse going.

And then there were the Hotties. The Hotties were the guys like Todd who, like Joshua Bell, the famous violinist, had it all: looks, money, talent … and most important of all, a car.

Which was kind of weird. I mean, a car being a prerequisite for hotness. Especially since Ruth has her own car, and it's even a convertible.

But according to Ruth—who was the one who'd made up all these rules in the first place—going to the dunes in your own car simply doesn't count.

The thing is, the chances of a Hottie glancing twice in the direction of either Ruth or me are like nil. Not that we're dogs or anything, but we're no Gwyneth Paltrows.

And that whole Do-able/Undo-able thing? Yeah, need I point out that neither Ruth nor I have ever "done" anybody in our lives?

And I have to say, the way things are going, I don't think it's going to happen, either.

But Andrew Shippinger? So not Do-able. Why was Pamela talking to me about him? Did she think I'd given him mono? Why do I always get blamed for everything? The only way my lips would ever touch Andrew Shippinger's would be if he sucked down too much water in the pool and needed CPR.

And when was Pamela going to move her arm?

"Which leaves us," she went on, "with a shortage of male counselors. I have plenty of females on my waiting list, but absolutely no more men."

Again, I wondered what this had to do with me. It's true I have two brothers, but if Pamela was thinking either of them would make a good camp counselor, she'd been getting a little too much fresh air.

"So I was wondering," Pamela continued, "if it would upset you very much if we assigned you to the cottage Andrew was supposed to have."

At that point, if she'd asked me to kill her mother, I probably would have said yes. I was that relieved I wasn't being fired—and I'd have done anything, anything at all, to get that arm off me. It isn't just that I have a thing about people touching me. I mean, I do. If you don't know me, keep your damned mitts to yourself. What is the problem there?

But you'd be surprised how touchy-feely these camp people are. It's all trust falls and human pretzel twists to them.

But that wasn't my only problem with Pamela. On top of my other "issues," I have a thing about authority figures. It probably has something to do with the fact that, last spring, one of them tried to shoot me.

So I stood there, sweating copiously, the words "Sure, yeah, whatever, let go of me," already right there on my lips.

But before I could say any of that, Pamela must have noticed how uncomfortable I was with the whole arm thing—either that or she'd realized how damp she was getting from my copious sweating. In any case, she dropped her arm away from me, and suddenly I could breathe easily again.

I looked around, wondering where we were. I'd lost my bearings in my panic over Pamela's touching me. Beneath us lay the gravel path that led to various Camp Wawasee outbuildings. Close by was the dining hall, newly refinished with a twenty-foot ceiling. Next, the camp's administrative offices. Then the infirmary. Beside that, the music building, a modular structure built mostly underground in order to preserve the woodsy feel of the place, with a huge skylight that shone down on a tree-filled atrium from which extended hallways leading to the soundproof classrooms, practice rooms, and so on.

What I couldn't see was the Olympic-sized swimming pool, and the half dozen clay tennis courts. Not that the kids had much time for swimming and tennis, what with all the practicing they had to do for the end-of-session orchestral concert that took place in the outdoor amphitheater, with seating for nine hundred. But nothing was too good for these little budding geniuses. Not far from the amphitheater was the Pit, where campers gathered nightly to link arms and sing while roasting marshmallows around a sunken campfire.

From there the path curved to the various cabins—a dozen for the girls on one side of camp and a dozen for the boys on the other—until it finally sloped down to Camp Wawasee's private lake, in all its mirror-surfaced, tree-lined glory. In fact, the windows of Frangipani Cottage looked out over the lake. From my bed in my little private room, I could see the water without even raising my head.

Only, apparently, it wasn't my bed anymore. I could feel Frangipani Cottage, with its lake views, its angelic flutists, its midnight-gabfest-and-hair-braiding sessions, slipping away, like water down the drain of … well, a steam table.

"It's just that, of all our female counselors this year," Pamela was going on, "you really strike me as the one most capable of handling a cabinful of little boys. And you scored so well in your first aid and lifesaving courses—"

Great. I'm being persecuted because of my knowledge of the Heimlich maneuver—honed, of course, from years of working in food services.

"—that I know I can put these kids into your hands and not worry about them a second longer."

Pamela was really laying it on thick. Don't ask me why. I mean, she was my boss. She had every right to assign me to a different cabin if she wanted to. She was the one doling out my paychecks, after all.

Maybe in the past she'd switched a girl counselor to a boys' cabin and gotten flak for it. Like maybe the girl she'd assigned to the cabin had quit or something. I'm not much of a quitter. The fact is, boys would be more work and less fun, but hey, what was I going to do?

"Yeah," I said. The back of my neck still felt damp from where her arm had been. "Well, that's fine."

Pamela reached out to clutch me by the elbow, looking intently down into my face. Being clutched by the elbow wasn't as bad as having her arm around my shoulders, so I was able to remain calm.

"Do you really mean that, Jess?" she asked me. "You'll really do it?"

What was I going to say, no? And risk being sent home, where I'd have to spend the rest of my summer sweating over trays of meatballs and manicotti at Joe Junior's? And when I wasn't at the restaurant, the only people I'd have to hang around with would be my parents (no thanks); my brother Mike, who was preparing to go away for his first year at Harvard and spent all the time on his computer e-mailing his new roommate, trying to determine who was bringing the minifridge and who was bringing the scanner; or my other brother, Douglas, who did nothing all day but read comic books in his room, coming out only for meals and South Park.

Not to mention the fact that for weeks now, there'd been a white van parked across the street from our house that didn't seem to belong to anyone in the neighborhood.

Um, no thanks. I'd stay here, if it was all the same.

"Um, yeah," I said. "Whatever. Just tell me what cabin I'm assigned to now, and I'll start moving my stuff."

Pamela actually hugged me. I can't say a whole lot for her management skills. One thing you would not catch my father doing is hugging one of his employees for agreeing to do what he'd asked her to do. More like he'd have given her a big fat "so long" if she'd said anything but, "Yes, Mr. Mastriani."

"That's great!" Pamela cried. "That's just great. You are such a doll, Jess."

Yeah, that's me. A regular Barbie.

Pamela looked down at her clipboard. "You'll be in Birch Tree Cottage now."

Birch Tree Cottage. I was giving up frangipani for birch. Story of my damned life.

"Now I'll just have to make sure the alternate can make it tonight." Pamela was still looking down at her chart. "I think she's from your hometown. And she's a flutist, too. Maybe you know her. Karen Sue Hanky?"

I had to bite back a great big laugh. Karen Sue Hanky? Now, if Karen Sue had found out she was being reassigned to a boys' cabin, she definitely would have cried.

"Yeah, I know her," I said, noncommittally. Boy, are you making a big mistake, was what I thought to myself. But I didn't say it out loud, of course.

"She interviewed quite well," Pamela said, still looking down at her clipboard, "but she only scored a five on performance."

I raised my eyebrows. It wasn't news to me, of course, that Karen Sue couldn't play worth a hang. But it seemed kind of wrong for Pamela to be admitting it in front of me. I guess she thought we were friends and all, on account of me not crying when she told me she was moving me to a boys' cabin.

The thing is, though, I already have all the friends I can stand.

"And she's only fourth chair," Pamela murmured, looking down at her chart. Then she heaved this enormous sigh. "Oh, well," she said. "What else can we do?"

Pamela smiled down at me, then started back to the administrative offices. She had apparently forgotten the fact that I am only third chair, just one up from Karen Sue.

My performance audition score, however, for the camp had been ten. Out of ten.

Oh, yeah. I rock.

Well, at playing the flute, anyway. I don't actually rock at much else.

I figured I'd better get a move on, if I was going to gather my stuff before any of the Frangipanis showed up and got the wrong idea … like that Camp Wawasee was unorganized or something. Which, of course, they were, as both the disaster with the sign—the one I told you about earlier—and the fact that they'd hired me attested to. I mean, had they even run my name through Yahoo!, or anything? If they had, they might have gotten an unpleasant little surprise.

Skirting the pack of friendly—a little too friendly, if you ask me; you had to shove them out of your way with your knees to escape their long, hot tongues—dogs that roamed freely around the camp, I headed back to Frangipani Cottage, where I began throwing my stuff into the duffel bag I'd brought it all in. It burned me up a little to think that Karen Sue Hanky was the one who was going to get to enjoy that excellent view of Lake Wawasee from what had been my bed. I'd known Karen Sue since kindergarten, and if anyone had ever suffered from a case of the I'm-So-Greats, it was Karen Sue. Seriously. The girl totally thought she was all that, just because her dad owned the biggest car dealership in town, she happened to be blonde, and she played fourth chair flute in our school orchestra.

And yeah, you had to audition to make the Symphonic Orchestra, and yeah, it had won all these awards and was mostly made up of only juniors and seniors, and Karen and I had both made it as sophomores, but please. I ask you, in the vast spectrum of things, is fourth chair in Symphonic Orchestra anything? Anything at all? Not. So not.

Not to Karen it wasn't, though. She would never rest until she was first chair. But to get there, she had to challenge and beat the person in third chair.

Yeah. Me.

And I can tell you, that was so not going to happen. Not in this world. I wouldn't call making third chair of Ernest Pyle High School's Symphonic Orchestra a world-class accomplishment, or anything, but it wasn't something I was going to let Karen Sue take away from me. No way.

Not like she was taking Frangipani Cottage away from me.

Well, frangipani, I decided, was a stupid plant, anyway. Smelly. A big smelly flower. Birch trees were way better.

That's what I told myself, anyway.

It wasn't until I actually got to Birch Tree Cottage that I changed my mind. Okay, first off, can I just tell you what a logistical nightmare it was going to be, supervising eight little boys? How was I even going to be able to take a shower without one of them barging in to use the John, or worse, spying on me, as young boys—and some not so young ones, as illustrated by my older brothers, who spend inordinate amounts of time gazing with binoculars at Claire Lippman, the girl next door—are wont to do?

Plus Birch Tree Cottage was the farthest cabin from everything—the pool, the amphitheater, the music building. It was practically in the woods. There was no lake view here. There was not even any light here, since the thickly leafed tree branches overhead let in not the slightest hint of sun. Everything was damp and smelled faintly of mildew. There was mildew in the showers.

Let me be the first to tell you: Birch Tree Cottage? Yeah, it sucked.

I missed Frangipani Cottage, and the little girls whose hair I could have been French braiding, already. If I knew how to French braid, that is.

Still, maybe they could have taught me. My little girl campers, I mean.

And when I'd stowed my stuff away and stepped outside the cabin and saw the first of my charges heading toward me, lugging their suitcases and instruments behind them, I missed Frangipani Cottage even more.

I'm serious. You never saw a scruffier, more sour-faced group of kids in your life. Ranging in age from ten to twelve years old, these were no mischievous-but-good-at-heart Harry Potters.

Oh, no.

Far from it.

These kids looked exactly like what they were: spoiled little music prodigies whose parents couldn't wait to take a six-week vacation from them.

The boys all stopped when they saw me and stood there, blinking through the lenses of their glasses, which were fogged up on account of the humidity. Their parents, who were helping them with their luggage, looked like they were longing to get as far from Camp Wawasee as they possibly could—preferably to a place where pitchers of margaritas were being served.

I hastened to say the speech I'd been taught at counselor training. I remembered to substitute the words birch tree for frangipani.

"Welcome to Birch Tree Cottage," I said. "I'm your counselor, Jess. We're going to have a lot of fun together."

The parents, you could tell, couldn't care less that I wasn't a boy. They seemed pleased by the fact that I clearly bathed regularly and could speak English.

The boys, however, looked shocked. Sullen and shocked.

One of them went, "Hey, you're a girl."

Another one wanted to know, "What's a girl counselor doing in a boys' cabin?"

A third one said, "She's not a girl. Look at her hair," which I found highly insulting, considering the fact that my hair isn't that short.

Finally, the most sullen-looking boy of them all, the one with the mullet cut and the weight problem, went, "She is, too, a girl. She's that girl from TV. The lightning girl."

And with that, my cover was blown.

C H A P T E R

2

That was me. Lightning Girl. The girl from TV.

Lucky me. Lucky, lucky, lucky me. Could there be a girl luckier than me? I don't think so. . . .

Oh, wait—I know. How about some girl who hadn't been struck by lightning and developed weird psychic powers overnight? Hey, yeah. That girl might be luckier than me. That girl might be way luckier than me. Don't you think?

I looked down at Mullet Head. Actually, not that much down, because he was about as tall as I was—which isn't saying much, understand.

Anyway, I looked down at him, and I went, "I don't know what you're talking about."

Just like that. Real smooth, you know? I'm telling you, I had it on.

But it didn't matter. It didn't matter at all.

One of the boys, a skinny one clutching a trumpet case, said, "Hey, yeah, you are that girl. I remember you. You're the one who got hit by lightning and got all those special powers!"

The other boys exchanged excited glances. The glances clearly said, Cool. Our counselor's a mutant.

One of them, however, a dark, delicate-looking boy who had no parents with him and spoke with a slight accent, asked shyly, "What special powers?"

The chubby boy with the unfortunate haircut—a mullet, short in front and long in back—who'd outed me in the first place smacked the little dark boy in the shoulder, hard. The chubby boy's mother, from whom it appeared he'd inherited his current gravitationally challenged condition, did not even tell him to knock it off.

"What do you mean, what special powers?" Mullet Head demanded. "Where have you been, retard? On the little bus?"

All of the other boys chuckled at this witticism. The dark little boy looked stricken.

"No," he said, clearly puzzled by the little bus reference. "I come from French Guiana."

"Guiana?" Mullet Head seemed to find this hilarious. "Is that anywhere near Gonorrhea?"

Mrs. Mullet Head, to my astonishment, laughed at this witticism.

That's right. Laughed.

Mullet Head, I could see, was going to be what Pamela had referred to during counselor training as a challenge.

"I'm sorry," I said sweetly to him. "I know I look like that girl who was on TV and all, but it wasn't me. Now, why don't you all go ahead and—"

Mullet Head interrupted me. "It was, too, you," he declared with a scowl.

Mrs. Mullet Head went, "Now, Shane," in this tone that showed she was proud of the fact that her son was no pushover. Which was true. Shane wasn't a pushover. What he was, clearly, was a huge pain in the—

"Um," another one of the parents said. "Hate to interrupt, but do you mind if we go ahead and go inside, miss? This tuba weighs a ton."

I stepped aside and allowed the boys and their parents to enter the cabin. Only one of them paused as he went by me, and that was the little French Guianese boy. He was lugging an enormous and very expensive-looking suitcase. I could see no sign of an instrument.

"I am Lionel," he said gravely.

Only he didn't pronounce it the way we would. He pronounced it Lee-Oh-Nell, with the emphasis on the Nell.

"Hey, Lionel," I said, making sure I pronounced it properly. We'd been warned at counselor training that there'd be a lot of kids from overseas, and that we should do all "we could to show that Camp Wawasee was cultural-diversity aware. "Welcome to Birch Tree Cottage."

Lionel flashed me another glimpse of those pearly whites, then continued lugging his big heavy bag inside.

I decided to let the boys and their parents slug it out on their own, so I stayed where I was out on the mosquito-netted porch, listening to the ruckus inside as the kids tore around, choosing beds. Off in the distance, I saw someone else wearing the camp counselor uniform—white collared short-sleeve shirt with blue shorts—standing on his porch, looking in my direction. Whoever he was lifted a hand and waved.

I waved back, even though I didn't have any idea who it was. Hey, you never knew. He might have owned a convertible.

It took about two minutes for the first fight to break out.

"No, it's mine!" I heard someone inside the cabin shriek in anguish.

I stalked inside. All of the beds—thankfully, not bunks—had belongings strewn across them. The fight was evidently not territorial in nature. Little boys do not apparently care much about views, and thankfully know nothing about feng shui.

The fight was over a box of Fiddle Faddle, which Shane was holding and Lionel evidently wanted.

"It is mine!" Lionel insisted, making a leap for the box of candy. "Give it back to me!"

"If you don't have enough to share," Shane said primly, "you shouldn't have brought it in the first place."

Shane was so much bigger than Lionel that he didn't even have to hold the box very high in the air to keep it out of the smaller boy's reach. He just had to hold it at shoulder level. Lionel, even standing on his tiptoes, wasn't tall enough to grab it.

Meanwhile, Shane's mother was just standing there with a little smile on her face, carefully unpacking the contents of her boy's suitcase and placing each item in the drawers in the platform beneath her son's mattress.

The rest of the boys, however, and quite a few of the parents, were watching the little drama unfolding in Birch Tree Cottage with interest.

"Didn't they ever teach you," Shane asked Lionel, "about sharing back in Gonorrhea?"

I knew rapid and decisive action was necessary. I could not do what I'd have liked to do, which was whop Shane upside the head. Pamela and the rest of the administrative staff at Camp Wawasee had been very firm on the subject of corporal punishment—they were against it. That was why they'd spent four hours of one of our training days going over appropriate versus inappropriate disciplinary action. Whopping campers upside the head was expressly forbidden.

Instead, I stepped forward and snatched the box of Fiddle Faddle out of Shane's hand.

"There is no," I declared loudly, "outside food of any kind allowed in Birch Tree Cottage. The only food anyone may bring into this cabin is food from the dining hall. Is that understood?"

Everyone stood staring at me, some in consternation. Shane's mother looked particularly shocked.

"Well, that sure is a change from last year," she said, in a voice that was too high-pitched and sugary to come from a woman who had produced, as she had, the spawn of Satan. "Last year, the boys could have all the candy and cookies from home they wanted. That's why I packed this."

Shane's mother hauled up another suitcase and flung it open to reveal what looked like the entire contents of a 7-Eleven candy rack. The other boys gathered around, their eyes goggling at the sight of so many Nestlé, Mars, and Hershey's products.

"Contraband," I said, pointing into the suitcase. "Take it home with you, please."

The boys let out a groan. Mrs. Shane's many chins began to tremble.

"But Shane gets hungry," she said, "in the middle of the night—"

"I will make sure," I said, "that there are plenty of healthful snacks for all the boys."

I was, of course, making up the rule about outside food. I just didn't want to have to be breaking up fights over Fiddle Faddle every five minutes.

As if sensing my thoughts, Shane's mother looked at the box in my hand.

"Well, what about that?" she demanded, pointing at it. "You can't send that home with his parents—" The accusing finger swung in Lionel's direction. "They didn't bother coming."

Uh, because they live in French Guiana, I wanted to say to her. Hello?

Instead, I found myself saying possibly the stupidest thing of all time: "This box of Fiddle Faddle will remain in my custody until camp is over, at which point, I will return it to its rightful owner."

"Well," Shane's mother sniffed. "If Shane can't have any candy, I don't think the other boys should be allowed any, either. I hope you intend to search their bags, as well."

Which was how, by the time supper rolled around, I had five boxes of Fiddle Faddle, two bags of Double-Stuff Oreo cookies, a ten-pack of Snickers bars, two bags of Fritos and one of Doritos, seven Gogurts in a variety of flavors, one bag of Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies, a box of Count Chocula, a two-pound bag of Skittles, and a six-pack of Yoo-Hoo locked in my room. The parents, thankfully, had left, chased off the property by the sound of the dinner gong. The goodbyes were heartfelt but, except on the part of Shane's mother, not too tearful. Somewhere out there, a lot of champagne corks were popping.

As soon as the last parent had departed, I informed the boys that we were headed to the dining hall, but that before we went, I wanted to make sure I had all their names down. Once that was settled, I told them, I'd teach them the official Birch Tree Cottage song.

Shane and Lionel I was already well acquainted with. The skinny kid who played trumpet turned out to be called John. The tuba player was Arthur. We had two violinists, Sam and Doo Sun, and two pianists, Tony and Paul. They were pretty much all your typical gifted musician types—pasty-skinned, prone to allergies, and way too smart for their own good.

"How come," John wanted to know, "you told us you aren't that girl from TV, when you totally are?"

"Yeah," Sam said. "And how come you can only find missing kids with your psychic powers? How come you can't find cool stuff, like gold?"

"Or the remote control." Arthur, I could already tell, was going to make up for his unfortunate name by being the cabin comedian.

"Look," I said. "I told you. I don't know what you guys are talking about. I just look like that lightning girl, okay? It wasn't me. Now—" I felt a change of subject was in order. "Shane, you haven't told us yet what instrument you play."

"The skin flute," Shane said. All of the boys but Lionel cracked up.

"Really?" Lionel looked shyly pleased. "I play the flute, too."

Shane shrieked with laughter upon hearing this. "You would!" he cried. "Being from Gonorrhea!"

Now that his mother was gone, I felt free to walk over and flick the top of Shane's ear with my middle finger hard enough to produce a very satisfying snapping noise. One of my other issues, on which I'd promised Mr. Goodhart to work during my summer vacation, was a tendency to take out my frustrations with others in a highly physical manner—a fact because of which I had spent most of my sophomore year in detention.

"Ow!" Shane cried, shooting me an indignant look. "What'd you do that for?"

"While you are living in Birch Tree Cottage," I informed him—as well as the rest of the boys, who were staring at us—"you will conduct yourself as a gentleman, which means you will refrain from making overtly sexual references within my hearing. Additionally, you will not insult other people's countries of origin."

Shane's face was a picture of confusion. "Huh?" he said.

"No sex talk," John translated for him.

"Aw." Shane looked disgusted. "Then how am I supposed to have any fun?"

"You will have good, clean fun," I informed him. "And that's where the official Birch Tree Cottage song comes in."

And then, while we undertook the long walk to the dining hall, I taught them the song.

I met a miss,

She had to pi—

—ck a flower.

Stepped in the grass,

up to her a—

—nkle tops.

She saw a bird,

stepped on a tur—

—key feather.

She broke her heart,

and let a far—

—mer carry her home.

"See?" I said as we walked. We had the longest walk of anyone to the dining hall, so by the time we'd reached it, the boys had the song entirely memorized. "No dirty words."

"Almost dirty," Doo Sun said with relish.

"That's the stupidest song I ever heard," Shane muttered. But I noticed he was singing it louder than anyone as we entered the dining hall. None of the other cabins, we soon learned, had official songs. The residents of Birch Tree Cottage sang theirs with undisguised gusto as they picked up their trays and got into the concession line.

I spied Ruth sitting with the girls from her cabin. She waved to me. I sauntered over.

"What is going on?" Ruth wanted to know. "What are you doing with all those boys?"

I explained the situation. When she had heard all, Ruth's mouth fell open and she went, her blue eyes flashing behind her glasses, "That is so unfair!"

"It'll be all right," I said.

"What will?" Shelley, a violinist and one of the other counselors, came by with a tray loaded down with chili fries and Jell-O.

Ruth told her what had happened. Shelley looked outraged.

"That is bull," she said. "A boys' cabin? How are you going to take a shower?"

Seeing everyone else so mad on my behalf, I started feeling less bad about the whole thing. I shrugged and said, "It won't be so bad. I'll manage."

"I know what you can do," Shelley said. "Just shower at the pool, in the girls' locker room."

"Or one of the guys from the cabins near yours can keep your campers occupied," Ruth said. "I mean, it wouldn't kill Scott or Dave to take on some extra kids for half an hour, here and there."

"What won't kill us?" Scott, an oboe player with thick glasses who'd nevertheless been judged Do-able thanks to his height (a little over six feet) and thighs (muscular) came over, followed closely by his shadow, a stocky Asian trumpet player named Dave … also rated Do-able, courtesy of a set of surprisingly washboard abs.

"They reassigned Jess to a boys' cabin," Shelley informed them.

"No kidding?" Scott looked interested. "Which one?"

"Birch," I said carefully.

Scott and Dave exchanged enthusiastic glances.

"Hey," Scott cried. "That's right near us! We're neighbors!"

"That was you?" Dave grinned down at me. "Who waved at me?"

"Yeah," I said. But you waved first.

I didn't say that part out loud, though. I wondered if either Dave or Scott had a convertible. I doubted it.

Not that I cared. I was taken, anyway. Well, in my opinion, at least.

"Don't worry, Jessica," Dave said, with a wink. "We'll look after you."

Just what I needed. To be looked after by Scott and Dave. Whoopee.

Ruth speared a piece of lettuce. She was eating a salad, as usual. Ruth would starve herself all summer in order to look good in a bikini she would never quite work up the courage to wear. If Scott or Dave or, well, anybody, for that matter, did ask her to go with him to the dunes, she would go dressed in a T-shirt and shorts that she would not remove, even in the event of heat stroke.

Ruth eyed me over a forkful of romaine. "What was with that dirty song you had those guys singing when you all came in?"

"It wasn't dirty," I said.

"It sounded dirty." Scott, who'd taken a seat on Ruth's other side, instead of sitting with his cabin, like he was supposed to, was eating spaghetti and meatballs. He was doing it wrong, too, cutting the pasta up into little bite-sized portions, instead of twirling it on his fork. My dad would have had an embolism.

Scott, I decided, must like Ruth. I knew Ruth liked Todd, the hot-looking violinist, but Scott wasn't such a bad guy. I hoped she'd give him a chance. Oboe players are generally better humored than violinists.

"Technically," I said, "that song wasn't a bit dirty."

"Oh, God," Ruth said, making a face at something she'd spotted over my shoulder. "What's she doing here?"

I looked around. Standing behind me was Karen Sue Hanky. I hadn't seen Karen Sue since school had let out for the summer, but she looked much the same as she always did—rat-faced and full of herself. She was holding a tray laden with grains and legumes. Karen Sue is vegan.

Then I noticed that beside Karen Sue stood Pamela.

"Excuse me, Jess?" Pamela said. "Can I see you for a moment in my office, please?"

I shot Karen Sue a dirty look. She simpered back at me.

This was going to be, I realized, a long summer.

In more ways than one.

C H A P T E R

3

"It wasn't dirty," I said as I followed Pamela into her office.

"I know," Pamela said. She collapsed into the chair behind her desk. "But it sounds dirty. We've had complaints."

"Already?" I was shocked. "From who?"

But I knew. Karen Sue, on top of the whole vegan thing, is this total prude.

"Look," I said, "if it's that much of a problem, I'll tell them they can't sing it anymore."

"Fine. But to tell you the truth, Jess," Pamela said, "that's not really why I called you in here."

All of a sudden, it felt as if someone had poured the contents of a Big Gulp down my back.

She knew. Pamela knew.

And I hadn't even seen it coming.

"Look," I said. "I can explain."

"Oh, can you?" Pamela shook her head. "I suppose it's partly our fault. I mean, how the fact that you're the Jessica Mastriani slipped through our whole screening process, I cannot imagine. . . ."

Visions of steam tables danced in my head.

"Listen, Pamela." I said it low, and I said it fast. "That whole thing—the getting struck by lightning thing? Yeah, well, it's true. I mean I was struck by lightning and all. And for a while, I did have these special powers. Well, one, anyway. I mean, I could find lost kids and all. But that was it. And the thing is—well, as you probably know—it went away."

I said this last part very loudly, just in case my old friends, Special Agents Johnson and Smith, had the place bugged or whatever. I hadn't noticed any white vans parked around the campgrounds, but you never knew. . . .

"It went away?" Pamela was looking at me nervously. "Really?"

"Uh-huh," I said. "The doctors told me it probably would. You know, after the lightning was done rattling around in me and all." At least, that was how I liked to think about it. "And it turned out they were right. I am now totally without psychic power. So, um, there's really nothing for you to worry about, so far as negative publicity for the camp, or hordes of reporters descending on you, or anything like that. The whole thing is totally over."

Not even remotely true, of course, but what Pamela didn't know couldn't, I figured, hurt her.

"Don't get me wrong, Jess," she said. "We love having you here—especially with you being so good about changing cabins—but Camp Wawasee has never known a single hint of controversy in the fifty years it's been in existence. I'd hate for … well, anything untoward to happen while you're here. . . ."

Untoward was, I guess, Pamela's way of referring to what had happened last spring, after I'd been struck by lightning and then got "invited" to stay at Crane Military for a few days, while some scientists studied my brain waves and tried to figure out how it was that, just by showing me a picture of a missing person, I could wake up the next morning knowing exactly where that person was.

Unfortunately, after they'd studied it for a while, the people at Crane had decided that my newfound talent might come in handy for tracking down so-called traitors and other unsavory individuals who really, as far as I knew, didn't want to be found. And while I'm as anxious as anybody to incarcerate serial killers and all, I just figured I'd stick to finding missing kids … specifically, kids who actually want to be found.

Only the people at Crane had turned out to be surprisingly unhappy to hear this.

But after some friends of mine and I had broken some windows and cut through some fencing and, oh, yeah, blown up a helicopter, they came around. Well, sort of. It helped, I guess, that I called the press and told them I couldn't do it anymore. Find missing people, I mean. That little special talent of mine just dried up and blew away. Poof.

That's what I told them, anyway.

But you could totally see where Pamela was coming from. On account of the fireball caused by the exploding helicopter and all. It had made a lot of papers. You don't get fireballs every day. At least, not in Indiana.

Pamela frowned a little. "The thing is, Jess," she said, "even though, as you say, you no longer have, um, any psychic powers, I have heard … well, I've heard missing kids across the country are still sort of, um, turning up. A lot more kids than ever turned up before … well, before your little weather-related accident. And thanks to some"—she cleared her throat—"anonymous tips."

My winning smile didn't waver.

"If that's true," I said, "it sure isn't because of me. No, ma'am. I am officially retired from the kid-finding business."

Pamela didn't exactly look relieved. She looked sort of like someone who wanted—really, really wanted—to believe something, but didn't think she should. Kind of like a kid whose friends had told her Santa Claus doesn't exist, but whose parents were still trying to maintain the myth.

Still, what could she do? She couldn't sit there and call me a liar to my face. What proof did she have?

Plenty, as it turned out. She just didn't know it.

"Well," she said. Her smile was as stiff as the Welcome to Camp Wawasee sign had been, in the places it hadn't been eaten away. "All right, then. I guess … I guess that's that."

I got up to go, feeling a little shaky. Well, you would have felt shaky, too, if you'd have come as close as I had to spending the rest of the summer stirring steaming platters of rigatoni bolognese.

"Oh," Pamela said, as if remembering something. "I almost forgot. You're friends with Ruth Abramowitz, aren't you? This came for her the other day. It didn't fit into her mailbox. Could you hand it to her? I saw you sitting with her at dinner just now. . . ."

Pamela took a large padded envelope out from behind her desk and handed it to me. I stood there, looking down at it, my throat dry.

"Urn," I said. "Sure. Sure, I'll give it to her."

My voice sounded unusually hoarse. Well, and why not? Pamela didn't know it, of course, but what she'd just given me—its contents, anyway—could prove that every single thing I'd just told her was an out-and-out lie.

"Thanks," Pamela said with a tired smile. "Things have just been so hectic …"

The corners of my mouth started to ache on account of how hard I was still smiling, pretending like I wasn't upset or anything. I should, I knew, have taken that envelope and run. That's what I should have done. But something made me stay and go, still in that hoarse voice, "Can I ask you a question, Pamela?"

She looked surprised. "Of course you can, Jess."

I cleared my throat, and kept my gaze on the strong, loopy handwriting on the front of the envelope. "Who told you?"

Pamela knit her eyebrows. "Told me what?"

"You know. About'me being the lightning girl." I looked up at her. "And that stuff about how kids are still being found, even though I'm retired."

Pamela didn't answer right away. But that was okay. I knew. And I hadn't needed any psychic powers to tell me, either. Karen Sue Hanky was dead meat.

It was right then there was a knock on Pamela's office door. She yelled, "Come in," looking way relieved at the interruption.

This old guy stuck his head in. I recognized him. He was Dr. Alistair, the camp director. He was kind of red in the face, and he had a lot of white hair that stuck out all around his shining bald head. He was supposedly this very famous conductor, but let me ask you: If he's so famous, what's he doing running what boils down to a glorified band camp in northern Indiana?

"Pamela," he said, looking irritated. "There's a young man on the phone looking for one of the counselors. I told him that we are not running an answering service here, and that if he wants to speak to one of our employees, he can leave a message like everybody else and we will post it on the message board. But he says it's an emergency, and—"

I moved so fast, I almost knocked over a chair.

"Is it for me? Jess Mastriani?"

It wasn't any psychic ability that told me that phone call was probably for me. It was the combination of the words "young man" and "emergency." All of the young men of my acquaintance, when confronted by someone like Dr. Alistair, would definitely go for the word "emergency" as soon as they heard about that stupid message board.

Dr. Alistair looked surprised … and not too pleased.

"Why, yes," he said. "If your name is Jessica, then it is for you. I hope Pamela has explained to you the fact that we are not running a message service here, and that the making or receiving of personal calls, except during Sunday afternoons, is expressly—"

"But it's an emergency," I reminded him.

He grimaced. "Down the hall. Phone at the reception desk. Press line one."

I was out of Pamela's office like a shot.

Who, I wondered, as I jogged down the hall, could it be? I knew who I wanted it to be. But the chances of Rob Wilkins calling me were slim to none. I mean, he never calls me at home. Why would he call me at camp?

Still, I couldn't help hoping Rob had overcome this totally ridiculous prejudice he's got against me because of my age. I mean, so what if he's eighteen and has graduated already, while I still have two years of high school left? It's not like he's leaving town to go to college in the fall, or something. Rob's not going to college. He has to work in his uncle's garage and support his mother, who recently got laid off from the factory she had worked in for like twenty years or something. Mrs. Wilkins was having trouble finding another job, until I suggested food services and gave her the number at Joe's. My dad, without even knowing Mrs. Wilkins and I were acquainted, hired her and put her on days at Mastriani's—which isn't a bad shift at all. He saves the totally crappy jobs and shifts for his kids. He believes strongly in teaching us what he calls a "work ethic."

But when I got to the phone and pushed line one, it wasn't Rob. Of course it wasn't Rob. It was my brother Douglas.

And that's how I really knew it wasn't an emergency. If it had been an emergency, it would have been about Douglas. The only emergencies in our family are because of Douglas. At least, they have been, ever since he got kicked out of college on account of these voices in his head that are always telling him to do stuff, like slit his wrists, or stick his hand in the barbecue coals. Stuff like that.

But so long as he takes his medicine, he's all right. Well, all right for Douglas, which is kind of relative.

"Jess," he said, after I went, "Hello?"

"Oh, hey." I hoped my disappointment that it was Douglas and not Rob didn't show in my voice.

"How's it going? Who was that freak who answered the phone? Is that your boss, or something?"

Douglas sounded good. Which meant he'd been taking his medication. Sometimes he thinks he's cured, so he stops. That's when the voices usually come back again.

"Yeah," I said. "That was Dr. Alistair. We aren't supposed to get personal calls, except on Sunday afternoons. Then it's okay."

"So he explained to me." Douglas didn't sound in the least bit ruffled by his conversation with Dr. Alistair, world-famous orchestra conductor. "And you prefer working for him over Dad? At least Dad would let you get phone calls at work."

"Yeah, but Dad would withhold my pay for the time I spent on the phone."

Douglas laughed. It was good to hear him laugh. He doesn't do it very often anymore.

"He would, too," he said. "It's good to hear your voice, Jess."

"I've only been gone a week," I reminded him.

"Well, a week's a long time. It's seven days. Which is one hundred and sixty-eight hours. Which is ten thousand, eighty minutes. Which is six hundred thousand, four hundred seconds."

It wasn't the medication that was making Douglas talk like this. It wasn't even his illness. Douglas has always gone around saying stuff like this. That's why, in school, he'd been known as The Spaz, and Dorkus, and other, even worse names. If I'd asked him to, Douglas could tell me exactly how many seconds it would be before I got back home. He could do it without even thinking about it.

But go to college? Drive a car? Talk to a girl to whom he wasn't related? No way. Not Douglas.

"Is that why you called me, Doug?" I asked. "To tell me how long I've been gone?"

"No." Douglas sounded offended. Weird as he is, he doesn't think he's the least unusual. Seriously. To Douglas, he's just, you know, average.

Yeah. Like your average twenty-year-old guy just sits around in his bedroom reading comic books all day long. Sure.

And my parents let him! Well, my mom, anyway. My dad's all for making Doug work the steam table in my absence, but Mom keeps going, "But Joe, he's still recovering. . . ."

"I called," Douglas said, "to tell you it's gone."

I blinked. "What's gone, Douglas?"

"You know," he said. "That van. The white one. That's been parked in front of the house. It's gone."

"Oh," I said, blinking some more. "Oh."

"Yeah," Douglas said. "It left the day after you did. And you know what that means."

"I do?"

"Yeah." And then, I guess because it was clear to him that I wasn't getting it, he elaborated. "It proves that you weren't being paranoid. They really are still spying on you."

"Oh," I said. "Wow."

"Yeah," Douglas said. "And that's not all. Remember how you told me to let you know if anyone we didn't know came around, asking about you?"

I perked up. I was sitting at the receptionist's desk in the camp's administrative offices. The receptionist had gone home for the day, but she'd left behind all her family photos, which were pinned up all around her little cubicle. She must have really liked NASCAR racing, because there were a lot of photos of guys in these junky-looking race cars.

"Yeah? Who was it?"

"I don't know. He just called."

Now I really perked up. Rob. It had to have been Rob. My family didn't know about him, on account of how I never really told them we were going out. Because we aren't, technically. Going out. For the reasons I already told you. So what's to tell?

Plus my mom would so kill me if she knew I was seeing a guy who wasn't, you know, college-bound. And had a police record.

"Yeah?" I said eagerly. "Did he leave a message?"

"Naw. Just asked if you were home, is all."

"Oh." Now that I thought about it, it probably hadn't been Rob at all. I mean, I'd made this total effort to let Rob know I was leaving for the rest of the summer. I had even gone to his uncle's garage, you know, where Rob works, and had this long conversation with his feet while he'd been underneath a Volvo station wagon, about how I was going away for seven weeks and this was his last chance to say good-bye to me, et cetera.

But had he looked the least bit choked up? Had he begged me not to go? Had he given me his class ring or an ID bracelet or something to remember him by? Not. So not. He'd come out from under that Volvo and said, "Oh, yeah? Well, that'll be good for you, to get away for a while. Hand me that wrench right there, will you?"

I tell you, romance is dead.

"Was it a Fed?" I asked Douglas.

Douglas went, "I don't know, Jess. How am I supposed to know that? He sounded like a guy. You know. Just a guy."

I grunted. That's the thing about Feds, see. They can sound just like normal people. When they aren't wearing their trench coats and earpieces, they look just like anybody else. They're not like the Feds on TV—you know, like Mulder and Scully, or whatever. Like, they aren't really handsome, or pretty, or anything. They just look … average. Like the kind of people you wouldn't actually notice, if they were following you—or even if they were standing right next to you.

They're tricky that way.

"That was it?" I noticed that there was this one guy who kept reappearing in the photographs on the secretary's bulletin board. He was probably her boyfriend or something. A NASCAR-driver boyfriend. I felt jealous of the secretary. The guy she liked liked her back. You could tell by the way he smiled into the camera. I wondered what it would be like to have the boy you like like you back. Probably pretty good.

"Well, not really," Douglas said. He said it in this way that—well, I could just tell I wasn't going to like the rest of this story.

"What," I said flatly.

"Look," Douglas said. "He sounded … well, he seemed to really want to talk to you. He said it was really important. He kept asking when you'd be back."

"You didn't," I said, just as flatly.

"He kept asking and asking," Douglas said. "Finally I had to say you wouldn't be back for six weeks, on account of you were up at Lake Wawasee. Look, Jess, I know I screwed up. Don't be mad. Please don't be mad."

I wasn't mad. How could I be mad? I mean, it was Douglas. It would be like being mad at the wind. The wind can't help blowing. Douglas can't help being a complete and utter moron sometimes.

Well, not just Douglas, either. A lot of boys can't, I've noticed.

"Great," I said with a sigh.

"I'm really sorry, Jess," Douglas said.

He really sounded it, too.

"Oh, don't worry about it," I said. "I'm not so sure I'm cut out for this camp counselor stuff anyway."

Now sounding surprised, Douglas said, "Jess, I can't think of a job more perfect for you."

I was shocked to hear this. "Really?"

"Really. I mean, you don't—what's the word?—condescend to kids like a lot of people do. You treat them like you treat everybody else. You know. Shitty."

"Gee," I said. "Thanks."

"You're welcome," Douglas said. "Oh, and Dad says anytime you want to quit and come on back home, the steam table's waiting for you."

"Ha-ha," I said. "How's Mikey?"

"Mike? He's trying to get as many glimpses of Claire Lippman in her underwear as he can before he leaves for Harvard at the end of August."

"It's good to have a hobby," I said.

"And Mom's making you a dress." You could tell Douglas was totally enjoying himself, now that he'd gotten over giving me the bad news. "She's got this idea that you're going to be nominated for homecoming queen this year, so you'd better have a dress for the occasion."

Of course. Because thirty years ago, my mom had been nominated homecoming queen of the very same high school I was currently going to. Why shouldn't I follow in her footsteps?

Um, how about because I am a mutated freak? But my mom stubbornly refuses to believe this. We mostly just let her live in her fantasy world, since it's easier than trying to drag her into the real one.

"And that's about it," Douglas said. "Got any messages for anybody? Want me to tell Rosemary anything?"

"Douglas," I hissed in a warning tone.

"Oops," he said. "Sorry."

"I better go," I said. I could hear someone coming down the hall. "Thanks for the heads up and all. I guess."

"Well," Douglas said. "I just thought you should know. About the guy, I mean. In case he shows up, or whatever."

Great. Just what I needed. Some reporter showing up at Lake Wawasee to interview Lightning Girl. Pamela wouldn't freak too much about that.

"Okay," I said. "Well, bye, Catbreath." I used my pet name for Douglas from when we were small.

He returned the favor. "See ya, Buttface."

I hung up. Down the hall, I heard keys rattle. Pamela was just locking up her office. She came out into the main reception area.

"Everything all right at home?" she asked me, sounding as if she actually cared.

I thought about the question. Was everything all right at home? Had everything ever been all right at home? No. Of course not.

And I didn't think it'd be too much of a stretch to say that everything would never be all right at home.

But that's not what I told Pamela.

"Sure," I said, hugging the padded envelope to my chest. "Everything's great."

C H A P T E R

4

I was forced to eat those words a second later, however, when I stepped outside the camp's administrative offices, into the sticky twilight, and heard it.

Someone screaming. Someone screaming my name.

Pamela heard it, too. She looked at me curiously. I didn't have time for questions, though. I took off running in the direction the screams were coming from. Pamela followed me. I could hear her office keys and loose change jangling in the pockets of her khaki shorts.

Dinner was over. The kids were streaming out of the dining hall and heading over toward the Pit for their first campfire. I saw kids of all sizes and colors, but the two to whom my gaze was instantly drawn were, of course, Shane and Lionel. This time, Shane had Lionel in a headlock. He wasn't choking him, or anything. He just wouldn't let go.

"It's okay, Lionel," Shane was saying. He pronounced it the American way, LIE-oh-nell. "They're just dogs. They're not going to hurt you."

The camp dogs, barking and wagging their tails delightedly, were leaping around, trying to lick Lionel and just about any other kid they could catch. Lionel, being so short, was getting most of these licks in the face.

"See, I know in Gonorrhea, you eat dogs," Shane was saying, "but here in America, see, we keep dogs as pets. . . ."

"Jess!" Lionel screamed. His thin voice broke with a sob. "Jess!"

There was a group of kids gathered around, watching Shane torture the smaller boy. Have you ever noticed how this always happens? I have. I mean, I know whenever I take a swing at somebody, people immediately come flocking to the area, eager to watch the fight. No one ever tries to break it up. No one ever goes, "Hey, Jess, why don't you just let the guy go?" No way. It's like why people go to car races: They want to see someone crash.

I waded through the kids and dogs until I reached Shane. I couldn't do what I wanted to, since I knew Pamela was right behind me. Instead, I said, "Shane, let him go."

Shane looked up at me, his eyes—which were already small—going even smaller.

"Whadduya mean?" he demanded. "I'm just showing him how the dogs aren't gonna hurt him. See, he's afraid of them. I'm doing him a favor. I'm trying to help him overcome his phobia—"

Lionel, by this time, was openly sobbing. The dogs licked away his tears before they had a chance to trickle down his face very far.

I could hear Pamela's keys still jangling behind me. She wasn't, I realized, on the scene quite yet. Clutching my envelope in one hand, I reached out with the other and, placing my thumb and middle finger just above Shane's elbow, squeezed as hard as I could.

Shane let out a shriek and let go of Lionel just as Pamela broke through the crowd that had gathered around us.

"What—" she demanded, bewilderedly, "is going on here?"

Lionel, free at last, hurled himself at me, flinging his arms around my waist and burying his face in my stomach so the dogs couldn't get at his tears.

"They try to kill me!" he was screaming. "Jess, Jess, those dogs are try to kill me."

Shane, meanwhile, was massaging his funny bone. "Whaddidja have to go and do that for?" he demanded. "You know, if it turns out I can't play anymore on account of you, my dad's going to sue you—"

"Shane." I put one hand on Lionel's shaking shoulders and, with the envelope, pointed toward the Pit. "You've got one strike. Now go."

"A strike?" Shane looked up at me incredulously. "A strike? What's a strike? What'd I get a strike for?"

"You know what you got it for," I said, answering his last question first. The truth was, I hadn't figured out the answer to his first question. But one thing I did know: "Two more, and you're out, buddy. Now go sit with the others at the campfire and keep your hands to yourself."

Shane stamped a sneakered foot. "Out? You can't do that. You can't throw me out."

"Watch me."

Shane turned his accusing stare toward Pamela. Unlike when he was looking at me, he actually had to tilt his chin a little to see her eyes.

"Can she do that?" he demanded.

Pamela, to my relief, said, "Of course she can. Now all of you, go to the Pit."

Nobody moved. Pamela said, "I said, go."

Something in her voice made them do what she said. Now that's an ability I wouldn't mind having: making people do what I told them, without having to resort to doing them bodily harm.

Lionel continued to cling to me, still sobbing. The dogs had not gone away. In the usual manner of animals, they had realized that Lionel wanted nothing to do with them, and so they remained stubbornly at his side, looking at him with great interest, their tongues ready and waiting for him to turn around so they could continue lapping up his tears.

"Lionel," I said, giving the little boy's shoulder a shake. "The dogs really won't hurt you. They're good dogs. I mean, if any of them had ever hurt anyone, do you think they would be allowed to stay? No way. It would open the camp up to all sorts of lawsuits. You know how litigious the parents of gifted children can be." Shane being example numero uno.

Pamela raised her eyebrows at this but said nothing, letting me handle the situation in my own way. Eventually, Lionel took his head out of my midriff and blinked up at me tearfully. The dogs, though they stirred eagerly at this motion, stayed where they were.

"I don't know what this means, this 'litigious,'" Lionel said. "But I thank you for helping me, Jess."

I reached out and patted his springy hair. "Don't mention it. Now, watch."

I stuck my hand out. The dogs, recognizing some sort of weird human/dog signal, rushed forward and began licking my fingers.

"See?" I said as Lionel watched, wide-eyed. "They're just interested in making friends." Or in the smell of all the Fiddle Faddle I'd handled earlier, but whatever.

"I see." Lionel regarded the dogs with wide dark eyes. "I will not be afraid, then. But … is it permissible for me not to touch them?"

"Sure," I said. I withdrew my hand, which felt as if I'd just dipped it into a vat of hot mayonnaise. I wiped it off on my shorts. "Why don't you go join the rest of the Birch Trees?"

Lionel gave me a tremulous smile, then hurried toward the Pit, with many furtive glances over his shoulder at the dogs. I don't think he noticed that Pamela and I had as many by the collar as we could hold.

"Well," Pamela said when Lionel was out of earshot. "You certainly handled that … interestingly."

"That Shane," I said. "He's a pill."

"He is a challenge," Pamela corrected me. "He does seem to get worse every year."

I shook my head. "Tell me about it." I was beginning to wonder if Andrew, whose cabin I'd inherited, had heard through the grapevine that Shane had been assigned to it, and then lied about having mono to get out of having to spend his summer dealing with that particular "challenge." Andrew was a "returner." He'd worked at the camp the summer before as well.

"Why do you let him come back?" I asked.

Pamela sighed. "I realize you wouldn't know it to look at him, but Shane's actually extremely gifted."

"Shane is?"

My astonishment must have shown in my voice, since Pamela nodded vigorously as she said, "Oh, yes, it's true. The boy is a musical genius. Perfect pitch, you know."

I just shook my head. "Get out of town."

"I'm serious. Not to mention the fact that … well, his parents are very … generous with their support."

Well. That pretty much said it all, didn't it?

I joined my fellow Birch Trees—and the rest of the camp—around the fire. The first night's campfire was devoted almost entirely to staff introductions and acquainting the campers with Camp Wawasee's many rules. All of the musical instructors were paraded out, along with the rest of the camp staff—the counselors, the administrators, the lifeguards, the handymen, the nurse, the cafeteria workers, and so on.

Then we went over the list of rules and regulations: no running; no littering; no one allowed out of the cottages after 10:00 P.M.; no cabin raids; no diving into the lake; no playing of musical instruments outside of the practice rooms (this was a crucial rule, because if everyone tried to practice outside of the soundproof rooms provided for that purpose, the camp would soon sound worse than a traffic jam at rush hour). We learned about how Camp Wawasee was smack in the middle of five hundred acres of federally protected forest, and how, if any one of us went wandering off into this forest, we should pretty much expect never to be heard from again.

On this encouraging note, we were reminded that the mandatory Polar Bear swim commenced at seven in the morning. Then, after a few rounds of Dona Nobis Pacem (hey, it was orchestra camp, after all), we were dismissed for the night.

Shane was at my side the minute I stood up.

"Hey," he said, rugging on my shirt. "What happens if I get three strikes?"

"You're out," I informed him.

"But you can't throw me out of the camp." Shane's freckles—he had quite a lot of them—stood out in the firelight. "You try to do that, my dad'll sue you."

See what I meant, about gifted kids' parents being litigious?

"I'm not going to throw you out of camp," I said. "But I might throw you out of the cabin."

Shane glared at me. "Whadduya mean?"

"Make you sleep on the porch," I said. "Without benefit of air-conditioning."

Shane laughed. He actually laughed and went, "That's my punishment? Sleep without air-conditioning?"

He cackled all the way back to the cottage, and accrued another strike when, along the way, he threw a rock—supposedly at a firefly, or so he claimed—which just happened to miss Lionel by only about an inch and ended up hitting Arthur—who took out his feelings on the matter with prompt assertiveness. I, relieved to see that at least one member of Birch Tree Cottage could defend himself against Shane, did nothing to stop the fight.

"Jeez," Scott said. He and Dave, their own campers having obediently gone on ahead to their cabins—and probably brushed their teeth and tucked themselves in already—paused beside me to observe Shane and Arthur's wrestling match, which was happening off the lighted path, and in what appeared to be a dense patch of poison ivy. "What'd you ever do to deserve that kid?"

Watching the fight, I shrugged. "Born under an unlucky star, I guess."

"That kid," Dave said, watching as Shane tried, unsuccessfully, to grind Arthur's face into some tree roots, "is just destined to take an Uzi to his homeroom teacher someday."'

"Maybe I should stop this—" Scott started to step off the path.

I grabbed his arm. "Oh, no," I said. "Let's let them get it out of their systems." Arthur had just gotten the upper hand, and was seated on Shane's chest.

"Say you're sorry," Arthur commanded Shane, "or I'll bounce up and down until your ribs break."

Scott and Dave and I, impressed by this threat, looked at one another with raised eyebrows.

"Jess!" Shane wailed.

"Shane," I said, "if you're going to throw rocks, you have to be prepared to pay the consequences."

"But he's going to kill me!"

"Just like you could have killed him with that rock."

"He wouldn't have died from that rock," Shane howled. "It was a little itty-bitty rock."

"It could have put his eye out," I said in my prissiest voice. Scott and Dave both had to turn away, lest the boys catch them laughing.

"When you break a rib," Arthur informed his quarry, "you can't breathe from your diaphragm. You know, when you play. Because it hurts so much. Don't know how you're going to sustain those whole notes when—"

"GET OFFA ME!" Shane roared.

Arthur scooped up a handful of dirt, apparently with the intention of shoveling it into Shane's mouth.

"All right, all right," Shane bellowed. "I'm sorry."

Arthur let him up. Shane, following him back to the path, gave me a dirty look and said, "Wait until my dad finds out what a sucky counselor you are. He'll get you fired for sure."

"Gosh," I said. "You mean I might have to leave here and never listen to your whining voice again? What a punishment."

Furious, Shane stormed off toward Birch Tree Cottage. Arthur, chuckling, followed him.

"Jeez," Scott said again. "You want help putting those guys to bed?"

I knit my brow. "What are you talking about? They're almost twelve years old. They don't need to be put to bed."

He just shook his head.

About half an hour later, I realized what he'd been talking about. It was close to ten, but none of the residents of Birch Tree Cottage were in bed. None of them were even in their pajamas. In fact, they were doing everything but getting ready for bed. Some of them were jumping on the beds. Others were racing around the beds. A few had climbed under their beds, into the cubbies where they were supposed to stash their clothes.

But none of them were actually in the beds.

Somehow, I couldn't see any of this happening in Frangipani Cottage. Karen Sue Hanky, I was willing to bet, was probably braiding somebody's hair right now, while somebody else told ghost stories and they all enjoyed a big bowl of buttered popcorn from the utility kitchen.

Popcorn. My stomach rumbled at the thought. I hadn't had any dinner. I was starving. I was starving, Birch Tree Cottage was out of control, and I still hadn't had a chance to open that envelope Pamela had given to me to give to Ruth.

Except, of course, that what was inside the envelope was really for me.

It was the idea of the ghost stories that did it, I guess. I couldn't shriek over the screaming, and I couldn't catch any of the kids who were racing around, but I could make it a lot harder for them to see. I stalked over to the fuse box and, one by one, threw the switches.

The cottage was plunged into blackness. It's amazing how dark things can get out in the country. They had switched off the lights along the paths through camp, since everyone was supposed to be in bed, so there wasn't even any light from outdoors to creep in through the windows—especially since the area we were in was so thickly wooded, not even moonbeams could penetrate the canopy of leaves overhead. I couldn't see my own hand in front of my face.

And the other residents of Birch Tree Cottage were suffering from a similar difficulty. I heard several thumps as the runners collided with pieces of furniture, and a number of people shrieked as the lights went out.

Then frightened voices began to call out my name.

"Oops," I said. "Power outage. There must be a storm somewhere."

More frightened whimpering.

"I guess," I said, "we'll all just have to go to sleep. Because we can't do anything in the dark."

It was Shane's voice that rang out scathingly, "There's no power outage. You turned out the lights."

Little brat.

"I didn't," I said. "Come over here, and try the switch." I illustrated for them, flicking the switch on and off. The sound was unmistakable. "I guess everybody better get into their pajamas and get into bed."

There was a good deal of moaning and groaning about how were they supposed to find their pajamas in the dark. There was also some bickering about the fact that they couldn't brush their teeth in the dark, and what if they got cavities, et cetera. I ignored it. I had found, in the utility kitchen, a flashlight, for use in the event of a real blackout, and I offered to escort whoever wanted to go to the bathroom.

Shane said, "Just give me the flashlight, and I'll escort everyone," but I wasn't falling for that one.

After everyone had done what he needed to do, ablution-wise, I reminded them all about the early morning Polar Bear swim, and that they had better get plenty of sleep, since their first music lessons would begin right after breakfast. The only time they wouldn't be playing their instruments, in fact, would be at the Polar Bear swim, meals, and a two-hour period from three to five, when lake swims, tennis, baseball, and arts and crafts were allowed. There were nature walks, for those who were so inclined. There even used to be trips to Wolf Cave, a semi-famous cave near the lake—semi-famous because up so far north, caves are almost unheard of, the glaciers having flattened most of upstate Indiana. But of course some stupid camper had gotten himself whacked on the head by a falling stalactite, or something, so now spelunking was no longer listed as one of the activities allowed during the kids' few short hours of free time.

It seemed to me that for kids, the campers at Lake Wawasee weren't allowed a whole lot of time to be … well, just kids.

When they were all in their beds, and had sweetly sang out good night to me, I took the flashlight with me into my own room. No sense adjusting the fuse box so that my own light would turn on: they'd just see it, shining out from under the crack in the door, and know I'd lied to them about the power outage. I took off my counselor shirt and shorts, and, in a pair of boxers I'd stolen from Douglas and a tank top, I consumed most of a box of Fiddle Paddle while perusing, by flashlight beam, the contents of the envelope Pamela had given me to give to Ruth.

Dear jess,

I hope this finds you well. Your camp counselor job sounds like a lot of fun.

Yeah, right, I grunted to myself. Of course it sounded like fun … to people who'd never had the displeasure of meeting Shane, anyway. The very feminine cursive went on.

Enclosed please find a photo of Taylor Monroe.

I shined the beam from the flashlight into the envelope and found a color studio portrait—like the kind you would get at Sears, with Sesame Street in the background—of a curly-headed toddler in overalls. OshKosh B'gosh.

Taylor disappeared from a shopping mall two years ago, when he was three years old. His parents are desperate to get him back. The police have no suspects or leads.

Good. A neat and simple kidnapping. Rosemary had done a lot of homework to make sure of this. She only sent me the cases in which she was certain the kid in question actually wanted to be found. It was my only condition for finding the kids: that they really wanted to be found.

Well, that, and maintaining my anonymity, of course.

As always, call if you find him. You know the number.

The letter was signed, Love, Rosemary.

I studied the photo in the beam from my flashlight. Taylor Monroe, I said to myself. Taylor Monroe, where are you?

The door to my room banged open, and I dropped the photo—and the flashlight—in my surprise.

"Hey," Shane said with interest. "What's that stuff?"

"Jeez," I said, scrambling to hide the photo and letter in my sheets. "Ever heard of knocking?"

"Who's the kid?" Shane wanted to know.

"None of your business." I found the flashlight and shined it on him. "What do you want?"

Shane's eyes narrowed, but not just because there was a bright light shining into them. They narrowed with suspicion.

"Hey," he said. "That's a picture of a missing kid, isn't it?"

Well, Pamela had been right about one thing, anyway. Shane was gifted. And not just musically, either, it appeared. The kid was sharp.

"Don't be ridiculous," I said.

"Oh, yeah? Well, what are you hiding it for, then?"

"Shane." I couldn't believe this. "What do you want?"

Shane ignored my question, however.

"You lied," he said, sounding indignant. "You totally lied. You do still have those powers."

"Yeah, that's right, Shane," I said. "That's why I'm working here at Camp Wawasee for five bucks an hour. I have psychic powers and all, and could be raking in the bucks finding missing people for the government, but I prefer to hang around here."

Shane's only response to my sarcasm was to blink a few times.

"Come off it," I said sourly. "Okay? Now why are you out of bed?"

The look of dark suspicion didn't leave Shane's face, but he did manage to remember his fake excuse for barging in on me, undoubtedly in an effort to catch me sans apparel. He whined, "I want a drink of water."

"So go get one," I said, not very nicely.

"I can't see my way to the bathroom," he whined some more.

"You found your way here," I pointed out to him.

"But—"

"Get out, Shane."

He left, still whining. I fished out Taylor's photo and Rosemary's letter. I didn't feel bad about lying to Shane. Not at all. I'd done it as much to protect Rosemary as myself. After my run-in last spring with the U.S. government, whose ideas about the best way to use my psychic ability had sort of differed from mine, Rosemary, a receptionist who worked at a foundation that helped find missing children, had very generously agreed to help me … um, well, privatize. And we had been working together, undiscovered, ever since.

And I wanted things to stay that way between us: undiscovered. I would not risk revealing our secret even to a whiny almost-twelve-year-old musical genius like Shane.

To be on the safe side, I put away Rosemary's letter and picked up a copy of Cosmo Ruth had lent me. "10 Ways to Tell He Thinks of You as More Than Just a Friend." Ooh. Good stuff. I read eagerly, wondering if I'd realize, just from reading this article, that Rob really did like me, only I had simply been too stupid to read the signs.

1. He cooks you dinner on your birthday.

Well, Rob certainly hadn't done that. But my birthday was in April. He and I hadn't really started … well, whatever it was we were doing … until May. So that one was no good.

2. He makes an attempt to get along with your girlfriends.

I only have one real friend, and that's Ruth. She's barely even met Rob. Well, not really. See, Rob's from what you might call the wrong side of the tracks. Ruth isn't a snob … at least, not really … but she definitely wouldn't approve of me going out with someone who didn't have college and a career as a professional in his sights.

So much for Number 2.

3. He listens to you when—

I was interrupted by a thump. It was followed immediately by a wail.

Gripping my flashlight, I stalked out of my room.

"All right," I said, shining the flashlight into one face after another—all of which were very much awake. "What gives?"

When the light from my flashlight reached Lionel's face, it picked up the tear tracks down his cheeks.

"Why are you crying?" I demanded. But I knew. That thump I heard. Shane was in his bed, some feet away, but his face looked too sweetly innocent for him to not be guilty of something.

But all Lionel would say was, "I am not crying."

I was sick of it. I really was. All I wanted to do was read my magazine and go to bed, so I could find Taylor Monroe. Was that so much to ask, after such a long day?

"Fine," I said, sitting down on the floor, my flashlight shining against the ceiling.

Arthur went, "Uh, Jess? What are you doing?"

"I am going to sit here," I said, "until you all fall asleep."

This caused some excited giggling. Don't ask me why.

There was silence for maybe ten seconds. Then Doo Sun went, "Jess? Do you have any brothers?"

Guardedly, I replied in the affirmative.

"I thought so," Doo Sun said.

Instantly suspicious, I asked, "Why?"

"You're wearing boys' underpants," Paul pointed out.

I looked down. I'd forgotten about Douglas's boxers.

"So I am," I said.

"Jess," Shane said, in a voice so sugary, I knew he was up to no good.

"What," I said flatly.

"Are you a lesbian?"

I closed my eyes. I counted to ten. I tried to ignore the giggling from the other beds.

I opened my eyes and said, "No, I am not a lesbian. As a matter of fact, I have a boyfriend."

"Who?" Arthur wanted to know. "One of those guys I saw you with on the path? One of those other counselors?"

This caused a certain amount of suggestive hooting. I said, "No. My boyfriend would never do anything as geeky as be a camp counselor. My boyfriend rides a Harley and is a car mechanic."

This caused some appreciative murmuring. Eleven-year-old boys are much more impressed by car mechanics than people like … well, my best friend, Ruth, for instance.

Then … don't ask me why—maybe I was still thinking about Karen Sue over there in Frangipani Cottage. But suddenly, I launched into this story about Rob, and about how once this guy had brought a car into Wilkins's Auto that turned out to have a skeleton in the trunk.

It was, of course, a complete fabrication. As I went on about Rob and this car, which turned out to be haunted, on account of the woman who'd been left to suffocate in its trunk, I borrowed liberally from Stephen King, incorporating aspects from both Maximum Overdrive and Christine. These kids were too young, of course, to have read the books, and I doubted their parents had ever let them see the movies.

And I was right. I held them enthralled all the way until the fiery cataclysm at the end, in which Rob saved our entire town by bravely pointing a grenade launcher at the renegade automobile and blowing it into a thousand pieces.

Stunned silence followed this pronouncement. I had, I could tell, greatly disturbed them. But I was not done.

"And sometimes," I whispered, "on nights like this, when a storm somewhere far away douses the power, blanketing us in darkness, you can still see the headlights of that killer car, way off on the horizon"—I flicked off the flashlight—"way off in the distance … coming closer … and closer … and closer …"

Not a sound. They were hardly breathing.

"Good night," I said, and went back into my room.

Where I fell asleep a few minutes later, after finishing the box of Fiddle Faddle.

And I didn't hear another peep out of my fellow residents of Birch Tree Cottage until after reveille the next morning. . . .

By which time, of course, I knew precisely where Taylor Monroe was.

C H A P T E R

5

"I was so scared, I almost wet the bed," said John.

"Yeah? Well, I was so scared, I couldn't get out of bed, not even to go to the bathroom." Sam had a towel slung around his neck. His chest was so thin, it was practically concave. "I just held it," he said. "I didn't want to run the risk, you know, of seeing those headlights out the window."

"I saw them," Tony declared.

There were general noises of derision at this.

"No, really," Tony said. "Through the window. I swear. It looked like they were floating over the lake."

A heated discussion followed about whether or not Rob's killer car could float, or if it had merely hovered over the lake.

Standing in line for the Polar Bear swim, I began to feel that things were not nearly so bleak as they'd seemed yesterday. For one thing, I'd had a good night's sleep.

Really. I know that sounds surprising, considering that while I'd slept, my brain waves had apparently been bombarded with all this information about a five-year-old kid I had never met. On TV and in books and stuff, psychics always get this tortured look on their faces when they get a vision, like someone is jabbing them with a toothpick, or whatever. But that's never happened to me. Maybe it's because I only get my psychic visions while I sleep, but none of them have ever hurt.

The way I see it, it's exactly like all those times you've been sitting there thinking to yourself, Gee, So-and-So hasn't called in a while, and all of a sudden the phone rings, and it's So-and-So. And you're all, "Dude, I was just thinking about you," and you laugh because it's a big coincidence.

Only it's not. It's not a coincidence. That was the psychic part of your brain working, the part hardly any of us ever listens to, the part people call "intuition" or "gut feeling" or "instinct." That's the part of my brain that the lightning, when it struck me, sent all haywire. And that's why I'm a receiver now for all sorts of information I shouldn't have—like the fact that Taylor Monroe, who'd disappeared from a shopping center in Des Moines two years ago, was now living in Gainesville, Florida, with some people to whom he wasn't even remotely related.

See, ordinary people—most everyone, really, even smart people, like Einstein and Madonna—use only three percent of their brain. Three percent! That's all it takes to learn to walk and talk and make change and parallel park and decide which flavor of yogurt is your favorite.

But some people—people like me, who've been hit by lightning, or put into a sensory deprivation tank, or whatever—use more than their three percent. For whatever reason, we've tapped into the other ninety-seven percent of our brain.

And that's the part, apparently, where all the good stuff is. . . .

Except that the only stuff I seem to have access to is the current address of just about every missing person in the universe.

Well, it was better than nothing, I guess.

But yeah, okay? In spite of the psychic vision thing, I'd slept great.

I don't think the same could be said for my fellow campers—and their counselors. Ruth in particular looked bleary-eyed.

"My God," she said. "They kept me up all night. They just kept yakking. . . ." Her blue eyes widened behind her glasses as she got a better look at me. I was in my bathing suit, just like my boys, with a towel slung around my own neck. "God, you're not actually going in, are you?"

I shrugged. "Sure." What else was I supposed to do? I was going to have to call Rosemary, as soon as I could get my hands on a phone. But that, I was pretty sure, wasn't going to be for hours.

"You don't have to," Ruth said. "I mean, it's just for the kids. . . ."

"Well, it's not like I could take a shower this morning," I reminded her. "Not with eight budding little sex maniacs around."

Ruth looked from me to the bright blue water, sparkling in the morning sun. "Suit yourself," she said. "But you're going to smell like chlorine all day."

"Yeah," I said. "And who's going to get close enough to smell me?"

We both looked over at Todd. He, too, was in a bathing suit. And looking very impressive in it, as well, I might add.

"Not him," I said.

Ruth sighed. "No, I guess not."

I noticed that while Todd might be ignoring us, Scott and Dave definitely weren't. They both looked away when I glanced in their direction, but there was no question about it: they'd been scoping.

Ruth, however, only had eyes for Todd.

"And you have your tutorial today," she was pointing out. "I thought that flute guy was pretty hot. You don't want to smell chlorine-y for him, do you?"

"That flute guy" was the wind instructor, a French dude name Jean-Paul something or other. He was kind of hot, in a scruffy-looking French kind of way. But he was a little old for me. I mean, I like my men older, and all, but I think thirty might be pushing it a little. How weird would that look at prom?

"I don't know," I said as our line moved closer to the water. "He's Do-able, I guess. But no Hottie."

I hadn't realized Karen Sue Hanky was eavesdropping until she spun around and, with flashing but deeply circled eyes, snarled, "I hope you aren't speaking of Professor Le Blanc. He happens to be a musical genius, you know."

I rolled my eyes. "Who isn't a musical genius around here?" I wanted to know. "Except you, of course, Karen."

Ruth, who'd been chewing gum, swallowed it in her effort not to laugh.

"I resent that," Karen said, slowly turning as red as the letters on the lifeguard's T-shirt. "I will have you know that I have been practicing for four hours a day, and that my dad's paying thirty dollars an hour to a professor who's been giving me private lessons over at the university."

"Yeah?" I raised my eyebrows. "Gosh, maybe you'll be able to keep up with the rest of us now."

Karen narrowed her eyes at me.

But whatever she'd been going to say was drowned out when the lifeguard—who was also pretty cute: definitely Do-able—blew a whistle and yelled, "Birch Tree!"

My fellow birches and I made a run for the water and jumped in simultaneously, with much shrieking and splashing. Some of us were better swimmers than others, and there was much choking and sputtering, and at least one attempted drowning, which the lifeguard spotted. Shane was forced to sit out for twenty minutes. But, otherwise, we had a good time.

I was teaching them a new song—since Pamela had put the kibosh on "I Met a Miss"—when Scott and Dave and Ruth and Karen strolled by with their campers. All of them, I noticed, looked a little bleary around the edges.

"I don't understand how you can be so wide awake," Scott said. "Didn't they keep you up all night?"

"No," I said. "Not at all."

"What's your secret?" Dave wanted to know. "Mine were bouncing off the walls. I had to sleep with a pillow over my head."

Ruth shook her head. "Their first night away from home," she said knowingly. "It's always the toughest. They usually settle down by the third or fourth night, out of sheer exhaustion."

Karen Sue exhaled gustily. "Not mine, I'll bet." She glared at some passing Frangipanis, who giggled and tore off along the path, causing all of us to chime, in unison, "Walk, don't run!"

"They are little monsters," Karen muttered, under her breath. "Won't do a thing I say, and the mouths on them! I never heard such language in all my life! And all night long, it was giggle, giggle, giggle."

"Me, too," Ruth said tiredly. "They didn't nod off until around five, I think."

"Five-thirty for me," Scott said. He looked at me. "I can't believe that Shane of yours just slipped off to Slumber land without a fight."

"Yeah," Dave said. "What's your secret?"

I honestly didn't know any better. I said, cheerfully, "Oh, I just told them all this really long story, and they nodded off right away. We all slept like stones. Didn't wake up until reveille."

Ruth, astonished, said, "Really?"

"What was the story about?" Dave wanted to know.

Laughingly, I told them. Not about Rob, of course, but about the killer car, and the appropriating of some of Mr. King's works.

They listened in stunned silence. Then Karen said vehemently, "I don't believe in frightening children with ghost stories."

I snorted. Karen, of course, didn't know what she was talking about. What kid didn't love a ghost story? Ghost stories weren't the problem. But the fact that a three-year-old could be kidnapped from a mall and not be found until two years later?

Now that was scary.

Which was why, instead of joining my fellow Birch Trees for breakfast that morning—even though I was starving, of course, after my swim and my Fiddle Faddle dinner of the night before—I snuck back into the camp's administrative offices, in the hopes of finding a phone I could use.

I scored one without a lot of trouble. The secretary with the NASCAR-driving boyfriend wasn't in yet. I slipped into her chair and, dialing nine first to get out, dialed the number to the National Organization for Missing Children.

Rosemary didn't pick up. Some other lady did.

"1-800-WHERE-R-YOU," she said. "How may I direct your call?"

I had to whisper, of course, so I wouldn't be overheard. I also assumed my best Spanish accent, just in case the line was being monitored. "Rosemary, por favor."

The lady went, "Excuse me?"

I whispered, "Rosemary."

"Oh," the lady said. "Um. One moment."

Jeez! I didn't have a moment! I could be busted any second. All I needed was for Pamela to walk in and find that not only had I abandoned my charges, but I was also making personal use of camp property. . . .

"This is Rosemary," a voice said, cautiously, into my ear.

"Hey," I said, dropping the Spanish accent. There was no need to say who was calling. Rosemary knew my voice. "Taylor Monroe. Gainesville, Florida." I rattled off the street address. Because that's how it comes. The information, I mean. It's like there's a search engine inside of my brain: insert name and photo image of missing child, and out comes full address, often with zip code attached, of where child can be located.

Seriously. It's bizarre, especially considering I've never even heard of most of these places.

"Thank you," Rosemary said, careful not to say my name within hearing of her supervisor, who'd sicced the Feds on me once before. "They're going to be so happy. You don't know—"

It was at this point that Pamela, looking troubled, came striding down the hall, heading straight toward the secretary's desk.

I whispered, "Sorry, Rosemary, gotta go," and hung up the phone. Then I ducked beneath the desk.

It didn't do any good, though. I was busted. Way busted.

Pamela went, "Jess?"

I curled into a tight ball underneath the secretary's desk. Maybe, if I didn't move, didn't even breathe, Pamela would think she had seen a mirage or something, and go away.

"Jessica," Pamela said, in the kind of voice you probably wouldn't use if you were talking to a mirage. "Come out. I saw you."

Sheepishly, I crawled out from beneath the desk.

"Look," I said. "I can explain. It's my grandma's ninetieth birthday today, and if I didn't call first thing, well, there'd be H to pay—"

I thought I'd get brownie points for saying H instead of hell, but it didn't work out that way. For one thing, Pamela had looked as if she'd already been in a bad mood before she saw me. Now she was even more upset.

"Jess," she said in a weird voice. "You know you aren't supposed to be using camp property—"

"—for personal calls," I finished for her. "Yes, I know. And I'm really sorry. Like I said, it was an emergency."

Pamela looked way more upset than the situation warranted. I knew something else was up. But I figured it was some kind of orchestra camp emergency or something. You know, like they'd run out of clarinet reeds.

But of course that wasn't it. Of course it turned out to have something to do with me after all.

"Jess," Pamela said. "I was just going to look for you."

"You were?" I blinked at her. There was only one reason for Pamela to have been looking for me, and that was that I was in trouble. Again.

And the only thing I'd done recently—besides make a personal call from a camp phone—was the whole ghost story thing. Had Karen Sue ratted me out for that? If so, it had to be a record. I had left her barely five minutes ago. What did the girl have, bionic feet?

It was clear that Pamela was on Karen Sue's side about the whole not frightening little children thing. I could see I was going to have to do some fast talking.

"Look," I said. "I can explain. Shane was completely out of control last night, and the only way I could get him to stop picking on the littler kids was to—"

"Jessica," Pamela interrupted, sort of sharply. "I don't know what you're talking about. There's … there's actually someone here to see you."

I shut up and just stared at her. "Someone here?" I echoed lamely. "To see me?"

A thousand things went through my head. The first thing I thought was … Douglas. Douglas's phone call the night before. He hadn't just been calling to say he missed me. He'd been calling to say good-bye. He'd finally done it. The voices had told him to, and so he had. Douglas had killed himself, and my dad—my mother—my other brother—one of them was here to break the news to me.

A roaring sound started in my ears. I felt as if the bottom had dropped out of my stomach.

"Where?" I asked, through lips that felt like they were made of ice.

Pamela nodded, her expression grave, toward her office door. I moved toward it slowly, with Pamela following close behind. Let it be Michael, I prayed. Let them have sent Mikey to break the news to me. Michael I could take. If it was my mother, or even my father, I was bound to start crying. And I didn't want to cry in front of Pamela.

It wasn't Mikey, though. It wasn't my father, either, or even my mother. It was a man I'd never seen before.

He was older than me, but younger than my parents. He looked to be about Pamela's age. Still, he was definitely Do-able. He may have even qualified for Hottie. Clean-shaven, with dark, slightly longish hair, he had on a tie and sports coat. When my gaze fell upon him, he climbed hastily to his feet, and I saw that he was quite tall—well, everyone is, to me—and not very graceful.

"M-Miss Mastriani?" he asked in a shy voice.

Social worker? I wondered, taking in the fact that his shoes were well-worn, and the cuffs of his sports coat a bit frayed. Definitely not a Fed. He was too good-looking to be a Fed. He'd have drawn too much attention.

Schoolteacher, maybe. Yeah. Math or science. But why on earth would a math or science teacher be here to break the news about my brother Douglas's suicide?

"I'm Jonathan Herzberg," the man said, thrusting his right hand toward me. "I really hope you won't resent the intrusion. I understand that it is highly unusual, and a gross infringement on your rights to personal privacy and all of that … but the fact is, Miss Mastriani, I'm desperate." His brown-eyed gaze bore into mine. "Really, really desperate."

I took a step backward, away from the hand. I moved back so fast, I ended up with my butt against the edge of Pamela's desk.

A reporter. I should have known. The tie should have been a dead giveaway.

"Look," I said.

The icy feeling had left my lips. The roaring in my ears had stopped. The feeling that the bottom of my stomach had dropped out? Yeah, that had disappeared. Instead, I just felt anger.

Cold, hard anger.

"I don't know what paper you're from," I said stonily. "Or magazine or news show or whatever. But I have had just about enough of you guys. You all practically ruined my life this past spring, following me around, bugging my family. Well, it's over, okay? Get it through your heads: lightning girl has hung up her bolts. I am not in the missing person business anymore."

Jonathan Herzberg looked more than a little taken aback. He glanced from me to Pamela and then back again.

"M-Miss Mastriani," he stammered. "I'm not … I mean, I don't—"

"Mr. Herzberg isn't a reporter, Jess." Pamela's voice was, for her, uncharacteristically soft. That, more than anything, got my attention. "We never allow reporters—and we have had our share of illustrious guests in the past—onto our properly. Surely you know that."

I suppose I did know that, somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind. Lake Wawasee was private property. You had to be on a list of invited guests even to be let through the gates. They took security very seriously at Camp Wawasee, due to the number of expensive instruments lying around. Oh, and the kids, and all.

I looked from Pamela to Mr. Herzberg and then back again. They both looked … well, flushed. There was no other way to put it.

"Do you two know each other or something?" I asked.

Pamela, who was by no means what you'd call a shrinking violet kind of gal, actually blushed.

"No, no," she said. "I mean … well, we just met. Mr. Herzberg … well, Jess, Mr. Herzberg—"

I could see I was going to get nothing rational out of Miss J Crew. I decided to tackle Mr. L.L. Bean, instead.

"All right," I said, eyeing him. "I'll bite. If you're not a reporter, what do you want with me?"

Jonathan Herzberg wiped his hands on his khaki pants. He must have been sweating a lot or something, since he left damp spots on the cotton.

"I was hoping," he said softly, "that you could help me find my little girl."

C H A P T E R

6

I looked quickly at Pamela. She hadn't taken her eyes off Jonathan Herzberg.

Great. Just great. Mary Ann was in love with the Professor.

"Maybe you didn't hear me the first time," I said. "I don't do that anymore."

A lie, of course. But he didn't know that.

Or maybe he did.

Mr. Herzberg said, "I know that's what you told everyone. Last spring, I mean. But I … well, I was hoping you only said that because the press and everything … well, it got a little intense."

I just looked at him. Intense? He called being chased by government goons with guns intense?

I'd show him intense.

"Hello?" I said. "What part of 'I can't help you' don't you understand? It doesn't work anymore. The psychic thing is played out. The batteries have run dry—"

As I'd been speaking, Mr. Herzberg had been digging around in his briefcase. When he stood up again, he was holding a photograph.

"This is her," he said, thrusting the photo into my hands. "This is Keely. She's only five—"

I backed away with about as much horror as if he'd put a snake, and not a photo of a little girl, into my fingers.

"I'm not looking at this," I said, practically heaving the photo back at him. "I won't look at this."

"Jess!" Pamela sounded a little horrified herself. "Jess, please, just listen—"

"No," I said. "No, I won't. You can't do this. I'm out of here."

Look, I know how it sounds. I mean, here was this guy, and he seemed sincere. He seemed like a genuinely distraught father. How could I be so cold, so unfeeling, not to want to help him?

Try looking at it from my point of view: It is one thing to get a package in the mail with all the details of a missing child's case laid neatly out in front of one … to wake the next morning and make a single phone call, the origins of which the person on the receiving end of that call has promised to erase. Easy.

More than just easy, though: Anonymous.

But it is another thing entirely to have the missing kid's parent in front of one, desperately begging for help. There is nothing easy about that.

And nothing in the least anonymous.

And I have to maintain my anonymity. I have to.

I turned and headed for the door. I was going to say, I staggered blindly for the door, because that sounds all dramatic and stuff, but it isn't true, exactly. I mean, I wasn't exactly staggering—I was walking just fine. And I could see and all. The way I know I could see just fine was that the photo, which I thought I'd gotten rid of, came fluttering down from the air where I'd thrown it. Just fluttered right down, and landed at my feet. Landed at my feet, right in front of the door, like a leaf or a feather or something that had fallen from the sky, and just randomly picked me to land in front of.

And I looked. It landed faceup. How could I help but look?

I'm not going to say anything dorky like she was the cutest kid I'd ever seen or something like that. That wasn't it. It was just that, until I saw the photo, she wasn't a real kid. Not to me. She was just something somebody was using to try to get me to admit something I didn't want to.

Then I saw her.

Look, I was not trying to be a bitch with this whole not-wanting-to-help-this-guy thing. Really. You just have to understand that since that day, that day I'd been struck by lightning, a lot of things had gotten very screwed up. I mean, really, really screwed up. My brother Douglas had had to be hospitalized again on account of me. I had practically ruined this other kid's life, just because I'd found him. He hadn't wanted to be found. I had had to do a lot of really tricky stuff to make everything right again.

And I'm not even going to go into the stuff about the Feds and the guns and the exploding helicopter and all.

It was like that day the lightning struck me, it caused this chain reaction that just kept getting more and more out of control, and all these people, all of these people I cared about, got hurt.

And I didn't want that to happen again. Not ever.

I had a pretty good system in the works, too, for seeing that it didn't. If everyone just played along the way they were supposed to, things went fine. Lost kids, kids who wanted to be found, got found. Nobody hassled me or my family. And things ran along pretty damn smoothly.

Then Jonathan Herzberg had to come along and thrust his daughter's photo under my nose.

And I knew. I knew it was happening all over again.

And there wasn't anything I could do to stop it.

Jonathan Herzberg was no dope. He saw the photo land. And he saw me look down.

And he went in for the kill.

"She's in kindergarten," he said. "Or at least, she would be starting in September, if … if she wasn't gone. She likes dogs and horses. She wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up. She's not afraid of anything."

I just stood there, looking down at the photo.

"Her mother has always been … troubled. After Keely's birth, she got worse. I thought it was post-partum depression. Only it never went away. The doctors prescribed antidepressants. Sometimes she took them. Mostly, though, she didn't."

Jonathan Herzberg's voice was even and low. He wasn't crying or anything. It was like he was telling a story about someone else's wife, not his own.

"She started drinking. I came home from work one day, and she wasn't there. But Keely was. My wife had left a three-year-old child home, by herself, all day. She didn't come home until around midnight, and when she did, she was drunk. The next day, Keely and I moved out. I let her have the house, the car, everything … but not Keely." Now his voice started to sound a little shaky. "Since we left, she—my ex-wife—has just gotten worse. She's fallen in with this guy … well, he's not what you'd call a real savory character. And last week the two of them took Keely from the day care center I put her in. I think they're somewhere in the Chicago area—he has family around there—but the police haven't been able to find them. I just … I remembered about you, and I … I'm desperate. I called your house, and the person who answered the phone said—"

I bent down and picked the photo up. Up close, the kid looked no different than she had from the floor. She was a five-year-old little girl who wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up, who lived with a father who obviously had as much of a clue as I did about how to braid hair, since Keely's was all over the place.

"He's got the custody papers," Pamela said to me softly. "I've seen them. When he first showed up … well, I didn't know what to do. You know our policy. But he … well, he …"

I knew what he had done. It was right there on Pamela's face. He had played on her natural affection for children, and on the fact that he was a single dad who was passably good-looking, and she was a woman in her thirties who wasn't married yet. It was as clear as the whistle around her neck.

I don't know what made me do it. Decide to help Jonathan Herzberg, I mean, in spite of my suspicion that he was an undercover agent, sent to prove I'd lied when I'd said I no longer had any psychic powers. Maybe it was the frayed condition of his cuffs. Maybe it was the messiness of his daughter's braids. In any case, I decided. I decided to risk it.

It was a decision that I'd live to regret, but how was I to know that then?

I guess what I did next must have startled them both, but to me, it was perfectly natural. Well, at least to someone who's seen Point of No Return as many times as I have.

I walked over to the radio I'd spied next to Pamela's desk, turned it on very loud, then yelled over the strains of John Mellencamp's latest, "Shirts up."

Pamela and Jonathan Herzberg exchanged wide-eyed glances. "What?" Pamela asked, raising her voice to be heard over the music.

"You heard me," I yelled back at her. "You want my help? I need to make sure you're legit."

Jonathan Herzberg must have been a pretty desperate man, since, without another word, he peeled off his sports coat. Pamela was slower to untuck her Camp Wawasee oxford T.

"I don't understand," she said as I went around the office, feeling under countertops and lifting up plants and the phone and stuff and looking underneath them. "What's going on?"

Jonathan was a little swifter. He'd completely unbuttoned his shirt, and now he held it open, to show me that nothing was taped to his surprisingly hairless chest.

"She wants to make sure we're not wearing wires," he explained to Pamela.

She continued to look bewildered, but she finally lifted her shirt up enough for me to get a peek underneath. She kept her back to Mr. Herzberg while she did this, and after I'd gotten a look at her bra, I could see why. It was kind of see-through, quite sexy-looking for a camp director and all. I don't know much about bras, not having much of a need for one myself, but couldn't help being impressed by Pamela's.

When they had both proved they weren't wearing transmitters, and I had determined that the place wasn't bugged, I switched the radio off. Then, holding up Keely's photo, I said, "I have to keep this awhile."

"Does this mean you're going to help?" Mr. Herzberg asked eagerly, as he buttoned up again. "Find Keely, I mean?"

"Just give your digits to Pamela," I said, putting Keely's photo in my pocket. "You'll be hearing from me."

Pamela, looking kind of moist-eyed, went, "Oh, Jess. Jess, I'm so glad. Thank you. Thank you so much."

I'm not one for the mushy stuff, and I could feel a big wave of it coming on—mostly from Pamela's direction, but Keely's dad didn't look exactly stone-faced—so I got out of there, and fast.

I would say I'd gotten approximately five or six steps down the hall before I began to have some serious misgivings about what I'd just done. I mean, okay, Pamela had seen some papers giving the guy custody, but that didn't really mean anything. Courts award custody to bad parents all the time. How was I supposed to know whether the story he'd told me about his wife was true?

Simple. I was going to have to check it out.

Great. Not like I didn't have enough to do. Like, for instance, look out for a cabinful of little boys, and, oh yeah, practice for my private lesson with Professor Le Blanc, flutist extraordinaire.

I was wondering how on earth I was going to accomplish all of this—find Keely Herzberg and make sure she really wanted to go back to living with her dad, keep Shane from killing Lionel, and brush up on my fingering for Professor Le Blanc—when I noticed that the secretary whose phone I'd borrowed was in her seat.

And oh, my God, she looked just like John Wayne! I'm not joking! She looked like a man, and she had a boyfriend. Not just any boyfriend, either, but one who raced cars for a living.

I ask you, what is wrong with this picture? Not like unattractive people don't deserve to have boyfriends, but hello, I have been told by several people—and not just by my mother, either—that I am fairly attractive. But do I have a boyfriend?

That would be a big N-O.

But Ms. John Wayne over here, she not only has a boyfriend, but a totally hot one, who drives race cars.

Okay. There is so not a God. That's all I have to say about that.

C H A P T E R

7

"Hey." I put my tray down next to Ruth's. "I need to talk to you."

Ruth was sitting with the girls of Tulip Tree Cottage. They were all eating the same thing for lunch: a large salad, dressing on the side; chicken breasts with the skin removed; cottage cheese; melon slices; and raspberry sherbet for dessert. I am not even joking.

Not that the boys of Birch Tree Cottage were any different. They were following their counselor's example, too. Only their trays were loaded down with pizza, Tater Tots, coleslaw, baked beans, peanut butter bars, macaroni and cheese, ice cream sandwiches, and chocolate chip cookies.

Hey, I'd missed dinner and breakfast. I was hungry, all right?

Ruth looked down at my tray and then glanced quickly away, with a shudder.

"Is it about your saturated fat intake?" she wanted to know. "Because if you keep eating like that, your heart is going to explode."

"You know I have a high metabolism," I said. "Now, listen, this is serious. I might need to borrow your car."

Ruth had been delicately sipping her glass of Diet Coke. When I said the words "your car," she sprayed what was in her mouth all over the little girl sitting opposite her.

"Oh, my God," Ruth said as she leaned across the table to mop up the soda from the little girl's face. "Oh, Shawanda, I am so sorry—"

Shawanda went, "That's okay, Ruth," in this worshipful voice. Like getting sprayed in your face by your counselor was this big honor or something.

"Jeez." Ruth turned to me. "Are you high? You think I'm going to let you borrow my car? You don't even have a license!"

I know it sounds hard to believe, but Ruth was telling the truth. I don't have a driver's license. I am probably the only sixteen-year-old in the state of Indiana without one.

And it's not because I can't drive. I am a good driver, I really am. Better, probably, than Ruth, when it comes down to it.

I just have this one little problem.

Not even a problem, really. More like a need.

A need for speed.

"Absolutely not," Ruth said, spearing a melon wedge and stuffing it into her mouth. Ruth and I have been best friends since kindergarten, so it's not like we ever bother being polite around one another. Ruth spoke around the food in her mouth. "If you think for one minute I would ever let you touch my car, Miss But-I-Was-Only-Going-Eighty-in-a-Thirty-Five-Mile-an-Hour-Zone, you must be on crack."

"I am not," I hissed at her, conscious that the gazes of all the little residents of Tulip Tree Cottage were upon us, "on crack. I just might need a car tomorrow, is all."

"What for?" Ruth demanded.

I didn't want to just come right out and tell her. Not in front of all those inquisitive little faces. So I said, "A situation might arise."

"Jessica," Ruth said. She only calls me by my full name when she is well and truly disgusted with me. "You know we aren't allowed to leave the campgrounds except on Sunday afternoons, which we get off. Tomorrow, I shouldn't need to remind you, is Tuesday. You can't go anywhere. Not without losing your job. Now what's so all-fired important that you are willing to risk losing your job over it?"

I said, "I think I have management's okay on this one. Come on, Ruth, it will only be for a couple of hours."

Ruth's eyes, behind the lenses of her glasses, widened. "Wait a minute. This isn't … this isn't about that, you know, thing, is it?"

"That, you know, thing" is how Ruth often refers to my newfound talent. The fact that "you know, thing" is pretty much all her fault has never seemed to occur to her. I mean, she was, after all, the person who made me walk home the day of the lightning storm. But whatever.

"Yes," I said. "It is about that, you know, thing. Now are you going to let me borrow your car, or not?"

Ruth looked thoughtful. "I'll tell you what. If you can promise we won't get into trouble, I'll take you wherever it is you want to go."

Great. Just what I needed.

Don't get me wrong. Ruth's my best friend, and all. But Ruth isn't what you'd ever call good in a crisis. For example, once Ruth's twin brother, Skip, who is allergic to bees, got stung by one, and Ruth responded by clapping her hands over her ears and running out of the room. Seriously. And she'd been fourteen at the time, fully capable of dialing 911 or whatever.

I tell you, it's enough to make you question the judgment of Camp Wawasee's hiring staff, isn't it?

I went, carefully, "Um, you know what? Just forget about it, okay?" Maybe Pamela would let me borrow her car.

But what if Pamela was in on it? I mean, what if, despite the fact she and Jonathan Herzberg hadn't been wearing wires, the two of them were in cahoots with the Feds? What if this whole thing was an elaborately orchestrated sting set up by my good friends with the FBI?

Which was why I needed a car. I needed to check out the situation for myself first.

And not just because there was a chance this might be a setup, but because, well, Keely had rights, too. One thing I had learned last spring—one thing that had been taught to me, and very emphatically, by a boy named Sean who I'd thought was missing, but who, when I found him, turned out to be exactly where he wanted to be—is that when you are in the missing person business, it is a good idea to make sure the person you are looking for actually wants to be found before you go dragging him or her back to where he or she came from. It just makes sense, you know?

Not that I imagined Jonathan Herzberg was lying. If he wasn't in cahoots with the Feds, I mean.

Still, I sort of wanted to hear Keely's mom's side of the story before turning her over to the cops or whatever. And if she really was in Chicago, well, that was only like an hour north of Lake Wawasee. I could make it there and back in the time it took the kids to finish Handel's Messiah. Well, almost, anyway.

I wanted to explain all this to Ruth. I wanted to say, "Ruth, look, Pamela isn't going to fire me if I leave the campgrounds because Pamela's the person who is responsible for this in the first place … well, sort of."

But another thing I'd learned last spring is that the less people who know about stuff, the better. Really. Even people like your best friend.

"So what I hear you saying"—I tried talking to Ruth the way we'd learned during counselor training to talk to troubled kids—"is that you would feel uncomfortable loaning me your car."

Ruth said, "You hear me correctly. But I'll be glad to go with you, wherever it is. That is, if you can promise we won't get into trouble."

I ate some mac and cheese and pondered how to get out of this without hurting her feelings.

"No guarantees," I finally said, with a shrug.

"Well," Ruth said. "Then you're going to have to find some other boob to loan you their car. What about Dave? I saw him giving you the eye at the pool this morning."

I straightened up. "You did?" I thought he'd been giving Ruth the eye.

"I sure did. You should go for it." Ruth nibbled on a piece of chicken. "Hey, maybe we could double. You know, you and Dave, and me and—" I saw her gaze dart over toward Scott's table, then skitter back toward me. She swallowed. "Well, you know," she said, looking embarrassed. "If things work out."

If things worked out between her and Scott, she meant. She took it for granted things would work out between me and Dave. Ruth seemed to forget that I already liked someone, and it wasn't Dave.

Or maybe she wasn't forgetting. Ruth did not exactly approve of my relationship—such as it was—with Rob Wilkins.

Dave Chen, however, was acceptable. In a big way. I'd overheard him telling someone he'd gotten a near perfect score on his math PSATs.

I was sitting there, wondering why it felt wrong, somehow, to drag a guy like Dave into my problematic existence, when I had never thought twice about dragging Rob, whom I like a whole lot better than I like Dave, into it, when Ruth suddenly went, "Don't you have your first tutorial this afternoon? Shouldn't you be, oh, I don't know, practicing, or something?"

I took a bite of my pizza. Not bad. Not as good as my dad's, of course, but certainly better than that sorry excuse for pizza they serve at the Hut.

"I prefer for Monsieur Le Blanc to hear me at my worst," I explained. "I mean, you can't improve on perfection."

Ruth just waved at me irritably. "Go sit with your little hellions. They're calling you, you know."

My little hellions were, indeed, calling to me. I picked my tray up and joined the rest of the Birch Trees.

"Jess," Tony said. "Get a load of this."

He belched. The rest of the Birch Trees tittered appreciatively.

"That's nothing. Listen to this." Sam took a long swallow of Coke. He then let out a burp of such length and volume, diners at nearby tables glanced over in admiration. Although pleased by this, Sam modestly refused to take total credit for his accomplishment. "Having a deviated septum helps," he informed us.

Seeing that Dr. Alistair, the camp director, had glanced our way, I quickly steered the conversation in another direction—toward the new Birch Tree Cottage theme song, which I soon had all of them singing heartily:

Oh, they built the ship Titanic

To sail the ocean blue.

They thought it was a ship

No water could get through.

But on its maiden voyage

An iceberg hit that ship.

Oh it was sad when the great ship went down.

Chorus:

Oh it was sad

So sad

It was sad

It was sad when the great ship went down

To the bottom of the—

Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives

It was sad when the great ship went down

Kerplunk

She sunk

Like junk

Cha-cha-cha

Everything was going along swimmingly until I caught Shane, between verses, shoveling down all of Lionel's ice cream—the one food item of which there were no second helpings served at Camp Wawasee, for the obvious reason that, without this restriction, the campers would eat nothing but mint chocolate chip.

"Shane!" I bellowed. He was so surprised, he dropped the spoon.

"Aw, hell," Shane said, looking down at his ice cream-spattered shirt. "Look what the lesbo made me do."

"That's three, Shane," I informed him calmly.

He looked up at me bewilderedly. "Three what? What are you talking about?"

"Three strikes. You're sleeping on the porch tonight, buddy."

Shane sneered. "Big deal."

Arthur said, "Shane, you dink, that means you're going to miss out on the story."

Shane narrowed his eyes at me. "I am not missing out on the story," he said evenly.

I blinked at Arthur. "What story?"

"You're going to tell us another story tonight, aren't you, Jess?"

All the residents of Birch Tree Cottage swiveled their heads around to stare at me. I said, "Sure. Sure, there'll be another story."

Tony poked Shane. "Ha, ha," he teased. "You're gonna miss it."

Shane was furious.

"You can't do that," he sputtered at me. "If you do that, I'll—I'll—"

"You'll do what, Shane?" I asked in a bored voice.

He narrowed his eyes at me. "I'll tell," he said menacingly.

"Tell what?" Arthur, his mouth full of fries, wanted to know.

"Yeah," I said. "Tell what?"

Because of course I'd forgotten. About Shane barging into my room the night before, and catching me with Taylor's photo. I'd forgotten all about it.

But he wasted no time reminding me.

"You know," he said, his eyes slitted with malice. "Lightning girl."

I swallowed the mouthful of pizza I'd been chewing. It was like cardboard going down my throat. And not just because it was cafeteria food.

"Hey," I said, attempting to sound as if I didn't care. "Tell whoever you want. Be my guest."

It was a feint, of course, but it worked, taking the wind right out of his sails. His shoulders slumped and he studied his empty plate meditatively, as if hoping an appropriate reply would appear upon it.

I didn't feel the least bit sorry for him. Little bully. But I wasn't just mad at Shane. I was peeved at Lionel, too. How could he just sit there and let people pick on him like that? Granted Shane outweighed him by fifty pounds or so, but I had bested far bigger adversaries when I'd been Lionel's same age and size.

After lunch, as we were walking toward the music building, where the kids would continue their lessons until free play at three, I tried to impress upon Lionel the fact that, if he didn't stand up for himself, Shane was just going to keep on torturing him.

"But, Jess," Lionel said. He pronounced my name as if it were spelled Jace. "He will pound on me."

"Look, Lionel," I said. "He might pound on you. But you just pound him back, only harder. And go for the nose. Big guys are total babies when it comes to their noses."

Lionel looked dubious. "In my country," he said, trilling his r's musically, "violence is looked upon with disfavor."

"Well, you're in America now," I told him. The other Birch Trees had disappeared into their various practice rooms. Only Lionel and I remained in the atrium, along with a few other people.

"Look," I said to him. "Make a fist."

Lionel did so, making the fatal error of folding his thumb inside his fingers.

"No, no, no," I said. "Hold your thumb outside your fingers, or you'll break it, see, when you smash your knuckles into Shane's face."

Lionel moved his thumb, but said, "I do not think I want to smash Shane's face."

"Sure, you do," I said. "And when you do, you don't want to break your thumb. And remember what I said. Go for the nose. Nasal cartilage breaks easily, and you won't hurt your knuckles as much as if you went for, say, the mouth. Never go for the mouth."

"I do not think," Lionel said, "we have to worry about that."

"Good." I patted him on the shoulder. "Now go to class, before you're late."

Lionel took off, clutching his flute case and looking down, a little warily, at his own fist. From the other side of the atrium, I heard applause. Ruth, Scott, and Dave were standing there with, of all people, Karen Sue Hanky.

"Way to discharge that volatile situation, Jess," Ruth commented sarcastically.

"Yeah," Scott said with a snicker. "By teaching the kid to throw a punch."

Dave was feigning thoughtfulness. "Funny, I don't remember them teaching us that particular method of conflict resolution in counselor training."

They were joking, of course. But Karen Sue, as usual, was deadly serious.

"I think it's disgraceful," she said. "You teaching a little boy to settle his problems with violence. You should be ashamed of yourself."

I stared at her. "You," I said, "have obviously never been the victim of a bully."

Karen Sue stuck out her chin. "No, because I was taught to resolve my differences with others peacefully, without use of force."

"So in other words," I said, "you've never been the victim of a bully."

Ruth laughed outright, but Scott and Dave both put their hands over their mouths, trying to hide their grins. Karen Sue wasn't fooled, though. She said, "Maybe that's because I don't go around aggravating people like you do, Jess."

"Oh, that's nice," I said. "Blame the victim, why don't you?"

Now Scott and Dave had to turn toward the wall, they were laughing so hard. Ruth, of course, didn't bother.

The tips of Karen Sue's ears started turning pink. The way I noticed this is that she was wearing this blue headband—which matched her blue shorts, which matched her blue flute case—and the headband pulled her hair back over her ears, so that it fell into these perfect curls just above her shoulders. Oh, and it also showed off her pearl earrings.

Have I mentioned that Karen Sue Hanky is kind of a girlie-girl?

"Well," she said primly. "If you'll excuse me, I'm going back to my cottage now to put my flute away. I hope you enjoy your tutorial with Professor Le Blanc, Jess. He told me that I play exceptionally."

"Yeah," I muttered. "Exceptionally crappy."

Ruth elbowed me.

"Oh, please," I said. "Her flute isn't even open hole. How good can she be?" Besides, Karen Sue had already flounced out. No way she'd overheard me.

Scott, still chuckling, said, "Listen, Jess. Dave and I had an idea. About this ghost story thing of yours. What do you say to teaming up?"

I eyed them. "What are you talking about?"

"Like our cabins could get together after Pit tonight, and you could tell them all another one of those ghost stories. You know, like the one you told last night, that had your little guys so scared, they wouldn't get out of bed afterwards."

"We could bring our guys over," Dave said, "around nine-thirty."

"Yeah," Scott said, glancing shyly in Ruth's direction. "And maybe your girls would want to come, Ruth."

Ruth looked surprised—and pleased—at the suggestion. But reluctance to subject her girls to the likes of Shane overcame her desire to spend quality time with Scott.

"No way," she said. "I'm not letting any of my girls around that little nightmare."

"Maybe Shane'd behave himself," I ventured, "if we threw some estrogen into the mix." It was an experiment they'd tried during detention back at Ernest Pyle High, with somewhat mixed results.

"Nuh-uh," Ruth said. "You know what that kid did during all-camp rehearsal this morning?"

This I hadn't heard. "What?"

"He opened a trumpet's spit valve all over some Frangipanis."

I winced. Not as bad as I'd feared … but not exactly good, either.

"And it wasn't," Ruth went on, "even his instrument. He'd stolen it. If you think I'm letting my girls near him, you're nuts."

I figured it was just as well. It wasn't like I had a ghost story on hand that I could tell in the presence of a couple of guys like Scott and Dave. They'd know I was plagiarizing Stephen King right away. And how embarrassing, to be sitting there telling some story with my would-be boyfriend Rob as the hero, in front of those guys.

Dave must have noticed my reluctance, since he said, "We'll bring popcorn."

I could see there was no way of getting out of it. And free popcorn is never anything to be sneered at. So I said, "Well, all right. I guess."

"Awesome." Scott and Dave gave each other high fives.

I winced again, but this time it had nothing to do with Shane. Dave had jostled me so that a sharp corner of Keely Herzberg's photo, tucked into the back pocket of my shorts, jabbed me into remembering that I had a little something else to do tonight, too.

C H A P T E R

8

"Paul Huck was a guy who lived down the road from me."

I had figured out a way to not embarrass myself in front of Scott and Dave. I'd abandoned the rehashing of an old Stephen King story and opted for a ghost story my dad used to tell, back when my brothers and I had been little and he'd taken us on camping trips to the Indiana backwoods—trips my mother never went on, since she claimed to be allergic to nature, and most particularly to backwoods.

"He wasn't a very bright guy," I explained to the dozens of rapt little faces in front of me. "In fact, he was kind of dim. He only made it to about the fourth grade before school got too hard for him, so his parents let him stay home after that, since they didn't put much stock in education anyway, on account of none of the Hucks ever amounting to anything with or without having gone to school—"

"Hey." A small, high-pitched voice sounded from behind the closed porch door. "Can I come in now?"

"No," I shouted back. "Now, where was I?"

I went on to relate how Paul Huck had grown into a massive individual, stupid as a corncob, but good at heart.

But really, I wasn't thinking about Paul Huck. I wasn't thinking about Paul Huck at all. I was thinking about what had happened right after I'd agreed to allow Scott and Dave have their cabins stage a mini-invasion on mine. What had happened was, I had gone for my tutorial with Professor Le Blanc.

And I had ended up nearly getting fired.

Again.

And this time, it hadn't been because I'd been making personal use of camp property, or teaching the kids risqué songs.

Then why, you ask? Why would the famous classical flutist Jean-Paul Le Blanc attempt to fire a totally hip—not to mention talented—individual like myself?

Because he had discovered my deepest secret, the one I hold closest to my heart. . . .

No, not that one. Not the fact that I am still very much in possession of my psychic gift. My other secret.

What happened was this.

Right after Scott and Dave and Ruth took off, I sauntered over to the practice room where I was supposed to have my lesson with Professor Le Blanc. He was in there, all right. I could tell by the pure, sweet tones emanating from the tiny room. The practice rooms are supposed to be soundproof, and they are … but only if you're in one of the rooms. From the hallway, you can hear what's going on behind the door.

And let me tell you, what was going on behind that door was some fine, fine Bach. We're talking flute-playing so elegant, so assured, so … well, passionate, it almost brought tears to my eyes. You don't hear that kind of playing in the Ernest Pyle High School Symphonic Orchestra, you get what I'm saying? I was so entranced, I didn't even think to knock on the door to let the professor know I'd arrived. I never wanted that sweet music to end.

But it did end. And then the next thing I knew, the door to the practice room was opening, and Professor Le Blanc emerged. He was saying, "You have a gift. An extraordinary gift. Not to use it would be a crime."

"Yes, Professor," replied a bored voice that, oddly, I recognized.

I looked down, shocked that such lovely music had been coming from the flute of a student, and not the master.

And my jaw sagged.

"Hey, lesbo," Shane said. "Shut the barn door, you're lettin' the flies in."

"Ah," Professor Le Blanc said, spying me. "You two know one another? Oh, yes, of course, Jessica, you are his counselor, I'd forgotten. Then you can do me a very great favor."

I was still staring at Shane. I couldn't help it. That music? That beautiful music? That had been coming from Shane?

"Make certain," Professor Le Blanc said, resting his hands on Shane's pudgy shoulders, "that this young man understands how rare a talent like his is. He insists that his mother made him come to Wawasee this summer. That in fact he'd have much preferred to attend baseball camp instead."

"Football camp," Shane burst out bitterly. "I don't want to play the flute. Girls play the flute." He glared at me very fiercely as he said this, as if daring me to contradict him.

I did not. I could not. I was still transfixed. All I could think was Shane? Shane played the flute? I mean, he'd said he played the skin flute. I didn't know he'd been telling the truth … well, partially, anyway.

But an actual flute? Shane had been the one making that gorgeous—no, not just gorgeous—magnificent music on my instrument of choice? Shane? My Shane?

Professor Le Blanc was shaking his head. "Don't be ridiculous," he said to Shane. "Most of the greatest flutists in the world have been men. And with talent like yours, young man, you might one day be amongst them—"

"Not if I get recruited by the Bears," Shane pointed out.

"Well," Professor Le Blanc said, looking a little taken aback. "Er, maybe not then …"

"Is my lesson over?" Shane demanded, craning his neck to get a look at the professor's face.

"Er," Professor Le Blanc said. "Yes, actually, it is."

"Good," Shane said, tucking his flute case beneath his arm. "Then I'm outta here."

And with that, he stalked away.

Professor Le Blanc and I stared after him for a minute or two. Then the instructor seemed to shake himself, and, holding open the door to the practice room for me, said with forced jocularity, "Well, now, let's see what you can do, then, Jessica. Why don't you play something for me?" Professor Le Blanc went to the piano that stood in one corner of the walk-in-closet-sized room, sat down on the bench, and picked up a Palm Pilot. "Anything you like," he said, punching the buttons of the Palm Pilot. "I like to assess my pupil's skill level before I begin teaching."

I opened my flute case and began assembling my instrument, but my mind wasn't on what I was doing. I just couldn't get what I'd heard out of my head. It didn't make sense. It didn't make sense that Shane could play like that. It just didn't seem possible. The kid had played beautifully, movingly, as if he'd been swept away by the notes, each one of which had rung out with angelic—almost aching—purity. The same Shane who had stuck an entire hamburger in his mouth at lunch—I'd sat there and watched him do it—bun and all, then swallowed it, practically whole, just because Arthur had dared him to. That same Shane. That Shane could play like that.

And he didn't even care. He'd wanted to go to football camp.

He'd been lying. He cared. No one could play like that and not care. No one.

I put my own flute to my lips, and began to play. Nothing special. Green Day. "Time of Our Lives." I jazzed it up a little, since it's a relatively simple little song. But all I could think about was Shane. There had to be depths, wells of untapped emotion in that boy, to make him capable of producing such music.

And all he wanted to do was play football.

Professor Le Blanc looked up from his Palm Pilot at some point during my recital. When I was through, he said, "Play something else, please."

I launched into an old standby. "Fascinating Rhythm." Always a crowd-pleaser. At least it pleased my dad, when I was practicing at home. I usually played it at double time, to get it over with. I did so now.

The question was, how could a kid who could play like that be such a total and complete pain in the butt? I mean, how was it possible that the person who'd played such hauntingly beautiful music, and the person who this morning had told Lionel he'd dipped his toothbrush in the toilet—after, of course, Lionel had started using it—be one and the same individual?

Professor Le Blanc was rooting through his briefcase, which he'd left on top of the piano.

"Here," he said. "Now this." He dropped a book of sheet music onto the stand in front of my chair.

Brahms. Symphony Number 1. What was he trying to do, put me to sleep? It was an insult. We'd played that my freshman year, for God's sake. My fingers flew over the key holes. Open, of course. My instrument was practically an antique, handed down from some obscure member of the Mastriani clan who'd gotten it under questionable circumstances. Yeah, okay, so my flute was probably hot.

The thing I couldn't figure out was what was God—and I'm not saying I'm so all-fired sure there is one, but for argument's sake, let's say there is—thinking, giving a kid like Shane talent like that? Seriously. Why had he been given this incredible gift of music, when clearly, he'd have been happier tearing down a field with a ball in his arms?

I tell you, if that's not proof there is a God, and that he or she has one heck of a wacked-out sense of humor, I don't know what is.

"Stop." Professor Le Blanc took the Brahms away and put another music book in front of me.

Beethoven. Symphony Number 3.

I don't know how long I sat there looking at it. Maybe a full minute before I was able to rouse myself from my Shane-induced stupor and go, "Um, Professor? Yeah, look, I don't know this piece."

Professor Le Blanc was still sitting on the piano bench, his arms folded across his chest. He had put away the Palm Pilot, and was now watching me intently. The fact that he was, in fact, a bit of a hottie, did not make this any pleasanter than it sounds. He looked a little like a hawk, one of those hawks you see all the time, wheeling in tighter and tighter circles above something in a cornfield, making you wonder what the stupid bird is looking at down there. Is it a field mouse, or the decomposing body of a coed?

Professor Le Blanc said, enunciating carefully, "I know you don't know this piece, Jess. I want to see if you can play it."

I just stared at it.

"Well," I said after a while. "I probably could. If you would maybe just hum my part first?"

He didn't look surprised by my request. He shook his head so that his kind of longish, curly brown hair—definitely longer than mine, anyway—swung around.

"No," he said. "I do not hum. Begin, please."

I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat. "It's just," I explained, "usually, back home, my orchestra teacher, he kind of hums the whole thing out for us first, and I really—"

"Aha!"

Professor Le Blanc yelled so loud, I almost dropped my flute. He pointed a long, accusing finger at me.

"You," he said, in tones of mingled triumph and horror, "cannot read music."

I felt my own ears turning as pink as Karen Sue's had out in the atrium. Only not just pink. Red. My ears were burning. My face was burning. It was air-conditioned enough in that practice room that you practically needed a winter parka, but me, I was on fire.

"That isn't true," I said, trying to appear casual. Yeah, real easy to do with a face that was turning fire-engine red. "That note right there, for instance." I pointed at the music. "That's an eighth note. And over here, that's a whole note."

"But what note," Professor Le Blanc demanded, "is it?"

My shoulders slumped. I was so busted.

"Look," I said. "I don't need to read music. I just have to hear the piece once, and I—"

"—and you know how to play it. Yes, yes, I know. I know all about you people. You I-hear-it-once-and-I-know-it people." He shook his head disgustedly at me. "Does Dr. Alistair know about this?"

I felt my feet beginning to sweat inside my Pumas, that's how freaked out he had me.

"No," I said. "You aren't going to tell him, are you?"

"Not going to tell him?" Professor Le Blanc leaped up from the piano bench. "Not going to tell Dr. Alistair that one of his counselors is musically illiterate?"

He bellowed the last word. Anyone passing outside the door could have heard. I went, in a small voice, "Please, Professor Le Blanc. Don't turn me in. I'll learn to read this piece. I promise."

"I do not want you to learn to read this piece." Professor Le Blanc was on his feet now, and pacing the length of the practice room. Which, only being about six feet by six feet, wasn't very far. "You should be able to read all pieces. How can you be so lazy? Simply because you can hear a piece once and then play it, you use this as an excuse never to learn to read music? You ought to be ashamed. You ought to be sent back to where you came from and made to work there at the IG of A as a sack girl."

I licked my lips. I couldn't help it. My mouth had gone completely dry.

"Um, Professor?" I said.

He was still pacing and breathing kind of hard. In school, they made us read this book about this guy named Heathcliff who liked this loser chick named Cathy, who didn't like him back, and I swear to God, Professor Le Blanc kind of reminded me of old Heathcliff, the way he was huffing and puffing about something that really boiled down to nothing.

"What?" he yelled at me.

I swallowed. "It's bag girl." When he only gazed at me uncomprehendingly, I said, "You said I'd have to work as a sack girl. But it's called a bag girl."

Professor Le Blanc pointed toward the door. "Out," he roared.

I was shocked. The whole thing was totally unfair. In the movies, when somebody finds out the other person can't read, they're always filled with all this compassion and try to help the poor guy. Like Jane Fonda helped Robert De Niro when she found out he couldn't read in this really boring movie my mom made me watch with her once. I couldn't believe Professor Le Blanc was being so unfeeling. My case, if you thought about it, was really quite tragic.

I figured I'd make a play for his heartstrings … if he had any, which I doubted.

"Professor," I said. "Look. I know I deserve to get thrown out of here and all, but really, that's partly why I took this gig. I mean, I completely realize my inability to read music is hampering my growth as an artist, and I was really hoping this was my big chance to, you know, rectify that."

I totally did not believe he would go for this crap, but to my never-ending relief, he did. I don't know why. Maybe it was because I was trembling. Not because I was nervous or anything. I was, but not that much. I mean, it wasn't like the steam table held that much horror for me. It was just because it was about thirty degrees in there.

But I guess Professor Le Blanc thought I was suitably cowed or whatever, since he finally said he wouldn't turn me in to Dr. Alistair. Although he wasn't very gracious about it, I must say. He told me that, since his class schedule was completely filled, he didn't have the time to teach me to read music and prepare my piece for the concert at the end of the summer. I was like, fine, I don't want to be in the stupid concert anyway, but he got all offended, because the concert's supposed to be, you know, what all of us are working toward for the six weeks we're here.

Finally, we agreed I'd meet him three times a week at seven A.M.—yes, that would be seven in the morning—so he could teach me what I needed to know. I tried to point out that seven A.M. was the Polar Bear swim, which also happened to be the only time I could realistically bathe, but he so didn't care.

God. Musicians. So temperamental.

While I was sitting there back in Birch Tree Cottage, thinking about how close I'd been to getting fired, and talking about Paul Huck, I looked out at all the kids in front of me and wondered how many of them were going to grow up to be Professor Le Blancs. Probably all of them. And that saddened me. Because it seemed like they were never even going to get the chance to be anything else, if they only got two hours of free time a day to play.

Except Shane, of course. Shane, the only one of the kids at Camp Wawasee for Gifted Child Musicians who probably could make a living as a musician one day if he wanted to, clearly didn't. Want to, I mean. He wanted to be a football player.

And you know, I could sort of relate to that. I knew what a pain it was to have a gift you'd never, ever asked for.

"—so Paul Huck got jobs around the neighborhood," I went on, "mowing lawns and doing people's yardwork in the summer, and chopping firewood in the winter. And pretty much nobody noticed him, but when they did, they thought he was, you know, a pretty nice guy. Not a whole lot upstairs, though."

I glanced at Scott and Dave. They were sitting on the windowsill. In a few minutes, I would give the signal, and one of them would sneak into the kitchen to say his line.

"But there was actually a lot going on upstairs in Paul Huck's head," I said. "Because Paul Huck, while he was in people's yards, digging up their tree stumps or whatever, he was watching them. And the person he liked to watch most of all was a girl named Claire Lippman, who, every day during the summer, liked to climb out onto her porch roof and sunbathe in this little bitty bikini."

It was kind of disturbing the way real people crept into my made-up stories. In my dad's version, the girl was named Debbie. But Claire, who'd be a senior at Ernie Pyle this year, just seemed to fit somehow.

"Paul fell for Claire," I went on. "And Paul fell hard. He thought about Claire while he ate breakfast every morning. He thought about Claire while he was riding his tractor mower every afternoon. He thought about Claire when he was eating his dinner at night. He thought about Claire while he was lying in bed after a long day's work. Paul Huck thought about Claire Lippman all the time.

"But." I looked out at all the little faces turned toward me. "Claire Lippman didn't think about Paul Huck at breakfast. She didn't think about him while she was sunning herself on her porch roof every afternoon. She didn't think about him while she ate her dinner, and she certainly never thought about him before she fell asleep at night. Claire Lippman never thought about Paul Huck at all, because she barely even knew Paul Huck existed. To Claire, Paul was just the handyman who knocked squirrels' nests out of her chimney every spring, and who scooped the dead opossums out of this decorative little well she had in her backyard. And that was it."

I could feel the crowd getting restless. It was time to start getting to the gore.

Eventually, I told them, Paul got desperate. He knew if he was ever going to win Claire's heart, he had to act. So one spring day when he was cleaning out Claire's gutters, he got an idea. He decided he was going to tell Claire how he felt.

"Just as this occurred to Paul, Claire appeared in the window right where he was cleaning out the gutter. This seemed to Paul like the perfect time to say what he was going to say. But just as he was about to tap on the window, Claire started taking her clothes off." This caused some tittering that I ignored. "See, the room she was in was the bathroom, and she was getting ready to take a shower. She didn't notice Paul there in the window … at first. And Paul, well, he didn't know what to do. He had never seen a naked woman before, let alone the love of his life, Claire. So he just froze there on the ladder, totally incapable of moving.

"So when Claire happened to glance at the window, just as she was about to get in the shower, and saw Paul there, she was so startled, she let out a scream so loud, it almost made Paul fall off the ladder he was on.

"But Claire didn't stop with one scream. She was so startled, she kept right on screaming. People outside heard the screaming, and they looked up, and they saw Paul Huck looking through Claire Lipp-man's bathroom window, and, well, they didn't know he was there to clean the gutters. He had always been a weird guy, who lived at home with his parents even though he was in his twenties, and who talked like a nine-year-old. Maybe he'd flipped out or something. So they started yelling, too, and Paul was so scared, with all the yelling and everything going on, he jumped down from the ladder and ran for all he was worth.

"Paul didn't know what he'd done, but he figured it had to be pretty bad, if it had made so many people mad at him. All he knew was that, whatever it was he'd done, it was probably bad enough that someone had called the police, and if the police came, they'd put him in jail. So Paul didn't go home, because he figured that'd be the first place people would look for him. Instead, he ran to the outskirts of town, where there was this cave. Everyone was scared to go into this cave, because bats and stuff lived in there. But Paul was more afraid of the police than he was of bats, so he ducked into that cave, and he stayed there, all the way until it got dark.

"Now, once Claire got over being startled, she realized what had happened, and she felt pretty bad about it. But she didn't want to admit to anyone that it had been her mistake—that she'd asked Paul to clean her gutters, and that's what he'd been doing on that ladder. Because then she'd look like a big idiot. So she kept that information to herself, and let everyone think Paul was a Peeping Tom."

I went on to describe how Paul, scared for his life, stayed in that cave. He stayed there all night, and all the next day, and the next night, too. I explained how by then, Paul's parents were really worried. They had called the police to help them look, but that just made things worse, because one time Paul came out of the cave, to see if people were still looking for him, and he saw a sheriff's cruiser go by. That just drove him deeper back into the cave, where when he was thirsty, he drank cave water.

"But there was no food in the cave," I said. "And Paul couldn't come out to buy any, because he might get caught. Eventually, he got so hungry, well, he just lost his mind. He saw a bat, and he grabbed it, ripped its head off, and ate it raw."

This elicited some groans of disgust.

And that, I told the boys, was the beginning of Paul's descent into madness. Very soon, he was living on nothing but cave water and bat meat. He lost all this weight, and started growing this long, matted beard. He couldn't wash his hair because he didn't have any shampoo, so it started getting all filled with twigs and dirt. His clothes became tattered and hung off him like rags. But still, he wouldn't come out of the cave, because he couldn't face the shame of whatever it was he'd done to Claire.

Time went by. Winter came. Soon Paul ran out of bats to eat. He had no choice but to leave the cave at night, and root through people's garbage for old chicken bones and rotten milk, so he wouldn't starve. Sometimes, little children would wake up in the night and see him, and they'd tell their parents the next morning about the strange, long-haired man they'd seen in the backyard, and their parents would say, "Stop telling lies."

But the children knew what they'd seen.

More time went by. One night, Paul Huck was going through someone's garbage when he came across a newspaper. Newspapers didn't interest Paul much, on account of his not being able to read. But this one had a picture on it. He squinted at the picture in the moonlight and realized it was a picture of his old love, Claire Lippman. He didn't need to know how to read in order to figure out why Claire's picture was in the paper. In the photo, she was dressed in a wedding gown and veil. Claire Lippman had gotten married.

Paul, crazy as he was now, couldn't think like a normal person—not that he'd ever been able to before. But after a steady diet of bats and garbage, which was all he'd had to eat for the past few years, he'd gotten much worse. So what seemed to Paul like a really good idea—he ought to give Claire a wedding present, to show there were no hard feelings—well, that just wouldn't have occurred to a normal person.

"What was worse," I said, "Paul's idea of a wedding present was to go through all the yards in the town and pick every rose he could find. He did this, of course, in the middle of the night, and all over town children woke up and looked out the window and said, "There's Paul Huck again,' and they wondered what he was going to do with all the roses.

"What Paul did with all the roses was, he piled them up on Claire Lippman's front porch, so she'd see them first thing when she came out of her house to go to work."

And there, I told the kids, for the first time ever, an adult woke up and heard Paul Huck. It was Claire's new husband, Simon, who was a stranger to the town. He didn't know who Paul Huck was. All Simon knew was, when he came downstairs into the kitchen to get a glass of milk before going back to sleep, he saw this gigantic, shaggy-haired man, covered in dirt and blood—because the roses' thorns had cut Paul everywhere he touched them—standing on his front porch. Simon didn't even think about what he was doing. Since he was in the kitchen, he grabbed the first thing he saw that he could use as a weapon—a carving knife—and went to the front door, threw it open, and said, "Who the hell are you?"

"Paul was so surprised that someone was speaking to him—no one had said a word to him, not in five long years—that he spun around, just as he'd been about to leave the porch. Simon didn't understand that Paul was just startled. He thought this giant, hairy, bloody guy was coming after him. So Simon swung the carving knife, and it caught Paul just beneath the chin, and whoosh … it cut off his head. Paul Huck," I said, "was dead."

Silence followed this.

I went on to describe how Claire's husband, in a panic after seeing what he had done, ran inside the house to call the police. Hearing all the commotion, Claire woke up and came downstairs. She went out onto the porch. The first thing she saw was all the roses. The second thing she saw was this great big bloody body laying on top of them. The last thing she saw was a head, almost buried in the roses.

And even though the head had this long beard, and the eyes were all rolled back, Claire recognized Paul Huck. And she put together the roses and the fact that it was Paul and she knew that her husband had just killed the man that, because of her, had been living like an animal for five long years.

Claire wouldn't let Simon call the police. He had killed, she insisted, an innocent man. Paul had never meant to hurt either of them. If word got out about this, Claire and her new husband—who was this very important surgeon—were going to be socially ruined in town, and she knew it. She explained all this to Simon. They had, she said, to hide the body, and pretend like nothing had happened.

Simon was disgusted, but like Claire, he enjoyed his status high at the top of the town's social ladder. So he made a deal with her: he'd get rid of Paul's body, if Claire got rid of the head.

Claire agreed. So while Simon wrapped Paul's body in sheets—so he wouldn't bleed all over the back of his new car while Simon drove over to the lake, where he intended to dump the body—Claire lifted up the head and threw it in the first place she thought of: down the well in her backyard.

When Simon got back from the lake, the two of them cleaned up all the blood and roses. Then, exhausted, they went back to bed.

Everything seemed to go okay at first. Nobody except the children of the town had ever believed Paul Huck was still alive anyway, so nobody noticed that he was gone. Little by little, Claire and Simon were able to put from their minds what they had done. Their lives went back to normal.

Until the first full moon after Paul's murder. That night, Claire and Simon were awakened from their sleep by a moaning they heard coming from the backyard. At first they thought it was the wind. But it seemed to be moaning words. And those words were, "Where's … my … head?"

They thought they must have been hearing things. But then, sounding even closer than the first moan, they heard the words, "Down … in … the … well."

Claire and Simon put on their bathrobes and hurried downstairs. Looking out into their backyard, they got the shock of their lives. For there, in the moonlight, they saw a horrifying sight: Paul Huck's headless body, all covered with lake weeds and dripping wet, moaning, "Where's … my … head?"

And, from deep inside the well, the echoing reply: "Down … in … the … well!"

Claire and her husband both went instantly insane. They ran from the house that night, and they never went back, not even to move out their stuff. They hired a moving company to do it for them. They put the house up for sale.

"But you know what?" I looked at all the faces gazing at me in the soft glow of my single flashlight. "No one ever bought the house. It was like everyone could sense that there was something wrong with it. No one ever bought it, and little by little, it began to fall apart. Vandals threw rocks through its windows, and rats moved in, and bats, just like the ones Paul used to eat, lived in the attic. It is still empty, to this day. And on nights when the moon is full, if you go into the backyard, you can still hear the wind moaning, just like Paul Huck: 'Where's … my … head?'"

From the dark kitchen came a deep, ghostly wail:

"Down … in … the … well!"

Several things happened at once. The boys all screamed. Scott, grinning, emerged from the kitchen. And the front door burst open, and Shane, panting and white-faced, cried, "Did you hear that? Did you hear that? It's him, it's Paul Huck! He's coming to get us! Please don't make me sleep outside, I promise I'll be good from now on, I promise!"

And with that, I began to see a little—just a little—more clearly how it might be possible for a kid like Shane to make that beautiful music.

C H A P T E R

9

When I woke up the next morning, I knew where Keely Herzberg was.

Not that there was much I could do with the information. I mean, it wasn't like I was going to run over to Pamela's office and tell her what I knew. Not yet, anyway. I needed to check the situation out, make sure Keely wanted to be found.

And, thanks to Paul Huck, I knew exactly how I was going to do it.

Well, not thanks to Paul Huck, exactly. But thanks to the fact that I'd had Scott and Dave and their kids over the night before, I was a lot more savvy to the whole phone situation than I'd been before. It turns out all the counselors have cell phones. Seriously. Everyone except Ruth and me … and Karen Sue Hanky, I suppose, since she'd never do anything that might be construed as breaking the rules.

I don't know why Ruth and I are so out of it. We're like the only two sixteen-year-old girls in Indiana without cell phones. What is wrong with our parents? You would think they would want us to have cell phones, so that we could call them when we're going to be out late, or whatever.

But then, we're never out late, because we never really get invited anywhere. That would be on account of our being orchestra nerds. Oh, and on account of my issues, too, I guess.

But everybody else on the camp counseling staff had cell phones. They'd been making and receiving calls all week, just keeping them on vibrate and picking up out of Pamela's and Dr. Alistair's sight.

So now, thanks to my scaring their charges so thoroughly the night before that they apparently did everything their counselors asked them to afterward—like go to sleep—both Scott and Dave were eager, when I asked them at breakfast, to lend me their phones.

I took Dave's, since it had less buttons and looked less intimidating. Then I ducked out of the dining hall and went to the Pit, which was empty this time of day. I figured reception there was bound to be good. . . .

And it didn't seem likely that if the Feds were still monitoring my activities they'd be able to sneak up on me without me noticing.

Rob's phone rang about five times before he picked up.

"Hey, it's me," I said. And then since, for all I knew, there might be dozens of girls calling him before nine in the morning, I added, "Jess."

"I know it's you," Rob said. He didn't sound sleepy or anything. He usually opened the garage for his uncle, so he gets up pretty early. "What's up? How are things up there at band camp?"

"It's orchestra camp."

"Whatever. How's it going?"

What is it about Rob's voice that makes me feel all shivery, the way I'd felt in the super air-conditioned practice room the day before … only inside, not outside? I don't know. But I strongly suspect it had something to do with the L word.

Though it was just plain wrong, my having fallen so hard for a guy who so clearly wanted to have nothing to do with me. Why couldn't he see we were made for each other? I mean, we'd met in detention, for God's sake. Need I say more?

"Things are okay," I said. "Except I sort of have this problem."

"Oh, yeah? What's that?"

I tried to picture what Rob looked like, sitting there in his kitchen—he and his mom only have one phone, and it's in the kitchen. I figured he was probably wearing jeans. I'd never seen him in anything but jeans. Which was just as well, because he looks extraordinarily fine in them. It was like his butt had been designed to be molded by a pair of Levi's, his broad shoulders contoured specifically to fill out that leather jacket he always wore when he rode his motorcycle.

And the rest of him wasn't that bad, either.

"Well," I said, trying not to think about the way his curly dark hair, which was usually in need of a trim, had felt against my cheek the last time he'd let me kiss him. It had been a long time ago. Too long. Oh, God, why couldn't I be just a couple years older?

"Look," I said. "Here's the thing." And I told him, briefly, about Jonathan Herzberg.

"So," I concluded, "I just need a ride into Chicago to sort of check out the situation, and I know you have work and all, but I was kind of wondering if, when you get a day off, or whatever, you wouldn't mind—"

"Mastriani," he said. He didn't sound mad or anything, even though I was trying to use him … and pretty blatantly, too. "You're four hours away."

I winced. I'd been hoping he wouldn't remember that until after he'd said yes. See, in my imagination, when I'd rehearsed this call, Rob had been so excited to hear from me, he'd hopped right onto his bike and come over, no questions asked.

In real life, however, guys ask questions.

"I know it's far," I said. You dope. What did you expect? He said he doesn't want to go out with you. When are you going to get that through your thick skull?

"You know what?" I said. "Never mind. I can just get somebody else—"

"I don't like it," Rob said. I thought he meant he didn't like my asking somebody else to drive me, and I got kind of excited for a minute, but then he went, "Why the hell did your brother tell this guy where you were in the first place?"

I sighed. Rob had never met Douglas. Or anybody in my family, for that matter, except my dad, and that was just for a minute once. I don't think any of them would be that thrilled by the fact that I was in love with a guy I'd met in detention.

Or that the reason—at least the one that he gives me—that we aren't going out is that he's on probation, and doesn't want to screw it up by dating a minor.

My life has gotten seriously complicated, I swear.

"How do you know," Rob demanded, "that this isn't a setup by those agents who were after you last spring? I mean, it very well could be a trap, Mastriani. They might have arranged this whole thing as a way to prove you lied when you said you didn't have your powers anymore."

"I know," I said. "That's why I want to check it out first. But I'll just get someone else to take me. It's no big deal."

"What about Ruth?" Rob had only met Ruth once or twice. He had called her the fat chick the first time he'd ever referred to her, but he'd quickly learned I don't let people dis my best friend that way. Nor do I let Ruth call Rob what she calls everybody in our town who lives outside the city limits: a Grit. If Rob and I ever did start going out, there'd definitely be a little friction between the two of them. So much for me being able to tell he secretly loves me by the way he treats my friends. "Can't Ruth take you?"

"No," I said. I didn't want to get into the whole Ruth-being-no-good-in-a-crisis thing. "Look, don't worry about it. I'll find someone. It's no big deal."

"What do you mean, you'll find someone?" Rob sounded exasperated with me, which he didn't have any right to be. It's not like he's my boyfriend, or anything. "Who are you going to find?"

"There are a couple people," I said, "with cars. I'll just have to see if I can get any of them to take me, that's all."

Dave appeared suddenly at the top of the stairs down into the Pit. He called, "Hey, Jess, you almost through? I gotta take my crew on over to the music building now."

"Oh," I said. "Yeah, just a minute." Into the phone, I said, "Look, I gotta go. This guy loaned me his phone, and I have to give it back now, because he's leaving."

"What guy?" Rob demanded. "There's guys there? I thought it was a camp for kids."

"Well, it is," I said. Was it my imagination, or did he sound … well, unsettled? "But there's guy counselors and all."

"What's a guy doing," Rob wanted to know, "working at a band camp for little kids? They let guys do that?"

"Well, sure," I said. "Why not? Hey, wait a minute." I squinted up at Dave. Even though it wasn't quite nine yet, you could tell from the way the sun was beating down that it was going to be a scorcher. "Hey, Dave," I called. "You got a car, right?"

"Yeah," Dave said. "Why? You planning on staging a breakout?"

Into the phone, I said, "You know what, Rob? I think I—"

But Rob was already talking. And what he was saying, I was surprised to hear, was, "I'll pick you up at one."

I went, totally confused, "You'll what? What are you talking about?"

"I'll be there at one," Rob said again. "Where will you be? Give me directions."

Bemused, I gave Rob directions, and agreed to meet him at a bend in the road just past the main gates into the camp. Then I hung up, still wondering what had made him change his mind.

I trudged up the steps to where Dave stood, and handed him back his phone.

"Thanks," I said. "You're a lifesaver."

Dave shrugged. "You really need a ride somewhere?"

"Not anymore," I said. "I—"

And that's when it hit me. Why Rob had been so blasé about my going away for seven weeks, and why, just now on the phone, he'd changed his mind about coming up:

He hadn't thought there'd be guys here.

Seriously. He'd thought it was just going to be me and Ruth and about two hundred little kids, and that was it. It had never occurred to him there might be guys my own age hanging around.

That was the only explanation I could think of, anyway, for his peculiar behavior.

Except, of course, that explanation made no sense whatsoever. Because for it to be true, it would mean Rob would have to like me, you know, that way, and I was pretty sure he didn't. Otherwise, he wouldn't care so much about his stupid probation officer, and what he has to say on the matter.

Then again, the prospect of jail is a pretty daunting one. . . .

"Jess? Are you all right?"

I shook myself. Dave was staring at me. I had drifted off into Rob Wilkins dreamland right in front of him.

"Oh," I said. "Yeah. Fine. Thanks. No, I don't need a ride anymore. I'm good."

He slipped his cell phone back into his pocket. "Oh. Okay."

"You know what I do need, though, Dave?" I asked.

Dave shook his head. "No. What?"

I took a deep breath. "I need someone to keep an eye on my kids this afternoon," I said, in a rush. "Just for a little while. I, um, might be tied up with something."

Dave, unlike Ruth, didn't give me a hard time. He just shrugged and went, "Sure."

My jaw sagged. "Really? You don't mind?"

He shrugged again. "No. Why should I mind?"

We started back toward the dining hall. As we approached it, I noticed most of the residents of Birch Tree Cottage had finished breakfast and were outside, gathered around one of the campground dogs.

"It's a grape," Shane was saying, conversationally, to Lionel. "Go ahead and eat it."

"I do not believe it is a grape," Lionel replied. "So I do not think I will, thank you."

"No, really." Shane pointed at something just beneath the dog's ear. "In America, that's where grapes grow."

When I got close enough, of course, I saw what it was they were talking about. Hanging off one of the dog's ears was a huge, blood-engorged tick. It did look a bit like a grape, but not enough, I thought, to fool even the most gullible foreigner.

"Shane," I said, loudly enough to make him jump.

"What?" Shane widened his baby blues at me innocently. "I wasn't doing anything, Jess. Honest."

Even I was shocked at this bold-faced lie. "You were so," I said. "You were trying to make Lionel eat a tick."

The other boys giggled. In spite of the fright Shane had gotten the night before—and I had ended up letting him sleep inside; even I wasn't mean enough to make him sleep on the porch after the whole Paul Huck thing—he was back to his old tricks.

Next time, I was going to make him spend the night on a raft in the middle of the lake, I swear to God.

"Apologize," I commanded him.

Shane said, "I don't see why I should have to apologize for something I didn't do."

"Apologize," I said, again. "And then get that tick off that poor dog."

This was my first mistake. I should have removed the tick myself.

My second mistake was in turning my back on the boys to roll my eyes at Dave, who'd been watching the entire interaction with this great big grin on his face. Last night, he and Scott had confided to me that all the other counselors had placed bets on who was going to win in the battle of wills between Shane and me. The odds were running two to one in Shane's favor.

"Sorry, Lie-oh-nell," I heard Shane say.

"Make sure you mention this," I said, to Dave, "to your—"

The morning air was pierced by a scream.

I spun around just in time to see Lionel, his white shirt now splattered with blood, haul back his fist and plunge it, with all the force of his sixty-five pounds or so, into Shane's eye. He'd been aiming, I guess, for the nose, but missed.

Shane staggered back, clearly more startled by the blow than actually hurt by it. Nevertheless, he immediately burst into loud, babyish sobs, and, both hands pressed to the injured side of his face, wailed in a voice filled with shock and outrage, "He hit me! Jess, he hit me!"

"Because he make the tick explode on me!" Lionel declared, holding out his shirt for me to see.

"All right," I said, trying to keep my breakfast down. "That's enough. Get to class, both of you."

Lionel, horrified, said, "I cannot go to class like this!"

"I'll bring you a new shirt," I said. "I'll go back to the cabin and get one and bring it to you while you're in music theory."

Mollified, the boy picked up his flute case and, with a final glare in Shane's direction, stomped off to class.

Shane, however, was not so easily calmed.

"He should get a strike!" he shouted. "He should get a strike, Jess, for hitting me!"

I looked at Shane like he was crazy. I actually think that at that moment, he was crazy.

"Shane," I said. "You sprayed him with tick blood. He had every right to hit you."

"That's not fair," Shane shouted, his voice catching on a sob. "That's not fair!"

"For God's sake, Shane," I said, with some amusement. "It's a good thing you went to orchestra camp instead of football camp this summer, if you're gonna cry every time someone pokes you in the eye."

This had not, perhaps, been the wisest thing to say, under the circumstances. Shane's face twisted with emotion, but I couldn't tell if it was embarrassment or pain. I was a little shocked that I'd managed to hurt his feelings. It was actually kind of hard to believe a kid like Shane had feelings.

"I didn't choose to come to this stupid camp," Shane roared at me. "My mother made me! She wouldn't let me go to football camp. She was afraid I'd hurt my stupid hands and not be able to play the stupid flute anymore."

I dried up, hearing this. Because suddenly, I could see Shane's mother's point of view. I mean, the kid could play.

"Shane," I said gently. "Your mom's right. Professor Le Blanc, too. You have an incredible gift. It would be a shame to let it go to waste."

"Like you, you mean?" Shane asked acidly.

"What do you mean?" I shook my head. "I'm not wasting my gift for music. That's one of the reasons I'm here."

"I'm not talking," Shane said, "about your gift for music."

I stared at him. His meaning was suddenly clear. Too clear. There were still people, of course, standing nearby, watching, listening. Thanks to his theatrics, we'd attracted quite a little crowd. Some of the kids who hadn't made it to the music building yet, and quite a few of the counselors, had gathered around to watch the little drama unfolding in front of the dining hall. They wouldn't, I'm sure, know what he was referring to. But I did. I knew.

"Shane," I said. "That's not fair."

"Yeah?" He snorted. "Well, you know what else isn't fair, Jess? My mom, making me come here. And you, not giving Lionel a strike!"

And with that, he took off without another word.

"Shane," I called after him. "Come back here. I swear, if you don't come back here, it's the porch with Paul Huck for you tonight—"

Shane stopped, but not because I'd intimidated him with my threat. Oh, no. He stopped because he'd fun smack into Dr. Alistair, the camp director, who—having apparently heard the commotion from inside the dining hall, where he often sat after all the campers were gone and enjoyed a quiet cup of coffee—had come outside to investigate.

"Oof," Dr. Alistair said, as Shane's mullet head sank into his midriff. He reached down to grasp the boy by the shoulders in an attempt to keep them both from toppling over. Shane was no lightweight, you know.

"What," Dr. Alistair asked, as he steered Shane back around toward me, "is the meaning of all this caterwauling?"

Before I could say a word, Shane lifted his head and, staring up at Dr. Alistair with a face that was perfectly devoid of tears—but upon which there was an unmistakable bruise growing under one eye—said, "A boy hit me and my counselor didn't do anything, Dr. Alistair." He added, with a hiccupy sob, "If my dad finds out about this, he's going to be plenty mad, boy."

Dr. Alistair glared at me from behind the lenses of his glasses. "Is this true, young lady?" he demanded. He only called me young lady, I'm sure, because he couldn't remember my name.

"Only partially," I said. "I mean, another boy did hit him, but only after—"

Before I could finish my explanation, however, Dr. Alistair was taking charge of the situation.

"You," he said to Dave, who'd been standing close by, watching the proceedings with open-mouthed wonder. "Take this boy here to the nurse to have his eye looked at."

Dave sprang to attention. "Yes, sir," he said and, throwing me an apologetic look, he put a hand on Shane's shoulder and began steering him toward the infirmary. "Come on, big guy," he said.

Shane, sniffling, went with him … after pausing to throw me a triumphant look.

"You," Dr. Alistair said, jabbing his index finger at me. "You and I are going to meet in my office to discuss this matter."

My ears, I could tell, were redder than ever. "Yes, sir," I murmured. It was only then that I noticed that there among the onlookers stood Karen Sue Hanky, her mouth forming a little V of delight. How I longed to ram my fist, as Lionel had his, into her rat face.

"But not," Dr. Alistair continued, pausing to look down at his watch, "until one o'clock. I have a seminar until then."

And without another word, he turned around and headed back into the dining hall.

My shoulders slumped. One o'clock? Well, that was it. I was fired for sure.

Because of course there was no way I was making my meeting with Dr. Alistair. Not when I had an appointment at the same time to check out the situation with Keely Herzberg. I mean, my job was important, I guess. But not as important as a little girl who may or may not have been stolen from her custodial parent.

Remember what I was saying about how complicated my life had gotten lately? Yeah. That about summed it up.

"I told you," Karen Sue said as soon as Dr. Alistair was out of earshot, "that violence is never the answer."

I glanced at her sourly. "Hey, Karen Sue," I said.

She looked at me warily. "What?"

I made a gesture with my finger that caused her to gasp and go stalking off.

I noticed that a lot of the other counselors who were still standing there seemed to find it quite amusing, however.

C H A P T E R

10

He was late.

I stood on the side of the road, trying not to notice the sweat that was prickling the back of my neck. Not just the back of my neck, either. There was a pool of it between my boobs. I'm serious.

And I wasn't too comfortable in my jeans, either.

But what choice did I have? I'd learned the hard way never to ride a motorcycle in shorts. The scar was gone, but not the memory of the way the skin of my calf, sizzling against the exhaust pipe, had smelled.

Still, it had to be a hundred degrees on that long, narrow road. There were plenty of trees, of course, to offer shade. Hell, Camp Wawasee was nothing but trees, except where it was lake.

But if I stood in the trees, Rob might not see me when he came roaring up, and he might whiz right on past, and precious moments might be lost. . . .

Not that it mattered. I was going to be fired anyway, on account of missing my one o'clock meeting with Dr. Alistair. I was willing to bet that by the time I got back, all my stuff would be packed up and waiting for me by the front gates. Kerplunk, she sunk, like junk, cha, cha, cha.

Sweat was beginning to drip from the crown of my head, beneath my hair and into my eyes, when I finally heard the far off sound of a motorcycle engine. Rob isn't the type to let a muffler go, so his Indian didn't have one of those annoyingly loud engines you can hear from miles away. I simply became aware of a sound other than the shrill whine of the cicadas that were in the tall grass along the side of the road, and then I saw him, clipping along at no mean pace.

I didn't have to—we were the only two people on the road for miles, Lake Wawasee being about as isolated, I was becoming convinced, as Ice Station Zebra—but I put my arm out, to make sure he saw me. I mean, he could have thought I was a mirage or something. It was one of those kind of blazingly hot sunny days when you looked down a long straight road and saw pools of water across it, even though, when you finally got to the pool, it had evaporated as if it had never been there … because, of course, it hadn't been. It had just been one of those optical illusions they talk about, you know, in human bio.

Rob came cruising up to me and then put out a booted foot to balance himself when he came to a stop. He looked, as always, impressively large, like a lumberjack or something, only more stylishly dressed.

And when he took off his helmet and squinted at me in the sunlight with those eyes—so pale blue, they were practically the same color gray as his bike's exhaust—and I drank in his sexily messed-up hair and his darkly tanned forearms, all I could think was that, bad as it had been, that whole thing with the lightning and Colonel Jenkins and all, it had actually been worth it, because it had brought me the hottest Hottie of them all, Rob.

Well, sort of, anyway.

"Hey, sailor," I said. "Give a girl a ride?"

Rob just gave me his trademark don't-mess-with-me frown, then popped open the box on the back of his bike where he keeps the spare helmet.

"Get on," was all he said, as he held the helmet out to me.

Like I needed an invitation. I snatched up the helmet, jammed it into place (trying not to think about my sweaty hair), then wrapped my arms around his waist and said, "Put the pedal to the metal, dude."

He gave me one last, half-disgusted, half-amused look, then put his own helmet back on.

And we were off.

Hey, it wasn't a big, wet one or anything, but "Get on" isn't bad. I mean, Rob may not be completely in love with me yet or anything, but he'd shown up, right? That had to count for something. I mean, I'd called him that morning, and said I needed him to drive for four hours, cross-country, to pick me up. And he'd shown up. He'd have had to find someone to cover for him at work, and explain to his uncle why he couldn't be there. He'd have had to buy gas, both for the trip to Chicago and then back again. He'd be spending a total of ten hours or so on the road. Tomorrow, he'd probably be exhausted.

But he'd shown up.

And I didn't think he was doing it because it was such a worthy cause, either. I mean, it was, and all, but he wasn't doing it for Keely.

At least … God, I hope not.

By two-thirty, we were cruising along Lake Shore Drive. The city looked bright and clean, the windows of the skyscrapers sparkling in the sunlight. The beaches were crowded. The songs playing from the car radios of the traffic we passed made it seem like we were a couple in a music video, or on a TV commercial or something. For Levi's, maybe. I mean, here we were, two total Hotties—well, okay, one total Hottie. I'm probably only Do-able—tooling around on the back of a completely cherried-out Indian on a sunny summer day. How much cooler could you get?

I guess if we'd noticed from the beginning we were being followed, that might have been cooler. But we didn't.

I didn't because I was busy experiencing one of those epiphanies they always talk about in English class.

Only my epiphany, instead of being some kind of spiritual enlightenment or whatever, was just this gush of total happiness because I had my arms around this totally buff guy I'd had a crush on since what seemed like forever, and he smelled really good, like Coast deodorant soap and whatever laundry detergent his mother uses on his T-shirts, and he had to think that I was at least somewhat cute, or he wouldn't have come all that way to pick me up. I was thinking, if only this was how I could spend the rest of my life: riding around the country on the back of Rob's bike, listening to music out of other people's car radios, and maybe stopping every once in a while for some nachos or whatever.