“You all made it!” she said. “Good job!”
“What’s going on?” Hunter asked.
She ignored him, unclipping a walkie-talkie from the waistband of her yoga pants. She pressed it against her mouth. “Team One checking in.”
The walkie-talkie coughed static as the other counselors checked in. Team Two, Team Three—that meant Isaiah was safe—Team Four, Team Five, Team Six.
“We don’t have Hari!” Kate said, panicked.
“Oh, he’s around here somewhere,” Meg said. “He’ll find us.”
“We are a go,” crackled the walkie-talkie.
The trees erupted in Christmas lights that refracted off every piece of trash strung up in the branches. The distant sirens cut off mid-yowl. There was a loud crack as a butcher paper sign unrolled from the low branches of the largest tree in the clearing. It read “Aut Vincere Aut Mori.”
“Victory or death?” Brandon hissed at Meg.
“You know she likes to make an entrance,” Meg murmured back.
Perla glanced at Brandon. “You speak Latin?”
He blinked, seemingly surprised to find that he wasn’t invisible. He opened his mouth to say something, but Meg shushed him.
“Welcome to Mudders Meadow!” the counselor from Bryn Mawr called from under the banner. “I am Mary-Anne France, your activities counselor. And this—” She lifted a trophy high over her head and struck a pose. “Is the Cheeseman trophy. Four of you will win the Melee. One of you will win the Cheeseman. Or, as the camp directors call it, the counselors’ endowment. The twelve of us can grant a full ride to one of you based on your achievements in this tournament. Each counselor will choose a Cheeseman event. The person who wins the most events gets the endowment.”
The meadow drowned in gasps and shouts. The idea of a fifth scholarship plucked the breath out of my lungs and carried it off into the garbage trees. Leigh huddled closer to me, trembling in barely contained delight as she squealed, “Plot twist!”
“Still talking,” Bryn Mawr snapped. She shook the trophy in annoyance. It glittered in the Christmas lights. “You can’t prepare for the events. You won’t know when they’re coming or what they will entail. Participation isn’t mandatory, but attendance is. Clearly.” She planted the trophy in the dirt and crossed her arms over her chest as she barked, “Faulkner?”
Faulkner, the blond counselor in charge of our music class, broke apart from her team. Her long, spray-tanned legs stuck out from under pajama shorts printed with kitten faces as she skipped into the center of the field.
“Tonight’s event is a Mudders Meadow tradition,” she said. She flung her arms out wide, as if to embrace the trash trees as her throat ululated, “Amoeba tag!”
Every dream catcher, fork, and Christmas ornament trembled as a dubstep beat dropped.
“What. The. Hell,” I breathed.
“Hidden speakers,” Leigh called over the music, bursting into applause. “Very impressive. There must be a generator somewhere! Or possibly solar paneling!”
“They pulled us out of bed to play tag?” Galen asked.
Perla tore at her hair and screamed “Dicks!” at the clear night sky.
14
“You’re in or you’re out,” Faulkner said, bringing everyone back to the matter at hand. “If you’re in, step forward. If you’re out, take a seat.”
Hunter, Kate, Leigh, and I stepped forward. Brandon stumbled, as if shoved, and thrust his hands into his armpits. I glanced back, but the rest of our team was helping Meg get a blanket she’d stashed in the nearest tree. Perla was sulking in the dirt, her knees pulled up to her chest.
“The rules are simple,” Faulkner said over the persistent beat of the music. “Two people are it. If you get tagged, you join the amoeba and become responsible for absorbing the next person. The chain may split off into two or more players and reabsorb itself at will. The last person not attached to the chain wins.”
With a ballerina’s grace, she swept an arm out. Bryn Mawr’s cocaptain walked into the center of the clearing and gripped Faulkner’s wrist.
“Maxwell and I are it,” she said, lifting their tethered hands into the air. “The game starts in three, two—”
A whistle sounded, high and shrill over the music. I didn’t have a chance to check to see where it had come from. Faulkner and Maxwell were already speeding through the field, scooping up two campers who hadn’t moved fast enough.
“And that’s two down right after the whistle.”
Who had given Lumberjack Beard a bullhorn? I could see him sitting in the tree above Bryn Mawr, his spindly legs dangling over the Latinate sign.
I broke away from my teammates and ran, pell-mell, out of the way of the amoeba’s wobbling path. Shouts rose up from the edges of the meadow. Team numbers. People’s names. Cheers and boos. Complaints that we could all be asleep right now.
“We have our first split,” Lumberjack Beard boomed.
I spun and saw three groups of pajama wearers, linked together at the wrist. Hungry hands extended in all directions. I leaped back out of the way and skidded sideways on a lost flip-flop.
I thought of the week when Ethan had become obsessed with somersaults. Beth had dragged us to the theater and we’d ended up learning parkour rolls with the cast of Julius Caesar. Ethan had made me practice with him in the backyard for hours. It’d never been a particularly useful skill.
Use the momentum, my brain screamed.
I threw myself forward, tucking my head to the side. My shoulder landed in a patch of dead grass and my legs flew over. I propelled forward and jumped back to my feet, grateful to find myself momentarily out of harm’s way.
It’d be hell of embarrassing to get tagged while showing off my rusty stage combat skills.
The amoeba had connected again into a long chain. Leigh and Brandon had been absorbed. But they moved slower with so many people connected together. The line of people billowed out in the center, where Faulkner and Maxwell were struggling to regain control.
“Only ten players left on the field,” Lumberjack Beard announced. “Finish them, Faulkner!”
“Split!” Faulkner screamed.
One chain became six. I could see the girl who’d been assigned to hang my Firefly poster careening toward me, her face flushed under her cat-eye glasses. I kicked off my shoes, leaving them as land mines behind me. There were screams in my wake as the small chain fell. Twigs bit into the soles of my feet as I feinted between another cluster.
In the distance—underneath the butcher paper sign and Lumberjack Beard’s feet—a glimpse of dreadlocks.
Isaiah had always been a hopeless cheater. He stashed Monopoly money in his sleeves and moved battleships and double dribbled so much they’d kicked him off his fifth-grade basketball team.
There was no way I was going to let him hide until he was the last person standing.