I glanced at Deborah, wondering whether she was buying this. Her expression told me she wasn’t. “I’m sorry, Bella,” she said after a few seconds. “But I just don’t believe you. I’m not going to press charges, but I want you to leave this camp immediately. Call your parents from this phone to pick you up, and I’ll escort you over to pack your things. I can’t put my campers at further risk. I can’t. And if you try anything to further sabotage this camp, I will call the police.”
Bella shook her head like she couldn’t believe this. “You have no proof!” she cried. “I’ll sue you! We’ll sue!”
Deborah looked tired. “If you want to sue me over losing one day of your summer job, Bella, have at it. But I’m afraid you still have to leave.” She began walking toward the door, and I stepped aside to let her pass. She took Bella’s arm as she passed her and said, “Come on.”
Bella glared at her, then turned her ferocious stare on me. “I won’t forget this, Nancy,” she said in a low voice. “If our paths ever cross again . . . Mark my words, you’ve made a lifelong enemy!”
With that, she whirled around and followed Deborah out of the cabin. I watched them walk across the clearing, past the burnt GO HOME message in the grass, and toward Bella’s cabin.
Well, I thought, straightening up as the words lifelong enemy replayed in my mind, you certainly won’t be the first.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Stormy Night
“ARE WE ALMOST THERE YET?” Kiki asked, grabbing my arm and walking up beside me. “Just kidding! Ha-ha! Remember the first day when we hiked to the creek, what wusses we were? This feels like nothing now.”
I smiled, but I couldn’t quite agree with her. We were making the long hike up Hemlock Hill to the site of the camp-wide campout, and my legs were burning. Of course, some of my tiredness might just have been from the fact that it had been a long day for me. After Bella’s parents came to pick her up—they hadn’t seemed terribly thrilled by Deborah’s decision either—I’d had lunch with my bunk and a session of serious friendship bracelet-making. It was only about five o’clock, but I felt ready to climb into my sleeping bag and say good night to this day.
“I think we are almost there now,” I said, “but yeah, point taken, Kiki.”
“You guys are so much stronger than you were!” cried Maya excitedly. “You’ve grown so much this week! I can’t believe you’re all going home tomorrow. We have to keep in touch.”
Harper rolled her eyes. “Don’t get all sappy, Maya,” she said. “We still have tonight.”
At that moment, I caught a snippet of conversation from the eleven-year-old group in front of me. Sam, who’d taken over Bella’s position as of lunchtime, was patiently repeating the story she’d told about fifty times since Bella’s departure. “She just urgently had to go home,” Sam said. “I told you guys, everything’s fine, but it was unavoidable. She wanted to say good-bye, but she couldn’t. Don’t worry, though—we’ll still have fun.”
“Why do you always wear that baseball cap?” one of Bella’s campers, a redhead named Haley, asked.
Sam grinned, touching her fingers to the brim. “Because it keeps the sun out of my eyes,” she replied. “Plus, it looks so darn good on me. Yankee blue is my color, don’t you think?”
About ten minutes later we finally came upon the clearing on a rocky ledge above the lake where we’d be camping that night. Each bunk was given thirty minutes to set up their tent and lay out their sleeping bags inside. I’d been worried that it would take longer than that to set up, but actually, with all eight of us working together, setting up the tent was a breeze. It made me realize what a great team the eight of us had become, and that made me smile.
Once our bags and sleeping bags were laid out inside, we headed over to where Deborah and Miles were setting up a campfire. While Miles used a flint to get the campfire started—a cool trick he’d tried to teach the campers—Deborah asked the counselors to line up the insulated bags of food we’d brought. I plunked down the bag I’d gotten from the mess hall, which included hot dogs, buns, potatoes for roasting, and apples. Soon each of the kids was holding a hot dog on a pointy stick over the roaring campfire, and we’d all wrapped potatoes in aluminum foil to roast in the fire.
I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I began to smell the hot dogs cooking, and then my stomach rumbled angrily.
“Hungry much?” George asked, sidling up beside me.
I smiled. “I guess so,” I admitted. “Things were still so crazy at lunch, I don’t think I ate a lot.”
I’d filled George and Bess in on the Bella incident during free period.
George patted my back. “Don’t feel bad about it, Nance. You got a crazy person out of here! You saved the campout! Look at all these happy faces that would have been sad, watching another DVD in the mess hall or something.”
I looked around at the happy campers, trying to feel the truth in George’s words. But something just wasn’t sitting right.
“What if she didn’t do it?” I asked.
George turned to me, her eyes flashing. “Nancy, come on. You can’t be serious. Bella was acting weird since the moment we all got to camp.”