Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (general ebook reader .TXT) 📗

is almost nostalgic for her plaid uniform with the little bobble on the cap. And she loves Peanut Buster Parfaits more than she loves other people’s kids, though she definitely doesn’t hate kids. And neither does Amy, she thinks as she finally manages to retrieve the soiled green jeans with a long broom handle. She takes them to the staff cabin to wrap in a plastic garbage bag. They’ll need to go in a bear-proof container until the end of camp. If they haven’t disintegrated by then.

Lillian, a counselor from Montana, is sitting alone at a table writing postcards. She glances up, gives Fiona half a wave, and keeps writing.

Fiona smiles. Lillian is such a relief. She has no secret agenda like several of the other counselors from the Lower 48, who are either environmental activists or animal-rights activists or some other kind of activist that Fiona and Amy hadn’t even known existed. Like the girl who said pulling carrots out of the ground was cruel.

Fiona had thought she was joking and had laughed hysterically until Amy jabbed her in the ribs with her finger.

“You didn’t have to poke me so hard,” said Fiona.

“Well, you were giving her the stand-up comic of the year award with that laugh. You needed more than a nudge.”

Anyway, thank goodness for Lillian. She’s easygoing, funny, helpful—as long as nobody asks her to bring her campers to the basketball courts.

Fiona had asked her what she had against basketball and Lilian had just rolled her eyes and said, “Basically everything.”

The kids love it, though, because almost all Alaskan kids love basketball.

“Something for the bear container,” Fiona says, waving the garbage bag at Lillian.

Lillian covers her nose.

“Yeah, if I were a bear, I’d be all over that.”

Then she goes back to her postcards.

Finn, from Colorado, comes out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee and nods at Fiona. She doesn’t trust him, mainly because he’s really, really cute in a swoony kind of way, and he knows it. He ties his long hair up in a man bun and wears a headlamp, even though it’s light all night and nobody needs a headlamp.

“Habit,” he said when someone asked him about it.

Fiona cannot imagine a scenario where anyone would need to wear a headlamp so often that it became a habit.

What is he, a coal miner? A mole?

He points to the garbage bag. “Maybe we should hide those pants and map the coordinates, see if the kids can find them with a compass before a bear does.”

“What do you mean, ‘map the coordinates’?”

The look on his face reminds Fiona that she doesn’t fit in the Alaskan brochures Finn and the others read before heading north. Every time she or Amy asks a question, they get the same response, as if being from Alaska means they are supposed to know everything about the outdoors, from dog mushing to kayaking at night to rebuilding the engine of a bush plane.

“Are you kidding?” says Finn. “I thought Alaskan kids learned how to use a compass in utero.”

“Whoa, there, Mr. Know-It-All,” says Lillian suddenly. “Did you forget to get off your high horse before you tied it up at the barn?”

“Sorry, I’m just surprised,” he says. “I’m out.” He makes a motion like an umpire at home plate, switches on his unnecessary headlamp, and backs out of the lodge.

“Thanks for that,” says Fiona.

“Don’t worry about it. I get enough of that attitude back home. Small towns, you know? Everybody’s an expert.”

“Yeah, Alaska’s basically just a really big small town. I get it.”

She really should learn to use a compass, though. Fiona adds it to the list of things she didn’t know she was supposed to know in order to survive.

“Are you going to do something with that, by the way?” Lillian points at Nick’s pants. Fiona can’t believe she’s still holding the bag.

“Yep, going. I’m out.” She mimics Finn’s impression of an ump calling a play and is happy to see Lillian crack a smile.

Are they even worth saving? Is Nick’s mom really going to want them back in another week?

Nick and Franky’s mom, Nightingale, is a folk singer who is spending her free summer days at festivals without her sons, singing about wagon wheels and things blowing in the wind. Most of the counselors at Wildwood are of the folk-singing variety. Even Finn was mesmerized by Nightingale’s tiny sandaled feet and the way her flowery dress was just see-through enough to accentuate both her hairy legs and the fact that she did not believe in underwear.

But even more noticeable to Fiona was how quickly Nightingale had dropped off her kids. When Fiona mentioned this while on KP duty, the cook, who was thirty, said, “When you’re a parent you can have an opinion, but at seventeen you don’t know shit.”

Cook was rummaging through a box of vegetables Nightingale had dropped off when she’d also dropped off her boys.

“Would you just take a look at this organic broccoli from her garden.”

Fiona knew a lot about delinquent parents, actually, if anybody cared to ask. Which they didn’t.

“Nobody has broccoli growing by mid-June,” she said to Amy as they made their way to the water spigot that night, slapping mosquitoes off each other’s cheeks and arms while they walked.

“Maybe Nightingale has a greenhouse.”

Amy held out her brush and Fiona squeezed a dab of Crest onto both their bristles.

“Maybe people just believe what they want to believe,” she said.

Amy pumped the spigot, splashing water on Fiona’s sneakers.

“Well, you’d know all about that,” said Amy.

She spit toothpaste into a patch of devil’s club.

“What?” said Fiona.

“Nothing, never mind.”

Amy was not acting like herself. She had always let everything roll off her back so easily—this just didn’t make sense. Fiona and Amy’s friendship had lasted this long because Amy wasn’t melodramatic or selfish. Even the day they met, their first day of preschool, Amy had been the one to let Fiona know she had her back.

Amy had been wearing brightly colored tights with polka dots on them, and Fiona’s