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

so concerned about this girl, fine. You can look at her sheet.”

“Great.”

“After your campout. You have a job to do right now.”

“Can I at least bring a copy to read once my kids are asleep?”

She can tell the director doesn’t like her. It’s not as if Fiona fell off the turnip truck yesterday, as her father used to say. He was usually three sheets to the wind when he said it, though.

The director hands her Poppy’s intake sheet. “Get back to your campers.”

“Thank you for caring SO MUCH about children,” Fiona says, but only inside her head.

Back at the gear shed, Andrew is holding a tiny Snoopy backpack in front of his face, fending off three other boys who are crowding around him, waving tent poles as if they are billy clubs. His backpack is big enough to hold maybe half a peanut butter sandwich and an apple.

“Andrew, is that the backpack you told me you brought from home?”

“Fiona, the others have already made him aware that it’s too small,” Amy says, a note of warning in her voice.

“Jesus Christ,” says Fiona, “I said over and over that he had to carry a tent and a sleeping bag and he kept saying he had it covered. A tiny Snoopy backpack is his idea of having it covered?”

“Why is everyone here so mean?” yells Andrew, throwing Snoopy down and crashing off into the bushes like a baby moose.

“Way to go,” Amy says.

“Do you want to go after him?”

“No, it’s better if you make it right,” she says, “even though I’m beginning to wonder if this was your plan all along, always leaving me with ninety percent of our group.”

“I’ll bring him right back. Ten minutes, tops. I promise.”

But Fiona cannot find Andrew. After the ten minutes are up, there’s still no Andrew. Has any counselor in the history of Camp Wildwood ever lost a camper before?

“Andrewwww. Come out. You’re missing s’moooorrrres.”

She’s about to call it quits and head back to admit to the director that it isn’t Finn they should be worried about, but her. She is the worst possible person to be put in charge of children. She’ll turn herself in.

But then a flash of red curled up under a scrubby spruce tree catches her eye.

By the time she reaches him, her arms and cheeks are scraped from squeezing through dead, clawing branches. Fiona scrunches up her arms and legs, trying not to touch him.

She says nothing, tired of words, tired of always doing the wrong thing, even when she tries so hard to do the right thing, whatever the hell that is.

They each sit hunched in a round ball of silence, except for Andrew’s sporadic sobbing and adenoidal wheezing. From the corner of her eye she sees dead mosquitoes in his hair, blood and bites on his cheek. How will he survive till the end of camp? How will she?

“I’m so sorry,” Fiona says. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

She is thinking about Amy. How coming from a family that buys you nice tights and cuts your sandwiches into cute shapes and remembers to pick you up from preschool is such a simple, beautiful thing.

It does not prepare a person for how scary the world really is.

But Fiona knows. And Andrew knows. And Poppy seems to know, or at least, her invisible friend, Elizabeth, does.

“Why did you have to go and make such a big deal about my tiny backpack in front of everyone?” says Andrew.

“I know. I’m sorry. What can I say to make it better, Andrew?”

“Nothing,” he says.

Truer words were never spoken.

But his shoulders have stopped shaking. His red, puffy eyes look up at her with a glint in them so deep, she knows he’s going to spout something profound that will save them both.

“Have you ever seen that movie Escape to Witch Mountain?”

“Um, no. Actually, I haven’t.”

And then he proceeds to tell her the whole movie, in exquisite detail. She realizes Amy is going to genuinely kill her. But she owes him this. He’s probably never had anyone give him this much attention in his life.

An hour later they make it back to camp. Amy’s clothes and face look like she’s been in the trenches of World War I. Her ponytail is coming out of its scrunchie, and there’s marshmallow in her hair. But all the tents are up, and nineteen very sticky campers are happily roasting hot dogs over a blazing fire. She should win counselor of the year, Fiona thinks. She didn’t know Amy even knew how to make a fire.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and Amy waves her away with the willow branch she’s whittling into a point.

“Don’t make me stab you with this,” she says without looking up. “It’s very sharp.” There’s a long, long pause before she adds, “Andrew looks absolutely transformed. What did you do?”

“Kind of nothing,” Fiona says, which is a lie and the truth.

The kids have moved on from hot dogs and are now thrusting flaming marshmallows at her, asking for chocolate and graham crackers.

Fiona doles out s’more fixings. Then she looks at Amy and says, “Did I ever tell you what happened the day you gave me your tights in preschool?”

“I actually hated those tights,” says Amy. “It wasn’t that big of a deal, Fiona.”

“Yeah, it was,” Fiona says, “I got left at preschool that day. Nobody came to pick me up.”

“What do you mean?”

“My mom just forgot about me. I remember sitting at the coloring table and seeing the sky outside getting darker and darker and hearing Ms. Everett call someone, whispering that she didn’t know what to do. I knew she was talking about me. Remember those homemade worksheets she made about Dog and Moose and Bear going sledding together? I just pretended to color the same moose on a toboggan over and over again.”

The marshmallows are all gone, but Fiona keeps unwrapping pieces of Hershey’s chocolate and stacking them onto graham crackers anyway, as if in a trance.

“Someone came, I can’t remember who. It could