Chapter Eight: Rainy Day

When the first bell rang in the morning, David thought that it had to be either a mistake or a prank, because it was pitch black outside, with no sign of dawn. He groaned and rolled over, fully prepared to go back to sleep. It was only the fact that Sneakers's alarm clock went off a moment later that proved it really was time to get up.

It was still pouring, and thundering. Well, at least that explained where the dawn had gone; if it was storming that hard, the clouds would be thick enough to block out the sunlight. Still, though. It was stormy, and probably cold, and it seemed that no one wanted to get out of bed. The only one in the entire bunk to budge was Sneakers, and that was just to turn off his alarm.

And then, like a sign from God, the outdoors lit up with lighting and a thunder crack broke almost directly overhead. It was loud enough and close enough that no one could have ignored it or gone back to sleep, and David was relatively sure that Skittery had actually screamed. Fraidycat, David thought sleepily, as he sat up just in time to be thoroughly amused; from his sitting position he could see Snitch in the bottom bed of the next bunk over roll out of bed without bothering to stand up, pulling his blankets with him.

"Mmmph," he mumbled from the floor, and David suspected that what he'd said was actually a four letter word, but it was hard to tell.

Race got up and stepped over him; Skittery made his way down the ladder and tripped over him. He repeated whatever he'd said before, more emphatically.

"Remind me again why we have to go eat breakfast on mornings like this?" Blink demanded.

Mush also forced himself to get up, and upon seeing Blink still lying in bed, reached up and stole his pillow.

"Because there's coffee in the dining hall," David answered, and finally began the descent down to the floor.

"Jack been rubbing off on you or what?" Mush asked, as Blink tried to grab his pillow back, but was faced with the choice of grabbing it and crashing down to the floor or letting it go and not injuring himself. He chose to avoid injury at the last second and grumbled a bit as he finally got out of bed.

"What?" David asked.

"Jack. Drinks a lot of coffee." Mush paused. "And smokes too much."

"Well, I don' do that."

"Figures," Skittery answered, as he made his way to the bathroom. "Goody two shoes. Can we call him that?"

David rolled his eyes, and Race answered, "Nah, he's a pretty convincing liar."

David half-smiled. "Uh, thanks?"

"Liar?" Sneakers asked, vaguely interested. "Why do I feel as though I'm contractually obligated to report that to your mother?"

Race blanched a little. "It's too early in the morning for this," he groaned. "David's never told a lie in his life. Really. Promise."

"That's what I thought." Sneakers reached for the grubby items that were his namesake and them on over socks that seemed far too clean by contrast. "Way to save Jack's job, though, Dave. Not that I know anything about what happened. Nope. I didn't hear anything about it."

"Woah, what?" Snitch asked, then paused. "You mean that thing with Denton yesterday…?"

Race grinned and beat David's shoulder affectionately. Or at least, David assumed it was affectionately, given that it could have been a lot harder. "Let's just say David…" he paused, and shot a sideways look at Sneakers, who was pointedly, painstakingly fixing his shoelaces and not listening, "has some memory problems about what happened in the dining hall. So of course he couldn't answer any questions about it."

"Oh," Snitch said. "That's cool, man."

David shrugged nonchalantly, but inwardly wondered if that was the first time he or anything he'd done had ever been described as cool. He decided it probably was, and for a fleeting moment wondered if maybe his parents were right; maybe camp was a good, normal thing and this was what it was like to be, well, normal.

But he figured that it probably wasn't that easy. It couldn't be.

The second bell rang, and was accompanied by another thunderclap, and then all he was thinking about was how much he didn't want to go outside in the rain.

*

That morning, David discovered that the theater leaked. He'd begun to spend more and more time there, helping to paint flats and sew costumes when he wasn't needed to rehearse. The theater group of campers seemed to be a fairly close knit group, and while he definitely still felt like The New Guy, everyone was friendly enough.

The fact that Mush treated him like a pretty good friend helped, too. He seemed to be the center of the theater crowd; the counselors clearly liked him and all knew him well, he was good with the little kids, and since all of the older campers except David were girls, they all seemed to have crushes on him. Which, somehow, Mush took in stride.

Well, except for the time he spent hiding from them, which was whenever he possibly could. But the theater wasn't that big, and he was on stage for most of the time, so he couldn't hide very well or often. But at least being on stage kept him occupied, so that they couldn't bother him too much.

David watched a few of the girls fawning on him from one of the benches in the audience while he made tissue paper flowers that would eventually be Red Riding Hood's props, and shook his head in disbelief.

"Gotta wonder how he does it, huh?"

Startled, David swiveled to see Blink sitting behind him.

"Shouldn't you be trying to drown Smurf somewhere?" he asked, having already learned of the infamous boating beach feud.

"Waterfront's closed for the storm."

"Oh, right." That made sense.

"MISTER BALLATT, I do not mind you spending your free time in my theater while you're temporarily homeless," Lark called from on stage, "but you had best be making yourself useful."

"Yes, Lark," he agreed, and picked up a few sheets of tissue paper.

David wondered how many years Blink must have been coming to camp for the theater staff to know he spent all of his time at the boat beach… Or maybe everyone just knew everyone. It certainly seemed that way a lot of the time, though there were definitely cliques. Like the theater clique, though Blink seemed to be welcome there too. Maybe because he's Mush's best friend? David wondered. He felt more confident at camp every day, but didn't have all of the social politics down yet.

David finished the flower he'd been working on; it was a little lopsided, but not too bad. He set it down, then snatched it back up as he realized the bench was damp and would ruin it. Frowning, he investigated why the bench was damp, and discovered a slow but steady drip from the roof. "That can't be good," he commented.

"There's more of them backstage," Blink answered. "And a couple over there." He gestured vaguely towards the back of the theater, where the door was.

"How do you know?" David asked.

"Been there forever."

"How do you know that? You don't really seem to hang to be a theater person or anything."

Blink shrugged. "Basically everyone works on the big productions," he answered. "And anyway, Mush makes me."

"Oh."

"Yeah. Actually, just about all the buildings around here leak. All the cabins especially."

"Ours?"

"Yep. But not too bad, don't worry."

"Uh, okay."

Though as it turned out, David ought to have worried.

*

The morning passed slowly; the storm showed no signs of letting up, and after a few hours passed, no one seemed to be in a good mood anymore. Everyone at lunch seemed either cranky or withdrawn, or both. Mrs. Higgins declared there would be a meeting for all department heads before releasing the campers for their soggy march home. Even with an umbrella or a raincoat, it was impossible to trek all the way back to Pentland without getting soaked.

Fifteen minutes later, Sneakers arrived back at the cabin; David remembered that he was the head of the archery unit. "Right," he muttered, sounding less than thrilled. "All afternoon activities are cancelled. Too damn much rain."

"So what do we do?" David asked.

"We have a bunk-in," Race supplied. "Right?"

"Yep. Have fun, guys, I've gotta go deliver the message to everyone else."

"Um, wouldn't it have been easier to do that on the way up here?" David asked.

Sneakers glared at him before setting off again. No one said anything for a few minutes, just changed from their soggy clothes into dryer ones. "So…" David asked eventually, once again realizing that he was still The New Guy, "What's a bunk-in?"

"It's when we just hang out all afternoon. They plan activities and stuff for the kids, but we're old enough to entertain ourselves," Race explained.

"Sounds… Really dull."

"Yep."

David sighed and climbed up into his bunk, figuring that he could nap, or at least warm up and dry off under a few blankets, and discovered that Blink had been wrong. There was a large leak in their cabin. Directly above his bed.

He said a very, very nasty word.

"Wow, I didn't think you knew words like that," Mush commented. "So what's up?"

"Leak. On my bed."

"Oh. That sucks."

David checked and discovered that his blankets were all soaking wet, his sheets were beneath him, and furthermore the water had soaked through to the mattress, which was equally sopping wet. He repeated his earlier statement.

"So?" Snitch asked. "Just put your spare sheets on."

"What, so that they can get soaked, too?" David demanded testily.

"We'll shove the bed over," Race decided. "No problem." So David scrambled back down to the floor, and with Snitch and Skittery's help the shoved the bunk bed over directly against Sneakers's bed, which cleared just enough room for the drip to drip onto the floor. Race dug into the cabinet under the sink and found a medium sized pot inside.

"Dude, there's cooking stuff in there!" Snitch discovered.

"Well, yeah," Race said. "We've got a stove, so…"

"I didn't know we could use it, though. How'd you know that was there?"

Race rolled his eyes. "Who do you think gets the fun job of stocking these cabins?"

"Oh, right."

"I don't even get paid."

"Poor baby."

"Shut up."

David stripped his bed and hung the blankets over the chairs that sat around the table, and the sheets over the table itself. The mattress, he hoped, would air out and dry quickly, because he wasn't thrilled with the thought of sleeping in damp sheets on a wet mattress.

Well, he told himself as he sat on one of the blanket-covered chairs and stared out at the pouring rain, I guess it could be worse.

*

"A bunk-in?" Smurf groaned.

Sarah stared around the cabin in something resembling mild horror. She didn't actually detest most of the girls she lived with, but wasn't exactly thrilled to hang out with all of them. She didn't mind Shakespeare, who had the bed underneath hers, and Polecat didn't really talk to her and she didn't talk to Polecat, so that worked out okay. No one seemed to have figured out how to hold a conversation with Swinger, though people were beginning to try sign language (or a rough approximation there of, consisting mostly of pointing and yelling) to try to communicate. And Dreamer seemed nice enough, though Sarah didn't know her well.

The problem was Hotshot and Smurf, because while the two of them didn't seem to be best friends or anything, they were better friends with each other than with anyone else in the bunk, and they seemed to allied themselves against Sarah.

"Could be worse," Hotshot answered. "Chauncey could be here."

"Amen," Smurf answered. Hotshot had a point; the thought of spending the afternoon trapped inside a cabin with nothing in particular to do wasn't thrilling, but the thought of doing it under the watchful eye of counselor Chauncey, perhaps the single biggest stickler for rules in the whole camp, was even worse. At least this way, they had a little bit of freedom.

"So you mean we're stuck here?" Sarah asked, flopping into one of the chairs. "With each other?"

"Yeah, are you deaf, or just stupid?" Hotshot answered.

Sarah narrowed her eyes and glared.

"Hotshot," Shakespeare chided. "We're going to be here all afternoon, could you please try not to be a bitch the whole time?"

"I'm sorry, what did you call me?" she demanded.

"I didn't call you anything, I just said–"

"She called you a bitch," Smurf answered.

"Stop goading her!"

"I wasn't goading her, I was just telling her what you said," Smurf answered innocently.

"Troublemaker."

Sarah wasn't sure if that was Dreamer or Polecat; someone had muttered it barely under her breath.

"I didn't call you a bitch," Shakes answered. "I just, you know, suggested that maybe life for the next few hours would be a bit easier if we all tried to be pleasant to each other."

"Fat chance," Hotshot muttered.

"What is it with you?" Sarah demanded. "Do you have a permanent case of PMS or something? Because my God, you are a bitch."

"Oh yeah? Want to make something of it?" Hotshot demanded, and stood and glared angrily.

Sarah slowly got to her feet as well. "Yeah, maybe I do." She crossed her arms and met Hotshot's glare with a glower of her own.

"Hey, don't blow your wig, just igg," Swinger said, which, after three days, didn't even earn her a strange look.

"Okay, simmer down, there," Dreamer half-ordered, sitting up from where she'd been lying on her bunk. "No fist fights inside."

"Yeah, it's hard to get blood out of clothing," Polecat added.

The two of them received death glares for their trouble, but Sarah slunk back into her chair and was content to glare and occasionally mutter to Hotshot, who in return went back to her bunk and her conversation with Smurf.

Dreamer made herself comfortable again, and shut her eyes. It was clearly going to be a long and frustrating afternoon, and she just hoped that the screaming matches that were certain to happen wouldn't interrupt her daydreaming too much.

*

The collective mood of the boys of Pentland didn't improve any as the afternoon wore on. Skittery seemed content to ignore the rest of the world by turning his discman up loudly enough that he was oblivious to the rest of the cabin, who, in could hear his discman clearly. As a whole, they decided that three times through the same Best of Disco album was more than they should have to put up with.

Race managed to stop Blink from heading up a lynch mob, and the volume of Skittery's discman was decreased significantly after that. Though it would have helped more if he'd stopped humming aloud, but the rest of the bunk assumed that in the battle against the BeeGees, any victory at all was better than none.

The next incident involved Snitch, a tennis ball, several death threats if Snitch didn't stop bouncing it so that Mush could nap, Snitch's objecting that he had as much right to bounce his tennis ball as Mush did to sleep, Mush's claim that he had as much right to shove the tennis ball into a very delicate part of Snitch's anatomy as Snitch did to bounce it, and Blink and Race physically hauling the two of them apart before they could actually carry through with any of the threats.

Racetrack looked like he might crack under the strain of trying to keep the peace at any moment, though. He was muttering to himself under his breath, and all David could actually make out sounded like, "Not my (snarl) job, not even (snarl) getting paid (snarl), where the (snarl snarl snarl) is the (snarl) counselor?" and he was too afraid to translate the snarling back into English.

The constant drip, drip, drip of the leak into the pot of water didn't help anyone, either. It was almost as bad as the BeeGees. David glared at it hatefully, as though it had decided to leak just to spite him, like Mother Nature was trying to piss him off personally, and like the universe was conspiring against him. He wanted to follow Mush's lead and crash for the few hours that remained until dinner, but his mattress was still wet, and as a result he had nowhere to sleep.

"There's always Sneakers's bed," Race finally said, after David began bashing his head into the wall in rhythm with the dripping. "Since he apparently decided not to come back."

"Where d'you think he is?" Blink asked.

"Probably screwing Paint in the arts and crafts cabin," Race muttered, then at the horrified looks he was getting from David, "What? They're practically married anyway."

"They are?" David asked.

"Ew, they have sex in the arts and crafts cabin? Dude, I am never going in there again," Snitch decided.

"Yeah, they've been dating for five or six years now."

"Well, it's not like they don't do it in the archery equipment shed, too," Blink put in.

"Gross!"

"Please tell me they didn't meet and fall in love at camp."

"Nah, they–"

"Oh, come on, they've had sex all over camp, duh."

"That is seriously nasty. I mean, this is a freaking camp."

"–met in college. Sneakers had been coming here for years, this is only Paint's third, since they started wanting to spend summers together too."

"Well, I'd like to score at camp."

"I guess that's sweet."

"Yeah, but with who?"

"Do you guys mind, I am trying to sleep over here!"

"Yeah, they live together the rest of the year. She's in grad school for–"

"Okay, so most of the girls aren't exactly my type, but–"

"–fine arts, and he's a middle school PE teacher."

"–a few of them are kind of hot."

"Are you serious? They are not."

"Hey, you guys said my walkman was loud!"

"PE teacher? Wow, Jack was right; he is evil."

"No kidding."

"You don't think any of them are hot? Aren't you and Swinger, like, dating?"

"Not really, we kinda hooked up last summer–"

"Excuse me, I said, I am trying to sleep!"

"What, you need your beauty rest, Mushy?"

"–and yeah, I was kind of hoping to maybe do it again, but–"

"I must still seriously be an outsider, I don't know any of the gossip."

"–she won't freaking speak English."

"It's all right, it's okay, you can look the other way, whether you're a lover or–"

"Well, I only know the counselor gossip because I was here through the counselor orientation week."

"I do need my beauty sleep, actually, it's why some of us are more attractive than you are, dumbass."

"…whether you're a mother it's stayin' alive, stayin' alive…"

"Dude, I'm pretty sure those aren't the words."

"Gee, you don't have an ego or anything..."

"Hey, to be fair, the guy does have a harem."

"I give up, I'm not going to get any sleep, am I?"

"Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin' alive, stayin' alive…"

"No, probably not."

"Damn it."

"Does that mean I can have my tennis ball back now?"

"No!"

"Hey, guys?" Race asked, managing to break through the din of the various conversations that were going on, his mood improving a bit now that people were talking instead of sitting around sullenly. "I'm bored. Anyone up for a game of cards?"

*

Looking back, no one was sure exactly who started the fight or how it happened. But by the time the first bell rang for dinner, the battle lines were clearly drawn. Sarah was allied with Shakespeare, not so much because they knew each other well–they didn't, Sarah still didn't know anyone well–but because Shakespeare was sick of listening to Hotshot mouth off.

Hotshot and Smurf remained firmly together on the matter of how much Sarah sucked, though. And they discussed it, loudly, in as much detail as possible. Swinger also joined in, more or less; no one was entirely sure what, "That bree's a real hincty yarddog," meant, but in general seemed to be agreeing with Hotshot.

On the other hand, Polecat stayed firmly out of the whole fight, and Dreamer was hesitant to get involved on either side. She'd given up trying to keep the peace, and now was just hoping to stay out of the whole thing.

This whole kind of fight was new to Sarah, who was used to the social politics of a high school, not a camp. Things were different at camp; she had to live with the people she was fighting with. That made things harder, though she was certain she'd figure out just how far she could go soon. She'd managed to work it out at school, after all.

The only problem was that Hotshot already knew how much she could get away with. After four years, she knew exactly how to make trouble without getting caught, and by the time they left for dinner, she had some very definite plans on how to make her bunkmate's life miserable.

*

Sneakers was cheerful when he arrived back at his cabin, as the second bell for dinner rang. His clothes were soaked through to the skin, but he didn't seem particularly bothered.

Until he saw the looks on his campers' faces.

"Have fun, Sneakers?" Race asked mildly, looking up from dealing a round of cards.

"Uh."

Race finished dealing the hand and set down the deck, then looked over at David, who started laughing, which set off everyone else. Sneakers rolled his eyes.

"I was just hanging out in the little kids' bunk; they need as many counselors as they can get when everyone is stuck inside. I don't know what's so funny."

"Is that a paint smear on your forehead?" Mush asked, which set off another round of laughing.

Sneakers rolled his eyes and began to peel off wet clothing so he could be at least somewhat dry for dinner, and dressed. He sat on his bed to pull on his socks and shoes, then jumped back up.

"Um, guys?" he asked. "Why is my mattress wet?"

[End Chapter Eight]
Chapter Nine: Male Bonding and Mosquito Bites
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