Four and Twenty Blackbirds

The campers were all gathered outside in a small amphitheater, shuffling bottoms on the split-log seats. Some were chatting with cronies of previous years, and others were new, like me. The latter group played laser-tag games of eye contact, wondering who would be worth chatting up and whom to avoid.

I took a seat on the outer edge of the seating's crescent, making a point of keeping plenty of personal space between me and the next kid in line, a boy a couple of years my junior. I crossed my arms over my knees and leaned forward, waiting for the action to start.

Mr. Joe kicked things off with a knobby-kneed bang, doing a little hop as he came forward to begin the official greetings. "Hello, boys and girls, and welcome to Camp Lookout!" he announced, speaking with inflections that expect a cheer to follow.

He was rewarded with a discordant buzz of leg-slaps and whistled hoots, and Miss Candy stepped down front to join him. Miss Candy had bangs that had been teased with a curling iron and sprayed into place before the rest of her hair was pushed under a Camp Lookout baseball cap, and I figured that was pretty much all I needed to know about her.

Neither one of them impressed me much as people I should get to know, and I don't remember much of what they said. Mostly they gushed excited promises of games, swimming, and crafts—none of which spelled "summer fun" to me, exactly, but at least I was surrounded by new people. Everyone at school knew who I was, knew all about the court case and—almost as notoriously—the time I broke April's nose in the Choo Choo; but there at the camp, so far as anyone knew I was just one more awkward kid. The more I thought about it, the more I found the prospect of anonymity intensely appealing.

I met my roommates back at the bunks after opening remarks. We introduced ourselves and made idle chitchat while we unpacked, and then Maggie came bounding in behind us to perform a redundant round of roll call for our benefit.

"This is Anne," Maggie began, making a sweeping gesture at the crybaby I'd seen earlier in the parking lot. Anne was no longer sobbing, but the waterworks hadn't cleared up completely. She nodded to acknowledge her name and lifted her hand in a little wave.

"And Lisa." Lisa didn't look up from her methodical unpacking, but she also lifted her hand in a small wave to the room in general.

"And Eden." I followed suit, unwilling to break the routine.

"And this is Cora," she finished. Cora mumbled a syllable that might have been "Hi," but spared us the beauty queen hand twist. Maggie decided that her work with us was done, at least for the time being, so she left us all to "get acquainted, okay?"

Within five minutes I realized with a passive displeasure that I had been stashed in the oddball cabin. I never did decide if they put me there because my cover was blown and they thought I was one of the oddballs, or if I was just lucky.

Cora was the easiest to get to know, since she didn't tear up at the drop of a hat or freak out if you bumped the side of her bed and caused her socks to fall out of alignment, so I chose her as my first potential camp buddy. We had a number of things in common, and it was easy to talk. She was also tall for her age, and like me, she was the sort of girl who got asked a lot where her parents were from, since that's more polite than wondering aloud about somebody's racial makeup. Cora had never been to camp before, and she didn't know anyone else either.

"I've got a grandfather who's dying," she informed me over supper.

"I'm sorry," I said, just being polite, and she called me on it.

"No, you're not, but that's okay. It's kind of sad, but I don't know him real well. I'm just telling you so in case I go home in the middle of things, you'll know why. Mom didn't want me to come at all, since Grandpa's sick and we might have to leave for his funeral, but my stepdad said they could always bring me home if it came to that. Are your grandparents still alive?"

I had to think about it a minute. "My grandmother is, I think. I don't know. For some reason, we don't have much to do with her. I'm not even sure what she looks like."

"Why don't you have much to do with her?" Cora asked between a couple bites of cornbread.

"Not sure, exactly. Had something to do with my mom, maybe. It's a long story though, I bet." I tried to summon some memory of Lu's mother. I knew we'd lived with her until Lu met Dave, and I was a couple of years old then. I thought I might remember some half-heard voice that may have been hers, but then again, it might have been somebody else. I couldn't remember seeing her at Malachi's trial, and even my rarely seen aunt Michelle had come out for that one. "I think my grandmother's still alive, but I'm not sure we'd go to her funeral if she had one. I don't think she takes much interest in us, anyway, and I guess it's mutual."

"Oh."

Anne, who was sitting beside Cora on the other side of the table, began to sniffle. "I miss my grandma. I go to her place after school twice a week while my mom's at work."

We didn't pretend not to stare as she started crying again, but at least we didn't laugh, and Cora handed her a napkin. "That's sweet that you're so close," she said while Anne blew her nose. "But I bet she hopes you're having a good time. You're only going to be here two weeks, and then you can go home."

"Two whole weeks," Anne echoed mournfully, and then it was my turn to hand her a napkin.

"Geez, honey. Suck it up."

"That's not very nice," Lisa said without looking at me. She was too busy making sure her peas were lined up in tidy rows to raise her eyes and scold me in earnest, which was fine. It had been four hours, and I'd already figured out that it didn't matter how rude or gentle you were with Anne, she was going to cry anyway and there wasn't much you could do to improve or worsen the situation.

"It's okay," Anne said behind her improvised tissue.

"What about you?" Cora asked Lisa, who was deeply engrossed in her vegetable arrangement. "Why do you always do that thing where you have to make everything look just right?"

"Yeah, that's way weirder than Anne's crying," I agreed, and I peered over Lisa's shoulder, as if getting a closer look at her edible artwork would cause it to make more sense.

She elbowed me away without any real malice. "I like it this way."

I accepted the explanation, but I couldn't withhold judgment. "Bizarre," I concluded, and even Anne managed to nod through the snot to agree.

"I don't care," Lisa replied. Something about the way she said it made me believe her. That only made it stranger, so far as I was concerned, but at the same time it made it more tolerable too. At least I didn't have to feel sorry for her.

Across the table, Cora shrugged at me and I shrugged back.

Cora was easily the most normal of the bunch, and she probably thought the same thing about me, which only begged the question of what was really wrong with her. Before the week was out, I'd have my answer.

Thursday night we had a bonfire. There were marshmallows to be turned to dripping torches and dropped into the dirt; and two of the male counselors broke out guitars to compel a sing-along. I'm a fairly good singer so I joined in on the songs I knew even though I felt a little silly and didn't understand who Michael was, or why he needed to row the boat ashore.

Later, they wanted to tell ghost stories. Mr. Joe told the first two or three, but they sounded more like jokes than real events. Cora thought so too. She leaned over on the splintery log and said as much in my ear, but she wasn't any good at whispering and Mr. Joe overheard just enough to feign offense. "Cora." He found her on the far side of the fire and made sure everyone else saw her, too. "What do you mean they're not real ghost stories?"

She shifted on the log and tried to make herself look smaller. It didn't work, and all eyes were on her, so she had to answer. "I mean they're not, that's all. Real ghost stories don't have punch lines, Mr. Joe."

"They don't? Well, how should they go, then? Why don't you tell us, since you're the expert."

I was thankful for the dimly bright fire, because it camouflaged the flush that was creeping up my neck. I knew everyone was looking at Cora, but she was sitting next to me, and there was a chance someone would later remember me when presented with the mental prompt of "ghosts." I held my breath and waited for my new friend's answer.

"Real ghost stories . . . they're not whole stories," she said slowly. "You can't tell them like a joke, because you never know the whole thing. There's too much left out, and if you know the whole thing, it would take you longer than a couple of minutes to tell."

I found myself nodding along to her words, then I stopped myself, lest I be singled out as a fellow "expert" and asked to testify. But she was right, and I knew that better than anybody. It made me wonder how she knew it so well.

"Would you like to tell us a real ghost story, then?" Mr. Joe went on, and all at once I deeply hated him for forcing the subject. He didn't understand at all; if you had a real ghost story, you probably didn't want to tell it to a whole bunch of people who were only going to laugh at you if you believed it.

Cora opened her mouth and then closed it. She looked over at me, then, for general support or maybe something more specific. I didn't know how to help her, though, so she glared back into the fire. "I don't have any real ghost stories to tell, Mr. Joe. Yours are fine. You should tell us some more of them."

Her flat tone was utterly lost on our counselor, who needed only the barest hint of permission to make a further spectacle of himself. He happily began a new tale, and as he talked he stuffed another unfortunate marshmallow onto the end of his unbent coat hanger.

Cora let out a sigh of relief and uncrossed her legs.

"He's stupid," I whispered—and I'm good at whispering, so he didn't hear me. "Don't worry about it." Then, because I wanted to establish to her that I 'got it,' and that she could tell me if she wanted to, I added, "If you've got a real ghost story and you want to tell it later on, I promise I wouldn't laugh at it." ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">