I didn’t have long to think because The Scary Nurse suddenly appeared at our table. The sight of the scary, old nurse hovering over our table was enough to make me forget about Aunt May and the dishes.

“Who’s Chad Bayard?” she demanded, squinting at a plastic bag with pills in it and wrinkling up her big nose.

One of the boys looked petrified and raised his hand up to his ear. Out of habit, I peeked at the label on the bag to make sure Chad’s name was actually on it. At junior high camp when anybody in either of our families needed medication, R.J. and I always checked the bag to make sure their name was on it written in one of our mothers’ handwriting. I wasn’t afraid that she would use a potion on him and turn him into a frog, they way R.J. and I used to fear, but who knows if she’d really poison a kid or not? She might get so crabby that one of these days she’d crack. You don’t have to be a witch to poison someone. There is poison for regular people, too.

Chad took his pill; The Scary Nurse watched him swallow it, and she limped a little bit to the next table.

There was something weird about this elementary camp. Really weird. The cook had yelled at me, there were way too many new people I had to share a table with, and The Scary Nurse was probably going to come to our table every dinner to give Chad his medicine.

And to top it off, Carin was the only person I knew. Since I’ve been going to junior high camp for so long, I know all the counselors and the campers who have been there before. I like knowing people already because making friends is so hard when you’re shy. I thought they’d all be at elementary camp, too.

I looked around the dining hall. All I saw were strangers. Mr. LaBoyer, the manager, wasn’t even at his usual table with his family. I stretched around in my chair to look behind me. I expected to see Aunt May’s crabby scowl at the dish window, but Ben the lifeguard stood there instead, hurriedly sliding plates off a huge stack and arranging them on a blue tray.

I jumped out of my seat and ran to the dish window. I almost tripped over some kid’s chair that was sticking out. That wouldn’t have happened if the deans had arranged the tables in tidy rows like Dad does at junior high camp instead of these weird clusters.

“Ben! I'm so glad you’re here.”

“Is there something wrong, Abby?” His eyebrows scrunched together as he looked at me.

“You could say that everything is wrong.”

“Really? You usually like camp. And you seemed fine at the swim tests.”

“I know.” I looked around suspiciously at this place that looked like camp but didn't seem like it. “But this camp is very weird.”

Ben smiled and looked much less worried, but I don’t know why. He must’ve been as bummed out as I was. If anybody knew what made a cool week of camp and what made a lame one, it was Ben. He's probably been to a billion weeks of camp at Camp Spirit. I bet he thought this camp was as messed up as I did. But if he did, why was he going back to spraying the dishes and laughing?

“Don’t worry. By the end of the week you’ll have adjusted, Dean’s Kid.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but before I could say anything I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and saw a guy’s belt. I looked up and up and up, and finally I saw the tall guy’s face.

“Little girl, you’re going to have to sit down at your table.”

I turned around and started back to my table without even saying goodbye to Ben. I’m sure the tall guy thought I was being a good camper by obeying him, but I wasn’t thinking good thoughts about him. Who was this guy anyway? I’d never seen him before at camp. Then again, I hadn’t seen most of these people before.

And little girl? I haven’t been called “little girl” since I won a prize (it was Hoppity, actually) at the carnival, and the guy running the game announced, “A stuffed animal from the side wall for the little girl!” That was last year. I know I’m small for my age, but I’m not a little girl. If that guy was one of the counselors, he should get fired for being rude. Maybe I could tell the dean, and the dean could have a little chat with him about rudeness.

As I walked back to my table, I thought I saw Vanessa, but she was so far away and busy at her own table, so I didn’t go over to talk to her.

“Abby!” Eva said, pouncing on me before I even sat down. “You can’t go wandering off. You have to tell me where you are all the time. For all I know, someone kidnapped you.”

Great. Everybody was staring at me again because I was getting yelled at again. Who would kidnap somebody at camp? Another camper? A counselor? That was the silliest thing I had ever heard.

Eva didn’t think it was silly though.

“Listen up, everybody. Whenever you go anywhere, you have to tell your counselor. That means me or Dane during the day, and Allie or me at night for the girls, and Dane or Scott at night for the boys. We have to know where you are all the time.”

I wanted to crawl under the table and find some kind of secret passage that led home. Nobody likes being yelled at, especially when it’s in front of everybody else, but it’s worse when you’re a shy person. I don’t want everybody looking at me during normal times, much less embarrassing ones.

“We’re supposed to be a group here. We have to do things as a group. If everybody got to go off by themselves and do whatever they wanted all day, we wouldn’t be a group.”

“Eva,” Dane said gently. “I think they get it.”

Dane to the rescue again! He was quickly becoming my favorite counselor, although that wasn't too tough when his only competition was perfect, lecturing Eva and her mouth full of blindingly white teeth.

“I’m sorry, guys.” Eva’s smile appeared again. “I don’t want anybody to get lost or hurt. Dane’s right. It’s not as big a deal as I’m making it out to be.”

I bet we would have had an even longer lecture if Ben hadn’t come out of the kitchen and said, “Hello, elementary campers!”

Everyone looked at him, even the people at my table, who had been listening to Eva yell at me for walking thirty feet away.

Ben gave us a speech all about how to hop the tables. He talked exactly like this cartoon character that everybody my age watches and had almost everyone laughing by the end. I think he did that so we would pay attention to what he said.

Ben told us about scraping the plates into a bucket before we put them on the dish window counter. Now why hadn’t he told us about this before dinner was over? Why was the hopping speech after dinner when we had already hopped and gotten in trouble for not knowing things that Ben went over in his speech?

I tell you. This elementary camp is messed up.

I waited for somebody else to realize that the hopper speech had come after we hopped and apologize to me about getting yelled at when there was no way I could have known what I was supposed to do with the plate, but nobody did.

“It’s a beautiful evening,” Eva said when Ben had gone back into the kitchen. “Let’s go play some kickball down at the field.”

We all stood up at the same time and stacked our chairs on top of each other. Eva gave me a little hug on the way out, so I knew she wasn’t mad at me. Kickball was fun and almost made camp better.

But we had to walk together all the way to the field. On the way there, I thought about how nice it would be to lie in the grass and look up at the clouds for a few minutes. I didn’t stop though because I knew Eva would tell me to hurry up.