It took us so long to finish finding good graffiti for the questions that we had just finished our final draft of it when the bell rang for snack time.

Dad, Rick, Dane, and Savannah were scooping the ice cream, and there were all kinds of toppings we could slop all over the ice cream. I held my bowl out for Savannah to scoop strawberry ice cream into just as, on the other side of the counter, Maura walked by Dad.

“Hey, can we borrow that megaphone for our mealtime announcements?” Dad asked. “It would be really helpful.”

“The megaphone is camp staff property,” Maura answered.

“Great. So would you mind if we started using it at breakfast? It’ll really save on my voice. Rick and I always lose our voices by Thursday because of the awful acoustics in this building.”

“I think you misunderstood me.” Maura said it sweetly with a smile. “The megaphone isn’t for individual camps’ use. It’s mine. For my staff.”

“Oh.” Dad looked confused. “Okay. So we can’t use it?”

“I’m afraid not.” Then her smile turned into a frown as she tilted her head to check out the ice cream carton Savannah had just scooped my ice cream from. “Is that the strawberry ice cream?”

“Uh, yeah,” Savannah said. The way she said it sounded like a question, probably because Maura was glaring at her with a similar glare to the one Rachel gave T-Camp last year when he got marshmallow in her hair and Kate had to cut it out with scissors from the craft cabin.

Maura transferred the glare from Savannah to Dad. “I told you you could have the chocolate and vanilla. The strawberry belongs to the staff.”

“Tony told us we could use it,” Dad said.

“Well, Tony was wrong.” She reached across Savannah and grabbed the big carton with both arms, yanking it out of the window. “Tony is wrong about a lot of things. Tony doesn’t like to respect people’s personal property and offers it to anybody. Tony is too used to the days of Frank LaBoyer when everybody just did anything they wanted.”

I looked into my bowl of ice cream, feeling guilty about eating it for some reason. Who ever heard of a camp staff that didn’t share? Ben used to give us the staff’s stuff all the time. When I was a little kid, they used to order these jalapeno poppers that my dad loved, and Ben always made sure there were some out in plain sight the whole week we were here so Dad could take some whenever he wanted. Once the cooks got all these free samples of desserts from Sysco, and Mr. LaBoyer, Aunt May, Ben, Cammie the craft lady, and my whole family sat around the counter and sampled them during rest hour. Angela and I got to pick what dessert they ordered for the rest of the weeks of camp since we were the kids.

After we got our Sundaes, Car ditched us to sit at a table by the windows with Chad, T-Camp, and Brock. Lindsay and Rachel sat down at an empty table, and I sat across from them.

“Hey, can I sit by you guys?”

I looked up and saw Sam hovering over our table with a bowl piled full of ice cream.

“How’d you get so much ice cream?” I asked. “The counselors are supposed to only put two scoops.”

Sam sat next to me, and I took another look at his monstrosity. It was completely covered in chocolate chips and butterscotch topping.

“Dane scooped it. He didn’t follow the limit and gave me about five scoops.”

Lindsay jammed her spoon into her bowl under her small pile of ice cream and stood up.

“Where are you going?” Rachel asked.

“To Dane’s line. I got my ice cream from Abby’s dad and, no offense, Abby, but your dad is kind of stingy on the ice cream scoops.”

“Wait for me,” Rach said, sticking her spoon in her bowl and pushing out her chair. “Maybe there is a good use for my brother after all.”

Which left me with Sam. At an empty table. Sitting right next to each other because there were the exact number of chairs put out for every camper to squeeze into the eight tables.

“How was your year?” I asked, which was a stupid thing to ask since we had talked on the computer every night and I knew exactly how every day went, much less the year in general. For some reason, I felt nervous all of a sudden, and only dumb things like, “How was your year?” would pop into my head and out of my mouth.

“It was pretty good. Wrestling was good. School was good. I joined youth group at church.” He had not told me any new information. “How about you?”

Apparently, Sam didn’t have any fascinating topics of conversation either.

“Good. Gymnastics was good.” My spoon slipped out of my hand and landed in the ice cream with a soft clink against the bowl. Luckily, I don’t think Sam noticed because he was looking at his ice cream, not at me. I picked up the spoon and kept eating. “School was good. Church was good.”

This was the person I poured my heart out to every night at 9:45/8:45 Central Standard Time over the instant messenger, but I couldn’t come up with more than, “How was your year?” in person. It was so much easier to type to SamKHWT than it was to look into the face of a tall boy with sandy brown hair and glasses.

It’s not like I even liked him or anything. I mean, of course I liked him. He’s my friend. He’s actually becoming a very good friend, maybe even one of my best friends thanks to all our internet talks. But I know I didn’t like him in a boyfriend way because I’ve had exactly three crushes on guys before (1. Steve 2. Dave Larson from school 3. Chase Ephron from the Summer Sizzle movie series) and I did not feel about Sam the way I felt out them.

It was still a little nerve wracking to talk to a boy though, even when he was a boy who was my friend.

Lindsay and Rachel came back then with much more generous heaps of ice cream.

“You guys missed some good drama,” Rachel said.