Author’s apology: The book is much more action-packed than the excerpt, but I only have twenty-two pages of this particular volume written (plus the plot outline), and the rest of it all consisted of spoilers (things that would tip readers off to how the plots from the other books were resolved or surprising things) and I didn’t want to ruin it.

“So how was everyone’s school year?” Lindsay asked.

“Fine,” I said. “I could have done without Mr. Leman’s chemistry class though, right, Car?”

“Yeah, he was boring. Who cares about that periodic table? It’s just a bunch of nonsense letters and numbers to me.”

“I had chem, too,” Lindsay said. “It was okay, but we had an interesting teacher.”

“How about you, Rach?” I asked.

“I had bio for science. We got to dissect a sea lamp rey.”

“Gross,” Car muttered.

“It was awesome. There was, like, goo and crud everywhere.”

Car shuddered, and I was suddenly glad for Mr. Leman’s droning lectures about chemical equations.

“This jerk, Cameron Parker, stole my lab partner’s notebook, so I flung our sea lamp rey’s heart at him and hit him right in the forehead and told him he was a major loser.”

I could picture Rach doing that, and I snickered at the mental image of her dissection subject’s guts flying across the room at some unsuspecting bully. Cunningham justice is the best.

“What did the teacher do?” Lindsay asked.

“Kicked me out for two days. Mom was not too happy about that. But you can’t go around taking other people’s stuff. It’s just rude.”

“You say it like it wasn’t a big deal,” I said.

Rach shrugged and bounced a couple of times on her squeaky bed, hunched over so she wouldn’t hit her head. “It wasn’t.”

“You got kicked out of class,” Lindsay said, her eyes wide.

Lindsay runs with what Car calls the goody-goody crowd at school, the kids who are in bed by nine o’clock and don’t drink, smoke, or go to many school events. She’s on the ice every day at 5:30 for early practice. No, not for figure skating; Linds is a hockey player. Mild and meek in real life, she’s a machine during hockey games. I’ve seen a couple games, and I cannot believe that number 14 is the same shy friend I share secrets with, the shy girl who stared at Rach with her forehead wrinkled, looking very awestruck and concerned at the thought of her friend getting kicked out of biology class.

“Won’t that go on your permanent record?”

“Sure. But when you think about life, will it matter in two years that some stupid piece of paper sitting in a file drawer says that I acted out in class?”

“I guess not,” Linds said, but she shifted on her bed and frowned.

“Two years from now even Annoying Jim won’t remember that I got kicked out of biology class, but it may still matter that I stood up for a girl that everyone else picked on.”

“Was Jim mad?” I asked.

“Yeah. He says I should pick my battles.” She said that in a mimicking tone. “Whatever. My dad says I should fight for everything I want, as long as I don’t lose.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Lindsay said. “How do you know if you’ll win or lose until after the fight?”

“Well, it’s a lot better than, ‘Pick your battles, Rachel Marie.’” She did the mimicking voice again and this time added a goofy face with crossed eyes and tongue out. “Step-dads are such a pain in the rear. Don’t believe what you see on made-for-television movies. You don’t get used to step-dads no matter how long it takes for your mom to divorce them. They suck.”

“I’m glad you’re not bitter about it or anything,” I joked.

“The only thing I’m bitter about is how he’s made me put together about eighty stupid puzzles of horses over the last seven years. How many puzzles with pictures of horses are there in this world? About seventy-million? Every Sunday after church, we have to put together these stupid horse puzzles or Annoying Jim gives us a lecture on family togetherness and makes us go bowling. The horse puzzles are the lesser of two evils.”

“But bowling is fun,” Car said.

“Not when you go with a fifty-three-year-old man who has his own special bowling ball and a closet full of dorky bowling shirts and a little sister who just about wets her pants every time she knocks down more than five pins.”

We all giggled. Listening to Rachel tell stories about her family is hilarious. She comes from a long line of champion story-tellers. When we were little, Dane used to scare the heck out of us with ghost stories about ghouls who haunted different areas of camp.

“The best thing about camp is that it starts on Sunday, so I get to miss the horse puzzle hour today, and since I have every other weekend with my dad and Kylie, that means a whole month of no horse puzzle. I swear, I’d work here just so I could get away from that house all summer if there were some other normal people who worked here.”

“Come on, Rach,” I said. “Amazon lifeguard could be your best friend.”

“No.”

“How about Aaron?” Car asked. “He’s a prize.”

“Yuck,” Rach said.

Lindsay opened her mouth but then closed it and sat back on the bed. I know she likes Aaron. Not in a crush way or anything, but she thinks the assistant manager is an okay guy. Most of the rest of us can’t stand him and think he’s a jerk. I don’t know what she sees in him. He’s pompous and acts like a big shot and comes up with all these dumb rules that he forces down our throats.

The staff used to be cool and friendly. They were people like Ben McAllery, who always found something fun to do at the lake and could cure anybody’s homesickness with one of his Lifeguard Chocolate Chip Cookies and a joke; Mr. LaBoyer, the former manager who may well be the kindest man I’ve ever met in my life; Mr. Newman, our high school guidance counselor who used to love camp more than anything; and Julie Hayes, a pretty teenager who smiled a lot and taught us about make-up and boys when we were elementary campers.

Now most of the staff members are unfriendly and bossy. Plus, the cooks do things like try to poison us by feeding us chili with band-aid in it.