Free Love and Pollywogs from Camp Calamity by Mary Hershey

the oatmeal anymore. I stirred it all up until it was a giant sticky mess. Not having Maxey talk to me, or even boss me around, made me feel worse than ever. Maybe the altitude was sucking the bossiness right out of her!
    “You should be glad, Effie,” Aurora said. “Man, I wish my parents would forbid my brothers to talk to me. That would be heaven.”
    “You know what, guys? We are going to have such a blast today!” Nit said in a very enthusiastic voice, and then she kicked me hard under the table.
    “Owww!” I winced.
    “Ef, sorry! I meant to kick Aur—I mean, I just—well,
sorry!”
    “Right! No kidding! Fun!” Aurora broke in. “After class with that falcon chick and swimming class, Cricket said I can go shoot hoops over on the boys’ side. She worked it all out with Frank.” Aurora took a big sip of her steamy hot cocoa, put it down, and sighed. I could tell she liked camp a lot.
    Seeing her this way made me feel better. Maybe if I couldn’t have a good time, I would just enjoy hers. I’d follow in her happy jet stream. I took a big sip of my hot chocolate too. Burned my tongue so bad it felt like a scorched piece of bacon. I smiled through the pain.
    “Don’t forget, Aurora,” Nit said. “We have crafts after lunch. You don’t want to miss that, do you?”
    She shrugged. “If you make anything good, make an extra one for me, will ya? I’ve got to practice. I promised my team I would every day. Fancy will kill me if I go back with a stiff arm.”
    Fancy is the captain of Sam Houston’s sixth-grade team, and she’s even bigger than Aurora. You would never, ever want that girl mad at you! Even boys are scared of her.
    Phil swung by just then. “How’s everyone doing? Ready for a fabulous day?”
    Nit raised her hand like we were in class and not sitting around having breakfast.
    Phil looked startled, but said, “Oh—well, yes, Nit?”
    “Do you think you’ll ever stop being so completely annoying?”
    Phil gave her a tight little smile and said, “Five more minutes, girls! See you outside.”
    Aurora clapped Nit on the back and they giggled.
    I was still watching Maxey move around Mess. Wishing like anything she’d look at me. Even once! I’d even take one of her
Die, you little freak
looks.
    “Effie! Hellooo? Are you there?” Nit asked, standing with her tray. “Ready to go?”
    “Oh, sorry! Yes! I’m ready!”
    Ready for Maxey to get over her amnesia. Without her, I felt as tipsy as a three-legged cow.

M s. Hawkins’s science and nature center was super big, with indoor and outdoor sections. In the outdoor section, she had some animals in big pens—a mother and baby deer, a couple of armadillos, some goats that smelled really awful, a llama, and a lot of bunnies. Inside there were snakes, iguanas, and tons of rats and mice. There were even some dead stuffed things, which the boys went near insane over. One whole part of the room was just for bones, fossils, and different kinds of rocks. She had a big telescope too, by the back window, with charts about stars you could see from Camp Wickitawa.
    She gave us a whole half hour just to wander around and look at everything. She knew kids couldn’t concentrate on anything, she said, with so much cool stuff to see.Plus, this was one of the classes we had with boys, so there was a lot of teasing and stuff that had to happen first. Boys just have to get that out of their system or I think they’ll explode. The class twins, Bryce and Becca, were talking together a mile a minute, like they hadn’t seen each other since the birth canal.
    Donal had seats saved for Nit, Aurora, and me. He looked like he was ready to defend them to the death. I noticed his counselor, Matt, wasn’t there to make him sit with boys. His CIT, Jeb, had his nose glued to the snake aquariums.
    “I’ll hold the seats for us if you want to go look at stuff, Donal,” I said. I had mostly wanted to pet the armadillos, but they were very busy trying to bury