Free Ten by Lauren Myracle Page B

girlfriend who didn’t deserve him. I even knew his name, which was Ian. I knew Ian’s name, and yet I hadn’t managed to nail down the girls’ names, because they didn’t call each other by their names. Instead, they went by “Silly” and “Spaz” and “Bootylicious” and “Sugar Booger.”
    Personally, I would not want to be called “Sugar Booger.” I would not want to be called “Bootylicious,” either. In fact I highly disapproved of anyone—especially a girl my age!—being called “Bootylicious.”
    So in my head, I thought of them as the Polka Dots. The Polka Dots went EVERYWHERE with their arms linked, even the narrow nature trails, and even when it meant bumping into low-hanging branches.
    And behind them? Me. I was the cheese, like in “The Farmer in the Dell.” I found myself humming it all day long. The humming was out loud, but I sang the words silently, and only to myself. The cheese stands alone. The cheese stands alone. Hi-ho the derry-o, the cheese stands alone!
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    Day two of Wilderness Survival Camp was a repeat of day one, except with different activities. The best activity was learning how to make a fire—and I admit it, that part was fabulous. At home, we made a fire by turning on our fireplace. With a switch. The logs weren’t real and neither were the flames. They were made of gas, and at the bottom, they were blue.
    But Jake and Lily taught us how to start a real fire. First they split us up into groups of three, and my group consisted of me, one of the Polka Dots, and a boy named Connor. The Polka Dot in my group sighed a lot and looked yearningly at the other Polka Dots. Basically, she was boring.
    Connor was nice, though. He had long hair—the longest hair I’d ever seen on a boy my age—and he was good at listening to directions. While the Polka Dot sighed, Connor and I did everything Jake and Lily told us to.
    First we gathered some dry moss and broke it into pieces. That would be our “tinder,” Lily told us. Then we collected lots of different sized sticks. We used the smallest sticks to build a teepee around the moss, and then, with Lily right nearby in case of a forest fire, Connor struck a match and poked it onto the pile of moss.
    The moss caught on fire like that. It was awesome! You couldn’t have a fire made only out of moss, because the moss burned too quickly, but the flames lasted just long enough to catch the small sticks on fire.
    â€œSweet,” Lily said. “See how the sticks on the outside fall inward to feed the fire? Now start adding bigger sticks. Perfect , you two. You’re naturals!”
    Connor and I grinned at each other. His face was flushed, and his long hair had grown sweaty, but I didn’t care. Anyway, my hair probably looked sweaty, too.
    The Polka-Dot member of our group wasn’t sweaty or dirty at all, and her hair was still in its perky updo, decorated with about fifty clippies. But she didn’t know how to build a fire, now did she?
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    On Wednesday morning, I didn’t complain when it was time to head off for camp. In fact, I was ready before Mom was.
    â€œSo you are having fun, huh?” Mom said.
    â€œNo comment,” I said cheerfully.
    She smiled and kissed the top of my head. “I’m proud of you, sweetie. I knew you’d make it work.”
    That day, we hiked to a place called the Raptor Center. A volunteer gave us a tour and told us it was a hospital for birds of prey that’d been wounded. She showed us a falcon with a broken leg, a hawk missing a chunk of her wing because someone shot her, and a bald eagle that landed on a power line and got slightly electrocuted.
    â€œPoor thing,” I said.
    â€œYeah,” Connor said. “How’s an eagle supposed to know what a power line is?”
    He and I talked the whole way back from the Raptor Center, mostly about animals. Connor