Free The Stars of Summer by Tara Dairman Page B

plan, but it sounded good to her. “Yep,” she said.
    Around the table, eyes narrowed. Clearly, the other girls had all hoped to get the first invitation of the summer to Charissa’s.
    â€œGirlie!” Mrs. Spinelli’s voice boomed so loudly in Gladys’s ear that she almost spat her boring sandwich back out onto her plate. She turned around to see the cook waving a piece of paper in the air. “Take this order form down to the camp office, and tell Mrs. Bentley to fax it to Foodstuffs, Inc. before the end of the day. Otherwise, we won’t get our ingredients in time for next week.”
    Shoving one last bite of sandwich into her mouth, Gladys pushed herself out of her seat and slung her lobster backpack over her shoulder. She was happy for an excuse to get away from the table of death stares, but would her CIT duties never end?
    As she crossed the field toward the camp office, she looked over the form. It listed hundreds of food items in alphabetical order, and Mrs. Spinelli had checked off the ones she wanted and written in quantities next to them. Five hundred sesame seed buns. Ten bags of frozen chicken pieces. Three cases of prepackaged lemon bars.
    In short, the makings of hundreds more mediocre lunches. And the sad thing was that Foodstuffs, Inc. seemed to sell plenty of interesting and delicious ingredients.
    A wild idea struck Gladys. All the markings on the form were made in pencil—they’d be so easy to change. But did she dare? Mrs. Spinelli would be livid if the wrong ingredients got delivered, and would surely blame Gladys.
    Then again, Charissa had pretty much promised everyone that Gladys was going to reform the camp’s lunch program, and Gladys didn’t want to let her down. Plus, if she got caught, she could say that she was technically acting on the Bentleys’ (or, at least,
a
Bentley’s) orders.
    Gladys ducked behind a tree and rummaged for a pencil in her backpack. A few minutes of furious erasing and scribbling later, the task was done.
    After she dropped off the revised form at the office, she saw Charissa beckoning to her from where she stood with the other CIT girls, who were now all in their swimsuits. They must have changed after lunch. Rolanda’s braids still looked damp after her morning with the swim coach, and muscles rippled under the deep-brown skin of her bare arms and legs. Gladys’s limbs, by contrast, looked like floppy white worms.
    â€œQuick, go get changed and meet us by the pool,” Charissa told Gladys. “Once we’ve all passed our swim tests, we can have Free Swim time! It’s the
best
way to spend the afternoon.”
    The bites of sandwich in Gladys’s stomach turned over. She’d completely forgotten about the swim test.
    Charissa pointed Gladys toward the changing room next to the kitchen building, and Gladys plodded inside on heavy legs. She couldn’t disappear on the very first day of camp, could she? No, everyone would notice if she didn’t turn up at the pool. Besides, she really needed to save her hooky playing for days when she had to go into the city, and she hadn’t gotten a new assignment yet.
    Once she’d changed into her plain blue swimsuit, Gladys made her way toward the pool area. It had a huge twisty waterslide on one side, but all the action seemed to be taking place at the other end of the pool, which was roped off into lanes. A bald, stocky man in swim trunks and a Camp Bentley T-shirt was hunched over the side of the pool, alternately blasting his whistle and shouting, and Rolanda was perched beside him, taking frantic notes on a clipboard.
    â€œStein, lane three, you’ve got a lazy arm on that crawl stroke!” the man bellowed. “Rolanda, stick him in Intermediate! And Percheski, lane one, don’t bend those knees so much when you kick! Rolanda, it’s Advanced Beginners for her!”
    Gladys couldn’t believe how nervous she’d been