Code Name Cassandra Read online

  From there the path curved to the various cabins—a dozen for the girls on one side of camp and a dozen for the boys on the other—until it finally sloped down to Camp Wawasee’s private lake, in all its mirror-surfaced, tree-lined glory. In fact, the windows of Frangipani Cottage looked out over the lake. From my bed in my little private room, I could see the water without even raising my head.

  Only, apparently, it wasn’t my bed anymore. I could feel Frangipani Cottage, with its lake views, its angelic flutists, its midnight-gabfest-and-hair-braiding sessions, slipping away, like water down the drain of … well, a steam table.

  “It’s just that, of all our female counselors this year,” Pamela was going on, “you really strike me as the one most capable of handling a cabinful of little boys. And you scored so well in your first aid and lifesaving courses—”

  Great. I’m being persecuted because of my knowledge of the Heimlich maneuver—honed, of course, from years of working in food services.

  “—that I know I can put these kids into your hands and not worry about them a second longer.”

  Pamela was really laying it on thick. Don’t ask me why. I mean, she was my boss. She had every right to assign me to a different cabin if she wanted to. She was the one doling out my paychecks, after all.

  Maybe in the past she’d switched a girl counselor to a boys’ cabin and gotten flak for it. Like maybe the girl she’d assigned to the cabin had quit or something. I’m not much of a quitter. The fact is, boys would be more work and less fun, but hey, what was I going to do?

  “Yeah,” I said. The back of my neck still felt damp from where her arm had been. “Well, that’s fine.”

  Pamela reached out to clutch me by the elbow, looking intently down into my face. Being clutched by the elbow wasn’t as bad as having her arm around my shoulders, so I was able to remain calm.

  “Do you really mean that, Jess?” she asked me. “You’ll really do it?”

  What was I going to say, no? And risk being sent home, where I’d have to spend the rest of my summer sweating over trays of meatballs and manicotti at Joe Junior’s? And when I wasn’t at the restaurant, the only people I’d have to hang around with would be my parents (no thanks); my brother Mike, who was preparing to go away for his first year at Harvard and spent all the time on his computer e-mailing his new roommate, trying to determine who was bringing the minifridge and who was bringing the scanner; or my other brother, Douglas, who did nothing all day but read comic books in his room, coming out only for meals and South Park.

  Not to mention the fact that for weeks now, there’d been a white van parked across the street from our house that didn’t seem to belong to anyone in the neighborhood.

  Um, no thanks. I’d stay here, if it was all the same.

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “Whatever. Just tell me what cabin I’m assigned to now, and I’ll start moving my stuff.”

  Pamela actually hugged me. I can’t say a whole lot for her management skills. One thing you would not catch my father doing is hugging one of his employees for agreeing to do what he’d asked her to do. More like he’d have given her a big fat “so long” if she’d said anything but, “Yes, Mr. Mastriani.”

  “That’s great!” Pamela cried. “That’s just great. You are such a doll, Jess.”

  Yeah, that’s me. A regular Barbie.

  Pamela looked down at her clipboard. “You’ll be in Birch Tree Cottage now.”

  Birch Tree Cottage. I was giving up frangipani for birch. Story of my damned life.

  “Now I’ll just have to make sure the alternate can make it tonight.” Pamela was still looking down at her chart. “I think she’s from your hometown. And she’s a flutist, too. Maybe you know her. Karen Sue Hanky?”

  I had to bite back a great big laugh. Karen Sue Hanky? Now, if Karen Sue had found out she was being reassigned to a boys’ cabin, she definitely would have cried.

  “Yeah, I know her,” I said, noncommittally. Boy, are you making a big mistake, was what I thought to myself. But I didn’t say it out loud, of course.

  “She interviewed quite well,” Pamela said, still looking down at her clipboard, “but she only scored a five on performance.”

  I raised my eyebrows. It wasn’t news to me, of course, that Karen Sue couldn’t play worth a hang. But it seemed kind of wrong for Pamela to be admitting it in front of me. I guess she thought we were friends and all, on account of me not crying when she told me she was moving me to a boys’ cabin.

  The thing is, though, I already have all the friends I can stand.

  “And she’s only fourth chair,” Pamela murmured, looking down at her chart. Then she heaved this enormous sigh. “Oh, well,” she said. “What else can we do?”

  Pamela smiled down at me, then started back to the administrative offices. She had apparently forgotten the fact that I am only third chair, just one up from Karen Sue.

  My performance audition score, however, for the camp had been ten. Out of ten.

  Oh, yeah. I rock.

  Well, at playing the flute, anyway. I don’t actually rock at much else.

  I figured I’d better get a move on, if I was going to gather my stuff before any of the Frangipanis showed up and got the wrong idea … like that Camp Wawasee was unorganized or something. Which, of course, they were, as both the disaster with the sign—the one I told you about earlier—and the fact that they’d hired me attested to. I mean, had they even run my name through Yahoo!, or anything? If they had, they might have gotten an unpleasant little surprise.

  Skirting the pack of friendly—a little too friendly, if you ask me; you had to shove them out of your way with your knees to escape their long, hot tongues—dogs that roamed freely around the camp, I headed back to Frangipani Cottage, where I began throwing my stuff into the duffel bag I’d brought it all in. It burned me up a little to think that Karen Sue Hanky was the one who was going to get to enjoy that excellent view of Lake Wawasee from what had been my bed. I’d known Karen Sue since kindergarten, and if anyone had ever suffered from a case of the I’m-So-Greats, it was Karen Sue. Seriously. The girl totally thought she was all that, just because her dad owned the biggest car dealership in town, she happened to be blonde, and she played fourth chair flute in our school orchestra.

  And yeah, you had to audition to make the Symphonic Orchestra, and yeah, it had won all these awards and was mostly made up of only juniors and seniors, and Karen and I had both made it as sophomores, but please. I ask you, in the vast spectrum of things, is fourth chair in Symphonic Orchestra anything? Anything at all? Not. So not.

  Not to Karen it wasn’t, though. She would never rest until she was first chair. But to get there, she had to challenge and beat the person in third chair.

  Yeah. Me.

  And I can tell you, that was so not going to happen. Not in this world. I wouldn’t call making third chair of Ernest Pyle High School’s Symphonic Orchestra a world-class accomplishment, or anything, but it wasn’t something I was going to let Karen Sue take away from me. No way.

  Not like she was taking Frangipani Cottage away from me.

  Well, frangipani, I decided, was a stupid plant, anyway. Smelly. A big smelly flower. Birch trees were way better.

  That’s what I told myself, anyway.

  It wasn’t until I actually got to Birch Tree Cottage that I changed my mind. Okay, first off, can I just tell you what a logistical nightmare it was going to be, supervising eight little boys? How was I even going to be able to take a shower without one of them barging in to use the John, or worse, spying on me, as young boys—and some not so young ones, as illustrated by my older brothers, who spend inordinate amounts of time gazing with binoculars at Claire Lippman, the girl next door—are wont to do?

  Plus Birch Tree Cottage was the farthest cabin from everything—the pool, the amphitheater, the music building. It was practically in the woods. There was no lake view here. There was not even any light here, since the thickly leafed tree branches overhead let in not t
he slightest hint of sun. Everything was damp and smelled faintly of mildew. There was mildew in the showers.

  Let me be the first to tell you: Birch Tree Cottage? Yeah, it sucked.

  I missed Frangipani Cottage, and the little girls whose hair I could have been French braiding, already. If I knew how to French braid, that is.

  Still, maybe they could have taught me. My little girl campers, I mean.

  And when I’d stowed my stuff away and stepped outside the cabin and saw the first of my charges heading toward me, lugging their suitcases and instruments behind them, I missed Frangipani Cottage even more.

  I’m serious. You never saw a scruffier, more sour-faced group of kids in your life. Ranging in age from ten to twelve years old, these were no mischievous-but-good-at-heart Harry Potters.

  Oh, no.

  Far from it.

  These kids looked exactly like what they were: spoiled little music prodigies whose parents couldn’t wait to take a six-week vacation from them.

  The boys all stopped when they saw me and stood there, blinking through the lenses of their glasses, which were fogged up on account of the humidity. Their parents, who were helping them with their luggage, looked like they were longing to get as far from Camp Wawasee as they possibly could—preferably to a place where pitchers of margaritas were being served.

  I hastened to say the speech I’d been taught at counselor training. I remembered to substitute the words birch tree for frangipani.

  “Welcome to Birch Tree Cottage,” I said. “I’m your counselor, Jess. We’re going to have a lot of fun together.”

  The parents, you could tell, couldn’t care less that I wasn’t a boy. They seemed pleased by the fact that I clearly bathed regularly and could speak English.

  The boys, however, looked shocked. Sullen and shocked.

  One of them went, “Hey, you’re a girl.”

  Another one wanted to know, “What’s a girl counselor doing in a boys’ cabin?”

  A third one said, “She’s not a girl. Look at her hair,” which I found highly insulting, considering the fact that my hair isn’t that short.

  Finally, the most sullen-looking boy of them all, the one with the mullet cut and the weight problem, went, “She is, too, a girl. She’s that girl from TV. The lightning girl.”

  And with that, my cover was blown.

  C H A P T E R

  2

  That was me. Lightning Girl. The girl from TV.

  Lucky me. Lucky, lucky, lucky me. Could there be a girl luckier than me? I don’t think so… .

  Oh, wait—I know. How about some girl who hadn’t been struck by lightning and developed weird psychic powers overnight? Hey, yeah. That girl might be luckier than me. That girl might be way luckier than me. Don’t you think?

  I looked down at Mullet Head. Actually, not that much down, because he was about as tall as I was—which isn’t saying much, understand.

  Anyway, I looked down at him, and I went, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Just like that. Real smooth, you know? I’m telling you, I had it on.

  But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all.

  One of the boys, a skinny one clutching a trumpet case, said, “Hey, yeah, you are that girl. I remember you. You’re the one who got hit by lightning and got all those special powers!”

  The other boys exchanged excited glances. The glances clearly said, Cool. Our counselor’s a mutant.

  One of them, however, a dark, delicate-looking boy who had no parents with him and spoke with a slight accent, asked shyly, “What special powers?”

  The chubby boy with the unfortunate haircut—a mullet, short in front and long in back—who’d outed me in the first place smacked the little dark boy in the shoulder, hard. The chubby boy’s mother, from whom it appeared he’d inherited his current gravitationally challenged condition, did not even tell him to knock it off.

  “What do you mean, what special powers?” Mullet Head demanded. “Where have you been, retard? On the little bus?”

  All of the other boys chuckled at this witticism. The dark little boy looked stricken.

  “No,” he said, clearly puzzled by the little bus reference. “I come from French Guiana.”

  “Guiana?” Mullet Head seemed to find this hilarious. “Is that anywhere near Gonorrhea?”

  Mrs. Mullet Head, to my astonishment, laughed at this witticism.

  That’s right. Laughed.

  Mullet Head, I could see, was going to be what Pamela had referred to during counselor training as a challenge.

  “I’m sorry,” I said sweetly to him. “I know I look like that girl who was on TV and all, but it wasn’t me. Now, why don’t you all go ahead and—”

  Mullet Head interrupted me. “It was, too, you,” he declared with a scowl.

  Mrs. Mullet Head went, “Now, Shane,” in this tone that showed she was proud of the fact that her son was no pushover. Which was true. Shane wasn’t a pushover. What he was, clearly, was a huge pain in the—

  “Um,” another one of the parents said. “Hate to interrupt, but do you mind if we go ahead and go inside, miss? This tuba weighs a ton.”

  I stepped aside and allowed the boys and their parents to enter the cabin. Only one of them paused as he went by me, and that was the little French Guianese boy. He was lugging an enormous and very expensive-looking suitcase. I could see no sign of an instrument.

  “I am Lionel,” he said gravely.

  Only he didn’t pronounce it the way we would. He pronounced it Lee-Oh-Nell, with the emphasis on the Nell.

  “Hey, Lionel,” I said, making sure I pronounced it properly. We’d been warned at counselor training that there’d be a lot of kids from overseas, and that we should do all “we could to show that Camp Wawasee was cultural-diversity aware. “Welcome to Birch Tree Cottage.”

  Lionel flashed me another glimpse of those pearly whites, then continued lugging his big heavy bag inside.

  I decided to let the boys and their parents slug it out on their own, so I stayed where I was out on the mosquito-netted porch, listening to the ruckus inside as the kids tore around, choosing beds. Off in the distance, I saw someone else wearing the camp counselor uniform—white collared short-sleeve shirt with blue shorts—standing on his porch, looking in my direction. Whoever he was lifted a hand and waved.

  I waved back, even though I didn’t have any idea who it was. Hey, you never knew. He might have owned a convertible.

  It took about two minutes for the first fight to break out.

  “No, it’s mine!” I heard someone inside the cabin shriek in anguish.

  I stalked inside. All of the beds—thankfully, not bunks—had belongings strewn across them. The fight was evidently not territorial in nature. Little boys do not apparently care much about views, and thankfully know nothing about feng shui.

  The fight was over a box of Fiddle Faddle, which Shane was holding and Lionel evidently wanted.

  “It is mine!” Lionel insisted, making a leap for the box of candy. “Give it back to me!”

  “If you don’t have enough to share,” Shane said primly, “you shouldn’t have brought it in the first place.”

  Shane was so much bigger than Lionel that he didn’t even have to hold the box very high in the air to keep it out of the smaller boy’s reach. He just had to hold it at shoulder level. Lionel, even standing on his tiptoes, wasn’t tall enough to grab it.

  Meanwhile, Shane’s mother was just standing there with a little smile on her face, carefully unpacking the contents of her boy’s suitcase and placing each item in the drawers in the platform beneath her son’s mattress.

  The rest of the boys, however, and quite a few of the parents, were watching the little drama unfolding in Birch Tree Cottage with interest.

  “Didn’t they ever teach you,” Shane asked Lionel, “about sharing back in Gonorrhea?”

  I knew rapid and decisive action was necessary. I could not do what I’d have liked to do, whic
h was whop Shane upside the head. Pamela and the rest of the administrative staff at Camp Wawasee had been very firm on the subject of corporal punishment—they were against it. That was why they’d spent four hours of one of our training days going over appropriate versus inappropriate disciplinary action. Whopping campers upside the head was expressly forbidden.

  Instead, I stepped forward and snatched the box of Fiddle Faddle out of Shane’s hand.

  “There is no,” I declared loudly, “outside food of any kind allowed in Birch Tree Cottage. The only food anyone may bring into this cabin is food from the dining hall. Is that understood?”

  Everyone stood staring at me, some in consternation. Shane’s mother looked particularly shocked.

  “Well, that sure is a change from last year,” she said, in a voice that was too high-pitched and sugary to come from a woman who had produced, as she had, the spawn of Satan. “Last year, the boys could have all the candy and cookies from home they wanted. That’s why I packed this.”

  Shane’s mother hauled up another suitcase and flung it open to reveal what looked like the entire contents of a 7-Eleven candy rack. The other boys gathered around, their eyes goggling at the sight of so many Nestlé, Mars, and Hershey’s products.

  “Contraband,” I said, pointing into the suitcase. “Take it home with you, please.”

  The boys let out a groan. Mrs. Shane’s many chins began to tremble.

  “But Shane gets hungry,” she said, “in the middle of the night—”

  “I will make sure,” I said, “that there are plenty of healthful snacks for all the boys.”

  I was, of course, making up the rule about outside food. I just didn’t want to have to be breaking up fights over Fiddle Faddle every five minutes.

  As if sensing my thoughts, Shane’s mother looked at the box in my hand.