A Clatter of Jars (7 page)

There was a hint of something lingering in her mind. A memory, perhaps, although Jo could only catch the flavor of a few remaining tendrils.

It tasted of buttered popcorn.

Jo slipped her harmonica back into her sweater pocket and found a letter there, addressed to her sister.
Expedited mail
, she'd written on the front, in her neat blocky letters.

“Here.” She handed it to Del.

There was something Jo had been looking for, she thought, as she headed back to her office. No—something she'd
found
. But for the life of her, she couldn't remember what it was.

• • •

Sometimes memories hit like a wallop, all of sudden, and hard. Other times, for no reason that anyone can explain, memories take much longer to sink in. They seem to meander a bit before choosing which mind to settle into.

As Jo made her way back to the lodge, her buttered-popcorn memory was doing an awful lot of meandering. It tickled the tops of the pine trees, dove back down to the dirt, and darted here and there between the feet of Camp Atropos's many campers. It meandered throughout the evening, after the sun had set, then spent several days perched on a branch below a nest of friendly birds. Eventually, it would find where it wanted to be. But it was in no rush.

Some memories are slower than others.

Lily

L
ILY LAY O
N HER BACK, HER ARMS
TUCKED INSIDE HER
sleeping bag, warm in the chill of the morning, spinning a postcard in circles above her. The sun had only barely poked itself into the sky, and her bunkmates were all still snoring.

Hallo from Johannesburg!
the postcard read, in her father's tight scrawl.
Looking forward to seeing you Sunday!

For the past eleven days, Lily had been trying to come up with some sort of phenomenal act for her and Max to perform at the Talent show. She'd tried levitating Max's hair into amazing new hairdos, but none of the hairdos were quite amazing enough. She'd attempted a game of flying pinochle, but that hadn't ended well for anybody. And then there was the unfortunate juice-juggling incident that got Lily banned from the infirmary for an entire afternoon.

“I'll just help Hannah with her punch,” Max had told Lily yesterday. “Really, I don't mind. You should help, too. Everyone will get to drink it and have good memories. It'll be a nice thing for everybody.”

“I do plenty of nice things for everybody,” Lily had grumbled in reply. Although, as soon as she'd said it, she couldn't think of a single example. “Punch is dumb,” she finished lamely.

Lily curled the sleep out of her toes, her thoughts focused as the postcard circled above her.

Looking forward to seeing you Sunday!

Just two short days.

If only Jo really
were
keeping Talent bracelets in her office. The dream Lily had had last week—the “episode,” Jo had called it—felt so real that Lily could taste it.

Peaches. It tasted like peaches.

But Lily knew that what she remembered couldn't be real, because in the dream, the jar had shattered across the toes of her Kelly-green high-tops, and Lily had never in her life owned a pair of—

Lily let the postcard flutter to her chest.
Chuck,
she realized. Chuck hadn't worn those green shoes since the first morning of camp, but Lily had seen her in them. She was certain of it.

Focusing her thoughts at the bridge of her nose, Lily pulled back her sleeping bag. Carefully, quietly, she slid off the top bunk to the floor, being sure not to wake Chuck on the bed below. In the next bunk over, Miles slept flat on his stomach on his bottom bed, while above him Renny was curled into a tight ball. On the far side of the room, Ellie lay all alone, her left hand grazing the floor.

Crouching on her hands and knees, Lily peered beneath the bed, where Chuck had a habit of stuffing her things. Sure enough, behind a damp beach towel, Lily spotted a single Kelly-green high-top. She focused her thoughts at the bridge of her nose and tugged the shoe out.

Lily hadn't dreamed it at all. Someone had given her Chuck Holloway's memory.

• • •

The sun painted the dirt path orange as Lily hurried toward the lodge. The woods were filled with the music of an early summer morning—birds chirping, leaves rustling, squirrels
yut-yut-yut
ting. Otherwise, the camp was still. Lily scuttled to Jo's office window. She couldn't see past the curtain inside, and the window itself was—she tried it—locked.

But locked windows were no match for a Pinnacle.

Focusing her thoughts at the bridge of her nose, Lily concentrated on the window's latch, through the glass pane. Slowly, it began to twist. With the window unlocked, Lily shifted her focus and pulled the window up.
Cre-eeeak!
The noise was thunderous in the quiet of the camp. Lily tensed her shoulders, waiting, but the only sounds she heard were the birds, the leaves, the squirrels.

Lily pulled the window open.

Pushing the curtain to one side, Lily peered inside the office. She didn't need to look far. The shelves that lined the wall were bursting with glass jars, each of them sample-size, no larger than a Ping-Pong ball. Hundreds and hundreds of jars. And each, Lily could see as she leaned farther inside, had a bracelet nestled at the bottom, red or purple or yellow. Each jar was labeled, too, with a strip of masking tape, although even when she squinted, the words didn't make much sense to Lily.

FROGS
—that's what was written on one of the labels.

HAIR
, read another.

Focusing her thoughts at the bridge of her nose, Lily lifted a jar from the bottom shelf, where Jo would be least likely to miss it, and tugged it toward her through the air. The bracelet in the jar was orange, Max's favorite color, and the label read
HEAT
.

As Lily eased the window shut, she failed to notice that one jar with a bright green bracelet inside teetered off its perch. She didn't observe it rolling across the office floor.

And she certainly didn't see the jar wedge itself deep beneath Jo's filing cabinet.

• • •

“I brought you something,” Lily told Max when she got to the infirmary. Nurse Bonnie had gone to grab breakfast, so they were alone for the moment.

Lily pulled the jar from her pocket and unscrewed the lid. Then she pinched the orange bracelet between two fingers—she didn't want the Talent to soak into her own skin and go to waste.

“A bracelet?” Max said, wrinkling his nose when he saw her gift.

“Orange is your favorite color,” Lily reminded him, stretching his arm taut. She wondered what the label
HEAT
meant. Controlling the temperature might make for a nice act, or even knowing how hot it was outside without a thermometer. Lily tied the bracelet around Max's wrist.

“Where'd you get it, anyway?” Max asked, examining the orange thread against his light brown skin.

Lily wound her own length of swampy yarn around her thumb, waiting for Max's new Talent to soak through to his bones. It hadn't taken long at all, she remembered, with the frog.

“I made it,” she lied. “Arts and craf—”

“Look what I have for you!” came the world's most annoying voice. Hannah's long blond hair swished behind her as she stepped through the gap in the curtains. She was holding some sort of bright green concoction, in a tall clear glass.

Max straightened himself in the bed. “What is it?” he said. And Lily hated that his eyes lit up for the green muck Hannah brought him, when they hadn't for her bracelet.

“Wait till you see,” Hannah told him, holding out the glass.

It happened quickly.

One second, Max was holding the glass, bringing it in for a sip.

The next second, he said, “Oh.” Very quietly, but Lily heard it. And his eyes were wide. Worried.

The next second after that, Lily saw the first bubble, on the surface of the green juice. It burst with an audible
pop!

In the second that followed, more bubbles appeared. More and more and more. Until, only five seconds after it had all begun, the juice was boiling over, splashing out of the glass, sticky and scalding, and Max shrieked, and Hannah screamed, too, and Lily leapt to her feet, and the glass smashed to the ground, spraying boiling green muck everywhere.

“What
happened
?” Hannah cried, grabbing for Max's hands. They were unnaturally red. Swollen. Max howled, tears welling in his eyes.

“I have no ide—”

Lily's fingers clasped around the small glass jar.

HEAT
—that's what was written on the top.

“I'll find Nurse Bonnie,” Lily said. And she raced out of the room, out of the infirmary, running, running, kicking up dirt along the path to the lodge. She took the steps to the mess deck two at a time, and pressed through the campers crowded in the breakfast line. She spotted Chuck and Ellie near the front.

“No cutting!” called a kid behind her, but Lily ignored him.

“Have you seen Nurse Bonnie?” Lily asked the twins.

“Are you sick?” Ellie asked.

“Haven't seen her,” Chuck replied. “Why is this line
taking
so long?”

Still searching the crowd, Lily followed Chuck's gaze to the far end of the breakfast line. A group was clustered at the beverage station watching one of the older campers, Hal—who was thirteen or fourteen, and large, with an unfortunate bowl haircut—take a cup of ice water. “Let's see this mind-blowing Talent show act,” the counselor Teagan told him. And, with the drama of a magician performing a card trick, Hal took the cup, raising his eyebrows at his audience.

Lily could see it even from where she stood—the bubbles at the top of the cup. The beverage was boiling between Hal's hands.

With a flourish, Hal poured in a sprinkling of hot cocoa powder, and gave the cup's contents a quick stir with a plastic spoon. “There you are,” he told Teagan, handing over the cup. “Faster than a microwave.”

Teagan's hair shifted from electric blue bob to stark white, growing six inches. “Very nice,” she told Hal.

“His act's going to be
so
much better than identifying frogs,” Chuck said, turning back to Lily with a sigh.

Around and around Lily wound the length of yarn at her thumb. Suddenly lots of new thoughts were clamoring for space in her brain.

She looked at Chuck and Ellie. The Frog Twins, everyone called them.

FROGS
.

That had been written on one of the jars in Jo's office.

Lily's gaze shifted to Teagan, now sporting a blond pixie cut.

HAIR
.

That was one, too.

And finally Lily's eyes settled on Hal, who was bowing for his adoring audience.

HEAT
.

Lily wound the length of swampy yarn around and around her thumb, working it faster and faster.

“Lily?” Ellie said. “Are you okay?”

Something strange was going on at Camp Atropos. Something very, very strange.

Lily just had to figure out
what
.

Chuck's Frozen Mint Hot Chocolate

a drink reminiscent of a cool swim on a hot day

FOR THE FROZEN HOT CHOCOLATE:

1
1
/
2
cups whole milk, divided

6 sprigs fresh mint (plus more for garnish if desired)

2
/
3
cup semisweet chocolate chips

1 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder

3 tbsp sugar

5 cups ice

whipped cream (optional)

1. In a small saucepan, combine ½ cup of the milk and 6 sprigs of mint. Heat on the lowest setting for 4 minutes, stirring constantly and smashing the mint into the milk. Do not let the mixture boil.

2. Using tongs or a fork, remove the mint sprigs from the milk and discard them.

3. Add the chocolate chips, cocoa powder, and sugar to the milk. Stirring constantly, continue heating on the lowest setting until the chocolate melts and the mixture is smooth, 3 to 5 minutes.

4. Remove the chocolate mixture from the heat. Stir in the remaining 1 cup milk, mixing well.

5. Put the ice in the blender and carefully pour in the chocolate mixture. Blend on high until smooth. Pour into two tall glasses and top with whipped cream and fresh mint sprigs, if desired. Serve with drinking straws or spoons.

[Serves 2]