Witch Twins at Camp Bliss (5 page)

Claire knew she had stumbled upon evidence of a spell. More important, it was evidence of a problem-solving spell. Here’s how the spell worked:

Tell your problem to the apple, then polish and quarter it.

Whisper four possible solutions into each of the four sections.

Bury the sections North, South, East, and West.

After a week, dig all the sections up.

Whichever section of the apple is least rotten is the best solution to the problem.

But anyone knows that is a very quaint and bygone way to solve a problem. An Old School spell, Claire thought irritably. With about twenty-five percent accuracy. No modern witch wasted her time whispering to apples and digging them up. Whoever was teaching this rebel witch was using a very out-of-date textbook.

Angrily, Claire dug up the remaining sections and tossed them high into the trees. Of all the camps to pick, she thought, why did some strange Old School rebel witch have to come sneaking into her very own Camp Bliss?

I’m onto ye, trouble-enkindling Old School rebel witch,” Claire said out loud, in case the rebel witch was somewhere out there. Spying on her.

Which was a pretty spooky sensation.

O
NE AND A HALF WEEKS
down, Luna thought. Three and a half to go. She tried to remember what three and a half weeks in the past had felt like. She counted back to late June and the last day of school, when their fifth-grade teachers, Mrs. Fleegerman and Mr. Rosenthal, had taken them out to Wild Water Park for an end-of-the-year school trip. There had been a fun house and an observatory and a homemade fudge stand. Luna and Claire had shared a bag of white-chocolate fudge with pineapple chunks. Delicious!

The taste of pineapples and chocolate seemed like a million years ago.

It would be impossible to stay at Camp Bliss for three and a half more weeks, Luna decided. What was the point? She had not made an all-weather friend, though she was friendly with a lot of girls. Especially Penelope. That was mostly because they both were picked last for teams.

And every time she climbed all the way up to the top bunk, she was sure this was the night she would fall and break her arm.

In fact, the only place where she felt comfortable was the first-aid office. Probably since she’d spent so much time there.

It wasn’t her fault. Bad things kept happening to her.

For example, in spite of applying plenty of Haley’s fancy sunscreen, Luna came down with a skin-splotching rash. “Sun poisoning,” Pam said. “Go see Talita in the office. You’re excused from afternoon sports.”

Luna went down to the office to find Talita, who used to go to Camp Bliss but now was in medical school. Now, as a summer job, she was in charge of all the Camp Bliss paperwork, plus head of first aid.

Talita gave Luna some calamine lotion and a paperback to read while she recovered in the first-aid bed. The paperback was called
Eternally Eustacia.
It was an old-fashioned romance with lots of good descriptions of ball gowns and horseback riding.

When the rash faded into little pink bumps, Luna thought she was getting better. By the next morning, the bumps had started to itch. It turned out she had a case of poison sumac.

“Okay, Luna, you are excused from the basketball tournament,” said Pam with a frown.

Luna trotted to the first-aid office, where Talita mixed up a baking powder paste to stop the itch. She took another rest on the first-aid bed and read a couple more chapters of
Eternally Eustacia.
Then she and Talita played crazy eights.

“It’s fun to get a break from solitaire,” Talita said.

Luna smiled. Talita was nice. She had shiny eyes, and she wore her hair in little braid circlets she called twisty-ties. She promised she’d twisty-tie Luna’s hair one day when she had the spare time.

The poison sumac was almost gone the next morning when Luna woke up with a bloody nose. “We’re in a mountainous region,” Talita explained when she was summoned from the office to Luna’s bunk side. “Don’t be scared. It’s natural. Keep pinching your nose at the bridge.”

The nosebleed cleared up, but the next day Luna was back in the first-aid office because she had stepped into a thicket of nettles. Talita had to use tweezers to pick them all out.

“If there was a blue ribbon for being accident-prone, you’d get it,” Talita said as she swabbed Luna’s ankles with disinfectant. “All set.”

“How about a hand of crazy eights?” Luna looked around the first-aid room with longing. It reminded her of a combination of her mother’s examining room and Grandy’s library. A good balance of dark wooden beams and sterilised instruments.

“Okay,” said Talita. “And then you need to get back to camp.’”

But after crazy eights, they played go fish, and then one of the campers, Janna Bruskaard, came in with a scraped elbow. “I hope I’ll be healed by the canoe trip tomorrow,’” she said. “Everyone says I’m a star paddler!”

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Talita comforted her. Then Luna watched as Talita swabbed, sprayed, and bandaged Janna’s elbow and told her how brave she was. Talita will make a good doctor, Luna thought. She was calm and decisive.

Talita was teaching Luna rummy five hundred and telling her about her boyfriend, Curtis, when the dinner bell rang.

“Gosh, that’s the first time the bell took me by surprise!” Talita said with a laugh. “You go ahead. I’ve got to finish up some paperwork here. Guess I took a little bit of a sick day myself.”

“See you later,” said Luna.

“Or sooner.” Talita waved.

Sooner or later turned out to be the next morning. Right after breakfast, Luna felt a touch nauseated. Instead of canoeing over to the bluffs along with the rest of her cabin, she decided she had better rest up until her stomachache passed.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Pam when Luna approached her. “Go see Talita.”

“There’s nothing I can do about indigestion except give you some Peptine,” said Talita.

“Can I can help you with stuff around here, until I feel better?” Luna asked.

“Act-u-a-lee,” said Talita, pulling on every syllable as she looked at Luna, “there is something. See that brown box? We got some new supplies in, and I haven’t had a minute to unload them. But you’re canoeing today, right? You don’t want to miss something as fun as that.”

“I don’t mind,” said Luna truthfully.

She spent the rest of the day unloading the carton of supplies, and then taking inventory for Talita. In the cool quiet indoors, Luna counted and checked cotton balls, Q-tips, gauze bandages, and disposable thermometer strips. After she finished, she watched Talita update the Camp Bliss Web page.

That’s when Luna had an idea.

“May I write a letter home on behalf of the campers?” she asked. “It might add a nice personal touch.”

“Be my guest,” said Talita. “I never think anyone reads this Web page, anyhow.”

Luna jumped on the computer.

It’s been two weeks and we are having more fun than we ever dreamed! The sun shines all day long, and the nights are filled with campfire song! she typed. Today a bunch of us went canoeing. Everyone considers Janna Bruskaard to be one of the star paddlers.

“Nice. You could do daily updates and call it ‘Luna’s News,’” said Talita, looking over her shoulder. “It would be great, especially for the parents of the younger girls, the kiddies who haven’t been away from home before.”

“Okay,” Luna agreed. Perhaps writing cheerful bulletins about Camp Bliss would convince her that it was a fun place to be.

The next day, the entire camp was going to ride bikes along the Bluefly Ridge trail.

“So get psyched!” yelled Tammy and Pam. The girls whistled and stomped. Luna cringed. She checked for nosebleed, rashes, fever. Nothing. During cabin cleanup, she even hung her head off the side of her bunk bed, but not so much as a trickle of top-bunk sickness ran through her. She felt great!

That meant it was time for her last-resort tactic. A spell. It wasn’t a big-deal spell. It was more like a trick, one she had seen Grandy do for her friends at parties, with a wineglass balanced on her head. Luna guessed that the wineglass part was unnecessary.

Quickly, she said her name frontward and backward, then touched her forehead and tongue and cast:

There once was a girl who was weller

So she decided to cast her own speller.

She made her skin cold

Filled her mouth up with mold

From
the
sickly you now couldn’t tell her.

Then she ran down the hill and straight to the front office. The spell was so mild it would wear off in twenty minutes. She had to be quick.

“Good gracious!” Talita put her hand over her heart. “Your tongue is green and fuzzy.” She placed a palm on Luna’s forehead. “You’re cold as an ice cube! I don’t know what to do for that. I’ve never seen anything like it before, not even in my textbooks.” She looked so concerned that Luna felt bad.

“It doesn’t hurt at all, really,” she said. “I’m sure I’m fine.”

“Hmm. I should keep a close watch on you for a while.” Talita held up her pack of playing cards. “Want to play? That is, if you’re up to it?”

“Sure!” Luna smiled.

At lunch, they split a cream-cheese-and-olive sandwich, and then Talita had to go teach a water-safety session to the Cabin One and Two girls. “We need to keep reminding the little rascals, otherwise they get too bold,” Talita explained. “You can stay here and answer the phone while I’m gone.”

“Okay!” Luna was pleased to sit at the front desk. It had a computer and a big stack of Talita’s medical textbooks. This is what it would be like to be in college or have a job, she thought. With no more camp, ever.

She took
Eternally Eustacia
out of the desk top drawer. She was almost to the end of the book, and she was sure that a beautiful wedding would be coming up in the last chapter. Talita had said that when Luna was finished, she could donate it to the Pillowcase Fund.

After a few minutes, she was interrupted by a loud screaming from outside. “Help me, Taleeetaaa! I’m going to die!”

Luna looked out the window. Haley was hopping over the hill, holding her toe with both hands and crying at the top of her lungs. Luna hurried out and helped her into the office, and then helped her onto the first-aid cot.

“What seems to be the trouble?” she asked in her best doctor voice.

“There’s a gargantuan splinter in my toe! I got it on the dock!”

Luna looked. Sure enough, the half-inch splinter lay buried like a crooked frown under the thick skin of Haley’s big toe.

“Do something!” Haley moaned.

“We should wait for Talita,” said Luna.

“But I might get an infection!” Haley bawled. “If you stand by and do nothing, then you could go to jail. My parents are lawyers, so I should know!” Tears squirted from her eyes like watermelon seeds.

Although Luna didn’t quite believe this threat, her heart raced. Talita would not be back for at least half an hour, and Haley’s crying was already unbearable. Luna examined the toe more thoroughly. Simple, really. Nothing to it. Sterilise a pair of long tweezers, some rubbing alcohol …

“Okay, I’ll do it,” she said, “but you have to stop crying.”

“I can’t!” Haley cried. “I’m in more pain than I ever felt in my life!”

Luna doubted this was true, but she briskly washed her hands in the basin and selected the tweezers and alcohol from the first-aid cabinet. “Don’t wriggle,” she instructed. “Please, Haley. If you cooperate, this will be over in no time.”

“Hurry! The splinter is poisoning my blood as we speak!” screamed Haley. “I might have to get an amputation!”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous! You need to sit still, so that I can do my job,” Luna exclaimed. Haley’s crying was rattling her nerves. Maybe they should wait for Talita, after all.

“The splinter is touching my toe bone!” Haley screamed.

“Please, Haley, keep still,” Luna begged. But Haley was not going to stop wriggling or screaming.

Then Luna remembered that Talita kept a glass jar of sour balls in the lower cabinet. She grabbed Talita’s keys from the desk, unlocked the cabinet, reached in, and selected a green one.

“I’m not a baby!” wailed Haley. “I don’t need candy!”

“No, this isn’t candy. This is a medicine ball. It helps the pain,” said Luna. “It has a special … potion. Only the green ones, though. That’s why they don’t taste quite as good as the others.”

Haley looked skeptical, but she grabbed the candy and unwrapped it. As she slurped on the sour ball, the tears dried on her cheek. Luna took a deep breath as she again sat on the stool opposite the first-aid cot. She kept a firm grip on Haley’s toe and slowly, painstakingly, drew out the splinter.

“Voilà!” She held up the splinter for Haley’s red-rimmed eyes.

“Wow!” Haley sniffled. “It didn’t even hurt much. That’s strong medicine.”

“What’s going on here?”

Luna turned. Talita was standing in the doorway, her arms crossed and eyebrows raised.

“She saved me from a splinter.” Haley wriggled her bandaged toe. “See that? Luna did as good a job as a real doctor.”

“It was nothing,” said Luna, embarrassed.

Later, after Haley left, Luna told Talita the whole story. Talita laughed. “Green sour balls. I’ll have to remember that!” she said. “Good work, Luna.”

That evening, Talita must have said something to Pam, because straight after dinner, Pam walked up to Luna and dropped a hand on her shoulder.

“Luna, congratulations on your first-aid work. Talita says you’re a good apprentice.”

“Um, if you really feel that way” Luna began nervously. “The truth is, I’d rather be up in the front office, helping out and working on the Web page. I like doing that better than regular camp stuff.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Pam. “I’ve been thinking about you, Luna. I have a proposition.” She drew Luna a little way apart from the rest of the girls to speak privately. “I don’t want this getting out since it’s not really Camp Bliss policy, but here is my idea. If you put in more effort and enthusiasm during the morning camp activities, then I’ll let you off for afternoon office duty. Talita said she could use the help, and if you’re participating with us in the morning, then I don’t have a problem with it.” She stuck out her hand. “Team player?”