The Sign in the Smoke (Nancy Drew Diaries #12)(16)

She walked around me to reach her bag and carefully unzipped it, pulling out a thick blue book with pictures of dragons on the cover. Then she pulled out another book, this one green, but clearly from the same series, with the same dragons zooming around the jacket.

A frown played across Kiki’s face, and she looked from me to the other girls, who still stood in a cluster around her. “Um . . . cool. You must like books, huh? So where are you from?”

Harper lifted two more books out of her bag and then piled them all into a stack. She carefully lifted them and carried them around the bed to the dresser at the end.

“Um, I put my stuff in the three bottom drawers there,” Kiki said. “There’s only four dressers for eight people, so we’ll have to share. There’s some closets near the bathroom, though. Is that okay?”

Harper didn’t even look up. She hefted the books on top of the dresser. Then she shrugged—the only sign she’d heard Kiki—and began carefully arranging the books, lining them up along the dresser’s top edge. When she had them carefully placed, she tapped her lip and then switched the two on the outer edges. Then she nodded to herself, went back to her bunk, and began pulling out her clothes.

Kiki looked a little taken aback. I could tell she was trying to be friendly, but she seemed to have reached the end of her patience. “Oookay,” she said quietly. “I guess we’ll get to know each other later. Um, anyway”—she turned back to the others—“have you guys ever seen that show Camp Confessional??? It’s, like, my favorite!”

“Oh yeah!” one of the other campers, Winnie, cried. Winnie was Asian, with gorgeous glossy black braids, and had arrived with a curly-haired brunette named Katie. The two seemed to be BFFs. “Katie and I, like, totally binge-watched that on Netflix last weekend! We wanted to prepare. This is our first time at summer camp.”

As the girls chatted, Harper finished arranging her clothes in the dresser and carefully closed the top drawer. She folded her backpack with military precision and tucked it between the dresser and the wall.

I walked over to her. “Did you have a long drive to get here?” I asked. I knew it was a lame question, but I was desperate to get this girl talking.

Harper shrugged again.

“An hour? Less?” I prodded.

“About an hour.” She twisted her lips to the side, then looked away from me, back at the line of books. “Is it okay if I read until lunch?”

I struggled not to look too disappointed. I knew we’d just met, but I so wanted this girl to open up! The other girls were already chattering away like they’d known one another their whole lives.

“This is, um, sort of a ‘get to know you’ hour,” I said, gently putting a hand on Harper’s back and guiding her over to the rest of the girls. “Girls, why don’t we all have a seat on the beds and get to know one another? We have an hour before our hike and picnic lunch.”

“Oh, cool!” cried Katie, twisting some curls behind her ear. “Can we play Truth or Dare?”

I cringed. “No,” I said, “but we can definitely ask each other some get-to-know-you questions!”

Maya ran over, clutching a book and bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. “Nancy, here’s that book I told you about,” she said, holding up a small paperback titled 100 Great Questions. “Maybe we can use some of the questions in here, and go around the bunk?”

“That’s a great idea,” I said, smiling. Maya, who was a total extrovert, had told me the day before about a book she’d brought full of icebreaking questions to help the campers—and the two of us—get to know one another. I knew I was lucky to have such an enthusiastic CIT.

But as we all settled down on the bunks, I noticed that Harper sat cross-legged on the floor rather than sit on a bed close to Cece. And she wore a distant expression as we all chatted eagerly, like she’d rather be someplace else. When someone asked her a question directly, she answered politely but rarely used more than a few words. As soon as she’d finished speaking, she turned her attention back to the floor in front of her or out the window.

I could understand being a bit of an introvert. Crowds sometimes made me uncomfortable, and I always loved returning to the quiet of my room at the end of the day. But this seemed a little more extreme.

How am I going to draw Harper out of her shell?



“Are we there yet?” Cece asked for the twenty-seventh (or at least, that’s how it felt) time, and the rest of the campers cracked up over what had become a running joke.

“Almost,” I replied, just as I had every other time she’d asked the question so far. “But really this time. It’s just”—I unfolded my map and stared at the upper right corner—“right over this hill.”

“Didn’t you say that half an hour ago?” Winnie whined.

Nina, a tall, skinny girl with freckles and short blond hair, scoffed, “We’ve only been hiking for, like, forty minutes, guys. Toughen up!”

“Easy for you to say,” Kiki said with a sigh. “You’re, like, some kind of amazing basketball player or whatever. But I’m just a regular girl!”

“What does that mean?” Nina asked, frowning. “Athletes are regular girls too!”

I glanced at Maya and sighed. We’d been hiking longer than I’d thought we would—we might have been a little overambitious in choosing Mushroom Creek as our destination—and the girls were getting cranky. All the getting-to-know-you good vibes seemed to have dissipated, and the girls were focusing now on how much they didn’t have in common.