You Have a Match(23)

“Sorry for the interruption,” she says to the others. And to me: “Young lady, you can follow me.”

I open my mouth to protest, but one subtle, single shake of her head is all I need to think better of it. Instead I turn to Savvy, hoping I might catch some twinge of remorse, some hint of apology on her face, but she won’t even look at me. It’s like I am nobody to her. Like I don’t even exist.

So I turn and leave the firepit, my head held high and my mouth chewing the offending gum hard enough to snap my jaw, and don’t look back.





seven




“Who taught you how to wash dishes, the Hulk?”

I pause in the admittedly hostile washing of the plate in my hand and turn my head one begrudging fraction of an inch. It’s the boy from this afternoon, the exact same smirk on his face, as if it’s been there this whole time.

“Well,” he says when I don’t answer, “if the whole dish-washing thing doesn’t work out, at least you’ll have a solid career replacing the kid mascot for Dubble Bubble.”

So he’s a chatty type. Too bad. Whatever curiosity I had for him before is every bit as shoved down the drain as the leftover chili I’ve been washing off these mucked-up plates.

He leans against the sink, watching me in my vigorous routine of wash, dry, stack. “I’m Finn, by the way.”

I offer him a tight smile. He takes it in and lets out an exaggerated sigh.

“Fine,” he says. “I’ll help you. But only because you look kind of pathetic.” A pause. “And also cuz I got assigned kitchen duty, too.”

“What did you do?”

He waves me off. “What didn’t I do? Can’t get away with anything under the new regime,” he says. “It’s like they’ve all gotta be shitting me, if you know what I mean.”

I pause, the sink still running piping hot water into the soapy basin. “I didn’t see you at the pit,” I accuse.

“Ah, so you were looking for me?”

Ordinarily I’d be embarrassed, but I don’t care what this Finn guy thinks of me. I’m too angry to care what anyone thinks, really. A week of after-dinner kitchen duty assigned by a sixty-year-old woman with a whistle hanging around her neck will do that to you.

“I was there. Preoccupied, maybe, by the ‘Camp Reynolds’ sign I was defacing, but definitely there.”

I sigh, handing him the scalding-hot wet dish in my hands. He takes it so cheerfully that I can only guess he was hoping to get saddled with kitchen duty.

“You planning on telling me your name, or should I just give you one?”

I ignore him, handing over another dish. The thing is, Savvy’s been avoiding me. After Victoria assigned me kitchen duty and gave me a stern talking-to about “language” and a printout of the foot-long list of rules she didn’t care that I didn’t know about, she was nowhere in sight. And when I finally cornered her outside the cabins hours later, she had the nerve to think I was coming to apologize to her.

“What was I supposed to do?” she hissed under her breath. “It’s my first day as a junior counselor. The youngest one we’ve ever had, by the way, because Victoria trusts me. And then you come blazing in and deliberately test my authority in front of everyone—”

“I’m sorry, since when is what I put in my mouth part of your authority?”

“Did you not even bother to read the rules?” Before I could answer, she let out a huff and stepped back from me in faint disgust. “Of course you didn’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She took a breath and glanced around the edge of the building—making sure nobody saw her with her delinquent blood match, I could only guess—and said, “Listen, let’s forget about this. We’ve got bigger things to worry about. Come to the rec room during the free hour before curfew.”

“I can’t,” I told her. “Thanks to you, I have kitchen duty after dinner for a week.”

It was almost worth the punishment to get to drop that little bomb on her and watch her mouth form an inadvertent “oh” of surprise. Savvy, I’d already learned, was not a person who adjusted well to people messing with her master plans.

Then her brows furrowed, and she pointed at me. Pointed at me. Like we were in an after-school special, and she was the Extra-Disappointed Teacher. “You’ve got nobody to thank for that but yourself.”

I thought that was going to be it, because she whipped around to head back to the camp. But I let out a laugh that was more of a scoff, this ugly noise I’d never heard myself make before. I was almost proud of myself—hidden talent unlocked—until it prompted Savvy to turn back and say, “If you’re just going to make a bunch of trouble, why’d you bother to come at all?”

She said it fast, without even looking at me, but it still landed hard enough to sting. And just like that, all the anger I was trying to work up was knocked right out of me, and I was more puddle than person. I’d been someone’s little sister for less than a week, and I already screwed the whole thing up.

“Dubble Bubble girl it is,” says Finn, shaking me out of my thoughts and back to the plates I’d been mauling with the sponge. “Unless your parents gave you a better one.”