Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town, Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock [the mitten read aloud TXT] 📗

her back. Fiona should have noticed sooner, because the only person who has ever trusted her doesn’t seem to trust her anymore.

Oh shit, where are Nick’s pants? She can’t remember where she last had them.

The little girl who was cheerleading for nobody is still sitting on a rock by the water, but now she’s talking to herself, holding her towel off to the side and having a conversation with the empty space beside her.

Fiona goes over and kneels down in front of her.

“Hey there,” she says.

“Hi,” says the girl. She stops talking but is looking to her left, smiling at the empty air.

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Helping Elizabeth dry off.”

“Oh. Who’s Elizabeth?”

“She’s my friend. She’s a mermaid. She just got out of the water.”

“Were you cheering her on while she swam?”

The girl looks Fiona in the eye. Is that relief on her face?

“Uh-huh. Can you see her too?”

“Um, sure. Hi, Elizabeth.” Fiona pretends to shake hands with absolutely nothing.

The girl giggles.

“You’re just moving her tail up and down.”

“Well, that’s because I thought that’s how mermaids say hello.”

“She has hands, silly!”

“Of course. Sorry, Elizabeth. Let’s shake hands.”

Apparently she does it right the second time, because the girl looks pleased.

“I’m Fiona.” She holds out her hand again.

“I’m Poppy.” Poppy takes Fiona’s fingers and gives them a shake.

“Where’s the rest of your group, Poppy?”

But chatty Poppy suddenly turns quiet and shy.

“Hey, you okay? Did you lose your group?”

Poppy shakes her head.

“Do you know who your counselor is?”

Poppy nods.

Wow. Why the abrupt change?

Finn comes out of the sauna, his tanned arms and legs very visible in a pair of baggy swim trunks. His elbows are propped high on the door as he leans over someone standing against it. He bends down to whisper something into her ear, and Fiona sees that it’s Amy, holding the invasive weeds against her chest, tilting her ear up to hear.

“That’s him,” says Poppy. “That’s my counselor.”

“Poppy, are you scared of him?”

She shakes her head but whispers, “Elizabeth is, though.”

More of Amy and Fiona’s campers are swarming the beach, wet from their boating lesson.

“Fiona,” says a nasal voice near her elbow, “I already have a backpack, so I don’t need to borrow gear for the campout.”

She looks into Andrew’s round, pudgy face. His nostrils are coated in crusted snot that looks a lot like dried glue. How does he breathe?

“You have a way to carry your sleeping bag and parts of the tent? You’re sure?”

“Yes, I brought my own backpack from home.”

“Okay, because you guys have to all share the weight between the four of you in your group.”

He rolls his eyes. “I know, I know, Fiona. I’m staying here longer than anyone. My mom told me what to bring.”

She remembers that Andrew is here for a month, even though a week is too long for most of the campers his age. Fiona thinks the money would have been better spent on his adenoids, but then she remembers Cook telling her she’s too young to have opinions: “When you’re a parent you can have an opinion.”

Yeah, that’s not happening, she thinks.

“Okay, Andrew, you don’t have to come to gear checkout. Go have fun with your, uh, friends.”

Does Andrew have any friends?

When she turns back around, Poppy and Elizabeth are gone.

Later, at the gear shed, Amy is still barely talking to Fiona, but there’s no time anyway. It’s total chaos trying to sort gear for twenty kids. They dole out internal frame packs, tents, and sleeping bags as if they know exactly what they’re doing. For their group, it’s mostly symbolic: they are going to walk less than five hundred feet from their cabins and pitch tents on top of a grassy hill they could practically reach with a long stick.

For six-year-olds it’s just a chance to work as a group and get the idea of hiking and sleeping out. Amy and Fiona have never camped in their lives, but since no one asked, they pretend they were born doing this.

Amy has a clipboard with everyone’s names on it. They are pulling out tent poles and rainflies, and she tells them to split all the pieces up and see if they can carry them in their packs. Eventually, and after a great deal of confusion, they are surrounded by kids who look like they’ve been impaled by tent poles sticking out at all angles. Now they just need to walk up that hill, easy peasy.

“Hey, Franky, when Andrew gets here with his pack, give him part of the tent to carry. And a sleeping bag, okay?”

“He’s sleeping in our tent? But he snores like a snow machine!”

“Be nice,” says Fiona. “I’m going to the mess hall to get the s’mores and hot dogs and stuff. I’ll be right back.”

“That’s what you said last time,” says Amy, but she’s busy trying to get her girls to stop using the rainfly as a parachute. “Okay, everybody out,” she says as she trips and falls into the middle of it.

“A big fat fly!” cries one of the girls.

“Let’s eat her for lunch!” Six other very dirty spiders in wet pink bathing suits fall on top of Amy.

Fiona slips away.

But she has one quick stop before the mess hall.

“This is a pretty serious accusation,” the director says when Fiona tells her her concerns. “Do you have any proof?”

“I’m not saying Finn did anything. I’m just saying that little girl Poppy seemed genuinely scared of him.”

“You don’t seem to be making a lot of friends among the counselors, Fiona.”

“I swear this isn’t about me.”

“Well, I think Finn deserves to know what he’s being accused of,” she says. “And don’t you have campers you should be attending to right now?”

Why does everyone shoot the messenger?

“Can I just look at Poppy’s intake sheet? The one her parents filled out?”

“Why? Usually just the camper’s counselor gets to do that.”

“We do sometimes have to help out other people’s campers. If there’s something in there we should all know so we don’t do the wrong thing, I’d like to read it.”

“Since you seem