Summer on the Short Bus Read online

  I think back momentarily to the chaos that was the night before. After Quinn returned me to my bunk, I took a quick shower, changed clothes, swiped my lashes for good measure, and joined everyone at the mess hall for movie night.

  Rainbow cornered me the second I stepped foot on the cracked linoleum floor.

  “I wasn’t able to reach your father,” she said in a quiet, yet firm voice. “According to your housekeeper, he’s out of the country until a week from tomorrow. Since you don’t have another legal guardian who can give me permission to let you leave, you’ll have to stay.”

  Well, there’s a news flash, Anderson Cooper.

  The campers may have been too preoccupied with their microwave popcorn to notice our conversation, but it definitely didn’t get past my fellow counselors. I turned my back to them for more privacy. “I guess I don’t have a choice then, do I?”

  “Does this mean you’ll give it a shot?”

  I looked sadly at my flip-flopped feet. My once-beautiful toes looked like I’d taken a jackhammer to them. And thanks to some blisters from my seldom worn Asics, each pinkie toe was sporting a shimmery red Bieber Band-Aid. It was all so sad. And yet, there I was, actually agreeing to do it.

  “I guess,” I finally said. “But I’m still planning to call my dad the second he’s back in town.”

  A smile spread across her speckled face, and for a moment I thought she might cry. “I’ll let the rest of the team know what you’ve decided. I have a good hunch you’ll want to stay.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  Rainbow disappeared into the kitchen with an unsettling spring in her step, while I stood completely dumbfounded, wondering what the hell I’d just done. Colin finally broke me from my fog when he stood in front of the group and announced that the movie of our night was the original Karate Kid. (There was an original?) I selected a spot on a fuzzy green pillow next to Fantine’s blue one, praying that Quinn would occupy the other side and the campers would stay at least five arms’ lengths away.

  That lasted for all of four seconds. . . .

  “Chirp, chirp! Where is Cricket? Chirp, chirp!” Claire suddenly appeared by my side, crouching in a position I wasn’t certain she’d ever get out of. “Quinn said you will sit with me.”

  “What?”

  She leaned forward and whispered right against my ear. “Quinn said you will sit with me.”

  I jerked back. “No, um, you must have misunderstood—” Before I could assure her that sitting anywhere near me was not an option, she plopped her enormous, disproportionate body onto the other half of my pillow. She proceeded to tell me, again, how much she loved Robert Pattinson, and that even though her parents assured her otherwise, she was pretty sure vampires actually did exist.

  Trying to ignore her, I searched the room for Quinn. I found him sitting on a metal folding chair with his feet crossed at his ankles and a devious smile resting on his otherwise perfect face.

  “What the hell?” I mouthed, raising my hands.

  His only response was an exaggerated shrug.

  I was about to return the middle finger salute he gave me earlier in the day, when a heavy poke on my shoulder forced me to turn back to Claire.

  “What now?” I said.

  “Meredith doesn’t like Edward.”

  “Meredith? Who the hell is Meredith?”

  “Her,” Claire says, motioning behind me.

  I craned my neck over my right shoulder and nearly shrieked when I found the wheel-chaired, Hannah Montana stalker just inches from my face.

  “Mom saaaaaays vampires aren’t reeeeal,” Meredith sputtered. “Are they reeeeal, Cricket?”

  “Chirp! Chirp!” Claire added. “Are they, Cricket?”

  Both girls broke into a fit of laughter, while I turned to Fantine, hoping she would offer me some sort of salvation. Like maybe a rock to the head.

  “Looks like you’ve got some new friends,” she said, making no attempt to hide her amusement.

  “Can’t you move them? Or roll them somewhere? This is a huge room, is there nowhere else they can sit?”

  Fantine motioned her head back toward the pair who were getting even more comfortable in their respective seats. My seat. “I think they’re pretty happy where they are. Besides, they’re both in love with Zac Efron over there. He tells them to sit with you, they’re gonna do it.”

  I looked beyond her and found that Quinn had moved from the folding chair to a black beanbag just a few feet away. Sitting Indian style on his right side was the black kid with superthick glasses I saw climbing off the bus, his crutches a few feet away on the floor. On his left, squatting like he was hoping to lay an egg, was the kid I only remembered as the Drooler.

  The Drooler got to sit beside Quinn, and I was stuck with my new BFFs. WTF?

  I edged to the corner of my cushion with my eyes fixed on the screen, and silently prayed for the gates of hell to open up and take me already.

  Just as Quinn said, the movie started rolling at eight on the dot, but it took at least fifteen minutes before the Wonder Twins beside me finally shut up and stopped laughing. Other than random outbursts of “balls,” “cock,” or “piss” by a red-haired boy named Chase, the room was virtually silent. It wasn’t until the final scene, when Daniel-san did his famous crane kick to defeat the sexy Cobra Kai bully, when the gates of hell actually did come flying open.

  Claire saw me sucking back tears, a reaction I’m sure everyone has the first time they see that movie, and felt the need to share my sentiments with the entire room.

  “Cricket loves Daniel-san, Cricket loves Daniel-san!” She was singing at the top of her lungs, hopping around like a frog with broken legs. I was half a breath away from telling her to shut her crazy pie-hole, when Meredith and her ten-thousand-pound wheelchair rolled over my hand.

  “Son of a bitch!” I shook my hand, hoping to regain feeling. But my need for medical attention was quickly dismissed in the midst of the chaos going on around me.

  “Waaaaax on, Cricket! Waaaaax off, Cricket!” Meredith yelled from her wheelchair, while Trevor with the freaky eyes added, “Don’t forget to breathe!” Within a minute every window-licker within a thousand feet was jumping, hobbling, rolling, or bouncing through the room shrieking about my love for the Karate Kid.

  High-functioning my ass—those kids were freakin’ nuts!

  “Damn, that was funny,” Fantine says, bringing me back to the present with a hearty laugh.

  “I’m still not sure how I got out of there without a tranquilizer gun,” I say, and find I’m actually laughing with her. “You guys didn’t help any, either. Pete said he almost wet his pants.”

  “I’m pretty sure he did. He took off and didn’t tell anybody where he went—probably had to change into some clean boxers.”

  I blow out a heavy sigh as the memory of the night before slowly disappears and the reality of my day comes back into light. “I’m thrilled to have been part of your entertainment for the evening, but I still don’t think I can do this. It’s no big deal when you guys are around, but I’m going to have to be alone with them at some point. I just don’t think I can pull it off.”

  “They’re just kids, Cricket. They don’t bite. At least not most of them,” she says, dropping her head between her knees as she pulls her penny-colored curls into a ponytail. “Are they different? Yes. Will there be times when you think you’re going crazy? Hell yes. But once you get over that stuff, you’ll actually have a good time. Besides”—she flips back up with a crude smile on her face—“I saw you eyeing Quinn more than a couple times last night. If you leave early, you won’t be getting any action.”

  “Ugh, whatever.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says dramatically. “It must be the other Barbie twin whose eyes glaze over the minute he walks into the room.”

  “They do not!” I say, a little too emphatically to believe. “I just think he’s cute. That’s all. I mean, he looks like a celebrity!”

  Sh
e crosses her muscular arms over her chest and glares at me. “So the fact that he’s sweet as pie, earned a scholarship, and bends it like Beckham doesn’t factor into your opinion of him whatsoever? Not one little bit?”

  I chew on my lip, fearing that if I try to speak I’ll burst into hysterics.

  “Mmm-hmm, that’s what I thought,” she says. “Come on, Mrs. Efron, let’s get these girls ready for breakfast.”

  Never in my life did I think teenage girls could spend an entire Saturday without a trip to Barney’s, marathon texting, or a Liam Hemsworth movie, but that’s exactly what happened today. And I hated every minute of it.

  From the very awkward breakfast where I was wedged between my two self-proclaimed BFFs, Claire and Meredith, to diving for cover when wonky-eyed Trevor misjudged his archery target by about nine thousand feet, I hadn’t had a moment’s peace all day. (FYI: Archery lessons have been cancelled for the rest of the summer. Ya think!) Even tonight’s amazing shrimp scampi was ruined when Robyn, one of Fantine’s bobble-headed campers, threw up all over my new Kors denim shorts. Not even a full Quinn grin could make a food allergy puke fest less revolting. As far as I was concerned, my dad’s return to the States couldn’t come soon enough.

  It wasn’t until we’d finished dinner and I bagged my new shorts in a Hefty that things started looking up.

  “Did anybody tell you what we do on Saturday nights?”

  I can’t help but roll my eyes at Fantine’s question. Had she completely forgotten that besides her, my interactions with anyone with half an IQ point was virtually nonexistent?

  “No,” I say. “Somehow I missed the news flash about the wild and crazy Saturday nights at Camp Kill Me Now.”

  “Stop being so freaking dramatic,” she says. “Saturday nights we sing songs, roast s’mores, tell ghost stories around the campfire—”

  “Sounds riveting.”

  “My God, you’re annoying sometimes,” she continues, proving my death glare has nothing on hers. “As I was saying, after we do all that and get the kids settled for the night, the four of us get to go out.”

  “What!” I scramble off the bed. “Did you say we get to go out? Like, away from here?”

  “I thought that would get your attention.”

  She drops down beside me so we’re both sitting on the edge of my bed. In a quiet voice she says, “As long as there isn’t anything serious going on here, Rainbow will cover things at our cabin and Pete will cover things at the boys’. She doesn’t care when we get back, as long as we’re up and ready in time for breakfast.”

  “Where will we go? What will we do?”

  “There’s a little town called Freeport about twenty minutes north of here,” she says. I scootch closer, hanging on every word like she’s Jesus delivering the Sunday sermon. “There’s not a whole lot to do, but there’s a bowling alley and a Denny’s. It’s better than nothing.”

  I have no idea what this Denny’s is, but I already know it’s going to be perfect.

  “Colin’s also twenty-one now,” she adds. “So I’m sure he’ll hook us up with some beer. Do you drink?”

  “Sometimes. At parties or whatever. Do you?”

  “Same, but we can’t drink much. If Rainbow suspects we’ve been drinking, we’ll be fired on the spot. No exceptions.”

  Fired on the spot, eh? The proverbial light bulb in my brain flickers on.

  Hello, escape route.

  EIGHT

  For the record, a Saturday night should never involve burned s’mores, Scooby-Doo-inspired ghost stories, or off-key renditions of the same Taylor Swift song sung so many times one considers ripping off their own ears with a pair of pliers. If not for the drunken liberation awaiting me, suicide would sound like a pretty legit course of action right now.

  At ten o’clock, we start herding the campers to bed.

  “Just a few more minutes,” Fantine says under her breath, while subtly tapping the face of her watch.

  “Believe me, I know.” Despite our differing motivations, it’s nice to know I’m not the only one eager to get the hell out of here.

  “Cricket?” A hearty tug on my arm forces my attention away from Fantine to my right side. Oh goody, it’s Claire. “You’re tucking us in, right?”

  “What?”

  Per usual, Claire thinks I didn’t hear her question, when in reality I’m too disgusted by it to answer. “You’re tucking us in, right?” she says again, motioning to herself and Meredith, who has just wheeled up beside her.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  They shake their heads.

  “Aren’t you guys like thirteen?”

  “Fourteeeeeeeen,” Meredith answers.

  “Fine, fourteen. Whatever. Don’t you think you’re a little too old to get tucked in?”

  “No,” Claire answers quickly.

  I turn to Fantine hoping she’ll confirm that my nighttime duties do not include bedtime stories, but she’s too busy dealing with her own campers to offer me any help.

  “Ugh, fine,” I say. “I’ll do it, just stop talking about it.” Not like I’ll be around to do it again.

  “Yay!” Claire shouts and pumps her fist in the air. “Chirp! Chirp! Cricket’s putting us to bed. Cricket’s putting us to bed!”

  Before I can say, “chirp again and die,” the commotion of movie night starts up all over again. Meredith is popping wheelies in the dirt, yelling, “Cricket is the bedtime queeeeeen!” while Robyn, who made a miraculous recovery thanks to a bottle of Pepto, suddenly joins the festivities and is clapping her hands together, cackling like a hyena.

  “Hey, what’s going on over there?” Quinn’s voice suddenly emerges from the other side of the dwindling campfire. “Are you trying to wake the dead?”

  “Cricket’s putting us to bed!” Claire calls back.

  Mortified, I raise my head and glance in Quinn’s direction. Even through the hazy smoke, his gaze is penetrating. It momentarily makes me wonder if staying here would really be that bad.

  “Awesome!” he calls back. “But you should probably start settling down. It’s lights out in ten minutes. You need your beauty rest!”

  “You’re right, Quinn,” I holler back. “We don’t all have the natural beauty of a movie star!”

  He lets out a hearty laugh. “Touché, Cricket,” he says, before leaving to catch up with his own campers.

  “I think he’s hotter than Zac Efron,” Claire says wistfully.

  I can’t help but laugh. “Yeah, he’s pretty easy on the eyes.”

  “But he’s no Edward Cullen, right?”

  I’m not sure at what point in this ridiculous conversation Claire thought I invited her to touch me, but I feel her pudgy fingers wrap around my hand. “No, Claire,” I say. “He’s definitely no Edward Cullen.”

  The beater pickup complete with the CAMP I CAN logo and blue handicapped tag swaying from the rearview wouldn’t have been my first (or second) choice for my night on the town, but considering what my life has evolved into the last two days, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me.

  Quinn settles into the front seat with Colin, hardly noticing how amazing my butt looks in my skinny sevens, so I hop in the back next to Fantine, where we talk reality TV. I do my best to stay engaged in the conversation, but it’s not easy. I’m way too focused on the night’s future activities to focus on anyone from the Jersey Shore. It’s when we pull into the stark parking lot of Ten Pin Lanes that my excitement begins to fade.

  The building consists of little more than four crumbling walls, a tin roof, and a bum passed out between the Dumpster and chain-link fence. There are Coors Light signs hanging in the front windows, while a handwritten sign saying SHOES CLEANED MONTHLY is tacked to the front door.

  “Is it even safe to go in there?”

  “Don’t worry, princess, we won’t let anybody give you a tattoo,” Fantine says, rolling her eyes. “Just think of it as an adventure.”

  An adventure. Right.

  Collin find
s a space near the back of the lot. The faint smell of cigarettes and concession food forces me to roll up my window before we actually stop. I’m the last to climb out of the truck, and when I do, I immediately link my arm through Quinn’s. Under normal circumstances I’d never make the first move, but nothing about this circumstance is normal.

  Quinn seems unfazed by my boldness. “I’m sure they’re harmless,” he says under his breath, referring to a couple of guys monitoring us from the back of a neighboring pickup. With their award-winning mullets and ability to throw back whiskey shots while still tongue-wrestling their chewing tobacco, I can see why he thought they were the cause of my angst. “And even if they do start something, we’ll be fine. We know karate.”

  “We do?”

  He nods. “We’ve seen Karate Kid, remember?”

  I’m in the mood to get shit-faced and fired, not have a good time. But once again, Quinn’s easy attitude gets the better of me and I begin to laugh.

  We make our way across the broken asphalt, through the battered front doors, and straight into a white trash Wonderland. Flannel shirts, mullets, and cigarette butts, oh my!

  I’m pleased to see that Colin heads straight to the bar, leaving the rest of us to search for a place to sit.

  “How about this one,” Fantine says, pointing to a plastic booth directly across the stained carpet from the shoe rental counter. Considering every surface in this place probably carries an infectious disease, I don’t see the point in protesting.

  I slide into the side of the booth opposite of Fantine. Quinn slides in beside me, his arm extending the length of the plastic cushion behind me.

  “I’m guessing you don’t do a whole lot of bowling,” he says to me with a teasing grin.

  “Something like that,” I say.

  “What is your typical Saturday night, Cricket?”

  I look across the table and am surprised to see Fantine staring at me with a deadpan, Oprah-interviewing expression on her face.

  “I don’t know, just typical stuff I guess. Movies, shopping, parties.”

  “And who do you do these things with?”