The Pandora Device Read online

  Mr. Parker sprang to his feet. “Welcome to camp,” he said, beaming at us.

  Some of the other campers looked as confused as I felt. They peered ahead through the windows and then back the way we came.

  Ellen dug an elbow in my ribs. “I never would’ve come if I’d known it was just on the other side of Simmons Hill,” she said.

  Lindsey was gazing dreamily out the window. “Is it Simmons Hill?” she asked.

  Ellen squinted at her, and for a moment I saw a flicker of uncertainty. “Ridiculous,” she said.

  But I wasn’t so sure. Maybe Lindsey was right. Could it be super-advanced science—some kind of mass hypnosis or a new kind of transportation?

  The bus rumbled its way into the woods, and the chatter on the bus intensified. Mr. Parker waved his arms, and the entire bus exploded into a song that resembled donkeys braying. I caught the words “Camp Hawthorne” and “dear old camp,” but they were all mixed together.

  The bus veered around a corner and rolled up a driveway toward the most bizarre house I’d ever seen. It was at least three stories tall with windows topped by pointed roofs and chimneys that curved out like one of Grandma’s vases. Black and orange bricks made diamond patterns in the red walls, and a round room with glass windows and a cone-shaped roof bulged out from one side. The glass room appeared to be filled with leafy trees. The middle section was a tall tower, and around it, like a skirt, frilled the roof of a porch that ran along the front and side.

  Everyone stampeded off the bus, and Mr. Parker gathered the new campers on the porch, where dozens of three-legged stools clustered around barrels topped with checker boards. A guy and a girl, who might have been college-age, left their game and came over to us.

  The guy wore a safari hat and khaki shirt with a blue bandana. “This is Buckeye,” Mr. Parker said. “He’s head counselor for the boys.” He turned to the girl. “And this is Skeeter—head counselor for the girls. They’re going to take you from here.”

  Skeeter waved. She had two pencils stuck through the twist of brown hair on top of her head.

  “Art pencils,” Lindsey murmured next to me. “Cerulean blue and indigo.”

  “This is Twain House, one of the dormitories,” Buckeye began, speaking over the muttering of the crowd. He had a funny accent—maybe English or Australian. “And everyone will eat their meals over there.” He pointed to another brick building that was not as fancy as the main house.

  Ellen sniffed. “Looks like a garage.”

  Buckeye read names from the clipboard, and six campers followed him through the door. Skeeter motioned to the rest of us. “Your dorms are farther off, so everyone else come with me.” I glanced back and saw Jayden slouching near the end, behind a group of three boys wearing red T-shirts.

  I carried my suitcase in one hand and tucked my sleeping bag under the other arm as we hiked down the driveway and onto a dirt track. Skeeter slowed up to let Lindsey and me walk alongside her. After our crazy ride, it felt good to breathe the tangy air, which smelled of pine needles.

  “I like your pencils,” Lindsey said.

  Skeeter slipped the blue one out of her hair. “It’s believed that owls are the only animals that can see the color blue,” she said. “And the Aztecs believed this color to be protective, so they used the turquoise stone in their shields.”

  Lindsey was fingering one of her braids, a faraway look in her eye. I was sure she was planning to wear pencils in her hair to school next year.

  The trail twisted around, and Skeeter called a halt at a huge stone in the path, where some older kids waited. She patted the stone. “Campers, this is the Junction Stone. Get your bearings on this marker, and you’ll never get lost. Five paths meet here, one from each dorm. Your counselors are going to take you from here.”

  Calling names from a list, she assigned us to the waiting counselors. The red shirts and a boy in overalls joined the team from our school. Our counselor was Eugene, and he wore all black with a spiky haircut. He scowled and led us to the left path, which ran along a shallow creek.

  The day was growing warmer, and mosquitoes buzzed around my head. My suitcase banged against my legs and the butterfly net kept getting tangled with my sleeping bag. I watched Ellen rolling her bag on its wheels and thought how nice it must be to have an up-to-date suitcase.

  We rounded a cluster of pine trees and someone said “ooh.” The house stood under an ancient tree, and the shadows wavering on the gray siding seemed to dissolve the building into the woods. Bits of roof ran in every direction with chimneys poking out at strange angles. The windows reflected back the light like blind eyes.

  “Who would want to stay here?” Ellen whispered in my ear. “It’s creepy.” I ignored her, stepping closer to Eugene to hear what he was saying.

  “This is Hawthorne House,” he announced in a monotone voice. “And this tree is called the Hawthorne Elm.”

  Lindsey gazed up into the branches. “Lovely tree.”

  Eugene grunted and turned abruptly to step into the house. “The camp store is here.” He seemed determined to deliver information with the least number of words possible.

  The store had a narrow counter standing in front of rows of granola bars, T-shirts and brightly colored plastic cord on reels—the same stuff used for my mother’s key chain. I slipped my hand in my pocket to make sure it was still there.

  We followed him through a door and up a narrow set of steps to a landing on the second floor. “Girls, go that way,” he said with a flick of his head, then turned and led the boys up the next flight of stairs.

  The gloom of the hallway was depressing, but I pushed open the first door I came to and found a long, low room with sunny windows along one wall. A girl was spreading sheets on a bed, and she jumped back and held the door for us. “Hi y’all. I was expecting you any minute.” She had blue eyes and a matching blue shirt that said Perform Random Acts of Shakespeare.

  “I like your shirt,” I said.

  “Are you into Shakespeare?”

  The only Shakespeare play I’d ever seen was an old movie Grandma brought home called The Taming of the Shrew. “I guess,” I said. “I don’t really know much about him.”

  “I’ll have to get you hooked,” she said. She stuck out her hand. “I’m Cecily, your CIT.”

  I shook her hand, feeling oddly grown-up. “What’s a CIT?”

  “Counselor-in-training.” Her words rattled off her tongue like beads on a plate. “Let me know if you need anything. I’m on kitchen duty, so I’ve got to scoot or the cook will be in a tizzy. When you get unpacked, come back up to Twain House.”

  Before I could ask any questions, she was gone.

  Our dormitory was certainly an improvement on the other parts of the house. The room smelled of lemon floor cleaner, and pots of geraniums hung from hooks at the corners. Along both sides stood three sets of bunk beds.

  “How many people sleep in one room?” Ellen asked.

  This was the kind of math question I enjoyed. “Twelve,” I said.

  Ellen stuck her nose in the air. “Every camp I’ve ever been to had only four to a room.”

  Lindsey sat down with a bounce on one of the cots. “Twelve is more fun—we’ll meet lots of new people.”

  Ellen scowled and put her bags on the cot under Cecily’s bunk. The other beds were already claimed, so Lindsey and I got the remaining bunk at the far end.

  “Can I take the top?” she asked, swinging herself up the metal frame. She knelt on the mattress, her head almost brushing the underside of the sloping roof. “This is going to be great!”

  Another girl breezed in while we were unrolling our sleeping bags. She was the girl with the long black hair who sat in front of us on the bus. She unzipped her bag, and Lindsey’s eyes widened at the pile of colorful shirts and designer jeans she stuffed in the plastic bins by her bed.

  The girl smoothed her hair and came over to us. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the butterfly net I’d draped by my cot.
Before I could answer, she snickered. “No one uses those anymore. It’s barbaric to catch butterflies. We use these babies in the twenty-first century.” She lifted the camera she carried around her neck and clicked a picture of me staring at her with my mouth open.

  Another girl peered around the doorway. “Joanne, where have you been? Everyone’s looking for you.”

  The girl ambled after her without giving us another glance.

  “I guess her name is Joanne,” Lindsey said in a small voice. “I hope we brought the right kind of stuff.”

  I thought of my grandmother and her delight as she helped me pack, and I shoved my suitcase under the cot. “She may have a nice camera, but she doesn’t know everything,” I said. “We can unpack later. Let’s go find Jayden.”

  Chapter Six

  Ellen came with us, and for once she was actually pleasant. She must have felt as odd as we did in this new place. We found Jayden in the camp store, drinking a purple liquid from a paper cup. “It’s called bug juice,” he said, a slight blush of purple staining the corners of his lips. “But it doesn’t have bugs in it. Weird camp.”

  We followed the path back to Twain House and arrived just as the gong sounded for lunch. I wasn’t prepared for the crowd that streamed into the dining hall. There must have been at least four bus loads of kids. I was standing still, trying to figure out where to go, when someone pushed me from behind. I turned and saw Joanne, the girl from our dorm.

  “Sorry,” she said in an exaggerated way so I would know she didn’t mean it.

  “What’s with her?” Lindsey asked.

  I was wondering the same thing, but I didn’t know what to do. Fortunately Cecily ushered us to a table. The boys with red shirts were already sitting there. “We’re the boys from Bromley,” said one of them. He had curly brown hair and so many freckles that they spilled over onto his arms.

  Jayden muttered to the rest of us, “Private boys’ school near DC.”

  The freckled boy continued, “My friends call me Freddy, and this is Garrett and Coop.”

  The other boys didn’t seem interested in talking.

  We told them our names, and Garrett wrote them in a tiny notebook he kept in his pocket. “Field notes,” Freddy explained.

  Joanne and her friends sat at the next table. I must have been frowning at her, because Cecily laughed. “You look like the dog that caught the car. Did you meet Joanne already?”

  “She came in when we were unpacking.”

  “Don’t let her bother you. She treats everyone that way. Now who wants to be the runner today?”

  It turned out, every table had a runner. They got the pitchers of bug juice and platters of food to bring from the kitchen. To my surprise, Ellen volunteered.

  Since all of us were first-time campers, Cecily kept up a commentary on how the meals worked. If anyone wanted seconds, the runner would take our platter back for more. The food that wasn’t eaten had to be scraped into a can in the middle of the table. “It’s for the pigs,” she said.

  “There are pigs at camp?” I asked.

  “Sure, who else is going to eat all the slops y’all leave behind? Actually, the pigs belong to Aunt Winnie. She has a little place near the lake. Now, who wants to volunteer for dishwashing?”

  I was curious about everything at camp, so my hand shot up. Jayden volunteered, too. I gathered the plates from our table, and Jayden collected the pile from Joanne’s group. No one had volunteered there. “It happens sometimes,” Cecily said with a disapproving look at the neighboring table.

  Jayden was halfway to the kitchen when it happened. He didn’t see a bench that had been pushed into the aisle, and he stumbled against it. His plates flew in the air, and it looked like he would go sprawling across the bench, but the next moment he caught his balance and stretched forward to catch the plates. One by one they rattled back into a pile, and the silverware clattered on top of them. Not a single thing fell to the floor. The nearby campers began to clap, and Jayden ducked into the kitchen before the rest of the room broke into applause.

  I followed him through the swinging doors. “That was amazing!”

  He scowled.

  I didn’t get Jayden. One minute he was volunteering to help, and the next he was clamming up when you said something nice.

  The cook was a giant man with scars on his face and arms, where his sleeves were rolled up. He stared at us, then jerked his thumb toward the door. “Out back.”

  Behind the dining hall we found about twenty bins, some with suds and some with clear water, lined up against the wall.

  I was trying to figure out what to do next when Cecily appeared. “Jayden, you must’ve gone a minute in thirty seconds back there,” she said. “Have you considered going professional with that trick?”

  He didn’t say anything, but his frown relaxed.

  She had her own stack of plates, which she dumped in a bin of soapy water. “You should’ve seen Mr. Parker’s face when you caught all those plates. I thought he was going to shout Halleluiah.”

  “Why?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine a pile of plates was that important.

  “Never you mind for now. Let’s get these dishes scrubbed.” Cecily showed us how to wash the plates in soapy water, then rinse them in clear water, before stacking them in the empty dish pans.

  We started scrubbing our dishes, and other campers joined us. I was finishing my plates when one of the volunteers cried out, “I’ve found a pearl!”

  Cecily motioned to us. “Feel in the bottom of your bins and see if you have any.”

  I ran my hand through the soapy water, and there were two pearls. Jayden found one, too. “You take them to the cook, and he’ll give you a candy bar,” she said.

  “Weird camp,” Jayden said, but he was smiling as we stood in line with the others to get our chocolate.

  Mr. Parker was waiting when we got back to our table. “Jayden and I need to talk.”

  The guarded look returned to Jayden’s face, and I watched them walk out, a prickle of worry starting up again.

  “Why so glum?” Cecily asked. “You have a free hour after lunch—you should go exploring.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait for Jayden?”

  “Mr. Parker won’t be done with him for at least an hour,” she said.

  What did that mean?

  I started toward the door, but a display on the far side of the room caught my eye. Rows of canoe paddles, painted with names, covered the wall. “Cecily, what are those?”

  She shrugged. “It’s a Camp Hawthorne tradition. The names of the head counselors are recorded on a paddle. Buckeye and Skeeter will be featured this year.”

  I walked closer and scanned the names. Near the top of one column hung a paddle painted with “Franny and Dan.” My heart leapfrogged into my throat. I reached as high as I could to touch the edge of the handle, and my fingers tingled.

  Lindsey was right behind me. “You found them,” she whispered.

  Ellen called from the doorway. “Are you coming or not?”

  The image of my parents holding the paddle flashed in my mind. Perhaps I could find more clues about them. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s explore.”

  Cecily showed us the path to the lake but had to get back to kitchen duty. We joined the boys from Bromley, who were pulling compasses and tiny notebooks from their pockets. Freddy wore something that looked like a medallion around his neck. He turned it over to show us a tiny screen on the other side. “It’s a GPS receiver,” he said. “Our whole team got the invitation after we won the Mid-Atlantic Geo-caching Contest.”

  “How does it work?” asked Lindsey.

  Freddy pushed a button. “Those are your coordinates.”

  “Like latitude and longitude?” Lindsey locked onto the device like it was one of her dream catchers.

  “Precisely.”

  “Where are we now?” I asked

  He read off some numbers that meant nothing to me.

  “Doesn’t it tell you the name of t
he place?”

  “No, you have to use a map for that.”

  “We know where we are, anyway,” Ellen said, giving me one of her pathetic looks. “We’re just past the tunnel in Simmons Hill.”

  But I wasn’t so sure about that.

  The path to the lake meandered behind Twain House and down a slope covered with trees. Roots grew across the trail, so you had to watch your feet, and Lindsey looked like she was dancing as she skipped over them. Freddy and his gang kept stopping to take readings, which they copied into their notebooks.

  “When will we get to the lake?” I asked after the fifth stop for readings.

  Freddy grinned, and his freckles spread over his face in dozens of new constellations. “We have no idea, but we can tell our location from satellite.”

  “Ha,” Ellen said. “Any fool would know it’s over there.” She pointed through the trees, where I could make out the sparkle of sun on water.

  “Let’s run,” I said.

  “Wait,” Freddy called. “You’re not supposed to run on trails like this.”

  I dashed, anyway. The trail curved around again, and I caught my breath at the sight of the lake, rippling in a slight breeze. Three canoes lay on the shore, like the picture online. Even the pine trees looked the same, and the sky was just as blue. I pulled off my shoes and waded into the lake. The first shock of cold sent a thrill to my brain: my parents were here once.

  Ellen splashed into the lake beside me, a huge smile taking hold of her cheeks, like she couldn’t help it. “Good job finding this camp.”

  I almost fell over into the water. It was the first nice thing she’d ever said to me. We waded along the shore picking up pebbles from the shallows, and before I knew it, Freddy was calling that our time was up.

  I sighed and dried my hands on my jeans. This was just the beginning of finding clues to my parents. I couldn’t wait to get started on all the camp stuff.

  Chapter Seven

  Back at the dining hall, Skeeter rounded up the new campers for a game. Jayden was back, but he didn’t tell us anything. He kept shaking his head like my grandmother does when she can’t find something.