Willows vs. Wolverines (mix) - Hardcover

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Alison Cherry is the author of the YA novels Red, For Real and Look Both Ways, and the middle grade novels Willows vs. Wolverines and The Classy Crooks Club. She is a professional photographer and spent many years working as a lighting designer for theater, dance, and opera productions. This whole “writing books” thing is just a cover for the international crime ring she runs out of her Brooklyn apartment. (Shhh, don’t tell.) Visit her online at AlisonCherryBooks.com.

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Willows vs. Wolverines

CHAPTER 1

Mackenzie and I are on an ugly orange bus filled with strangers, and all of them are singing off-key.

“Foxtail, Foxtail, burning bright, you’re my heart’s one true delight!” shrieks a chorus of piercing voices, and I slump farther down in my ripped vinyl seat, hoping some of the sound waves will fly over my head and miss my ears. I don’t understand how anyone could be so excited about Camp Foxtail. Then again, the rest of these kids probably don’t know what they’ve been missing at Camp Sweetwater, where Mackenzie and I have spent summers since we were eight. And where we would be headed right now, if there were any justice in the world.

“No singing until we’re on camp grounds!” shouts the driver. He’s got about twelve pieces of gum in his mouth, so the words sound garbled, but his exasperation comes through loud and clear. I can tell he’d rather be doing pretty much anything other than chauffeuring a bunch of kids to middle-of-nowhere Michigan—going to the dentist, shoveling snow, getting all his leg hair waxed off.

I know how he feels. This is the last place I want to be too.

Mackenzie rubs her eyes under her purple-framed glasses. “I can’t believe we’re missing Midnight Snack at Camp Sweetwater,” she grumbles.

“I know,” I say. “I’ve been dreaming about it all year.” After the Welcome Campfire there was always this enormous late-night snack buffet in the mess hall—sundae ingredients, popcorn, cookies, you name it. Mackenzie couldn’t eat most of it because of her dairy allergy, so we invented these special dessert sandwiches made of toaster waffles, peanut butter, bananas, Marshmallow Fluff, and chocolate syrup: the ChocoNanaFlufferNutter Delight. We’ve tried to replicate them at home a million times, but they never taste the same. Mackenzie once read about this Chinese restaurant that put drugs in its disgusting food so people got addicted and kept coming back, and we have a theory Camp Sweetwater might do the same thing with their peanut butter. We even pooled our allowances and bought a drug-testing kit so we could investigate our hypothesis this summer. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to peeing in a cup in the spider-filled cabin bathroom, but I was totally prepared to do it for science.

Of course, that was all for nothing now that my parents and Mackenzie’s had some stupid falling out with Delilah, their friend who runs Camp Sweetwater. Why do adults have to be so dramatic about their friendships? Don’t they realize camp is way more important than whatever they’re fighting about?

“I bet Camp Foxtail won’t even have peanut butter,” I say.

“They’ll probably feed us eggplant casserole and chicken feet and those disgusting Jell-O molds with canned fruit that my great-aunt Doreen makes,” Mackenzie says.

“They’ll probably make us eat dog food.” All this talk of food reminds me of the package of Red Vines in my backpack, so I dig it out. Mackenzie takes a whole handful. There’s not much that can improve this situation, but candy makes everything at least a little better.

“I bet the lake will be full of seaweed and trash and leeches,” she says with her mouth full. “I bet we won’t even be able to swim.”

“I bet they won’t have beds. We’ll have to sleep on the floor.”

“Or on the lawn.”

“Or in the woods.”

“Or in a pit of snakes.”

“And what kind of name is Camp Foxtail, anyway?” I ask. “It’s like they were too cheap to name it after an actual animal, so they named it after a piece of fuzz hanging from an animal’s butt.”

Mackenzie finally cracks a smile. “Camp Fuzzbutt,” she says, which makes us both start giggling. At least she’s with me on this horrible orange bus. There’s no way I could make it through an entire month of this horror show without her.

The ride takes four hours. By the time we finally turn onto the dirt road marked with a huge wooden sign in the shape of a fox, I’m restless and cranky and thirsty from all the sugar I’ve eaten. The second we bump past the sign, everyone starts scream-singing “Foxtail, Foxtail, burning bright” again, and this time the driver lets them get all the way through it. There are only about three other people on the bus who don’t seem to know the words, and despite the fact that I don’t want to be here, I feel left out.

I know I should feel lucky that I get to go to camp at all—none of my aunts and uncles went, and they won’t let my cousins go either, even though they’ve been begging for years. The rest of my family thinks my parents are totally nuts for letting me go away for an entire month, but my mom has all these amazing memories of spending her summers at Camp Pine Needle in Minnesota, and she wants me to have similar experiences. Then again, if that’s the case, she should really send me to a camp where I’ll actually have fun. I wish more than anything that Mackenzie and I were riding through the familiar arch that marks the boundary of Camp Sweetwater right now, belting out the Sweetwater Anthem Delilah taught us when we were little kids.

The bus winds through the woods, and I brace myself for what I’m going to see when it pulls out the other side. I know how much photos on websites can lie. But the woods open up onto a wide green lawn, and then the bus lurches to a stop in front of an old-timey-looking wooden building. There’s a sign that says FRIENDSHIP SOCIAL LODGE above the front door, which is super cheesy, but the lodge itself actually looks pretty nice.

I turn to Mackenzie. “Hey, do you think—” I start to say, but she’s staring out the window in the other direction.

“Whoa,” she says quietly.

My eyes bug out when I see what she’s looking at. I knew Camp Foxtail was bigger than our old camp, but I didn’t realize it was this much bigger—there are easily two hundred kids on the lawn. I knew practically everyone at Camp Sweetwater, but here I don’t recognize a single face.

At school, I’m never the most popular or the best at anything—Dani Alvarez and Nick Riccardi get the highest grades, Sasha Hollingsworth always beats me on swim team, and Lily Greer-Whipple is the teacher’s pet. I’m not even the class clown—Gavin Yeh’s jokes are so dumb, but the whole sixth grade still thinks he’s the funniest. But at Sweetwater I was always the pranking queen. Dozens of girls always swarmed me the second I got off the bus, eager to hug me and take selfies with me and hear about the hijinks Mackenzie and I had planned for the summer ahead. Camp was the only place where I was cool and interesting and fun without having to try.

Now I’m going to have to start all over again at the very bottom of the social ladder, and just thinking about it is so exhausting that I want to cry. Nobody at this camp even cares that I’m here. It might be forever before I have a solid group of friends. For all I know, it might not happen at all.

I’m about to complain about all of it to Mackenzie, but before I can say anything, she reaches out her pinkie...