Read Online Five Summers by Una LaMarche - Free Book Online Page A

She adjusted the volume and started in earnest. “Welcome, everybody,” she said, raising her voice to reach the back row, where Mark and Matt Slotkin were practicing handstands, “to the sixth annual Camp Nedoba reunion weekend!” There was half-hearted clapping, and someone let out a whoop. Jo put her hands on her hips.
    “Come on, guys, that was weak,” she cried. “
Omki!
” Everyone laughed.
Omki
was the Abenaki word for
Wake up!
and it was a camp tradition that, every morning, the counselors would gather around the beds of hard-to-rouse campers, stomping their feet and chanting it until consciousness was achieved. If you woke up to the sound of “
Omki
,
omki
,
omki
!” it became your job to clear and scrape all the plates from your bunk’s table at breakfast.
    Jo looked over at her dad, who was sitting on the office porch in his favorite Adirondack chair, watching her with pride as he munched on a bag of the homemade spicy pickle chips he force-fed to the campers at every conceivable opportunity. Mack gave Jo an enthusiastic thumbs up.
    “Okay,” she continued over the chatter, “we have a lot of fun activities planned, but first I’ve gotta do a roll call to make sure everybody’s present and accounted for before we start.” A collective groan rose from the crowd. “I know, I know,” Jo said gamely. “But look at it this way—if you didn’t get to catch up in the gazebo, this is your chance to see what everyone looks like now, and who you want to buddy up with.” A few people snickered, and Jo rolled her eyes. She hadn’t meant it like that, but it didn’t surprise her that some people were incapable of hearing anything besides sexual innuendo. Jo shook it off and clicked her pen into action. There were check marks to be made.
    “Mini Mack!” someone fake-coughed. Jo smiled tightly. Everyone always told her how much she was like her dad. It wasn’t an insult, but it got old after a while. She knew what the other campers called her behind her back. Apart from Maddie, Emma, and Skylar—and Nate, who always seemed to be there when she needed help carrying sports equipment or doing graham cracker inventory—none of the other campers had ever really tried to get to know her. They seemed scared she was an enemy spy, just a little adult in a teenager’s body. When they looked at her, she thought sadly, they probably didn’t even see a girl. Jo had her mom’s full lips and high cheekbones, but she had Mack’s olive skin, black hair, aquiline nose, and wide-set brown eyes. She was, at least on the surface, only her father’s daughter.
    Jo’s home away from camp, at least according to the post office, was in Danbury, Connecticut. Her mother, Wendy, was a beauty sales executive who commuted into New York on the train every day to place mentions of lip glosses and age-reversing concealers in fashion magazines. The fact that her only child was a tomboy was an obvious source of disappointment. “I have a closet full of vintage Chanel,” Wendy would joke to clerks when she took Jo back-to-school shopping at the mall, “but, of course, my daughter has never met a pair of cargo shorts she didn’t like!”
    Before the divorce, Mack and Wendy had been summer renters in Onan. Jo still missed the big house with the blue-painted porch stenciled with seashells all around the railing. If she stood on the dock on a clear day, she could sometimes see its weathervane peeking out from the trees across the water. Onan was the place all her good memories came from, and if it was up to Jo she would stay year-round, joining the sleepy off-season population of 2,796. As it was, she lived for the summers. It was where her
real
home was. Where her real friends were.
    She was halfway through the roll call when a taxi pulled into the parking lot, interrupting the proceedings. Jo hadn’t heard anything from Maddie, and her heart leapt at the thought of her best friend finally arriving. Maybe Maddie’s