Five Summers by Una LaMarche

quickly. “I’ll have the rest by September, and I can mail it. I would have had it all, but my mom—”
    “Honey,” Mack said, interrupting her. “You know I won’t take this.” He handed the envelope back to her, and when she crossed her arms stubbornly, he tucked it into her purse.
    “But I owe you,” she said, her chin starting to quiver. She had never paid for camp, not a single cent. It was the only way her parents agreed to let her go. She burned with shame when she thought of the letter she had written to Mack when she was nine, after she’d found the Camp Nedoba website while secretly Googling her birth dad on the free library computers.
Dear Mr. Putnam
, she had written,
I am very interested in your summer camp but I only have $57 but I hope we can work out a deal.
    “No, you don’t,” he said firmly. “You belong here, and how you got here doesn’t matter. It never has.” He patted her shoulder. “Some people will tell you it’s the journey that counts, but as far as I’m concerned, in this situation, it’s the destination. So, I think you’d better go find your friends. Don’t you?”
    She nodded, blinking back tears, and started for the door.
    “Hey!” Mack called, and she turned around. “Why don’t you tell them the truth this summer? It’s never too late.”
    Maddie grimaced.
    “I’ll think about it,” she said.

Emma
    Reunion: Day 1
    THE GIRLS’ BUNKS LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE EMMA remembered them. Made of sturdy, caramel-colored cedar planks outfitted with rolled kelly green tarps to keep rain out of the open windows and doorway, they were spaced in two even rows of four within a sunny rectangle a quarter mile from the Green, accessible by a shaded, woody path dotted with tiny clearings of crab apple trees. On quiet mornings, she remembered, deer would poke their downy heads out of the woods along the path and sometimes even wander among the cabins searching for food. One time, Maddie had gotten a doe to eat a granola bar out of her palm.
    The cabins themselves were about fifteen feet long and twelve feet wide, but now they felt even smaller than they had when she was a camper. They’d always reminded Emma of the log cabins described in the Little House books she’d devoured as a kid—only, drying on the clothesline outside were damp towels instead of fresh venison, stripped from a deer that had recently been killed by Pa Ingalls. All the Nedoba cabins were named for a different Abenaki tribe, and for reunion the girls had been assigned to Souhegan, where they’d lived the summer they were thirteen. Emma could swear it still smelled like the strawberry-flavored lip balm she’d religiously applied for eight straight weeks just in case she got the opportunity to kiss Adam. She cringed inwardly at the memory of all that wasted hope as she flopped down on the bottom bed of the bunk she was sharing with Skylar.
    “Does this take you back?” Skylar asked, hanging her head over the side so that her hair almost brushed Emma’s comforter.
    “Yes! We’re even in the exact same beds—look.” Emma ran her finger over a tiny piece of writing on one of the slats supporting Skylar’s mattress:
E + S = BFF
. She’d used a red marker from Skylar’s stash. The graffiti had been the culmination of a nonstop week of rain during which the four of them had spent so much time in the bunk they’d gone stir-crazy.
    “You were so scared to get caught,” Skylar said, examining the initials.
    “Well, you made me do it in broad daylight!”
    “At night would have been too easy,” Skylar laughed.
    “I sort of cheated anyway, though.” Emma had refused to use the first letters of their last names so it couldn’t be traced back to her, as if she was a criminal mastermind in an episode of
CSI: Camp Nedoba
.
    “It’s okay,” Skylar said, settling back onto her bed. “I knew you weren’t big on dares.”
    Emma frowned. She liked to think that wasn’t true anymore. Moving to New York for