Maniac Monkeys on Magnolia Street & When Mules Flew on Magnolia Street by Angela Johnson Page A

each other's T-shirts.
    The counselors had to go to a meeting afterward. But they were laughing when they came out, and the camp owner just shook his head a lot and took off in his car real fast.
    I love camp.
    Charlie…we have a real live (dead, really) ghost at Camp Margaret. And I saw him! That's kind of why I'm not supposed to be chewing gum.
    It all started on the bus trip out here. Our parents had to drop us off at the huge mall over by Lake Blackhorse. The camp bus would pick us up and take us the two hours to camp. It was fan on the bus—meeting everybody and laughing. There were only a couple of kids who had been to Camp Margaret before. But they told the same story.…
    It was a story about a kid whose parents forgot to pick him up at camp. He stayed there for a few days waiting for them—but finally got tired and went to live in the woods. He liked it so much he decided he would never go back to the suburbs. He lived off berries and wild animals. He grew older in the woods and made a house in a cave.
    His parents would come at the beginning of each summer and try to lure him out of the woods with peanut butter sandwiches (his favorite), but it never worked. He was tricky and would always manage to get the sandwiches but not get captured. His parents finally gave up, deciding he would be happier in the woods.
    Well, the kid grew up till one day the counselors at the camp figured he was about one hundred years old. Even though there had been a lot of sightings of him through the years—running, or swinging from tree to tree—there came a time when no one saw him for a whole summer. Everybody figured the old camper had finally passed on.
    The next summer came and went, then a few more summers after that. But one night during a campfire sing-along, the Ghost of Camp Margaret was seen for the very first time.…
    These two kids who were sneaking out of the sing-along to pour honey in the counselors' hiking boots saw him walking by the entrance gate, a little old stooped-over man in a Camp Margaret T-shirt and a backpack. They say he was waiting for his parents to come and take him home from camp.…
    Now, that pretty much scared me while these kids were talking about it on the bus. I didn't want anybody to know it scared me, so I just laughed with everybody else, even though some of the kids' eyes got as big as mine while the story was being told. So three days later…
    It's a shame sometimes that I have to chew so much gum all the time. (My aunt has been trying to break me of my bubble-blowing habit for a while. I think it's impossible.) Anyway, I started keeping emergency gum hidden in the knothole of this huge maple tree by the kitchen. I'd guess it was about two in themorning when I was woken out of a sound sleep by the need to blow a bubble.
    I was kind of sleepy as I sneaked out of the cabin, hopping over Mickey Howard's Bigfoot trap (he thinks Bigfoot lives in the woods). I was really needing to blow a big bubble and really didn't pay attention to much else except finding the tree in the dark when all of a sudden there
he
was, the ghost camper, with a backpack on, by the kitchen, almost glowing in the dark.
    Charlie, I couldn't even yell for help I was so scared.
    The ghost of Camp Margaret was right in front of me!
    Okay, okay, Charlie, it's not like that time I thought I saw the Loch Ness monster in Krieger's Pond. And it's not like that time I saw the pterodactyl flying over the bridge that runs past Magnolia Street.
    This was different.
    I fell to my knees and crawled real fast back to my cabin. Boy, is there a lot of stuff on the ground you don't notice when you're walking straight up, on your feet. I was really moving, Charlie. I knew nobody was going to believe me about the ghost. I had to wake up somebody. Unfortunately, I woke up
everybody.
Absolutely everybody in the camp.
    Just as I was about to pull open the cabin door and wake up Mickey, his Bigfoot trap caught me.
    The next thing that happened