The Glory Hand by Paul, Sharon Boorstin Page B

Cassie out of trouble, Robin,' Clay said. 'You're supposed to be the responsible one.' At the mention of the word 'responsible,' the two girls looked at each other and broke up.
    Three deafening blasts from the bus horn, and the campers squirmed away from their parents' hasty kisses. Cassie searched for a face in the crowd.
    Robin laughed: 'You waiting for Todd to come kiss you goodbye?'
    'I wrote him ... I hoped he'd see me off . . .' Cassie said.
    'He must be royally pissed. Anyway, how does it go? "Absence makes the heart grow . . ."' Clay wrapped his arms around Cassie, and Robin stopped herself. 'You two are unreal.' She climbed into the bus. 'If you're thinking about changing your mind, Cass, forget it. I'm not going without you.' ■
    Cassie hugged her father tightly. She didn't like the feeling, the two of them balancing in each other's arms, as if one of them were about to fall from a high place. With her eyes closed, the diesel fumes and the din of the jostling mob wrenched her back to another time, another frantic moment. She couldn't block out that other goodbye high on the shuddering scaffolding, so cruel, so unexpected. To escape the memory, she pulled away from him and climbed into the bus.
    You chose to do this, she tried to comfort herself as she fought her way down the crowded aisle. It's what she wanted for you.
    Part Two
    THE WARNING HAND
    Chapter 8
    Cassie tried to figure out how long it had been: the campers had worked their way through 'Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer On the Wall' so many times she had lost count, the song a monotonous counterpoint to the knocking engine and the rattle of empty Tab cans rolling back and forth in the aisle. Enough peanut butter cups and Hostess Twinkies had been consumed, their wrappers hurled out of the windows, that they could have used the litter to retrace their route all the way back to Bangor, Maine.
    But by now, the girls' voices had grown hoarse, and they stared dumbly ahead, their faces sickly in the pine shadows. The New England brick houses, darkened with coal soot, the lath and plaster English Tudor tracts in the suburbs, had long since given way to a never-ending wall of trees. They had seen their last house, their last person, at the 'john' stop an hour ago, and the forest, miles and miles of it, made Cassie begin to wonder whether she had done the right thing to talk her father into letting her go.
    Her back ached. The seats of the rickety yellow school bus were little more than benches; their springs had rusted years ago. In a tight Casmaran T-shirt that showed off her bust and fashionably oversized sunglasses, the counselor who drove hardly turned the wheel at all. The bus sped along, as if it knew the way by heart.
    Robin was slumped against Cassie's shoulder, asleep, a smile on her lips. Cassie envied her friend for being able to shut her brain off at moments like this. Hers was always switched on, darting, weaving, twisting around corners like the bus, racing down dark roads before she quite had time to know where she was going, or even where she had been.
    The bus jolted through a pothole and Robin woke up. She looked out the window at the same wall of trees that had been there when she had dozed off. 'If Casmaran turns out to be the pits,' she said, 'it's your ass.' To distract herself from the thought, Cassie opened the copy of Cat's Cradle she had brought along, but the brooding, endless corridor of trees meant that even at noon it was hard to read.
    Robin picked up the brochure Cassie had been using to mark her place, the brochure that had come in the mail along with Cassie's acceptance letter, and read it aloud in a melodramatic baritone: '" The oldest girls' camp in America ... In operation under the same management since 1889.' Great. I bet they've also got the same plumbing. " What began as a retreat devoted to training daughters of prominent New England families in deportment, the household arts, and lawn sports ..." Are they kidding? "... now