Chapter Text
Adam was the last member of his cabin to arrive, and so was left with the bunk in the back corner of the room by default. Which was just fine, because it was the bunk he would have chosen anyway, Adam assured himself. He threw his suitcase down on his bed, and tried to decide if he wanted to unpack like two of his cabin mates were doing or if he wanted to live out of his bag like it looked like the other one was planning on doing. It was as he was considering this that he noticed something odd.
“Excuse me,” Adam said to the person who had taken the bunk next to his. “Are you a girl?” As soon as he asked the question, he could hear his dad’s voice in his head, telling him that was a rude question and a rude way to ask it and he sounded like his Uncle Gabriel.
Adam had only ever talked to Uncle Gabriel the one time. He stopped by the bookshop once a year every year to try to convince Adam’s dad to come back to the family – which his dad assured him meant their biological family, but Adam always thought Uncle Gabriel could be a part of the mob and he was sure his dad wouldn’t tell him if he was, so Adam hadn’t completely ruled it out. It didn’t matter that much anyway, since Dad always kicked Uncle Gabriel out straight away. The only reason Adam ever talked to him was Uncle Gabriel had stopped by about a month earlier than he usually did that year while Adam’s dad was in the back working on the book repair. Adam had been stuck with Uncle Gabriel for a full six minutes until Newt got back with their lunch and Adam was able to run to get his dad without having to leave Uncle Gabriel unsupervised in the shop. Dad had told Uncle Gabriel to fuck off, sounding really angry and dangerous when he said it for once instead of just tired, and Uncle Gabriel had left. He’d started making his annual visits on school days instead of the weekends after that, so it had been the last time Adam had ever seen him. It had still been more than enough to impress Adam with how terrible it was to sound like Uncle Gabriel.
“Sorry. But, er… are you?” Because he did still want to know. He was a bit confused was all.
“Yes,” she said, and she didn’t look offended, so Adam supposed that was alright then.
“Her name’s Pepper,” said the boy on the bed on the other side of her. “I’m Brian and that’s Wensley.”
“Wensleydale, actually,” said Wensley.
“Adam,” he said before turning to look at Pepper again. “But Camp Walden is a boy’s camp.”
“That’s sexist,” Pepper retorted. “Camp Walden is one of the best summer camps in the country. Maybe even in the whole world, since you came here all the way from London.”
“You don’t know I came from London. I could be from Oxford or Birmingham or Tadfield or… well, okay yes, I did come from London. But you didn’t know that,” Adam said.
“Why did you come all the way here from London anyway?” Wensley asked.
“My mother lives in America,” Adam said. He left off the part where he’d never actually met his mother and she had no idea he was here.
“Are you visiting here while you’re here then?” said Pepper.
Adam shrugged. He knew that technically America was a really big country – though he thought his Dad must have been taking the mick at least a little bit, because one country couldn’t possibly be as big as all of Europe – and his mother probably lived on the other side of it. All that meant the odds of him just coincidentally running into her at some point while he was in America were pretty low. On the other hand, if this were a book, he’d definitely run into her and she’d tell him how much she’d missed him and loved him and come back to England with him, and she and Dad would get back together, and they’d live happily ever after. And if it could happen in a book, Adam couldn’t see any reason why it couldn’t happen in real life.
He wasn’t ready to explain all that to his cabin mates yet, so instead he added, “Plus I heard in America they have ice cream shops with 39 different flavours of ice cream.” They had ice cream shops with that many different flavours in London too, Adam had counted, but it that was something one of the kids that lived down the lane from their cottage in Tadfield had said to him once. He thought it sounded like the kind of thing that would make him sound properly British and interesting to a bunch of Americans without sounding too British.
“It’s only 31 different flavours,” Brian said. “They’ve even got a 31 in the logo.”
“Yeah, at that specific ice cream store,” said Pepper. “But I bet there are tons of other stores that have way more than that. More than 39 even.”
“Well, we’re not that far from town are we?” Adam asked. “We should sneak out one day and go to all the ice cream shops and count and see which has the most.” This was all around agreed to be an excellent idea, and the four of them set about planning how they would accomplish it. They spent the remainder of the afternoon discussing what they wanted to do during their next eight weeks, most of them being official Camp Walden activities and some of them decidedly not. By the time lights out had rolled around, all four of them were fast friends with Adam as the unofficial leader of the group. This suited Adam perfectly well.
The trouble started the next morning at breakfast. By the time Adam and Brian had arrived not-technically-late at the mess hall, most of the other kids were already there and they were all talking about something. Something big and interesting had happened, and Adam had not been a part of it. This did not suit him well at all.
Adam didn’t need to be at the centre of attention. He was perfectly alright with everyone going along and paying attention to whatever they were interested it. It was just that if someone was going to be the centre of attention, he preferred it to be him. At the very least he liked to be next to the centre. Like at dinner last night, when everyone had been talking about Pepper, the only girl in camp and Adam’s good friend. But they weren’t talking about her this morning. Adam could tell because she and Wensley had already gotten a table off on one side of the room, and no one was staring at them or anything.
“What’s going on?” Adam asked as he and Brian joined the other two.
“Boys being stupid,” Pepper said. She rolled her eyes and went back to her breakfast. Adam looked at Wensley.
“You know that kid Johnson? I guess someone dared him last night or something, and he jumped into the lake, completely naked,” said Wensley.
“Oh,” Adam said. That was a pretty good dare, he guessed, but it wasn’t that interesting. “Johnson does look kind of greasy; he could probably use a bath.”
“Thar’s not even all of it,” Wensley said. “Apparently while Johnson was in the lake, the person who dared him took all his clothes, so he had to walk all the back to his cabin completely naked too.”
That was a little impressive, actually. Kind of funny too. “Do you know who did it?” Adam asked.
“Probably him,” Pepper said, pointing at the door to the mess hall.
Adam turned to look and saw another boy being marched in by one of the camp counsellors. He used his hand on his shoulder to walk the boy over to a tiny little table in the corner no one was sat at because of the sign hanging off the side reading “Isolation Table.” The counsellor pushed the boy down into one of the chairs. “Stay there,” he said. Everyone else had gone quiet, so even from the opposite side of the room Adam could hear him. “I’ll go get your breakfast, and we can discuss your punishment more afterwards.”
“I’m allergic to strawberries,” the boy yelled after the counsellor as he walked around the corner to the food line. As soon as he had disappeared, everyone burst into conversation again.
“You know,” Brian said thoughtfully, “he kind of looks like you, Adam.”
“He does not,” Adam protested, feeling offended without knowing why and oddly possessive of his own strawberry allergy.
“He does a little. You have the same colour hair,” Brian insisted.
“They both have brown hair. Lots of people have brown hair. All four of us have brown hair,” Pepper said.
“Yes, but they’re different coloured browns. Adam’s and his are the same colour brown,” Brian insisted.
“So is Wensley’s,” Pepper said.
“Actually, I think Brian is right,” said Wensley. “I mean, the two of you obviously aren’t identical or anything, but you do look a little alike. Even besides just the hair.”
“No we don’t,” Adam bit out. And that was the end of it.
Well, it was the end of talking about whether Adam and Dare Kid – Adam refused to learn his name – looked alike. It wasn’t really the end of Adam thinking about Dare Kid. Adam was feeling very upstaged at the moment. Again, not that he needed to be the centre of attention or had been planning on it, but… But on the very first day, while the rest of them had still been busy unpacking and figuring out where everything was, Dare Kid had been pulling off a prank that had gotten everyone talking about him. It wasn’t fair.
The only thing for it, Adam decided, was to pull off his own prank, better than the one Dare Kid had done. And Adam wouldn’t get caught at it either. Thinking about Dare Kid’s prank the main flaw in it, aside from having got caught, was that no one had actually seen anything. Sure, people were talking about how embarrassing it was for Greasy Johnson, but hardly anyone had seen him being embarrassed. So to make his better, Adam would have to make sure there was plenty of proof of his prank out where everyone could see it.
It was easy to figure out after that. Three nights after Dare Kid’s prank, Adam snuck into Greasy Johnson’s cabin and stole every single pair of his pants. Then he took them and strung them up on the flag pole all in a row. There weren’t enough of them to make it down the length of the pole, but there were honestly more pairs than Adam had expected.
The next morning Adam stopped by the flag pole on his way to breakfast to admire his handiwork. There were already a bunch of other kids gathered around, and Adam felt a surge of pride. Now this was a well-done prank.
“Hey Adam,” said Billy, one of the kids from a different cabin. He waved up at the flag pole. “Greasy Johnson must have really made him mad, huh?”
“What?” Adam said.
“You know that one kid, the one with the funny name. A few days ago he dared Greasy Johnson to jump into the lake naked, and now he’s hung up all his underwear up on the flag pole,” Billy said.
Adam stormed off after that, ignoring Billy calling after him.
His mistake was pulling a prank that was too similar to what Dare Kid had done. Of course people were going to think he’d done it, especially with the way Dare Kid kept going around saying he hadn’t. What Adam needed to come up with was something really different, and to be safe it had to be something that couldn’t be done by just one person. His cabin mates agreed to help, and they picked out one of the boys who was a jerk anyway. Then during a day when there weren’t any especially fun camp activities going on, they went into his cabin and stole the furniture. Adam wanted to put it all on the roof, but they couldn’t figure out how to manage that, so they just set it up out in front of his cabin instead. Pepper even volunteered her teddy bear to put on top of the bed to make it extra embarrassing for him. She said she didn’t care about the bear and her mom had just packed it for her, but Adam made sure to sneak it back after everything was all done, just in case.
The furniture prank wasn’t as funny as the pants prank – it would have been funnier if they could have gotten it on the roof – but it was more impressive. Way too impressive for anyone to believe Dare Kid had done it. Adam was prepared for some of the other kids to suggest he’d done it this time, but after a few minutes someone was bound to point out that Dare Kid was by himself basically all the time, and no way he could have pulled it off alone. Then eventually someone else would look at Adam and ask who he thought did it. Adam would shrug and say, “I don’t know” in just the right way to make everyone realize he was the one who’d done it. That would show Dare Kid.
Except no one ever pointed out it would have been impossible for Dare Kid. They all just went around being more impressed with him for pulling such a big prank off all by himself. And Dare Kid made sure everyone believed it again by insisting he hadn’t done it. The whole thing was starting to drive Adam mad.
One last prank, a really big one, and he’d pull it on Dare Kid’s friends so no one would think Dare Kid had done it. If Adam could figure out who Dare Kid’s friends were. Because during mealtimes he ate at the Isolation Table alone and during off hours he was up in the Isolation Cabin alone. He did get to hang out with everyone during camp activity hours, but most of the time he was still off by himself, too cool for the rest of them. Finally Adam decided the kids from Dare Kid’s old cabin were basically his friends. Close enough anyway. He could prank all of them, and this time no way would Dare Kid get to steal the credit.
And oh, what a prank it was. Adam, Pepper, Brian, and Wensley snuck over to the other cabin as soon as it was late enough to be sure everyone was asleep, and they spent the entire rest of the night setting it all up. They crisscrossed strings all over the room. They coated the floor with patches of vegetable oil and patches of honey. They covered the other kids with shaving cream and even more honey. They rigged a trap next to one of the beds so when the boy stood up it would drop water balloons on his head. And another trap by a patch of vegetable oil so that when someone slipped and tried to steady themselves by grabbing onto a balled up shirt tied up in one of the strings, it would tug the cord to turn the fan on, sending feathers falling down everywhere. It was truly a masterpiece.
So it was a shame about the head of the camp showing up for a surprise inspection and ending up with chocolate sauce dumped all over him. Though not as much a shame as it was that all four of them had wanted to watch the prank unfold and so were right there when it happened.
“It’s not their fault; it was all my idea,” Adam said as soon as it became clear they were not getting out of this one.
“Trust me, I know, Fell,” Marvin said. A fat glob of chocolate syrup rolled down his forehead and dripped off the tip of his nose. “And I’m sure you were behind those other pranks these past two weeks as well. But that doesn’t excuse your friends for going along with it. All four of you will be cleaning up this mess, and then you three are restricted from any activities for the next three days. As for you Fell…”
Adam pasted on his best innocent expression. It probably wouldn’t work since he’d already admitted to having done it, but it probably couldn’t hurt. Marvin was clearly thinking something over, so maybe if Adam got lucky he’d think himself right out of getting Adam in trouble.
“Yeah, that’s probably the best solution,” Marvin said to himself. “It doesn’t seem to fair to keep Crowley completely isolated, and if the two of you are bad influences, at least it’ll only be on each other.” He nodded to himself, sending another fat drip of chocolate to the floor. “After you’re done here Fell, pack your bags. You’re moving to the Isolation cabin.”
When Adam got to the Isolation Cabin that afternoon, feeling gross and tired and annoyed, Dare Kid was sitting on one of the bunks with his mobile phone, probably playing a game on it or something. Not that Adam would know; he didn’t have a mobile and wasn’t allowed to get one until he was 13 or 15 or 18 or whenever he moved out and got one for himself because his dad was so old-fashioned he still had a flip phone.
Adam flung his suitcase on the empty bunk and jerked the zipper open.
“You’re Adam Fell, right?” Dare Kid asked. Adam grunted in agreement and didn’t turn around. “I’m Warlock Crowley.”
“I know,” Adam said. Of course he knew. Everyone was talking about him and how great his pranks were – pranks he didn’t even do, pranks Adam had done. How could Adam not have heard his name by now?
“Marvin said you were being sent here because of a prank you pulled on the Navajo cabin, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was,” Warlock said.
“So?” Adam demanded, turning around.
Warlock had set his phone down on his lap and was looking over at Adam. “So, I thought it might be funny? Your other pranks were funny. Especially the one with Greasy Johnson’s underwear.” Adam glared at him. Warlock picked his phone back up and ducked his head down to look at it, his hair swinging in his face. “I thought they were anyway.”
“Is that why you told everyone you’d done them?” Adam said.
Warlock scoffed. “I told everyone I didn’t do them,” he said, not looking up from his phone. “It’s not my fault if they didn’t believe me.”
Adam glared at him some more. Warlock kept playing his game. He looked tense, and Adam realized maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he hadn’t been trying to be clever and trick people into believing he’d done the pranks at all. Maybe he really did think Adam’s pranks were funny and wanted to talk about them.
Adam definitely wanted to talk to someone about how funny his pranks were.
He plopped down on Warlock’s bed. Warlock jerked his head up from his phone. “Was Marvin still covered in chocolate sauce when he came up here?” Adam asked.
“Chocolate sauce?” Warlock said.
“Yep,” Adam said. “That’s how we got caught; Marvin showed up to give Navajo cabin a surprise inspection and got hit by the chocolate sauce trap part of it. It was a really great prank.”
He told Warlock all about it, and then all about how he and his friends had pulled the other two off as well. Warlock was a good listener. He didn’t outright laugh really, but he grinned a lot and complimented Adam on all the especially clever bits and came up with his own clever bits too. It was enough to make Adam wish he actually had been helping on the pranks.
“What about you?” Adam asked. “How’d you get Greasy Johnson to jump in the lake naked? Must’ve been pretty impressive to get you thrown in here just for that.”
“It wasn’t just that, even if that was part of it,” Warlock said. “I was playing poker with my cabin mates and I guess word got out because Greasy Johnson and his friends came to play too. On one hand the pot got big enough that Johnson was out of cash so he raised with a bet that whoever lost had to jump in the lake naked. He lost, but I guess he was mad about that, or mad that I stole his clothes because he ratted me out to the counsellors. And my cabin mates were mad because I won all their money of them in poker too, so they backed him up. Then when the counsellors were going through my stuff to confiscate all my winnings they found my athame and that’s when they told me I had to come here.”
“What’s an athame?” Adam asked.
“Ceremonial blade for witchcraft,” Warlock said.
“Wait, so your name’s not Warlock, you’re just actually a warlock?” Adam said. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. For all of a few seconds anyway, then he decided it was pretty cool.
“No, that really is my name. My neighbour who’s teaching me says that’s what mom gets for trying to be clever about my name. Course, my mom tells her that’s pretty rich from someone named Anathema.”
“We’ve got a shop assistant at my dad’s bookshop called Newt. That’d be a good name for a witch,” Adam said.
“A good one or a really bad one,” said Warlock and Adam nodded in agreement.
“By the way,” Warlock said. “Did Greasy Johnson ever apologize to Pepper? He was supposed to.”
“I don’t think so. When?”
“I shouted at him to do it when I was stealing his clothes,” Warlock said.
Adam thought about it for a minute, then shook his head. “I don’t remember him doing it, but we can go ask Pepper to be sure.” He hopped off the bed and walked toward the door.
“It’s against the rules for us to leave outside of mealtimes and official camp activities,” Warlock said.
Adam was deeply disappointed in him for a moment, until he turned around and saw that Warlock didn’t really mean it. He was just saying it to have said it, and was already getting up off the bed too. “My dad says I’m an intelligent enough young man to figure out why the rules are there, and if I can’t figure it out, then maybe they shouldn’t be there in the first place.”
“My mom just says screw the rules,” Warlock said.
“I think I’d like your mom,” said Adam.
“Yeah, probably,” Warlock said, stuffing his feet in his shoes. “C’mon, let’s go.”