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"So your birthday's next week," Isabella said, cornering her one afternoon in the kitchen while she was getting a snack.
"Uh, yeah…?" Candace said, closing the fridge and leaning against it. She narrowed her eyes at her. "You better not be expecting me to drive you guys around once I get my license, if that's what this is about."
Isabella rolled her eyes. "We can get around just fine on our bikes, and Uncle Perry's more than happy to take us if we can't," she said. "No, this is about your Fireside Girls' membership."
"What? Is it expiring? Whoop-de-doo. I've been to, like, three whole meetings since I joined," Candace told her.
"The opposite," Isabella said. "You're graduating to Senior Cadet, which means you're eligible to be a camp counselor."
"O…kay," she said. "And?"
"There are a few wilderness patches we're missing, and we're planning to take a camping trip as a troop to get them, but we need supervision," Isabella told her.
Candace could see where this was going. "Nope, not doing it," she said, pushing off the fridge and heading toward her room.
"Why not?" Isabella snapped. "You took an oath to the troop!"
"Yeah, pipsqueak," she shot back, "but that was before my dad proposed to Vanessa's dad, and now there's a wedding to plan."
"Oh," Isabella said, calming down almost instantly. "Well, you know… You can take a break from that to come watch us. I know Uncle Perry wouldn't mind."
"No, I can't!" Candace said, feeling frazzled at just the thought. "It has to be perfect!"
"Does Uncle Perry even want a big wedding? I would think he'd want something small," she said, "so there can't be that much to plan."
Candace sighed. "No, he doesn't," she said. That had been such a disappointment. "It's already almost completely done." She pointed her finger at Isabella, getting a second wind. "But that doesn't mean I can just leave for however long your trip is! I have to make sure nothing goes wrong!"
"Can't you trust Uncle Perry to handle that? He's great at handling emergencies!" Isabella argued. "You know what? I'll even go ask him. And I bet he'll say you should go."
"No, no! Ugh, fine. Stop twisting my arm; I'll go," Candace said quickly. If Isabella talked to her dad, then he'd give her that look, and then she'd feel even worse for not saying yes right away. "Just… tell me when and where."
The first day of the camping trip, she drove the family van out to the spot in the Danville National Forest where the Fireside Girls were supposed to be meeting her.
The girls' parents were dropping them all off, so originally, she'd planned to just take her car, but as soon as she'd told Dad-Perry, he insisted she take a vehicle with enough seats for everyone in case of an emergency.
He always looked out for all of them.
She'd never admit it to him (because it was super uncool to be sappy to one's parents, and he'd drive her crazy with his teasing if he knew) but he really was the best dad (tied only with her other dad… and she supposed Heinz too).
While she waited for all the girls to get dropped off, she tapped away on her phone, texting Jeremy and Stacy and Vanessa.
The girls each said 'hi' as they arrived, but otherwise grouped up and talked to each other, leaving her to talk to her boyfriend and friend and sister about upcoming plans and recent gossip.
Katie was the last to show up, but once she did, Candace tucked her phone in the pocket of her uniform skirt.
"Okay, children," Candace said, clapping loudly. "I was told we had patches to achieve and things to do, so what's first on the agenda?"
"The campsite's half a mile up the trail, so we need to make our way there," Isabella told her. "Girls, maps!"
Every single one of them pulled out a trail map and a compass, and Candace only stared.
"It would've been nice if someone had told me I needed to grab one of those at the visitors' center," she grumbled. She cleared her throat before saying louder, "Okay, lead the way."
Looking between the girls, she noticed a distinct lack of luggage.
"Um… Wait. Don't you guys need, like… tents? Sleeping bags?" she asked.
"We're working on our Stranded in the Wilderness Patch this weekend!" Milly told her excitedly. "We're only allowed to use a map, a compass, and a knife!"
Candace leaned away from the girl's enthusiasm about the pocket knife she suddenly whipped out to show off and deadpanned, "If any of you cut off your fingers, you're in charge of getting your own Emergency Stitches Patch."
Gretchen giggled. "There's not an Emergency Stitches Patch. There is, however, an Emergency Wilderness Medicine Patch!"
"Great," Candace said blandly. "Exactly what I want us trying to earn this weekend. Like I won't be grounded until I graduate if any of you get hurt."
"We'll be fine," Isabella said, waving off her concerns. "We all already have a bunch of our wilderness safety patches. There's just a handful we still need to get."
"We should get moving so we can make good progress on our shelters before dark!" Adyson said, bouncing off toward the trail and promptly tripping over a fallen branch. Before Candace could rush over to check on her, she said, "I'm okay!" hopping back up and continuing along.
Candace followed behind the group of girls as they headed toward the campsite, keeping an eye on all of them to make sure they didn't go running off and getting lost in the woods or climbing a tree and falling out of it or whatever it was they got up to on excursions like this.
They were all just as adrenaline-seeking as her brothers, and she would not have one of them braining themselves on a rock or breaking an ankle or something worse on this trip.
"I think I see oyster mushrooms over on that log over there!" Ginger said, pointing over to a log about forty feet off the trail.
"Perfect!" Isabella said. "We can work on our Non-Poisonous Mushrooms Identification Patch! And it's a good start on collecting dinner!"
Candace scrambled to chase after the girls, who'd all scampered over to the log through the underbrush. "Hey! Do not eat the strange wild mushrooms! I am not taking any of you to the hospital to get your stomachs pumped."
Holly gently rested a hand on her arm and told her, "It's okay, Candace. There aren't any poisonous or inedible mushrooms that look like oyster mushrooms. We won't get sick eating these. Promise."
"And look! We'll have plenty to eat this weekend!" Gretchen said, gesturing to the log. "There's so many of them, and they look fresh!"
The log had half a dozen basketball-sized clumps of mushrooms growing off it, so it wasn't like Gretchen wasn't correct in saying they'd be well-fed, but still…
Candace narrowed her eyes. "I'm going to look this all up on my phone, and if what you're saying is right – and only then! – then you can collect them for dinner tonight."
While the other six girls nodded understandingly, Isabella said, with a hint of snark in her voice, "If that'll make you feel better."
Once she double-checked online with a few identification guides (and after sending a text to Dad Perry to triple-check with him that they were safe and edible), she okayed the girls collecting the mushrooms.
They used their hats as makeshift baskets and carried their haul the rest of the way to their campsite.
"Okay, girls!" Isabella said as they arrived at the clearing. "After we get this set down, our next step is collecting materials for our shelters!" She assigned each of the girls a material to collect and everyone got to it.
Candace ended up paired with Katie, and she asked her, "So are we making, like, a lean-to, or…?"
"We're working on our Bivouac Shelter Patch!" Katie told her, skipping along as they looked for good pine-boughs to collect. That… explained absolutely nothing to her about the type of shelter they'd be making. "But I'm also working on my Wildflower Identification Patch. All the other girls got theirs back in April, but I had the flu that week," she said, frowning.
She sighed, knowing she was about to get roped into another thing she felt underqualified for. "What kinds of flowers are we looking for?"
Katie's face lit up.
That night, as they all sat around the campfire the girls had lit (with only things found in the woods, to earn their Flintless Fire-Starting Patch), after eating an… interesting… dinner of roasted mushrooms and pine tea, Candace realized for all her anxieties about the day, she was actually having fun.
Sitting underneath the stars, breathing fresh air, and being surrounded by people she cared about, girls that were almost like little sisters to her, Candace decided she wouldn't mind supervising another one of these trips.
It was exciting to earn patches with the girls, even if they kept trying to give her a heart attack.
It was nice to decompress from the self-induced wedding-planning stress she'd been under lately.
"Thanks for roping me into this," she murmured to Isabella.
"Thanks for coming," Isabella said back, smiling brightly at her.