8

Jax

Eleven years old

Year one of summer camp

I talked to myself a lot.

Not loudly or anything, just mumbles every now and again. Dad said he hated when I mumbled, but my mumbles were for me and no one else to hear. Sometimes I wished I had a friend who mumbled too so we could mumble together for only us to hear, but for the time being, the only person I could mumble to was myself.

Currently, my mumbles were about Kennedy Lost.

“What a weird girl,” I murmured.

Kennedy was sitting in a mud pile, building what looked like a castle while everyone else was doing arts and crafts inside during our free time. The rain poured down on her, making her look like a wet mop, and she sang some kind of song as she bounced her head back and forth.

That girl was always singing. She probably sang even more than she talked, and she talked—a lot. Her talking wasn’t mumbling; it was the loudest thing ever, her words never seemed to run out. She was like the longest run-on sentence ever.

She talked nice and loud to anyone and everyone who would give her a minute of their attention. She was the definition of an Energizer Bunny—she went on and on and on, and her batteries never ran out. I would have bet she even talked in her sleep at a million miles per minute.

She was such a strange person. I’d never seen a stranger person when I met Kennedy Lost at summer camp that year. She was always getting into trouble, wandering off and doing her own messy thing even though she’d get yelled at for it.

I was sure the moment Miss Jessie saw Kennedy, she’d be in big trouble.

Kennedy wouldn’t even care, though. Her messy, tangled, honey-colored curly hair matched her golden eyes of mischief. I’d never seen golden eyes before I met Kennedy. They had splashes of brown in them, too. Not that I was looking at her eyes too closely, because whenever I looked at Kennedy for too long, she’d look back and smile at me in a way that made my stomach turn upside down.

She made me sick, but the kind of sick that felt a little good…kind of. I hadn’t known feeling sick to your stomach could feel good until I met Kennedy.

Kennedy stood and held her hands out wide as she looked up at the rain clouds. Didn’t she know lightning could strike and kill her? I’d once seen a documentary with Mom about how many people died in lightning storms, and sure, maybe it wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to keep me from ever wanting to stand outside in the rain with bolts of fire flashing throughout the sky. She was oddly close to a tree, too—a tree she’d no doubt hugged earlier in the day.

Kennedy Lost—the tree-hugging, mud-castle-building oddball at camp.

“Is that Kennedy out there?” Miss Jessie exclaimed as she looked out the window at the girl who was now dancing in the rain beside her messy castle like a wild thing.

Where do the wild things grow, you ask? Wherever Kennedy Lost was found.

Miss Jessie shot outside toward the weirdo, and all of us rushed over to the window to watch as Kennedy got yelled at and dragged off to her cabin to get cleaned up.

“What a freak,” someone muttered.

A lot of people called her mean names, and I knew Kennedy heard them sometimes, but she didn’t seem to care. I wished I were like that. I wished I couldn’t have cared less about what people thought of me, especially my dad, but for some reason, I cared what he thought about me more than anyone else in the world.

As Miss Jessie walked Kennedy back to her cabin, the weird girl danced the whole way there.

For the most part, I hated camp. I hated the sports, and the games, and the group activities. I hated being away from home—well, kind of. I missed Mom because I figured she missed me, too. I didn’t miss Dad because it seemed as if I was never good enough for him even though I tried my hardest. Dad loved my older brother, Derek, a lot more than he loved me. Derek wasn’t even his biological son, but still, he got Dad’s love the most. They liked all the same kind of stuff—football, hunting, action movies. I wasn’t a good son like Derek, and Dad made me feel bad about it all the time, too.

He sent me to camp hoping I’d get better at certain things and man up. Mom sent me to camp in hopes I’d make friends.

I wasn’t good at manning up or making friends, even though that was all I’d ever wanted.

People called me weird—kind of like how I called Kennedy weird, I supposed, but I didn’t dance in the rain and build castles out of mud. I was actually the complete opposite of Kennedy Lost. She was loud, and I was reserved. She dressed in all the colors of the rainbow while my clothes were black, white, or gray. She always yapped on and on about made-up stories while I stayed mute. She even wore her curly hair wild with the tips dyed purple while mine stayed brown, tamed, and in place.