next to each girl’s name. Jenny had already drawn her yellow button when she saw Cassie draw a blue one.
The last girl to arrive in the parking lot and the last to draw her button was Dora Matthews. Glimpsing the yellow button in Dora’s fingers, Jenny’s heart sank. Of all the girls in the troop, Dora Matthews was the one Jenny liked least.
For one thing, Dora’s hair was dirty, and she smelled bad. She was also loud, rude, and obnoxious. She couldn’t have been very smart because she was thirteen years old and was still in a sixth-grade classroom where everybody else was twelve. Mrs. Lambert usually brought Dora to troop meetings and was always nice to her, even though Dora wasn’t nice back. Two months before school was out, Dora and her mother had returned to Bisbee and moved into the house that had once belonged to Dora’s deceased maternal grandmother, Dolly Pommer. All their lives, the elder Pommers had been movers and shakers in the Presbyterian Church. Out of respect for them, Faye Lambert had done what she could for their newly arrived daughter and granddaughter. That also explained why Dora Matthews was now the newest member in Jenny’s Girl Scout troop.
Not that Dora was even remotely interested in Girl Scouts—she was far too mature for that. She was into cigarettes. And boys. She bragged that before she and her mother had moved back to Bisbee, she’d had a boyfriend who had “done it” with her and who had wanted to marry her. Dora claimed that was why her mother had left Tucson—to get her daughter away from the boyfriend, but Jenny didn’t think that was the truth. What boy in his right mind would ever want to marry someone like Dora?
“Guess,” Jenny muttered dolefully in answer to Cassie’s question.
Behind her thick glasses, Cassie Parks’s brown eyes widened in horror. “Not Dora,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
“You’ve got it,” Jenny replied and then lapsed into miserable silence. She hadn’t wanted to come on the camping trip to begin with. It was bad enough that Grandma Brady had insisted she bring her stupid sit-upon, but having to spend the weekend with Dora Matthews was far worse than anything Jenny could have imagined. After three whole nights in a pup tent with stinky Dora Matthews, Jenny would be lucky if she didn’t stink, too.
Slowly the four vehicles wound up the dusty road that was little more than a rutted track. On either side of the road, the parched desert was spiked with spindly foot-high blades of stiff yellowed grass. Heat shimmered ahead and behind them, covering the road with visible rivers of mirage-fed water. At last the Tracker pulled off the narrow roadway and into a shallow, scrub-oak-dotted basin. Kelly Martindale and Amber Summers leaped out of the Tracker and motioned the other vehicles to pull in behind them. By the time the motor home had maneuvered into place, all the girls had piled out of the minivans and were busy unloading. Dora, who had been accorded the honor of riding along with Mrs. Lambert in the motor home, was the last to arrive. She hung back, letting the other girls do the work of unpacking.
“All right, ladies,” Mrs. Lambert announced as soon as the minivans drove away. “You all know who your partner is. Take tents from the luggage compartment under the motor home. Then choose your spots. We want all the tents up and organized well before dark. Let’s get going.”
Each pair of girls was required to erect its own tent. Of all the girls in the troop, Jenny had the most experience in that regard. While Mrs. Lambert and the two interns supervised the other girls, Jenny set about instructing Dora Matthews on how to help set up theirs.
When it came time to choose a place for the tent, Dora selected a spot that was some distance from the others. Rather than argue about it, Jenny simply shrugged in agreement. “Fine,” she muttered. Without much help from Dora, Jenny managed to lay the tent out properly, but when she asked Dora to hold the center support pole in place, Dora proved totally inept.
“Don’t you know how to do anything right?” Jenny demanded impatiently. “Here, hold it like
Instead of holding the pole, Dora grabbed it away from Jenny and threw it as far as she could heave it. The pole landed in the dirt and stuck up at an angle like a spear.
“If you’re so smart, Jennifer Brady, you can do it yourself.” With that, Dora stalked away.
“Wait a minute,” Mrs. Lambert said, picking up the pole and walking toward the still unraised tent. “What seems to be the problem, girls?”
“Miss Know--It-All here thinks I’m stupid,” Dora complained. “And she keeps telling me what to do. That’s all right. If she’s so smart, she call have the stupid tent all to herself. I’ll sleep outside.”
“Calm down, Dora,” Mrs. Lambert said reasonably. “These aren’t called two -man tents just because they hold two people. It also takes two people working together to put them up.
