“All right,” I said, brandishing my pen. Excellent. It was my turn now. “If that’s all the moose-storytelling and leader-electing business out of the way, let’s get started on this game—camp—thing.”
“Hooray,” said Abby. “What should we do first?”
I gave her a look. “Are you serious?” Don’t do this to me, New Abby. “You know the answer to that.”
Abby smiled and rubbed Samson’s head with her chin. “‘All good games start with a map,’” she said, quoting my long-standing policy. I gave a sigh of relief.
We divided up the work. Abby did the actual drawing, since she had the art and graphic-design superpowers, while I surveyed the forts and picked out colored pencils.
Abby did a beautiful job. She put our forts side by side right in the center of the map, making sure to draw in the correct number of pillows, and outlined the whole thing in a border of sheets and blankets. In the blank spaces at the edges she wrote Here There Be Margins, which she said was an inside joke from camp. I decided not to ask what that was about.
All good maps are supposed to be jagged at the edges, technically speaking, but the crimping scissors I stole from my mom were missing, so we had to settle for artistically ripping the paper instead. Abby added a picture of Creepy Frog in one corner for scale, and another of Samson with his tail pointing north for a compass, and our map was complete.
“Dude,” said Abby, running a finger over Fort Comfy. “Look at how many unlinked pillows we have. Hey, what if they all went somewhere? There could be another fort here, and here, and here. We could go so many cool places!”
“Cool places?” She had me just a pillow fort away. Wasn’t that enough? “What sort of cool places?”
“Anywhere! Come on—use your famous imagination, Mags.” She counted off on her fingers. “We could have links to the pool, the museum, the library, the teachers’ lounge at school next year, both ice cream shops, the Roller Derby rink, that one amazing costume shop, the aquarium . . .”
I gaped at her. That was brilliant. Although my highly trained brain already saw a problem. “Okay,” I said, “but wouldn’t we have to somehow get to all those places and build pillow forts in them first?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, our forts only connect to each other, not to other rooms in our houses, right? So there probably always needs to be a fort on the other end to connect to. And I seriously doubt there’s already a pillow fort hidden in the aquarium waiting for us.”
“Shoot,” said Abby, “fair point. Well, I hope we figure it out and find a way to add more forts and people soon.”
“What, Samson and I aren’t good enough for you anymore?” I asked, only half joking.
Abby suddenly became very interested in smoothing out a corner of the map. “Of course you are. It’s just that, you know, two people and a cat isn’t much of a camp, is it? If we had more campers, we could really do it right. And that would mean we’d have more cabins, too.” She tapped the paper. “I mean, how cool would it be if somebody else did have a fort somewhere, like some kid nearby. What if we were linked in already and we just didn’t know it yet?” She looked around hopefully at the pillows lining the walls.
“That would be awesome,” I said. Except obviously it wouldn’t. I’d only just gotten Abby back; I wasn’t about to start sharing her with someone new. “But it’s pretty much impossible.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Abby sighed. She cuddled Samson closer. “They’d probably need some sort of connection with us, not just a fort of their own. And I’ve been gone all summer, so that’s no good. And you haven’t really been in touch with anybody at all, right?”
I nodded. She didn’t have to say it like that, but it was true. “Only my mom,” I said. “And, ugh, tennis lessons—I never did learn those kids’ names—and Caitlin for like a second, and you, but no one else except . . . hey . . . maybe . . .”
Five
Abby beat me to the punch. “Your uncle!” she cried, pointing dramatically at the postcard box. “Your uncle Jim, Mags!”
“Uncle Joe.”
“Your uncle Joe, Mags! He’s been sending you postcards, right? And you’ve been writing back from inside your fort?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “Only I really don’t think—”
But Samson was upended with a yowl as Abby jumped up and started pulling pillows aside.
“Hey, hang on,” I said. What if she brought the whole place down? What if she collapsed the link? What if the collapsing link sucked us down with it into some blankety underworld? “Uncle Joe probably doesn’t even have a—”
“BINGO!” cried Abby, clenching a wall pillow in one hand, pointing dramatically with the other at a completely out-of-place gray cushion filling the gap.
I goggled.
“But—but this doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why would Uncle Joe have a pillow fort?”
“Why not?” said Abby, a massive smile on her face. “Maybe you gave him the idea in one of your postcards and he thought it sounded fun, and whatever’s making them all connect is affecting his, now.” She held out a hand to the strange gray cushion. “So, after you!”
I shook my head. This was happening way too fast.
“Hold on, hold on,” I said. “Just wait a second. There’s no proof that link goes to Uncle Joe’s fort. None. What if it goes to a . . . a haunted platinum mine instead? Or a space station that had a massive hull breach and there’s no more oxygen? Or an underwater trench full of razor-backed assassin crabs? What if I go through that pillow and never come back?”
Abby raised her eyebrows. “Seriously? Earth to Maggie. This isn’t one of your games. This is real life, and
