Maggles! I saw a turtle today. I named it Brandon McPondy. It pooped beside the lake. Wish you were here! Can’t believe it’s almost over! Home Thursday!
Abs
That was all.
Only. Wait. Wait wait wait-wait-wait. Thursday. TODAY Thursday?!
I sat up, staring around as though some total stranger would appear and confirm that yes, today was the fifth day of the week and this glorious news was true. I punched the air, my mood doing a complete one eighty.
Abby was coming home today!
But there was something weird going on with the postcard. This was Abby’s very last message, so why was she still writing in code? She’d been sending cheerfully pointless cards every other day since she got to camp, all way too out of character to be anything but secret messages, but for the life of me I’d never been able to work out what her encryption system was. I’d been counting on some sort of big reveal at the end, but here she was keeping the act going right up to the final card. It was very mysterious. Camp Cantaloupe must have been such a horrible, oppressive place that she couldn’t risk saying any more until she was safely home.
Of course, Camp Cantaloupe wouldn’t have been horrible if I’d been able to go with her like we’d planned. Then it would have been, like Abby said, ah-may-zing. Then instead of waking up week after week to a silent house and boring chores, I’d have been waking up to a log cabin with splintery floors, dead wasps in the windows, and Abby snoring away in the bunk below me. And when we lined up for roll call, we would have been standing side by side because our last names are close, and they would call out “Hernandez, Abigail!” and Abby would shout “Hair!” and I would smile, and they would call “Hetzger, Margaret!” and I would shout “Peasant!” and Abby would snort. And then we’d steal all the red and orange Froot Loops from the mess hall and the games would really begin. Camp Cantaloupe would never know what hit it.
But we didn’t go to camp together. Our plans failed. And all because my overworked mom forgot to send in my camp registration paperwork, and by the time anyone realized, it was too late. Abby did everything she could to cancel, but we couldn’t stop it: we were doomed to spend the first half of our last summer before sixth grade and middle school—where, if the stories were true, everything was going to change and the earth’s crust would break into pieces and the world as we’d known it would be turned upside down—horribly, tragically apart.
I reread Abby’s card, looking for hidden patterns. “Can’t believe it’s almost over.” What could that mean? Abby had promised she would hate every minute of camp without me, and these messages—all on official, silly Camp Cantaloupe postcards—were so Fun-Fun Rainbow Crispy cheerful they had to be fake. My co–secret agent just did not use that many exclamation marks.
And what about the other clues? Along with her steady stream of postcards, Abby had sent back a map of the campgrounds, a speckled owl feather, and a scarf she’d made out of an old patchwork quilt during her first arts-and-crafts lesson. I’d spent a whole week working out rescue missions based on the map, but had to give it up when I realized none of them were really doable without my own helicopter. The scarf and feather became Abby-themed decorations in my fort, but what if all those things were actually a cunning key to decode the postcards, and I’d somehow missed it? Me, the world’s greatest secret agent? I’d never live it down.
I glanced at the picture on the front of the card, which showed Orcas Island and, for some reason, a goofy-looking moose, and shoved it in the very back of my postcard shoe box alongside all the others. That was it, then. It was over. My best friend was coming home, and one way or another I was finally going to get the answers to all my questions.
Nothing to do now but climb up on the roof and wait.
It got pretty hot sometimes, but every day that summer I’d braved the heat and the danger and clambered up roofside, staring out west past Seattle and Puget Sound toward Orcas Island. Somewhere out there, somewhere past that darn pine tree blocking my view, Abby was trapped all alone at camp, waiting, counting down the days just like I was.
Which meant we were waiting together.
Only, as the scorching July days dragged by, I’d had to admit I was starting to feel, despite all my training and patience, maybe just the teeniest bit . . . lonely.
Which might explain why I screamed like a third grader presented with pie when the Hernandezes’ car crunched into the driveway next door with a back seat full of duffel bags and a front seat full of . . . Abby!
I scrambled off the roof so fast I almost broke my neck. We met in the middle of Abby’s lawn and slammed our arms around each other.
“Abs!”
“Maggles!”
We hug-danced around and around and around. We stepped back.
Abby looked fantastic. She had a hearty sunburn, impressive scratches on her arms, and a fancy new side braid in her dark, curly hair. She was also taller than me somehow. I squinted. She actually looked pretty different. She looked like . . . New Abby.
Wait, I thought, for the first time all summer, what do I look like? Am I New Maggie? I felt the same, and I knew from the mirror that morning that I still had my usual choppy bangs, square jaw, and independent eyebrows. Abby was smiling, though, so I must have been doing okay.
“Look at you!” she said, bopping me on the arm. “Look at your tan. I missed you.”
“You too,” I said, bopping her back. “And how dare you get
