Bones & All Read Free

“I find them in the bushes,” he said, like it was some great secret. “It’s the exoskeleton. They shed ’em once in a lifetime. Isn’t that cool?” He plucked one of the shells out of the box and put it in his mouth.
    â€œThey’re pretty tasty,” he said as he munched. “Why are you making a gross-out face?”
    â€œI’m not.”
    â€œYes, you are. Don’t be such a girl.” He took out a second shell. “Here, try one.” Crunch, crunch . “I gotta grab a salt shaker at dinner, they’ll be even tastier with some salt.”
    He put the shell in my palm and I looked at it. Something flickered then, in a dark corner of my mind: I knew about things that weren’t meant to be eaten.
    Then the whistle blew for afternoon roll call. I dropped the locust shell in the shoebox and ran away.
    That night I found a third note under my pillow. He’d written the first two like he was introducing himself to a new pen pal: My name is Luke Vanderwall, I’m from Springfield, Delaware + I have 2 little sisters, this is my 3rd summer at Camp Ameewagan + it’s my favorite time of the whole year. I’m glad you’re here. Now I’ll have somebody to swim with even if we have to break the rules to do it.…
    This one was short. Meet me outside at 11 o’clock , it said, + together we will go 4th + have many adventures .
    That night I had my bathing suit on under my pajamas. I lay in bed until I heard everyone breathing evenly, and then I unlatched the screen door and slipped out of the cabin. He was already there, standing just beyond the arc of the porch light. I tiptoed down to meet him and he took my hand and tugged me into the dark. “Come on,” he whispered.
    â€œI can’t.” I shouldn’t.
    â€œâ€™Course you can. Come on! I want to show you something.” Hand in hand, we stumbled past the rec hall back to the boys’ camp. After a few minutes I could see the cabins through the trees, but then he drew me away from them, deeper into the darkness.
    The woods were alive in a way I’d never noticed in the daytime. The slip of an old moon hung above the trees, giving us just enough light to see by, and fireflies hovered all around, flashing their green-gold lights. I wondered what they were saying to each other. There was a night breeze, so cool and fresh that I imagined it was the pines sighing out the good clean air, and the forest hummed with an invisible orchestra of cicadas and owls and bullfrogs.
    A whiff of woodsmoke tickled my nose. Outside Ameewagan, but not far off, someone was having a campfire. “I could sure go for a hot dog,” Luke said wistfully. A moment later I saw a glimmer of something ahead, but as we came closer I could see it wasn’t a fire.
    There was a red tent in the woods, all lit up from within. It wasn’t a real tent—the kind with retractable metal rods and a zipper that you could buy in a store—which made it seem all the more mysterious. He’d found a red tarpaulin and cast it over a length of clothesline strung between two trees. For a moment or two I stood there admiring it. From here I could pretend it was a magic tent that I could step inside and find myself in the thick of a Moroccan bazaar.
    â€œYou made this?”
    â€œYeah,” he said. “For you.”
    This is the first time I can remember feeling it. Standing next to Luke in the darkness, I breathed in the warm night air and found I could smell him down to the lint between his toes. He still had the stink of the lake on him, dank and rotten-eggy. He hadn’t brushed his teeth after dinner, and I could smell the chili powder from the sloppy joes every time he breathed.
    It trickled over me then, making me shudder: the hunger, and the certainty. I didn’t know anything about Penny Wilson. I just had a feeling I had done something horrible when I was little and that I was on