Code Name Cassandra Read Free

trust falls and human pretzel twists to them.
    But that wasn’t my only problem with Pamela. On top of my other “issues,” I have a thing about authority figures. It probably has something to do with the fact that, last spring, one of them tried to shoot me.
    So I stood there, sweating copiously, the words “Sure, yeah, whatever, let go of me,” already right there on my lips.
    But before I could say any of that, Pamela must have noticed how uncomfortable I was with the whole arm thing—either that or she’d realized how damp she was getting from my copious sweating. In any case, she dropped her arm away from me, and suddenly I could breathe easily again.
    I looked around, wondering where we were. I’d lost my bearings in my panic over Pamela’s touching me. Beneath us lay the gravel path that led to various Camp Wawasee outbuildings. Close by was the dining hall, newly refinished with a twenty-foot ceiling. Next, the camp’s administrative offices. Then the infirmary. Beside that, the music building, a modular structure built mostly underground in order to preserve the woodsy feel of the place, with a huge skylight that shone down on a tree-filled atrium from which extended hallways leading to the soundproof classrooms, practice rooms, and so on.
    What I couldn’t see was the Olympic-sized swimming pool, and the half dozen clay tennis courts. Not that the kids had much time for swimming and tennis, what with all the practicing they had to do for the end-of-session orchestral concert that took place in the outdoor amphitheater, with seating for nine hundred. But nothing was too good for these little budding geniuses. Not far from the amphitheater was the Pit, where campers gathered nightly to link arms and sing while roasting marshmallows around a sunken campfire.
    From there the path curved to the various cabins—a dozen for the girls on one side of camp and a dozen for the boys on the other—until it finally sloped down to Camp Wawasee’s private lake, in all its mirror-surfaced, tree-lined glory. In fact, the windows of Frangipani Cottage looked out over the lake. From my bed in my little private room, I could see the water without even raising my head.
    Only, apparently, it wasn’t my bed anymore. I could feel Frangipani Cottage, with its lake views, its angelic flutists, its midnight-gabfest-and-hair-braiding sessions, slipping away, like water down the drain of … well, a steam table.
    “It’s just that, of all our female counselors this year,” Pamela was going on, “you really strike me as the one most capable of handling a cabinful of little boys. And you scored so well in your first aid and lifesaving courses—”
    Great. I’m being persecuted because of my knowledge of the Heimlich maneuver—honed, of course, from years of working in food services.
    “—that I know I can put these kids into your hands and not worry about them a second longer.”
    Pamela was really laying it on thick. Don’t ask me why. I mean, she was my boss. She had every right to assign me to a different cabin if she wanted to. She was the one doling out my paychecks, after all.
    Maybe in the past she’d switched a girl counselor to a boys’ cabin and gotten flak for it. Like maybe the girl she’d assigned to the cabin had quit or something. I’m not much of a quitter. The fact is, boys would be more work and less fun, but hey, what was I going to do?
    “Yeah,” I said. The back of my neck still felt damp from where her arm had been. “Well, that’s fine.”
    Pamela reached out to clutch me by the elbow, looking intently down into my face. Being clutched by the elbow wasn’t as bad as having her arm around my shoulders, so I was able to remain calm.
    “Do you really mean that, Jess?” she asked me. “You’ll really do it?”
    What was I going to say, no? And risk being sent home, where I’d have to spend the rest of my summer sweating over trays of meatballs and manicotti at Joe Junior’s? And when I