Arnold Evans
Different -the girls of summer
CHAPTER ONE
"All right, girls! Quiet down!" Pat Fulton put her hands on her hips and shouted in her most authoritative voice to bring the dozen or so teenage girls ringed around her to order. As the babble of conversation and laughter continued without letup, she stuck the bright silver whistle hung around her neck into her mouth and gave it an ear-splitting blast.
"I said quiet down!" she warned a second time, turning her head quickly from face to face, a dark frown of anger creasing her forehead. The majority of the girls in the group ranged in age from thirteen to sixteen. Although Pat herself had just turned twenty, she had enough of an age difference on her side to command respect and attention from the younger girls in her charge. When she flashed her large dark eyes and knit her jet-black brows in a slash of disapproval, even the boldest of them became instantly quiet.
"If there's one thing you're all going to learn before you've been at the Summer Sisters Girls Camp very much longer," she declared, "it's that when a Big Sister like myself tells you to do something, you do it. No questions asked. Does everyone understand that?"
Most of the girls nodded their heads up and down quickly, their faces reflecting their fear of Pat and of being at the camp itself. For many of them it was the first time they'd ever been away from home for a night in their lives, and a few looked like they were on the brink of tears. One of the older girls, however, seemed determined to make a reputation for herself with the counselor on the very first night of camp.
"What if you tell us to do something we don't think we should do?" a voice in the little group questioned.
"Who asked me that?" Pat growled, turning her head quickly around in the direction where the girl's voice had come from. She felt herself stiffen slightly inside as she confronted a face she had noticed earlier, when all the camp counselors had met the summer group at the local train station. Pat had suspected from her first glance at the girl that she was going to prove to be trouble. Staring into her deep blue eyes once again, she was almost certain of it. She'd been a girls camp counselor long enough to recognize that look at once. "Oh, you," she muttered. Her eyebrows tightened in another frown, but the girl's eyes stared right back at her in challenge. "Aren't you the one who was making all the fuss at the train station?" she snapped.
"I was questioning why we had to ride all the way up here in that cattle car you called a bus, yes," she answered. "At the camp I went to last summer, they sent private limousines into town to pick us up."
"Then why didn't you go back to that camp this summer?" Pat asked as sweetly as she could manage her voice to sound, but the hard line around her mouth betrayed the truth of her feelings.
For a moment, the girl seemed completely flustered. Her stare darted away from Pat's face and she shifted her stance nervously. "I-I – didn't go back there because I was bored with the place," she declared after a hesitant start.
"Well, I'm afraid you're going to be bored with this camp, too," Pat hinted, "unless you learn to follow orders like the rest of the girls. What's your name?"