A/N: Only in broad strokes will this follow the 1961 original, but there will be deception, misunderstandings, jealousy, well-intentioned interference, and (minor) heartbreak before the gloriously happy ending. The first chapter and most, if not all, of the second will be from Maddie's point of view, but then we switch over to Myka and Helena, with, perhaps, an occasional interruption from the kids.

Though she didn't know it, she was frequently the subject of the counselors' daily wrap-up. Most of her would have been mortified to know it, but part of her would have been pleased by the attention because it meant that someone, finally, had noticed her. Fifty kids her age at this camp and she hadn't yet found a friend among them.

The counselors were aware of that, too. Maddie Martino was shy; tall for her age, and gawky, her limbs acting independently of each other, she had been hopeless at the physical activities the other shy children had found refuge in, turning over her canoe, serving the volleyball into the net, rolling her ankle on a hike. She had overcompensated in the classroom for her failures elsewhere, too readily answering the counselors' questions about the plants and insects they collected on their hikes, too eager to help the students who were slower to arrive at the difference between an oak leaf and a maple leaf. When the campers were asked to break into groups, she was the one who loitered on the fringes desperate for an invitation, not having the confidence to saunter up to one of the rapidly forming groups of children and take her place among them.

Which was exactly what Christina Wells would do, equally an outsider but for vastly different reasons. She was a sly one, one of the counselors said with a disapproving smile and the others agreed. While she didn't have Maddie's clumsiness when it came to the games and hikes that were part of the children's daily schedule at camp, she was an unenthusiastic participant, her "tender ankles" preventing her from leaping up and pushing the volleyball back over the net as well as answering for why she always lagged behind the other girls as they followed the trails that wound through the woods. A shirker, another counselor announced, describing how Christina's cabin mates would end up making her bed and folding her clothes as she told them tales of her outlandish doings. A liar, yet another counselor volunteered, bragging about her father, an Italian television star named Marco. As if. But clever, they all grimly agreed. "Someone" had picked the lock on the cabinet in which the campers' cell phones and computers were stored during daily activities and at bedtime, picked it, didn't break it. Until the scratches on the lock and the cabinet doors became more numerous and more noticeable, the counselors hadn't been aware that "someone" had been sneaking out of her cabin after hours to take her phone from the cabinet. They had had to start keeping all the electronics in the safe that held the petty cash after that - and make sure they locked the doors.

Perhaps it was time, one of them announced to the others, to reshuffle the cabin assignments. Christina needed new victims to work her wiles upon, and she was undeniably charming. However, while Maddie was shy and awkward, she was smart and perhaps not so gullible as her shyness and awkwardness would have people believe. Not that it was appropriate to pit children against each other, not at all. This was an opportunity for Christina and Maddie to learn from one another, to grow as individuals. They were putting together two girls who, in different ways, were finding it difficult to make lasting friendships with the other campers. There was no entertainment value for them in this, the counselors reassured one another, none at all.

###

Maddie shrugged on the backpack holding her Kindle and actual, real, paper books, a plastic sandwich bag that contained a few necklaces and a wristwatch (presents from her dad over the years), a cheap picture frame in which she had inserted a photo of her and her mom hugging their black lab/German Shepherd mix Remy, and some odds and ends, including half-finished tubes of lip gloss and a plastic case that displayed a piece of masking tape with "Period Stuff" written on it. Camp counselors had already taken her suitcases to her new cabin. Her cabin mates, while a little surprised at the switch, had given her no more than a limp hug or two and then went down to the lake, where they could swim or paddle kayaks and canoes - under supervision, of course - until lunch. She felt that she was being punished, although she couldn't identify the infraction and the counselors had assured her that cabin changes were to be expected. "It's always good to stir up the mix," one of them had brightly told her.

Her new cabin was set apart from the others, tucked more deeply into the trees, and though it wasn't even midday, she could see the shadows stretching across its roof. She didn't hurry along the path, and she slowly climbed the steps to the door. Pressing her nose against the screen, she tried to peer through the gloom. Her bags were in the middle of the floor. Letting the door bang behind her, she shuffled into the main room. Bunk beds lined one wall; across from them was a lounge area, consisting of a loveseat, an armchair, and a bookshelf bowed under the weight of books and puzzles and board games. The loveseat and the chair looked like they could have come from her Grandma Bering's living room, old people's furniture with flowers.

"Hey." The voice came from behind and above her. Maddie turned around. Christina Wells was on the top bunk. "What did you do to get sent here?"

"I don't know," Maddie said, placing her backpack on the bottom bunk. "The counselors said they just change the cabin assignments sometimes. They like to mix things up." She had figured that she would get the bottom bunk, she'd had one of the bottom bunks in the other cabin, too. Things tended to work out that way for her, but at least it was just the two of them in the cabin. Usually there were four girls. Besides, she had heard one of the top bunkers complain about being closer to the bugs, especially spiders, that had taken up residence in the rafters. She wouldn't be sleeping next to the spiders, and if an emergency required them to evacuate the cabin, she was closer to an exit. She could roll out of bed and run for the door. Christina would have to jump down - or burn up.

Christina had stopped hanging her head over the top bunk and was sitting up, watching Maddie take her clothes from her suitcases and put them in her half of the dresser. "You're neat," she observed, and Maddie knew which kind of neat she meant; probably no one except her mother would use "neat" the other way, the being cool way, which would sort of cancel out being cool. Her mother killed cool, literally stomped it out of existence, although Myka Bering would never stomp, hadn't ever stomped for as far back as Maddie could remember. But Myka Bering had been consigned to the bottom bunk when she was a kid, Maddie could guarantee it.

"I like knowing where things are," she said matter of factly, taking a pair of shorts from one of her suitcases.

"But then you're never surprised. Yesterday I found some socks way back in the drawer, which was good 'cause I was out of clean socks."

Christina had sounded more earnest than argumentative, but it still made finding the right response a chancy matter. Maddie didn't want to get off to a bad start with her new cabin mate. Her limited knowledge of Christina hadn't given her the impression that Christina looked for excuses to be mean; on the other hand, she didn't go out of her way to be nice either. Christina floated, not part of any group but mingling with one briefly before moving on to the next, the way a fish would nose among the turrets of a castle dropped on the pebbly bottom of an aquarium before swimming over to check out the treasure chest.

"I also like knowing surprises in advance," Maddie said gravely, waiting a beat or two before grinning up at Christina. Well, she did, so it wasn't much of an exaggeration.

Christina grinned back at her, and they chatted about their experiences at the camp as Maddie emptied her suitcases and started in on her backpack. Jumping to the floor - apparently her "tender ankles" didn't slow her down when it came to getting in and out of the top bunk - Christina said, "It's dinner time. Are you coming?"

Maddie surveyed the contents of her backpack. She could see the outline of her "period stuff" box at the bottom of it. "I will in a few minutes. You don't have to wait."

Christina shrugged. "Okay. See you over there."

Maddie waited until she heard the screen door slam before she took out the case and opened it. Underneath a row of tampons and a few pantiliners (all taken from her mother's supply), which she didn't have any use for, not yet, anyway, was the smartphone she used to talk to her dad. It was against the rules not to declare - and surrender when asked - any electronic device brought to camp. She had declared the smartphone she used to talk to her mom and her laptop, but she wasn't going to surrender what, for the purposes of this extended stay in the woods, was her emergency phone. What if she encountered a bear or a wolf on a midnight trip to the communal bathroom? What if her cabin caught on fire? What if one of her cabin mates got sick from food poisoning? You had to have plans and you had to be prepared. She hadn't been at all sure that simply hiding the phone in a plastic case and scattering a few tampons over it would be enough, but when the camp counselors had gone through her backpack her first day, precisely to find such smuggled treasures, they looked at the case with its Sharpie-marked label and moved on. If one of them had picked it up . . . well, they hadn't, and she was very, very careful with her phone. She had some time to build up its charge before Christina came back. Although she had told herself it was only for emergencies, she would sometimes sit in the bathroom late at night and play games on it. She had to make sure it worked, after all. Her dad would probably call her mom next month about all the extra minutes she had used, but she would worry about that once camp was over.

The next couple of days were like all the ones that had gone before, except that Christina was messier than her old cabin mates, leaving her dirty clothes on the floor and not bothering to make her bed. The first morning Christina had chattered at her as Maddie made her bed and put her pajamas under her pillow, talking a lot about all the famous people she had been able to meet because of her dad and, to a lesser extent, her mom. "Hey," Christina had said cajolingly, "if you make my bed, I'll tell you how I got to meet Taylor Swift. Maybe I can work it so you could meet her, too."

Christina might have met Taylor Swift, but if she had, Maddie suspected it had been the same way any other 11-year-old girl would have met Taylor Swift, standing in line for an autograph at a concert. Besides, while there might be celebrities Maddie would make someone else's bed for the opportunity to meet, Taylor Swift wouldn't be one of them. Not that she had anything against Taylor Swift, she was sure Ms. Swift was perfectly nice and she enjoyed her songs. Now if Christina had said she had met . . . well, most of Maddie's "people I would love to meet" were old-fashioned heroines and long dead, the likes of Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt and Harriet Tubman. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Yes, she would make Christina's bed to meet her. "Close but no cigar, as my mom would say. Try me again tomorrow morning," she told Christina. And with that she went to breakfast and sat alone but close enough to a group of girls that she could almost pretend she was one of them.

By the third morning Christina had given up, making her own bed by flinging her blanket over her pillow. She didn't chatter at Maddie nearly as much, apparently because she saw no benefit resulting from it. They might have settled into the distantly friendly acquaintanceship Maddie had had with her former cabin mates, except for two things, both of which happened that third day. The first thing happened after dinner when the campers were allowed to call home and relate the day's adventures to their parents. The two previous nights Christina had climbed to her bunk to make her call, but tonight she sat on the loveseat, and Maddie glimpsed the screensaver on her phone. It was a photo of Christina, a woman who looked too much like her not to be her mother, and a man who looked a lot like the woman. They were dressed as vampires, but even though Christina's mom's was wearing some kind of white make-up, flaring her eyes, and opening her mouth wide to show off her fake fangs, as if she were ready to bite someone's neck, Maddie thought she looked familiar, and not just because Christina resembled her. She would remember where and when she had seen Christina's mother, she just had to be patient and let the memory rise to the surface. It always did. Her mom said they both had prodigious memories. Not photographic memories because those didn't really exist but very, very good memories all the same. She usually smiled when she said it, but at least once she had told Maddie ruefully, "Some days you're better off forgetting."

The second thing happened much later, when Christina found out about her smuggled phone. Maddie thought she had taken her usual care in getting out of her bunk, and then the cabin, without making a sound. She didn't open the case until she was safely locked in a stall in the bathroom. At first she took no notice of the stall door next to hers shutting; girls came in and out, and no one bothered her. She was so absorbed in reading The War of the Worlds, one of her and her mom's favorite books (she had left her paperback copy at home, an oversight she wouldn't commit again) that she nearly dropped her phone in the toilet when, once more, she heard Christina Wells's voice from above.

"I thought you were hiding something. You've been way too sneaky about leaving the cabin in the middle of the night."

Maddie was more familiar than she wanted to be with that tone, the tone that always said "I'm stronger than you" or "I'm bigger than you" no matter what the person was actually saying. The tone always foretold the threat that would come next, which was "Do what I want or I'm going to pound you into the ground/tattle on you/tell everyone in school you wet your pants in class." Her dad urged her to stand up to bullies, while her mom said that they should always report bullying to her teacher and the principal, per school policy. Maddie had found neither a very satisfactory option. Unfortunately she rarely had a better answer, so sometimes she found herself driven head first into a snowbank and sometimes she found herself in the principal's office with her mom, the bully, and the bully's parents all trying to find a "reasonable solution" as the principal called it. (Invariably she would find also find herself in the principal's office with her mom, the bully, and the bully's parents after she had been driven head first into a snowbank.) On rare occasions, however, she had a counteroffer for whatever it was the bully wanted, and tonight was one of those occasions.

"You weren't sneaky enough when you were breaking into the office cabinet for your phone," Maddie said coolly, ignoring Christina's outstretched hand and tucking her phone in a pocket of her shorts.

"How do you know it was me?" Christina didn't take Maddie's ignoring of her hand as a provocation. Instead she used that hand to scratch absently at her other arm, as if she had been intending to put it to work all along and was completely indifferent about whether it grabbed at someone else's phone or scratched at a bug bite.

"Everyone knows it was you," Maddie scoffed, emboldened by Christina's lackadaisical bullying. In fact, it couldn't even be called bullying because Christina hadn't threatened her . . . yet. Just to make sure that there wouldn't be any necessity for bullying, Maddie added with more confidence than she actually felt, "I know how to get your phone out of the safe."

Christina's eyes widened but her mouth remained skeptical. "You do?"

"If you can get us into the counselors' office, I can open the safe."

It turned out that Christina had been getting into the office by climbing onto a low-slung tree branch that ended a few inches from one of the windows. She leaned over and worked at the frame until she could grip the sash and lift it. Maddie stood under the tree and marveled, not at Christina's fearlessness (the drop to the ground was no more than a few feet) but at her brazenness. Granted, there weren't going to be that many people out after midnight, but Christina's hunched-over form was visible in the moonlight. All it would take would be one camp counselor restlessly patrolling the grounds . . . . Sidling closer to the tree trunk, Maddie saw Christina peer at where she had just been standing and hiss so loudly she might as well have been shouting, "Where'd you go? I've got it open."

"Get in before somebody sees us," Maddie ordered irritably. "You just need to unlock a door and then I'll follow you in."

"Gotcha," Christina said in sudden understanding.

Maddie shook her head in dismay. There went a master criminal. Why was she putting her hopes for someday having a social life in Christina's hands? Because if they were caught and it got back to her mom, as it undoubtedly would, she would be grounded until she graduated from high school. Yet she also couldn't deny that this was the most fun she had had since she arrived at camp. She was breaking the rules with a popular girl. Maybe not a popular girl, Maddie amended, but a girl the popular girls accepted, and that was still more than she could have expected to happen to her.

Christina was craning her head around a doorway and urging her to hurry up in that too-loud voice. Maddie ran across the strip of grass that separated the tree from the building and flattened herself against a wall, sliding along it until she met a corner; then she sprinted the last few feet to the door. Christina had disappeared inside, although Maddie easily picked her out from the other shadows. The moonlight was bright, and Christina was the shadow that was hopping and bobbing as though there were surveillance cameras to hide from. But there were no surveillance cameras, just a couch and chairs for the counselors to collapse into when they caught the odd break from attending to the campers, a small first aid station which Maddie had had to visit only once for an application of calamine lotion when a forest hike had left her with a rash on her legs, and a kitchen table and chairs crowded into the corner opposite the first aid station. Straight ahead of them was the office's inner office, which held what appeared to be a true office desk, the cabinet Christina had broken into, and the safe. Watching Christina weave and dip as if she were eluding pursuit, Maddie began to wonder if the reason that Christina had been repeatedly sneaking into the office had nothing to do with her addiction to her phone and everything to do with alleviating boredom. She probably would have broken into the cabinet if there had been only construction paper and glue to steal. Great, Maddie concluded, I'm hanging out with a criminal and an adrenaline junkie. When Christina had been doing all that shouting earlier, she had probably been hoping that she would wake up a counselor.

Somewhere along her circuitous route, Christina had found a flashlight, and she was shining it into the inner office directly at the safe, which presented an old-fashioned combination lock. "What's the combination?" She handed Maddie the flashlight and then crouched in front of the safe, waiting for the magic numbers.

This was it, the make or break moment. If she was right, she could count herself among the coolest kids in camp, if only in her own mind (and, possibly, Christina's too). If she was wrong . . . well, how could it get even lonelier? Failure couldn't make camp a worse experience than it was now, and she couldn't lose Christina as a friend because they weren't friends. There was nothing to break that wasn't already broken, so Maddie said with a casual air, "Try 9, 57, 88, and 31."

"Hold the flashlight still," Christina complained, "I can't see the numbers."

Okay, Maddie acknowledged, maybe she was a little nervous. Gripping the flashlight with both hands, she tried to keep it from shaking. Christina carefully revolved the dial four times and yanked at the handle. The door didn't budge. "It didn't work," Christina sighed.

Maddie already had her phone out, and she was searching intently - not in a panic, absolutely not - for online instructions on how to open a combination lock safe. "Same numbers," she said rapidly, "except turn the dial to the left four times before you stop on 9, to the right three times before you stop on 57, left two times before stopping on 88, and then right, once, stopping on 31." She wasn't holding her breath, not at all, although after Christina completed the sequence as instructed and opened the door, Maddie was gasping for air as if she had been underwater the entire time.

Nothing in recent memory, perhaps her whole life, was sweeter than Christina's awed "How did you know?"

Maddie wanted to revel in the moment, but it would be much cooler if she dismissed the feat as no big deal. "I overheard one of the counselors what the combination was. I've got a pretty good memory." She considered emphasizing that she had overheard the numbers several days ago, but Christina might think she was fishing for compliments, and that would undo all she had achieved. Besides which, she would probably have to reveal that she had overheard the counselors here, in the office, while she was being doused in calamine lotion - for her rash. Nope, the less said about it the better, although Christina's amazement had already faded, and she was pawing through the phones, tablets, and laptops on an inner shelf for her phone. "So, what were you going to do to me if I hadn't suggested this?" Maddie wasn't sure why she suddenly felt lonely with Christina's attention focused on finding her phone. It wasn't like they had magically become best friends, but it had been nice, she had to admit, being part of a team, even if the goal had been something that might get them both kicked out of camp. She was also curious to know what punishment Christina had had in mind. It would have been more inventive than pitching her head first into a snowbank or its summer equivalent, she was sure.

"Do to you?" Christina repeated. She had found her phone and she was scrolling through her messages. It looked like there were a lot of them, and her e-mail icon had a red circle with a number, a big number. Maddie had been receiving just one message a day, a text from her mom. This past weekend she had gotten e-mails from her dad, her Aunt Tracy, and her friend Sophie. She had thought that was pretty good until now. Although who would want a zillion messages? You'd be spending all your time responding to them. Except that Christina didn't seem the responding type; she seemed more of a "I meant to get back to you" type. Yet as soon as that snide little thought crossed Maddie's mind, Christina was saying, "Do to you? Like beat you up or something?" She was genuinely horrified. "No, I was going to suggest we trade. You'd let me use your phone, and I'd get you something you wanted." She turned her phone off and put it back in the safe. Failing to stifle a yawn, she said, "My mom always says that the best way to get what you want is to know what the other person wants." Talking through an even bigger yawn, she offered, "You eat by yourself a lot. I can ask Hannah to invite you to eat with her."

Hannah Sparling. Pretty, athletic, smart, nice, but not so much that you had to resent her for it. Hannah had so many girls clustered around her wanting to be her friend that she probably couldn't see all the other girls on the fringes who also wanted to be her friend. In the dining hall, the counselors had to put two tables together for Hannah and her court. Even if Maddie were the one who sat the farthest away from her, just sitting at Hannah's table was an achievement. If Christina had put this on the table a few hours earlier, Maddie would have snapped it up, but the picture of Christina's mom was niggling at her. She had seen her before, she was sure of it, and though she couldn't have explained why, she knew it was important that she figure it out. She might need Christina's help to do it, and she wasn't going to trade that away, not even for a chance to eat dinner with the most popular girl at camp. Waving good-bye to Hannah in her mind, Maddie said, "Let me think about it. I'm sure I can come up with something."

###

They had made it back to their cabin without being discovered, and it only fueled Christina's desire to do the same thing again the next night and the night after. While Christina muttered as she went through her messages, deleting some and declaring after reading others, "I have to get back to Chloe (or Samantha or Emily or Eric or Will)," Maddie smiled to herself and continued to ferret out from the depths of her memory everything that could possibly tell her why she had recognized Christina's mom, when and where and what she had been doing. It was a trick her mom had taught her if she couldn't remember something - "Start putting together what you can remember." She didn't have much; she was pretty sure she had never met Christina's mom, so that suggested to her that she had seen another photo or a video of her. "Is your mom famous or something? Your dad's an actor, right? Is she an actress?" Maddie had tried to think of all the famous older women she knew, not as old as Ruth Bader Ginsburg but old like her mom, over the past two days but hadn't come up with any who resembled the woman in the photo on Christina's phone.

"My mom sometimes works with actors - it's how she met my dad - but she's not an actress. She and my Uncle Charles run a public relations company, Future Image. My mom says their motto would be 'We make the crisis of today the joke of tomorrow' except that their clients fear being a joke most of all." Christina held her phone out to Maddie. "This is their website."

Christina's mom knew her H.G. Wells. That was interesting, more interesting than the website, which had lots of useless information, descriptions of Future Image's services, client testimonials, a mission statement (whatever that was), and the like. But the website did have pictures of its top officers, Charles Wells and Helena Wells, and now that Maddie could see Christina's mom without the vampire make-up and smiling like a human being instead of baring fake fangs in anticipation of drinking someone's blood, she realized two things; one was that Helena Wells was really pretty, even though there was still something kind of wicked about her smile, and the second was that her mom knew Christina's mom. Maddie didn't have all the pieces yet, but she knew where she had first seen a photo of Helena Wells, in a box of old pictures her mom had stuck in a filing cabinet in her office. She had seen that same smile, only on a much younger version of the woman who was the senior vice president of Future Image.

"Has your mom ever mentioned the name Myka Bering?"

Christina furrowed her eyebrows. "I don't think so. Who's she?"

"My mom."

Christina's brows only furrowed the more. "Why would my mom know your mom?"

Maddie shrugged to show that she didn't consider the question very important, but it was important, even though the why of it continued to elude her. She was afraid, however, that if she pressed Christina too hard, Christina would begin to think she was weird. Weirder, Maddie reluctantly conceded. What kid cared that her mother might know another kid's mother? A kid who stuck out for all the wrong reasons, she answered her own question, a creepy kid. Maddie decided that she would dredge her memory a few more times before asking Christina more questions. "Let's go," she said. "Last night I saw lights on in one of the counselors' cabins as we were leaving." She handed the phone back to Christina.

Christina stared at it unseeingly. "My mom sent me to this camp because she said I needed to get out of my 'comfort zone.'" She dropped her phone into her lap to make the air quotes. "I think she did it because she's getting me ready for when she marries Nate. She told me that coming here would teach me how to get along with all kinds of kids and to get used to being in a new environment." Her frown had turned into a scowl. "I hate the outdoors, and most of the kids here are boring. Just like I hate Nate's house and I think he's boring."

Wow. Maddie hadn't been expecting this. How selfish was it that the first thing she wanted to say was "Do you think I'm boring?" Maybe later she could find a way to work the question in, but right now she should . . . change the subject or let Christina fume? In their short acquaintance, she had never seen Christina like this, scowly and irritated and, just possibly, in need of a friend. Even when Christina was begging off an activity - yesterday a "sore shoulder" had prevented her from canoeing across the lake with the rest of campers - she never crabbed or whined about it. She would always look sorrowfully at the counselor and say with a regret that sounded so sincere that Maddie almost, almost could believe her, "I don't think my shoulder/ankle/knee is up to it today. I heard it pop this morning, and it feels wobbly." Early on, when the counselors had only stared at her in disbelief, Christina would sigh and offer with a puzzled, wondering quality, "My mom says it's genetic, loose ligaments." And once, when an especially impatient counselor had pushed her to do the activity anyway, Maddie had heard Christina deliver the put-away pitch, a 100 mile per hour fastball right down the middle of the plate. "They pushed my uncle so hard at school, running and jumping and all sorts of exercise, that he walks with a cane now." Having envisioned the camp closing under the weight of the resultant lawsuits, the counselors limited themselves to shaking their heads in disgust or gazing skyward in the hopes that lightning would strike Christina for lying before giving in and sending her off to the dining hall or back to her cabin.

Maddie settled on a question that she thought Christina could use either to turn her thoughts from her mom's boyfriend or complain more about him, whatever she preferred. It could also make her unhappier. Why couldn't Christina be making fun of her? That was a situation Maddie knew inside and out. "Do you wish your mom and dad were still together?"

"They were never really together," Christina said casually, putting her phone in the safe. "He was with someone else and my mom always said she wasn't the marrying kind." She paused. "That's what she used to say . . . before Nate." As they exited the cabin through the window (while they had to lock the doors from the inside, Maddie couldn't honestly regret the extra little risk that climbing out the window added to the adventure), Christina said, with a return of her customary breeziness, "I'm the product of a night of passion." Then she said, almost condescendingly, "I wasn't a twinkle in my parents' eyes, I was a fire. Not everyone can say that, you know." Maddie had the feeling that the words weren't Christina's own, that she was parroting words her mother had told her over and over.

"Do you get to see him often? He lives in Italy, right?"

"I don't know him very well," Christina admitted. "He doesn't have a lot of time off from his show, so I don't see much of him."

This time Maddie thought she was parroting the excuses her father had told her over and over. Assuming the television part was true, assuming the Italy part was true. Maddie knew a little something about the paternal penchant for exaggeration and invention, especially when it came to missed visits and late child support payments (although she wasn't supposed to know about the latter).

"How about you?"

"What?" Startled, Maddie stepped on a twig that snapped as loud as a gunshot, the sharp crack reverberating through the camp.

"Are your parents together?"

"No, they got divorced when I was little." Not baby little, more like kindergarten little, but Maddie didn't have many memories of her dad and mom together. Not happy together, anyway. There hadn't been many fights, but there had been lots of silence. She almost remembered the silences better than she did her dad, and it wasn't because she had trouble remembering him. She didn't have much material to work with. "I don't see him much either," she volunteered. She kept her voice low; no lights had come on after she stepped on the twig and none of the counselors were calling "Who's out there?," but she didn't want to draw any more attention to them. "He's not an actor, and he doesn't live halfway across the world, but he travels a lot."

Sam Martino worked in the development department of a big state university. Maddie had asked her mom once what her dad's job actually was because her mom usually knew everything, and, since she worked at a college herself, she would certainly know about development departments. But her mom had disappointed her, because, instead of gushing like the fountain of knowledge she ordinarily was and pointing out ten zillion books or websites as resources for even more information, her mom had said only, "He raises money for the university." Not very enlightening, but luckily her Aunt Tracy had chimed in, "He goes around the country and visits alumni and asks them for money. Which means he gets paid to drink beer and attend football games and reminisce about the good old days. In other words, honey, your dad's being paid to never grow up." Her mom had said sharply, "Tracy, that's enough," and Aunt Tracy had pinched her finger and thumb together and drawn them across her lips, like she was zipping them together, but not before she muttered, "It's true, and it's always been your weakness, Myka."

Christina said, not in a low voice but conversationally, as though they weren't sneaking back from breaking into the office, "My Uncle Charles is more like a dad to me than my real dad. He calls me every week, and we text each other all the time."

Maddie didn't have that kind of relationship with any of her uncles, not that she was looking for a more dad-like dad. She had her mom and her Aunt Tracy, and that was plenty. Besides, sometimes Pete Lattimer, her old soccer coach, would say that she was his third kid, and while she knew he was just joking, it felt kind of good all the same. If she ever had a serious problem, she wouldn't hesitate to talk to him about it. She would keep that to herself, however; it would probably sound pathetic to say, "The guy who taught me soccer when I was six is my backup dad."

Thankfully they were close to their cabin now, so it didn't matter so much that Christina was talking as if she were trying to be heard over the other campers in the dining hall. "It's not that I don't want my mom to be happy or to get married if she wants to. If she wanted to marry her friend Gigi, I'd be all for it. They used to date, and I loved having her around all the time, but they broke up. My Uncle Charles said it was like putting two piranhas in a fishbowl, it just wasn't going to work. But I wish it had."

Maddie slowed. Her mind was working so fast that she couldn't walk and think at the same time. She plopped down on the steps to their cabin door. It was turning out that she and Christina had a great deal in common for two girls who, on the outside, would seem to have nothing in common. "My mom has girlfriends, too," she said, not really caring if Christina heard her. "She used to go out with this professor named Michelle, then they broke up, like your mom and Gigi, and my mom was really sad . . . ."

All the pieces were there, and Maddie knew exactly what she had been doing and where she had been when she had seen the photo of Helena Wells. "I think . . . ." Christina was stomping around the inside of their cabin, slamming dresser drawers. "I think," Maddie spoke louder, but it was hard to shout out something when you were still marveling over it.

"What'd you say?"

Maddie turned around. Christina was at the screen door, wearing her pajamas. It was late, and tomorrow was going to be a full day, chock full of nature walks, water safety lessons, fire safety lessons, first aid lessons, more nature walks. She should have been growing tired just thinking of it all, but she wouldn't be getting much rest tonight. Her mind wasn't going to be slowing down anytime soon.

"I think our moms used to be girlfriends."