Applewhites at Wit's End by Stephanie S. Tolan

into the unsheltered meadow. And heard the sound of someone crying.
    â€œCinnamon?” she called. “What’s wrong?”
    The sobbing stopped with a gulp and was replaced by loud snuffling, but no answer. E.D. pushed her way gingerly between a blackberry bush and a honeysuckle-draped shrub and found Cinnamon, kneeling on the shoulder of the road, next to the newly dead body of a possum. The girl looked up, her crimson face wet with tears. She wiped her cheeks, leaving streaks of dirt. Her feet, in her blue-sequined flip-flops, were filthy from walking in the dirt at the side of the road. Her cell phone lay on the ground by the corpse. For a moment neither of them spoke.
    â€œAre you okay?” E.D. asked.
    â€œWhat does it look like? Stupid road,” Cinnamon said. “Doesn’t anybody ever drive on it?”
    E.D. looked at the dead possum. “Somebody did, obviously. Last night, probably. Possums freeze in headlights, you know. What were you doing out here?”
    â€œLooking for some place my stupid phone would work. Or a ride to town. As if!”
    â€œLet’s go back. It’s nearly time for lunch.”
    Cinnamon picked up her phone and pushed herself to her feet. “I thought maybe it was just pretending. ‘Playing possum,’ you know. But it’s really, really dead.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Stupid animal. Stupid, stupid, stupid animal!” Then she leaned down and touched its fur, patting it gently, as if it were still alive. “You’d think it could cross a completely deserted road without getting itself killed!”
    All the way back to the house, Cinnamon muttered about the stupid road, the stupid possum, and her stupid phone.

Chapter Sixteen
    S o far, on this first full day, camp was a whole lot like babysitting Destiny, Jake thought as the two of them walked toward the pond in their bathing suits with towels around their necks. Jake was carrying the life jacket Destiny would wear when they went swimming.
    â€œDoes all the campers have to go in the water?” Destiny asked.
    â€œYes. They have to take a swim test before they can have free swim.”
    â€œBetcha they won’t all! The green twin says she isn’t going in the water ever again. She says the Death Pond tried to pull her in and just about drownded her. She says if you hadn’t saved her, she’d be dead now and you’re a superhero.”
    Jake sighed. Ginger had sat next to him at lunch—the only girl at the boys’ table—and had given him another poem. She had brought him a handful of Queen Anne’s lace. And she stared at him all the time. The girl had become some kind of stalker. “She wasn’t drowning . She just got stuck in the mud, like Winston does sometimes. The dock’s there now, so she won’t have to go anywhere near the mud.”
    â€œMommy says the twins are ’dentical. Isn’t that s’posed to mean they’re just exactly alike?”
    â€œPretty much. These two are, for sure. If they didn’t wear different colors, we couldn’t tell which was which.”
    â€œThat’s silly. Except for how they look, they’re not the same at all. Cimma—Cim—the blue twin’s sad and the green twin isn’t. The blue twin’s really, really sad.”
    â€œSeems to me she’s mad most of the time.”
    Destiny shook his head solemnly. “Nope. Sad.” He started humming “Twinkle, Twinkle,” and stopped suddenly. “Did you know possums gots fingerprints, Jake?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œFingerprints. Possums got beautiful, star-shaped paws and fingerprints just like us. And beautiful fur, too. The blue twin says they just get a bad rap ’cause of their tails. That’s what the blue twin says. She’s just like Aunt Lucille about aminals—she talks to ’em.”
    â€œWhat possum? Destiny, what are you talking