Crossing Over (Camp Rolling Hills #2) , livre ebook

PUBLISHER S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Davidowitz, Stacy, author. Title: Crossing over / by Stacy Davidowitz. Description: New York : Amulet Books, [2016] | Series: Camp Rolling Hills ; Book 2 | Summary: Summertime adventures continue with tomboy Melman, who is dared to wear a pink princess dress, and inventor Steinberg, who loses a robot competition. Identifiers: LCCN 2015031570 | ISBN 9781419718809 (paperback) | ISBN 9781613128916 (e-book) Subjects: | CYAC: Camps-Fiction. | Love-Fiction. | Humorous stories. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Humorous Stories. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Friendship. | JUVENILE FICTION / Love Romance. Classification: LCC PZ7.1.D3365 Cr 2016 | DDC [Fic]-dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015031570 .
Text copyright 2016 Stacy Davidowitz Illustrations by Melissa Manwill Book design by Pamela Notarantonio
Inspired by the original musical Camp Rolling Hills copyright 2013 Adam Spiegel, David Spiegel, and Stacy Davidowitz Music and lyrics by Adam Spiegel Book and lyrics by David Spiegel Stacy Davidowitz
Published in 2016 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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For the fam and our one-day Davidowitz Camp

Steinberg peered through his safety goggles at the camp gates. He d been waiting anxiously on the Boys Side lawn for eighteen minutes and six seconds already, so he knew that at any moment . . . There! Guru Yoshi, there! he yelped. The buses are coming in!
I dunno, buddy, you must have twenty-twenty with those goggles on, cause I can t see a thing.
Steinberg wondered what his new counselor, who insisted on being called Guru Yoshi, was a guru of. Certainly not the physics of bus manifestation.
The mix of anticipation and the fresh-cut lawn was making Steinberg wheeze. How do you not . . . see the dust . . . rising up the road? As he caught his breath, his lightning-fast logic skills whipped into action: (a) Yoshi was standing only a quarter of a mile from the camp s entrance. (b) He was not visually impaired. (c) He must have seen it. a + b = c. Steinberg had a name for his impressive internal processor : Chaim Roboto. The dust is rising at the start of the road cause the buses are about to manifest in five, four, three, two . . . Bingo! Just then the first bus came into view. See? Who s the guru now? Steinberg thought. Well, of the things that matter, that is , he autocorrected. If it wasn t science-related, he tended to slack.
Oh, hey, buddy! The buses! Yoshi exclaimed, as if Steinberg s dust theory hadn t just proved true and the buses were randomly appearing and Steinberg couldn t see them unless Yoshi pointed them out to him. As if Steinberg didn t have prescription lab goggles on that he d tinted for UV protection and made tight enough in case he was unexpectedly tossed in the lake.
The buses stopped at the gate.
Bummer! Yoshi exclaimed. He looked around at the sea of male counselors and early-bird campers, then leaned forward toward Rick, who everyone knew was back for his tenth summer. His staff shirt said it: A DECADE AT THE HILLS . Hey, man. You think they ve broken down?
Rick looked over his shoulder. Oh, hey. You re Preston, right?
Preston is my birth name. Guru Yoshi is my spirit name.
Steinberg rolled his eyes so hard, he had to blink to keep his balance.
Cool, man. I m Rick, and my spirit name is Rick.
Steinberg chuckled into his fist. He was going to miss having Rick as his counselor while he and his cabinmates lived in Hamburger Hill with this Preston / Yoshi Guru character.
The buses are fine. They just have to roll into paradise at the same time. Part of the No camper left behind policy, Rick joked. Hey, Steinberg, which one do you think got held up by the drawbridge? Paramus or Long Island?
This was a no-brainer for Chaim Roboto. Paramus. The Paramus buses took the bridge. The Long Island buses didn t. Rick knew that. Everyone knew that.
Rick raised his hand for a high five, and Steinberg slapped it. Meanwhile, Yoshi licked his pointer finger and held it up in the air. My bet s on Long Island.
Rick cocked his head at Steinberg, and they each pressed their lips together to keep their grins from exploding into laughter. Rick ended the conversation with a polite nod and turned back to face the dirt road, holding his wooden San Juan Hill sign from last summer high above his head. Steinberg could see Play Dough s and Smelly s initials still etched on the back.
Yoshi put his hand on Steinberg s shoulder and squeezed. Don t you feel like we ve been waiting forever?
Steinberg checked his stopwatch. It felt like twenty-one minutes and forty-two seconds. Well, I think it feels like twenty-
Nihongo ga hanasemasu ka?
Huh?
I guess not, Yoshi said, nodding away like he was listening to music, even though no music was playing, not even over the PA.
Steinberg s eyes bulged with confusion. He hoped this guy wasn t lacking the watch-and-learn gene. Yoshi had a long way to go before he d be in sync in the way that Steinberg was in sync with his cabinmates: Play Dough and Smelly and Dover and Totle, and even Wiener, when he wasn t being so Wiener. But Steinberg was hopeful because, unlike his cabinmates, who were his best friends, he d actually known Yoshi only for the calculated twenty-two minutes and fourteen seconds that they d been waiting for the buses. People adapt , he reminded himself, thinking about how far Smelly had come from the beginning of last summer.
You are Japanese, right? Yoshi asked, crouching down his six-foot-tall stature so that he was now level with Steinberg s face. Steinberg held back a high-pressure sigh so it wouldn t knock his nosy counselor off balance. Explaining himself to new people was routine, but he d just gone through it ten minutes ago with the new basketball counselor, who d responded with facial ticks: Both my parents are Jews from New York City. Blink . I was adopted from Takahama, Japan, when I was two. Nod . I m Japanewish. Blink. Nod. Blink .
Steinberg settled on a simple answer for Yoshi: Yeah.
Me too.
Steinberg lifted his goggles and took stock: blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin.
What percent? Steinberg asked. He guessed it was a fraction somewhere between zero and one.
One hundred percent, man.
Chaim was short-circuiting.
Yoshi stood up and let out a howling laugh. All signs pointed to a joke.
Don t look so concerned! I go to an American school in Japan. And since I was born there, I m technically Japanese!
Steinberg gave him a look of skepticism. He thought back to the coed sleepover that Missi s grandparents had hosted at their farm in New Jersey last fall. Missi was born in a stable. Does that mean she s a horse?
Steinberg pulled his backpack straps tighter and stretched his back. But then, without warning, Yoshi lifted the backpack from Steinberg s shoulders. Whoa, man, what is in this thing?
Batteries. For my robots. I m an inventor.
When TJ, the camp director, had greeted Steinberg at the gates by flipping him upside down, he d also asked about Steinberg s heavily loaded JanSport. Steinberg knew this would ve made his mom freak-both his horde of batteries and the friendly assault-but she and his dad were busy with the Captain (TJ s wife and co-camp director), who was promising that their son would practice his haftarah for his bar mitzvah three times a week under TJ s instruction.
OH, HEY, STEINBERG!!!
Steinberg recognized that deafening voice. It belonged to Sophie, a camper in his age group whom he d known for exactly four summers. She was currently galloping toward him from the Girls Side lawn, flapping her arms like a chicken for momentum. He noted that her hair was in one, two, three, four . . . seven braids, and she was wearing shorteralls (shorts plus overalls) that were the orange of a traffic cone. Her arms were outstretched like her end goal was a hug, but she stopped short right in front of him, in his personal bubble of oxygen.
I didn t know you were here! she blurted out at what Steinberg estimated to be eighty-eight decibels, just short of a lawn mower.
Yeah, well, my parents dropped me off. Even when the Dramamine settles my nausea, the bus fumes tighten my lungs. I have got to stop telling people that , Steinberg thought. Especially girls .
You re special like me! I just flew in from Florida without my parents, but they made me take my EpiPen. Sophie whipped it out from a purple pouch around her waist so fast that it made his head jerk.
Cool.
American Airlines gives you peanuts, but if I come into contact with peanuts or peanut butter or peanut oil I go into anaphylactic shock.
What? Steinberg could hear his heart pounding in his chest. Sophie was so close, he d be only thirty percent surprised if she could hear it, too.
Anaphylactic shock. Means I stop breathing.
She was making Steinberg short of breath with all of her breathing talk while standing too close by social standards, plus it was ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit outside. Oh, th-th-that s cool, Steinberg stutter