Chapter 6

Couples

The next day the boys didn't go in to try and wake the girls, so naturally the girls were late to breakfast. So breakfast became break-super-fast. They didn't even have time to sit down with the boys before the bell drilled out it's sad greeting. They grabbed their toast and headed out the door.

As they were walking Twitch came up behind Katie. "Guess what?" Katie rolled her eyes. "Oh no. What?" "I have a nickname for you. It's perfect." Katie turned on her heel, nearly making Twitch slam into her. "Tell me." Twitch actually looked nervous. "It's umm...Mustang."

Zigzag and Hannah had sort-of slipped into their own little world on the way to "work." Talking back and forth, they soon knew nearly everything about each other. "I've got your nickname, Hannah." Zigzag informed Hannah rather suddenly. Hannah's eyebrows raised in spite of herself. "Okay, I'm curious now. What is it?" Zigzag smiled. "Well, since you have 5 cats at home, and your name IS Hannah, so now it's Kat!" He smiled proudly.

Later as the teens were working, Mr. Man drove up in his clunky light blue truck. (no...Twitch didn't start twitching, b/c he didn't like that old thing.) When he got out he walked over to the edge of where they were all digging and made an announcement. "Kids. I think I have someone in this truck you might remember." With that the other door of the truck opened and out stepped Stanley Yelnats.

Mandy had just gotten out of her hole to get water when Stanley had stepped out. She came within a hair of falling right back in again. He caught her eye with a pleasant surprised look dancing across his face. "Umm...Mr. Man. I didn't know we had girls at the camp now."

Mr. Man look embarrass. "We...umm...had a minor mistake made sir." The boy caught the last word and look over at Stanley questionably.

He smiled. "Yeah. Well, since I own this camp now..."

He barely said this before the boys started cheering and yelling and laughing all at the same time.

Armpit walked up to Stanley and threw his arms around him. Poor Stanley.

"Ah. Umm...Armpit man! Put it down..." Stanley started walking backwards to try to get away from the smell.

"Stanley, look out!"

But before he had any time to think Stanley fell right into a hole. Mandy's hole. (I'll leave this part to your imagination.) Mr. Man walked over. "Not for business. We are going to stop digging right now." He half grinned. "But this still is a detention camp. We'll need to come up with some other way to "help" these kids."

Stanley crawled out of the hole, pulling Mandy up after him. As Katie looked over at Mandy she smiled. Mandy looked like she was totally lost in her own world. But now that Katie thought about it...so were Hannah and Zigzag. And what was happening between her and Twitch was too weird for words. Another thing that had happened was that morning Katie had been walking and, (surprise!) Twitch hadn't been anywhere where he could see her, she tripped and fell on her face, scraping her knee.

FLASHBACK

(about a minuet later)

"Mustang, are you ok? I mean I was in line getting my shovel when all of a sudden I just had this feeling you were hurt so I came to see. Is your knee okay?"

END FLASHBACK

Yeah, it had been weird.