Okay, here's the deal; we are a group of three people who are trying to write this story together. I (Spunky) will be writing the first chapter, then CatHead will take her turn, and then Lex, and it will continue on in that order! It may be a bit confusing, but you'll get the hang of it.
Disclaimer: We own nothing but Cheif, the other campers, Amelia, Popcorn, Sleeping Bag, and Campfire. Believe me, if we owned the other characters, we would have cardboard cutouts of them; not to mention, we'd probably me married to said cardboard cutouts. CatHead would have taken Sirius, leaving Lex and I to fight over James and Remus. In that case, maybe I'm glad that they aren't ours...it's no fun fighting with friends.Lily was packing her bag, preparing to go to a place she hadn't been in a year… summer camp. She had been a counselor there since she had left Hogwarts, and, since she had been living in the wizarding world since then, she thought that it was a nice break in the muggle world. She'd gone there every summer since she was a little kid, and every year, she looked forward to seeing her fellow counselors and meeting her new cabin members.
The best part about going to camp were the stupid nicknames that all of the counselors got. The cabin members almost never knew their counselor's real name, and it was a rare occasion if another counselor did. Lily's closest friends at the camp, however, were an excuse.
Lily had been dubbed "Pajama", "PJ" for short, because, in her third year there, she was participating in the annual girls-against-boys rivalry in the middle of the night when she was caught by the "chief", or head counselor, hanging a bucket of green jello over the cabin door of one of the boys cabins. Lily smiled at the memory.
Her other friends, Popcorn, Campfire, and Sleeping Bag, had acquired their names in the same "ridiculous" manner, so said the chief. Popcorn had been named after the night she popped a bag of popcorn inside a different boy's cabin, scaring them in the middle of their sleep and chasing them out of their cabin. Campfire was named for her habit of nearly scalding her legs at the end of every year jumping over the bonfire. Sleeping Bag was the only one unfortunate enough to be named for the prank pulled on her. She was called Sleeping Bag after waking up on the first day of camp, her first year attending, inside her sleeping bag, on top of her air mattress, in the middle of the lake that separated the girl's "village" from the boy's "village".
Lily loved the way the camp was organized. Each cabin was named after an Island, each group of cabins after a group of Islands. The cabin she had always stayed in, Luzon, Philippines, had the name carved in numerous places all over the cabin. The lake that had separated the villages was simply "the ocean".
It was the place she had come to recognize as a vacation from the trouble that had been in the wizarding world for as long as she had been part of it, maybe longer, and, while she could never completely escape from the disasters that you-know-who and his Death Eaters had been causing for such a long time now, it was a relief to get away from the stress that it was causing and act like a kid again.
Lily threw her bag on the bed, getting up to pick up the picture of her camp friends from the collection of pictures from her past. Some of the pictures were muggle, with unmoving people and smiles that held their place for all of eternity, and some of them were wizard pictures, moving and talking, doing new things every minute. Lily smiled at the picture of her friends, on their very last night as people coming to camp, without being counselors, standing in front of the bonfire, where the entire camp slept out under the starts, like they did on the last night of every year. She studied the picture for a minute, before knocking over all of the pictures on her dresser.
She muttered to herself, repairing broken glass and frames, before rearranging them back on the dresser. She stopped before setting down a picture she didn't recognize. It took a moment before Lily remembered the scene as her last night at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. She looked back at her past self, sitting in the Gryffindor Common Room, mingling with a large group of people. She was sitting with a particularly interesting group of boys that she had become particularly fond of during her last year of school. She remembered how they always managed to keep her smiling, if not laughing so hard that she could scarcely breathing. In the picture, Lily was sitting in between the two most amusing ones…Lily struggled to remember their names.
She set the photograph back on the dresser along with the rest, searching back through her memory for the names of the boys in the picture. 'I wonder where they are now…or if they've grown up at all?' Lily thought before cramming her picture in the bag and throwing it up on the bed next to her guitar case.
"James, please, you'd have so much fun with all of the kids, and you could get to know some more friends, and you would have such a great time, please, please, please, please come? I know that you would love camp, it couldn't be that bad, could it?" Amelia begged, pulling on James's arm like a child.
"Amelia, I can't go, I'm finally getting to the end of my Auror training and I don't want to miss a lot of it; you'd be so much better at it then I would! Besides, what would I do if someone got hurt? I can hardly take care of myself; I'd start freaking out if someone else got hurt; I wouldn't be able to take care of them!" James replied, shaking his head.
"Wait a second; we have Auror training during the summer? Moody never told me that, I'm toast; my summer is completely filled already!" Sirius said, shooting up from where he was sitting. "Hold on, you were with me when he said we didn't get back to our Auror training until September; he couldn't have changed his mind."
James sent Sirius a death glare before Remus mentioned "You'd have a lot of fun, James; I'd be there, and Sirius could come too."
"Wait a second; don't drag me into this…"
"Fine, but only if Sirius comes, too. I don't want to be the only loser there," James told them.
Amelia squealed. "Oh, this is going to be so much fun, James! We'll have such a fantastic time!"
Oh, goody gumdrops! James thought, forcing himself not to roll my eyes.
"LI-I mean, PJ! YOU'RE HERE!" Lily heard Popcorn yell. She was about to turn around to feel a terrible weight on my back. She had just jumped on Lily's shoulders and was yelling out to our friends that Lily had arrived.
Sleeping Bag and Campfire came up to me "PJ", greeting her and helping her get Popcorn off of her shoulders.
"I wonder what this year's kids are going to be like. Last year, my cabin was so noisy, I couldn't sleep at all!" Campfire said, hugging Lily.
"I hope I don't have Cecelia this year, she was the only one in my cabin that I really didn't like much," Popcorn said, shrugging.
"I wouldn't mind if I got any of my cabin members that I had last year," Sleeping Bag said, smiling. She always was the sweetest one of the group.
Lily snickered, looking at the attire that her friends had chosen. Every year, the counselors had to wear something that stuck out of the crowd, something that would keep the campers from going off with other counselors. Popcorn wore a tie-dye shirt and a pair of round sunglasses, along with bell-bottoms; being the tree-hugging hippie that she was. "Still stuck in the last decade, I see."
She smiled, "Don't blame me when the world is ruled by cannibals."
"Well, if there were more places like this camp, we wouldn't need to worry about that," Campfire replied. She was the sporty type, and she wore her football jersey.
"If only that would happen in real life," Sleeping Bag sighed, placing her alien antennas on her head.
Lily always considered herself the lucky one out of the group. She was the only person at camp that didn't have to dress abnormally on the first day; her hair stuck out in a crowd, even amongst the ones that stick out.
"Alright there, Lily?" Lily heard someone ask from behind. She turned around and saw a woman with a giant Indian Headdress.
"Hey, Chief, how's it going?" Popcorn asked.
"Fine, Pamela, thank you," Popcorn winced at hearing her real name. "Here are the lists of the campers that will be staying in your cabin. Ah, here the buses…" She said, walking over to where the buses were parking after coming in the gate. The girls hopped on the tops of the parked buses and unloaded bags and suitcases.
"The Chief said that we'll be sharing a cabin with the boys in our group since it's your first year here," Remus said, as James and Sirius nodded.
"Alright, now that the buses are coming, we've got to have nicknames for you guys," Remus told them as the children started piling off of the buses. "Padfoot, Prongs, are you paying attention?"
"Yeah, but why can't we just stick with 'Padfoot and Prongs'? It's been our nicknames forever, it would be weird if we had to start calling each other new names," Padfoot said, upset that he'd have to change something that had been a custom since Hogwarts.
"You don't want them to find out we're wizards, and we can't risk having to explain what they mean," James said, looking from Sirius to Remus. "So, Remus, what did you have in mind?"
Remus thought for a minute before replying "James, you can be XYZ, and Sirius, you can be Airhead."
"What? Why do I have to have the stupid one?" Sirius asked, but he was ignored by Remus.
"What does 'XYZ' stand for?" James asked.
"Well, it's based on this muggle expression; it stands for 'examine your zipper'." Remus said, smiling.
"What! What is that supposed to mean? Why do I have to have that for a nickname?"
"Well, your favorite thing to do is Quidditch, isn't it? What do you have to do in Quidditch?" Remus asked, smiling like he was kidding some ridiculous joke.
"Uh, fly on a broom?" James asked, dumbly.
"Exactly. And, isn't 'fly' another name for zipper?" He asked.
"Oh, fine, but you have to be the one to say that when people look at me with a weird look," James muttered.
"Why do I have to be Airhead?" Sirius whined as a group of kids came up to them.
"Alright, welcome to Cabin Luzon, located in the Philippines! I am your counselor, Pajama, or PJ for short and one little thing you should know about me is that I am the world's biggest tomboy! Whether that is a problem with you or not, we'll just have to find out… Welcome to camp!" Lily said, letting her cabin members into the cabin.
The girls set their bags on their individual beds and started to unpack. Setting her guitar case on the bed, one of the girls pointed and said "I thought we couldn't bring anything like that…"
"You aren't, but I am using it for the talent show at the end of the summer, and I am a counselor, therefore, I get permission to do whatever I want!" Lily said shrugging and continued to unpack. The girl huffed and mumbled under her breath.
As Lily continued to unpack, another one of the girls noticed Lily's large supply of lipstick and toilet paper. "I thought you said that you were a tomboy…" She mentioned.
Lily smiled, turning around to face the rest of the girls. "Now girls, I don't know if anyone's told you about the annual girls verses boys thing going on around this camp, but it is vital to have a large stock of lipstick when you are performing bandit-like procedures." She said, holding up a tube of lipstick.
"Why would we need lipstick?" The girl looked confused.
Lily opened the tube of lipstick and drew two lines under her eyes, then stepped back to admire her work. "You can't possibly act like a bandit unless you look like one."
The girls looked around at each other, smirking, before they all left for lunch.
Overall, Lily's day went fairly well with her cabin members…if only James could say the same.
Well, that's the first chapter. Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease leave a review! Also, if you do, if you could send it to "Spunky" it would be really cool of you, that way my friends and I don't get confused with which revew went to which chapter each person wrote.