One summer morning, the thirteen campers sat in the mess hall, awaiting their "breakfast". When Chef Hatchet plunked thirteen scoops of their meal into their bowls, they couldn't help but laugh (to keep from crying) at what was passing as food these days.
The morning slop bubbled and gurgled in its bowl. It seemed to be trying to communicate to the campers, "Put me out of my misery!" Knowing how the island was crawling with mutants, they thought this was a likely possibility. No way were any of them eating, much less touching than sentient abomination.
"Why is the food here so gross!" Dakota shed a tear. "No organic fruit salads, no fresh blueberry scones, not even a pink-berry smoothie to start the day?"
"Speak for yourself," Chester spat. "This mush goes well with my bland diet."
"My gym socks smell better than this stuff," said Jo.
Lightning squinted at his bowl of horror. "Where's the protein in this?" He shoved it away.
Complaint after complaint was uttered about the terrible food. All the insults eventually reached Hatchet's ears amidst the noisiness in the kitchen, where he was preparing the "beef" for their lunchtime Sloppy Joes. Coincidentally, Dawn had noticed a shortage of mutant goats on her morning nature walk.
Bursting through the kitchen door, Hatchet let them have it.
"You ungrateful maggots…!"
Scott shrugged, and sprinkled some dirt into his mouth.
"...Of all my years as a cook…!"
B almost uttered a word of protest.
"...Slaving over a hot stove every day…!"
Staci uttered tons of words of protest, mostly relating to her Great-Uncle Milton's discovery of words of protest.
"...If you brats think you can cook better than me, why don't you?!" Hatchet finished, smoke fuming out of his flared nostrils.
Promptly turning around and slamming the kitchen door behind him, Hatchet grumbled. From underneath the kitchen door, his anger, and eventual sadness could be heard, as his ranting subsided into sniffling.
Brick rose from his seat. "Soldiers, how dare we criticize our dining-hall lieutenant's culinary prowess. We rely on him for nutrition. For survival!" Running after Hatchet, Brick uttered apology after apology, begging not to be "dishonorably discharged".
Pulling out a piece of bark and beginning to carve it, Scott mulled over the end of Hatchet's rant. "Maybe Chef's idea isn't a total lump of crud…"
"What idea?" Zoey asked.
"Taking over the cooking ourselves. I'm tired of this crummy food tasting so bland."
"Are you outta your mind?" Anne Maria said. "The problem isn't that the food is bland, it's that it tastes like Theresa-Marie's burnt pesto from Real Housewives of Toronto."
"Vomitrocious," Dakota agreed.
"Whatever," said Scott. "All I'm saying is a pinch of dirt and mealworms in our dishes would make it edible for once."
"You might want soil and insects in your food because you're a hick," Jo smirked, "but we're in civilization. Food tastes the best when it tastes like victory!"
"And that would taste like…?"
"Sweat."
"Come again?" Mike blinked.
"The secret ingredient to my protein shakes: the blood, sweat, and tears of my enemies. I collect all of them in a jar as I'm forcing them into submission in a wrestling match. Right before they tap out, I scoop up as much of it as I can. When I get home for my victory meal–full of carbs to pregame before my post-game workout–I blend the jar of my opponents' blood, sweat, and tears in with my shake. Chef's kiss," Jo smiled dreamily.
"I've only been outside my bubble for a few weeks now," said Cameron, "but I don't think I'll ever hear anything as disgusting as that for as long as I live."
"What're you talking about? That sounds sha-awesome!" said Lightning, only registering the "protein shake" part.
"Friends," Dawn clasped the hands of the campers sitting next to her–B and Staci. "Why don't we savor the greatest food of all–the inner sustenance of our auras." She smiled serenely, closing her eyes. Everyone else rolled their eyes.
Sam shook his head. "For a Level 10 pixie class like you, that might work, but I'm personally a man of Mountain Dew and Cheetos!"
Scott raised his eyebrow. "We can tell, Soft Serve," he said, flicking Sam's fingers, the tips of which were covered in orange dust. Scott, Jo, Lightning, and Anne Maria snickered. Dakota started to stifle a laugh, but stopped completely after seeing Sam's eyes droop.
Dawn looked confused as to how the strength of others' auras weren't enough to live off of. One look exchanged between B and Dawn, though, told her how scientifically impossible that was for the rest of them.
"We've all got lots of different ideas about what's delicious," Zoey chuckled. "Maybe we could have a day where we all take over the cooking?"
Mike nodded along. "We could make it a group effort–"
"–OR a competition!" Chris burst through the front door of the dining hall, a large video camera hoisted over his shoulder.
"Uh..were you eavesdropping on us?" Dakota furrowed her brow. "Because if so–make sure you get my good side!"
" Zoey was onto something," Chris explained. "Before she got all kumbaya. Why don't you all see who truly makes the best dish? The winner can have whatever they want served in the mess hall all day tomorrow! No expense limit either–community service tax write-offs and all that."
The campers' ears perked up.
Originally, when Chris stepped through the door, they expected his thinly-veiled attempt to goad them into competing against each other so he could film it and get un-blacklisted by Hollywood and make millions again and blah blah blah would be unappealing and repulsively predatory, as usual. But after weeks of crummy camp food, they all knew that a break from the daily assault on their taste buds was in order. Chris might have been a better "slimy TV producer" than "caring camp counselor", but the incentive of semi-enjoyable meals was weighing on their decision to play along.
So…even if Chris was definitely going to exploit their competitive spirits and desire for humane food, imagining breakfasts of gourmet French toast and dinners of filet mignon if they won was too enticing. After a twelve-person huddle (Brick was still consoling Chef, in relentlessly loyal little-drummer-boy fashion), the campers came back with their answer.
Turning around as their spokesperson, Anne Maria's no-nonsense eyes–amplified by her heavy Snooki macara–sized up Chris.
"Fine, we'll bite," she said. "But how are you going to judge our cooking contest? I don't watch any cooking reality TV, but I watch a lotta Real Housewives, and I can tell crap from a mile away," she narrowed her eyes, getting up in Chris's worried face.
"Relax," he held up his hands. "The competition will be judged impartially, and not by me."
The campers sighed in relief.
"It'll be judged by Chef Hatchet!" he said.
The campers screamed in terror.
At that moment, Hatchet burst through the door, not to scold the campers this time, but to revel in their indignant expressions. His newly-appointed assistant judge Brick marched behind him, eager to serve and protect…and taste-test.
"That's right," said Chris. "The very Chef Hatchet whose cooking you all dragged through the mud this morning!"
"Dragged his crummy cooking through the mud?" Lightning stood up. "He dragged us through the mud afterwards, so it cancels out! We're basically even, by the laws of…sha-algebra or something." Cameron smiled, glad that his weekly tutoring sessions for the footballer were amounting to something, however wrong that something was.
"Regardless," Chris said, delighting in the petty retribution of it all. "Don't expect any easy scoring, is all I'll say."
Seeing their judge with a vendetta, the campers started to protest, but Hatchet banged a spatula on a pot, shutting them up.
"Listen up, maggots! You may not like it, but I've got more cooking experience in my gangrene-decaying pinkie toe than you all have got combined! It's 0900 hours right now. Be back at high noon with a dish for me to test if you want to compete."
"The theme for Round 1 is…" announced Chris, "Appetizers!"
"Now scram, you buncha future burger-flippers!" yelled Hatchet.
That was the only warning they needed to scramble, both away from the rage-induced veteran in the puffy chef's hat and to make a meal fit for a king–or at least for Chef Hatchet.
Soon enough, the clock struck 12 PM, or "high noon," as Mike, the Spaghetti Western fanatic, kept saying, much to Cameron's pop-culturally ignorant and Zoey's pop-culturally repulsed chagrin. At 1200 hours, the campers gathered once again in the mess hall, stealing looks at each other's covered dishes and glaring at each other, the spirit of competition filling the air and everything on the line–like a breakfast with pancakes filled with actual blueberries and not blueberries: berries turned blue from radiation poisoning, that is.
Hatchet and Brick planned to walk around the mess hall like a gallery, surveying and scoring each camper's dish on a scale of one to ten. As Chris explained, the maximum score, from both judges combined, would be 20 points, and only the campers with the six highest scores could advance to the second round. Half the campers being gutted from the game almost as quickly as it had begun was nerve-wracking, but they were at the mercy of a vengeful Chef Hatchet and a sadistic Chris. Maybe they'd made a mistake signing on for this…
Staci went first. "La sopa de crema de baba de caracol!" She revealed a bowl of syrupy gray soup.
Brick and Hatchet tasted the soup. The pleasant mixture of sweet and savory surprised them.
"Nine out of ten!" Brick said. "Impressive work, private."
"Seven out of ten," said Hatchet. "Not bad, but something a little more binding would've done the trick. Still…what's your secret ingredient?"
"Snail slime cream!" she chirped.
Brick gagged, but Hatchet held his stomach.
"Mouthy girl," he said, stepping towards her. "You made an appetizer with one of the most disgusting ingredients I've ever heard…I'm impressed. Eight out of ten points."
Staci clapped and jumped up and down.
"That's seventeen points to Staci!" Chris zoomed his camera in on her shockingly high score.
"Onto the next one," Hatchet said. His expression hardened. "What is this?"
Mike, Cameron, and Zoey circled around a single covered dish.
"We decided to combine our three distinct culinary palettes into a gastronomical wonder!" Cameron blinked at Hatchet, who was unimpressed.
"We put our thinking caps together, so we hope you like it, Chef," Zoey smiled. Her hands itched with excitement
"Ahem!" Mike cleared his throat. "I present to you…tentacle tenders!" He scratched his neck.
He unveiled a dish of three breaded tentacles, the suckers stuffed with herbs and a container of a glowing green dip in the middle.
"Why is it glowing? asked Brick.
"No idea," Cameron scratched his head. "I ran an isotopic analysis on the vines we collected to make the veggie dip, but nothing indicating radioactivity came up." He scratched his arm, too.
Brick and Hatchet tasted a tentacle tender.
"Delectable," Brick said. "Adequate job, campers! Eight points."
"Not bad, but a little tough," Hatchet frowned. "Five p–"
He stopped in stunned silence at the sight before him. Red rashes were covering the three campers' arms, hands, and neck.
Scott looked at them and laughed. "No wonder your dorky iso-whatever didn't find radioactivity. It's just poison oak."
Cameron gasped. "But the vines didn't look anything like that!"
Zoey winced. "Sorry, guys!" She scratched her hands. "I separated the leaves from the vines–I had no idea it was poison oak."
"As my old scoutmaster always said, 'Leaves of three, leave them be.'" Brick shook his head, disappointed.
"That would be really helpful about two hours ago," Mike's scratching became more frenzied. The red spots had completely covered his arms.
Hatchet backed away from them. "For being a bunch of poison-oak-kissing tulips and almost getting me killed, you all are disqualified! Now go to the infirmary and wait there! I can't leave you kids anywhere," he grumbled. Putting on a nurse's hat, he declared that "Chef Hatchet" was gone and "Nurse Hatchet" was entering the building. He corralled the three spotted campers away to the medical tent for a healthy dose of screaming and calamine lotion.
After Hatchet returned, his scoring seemed to get even harsher. Or maybe the campers' dishes seemed to suck even more?
Dawn's dish of "aura hor d'oeuvres" (a tray of six empty muffin liners) earned her a laughing fit from Hatchet, then a disqualification right after.
Sam spent too long wondering if Dawn was secretly an energy vampire instead of a gentle aura-reader, then by the time he realized time was running out to cook something, he got distracted by earning Platinum medals on all the Cooking Mama DS dishes, and by the time he got finished with that, he had two minutes left and just placed a bag of Cheeto Puffs on his dish. After unveiling it, Chef's roaring laughter sent a swarm of rat-seagulls flying out of their trees. Shockingly, Sam was disqualified too.
Anne Maria's cannoli would've been a crowd pleaser, if she hadn't spent three minutes spraying the poof on her hair right next to it. By the time Brick and Hatchet had choked down a bite, they could feel their throat screaming for the dessert, coated with beauty-salon product at that point, to stop. Zero-out-of-ten from Hatchet, and a one-out-of-ten from Brick, for "effort." Not that cannoli was an appetizer anyway.
It should be noted, though, that not all the dishes were as hilariously disgusting (or disgustingly hilarious?) as the eliminated campers.
Lightning had the stellar idea of piling strips of tree bark onto his plate for a "carb overload" appetizer, since "carb" and "bark" were the same word if said backwards (Cameron had been including wordplay puzzles in their tutoring sessions, too). Absolutely appalled by the taste but fondly remembering the days of subsisting on tree bark for wilderness training, Brick and Hatchet gave him three points each.
Amidst the spare parts and junk metal he fished out of the bottom of the lake that morning, B caught a four-eyed catfish with gills and talons. Arguably the most normal appetizer there, his fish sticks earned him eight points from Brick, and six from Hatchet.
Scott's dish, while inevitably sprinkled with dirt, included a surprisingly tasty earthworm sautee with a smooth crunch. Jo put her money where her mouth was with her equally delicious "blood, sweat, and tears" beverage, and Dakota's caterer–I mean, Dakota herself, crafted a light antipasto with a sweet vinaigrette.
With that, the first round was over, and six campers were left standing in the quest to make their food dreams a reality at camp–at least for one day. Staci, Lightning, B, Scott, Jo, and Dakota.
At that point, Chris sent the six campers off on a three-hour preparation period so he could edit footage (i.e. lounge in his "cottage" hot tub) before Round 2. Round 2's theme, Hatchet said, would be salad.
It didn't take much for the six semifinalists to prepare their dishes. Salad was easy enough–rip some glowing leaves off some glaring trees, toss in a few shrieking pinecones, maybe snag a wilting, semi-edible cherry tomato from the kitchen while Hatchet wasn't looking. Each of them put their own unique spin on their plates of leaves. Lightning dusted his with a dressing of protein powder, Scott with a dusting of dirt–which was getting repetitive, Dakota with a splash of imported raspberry vinaigrette (a parting gift from her secret caterer in Round 1), and B with a side of 3D-printed ranch dressing–his methods for doing so are still unknown to this day. Only Jo and Staci didn't spruce up their mysterious forest-leaf salads: Jo because she didn't need to dress up food that was clearly a salad of champions, and Staci because there was bad juju in trying to spruce up her great-grandparents' salad recipes.
For Scott, a day of soil-infused meals reminding him of home was too enticing to pass up. It wasn't enough that he thought his salad was clearly the best–the others had to be sure to lose. Seeing Mike, Cameron, and Zoey's poison-oak mishap from Round 1, he strolled up to the medical tent with a paltry bouquet of wildflowers, a gesture so as to say "Get well soon!" The three itchy campers laid on cots. Seeing Scott's kind gesture, Mike was suspicious, Zoey was flattered, and Cameron was struck by the fasciation on the flowers. Their abnormal growths were definitely a result of the island's radioactivity, as per usual, but that didn't make them any less interesting. Setting the flowers on Cameron's cot, he offhandedly asked where they had gotten the poison oak, so he could avoid accidentally picking some during the salad round. By the time Scott left the medical tent, his sabotage was all but guaranteed to work. An hour later, five of the six salads sitting on the table, waiting to be picked apart by Hatchet, were coated with crushed leaves of poison oak.
Unfortunately for Scott, the person responsible for arranging the dishes for dramatic effect was Chris. And if Chris, being the grade-A camp counselor he was, truly cared about the cooking contest's accuracy instead of getting the juiciest footage possible for his cooking-show pitch, he would've made sure the six semifinalists received their own dishes. But this was Chris McLean the flippant washed-up TV host, after all. Still washing the hot tub's jet bubbles from his hair, he absentmindedly tossed each dish to a random seat, thinking up titles for his potential show.
When the six campers left shuffled back into the mess hall to have their beds of lettuce undergo a vicious verbal dissection, the ensuing chaos had already been set in stone. The dishes were covered and no one had any idea of what was to come.
First, Hatchet and Brick surveyed Scott's "earthy" salad. His consistency was leafy, texture was leafy, taste…leafy. Salads are difficult dishes to mess up, so it was no surprise when Hatchet and Brick decided on a solidly high score for him. In fact, sure that all of their dishes were adequate enough, Chris's inner (and outer, let's be honest) meddling TV producer urged Hatcher to speed the judging along so he could stage a fight between two campers about which of their salads was better. Saluting his camp counselor, the ever obedient Brick scooped up leaves from the other five camper's dishes and handed some to Hatchet. After stuffing the pieces of unwashed salad into their mouths, the two judges were just itching to give high scores to the others, too. Literally. Hatchet tried to open his mouth, but his lips were covered with blisters and he was scratching something fierce. Likewise with Brick, the soldier-to-be was so choked up that one would think he was getting teary-eyed at the deliciousness of Scott's dish. Chef's kiss.
Not quite–Chef's nightmare. The cadet was actually speechless from the poison oak swelling his throat with an itching sensation that only a back-scratcher that could reach into someone's trachea could fix. Hatchet rushed out the door to the medical tent, Brick closely behind him. Hatchet had almost exited the mess hall, but not before making two enraged "0's" with his spotted hands and staring daggers at the dirt farmer.
The other five stared into their dishes and were surprised to see, upon closer inspection, tiny specks of poison-oak leaves in their otherwise mediocre salads. This addition of culinary sabotage, though, had tanked their dishes' quality from just "mediocre" to "hospitalizing." Their closer look at the irritating ingredient in their salads exposed them to the same poison oak that had shut up Hatchet's barking criticism and Brick's rule-bound moralizing. Too busy itching their face to yell at Scott and their hands to attack him, Lightning, Jo, Dakota, and B (not that he would have yelled anyway) ran out, too. Scott, having his poison-oak-free dish swapped with Staci's, succumbed to the itchiness too. Only Staci was shocked to see that her dirt-sprinkled salad looked completely normal. She smiled and patted herself on the back. The Dirt Salad recipe remains untouched. Thanks, Great Grandma Genevieve! And thanks, Great-Great-Great Grandpa Lester for your discovery of self-congratulatory back pats….and thanks, Great-Great-Great-Great…
The cooking contest was put on an indefinite hiatus. Chris threw his camera in the trash and started grumbling about backup TV pitches. The campers grumbled, too–no cooking contest meant no winner, and no winner meant the same old, biohazardous gruel for breakfast; the same old suspect sandwiches for lunch; and the same old mysterious meat surprises for dinner; with a rock-hard, stale slice of cake or simply the food stuck in between their teeth as dessert.
That evening, the cramped medical tent was filled with ten scratching campers: Mike, Cameron, Zoey, Hatchet, Brick, Lightning, Jo, Dakota, B, and Scott. Their discomfort was endless. The scratching would last through the night, thanks to a shortage of topical ointment, which itself was thanks to Chris blowing 80% of that week's camp budget on the camera equipment and flashy business-presentation materials for his "surefire" teen cooking show idea.
"When I get my hands on you," Scott heard from Jo, or at least deciphered from her, since her throat was swollen shut. "You'll be a dead man, Dirt Boy."
Scott tried to feign a scoff, but it came out more like a chicken's croak, thanks to his similarly closed throat. And just like a chicken, he inched from his cot towards the tent flap just in case he needed a running start after everyone recovered.
"I should've known something was up when you brought us those flowers," Cameron fumed. "Granted, the rapid genetic mutation in their flowering stage was still quite interesting…"
"I can't believe we're going back to…to…protein-less breakfast!" Lightning burst into tears, his sobbing hiccups sounding like heartbroken "sha's".
Scott rolled his eyes, then scratched them. "Look, I'm s…"
B raised his eyebrow at him. Is he trying to…?
"A snake?" Manitoba said, for the fedora Mike hung on the medicine cabinet above him had toppled over onto his head. "Yeah, you got that right, mate."
"I'm s-so…"
"So annoying?" Zoey guessed. "I don't like to speak bad about others, but…you said it, not me."
"S-so-sorr–"
"Sorely mistaken if you think you aren't paying for my poison-oak cucumber skincare treatment?" Dakota frowned. "Because you definitely are."
"Sorry. I'm sorry, okay."
"Apologies are for the weak! If I went down in the contest, I was always planning on taking you with me," Jo glared at him.
"An apology is a start…even if it is Scott's," Zoey sighed.
That moment, a small party of the remaining campers opened the tent flap. Staci, Sam, Dawn, and Anne Maria poked their heads in and stared at the itch-inducing sight.
"We come in peace," Dawn smiled. She held a potted venus flytrap in her arms which suggested everything but. It spewed an herbally-scented cream of some sort onto the floor and snapped at the strangers apprehensively.
"Knock knock!" Staci said. "My Great Great Uncle Eustace invented knock-knock jokes, by the way. Before him, you had to–"
"Nuh–uh," Anne Maria shoved her aside. "Dawn and Miss Mouth over here brought youse guys some 'camel line' lotion or whatever."
"Calamine," Sam corrected. "It heals all your status effects in Pocket Monsters, so it'll probably work on us powerless humans too."
Cameron was starstruck yet again. Mutations inducing size increase and a secretion of natural skin-irritation ointment? Occasionally, camp felt less like a bubbleless hell-on-earth, and more like a biological wonderland.
Like a motley crew of unpaid nurses, the four campers walked around, letting the snapping carnivorous plant spit out calamine lotion into each of the others' hands, which they vigorously rubbed on their skin.
"Thanks, Sammy," Dakota sighed in relief, slathering her arms in the topical ointment. Blushing at this nickname, Sam stumbled over a "No problem", sounding as if his throat had closed up, too.
"But where did you guys find this little buddy?" Zoey asked as she petted the plant, which cooed at the touch. It hid its razor-sharp leaf teeth and looked almost cute.
"Right by the bed of poison-oak I pass on my morning nature walks," Dawn explained. "This morning, after seeing Chef cruelly kidnap a group of mutant goats to cook–"
Hatchet coughed loudly, drowning out the rest of her answer. Dawn glared at him with the full force of environmental disappointment, but said nothing else.
"The remedy to our epidermal woes was right next to the poison-oak and we never saw it," Cameron face-palmed.
"So much for poison-oak duty," a fedora-less Mike frowned.
He and Zoey apologized to Cameron, who readily accepted it. Scott started to mumble a hypothetical of the two spotting the calamine-spitting venus flytrap if they hadn't spent the entire morning making googly eyes at each other. This time, Mike and Zoey acquired Hatchet's sudden-onset loud coughing fit, and Scott dropped the subject, mainly after the flytrap chomped onto his finger and wouldn't let go.
A man of his word, Brick retrieved the last salad sample from his pocket. The others yelled at him not to try it, but Brick promised to fairly judge every last dish, for better or worse. A severe allergic reaction definitely felt like the "or worse" part, but Brick didn't care. Popping the leaves into his mouth, he chewed on it thoughtfully, before his eyes widened. Fearing he would need a double dose of calamine lotion, the four makeshift nurses hurried over to him. Dawn waited with baited breath. Sam sucked in a breath. Anne Maria watched in annoyed, but alarmed anticipation. Staci frowned, expecting the worst.
Brick merely smiled. Seven-out-of-ten is what he rated the dish. The best–and only–score yet of the otherwise disqualified salads. Shocked, Hatchet grabbed one of the salad leaves and chewed on it. Providing the exact same score, it seemed that fourteen points was all it took to declare a winner.
"Sorta caked with dirt, but otherwise downright delectable!" Brick saluted to no one in particular, for he had no idea who the mystery winning salad belonged to.
"Whose dish was that?" Chef asked. "Looks like one of you maggots made me semi-proud."
Scott swelled–from pride this time, not poison-oak. "That would be me! It's our family's Soil Salad secret recipe!"
B stared at him blankly. Is it not just a sprinkle of dry dirt on a bed of unwashed maple leaves?
Staci frowned. "Huh…that's funny. My salad looked exactly like that."
"Think again, Bird Brain. Chris must've swapped the dishes around before the judging."
Hatchet shrugged. "The dish you presented is the dish you own! Staci wins!"
As much as their hands, still slightly itching, would allow, the campers clapped for her. Staci smiled–it was the second time she had won anything in her life. The first was her winning her high school's creative writing contest by submitting a two-hundred-page summary of her family history. The English teachers who judged the event thought it made for a compelling, if a bit long-winded novel, especially the chapters about Staci's ancestors' supposed invention of whipped cream and mechanical pencils. Despite that, Staci intended to submit the summary not as a novel, but as a familial biography. Oh well, she thought then, receiving the grand prize of a free Ancestry family DNA test. A blue ribbon is a blue ribbon!
As much as Scott grumbled about the supposed injustice of Hatchet's targeted rule–he had landed practically the entire camp in the infirmary, after all–the war veteran wouldn't budge. Staci was the de facto winner, having not poisoned any of the judges. After a while, Scott's indignation subsided. After all, the dirt farmer thought, if I apologize but keep whining about getting totally scammed out of a win, they won't let their guards down long enough for me to scam them again. So much for a change of heart?
Lightning and Jo were miffed about losing, too, but they were glad they could refocus their competitive efforts against each other on athleticism again. As for B, he was just there for the technological inspiration–an idea for an invention that automatically dispensed calamine lotion on the afflicted patient's skin was already formulating in his brain. Seeing how little his tutoring on Lightning had worked, Cameron planned to join the silent camper on the endeavor.
When Sam said he knew Dakota hired a caterer, the heiress was offended. She asked him to explain. When he remarked that a girl as fashion-forward as her probably didn't have time to be big on cooking, she basked in the compliment. Calling him "Sammy" again, Sam considered a legal name change at the end of the summer.
Eager to hear Staci's plans for her upcoming day of total culinary control, the campers sat as she explained in excruciating detail the historical backgrounds behind each of the meals' family recipes. Quickly, the campers remembered that this was why they didn't frequently ask Staci open-ended questions. At the very least, the campers could comfort themselves in knowing that they could keep themselves entertained in their cots for the night, by seeing who could stay awake the longest listening to Staci's explanation.
To this day, they still don't know who won.