Crossing Over Read online

  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.

  Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

  115 West 18th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  www.abramsbooks.com

  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 thou
ght 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 stuttered, hoping she’d leave so he could puff his inhaler in peace.

  “Whatever. It’s not that scary. I know what foods to avoid. But in case someone forces me to eat something that contains peanuts—”

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  “—then I just do this.” Sophie went to stab him in the thigh. He let out a choked cry as the EpiPen stopped a centimeter from his cargo shorts.

  Time for the inhaler, Steinberg decided. He took a puff.

  “Wow! I was kidding!” She laughed. “Even if I did stab you, it’s just adrenaline, silly!”

  Oh, well in that case, stab away! Steinberg rolled his eyes.

  Sophie put away her EpiPen and reached into a second bag, this one draped over her shoulder. Steinberg’s heart raced at the thought of what weapon she was taking out next. Luckily it was just a book, and unless she chucked it at his brain, he knew he’d be safe.

  “It’s classic BR,” she remarked, showing its silver cover.

  “Uh-huh,” Steinberg said between inhaler puffs, even though “BR” was foreign to Chaim Roboto. Sophie was like a weird science experiment he was still trying to figure out. He didn’t want to give her too much attention in case she imploded in on herself, but he wanted to engage her just enough so that he could track her ever-evolving, ever-surprising personality on a summer-to-summer basis.

  “Bot-rom,” she enunciated, as if her made-up acronym was used in basic conversation worldwide and Steinberg was an idiot for not knowing what it stood for.

  “Cool.” He scanned Chaim for “bot-rom” and came up with nothing.

  “Ro-bot rom-ance!” she squealed with an eye roll, hugging the book to her chest.

  Steinberg saved it to Chaim for future Sophie confrontations. He guessed she’d moved on from last summer’s obsession: vampires.

  “I’m on chapter thirteen.”

  “Well, that’s . . .”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Steinberg.”

  You’re stealing my oxygen, step away from the bubble?

  “You’re thinking: ‘Ease up, Sophie Edgersteckin. It’s summer. It’s the season of fun!’ ”

  “I wasn’t thinking that.”

  “Well, reading is fun. And for me, reading bot-rom is as much fun as you have emceeing Miss Rolling Hills every year.”

  Only Sophie would compare reading a book to emceeing Miss Rolling Hills, the camp-wide cross-dressing beauty pageant. emceeing a camp-wide contest was “mad cool” by all standards. Reading about robot love? Only mad cool to Sophie. Though, at least she said emcee, he thought—a real acronym. What does that stand for again? Microphone champ? Chaim came up blank. He’d have to ask Dover. Dover knew random facts.

  “And this book is teaching me so much about building robots. Now winning the robotics contest will be a breeze!”

  Steinberg froze. His stomach bubbled with excitement. Five summers ago, he’d chosen Camp Rolling Hills because of the robots featured on their camper-recruitment video. He was more than disappointed to learn that the video had been made fifteen years earlier and that there’d been no robots since. When he found out, he’d tried to run away from the camp, but his cabinmates had foiled his plans. “A ROBOTICS CONTEST?!” How could Sophie know about this before Chaim Roboto did? “Was there a letter sent home about it?”

  “A letter?! No!” she exclaimed. “A few weeks ago, my mom called TJ to ask what’s new this summer. She does it every year to make sure Camp Rolling Hills is keeping things fresh. And then TJ told my mom that there would be a robotics contest! And I LOVE robots!”

  For a millisecond, Steinberg wanted to call her out as a poser—this was the first summer he’d heard about Sophie’s supposed “robot obsession,” which meant she’d loved robots for, at max, ten months, whereas he’d loved robots for thirteen years. But this was no time to have a sour ’tude. This was a time for robot planning!

  “What are the parameters?” he asked.

  “You make a robot.”

  “What kind of robot?”

  “A winning one.”

  “Obviously . . .”

  “We can use supplies from Arts and Crafts, but we’re encouraged to be innovative. It needs to have a purpose, Steinberg. It needs to do something extraordinary! You know, something that will really wow the judges.”

  Steinberg could feel his synapses firing. At home, he and his He-bros (his Hebrew school friends, Moses and Sam) made robots in Steinberg’s bedroom, but the robots couldn’t see the light of day because (a) Steinberg lived in a basement apartment; (b) their classmates had stolen, broken, and or flushed down the toilet their greatest inventions; and (c) there were no robot contests at Beth Shalom or his middle school. Steinberg was a robobrained fish in a massive pond of cool kids, and he had yet to find his place, let alone be recognized for his genius.

  Camp was different. Here, robots were his thing, and he was THE MAN because of it. He had a place. All his cabinmates did—they were cogs in a well-oiled machine: Totle was the philosophical jock, Play Dough was their impulsive leader, Dover was the raid expert, Smelly was the musical newbie with make-out experience, and Wiener was the butt of every joke. Their cabin had magical chemistry, and with all of their talents tied perfectly together somehow, they were an unstoppable force.

  And now, for the first time ever, he could show his camp family just how genius his genius could go. If the judges wanted to be wowed, he’d give them wow. His robot would be his most brilliant invention yet. His robot cou
ld become the Rolling Hills mascot! The logo on every camp T-shirt! They’d be invited to co-emcee the most important Rolling Hills activities! Like Miss Rolling Hills! They’d take center stage to thunderous applause! Oh boy, he and his robot would be the celebrity couple of the century! Double dates with TJ and the Captain!

  Sophie was nodding her head, as if she could see inside Steinberg’s brain. He was pretty sure she couldn’t—she was probably just mirroring his enthusiasm—but he quieted Chaim down just in case. “So, what’s your robot idea?”

  Sophie bounced her eyebrows up and down. “My lips are sealed,” she whispered, even though her lips were an inch apart. Steinberg’s mind raced ahead with battery inventory and model numbers and rubric ideas as Sophie applied six swipes of Chap-Stick. He had no idea what extraordinary thing his robot would do, but he was sure his cabinmates would make great lab assistants, maybe even help him come up with the winning idea!

  Sensing the awkward silence, or, more likely, totally oblivious to it, Sophie started up again. “All right, well, I’m gonna go back over to the Girls’ Side of the fork—NOT spoon. Scottie is my counselor this summer, and she told me I could say hi to you for a minute, and I believe”—she checked her watch—“my minute is up. Bye!” With that, she turned on her heel and skipped away, crossing the dirt road to where the girl counselors were cheering with banners and welcome signs, anxiously awaiting the buses like the guys.

  Steinberg looked up at Rick, who was clapping at random intervals and chanting, “Ran-dom clap-ping!” Steinberg watched Yoshi trying to follow Rick’s lead. His first go at watch-and-learn! Steinberg joined in while moving his gaze up the dirt road and, sure enough, it was time. The buses were rolling in.

  All ninety-seven staff members and twenty-four early-bird campers gravitated toward the buses, chanting the traditional welcome song, their voices growing louder and louder. Steinberg estimated ninety-five decibels.

  “We welcome you to Rolling Hills.

  We’re mighty glad you’re here.

  We’ll send you in reverberated

  With a mighty cheer!