Page 26 of Pioneer Summer

“Well ... ,” someone in another bed began hesitantly.

“No!” said Sasha boldly.

“Tell us!” urged Pcholkin.

Yurka paused for dramatic effect, listening to the utter silence in the room. Then, slowly, he whispered: “Four years ago a girl named Nina came to the Barn Swallow. She was a regular girl, nothing about her was all that memorable—except for her eyes. She had really, really pretty eyes. Big, and a very clear blue, just like the sky.”

Olezhka interrupted him. “Did you know hew, Yuwa?”

“Of course I did,” Yurka confirmed without hesitation. “We didn’t talk or anything, because back then I was just a little older than you all, but she was fifteen, a senior camper, basically a grown-up ... Anyway, Nina was a very solitary and unsociable girl. She never did make any friends. Some people are just like that, withdrawn and socially awkward. And because she wasn’t able to make any friends and was always by herself wherever she went in camp, everyone started thinking of her as a loner and making fun of her. Everyone teased her and called her names. They even came up with a special nickname for her: the Crusty Old Codger.”

The boys giggled. Yurka shushed them.

“One night the girls from Nina’s troop decided to toothpaste the boys. This is almost a ritual for the senior troops, you know: if your troop hasn’t been toothpasted at least once during your session, the session’s a failure.”

The boys perked up. Questions rained down on Yurka from all sides: “Have you ever been toothpasted?” “Has anybody ever toothpasted Volodya?” “Have you ever toothpasted anyone?” This wasn’t the time for them, though. Yurka quickly answered a few, then ordered the boys to be quiet and continued. “Anyway, nobody ever asked Nina to go out toothpasting. It hurt her feelings a lot to hear the other girls in her troop giggling and describing the patterns they’d drawn on the boys’ faces. And so she was overcome by her hurt feelings, or maybe she wanted revenge, but in any case she used up almost all her toothpaste the next night toothpasting the girls. But because nobody’d ever asked Nina to join them, she didn’t know the ground rules. For example, that you never get toothpaste in people’s hair, since when it dries it gets hard as concrete and you can’t get it out; sometimes you just have to rip the hair out. Sure enough, the next morning two girls couldn’t get the toothpaste out of their hair! And revenge, you know ... revenge iscontagious ... At first the girls thought it was the boys from their troop and were getting ready to get revenge. But then somebody noticed that Nina’s toothpaste tube was almost empty and that the Crusty Old Codger herself had gone untouched on the night they were all toothpasted ... All that day she heard the other girls in her troop whispering and discussing their plans for revenge on the boys, but that night they got their revenge on the completely unsuspecting Nina! She woke up because suddenly she felt this burning sensation all over her face, especially on her eyelids. Still groggy and half-asleep, she opened her eyes and rubbed them, but the burning got so bad that she burst into tears. Trying to clear out her eyes, she rubbed them even harder, but that only made it worse! Nobody lifted a finger to help her. All she heard around her was snickering. So she got up and, unable to see a thing, felt her way out of the cabin and ran away. But the next morning”—Yurka held his breath and let the dramatic pause linger—“the next morning, Troop Three, the first to show up for morning calisthenics, saw Nina in the swimming pool. She was floating face down, in her white pajamas, with her arms stretched wide and her hair gently swaying in the water ... and she was dead! They pulled Nina out of the pool, rolled her over onto her back, and saw that where her beautiful sky-blue eyes had once been, now there were just red, burned-out sockets!”

“Oh, that’s awful!” someone squeaked in the corner of the room. “But how did she end up in the pool?”

“Because she was running with her eyes closed and fell in. And Nina couldn’t swim very well, and also her eyes were burning. And so she drowned.”

“Yuwa, you saw it youwself, didn’t you?”

“But that’s not the end of the story!” Yurka announced, interrupting the boys’ sudden clamor. “They tried to hush up what happened as fast as they could so word wouldn’t spread. They cut the session short and sent everyone home, but the rumors spread like wildfire! And now, any Pioneers or troop leaders who happen to be by the pool late at night, at a specific time—at three seventeen in the morning—see a blue light floating above it. The light hovers there in the air for exactly four minutes, and then, as though blown away by a strong gust of wind, it flies off toward the senior troop cabins. And on the nights it does that, strange things happen there: in the morning,someone always wakes up with toothpaste on their face, on their cheeks and forehead. And it’s always just one person, the biggest prankster in the troop, and the smears of toothpaste are sort of weird, as though somebody’d been aiming for the eyes but couldn’t quite get it right. And then the pranksters tell about their dreams, which are always about the exact same thing. They hear the splashing of water and they feel someone’s fingers touching their faces. And then they hear a girl’s soft voice calling to them: ‘Let’s go play some tricks ... I have a full tube of toothpaste ...’ And nobody has the shadow of a doubt that it’s the ghost of the little girl Nina, the Crusty Old Codger, who walks the earth on those nights, searching the camp for someone to play with. People say Nina makes sure to pick the most mischievous kid at camp, because they’re the most fun, but also because she wants to get her revenge. So first she calls to them to come out and play, but then she toothpastes them and drowns them! And she wants to toothpaste them right in the eyes, but she can’t, because she can’t see.”

“But Nina only searches for culprits in the senior cabins—right, Yur?” Sasha clarified.

“Where’d you get that idea?” said Yurka indignantly. “I’m thinking she might come and visit us now, since you’re all planning on a little mischief. So just be careful with that toothpaste!”

“Can it really burn out your eyes?”

“Why don’t you try it, Sash, and then we’ll ask Nina to come and check—”

“No way!”

“That’s what I thought! Now drill this into your heads, all of you: Never toothpaste anyone in the eyes, nose, ears, or hair. Not at all, not for any reason.” Yurka stood up from the bed, cracked his back, and stretched.

“Why not the nose and eaws?” asked Olezha.

“Think about it, Olezh! After you toothpaste somebody, the toothpaste dries and they can’t breathe through their nose or get it out of their ears! All right: I’m off to find Volodya, he’s disappeared somewhere. Do you all promise to stay quiet in bed and not play tricks?”

“We promise!”

Yurka headed for the door, but paused at Sasha’s bed and stuck his hand under the pillow. “I’ll just go on and take this anyway,” he said, pulling out a tube of toothpaste. “Better safe than sorry.”

“Fine, take it. I changed my mind anyway. I’m not going to toothpaste anyone ... for now ... ,” grumbled the chubby boy.

The narrow hall was pitch-black. Yurka felt his way to the door to the girls’ room, opened it carefully, and looked in. The room was silent, all the girls sleeping peacefully, but neither Volodya nor Lena was with them. Yurka turned and tiptoed to the troop leaders’ room, which Volodya shared with Zhenya, the handsome physical education instructor.

The room was at the far end of the hall. Yurka couldn’t see a thing and groped his way along the wall toward the thin strip of light showing underneath the door. It was always interesting to see how the troop leaders lived, especially Volodya. And now he finally had a reason to go visit the troop leader.

As he approached the door to Volodya and Zhenya’s room, Yurka heard a whisper: “No I didn’t!Lena’sthe one who askedmeto dance!” He recognized Zhenya’s voice. He carefully felt for the door in preparation for knocking. But he accidentally bumped the door, which swung slowly and soundlessly open, gradually revealing the troop leaders’ room.

The first thing he saw was a neatly made bed, its brown bedspread drawn perfectly taut, a poster for the band Mashina vremeni—Time Machine—on the wall above it. Next, the nightstand was revealed. Volodya’s extremely battered notebook and his glasses case were on it, along with a glass of water and a tiny bottle of valerian extract. But Volodya himself wasn’t there. Where was he? Yurka took a step back and turned to leave, but he heard the whispered voice again—“All I did was dance with her!”—and through the open door he saw the phys ed instructor’s close-cropped hair and broad back, clad in a blue tracksuit jacket.

Zhenya was kneeling in front of the other bed, on which, wiping her red eyes, sat none other than Ira Petrovna. Her green circle skirt covered her legs down to the ankle. The red neckerchief over her white turtleneck had gone crooked. Her long hair was loose and messy instead of being pulled back in her usual high, tight ponytail, and her eyes were squeezed shut as though she was trying to decide whether to do something.

Zhenya stood up, leaned close to her, and whispered something in her ear. Ira finally gave in. She reached out to the phys ed instructor, folded her arms around his neck, and kissed him full on the lips.

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