“Look, I’m not some orphan who had to live in a boxcar or sleep under a staircase,” Syl scolded TimTim and me after the weenie roast the following night.

  And let me first protest the whole concept of a weenie roast. What a ridiculous pantomime of the primal meal: flames, smoke, spearing sticks as if we’d hunted down our vacuum-sealed prey. Then there’s the carcinogenic blackening of those suggestive tubules containing Jove knows what manner of Frankenfauna. It’s all a bit much, which didn’t stop me from downing three dogs slathered in onion relish. I own that I have an eating-control problem and a big-word fetish. NPR can only be blamed for one of those.

  At any rate, TimTim and I confronted Syl after the weenie roast, which I know leaves a gaping hole in my storyline. I’m sorry for the, unreliable aka lazy narrator shortcuts, but how TimTim and I teamed up is not nearly as interesting as what Syl said when we hounded her with our questions about how she’d hexed me the day before and why she’d given TimTim a set of ghost arms.

  Hmmm. Ghost arms are pretty dope, so let me just quickly backtrack to them before I race to Syl’s flippant suggestion that if we wanted the whys, whats and hows of hexing and summoning we could (spoiler!) open a portal to Sussex Downs and interrogate the “Chanctonbury bitch of a witch” ourselves.

  First things first. Ghost Arms. Amazingly, after being imp-menaced and gummy bear traumatized in the middle of the night, I slept decently. So, the next morning in the camp cafeteria as I was chowing down oatmeal with way-too-much-for-my-own-good brown sugar, I couldn’t use imp-induced exhaustion as an excuse for what I was seeing at the opposite end of the long table where I’d parked my royal plumpness.

  A couple of fellow campers weren’t quite eating their oatmeal with the same gusto I was able to muster. The thing is, they had plenty of other carb and dairy and fruit choices, but they seemed quite content catapulting their oatmeal across the table into each other’s bowls.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Childish, wasteful, but, hey, that’s pretty much how adolescents roll. Problem was the kid who I’d soon know as TimTim, not because that’s the name he’d answered to his whole young life, but because Syl liked the sound of it. She messed with all our names as if taking control of our identities was something Syl wanted or needed. For future reference, let’s just say her intentions proved neither transparent nor pure. By Jove, she made me paranoid. As if I needed more of that brand of baggage.

  So, TimTim was sitting there watching these guys fling spoonfuls of oatmeal at each other, and I was thinking that he’s thinking that these guys are going to start upping the ante. And they did. They started sucking up milk with straws and shooting it at each other.

  I quickly realized this could turn into a full on food fight. Which did sound exciting, except for the childish and wasteful aspects which I mentioned earlier, plus the fact that as a fatty I was sure to be a target. In addition, much earlier that morning I’d already witnessed a gummy bear massacre.

  So, I was readying to beat a fast retreat when my eyes registered an eerie blue flickering coming from TimTim. I half expected an army of imps to overrun him. Instead, two shimmering blue arms reached out from TimTim’s sides and skull-slapped the dunderheads slinging oatmeal. Bap! Bap! Lightning quick. The oaf bros literally didn’t know what hit them and looked furiously around. TimTim stared hard into a bowl of yogurt and everyone else at the table seemed unsure of what had happened.

  It looked like the former breakfast buds were going to come to fisticuffs (digging deep into the thesaurus now) when Slam! Slam! TimTim’s ghost arms struck out and pinned their raised fists to the table. Other kids were now bailing from our table trying to avoid further spazzification.

  I was about to join the exodus when TimTim looked my way and both his ghost arms pointed at me and then to the far exit door. Definite creepshow material, but how often did I get invited anywhere. Especially from a kinda cute guy. Even if it was a cryptic ghost arm invitation, I felt it’d be rude to ignore.