Chapter 2

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 The picture of the side is of Troy Flarehill.

Chapter 2        

              All three of them jumped down the other side and ran for the bus. The crowds were enormous but they weren’t as bad as the crowds inside Towerhall Academy were. Troy managed to wade towards the door of the bus. Dahlia and Helen followed him and they slammed the bus door.

              Olive saw them coming and threw open the bus door. Troy dropped Helen’s suitcase in the compartment beneath the bus. Dahlia and Helen stumbled onto the bus. Troy joined them and they collapsed in the back seat of the vehicle. The bus pulled out of the lot.

              “Phew!” Dahlia gasped. “That was tough!”

               Helen bent over to relieve herself of her stitch. They were all sweating from their crazy jumps and climbing of the wall. Troy leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. He wiped his forehead with his hand and then rubbed the sweat on his blue jeans.

              Dahlia pulled her pink iPod out of her pocket and plugged in her earplugs. Olive took his laptop out of his backpack and booted it up. Dahlia put in her earplugs and scrolled down her list of songs. She enjoyed many artists but her favourite was Taylor Swift.

               As she settled on one of her favourite songs, Troy leaned over and pinched one of her earplugs. He put the earplug in his ear and grinned cheekily at Dahlia. She scowled fiercely in return. Knowing full well that it would be useless to protest, Dahlia leaned back against the seat and fell asleep in a second.

               Three hours late, Dahlia awoke with someone shaking her arm. She opened her eyes. Troy was shaking her while Olive was putting away his laptop and Helen, her book.

              “We’re here,” he said. “Come on.”

              Shaking off her daze, Dahlia sat up properly. She realised that she had been leaning on Troy and felt a crimson flush spread over her cheeks, painting them a bright red. Neither Helen nor Olive knew that she liked Troy, certainly Troy himself did not know.

               She stuffed her iPod and earplugs back into the pocket of her jeans. Grabbing her backpack, she swung it over her shoulders and pulled out her blonde ponytail from under it. She let it curl around one shoulder.

                The bus jerked to a stop in the grounds of Camp Forrest. It lurched a little and several students fell forward. Dahlia grabbed the seat beneath her to keep from being catapulted into the aisle.

                Troy seized his bag and Helen’s before tossing his sister’s bag to her. She shrugged it on and Dahlia, Troy, Helen and Olive joined the crowd flocking out of the bus into the grounds of Camp Forrest.

                The four of them jumped out of the bus. Everywhere, people were grabbing their bags and tramping across the grounds to the cabins.

                The camp was an extremely large one with about fifty cabins arranged in two large horseshoes, one outside the other. The cabins were identical with wooden doors and small glass windows with flowers on the outside. Inside, there were ten bunks lining the walls and a large wardrobe at the back of the room for all the occupants of the cabin to use.

                Besides the cabins, there was a basketball court and a football pitch on the right of the cabins. Several older girls and boys were playing already. They were all dressed in their usual camp T-shirts which were green and displayed the words ‘Camp Forrest’ in big, bold, black letters.

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