Otter looked at her list, noting two familiar names, then up again to match the ones she didn’t know to some faces. “Alexandra?” She was corrected to ‘Alex’, by a tall girl, and nodded.
“Sabiha? Sherman? Tamara?” Fuck, Tamara was tiny. She had to be just barely twelve. “And... Yuri.” Yuri wasn’t much better. Tadpoles, both of them. Jesus.
Three lanky assholes bounded over, each sporting a black bandana. Otter’s eyes widened and she shook her head vehemently. “No. No no no. The list said two of you, not three---” She levelled a finger at them.
“Chill, Captain, I’m just messing with you.” Harold tugged his bandana off and stuck it in his pocket. “I’m an Angle now. Just had to see your face.” The big lunk pulled a disgruntled Otter into a hug, which she pushed out of grumpily.
“You’re hilarious. Get lost.”
“Getting lost! Later, losers,” he crowed, then bounded off towards Leaf and the rest of their group.
“I told you all last year, I didn’t want to see you here again,” Otter growled, turning on the two boys remaining, who wore matching grins that apparently her wrath did nothing to diminish.
“We missed you!” said Trevor sweetly.
“He missed you. I missed sailing,” Ali added, crossing his arms. Ali, who’d worked so well with her last year people had started calling him Skipper, was at least a good worker. Trevor was just a mess.
“Fine.” It took effort not to grin at the both of them, so she focused on the task at hand. “Whatever. Help me with these then, and I’ll yell at you both later.”
She pulled out a bag of navy blue bandanas, and began distributing them. Last year it had been a spur of the moment idea, but it’d worked well to differentiate her group from the others, and they wore them constantly like badges--- plus, the ones with long hair always had something to keep it out of their faces.
“Blue this year, suh-weeeeet!” crowed Trevor, tying his blue bandana overtop of his older black one.
“You look ridiculous, Trevor” she sighed.
“Yep. You really do,” provided Skipper, who had chosen to put his own blue bandana on his head rather than both on his neck, which wasn’t much better.
“It’s not Trevor, it’s Wall-Eee now. But you can just call me Wally for short,” he said, proudly.
Otter glared at him. “Fine, Wally.”
“Why does he get a new name?” said one of the new Sailors, Sabiha.
Trevor’s face lit up and he grinned at Otter. “Can I do it?”
Otter rolled her eyes, but Trevor--- or, Wally--- looked ecstatic. “Fine, go on,” she said.
Wally glanced around. Across the field, Rugrat’s group was bouncing around, and just as it looked like they were about to head off somewhere, three of them were stopped short with a chorus of ‘ow’s and ‘what?’s’. They struggled to get to their group, but an invisible force was keeping them at bay, the wall flickering into visibility where they touched it.
“Okay, okay, enough.” Otter put a hand up. “Sorry, Rugrat,” she called across, as the wall dropped and her campers regrouped in mild confusion.
“Anyway,” she said, turning back to her campers. “If you two are going to stay, I hope you know I expect you to help out everyone else, and be absolutely amazing at absolutely everything.”
The boys grinned. “Got it, Cap’n,” Skipper said, saluting smartly.
“And as for the rest of you--- follow their lead, and mine, and help each other out. I don’t do whiners, and I don’t do drama, so if you’ve got problems with each other you have to come to me before it gets out of hand. We leave our baggage on the shore, we don’t take that stuff out on the water. You’re here to learn to sail, and that means I expect your full attention when I’m talking, so you don’t end up in awkward situations, like having to visit Maybe in the Infirmary. Or drowning. That’d be super embarrassing for all of us.” She nodded, and they seemed to accept it. “That’s it for now. Go unpack your sh----stuff, and meet me at the boats in fifteen. We’re starting right away. The dorks,” she looked pointedly at the two double-bandana boys, “can show you where. Dismissed.”
Her group wandered off towards their cabins. Otter watched them go, tying her own bandana around her neck--- at least the two return campers were good guys. The summer might turn out not to be a spectacular failure, after all.
