8. The Universe Is Boring

8 The Universe Is Boring I had to admit the girls won the campfire contest fair and square. When both fires died down a little, Miss Blake got hot dogs from her backpack, and we cooked them. Yum! Then she got out a bag of marshmallows for us to toast. Double yum! I ate so

many marshmallows, I thought I was gonna throw up. It was the greatest night of my life. It was getting dark out. Miss Blake said she was going to rest in her tent, but we could spread our sleeping bags on the ground and talk for a while. We were all lying on our backs looking at the sky. It was filled with stars. And it was weirdly quiet. There were no cars. No TVs. No noise. "Isn't this peaceful?" asked Emily. "Yeah," everybody replied. "What do you see when you look up at the stars?" asked Andrea. "I see stars," said Ryan. "Maybe we'll see a shooting star," said Michael. "Just think," said Andrea. "Those stars are billions of miles away. If the sun

exploded, we wouldn't know it for eight minutes. That's how long it would take for the light to reach our eyes." "I'm scared," said Emily. "The universe is so big," said Alexia. "Where do you think it ends?" asked Neil.

"Nobody knows," said Ryan. "Maybe it never ends," said Michael. "It can't go on forever," said Andrea. "It's got to end somewhere." What a snoozefest. All this talk about the universe was boring. "Hey, let's tell ghost stories," I suggested. Ghost stories are cool, way cooler than talking about the universe. "I'm scared," said Emily. "Don't be scared," said Andrea. "Ghost stories are just stories. They're not real." "I'll start!" I said, sitting up so everybody could see me. I picked up my flashlight and held it under my chin, pointing up at my face.* "Okay," I said. "Here's the story. There was this boy..."

"Yeah?" everybody said. "And he was out in the woods on an overnight," I said, lowering my voice to a whisper. "Like us." "Yeah?" "And it was pitch-dark. Just like now." "Yeah? "What happened next?" asked Andrea.

"A ghost came along and murdered him," I said. "The end." "That's your story?" asked Andrea. "It's a short story," I told her. "I cut out all the boring parts." "Dude, that ghost story was lame," said Michael. I said that if nobody liked my ghost story, they could tell a ghost story of their own. And somebody would have. But that's when the weirdest thing in the history of the world happened. There was a noise behind us. We turned around. It was a bear!