The Curse of Camp Cold Lake

Sarah Maas hates water, hates sports, hates camp, yet tragically finds herself at a water sports camp. Sarah's younger brother, Aaron, is positioned to be that character everyone likes.

Sarah has trouble making friends at camp. She forces Briana, one of her bunkmates, to give up her bunk because she won't sleep under a window. And then when Meg gripes about being too short, Sarah tells her that she gets picked on for being tall, it's still better than being short. Sarah follows that by picking up Jan's bag, spilling out her asthma medicine and revealing that medical secret to the whole bunk.

The three bunkmates get back at Sarah by convincing her that some boys threw firecrackers into the bonfire. Sarah runs away screaming and the entire camp laughs at her. Then the girls offer to make up with her, but this too is a ploy to simply place a snake on her back. The two main camp counselors, Richard and Liz, present the camp's water safety rules. Liz is described by the female narrator as being quite fetching, and all the kids give her wolf whistles when she appears in denim cutoffs and a half-shirt. Liz is all business and starts rattling off the twenty-item swimming safety list. Sarah frets that she'll never learn twenty rules.

Liz emphasizes that the most important rule is to follow the Buddy System when going anywhere near the water. Liz proceeds to hammer home the importance of always going out in the water with another partner. Richard follows this by leading the camp in song. After the bonfire, Sarah races off into the woods and scoops some spiders into her flashlight, screwing the top over the creepy crawlies. Her brilliantly devious plan is to place the spiders under the covers of Meg and Briana's beds. After she makes it back to the empty cabin, Jan catches her tucking back the covers on Meg's bed and tattles once the girls get bitten by spiders.

Now completely shunned by the camp, Sarah eats breakfast alone the next morning. At canoe class, no one will be Sarah's partner and she tattles to Liz to force Jan to be her Buddy. Out in the boat, Jan tips over the canoe on purpose, then blames Sarah. Sarah's had enough and wants to run away from the camp. She tells her brother that she's going to run through the woods to the small town on the other side of the camp and call their parents to pick them up. Aaron reminds Sarah that the camp counselors specifically warned against walking in the dangerous woods.

Sarah gives up on the running away plan and hatches a new plan: she'll go out into the water during free swim and pretend to drown. Since she can hold her breath for a long time, she'll just go hang around at the bottom of the lake for a few minutes, then float back up. Since no one will be her buddy, she convinces Liz to let her swim alone. Sarah enacts her brilliant drowning plan. As soon as she makes it back to the surface of the water, she can tell something's wrong with the campgrounds. Though it was summer when she went under, the air is a lot colder and all the leaves have fallen off the trees. What's more, there doesn't seem to be any other campers around. Sarah swims to shore and exits the cold water, shivering in the bitter air. As she walks around the deserted camp, flakes of snow begin to fall.

The camp is eerily quiet until a single voice catches Sarah's ear. Sarah encounters the source of the sad song she heard resting on the rickety old porch of a cabin. A pale girl wearing all white greets her. The pale girl introduces herself as Della and gives Sarah a nice warm white bathrobe. Della is thrilled that Sarah's come, because she needs a buddy before she can enter "the Other World."

Della floats up, revealing that she's a ghost, and that Sarah too has died. Della tries to bully Sarah into being her buddy but Sarah freaks out and runs towards the water. She swims out as far as she can and is suddenly greeted with the welcoming image of Liz performing CPR on her.

Liz exclaims she's alive. She confides that they thought she had died. Jan spoils the celebratory mood by chiming in that she and her boyfriend George Glass are sure Sarah just drowned for the attention. The bunkmates eventually decide that they've been too mean to Sarah and offer her a genuine fresh start. Everything seems to be going so well until Sarah starts seeing the ghost of Della everywhere around camp.

Slowly losing her mind, Sarah visits with the head counselor and asks to hear about the camper who drowned at Camp Cold Lake. The counselor clams up and insists that no camper ever drowned at the camp. Sarah insists that one did, Della, but he won't listen to her. He explains that the camp has so many safety rules for swimming that some people even consider it "the Curse of Camp Cold Lake."

Outside of his office, Della taunts Sarah and Sarah hurls insults at the ghost girl. Unfortunately, Briana chooses that moment to walk up to Sarah in a friendly manner, and she's genuinely crushed that Sarah would insult her for no reason. Sarah tries to convince Briana that she was talking to the ghost and Briana gives her a strange look. Richard suggested that Sarah take up water-skiing, with the idea being that the sport is so hard that she'll have to focus all her energy on performing and won't have time to think about ghosts. This is an excellent plan up until the moment where Della takes control of the motorboat and attempts to kill Sarah. At one particularly gruesome moment, Della runs the motorboat over Sarah's head, attempting to decapitate her with the blades of the motor. Sarah figures that she's had enough of Della trying to kill her in the water and revives her plan to run away. She runs into Briana on the way to the woods and Briana wishes her good luck. As Sarah makes her way through the forest, she spies Della's ghost hanging out in a tree and looking very happy. Della tells her that she'll never leave her; after all she's her buddy.

Sarah is repulsed and lashes out at Della for trying to drown her just because she herself drowned. Della laughs at this and asks her why Sarah had thought she drowned? Della tells Sarah that the counselor was right, no child has ever drowned at Camp Cold Lake. After all, how could anyone drown when there are twenty different rules in place to prevent it? No, Della had wandered off into the woods and was bitten by a poisonous snake. Della explains that she had to make Sarah afraid of the water so that she would try to escape from the camp through the woods. There are so many poisonous snakes in the woods that it's impossible to make your way through without being bitten. Sarah feels a snake wrap itself around her leg. Before the snake can bite her though, a voice cries out, warning that Della is not her buddy: Briana!

Briana rushes over and pulls the snake off of Sarah's leg and hurls it into the woods. Briana reveals that she went to the camp last year and Della tried to get her to be her buddy, but she resisted. That's why Briana came back this year, to warn whoever Della targeted next not to be her buddy. Suddenly empowered, Sarah proclaims that even though she hates the camp, she'll come back next year to warn the next potential victim against being Della's buddy. Della howls out in anger and falls off the tree limb, disappearing into the darkness.

Sarah goes to hug Briana, only to discover that her arms go right through her. Briana explains that Della killed her last summer, and the only reason she didn't become her buddy is because she didn't like her. Briana then holds up a large poisonous snake and asks Sarah to be her buddy.