No Place Like Here

by Christina June

“She’s just . . . focused.”

  “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?” I crossed my arms, leaning backwards to give him a hard stare. “Hey, hey,” he said, putting his hands on my arms and tugging me closer. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I guess I’m just confused why you’re hanging out with them. That’s all. Doesn’t seem like a good fit. Especially when you could’ve been hanging out with me instead.”

  Before I could respond, fully prepared to tell him how I’d found him occupied earlier, he smiled at me. Against my better judgement, I smiled back. Marcus lowered his head to mine and I let him kiss me. He held my face in his hands gently, like I was more than a girl he kissed a few times at his summer job. His lips on mine, I tried to imagine what it might be like if we kept talking after he went back to school. Maybe started dating. Would he invite me to see him at college? Introduce me to his friends as his girlfriend? Would he meet my mother and send me letters at school? I couldn’t picture it. I pulled away.

  I hadn’t started kissing Marcus because I thought he would make a good boyfriend. I had liked his confidence, his ease in navigating a room full of strangers, his magnetism. But I wasn’t the same girl who had thought those things anymore. Though I was still a work in progress, I could see cracks in his façade. Not unlike my dad, actually. The little jabs at Hannah and Baxter. The joke about his roommate. Having his mom do his laundry. The flirting with Mallory. Perhaps I’d been able to ignore them a few weeks ago, but I wasn’t the same girl who would settle for those things now. Whatever was in that kiss, even though it felt nice, was no longer what I wanted.

  I put both hands on his chest and pressed lightly. “Good night, Marcus.”

  He looked confused, wounded almost, like he’d never had a girl say good night to him before he was ready, but he nodded and let me go. “Good night, Ashlyn.”

  Those things I liked about him tasted sour on my tongue now; Marcus was all smoke and mirrors. And maybe, just maybe, I deserved something more.

  I went back to the cabin. Hannah’s shower stuff was gone, so I knew I had at least a few minutes alone. I dashed off a quick letter on a Sweetwater postcard to mail in the morning.

  Dear Tate,

  I think I may have just lost my taste for boys with polos. What do you think about hiking boots?

  Love,

  Ash

  “Ashlyn, I need you,” Deb bellowed from the office door as I walked into the lodge the next day.

  I hurried to her, afraid there was another emergency. “What’s going on?”

  “Well, nothing good. We have a group arriving today and we are short staffed; there’s some kind of summer flu going around. I’m going to need you to cover the morning shift.”

  “Sure, where do you need me?”

  “Volleyball courts. It’s the Springville Methodist Church’s Sunday School group. They need to be supervised while the adult leaders go through the ropes course. You can play games with them. Red rover and that kind of thing, okay?”

  Ugh. Kids. I was not a kid person at all. And all morning in a pit of sand? “Okay,” I said, though, because I had no other choice.

  “They’ll be there waiting for you in about fifteen minutes, so get a move on.”

  Aye-aye, captain, I didn’t say.

  When I got to the volleyball court less than five minutes later, a large group of kids and one harried-looking adult, who was tapping her foot and staring at her watch, were already waiting for me.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here.” The woman squeezed my shoulders like we were long-lost friends. “I don’t want to miss the directions. We’ll be back when we’ve mastered the course,” she called, already starting to run up the hill toward the zipline.

  “Okay,” I said, mostly to myself. I surveyed the crowd and then counted. Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two. Thirty-two children, and from the looks of it, none of them were much older than twelve. Some looked as small as kindergarteners. They were running in circles, throwing sand in the air, tagging each other and darting away, turning cartwheels and being louder than a rock concert.

  “What am I supposed to do with them all?” I asked no one.

  The ropes course took what? Two hours? More? I felt the first threads of panic rising in my throat. You’re in over your head. This is beyond your capabilities, Dad’s voice said in my mind. I clamped my jaw tight and ignored him.

  Back in control of my thoughts, I tried to form a plan. Think. What did I like to do when I was younger? That was ridiculous, I liked to stay indoors and read, play with makeup, and watch TV. Not options there. I spun in a slow circle trying to get ideas from my surroundings. And then it hit me. I was standing smack dab in the middle of a teambuilding retreat center. For weeks now, I’d been watching groups of all kinds go through exercise after exercise, learning about one another and themselves. I pulled out my quote journal and ripped out several pages. I quickly wrote down some information on the sheets and smiled to myself.

  “Hey!” I called as loud as I could. Approximately two kids turned and looked my way and then went right back to their friends. “Hey!” I tried again, waving my arms in the air like I was trying to land a plane.

  A small girl with glasses, who was about ten or eleven years old, came up and tapped me on the shoulder. “You need to put your hand up like this.” She held her hand up high in the air, as if she were ready to receive a high five.

  “Oh. Thanks. What’s your name?”

  “Avery Chen,” she said, flipping her dark pigtail over her shoulder.

  “Thank you, Avery.”

  “No problem. What’s your name?”

  “Ashlyn Zanotti.”

  Avery nodded and walked back to her group of three friends. I thrust my hand into the air, my fingers splayed, and waited. Avery did the same, and her friends followed suit. One by one, the other members of the Springville Methodist Church youth group raised their hands and stopped talking.

  Why hadn’t that woman told me about this magic trick before she’d rushed off? When I had their attention, I cleared my throat and smiled. Oddly, I enjoyed public speaking. There was something much less threatening about talking to a group of strangers. It was just talking to people I knew that scared me.

  “Hi, everyone. My name is Ashlyn. I work here at Sweetwater. And we’re going to do something fun today. Has anyone ever been on a scavenger hunt?”

  A few kids raised their hands. “This is going to be boring,” a little boy said out loud. I didn’t let it derail me.

  “I want you to count off by fives and you’ll be matched up by your numbers. You’ll need to work together to find all the items on your list.” I held up the papers I’d written on. “Everyone has the same things to find but you won’t all have the same answers, and that’s okay. When you find an item, describe it as carefully as you can. First team to come back here with a completed list wins.”

  “What do we win?” An older girl raised an eyebrow at me.

  I blanked, but only for a moment.

  “Do you like Swedish Fish? Jellybeans?” There was so much candy in the lodge, in all of Deb’s stashes, she would never miss it.

  The kids cheered.

  “Alright, get with your teams and remember to stick together. If a team comes back without all their members, they’re disqualified. Go!”

  They all ran off. As I watched them study their lists in their small groups and chatter, presumably about the best way to go about ticking off all the items, my heart warmed. I’d done that. They were happy because of me. And I’d done it all by myself. I couldn’t help the wide smile that broke out on my face. Maybe I wasn’t a one trick pony after all.

  Avery’s group paused near the entrance to the locker rooms right by the pool. I knew what they were looking for, the one I had listed as “one item that gets you wet.” At that location, they could choose the pool, the showers, the sinks, or even the hose used to wet down the pool deck and chairs. I smiled and moved on.

  I foun
d another group pointing to the archery range, most likely searching for “something sharp.” The smile stayed on my face as I kept walking the trail, by the edge of the lake, and towards the lodge. Occasionally a group would run past me, making a beeline for whatever they’d identified. I spotted the equipment kiosk up ahead and decided to tell Hannah about my great idea.

  Chapter 22

  I raised my fist to knock on the frame of her open window when I heard her groan from inside.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?”

  Hannah popped her head up to the window and rolled her eyes. “There are kids running rampant all over the campus. Unsupervised. Two little packs of them have already come over here asking if I have anything round. I told them to go jump in the lake.”

  “You did not.” I gave Hannah my best stern look, and she rolled her eyes again.

  “I did not. I showed the first group a bocce ball and the second group a Frisbee. They said thanks and ran away. Do you know what’s going on?”

  “Yes, yes I do. I’m in charge of them and they’re on a scavenger hunt. I’m pretty proud of myself for thinking of it, especially since Deb told me I was watching them, oh, about thirty minutes ago.”

  Hannah shook her head. “Deb is the worst. I’m sorry she stuck you with them. That totally sucks.”

  “Once I figured out a plan, it didn’t suck that much. I’m guessing they should be occupied for at least an hour or so, and then we can share what they found. And then . . . who knows?”

  Hannah put a hand in the air. “Back up a minute. How many kids are you talking about exactly?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  I thought her eyes were going to fall out of her head. “Deb left you in charge of thirty-two children? Has she lost it? There are ratios to maintain, and one adult to thirty-two children is way over the acceptable limit.”

  My heart started to race. “What do you mean? What ratios?”

  “There are very strict guidelines for how many children can be supervised by one caregiver. Unless they changed the laws since last summer, it should be no more than fifteen school-aged kids per legal adult. That’s why last year I was an assistant lifeguard and couldn’t supervise any kid groups on my own. I wasn’t eighteen yet.”

  “I’m not eighteen yet,” I whispered.

  “Oh, my gosh, I forgot. The ratio is totally off and you’re not a legal adult?” If Hannah had punctuation floating above her head, it would’ve been an exclamation mark followed by a question mark, and repeated about a hundred times. “If someone were to come inspect right now, we would be in so much trouble.”

  “So what do we do?” My knees quivered. This was exactly the kind of thing I was afraid of—some kind of huge disaster that my dad would assume was my fault, sending me back to boarding school for another year. If Sweetwater got written up for these violations, I would never hear the end of it.

  “I don’t know that there’s anything we can do right now,” Hannah said with a concerned look. “You can’t abandon the kids in the middle of an activity. Plus, we don’t want them to think something is wrong and alert their parents or whoever they’re with. That would be bad too. I’ll close up the kiosk and supervise with you until the adults come back, and then we’ll figure out what to do next.” She looked at me and realized I wasn’t breathing. “Ashlyn? It’ll be fine. Take a breath.” I did. My heartrate slowed a tiny bit. “We can handle this. Sorry I went off the rails there for a second. It’s just one more thing with Deb, you know?”

  “I know.”

  We agreed to take opposite routes around campus, keeping an eye out for the teams, and planned to meet back at the volleyball court. I went toward the lodge while Hannah went uphill in the direction of the ropes course. I spotted a group making their way out of the lodge’s front doors with huge grins on their faces.

  “Ashlyn! There are gingerbread houses in there!” a tiny boy exclaimed.

  “There sure are, buddy. Handmade,” I said with a smile.

  “Is that where the candy is coming from? Are you stealing it from the kitchen?” A girl, maybe nine or ten, gave me a skeptical look.

  I laughed. I was pretty sure I’d used that look a lot at her age too. “I’m not stealing.” I leaned closer to the kids. “I bought that candy.”

  One boy shoved another with his elbow. “Come on! One more thing to find and then we win.” The whole team dashed off, cheering. Despite my growing anxiety over the situation, at least the kids were having a good time. And, up to this point, nobody had a clue that anything was amiss.

  I took a lap around the lodge and then walked through the main hallways. I noticed Deb’s office was now dark. Now where did you go? What if there was some kind of emergency again and she wasn’t there to report it? I didn’t want to have to call the paramedics again, and I definitely didn’t want to have to try and explain why a minor like me was in charge of a huge group of other minors.

  I suddenly regretted putting “something sharp” on the scavenger hunt list of items to find. I could just see the little boy who called the hunt boring looking for ways to make the game more interesting. Irresponsible, my dad’s voice scolded. My hands began to sweat as I speed-walked to the competition kitchen to make sure none of the knives were out of place. There, I saw the lights were on but the room was thankfully deserted and untouched. Phew. Before locking the door behind me, I snagged a few bags of candy to take with me back to the kids and tried not to think about other potential dangers.

  Miraculously, everyone made it back to the volleyball court in one piece. When I got there, Hannah was tossing a tennis ball back and forth in her hands while a bunch of the younger kids were making snow angels in the sand. It appeared a group had brought back a broken branch, as “evidence,” and another team had started making a daisy chain out of the weed flowers that grew on the edge of the sand. I counted and breathed a sigh of relief. Thirty-two.

  “Good work, everyone. Welcome back. Who would like to share their lists?”

  About half the kids raised their hands. Hannah and I called on group after group as they read their descriptions for each item found. I was impressed with their creativity and how they defended some of their finds. Two boys, I think they must have been brothers, successfully convinced us that the shoes they were wearing counted for something that gets you wet “because you run and you sweat.” I told them they should become lawyers when they got older.

  Hannah and I made a big show of deciding who won. A lot of the groups had the same items—the pool for wet things, a ball for round things—and we ultimately decided, after much exaggerated whispering to one another behind our hands, that every team would win.

  “You all did such a good job so . . . you all get candy!” I threw my hands up in the air like a gymnast after sticking a landing.

  “Participation trophies,” Hannah said to me, shaking her head, while the kids all cheered.

  “We’re trying to call as little attention to ourselves as possible, remember?” I said into her ear. She groaned.

  When all our charges were in a bona fide sugar coma, the adults appeared. They looked just as exhausted as the kids, but at least everyone was smiling. Hannah and I told them how well-behaved they’d all been, and then pointed them in the direction of the lodge so they all could get lunch. We waved goodbye until the last of them disappeared down the path. Once they were gone, Hannah grabbed my arms.

  “Go get whatever list you’ve been keeping on Deb. We need to make a plan.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I grinned at her and pulled out my journal. “List is right here actually.”

  “I still can’t believe you’re keeping a blackmail list in your quote journal.”

  Was she impressed or horrified? “Better to keep it close. Also, would we call this blackmail? We’re not going to go wave it in Deb’s face, are we?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “You should probably lay off the espionage movies. Let’s go.”

  In the equipment kiosk, Hannah t
urned on the laptop she used for checkouts and inventory and pulled up a blank email. “Okay, hit me with your list.”

  I rattled it off.

  1.Disappears for hours at a time without notifying staff of her location

  2.Improper food allergy communication with kitchen staff

  3.Not enough lifejackets for boats

  4.Slow to repair boats

  5.Improper staff-to-kid ratios

  6.Allows minor to do things only permissible for a legal adult

  7.Competition kitchen safety concerns

  “There also aren’t enough bike helmets,” she added. “And the signs in the parking lot indicating a crosswalk and the speed limit are covered by tree branches. I almost got run over by a guest the other day.”

  I read over what she’d typed. “This is a long list. All these violations . . . we should tell Mr. Allen, right?”

  Hannah nodded. “I think it’s time.”

  “Wait, I just thought of something. What if there are more things? I mean, this is only what we’ve observed, and there are tons of other things that could go wrong here. So many moving parts. Should we scout around some more first?”

  “We do want to make sure Mr. Allen takes us seriously.” Hannah scratched her head.

  This is your supervisor you’re about to implicate, said my dad’s voice. What a lack of loyalty. A wave of guilt hit me. “Before we go to Deb’s boss, don’t you think we should talk to Deb first? For all we know, there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for her behavior.”

  Hannah put a hand on her hip. “A perfectly reasonable explanation for violating multiple state laws?”

  “Well, she did say we were short staffed this morning. That’s not her fault, right?”

  Hannah gave me an eyebrow. “A perfectly reasonable explanation for endangering the life of a woman, who paid good money to be here, with a peanut allergy?”

  I looked down at my feet. “Maybe you’re right. But I do feel bad about the idea of blindsiding her. Don’t you?”

  “A little,” she sighed. “Do you think she’s back now? We could go talk to her.” I didn’t even have to answer, my face said everything. “Come on.”