He walked up to me slowly, and any relief I felt was brief, being quickly replaced by fear at the expression on his face. He looked angrier at me than usual. Ashley must’ve spoken to him. “You deserve more than that.”
His words were meticulous and slightly accented. I didn’t think Ashley’s bodyguard could get any more intimidating, but hearing Pika speak for the first time was a new experience. My feet moved backward. I was literally cowering before him.
“I never liked you, Gregor. And now I know why. Ashley was so happy, thinking she had a friend, but I knew you for who you really were. Just another little shit.”
“Look, I’m sorry, okay, Pika? I know I messed up.”
“It is not me who you need to apologize to.”
“I know that. All I want to do is apologize to Ashley. Can you tell me where she is?”
“I don’t know where she is. She left, and I can’t call her because she doesn’t own a cell phone. But she told me what you said.”
Was he going to kill me? Would this be the moment my life ended? If a Gregor got killed in the woods and no one was around to hear him, did he really scream?
“You do not know anything about Ashley,” Pika said. “But I know her. I am her father.”
Plot twist. What?
“I am her mother,” Pika continued, confusing me further. “I am her brother and sister. I’m even her grandmother. I am her shoulder and her rock. I am there when she is happy and I am there when people like you make her sad. I am all she has.” He was close enough to chew my head off if he wanted to. “I have seen what boys do to that girl. I have been there when they break her heart. My job was to protect her from everything, but especially from boys like you.”
He scoffed and then stepped back, and I felt like I could breathe again. “I don’t want to see you,” Pika said, swishing a dismissive hand my way. “Get out of my face.”
* * *
Now that I’d done it once before, breaking into the counselors’ office was easy. Made easier by the fact that this time I didn’t care about being caught. No one was there, and the office door was practically swinging wide open for me, waiting for me to get online on the only computer at camp and check out Ashley Woodstone’s Wikipedia page.
Pika was right. Well, he was right about me being a little shit, but mostly he was right about the fact that I didn’t know Ashley at all.
Ashley became an actress at nine months old, after her mother saw an ad that said they needed a baby for some formula campaign. Then, from ages three to eight she was the adorable child of the two gay dads on the sitcom I Love My Two Gay Dads. From ages nine to fifteen Ashley was on Smarty Pants, where she played Vivian Pants, a little girl so smart that she skips ahead to high school. All of her costars were teenagers when the show started and adults by the time it was over. Of her experience on the show, a precocious Ashley was quoted as saying, “Everyone is so great, but we don’t really hang out off set because I’m still too young to get in anywhere.” Smarty Pants abruptly ended when one of its stars, Carla Owens, got busted for growing large amounts of cannabis in her basement.
It wasn’t until she was fifteen that Ashley’s life really hit the tabloids. Having discovered that her parents were squandering all of her money, Ashley petitioned to get emancipated from them and won her case. She left television altogether and decided to try her hand at feature films, where she went after the meatier roles that her parent-managers never bothered to send her. She found great success playing roles as the daughter of some of the more important actors of our day, quickly working her way up to lead roles. Last year she’d been the “it girl” of Hollywood, with five movies in the can.
Her most prominent and public relationship had been with Rupert Lemon of the musical group The Ruperts. The relationship was short-lived and ended when Rupert L. was arrested.
I stopped reading, and the pit in my stomach that I’d felt all day got larger and deeper. All she wanted was a friend. It was obvious that her lifestyle of growing up as the only kid on soundstages had never afforded her one. She came to this camp looking for real experiences, and all anybody cared about was her celebrity.
All she’d wanted was a friend, and I’d failed her.
Like I said. I was a colossal idiot.
Hello, Mother, hello, Father, here I
am at Camp Save the World.
There’s not much to report.
Ashley was the best person at this
camp. A much better person than I
am. This whole time I thought
everyone at this camp was ridiculous.
But I think Ashley was the least
ridiculous of all of us. She was the best
of all of us. And I drove her away.
I really screwed up.
I Like Paint—Alec Pent—had been sent to his art camp in California where he truly belonged. But even though he was gone now, I still liked visiting his mural.
I went to see the mural for the first time after Visit Day. ILP was already gone by then. It was weird, seeing it so quiet, without the flurry of ILP’s delicate paintbrush constantly touching it up. A world with arrows pointing from Croatia to New York, to California, with a bunch of exclamation points all over LA and question marks over New York. (In the last week that he was here ILP had added even more detail, painting three self-portraits at different points on the globe: himself in Croatia with his bags packed; himself in New York with tears springing out of his eyes like fountains; and himself in California, happy.) His message seemed totally obvious now. ILP—Alec—had been lost, and he’d painted himself a map to get himself found. I felt lost too, and even though his map wasn’t tailored to me, I still went to see it, hoping it’d bring me the peace of mind it normally did. But tonight it seemed like I wasn’t the only one feeling lost.
Men’s Rights sat on the ground, his meaty legs splayed out before him, probably too packed with muscles to be comfortable cross-legged. He faced the mural, staring up at it like it held the answers to all his unasked questions. It seemed impossible, but Rights looked almost … sad. I knew what sad looked like. It took one to know one.
“What are you doing here?”
Rights looked up at the sound of my voice. “Superman. I’m glad you’re here. I could use a friend.”
“We are the opposite of friends.”
“That’s fair. But I could really use some advice right now. I know you’re bummed that Ashley left. And that you humiliated yourself in front of Robert Drill and the press and you have absolutely zero chances of winning the paid internship, not that you ever had any to begin with. I need to know: What’s it like being such a failure?”
I guess I wasn’t going to get my peace of mind here.
“Wait!” Rights said as I was turning to go. “I’m sad.”
I stopped. As much as I disliked him, I had to admire Rights for his candor. He wasn’t ashamed to admit when he liked somebody, and now he wasn’t ashamed to admit something that most people would probably not say out loud. I sat down on the ground, keeping some distance from him. “What have you got to be sad about?”
“Diabetes is in the hospital because of me.”
Diabetes Awareness had been taken to the hospital after he collapsed on Visit Day. None of us had seen him since. “Diabetes is in the hospital because he made some bad decisions.”
“That I led him to make,” Rights said. “I worked him too hard. He starved himself because I told him he could get rid of his sugar illness.”
“He had type 1 diabetes. You can’t just ‘get rid of it.’ You knew that, right?”
“Well, I know that now.” Rights dropped his head, letting it loll between his collarbones. “Diabetes almost died. And it was my fault. It’s got me shaken up, Superman. Shaken to my perfect core. I need to make some changes.”
I’d never seen this side of Men’s Rights before. Serious, reflective, accountable. And then, with no small amount of shock, I realized what I was witnessing. This was a maj
or moment in his life that was serving as a catalyst for change. Almost killing Diabetes was the defining thing that would launch Rights into his destiny. Just like in the movies when Superman and Spider-Man and Batman all realized their destiny, this was Rights’s origin story.
“I gotta clean up my act,” Rights said. “I need to do better. I have to rise above.”
“Does this by any chance mean you’re going to stop throwing money at me?”
“Oh, poor Superman. People are just throwing money at me!” He pulled some bills out of the pocket of his hoodie and threw them at my feet. “Get out of here with your white people problems, you dumb shit.”
“I’m half Mexi—”
“I know, I know,” Rights said. “Sorry. Reflex. It’s going to take some time for me to get used to this. This … nice thing.”
“So you’re going to stop pranking and sabotaging everyone?”
“Absolutely. Just after Color War’s over.”
* * *
I wasn’t there when it happened, since I’d been unceremoniously escorted out before it was over, but at the press conference, Robert Drill had tried to maintain the illusion that Camp Save the World was the most normal camp in America by declaring a most normal summer camp activity: Color War. Color War wasn’t part of the official competitions to win The Prize, but it would still incorporate them into the game. A particularly overzealous reporter had apparently used his one opportunity to ask Drill a question to inquire what the teams were going to be.
Drill, knowing nothing about the bunks or the dynamics between the campers, shrugged and said, “Boys versus girls?”
So those were the teams. Boys versus girls. A number of campers were protesting Color War because it divided people into antiquated gender groups without considering the plethora of humans that fell between the assigned gender normative roles of male and female. But just because they were protesting didn’t mean they weren’t still participating. The members of the losing team would be ineligible to win the paid internship, making the stakes for this very normal camp activity impossibly high. By declaring Color War, Robert Drill had effectively made the situation at camp worse. Before, it was sabotage. Now, it was cutthroat.
Obviously, all I wanted to do was stay in bed. I want to be clear that the only reason I was doing any of this was to forget about Ashley. I was standing in the bushes behind the row of girls’ cabins strictly to forget about her.
I still wasn’t sure what the plan consisted of, or if there even was a plan, but all the guys who were present—Win, Rights, Unity, Anti-Robotics, War on Drugs, Seat Belt Safety, Boycott Camp, Gun Control, and Legalize Marijuana—seemed very determined to do whatever it was we were about to do. It didn’t put me at ease at all when Rights dunked two fingers into a flat tin can and smeared eye black under my eyes. I squirmed out of his reach when I realized what he was doing, so I was pretty sure the inky stuff was now an abstract design down the side of my left cheek.
“There,” Rights said. “Now you’re one of us, Superman.”
“Can someone please tell me what the hell we’re doing?”
“There’s ten of us,” Win said. “One for each cabin. Gregor, you get Cabin Three.”
“Our intel tells us that the girls are off having a secret meeting in the playing fields all the way on the other side of camp,” Rights said. “So we’re in and out in one minute flat.”
“We have intel now?”
Rights ignored me and swung his backpack off his shoulder. It made clinking sounds, like glasses coming together for a toast. “Quiet as church mice, spry as cats on their ninth lives, you got that? Make sure you hide these well. We can’t have the girls finding them before we alert Jimmy.”
He was placing a bottle in each guy’s hands, all of them a different shape and color. And all of them small enough to fit in our fists. It wasn’t until Rights handed me mine that I realized just what kind of bottles these were. “Minibar liquor bottles? We can’t have liquor.”
It came to me in that moment that perhaps what I’d just said was exactly the reason I was never invited to any parties. Rights stared at me like the loser that I was. But now I understood the plan. Possession of alcohol was one of the three offenses that would get you kicked out of camp. We were going to plant bottles in the girls’ cabins and then tip Jimmy off. He probably wouldn’t kick out the entire female population of campers, but it would surely get them eliminated from Color War. “Planting booze? Are you serious?”
“Serious as a heart attack, Superman.”
“This isn’t right,” I said. “The girls don’t deserve this. And also, how did we get booze?”
“There’s no time for perfectly rational questions right now!” Unity said. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, his large, deep-set eyes looking particularly crazed above the eye black. It might’ve had to do with the fact that he’d smeared the stuff not only on the tops of his cheeks but also over the entirety of his forehead. “The girls aren’t in their cabins right now, which means there’s nothing between us and their dressers. And do you know what’s in their dressers? Panties.”
I grimaced as soon as he said it. I knew he was going to go there, but still, the optimist in me had hoped for the best. “A panty raid? Come on, Unity, what is this, a bad eighties college comedy?”
Unity shrugged. “You have your reasons for being here, and I have mine.”
“What happened with you and World Peace? I thought you two were going to be an epic couple.”
“We had a fight. Never play Settlers with a girl you love, Children. It can get ugly.”
“I told him not to put the robber on her six, but did he listen?” Rights said. “Just because I wasn’t playing with you guys doesn’t mean I still wasn’t offering expert advice.”
“Alright,” I said. I no longer had a reason to be here. I put my bottle of Scotch down on the ground but didn’t get too far before Win stepped in front of me.
“Come on, Gregor, we need you. One guy per cabin.”
“Win, how are you of all people on board with this?”
“It’s Color War,” he said. “All bets are off.”
“Look, everybody knows that when girls aren’t wearing underwear they go a little insane,” Unity said.
“What?” I said.
“It’s totally factually true, man,” he continued. “Rights told me. Plus, this could be my only shot at getting close to girls’ panties.”
“You’re definitely right about that.”
Win pulled me aside and spoke in a low voice that the rest of the guys couldn’t hear. “I think this could be good for you,” he said.
“Yeah, and why’s that?”
“Because this whole time we’ve been out here I bet you haven’t spent a single minute thinking about Ashley.”
* * *
I stood in the middle of Cabin 3 with the bottle of Scotch in my hand, not thinking about Ashley Woodstone.
I probably should’ve put the Scotch down and gotten the hell out of there immediately, but I had to stop and marvel at the neatest cabin in camp. I didn’t know who it belonged to, but nary a shoe was out of place. Were all girls this tidy? Should I stop generalizing about girls so much?
I had no clue where to hide the bottle. Any place I tried to position it seemed out of place. Obviously. A bottle of Scotch would always seem out of place in a summer camp cabin. I decided to put it under one of the beds.
Except there was already a bottle of Scotch under there. A larger, full-sized one. I tried putting my mini bottle in a drawer, but there was booze in there already too. Actually, there was a bottle of alcohol in every drawer I opened. I began to wonder if the girls of Cabin 3 weren’t actually all alcoholics.
“What are you doing in here?”
I spun around. Down With Styrofoam stood at the door and locked eyes with me. Then she shrieked.
I ran out of the cabin as fast as I could, shrieks ringing out outside. Whoever had timed this scheme was an idiot or we’
d had some faulty intel, because practically every girl in camp was chasing after us. “GIRLS!” Marijuana yelled, his voice taking on a desperately paranoid edge. Boys dressed in blue and eye black ran like they’d just lit a fuse, but not all of them got far enough. Feminism tackled Unity to the ground, and a flurry of brightly colored underwear flew out of his arms like a spray of blood from a gunshot wound.
I was finally grateful for my long legs. No one was going to be taking me down.
I was taken down. She came at me so quick it blindsided me, and the two of us collapsed in a tangle, tumbling on the grass. I was getting ready to get up and run again when the black hair tipped me off. “Poe?”
She was on top of me, pinning me to the ground, the tips of her loose hair brushing against my cheek. All thoughts of running left my mind immediately. This wasn’t the worst way to get caught, all things considered.
“They were trying to plant liquor in our cabins!” Feminism said, holding up one of the bottles. She stood with one foot on the ground, the other on Unity’s chest.
“Gee, Gregor, I didn’t know you had it in you,” Poe said.
“What can I say? I’m a badass.”
She actually laughed, and it didn’t matter that we’d failed at our mission because Poe was on top of me and happy to be there.
“Girls, girls!” I could hear Win’s voice call out. “Maybe we can work something out.”
I wondered what Win had in mind. Poe apparently did too. She waggled her eyebrows at me, questioning but not disinterested.
* * *
Sometimes it felt almost like all the counselors up and left for the night. Tonight was one of those times.
Because there was no doubt that we probably could’ve used some adult supervision right now. Even though it was way past lights-out, it was relatively easy sneaking over to the playing fields. Much easier than it should’ve been for practically every camper to go unnoticed with a bottle of booze in hand. Poe got the party started by standing before everyone and declaring, “The world is fucked! Let’s get drunk!”
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