Nothing Happened

by Molly Booth

  When we finished our last swim test before lunch, I pulled myself up onto the dock and wrapped a towel around my waist. Technically, I was supposed to change out of my suit for the dining hall, but if I didn’t, then Claudia might see me in it. My rash guard top, lifeguard official, hugged my chest, and though I wasn’t Margo-epic, I knew I looked good.

  I slipped on my flip-flops and thanked George, our day lifeguard, on my way out. I found Margo outside of Dam, by the flagpole, lying out on a towel in the sun.

  “Hey, darlin’,” she said, sitting up. “Nessa and Rachel are getting my group changed for lunch. How cool is that?” Margo had the littles, our youngest group of campers.

  I smiled. “Pretty cool. Don’t let my mom catch you tanning, though.”

  “Not tanning.” She sighed, standing up and shaking out her towel. “Just freckling more.”

  “Beautiful freckling,” I said. “We should head in and help set up.”

  “Oh wait!” Margo caught my hand and pulled me away from the veranda steps. “I forgot: I have a plan.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Donald,” I pointed out.

  She steered us around the side of Dam, through the gate and into the garden near the carrot tops, where she shot the fluffy greens a brief glare, like she was threatening them not to repeat anything.

  “Okay, so this morning, I got Jay and Maddie for lice check,” she whispered.

  “Oh, I got them too for swim test!” I said, normal volume. “They both passed into the deep end this year.”

  “Cuties!” Margo whispered, face lighting up for a moment as she temporarily forgot her mission. “Right,” she said, becoming serious once more. “So, they were talking about how Bee never goes to polar bear swim.”

  “Oh, never.” I shook my head. “She hates waking up that early and hates cold water.” Two of my favorite things.

  “That’s a lot of hate,” Margo admitted. “But what if we got Raph to take her to Kangaroo Court tomorrow and sentence her to a morning of polar bear swim?”

  It was kind of evil, but I did love getting everyone to go to polar bear swim, and a public Kangaroo Court sentencing would be such good press.

  “I’m in,” I agreed, and Margo clapped in excitement. “But what does polar bear swim have to do with Donald’s plan?”

  “That’s the brilliance of it,” Margo said. “Bee is groggy in the morning.”

  “Yes.” Bee was really out of it early in the morning. Sometimes she left for school without her books or tried to get in the car wearing pj bottoms. She was never late, but she was never with it, either.

  “So it’s the perfect time to stage our trick.”

  “You mean—”

  “We plan it so she’s coming down to the bathroom to change, and we’re already there waiting outside, hidden, right?” Margo’s voice got faster as she talked. “So we wait until she goes in, and then we go in, and talk about how Ben is in love with her!”

  “Oh.” This just got real, real fast.

  “And she’s so out of it that she actually believes us. What do you think?” Margo bit her lip.

  I considered Bee’s grogginess. I considered our acting skills. “I think it’s our best shot?”

  “Yes!” Margo squealed. “I’ll go catch Raph.” With one more silencing frown at the carrot tops, she hopped around the corner. Then reappeared a second later, and made funny eyebrows at me, whispering, “By the way, you look real cute in your swim top.” She winked, and disappeared again.

  Okay. That was sort of random. But a second later, it made sense: Claudia tentatively peeked out from around the corner. I smiled, and she closed the distance between us.

  Back here in the garden, we were shielded from the world for a moment, and I could see her eyes take me, and my swimsuit, in. I took her in too, in her athletic shirt and cargo shorts. I imagined we felt the same way about each other’s clothes. Like we’d rather we weren’t wearing them?

  “Hey,” she said, voice low, wrapping her arms around my waist. She didn’t seem to mind I was soaked.

  “Hi,” I whispered. “How was your morning?”

  “No lice,” she said. “How about you?”

  I smiled. “No one drowned.”

  “You’ll never believe what Donald’s planned for Ben.” Her eyes sparkled with laughter.

  “Oh, I can probably believe it.” Before I realized what I was doing, I’d gently grabbed her shirt. One small movement, and we crashed together. Our lips pushed against each other urgently. Her fingers entwined through my damp hair. My hands found their way onto her back, grasping her closer.

  Was kissing Claudia ever not going to make the world spin double time? If it kept going like this, we were going to disrupt the solar system.

  All at once, we broke apart, breathing heavily. Whatever was happening, it was super not camp appropriate. Breathing like that, looking into each other’s eyes, I realized this was moving fast.

  “To be continued?” I whispered.

  “Mmm,” she hummed back.

  OH MY GOD. My first day of camp was exhausting. I fell asleep as soon as the kids finally did. And then I had to get up and go to breakfast and start all over again.

  I didn’t even think about the fact that being a counselor would be like babysitting twenty of my sisters at once. Margo and I had seven-year-olds, who were a year younger and cuter than the twins, but maybe even more of a handful. One of them peed themselves the first afternoon, and another one turned into a dinosaur, which Raph and Bee did work into improv class flawlessly. Still, it wasn’t as useful for our nature hike, because he scared away most of the birds and chipmunks.

  “RRRRGH!”

  Margo salvaged the hike with icky-looking plants. “Look at these gross mushrooms, though!”

  “Ooooooh!” “Nice. That’s disgusting.” “Can we eat them??”

  We spent all day ordering our littles in and out of places: in and out of the water, in and out of the bathroom, on and off the field, in and out of Dam. And half of them couldn’t sleep that first night because they were homesick. Luckily, Margo had a bunch of stories up her sleeve.

  “The trick is,” she whispered, once the last one had drifted off, “to start the story really exciting, and then make it more and more boring. And voilà!” She gestured to our snoring cabin. “I’m going to go get a snack!” How she had the energy to move after all of that, I had no idea. I fell asleep ten seconds later.

  The next morning, we were up at eight, changing, bathroom, breakfast. I barely said a word except “No, Howard. No.” I never wanted to admit it, but Ben and I were both bad before ten a.m.

  Standing in the breakfast line, the comfy smell of pancakes started easing me back to sleep. I felt my lids start to flutter. Could I sleep standing up? And then Sophia leaped in next to me, in a blinding shade of lime green. What a scary alarm clock.

  “Nessa, you’ll never believe what I heard.”

  “How did you hear anything?” I yawned. “Over all the kids?”

  “Mine are eleven.” Sophia pointed to a group of older kids in line at the eggs counter. Tall kids. Almost-our-age kids. Kids who looked like they could express when they had to pee, before the fact. I felt a little pang of envy.

  “They’re kind of mopey.” She tilted her head at them.

  “Lucky,” I sighed. But then I saw my dinosaur camper, sneaking around the muffin basket, hunched over like a velociraptor. At least my group kept things interesting.

  She poked my side. “Yeah, but ask me what I heard.”

  Gossip, Vanessa. Wake up. Get in the zone. “Okay, what did you hear?!”

  “I heard that Claudia and Hana are dating.”

  That woke me up. There was nothing better than counselor relationship gossip. Although it was weird when, like last summer, your brother was in the middle of it.

  “Seriously?” I whispered. “Who told you?”

  “Isabelle, who heard it from Rachel and Doug.”

  “Whoa.” This
was big. Actual counselor information. I guess being pre-counselors now, we got more reliable gossip. We grabbed plates of pancakes and fresh-cut strawberries. I eyed Hana at one end of the dining hall, pouring herself coffee, smiling at her mom. Dark hair in a curly knot, already damp, wearing board shorts and a short-sleeved lifeguard swim top. So pretty, no matter what. I looked and found Claudia sitting with her group, the nine-year-olds, playing table hockey with a melon rind.

  Hmmm. They weren’t looking at each other longingly or anything. But they weren’t supposed to either. We’d found that out at orientation. NO PDA. Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. Boundaries sure made it hard to snoop.

  “But can you believe it?” Sophia continued seamlessly, as we got our tea.

  “Believe what?” Wallace asked.

  “Hana and Claudia,” I whispered. “There’s a rumor—”

  “Oh man, yeah.” Wallace smacked his forehead. “So embarrassing. I accidentally saw them kissing yesterday before lunch.”

  Sophia let out a little shriek, and I spilled hot water all over the table. We quickly mopped it up.

  “You did?”

  Wallace scratched his head. “Yeah. I mean, I didn’t watch, but I went to cut through the garden, and they were…you know…in the garden.”

  I had so many questions: Was it like a peck? Or were they in a romantic embrace?? But Wallace looked embarrassed enough already.

  “Amazing,” Sophia breathed.

  “Well, I think they’d look pretty cute together,” I said, picturing it in my head. Automatically, my brain put them in front of a wedding altar with Hana in a flowy white dress and Claudia in a sharp black suit. “I can see it.”

  “Yeah…but they’re both girls?” The way Sophia said the last part, I wasn’t sure whether she thought one of them was a dude, or whether she wanted to know if I didn’t like gay people.

  “Weren’t you at orientation?” I fired back, suddenly terrified my friend was homophobic. “We had a talk about diversity, you know.”

  “Oh, I know,” Sophia whispered. “I’ve just never known any girls who date, you know, each other.”

  “Well, now you do,” I said firmly. They were the first girl couple I knew, too, but Ben had told me about that stuff. And now that we didn’t live with my dad anymore, I didn’t have to hide that I supported everyone.

  “Hey, you’re right!” Sophia brightened. “This is going to totally shock my school friends.”

  “I don’t think that’s—”

  “Let’s go discuss with Isabelle.”

  She jumped up, Wallace followed, but then three of my campers asked if I would come sit at their table. Who could say no to those little faces? As we crossed the dining hall to their perfectly selected spot, I scouted the rest of the room.

  Rachel and Doug? Rachel and Jen? Doug and Dave? Who else was dating?

  I could not wait to find out.

  IF I’M BEING honest, Hana and Claudia making out at the island party, after I’d asked her out, wasn’t my ideal. My ideal was me making out with Claudia. So yeah, a small setback in the plan, but hey, everyone’s gotta do their thing, and I didn’t hold it against Claudia for liking girls too. That just made her hotter, as Bobby pointed out. And I couldn’t deny Hana was cute, even though she was super boring. All that girl did was swim and smile. But she was fine for a hookup buddy.

  I barely saw Claudia over the first two days of camp. I had the ten- year-olds, and damn did they have energy. And concerns. So many concerns. I missed working with younger kids (they were usually just cute as all hell), but Margo and Rachel got them this time. I did get to see Claudia, briefly, during sports, and she smiled and joked with me like usual. I figured I was in a good position to ask her to hang out on the weekend. Maybe for Saturday. The sparkler party was Friday, but my real aim was to get Claudia alone.

  I snuck glances at her in the dinner line. The piercings all along the back of her right ear. The gentle smirk she threw at campers. She seemed to operate in the world so easily, so herself.

  If I asked her out tonight, after Counselor Hunt, was that too desperate? Maybe I should wait till tomorrow?

  “John, Lis says she doesn’t like our president,” one of my boy campers complained, jerking his thumb at one of the girls. “Isn’t that unpatriotic?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Connie by the piano, motioning at me to come over.

  “What’s to like?” I replied, nodded at Lis, and ducked out of line. I heard the boy huff as I dodged into the bathrooms hallway. Connie poked her head out of one of the single occupancies, and I followed her in. She shut the door hard, behind her.

  “Pretty sure we’re not supposed to be in the bathroom together,” I pointed out. Suddenly, I was paranoid: if Claudia saw us come in here, would she think I liked Connie?

  There was a knock at the door, and Bobby slipped in too. Would Claudia think I was having threesomes with these knuckleheads?

  “What’s up?” Bobby asked.

  “I have bad news,” Connie announced.

  For bad news, she didn’t look real upset. “All right,” I said. “Make it quick. I have kids out there, and some of them have dietary restrictions.”

  “You know how Claudia and Hana…?”

  “Only wish I’d seen it.” Bobby sighed. I hit him in the gut.

  “Yeah, so?” I prompted. I was pretty sure Connie was into me. She’d seemed overly excited that Claudia had made out with someone else.

  “So they’re a thing.”

  “A thing?”

  “Like a dating thing.”

  My stomach dropped. They weren’t supposed to be a thing, of any kind. A sexy thing, at the very most. “How do you know?”

  “A bunch of people saw them in the garden yesterday, kissing.”

  “Where am I when all of this is happening?” Bobby demanded. I hit him in the gut again.

  “Ow.”

  More kissing? In the fucking garden? That sounded sickeningly romantic. “So they’re kissing.” I tried to blow it off. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Well.” Bobby held up a finger. “Combined with the fact that all the CITs know they’re dating—”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, that was my second piece of bad news.” Connie nodded. “Ellie told me, and apparently everyone else, that Hana and Claudia are a legit couple.”

  Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. These girls always knew each other’s business. And Ellie was friends with Hana, and she might’ve talked to her.

  I kicked the door. Now I was back at this goddamn camp, because of my goddamn brother, and my goddamn pseudo-father, and my one chance…

  No. That’s not how this worked. People dated all the time. Hooked up all the time. They hooked up with people they liked, and people they didn’t like….All we had were rumors. And some kissing.

  “This doesn’t mean anything,” I decided. “Until there’s actual proof.”

  “But what more proof—” Connie started.

  Bobby cut her off. “John’s right,” he said. “It’s just two girls doing that experimenting thing. You know.” Connie glared at him. But I’d seen plenty of girls go through that phase.

  “But keep an ear out, yeah?” I said. “For actual proof. Like, online or something.”

  Connie rolled her eyes, clearly frustrated—she so wanted me—and shoved her way out of the bathroom.

  “Dude, I’m totally hooking up with Margo later,” Bobby whispered. “She gave me the nod.”

  “Good for you, man.”

  I slapped him on the back affectionately. Dude was in to get his heart mashed into papier-mâché pulp, third summer running, but who was I to stop him?

  We split up. I went and found Marigold, who needed gluten-free pasta, and Caleb, who needed soy-free sauce. I had to stop myself from talking to them like my grandma: “When I was your age, if someone was allergic to peanuts, they ate a peanut, died, and got it over with.”

  DAY TWO OF sports went smoothly; I didn�
��t have to send anybody to Andy/Black Bear for any kind of medical attention, which might’ve been a first for the sports program. I dug being in charge of the games we played, the sportsmanship lectures. When I’d been Pete’s assistant, I had helped out, but my assistant, Claudia, was so disgustingly in love, I got to do everything myself!

  Lucky me!

  But whatever, I still liked it a lot, in spite of space cadet Claudia. I’d made her the permanent catcher that morning during tee ball so that she didn’t have to hold a bat. That seemed wisest.

  The routine of camp had wrapped itself around me like my cozy sleeping bag. I loved having every inch of the day planned for me. I loved being busy. I didn’t love when I had time to think—like this weekend, and Fourth of July. We had the rare Friday Fourth, which meant the kids would go home after lunch. Which meant maximum sparkler partying.

  Fireworks.

  Picnic blankets.

  Warm beer.

  Bee…

  I tried to shake it out of my head, like an Etch A Sketch.

  Donald, however, could not shut up about it. He whispered to me in hushed tones when I sat in on the afternoon art class. Hana had volunteered to help out with an origami unit on her break, so everyone who was free came to hang out. Luckily, Bee wasn’t free. Some kind of ropes course disaster.

  “I’m making a booze and fireworks run on Thursday,” Donald murmured, creasing a blue paper creation. “You want to come?” He handed me the finished product.

  I ignored him for three reasons. One, seriously, a bunny? Fuck off. Two, I didn’t really want to think about this party and all the memories that went along with it. And three, folding tiny origami stars takes a lot of concentration.

  “Donald, I can’t make a crane,” Reading whined. “Can you do it for me?”

  “Did you try?”

  “No…”

  After dinner, en masse the kids poured onto Monarch for evening games. Tonight, a classic and a favorite, Counselor Hunt. The rules were simple: counselors hid, campers sought.