“I know. I’m sorry. What can I say to make it better, Andrew?”
“Nothing,” he says.
Truer words were never spoken.
But his shoulders have stopped shaking. His red, puffy eyes look up at her with a glint in them so deep, she knows he’s going to spout something profound that will save them both.
“Have you ever seen that movie Escape to Witch Mountain?”
“Um, no. Actually, I haven’t.”
And then he proceeds to tell her the whole movie, in exquisite detail. She realizes Amy is going to genuinely kill her. But she owes him this. He’s probably never had anyone give him this much attention in his life.
An hour later they make it back to camp. Amy’s clothes and face look like she’s been in the trenches of World War I. Her ponytail is coming out of its scrunchie, and there’s marshmallow in her hair. But all the tents are up, and nineteen very sticky campers are happily roasting hot dogs over a blazing fire. She should win counselor of the year, Fiona thinks. She didn’t know Amy even knew how to make a fire.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and Amy waves her away with the willow branch she’s whittling into a point.
“Don’t make me stab you with this,” she says without looking up. “It’s very sharp.” There’s a long, long pause before she adds, “Andrew looks absolutely transformed. What did you do?”
“Kind of nothing,” Fiona says, which is a lie and the truth.
The kids have moved on from hot dogs and are now thrusting flaming marshmallows at her, asking for chocolate and graham crackers.
Fiona doles out s’more fixings. Then she looks at Amy and says, “Did I ever tell you what happened the day you gave me your tights in preschool?”
“I actually hated those tights,” says Amy. “It wasn’t that big of a deal, Fiona.”
“Yeah, it was,” Fiona says, “I got left at preschool that day. Nobody came to pick me up.”
“What do you mean?”
“My mom just forgot about me. I remember sitting at the coloring table and seeing the sky outside getting darker and darker and hearing Ms. Everett call someone, whispering that she didn’t know what to do. I knew she was talking about me. Remember those homemade worksheets she made about Dog and Moose and Bear going sledding together? I just pretended to color the same moose on a toboggan over and over again.”
The marshmallows are all gone, but Fiona keeps unwrapping pieces of Hershey’s chocolate and stacking them onto graham crackers anyway, as if in a trance.
“Someone came, I can’t remember who. It could have been a policeman, or the owner of the preschool, or a social worker. I got moved around for days between different strangers’ houses. I still had your tights, which was the only thing I had that was supposedly my own, even if they weren’t really mine.”
“That’s so crazy,” says Amy. “I had no idea. Why have you never said anything?”
“I guess I was embarrassed.”
Amy nods.
“Maybe you were right. Maybe I really do want things because they’re yours.”
“Really?”
“Not Mason Hawk, I swear. But you know, a nice grandmother from Denmark, like your Momo. Or just the fact that people worry about you if you don’t come home at night. I want all those things.”
“My family loves you.”
“Yeah, but they’re still yours.”
They watch their campers lazily yawning next to the fire, mesmerized by the flames. Fiona doesn’t remember ever feeling that content when she was six.
“Someone told me they saw you and Mason together that night,” Amy says quietly.
“So why didn’t you say anything before now?”
“I guess I was embarrassed too. And also jealous and hurt.”
Fiona understands being embarrassed. But Amy really didn’t need to be jealous or hurt.
“He just wanted to ask me about you. He told me not to say anything, but that’s all I was doing with him, answering questions about you. But then we got fired and you were so mad…I honestly forgot about it.”
“Oh my God.” Amy puts her face in her hands. “Fiona, I really thought…”
“Yeah, I know.”
She remembers the camp director’s squinty eyes. You don’t seem to be making a lot of friends among the counselors, Fiona.
“I really jumped to the worst conclusion, didn’t I?” says Amy.
Andrew has crawled into Fiona’s lap, covered in ketchup and snot and mosquito blood, and fallen asleep. He’s already snoring.
“It’s just hard, you know,” Amy says. “Believing you sometimes. I wish it wasn’t like that.”
“I want us to be friends in fifty years,” says Fiona. “How do we make sure that happens?”
“Well, for starters, I can’t just let everything roll off me anymore.”
“Yeah, I noticed that too.”
“And you have to trust me.”
It’s true; Fiona trusts barely anyone. But Amy isn’t just anyone.
“I will try harder, I promise.”
Another thing she’s always liked about Amy is that she knows when to stop talking.
“Come on, let’s get these guys in their tents,” says Amy.
In the firelight, their campers have just fallen asleep wherever they’ve landed. Some still hold charred willow sticks in their grubby fists, their bodies and faces covered in so many layers of food and dirt and dead bugs, they may need archaeologists to come in and dig them out to find their real skin.
Amy and Fiona nudge their little Jell-O bodies, trying to get them to walk, then finally give up and carry the ones that have collapsed.
“It’s solstice tonight,” Amy says.
“Is it?” asks Fiona as she picks up a groggy camper still wearing a sandy pink swimsuit. Do these girls even have any real clothes?
“The other counselors are having some kind of celebration. Finn told me to meet him by the lake.”
“I thought we only did that in the winter?” whispers Fiona. “You know, when the sun comes back. Who wants to celebrate shorter days ahead?”
“I guess people do it because it’s the longest day of the year,” Amy says. “Just another thing we didn’t get the memo about.” She holds up a melted shoe that was too close to the fire.
“Yeah, I bet everyone thinks Alaska was wasted on us,” says Fiona.
“Maybe, but I might go down and celebrate, if you don’t mind. Payback for doing all the setup?” She holds her hands together as if in prayer and blinks rapidly at Fiona. “Please?”
“Sure, of course. Have fun.”
Fiona needs to read Poppy’s intake sheet before she says anything about Finn. Even though Amy just said they should be honest, if Fiona accuses Finn and is wrong, it will be the last straw for her and Amy.
But her gut tells her she’s not wrong.
She carries Andrew to his tent and puts him down next to his Snoopy backpack. Nick and Franky stare at her in disbelief as Andrew’s snores rev into gear. Fiona laughs and whispers, “Aw, c’mon, you guys. Give him a break.”
They cover their ears with sweatshirts and pillows, then curl up together and slowly fall asleep beneath the midnight sun.
After Amy goes to meet Finn and the others, Fiona sits alone at the fire, holding Poppy’s information. For a second, she thinks about just tossing it into the flames—why stir the pot? But then she hears Poppy’s voice saying she’s not scared, but “Elizabeth is, though.”
She opens Poppy’s intake sheet and reads.
What do you hope your child will gain from camp? Poppy suffered a traumatic loss when her best friend went missing and was never found. They were both six at the time. She’s been doing much better since we moved to Alaska, and we hope she’ll make some friends her own age at Camp Wildwoo
d.
Any concerns that we should know about? For quite a while after the loss of her friend, Poppy developed an intense relationship with an invisible friend she called Elizabeth. She’s eight now, and too old for invisible friends—we hope. For the past six months, she seems to have moved on and no longer needs Elizabeth quite as much. If Elizabeth were to surface again at camp, it would signal that Poppy may have had some kind of relapse, and we would appreciate being contacted immediately.
Even if Finn had done nothing to make Poppy afraid, he was supposed to have read the intake sheet. Shouldn’t he have let her family know that Elizabeth is back?
“Fiona! Come quick! Nick was peeing and then something shot out of his butt! Hurry!”
She must have fallen asleep by the fire.
Oh, Nick, no, no, no. No. Please. Not again.
Franky and Andrew are hiding behind a tree, watching Nick, whose pants are down around his ankles.
There’s also a bear about fifty yards away on the trail, sniffing, nose in the air.
Fiona cannot breathe. Or move. She tries willing Nick with her mind to just step out of his pants, leave them on the ground, and back away slowly. But Nick hasn’t seen the bear yet.
“Franky, get me some leaves!” he shouts.
“No, Franky, stay put,” Fiona says.
“Why?”
Fiona points. Franky freaks out. “A bear! A bear! Go away, bear! Go away, bear!” He’s waving his arms and jumping up and down, which is exactly what you’re supposed to do when you see a bear. Fiona forgot this important information from orientation.
“Good job, Franky!”
Now Andrew has joined in, and Nick has stepped out of his pants and is jumping up and down with a bare bum. They are all yelling and making themselves big, which, compared with a huge brown bear, doesn’t mean all that much.
“Okay, but back away, guys,” Fiona says. “Slowly. Back away slowly.”
At the last second she thinks to snag Nick’s pants with a long stick and toss them as far as she can in the bear’s direction. That should keep him (or her) busy.
“I don’t have any more pants,” Nick says, but he backs away like Fiona told him to.
“You can have a pair of mine,” says Andrew.
“Okay, yeah,” says Fiona, eyes on the bear. “You can wear Andrew’s.”
Suddenly the bear’s ears prick up and it turns to look over its shoulder. Fiona follows the bear’s gaze….
Oh shit!
Poppy is walking along the trail in her nightgown and slippers. What is she doing out of bed?
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” Fiona grabs a metal pot and a spatula. She bangs wildly on the pot to get the bear’s attention.
“Come get these jeans!” she yells. “Yummy, yummy!”
Franky, Nick, and Andrew look at each other questioningly. Yummy?
Poppy hears the banging and stops. The bear freezes too, confused by all the noise; it just stands in the trail, halfway between Poppy and Fiona.
The rest of the camp hears the noise. Lillian runs over, banging a huge cowbell with a stick. Everyone is making as much noise as they can, until the bear looks so confused it heads off in the only direction where no humans are yelling and screaming.
Fiona drops the spatula and the pot, rushes to Poppy, and hugs her hard.
“What are you doing out of bed, Poppy?”
“I was looking for Finn.”
“I’m right here,” says a voice behind Fiona. “I’m sorry, Poppy. I’m here.”
He picks her up and holds her tight.
“I can’t find Elizabeth.”
Fiona is totally baffled. Isn’t Elizabeth scared of Finn?
“What’s going on?” Amy must have arrived with him.
“Poppy is from my hometown,” Finn says. “When her mom found out I was working here, she requested me as Poppy’s counselor.”
“But Elizabeth is scared of you,” Fiona blurts out.
“Her name is Poppy, Fiona,” Amy whispers. “And she doesn’t look scared.”
No time to fill her in.
Poppy is relaxed in Finn’s arms. She even giggles. “Fiona shook Elizabeth’s tail.”
Finn’s face grows serious. “Poppy?” he says. “Did you need to see Elizabeth? Is that why she was here?”
“She was only here for the day.”
“Poppy, why was Elizabeth scared of Finn?” Fiona asks.
“I’ll tell you why,” says Finn, not at all surprised by the question. “Because Elizabeth knows she’s not signed up for camp. Right, Poppy? I can see her with my special invisible mermaid headlamp. She knows I have to call Poppy’s mom if she shows up.”
Fiona just stares at him. Special invisible mermaid headlamp?
“Nobody is mad at you or Elizabeth,” Finn tells Poppy. “But I should still call your mom.”
“Elizabeth really wanted to swim in the lake and splash her tail around,” says Poppy. “She knows I don’t need her anymore, but sometimes she still needs me.”
Poppy rests her head against Finn’s shoulder and closes her eyes. “I want my mom anyway.”
Fiona is so relieved that she never told Amy her suspicions. So relieved that the camp director didn’t take her seriously. Best of all, nobody got eaten by a bear tonight.
Although, unbeknownst to any of them, down by the mud pits, a brown bear is ripping Nick’s other pair of soiled, forgotten pants into smithereens.
THE STRANGER IN THE WOODS
The summer the wildfire ripped through the forest and then licked dangerously at the houses on the edge of town was the summer Jenny learned that fire might actually be her friend.
She hadn’t really paid attention in school when they’d studied ecosystems and how wildfires were the age-old way that the earth took care of itself, since long before the arrival of humans. Her high school had added a new subject, ecology, taught by a very young graduate of the University of Colorado, who had stressed that lightning strikes were necessary: they ignited and burned old growth, thus making way for new growth. Circle of life. Birth, rebirth. The best way to fight fire was with fire. Blah, blah, blah. Why did they need to learn this?
Now, Jenny was surprised to realize that some of it had actually sunk in. During that fateful summer when the wildfire smoke had scorched their lungs every single day and practically the whole town had had to evacuate, Jenny had been consoled by one important thing she’d learned in that class: “Fire is essential for managing the forest. It keeps the ecosystem healthy without interference from man.”
In the margin of her notes, Jenny had written “or woman,” and punctuated it with a smiley face, figuring her young, hip teacher would appreciate the sentiment. Besides, she’d thought, she would never need to know this stuff in real life. The class had mainly been an exercise in equality and the evolution of language, or so she’d thought.
But now, as the woods near her house continued to burn and the winds took a nasty turn, the Forest Service announced a level three evacuation order, and everyone had to scramble to leave their homes, grabbing whatever valuables they could at the last second.
People had built way too close to the forest, and Mother Nature didn’t really give a damn about things like subdivisions or the skyrocketing price of insurance. The fire had started more than a hundred miles away, outside Granville, but warm weather and drought had brought the flames right to Jenny’s doorstep.
Before this summer, the only threat in that thick stand of dead spruce near her house had happened ten years ago. It wasn’t fire, but a stranger who had emerged from those trees and threatened their safety. Jenny was so sick of hearing that particular story, she was almost relieved to see it being rewritten by nature.
Not Jenny but her sister, Jade, had been riding her bike near the dead-end road that butted
the forest. Jade had been about six, and had just gotten her training wheels off. Seven-year-old Jenny hadn’t been there, but she could imagine it: her younger sister, standing up on her pedals and braking with the full force of her weight, scattering pebbles beneath her tires.
Jade had always been overly sure of herself, in Jenny’s opinion.
The part about the man coming out of the woods was harder for Jenny’s brain to wrap itself around, since she and her sister never really saw strangers. They lived in a place where everyone knew everyone. Jenny knew about strangers, of course, but the girls had never been anywhere that they might run into one, except for maybe JC Penney. It was the only place they could even imagine wandering off and getting separated from their mother. The one place where their mother had bothered to use that delicious word—“stranger”—which always made Jade and Jenny move a little closer to the hem of her skirt, as if she were base in a game of tag.
But in their neighborhood, mountain lions were a bigger threat than strangers. Also rare, but they had at least been spotted once or twice. “Strangers,” though: that was an exotic, spine-tingling word.
So Jenny had been especially jealous when Jade had met one.
Jade had relished telling the story, how he’d come toward her slowly, with a five-dollar bill in his outstretched hand.
“Here you go, sweetheart,” he’d said. Jade had said he smelled like skunk, and she’d seen a rip in his jeans. Every time her little sister told it, Jenny noticed that the story grew, until it included every missing button on his shirt, the ominous dirt under his fingernails. She doubted very much that Jade was remembering new details for every retelling, but Jenny said nothing, just chewed the inside of her cheek, feeling invisible, while her little sister awed everyone in her typical way.
Jade had taken the money and then whipped away on her bike (her words again), standing expertly on her pedals. Jenny knew that Jade thought the people she was telling the story to would be impressed by this.
Jade loved an audience.
“Hold on there, darling,” the man had said. “There’s lots more money where that came from, if you just come through these trees with me.”
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