by Kasie West
“Oh.” I had a phone call. “Wait…What?”
“A phone call. Someone called you at the pay phone.”
“What pay phone? Is there a pay phone at the lodge?”
“No…” He seemed to assess my sincerity. “Up at the employee cabins.”
“Someone called me? Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“And they asked for me? By name?”
“No, they asked me to find just any cute brunette and I chose you,” he said. “Of course they asked for you by name. Why else would I be here at six-thirty in the morning unless some person made the phone ring for ten minutes straight?”
“I…” He probably wanted me to just say thank you and take my phone call so he could move on with his day, but my stomach was now in knots and all the blood seemed to drain from my face. “Who was it?”
“I don’t know. Probably whoever you gave the phone number to.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t give it to anyone. I didn’t even know it existed.”
“Okay,” he said like he didn’t quite believe me. “Do you want to take the call or not?”
“No…Yes…I don’t know.”
“Are you always this indecisive?”
I’d never thought I was before a few days ago, but now it seemed that’s all I was. His question motivated me to action, and I started walking in the direction of the employee cabins. He matched my pace.
“What did she say?” I was assuming it was Shay, somehow figuring out how to get ahold of me. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was Trent?
“Who?” Brooks asked.
“The person on the phone.” A morning jogger ran past and Brooks put some space between us. “Was it a girl?”
“Yes.”
“Did she say anything?”
He laughed without humor. “She was very demanding. Told me she had to talk to you or her life would be over. Told me I had to go down and wake you up despite the fact that she’d just woken up the entire employee village. Told me she’s been trying to get ahold of you all weekend.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Why did something else have to happen that made him think I was super entitled?
“It’s fine,” he said, seeming to realize how grumpy he sounded. “It’s just early.”
I gave a breathy laugh. “Too early.”
He pointed at his cheek. “What’s on your face?”
I rubbed at the marks again. “Oh, a project I’m working on.”
“Um…”
“No, this isn’t the project. I was writing in a notebook. This is the notebook.”
“Oh, yeah, I can see it now. Spiral bound. Seventy pages?” He smirked.
“An amazing guitar player and a notebook expert? Stop stealing all the talents.”
He gave a half-smile. “I’ll try.”
As we headed up an incline, my feet slid in the flip-flops. I curled my toes to hold them in place.
He noticed me falling behind. “Why didn’t you grab your own shoes?”
“Because you were standing there waiting for me and I didn’t think we were going on a hike and I’m an idiot.”
“No, an idiot would have also left her cabin in a tank top….Oh wait.” His smile widened.
I reached over and shoved him, very satisfied when he stumbled a little from the force. I actually wasn’t cold at all. Maybe it was because my heart felt like it was pumping a hundred miles a minute.
“So that’s all Shay said?” I asked.
“Shay?”
“The girl on the phone.”
“Right. She said she’d keep calling if I didn’t get you and she said she was your best friend, so I figured you’d want to talk to her.”
I hesitated.
“Would you like me to ask her what she plans to say to you?”
“Will you? Please,” I joked.
He saw through me. “You don’t want to talk to her.”
“I don’t.” I closed my eyes and blew out a slow breath. All the anxiety I’d felt since the moment I’d found out about Shay and Trent seemed to have grown into an elephant sitting on my chest. I leaned over and braced my hands on my knees.
“Whoa. You okay?” Brooks asked. It sounded like he was speaking underwater.
“Yes, fine. I just need to…I just need to sit for a second.” I lowered myself to the dirt path just as a woman walked by with a small child. I could feel her eyes on me. My cheeks heated up as my eyes stung with tears. Small rocks dug into my palms.
Brooks squatted down in front of me. “What is it?” he asked quietly, concerned.
“I can’t talk to her,” I said. “She just called to make herself feel better. This is not going to make me feel better.” A tear slipped down my cheek and I swiped at it in frustration.
“There’s a bench up there. Let me take you.” He helped me to stand, then led me up the hill, past the Employees Only sign, and to the back side of the bathrooms. I could hear showers running inside as he pointed to the bench.
I lowered myself down and took several calming breaths. “You guys don’t have bathrooms in your cabins?”
He let me change the subject. “No. We have good old-fashioned communal bathrooms and showers.” He patted the log building behind me.
I nodded and toed a pine cone by my foot. I pushed it one way and then the other several times. “I’m sorry. I’m okay.”
His eyebrows lowered. “You don’t have to talk to anyone you don’t want to.”
But didn’t I? It may have felt like I was a million miles away at the moment, but summer wouldn’t last forever and I’d have to go home and deal with this. It would be easier to just get it over with now, not let it stew all summer. She felt bad. I just needed to talk to her. “Where is this pay phone?”
He waited a beat, seeming to gauge my sincerity, but when I stood, determined, he led me around the corner. Sure enough, on the far side of the bathrooms stood a single pay phone. The black handle was dangling at the end of the stiff metal cord. Had she been waiting for me this whole time?
Even though I hadn’t seen it happen, a flash of Trent and Shay kissing invaded my brain. It was just an accident, she had said. They had been talking about how much they would miss me. Another memory I had almost forgotten about flooded my brain along with this one. Last summer, at a pool party, I had overheard Shay and another girl talking bad about me. Shay had assured me she was just trying to get all the information so she could set the record straight. For me.
My eyes went to the dangling phone again. I took several sips of air, not able to fill my lungs fully. I leaned a hand against the wall, bracing myself, trying to force my other hand to grab the handle. That’s when Brooks picked up the phone and held it to his ear.
“Hi, Shay, is it?”
Shay must’ve responded.
“How did you get this number?” He listened for a moment, a dark expression, the one I realized I hadn’t seen since the campfire, on his face. “Google?”
He met my eyes, his brows rising in question, and I just stared, frozen.
“Avery is unavailable at the moment. She’ll call you back at her convenience, not yours. Please respect her request.” With that, he hung up. I leaned my back against the wall, then slid down to the ground in relief.
“Should I have done that?” he asked.
I nodded over and over, grateful. “I’m not normally this dramatic.” I let out a shaky laugh. “That’s my sister’s role.”
He shrugged. “It’s not drama if it’s real.”
I gnawed at the inside of my cheeks. It was so real. I’d just been pushing it down, trying not to think about it. Now it was demanding to be thought about. “Well, thank you. For that.” I nodded toward the phone. “And that.” I gestured back toward the bench.
“No
problem.” He looked to his left, where someone was exiting the bathroom, her hair wrapped in a towel, carrying a caddy of toiletries. He waited until she was out of earshot before saying, “Are you okay? I mean, obviously you’re not okay, but can I…Do you need anything?”
I stood and brushed the dust off my backside. “I’ve made you feel enough pity for me that you don’t hate me anymore?”
“I never hated you.” It took him a second to realize I was kidding. The crease between his brows relaxed and he said, “I really was a jerk. I just have a lot going on. I’m four hundred miles from home and I can never quite leave it behind.” He stared into the distance as if he could see some scene playing out in front of him.
“You want to?” I asked.
He held his hands out to the sides as if this entire forest was the answer to my question.
“What are you running from?”
“Life, reality…responsibility.” He looked at the pay phone. “What about you?”
I thought about that for a moment. “Life, reality…decisions…apparently.”
Just as I was about to ask him to expand on his answer, Kai’s loud voice rang out from somewhere beyond the nearest cabin. “Brooks! You out here?”
Brooks glanced over his shoulder and then back to me. “You sure you’re good?”
“You mean aside from the poor clothing and footwear decisions I made this morning?”
His eyes lit up. “See you around.” He started walking, then turned, moving backward for a moment, his magic smile on, reminding me of the very first time we met. “Write some more awesome lyrics for me, will you?”
“Only if you screen all my future phone calls.”
He laughed and disappeared around the cabin. I sighed and stared at the phone that I hadn’t known existed before today. I wished I still didn’t know.
“Hey, Maricela!” My original plan today had been to work more on the “Try New Things!” schedule, but after the failed phone call that morning, I felt emotionally drained. I decided the correct alternative was to float on the lake for hours. It was the right choice. The vitamin D and rocking motion of the lake had left me with a serotonin buzz.
“Avery! Hey! Cute suit.”
I was wearing a floral one-piece, the straps ruffled. “Thanks.”
“Walk with me? I’m heading to my cabin to get out of this.” She pointed to her red lifeguard suit.
“Sure.” I changed direction. “How was work?”
“You don’t want to know. Some kid vomited in the pool today and I had to evacuate everyone.”
“I’d think people would willingly evacuate a vomit pool,” I said.
“It was like herding chickens. And have you ever tried cleaning up vomit with a pool net?”
“No, and I hope I never have to.”
“Yeah, I’ll have nightmares about it.” Maricela stopped at the fifth cabin and pulled out a set of keys. Before she inserted the key into the lock, she knocked on the door. “I’m coming in. Hope you’re not naked!” She swung open the door to an empty cabin. It was just one big room. Three twin-sized beds lined one wall and a dresser and changing screen were on the other, plus two suitcases, overflowing with clothes.
“You have roommates?”
“Just one this year. You want to move in?” She pointed at the far bed that obviously hadn’t been slept on but had become another dresser of sorts—piled with clothes.
“Sure, but will I have to clean up vomit?”
“Yes, number one requirement.” She collected a pair of shorts and a tee off the foot of one of the beds, then pulled out some underclothes from the top drawer of the dresser. She ducked behind the screen.
As I stood there in silence for several moments, I suddenly wondered if Brooks had told her about the embarrassing breakdown I’d had that morning. Was he the type to talk? I really didn’t want her to ask me about it.
“So?” she said after a few more quiet moments, still behind the screen.
I sat on the end of her bed. “Yes?”
She stepped out, dressed, then retrieved a tube of lip gloss off her dresser and applied it. She took out her ponytail and finger-combed her hair. “How do I look?”
“Amazing.” She really did. Her natural curls were full of body and her emerald-green T-shirt looked great against her skin. “Are you trying to impress someone? Aside from me, of course?”
I asked it as a joke, but the way her smile slipped off her face before reappearing again let me know I’d guessed right. “Who?” I asked.
Her eyes shot toward the door, then back to me. “Shhh.”
I looked around. “Nobody is here.”
“I know, but I swear this place has ears everywhere.”
“Someone off-limits, then? A coworker?”
She smiled. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“You haven’t told me anything.”
“I know, and I can’t. It’s still super new. After summer is over, I’ll tell you everything.”
“That’s torture,” I said. “But I get it.”
She picked up her wet swimsuit from the floor behind the screen and hung it on a hook by the door. Then she stretched her arms above her head. “Do you have dinner plans or do you want to see if the campfire is happening again tonight?”
“Is it already dinnertime?” I’d stayed out at the lake longer than I thought.
“Yes.”
I snapped the strap of my swimsuit. “Let me go change. Can I meet you up there in like thirty?”
“For sure.”
* * *
I opened the door of our cabin to yelling.
“I said I’m not hungry!” Lauren called from what I assumed was our bedroom.
“Then just get something small,” Mom said, swiping her key from the counter and sticking it into the pocket of her jacket.
“Just bring me back something if you’re worried about it!”
Dad, sitting on the couch and tying his shoes, called, “Lauren, don’t talk to your mom like that!”
“I wasn’t trying to be rude! I was being serious!” she called.
Mom scoffed.
“Hey,” I said from the doorway, where nobody had noticed me yet.
“Oh, hi, Avery,” Dad said. “You ready for dinner?”
I looked from Mom, who seemed tired, to Dad, who was obviously frustrated. “Yep,” I said.
His face relaxed. “We’ve missed your go-with-the-flow energy today.”
I took a deep breath, trying to decide how to respond to that, when Lauren yelled, “Bring me back one of those garlic knot things!”
I sighed. “Let me go change.”
When I got to our bedroom, I shut the door. Lauren was sitting on her bed, laptop on her knees.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Nothing. I don’t want to go to dinner. I’m working on editing Kai’s interview from the other night.” As she said it, her smile widened. She turned the computer toward me, where a close-up of Kai’s smiling face filled the whole screen. “Here’s my star.”
“Yeah, he’s pretty charismatic,” I said. “But would it hurt to take a break and go to dinner?”
“Yes, it very well might.”
“It would make the parents happy.”
“That’s your game, Avery. You do things to make people happy,” she said, as if making people happy was a bad thing. “Maybe you should add start saying how you really feel to your list of new things to try.”
“Thanks.” I pulled out some clothes and headed for the bathroom to change.
“I’m sorry,” she called after me. “I didn’t mean it like that!”
I just lifted my hand in a wave but didn’t turn around.
After I’d changed and joined my parents, I hooked my arm in my dad’s as we walked to the
front door.
“Everything okay with you?” he asked.
Lauren was right—I needed to tell him how the things he said sometimes hurt. I opened my mouth and said, “Yes, I’m fine.”
* * *
The campfire group was smaller tonight, so Maricela was easy to spot, sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the flames, talking to a girl next to her. I scanned the rest of the faces and didn’t see D, so I relaxed as I made my way around to them.
“That was the longest thirty minutes ever,” Maricela said when she saw me.
“I know. I got roped into dinner with my parents.”
“This is my roommate, Tia,” Maricela said, pointing to the girl next to her.
She looked familiar. “Hi, I’m Avery.”
“Did you know that tía means ‘aunt’ in Spanish?” Maricela said to her.
Tia laughed.
Maricela looked up at me. “I tell her that like five times a day.”
“And yet it never gets old,” Tia said.
Maricela clucked her tongue. “Sarcasm is the ugly stepsister of humor, Tia.”
“Are we not allowed to use sarcasm around here?” I asked.
“No, it’s my third language,” Maricela said. She leaned her head back. “Sit, already.”
There was an empty chair to her left. I pointed at it and she nodded.
“Your sister does the videos, right?” Tia asked.
That’s why she looked familiar. She was the roll girl in the cafeteria from day two. And the one who’d given Lauren all the info on the band. “Yes, she does.”
The fire crackled and the smoke shifted. I waved it away and moved the chair before I sat.
“I forgot to ask you earlier—how is that home drama going?” Maricela asked.
“Brooks told you,” I said, more disappointed about that than I wanted to be.
“Brooks? No, you told me the other night.” She turned toward Tia. “Avery is knee-deep in some mysterious drama at home.”
“Welcome to the club. Pretty sure that’s why most of us come up here in the first place.”
Someone across the way threw a stick into the fire, causing sparks to fly.