Thin, Rich, Pretty

by Harbison, Beth

  “Monica would be the plus-size girl you left in there, probably in the middle of some deal whereby you’d give her the emotional satisfaction she’s craving in exchange for her, um, dropping a few pounds, is that right?” Her anger was boiling over. “Am I close, Randy?”

  “I don’t know where this is coming from, but I don’t deserve it.”

  “Yeah, well, you shouldn’t have chased me out here to get it, then, should you?”

  “What happened to you?” he demanded. “You used to be so nice.”

  “What happened to me? I’ll tell you what happened to me: You happened to me! You made me feel like I wasn’t good enough for you unless I met a certain physical standard. You told me you’d marry me if—and only if—I lost weight. You watched me struggle, you watched me starve, you didn’t care about my health, all you cared about was watching and seeing the magic your manipulation created. Once the trick was over, you moved on to the next one.”

  “That’s not true.” His objection was weak. It was as if he’d never thought of it in such clear terms himself and recognized the truth only when he heard it.

  “It’s one hundred percent true. I just can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner.” She wanted to kick him. “What’s her name? Monica? Maybe I should go in and warn Monica what you’re all about. Maybe spare her some heartache and yo-yo dieting.” But the truth was, Monica wouldn’t believe her.

  Holly wouldn’t have believed some strange woman saying these things, either.

  “This is none of your business.”

  “You’re right. But if I thought I could help her, I wouldn’t care if it was my business or not—I’d try.”

  “You’re just jealous,” Randy said. Oddly enough, he sounded like he was trying to soothe her, though his voice was having the opposite effect. “You need to move on.”

  “I need to move on, all right. I need to get the hell out of this box I’ve been stuck in.”

  “Box? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the fact that I led a sheltered, fearful life and you loved that. You totally took advantage of my insecurities in order to dominate me. Did it make you feel big?”

  He straightened and started to object, but the way his face colored told her he’d probably already been accused of this. “If you’re in a box, it’s not my fault.”

  “No, you’re right. I should have gotten out a long time ago.” She looked at his smug face and felt like she was really going to lose her mind if she stood there one more moment. “I just didn’t know I could. Now I do.” She didn’t wait for an answer but just hurried away, desperate to get to the safety of her car.

  She’d realized, in bits and pieces, that her relationship with Randy had been unhealthy, just like her relationship with Derek before him had been, but it wasn’t until tonight that she fully realized just what a toll it had taken on her.

  She’d let those relationships affect almost every part of her psyche and self-esteem. She’d been manipulated, but only because she’d allowed it.

  Thank God Nicola was coming. Thank God.

  It had been so long since Holly felt like herself that she didn’t even know what it meant anymore.

  But she did know that if there was one person she’d always been unself-conscious with, it was Nicola.

  She couldn’t wait to see her.

  Holly waited by gate 2C at Dulles International Airport, looking for her best friend, whom she’d been warned she’d know only by the fact that she wouldn’t recognize her anymore.

  The passengers from Nicola’s JetBlue flight filed out of the security doors, and Holly waited, half holding her breath, wondering if Nicola looked anything like herself, or if she should just wait for perhaps a beautiful Asian woman to come running toward her, arms outstretched, saying how long it had been since they’d seen each other.

  It was funny, though—she knew Nicola the minute she came off the plane. Sure, she looked a little different, but to Holly it was as if Nicola had red lipstick on, not a whole new face.

  “It’s so good to see you!” she cried, throwing herself into Nicola’s arms.

  Nicola held tight. “You, too! You look different.” She drew back and frowned. “What’s changed?”

  “Nothing.” Holly laughed. “Everything but nothing. It doesn’t matter. You’re here and that’s all that matters. Well, that and whatever’s going on with you.” She was concerned at the pale, serious look on Nicola’s face. “Are you okay?”

  Nicola nodded. “I’ve had a few long weeks with work and . . . everything. And the last part of the flight really tested my stomach, but everything’s fine now. For the first time in ages, I feel like I’m home.”

  “Good. Because I feel like you’re home, too.” Holly hooked her arm through Nicola’s. “Let’s go. We’ll have some wine and eat junk food until we’re ready to burst.”

  “Good. You look like you need to have a snack.”

  “I know, I couldn’t eat after the whole Randy thing—”

  “Or during the whole Randy thing.”

  “Right. That, too. It’s funny how being thin isn’t as fun as I thought it would be.”

  “I feel the same way about being pretty.”

  Holly laughed. “Who would believe it?”

  Nicola smiled. “Neither of us would have.” They walked a few minutes in silence; then Nicola asked, “So we’re off to Camp Catoctin tomorrow?”

  “If you’re up for it. I think it will be a blast.”

  “It’s kind of cool, huh? It’s almost twenty years to the day that we left that place for the last time. I never thought we’d be back.”

  “Me neither. Because we were too old. Imagine if we’d known we’d be back at thirty-three!”

  Nicola laughed outright. “We thought we were old then!”

  “Ugh. I know.”

  Nicola looked at her again. “I can’t get over how . . . different you seem. Happy. I like it.”

  They went to the baggage carousel, where Nicola’s bag was, miraculously, one of the first ones off.

  “So you’re sure the place is still there?” Nicola asked. “The camp, I mean?”

  Holly nodded. “I did some research. From what I can tell, it’s unchanged. They’re not using it for kids anymore, at least not this year, but the main facility is being used as an adult education center. There’s been no development, from what I can tell.”

  “Unless Mr. Frank is still there and decided to build himself and his wife a house out in the woods.”

  “If that’s the case, and if they ended up exactly where we’re going to look, I think we’d have to take that as a sign.”

  “No kidding.” Nicola laughed uneasily. “But we don’t believe in signs.”

  “Nope!”

  They stepped through the automatic doors, into the night air. “Keep reminding me of that, okay?”

  20

  “This is so creepy,” Holly said. They were standing in front of what remained of the crescent of cabins that used to be Camp Catoctin. The buildings were overgrown now, with weeds growing into—and out of—them. Some of the roofs were sagging, and most of the windows were broken.

  Cabin 5 had QUINCE RULES spray-painted on it in black, whatever that meant.

  “It is,” Nicola agreed, heavyhearted. “It’s sad seeing something that seemed so big and lively so small and broken now.”

  Holly nodded. “I wonder why it closed.”

  “It’s probably like all those quaint old ghosts of restaurants you see on the side of old interstates. Maybe they used to be in vogue, but as cities got tighter and more people moved in, the service industry moved in, not out.”

  “Plus, no one can afford anything anymore.”

  “Yeah, there’s that.”

  “Should we go look at our cabin?”

  Nicola hesitated. She might regret this. “I’m thinking we have to.”

  Together, they walked from the gravel parking lot toward cabin 7. For a while they didn’t say
a word; they just walked across what was once a sweep of green grass but what was now a mangy old dog of a patch, with crabgrass and bare patches of dirt, to the cabin they’d both loved and hated for four weeks twenty years ago.

  The wood was rotting, and there was a pale 7 faded into the peeling paint where once there had been a large brass number.

  “How long has it been closed?” Nicola asked.

  “I don’t know. They still use the meeting hall for adult education and retreats, so technically, it’s not closed. But when I called to make sure it was still here, the person who answered the phone said it hadn’t been a kids’ camp for ‘years.’ Who knows how many? Maybe it closed the year after we were here.”

  “If only it had closed the year before we were here.” Nicola laughed.

  “But then we wouldn’t have met!”

  “Sure we would. People who are meant to meet each other meet one way or the other. We might have ended up in line together at Dulles Airport. It didn’t need to be here.”

  “Yes, it did,” Holly contended. “Because you don’t make lifelong friendships with people you stand in line with at the airport.”

  “I don’t know—lines at the airport have gotten awfully long.”

  “Be that as it may, I’m glad we met here.”

  Nicola smiled. “Me, too.”

  “On the other hand, I’m not so glad we’re here right now. It’s way spookier than I thought it would be.”

  “It is.” Nicola took a tentative step.

  “Maybe this is the penance for going back to the scene of our crime.”

  “No, no, the statute of moral limitations has expired here. We’re back because we’re good people, not because we have to come back—”

  “Really?”

  “Okay, we have to come back and look for the ring, but we don’t have to cop to it.”

  “So far we haven’t.”

  Holly rolled her eyes. “Do you want to banter or atone?”

  “Atone. This time.”

  “Fine. Let’s go.” She turned around and looked. “But do you want to go in first?”

  Nicola grinned and nodded. “Of course!”

  Holly took an uncertain step onto the wooden porch. She could totally picture the entire thing breaking and splintering under her weight. Not that the embarrassment would have been that huge with just Nicola, but she didn’t want a serious accident, and given the looks of the entire campsite, it seemed like anything was possible.

  “Remember how the horses neighing and galloping would keep us awake at night?” Nicola asked behind Holly.

  For a moment, Holly closed her eyes and remembered the sound from outside the windows—the soft neighs and the hard pounding of dirt. So hard, she could picture the clouds of dust rising from beneath galloping hooves. “Yes.” She smiled. “Though now you could add that sound to one of those spa-effects clock radios, and I’d probably sleep like a baby.”

  “Let’s go in.” Nicola pulled the screen door to the cabin open. The hinge was broken, so the door dropped limply onto the porch, and she had to scrape it across the planks. “Do you remember that squeaky sound?”

  “Yes, but only from those nights we were trying to sneak out without anyone hearing us.”

  “That’s the only time I was so aware of it, too. Weird how even now it’s familiar.”

  Holly nodded but said nothing. This was proving to be a lot more melancholy than she’d anticipated. They stepped over the wooden threshold and into the sleeping space.

  It was a lot smaller than she remembered it.

  Seriously, the room was about twelve feet square, with two of the three bunk beds still there. Both were rusted, with some of the springs popped and sticking out. There was a mattress on one top bunk—Nicola’s actually—and the rest were bare. How was it that someone had come through and cleaned up just that much—to remove one complete bed, three mattress, but to have left two frames and one mattress behind? Was there some sort of emergency that interrupted them to the extent that they never came back to finish the job?

  Thanks to the state of disrepair—in addition to the mouse droppings and spiderwebs—it was obvious they weren’t still using the cabins for guests, so why hadn’t they completed the job of razing them?

  Standing in the small space, Holly was overwhelmed by memories and a strange protective feeling for the child she’d been. This wasn’t a happy place for her. This was a place where angst and misery were almost literally soaked into the wood-beam walls and the mattresses that remained. Her nights here had not been happy ones, gazing out the window and fantasizing about whatever bright future she might have, but instead of misery and self-consciousness, trying to stay awake and be the last to fall asleep so that if anyone started talking about her and laughing at her, she’d be aware of it.

  What she’d imagined she’d do with that information, she didn’t know.

  She’d never gotten that far.

  “Let’s go,” she said. She actually heard herself say it before she realized she was really going to say it.

  “What’s wrong?” Nicola asked.

  But when Holly looked at her, she could see that Nicola was being haunted by very similar ghosts. “Don’t you find this disconcerting?” she asked her.

  “Totally,” Nicola said. “But it’s fascinating at the same time. Not only is this place a ghost town, but it’s my ghost town.” She pointed to the window. “I used to look out that window right there and watch the moon cross the sky. As long as it made it from one pane to another, I knew time was passing and that I’d be able to get out of here sooner or later.”

  “I just closed my eyes and willed myself to sleep,” Holly confessed. “I knew that as soon as the sun came up, another day had passed and that was another black X across that day on the calendar.”

  “Do you think it’s healing to be here?”

  Holly thought about that for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but to tell you the truth, I’m standing here now feeling almost as nervous as I did when I was a kid. Like Lexi and Tami and Sylvia are going to come prancing through that door any minute and say something mean. Something to make life miserable.”

  “Yet you want to help her. Lexi, I mean.”

  “That’s right.” Holly nodded, but there was a bit of the fearful girl she used to be in her expression. “Go figure. Now, can we get out of here? I’m terrified that the floor is going to crumble under our feet and we’ll fall into some sort of termite hell.”

  “Let’s go.” Nicola led the way and opened the door for Holly, then followed her out.

  Holly was profoundly relieved to breathe the fresh air again. She was a thirty-three-year-old woman with her own business, and her own house, and a new lease on life—she shouldn’t have been afraid of ghosts in an old camp cabin, and yet she was quaking deep down in her body.

  She picked her way down the steps carefully, glad with every step she took that she was getting farther away from the cabin. Mr. Frank’s office and meeting hall were barely visible behind a curtain of evergreens in the distance, but she was glad to see them nevertheless. “So where do we go?” she asked, digging her heels into the dirt. “It’s left, right?”

  “Eleven o’clock from the front of the cabin.”

  Holly looked at Nicola. “You just happen to remember that?”

  “Hey, this was a big deal for me. I had mental maps to everything around here. Don’t forget I was the one who had to navigate home on the water in the middle of the night. Alone.”

  “True. You’re lucky you didn’t become one of those short-lived news stories and long-lived urban legends. Can you see kids lying in these cabins talking about it? ‘She left the dance and took a rowboat back to camp, but before she got there, a slimy hand reached out of the inky black water and grabbed her—’ ”

  “Ew! Stop! I remember the horrifying details well enough—you don’t need to embellish them with disembodied hands.”

  “It wasn
’t disembodied, but that’s a nice touch,” Holly said. “That’s the kind of gross detail that makes the story stick. And, believe me, I have a bunch of stuck old horror stories in my head.”

  “This is the place for them.” Nicola started walking across the weedy landscape, and Holly followed her.

  “Maybe we should have brought a compass. Or water or a candle or some sort of safety stuff. Do our cell phones work out here?” Holly took out her cell phone and turned it on. One bar. “Oh my God, maybe we don’t even have cell service.”

  Nicola stopped and turned around. “There’s your car right there.” She pointed. “We are not that far from civilization. This place isn’t nearly so big as it felt when we were little. Get ahold of yourself.”

  “Easy to say now.” Holly glanced at the comforting sight of her car, then at the thick woods ahead. “But when we’re there . . .”

  “How long has it been since you left the city?”

  “A long time. Months. Maybe years.”

  “You’re just being princess-y. It’s fine. These are very thin woods, and we don’t have to go very far.”

  “How long has it been since you left the city?”

  “Fourteen years.”

  Holly’s jaw dropped. “Are you serious?”

  “Sort of. We filmed in Upstate New York about fifteen years ago, then I went back to L.A. and did two more movies in the studio, and . . .” She thought about it. “Yeah, I guess if you’re talking about when was the last time I left the city or suburbs, it’s been a while.”

  “Great.”

  “What difference does it make?” Nicola laughed outright. “If I’d been hiking along the Appalachian Trail last year, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to what we’re doing right now! What we’re doing is time travel, not hiking.”

  “True.”

  “And time travel is much worse. So stop wigging out about this, and start trying to remember where the hell we’re supposed to go.”

  “I thought you had mental MapQuest going on.”

  “It’s not infallible.”

  Dread simmered in Holly’s veins again, but this time she didn’t mention it. “I followed you. Get us to the entry point, and I might be of more use. Though I do remember it as being just about this angle when we went into the woods.”