by Una LaMarche
That summer, I had been trying to get him to open up to me about his life back home, with middling results. He’d told me that in sixth grade he’d been diagnosed with mild ADHD and that his dad wanted to treat him but his mom didn’t, because she read a book called The Overmedicated Child that Adam had found—complete with damning annotations—in the pantry underneath her carb-free diet bars. I knew he had some trouble in school and that his prized possession was his grandfather’s Red Sox cap, which was signed on the back by Carl Yastrzemski, and which he had never worn outside the house because he was so superstitious about losing it. But that was basically it. For someone so talkative, Adam didn’t say much.
“Oh, come on,” he protested, grabbing my hand for balance as we navigated the newly wobbly terrain of slick boulders with our arms outstretched. “I’m not that bad.”
“You just got voted Biggest Flirt—by the counselors,” I reminded him, and he laughed.
“Touché.”
The rocks looking out at the western coast of Wexley Island—a supervised overnight campground about half a mile off shore that everyone called “Sexy Island” for the rumored counselor hook-ups that frequently went down there—could be jagged and uncomfortable, but they were also isolated, and they had pretty great views, especially on a clear night like that one, when the stars were so big and unbelievably bright they looked almost fake. Adam climbed nimbly onto a big, flat rock that was conveniently about the size of a loveseat. He cocked one eyebrow and reached a hand down for me.
“Can I can convince you to join me on this luxury boulder?” he asked. I grasped his hand, braced my foot, and swung my other leg up. It wasn’t graceful, but at least I didn’t fall. I slid next to Adam, and our thighs touched. From our perch we could see the counselors’ boat out on the lake in the moonlight. They were singing, and someone was shouting something about finding the goddamn lighter. I could feel Adam looking at me, but I was too afraid to look back. My skin felt electrically charged, and every infinitesimal movement he made set off an explosion in my brain that made me want to simultaneously fly and vomit.
“It’s pretty up here,” I finally squeaked.
“You’re pretty up here.” I looked over. He was smiling, but he didn’t say it like a joke.
“Stop it,” I said. Please don’t stop, I thought.
“I mean it.” He looked at me for a long minute. “Emma—” he paused, like he was trying to figure out what to say next. And then he put his hand on my leg.
I remember the next few seconds happening in slow motion. I turned to him, trying not to look as scared as I was. He started to lean—so slowly I wasn’t even sure he was really leaning. Maybe I was just having lust-induced vertigo. His lips parted slightly, those warm brown eyes searching my face for permission, like that time I slipped climbing a tree in the north field when we were twelve and he had to take a two-inch splinter out of my shoulder. I knew what I was supposed to do; I was supposed to cock my head, close my eyes, and let go.
But I couldn’t.
It was only once I was in the moment that I realized I couldn’t go through with it. My thoughts started spiraling anxiously. Yes, kissing Adam would be amazing, I thought, but then what? The next morning our parents would come and pick us up, and we couldn’t exactly have a tender good-bye. And then he would go north to Maine and I would go south to Boston and we didn’t even know if we would be back the next year as CITs (a.k.a. counselors in training) together. If we kissed, everything would change, five years of friendship reset in a single second. Everything would change even more than it was already going to. I didn’t know if it was worth it. At least the dull ache of my unrequited longing was familiar. I knew what it felt like. I knew I could survive it. But that kiss . . . suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.
So at the last second, I turned my head. His lips brushed my earlobe, his nose bumped against my cheek.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Oh,” he said, pulling back, looking surprised. “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t . . . I mean, I thought . . . wow. Sorry.” The first fireworks shot through the still night sky like lightning, and Adam shifted away from me. Sparks were literally flying through the air and we had a front row seat, and I was wearing his hoodie, which smelled so much like him I wanted to live in it. I couldn’t have asked for a better moment, and I’d just ruined it, so I muttered an excuse about having to get back to help Jo wrap up the leftover s’mores, gave him a stiff, awkward hug, and jumped down to the sand, barely sticking the landing, I was shaking so hard. As I ran back, cutting through the woods so no one saw me, willing the hot tears to wait until I was safe in my bed or curled in my friends’ arms, I could still hear the fireworks crackling overhead like gunfire, invisible bullets grazing my heart again and again.
That was the last night I saw Adam. It was also the last time for years that Skylar, Jo, Maddie, and I were all in one place—well, the next morning was, but it was so chaotic and went so fast it barely registered. Our real good-bye had been on the beach, when we sealed the pact, but none of us had known it at the time. If we had, maybe we would have stayed longer, lingered with our toes in the cool sand, listening to each other laugh, letting our candles burn down to our ink-stained fingertips.
Only Sky and Jo came back the next summer as CITs. So did Adam and Nate, and the twins. Maddie had some family stuff to deal with, she said, so she didn’t come back, and I applied, but—and it’s still hard to say this, three years later—I wasn’t chosen. Mack wrote me a nice note along with my rejection, explaining that he just hadn’t seen enough of my wilderness skills to be able to confidently hire me, but it stung. In retrospect I guess reading in the bunk all day was a bad call. I cried for a week and then threw myself even more into school, even getting a summer internship from my dad’s friend, collating papers at his asbestos litigation law firm (which was as thrilling as it sounds). I told the others I was too busy to be a counselor, but Jo probably knew the truth; I never asked and she never mentioned it. We all kept in touch every few weeks that first year, but then we started to let months go by, which turned into whole semesters. We tried to four-way video chat once, but Maddie’s Internet connection kept dropping out. She blamed Mercury in retrograde.
Some nights, later on, I’d find myself lying in bed spooning my laptop and scrolling through Facebook photos Skylar had posted from camp. In them, she was always mid-laugh, her arm draped over someone else’s shoulder: a tensely smiling Jo wearing what looked like—could it be?—lip gloss; a slimmer, dimpled, surprisingly attractive Nate. There’s one particular photo I always came back to, though, one of her and Adam sitting on the counselors’ porch. It must have been taken at the end of the summer, because they’re both really tan. They’re splayed out in Adirondack chairs, grinning and holding Dixie cups of bug juice. Each drink is topped with one of those miniature cocktail umbrellas, and Skylar captioned the photo “Wish you were here . . . .” It was like she had written it for me.
It was weird seeing my old friends get taller and cycle through different haircuts, but that’s not why the photos kept reeling me back in. It was a little heartbreaking to see snapshots of a new Camp Nedoba that I wasn’t a part of. Something like Halley’s Comet shows up once a century and then disappears again, but camp just kept going without me in it. I knew, deep down, that I could always go back, and that we’d always be friends. But life had obviously gotten in the way. So I was beyond excited when I got the reunion invitation, set for three summers after our graduation. It was an opportunity for us all to be together again, in the place where our story started, away from the stresses and distractions of everyday life.
It felt, in so many ways, like a second chance.
Emma
Reunion: Day 1
Present Day ♦ Age 17
EMMA WAS RUNNING LATE. SHE HATED RUNNING LATE. Reunion registration started at eleven, but the girls had set their own pre-reunion for ten thirty, and wit
h the traffic she was hitting as she approached Worcester on the Mass Pike, there was no way she would make it. But she was driving her aunt’s car—without express permission, although, Emma reminded herself, Aunt Leila had written “What’s mine is yours” in the two-page memo she had affixed to the fridge, along with instructions on how to water her azaleas and the preferred ratio of wet-to-dry food mix for her obese and ornery cat, Raoul—and so Emma was sticking to the speed limit. She couldn’t afford to pay a ticket, anyway, on her ten-dollar-a-day stipend from what had turned out to be the most disappointing summer job ever.
It had sounded so perfect: an editorial internship at Miss Demeanor, a teen-focused literary magazine that featured original essays along with articulate, funny, nonpatronizing advice about issues like sex, drugs, and conflicts with parents. After putting in a long, mind-numbingly boring year editing the op-ed page for the Reed Memorial High School Voice (“The Spork in the Road,” an argument against plastic cafeteria utensils, was a high point), Emma had been ecstatic to start working at a real publication that wrote about real issues that would look amazing on her college applications and was based in New York City, where she could get away from what had become a constant, slow-burning battle with her parents over whether she would retake the SATs in the fall. (2100 was 96th percentile, but they felt that was on the low end for the Ivy League.) She’d harbored fantasies about penning Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reports—or at the very least getting to write posts for the magazine’s blog. But after a week spent making lunch runs and refilling the printer ink, Emma had been forced to readjust her expectations.
“Editorial intern is just code for slush pile slave,” a fellow intern named Jeff had told her on her second day, as they waded through box after box of unsolicited submissions, 99.9 percent of which got transferred directly into the paper shredder, unless the grammatical errors were egregious enough to earn them a place on the conference room bulletin board. Jeff had just finished his first year at NYU, and his blue eyes, brown hair, dimples, and thick black-framed glasses made him look like Clark Kent. Jeff was definitely the best part of Miss Demeanor so far, Emma thought with a smile, glancing up at herself in the rearview mirror as traffic slowed to a complete stop.
But work was quickly slipping from her mind the further she got from New York and the closer she got to the exit that would take her off the highway and through the sleepy main street of Onan, New Hampshire, up to the old oak tree adorned with a threadbare blue flag that signaled the discreet right turn onto Nedoba’s private gravel road. Emma couldn’t believe she was finally going back. It seemed physically impossible, like how she used to feel about air travel as a kid, waking up in Boston and going to sleep in California. No matter how many times her dad explained the mechanics of flight, she just couldn’t accept that magic didn’t factor in somehow. That morning, as she’d brushed her teeth in her aunt’s narrow bathroom, with a window that looked out on Central Park, Emma had tried to picture lying down that night on a thin, musty mattress, looking up at the underside of a bunk bed, hearing Skylar, Jo, and Maddie’s voices, and she couldn’t do it. But as she inched the green station wagon down the highway, it was getting more real by the minute, and Emma was equal parts thrilled and terrified.
She’d been texting with Skylar more over the weeks leading up to reunion (Ten days! Emma would write, receiving a reply hours later in Sky’s hasty typing—Duuuude cant wait <3 uuu!), but it had been at least six months since they’d exchanged any real correspondence. The last time they’d talked, in January, Skylar had been about to leave for a semester abroad in Florence, and she and Skylar had made excited plans to apply to Brown and RISD, respectively, so they could see each other again during college, all the time. At the end of the call, like always, they swore up and down to make a weekly phone date, but then Sky had never replied to Emma’s e-mails asking for her international number, and Emma had gotten swept up in schoolwork, SAT prep, and internship applications, anyway. Skylar had written a mass e-mail to the girls once, from Italy, which focused almost exclusively on a guy named Carlo, a tour guide she had started dating after he’d taken her on a gondola ride along the Arno. Emma didn’t know if he was still in the picture. Skylar’s Facebook relationship status was listed as “It’s complicated.”
Maddie had been even harder to pin down than Skylar. Over the years, she had amassed four different e-mail addresses, and Emma was never really clear on which one she actually checked. Often she would see an e-mail from Maddie in her inbox and get excited only to find out it was a spam ad for diet pills or inflatable underpants to make your butt look shapelier. It was just the sort of prank Maddie would have pulled in their camp days, and it made Emma miss her even more.
Jo was the best at keeping in touch, but her updates were never particularly illuminating. She would e-mail that her team had won the regional volleyball championship or that she was getting certified in ropes course training and was lobbying her dad to set one up at camp. But every time Emma would reply to her with an enthusiastic “How are you??” Jo’s response was always the same: “Good.” She was good. Things were good. Camp was good. Emma had come to hate the word good. It was what people said when they couldn’t or didn’t want to talk about what they actually felt.
She looked over at the backpack sitting on the passenger seat. It was the same one she’d brought to camp every summer since she was ten: pink canvas with a fold-over flap at the top painted with black seeds to look like a watermelon slice. Despite the fact that carrying it was now highly embarrassing, Emma had spent two hours cleaning out her closet during a visit back home just to find it so that she could bring it with her to camp again. It wasn’t so much the backpack as what was inside that she needed: the Friendship Pact. Maybe she had just been reading too many sci-fi novels, but it felt like a talisman, something to help make sure reunion brought them back together again—not just for a weekend, but for good.
Emma had spent a lot of time thinking about when things had started to change. Every summer had brought minor shifts, just the natural effects of increased hormones and responsibilities (even though Emma felt like laughing at them now, those twelve- and thirteen-year-old troubles that seemed so monumental, like finishing a summer reading list or passing a swim test). And of course there were their “real world” friends, the ones they saw every day from September through June and who became more important fixtures in their outside lives as they got older. But those things hadn’t made the girls drift apart. Not on their own, anyway. Something had shifted the last night of camp, after Skylar hadn’t come back to the cabin. Emma had felt it the next day—and it wasn’t just Skylar, although she was distant; Jo was unusually touchy-feely, and Maddie could barely get a word out without dissolving into tears. It was almost like there had been a bad storm while they were sleeping, and the next morning they had woken up to find that things just weren’t in the right places anymore.
The traffic wasn’t getting any better, so at the next rest area, Emma pulled over to use the bathroom and check her voicemail. As she pushed through the door to the QuikMart, sounding an electronic bell, she felt the clerk’s eyes on her. He was maybe nineteen or twenty, with a round, boyish face and a sparse red goatee. He nodded and smiled at her as she turned down the aisle of energy bars and snack mixes that led to the ladies’ room. “Morning, gorgeous,” he said. She still wasn’t used to it.
As she washed her hands, Emma looked in the mirror and tried to imagine what her fourteen-year-old self would think of the seventeen-year-old standing there. Without being too cocky, Emma thought she’d cleaned up nicely. Maybe not gorgeous, but the awkwardness of adolescence—the nose that felt ever-so-slightly large for her face, the scrawny limbs and nonexistent curves, the crooked smile—had given way to a prettiness that still managed to surprise her. She’d had to work at it a little bit, of course, learning how to blow-dry her hair, which was normally mousy, to a high-gloss sheen, pluck her eyebrows, and take c
are of her skin (and she still sometimes wore her retainer at night, secretly terrified that her teeth would shift back if she didn’t), but part of it had happened naturally. “You’ve grown into your looks,” was how her grandmother put it. It was a backhanded compliment, but Emma would take it. She put on some lip gloss and smacked her lips together the way Maddie had first showed her when they were eleven. Then she flashed herself a big grin. She thought she looked a lot better, but would they? And—she couldn’t stop herself from wondering—would he?
It had taken her a while to get over Adam Loring, but Emma had eventually convinced herself that what had happened on the rocks that night had been for the best. She’d never been quite sure about him, anyway, even if he had been her first real crush. He was such a chameleon, sincere one minute and distant the next. She knew she needed to stop obsessing, so the second semester of freshman year she had made a beeline for Danny Hoffman during the Model UN’s trip to Washington, DC. Danny was short, dark, and handsome, and extremely well versed in foreign events. They’d ridden on the paddleboats together and made out in the back of the bus on the drive back to Boston. It had lasted a month. Of course, the next year Danny had decided he was actually gay, but still, it felt like progress. Emma even felt good enough to e-mail Adam at the start of sophomore year, extending an electronic olive branch, and they started chatting online from time to time. He was still flirty, but that was just how Adam was. They never talked about the last night of camp. Mostly they commiserated about the Red Sox or traded complaints about school. Sometimes they talked obliquely about dating stuff, but it was harmless. Adam was still juggling girls and Emma still didn’t have a serious relationship. In that respect, nothing had changed, but it didn’t make her jealous anymore. She had only saved one of his instant messages, which had popped up on her laptop screen when she’d been in the shower after she’d first gotten to New York that summer: Can’t believe I’m going to see you in a month. Canoe? It was a stupid inside joke, but it had made her laugh.