Five Summers

by Una LaMarche

  Emma, Skylar, and Maddie were all still sleeping, their peaceful faces belying the heartache of just a few hours ago, when Jo, dressed in a black T-shirt and jean shorts, had crept out of the cabin, slipping into her Converse sneakers on the grass outside to avoid waking anybody up. She wasn’t ready to face any of them yet—least of all Maddie.

  Jo jogged down the path back to the center of camp, not sure exactly where she was going. Overnight, it felt like Nedoba—her home, her playground, her sanctuary—had transformed into a minefield. She knew that her friends (or maybe former friends, she thought with a stab of remorse) were back in their beds, but Nate could be anywhere, and the thought of running into him after their awkward kiss and his misunderstanding and her hot-headed tirade made her want to hide in the barn loft until reunion was over.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d been asked point-blank if she was gay. Jo was used to it. The people who asked were usually either antagonistic kids at school, actual lesbians, or her own mother, who put feelers out about once every six months (“Are there any boys . . . or other people . . . you’re interested in these days?”). But no guy Jo liked had ever asked. Certainly no guy who liked her back. It was just awkward all around. To be able to face him, she decided, she would need a very large coffee.

  She was walking across the Green to the cafeteria when she tripped over someone lying in the grass.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, stepping back.

  “Huh?” The person rolled over. It was Adam. He was still in his clothes from the day before and bleary-eyed. He squinted at her for a second and then yawned. “Oh, hey,” he said casually.

  “Oh, hey,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. But it failed to penetrate the bubble of oblivion Adam tended to float in. He rubbed his eyes and smiled sleepily. “Where were you last night?” Jo asked.

  “Just hanging out,” he said.

  “Didn’t feel like joining the party?”

  “What party?”

  “The one in our bunk. At four in the morning. When your idiot friends raided our cabin.” She gestured to the pool, where an overalls-clad Gus was grumpily fishing underpants and lip gloss tubes out of the water with a net.

  “They went through with that? Sorry,” Adam said, sitting up and stretching. “I thought it was a joke.”

  “You think everything is a joke, don’t you?” Jo said, resisting the urge to stomp on his hand or deliver a swift kick to the kidneys that would sideline him for days.

  “What’s going on over here?” A blond girl Jo recognized from the year ahead of theirs walked over holding a paper cup of coffee in each hand. She had a sunburn across her nose and thin, straw-colored eyelashes. She sat next to Adam and handed him one of the coffees. “Tired of me already?”

  Jo was dumbfounded—after Skylar on Thursday night and Emma on Friday, Adam had then moved on to yet another girl. He either had sexual ADD or some kind of moral malfunction.

  “We’re just old friends,” Jo said through her teeth. She stepped over Adam’s legs and walked a few feet before turning around. “By the way, Emma was looking for you last night,” she said. “And she knows everything. You’ll never get another chance. Enjoy your day!”

  Adam’s eyes widened, and Jo flashed him a smug smile. She wouldn’t even need sugar in her coffee, that coup de grâce had been so sweet.

  Jo found her father in his office opening boxes of bright green bandanas and checking them off on an inventory sheet. At Camp Nedoba, to avoid injury, everyone played capture the flag with a bandana hanging out of his or her back pocket or waistband, so instead of tackling, players just yanked the bandanas out. It was like a pacifist, sportier Lord of the Flies.

  “Hi, honey!” Mack said, tossing a bandana to Jo. “How’s my favorite girl on her favorite day?”

  “Okay, I guess,” she said, sipping her coffee. The momentary high she’d gotten from seeing Adam process the fact that his long con on Emma had been busted was wearing off quickly. Adam wasn’t her real problem.

  “Just okay? This is the day you’ve been waiting for since, what, birth?”

  Jo tried to smile, but suddenly it all felt like too much. It was the day she’d been waiting for with bated breath for months, but she’d ruined it before it had even started.

  “I really messed up, Dad,” she said.

  “I doubt that,” Mack said. He put down his checklist and sat down in his ergonomic desk chair.

  “I let you down,” she said. “I let people drink beer the other night, by the lake.”

  “I see,” he said, frowning. “Did you buy it?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Did you drink it?”

  “Some.” She couldn’t even look at him.

  “A lot?” he asked. Jo remembered the orientation video she’d watched her first year on staff, which had not so subtly reminded them that drinking on camp grounds could prove fatal in a number of terrible scenarios.

  “No!”

  “Okay, good. Did anyone get hurt?”

  “Not physically,” she sighed.

  His mustache twitched. “What do you mean?”

  “We had a fight,” Jo said. “A bad fight.” She felt her throat closing up and tried to breathe. She sank down to the floor, and Mack crouched next to her.

  “You and the girls?”

  Jo nodded miserably. He studied her face for a moment and then drew her into a hug. She pressed her face into his shirt so hard that when she pulled away she left tear stains—two perfect almonds, like the eye holes he used to cut out of black pillow cases so that they could play ninja when she was home sick from school.

  “Sweetie,” he said, “everyone fights. I’m sure it will blow over. These things always do.”

  Jo shook her head. “Not this time,” she said. “Emma and Skylar were screaming at each other. And I really hurt Maddie. I said awful things. I called her a liar.”

  “What did she lie about?” Mack asked, getting up and turning back to the stack of bandanas. Jo wasn’t sure if he was playing dumb or just not listening.

  “Dad,” she said with a heavy sigh, “I know. About your . . . arrangement.”

  “Oh.” Mack looked concerned, but not surprised. He sat back in his desk chair and got the stern look he always got when he was thinking about how to phrase something.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Jo asked.

  “It wasn’t my secret to tell.” Mack sighed. “You shouldn’t be so hard on her—or yourself,” he said finally. “Sometimes we do things we’re not proud of, especially when we’re scared. Do you remember when I bought the camp?”

  Jo nodded. “When mom left.” But then his words sunk in. “Wait, you’re not proud of that?!” Jo had already had too many shocks for one weekend. If her dad renounced the camp she loved, she would spontaneously combust.

  “No, I am proud of what I’ve done building this camp,” he said. “But I’m not proud of how unwilling I was to face the reality of my life at the time. This was such a special place to me—it was where your mom and I came on our honeymoon, and where we brought you every summer after you were born. When I moved here it was because I wanted to live in those memories. I didn’t want to move forward, I just wanted to go back.”

  “I wanted to go back, too.” Jo remembered the first days she spent in Onan without her mom, when everyone from the general store clerk to the gas station attendant had asked where she was. “She had to work this summer,” Jo would tell them brightly, when her dad was out of sight in the cereal aisle or busy filling up the tank. She’d been, Jo realized with alarm, no better than Maddie.

  “I know you did, honey,” Mack said. “And that’s why I wanted you here every summer. But now I wonder if I did you a disservice.”

  Jo felt her face crumple. “Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” Maybe Maddie was right—maybe she was
repressed. Not a late bloomer but an unwilling one.

  “No,” he said. “You’re my daughter, and I’ll always think you’re perfect.”

  “Other people think I’m weird.”

  “Why?!” He was honestly dumbfounded, and Jo was reminded of how many times he’d told her she was beautiful during her adolescence, when all she felt was awkward and plain.

  “Because I live here,” she sputtered. “Because I dress like you and not like mom. Because I’m not . . . normal.”

  “Who wants to be normal?” he asked. “I don’t care if you’re normal. I don’t think your mother cares if you’re normal. I don’t think your friends care if you’re normal. I think they love you because you’re you.”

  Jo looked out the window, which perfectly framed the top of the barn rising out of the hill past the cafeteria. Her dad was right. That was exactly how she felt about her friends, too. She could have said that to Maddie, instead of letting her stubborn anger get the best of her. Jo closed her eyes and tried to breathe through the swell of shame she felt.

  “I think,” Mack said, helping her up from the floor and kissing her on the cheek, “that what you need is to go and make things right with your friends.” He looked at the clock above his desk. “Because you’ve only got two hours before the game starts.”

  Jo shook her head furiously. “I can’t play, Dad,” she said. “I can’t focus. We’ll never win; we’re not even speaking.” Tears filled her eyes again, and she wiped them away with her arm.

  “Hey, hey, no tears!” Mack said, grabbing her shoulders and looking at her with a warm, crinkly smile. “Nobody said you had to win. But you can’t quit. My daughter, my delightfully abnormal daughter, doesn’t quit. I know capture the flag is fun, but it’s more than a game. It’s about building teamwork and bringing people together. Which sounds like what you girls might need right now.”

  Jo nodded. He was right. They needed something that would force them to work toward a common goal. They needed to be there for each other, the way they’d promised they always would be. They had to play. She just wasn’t sure how she would convince them.

  Emma

  Reunion: Day 3

  EMMA STOOD AT THE BELGIAN WAFFLE STATION sipping her Styrofoam cup of weak coffee and hating pretty much everyone. She had been doing okay, all things considered, when she’d left the cabin, having successfully avoided making eye contact with either Maddie or Skylar, but as consciousness washed over her in the harsh morning sunlight, a new wave of nauseating rage came rolling in. She still felt hurt and horribly betrayed, but it felt better—more productive—to focus on the anger now, and the rising steam from the waffle iron just helped to set the mood.

  She was angry at Adam for being such a generally sucky and selfish person and terrible non-boyfriend-slash-ex-friend. She was angry at Skylar for being so thoughtless and dishonest. She was angry at Jo for telling her what she sort of suspected but didn’t want to know and she was angry (even though she knew it was irrational) at Maddie for having a personal crisis that stole focus from her own. She was also angry at the waffle maker for taking so long and for dripping the batter out onto the tablecloth even though Emma had poured in exactly the right amount using the provided measuring cup and at the coffee for being so thoroughly crappy and unsatisfying. Mostly, though, she was angry that she didn’t have anyone to take her anger out on. So when Adam finally showed up, it was almost a relief.

  He was alone and freshly showered, and seeing his wet hair combed back reminded Emma of the previous day’s water sports. Now, his little speech about how Skylar had grown so attached to him and was projecting her longing for closeness with Emma onto him struck her as possibly the most supremely douchey thing anyone had ever said. How had he been able to feed her those lines with a straight face?

  If Adam saw Emma seething quietly by the waffle station, he didn’t react. Instead, he just waved to someone across the cafeteria, plucked a cup from the stack near the coffee urn, and started fiddling with the knobs.

  Finally, the waffle iron beeped and Emma turned the handle to release the asymmetrical but delicious-smelling contents. She doused it liberally in maple syrup and even added a fat curlicue of whipped cream. Having a healthy sense of irony, she was overjoyed that the kitchen workers had set out a bowl of maraschino cherries. She set one on top of the waffle with a satisfying feeling of schadenfreude. And then, as she balanced her plate in one hand and crossed the room to where Adam was standing, Emma saw Skylar and Maddie waiting in line at the buffet table separately, but both staring at Adam, too.

  Things were about to get interesting.

  “Hi,” she said, startling Adam as he continued to fail at pouring himself a cup of coffee. Adam startled and flipped on the switch, sending hot decaf splattering onto his flip-flop clad feet. He cursed and jumped back. People looked over. Emma saw Maddie smirk.

  “Hey,” he said, avoiding her eyes and wiping at his legs with a napkin. “Um, good morning.”

  “Actually, it’s not such a good morning for me,” she said, stretching her lips into a thin smile. Adam finally managed to get his cup under the spigot and fill it. “Aren’t you going to ask me why?” she said.

  “I, uh, I ran into Jo.” he muttered.

  “Oh, good,” Emma said loudly. “So you’re caught up. So you already know that last night a bunch of your friends came into our bunk, yelled at us, took our clothes, and stacked them on the diving board. Right?” He looked down at his coffee. “And that after that was over, I found out that you’ve been hooking up with my best friend for the past three years, ever since the night I refused to kiss you.”

  “Emma,” he said, keeping his voice so low it was barely audible. “I know you’re upset. And believe me, I want to explain. I know I owe that to you, but can we not do this right here?”

  “Where would you like to do it?” she asked.

  “Um . . . outside?”

  “Great idea,” she said. “Follow me.” She walked past Adam, shoving her waffle into his chest with as much force as she could muster from such close range. The only flaw in the execution was that she didn’t get to see his face right after it happened. But the people in the buffet line did.

  As she pushed through the double doors, she heard Maddie start to slow clap.

  “I guess today is a two-shower day,” Adam said as he emerged behind her, his shirt wet and still streaked with syrup. Emma was waiting on the lawn out front, sitting cross-legged and picking idly at grass.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d actually come out,” she said.

  “I didn’t really have anywhere to go.”

  “There’s the back exit.”

  “Come on, I’m not a total coward.”

  Emma crossed her arms. “Then where were you last night?”

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said. He kept a distance of about two yards and stayed on his feet—the better, Emma thought wryly, to dodge additional carbohydrate attacks.

  “That’s not an answer,” she said. Adam just squinted into the sun, looking like he’d rather be somewhere—maybe anywhere—else.

  “You know, I was fine before I came back here,” Emma went on. “I wasn’t looking for anything to happen this weekend. But then we hit it off again, and . . . I’m just trying to understand why you would go after me if you didn’t actually want me.”

  “I did want you,” he said, without moving.

  “But not anymore?”

  He looked flustered. “No, I didn’t say that.”

  “You don’t say anything,” she said, standing up, her voice getting strong and angry. “Nothing real, anyway. You want to know why no one ‘gets’ you, Adam? Because there’s nothing to get. You’re just as superficial as you pretend you are!”

  He looked down at his feet, and Emma felt her anger surge again. Not only had he hurt her and hurt Skylar, but he’d tried to come between
them—knowingly. He didn’t care about either of them. He only cared about himself.

  “Do you even know what you want?” she asked. What she meant, really, was who he wanted. But she realized that if she let him choose, like they were two toys on a shelf, she would just be playing into his already massive ego. And she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

  Adam looked at her as if he was formulating actual words that might one day work their way through his lips and out of his mouth when Skylar pushed through the doors of the cafeteria clutching a cup of coffee. She stopped when she saw them, and something that looked like fear flickered across her face.

  “You know what?” Emma said. “You don’t have to know. You can have each other. I’m done.”

  She turned and walked back toward the main path, focusing her eyes on the ground in front of her. This time, she was determined not to run.

  Emma

  The Second Summer ♦ Age 11

  Last Week of Camp

  “Friendship Rule: Best friends don’t fight dirty.”

  “HOLD STILL.”

  Emma stood behind Skylar, delicately holding a sticky, tangled strand of her long blond hair. She didn’t want to hurt her, but she had to pull on it a little to see what she was dealing with. Under the bright lights of the empty shower room, she examined the thick wad of purple gum that had been embedded in the hair three inches from Skylar’s scalp.

  “Okay,” Emma said, holding out a hand like she was a doctor asking for a scalpel. “Give me the peanut butter.”

  It had happened after lunch, when they were dropping off their trays. Skylar and Emma had been standing in front of Mark and Matt, who were taking turns burping letters of the alphabet. It made the lasagna in Emma’s stomach lurch.

  “That is so gross,” Skylar had said.