Five Summers

by Una LaMarche

  “You’re gross,” Mark had shot back, taking a deep breath and then repeating it in a long belch. “Groooooooooosssssssss.”

  “Yeah, but there’s two of you so you’re twice as gross,” Skylar had laughed. And that’s when Matt had planted his gum.

  They’d already tried ice (Jo’s idea), Vaseline (Maddie’s), and olive oil (Skylar’s). It looked like someone had cooked an omelet on Skylar’s head and then covered it in kindergarten paste. Luckily there were no mirrors around.

  “How bad is it?” Skylar asked.

  “Pretty bad,” Jo said, peering over Emma’s shoulder.

  “It’s not that bad,” Maddie said. Skylar reached her hand up to feel.

  “Don’t touch it! You’ll just make it worse.” Emma looked at the butterscotch-colored snarl and tried to figure out how to start. She only knew about the peanut butter trick because she’d seen her mom take gum out of her brother Kyle’s hair once. She decided not to tell Skylar that Kyle had ended up with a crew cut.

  “I wasn’t sure if I should get chunky or smooth,” Jo said. “So I got both. And some Reese’s peanut butter cups, just for snacking.”

  “I think we should go with smooth,” Maddie said.

  “Definitely,” Emma said. Jo unscrewed the lid from the jar and Emma dipped her pointer finger in, coming up with a scoop the size of a quarter.

  “Are you sure this will work?” Skylar asked.

  “No,” Emma said. “But it’s our last chance.”

  “I smell like a compost pile!” she cried. Emma smeared the peanut butter onto the gum and started to knead it with her fingers.

  “My mom says boys only tease you if they like you,” Maddie said encouragingly.

  “That doesn’t make me feel better,” Skylar moaned.

  As she worked, Emma tried not to smile. But Skylar always seemed so cool and confident, seeing her pitch a fit was kind of funny. Emma wondered if that made her a bad friend.

  “Okay,” she said. “Comb, please.”

  The gum had gotten stiffer and less sticky, but it didn’t budge when Emma dragged the plastic comb through the knot.

  “Ow!” Skylar yelled.

  “Sorry!”

  “Maybe you should pull harder,” Jo suggested, biting into a Reese’s cup.

  “No,” Skylar said. “Don’t do that.”

  Emma worked for a few more minutes, even letting Maddie have a try, before declaring the experiment a failure.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Skylar. “I did everything I could.”

  “So what now?” Skylar sniffled and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “We can’t just leave it in there.”

  “I think,” Maddie said gravely, “we’re going to have to operate.”

  Maddie had experience cutting her little sisters’ hair back home, so she did the honors while Emma and Jo held Skylar’s hands, offered her candy, and assured her that she was going to look fine. Emma wasn’t really all that sure—not all girls could pull off short hair, even the pretty ones—but she tried not to show it.

  “You’re so beautiful,” Jo said. “This won’t change it.”

  Skylar squeezed her eyes shut as the scissors snapped shut and the gum fell to the floor in a tangle of golden hair.

  “I could give you a mullet if you want to go emo,” Maddie said. “Then the back would still be long.”

  Skylar grimaced. “Now you’re just trying to make me look bad.” She looked at Emma and squeezed her hand. “Everyone’s going to look at me, Em,” she said quietly. “They’re going to laugh.”

  “No, they won’t.”

  “The boys will. Especially the twins.”

  Emma knew that she was right. The boys would never let her live it down and would make fun of her every chance they got. She couldn’t let that happen.

  “Can I have the scissors?” she asked Maddie.

  “You want to try? Be my guest.” Maddie handed her the nail scissors—which they’d borrowed under false pretenses from their counselor, Beth—and stepped back.

  Emma smiled at Skylar as she brought the scissors up and snipped off a huge chunk of her own hair.

  “Emma!” Skylar cried, her hands flying up to her mouth.

  “What?” Emma asked innocently. “Is there something on my face?” She handed the scissors back to Maddie. “I guess I’ll need a haircut, too,” she said.

  Maddie grinned. “Mine’s a pain in the ass in summer anyway,” she said, clipping off a handful of her auburn curls.

  “You guys are nuts,” Jo laughed, clutching her long black ponytail protectively.

  “Come on,” Emma said. “All the pro athletes shave their heads. It cuts down on wind resistance.” She wasn’t sure that was actually true, but it seemed to make Jo happy.

  “Okay,” she decided. “But just because I don’t want to be left out.”

  By the time they were done, the shower looked like a petting zoo, and the girls moved over to the sinks to admire their handiwork. Emma almost didn’t recognize the girl staring back at her in the mirror. The choppy bob Skylar had given her didn’t look half bad—it actually made her look a little older, she thought, and more stylish.

  “Wow,” Skylar said, meeting Emma’s eyes in the mirror and giving her a grateful smile. “I thought we were twins, but it turns out we’re quadruplets!”

  Emma nodded, and looked down the line at the faces of her friends, which all looked new without so much hair. They looked different than they had before, but anyone could see that they belonged together.

  Jo

  Reunion: Day 3

  JO STUDIED HER REFLECTION IN THE BATHROOM mirror. After her talk with her dad, she had changed into a black tank top, brown jodhpurs (she’d wanted real army fatigues, but camouflage wasn’t allowed during capture the flag thanks to a male counselor who had painted himself brown and green one year, hidden in a tree, and scared a female camper so badly she’d had to be taken to the ER), and black boots, and then she’d slicked her hair back with pomade, strapped her cell phone and a granola bar to her calf, and applied two thick stripes of eye black across her cheeks.

  She knew she was overcompensating with the outfit, but Jo needed all the celebratory spirit she could muster. Because somewhere along the path on the walk back to Souhegan, she’d realized something she’d been trying to deny for a long, long time: it was time for her to go. Her dad was right. She needed to move forward, to grow up, to stop holding on to the past. And that meant leaving camp. For a while, anyway. She had to convince the others to band back together for one last hurrah. Jo took a deep breath and tried to smile. She was preparing for the rally of a lifetime.

  Skylar was back in bed, with her blanket covering her head. She, Emma, and Maddie had all come back from breakfast separately, still, it seemed, in terrible moods. Emma was paging through a thick novel and Maddie was doing her makeup, and neither was talking to anyone. Jo tried to ignore their chilly stares and cued up her iPod to play Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” She’d seen it used to powerful effect in Apocalypse Now and hoped it would make a compelling motivational soundtrack for the day.

  As the surging strings and triumphant horn calls filled the cabin, Maddie looked up with a death glare.

  “Please turn that off,” she said.

  Emma nodded in agreement. “Seriously, Jo—no. Not today.”

  Skylar, true to form, didn’t stir until the crescendo.

  “Ladies,” Jo announced, “last night is in the past. Today is a day that will live in infamy.”

  “That was Pearl Harbor,” Emma snapped.

  “Fine,” Jo said. “But today will, too. Because today is the day that we finally claim victory against the boys in capture the flag.”

  “I’m not playing,” Emma said. “Give it up.”

  “You’re crazy,” Maddie sighed.

 
“We first played capture the flag together eight years ago,” Jo continued, ignoring them. “It was a cloudy Sunday in August, and even though we were small in stature we had big dreams. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it off the Green before all our bandanas were snatched, and we had our first taste of defeat.

  “The following year we amped up our game but fell victim to a classic fake out by a group of senior boys who led us into the north field and ambushed us,” Jo went on. “Our third summer we had to forfeit when Maddie lost her glasses and ran into a tree. The next year was a dark time, when two weeks of rain made the ground so muddy that capture the flag had to be canceled. And during the last game we played together, we literally touched greatness when I was at last able to get my hand around the boys’ flagpole—”

  “Poor word choice!” Maddie yelled, but Jo could see that she was trying not laugh, even while scowling.

  “—only to be tackled by an eleven-year-old in an ILLEGAL move that was upheld for reasons unknown by a member of my own family.” Jo clapped her hands together and held them underneath her chin, saying a little prayer. Everything about the previous two train wreck nights could be made right if she could only pull this off.

  “Now,” Jo said as she reached into her duffel and pulled out four green bandanas still in their crisp cellophane wrappers. “Before you guys even got here, I took the liberty of ordering custom bandanas for us this year for solidarity and good luck.” She slipped a bandana from its sleeve and unfolded it to reveal the Camp Nedoba logo, surrounded in a circle by all four of their names.

  “That’s sweet, Jo,” Emma said, the bite gone from her voice. “But nobody’s in the mood.”

  “And what does . . . katiff fatwah mean?” Skylar asked groggily, hanging her head over the side of the bunk and squinting at additional letters printed on the four corners of the fabric.

  “That’s CTF FTW,” Jo corrected. “Capture the Flag For the Win.” She sighed. “I know I can go overboard and be a little stubborn sometimes”—she looked at Maddie—“and I know that no one but me wants to spend all day running around in the woods after a plastic flag. But guys,” she said, swallowing hard, “I need this. We need this. And I can’t do it by myself. So, please, let’s suck it up and show Adam and Nate and Charlie—in absentia—that we’re not afraid of them anymore. And that we won’t let anything keep us apart.”

  No one said anything for a few minutes, and Jo started to worry that she’d misjudged the situation. She should have started with the sincere part and left the jokey theatrics to the end after she’d won them over with her heart and loyalty.

  “I think I need more coffee before I can deal with this,” Skylar said finally, clambering down from her bunk.

  “I need a shower,” Emma said.

  Maddie capped her lip gloss and let out a deep breath. “I don’t know,” she murmured.

  “Lucky for you, I do,” Jo said, blocking the door. “I’ve been waiting for this game my whole life.”

  “That’s really sad,” Maddie said.

  Jo paused, wondering if she should tell them about her decision to quit. It would be so much easier to get them on her side with the added push of a little sympathy. But no, she decided. She didn’t deserve a victory that was won by manipulation.

  “Maybe,” Jo said. “But who in this cabin doesn’t need a win today? Who doesn’t need to feel better about themselves? We all came here—or stayed here, as the case may be—expecting different things out of this reunion, and so far I think it’s safe to say we’ve all been disappointed.” Skylar stood still at the edge of the bed, staring down at the floor. Emma hugged her knees and let out a deep breath. Maddie stared off at the corner of the cabin where the glass from the photo frame still lay in glittering shards, her nostrils flaring.

  “We need this, you guys,” Jo said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not going down without a fight. So come on—who’s with me?”

  Emma

  Reunion: Day 3

  WHEN EMMA SAW THE CROWDS OF CAMPERS LINED up on the Green, on opposite sides of a bright yellow line of caution tape that had been stretched across the grass, she knew she had made a terrible mistake. She thought Jo was just being her normal over-the-top camp self, wearing the eye black and playing the weird opera, but almost everyone else had shown up for the game with the same level of commitment. People wore face paint and had pre-arranged team outfits. Even Meredith, Allie, and Ruth wore matching pink ringer tees and white denim shorts. They looked like the Easter Bunny’s harem.

  Mack came out ten minutes before the start time to thunderous applause, wearing his referee T-shirt and whistle along with a pair of incongruous butter-colored Crocs. He dragged his Adirondack chair to the edge of the caution tape and sat down with his Thermos full of coffee, winking at Jo, who was already toeing the line, peering through a set of binoculars to try to see signs of the guys’ base camp.

  Capture the flag had always been Emma’s least favorite camp activity, a full day of running around in the woods trying not to get tagged out by fellow campers on the opposing team. It took speed, strategic thinking, and a lot of paranoia, so it had always been intimidating—but the reunion game set even higher stakes. It was girls versus boys, for starters. And of course it was still the JEMS versus . . . each other.

  Jo’s speech had been hard to say no to, but Emma, Maddie, and Skylar still weren’t really speaking. They all had the same expression of anger and skepticism mixed with abject fear. And they were the least visually coordinated group: Maddie was in her blue tank top, grungy Keds, and white capri pants—which had taken a beating over the past two days and were covered in dusky dirt splotches that looked like bruises and welts; Skylar was wearing a forest green romper that seemed to have been made from old sweatpants (somehow she was still pulling it off, though, which just added insult to injury as far as Emma was concerned) with Converse high-tops; and Emma had on the workout clothes she’d packed but never used: a pair of black running shorts and an old T-shirt of her dad’s that read NEW YORK CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION. Jo had asked Emma to bring her watermelon backpack, but Emma would sooner have run the course completely nude, so Jo carried it. The combination of the infantile backpack and the Lara Croft–style wardrobe made Jo look like she belonged in a mental institution. Which she kind of does, Emma thought with a smirk.

  “Okay!” Mack yelled. “The game starts in a few minutes and everyone needs to go back to their base, but I just want to go over the rules, for those of you who may have forgotten or who may be trying to circumvent them. . . .” He looked right at Jo when he said it.

  “This yellow line marks the border between the two sides of camp. Each team will start back at their bunks, and on my signal you’ll be free to travel anywhere on camp grounds in pursuit of the other team’s flag. Rule number one is that you must cross this line going back and forth—and while the Green will be a battlefield of sorts I want to take a moment to stress that these are not the Hunger Games, so please, don’t get carried away. Which leads me to rule number two: no tackling.” A group of boys booed.

  “That’s right,” Mack repeated. “No tackling. If someone relieves you of your bandana, you’re out, and when you get tagged out, you stay where you are until you hear my whistle that signals the end of the game—no sneaking off. And no inappropriate touching. You’re grabbing the bandana, not the person. The body may be a wonderland, as John Mayer says, but for our purposes today it is off limits.”

  Emma bit her lip to keep from laughing, and out of habit looked over at Skylar. But Skylar had her headphones in and hadn’t even heard. Overhead, the clouds were looking ominously gray.

  “Ready?” Jo asked. They were clustered back on the girls’ side, standing around a dead pine stump. Emma sighed and put her hands on her knees. She had never felt less ready for anything. She had a headache from drinking too much coffee, and the thought of sprinting made her stomach flip.


  “I think I’m going to throw up,” Emma said.

  Jo looked down at her watch. “Do it now,” she said. “We only have twenty seconds.”

  “You’re not getting out that easy,” Skylar said, stretching her calves.

  I’m not the one who’s easy, Emma thought, but she kept her mouth shut. She knew she had lost it during the fight and had said some things she didn’t mean. She wanted to talk to Skylar more about it, but first she needed to hear a real apology, not just a series of excuses. She couldn’t believe that Skylar had made it seem like the betrayal was somehow her fault.

  “No more sniping,” Jo said. “Today is a new day. We’re in this together.”

  “Whatever,” Maddie sighed. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  “Okay, on my count,” Jo said, lowering herself into a runner’s stance. Three . . . Jo mouthed. Two . . . ONE! At the sound of Mack’s whistle, girls broke off from the cabins in all directions. The older girls in pink jogged off toward the woods that led back behind the barn, while Sunny, Aileen, Jess, and Kerry hung back to “defend” the flaccid red flag Jo had planted in the dirt behind a picnic table, staring uninterestedly at their cell phones. But per Jo’s instructions, Emma started down the main path toward the Green, bringing up the rear of their disjointed team. She watched Maddie’s red ponytail swing back and forth as she focused on her breathing and tried to ignore the burning sensation in her lungs, which were exhausted from all the crying and screaming and did not seem at all amused that Emma had chosen this particular moment to rediscover physical fitness.

  Jo’s preferred route, which she had outlined to Emma, Maddie, and Skylar in a series of e-mails dating back to April—and reviewed again that morning—was fairly simple: they would head straight for the border line, wasting as little time as possible, and then divide and conquer to make it across the Green, around the well, and over to the woods on the northern border of the boys’ side without being tagged out. Then they would regroup and lay low, edging together around the boys’ bunks through the thick, almost impassable woods on the eastern side and ambush them from behind. It was an ambitious strategy even under the best of circumstances, but with their communication hovering somewhere between stony silence and open hostility, Emma knew they didn’t have a chance. She half hoped that one of the boys would tag her right away and put her out of her misery.