Don't Ever Change

by M. Beth Bloom

  I read my notes, pleased with my character descriptions. I fold the page and put it in my pocket. I look around at the girls, who’re just blankly staring up at me, and then it hits me where to begin.

  “Everyone tell me your favorite thing about camp.” I say. “Lila, you first.”

  “Swimming,” Lila says.

  “Yeah, swimming,” Renee says after Lila.

  I point to Jessica next. She says, “Meeting friends,” and Alyssa dramatically rolls her eyes, makes a pbbth sound.

  Zoe shouts, “Tetherball!” and Rebecca/Becks says, “Field trips,” and Maggie says, “Swimming,” and then someone reminds her that two girls have already said swimming, and then I have to remind them that it’s okay to have the same answer as long as we’re all thinking for ourselves.

  Jenna’s favorite thing about camp is going home from camp.

  Then Billie raises her hand. “I like making lanyards and I like outdoor cooking and the skits are fun and so are the sing-alongs.”

  “Anything but the horses,” Alexis says.

  I look over at Alyssa.

  “What, you want me to answer too?” she asks, sort of indignant. “Uh, lunchtime.”

  “Okay, well, we’re going to do all those things,” I say. “But right now is free play and next is”—I glance at the schedule—“capture the flag, with the boys.” I look at the schedule again, because that doesn’t seem right.

  “Ooh, the boys,” Alyssa says, and some girls squirm while other girls giggle.

  “Alyssa,” I say, whispering, “are we always going to have an hour with Foster’s group?”

  “They’re our Brother Group,” Alyssa explains. “So, yeah, every day we have an hour with them. Some days two, if swim overlaps.”

  “Shit,” I say, and the girls go quiet. “Shoot,” I say.

  “Corey’s hot,” Alyssa says.

  “Who’s Corey?”

  “He’s Foster’s CIT.”

  “Oh my God,” I say, burying my head in my hands. I stay like that for a second, sighing, and when I look up, the girls haven’t moved. They’re waiting for some instruction from me: an order to stay, permission to go, anything. “It’s free play,” I say. “Go, go.”

  The girls scatter. Alyssa pulls out her phone—which she’s explicitly not supposed to use during camp hours—and starts texting. I’m too overwhelmed by the heat and our schedule to bother scolding her. I consider taking out my phone too but don’t, even though I know now would be the perfect time to call Elliot, because he’s probably just woken up and hasn’t started his long drive to the next city. I think, Let Alyssa text, let her get in trouble, let her get fired, and then I realize Alyssa can’t get fired, she’s just a kid. I’m the one in charge.

  “Alyssa,” I say, when we’re alone. “What are they supposed to do?”

  “It’s free play,” she says between texts. “They’re doing it.”

  “What do we do? You and I.”

  Alyssa sits up. “I don’t know. Some counselors make up group mottos or, like, little songs for their group to sing. Some groups have a color and then they wear a bandanna that color or something else.” Alyssa sends a text. “We can talk about the girls if you want,” she says. “I like Becks, she’s so funny. She was in a stain remover commercial once, she told me.”

  “That’s cool,” I say, looking out at the grassy field, silently counting the number of unsupervised nine-year-olds. I count three together, two together, three together, and then chubby Alexis Powell all by herself pulling up grass in clumps, tossing it in the air.

  “No one wants to play with Alexis,” I say. Alyssa throws a short glance in Alexis’s direction.

  “That’s their problem,” she says. “Girls read too many magazines. They have body image issues,” she says, and flips her hair.

  “We are going to fix the Alexis problem.”

  “Pbbth.”

  “But first, what did you say about mottos?”

  “I don’t know,” Alyssa says, ignoring me, so I grab her phone and hold it above my head so she has to deal with me. “You know,” she says, rolling her eyes, “a motto, like our own saying, like we shout it, y’know?”

  “Sure, like ‘Go Team,’” I say.

  “Yeah, but not stupid.”

  I hand Alyssa her phone back and call the girls in, and even though I’m telling them to hurry, they’re slow, sluggish or distracted by other sights and sounds: butterflies, a dandelion, animal-shaped clouds rolling by. I call them again and this time I clap, above my head like a coach, and I stamp-stomp too. But the girls don’t react; I have no control over them. Obviously we need a motto that will bring us together somehow. I pull out my notebook and flip through the pages for something I already know, something I’ve already thought of, lived through, and this will work toward solving the Roush Problem too. Motto what you know. What. Do. I. Know.

  By the time the girls finally make it back to the rock, they already look bored. I imagine what it’d feel like to hate these girls, and if I eventually did hate them, if that’d make me a terrible person.

  “We’re going to have a motto,” I say.

  “What’s a motto?” Jessica asks.

  “It’s like our own phrase that we say, like a way to say hello or good-bye or good luck or good one or go team, or whatever.”

  Hands shoot up; everyone has an idea. Someone says, “Boys are toys!” and someone else shouts out, “Wild things!” and then Jenna says, “When you mouth the words ‘F you,’ it looks like you’re saying ‘vacuum,’ so how about Vacuum for our motto, because no one will ever know that it really means F you.”

  I look at Alyssa, and she’s trying not to explode laughing. The rest of the girls are scandalized.

  “Orrrr,” I say, “when you mouth the words ‘I love you,’ it looks like you’re saying ‘olive juice,’ so how about Olive Juice? That’s nicer, I think.”

  No one likes Olive Juice.

  “But we want it to be secret, right, like how nobody gets what it means but us. Right?”

  They all agree, right.

  “How about instead of Girl Power we say Curl Powder? We can yell ‘Curl Powder!’ whenever one of us scores at a game or dives off the high dive. And then how about Whirled Peas instead of World Peace, and we can say that when we mean hi or bye or when we all have to meet up back here after free play?”

  The girls are silent; they think about this.

  “Whirled Peas is cool,” Alyssa says, weighing it. “And Curl Powder is definitely cool.”

  So that’s what it’s going to be.

  14.

  NIGHTMARING

  MARCHING THE KIDS from one recreational destination to another isn’t so bad, but it is kind of exhausting, and not just because it’s ninety degrees and everything’s pretty far apart. It also feels weird for me to encourage anyone to do anything that isn’t brainy or bookish, let alone a bunch of kids who just want to play. Being at Sunny Skies is forcing me to remember my own childhood, which is the exact opposite of what I’m trying to do, which is focus on my future. When I was seven, my favorite game was called Teacher/Student, and it involved me crafting long, difficult multiple-choice tests for Ariella Klein, and then only giving her ten minutes to complete them. After the time was up I’d collect her pages, grade them, and stick a glittery star sticker at the top before dismissing her for recess. “The best thing about your job,” my father would say, tossing me a shiny red apple, “is you get your weekends and summers off.” Then he’d wink.

  I never got the joke.

  I get it now, though. But I’m not teaching anyone. I’m less of a leader than I am just a tour guide for fun, a kid–cattle rancher—which no one in a billion years would’ve imagined me as.

  I didn’t really get a chance to talk with Foster during our hour together, or at the pool when our groups swapped places, but when I stop by the nurse’s station to ask for an Advil or three, he’s there and seems excited to see me. He’s waiting for a camper’s insu
lin shot and makes a joke about me doping for the next big capture-the-flag game. It’s funny, Foster’s funny, and also sort of calm and caring. I can tell by the way he pours a cup of orange juice for his sad-eyed camper and also by the way he laughs when he realizes I’m digging for excuses not to rejoin my group.

  “How are you so good at this?” I say.

  “How are you so good at writing?”

  “Practice.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he says.

  “Foster, how should a counselor be? I’m serious.”

  “You’re being it.”

  “Yeah, Curl Powder,” I say, without spirit, raising a limp fist in the air. “I just feel like it should come easier, because I’m sort of cool, so shouldn’t a nine-year-old think I’m cool too?”

  “Everyone thinks you’re cool, Eva,” Foster says, amused.

  “I should write about this,” I say. “This is like a real struggle. I’m struggling for real.”

  “Remember when we read Heart of Darkness in Mr. Perry’s class?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Yes, you do,” Foster says. “Remember that line where Conrad’s like, ‘I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice’?”

  “You’re calling camp the nightmare of my choice?”

  “I guess I am,” Foster says, cracking up.

  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Foster really laugh, like how you laugh around friends—all cackling sounds and contorted faces. When I think back about it, I can’t remember many times Foster let loose and had fun around me. He’s always so self-conscious and, like, composed. But maybe that was just Foster trying to impress me, which sounds like it’d be kind of annoying but is actually so sweet. And this is even sweeter: laughing together, away from school, in a totally different context, where I can be New Context Eva, seen in a totally new light.

  “Anyway,” I say, “I hate that book. I hate all books about ships, and I hate Mr. Perry.”

  “You can’t hate that book, it’s a classic,” he says.

  “You know what I say to classics? Vacuum! I say Vacuum! to classics.”

  “Am I supposed to understand that?”

  “Just tell me what you’re writing now,” I say, “because I know you go home and write every day.”

  “It’s a short story about a boy who dies on accident.”

  “Wait, a boy who dies on what?”

  “A boy who dies on accident.”

  I stop to consider the statement. This is a moment. I’m having a moment, and this is why: Foster says on accident, which you can’t say because it’s not correct. The correct phrase is by accident, and normally a mistake like that would kill me, drive me insane, but when Foster says on accident, I like it. It makes the boy dying seem even more sad, even more accidental, as if there’s this other kind of accident and it’s even more horrible and unfair.

  But I still can’t stand that there’s a boy dying. Why is anyone dying?! It’s the endless Foster Problem. I guess I like Foster, though, he’s a sympathetic character, and I have to cure him of this ridiculous, endless Foster Problem.

  “Listen,” I say, “some people don’t know how to begin things and some people don’t know how to end them.”

  “Where would you begin things?”

  “In the middle,” I say. “Close to the end.”

  “And where would you end things?”

  “Not with a death.”

  “Why not?” Foster asks, but then his diabetic camper stumbles toward us, holding a cotton ball over the tiny needle hole in his side. The kid is less green but no more coordinated, because he drops his plastic cup of OJ, juice spilling down the front of his Sunny Skies T-shirt. Foster takes him into the nurse’s bathroom, where I can hear him splashing water on the boy, telling him not to worry about getting wet, that now he’ll be nice and cooled off in the sun. This is how a counselor should be. I do like Foster! Foster’s a saint! Why were we rivals instead of friends? Why, on accident, were we ever such frivals?

  “Why not?” Foster says again when he returns with the boy, holding hands, as they follow me out of the nurse’s station into the hot day. “People do die,” Foster whispers. “Death is an end.”

  “Because, Foster!” Then I turn to him and say something I’ve always wanted to say to him, ever since our sophomore year creative writing class with Mrs. Dubrowski, ever since Foster’s first short story about the mailman who gets stabbed in the eye with his own letter opener: “Because aren’t things sad enough already?”

  “Your stories are sad,” Foster says.

  “My stories are . . . hard.”

  “And is your life so hard?”

  I’m about to answer when Alyssa walks up with the rest of my group. Their hair’s all wet, some of them still wearing bathing suits under their jean shorts. Alexis is holding my clipboard, and Billie’s gripping a clump of rainbow lanyard string, on their way to the Craft Shack. I scan their faces for frowns, dulled senses, disinterest, and notice they’ve all got freckles, every one of them, and a sense of duty floods through me, and I suddenly feel super protective. How many more summers are these girls going to have freckles, and how can I make these freckle-filled summers as fun as humanly possible?

  Alyssa tells me the girls want me to pick out our group’s colors so they can make beaded necklaces in those colors and wear them to the End-of-Day Ceremonies. I suggest pink and turquoise, which they all love, and then, God, I realize I’m actually feeling loyal to the nightmare of my choice. Then Alyssa counts off, “One, two, three!” and that’s when they each hold up peace signs and all together yell, “Whirled Peas!”

  A few seconds later they wander off, and I feel so sensitive I want to hug Foster because even though I did this, it feels like he did it too.

  15.

  THERE YOU ARE

  AT HOME COURTNEY’S on the couch arguing with Dad about the same stuff as always, while Mom leans against the counter eating soy chips out of the bag, watching the two of them longingly, like somehow even this aimless afternoon bickering is a precious family moment. When I tell them about the Conrad quote, Dad answers back, “Sure, but that guy will say anything to get on a syllabus,” and Mom chimes in too, something about how the redeeming things in life aren’t happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come from struggle. Then she brings up F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote about Gatsby and guilt and tycoons and other Classic stuff. Mom actually had a cat when she was little named the Grrr-eat Catsby, and Dad always tells us about his idea for a cookbook called Recipes for Disaster. Whenever I think about that, I think about how people always say babies are so cute, but parents can be just as cute sometimes.

  Courtney doesn’t think so; when I go upstairs my sister follows me, shutting the door behind us.

  “I’ve got two thousand saved,” she says, “but Dad’s making me put it toward that stupid scratch on his car instead of letting me use it for Amsterdam.”

  “Mom and Dad were being so cute,” I say. “Did you hear when Dad made that syllabus joke? I could potentially miss them a lot.”

  “Potentially,” Courtney says. “But Dad’s taking my money.”

  “Yeah, but you hit that guy’s speedboat.”

  “Like a hundred years ago.”

  “Dad’ll forget,” I say. “He’s literally forgotten every single thing that’s ever happened. And Mom doesn’t care. She’s hit, like, thirteen mailboxes just this year, and she hates Dad’s car.”

  “That’s actually helpful,” Courtney says, encouraged.

  “Hey, I’m on a serious roll today,” I tell her.

  Then Courtney leaves for a second. When she comes back she’s holding the Lonely Planet guide to Amsterdam and sits next to me on the bed. As she flips through the pages, showing me stuff, pointing to everything, her whole face lights up—her whole body even. It’s the first time I’ve been able to tell how Amsterdam really means the world to her—the whole lonely planet to her—and the appeal isn’t just that Amsterdam�
�s exotic and in Europe but because it’s its own thing. It’s got its own flavor, which seems obvious—because doesn’t everywhere?—but that’s what Courtney’s attracted to: the substance of what the place truly is.

  I don’t feel the same way about Boston. I don’t care about the city specifically, I just care that it’s three thousand miles away. I confess this to Courtney, the shallow truth that I only like Boston because it’s far from LA and seems safer than New York and essentially that’s it, that’s the only reason I’m going to school there, and she shuts the book, hands it to me.

  “Take this,” she says.

  “I’m not going to Amsterdam,” I say.

  “I know, but think of Amsterdam as Boston,” Courtney says.

  “How do I do that?”

  “Just try to think deeply about being somewhere other than where you are.”

  I skim through the Lonely Planet guide. Nothing looks that interesting. There’s a page about Anne Frank’s house, but it doesn’t seem interesting either, which makes me feel like a bad person.

  “Lots of history, I guess,” I say.

  “Lots of history in Boston too.”

  “Do you think you’ll change when you’re in Amsterdam?” I ask.

  “Sure, but not that much. I mean, not like my essence.”

  “In Boston I want to change everything,” I say. “I’m going to buy a beige trench coat like Mom’s Burberry one and carry a newspaper under my arm, and every time I want a book, instead of buying it on Amazon, I’m going to check it out from the library. And maybe I’ll be wearing glasses, too, either round tortoiseshell ones or the kind with clear frames, very professorial.”