I finish the movie, but the house is still empty. Performances at the Bowl rarely run this late, so I focus and really try to remember where my parents said they’d be tonight. Something about Santa Barbara, maybe? For an anniversary? Exercising my memory wears me out for some reason (Eat a cheeseburger!), so I fall asleep on the couch, still in my camp clothes.
I wake up later to the doorbell ringing, the TV a solid blue screen. I rub my eyes, unsure how long I was out. Elliot’s at the door, bag slung over one shoulder, guitar case in hand. He does this move where he leans against the door frame, but not in a sexy Foster way, more in just a stupid drunk way, and I can tell by the way his eyes swim that he’s seeing two or three of me, instead of just the one pissy me.
He stumbles inside, dropping his stuff at the foot of the stairs, and follows me up to my bedroom. Even though he’s out of it, I’m happy to see him—we’re friends after all, we are friends—I just don’t know what to do with him. What not to do with him too.
I mention that my parents are gone. I try not to make it sound like an invitation, but how could it not?
“They’re in Santa Barbara,” I say. “Or possibly Ojai. For the night.”
“Oh hi,” Elliot whispers into my ear, “for the night.”
Once we get to my room, he walks straight to my bed and flops down on it.
I say his name a few times, but that’s it, he’s out. For the night.
To myself I say, “Oh, Elliot,” and I mean it in a frustrated way, like “Oh God,” but it comes out sounding tender, forgiving. Finally I flop down too, next to the bed on the carpet.
I guess I did want him to come back. I guess I needed to see him, to see what I felt when I saw him.
Hours later, in the early morning, I wake to a weight on my back. It’s Elliot, snuggled against me, nuzzling into my hair, rooting around sleepily for a kiss. My face feels like it’s sewn into the carpet, or made of carpet, so I don’t even try to lift my head to return the gesture—not even when he traces one finger lightly along the elastic of my bra strap.
Everything in front of me is a wash of blurry, color-bleached textures, real but not really, my room but seen through a degraded, muffled haze.
And when I say, “Oh, Elliot,” this time, I can’t tell which Oh, Elliot it is.
51.
CHRISTY AND THE CASE OF THE MISSING CLIPBOARD
WHEN I WAKE up, Elliot’s gone, but there’s a scribbled note on my dresser. All it says is: Texted you.
Something about his lazy scrawl on the back of an envelope makes it clear to me in a uniquely official-feeling way: Elliot’s wasting my time, and I’m wasting his.
This is what Mr. Roush would call an Anticlimax. Curiosity, anticipation, promise, all building toward a Significant Moment—Elliot’s Return!—but then it happens too quickly, fizzling out without even feeling like much. Mr. Roush has always pushed me to work harder on my plots and engage a deeper, more descriptive language, but it’s not easy.
I do want to be relatable, to be related with, and to craft a story that’s memorable, that reflects something thoughtful and crucial—the difference between some random romance and an epic one, between a Naive Eva and a potentially Wiser one.
It’s just that last night with Elliot lacked the right adjectives. It can’t really be described as anything particularly resonant, or specific, and the main word that comes to mind is ambiguous, which is basically the opposite of specific, and rarely means anything good when it’s written in red ink at the top of one of your pages. Even now that he’s come and gone, Elliot’s still What I Don’t Know. I guess he’s sort of a Rough Draft person, no matter how many times I try to revise him.
I didn’t change out of my camp clothes last night, so I just leave for work, doubtful my parents will even notice I came home.
After my girls swim and sunbathe, we move on to pottery, where the previous group’s already fired up the kiln. I help the girls roll clay snakes and shape little clumsy cavewoman bowls, listening to them chatter about who’s cute on TV and who isn’t, and the repetition soothes me. Even Alexis seems relaxed, therapized by the soothing rhythm of her thumbs pressing into stiff, cold mud. She’s happy as a fat little clam.
“Let’s finish up soon,” I say to the group, “so we can get our projects in the oven.”
Everyone cheers.
“Where’s the clipboard?” I ask Alyssa. Today there’ll be no wasting time, and no one’s time will be wasted.
“I dunno,” she says, shrugging.
“Anyone?” I ask. “Clipboard?”
“Oops,” Alexis says.
“Where’d you leave it?”
“Changing room.”
I ask the girls if they can be good and watch themselves while I’m gone, and they nod and mumble, “Yes, Eva,” without looking up from their gray blobs. I make my way back to the pool, where now the twelve-year-olds have taken over, splashing around in the deep end and diving off the diving board.
Inside the changing room it’s dank and drippy like a cavern, and smells of old towels, the concrete floor slick with water. I do a quick walk-through, looking for the clipboard, and that’s when I see Katie—or is it Christy?—one of the older girls. She’s over in the corner near the showers, facing the wall, crying it looks like, staring down at her hands.
“Katie,” I call out. She doesn’t move.
I try “Christy,” and she turns.
Even in the dim light I can make out the blood on her hands. But the color of the blood isn’t the normal bright red I’ve seen running from my campers’ noses or down their scraped knees; this blood is brown, and clotted, and tacky on Christy’s palms.
“You got your period,” I say. My voice echoes off the concrete.
I walk closer and notice the crotch of her bathing suit is brown and damp. She’s also left a few faint, bloody fingerprints on the skinny wooden bench next to her.
“It’s okay,” I say. “Let’s wash your hands.” I lead her over to the sink and turn on warm water. She’s shaken, but not actually crying. I help wash her hands and dry them.
Next I tell her to take off her bathing suit so I can wash it. She doesn’t react.
“Christy?” I say, and then she reaches back into her bathing suit, and when she pulls her hand out, it’s streaked with brown blood again. I’m too stunned to say anything, especially because what she does next is touch her fingers to her tongue.
52.
ANOTHER IDEA FOR A PLAY
THE REST OF the day I map out an idea for a new play:
There’s a husband and wife. She’s pregnant in the first act, with a giant round belly. She shuffles around the stage in pain, grasping at her back, and the only thing that takes her mind off the pain is tending to a garden she’s started in the backyard. So even though her husband’s concerned for her health, he lets her spend day after day—each day leading closer to the due date—on her knees in the vegetable garden, planting and cultivating and sweating in the sun. He lets her root out weeds until her hands are blistered and raw, because it makes her happy and because it gives her a different kind of pain to focus on.
At the beginning of act two she loses the baby; or she doesn’t lose it, it’s a stillbirth. Then the husband and wife begin to drift apart, slowly losing interest in one another. The husband spends most of his time at work, the wife in her garden. Each day he comes home she’s prepared dinner and feeds him vegetables that look like nothing he’s ever seen before. They almost aren’t recognizable, these vegetables. A squash, but not. A zucchini, but not really. That sort of thing.
She begins acting strangely—as all my characters tend to do when they’re hiding a secret. And her secret is that she’s planted the placenta, the nutritious afterbirth, the blood and all its bloody mess, in the soil of the garden. It’s what’s fertilizing the vegetables.
“What have you done?” he says. “What have you given me?”
Then one of the vegetables falls off the table and rolls down into
the audience. Then the curtain lowers and the stage goes black.
It’s a compromise, I think. Something for Mr. Roush, and something for me.
53.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF CAMPS
IT’S THURSDAY, ONE in the afternoon, and I can’t understand it.
“Are you sure it isn’t Friday?” I ask Alyssa. She’s holding her face in the high, wet arc of the drinking fountain, letting it splash all over her like a shower. “It’s Friday, I know it.”
“Thursday,” Alyssa tells me.
“Thirstday, Frieday,” I say, and stick my head in the water too.
We’re walking toward archery—nine sunburnt girls and a dripping CIT and me—when Rachel, the camp activities coordinator, comes up and tells me Steven wants to see me in his office. She tells me that she’ll be taking over my group and supervising our bow-and-arrow safety lesson, and that I should go now.
“Now, Eva,” Rachel says.
Her voice is sunny but stern, like she’s trying to convey something serious without seeming too serious. I assume I’m in trouble. Maybe the girls do too, because they cling to my legs, begging me not to leave. I have to physically pry them off, which for some reason makes Rachel look away.
I walk across to Steven’s office at the center of camp. I don’t feel nervous, I know what to say in these situations:
I did my best.
I’m trying to do my best.
We all like to think we’re basically doing our best.
Steven greets me at the door and ushers me in with a hand on the middle of my back. We sit. He asks if I know why I’m here, and I say I do.
“It’s about Christy,” I say, sitting up straight in my chair.
Steven’s confused. He flips through some papers. His face says, What Christy? Who’s Christy? I worry for a second that I’ve switched the names again, that Christy is actually Katie, and that’s when a man and a woman, holding hands and Sunny Skies packets, come into the room.
“Eva,” Steven says, “this is Mr. and Mrs. Powell. Mr. and Mrs. Powell, this is your daughter’s counselor, Eva.”
Apparently they’re Alexis’s parents, but that seems impossible because they’re both extremely fit. Not skinny but muscular, toned. And they’re tan; maybe too tan.
I say hello and they say, right off the bat, “Alexis loves you.”
“She really loves you,” Mr. Powell says.
“She does,” Mrs. Powell agrees.
“Well, I love Alexis,” I tell them. Once I hear myself say it out loud, I know it’s not a lie.
They want to know if I’ve noticed their daughter’s weight problem.
She’s a little fat, but I don’t say that. Instead I say, “Yes, I’ve noticed it.”
The Powells look at each other, give a collective sigh. Then the mantra begins, like a family slogan, and it speeds up into a chanting march:
She’s got to get on that horse. She’s got to get on that horse. She’s got to get on that horse. She’s got to get on that horse.
I smile while they talk and consider whether it’d be too straightforward to point out that not only does Alexis Powell not want to get on that horse, but that she basically shits blood whenever she gets near that horse, that she breaks into tears just thinking about a horse.
“And she needs to play all of the games,” Mr. Powell says.
“Especially the ones with running or climbing,” Mrs. Powell says.
They go on like that for a while, listing everything Alexis should be doing, and all the various reasons why she should be forced to do them.
Then Steven interjects. He tells me that this is what camp is for, this is what camp’s all about: to shape Alexis Powell, literally and figuratively, until she’s a skinny little thing and not a fat little thing.
“But this isn’t fat camp,” I say.
“You should always be promoting health,” he says.
“But this is summer camp. This isn’t some, some, concentration camp.”
“What did you just say?”
But I don’t have to say it again. I’m told to leave the campgrounds immediately, because I’m fired—and with only three weeks of summer left.
54.
DROPPING IT
WHEN I GET home, Courtney’s sitting silently at her desk—something she never does—her body stiff, her eyes locked on the computer screen. I notice too that her room’s not the tornado it’s been the past few weeks, full of clothes and bags in a state of mid-packing; right now it’s almost tidy and smells of sandalwood and shower products. Courtney’s wearing a damp towel twisted around her head like a terry-cloth turban. She hears me enter and tilts her head in my direction, causing the towel to loosen, slip down the back of her neck, and fall to the floor. But Courtney just leaves it there; that’s how I know something genuinely bad has happened. Maybe something even worse than what’s happened to me.
“What is it?” I say.
“Someone in the Amsterdam program died. I guess yesterday.”
“What do you mean they died?”
“It was an accident,” Courtney tells me. “This girl had an allergic reaction. Something she ate.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” Courtney says.
“Well, that’s not the program’s fault, right? I mean, it’s not like she was in a dangerous situation. That’s not, like, Amsterdam’s fault or anything,” I say.
Courtney puts her head in her hands and breathes in an overly focused way. When she looks up, her face is a mess, on the verge of losing it. I walk over to her and bend down and grab the towel. When I hand it to her, she doesn’t take it; I keep my arm extended anyway, the towel an inch from her head, basically hanging next to her hair. Still she won’t take it.
“You’re going to go anyway, though, right?”
“I don’t think so,” Courtney says.
“You have to,” I say. “This shouldn’t have even happened.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be at camp?”
“Like, this wasn’t some normal thing,” I say.
“What time is it?” she asks, glancing around for a clock. Then she puts it together: “You got fired, didn’t you?”
“But no one else has died! It was a food allergy. Accidents happen.”
My arm’s still out, but it’s beginning to shake.
“Hey,” Courtney says, “I’m sorry you got fired.”
How can I be sad for myself when I’m so, so sad for my sister?
“You have to go,” I say, my voice breaking. “We both have to go.”
“Not anymore.”
“Yes.”
“Eva, just drop the stupid towel.”
“Fine,” I tell her. “I’m dropping it.”
55.
BLACK-AND-WHITE
AT THE TABLE my parents don’t know which daughter to be more devastated for, so we all sit and eat quietly, no puns, no jokes, no laughs. But after dinner my sister has plans and leaves, so my parents zero in on me.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I say.
“But did you do anything right?” my father asks.
“No,” I say. “Nothing.”
“That’s not true, Eva,” my mother says. “You stood up for that little girl. You didn’t let her down. You did your best.”
“My best?” I say. “My best?” I repeat. “Nowhere close.”
“You did your burst then,” my father says. “Your bust.”
“I could’ve gotten a warning at least,” I say. “They didn’t have to, like, throw me right out.”
“They had to make an example out of you,” my mother says.
“Usually you like being the example,” my father says.
“Why don’t you just go back down there and explain yourself? You’re a very smart girl,” my mother says.
“Mom, I’m just smart. I’m not very smart.”
“Well, you’re smart enough to know this job doesn’t really matter anyway,” my father tells me. “You’re leaving
soon. This was only a temporary position; you didn’t want to be a professional camp counselor. In a way it’s better. Absolutely okay.”
“All jobs matter,” I say. “Everything matters.”
“Not everything matters,” he says.
“That’s vague.”
“That’s the vague of the vorld,” my father tells me.
Then my mother pivots straight into Preservation Mode, asking about my various possessions and how many of them I want to take east with me, and maybe having things from home will help me adjust more smoothly? There’s a lot to sort through. She digs out an unused suitcase from the hallway closet and assaults me with suggestions of items I could fill it with: used textbooks, jeans that don’t fit, scratched CDs of bands I don’t listen to anymore, group photos with friends I barely know, high school yearbooks, holiday socks, tampons. None of it’s coming with me to Boston, but I do appreciate the urge to clean house, get rid of extra baggage, and not be misrepresented by old stuff you don’t want around anymore.
My mother anxiously discusses packing strategies until some instinct or thought process prompts her into feeling like she has to drive to the store this second. I don’t bother asking for what.
A half hour later she’s back, loaded down with shopping bags. Courtney pulls up a few minutes after.
“Home again, home again, jiggity-jig,” Mom says, pulling out packs of diet soda and Weight Watchers frozen dinners and paper towels.
Around nine there’s a Hitchcock movie on, one I’ve already seen, where Jimmy Stewart loses his mind because there’s a murder. No one else in my family’s seen it, so they all watch it silently, shushing me every time I try to say something. When it’s over, Courtney vents how stupid and staged it was.
“Too Hollywood,” she says.
But I wish it was more Hollywood. I wish everything was a lot more black-and-white.
56.
CHECK HER
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