The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore

by Kim Fu

“Sometimes people look dead and they’re really not,” Nita said. “I read about it in one of my dad’s books. That’s why doctors are the ones who have to make the call.”

  “What if we wait a little longer?” Siobhan said. “If we spend one more day here, and Jan doesn’t wake up, will you come with us?”

  “We’ll run out of food if we do that,” Nita said. “We only have enough for today.”

  “Shut up!” Siobhan was crying again, and again it had caught her unawares. In the past, she’d been able to feel tears before they came, as pressure welling up in her chest and throat, but this was a new kind of crying, connected to a different, more immediate source, a part of her body she could not feel. “Just shut up, Nita!”

  “I’ll show you,” Andee said. “I’ll prove it.” She reached into the food supply bag and pulled out Jan’s closed switchblade. She turned and ducked into the tent.

  The other girls huddled behind her at the open flap. Andee knelt beside Jan’s sleeping bag. Dina covered her face with her hands.

  “What are you doing?” Isabel cried. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  Andee flipped open the knife. She wavered for only a moment, her face looking slightly ill, green-tinted, but no less determined. She plunged the knife into the sleeping bag, low, about where Jan’s feet would be. Isabel shrieked.

  A horrified silence followed. Even Andee, Siobhan thought, had hoped that Jan would cry out, awake and alive and bellowing. None of them could quite believe the human form in front of them wouldn’t react to being stabbed. Jan stayed silent and unmoving, her pried-open expression unchanged.

  Andee sat back on her heels. She opened her fist and the knife tumbled to the floor of the tent. A small dark spot bloomed on Jan’s sleeping bag. “There,” Andee said, a quaver in her voice. “There, see?”

  In the entrance to the tent, Isabel sank to her knees. “I’m not leaving Jan,” she said. “I don’t want to be out in the woods without her.”

  Nita became the third one to kneel. She put her hands on Isabel’s shoulders from behind and murmured into Isabel’s ear, but Siobhan could still hear her. “It’s okay. You stay here. We’ll be really quick. We’ll walk to town and get help. We’ll tell them where you and Jan are. Maybe you’re right. Maybe they’ll get Jan to a hospital and she’ll be okay.”

  Isabel nodded without looking back. Nita lowered her chin to one shoulder and spoke in a low voice to Siobhan and Dina. “Let’s go.”

  Isabel

  1

  Isabel and Victor drive south toward Santa Cruz from their home in the suburbs of northern California. Victor’s apricot-colored surfboard is lashed to the roof rack. Ash from a distant forest fire drifts down like black snow.

  Isabel reaches across the gearshift to touch the back of Victor’s head. Her hand moves slowly down his body, cupping the back of his neck, fingers trailing over his shoulder and forearm, landing on his upper thigh with a friendly squeeze. She draws her hand back. She feels sated, as though she leeched a substance out of Victor through her fingertips, into her bloodstream: a mild, warming high. Her eyelids are heavy.

  Over the dashboard, across the horizon, the red glow of sunrise or the fire itself. In the early-morning haze, the cliffs on all sides—lush ridges in daylight—look flattened and beige, like hills of sand.

  Victor wonders aloud if he should take one highway or another. He talks about the weather conditions, technical jargon about tides, winds, and surfing technique that Isabel indulges but doesn’t absorb. His voice eddies pleasantly around her sleepy mind.

  They exit the highway and drive through a small coastal town. Surf shops, bike rentals, gelato, handmade crafts. Nothing is open yet. Their car descends a steep incline toward the beach, through a damp layer of fog. The spectacle of sunrise ends. The sun becomes a sizzling, perfectly round yolk, hanging low across a canyon between the hills to the east.

  They park across the street from the boardwalk. A carousel and an arcade with walls of pink sandstone, also closed. Hot dogs, deep-fried seafood, ice cream, funnel cakes, closed. The smell of stagnant cooking oil and rotten fish.

  Victor changes. Isabel sculpts a mound of sand into a backrest, spreads a blanket in front. She has a stack of books and magazines and a travel mug of milky hot tea. The beach is chilly and desolate, the colors of the boardwalk storefronts washed out by years of salt, sun, and wind. Isabel wraps another blanket around herself, though she’s already dressed in layers of synthetic and wool. She looks away as Victor wades out and rides. The waves crash over hidden trenches like curls of cold butter. They seem enormous and violent to Isabel, a house-size monster storming the shore. It’s better not to watch.

  Good, strong waves. Yet the beach is empty, no other surfers, no kites or kayaks, no wanderers or addicts. An hour or so passes. Isabel checks her phone periodically even though the result is always the same: no service.

  The wind ruffles her pages forward. Her eye catches a phrase that ruins a twist in the novel she’s reading. She ties her hat into her hair. It blows off her head anyway, whipping behind her, still attached to her hair, yanking at her skull. The second time, it pulls completely free, rolls playfully across the sand, grounding and then lilting upward again like a stone skipping across a pond. She chases it. Her hair blows around her face and into her mouth.

  She catches her hat where it comes to rest in a divot in the sand, the edges still flickering. She seizes it with both hands. She looks up. The empty ocean stretches away. Where’s Victor?

  The surface of the water is reflective silver, making it hard to focus her eyes. She looks for his orange surfboard. She looks for his black wetsuit. His slick of wet hair. His tan face. His hand. A shape. Anything. She looks back at her blanket, thinking maybe he’s come out to meet her. The wind has knocked over her tea, leaving a spot of wet sand.

  She calls out, inquiring, Victor?

  She stands still, listening. The ocean roars like the white noise of a television, turned all the way up. The rustling of leaves somewhere. Louder, longer: Victor!

  She feels acutely alone. The ocean draws waves from its depths reflexively. It howls and crashes to the same rhythm as before. It doesn’t care about Isabel and Victor.

  Her heart is thudding but she stands still. Is he just out too far to see? She pictures herself running frantically along the water’s edge. She sees herself wading in, diving down, kicking up the sand at the bottom, searching pointlessly. She can see more from here, at a distance. She grew up by the ocean. She knows not to trust its pull. She cups her hands around her mouth and yells his name as loudly as she can.

  She calls his name three times in a row, broken into its syllables. Vic-tor! It sounds like the word and not the name, the one who gets the spoils.

  She can’t help it. She runs. She goes back to her spot on the sand, checks her phone, and of course, no service. Who would she call, if she could?

  She runs. She runs. He must be farther along the beach somewhere, he must’ve decided it was too dangerous and went in search of calmer waters. He’s somewhere. The ocean is vast but not infinite.

  She waits. She’s covered in sand for some reason. When did that happen? Her calves are wet and the sand sticks. Sand in her mouth, her eyes. Sand weighs down her feet.

  She waits.

  She pulls out her phone and starts running again, up the beach, away from the water. One bar flickers in and out, then disappears. When she reaches the boardwalk, she sees someone inside the beachfront café. She bangs on the glass door. The employee, a drowsy young man in a white apron, gestures at the CLOSED sign. She bangs again with both fists. I need help, she cries. It’s an emergency!

  Is it? Is it yet?

  He reluctantly turns the lock and opens the door a crack, to hear what Isabel’s yelling about. His manager, a middle-aged woman in a brown patterned dress with glasses on a chain, counting cash as she assembles the float for the day, says, Oh, for God’s sake, let her in.

  Isabel calls 911 on the café phone. She stan
ds by the door with the receiver against her ear, still scanning the ocean. The young man in the apron hovers nearby, faintly regretful. He wants to help.

  In a fundamental way, Isabel believes nothing bad has happened to Victor. He’s safely out of view. Even as the police arrive, and then the coast guard, and a small rescue boat putters back and forth from where she saw him go in. She has a conversation with the woman in the brown dress, on a loop. Isabel says, He’s a strong swimmer, he’s an experienced surfer, he knows his limits, he knows the water, he knows this beach. The woman says, I’m sure he’s okay. Isabel says, He’s okay. They go back and forth: He’s okay, he’s okay, he’s okay.

  The hours stretch into years of possible lives. Isabel thinks about how mad she’ll be when it turns out to have been nothing at all. Victor came out of the water far down the beach, judged that the water had turned, and is hiking back. He paddled his board into calmer waters, to lie flat on his back and doze, not realizing he’s out of sight.

  The woman in the brown dress asks Isabel if she’d like something to eat. Isabel starts allowing for the possibility of a small injury, a twisted ankle—he’s clinging to his board, out too deep, waiting for rescue.

  The woman in the brown dress says Isabel really should eat something. The light is changing. The sea is beginning to calm. The beach has filled with people, gawkers and onlookers and those determined to enjoy themselves. The arcade lights up. The carousel plays its mocking tune. Serious injury, then: Isabel imagines Victor’s life as a paraplegic. She would nurse him through the early days, the relearning, the physical therapy. They’d cry together. When he went back to work, his co-workers would applaud. He’d join a wheelchair basketball league.

  Five miles down the beach, outside the wind tunnel made by the shape of the backing hills, nine-year-old June builds a sand castle at the water’s edge. Her parents are far up the beach. Her little sister, Emma, who is hot and bored, sits between them underneath an umbrella and sucks on a freezer pop.

  June thinks she might be out of her parents’ sight. Or almost. A girl shape in a purple swimsuit. She feels a frisson of naughtiness. Lately, being alone feels exciting instead of scary. Or rather, it feels scary and exciting. Even though she doesn’t do anything bad, it’s just the idea that she could. The realization that her mother doesn’t know everything.

  June feels like she invented lying by omission. Emma lies, of course. Emma’s lies take the form of Nuh-uh and stomping her feet while screeching, I didn’t do it! I didn’t do anything! Which of course means she did. June is sophisticated. She says nothing at all.

  June needs more water for her sand castle. She brings her plastic bucket down to the clearer shallows among some nearby rocks. She stops a few feet away. She sees a man swimming. Not swimming, floating. Facedown. Is he snagged on one of the rocks?

  He needs help, June decides. He needs help right now. She looks behind her. Her parents seem far away, across a huge stretch of hot sand. Parent-shapes.

  June is proud of her strength. She can hang from the monkey bars longer than anyone. She can win mercy fights against boys. She can jump from the high dive and swim five laps of an Olympic-size pool. And still, for no good reason, her mother won’t let her go in the water by herself.

  It will take too long to get her parents.

  June plunges in. The tide is on her side in that moment, draws her out in the direction she wants to go. Toward the man. She swims in smooth, strong strokes. When she gets close, she sees his ears dip above and below the waterline with the motion of the waves. She treads and calls out, “Hello! Are you okay?”

  She continues to tread in place. She needs to decide if she should try to flip him over. She’s learned how at swim lessons, although, of course, she’s practiced only on dummies and other kids. Up close, the man is much larger than he looked from the beach. She momentarily doubts her strength, but there’s no time for that. She has to hurry.

  With both hands, she grabs ahold of his arm in its wetsuit. She dolphin kicks in an attempt to pull him under and around. She’s lost track of the tide. A wave hits her back and sucks her down. She lets go of the man’s arm but gets tangled in the heft and confusion of his body, seemingly everywhere, possessing a hundred limbs.

  June realizes she has to dive down to escape him. She kicks away, her eyes open, the water frothing from her panicked breath. She rolls underwater to reorient herself: which way is up? Where is the light coming from?

  She sees his face.

  The features are blurred and dreamlike. Something has nibbled away at the edges. His eyes are open, clouded.

  June allows her instincts and buoyancy to pull her toward the surface. She kicks hard, bursts clear. She gulps her first breath and takes in water. She remembers her lessons: calm down.

  She zigzags to shore, using her parents’ umbrella as a marker. She knows she can’t swim straight toward them the way she wants to. She knows she can’t start crying yet.

  June emerges from the ocean level with her family. Her mother sees her striding up the beach. Her long ponytail hangs down her back in a teardrop shape. She looks aquiline, flushed, seal-smooth, vibrantly alive. A creature of the sea. She looks changed.

  2

  The first one was Elliott Mars.

  The drama teacher at Isabel’s high school, Mr. Greeley, was a man obsessed. The teachers before him could scrape together a show every few years if pressed, preferring to show filmed plays on a rolling television-and-VCR cart and solicit summaries in the kids’ bland, opinion-averse way: this happened, then this happened, then this happened. Mr. Greeley ran drama as a multi-grade class during the school year and a club in the summer, with at least two shows that bookended the school year.

  Isabel’s best friend at the time, Marcy, was Mrs. Webb in Our Town in the fall of their sophomore year. Marcy described the play’s folksy dialogue and school-friendly inoffensiveness and Isabel felt bored just thinking about it. She waited until closing night to go because Marcy promised to take her to the cast party afterward. As the curtains opened, Isabel folded a paper crane from her program, sitting with her legs tucked up on the wooden folding chair. She’d come alone and sat in the second row, in the section of the audience for parents and the supportive old ladies who came to everything.

  As the lights came down and the curtains parted, Isabel felt momentarily disoriented. She’d been in recitals and Christmas showcases in elementary school, when everyone had to be, but at fifteen, she’d never been in the audience of a live show before. The darkness swallowed up the auditorium, the school, the night beyond. Nothing existed but the stage, the world shrunk to its conspicuously shallow dimensions.

  Elliott Mars, a junior, played the Stage Manager. He strode out and began the opening speech of Our Town, mapping out each building in Grover’s Corners. He was pale and absurdly tall, six feet four without any of the other trappings of manhood.

  Elliott was hypnotic to watch. He looked out over the invisible town with nostalgia and fondness, his voice casual. He navigated among objects that weren’t there with ease. You believed they were there because he did. He noted the passage of time with such quiet wonder that Isabel felt it slipping away. She felt herself age, she felt the regrets she didn’t yet have.

  At the end, as a parade of sweaty teenagers dripped stage makeup, grasped each other’s hands, and bowed, the parents leapt up for a roaring, standing ovation. Isabel stayed in her seat. Stricken. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been crying until the lights went up. The other kids had been fine, decent. In a moment, Isabel would recover herself and go out into the hall to congratulate Marcy and tell her she’d been great. She would make a point of mumbling a similar sentiment to the senior who played Emily, whose revelations about life and death—however hammily played—were primarily what had made Isabel bawl.

  There was nothing that could be said to Elliott. Isabel was impressed that her peers had achieved the bare minimum—they could brave a crowd and remember their lines and enunciate
clearly and mime shucking peas and holding umbrellas, something Isabel could never do. But their competence only highlighted Elliott’s radiance. His unselfconscious grace, expressive from his eyebrows to the tips of his fingers. He alone made Grover’s Corners real. He could act.

  Isabel hovered near Marcy at the cast party at the drama teacher’s house, worried someone would ask what she was doing there. Marcy was ignoring her, busy reliving the high of the performance with her castmates, dwelling on some hilarious near-disaster in the wings. Isabel looked around for Elliott. She spotted him talking to the drama teacher and his wife. Out of costume, everyone had reverted back to their T-shirts and plaids. Elliott wore a maroon button-up and dark jeans. He and the two adults appeared cut out from another scene and pasted into this one. The after-party of a Broadway show, cocktails instead of store-brand cola cans. Everyone seemed small and provincial beside him.

  Isabel noticed a cluster of more familiar kids in the corner. Her people: misshapen nerds in unflattering black turtlenecks. The stagehands, the set builders, the tech team, everyone who needed the art credit or extracurricular but couldn’t or wouldn’t act. She could do that.

  Isabel watched the next play from the distorted broad angle of the wings. She was so distractedly in love with Elliott that she couldn’t enjoy this show—Harvey—the way she had the last one. The kids had more trouble with comedy, or the teacher had more trouble directing them. The audience was confused by the pauses and the broad gestures, a constant game of Was that a joke?

  Elliott, of course, was Elwood. The drama teacher was probably picking shows that played to Elliott’s strengths—his ability to make seen the unseen. The way he stared a man-size imaginary rabbit creature in the eyes, communed with it, and placed a hat on its head, the creature was as clearly and effortlessly in the room as Elliott was. Elliott made Harvey more compelling than the other solid, real actors.