The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore

by Kim Fu

  Kelly was in psychology, Lisa in political science, Zoe in marketing, and they rarely talked about their studies with one another, as it involved too much explaining, too many acronyms. There was just class and papers and exams, subject matter undifferentiated, the occasional lab partner or study group materializing in the living room.

  The class inched together through Ulysses, page by page, all through the semester, as Victor and Isabel inched toward each other. Even the students most inclined to showing off, the ones with an aching, holdover need to be recognized as special, who forgot they were in supposedly free-form adult discussions and raised their arms with quivering hands like the tails of agitated dogs, even they eventually succumbed to the collaborative nature of the reading. Even they admitted they could not, on their own, make every connection, catch every reference, parse this web of near-infinite points. Victor, who treated the book like a puzzle or a game rather than a trove of philosophical meaning, fared as well as anyone.

  Victor and Isabel came early to class, walked together afterward. They contrived to run into each other on their way there, running to catch up and slowing down to be caught, carving out small, noncommittal meetings. Victor had grown up on the opposite side of the Georgia Strait from Isabel, and she learned that he loved to surf. He dreamed of living in California. He seemed Californian already, or Isabel’s idea of it: his drawn-out, easy way of speaking, the precise, rectangular teeth that suggested expensive orthodontics, his year-round tan, skin brimming with sunshine.

  They went out for lunch after class. Once, and then after every class. He took her to a vegan restaurant and she was amazed by what could be done with raw mushrooms. She took him to a Portuguese chicken joint where customers were invited to draw on the walls. He took her to her first Ethiopian restaurant, showing her how to sop up curry with the spongy bread. She took him for what he declared were the best burgers of his life, accompanied by thick milkshakes in metal tumblers. They both gained weight as the weeks passed. Isabel didn’t mind. Her new body felt soft and womanly.

  They walked aimlessly along the quays and he told her about his honors thesis project, a slight modification to a computer program that plays Go, and about a project he was working on for fun with his roommates, something about the way data is managed on the stock exchange. She didn’t try to follow the technical details. She caught herself just watching his mouth move. Their hands brushed as they walked, and he once closed his hand over hers but released it a block later, before she could figure out how to react.

  She came home from one of these lunches and found her roommates together in the living room, sitting on the floor around the coffee table, which held a delivery pizza and a massive cookie they’d made by rolling out a tube of premade cookie dough onto a baking sheet. They too were losing their teenage sleekness. “What’s with you?” Lisa said, as Isabel’s head appeared over the landing of the internal stairs. “You’re grinning like the Joker.”

  Isabel reached up and touched her face, surprised to find it locked in a giant smile. She had to work her jaw to release it. “Nothing.”

  “It’s that guy from your Ulysses class, right?” Zoe said, plucking olives off her pizza slice.

  Isabel sat down on the couch and broke off a corner of the cookie. The grin returned.

  “Are you guys dating or what?” Kelly asked.

  “I don’t know. I think so? We’ve never talked about it.” They hadn’t even seen each other after dark.

  “Has he made a move?” Zoe said.

  “We’ve held hands, sort of.”

  “That’s cute!” Kelly said.

  “Sure, if you’re ten years old,” Zoe said. “Have you made a move?”

  “He seems happy with the way things are.”

  Lisa brought Isabel a plate from the kitchen. “Are you happy?”

  Isabel considered, taking a slice of pizza despite the two dozen dumplings she’d just shared with Victor. “I could . . . do with more.”

  Zoe pretended to be scandalized, gasping and fanning herself as she fell back onto the couch. She sat upright again. “Then go get more!”

  Their final papers were due. Isabel’s copy of Ulysses was now dog-eared, wavy with water spills, stained by coffee rings and smudged lead, covered in scrawled pencil notes that made little sense to her now. Victor invited her over for lunch this time. He lived in a basement apartment with two roommates, one much like Isabel’s, except down the stairs instead of up.

  In their living room, in lieu of any other furniture, four unrelated tables had been pushed together to form one larger one, covered in computers and equipment. The two walls without doors were painted over with chalkboard paint and used for equations and doodles. Chalk dust hung in the air and coated every surface. His roommates sat at two terminals on the big table, a third computer off and expectant. The curtains were drawn over the high, street-level windows, the dim room glowing blue.

  Victor’s roommates didn’t introduce themselves as he and Isabel passed through to the kitchen. They didn’t even look up. Victor puttered around the filthy kitchen, making tacos, while Isabel sat at a Formica card table. She drank the beer he’d given her, a Corona with a lime wedge in the neck. She didn’t offer to help. The beer tasted of nothing but lime. She could have sat back and watched him cook forever.

  “I liked the last chapter best,” Victor said.

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah. That would have been a better book. ‘The Adventures of Molly Bloom.’”

  Isabel laughed. “Is that what you’re writing your paper about?”

  “No . . .” He held the spatula aloft, thoughtfully. “We didn’t have as much time to discuss it, and I’d just sound like an idiot going it alone.”

  After they ate, Isabel left by the back fire escape instead of passing through the living room dungeon again. Victor brought her shoes. As he held the door open, she leaned across the threshold to kiss him.

  “I was waiting for you to do that,” he said.

  “I was waiting for you to do that,” she replied.

  “We could’ve been waiting forever.” He opened the door wider. “Why don’t you come back in?”

  Victor’s bedroom, like the rest of the apartment, was spare but messy. A bike hung on the wall, another computer on an overturned milk crate, a mattress on the floor, piles of clothes and textbooks. “I didn’t think you’d be coming in here,” he said sheepishly.

  Isabel was excited. She was excited that she was excited. She had known sex as a grand existential opera, she had known sex as a blank trauma, and this was yet something else, this was Isabel as a dumb, simple, happy animal; stroke the head and the tail wags. This pleasure frothed along the surface of her skin, weightless and lacy as ocean foam, bubbling upward until it reached her mouth and dissolved into laughter.

  They stayed in Victor’s room all afternoon and evening, all night. When they emerged in the morning, ravenous, ragged, one of his roommates was still at the shared desk. He blinked behind his glasses, realizing both that daylight had come around again and that Isabel was still there. He lifted one hand to wave. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Isabel said.

  A week after graduation, Isabel and Victor stood before a justice of the peace, before her parents and his mother, sister, and stepfather, and vowed to be each other’s last, the end of this line, this way of recording a life. They had known each other for just over a year. They were twenty-two years old.

  The group walked from the courthouse like a procession. At the front, alongside Dina, Victor’s stepfather pushed his wife in her wheelchair. The bride and groom followed, and Isabel’s parents went last. Isabel’s mother read aloud the signs of businesses as they passed, sometimes with a little Hmm! exclamation, as though each one contained some delightful mystery.

  They approached the third-floor restaurant where they had their lunch reservation, the neon sign in the window written in Chinese characters. The seven of them sat down. Isabel looked around the circular tabl
e, covered in a white tablecloth, as the waiter laid out their teacups. The wheelchair raised Victor’s mother higher than the others. She sat straight-backed in a silver dress that matched her thick, neatly curled hair, gray on the outside and white on the inner curves, piled like whipped cream atop her head. Her mouth was pursed and lipstick-red. She looked regal and self-possessed, the queen of this occasion. She should have been the bride.

  To her left, Victor’s stepfather, a white man, looked bemused and half asleep in his green tweed suit, his long white nose hairs joining his limp white mustache. Victor addressed him only as “Mr. Davies.” To his left, Dina slouched in a funereal, shapeless navy-blue shift, her black-bleached-auburn bangs in her eyes, her skinny elbows on the table. Dina had grown up extraordinarily attractive, more than Isabel could ever have imagined.

  Beside Dina, Isabel’s mother, sixty-two going on a hundred, prattled on about how nice the restaurant was. She wore a pink skirt suit that Isabel knew was thirty years old, having seen pictures of her mother in it from before she was born. The shoulder pads sat comically off-center on her fleshless frame. Her father grinned as though something unexpectedly wonderful had happened, like he couldn’t believe his luck, in an equally aged brown suit, threaded with yellow, and a wide yellow tie. Her parents were neither poor nor cheap—they just really liked those outfits, logic that had never bothered Isabel until that moment.

  Victor’s mother ordered for all of them: jellyfish and barbecued pork, abalone and scallops, noodles with lobster, a whole steamed sea bass. Dina sighed dramatically and Victor’s mother added a dish of bok choy and black mushrooms. “Not even seafood, darling?” Mr. Davies said. Dina only sighed again.

  “Can I see the ring?” Isabel’s mother said, reaching awkwardly across her husband. Isabel held out her hand, showing two thin gold bands woven together into one ring. Victor’s was identical. “Ho liang-a! So pretty!”

  “Where did you get them?” Mrs. Chang asked.

  “Pawnshop,” said Victor. “Near here, actually.” A narrow storefront selling mostly old stereos and TVs, hidden between two stores selling foam slippers and Hello Kitty merchandise. The owner had brought out a jumbled tray of jewelry, and Isabel and Victor had reached for the same pair of rings at the same time.

  “Rings of dead strangers,” Mrs. Chang said. “Bad luck.”

  Mr. Davies patted her arm and looked out at the table with an indulgent smile, as if to say, Doesn’t she say the darndest things?

  The dishes started to arrive. Isabel’s father started loading his plate with barbecued pork and her mother playfully slapped his hand. “Aiyee! You’re the one who said we should eat less meat.” Dina looked up with restrained interest. “Part of getting old, you know.” Dina took one piece of bok choy, held it aloft in her chopsticks, nibbled lightly on the leafy end, and put it down again. She drank a lot of tea.

  Isabel sometimes felt her parents affected being older than they were. She knew they would go back to the hotel room and change into matching tracksuits, then walk briskly in circles around the city, complaining about their backs and knees. They’d requested an accessible hotel room, with handrails that they didn’t need in the shower and around the toilet. Or maybe Isabel was in denial, and her parents, who’d had her in their early forties, were in fact entering the last phase of their lives.

  Below the table, Victor took Isabel’s hand. He rubbed his thumb against the center of her palm.

  “So,” Mrs. Chang said. She ate noodles more tidily than anyone Isabel had ever seen. “What are you going to do in San Francisco, Isabel?”

  “Well, I won’t be able to work for the first few years, because I’ll have a non-working visa. I thought I’d just . . . hang out.”

  “Hang out,” Mrs. Chang repeated. She and Isabel stared at each other in mutual disbelief at what Isabel had just said.

  Isabel tried again: “See the city. Make some connections. Figure out what I want to do next.” These did not seem like better answers.

  “And you support this,” Mrs. Chang said to Victor.

  “Absolutely.”

  Mrs. Chang addressed the Wens. “You too?”

  Isabel’s father kept on grinning. Her mother said uncertainly, “She’s a lucky girl.”

  “Well, then.” She folded her hands onto her napkin, in her lap. “I hope you have fun.”

  Two months earlier, Victor and his roommates had been flown out to California by a company they’d never heard of called Jacquard. Jim had to get a passport in a hurry. On the plane, Shen and Jim drank complimentary business-class beers until they fell asleep, while Victor stared out the window. Their plane floated west over the clouds, the sun hanging, fixed in place, as they traveled against time.

  They’d been too busy with finals to give this trip a ton of thought. They hadn’t incorporated or consulted a lawyer. They didn’t really think of the code they’d written as a product, worth anything to anyone. It was a mathematical curiosity they’d shared with the internet at large, an invisible populace of people like themselves, and now they were tired of it and one another. They were ready to move on.

  They touched down at the San Jose airport in the late afternoon. Jacquard’s offices were in the patchwork of tech-dominated municipalities around the bay, halfway between San Jose and San Francisco. The boys whimsically rented a red-striped convertible, using the email voucher Jacquard had provided. Victor drove them onto the gridlocked highway that led to their hotel. They put the top up to keep out the dense cloud of car exhaust.

  Their hotel was a motor inn bought and renovated by an upscale chain, across the street from a strip mall of Chinese restaurants and stores. The renovation involved slapping walls up around what had been the parking lot and turning it into an indoor courtyard with a shiny new lobby, while otherwise retaining the motor inn’s original layout. The net effect was preservation, imitation, a Disneyland version of the seedy motel it had been.

  Not knowing what to do with themselves, they ate at a fried-noodle place in the strip mall. It took them twenty minutes to walk to the corner and cross the street, the block stretching uninterrupted for a mile in either direction from the hotel. Everything seemed larger than it should be, the roads wider, the parking lots deeper, their sense of distance thrown. They had more beers in the hotel bar, not talking much, an eerie orange light coming in through the windows. “What are you going to wear tomorrow?” Jim asked.

  “This?” Shen said, in his hoodie and jeans. “With a different T-shirt.”

  “I brought a suit jacket,” Jim said hesitantly.

  “I don’t think it matters,” Victor said.

  “We should go for a drive,” Shen said, perking up. “Cruise around in the convertible. Or drive into the city? Where the hell is the city?”

  “I’ve had too much,” Jim said, gesturing with his empty glass. “You?”

  “I don’t want to risk getting a DUI in the States,” Victor said.

  “So what are we supposed to do? Just go to bed?”

  Jim and Victor glanced at each other. “We should find internet somewhere and figure out where Jacquard is.”

  Shen slumped into his chair. “Well, this trip blows.”

  After visiting a Starbucks, another endless walk on the deceptive, baking concrete, there was some debate over the room’s two beds. Victor offered to sleep in the bathtub, but Jim and Shen said they were fine sharing. The two were still glumly watching television when Victor fell asleep.

  In the morning, they returned to the same Starbucks for breakfast. They budgeted an hour to drive eight miles, but they somehow kept getting on the wrong freeway, and made it just in time. They pulled into an anonymous concrete-and-glass low-rise in a business park, spaced far apart from several other, identical buildings. Low-lying fog obscured the horizon, making each building seem like it stood alone in the middle of nowhere. “I don’t know what I expected,” Shen said.

  A receptionist led them through an open floorplan of desks pushed together that loo
ked oddly similar to the setup in their apartment, multiplied fifty times over. The office seemed underpopulated, about half of the desks empty. Someone tossed a Nerf football to himself in his chair, someone else was asleep. The staff was almost entirely men. All of whom, in some implacable way, resembled Victor, Shen, and Jim, a thought that depressed Jim; he’d never thought of himself as a “type.” Victor and Shen were less surprised.

  The receptionist left them alone in a dark boardroom. A small amount of daylight came in through a high, rectangular window, but they couldn’t even see one another’s faces clearly. “Should we turn on the lights?” Jim asked.

  “I don’t know,” Shen said. “I kind of don’t want to touch anything.”

  Rolling chairs were clustered into a corner rather than around the table. It seemed safe to pull out a few of these to sit on. They left the light switches alone. When someone finally came to meet them, the lights flicked on and the three of them felt small and startled, blinking, vulnerable as nocturnal animals.

  Two men and a woman sat down across from them, after the woman pulled out three chairs, introducing themselves as VP-Acquisitions, Legal Counsel, and Brenda from HR. Pulling papers from a thick, inexhaustible folder, the two men spoke briskly and severely, while Brenda stared probingly at the boys, like she was trying to see into their souls.

  After ten minutes of this, Shen said, slowly, “So . . . you’re asking if we want money or jobs?”