Every Little Thing in the World

by Nina de Gramont

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “We’re going to find out who has the most toxic bug spray and become his best friend.” I had barely finished my sentence when into the tent flew Mick’s useless, childlike sleeping bag. He stuck his bald head in after it.

  “Hey, girls,” he said. “What’s the chatter?”

  “Is that some kind of expression?” Natalia said. “‘What’s the chatter?’ The chatter is, this tent belongs to the girls.”

  Never mind what she said, her tone could not have been more inviting. Mick crawled in and spread out his sleeping bag next to hers. “Come on,” he said. “You don’t want to break up our group, do you? Wouldn’t you rather share a tent with Brendan and me than those boring white kids?”

  Natalia and I looked at each other, confused. Was this another expression? Or was Mick just a major weirdo?

  “Um,” Natalia said. “Don’t look now, but we’re all white kids too.”

  “Shit,” said Mick. “You noticed.”

  Natalia and I burst out laughing. “Hey,” Jane’s voice called, from somewhere in the camp. “Everybody needs to look for sticks. We’re roasting hot dogs for dinner.”

  Surprisingly obedient, Mick climbed out of the tent, leaving his gear right where he’d put it. While he and Natalia started searching for sticks (“Not too dry,” Jane shouted. “Find one that’s a little green at the tip.”), I walked over to Brendan, who stood watching Jane work on the fire.

  “Hey,” I said to him. “Do you have any bug repellent?”

  “Sure,” he said. I followed him to his pack, which like everyone else he’d rested against a tree, apparently waiting for our ruling on Mick. He pulled out a huge bottle of Off ! Deep Woods Sportsmen—98 percent deet. I could have kissed him.

  I closed my eyes tight and shielded them with my hands while he doused me with the poison. It should have been kind of an intimate moment, but Brendan acted more like a mom taking care of me than an interested guy.

  “You better save some for Natalia,” I said. “She’ll probably have a million bites before dinner starts.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll hide this in here for us.” By “us” I knew he meant him, me, Natalia, and Mick. He stuffed the bottle deep into his pack then carried it over to our tent and tossed it inside—zipping everything tight, to keep out the bugs.

  In my mind, Brendan had already faded from movie star to platonic guy-friend. It seemed very normal standing there next to him. We both let our eyes travel across the campsite, to where Mick searched for sticks.

  “Interesting guy,” Brendan said. “I’m going to really study him, in case I ever have to play someone like that.” I tried to picture Brendan dressed up to play someone like Mick—tattoos, shaved head, and all—and thought that the best acting coaches and costume designers in the world wouldn’t be able to make it convincing.

  Though no one had said a word about his acting, Brendan didn’t bother pretending we didn’t know exactly who he was. Still, I didn’t find him cocky. He just seemed kind of nice and easygoing. And although I got absolutely no vibe of interest toward myself, he also didn’t appear to be lusting after Natalia, which struck me as a refreshing change. We could all be just friends, with no messy sex to interfere with alliances.

  That night we had a feast around the fire. We sat on logs and roasted hot dog after hot dog on our whittled green sticks. We cooked potatoes on sticks too: They tasted charred and crispy on the outside and firm and green on the inside. We passed around cans of peaches and a roll of cookie dough that Jane didn’t feel like baking. No silverware, just sticks and fingers. Everything had a slight tinge of ash, dirt, and bark, but after our day on the water it all tasted delicious.

  “We have to eat all the perishables this first week,” Jane said. “They won’t last much longer in the cooler.”

  Because Jane had masterminded our entire meal on sticks, there were no dishes or pots to wash. After we’d all gorged ourselves, Brendan brought out his guitar. I had somehow won the spot next to him—Natalia sat next to me, and Mick next to Natalia. Meredith and Lori sat on the other side of the fire with their heads together, their chins in their hands, staring swoonily as Brendan strummed corny old songs like “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and “Kumbaya.” He had a sweet, earnest voice and only missed an occasional chord. Silas left his guitar in his tent, and I wondered if that meant he played better or worse than Brendan. Everything seemed companionable enough until it was time to go to bed.

  “Hey,” Meredith said. “The boys’ sleeping bags are in the girls’ tent.”

  Silas and Jane were already heading toward their tent. They stopped and looked at each other. Then Jane gave Silas a look that seemed to say, Your turn, which he handled by shrugging and smiling, then following Jane off to bed.

  Charlie and Sam stood limply by the fire, waiting for our verdict.

  “What are you,” Mick said to Meredith, “some kind of prude?”

  Natalia surprised me by stepping in. “Look,” she said. “They shouldn’t have to sleep in the same tent with guys if they don’t want to. You should move your sleeping bag.”

  Her voice sounded more calm and composed than bossy. Mick responded by walking directly to our tent and removing his belongings. I took this as the first sign that he’d already fallen completely in love with her.

  Our tent full of girls smelled of acrid sweat and chemical bug spray. Natalia’s solar-powered lamp glowed in our corner. It was amazing, that captured ball of sunlight, energy in its most basic state. I thought how my dad would approve.

  While Meredith and Lori read paperbacks from their summer reading list, Natalia pulled out a pen and a pad of paper. “I’m going to work on a list of questions for Margit,” she said. She planned to send them to her at the two-week point, when we could send and receive mail. We lay down side by side, Natalia pressing a ballpoint pen to a legal pad.

  “First question,” Natalia said. “Why didn’t you have an abortion?”

  Meredith and Lori gave no sign that they’d stopped reading and started listening, other than a shift in breathing pattern, but I could hear them absorb our every word.

  “Ask her who the father is,” I whispered.

  Natalia wrote down: Who is the father? We had agreed on this language without discussing it, always saying “the father,” never “my father” or “your father.”

  She paused and scratched at a mosquito bite on her wrist. Above the flap in the tent, we could see silhouettes of a thousand bugs—moths, mosquitoes, dragonflies—trying to beat their wings through our canvas fortress.

  “What else?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But you have two weeks before you send it. We don’t have to think of every question right now.”

  Natalia said, “Every time I get mad at her, I think how scared she must have been.”

  I paused for a minute, then nodded my agreement. I watched as Natalia wrote in her awkward sideways handwriting: Were you scared?

  “I have to pee,” I said.

  I crawled over our tent mates, who hadn’t once taken their eyes off their books. I unzipped carefully and slid out, trying my best not to let in any bugs. But I knew a few slipped by. From where I squatted by the lake, I could see insect shadows joining the girlish ones inside the tent.

  No light or shadows came from the counselors’ tent, or the boys’. Both stood dark and silent in the camp. Jane had doused the fire with lake water, but the scent of wood smoke and roasted meat lingered. A mist rose off the lake. Mosquitoes buzzed at my ear, then retreated, repelled by Brendan’s super-industrial goo.

  When I got back to the tent, the solar lantern sat outside. I carried it up the mossy bank and rested it behind a small pine tree. The woods filled with dark sounds, hoots and whistles and twitching. It beckoned and frightened me, like a ghost story.

  I stood there a minute, hoping that I wouldn’t have to pee until morning. Then I picked up two sticks and made a little cross in front of the pine tree, so
I wouldn’t forget where I’d left the lantern. The only problem with a solar lamp: There was no way to turn it off, other than hiding it.

  chapter seven

  newly savage

  I learned everything about Meredith and Lori during the night, because it turned out Meredith had a urinary tract infection and needed to pee as often as I did. Every time I crawled over her sleeping bag she would wake up and come along with me. We moved the solar lantern from behind the pine tree so it would light our travels from tent to increasingly damp earth.

  Meredith had brought along prescription antibiotics. On our third trip to the tree, she expressed concern for my lack of medication. “You might have an infection too,” she said.

  “No,” I assured her, “just a very small bladder.”

  “Or maybe you’re diabetic,” she said. “My cousin is, and that’s how they found out. She started needing to pee all the time.”

  This conversation took place in very early morning, that silent moment between deepest night and the first rays of morning: no longer completely dark, only a hint of light from beneath the horizon. With nocturnal animals finally silent and the daytime ones still sleeping, it was still dark enough that Meredith and I squatted in front of the trees rather than behind them.

  “Frequent urination can be a symptom of a lot of medical disorders,” she told me.

  “I’m really not worried.” I hoped my tone sounded final, but I tried not to make it too stern. Without her glasses, Meredith looked like a little girl, pink cheeked and snub nosed, her sandy blond hair endearingly messy.

  We stood up and pulled our sweats back up, then headed back toward the tent. We had worked out a complicated system to keep out bugs. It involved unzipping as little as we needed, then sidling under and in quick succession, rezipping between each of our entrances. But when I looked to see if she was ready, she waved her hand and started toward the lake.

  “I think I’ll stay up and watch the sun rise,” she said. I hesitated for a second, almost tempted to join her, but fatigue got the better of me. I climbed over my tent mates and into my sleeping bag. Natalia slept like a log, her hair still in yesterday’s ponytail, her mouth closed. She breathed quietly, through her nose, unlike Lori, who snored like an asthmatic.

  Lori and Meredith lived in a small town in Ohio, which—Meredith had told me, when she heard that Natalia and I went to private school—had an excellent public school system. The two of them were best friends, and I got the feeling from Meredith’s wistful and claustrophobic description that they were also each other’s only friend. They had found Camp Bell online and, though they had never done any camping, thought it sounded romantic.

  “In the literary sense,” Meredith explained pointedly, “not the sexual.” The statement may have proved that her public education was as good as Linden Hill Country Day, but I wasn’t totally convinced she and Lori didn’t hope to meet guys. I guessed they must be pretty disappointed by the selection: the dreamy but unattainable Brendan, the distinctly undreamy team of Charlie and Sam, and the flat-out frightening Mick. Not to mention the unbeatable competition in the form of Natalia. When I hinted at this, Meredith set me straight.

  “No,” she said. “We both really needed to get away from the whole guy thing.” She told me that in the past year, both Lori and she had lost their virginity to Amish boys who lived in the neighboring town.

  “Really?” I said, not able to hide my shock. “How did you meet them?”

  “We live near Amish farmland. They’re around all the time.”

  “Wow,” I said, not quite able to get my head around this. “Did you date them?”

  “We tried to,” Meredith said, looking mournful. “But obviously it didn’t work out.”

  “I’m amazed,” I told her. “I thought Amish kids weren’t allowed to have sex.”

  “Well,” Meredith pointed out, “neither are we.”

  On our next late-night pee, Meredith told me that Lori was already put off by the overly rustic nature of the trip.

  “I don’t know what she expected,” I said.

  “She thought there would at least be Porta Potties at campsites,” said Meredith. “And she wasn’t expecting to get so wet. Also, her skin is breaking out so badly.”

  It seemed too mean to point out that Lori’s skin had been badly broken out when she got here. So instead I said, “Of course she’s going to get wet. We’re on a lake.”

  “I know,” Meredith said. “And I kind of like it. I don’t mind the water, or peeing outside. I feel so far away from everything. In a good way. You know?”

  I definitely did. Lying in my sleeping bag with my eyes shut tight, I could feel the sun outside the tent, rising and widening. Birds started to chirp and sing. The pine branches moved in a silent rustle; I could see their spiraling shadows on the inside of my eyelids. And I sank like a stone into unmoving sleep.

  At what must have been midmorning, I stumbled out of the tent in blinding sunlight. Last night around the campfire we had discovered that not a single one of us had brought along a watch. For the next two weeks, at least, we would have to guess how much time had passed on any given day. I squinted into the numberless light, toward the sounds of a much better guitar player than Brendan: Silas, strumming by the campfire. I didn’t recognize the tune, a beautiful collection of chords and picking. Silas himself looked strangely beautiful too, unaware that I was watching him, his brows knitted together in concentration. The birds had stopped their hysterical morning chatter, and my own internal sundial struck nine forty-five. Music rose and settled around Silas like daytime stardust, and I wished I knew him better so I could walk over and sit at his feet, listening. That longing, and his distance, felt strangely and sweetly familiar. I walked over to the campfire and sat down on a log next to Natalia.

  “Oh no,” she said, when I told her what time I thought it was. “I know it’s much earlier than that.” She sipped black coffee from a tin camping mug. Her hair sat on top of her head in tangled disarray. Her cheeks had creases from the makeshift pillow. Her long lashes were crusted with sleep. But she still managed to look beautiful, hunched in that fuzzy white sweatshirt. On the other side of the campfire Sam and Charlie squinted from either the sunlight or the glamorous reflection of my groggy best friend. I tried to picture the Natalia equivalent at whatever school they went to, and wondered if they felt blessed or intimidated having her along on this trip.

  Jane had brewed coffee in a pot that sat directly on the fire, and its strong, charcoal smell competed with the piney woods. I had never gotten around to developing a taste for coffee, and as far as I knew Natalia wasn’t used to the sludge either. After every sip she wrinkled her nose in delicate distaste. The one thing I did know about coffee: Pregnant women were supposed to avoid it. I grabbed a mug from the jumble of pots and pans and poured myself a cup. The first sip tasted muddy and acrid, and I almost gagged. But after a while, it felt good to have something warm in my stomach, which felt deeply, deeply hollow. I put my hand on my belly. It was flat as usual, my fingers resting directly on ribs.

  “You look skinny,” Natalia said, reading my mind. I frowned at her.

  “Don’t tell me you’re trying to lose weight,” Jane said to me. “Last year we had a bulimic on the trip. It was a horrible feeling, going to all this work making food and knowing it would just be yacked up behind a tree. Plus, she had no energy for rowing at all.”

  “I’m not bulimic,” I said.

  “Good,” said Jane, bustling around the campfire, which was obviously her private domain. She loaded slices of bread into a funny mesh contraption with a long handle, which she held over the fire, shaking it occasionally like old-fashioned popcorn. Like all the equipment that belonged to Camp Bell, the toaster looked like it had been dug out of a time capsule from the 1940s.

  “I think I’d rather eat the bread raw,” Natalia said.

  Jane didn’t look up, but frowned quietly. She shook black bangs away from her eyes. Although Natalia had
obviously rejected her as any kind of authority, I liked Jane. I thought she looked athletic and unself-conscious, squatting in front of the fire. I thought of her yesterday, peeling off her shirt without any thought as to how we might react. I admired that. I also admired Silas, not paying the slightest bit of attention to any of us, just sitting on a log and picking the prettiest morning music on his battered guitar.

  Mick struggled out of the tent and walked over to the fire, where he knelt and rooted through the cooler.

  “Are we going to cook this?” he asked Jane, holding up a package of bacon.

  “I guess,” she said. “We’ve got to eat all the perishable stuff first. But it’s good raw, too.”

  Mick hesitated, the package still in the air like a question mark.

  “We could cook it if you want,” she said, “but then you guys would have to scrub the frying pan.”

  Mick seemed to find that task worth avoiding. He tore the plastic off the bacon and peeled off a long, raw strip, which he rolled into a little ball and then popped into his mouth.

  “Hey,” Sam said. His voice sounded shrill and boyish. “You can’t eat bacon raw.”

  Mick turned to him and rubbed his belly. “Mmm,” he said. Sam’s face turned bright pink. Charlie didn’t say anything, and it occurred to me that in two days I hadn’t heard him speak a word. I had no idea what his voice sounded like.

  Mick peeled off another piece of bacon and passed the package to me. My father would have died. If he saw me eating raw bacon straight out of the package—Oscar Mayer, no less—he would have lain down in front of the fire and died. In his world, even grass-fed, organic meat had to be cooked straight through. “You never know what neighboring farmers are up to,” he always said. “There’s all kinds of ways to contaminate groundwater.”

  And I don’t think I had ever in my entire life seen my mother eat bacon, raw or otherwise. She would definitely have had a lot to say if she knew I was even considering eating raw bacon. But what mattered less than what either of my parents thought? Back at Newark International they had both disappeared into the ether. Since the moment I stepped onto that Air Canada flight, they existed only in theory.