Every Little Thing in the World

by Nina de Gramont

  “If we go home now,” she said, “I can figure out a way to see Steve. You can figure out what to do about the baby.”

  It drove me insane, the way she insisted on calling it “the baby.” Still, my heart went out to her a little bit, thinking how scary it must be to feel herself falling for Mick. Next to him, Steve was an Eagle Scout. If they could catch a single glimpse of Mick, Natalia’s parents would beg her to run away with Steve. At the same time I thought of everything we had risked this past year so Natalia could be with Steve. And now she wanted me to give up this last refuge, the canoe trip, because she felt drawn to someone else.

  I closed my eyes against the sun and imagined the murdered man lying on the ground, blood trickling out of his ear. I tried to remember if Mick had mentioned how old he was, but only one detail—the ugly word, saying more about Mick than his victim—had lodged in my brain.

  “Do you really think it was self-defense?” Natalia asked, though I hadn’t said a word. She picked up her paddle and began to row.

  “I do,” I said, and I meant it. I hated the image, but at the same time I couldn’t blame Mick. I even admired him, for doing what needed to be done in order to protect his own world.

  We reached the portage at what I guessed was noon. The sun shone strong and bright overhead. So far, the portages on our route had been very brief, but today’s stretched more than a mile across a portion of abandoned road that had once led back to Keewaytinook Falls. Summer cabins—long since gone to seed—sagged, forlorn, beside the path. At one point there was a small bit of pavement under our feet. Grass and poison ivy poked up through its cracked median line. It comforted me, somehow, to see nature reclaiming a site so easily.

  Jane insisted that we carry everything to the other side before we sat down to eat lunch. Since Natalia and I showed up last onshore, we didn’t have a chance to rest before the hike began. First we had to carry all our gear to the opposite end of the portage. Then we had to return to our canoe, turn it over, and hoist it over our heads. Natalia was taller, so she took the stern. It was slow going. Now that all the boys had learned a passable J stroke, Silas and Jane canoed together. Lori usually went in Charlie’s canoe, and Meredith in Sam’s, which made Natalia and me the only two-girl canoe. In a way it made me proud of us, forging our own way with no testosterone-fueled muscles. But other times it was incredibly frustrating—the way we always ended up in last place, except for when Brendan and Mick shadowed us for purely social reasons.

  The canoe felt awkward over our heads, but at least it shielded us from the sun, which was hot that day. “You okay?” Natalia called to me, and I grunted back that I was fine. She impressed me every day, the way she’d left all her girliness back in New Jersey. Unlike, for example, Lori—who continually whined about hard ground, sore arms, and broken fingernails. I couldn’t believe Natalia would seriously consider leaving after all the progress she’d made, and I told her so.

  “This place here is neat,” she admitted, shrugging one shoulder toward a two-story building that had lost its roof. We could see the structure’s innards—its dilapidated stair- way and its random division of rooms. An old woodstove stood in the middle of the downstairs, where the kitchen must have been.

  “Remember that Robert Frost poem we read in Mr. Lombardi’s English class?” Natalia said. “The one about the ghost town? This reminds me of that.” I was about to agree when I noticed a fresh explosion of graffiti on the wall just to the left of the stove. In black letters, large enough for me to read from my distance of three yards or so, it read MICK PISSED HERE. Natalia and I both stopped, the canoe suspended over our heads. We stared at the ugly words, not saying anything.

  I remembered Mr. Lombardi’s lecture about that poem, “Directive.” He told us what Robert Frost meant: that you had to lose yourself before you could find yourself. In Mick’s world, he had to destroy everything to prove he existed in the first place. I tried to remember the last few lines of “Directive,” which had given me chills the first time I read it. But staring through the empty window, my own past as faded and deserted as the ghost town around me, the words wouldn’t come.

  “Do you have a pen?” I asked Natalia.

  “No,” she said. “All that stuff is in my gear at the other end.” We put down the canoe and walked inside the house. My shoulders felt stiff and unnatural, like the muscles themselves were sunburned. If a smell of urine hung in the air, the stronger scents of dust and pine resin managed to drown it out. Natalia and I pulled nails from the loose floorboards and used them to scrape off Mick’s foul graffiti. The wood flaked away easily in damp and moldy strips.

  A while later we emerged from the woods onto a sandy, idyllic beach. The water was clear as ever, a deep and gorgeous blue. We dropped the canoe to the ground and headed directly into the lake. Everyone else sat on the sand eating peanut butter sandwiches, their hair wet from swimming. This morning after Lori’s outburst, Jane had unashamedly fed us baked beans and canned pineapple, a combination that still sat in my gut so heavily that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to eat lunch at all.

  Natalia and I dove into the water and swam out till it was deep enough to pedal our feet through the soothing chill. A few loons floated nearby, either so used or unused to people that it didn’t occur to them to fly away. We treaded water, staring at the birds, waiting for the trill that made up a fair percentage of our daily sound track. So long Tupac, Incubus, Green Day, and Coldplay. These days a bunch of long-necked and prehistoric birds were the closest thing I knew to rock stars.

  We heard a splash in the water, the thunk of a light missile. Natalia and I both raised our arms, shielding our faces. Mick had walked to shore, the bandanna I’d worn the night before returned to his head. He was bare chested in the hot sun. The days of rowing and rations had made him leaner, more muscular, but I’d never found him less attractive. He jittered in a restless, antagonistic way, rocking on the balls of his feet.

  He threw another rock. This one landed just shy of the loon closest to us. The bird flapped its wings and squawked—nothing like the musical sound that had become so familiar—then both birds skimmed across the water in clear outrage. Next time they’d know better than to rest so close to humans.

  “Hey, you asshole,” Silas called. “Don’t throw rocks at the loons.”

  “I’m not,” said Mick. “The loons just happen to be there, man.” He threw another, this one skipping closer to Natalia and me. I wanted to swim to shore and start eating my lunch, but I couldn’t quite figure out the nature of his actions—whiling away the time, or staging an attack.

  Silas stood up and walked over to Mick. Since we’d left base camp, Silas had lost weight at an amazing rate, going from burly to slim almost before our eyes. His T-shirts hung off his shoulders, and the drawstring on his shorts grew longer every day. But Silas was still a big guy, taller than Mick and with broader shoulders. He stood over him, hands on his hips, looking down. As a daily presence Silas always seemed bemused but totally uninvolved, which made it all the more remarkable—this pointed confrontation.

  “Put the rocks down,” he said.

  Mick stared up at him, a defiant quiver in his shoulders. He looked taut and ready to spring. Underwater, Natalia’s hand bumped into mine. I think it went through both our minds what we now knew Mick to be capable of. It was impossible not to imagine Silas splayed out at his feet.

  “Put the fucking rocks down,” Silas said. His voice sounded stern but also condescending, as if he considered this standoff the funniest and most pathetic thing in the world.

  Mick shrugged like it didn’t matter. He didn’t exactly put the rocks down, but tossed them lamely to one side. They plopped into the water. Satisfied, Silas turned and went back to his lunch.

  Natalia and I swam back to shore. We kept our eyes on the ground, not looking at Mick, but reunited by his assault on us. We shared a PBJ, then joined the rest of our group in filling empty peanut butter jars with the wild blueberries that lined the portag
e path. We ate as we picked, and talked to everybody, and laughed. Even Lori laughed, and I think Charlie may have spoken—though it was only a mutter, and I couldn’t quite make out the words. It was a rare moment of solidarity among each and every one of us—except for Mick, who stayed glowering by the water, throwing imaginary rocks, one after the other, at the escaping wildlife.

  When we got to our campsite for the evening, Natalia marched over to Lori as soon as we’d hauled our canoe onshore. “I’m thinking about going home too,” she said.

  “You are not,” I objected.

  Lori and Meredith hunched on the ground, pounding tent stakes with rocks. I knelt to help them while Natalia stood by, a glamorous supervisor. Meredith sat back on her haunches. “If Natalia goes,” she said, “then maybe I don’t have to.”

  I felt a happy sort of rising in my chest. I knew Meredith didn’t want to leave!

  “Of course you have to go,” Lori said. “My parents won’t let me go home if you don’t. I am not going to be the wimpy one.”

  Meredith turned back to pounding stakes. She mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like, “But you are the wimpy one.”

  “I heard that,” said Lori, on the brink of tears as usual.

  “You can’t go home,” I told Natalia. I thought suddenly how scary it would be to have her loose in the world, able to tell anyone about my situation. The risk seemed especially high if she returned to her own situation, the spoils of teen pregnancy coming to a sixteen-year head. Better to keep Natalia close, even if it meant facing these constant reminders.

  “I’m going home,” she said. “And I want you to come with me.”

  There was something about her tone I didn’t like, an unspoken threat—overly aware of all the ways she could black- mail me.

  “But I’m not going home,” I said. “I don’t want to, and I won’t.”

  Natalia rolled her eyes and flounced away from the tent, toward the woods. I followed her. “Look,” I said. I felt an angry kind of froth building up inside, the kind of fury I’d only ever felt toward my mother. “I’m going to tell you one thing. If you make me go with you, I’m going to tell my mother I’m pregnant the second I get off the plane. I’ll be scheduled for an abortion before our first night at home.”

  Natalia stopped short and whirled around. My toes bumped into hers, and I took a step back. She put her hands on increasingly slim hips.

  “So what?” she said. “That’s what you’re going to do anyway, right? It’s not like if I stay, you’ll have the baby.”

  “What baby?”

  We turned our heads at the same time, and there at the edge of the tree line, a bundle of timber under his arm, was Mick. He dropped the wood and walked over to me.

  “Syd,” he said, with that sadistic mock delight. “You in the family way?”

  “Fuck you, Mick,” Natalia said. Mick had flattened his palm, and his hand floated toward me as if to touch my stomach. Natalia batted it away.

  “How about that.” Mick whistled. “Little Sydney’s been getting busy. I’d believe it about this one over here”—he pointed a thumb toward Natalia—“but not my sweet, innocent little Syd.”

  “Please just shut up,” Natalia begged. For my part, I stood frozen. I watched Mick retrieve his wood and head back to the fire. I wondered if he would announce the news to everyone. I wondered if Jane and Silas would make me go home.

  Natalia touched my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t tell anyone.”

  She ran after him. I saw her catch him by the elbow. He took a step closer to her, his forehead practically touching hers. Natalia hesitated the barest fraction of a second, and although I could see her waver between two actions, I couldn’t tell which was instinct: stepping toward Mick or stepping away. She decided on the former, allowing his forehead to graze hers and walking her fingers from his elbow to his upper arm, lightly tripping over the misshapen tattoos. Mick’s body froze, amazed by this reception, and I could almost see sparks—like metal sawing into metal—flying up around them.

  He’s so alive, I found myself thinking. Alive and raw and always poised on the brink of something startling. I wondered if it felt as uneasy as it looked.

  Natalia as temptress looked so perfectly expert. Her long legs had browned the color of caramel. Her dark hair glinted with impossibly natural threads of gold. She looked like a retouched magazine photo come to life, and I realized that it didn’t make any sense to resent her for coming on this trip and taking away all my attention.

  I understood that I was pretty in an average kind of way—“pretty enough for all normal purposes.” My high school had done Our Town too. If Natalia hadn’t come along on this trip, there was a good chance that whoever took her place could have just as easily stolen my modest thunder. Whereas Natalia would always be the It girl, wherever she went. No one else in the world could ever be prettier than her.

  I saw Mick nod, that trancelike obedience. He looked toward me and held up two fingers. Peace. My chest flooded with something that felt alarmingly like love.

  That night around the campfire, Silas sat next to me. It surprised and cheered me, being graced with his nearness. I loved the lanolin scent of his fisherman’s sweater. I found myself studying his face so hard—the yellow stubble across his jaw, the small colorless mole at the tip of his nose—that I could feel Jane’s hard gaze at me as she knelt over our meal. I looked back down at my hands and asked Silas about his weight loss.

  “Normally I’m a skinny guy,” he said. “I can gain weight, but I can’t keep it on my body. So for months before I leave for Bell, I just eat everything in sight. Big Macs, chocolate cake, everything. That way I won’t be a skeleton by the end of summer.”

  Silas told me he’d been coming to Camp Bell for five years, since he was fourteen. “But doesn’t that make you nineteen?” I said. “I thought you were twenty-two.”

  “Oh right,” Silas said. “I meant eight years. Five years as a camper. Three as a counselor.”

  “Interesting,” I said. Though I had never doubted Silas’s maturity, I did glance over at Jane, as if he had flubbed her age instead.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “I’ve been coming here long enough that I know I need to put on serious weight before the trips begin. You’re here four weeks. But at the end of July, I’ve got four days at base camp and then it’s back on the water with a new group.”

  “Has Jane been coming here eight years too?”

  “Not that long. Just a few summers.”

  He picked up his guitar and started strumming. The sound it made was weird, jarring. Silas lifted it up to his ear and shook it. We heard a clunky, rattling thump.

  “A guitar pick?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Too big. This always happens, little pebbles and twigs fall inside when I leave it out.”

  He loosened the strings and tried to reach around them to locate the offending object, but his hands were too big. I gave it a try, but my fingers kept touching the edge of what felt like a pebble, without quite grasping it. Silas took the guitar from me and in one swift motion ripped the back off of it. Then he gave it a little shake, and the pebble fell out along with some pine needles. He tossed the back of the guitar onto the fire and went back to playing. The music sounded tinny, more open, like an instrument from more ancient times.

  I wished I had Silas’s ability, to change something so basic and then continue without a backward glance. My body felt worn out from everything it had done that day, not to mention everything that had occupied my mind, and I fought the urge to let my head fall onto his scratchy shoulder. Then, remembering his big hand on top of my head, I thought, What the hell. At the moment, in this world, Silas was like the dad. With the intimacy of night and the campfire, snuggling up to Silas seemed a whole lot more natural and easy than snuggling up to my own father. So I did it. I plopped my head right against his upper arm. He didn’t acknowledge the gesture in any way, but he didn’t rebuff it
either. He just kept playing, my head bumping up and down as he moved his fingers along the fret. Jane seemed completely unbothered, working away at the fire.

  Before dinner, Natalia, Mick, and I had gathered around Brendan as usual for a spray from his ultra-deet bottle. But now Mick and Natalia huddled up together on the opposite side of the fire, leaving Brendan to Lori and Meredith. Lori sat on one side of him, chatting away about Uta Hagen and Method acting, while Meredith slumped on the other side, looking embarrassed and apologetic. Brendan nodded politely, and I wished he would try to engage Lori more. Maybe then she would stay.

  Not being a schemer, this didn’t occur to Brendan. Instead he excused himself to get his guitar and sat down with me and Silas. Silas showed him some new chords, and the two of them played together for a while. We all sat listening, Meredith and Lori up later than usual, Charlie and Sam smoking their deer moss, which had become a major habit. If the sterilization myth proved true, neither of those two would have any hope of ever reproducing. After a while, Mick and Natalia stood up and walked off into the woods hand in hand. I turned toward Brendan, whose eyes were fixed on the pair, sad but maybe also a little relieved.

  I had the weirdest, jumpiest feeling in my gut. I wondered if Natalia would have sex with Mick, and if so, would she say that she had done it for me, to keep him quiet. I couldn’t bear to think of how responsible this made me, for so many things, not the least of which was this unfaithfulness to Steve. And even though I did feel guilty, it also made me kind of furious that I should be put in that position. I hadn’t asked Natalia to come on this trip or flirt with Mick. I hadn’t asked her to do one damn thing except keep her mouth shut and help me get an abortion—neither of which she’d been willing to do.