Not Now, Not Ever

by Lily Anderson

  I couldn’t stomach the idea of Perla winning this argument. None of us would benefit from her having a feather in her cap. “We can’t mutiny and we can’t force anyone to teach us anything. We’ll just keep studying.”

  “And watching The Breakfast Club,” grumbled Kate.

  “Screw that,” Hunter said. “I’ll study, but I refuse to watch the same movie every night. I tried watching it on Monday. And guess what? The Breakfast Club sucks.”

  I gave him a small salute, remembering at the last minute to let my wrist limp to keep it from being too regulation. “‘So say we all.’”

  “Mail call!”

  All of our heads turned toward the source of the trill. Meg was prancing toward us, flapping an envelope around her face like a fan.

  “Mail?” Galen repeated, his mouth slack.

  “For one B. Calistero, care of Camp Onward,” Meg said, handing the envelope to Brandon.

  Jams craned his neck, trying to see the return address. “I thought you were local, Bran?”

  “I am,” Brandon said, tucking the letter into his binder. “I have friends.”

  “Friends who don’t know your email address?” Galen asked.

  “Or what century this is?” Perla added.

  “Be nice,” Meg said, smiling daggers. “There’s something to be said for epistolary discourse. If you want the handwriting analyzed, B, you know that Mary-Anne is—”

  “Thanks, Meg,” Brandon interrupted, squirming under the team’s attention. “I think I’ll be all right without.”

  She planted her hands on her hips, swaying cheerfully. “And how is my favorite team doing? I didn’t see any of you at movie night yesterday. We have a machine on loan that makes the most delicious kettle corn you’ve ever eaten. Seriously, I thought about it the whole flight here. And there’s always regular popcorn and candy.” She ticked off her fingers. “Skittles, sour straws, licorice—both red and black—and all the fun-sized chocolate you could ever hope for. Unless you were hoping for peanut butter cups. I think Peter ate all of those already.”

  She shook herself and clasped her hands to her chest like she was bracing to burst into song. “It would really mean a lot to me if you guys could come tonight for some Team One bonding time. I know you have a ton of studying to do, but I feel like I haven’t seen you since classes started. And we’re showing a great movie…”

  “Bollocks,” muttered Jams.

  I couldn’t have agreed more.

  12

  “I grant you that it was a different time,” Leigh whispered, a fistful of kettle corn clutched in her fist. “But are we really supposed to believe that a parent would buy their son a whole carton of cigarettes for Christmas?”

  “Cigarette packs have had the surgeon general’s warning on them since nineteen sixty-six,” Kate whispered back. “I looked it up after I watched this last night.”

  I bit a licorice whip in half. “If he said, ‘I’ve never had a Christmas present in my life,’ I’d feel worse for him. Now, it seems like his dad was trying to get him something he’d want. He probably is a smoker, right?”

  Kate scrunched her face in thought. “I think the implication is that Bender’s dad wants him to die.”

  The movie flickered against a sheet hung between two trees in the center of the quad. With the blankets spread out in the grass and the kettle corn machine churning out sweet and salty gold in the lobby of the residence hall, movie night had a sort of drive-in feeling to it.

  Day five of the Breakfast Club marathon had chased off most of the other teams and their counselors, leaving us with room to sprawl in the grass. Bryn Mawr was writing in a small notebook next to Meg, who was contentedly stuffing her face with kettle corn. Hari was sitting behind the projector cart, unabashedly reading a hardcover book that was missing its dust jacket.

  “That blond kid is the smallest wrestler I’ve ever seen. What’s his weight class? Ninety pounds?” Hunter asked from behind us, twitching as a mosquito flew too close to his head. Meg’s homemade bug spray succeeded in making us smell like Vicks VapoRub but didn’t do much when it came to repelling insects.

  “Does anyone else think he and the nerd kid look too much alike?” Jams asked, hugging his knees to his chest.

  “That’s the point,” Perla said. “The movie is trying—heavy-handedly—to point out that, despite their archetypes, they’re not that different after all. It’s total horseshit. Five white kids from the same rich imaginary suburb would be basically interchangeable.”

  “You had me and then you lost me,” Galen said. “With the racism.”

  “You can’t be racist against white people,” Leigh hummed. “FYI.”

  “For real,” I agreed.

  “Five Caucasian cisgender heterosexuals from homes with a median income that would allow for all of them to go to school in Shermer do not represent range,” Perla drawled. “Popular versus not popular is not diversity of circumstance. It’s caring too much about what other people think.”

  “Oh,” said Galen. “That makes more sense.”

  “Of course it does,” she snapped. “I’m a fucking genius.”

  Brandon’s black and white Chucks crunched through the grass toward us. He held a brown paper bag of popcorn close to his chest—his third. Not that I was keeping count.

  “What’d I miss?” he asked as he collapsed next to Jams.

  “Perla said something insightful and then ruined it by continuing to talk,” Jams said, scooping up a handful of fresh popcorn and stuffing it in his mouth. A fun-size Snickers flew through the air and bounced off his shoulder.

  Brandon picked up the Snickers and unwrapped it. “Pretty standard.”

  “Whatever,” Perla said. “I didn’t come here to make friends.”

  Hunter giggled. “Even you have to know that makes you sound like a reality show villain.”

  Perla sneered at him as she unwrapped a fun-size candy bar and dropped the foil on her blanket. “I’ve been going to college summer sessions since I was nine. Princeton, Berkeley, Yale. I’ve tried them all on, stuck on teams with people like you.” She popped the candy into her mouth and chewed as she continued, “I pack to a science. I study alone. If there’s a talent night, guess what? I’m gonna skip it because it’s extraneous bullshit.”

  “What does a nine-year-old do at Yale?” I asked, unable to contain my curiosity. I tried to picture my little brother at an Ivy League school for the summer, but it wouldn’t compute. He would be so tiny next to all of those ivory towers.

  “Algebra and creative writing, mostly,” Perla said, nostrils flaring. “So, sorry, but I used up all my camp BFF energy like five summer institutes ago. I’m here to get my scholarship and go home where it’s actually summer. And I literally could give a fuck about how that makes you feel about me.”

  “Then why come to movie night?” Galen asked.

  She let out a short sigh and threw a glare over her shoulder at the counselors. “Meg wouldn’t let me bring the kettle corn up to my dorm.”

  The pocket of my hoodie buzzed. I reached in and pulled out my cell phone. Beth’s picture stared back at me, her button nose scrunched in response to the camera being aimed at her.

  “Who’s that?” Leigh asked. The bright light of the phone’s screen threw bluish shadows on her face as she peered over my shoulder.

  “My stepmom,” I said. I hopped to my feet. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Bring more kettle corn!” Kate called after me.

  “And some sour straws!” Hunter added.

  I gave them a thumbs-up as I jogged to the edge of the field. Behind me, I could hear Jams’s voice saying, “Hey, Perla. I’ve been meaning to ask you: Who is John Galt?” Holding in a snicker, I pressed the phone to my ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Beth’s voice echoed. She didn’t believe in holding phones near her face. She said the screen made her skin greasy. She was perpetually on speakerphone. “I’m not interrupting anyth
ing, am I? I’m on my way home from rehearsal. I wanted to say hi. We miss you.”

  I slipped inside the heavy glass door of the lobby. The warm sugar smell of the kettle corn machine filled my lungs like airborne cotton candy. “I miss you, too. I haven’t had a decent breakfast in days.”

  “Poor darling. We had Snoopy waffles this morning. They didn’t taste the same without you. Also, I forgot to put the cinnamon in.”

  I smiled into the phone as something cold ricocheted around my ribs. “I found the sweatshirt you packed for me. I’m wearing it now.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re warm, if hungry. It’s about ninety-two here right now. I’m running the air conditioner for all it’s worth. You know how the theater swelters in the summer. And tonight was my first time wearing my wig.”

  “They’re wigging you?” I asked, walking up to the small concessions table that the counselors had put together. I shook out a sandwich bag and started filling it with candy. “But your hair is basically the same length it was the last time you did Earnest.”

  “Oh, the director has very firm ideas about the duality of Gwendolen and Cecily. We’ll have identical wigs in different colors. Big Gibson girl buns. It’s exactly like wearing a fur hat stabbed into your head with bobby pins. They’re a little much, if you ask me. But no one did.”

  The fact that I wouldn’t see Beth on stage this summer hadn’t sunk in before. I’d known it logically. Thinking about Earnest was what had inspired me to leave home to begin with. But Beth had never played Gwendolen without me in the audience. Would Woodland recycle her costume from the last time? Or would they do something kooky—like set the play in the Old West or feudal Japan or something else that would piss off the subscribers?

  I wondered if she’d miss me quoting lines with her. The show would go on, because it had to. The saying said so. But still, it made me sad to know that I wouldn’t be there.

  “Costumers,” I said faintly.

  “Costumers,” she agreed with a laugh. “But everything is the same here. Your father is deep into this new case and Ethan continues to hate baseball camp until it’s time to come home.”

  “Has he hit a ball yet?”

  “I don’t think so. But he stopped getting hit by them, so that’s a start.” I could hear the whir of the car engine as she accelerated. I pictured the on-ramp out of Woodland, the fast-food restaurants disappearing in the rearview mirror as the car hurtled onto the tiny two-lane freeway toward home. “Don’t let me keep you. I just wanted to hear your voice. I know that this is practice for next year, when you’re off at college.”

  College, not the academy.

  I doubted whether my mother or father would ever truly understand why I’d lied and come to camp. To them, it would always be a betrayal of trust. The very idea of Rayevich was familial treason. But it was possible that Beth would understand, someday, that this was practice for both of us. I had to try on the idea of being something beyond a Gabaroche or a Lawrence. I had to try on this choice before I made it.

  “It’s only three weeks,” I murmured.

  “I’m already planning your homecoming dinner,” she said. “How does pork belly from Thai Canteen and white mint chip gelato from Hot Italian sound?”

  I thought of the congealed mac and cheese I’d had for dinner an hour ago. “Amazing.”

  “I thought so,” she said. “I’ll let you go. I love you, sweetheart.”

  “Love you,” I whispered, holding the phone too tight. “Love to Dad and Ethan.”

  “Kisses!” There was the faraway mwah, mwah, mwah sound of air kisses and then the road noise disappeared.

  I dug my thumb into the Power button, watching as the screen blinked into blackness. My reflection stared back—lips pulled down in the corners, eyes too glossy, a pucker above my nose.

  I could imagine how nice it would feel to cry. To set down the team’s candy and go back up to the dorm and curl up on my too-small bed. To think about how the carpet made the residence hall smell and to try to remember what my sheets at home felt like. To feel the weight of all of my stupid hopes and dreams and all of the trust that I’d sold out the second I’d climbed onto that train.

  I took in a breath so deep that it burned the back of my throat, killing a sob before it could start. I could taste the eucalyptus baked into my sweater.

  No more phone calls, I swore to myself.

  I had to leave California where it was. It’d wait for me. If I didn’t want this summer to be a wash, I had to focus. On Ever. On the Melee. On two more weeks of work.

  Even if that work was currently bad-mouthing The Breakfast Club.

  13

  I burrowed deeper into my sheets, pulling them up over my forehead. The creases from the packaging scratched against my arms. On the other side of the room, Leigh’s nose whistled. She’d crashed the second Meg had called lights-out. I wasn’t even sure she’d brushed the popcorn kernels out of her teeth first.

  I had never been good at falling asleep. The family psychologist my dad had dragged me to after Mom left had sworn that it was a by-product of the divorce. Keep her on a regular bedtime schedule and she’ll acclimate. Once she feels safe in this new normal, her body will accept the change.

  Total bull. It’s not like I was staying up late, pining for my mother. Especially now, when I’d lived longer without her nearby than with. When I laid down, my brain just clicked on like it’d been waiting all day to run through scenarios and idle questions.

  In the dark, it was impossible to stay in character. Telling myself that Ever didn’t have mild insomnia couldn’t change my brain chemistry.

  Besides, was there an Ever Lawrence if there was no one to perceive her as someone separate from Elliot Gabaroche?

  If I was setting up Buddhist riddles for myself, there was no way I was going to fall asleep.

  Lights flashed through my blankets as sirens split through the night. I almost jumped out of my skin. I heard Leigh slap into the wall, and something crashed downstairs. I flung the sheets off my head. The red fire alarm box built into the ceiling over my wardrobe was blaring and blinking.

  I lurched over the side of my bed, stuffing my feet into my Jordans. Leigh struggled against her zebra sheets, kicking wildly.

  “Come on,” I shouted to her over the wail of the alarm. “We need to get downstairs!”

  Fists pounded on doors up and down the floor, accompanied by a squeaking voice—Meg, telling us to get out and take nothing.

  I yanked Leigh to her feet. She scooped up her shoes as we flew out of the room into the glare of the hallway. There must have been dozens of alarms hidden in the ceiling. The lights burned white in strobing intervals and the noise was a constant screech, drowning out the sound of doors opening and yawned questions.

  “Take the stairs!” the Perfect Nerd Girl yelled from the end of the hall.

  Leigh hopped into her shoes as I kicked open the stairwell door. A crush of pajamas cascaded down the stairs. I couldn’t smell smoke, and the cement walls were cold as my arms brushed them. But there were shouts from counselors, pushing us forward, pushing us out. I kept Leigh in front of me, using her yellow hair as a guide through the crowd.

  Lumberjack Beard was at the base of the stairs, holding open the door. “Get away from the building! This is not a drill!” A kid stumbled into him. Lumberjack Beard scooped him up by the armpits and tossed him out into the lobby. “Come on, Onobanjo. I’m not gonna lose you. Not tonight.”

  The sirens echoed through the quad. Hari was already outside, directing traffic away from the residence halls with two flashlights.

  “Everybody go toward the library!” he called. “Go quick!”

  The path toward the library was dark. The trees grew thicker in between the buildings, blocking out the streetlamps. The alarms persisted in a constant scream. I imagined the residence hall smoldering behind us, flames licking through laptops and twin XL mattresses and the novels I’d unpacked on my desk. I tried to catch a glimpse of Isaiah,
but there were too many strangers shoving by me.

  Don’t burn alive, you moron, I thought. I cannot handle Grandmother Lawrence making a martyr out of you.

  The people ahead of us skittered to a stop and took a sharp left turn into a copse of trees. The path to the library had been sectioned off with caution tape. One of the RAs was shooing everyone away.

  “There’s a clearing through the trees!” she said. “Go through and find your teammates! We need to get a head count as soon as possible!”

  Leigh shot me a nervous glance before we stepped off the path and into pitch darkness. The ground was squishy under my sneakers. Twigs snapped and people cursed that they’d run out without their shoes. The sound of the alarms started to fade behind us as we snaked through the trees.

  “Team Four!” someone shouted.

  “Team Six!”

  “Team Three!”

  Leigh and I entered a clearing where half a dozen flashlights were waving. The starry sky stretched above us, illuminating the sparse grass and trees hung with garbage. No, not garbage exactly. Dream catchers. Silverware on ribbons. Birdhouses. Christmas ornaments.

  “Ever! Leigh!”

  A light hit my face. I threw my hands up and squinted between my fingers. Jams came into focus, first as a big-eared shadow and then as a pale wisp. A body next to him raised a hand in greeting—Brandon.

  “Hey!” Jams said, waving wildly at us. “I recognized your hair!”

  I looked down at Leigh and found her staring up at me. It dawned on me that, while no one had hair brighter than my roommate, I was also the only girl at camp rocking a full ’fro. I was the pot judging the kettle’s coif. Oops.

  “Where did you get the flashlight?” Leigh asked Jams.

  “Hari shoved it at me before he went out to direct traffic.”

  “So,” I said to Brandon. He, I noticed, had managed to put his Chuck Taylors on. “This is more exciting than The Breakfast Club, huh?”

  He tucked his hands into the pockets of his pajama pants and blew out a shaky breath. “Yep.”

  More flashlights broke through the trees. We broke into a chorus of “Team One!” to guide Galen and Hunter toward us. Or a fully dressed Galen and Hunter’s very bare chest. Leigh’s nails dug into my arm. I hadn’t considered that not everyone would go to sleep in sweats and an undershirt, like me. Hunter was unabashedly standing only in his boxers and a pair of flip-flops.