Stalker Girl

by Rosemary Graham

  Every night Carly would call and report to Val, whose “thing” (as she insisted on calling it) with Jake Alden, now interning at his father’s investment bank, was progressing quickly. Val thought Cameron’s actions indicated interest. And Jake thought so, too.

  “You’re telling Jake? Don’t tell Jake.”

  “Why? He’s not going to tell anyone.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he’s not like that. He doesn’t gossip.”

  “But it’s still embarrassing. Please?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. Can you go outside now?”

  Every night Carly would ask Val to take her phone outside the restaurant so she could fill up on city noise. Isabelle always seemed to be in the camp office, and after Jess fell asleep, Carly found the sounds—and sometimes the silence—of the woods unnerving. With every twig snap and leaf crackle, she’d find herself thinking about the state prison she’d glimpsed out the train window on their way up, or about the rabid raccoon Cameron told her had terrorized the camp one summer, not too long ago. . . . If she could hear the swish of traffic, or a few bars of horn honking, or maybe the sound of a basketball hitting the pavement on the court next door to SJNY, then she’d be okay.

  Carly had always considered herself an equal-opportunity-type person. She thought she was immune to the petty snobbery of places like Bellwin, where, if someone worked as a dishwasher, say, in the smelly, steamy kitchen of summer camp, you would dismiss them as being beneath you, unworthy of your attention.

  But when she first met Brian, she did just that. Even though she was working in the same smelly, steamy kitchen, it simply didn’t occur to her to think of the skinny townie dishwasher as a romantic prospect.

  Never mind the pretty eyes. Or the sexy slouch.

  The fact is, she hardly even noticed these attributes of Brian’s when she met him on her first full day of actual work, the day Stony Hollow’s two hundred campers arrived.

  Even though most of the Stony Hollow food came frozen, canned, or dehydrated, Kevin the Cook dressed in a full chef’s getup: checked pants, white, double-breasted jacket, and two-foot-high toque. He claimed to have graduated from the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America, which was nearby, but Carly had her doubts.

  Kevin made no effort to hide his annoyance at being forced to employ Carly.

  “You got any experience? Kitchenwise?”

  “Not in the kitchen, but I have worked in a restaurant in Manhattan. SJNY?”

  Carly wasn’t sure if his grunt meant he had or hadn’t heard of SJNY, but she decided not to press it.

  She stood next to Kevin while he introduced her to the rest of the staff. “That’s Louise, Rachel, and Sarah,” he said, pointing to the three middle-aged women at the stove. “Ladies, this is Carly, Boss Lady’s daughter.” They looked up from their bubbling vats, waved plastic-gloved waves, and smiled.

  “Do you think maybe you could not call me that?”

  “It’s your name, isn’t it, Carly?”

  He was smiling, daring Carly to challenge him. “Yes. Carly is my name. I meant the ‘Boss Lady’s Daughter’ part.”

  “Oh. Okay. Hey, boys.”

  The three young dishwasher guys at the back of the kitchen kept right on talking to each other, oblivious. They were arguing. Something about a band. Whether the studio or live version of some song was better.

  Kevin cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled louder. “Yo. Dudes.”

  They stopped arguing and looked at Kevin, who pointed at and named each of them—Brian, Liam, Avery. Three variations on the same face: dark blue eyes beneath thick dark brows under thick black hair.

  “Boys, meet the newest member of our humble kitchen staff. Carly. She’s the daughter of Interim Director Isabelle . . . What’s your last name, darlin’?”

  “Mine’s Finnegan. My mother’s is Greene. But do you have to—”

  “Interim Director Isabelle Greene.”

  The dishwashers greeted her with nods, chin lifts, and halfhearted heys and went right back to their debate.

  It was an exhausting first day. A lot went into feeding two hundred campers, and despite her alleged lack of experience, Kevin put a lot on Carly’s shoulders. She peeled twenty pounds of carrots; calculated, measured, and mixed the proper amount of water with dehydrated brown gravy mix to produce enough for two hundred slices of meat loaf; and scooped globby, gelatinous chocolate pudding out of institutional-sized cans and into serving bowls. She’d never worked that hard for that long in her life, and when she’d plopped the last glob of pudding into its bowl, all she wanted was to get out of her sweaty work clothes, into a long hot shower, and down to the beach.

  She knew what she was supposed to do with the cans. She knew she was supposed to rinse them, remove the labels and bottoms, and flatten them, then put them in the bright yellow recycling bin under the hand-lettered poster next to the garbage at the back of the kitchen:

  Stony Hollow So Cares About Our Planet!!!

  Normally she’d have been all over the recycling. She didn’t need to be convinced with cheery posters or threatened with shame. She’d walked through enough of New York’s junkyards with Nick to know a thing or two about waste. Seeing those vast mountains of everything from wrecked cars and broken refrigerators to Coke cans and beer bottles had done more to convince her than any public service announcement ever could.

  But at that moment, she just didn’t care. She just wanted out.

  She made her way to the back of the kitchen, barely noticing Brian, who was scraping away at a baking pan crusted with mac and cheese. He didn’t seem to notice her, either. He didn’t look up as she threw the two empty pudding cans in the big plastic garbage bin and tossed the long-handled metal spoon in the pan of soapy water next to him. But then, as she was walking away, she heard the scraping stop and someone say, “Yo.”

  He didn’t yell, but something about the way he said it—firmly, authoritatively—made Carly freeze. She turned around and found herself looking straight into Brian’s eyes.

  Blue and heavy-lidded, with lashes so thick and black you might wonder, on first seeing them, if cosmetics could be involved. Maybe dye? Of course, once you knew him, the idea of Brian Quinn standing in front of a mirror with a mascara wand in his hand or sitting in a chair at the salon was laughable.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Just . . . cleaning up. Getting ready to leave.”

  “Those cans,” he said, pointing his spatula at the pudding cans sitting on top of the garbage, “go in recycling.”

  “Oh.” She smiled.

  He glared.

  “I’m totally with you on that, but I’m so tired. I’m dying to get in the shower.”

  He glared harder.

  “Okay, okay. Relax.” She walked back to the garbage and picked out the pudding cans, both now smeared with something slimy and yellow. She looked over her shoulder as she headed toward a sink on the other side of the kitchen.

  He was watching her, smiling now, and it seemed like he had a whole different face. A not-scary, kind-of-even-maybe-nice face. For a townie dishwasher. He opened his mouth, like he was going to say something more to her, but stopped abruptly. Then he lifted one of his ear buds and cocked his head to listen, all the while keeping his eyes on Carly.

  “Solo’s still too long,” he shouted over his shoulder.

  “Dude, you say that about all my solos,” came the response from the back of the room, where the other two townie dishwasher dudes—Brian’s brother, Avery, and their cousin, Liam—were struggling to keep up with the campers’ trays that had started rolling in on the conveyor belt and piling up against the back wall.

  “Yeah, well, that’s ’cause all your solos are too long.”

  The trays started coming faster. A lot faster. Plates of half-eaten meat loaf, congealed gravy, and lumpy mashed potatoes teetered on top of each other. Already a few plastic cups had fallen off and bounced along the
tile floor at their feet. It was only a matter of time before everything came crashing down.

  Avery stopped talking as he struggled to keep up, scraping the plates one by one into a garbage barrel next to him. Liam just stood there looking at the mess like he was afraid to move.

  “Hit the button!” Brian didn’t say “moron,” but he didn’t have to. The tone said it all.

  Liam looked at Brian. “What button?”

  “Up there! On the wall.” While Liam looked around clueless, Brian ran over, elbowed Avery out of the way, jumped up, and slapped the bright red button marked EMERGENCY SHUTOFF on the wall. The conveyor belt stopped. Plates and silverware continued to clatter for a few seconds. A lone plastic cup fell to the floor and rattled its way across the kitchen. Then all was still.

  “Two words, brother,” Avery said, like nothing had happened. “Jimi. And Hendrix.”

  “Three words, brother,” Brian responded, counting the words off on one hand while stacking plates with the other. “In. Your. Dreams. But keep practicing. You never know.”

  No one seemed to be paying attention to Carly anymore, so she started toward the back door, thinking about that shower.

  “Ah—ah—come back here, Earth Destroyer. I’m not letting you off that easy.”

  So she did as she was told. She rinsed and flattened the cans, put them into the proper receptacle, and scurried away dreaming dreamy dreams of a summer romance with Cameron Foster.

  “Hey, Carly.” Cameron smelled faintly of shaving cream, and the ends of his hair tickled Carly’s neck. He pressed the wet, cold beer bottle against the exposed skin of her upper arm. “Glad you could make it. Do you know everyone?” He turned her toward the big rock at the edge of the water, where most of the counselors were spread out, talking in pairs and small groups. “Come on.” Cameron started walking toward a big rock at the edge of the water, where two girls she recognized as tennis instructors were sprawled out. “Anna, Lucy, have you met Carly?”

  Without so much as raising their heads, they looked Carly up and down. One said, “Hey.” The other half-raised a hand, in something resembling a wave, like she wasn’t sure Carly was worth the trouble.

  “Carly’s Isabelle’s daughter.”

  That got their attention. They both sat up, wide-eyed, nervously looking at their beer bottles.

  “Oh, don’t worry. She’s cool.” Cameron winked. “Right, Carly? You’re not going to rat us out for drinking on camp grounds or anything, are you?” He reached into the side pocket of his cargo shorts and pulled out a silver flask. He screwed off the top and offered it to her.

  She took the flask and lifted it toward her mouth. The fumes stung her nose. “Don’t worry,” she said, and to show them just how much they could trust her, she guzzled. She got three full swallows down before her throat felt like it was closing itself. She handed the flask back to Cameron, gasped out “Thanks,” and sat down.

  The rock was still warm from the sun. She closed her eyes and took in a long, slow breath of the night air. Mixed in with smell of wood smoke was the dank and fishy smell that seemed to permeate Stony Hollow. She thought she was going to be sick, but then a pine-scented breeze came off the lake, and she managed to calm her churning stomach. She was pleasantly buzzed, enjoying the company of the Stony Hollow counselors and the illusion of Cameron Foster’s interest.

  As she sat there, listening to Cameron’s tales of adventure crewing a boat that sailed from Maine to Puerto Rico the summer before, she imagined what it would be like to be with Cameron. On a night like this, on the open sea, just the two of them. When Cameron offered the flask a second time, Carly took two even bigger swigs, pausing to breathe in between. And when someone offered her a bottle of something bright red and very sweet, she gladly accepted and drank it down like it was soda.

  Which it wasn’t.

  As long as she was lying against the warm rock, it didn’t matter that she felt like she was on a boat. It was actually kind of nice, closing her eyes and imagining herself on the sea with Cameron Foster as her only companion.

  But the second her feet hit the ground, that pleasant sensation of being gently rocked on the water turned into the feeling of being tossed around in a major storm. One step and she knew she was in trouble. She was on her way down to the ground when Cameron and Ben Marcus, one of the tennis guys, caught her, one on each side.

  “Whoa.”

  The two of them steered, dragged, and carried her back to the cabin she shared with her mother. Luckily for Carly, her mother was spending most of her time in her office, combing apartment listings online or talking on the phone with her sister Nancy, reviewing the last days of her and Nick.

  As Carly wobbled along, she told them all about how she wasn’t supposed to be at Stony Hollow but in Turkey, with her famous—in archaeological circles—father who revolutionized the study of the ancient Greek safety pin.

  They didn’t seem to appreciate the significance.

  And then she barfed. On Cameron Foster’s feet. The neon pink puke glowed against the dark brown of his Top-Siders.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “It’s cool. It’s cool.” The look of disgust on his face and the way he practically shoved her onto her bed said it wasn’t.

  10

  SHE WOKE up dizzy and nauseous and humiliated, wishing she’d chosen to spend her summer among the juvenile delinquents and Amish of Ohio. She dragged herself to the kitchen and tried not to gag when she walked into a cloud of sausage-flavored steam.

  The hair-netted ladies were chirping away over their bubbling vats; the dishwasher guys were quiet, each plugged into his own iPod.

  Kevin gave her a list of stomach-turning tasks she needed to finish by the midafternoon break. It started with scrambling the liquid-egg equivalent of two hundred eggs and ended with dishing out that night’s dessert of artificially flavored banana pudding. In between, she was supposed to spread two hundred previously frozen chicken legs out on four giant baking dishes.

  The chicken legs brought her seriously close to vomiting for the second time in less than twelve hours. She hadn’t so much as touched a cooked chicken leg in a couple of years. The raw ones, with their pink-gray flesh under all that saggy, yellow skin, were just too much. After laying the first fifty out in five rows of ten, she had to go outside for air.

  When she came back in, all four baking dishes were lined with legs. The bags they’d been in were nowhere to be seen, and the stainless-steel counter had been cleaned to Kevin’s exacting standards.

  Carly looked around the kitchen, trying to figure out who had come to her rescue. The dishwasher guys were busy with the pots and pans the hairnetted cooks kept delivering to them. The hairnetted cooks were way too busy trying to keep up with the lunch line. Kevin was nowhere to be seen.

  She moved on to the pudding. That was a lot easier because she didn’t have to have any actual contact with the stuff. As long as she could avoid breathing in through her nose and thereby avoid the too-sweet smell of artificial banana flavoring, she’d be okay.

  While she was scooping the pudding, she caught sight of Cameron in the dining room through the conveyor-belt window. He was laughing it up with the beautiful Julia McMillan, head girls’ counselor.

  “Ah, the other half.” She hadn’t heard him come up behind her. But there was Brian, standing to her left, looking out at Cameron and Julia.

  “See how they live,” said Avery, standing on Carly’s other side.

  “What?” she scooped faster and tried to act like she didn’t know what they were talking about.

  “The beautiful people. They’re so . . .”

  “Bee-oo-ti-ful,” said Avery, in falsetto, holding his arms out to the side like some maniacal ballerina. He clasped his hands together, pressed them to his cheek, and batted his eyelashes at Brian. “Oh, Sailor Boy, what strong tanned arms you have.”

  Brian stuck his chest out and held his arms stiffly at his sides. His rendition of C
ameron’s smirk was dead-on. He deepened his voice to a mock manly man’s. “Yeah, well. Comes with the territory, honey. Did you know I’ve won several national sailing competitions, including the Single-Handed Championship? And, by the way, there’s no ‘team’ in ‘Single-Handed.’”

  Carly laughed. This tidbit of Cameron Foster’s biography—along with the news that he’d be entering Columbia in the fall—was prominently featured on the Stony Hollow Web site below a picture of him turning about or lowering the boom or whatever it is that Single-Handed Sailing Champions single-handedly do.

  Twenty-four hours before, she’d been swooning over the details of his résumé while using the wireless connection in her mother’s office. Now, with Brian reciting it, it all sounded silly.

  “Really?” Avery widened his eyes and put a hand on each cheek. “That’s such a coincidence! Did you know that I hold the scoring record in field hockey for the National Independent Schools Athletic Association and will be attending a prestigious liberal arts college in New England in the fall?”

  These facts could also be found on the camp Web site, under a close-up of Julia’s beautiful, lightly freckled face.

  Maybe these townie guys weren’t so bad. Maybe working in the kitchen would turn out to be fun.

  Avery disappeared, and Brian asked how she was feeling.

  “Fine,” she said, as the blood rose to her cheeks.

  “Really? Working with food isn’t exactly the best cure for a hangover.”

  “Tell me about it.” Wait. How did he—? “How did you know?”

  “Saw you.”

  “You saw me?”

  “Actually heard you first. Me and my brother were on our way home, and we heard this girl kind of yelling, and we were worried. So we followed the sound, and then we saw you and Sailor Boy and Tennis Guy. Man, you’re a loud drunk.”

  Usually when Carly was about to cry, her body gave her enough advance notice to prepare. Her nose tingled and the back of her throat tightened and her ears would get really, really hot. But this time, there was no warning.