She was already rushing down her row and up the aisle, her hands over her mouth. He jumped off the stage and sprinted after her. I’d pulled back into the shadows at the side of the room so he couldn’t see me.
Ernie didn’t notice me either. He stared after the others, his fingers still wiggling, his face red with confusion and mortification, before he hurried out through the emergency exit on the other side of the screen.
And then I was alone. Which left me plenty of time to grab the black duffel bag from the stage and, with a swing in my hips Lana Turner would’ve envied, sashay out of the theater.
“Damn!” Tino said. “Boy’s got a dark side. Who’d have thought?”
“Did you really steal that money?” Jenna asked.
Cody didn’t seem to know how to react to all the attention.
David was laughing. “No way that happened. But you’ve got a hell of an imagination. I bet I could make a movie out of that. We should film it when we’re out of the Bend.”
“I’ll pass,” Cody said.
We’d found a lake. A motherfucking lake with motherfucking fish in it. Didn’t help that none of us had fishing poles. Didn’t stop us from talking about all the fish we were going to catch, either. You want a good laugh? Go watch a bunch of city kids wading in a lake trying to snatch fish out of the water with their bare hands. That shit’ll keep you laughing for days.
The others had gathered around to listen to Cody’s story as we’d walked. Even Tino, though he’d tried to pretend he wasn’t listening. I spent some time after Cody’d finished, trying to pick out the shards of truth from the fiction and wondering whether he’d told us what had really happened or only what he’d wished had happened. Sometimes it’s easy to spot the truth in a story. Sometimes it’s lit-up neon and you can’t help but see it. Other times it’s not as easy.
I was looking for a nice-size rock, thinking I could beat a fish with it, while Jaila sat by herself sharpening a stick against the side of a boulder. David kept circling her, his orbit decaying until she finally said without looking up, “What?”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“I’m kind of busy here, David,” she said.
“I know, but still. Do you think they’re real?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“I saw a ghost once—”
Jaila stood, holding her stick like a spear. “That’s great and all, but I’m hungry, so if you’ll excuse me.”
Turned out, Jaila had the right idea. It took her a solid hour, but she finally managed to spear a fish. It didn’t take long for the others to sharpen their own sticks, strip to their underthings, and start making hilarious attempts to spear fish of their own.
Might as well get this out of the way. You’re thinking it’s weird that our little group was a mix of boys and girls, right? Figure it’s strange that Doug and the other camp leaders didn’t worry about us having mad orgies or some shit. It wasn’t like that, though. Despite the garbage that movies and TV shows try to fill our heads with, boys and girls are completely capable of spending time together without trying to get in each other’s pants. The only sex-crazed boy in our group was David, and he was too scared of the girls to try anything. Any one of them could have easily knocked him on his ass if he’d gotten inappropriate. And the rest of us would have kicked the shit out of him while he was down.
Plus, there’s nothing hot about being dirty and sweaty and hungry. And after you’ve seen someone take a shit in the woods, all thoughts of sex nope the fuck right out of your brain.
Once we’d caught our fish—three total to split between us—we had to figure out what to do with our freshly dead food. Jaila knew how to clean them, but she didn’t have a knife. Luckily, Tino did.
“Where’d you get that?” Georgia asked as she slipped back into her uniform.
“Mind your own fucking business,” he said.
Cody stood beside Georgia, clenching his fists. I kept waiting for that boy to pop. Figured it was coming sooner or later, but Jackie snatched the knife from Tino’s hand before he could stop her, and gave him a shove back. She handed it to Jaila, who set about gutting our fish.
The sun was starting to sink to the west, but we still had a few hours of sunlight left, and even though we were hungry, Jaila said, and most everyone agreed, that we should keep walking until dark before trying to set up a camp and cook.
“Who the fuck does she think she is?” Tino was saying to David. I’d fallen back to listen to him complain.
“Do you know how to clean fish?” David asked.
“Not the point.”
“It’s kind of the point.”
“Jaila’s nothing special,” Tino went on. “She probably doesn’t even know where we’re going.”
“I don’t know,” Cody said, wandering toward them. “I’d put my money on her getting us back to camp.”
Tino rolled his eyes. “You didn’t steal any cash. A fucking wuss like you? Probably the only part of that story that’s true is the part where you got humiliated.”
“You don’t know anything!” Cody stomped ahead to where Georgia was walking with Jenna.
David was having trouble breathing because of the pace we’d set, and he constantly touched his pocket where his inhaler was, but he hadn’t used it in hours. “I got a true story. This one time—”
“Save it for your shrink, perv,” Tino said, and moved away, leaving David to bring up the rear alone.
We walked until the sun was starting to set, and then found a clearing surrounded by trees to make camp. Tino was barking orders, but I ignored him and wandered out to find wood with Georgia and Cody.
“You should tell it,” Cody was saying.
Georgia shook her head and glanced back at me. I didn’t say anything, but I got the feeling she didn’t like me much. Or maybe she liked me a little and that was why she didn’t like me.
“It’s a good story,” he said. “And I bet it would scare Tino so bad he wouldn’t sleep until we got back to camp.”
“Don’t let what he said bother you, Cody.” Georgia touched his arm lightly, and he drew back.
“I just don’t understand why he’s got to be so mean.”
“He’s scared,” she said. “Like we all are. And we all deal with fear in different ways.” Georgia gave me another look and lowered her voice.
I went off on my own, keeping Cody and Georgia in view but getting far enough away that they could talk without me hearing. When I got back to camp, Lucinda was standing on one side of the fire pit someone had built, while Tino stood on the other side, Jackie and Jaila holding his arms, and blood was running down his nose.
“You bitch!” he yelled.
“You don’t scare me, you limp-dick psycho,” she said. “If you knew the reason I was really here, you’d—”
“Laugh?” Tino said. “Probably. Because you’re a phony.” He looked around the camp. “You’re all phonies.”
Sunday stepped forward to try to calm the situation while Jenna sat by the fire pit, staring into the empty space, like she was trying to will the flames to life with her mind. But things were getting deliciously out of hand.
“Why do you hate men so much?” I asked Lucinda. “I mean, that’s what Tino said, anyway.”
“I didn’t—”
But Lucinda was already moving toward Tino again, and David and Sunday had to hold her back.
“Do you guys want to hear a ghost story?”
Georgia stood off to the side with Cody, but her voice was loud and carried through the campsite. There was something commanding about it that made the others stop.
“I mean, it’s not really a ghost story. It’s something that happened when I was a kid at summer camp. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have happened the way it did if it hadn’t been for the ghost stories.”
“I want to hear it,” Sunday said. “I mean, as long as it’s not too scary.”
“You calm?” Jackie asked Tino.
“Just kee
p that girl away from me,” he said, motioning at Lucinda with his chin.
I was kind of hoping for a real fight. My money would have been on Lucinda kicking Tino’s ass all the way back to the Bend. But everyone settled around the fire while Jenna worked to get it started and Jaila unwrapped the fish so we could finally get some food in us.
Georgia sat down last.
“Okay, so this happened the summer before I was in sixth grade,” she said. “When I was at an all-girls camp. And none of it was my fault.”
“LOOK DOWN”
by Robin Talley
WE WERE ALL OBSESSED with ghost stories that summer.
It was the August before sixth grade. My mom wanted to get rid of me—my mom always wanted to get rid of me for one reason or another—so I was stuck going to the same dumb all-girls mountain camp I’d gone to the August before and the August before that.
But this time I didn’t really mind. In fact, that summer, camp actually turned out to be pretty awesome.
Up until all the creepy stuff started happening, anyway.
The awesome parts were mostly because of Hailey. She was my best friend that summer, and she told the freakiest ghost stories of anyone.
The others thought so too. Hailey and I shared a tiny wooden cabin that year with six other girls. Every night, as soon as we were tucked into our bunk beds, someone would turn out the overhead lights and put a flashlight in the middle of the floor, pointing at the ceiling so the room would get all shadowy. Then we’d take turns trying to outscare each other.
Most of the stories the girls told weren’t all that creepy, really. They were the kind you hear everywhere. Guys with hooks for hands who hide in the backseat of your car and try to kill you as soon as it gets dark. Babysitters who get creepy phone calls that turn out to be coming from inside the house. Med students who drug you at a party, then cut out your kidneys and leave you in a bathtub full of ice with a note to call 9-1-1 if you want to live. You know, that kind of thing.
In our cabin on the mountain, with the lights out, though, the stories still felt scary, even if you’d heard them before. The camp was basically in the middle of nowhere, and—actually, that camp looked a lot like where we are right now, come to think of it. Weird. I hadn’t noticed that before.
But anyway, it can get really, really dark up on the mountain at night, and when there’s no one else around . . . Well, it’s easy to get caught up in that kind of stuff. You know how it is—you hear a story, and even though you know it can’t possibly be true, it still sticks in your head. And then later, when you’re out in the dark, and a breeze goes by and you feel that sudden chill on the back of your neck . . . At times like that, even the stuff that you know can’t be true still feels like it could be, somehow.
I never let on when I got freaked out, though. Everyone at camp thought I was impossible to scare, and that was how I wanted it.
I told the goat-man story on our first night there. The goat-man was always my favorite. It was supposed to be a true story—I’d heard it from a counselor a couple of years earlier—but it was obviously impossible. But like all the best ghost stories, it felt real when you thought about it later. Even though you knew better.
Back in the 1920s, the story went, the mountain where our camp was built had been cleared for farmland, and there was this one weird farmer who owned the biggest chunk of it. All the other farmers who lived on the mountain hated him because he was more successful than they were. His harvests were always huge, even when the weather sucked and no one else could grow a thing.
He was getting rich from the land, and the other farmers wanted to know his secret. So one Saturday, two of the neighbors snuck up onto his land and hid all day to watch him work.
They figured they’d see him doing something illegal they could report him for, or at least using some secret farming techniques they could copy. They watched him from sunrise to sundown, but they didn’t see anything unusual. He was just planting and harvesting, the same way the rest of them did.
By the time it got dark, the farmer had stopped working for the day, and the two neighbors were ready to give up and go home. As they were creeping back over the property line, though, they heard a strange sound, like someone screaming. It was coming from the barn.
They rushed back across the farm and into the building, thinking someone must be in terrible danger—and saw the farmer holding a bloody ax, with a decapitated goat lying on the ground in front of him. On the wall of the barn, in huge red letters, the words “HAIL SATAN” were written in thick, dark blood.
Well, the two neighbors turned and ran as fast as they could. They made it home safely, and the next day they told everyone in town to watch out for the creepy, Satan-worshipping farmer.
After that the farmer couldn’t sell his crops to anyone. His harvests were just as big as they’d ever been, but the whole town knew it was because he’d cut a deal with the devil, and they didn’t want to eat food the devil had paid for.
No one really saw the farmer after that. He stopped leaving his land after a while, and then at some point, so much time had passed that everyone assumed he’d died.
He didn’t have any children, so there was no one to inherit the farm. Years later, it was turned into a camp. Workers tore down the farmer’s house and barn and built new lodges and cabins, and in between them, the scrub and trees grew back until the mountain was covered in forests again. You couldn’t tell it had ever been a farm at all.
But every Saturday night, if you wandered deep enough into the woods, you could hear a long, loud scraping sound out where the barn used to be. And if the moon were high enough, you’d see a half man, half goat walking down the trail, dragging a bloody ax behind him.
That was how the story ended. After I was done telling it, I’d pause for a second, so the room was totally silent. Then I made a high-pitched goat-bleating sound. You could tell who was cool and who was a wuss by whether they laughed or shrieked.
Up until that August, the girls I’d shared a cabin with had always said my goat-man story was the scariest they’d ever heard. But everything changed that summer. All because of Hailey.
Hailey loved telling ghost stories too. But the stories she told weren’t ridiculous like the ones about hook-hands and babysitters, or bizarre like my story about the goat-man. That was because Hailey’s stories really were true. She’d heard them from her grandmother, and they were nothing like our stupid made-up kids’ stories.
Plus, it was impossible not to believe what Hailey said. She was one of those people. You could tell just from how she talked—she was so warm, so open, so friendly—that she’d never lied about anything in her entire life.
From the moment we met, I trusted her completely. I looked right into her eyes, and she looked into mine, and— Do you know what it’s like when you meet someone and you just get each other right away? When they always know what you’re thinking, without you having to say a word? When you know it’s safe to tell them all your secrets because they’re going to tell you all of theirs, too?
That’s how things were with Hailey, from the very beginning. I’d never felt it that strongly with anyone before.
That summer, the two of us were together pretty much all the time. We didn’t really hang out with anyone else, at least not during the day. The other girls in our cabin were nice and everything, but they were a little, well . . . They just weren’t as mature as Hailey and me.
Her grandmother’s stories, though. I’m not easy to scare, but the stories Hailey told . . . Well, they made me nervous sometimes.
Because Hailey’s stories were about ghosts. Real ghosts. The kind that hid in dark places and made the whole room turn ice cold. Who could get inside your head and make you see stuff that wasn’t really there.
Hailey’s stories weren’t the kind that made you jump and squeal. They were the kind that clung to your mind all night, even after the flashlight had gone out and you were shivering in your sleeping bag in the quiet darkness
.
Her stories didn’t let go of you, not even when you fell asleep. They slipped into your dreams instead. The night after one of Hailey’s stories, you always knew there would be at least one girl crying in her bunk after she thought the rest of us had gone to sleep.
She never got scared herself, though. Not Hailey. She told them all in this low, even voice. You could just tell there was nothing in the whole world that could ever scare her.
Naturally, I didn’t want her to know any of them ever scared me. Everyone at camp knew I was impossible to scare. Plus, I guess I just liked her a lot. I wanted her to think I was cool and sophisticated and all that.
You know how it is when you’re in middle school. All I could think about was making sure Hailey never found out I’d gotten scared. One night, hours after we’d finally finished telling stories, I woke up while it was still dark out because I had to pee. The bathrooms were up on a hill overlooking the campsite, and to get there, you had to leave the cabins and follow a path down through the woods, past the main lodge house, and up the hill where the trees were super old and thick.
The rule was that if you left the cabin at night, you had to take someone with you. So I woke up Hailey, and we put on our shoes and got our flashlights.
Everything was totally normal at first. Usually, we would’ve joked around while we walked, giggling about the other girls in our cabin who’d gotten scared listening to that night’s stories. But Hailey was still really sleepy and didn’t seem to feel like talking, so we were quiet as we followed the path past the lodge house and up the hill. We could hear crickets and birds and stuff. Nothing unusual.
It was pretty out, and I remember looking around that night more than I had before. The path to the bathrooms had basically been cut into the side of the mountain, so the drop-off was steep—that’s why we weren’t allowed to go up there alone in the dark. Sometimes it could be hard to tell where the path ended and the drop-off began, but that night there was a little moonlight, so we could see down past the edge of the path and into the ravine below.
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