Last Chance Summer

by Shannon Klare

  “Got it,” he said. “You have the right to say no, and you did that. I guess I just wasn’t really expecting it.”

  “Grant.”

  “Let’s just pause the conversation,” he said. “For when there aren’t a bunch of campers floating around, eavesdropping. Later?”

  “Yeah.”

  I stepped away, crossing through the opening in the pool’s concrete wall while echoes of the conversation rang through my mind. Rejection was the only real way of keeping myself safe, but Grant had no clue what he did wrong.

  He couldn’t know. He never would.

  16

  Fate

  Around nine forty-five, I dragged a hoodie from beneath my bed and hauled it over my head. The girls were playing a game of Monopoly near the cabin door. Brie held the dice as I passed. Her eyes landed on my hoodie for a second, her eyebrow arching.

  “You can’t seriously be going out on a date for the second night in a row,” she said. “I mean, how is it fair that you get action and we’re stuck in this cabin playing some hokey board game?”

  “What she means to say is: If you’re meeting Grant again, could you at least get us some food from the mess hall?” Jess said, nudging her friend. “I would prefer leftover brownies, if possible.”

  “Or a jar of those dill pickles they set out when it’s hoagie day,” Steff said, glancing at me. “Those are amazing.”

  “But brownies if you can only pick one,” Jess said.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said, quietly opening the cabin door.

  Outside, a warm night breeze riffled loose strands of hair. I had made a concerted effort to avoid Grant the rest of the afternoon, but my emotions were in a tailspin.

  How could I shut him down, when I cared about him? When the only thing I wanted to do was spend time with him? But how could I not let him go? How could I knowingly let this continue when my own demons were gnawing away at my conscience? When he thought he knew the real version of me but really had no clue?

  No. In the end, this would be the best thing for both of us. I could detach before he had the chance to hurt me. He could do the same.

  Inside Grant’s side of the cabin, the strum of his guitar drifted through the screen door. He was playing what sounded like an acoustic version of James Arthur’s “Empty Space.” It was hard to tell, though, with guys talking around him and the rhythm too muddled to hear.

  I leaned against the porch, drinking in the dark. This time of night, stripped of campers and chaos, was the most peaceful. A stillness clung to the air, chilling despite the chaos of the day.

  Releasing a breath, I stared down the opposite end of the road. A flashlight bobbed up and down in the dark, and I heard tennis shoes crunching against the path. The closer she got, the more defined Loraine’s face became.

  “Are you doing cabin patrols?” I said, surveying her.

  “No, but we need to talk.”

  Dread curled up my spine. The tone in her voice walked a fine line between frustration and disappointment. Her expression was a mirror image of my mom’s when she was pissed. That told me everything I needed to know—we had a problem, and I didn’t know what it was.

  I pulled away from the rail, mentally prepping myself for conflict. “Is this the part where you tell me I’m in trouble?” I said, stepping off the porch. “You sound like my mom, so I’m guessing yes.”

  “I’d rather talk about this in private,” she said, pivoting the other direction.

  I let out a long sigh. Another serious conversation was the last thing I needed at this exact moment. My plate was full. Full of worry. Full of chaos. Full of guilt.

  “If you’re about to yell at me, it really doesn’t matter where you do it,” I said. “Just spit it out. What did I do and how do I fix it?”

  “Madeline turned in your therapy notes today and I was looking over them when I realized you walked out of today’s session five minutes into it. Those sessions aren’t optional,” Loraine said, facing me. “They’re a part of the deal, remember?”

  “A deal I didn’t realize I was agreeing to when I got here,” I said, stopping. “You threw that part in after I was already settled. I never would’ve agreed had I known.”

  “But you did agree and here we are. You’re skipping out on sessions, and I’m the one who has to explain to your parents why you’ve been out here almost a month and haven’t made any serious headway with the person I told them was the best juvenile counselor this side of Houston.”

  “Because as far as I’m concerned, none of my emotions or reactions or thoughts for that matter are anyone’s business,” I said. “I’ll end those sessions when I damn well want to, and if you don’t like it you can cancel them altogether.”

  “Did you just swear at me?”

  “Damn. Damn. Damn,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “Why? Have I broken another cardinal rule of camp?”

  “You’re about to get yourself written up.”

  “Then quit lecturing me on how long I am or am not in therapy with a therapist I didn’t ask for!”

  I glared at her, my temper flaring the longer she stood unmoving. How dare she expect me to talk to a stranger about my feelings? That had nothing to do with her. That had nothing to do with anyone but me and it was my decision.

  “As long as you’re out here, you’ll abide by my rules,” Loraine said.

  “I didn’t even want to come out here,” I said. “And if me opening up to some crappy counselor isn’t a negotiable, then you’re either going to have to kick me out or you’re going to have to get over it. I’m the one who gets to open up to people when I feel like it, so walking out of a therapy session is my choice. Not yours. Not my parents’. Mine.”

  Her lips formed a thin line in the dark. Her shoulders turned rigid.

  “Y’all didn’t even ask me what I wanted,” I said. “You and everyone else just thought they could pick and choose what’s best for me, but no one bothered to ask! No one ever asks!”

  I shook my head, crossing my arms as heat flooded my cheeks. With the events of the day and the stress of what I had to do with Grant boiling already, I couldn’t handle this. It was too much.

  “You and I both know everyone is just concerned for your well-being,” Loraine said. “You’ve been through a lot, Alex. You’ve seen way more than you ever should. That affects a person.”

  “I know!” I said, throwing my hands up. “I was there! I lived it. I was the one trying to make it through my last year of school. I was the one trying to figure out how to live in a world where my best friend no longer existed. I was the one—”

  Grief formed a knot at the base of my throat. I would choke on those words before I said them out loud. Before I ever admitted to anyone that I was to blame for Nikki. That I could’ve taken the keys.

  Tears burned my eyes; emotion spiraled its way through me.

  All these months and I had kept this to myself. I drowned in the guilt and internalized how I felt about it so no one would judge me for not doing more to save my friend, so I wouldn’t have to live with people knowing I could’ve changed the outcome but chose to be selfish instead.

  But here I was, standing in some horrible reformation camp, giving it the exact same thing it wanted from me. Admission. Guilt. Acceptance of my faults and everything that came with it.

  And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t say it was my fault.

  “Is everything okay?” Grant said from behind me.

  His voice, so full of conviction, broke the last of what little resolve I was using to hold myself together. Tears burned their way across my cheeks. My guilt swallowing me whole.

  “I can’t do this,” I said, stepping away. “I can’t. You. Him. I want to go home.”

  “No!” Loraine said, shaking her head. “You have to quit holding on to all these emotions and just grieve, Alex. Quit running away. Quit being so stubborn and let us help you. Please.”

  “How are you going to help me?” I said, facing her. “You
have no idea what I’ve been through. You have no idea what I’m feeling. I lost my friend, Loraine. Someone who knew and accepted me long before anyone else ever did. Who saw me. The real me, and liked me anyway. You have no idea what it’s like to lose someone like that. You have no idea.”

  “I do,” Grant said.

  I closed my eyes, tears hot on my cheeks.

  “I know exactly how that feels. I lost my best friend. My role model. My hero. And I don’t know how that played out for you, but I spiraled. I spiraled hard. Don’t do that. Not when you have people willing and ready to help you. Not when they want to help you.”

  “So what happens when they realize you’re the one responsible for your own destruction?” I said, my body shaking as I forced the sentences out. “What happens when you have to explain to the people who have this huge faith in you that you’re the one who let your friend keep the keys? That you knew they were drunk and you let them drive anyway?”

  The pair of them froze, the words a wall between us.

  “You’re blinded by your faith in me,” I said, shaking my head. “You want to preach at me about how I can help myself. You want me to let it all out so I can move on. But I can’t move on. I can’t let it go. I have to live with this. And that’s something you could never understand. I’m on my own. Quit trying to help me.”

  Silence filled the space as I headed for the dark, my admission breaking me down.

  I was the one responsible for my fate. Now I had to live with it.

  17

  Flawed

  The next morning, Grant wasn’t on the porch.

  He wasn’t at breakfast.

  He wasn’t at lunch.

  I crossed in front of cabin two, headed for a duty shift at arts and crafts. I needed to paint like I needed to breathe. It was the only way to channel these emotions into something beautiful. It was my first step in burying my grief.

  Inside arts and crafts, campers clustered around each of the rectangular tables. Jess was at one of them, working on a bracelet. She glanced my way as I crossed the room, her attention returning to her bracelet as I approached the counselor on shift.

  “Now that you’re here, could I possibly…” The girl jabbed her finger toward the back where the bathrooms was.

  “Absolutely,” I said with a nod.

  She scurried off and I turned toward the paint products. I was carefully putting paint supplies on the countertop when Jess crossed the room, long pieces of string clutched between her finger and her thumb.

  “All right,” she said, dropping onto one of the bar stools. “Will you please explain to me what I’m doing wrong? I’m alternating the strings and everything, but this bracelet looks like crap.”

  “It doesn’t look that bad,” I said, surveying the knotted pieces of string that looked more like a chaotic heap than a bracelet.

  “Yeah. You’re a terrible liar.”

  “Only sometimes.” I finished gathering supplies and stared at her. “That isn’t really my thing anyway. I’m a painter, not a weaver.”

  “I’m neither, and Brie will rag me about it if I don’t make her a bracelet after she spent all that time working on mine.”

  “Brie made you a bracelet?”

  “She made four,” Jess said. “One for her, and one for each of the girls in our cabin.”

  Surprised, I grabbed a canvas and laid it flat on the counter. For Brie to do anything selfless must have meant hell froze over. Or pigs flew. No telling which.

  “I’ll try,” I said. “Step one would be to get you some fresh string. Pick out the colors you want. I’ll give them to you for free.”

  “Thank you,” Jess said, sliding off the stool.

  I started sketching while she snipped pieces of yarn from the spools. When she returned, she plopped right onto the same bar stool and knotted the ends.

  “What are you working on?” she asked after a second. “You haven’t sketched enough to really make it out.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, tapping the pencil against my jaw. “Whatever the canvas wants to give me, I guess. Usually the picture creates itself. It never does what I want it to do.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “That’s me,” I said.

  I dragged the pencil across the canvas again, the charcoal tip marring its clean surface. If this ended up being any reflection of my state of mind, the final product would be dark and gloomy.

  “I wish I could do that,” Jess said after a moment. “I’ve got all this street cred and zero usable abilities. It’s a shame, since talents like yours are the talents people actually appreciate.”

  The words stole my attention from the canvas, the disappointment in her tone making me pause. “Not everyone’s talent is artistic,” I said. “You, for example, could probably talk your way out of a paper bag. That’s a talent, Jess.”

  “Meh. Anyone with half the experience I have could do the same.”

  “Doubt it.”

  She quirked an eyebrow and I set down my pencil, realizing I had unknowingly walked into a conversation.

  “Okay,” I said, leaning forward. “Remember when I told you about my tiny brush with the law?”

  “You crashed a cop car into a lake,” Jess said. “That isn’t tiny.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Point is, you could’ve talked your way out of that in five seconds flat. All I could do was sit in the back of a deputy’s squad car, claiming I had nothing to do with it when my cell phone and purse were still inside the vehicle.”

  “Still not a talent. All my bullshitting has ever done is land me in a new group home with a new set of issues. Painting seems less dramatic and less of a hassle. I want those skills. I’ll trade you.”

  “You live in a group home?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Right now, I’m technically a ward of the state. Unless I get adopted between now and the time I turn eighteen, which is doubtful. No one ever wants someone above the age of ten.”

  Guilt worked its way into my thoughts, pulling my attention back to the canvas. Had I known this earlier, I could have been softer from the beginning. Had I been softer, though, we may not have made it this far.

  “You don’t have to get all weird,” she said. “You can look at me. I’m not asking for your sympathy or anything.”

  “No sympathy,” I said, nodding. “I just didn’t know. That caught me off guard.”

  “Well it isn’t like I wore it around my neck on some flashing neon sign,” Jess said. “Most people find out and they look at you some kind of way, like they want to help you but they don’t know how, so they just avoid you instead.”

  “I can’t avoid you. You’re stuck with me.”

  “Exactly. You’re stuck with me either way.”

  She went back to crisscrossing strings on the bracelet, making some sort of pattern as each of the strings worked together. After her fourth round of alternating, she looked at me.

  “So, now that I’ve been all open and honest with you, do you feel like telling me what all that crying you were doing in your bed last night was about? I’m not here just to make a bracelet, Alex. If you’re out here to be my counselor, you need to make sure that trust is flowing both ways.”

  “The last time I told y’all something, it ended up being passed around camp,” I said.

  “The last time you told us something, Brie was around. You should’ve expected it to be passed around camp.”

  I gave her the side-eye, focusing on my canvas instead of talking. She might understand, or she might not, but I wasn’t talking about it anymore. Period.

  “Okay,” she said after a minute. “Talking isn’t on the table. Got it. How about we break some rules instead? You give me the chance to do something fun, and I give you the chance to get your mind off your issues. At least temporarily.”

  “What do you want me to do? Sneak you out of camp?”

  “Your suggestion. Not mine.”

  “You and I both know if I got you out of camp, Lo
raine would get me a one-way ticket home. I have a reason for being out here that revolves around a large sum of money and a set of parents who are already positive I can’t make good choices. That’s like confirming it.”

  “Your parents are that bad?”

  “Well, they offered me an ultimatum to get me out here, then volunteered me for extra therapy sessions I never agreed to. At this point, I’m not even sure I want to go home. The longer I’m gone, the more I think I like being on my own.”

  “No one is better on their own.”

  “You haven’t met my parents.”

  “At least you have parents.”

  I ran my tongue across my teeth, my jaw jutting to the side. Jess’s expression was unflinching, her brown eyes squarely centered on mine. Leave it to a camper to attempt to put me in my place. Leave it to a camper to do the best job at it.

  “Give me something real to go on here,” she said.

  “I’m not giving you anything but the free string you’ve already got.”

  “Then stand on your side of the counter and angrily draw something,” she said. “Staying silent never changes anything, but you do you, boo.”

  “You’re getting on my nerves.”

  “You always get on my nerves, but I never say anything to you,” she said. She started on her bracelet again. “So was that the issue between you and Grant? Your annoying personality?”

  “My issue with Grant is that he deserves someone better than me,” I said, resting my hands on either side of the canvas. “And my current issue is that you won’t get off the subject. What is it with the people at this camp? Geez. You’re all nosy.”

  “Um, we spend the majority of our time doing stupid team-building exercises and expressing how we feel with people we don’t really care to share it with,” Jess said. “Excuse me for thinking maybe for once you’d feel like sharing something too.”

  “I have shared. Cop-car story. Remember?”

  “Okay, and I just gave you deets on something personal. Does that mean I don’t have to participate in any other summer activities? No. I’m stuck in yoga sessions, even though I don’t want to be. Let me out of those and I’ll let you out of this.”