Whenever someone gets poisoned in comics, it’s always at the villain’s hand, and he’s got an antidote, and the superhero spends the entire issue thwarting the bad guy’s evil plan, finding the antidote, and saving his love’s life.
This was nothing like that.
I was angry at myself for being all Ashley had right now. I wasn’t enough. Fuck, I was probably still high. The anger was just the tip of the iceberg. Below that I was terrified. My entire body was made of fear, operating off of it. I was sure the only reason I wasn’t crumbling in it was the mission at hand. When she passed out I had to think fast, I had to take matters—and Ashley—into my own hands, and all I could think to do was run.
I couldn’t explain the speed. Maybe it was that Ashley was so light. I’d never carried a girl before. Were they all this light? Her side knocked against my stomach anytime I stepped on an overgrown root wrong, but I did not stop.
There wasn’t time to stop.
Why was Ashley so light? I snuck glances down at her whenever I wasn’t trying to navigate through trees. Her lips had lost their pink color.
I couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t waking up. She was a scavenger. She lived off the land. Didn’t she know what she was and wasn’t supposed to eat? They were just flowers. Just pretty purple flowers. But then, this was just like Ashley. Even now she couldn’t help but be dramatic. I wished someone would yell, “Cut!” I wished she’d wake up like this was just a take in a scene and she was only acting.
Irrationally, I wished she felt heavier. I needed her to feel more substantial than this. She was too light.
“Ashley, wake up,” I demanded. It came out jagged and raw, stuck between the gusts of air crashing down my throat. “Come on.”
I didn’t know the woods as well as she did. She needed to wake up and tell me which way to go. Why couldn’t I have spent more time in the woods with her?
“Ashley, talk to me. Who gave your favorite Oscar speech last year? I bet it was Meryl Streep. Chances are good it was her, right? She must be your favorite actress.”
Ashley didn’t answer. Her forehead was damp. I could feel my heartbeat in my face. I could feel the redness blossoming there, just below a layer of sweat. Why didn’t I ever ask her who her favorite actress was? Why couldn’t I do that one thing?
This was taking too long. “Please open your eyes. Please d—” My cape snagged on a low branch, choking me, forcing me to stop for too long. I forgot I had been wearing it, and the seconds that it was stealing from me enraged me. I tore the cape off with a grunt, struggling to hold Ashley up. This was so dumb. This was so stupid. I was no superhero. I wasn’t going fast enough and Ashley wasn’t waking up. I wasn’t saving her.
“Hey, hey!” I needed to be loud so that she would hear me. I couldn’t let her slip away. “You need to tell me how Chasing Amy ends. You can’t leave me hanging.” None of what I was saying mattered, but I needed to keep talking for her. She was too still. “Don’t die on me, Ashley. Don’t let go.”
And then I saw him. I finally found him. Jimmy was still crying right where I’d left him. But when he saw the two of us he stopped. “I need help,” I rasped. “We need your car.”
The thing about origin stories—the thing I did not think about until now—was that most of them were tragic.
Spider-Man had to lose his uncle in order to realize his destiny. Batman lost his parents. Superman lost his entire planet.
At the start of the summer I was too focused on the idea that this camp was going to turn me into the person that I was meant to become, and what I didn’t realize was that it wasn’t my surroundings but the people in it that would shape me. Or one person in particular. And now all I was left with was who I would become if I lost her.
Death was too often the catalyst in the hero’s life.
But then, I wasn’t a hero. And I promised myself and whoever was up there listening that if anything happened to Ashley I would not learn a lesson from it. I would not learn a single thing.
So don’t let her die.
I forced myself not to think about that.
It was the only thing I was thinking about.
The thought of losing Ashley enveloped me, wrapped itself around me so tightly that I sat frozen in the hospital waiting room seat. One of the nurses had come by earlier and offered me a paper gown since I was still without a shirt, so I sat there absolutely stock-still in my finest hospital wear, looking like I’d just tried to escape. I wasn’t just scared—I was shocked by the magnitude of my fear.
I convinced myself that if I was still enough it meant that time could stop and I could still live inside the comfortable confines of the possibility that I’d brought Ashley to the hospital in time.
It felt like hours that I had not moved.
Jimmy, on the other hand, moved a lot. He hadn’t stopped moving since he’d helped me lay Ashley down in the backseat of his hybrid. He was very animated in his concern, pacing the room, curling into a ball on the uncomfortable vinyl chairs, and digging worried fingers into his curly hair. But then, suddenly, Jimmy announced, “I think she’ll be okay.”
He was sitting opposite me, and a calm quality had come over him. “You know what I was just thinking about, Chil—Gregor? I was thinking about how I’d been crying in the woods when you found me. I was freaking out about the campers tearing each other to shreds. I was thinking of my stepdad. I mean, Robert. I mean, Mr. Drill. I was thinking about how much I was disappointing him with this whole fiasco. But then you came to find me with Ashley in your hands and I stepped up. I was able to help.”
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “Congratulations?” I really wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say.
“Don’t you see, Gregor? I’d been worrying about so much. Too much. But when Ashley needed help I stopped worrying and focused all my energy on getting her here. I helped. I think everything happened the way it was supposed to happen. I was supposed to be in those woods, at exactly the right place for you to find me. You and me—we saved her life.”
“We don’t know that she—”
“Trust me, Gregor, she’s going to be okay.”
I watched him for a moment. I let myself believe in his new assured calmness, and I nodded.
I only realized the doctor had appeared by the look on Jimmy’s face as his eyes gazed behind me. I jumped to my feet. “How is she?”
“Are you Ms. Woodstone’s family?”
“I’m her friend,” I said.
“I’m her head counselor.”
“I’m sorry, I can only talk to family.”
“Good luck with that, because Ashley doesn’t even talk to her family,” I said. I lowered my voice when I realized it was too high. I tried again. “Please …” I scanned the ID clipped to his breast pocket. “… Dr. Zaul. We brought her in. We just want to know if she’s okay.”
The doctor stayed silently grim, but after a moment he sighed and said, “Yes, she’s okay.” My body released all the tension I’d been storing and I was suddenly loose, weightless, feeling like I could take flight or pass out. “She was lucky you brought her in so quickly,” Dr. Zaul went on. “And also that for some reason she had a large amount of charcoal in her system, which acted as a natural antidote, helping to neutralize the effects of the plant she ingested. Do either of you know why Ms. Woodstone would have ingested charcoal?”
If I had to guess? “Dessert,” I said. “Can I see her?”
“I’m afraid not.”
I waited until Dr. Zaul left before I turned to Jimmy and said, “I’m going to go see her.”
Jimmy squeezed my shoulder. “I need to go clean up the mess at camp. Tell Ashley I’m glad she’s okay.”
I’d snuck into the counselors’ office twice, so a hospital would be cake. And it was. No one thought twice about seeing a teenage boy in a hospital gown roaming the place. The tricky part was finding her room without asking for anybody’s help. I surreptitiously searched every name next to every door. I
was beginning to wonder if she was even on this floor, when her name popped out at me. A. Woodstone. Room 3478.
She was sleeping when I walked in, so I made myself as comfortable as I could in the chair next to her bed. I was dead tired, but there was no way I was going to sleep now. I grabbed the remote and turned on the TV in the upper corner of the room, flipping through the channels on mute. I stopped on a line of men and women dancing, dressed in highlander attire. The title of the show flashed onto the screen. Village of Hoors.
Three and a half episodes after I learned that Hoors, the lead character, was going to form a search party to look for his runaway wife, Ashley woke up.
“Gregor Maravilla.” Her voice was a rasp but she had a smile on her face. Of course.
I moved my chair closer to her bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Better. What happened?”
“The doctor couldn’t tell me too much, but you definitely ate a poisonous plant, and the only reason you’re not dead is because apparently there was charcoal in your system.”
She considered this, improbable as it was, and then nodded. “Makes sense.”
“Ashley, you have to do something about your eating habits. A person can’t subsist on a dirt-and-chia-seed diet.”
“You worried about me, Gregor Maravilla?” she said, a coy tone to her voice, like she was needling me.
“Yeah. I am.”
“Okay,” she said, and I knew she was serious too. “The charcoal may have helped, but I think the only reason I’m not dead is probably because of you.”
I took a deep breath, weirdly uncomfortable with the magnitude of that. “It was Jimmy. He drove you here in his hybrid.”
“Jimmy,” Ashley said, her forehead creasing. “But he has to take care of camp.”
She was in a hospital bed, having just dodged death, and she was worried about everyone else. My hand slinked up the side of the bed until it found hers. I squeezed it. “Don’t worry about camp.”
“Well, thank you.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You need to stop selling yourself short, Gregor. Stop downplaying things and start recognizing them for what they are. You came to camp to save the world—”
“And it was a total bust.”
“—and you are saving it,” Ashley said. “You saved my life.”
She squeezed my hand back.
“When Jimmy was talking to me in the waiting room he said something that I’m still thinking about. He was pretty overwhelmed with everything that was happening at camp. He was pretty down about it, thinking he hadn’t done any good this summer and that he was just a big disappointment to his stepdad. And then when he was able to drive you over here he talked about it like him being in the woods at the exact place I needed him to be was fated. And like it didn’t matter if the whole camp was just a failed experiment because at least he got to do some good by forgetting about everything else and focusing on one small thing. Which was getting you in his car and driving you here.”
“Fate,” Ashley said.
“That day that I snuck into Jimmy’s office, when I found out that the only reason I was at this camp was because I’d been randomly selected, I was bummed. But maybe it wasn’t random. Maybe I was meant to be here. To meet you.”
Ashley smiled at me, and maybe it was the hospital setting, but it felt like medicine. The kind that tastes good and cures you instantly.
“Jimmy has a point, I think,” I said. “I’ve been so caught up in making an impact on the world that I never stopped to see the impacts I’m making in the here and now. Even if they’re small.”
“You and Superman have that in common.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “What’s that?”
“He always thought he could fix everything. It was his one flaw.”
I let my head fall forward, and as soon as I did I could feel Ashley’s fingers in my hair, smoothing the strands to the side. I could feel her trying to form the S again.
It was very early in the morning when I decided to walk back to camp. A walk would be good; I needed the time to think. I’d been waiting for this moment the entire summer, this clarity that I now felt. It took a trip to the hospital, my best friend almost dying, and a couple of weird conversations with my head counselor and a salamander, but I thought I finally understood what it actually meant to save the world.
It was only when I got back to camp that the reality of life—and war—came back to me. I didn’t even have to step through the gates to realize the camp was now just the ruins of Color War. I looked up at the CAMP SAVE THE WORLD sign. Someone had knocked down the last two letters in CAMP and spray-painted the letters N and T so that CAMP SAVE THE WORLD now read CANT SAVE THE WORLD.
The irony was not lost on me.
* * *
Save for the morning song of the birds it was quiet all around, but not for lack of people. They were everywhere. Kids were sprawled on the ground, sleeping off their Capture the Flag hangovers. There were so many of them that I actually had to step over some on the way to my cabin. A few were stumbling awake with the pale-blue pallor of new zombies. Though, I guess the smeared, stale face paint of the boys’ team was largely to blame for that. Some people were only half-dressed, wearing one sock, or in one particular boy’s case, only one pant leg. Other kids bore the dazed and horrified expressions of PTSD. As terrible as my night was, I was beginning to suspect that it was just as horrible for the campers of Camp Save the World.
Win was in our cabin, sleeping in his own bed, but even he didn’t look unscathed. He was on his stomach, his limbs splayed out like stiff planks off every side of the bed. He looked like he’d been dropped there from very high up.
“Win, wake up,” I said, shaking his shoulder.
He opened his eyes slowly, squinting up at me. Shock and relief colored his face. “Gregor. You made it.”
Were there people who hadn’t made it? “Where’s Rights?”
A solemn look fell over Win’s face. “It’s better we not think about it.”
“Look, there’s something I want to tell the whole camp. It’s important. You think you can help me rally everyone together?”
He actually managed to laugh. “Bring the camp together? After what happened yesterday? Funny.”
“Come on, you’re the only person anyone will listen to. People love you.”
“The camp is completely divided, Gregor. I don’t know where you were last night, but you have no idea what went on here, man. You have no idea.” His voice shook slightly, like it wasn’t a Capture the Flag game he was reminiscing about but his time in battle. “The things they did to get our flag.”
I sat on the side of his bed, surprised to hear him talk like this. The Win I knew was an eternal optimist. The purest kind of idealist. The Win I was looking at now, tangled in a flimsy sheet with all the light sucked out of his eyes, was someone I did not recognize.
“It couldn’t have been that bad,” I said, nudging him slightly. “I guarantee you your night couldn’t have been worse than mine.”
“It’s not just what happened at Capture the Flag, even though I’ll probably never get those images out of my head. It’s everything. This camp has just left me so … disillusioned. When it was supposed to do the exact opposite.”
“I know how you feel,” I said. “I feel that way too.”
“And I’m also kind of heartbroken? So I’ve got that to deal with.”
I angled my body so I could face him better. “You? Got your heart broken?” This was definitely a new side to Win. This whole summer I basically thought he’d been hooking up with Poe, but now that I knew he was gay, that theory was totally debunked. “Who?”
“I Like Paint.”
“You mean Alec Pent?”
Win nodded.
Whoa. “I had no idea. I never saw you two hanging out together.”
“Because I had a massive crush on him. I was totally awkward around him. You didn’t notice?”
&n
bsp; I shook my head.
“I don’t know, the hair, the paintbrushes, the whole foreigner thing. And he was always covered in paint.”
I flashed to the image of ILP stumbling into the picket sign competition, drenched in red paint. That probably was not what Win meant, though.
“I stayed away from him because it was torture getting too close. But when he left, that was a total blow. Unrequited love, I guess.”
This was definitely a new side to him, but most shocking of all was learning that Win—perfect Win—was capable of having his heart broken. Clearly my idea of “perfect” was also misguided up to now.
“This camp has messed with a lot of us,” I said. “And I know that everything feels hopeless. But it’s not too late to change things. There’s something I need to do, and I need your help.” I grabbed hold of his shoulders and looked him sternly in the eye. “Are you in?”
Some of the light that was missing before came back in his eyes and he sat up. Win nodded. “I’ll do whatever you need.”
* * *
Win and I spent most of the morning gathering whatever campers we could into the mess hall. By which I mean we spent most of the morning being ignored by campers and waiting for them to congregate at the mess hall, where they eventually headed anyway for breakfast. Not that there was much food around, save for cereal. The kitchen staff was MIA, as were the counselors. They had either abandoned ship or were recovering in their own quarters. But having no counselors around was not a new phenomenon at this camp. And anyway, we didn’t need them right now. We needed to fix this ourselves.
With mostly all the campers there, I stood on top of a table. “Uh, everyone?”
Nobody turned to look my way, and I had to rely on Win to whistle to get everyone’s attention. “Guys! Children has something to say!” He nodded at me to start talking. The campers were grumpy, and the expressions on their tired faces told me they were not in the mood to hear me give a speech right now, but if I ever wanted to be a leader I would have to start somewhere. It was time to speak up.
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