Camp So-And-So

by Mary McCoy

  It was then that Vivian and Kimber strolled up to them. While the others had been talking, they’d wandered down the beach, peering longingly beyond the invisible, electrified perimeter.

  “We want to do the All-Camp Sport & Follies,” Kimber said.

  “We want to go to their beach,” said Vivian.

  “Really?” Kadie asked, hopeful and wary all at once. “What about you, Dora?”

  Dora gazed at the white sugar sands and the diving tower.

  “I bet their cabins have walls,” she said.

  “So that just leaves you, Cressida,” Vivian said. She and Kimber shot pointed, vaguely threatening looks in Cressida’s direction.

  Kadie felt suddenly protective of Cressida with her bluish skin and her frail, spindly legs.

  “She doesn’t have to do it,” Kadie said, stepping up so she was standing shoulder to shoulder with Cressida, a united front if she wanted it.

  As Kadie glanced over to see if she appreciated this unexpected allegiance, a strange, scheming look spread across Cressida’s face. It was hard to tell what it meant, though.

  A Note from the Narrator: It could have meant anything, and to be honest, on a face like Cressida’s, even ordinary thinking looked rather a lot like scheming.

  “I’m in,” Cressida said at last. “Let’s see how smug they are when we take their camp.”

  TO: Sebastian Langley, Executive Assistant to Inge F. Yancey IV, Yancey Corp. CEO

  FROM: Octavia Henry, Director, Camp So-and-So

  Dear Sebastian,

  Only three months until the first day of summer session!!! Everyone here is excited already—we can’t wait to kick off another GREAT year!

  With enrollment set—and of course, with your permission—I’d like to move forward with hiring for seasonal staff. Below I’ve included a list of positions that need to be filled:

  Counselors (5)

  Kitchen Staff (3)

  Lifeguard (2)

  Archery Instructor (1)

  Creative Arts Instructor (1)

  Horseback Riding Instructor (1)

  Music and Theater Instructor (1)

  Registered Nurse (1)

  In response to the directive from corporate, staffing requests have been reduced by 20%; however, I’m confident that we can work more efficiently and run a GREAT camp even with this bare-bones crew.

  Eagerly awaiting your reply,

  Octavia

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

  WALLIS

  CORINNE

  SHEA

  HENNIE

  BECCA

  MEGAN, their counselor

  OSCAR, a groundskeeper

  CABIN 2

  KILLER IN THE WOODS

  [SCENE: A meadow on the banks of Lake So-and-So]

  Within two hours of arriving at summer camp, Wallis was standing in a meadow talking to a man on a riding lawn mower about murder. It did not bode well for the rest of the week.

  Nothing about Camp So-and-So was like the brochures had promised, starting with their cabins. They were nothing but wooden slabs, support beams, and a sloping roof. There were no walls to speak of, just some vinyl-lined tarps that could be rolled down in the event of bad weather. Wallis had spent some of her allowance money on a brand new sleeping bag to bring with her. Now she wished she hadn’t bothered. It was sure to be mildewed and filthy by the time she went home.

  She hadn’t even really had a chance to meet the other girls properly. Robin, the counselor-in-training, had checked her off on her clipboard and shunted her off to Megan, their freckled, ponytailed, infectiously chipper counselor. Megan had marched them all to the cabin to drop off their things, then turned them around and marched them straight back to the mess hall to sit at a table covered with balloons and a sign that said “CABIN 2! 4-EVER!” Theirs was the most festive table, Wallis could not deny that, but there was not a single working lightbulb in the room and dinner was a plateful of grayish hot dogs. And while the girls from the other cabins chatted together happily, dinner revealed the girls of Cabin 2 for the drawerful of mismatched socks they were.

  Nobody went together. At first, Wallis wondered if Shea and Corinne might be friends. They were both pretty in the same kind of carefully groomed way, right down to their shell-pink manicures and tasteful gold hoop earrings. But the moment they opened their mouths, Wallis could tell that was where the similarities ended.

  “I like your shoes,” Corinne said to Shea, tentatively testing the friendship waters.

  “FOUR DOLLARS! I GOT THEM ON CLEARANCE!”

  A Note from the Narrator: It wasn’t that Shea yelled exactly. It was just that she came from a large family where one frequently had to talk over others to be heard, and as a result, she had no indoor voice.

  At the sound of Shea’s booming voice and twangy accent, Wallis saw Corinne wrinkle her nose in distaste. If that was what she made of Shea, Wallis did not hold out much hope for Corinne’s estimation of the rest of them. Becca flinched if you so much as looked at her. Hennie wouldn’t stop smiling at everyone with a toothy, creepy smile that lasted too long.

  And then there’s me, thought Wallis. Wallis knew she looked young for her age, that she really ought to let down her pigtail braids, trade in her plastic-rimmed glasses and overall shorts for something more sophisticated, but whenever she seriously considered the idea of sticking a contact lens in her eye or stuffing herself into a camisole top and cut-offs, she could feel her lip curl.

  Still, she was not entirely opposed to change. Wallis had meant to use camp as a kind of social experiment to try out different forms of self-expression that she might take back to school with her in the fall. Her plan had been to start with her name. She was tired of the strange faces and questions and giggles she got whenever she told people her name was Wallis.

  No, not like the boy’s name Wallace. W-A-L-L-I-S. Like the Duchess of Windsor. The English one. Well, actually she was American. King Edward VIII abdicated his throne to marry her, and she became the Duchess of Windsor.

  By that point no one was ever listening to her. Her middle name was Dorothea, and she planned to introduce herself that way. Not that it was a marked improvement over Wallis, but at least it was recognizable as a girl’s name. But the habit was too ingrained. She opened her mouth, and out came all the usual things about the Duchess of Windsor, which resulted in yawns and glazed eyes and people looking over her shoulder for someone else to talk to. So much for that part of the social experiment.

  After dinner, Megan sent them off to explore while she prepared what she called a “Big Surprise!!!” for them back at the cabin. You could actually hear the extra exclamation points in her voice, but Wallis heard disappointment there, too, disappointment that the girls had failed to become Best Friends!!! So now, they were supposed to explore Camp So-and-So, in the hopes that this would bond them in a way that a lukewarm hot dog supper could not, and that they could share living quarters for the next week in something other than awkward silence. While Megan was back at the cabin preparing the Big Surprise!!!, the girls from Cabin 2 were walking down the main road from the mess hall.

  It was the road their families had taken into Camp So-and-So, and Wallis noticed now, though she hadn’t then, how long, how winding, and how unnecessarily far away from civilization it was. The west side of the road was heavily wooded, and according to the map of Camp So-and-So that someone had carved into a slab of wood outside the mess hall, it was where the pony trails and caves were. To the east lay the meadow, which was just what it sounded like. From where they stood, they could see all the way to the unappealing, stony shores of Lake So-and-So.

  Fascinating as it was to go on a forced march down a dirt road, eventually the girls of Cabin 2 bored of their route. Corinne was the first to venture off, and one by one the others followed her into the meadow, which was lush, green, and by far the most pleasant part of the camp they had yet seen.

  Hennie began plucking clover blossoms, which she arranged into a miniature bouqu
et and inserted in a buttonhole on her shirt. Corinne lifted her hair off of her neck and arched her back in the sun, while Becca and Shea lay on their backs in the peaceful green field. The only sound was the pastoral sputtering of a riding lawn mower in the distance.

  While the others communed with nature, Wallis went off by herself, wandering across the meadow until the other girls were no bigger than her fingertip when she looked over her shoulder. She let out a sigh of relief.

  It was not that she had expected camp to be any easier than school. She just hadn’t expected girls from other places to reject her in all the same ways.

  When she saw Corinne for the first time, she thought, At least I’m not the only black girl in the cabin. Maybe they’d be friends, never mind that Corinne was tall and glamorous-looking with her sleek, flat-ironed hair and petal-pink nails, and Wallis was . . . Wallis. Maybe it wasn’t too much to hope for. Maybe they’d bond. Maybe Corinne would take Wallis under her wing and let her borrow her clothes and show her how to act like a halfway normal person.

  But the moment she saw Corinne and Shea sizing one another up, her hopes were dashed. Even though Shea was white with curly red hair, she and Corinne looked like they belonged together in a way that Wallis knew she didn’t. And if she didn’t fit with Corinne, Wallis wasn’t sure who in this cabin she did fit with. Shea had a brash confidence that made Wallis feel like even more of a baby than she usually did. Becca didn’t seem actively mean, but she wasn’t friendly either. She wasn’t the kind of person you felt like you could just walk right up to and start a conversation with. Not that Wallis felt that way about anybody.

  And then there was Henrietta, or Hennie. Wallis was at least pleased to see that there was one person in the cabin who appeared to be as weird and hopeless as she was. Hennie was perilously tall with beaky features, thick eyebrows, and that goony smile that came on and off as though it were on a timer. It was as if someone had once told her that people would like her more if she smiled, and didn’t bother to explain that there was a little more to it than that.

  Before going off to camp, Wallis had made a promise to her parents that she would at least try not to be a recluse, that she would not spend the whole time holed up in the cabin rereading her Isis Archimedes books or hiding underneath the headphones that swallowed up her whole head and tuned out the rest of the world. She’d kept her promise so far, more or less. Maybe it was antisocial to wander off, but she’d really needed a break from being around these girls. It had only been three hours since she’d hugged her parents good-bye, and she had no idea how she was supposed to last a week in this place, but she was determined to try. It was time to approach the social experiment from a different angle. If she couldn’t be Dorothea for a week, she could at least turn around, walk up to someone, and try to start a conversation.

  Hennie seemed like a good person to try something like this out on. At worst, a very weird person would think she was weird. At best, she’d discover that Hennie was fantastically interesting and they’d be camp best friends, after which they’d return home to their respective cities, exchange a few letters, each one shorter and more distant-sounding than the last, until finally they forgot all about one another. The stakes were so low, there was really nothing to lose.

  Wallis told herself to approach Hennie, but her feet were having none of it. If this went badly, she’d still have to live alongside her. Hennie might manage to befriend Becca—if Becca stopped flinching long enough. And if Shea and Corinne decided to stick together after all, that would leave Wallis as the odd girl out. Or Hennie might turn on Wallis in an effort to prevent herself from becoming the cabin’s obvious outcast, and Wallis would spend the week being tormented and ignored. It was more pressure than she could bear.

  Just as she was about to abandon the idea altogether, she noticed that the rumble of the riding lawn mower had grown unignorably loud, and she turned to discover that it was coming right for her. Its rider braked and turned off the engine. His face was leathery and sun-spotted, and he wore a pair of faded blue coveralls that made him look as though he had just escaped from a chain gang.

  “Young lady, could you take a step or two to the left so I can keep mowing straight?”

  Wallis stood there stupidly for a moment, still so deep in thought that she didn’t quite register what he’d said.

  “Young lady, are you all right?”

  That shook her to her senses. She hopped out of the way and said, “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “I thought you might have gone a bit sun-struck,” he said, sticking a finger in his ear and digging with great enthusiasm.

  “Sorry, I was just thinking,” Wallis said, then extended her hand to the man, encouraged at the idea of talking to someone new, someone she had not yet alienated with her weirdness. “My name’s Dorothea. What’s yours?”

  Thankfully, he shook with the hand that had not been in his ear.

  “Oscar,” he said. “I’m the groundskeeper.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Wallis said.

  “Likewise.”

  See? Wallis told herself. Meeting people is easy. This is going perfectly well.

  “So do you like working here?” she asked. “How long have you worked here?”

  A conversation! She was having an actual conversation!

  “Twenty years now.” He shrugged. “It’s a living, I suppose.”

  Having spotted Wallis talking to the man on the riding lawn mower, the other girls in Cabin 2 made their way toward her. They had all watched enough television shows about murderers and girls in peril to know that these kinds of conversations could end badly.

  “HI, WALLIS. WHAT ARE YOU DOING OVER HERE BY YOURSELF?” Shea asked.

  “This is Oscar,” Wallis said, oblivious to their concern. “He’s the groundskeeper.”

  “But why are you talking to him?” Corinne asked, looking Oscar up and down like she was memorizing a description to pass along to the authorities.

  Wallis cringed, but Oscar seemed to take Corinne’s suspicion in stride.

  “It’s good that you’re sticking together like you are,” he said. “It’s good that you’re looking out for each other.”

  If only he knew, Wallis thought, that as soon as this walk was over, the five of them would probably never by choice be within such close proximity again, at least during waking hours.

  “Lot of things out there,” Oscar continued. “Lot of real bad things.”

  The girls, even Wallis, now exchanged surreptitious glances and began to inch away from the spot where Oscar sat on his riding mower.

  “Not so fast, girlies,” he said. “You might want to listen to old Oscar. You might be glad you did.”

  He wasn’t that old, Wallis thought. He couldn’t have been much older than her parents, and yet, when he said it, a cloud passed overhead and threw shadows on his face and made it look drawn and withered.

  “It all started a few summers ago,” Oscar said. “A terrible thing.”

  Corinne shivered and hugged herself even though the evening chill had yet to fall over the camp.

  “A group of kids decided to go exploring in the cave near the pony trails. Not a nice place, never has been. Some people even say it’s cursed.

  “But the girls from Cabin 2 decided they wanted to have themselves an adventure, so they went to the cave and explored and saw what there was to see, and then they climbed back out again following a rope they’d tied to a rock. But when they stepped out of the cave, they realized they were a body short. One of the girls had gotten separated from the rest, and no one had noticed until it was too late. They went back inside and searched for her, but it was no good. They couldn’t find her. By that time, it was beginning to get dark, and the girls had to get back to their cabin. They left the cord tied to the rock for her, and went to get help. But it was the night of the song-and-dance competition in the All-Camp Sport & Follies, and in all the excitement, they forgot to tell their counselor that the girl was still inside the cave. To
be fair, the counselor didn’t notice she was missing either. She was a quiet girl, timid, easy to overlook.

  “The next morning, the girls woke up and suddenly remembered what had happened, and they went back for their friend, but when they got to the cave, they came upon a chilling sight. The rope was gone, and there was no sign of the girl inside the cave. All that was left was the journal she kept, detailing the sad, lonely story of her time at Camp So-and-So. And when they shone their flashlights on the walls, they saw that they were splattered with blood.

  “They didn’t stop running or screaming until they reached the cabin, where they finally told their counselor what had happened. The authorities were called in, the cave was thoroughly searched, and the blood on the walls was found to be that of a squirrel, but other than the journal, they recovered nothing else of the girl.”

  “What was her name?” Wallis asked. The part of the story about the girl being quiet and easy to overlook made her more uncomfortable than she liked to admit. She wondered if the others would notice if she were lost in a cave and separated from the group. Had she been psychic, she might have been comforted to know that Hennie and Becca were feeling exactly the same thing at that moment.

  A Note from the Narrator: Wallis was not psychic. There were no psychic girls at Camp So-and-So, at least not this summer.

  “The girl’s name was Abigail, and the worst was yet to come,” he said. “Even though none of the other cabins knew what had happened—the camp director decided it would be unnecessarily upsetting and kept the thing hushed up—strange things began to happen to the rest of Cabin 2. They heard noises outside late at night, felt like they were being watched even when there was no one else around. They’d wake up in the morning and find dead snakes and spiders on their pillows.