by Mary McCoy
“Why were you back there?” Verity asked. “Pam told you to invite Cabins 3 and 5 to our mixer thing.”
“Which you did not do,” Annika pointed out.
“I know!” Amber said, giggling. “But when we went behind our cabin, there was this, like . . .”
“It was like a magnet,” Addison added. “We couldn’t NOT follow it.”
“And so, we’re in the woods, and all of a sudden, there were BOYS!”
“That’s not possible,” Verity said.
Boys were strictly forbidden at Camp So-and-So, Pam had said. There was a coed camp across the lake, and more than one camper in the past had tried to steal a canoe and cross the lake under cover of night, or to smuggle a boy from the Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp back into their cabins. They were always caught, Pam had warned them, and punishments were harsh.
Addison tugged Alix by the arm. “Come on. We’ll show you.”
With Addison leading the way, the girls circled around the back of their cabin and toward the woods in a single file. Verity hung back, partly because she didn’t want to get in trouble if they were wandering into some forbidden encampment of boys, and partly because she wasn’t sure that Addison’s invitation extended to her. But in case it did, she followed along at a safe distance.
She was glad she had, because it gave her an extra moment to make sense of what she saw next. Just before Addison crossed into the forest, her body jerked to the left and she began side-walking into the underbrush as though she were drunk.
“This is just how it happened before!” Addison said as she lurched sideways. “Like a magnet!”
As she spoke, Amber also stumbled, then fell in line behind Addison. Alix was knocked off her feet, but she got right back up and was soon chasing after the other girls, letting the magnetic force pull her along through the woods.
Annika looked over her shoulder at Verity before she too was carried into the forest. “You’re coming, right?” she asked.
Well, now she was.
If I am killed by a pack of hillbilly aliens or escaped convicts who are hiding in the woods of Camp So-and-So, at least I will die having been invited to something, she thought.
It felt like stepping into a strong river current, and Verity had trouble keeping her balance as it pulled her into the trees. She eventually settled on a half-walking, half-running stutter step. If there really was a cabin of boys waiting up ahead in the clearing, this was unlikely to make a good first impression on them.
Up ahead, Addison and Amber attempted not very successfully to muffle their squeals of delight. They sought cover behind a fallen tree, blackened and split halfway down from where it had been struck by lightning long ago. Addison settled in, lying flat on her stomach behind the log, and Amber motioned for the other girls to join them. Soon, all five of them were laid out in a row, feet sticking out behind them, elbows propped up on the trunk.
“Look,” Addison whispered, pointing toward a grove of poplars not ten yards away. In the center of it stood a cabin identical to their own, and sure enough, all around the cabin, there were boys. There was a boy sitting on the cabin steps playing a guitar. A boy with a rockabilly pompadour doing pull-ups on a poplar limb. A boy standing on the peak of the cabin roof, perfectly balanced on a skateboard. A boy building the beginnings of a campfire with kindling and pine needles.
Addison locked her eyes on him and whispered, “Isn’t he gorgeous?”
Alix was too busy staring at the skateboarder to reply. To be fair, he was creating a pretty interesting spectacle at the moment. Verity watched, too, as he tipped back on his board, then launched himself down the cabin roof, realizing only once he was airborne the folly of his plan. He flailed only for a moment as the skateboard shot out from under his feet, then tucked his chin and somersaulted in midair before making a perfect landing. Alix gasped, her eyes phosphorescent with love.
Amber missed the whole thing, humming along with the song the boy played on his guitar. “That’s my favorite song,” she whispered. “How could he know?”
“He couldn’t,” Verity started to explain, but Annika poked her in the ribs.
“Shhhhh,” she said, never once taking her eyes off the shirtless boy doing pull-ups. His muscles looked like they’d been oiled, and they flexed dramatically each time he lifted himself on the branch.
“I wonder how he gets his hair to do that,” Annika murmured.
Verity opened her mouth to make a crack about how he probably styled it with pec sweat, but before she could speak, the girl walked out the cabin door.
She was the prettiest girl Verity had ever seen, with cheekbones that looked like they’d been sculpted out of marble, and skin that glowed. Her smile was wide and joyful, and the very sight of it filled Verity with so profound a sense of well-being that she felt she might never feel the need to be sarcastic about anything ever again.
Or was that sarcasm, too? Verity smiled, knowing for no particular reason yet knowing all the same that the girl would smile at that, too. And then, just when she thought she couldn’t crush any harder, Verity saw that the girl was holding a copy of the first book in the Isis Archimedes series.
Written by Eurydice Horne, the Isis Archimedes books told the story of a young foundling who swears revenge against the tyrant S’ulla after his armies destroy her village and his soldiers murder the only family she has ever known. In the second book, Isis Archimedes devises a plan to train as a soldier and spy and to infiltrate S’ulla’s army, but when that fails, when she’s captured and thrown into prison, Isis finally learns the truth about who she really is. That was where the story really got going for Verity. She liked battle scenes and sabotage and political intrigue as much as the next person, but she was in it for the magic.
They were the books Verity read whenever she felt lousy about the world, like there was nothing worth doing or seeing, and they always made her feel better. She didn’t know anyone else who read them. The series was supposed to be seven books, but it had been over a decade since the fifth one came out, and Verity had almost given up hope that she’d ever find out how it ended. Even Eurydice Horne herself had gone into hiding, shuttered her website, given no interviews, and made no statements since the publication of the fifth book.
Watching the girl settle into her hammock with the first Isis Archimedes like it was an old friend shook Verity out of her thoughts about the fifth book and its deeply troubling ending. And after another minute, she found she wasn’t thinking about the books at all but, rather, what it would be like to be curled up in the hammock next to the beautiful girl.
“Should we go talk to them?” Annika asked, her eyes still locked on the boy doing pull-ups.
Amber let out a little shriek. “No, I could never.”
Alix nodded in agreement. “Not yet. Let’s just keep watching them.”
Annika shushed them again. “If you all keep talking, they’re going to hear us.”
For a moment, it seemed like Addison’s boy, the one building the campfire, had actually heard them. He got up from his crouch by the fire pit and began walking toward their hiding place. If he’d taken two steps into the woods, he would have spotted them stretched out behind the mossy log. But instead, he stopped at the edge of the clearing and began to fill his arms with firewood.
The moment his back was turned, Addison pulled herself up and, keeping her head and shoulders hunched down, crawled over the log. For a moment, Annika, Alix, Amber, and Verity thought she was about to go running after him, but instead, she stole over to the woodpile where he’d been standing, plucked something up off the ground, and stole back unseen.
“Are you insane?” Annika asked, pulling her down behind the log.
Addison grinned and held her palm open to them.
“He lost a button,” she said.
Annika whispered, “Are you going to give it back to him?”
“I’m keeping it,” Addison said, shoving the button into the pocket of her shorts. �
�It’s my soul mate souvenir.”
The five of them froze at Addison’s words, and their eyes met, none of them daring to speak aloud what they thought. Because the idea that Addison could know that the boy gathering firewood was her soul mate after watching him for five minutes was ridiculous, and Verity knew it. They all must have known it. But she felt the same way about the girl reading Isis Archimedes. She knew that in those moments when she felt alone and lost and altogether unknowable, this girl would see her as she really was, would love her—nicks, bumps, broken pieces, and all. And if she could know something like that, why couldn’t Addison know that the firewood boy was her soul mate too?
Suddenly, Addison began to crawl away from the fallen log. She shuffled backwards through the leaves until she butted into a yew tree and slumped back against its trunk, clutching her head in her hands.
“We should go back,” she whispered, pain etched on her face.
Before the other girls could even protest, she got up and began to run back toward their camp. Amber and Annika and Alix looked at each other. The conflict was plain on their faces, but loyalty won out, and they got up to follow her.
“Come on,” Annika said to Verity, extending a hand to help her to her feet.
Verity took one last look back at the cabin and saw that the girl had slung herself out of the hammock and lay under the poplars reading Isis Archimedes. She felt a pang of longing in her chest and, for a moment, considered turning back. But then Annika gave her a pull, and she snapped back to herself and followed after the others.
She had no idea where they were, no idea how they’d gotten there, so it was almost a relief when she felt the same current that had pulled them to this place tugging at her feet.
Once they were almost back to their cabin, Alix said, “When can we go back?”
“Yeah,” Amber agreed, turning to Addison. “What’s wrong? Why’d you make us leave?”
“I don’t know,” Addison said. Her face was no longer contorted in pain, but looked troubled instead.
“Maybe it was the woods,” Alix said. “Maybe you’re allergic.”
“You should take some Claritin or something, and then we should go back,” Amber said.
“It’s really weird, though, right?” Addison asked. “Them being out there. Five of them, five of us.”
At this, Verity began to panic. Five of them, five of us, Addison had said. That meant that she’d seen the girl, too, that all of them had. Verity felt suddenly exposed.
“If that’s true, we should go back to them,” said Alix.
“Maybe,” said Annika. “But we can’t just go back there and stare at them. We have to do something next time.”
To her surprise, Verity found herself chiming in, “Otherwise what’s the point?”
Annika nodded to her in encouragement. “Yeah, otherwise what’s the point? If they’re really our soul mates, we have to meet them eventually. We have to be ready.”
“We should go back to their cabin and talk to them,” said Addison. “We should invite them to do something.”
“But what are we going to invite the boys to do?” asked Amber.
Boys? Verity thought.
And then slowly it dawned on her that no camp would allow four teenage boys to share a cabin with a girl. That if anyone from Cabin 5 had noticed the girl with the beautiful smile and the glowing cheekbones, they certainly would have said something.
“Five boys, five of us,” said Verity, carefully testing her theory. “We could see if they want to play basketball.”
Amber wrinkled her nose. “I don’t want to play basketball. Besides, where would we play? It’s not like we can invite them back to Camp So-and-So.”
“What about paintball?” asked Annika. “Or hiking.”
While the four other girls considered the merits of these suggestions, Verity mulled over her own thoughts. There was no doubt in her mind that she’d seen the girl, that she’d really been there. But if Addison and Amber and Alix and Annika hadn’t seen her, what had they seen instead? And what if Verity had seen things that they hadn’t? For all she knew, the guitar-playing boy could have been strumming a harp and the rockabilly pompadour might have looked like a mohawk or a buzzcut to Annika.
And if they couldn’t trust their eyes, what they saw in the woods could have been anything at all.
TO: Sebastian Langley, Executive Assistant to Inge F. Yancey IV, Yancey Corp. CEO
FROM: Octavia Henry, Director, Camp So-and-So
Dear Sebastian,
Maybe my last note slipped through the cracks! Just touching base about the staffing situation at Camp So-and-So. It’s less than two months until camp starts, and I’m starting to get a little nervous about getting those positions filled in time. Here’s hoping I don’t have to go over your head and start pestering Mr. Yancey about this. Haha, kidding!
If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch, day or night. That art barn isn’t going to run itself!
Look forward to hearing from you!
Octavia
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
FIVE CAMPERS, names unknown
CABIN 5
SURVIVAL
[SCENE: A cabin encircled by thorns]
The ground erupted in a perfect circle around Cabin 5, causing a blast that shook the earth and rattled the cabin eaves, and out of the dirt rose a wall of thick, writhing brambles.
One girl screamed as they were sealed off from the rest of the camp. Another fainted. One attempted a running leap, but the wall rose up too quickly, and she failed to clear it. The last two girls tried to climb up the brambles instead, but the brambles did not want to be climbed and raked their flesh. A vine snaked around one girl’s ankle and yanked her off the wall. The other managed to climb a bit higher, until a thorny branch pitched her off into the fire pit, where she landed, limp as a sock puppet and covered in scrapes.
A Note from the Narrator: Cabin 1 was at Most Excellent Beach when it happened, and Cabin 2 was talking to Oscar in the meadow. Cabin 3 had set forth on their quest for the beast, and Cabin 4 had just clapped eyes on their soul mates for the first time.
No one saw it happen except me. Because I see almost everything.
I saw the screaming girl collect herself. I saw her help the girl who’d tried to hurdle over the wall up off the ground, and I saw them both slap the cheeks of the girl who’d fainted until she revived. I saw the girls who’d been flung from the walls cover their mouths in horror and awe as the vines rose forty feet in the air.
I saw it dawn on all five of them that they were cut off from the latrine, the mess hall, the other cabins, their counselor.
I saw it dawn on one of them that this all might have been avoided if they’d gone over to Cabin 4 for s’mores and icebreakers five minutes earlier.
I saw them gather around the cinder block steps and look to one another in the hopes that someone, anyone, had the slightest idea what they were supposed to do next.
CABIN 1
THE ALL-CAMP SPORT & FOLLIES
[SCENE: Inside Cabin 1, KADIE wakes her fellow campers, CRESSIDA, DORA, VIVIAN, and KIMBER, in preparation for the first event of the All-Camp Sport & Follies—archery]
It was still dark when Kadie showered, dressed, and went to the mess hall, where she liberated enough apples, granola bars, and peanut butter crackers to feed three cabins. They had a long day ahead of them: five tests of strength, skill, wit, and endurance. There would be no time for proper meals.
Next, she went to the equipment shed, which, remote as it was from the rest of the camp, was a desolate place before dawn. Kadie had no desire to stay there longer than necessary, so she did not question why the door was unlocked or why the air was thick with the smell of burnt oil and tires. She took the bows and arrows and targets and left.
Back at the cabin, she woke the others, starting with Dora, who grabbed her towel and shuffled off to the latrine without protest. Kadie wasn’t surprised. The girl had all the backbone o
f a potato. She had not expected that it would be so easy to get Vivian and Kimber moving, but since laying eyes on the Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp, they had visions of feather beds and sugar-sand beaches dancing in their heads and got up right away.
When Kadie went over to Cressida’s bunk, she found her lying in the dark, her eyes open, watching and waiting. When Kadie nudged her shoulder, she rolled out of her sleeping bag already dressed, right down to her hiking boots.
A Note from the Narrator: Of course, this is because Cressida had been up even earlier than Kadie, working on schemes of her own.
They crept out of the cabin and left Sharon snoring in the dark. Eventually, the others emerged from the latrine, and they gathered around the fire pit, where Kadie distributed the granola bars and apples and crackers.
“Was that hedge there last night?” Dora whispered. It was still too dark to make out the contours and scale of the thorny wall that now rose up around Cabin 5.
Kadie squinted. There’d been five cabins, hadn’t there? Or maybe there’d only been four. Maybe that had changed since last summer, too. Kadie had been so fixated on trying to convince her cabinmates to do the All-Camp Sport & Follies last night that she wasn’t able to say for sure how many cabins there were.
“Come on,” Kadie whispered, shoving aside her own nagging suspicions in favor of the matter at hand. “We’ve got work to do.”
By the time the fog had burned off and the Inge F. Yancey campers had arrived at the meadow (they could have rowed across the lake, but preferred to be driven in town cars), the girls of Cabin 1 had what passed for a game plan.
Things had not gotten off to a promising start that morning as Kadie set up the archery targets and ran drills to assess their talent. Dora had been eliminated immediately, being too nervous to grip the bow with any conviction, and Cressida’s spindly arms lacked the strength (or appeared to) to pull back the string. To the surprise of everyone, most of all themselves, Vivian and Kimber took the field first, representing Cabin 1 in archery.
