Camp So-And-So

by Mary McCoy

  “Like a copy of yourself?”

  “More like a reflection,” Erin replied. “I guess there’s another version of me out there right now, living in my house, going to my school, but I don’t know what she’s doing or if she feels like I do.”

  Verity wondered how you carved out a piece of another person, whether you used a knife or a melon baller or a magic wand.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” Erin said. “I just feel kind of hollowed out. Empty. I’m not myself, and you’d think that after a year, I’d be used to it, but I’m not. I never forget that I used to be someone else, that that’s who I really am, and, Verity, that person is gone.”

  It took a minute for Erin’s words to sink in, but once they did, they nearly took Verity’s breath away. Erin was alive, she was unharmed, she wasn’t in pain or in danger, and yet, it was clear that a terrible thing had happened to her. It wasn’t just that Erin was trapped here, separated from her friends, from her family. She was separated from herself, too. Verity thought about the conversations she had inside her brain multiple times each day, the check-ins and assessments and commentary and pep talks between herself and herself. She thought about what it would mean if someone took that away from her.

  “You must be so lonely,” Verity said at last.

  The moment she said it, Erin began to sob.

  “All the time,” she said through her tears.

  Verity felt terrible. She hadn’t meant to make Erin cry, and didn’t know how to make her stop. She reached out and put one arm around Erin’s shoulders and gave it a tentative squeeze. Erin buried her head in the crook of Verity’s neck and wept. Verity didn’t say anything, just sat there with both her arms now wrapped around Erin until her crying subsided. At last, Erin peeled herself off of Verity’s shoulder, pulling up the collar of her t-shirt to wipe her face. When she was done, the fabric was blotched with tears.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” she said, looking away.

  “Don’t be,” Verity said.

  “Thank you for believing me,” Erin said. “Thank you for understanding.”

  She took Verity’s hand and laced their fingers together.

  A moment earlier, Verity had been too caught up in the immediacy of the crying girl to think of her as The Girl She Liked. Now, it was all she could think about. A shiver passed through her fingers and up her arm.

  “Are you cold?” Erin asked.

  “I’m fine,” Verity said. In truth, she was better than fine. She was sitting on a step, hip to hip with a beautiful girl, so captivated by the luxurious feeling of Erin’s thumb stroking the back of her hand that she couldn’t imagine it ever ending.

  “What stories are they doing this year?” Erin asked, shaking Verity out of her reverie.

  At first Verity was confused, but then she remembered what Erin had said about every camper being plopped down into the middle of Tania’s stories.

  “I have no idea,” Verity said. “I’ve hardly even seen the other girls.”

  “No boys this year?” Erin asked, raising an eyebrow. “I guess that makes sense. They did stock up on quite a few of them last summer. Maybe they’re evening the numbers.”

  “I hope not,” Verity said with a shudder. The idea of more campers being stolen away was terrible to consider even though she didn’t know them.

  “Last summer, they stranded a cabin of campers in the high ropes course. They cut down all the ladders and left them there.”

  Verity gasped. “How did they get down?”

  “Actually, it wasn’t that big a deal. Everyone in the cabin just slept up there for a couple of days, then when they got bored, they picked apart one of the rope obstacles and just climbed down. Tania must have been pissed because she expected everyone to freak out, and instead, everyone had fun.

  “Some of the other cabins didn’t have it so easy, though. One got really unpleasant superpowers, and I think another spent the whole week on a quest to find buried treasure at the bottom of Lake So-and-So.”

  “What about your cabin?”

  Erin rolled her eyes. “Verity, count yourself very lucky that you have never had anything to do with the All-Camp Sport & Follies.”

  Verity laughed and pretended to shudder. “I don’t know what it is, but it sounds horrible.”

  “It was!” Erin said. “We rode horses and made crafts and shot bows and arrows and went canoeing and did these little skits. And there were all these stuck-up rich kids we were competing against. They were extremely fixated on kicking our asses, and I remember they all had matching Gucci flip-flops.”

  As Erin listed off the activities, her eyes squeezed shut and she began to giggle like these were the most hilarious things anyone on the face of the planet had ever done.

  “It all sounds so normal and . . . campy,” Verity said.

  Erin let out a fresh peal of laughter.

  “I know! And look at me now!”

  Verity didn’t reply, and the smile vanished from Erin’s face.

  “I guess it’s not actually that funny,” she said.

  “No, not really.”

  Erin took a deep breath and went back to stroking Verity’s hand with her thumb. She hadn’t let go of it, not even when she was giggling so hard Verity thought she was going to fall off the step. She held it so casually it might have been an accident, like when their legs brushed together. And though the hand-holding was consuming a sizable chunk of Verity’s concentration, she didn’t dare say anything to call attention to it.

  “Earth to Verity,” Erin said, waving her hand in front of Verity’s face.

  “Sorry. Did you say something?”

  “I said, you never told me what story your cabin is in. Are you going to jailbreak us or something like that?”

  Tell her the truth, Verity thought, but when she opened her mouth to speak, nothing came out.

  “Are you going to tell me, or are you going to stare off into space like a hypnotized trout?” Erin asked, making a goofy face at her.

  Tell her the truth. We’re already holding hands. How badly could it go?

  “We’re the love story. Something led us to your cabin, and when we saw you and the guys, all of us thought the same thing at once. That you were our—” Verity cringed at the last word, then spat it out as fast as she could. “Soul mates.”

  Erin’s lip curled and she drew her hand away from Verity’s.

  “Soul mates?” she mumbled into her knees, turning the word over in disbelief.

  Verity’s stomach lurched. Erin sounded so quiet, so calm, but there was also something in her voice that sounded like it was about to snap.

  “That’s not fair,” Erin said at last. “They can’t do that to people. They can’t just mess around with the way we feel. What did they think would happen? Did they think we’d just go along with it?”

  Quite suddenly, Verity found that she was too upset to breathe and certainly too upset to reply. Erin wasn’t finished talking, though.

  “Don’t tell me you actually think I’m your soul mate,” she said, her voice dripping with scorn. “You don’t know me. I don’t know you. How could we be anything to each other?”

  Verity felt like her heart had been smashed. She believed everything that Erin had told her—how could she not?—and yet, this was the point she couldn’t force herself to accept. She had no trouble believing that whoever ran this freak show of a summer camp could scoop out part of a girl’s soul, or manufacture a cabin in the woods that had no business being there, with a magnetic path that would draw her right to it.

  But Verity couldn’t bring herself to believe that they could make her feel something she didn’t really feel.

  “I never expected you to like me back,” Verity said, her voice shaking. “I never expected anything at all.”

  “Well, good.”

  Erin was sitting up now, her arms folded across her chest, her face stony and unreadable. Except, Verity found she could read it anyway, like a la
nguage she’d picked up in childhood and forgotten she knew.

  “But you do,” Verity said.

  It wasn’t arrogant or pushy the way she said it. It wasn’t maneuvering; it wasn’t manipulative. Verity was merely reading aloud what had been unmistakably written there in the language of Erin’s face.

  “Excuse me?” Erin asked.

  Verity closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them, she turned to face Erin and looked her in the eyes.

  “You do like me a little bit,” she said, then braced herself for the next part. “And I like you. I know it doesn’t make sense. I don’t even know if you like girls, so this might all be really presumptuous on my part, but the first time I saw you, I felt something.”

  “They made you feel it.”

  “Maybe,” Verity said, “but I believe it anyway.”

  “Why would you?”

  “Because I don’t think they can tell me what to feel,” Verity said.

  “I’m not your soul mate.”

  That word again. They’d all been throwing it around since the first time they’d seen Erin and the boys, and now she could see why Erin rankled at it.

  It was a word that took away all your choices. It was a word that meant there was no one else in the world to find, no one else to look for because it had all been decided and the matter was settled and you never even got to have an opinion about it.

  If that’s what a soul mate was, then it was bullshit. So much had been taken away from Erin already, and Verity had no desire to be one more thing she hadn’t gotten to choose.

  Still, there was one thing she needed to know.

  “When you saw me standing in front of your cabin, what went through your head? What did it feel like?”

  Despite herself, a smile spread across Erin’s face as she thought back to the moment that had taken place not two hours ago, but somehow felt like it was from another age.

  “I felt like I’d been found,” Erin said. “For a moment, I felt like I wasn’t alone.”

  Verity was so happy to see her smile, she wanted to jump up from the cabin steps and do a pirouette and throw her hands up in the air and sing, but she didn’t want to scare Erin off either.

  “I know what you mean,” she said.

  “I felt hope,” Erin continued, “and I knew it was stupid to pin so much hope on someone I’d never met, but I felt it anyway.”

  “Hope for what?” Verity asked.

  “That I’d be happy again.”

  It was the most beautiful thing that anyone had ever said to Verity, and she felt her eyes well up with tears at Erin’s words.

  Wiping them away, she asked, “Can it just mean that?”

  Erin’s eyes dropped to her knees, but she reached over and placed one of her hands on top of Verity’s, interlacing their fingers.

  “There’s a danger in thinking another person can make you happy. Which has never stopped anyone from doing it,” Erin said. “That’s a line from this book I like. There’s a character named Nikolai. He’s a healer who falls in love with the main character, Isis Archimedes, and she falls for him, too. Only, he has to stay in the village and heal people, and she has to go out on this quest to fulfill her destiny. Anyhow, that’s what he says to her before she leaves, when they both know it won’t work out.”

  Verity knew the scene she was talking about. And unlike Erin, who’d obviously not read the next four books, she knew that wasn’t the last Isis saw of Nikolai, not by a long shot. But even so, that line had always meant something different to her.

  “I always thought Nikolai was saying, you shouldn’t go around expecting other people to make you happy, but that doesn’t mean they won’t.”

  “It makes more sense the other way,” Erin said.

  “I know it does.”

  “But I like your way better.”

  Then she leaned over and touched Verity’s chin and kissed her.

  At first, Verity panicked, fearing that she’d kiss too prudishly or sloppily, or that their teeth would clack up against each other, or that she’d lose her balance and fall off the steps, or that this was all some sort of joke that Erin was playing on her, and that in another moment, a crowd of people would leap out of the bushes, including her mother, the paparazzi, and Lionel Hernandez, who’d given her her first kiss at a dance in the seventh grade and told everyone she was terrible at it. And all of them would point and say, “We knew it! We knew it all along!”

  But more than anything, more than she was scared, Verity wanted to keep feeling this girl’s lips against her own. And their teeth did not clack together, and it was neither too prudish nor too sloppy, and no one lost her balance. Verity reached out and put her arms around Erin’s waist and Erin put her arms around Verity’s shoulders, and Verity breathed in the smell of wood shavings that clung to Erin’s hair.

  The air around them was full of electricity and a warm golden light, and when Verity opened her eyes—just for a second, just to convince herself it was really happening—she saw hundreds of golden sparks drifting around their faces like fireflies.

  Then she heard a gasp from the edge of the clearing. Then another. Then a nervous giggle.

  Because Verity’s eyes were already open, she saw the peaceful expression on Erin’s face curdle before she pushed Verity away.

  Erin parted her lips to speak, and the golden light that had enveloped their faces darted inside her mouth, and then it was gone. All the firefly sparks buzzing around their heads froze and dropped out of the air like stones.

  “What happened?” Erin asked. “What did you do to me?”

  Erin leapt up from the concrete step and staggered backwards, in such a hurry to get away from her that she tripped on the top step and nearly toppled inside the cabin.

  “Did you know they were there? Is this some kind of joke to you?” Erin asked, her face contorted with rage.

  Before Verity could reply, Erin pointed at her and said, “Don’t. Just don’t.”

  She fled inside the cabin. Verity heard the fall of her footsteps, and then nothing. The darkness swallowed her up.

  At the edge of the clearing stood Verity’s cabinmates, too stunned to say a thing.

  CABIN 5

  SURVIVAL

  [SCENE: Twelve feet beneath the smoldering remains of Cabin 5]

  They could not squeeze through the thorns or cut them down or go over them, and when the hedge went up in flames, they found themselves surrounded, trapped behind a wall of fire with no way out.

  They could not go under the wall of thorns either, but they had tried, and in the end, that was what saved them.

  One of the girls had the idea to jump into the tunnel they’d been trying to dig under the wall. It wasn’t a proper tunnel yet. It was only a hole, not more than six feet deep. However, when the girl from Cabin 5 jumped down it, the ground at the bottom crumbled under her weight. Her right foot punched through and dangled beneath her into an unseen nothing. She dug her fingers into the dirt, hoping to catch hold of a root, but the earth gave way and she fell through it, discovering that the bottom of their hole was the ceiling of someone else’s tunnel. Fortunately, it was not a large one, only about eight feet in diameter, and the girl did not have far to fall. She even landed on her feet.

  One of her cabinmates saw her fall down the hole and ran over to pull her out. However, when the cabinmate looked down the hole, her friend was nowhere to be seen, and when she called out her name (which was Haley, though I hardly expect you to care about that at this stage in the game), Haley called back to her to get the others and jump.

  It was a tunnel for the stagehands, used for cutting from one side of Camp So-and-So to the other quickly and without being seen. It was big enough to accommodate a loaded dolly, a wheelbarrow, or, in a pinch, a very agreeable horse. At that moment, though, the girls from Cabin 5 did not care about its purpose or its terminus.

  They followed it under the mess hall, alongside the long, unnecessarily winding road, deep into t
he woods, beneath the pony trail, until it joined up with the limestone-walled network of passageways in my cave.

  They followed it.

  CABIN 1

  THE ALL-CAMP SPORT & FOLLIES

  [SCENE: Their numbers depleted, KADIE, CRESSIDA, and DORA prepare their song-and-dance number for the final contest in the All-Camp Sport & Follies.]

  Kadie refused to let herself be awed by the theater. It was impressive, she admitted, but it was also ridiculous. They were miles away from anything like a real city, and yet the walls were draped in brocade, the seats upholstered in gold velvet. Heavy brass chandeliers hung from the vaulted ceiling, and the stage had been recently sanded and finished. Who were they trying to impress out here in the middle of nowhere?

  The costume and props department was equally opulent and stocked with every sort of wig, frock, and set piece imaginable. There were flapper dresses, top hats, hoop skirts, gold lamé jumpsuits, fringed hippie vests, straw boaters, gowns with puffed sleeves, pantaloons, silk smoking jackets, feather boas, and sequined hot pants. The makeup table was laid with spirit gum and latex, baby powder, false eyelashes, and dozens of pots of eye shadow, rouge, pancake concealer, and gloss, all of it brand new.

  “Do you do theater at your school?” Cressida asked the other two girls.

  “Assistant director,” Kadie said.

  “Props,” said Dora.

  “Stage crew,” Cressida said. “And lights.”

  “I was going to guess costumes.”

  Cressida sniffed at this suggestion. “And publicity, too, for all the good that will do us. We’ve got a whole crew, but no cast.”

  Kadie turned to Dora with a hopeful grin. “I don’t suppose you’re secretly good at singing, too?”

  Dora belted out a few bars of the national anthem before Kadie held up her hand, cringing in dismay.

  “What about you?” said Cressida.

  Kadie shook her head vehemently. “The only thing I’ve ever done is backup and harmonies. And I can’t dance at all.”