Camp So-And-So

by Mary McCoy

  “Is there anything you’re actually good at? I mean, besides telling other people what to do?” Cressida asked, her pointed chin jutting out. “You’re afraid of horses, you’re bad at crafts, you can’t sing. Why did you ever care about winning the All-Camp Sport & Follies in the first place?”

  Kadie briefly considered slapping Cressida, but instead blew out a long, cool yoga breath.

  “I guess a bunch of magical beings filled my head with lies, then stuck me in a cabin with you,” she said, then stalked out of the room.

  Dora watched her go, then gave Cressida an accusing stare.

  “What?” Cressida said, daring her to say another word about it.

  “I’m going out to check on her,” Dora said. “She’s been through a lot.”

  “I’ve been through a lot, too!” Cressida called after her, but Dora was already gone.

  Cressida sat down at one of the vanity tables and buried her head in her arms. She felt especially small and ugly at the moment, and knew that her reflection would only make those feelings worse. Not only was she small and ugly, but she was failing at what she’d set out to do.

  If she had it to do over again, she would have slipped away from the group the first night of camp and gone off in search of Erin on her own. But no, she’d hesitated. She’d doubted herself, and now not only was she small and ugly and failing, but she’d dragged all the other girls into this mess with her.

  My name is Kadie Aguilar. I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with my mom. I have friends. I go to school and do Model UN and debate and theater. That is my real life. That is real.

  Except what if it wasn’t?

  After her spat with Cressida, Kadie had gone back out to the stage wanting very badly to be alone, to have a few minutes of quiet, a few minutes to think about what she now knew had happened to her.

  What they had done to her.

  Up until a few hours ago, Kadie had believed herself to be a Camp So-and-So veteran. She remembered friends, counselors, and experiences from last summer, but apparently, none of that had happened. None of those people had even existed.

  They’d gotten inside her head, tampered with the contents, and now, and as far as Kadie could tell, they’d done it so that she would convince her cabinmates to get on board with the All-Camp Sport & Follies. If Tania, or whoever was running the show, wanted a competition that badly, why not just make it mandatory? Better yet, why not make every cabin do it?

  And then Kadie thought about the other cabins and felt a sinking in her gut as she wondered what had happened to them. What kinds of manufactured drama were they being forced to act out? Or was something even worse happening to them?

  Kadie sat down in the center of the stage under the comfortingly hot lights, closed her eyes, and tried to concentrate. It was difficult to tell where the false memories ended and the real ones began, so one by one, she began to prod at them, looking for places where the stitches showed.

  She thought back to the first day of camp, her mother’s harried expression as she’d chewed antacids and unloaded Kadie’s bags from the trunk. She thought about the ridiculous argument they’d had on the drive up about whose job it should be to scoop out the litter box.

  You had the cat before I was even born, so I don’t see why I should be responsible for its upkeep now.

  But you love him, Kadie. He sleeps at the foot of your bed like a dog.

  Where Jasper sleeps is irrelevant, Mom.

  She thought about the snotty way she purposely used words like “upkeep” and “irrelevant” when she had ridiculous arguments with her mother like they were a trump card, like she deserved to win because she threw around words like that and her mother didn’t. When she conjured up her mother’s face, the way it had looked when she’d sighed and said, “Maybe you should just do it because I’m your mom and I asked you to,” Kadie felt tears prick at her eyes.

  That memory was real. She felt sure of it.

  She rubbed at her eyes, annoyed with herself for crying at a time like this. Tears wouldn’t help her, and they wouldn’t make this right. Neither would getting angry, although what she wanted most in the world after a good sob in the middle of the stage was to smash the floodlights, slash the curtains, and punch Tania in the face.

  She thought about the people she’d met at Model UN, some of whom she had little doubt would grow up to become the kind of people who would wield real power and inflict great harm on the world at large because they would always act like the whole thing was a game. Crying didn’t help you against people like that, and neither did getting angry. In fact, they loved it because it confirmed what they already thought: that they were strong and you were weak.

  Kadie crossed her legs in front of her and rested her hands on her knees. She tried to clear her head, to blow out her anger and frustration one breath at a time.

  This is who I am, she thought.

  They can play games with my head. They can think I’m dumb and weak, and that they’re better than me, and I’ll still come up with a way to beat them.

  Because that is who I am.

  Kadie opened her eyes to see Dora sitting in the front row of the theater, watching her like she was a grenade with a pulled pin.

  “Dora, could you get Cressida out here?” she asked.

  If only Kadie hadn’t followed her to the windmill, Cressida thought. If only they’d all just left her alone.

  Do you really believe it would have been that easy?

  Of course, she still didn’t know where Erin was. The Inge F. Yancey camp was so big, its boundaries so far-reaching, Cressida didn’t even know where to begin looking. And now they’d lost Vivian and Kimber, and whatever Tania and her minions had done to Erin, Cressida felt sure they had something similar in mind for her cabinmates.

  For the first time since she’d arrived at Camp So-and-So, Cressida gave herself over entirely to despair. She wondered how long she could sit there, arms tented over her head, forehead resting on the cool marble vanity table, before someone came to find her. She hoped no one ever would. She hoped they’d put on the show without her and leave her for Tania and the others. It was no less than she deserved.

  Then she heard Dora clear her throat.

  “Kadie and I have an idea,” she said.

  Cressida looked into the mirror and saw Dora standing behind her in the dressing room doorway, wearing a strange expression on her face.

  “You guys can do whatever you want,” she said. “I don’t care.”

  Cressida put her head back down on the vanity table. A moment later Dora cleared her throat again, and Cressida looked up to see that the girl was now standing by her side. Dora took Cressida by the elbow and hoisted her up from the velvet-upholstered chair.

  “We can’t do it without you.”

  Of all the things Cressida had come here to do and had not done, finishing the All-Camp Sport & Follies was at the very bottom of the list. That Kadie and Dora were still making plans after everything that had happened made Cressida a little sad for them. It was like they wanted this to be a normal summer camp so much that they were willing to overlook all evidence to the contrary. Kadie, especially, should have known better. Cressida was a little disappointed in her—and just when she’d been starting to like her.

  “I told you,” Cressida said. “I don’t care.”

  Dora sighed, but did not let go of Cressida’s elbow.

  “They took her memories and put something else in their place, Cressida,” she said.

  Cressida wrenched her arm out of Dora’s.

  “They took a whole person away from me,” Cressida cried.

  Dora nodded thoughtfully. “Then you should at least hear what Kadie has to say. After that, you can tell her to her face how much you don’t care.”

  Grudgingly, Cressida allowed herself to be led from the dressing room.

  In the center of the stage, Kadie sat in the lotus pose with her eyes closed and a calmness in her face that Cressida envied.

&n
bsp; “I hear you have an amazing idea,” she shouted from the wings, but not even her buzz-saw voice could break Kadie’s concentration.

  When she was good and ready, Kadie opened her eyes and stretched her legs out in front of her.

  “Every year Camp So-and-So loses the All-Camp Sport & Follies, but every year the games go on exactly the same. Do you know why?”

  “No,” Cressida admitted. This bit of camp lore still seemed a bit strange to her. It seemed like maybe after a few decades of guaranteed wins, Tania would have lost interest in carrying on this particular tradition.

  “Two reasons,” Kadie said, massaging the back of her neck. “They think we’re entertaining, and they think we’re idiots.”

  Dora stretched out a hand to Kadie and helped her to her feet.

  “Our idea is to give them what they want,” Dora told Cressida. “What they expect from us.”

  Cressida studied Kadie’s face, certain she had misunderstood. Altered memories and all, the All-Camp Sport & Follies were no joking matter to Kadie.

  “I thought you wanted to win,” Cressida said.

  “This isn’t about winning,” Kadie said. “It’s about ending the All-Camp Sport & Follies. For good.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “First, we have to lose.”

  A NOTE FROM THE NARRATOR

  When Inge F. Yancey III invited me here twelve years ago, it sounded too good to be true, and it was.

  He offered me more money than I’d ever seen in one place, simply to spend a single week at Camp So-and-So, to spin one little story in the hopes that it would make his gloomy son smile.

  “You’ll be a choreographer, camp director, and storyteller all in one. If you can dream it, Tania and her people can make it happen.”

  It sounded like no camp I’d ever heard of, but I didn’t care. I’d just killed off Isis Archimedes, had no idea how I was going to finish writing the series, had no idea if I even wanted to. Mr. Yancey’s offer sounded like just the escape from my own life I’d been hoping for.

  “He has trouble with other people his age, doesn’t make friends easily, but he’s a good boy. He likes to design buildings. Maybe you can do something with that.”

  You already know what a disaster that turned out to be. An innocent boy nearly had his spleen beaten into jam, and I almost alerted the outside world to the existence of this strange camp. That was what came of my efforts to bring a smile to the sour lips of Inge F. Yancey IV.

  After that, his father decided he’d had his fill of storytellers, and Tania decided it was too dangerous to send me back to the real world intact. No telling what someone like me might write down—and besides, she’d thought of another use for me.

  There is a Eurydice Horne back in the real world, and then there is me, and if there’s a reason why we never finished the Isis Archimedes books, I suppose it’s because we couldn’t do it without each other.

  The other version of me, the one who lives in a farmhouse and raises chickens, doesn’t quite have the imagination or guts to finish them. And me? I’m too scattered and wild to finish anything. No discipline, no craft.

  Together, maybe we could have written them. Together, maybe we could have found a way to stop Tania, to shut down the whole camp, but by myself, I wasn’t up to the challenge.

  Sometimes I would forget about my chains, about the fact that I was a prisoner, about the part of me that was missing, all because I was too caught up in the story.

  I was sucked in. I was so worried about missing something that almost without noticing, I missed twelve years of my life.

  I could only relate the wonderful, terrible, gobsmacking things that I saw from my cave. I never could see an ending to any of it—could not stop it, could not even be bothered to try to save myself—not until these girls came along.

  Not until they freed me. Not until they showed me the way out.

  Humans really are such amazing creatures.

  We never do what you expect us to.

  CABIN 2

  KILLER IN THE WOODS

  [SCENE: In a chamber of the cave, covered with bat guano and thousands of tiny mirrors, WALLIS and the NARRATOR, EURYDICE HORNE, consider their situation and its implications.]

  Wallis was bewildered. She was overwhelmed. She was standing in a cave with Eurydice Horne, who’d just informed her that Abigail wasn’t real, and confirmed the awful truth that Wallis had abandoned her friends in the woods because she’d been afraid of something that didn’t exist.

  “Have a seat,” Eurydice Horne said, patting the spot next to her on the bench. “You look a little frail.”

  Wallis pushed the chains aside and did as the author suggested. While Wallis recovered her nerves, Eurydice Horne explained how the stagehands rigged the booby traps, how the scenes were viewed—either as live theater or in edited broadcasts, complete with narration—by a forestful of creatures who delighted in watching humans flail and struggle and cower in terror.

  “Then my friends are still in danger,” Wallis said, imagining a platoon of blood thirsty stagehands setting traps in the forest. “Even though there is no Abigail.”

  “Yes,” said Eurydice Horne.

  “Tell me where I can find them,” she said.

  Facing her friends would be terrible. She’d have to throw herself on their mercy, apologize for being a coward and leaving them in danger. And when she was done doing that, she’d get to break the news that Abigail wasn’t even real, and that Megan and Oscar had died, and Shea had been hit with shrapnel and had her hands slashed to ribbons by barbed wire booby traps, and they’d all been frightened out of their senses for someone else’s entertainment. Going to them with a story like that—would they even believe her?

  Wallis turned her attention to the mirrors that covered every inch of the chamber walls and ceiling. On some of them, there were only swaths of trees or grass or water with no other movement, but on others, Wallis could see human-looking figures dashing around the frame so quickly their figures blurred. Each time they flashed across the screen, something changed—the mossy side of a rock now faced south, one fork of a trail was covered over by rotting leaves—until the scene was unrecognizable from what it had been.

  “Are those the stagehands?” she asked.

  Eurydice Horne raised her eyebrows and nodded. “Didn’t take you long to find that, did it?”

  Wallis let her eyes skim over more of the mirrors. In some of them, Wallis could see her fellow campers. She saw two girls sitting on a concrete block step, their knees bumping together in a way that might have been accidental or not. On another screen, she saw two girls sitting on the stage inside a theater, sketching plans in a notebook. Wallis’s eyes darted to the opposite wall, to a mirror where a third girl with thin blonde hair like dandelion fluff sat at a vanity, her face buried in her arms.

  “How did you know where to look?” Eurydice Horne asked.

  Even if Wallis had known that Kadie, Dora, and Cressida were all in the same cabin, the mirrors they’d appeared on were nowhere near one another. And yet, Wallis had located both as though a string connected them.

  Wallis shrugged. “I just did. Why?”

  “It took months of practice before I was that quick at it,” said Eurydice Horne. “And I was stuck here. I didn’t have anything else to do.”

  Before she could elaborate, Wallis pointed to a mirror wedged in a corner near the cave floor where she could see half of Corinne’s unsmiling face.

  “There they are!” she said.

  One by one, four girls crossed the frame. They were all whole and alive and, as far as Wallis could tell, unharmed.

  “I have to get them,” Wallis said. “I have to bring them back here where it’s safe.”

  “And how are you going to convince them to come?”

  “I have no idea,” Wallis admitted before starting for the chamber door. Before she passed through it, she turned around and said, “Don’t worry, though. I’ll come back. I won’t leave you
here.”

  “I’ll be watching,” Eurydice Horne said.

  Wallis made her way back to the mouth of the cave and onto the pony trail. It was easy to find the girls from Cabin 2, but then, it was easy to find anything if you had a picture showing you the way, and easy to see booby traps and snares when you weren’t hysterical with fear. As it happened, the rest of Cabin 2 had wandered lost in the woods after cutting themselves out of the net, but had eventually stumbled upon the pony trail less than half a mile from the mouth of the cave.

  They had stumbled upon other things, too, but more about that in a moment.

  Up ahead, Wallis could hear twigs and leaves crackling under her cabinmates’ feet. Gulping down her fear, Wallis cleared her throat and called out to them.

  “Hey!” she said. “It’s Wallis. I’m here. Is anybody there?”

  The crackling of leaves went still. A moment later, Corinne stalked around the bend in the path looking as though she might box Wallis’s ears. Wallis had heard that expression in old books, but had never before seen anyone who looked as though they might actually do it.

  “You left us up there to die,” Corinne said, now just a dozen paces away from Wallis and closing, her face livid.

  Becca and Hennie came around the bend in the path next, calling after Corinne.

  “Stay away from her!” Becca cried.

  “She’s trying to lure you to Abigail,” Hennie warned.

  Thankfully, Shea came around the bend next. As soon as she laid eyes on Wallis, she trotted past Becca and Hennie and stepped in front of Corinne. She threw her arms around Wallis’s shoulders and swallowed her up in a hug.

  “SWEETIE, I’M SO GLAD YOU’RE ALL RIGHT!” she said. Her throaty twang that sounded like honey and clover and being outdoors had returned to its full volume.

  Wallis had never been so glad to hear anything in her life.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  When she pulled away to dry them with her sleeve, she noticed there was something different about Shea.

  “Where’d you get those bandages?” she asked.