Camp So-And-So
Page 30
What Wallis could see was the pain on Renata’s face as she worried about her friend, and so she spoke to that instead.
“You saved her life.” Wallis laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Whatever she’s feeling right now, she doesn’t hate you.”
They loaded the girl with the upturned nose into the wheelbarrow. With Robin’s help, Hennie, Becca, and Corinne had made contact with the outside world, and an ambulance was currently on its way to Camp So-and-So. It would take the girl with the upturned nose to a hospital to have her compound fracture set. Shea’s injuries from the explosion and the barbed-wire booby trap were less grievous, but they’d convinced her to go as well. It would have been maddening to survive Camp So-and-So only to be done in by an infected wound. The two were relieved to be going, but also a bit sad that they wouldn’t have a chance to say good-bye to the other girls in their cabins.
Renata pushed the wheelbarrow bearing the girl with the upturned nose toward the chamber door, and Shea followed behind. Wallis was just about to go after them when she stopped and turned back.
“What about you? Aren’t you coming?”
Eurydice Horne looked over her shoulder as though Wallis might have been talking to someone else.
“I hadn’t planned on it,” she said. “Why should anything change?”
“Because everything’s changed,” Wallis said.
She thought about the chains that Eurydice Horne had draped over herself, pretending that someone else had been holding her prisoner in the cave. Even knowing that, they’d all assumed that on some level, Eurydice Horne wanted to leave. Now, Wallis wasn’t sure it would be that easy.
“There’s nothing for you to narrate now,” Renata pointed out.
Eurydice Horne looked offended. “There will be plenty of other things going on after you’re gone. There’s the kelpie and that interesting family of squirrels that lives under the mess hall. And of course I’ll spend a week or two catching up on my rest before any of that begins. What did you think I did the rest of the year anyway?”
The girls exchanged sad looks, then, one by one, extended their hands to Eurydice Horne.
“Come with us,” Wallis said.
“Please,” added the girl with the upturned nose. “We won’t leave you here alone.”
“IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, YOU CAN COME BACK,” Shea said.
“Besides,” said Renata, “we can’t finish our quest unless you do. First you must slay the beast inside its lair, and then set free the one imprisoned there.”
Eurydice Horne trembled. She hadn’t been outside in years, and the thought of it filled her with panic, but she reached out and took Wallis’s hand.
Say what you will about Eurydice Horne, that she’s a quitter, a monster who dragged readers along for five books only to kill off the main character, but she was not the kind of person who would stand between heroes and the end of their quest.
Kind-hearted Shea took her other hand, and together, they led her out of the chamber. Eurydice Horne dug in her heels once, craned her neck around for one last look at the screens, but then Shea squeezed her hand and Wallis gave her a little tug forward. They wound through the cave with its glowing white limestone walls, and a few minutes later, they were standing at its mouth in the clearing where the girls from Cabin 3 had fought the beast.
Eurydice Horne dropped to her knees and marveled at how big everything seemed.
Once they were mostly on the same side of the lake, Robin gathered all of them together in the English rose garden for a meeting.
“I find myself in the strange position of having nothing to be in charge of except you,” Robin said. “I find myself in the equally strange position of needing to make amends for what you have suffered.
“For the next five days, the entire grounds are at your disposal. I will arrange for staff—human staff—to be brought in to see to your every need and want. They will cook for you and clean up after you. They will be your lifeguards. They will teach you how to play the dulcimer or make a wallet out of duct tape. For the rest of the week, you may do as you please.”
A murmur went up through the crowd.
“How does that even begin to make amends?” asked one girl from Cabin 5, and more than a few others nodded their heads in agreement.
“I’m not sure that it does,” Robin said. “But I thought at the very least, you might appreciate a meal, a shower, and a good night’s sleep before we discuss anything further. I will stay out of your way. No traps. No tricks.”
“Why should we trust you?” asked Kadie.
Robin lowered her head.
“Because I am in your debt. Tania and I both.”
Cressida looked around the garden, then peeked through some of the hedges. “Where is Tania anyway?”
Robin made an incredulous face. “Were you hoping to hang out? Get to know each other?”
“I was hoping to replace her kneecaps with sourdough biscuits.”
“Which is why I decided it would be for the best if we all kept our distance,” Robin said, then gestured across Lake So-and-So. “Besides, the rules of the All-Camp Sport & Follies state that the winner gets to choose which camp they live at. Keeping her over there seems fair, don’t you think?”
Had they been less famished and exhausted, they might have dug in their heels at this proposition; however, at that moment, a dazzled-looking pizza delivery driver entered the English rose garden. Robin tipped him and took a dozen pies out of his hands before sending him on his way.
As the meal was of human provenance, they fell upon it like wolves and, besotted with food, allowed themselves to be led from the rose garden to their suites. Each cabin got its own, complete with feather beds, fireplace, hot tub, private balcony, and complimentary robes and slippers. That night, they slept like the dead, and woke in the morning, ravenous all over again.
After a breakfast of pastries, coffee, and juice (also delivered from the outside), they tentatively explored the grounds. They enjoyed eating and sleeping in and lying on their backs in the English rose garden, looking for shapes in the clouds. Kadie and Dora finally got to feel the sugar sands of Most Excellent Beach between their toes.
Robin was as good as her word. There were no tricks and no traps. By lunchtime, they’d decided they did want to stay there for the rest of the week. They harbored no illusions that Robin’s invitation balanced the books between them, or even began to make things right. Just because they’d briefly been allies did not make them friends now.
However, she was offering them something that each girl needed very badly, and that was time.
The idea of going home right away, after everything that had happened to them, seemed unthinkable. Of course, they would go when the time came. They would be grateful for their friends and families, even though they’d never be able to explain to those people what had happened to them. At some point, not talking about it would be a relief, but now, what they needed most was to be with people who had seen the same strange things they had seen. They had been soldiers. They needed a chance to exchange their war stories, and Robin could give them that.
As for Tania, the girl with beads in her hair had not lied to Inge F. Yancey IV when she told him that Tania would lose everything. She had no kingdom now. Her only follower was a sniveling former executive. Worst of all for a creature like Tania, she had nothing to do. She set up new quarters for herself across the lake in the camp director’s office at Camp So-and-So. She spent a great deal of time pacing and making lists, then balling them up and throwing them across the room. Eventually, she started entertaining herself by cleaning up the wreckage around the campgrounds. She encouraged Inge F. Yancey IV to make himself useful and design some improvements for the area.
It isn’t really possible to punish beings like Tania in any way that appeals to a human sense of justice. Unless you’re the kind of person who resolves your problems by trying to blow their brains out with enchanted musket balls, the worst you can do is disrupt their
comfortable routines, and hope you’ve done so in a way that coaxes some self-reflection, change, and possibly a little humility out of them.
Her first night in her own private suite, Eurydice Horne could not sleep. The bed was too soft, the blankets too warm, the pillow too plush. Even the carpet by the fireplace seemed like an enormous luxury, but that was finally where she lay down.
The next morning, by popular demand, she took a bath. The water was scented with rose oil, and Eurydice Horne had a vague memory that in her old life, this was supposed to be some sort of treat. With no screens to look at, however, Eurydice Horne found it difficult to relax.
Eventually, she put on a cotton sundress and a pair of sandals and struck out to explore the grounds of the Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp. Her first excursion was to find Verity, whose stolen diary she needed to return.
She found Verity in the rose garden staring at the sky, a book she wasn’t reading tented over her chest. She was alone—Addison, Annika, Alix, and Amber had decided to go for a swim.
“Where did you find this?” Verity asked when Eurydice Horne handed the diary over to her.
“Robin had one of the stagehands steal it for me,” Eurydice Horne explained, looking not the slightest bit ashamed. “For character-building and backstory in case you turned out to be important. Which you did.”
Had Verity been in higher spirits, she might have inquired further. If she’d been less distracted, she would have been mortified—and just the slightest bit thrilled—that her favorite author had read her most private thoughts. Instead she opened the leather-bound diary to a random page, skimming it and sighing.
“What’s wrong?” asked Eurydice Horne, taking a seat on the lounge chair next to Verity’s.
Verity flung herself over the chair’s arm and let her fingertips dangle in the grass.
“I miss her,” she said.
All small talk, posturing, and coyness had vanished from conversations around the camp. People walked up to one another all the time and started talking, whether they knew each other or not. They didn’t work their way up to deep conversations; they dove right into them. No one worried very much about what anyone else thought of them.
So even though Verity and Eurydice Horne had never actually met before, the author said, “There’s more than that, though, isn’t there?”
“I’m worried that when I leave camp, Erin won’t be my soul mate anymore.”
Eurydice Horne nodded. Summer love was one thing, but soul mates were tricky. She’d always advised Tania and Robin against them, not that they ever listened to her.
“What if you’re wrong, and she still is?” Eurydice Horne asked. “What if she never was? What if she isn’t your soul mate now, but in ten years, she will be? What if there isn’t any such thing as a soul mate? What if you get more than one in your lifetime?”
“What are you talking about?”
Eurydice Horne sat up straight in the chair and tried to conjure up that fireside storyteller with bits of stew in her beard and limitless reserves of wisdom. Then she cleared her throat and said:
The morning after she got home from camp, Verity called Erin and they talked on the phone for two hours. They talked again the next week, and the week after that, but each time they spoke, they found they had less to say to each other. They made halfhearted plans to meet at a county fair halfway between their hometowns, but that fell through when Verity came down with a cold, and after that, the calls stopped altogether.
Verity’s heart wasn’t broken, but it did feel bruised. How could she feel something that powerful, that meant-to-be, and be wrong about it? Why couldn’t she just make herself feel the way she’d felt a month ago?
She decided to call Annika to talk about it, and when she did, she found out that Addison and Tad were still together, but Alix and Amber both liked other guys now. As for Annika and the boy with the pompadour, they still talked, but she was pretty sure they were just friends.
“I thought they were our soul mates,” Verity said.
“Maybe they were only our soul mates at camp,” Annika said. “Anyhow, we’re going out tonight. Want to come with us?”
“Are you sure?”
“Kittanning is only twenty minutes from Butler. Come on. It’ll cheer you up.”
Time passed, and eventually the memory of Erin faded, and Verity discovered that her heart could feel numb, or heavy, but that sometimes it could feel like someone had opened a window and let in the sunshine.
“I want to be in love every day,” Amber said one Friday night while the five of them ate chips and ignored a bad movie. “I just don’t know how you do that with the same person.”
“You just haven’t met the right person yet,” Addison said, and they all wanted to roll their eyes because she and Tad behaved like such an old married couple, but they didn’t because she was their friend.
They all went to the prom together, and when someone called Verity and her date a nasty name, that person would live to rue the day that they said it within earshot of Alix.
They went to each other’s graduation parties, and even though they all went away to different colleges, they exchanged gifts at Christmas and went on a spring break road trip together, and slept on each other’s couches in their first crappy apartments. And when Addison announced, to the surprise of exactly no one, that she and Tad were engaged, they decided that for her bachelorette party they would take her camping, for old times’ sake.
As they sat around the campfire, Verity lifted her tin mug and proposed a toast.
“To Camp So-and-So,” she said, “and soul mates.”
Verity was so engaged by the story, and Eurydice Horne in the telling of it, that they didn’t notice until it was over that the girls from Cabin 5 had wandered into the rose garden halfway through and were now sitting, rapt, in the lounge chairs around them.
“Do us next!” exclaimed one of the Cabin 5 girls.
Eurydice Horne demurred, but the girls were insistent and flattered her shamelessly, and though she was unused to all the attention, Eurydice Horne found that she rather liked it.
“Just so you know, this isn’t fortune telling,” she said, then narrowed one eye and stroked her chin as she leaned back in her chair.
Strange as their story had been, the girls from Cabin 5 seemed to enjoy the rest of their week at camp the most. Having been denied any semblance of normal camp activities, they tried to cram as much of it in as possible. They rode horses, made crafts, climbed rocks, and punctuated each activity with meals that would have stymied a hobbit.
But when they returned home, each found herself drawn toward danger, adventure, and a rush of adrenaline in a way she never had before. Most found constructive outlets for this. One would become a paratrooper. Another would find her purpose by becoming a trauma unit surgeon. One climbed mountains and wrote about it for outdoor magazines. One was a singer and toured the world putting on electrifying shows.
The last, however, lived simply in a sleepy little town. Her pleasures were quiet ones—books, films, museums. Her work was fulfilling, but not dangerous or exciting. Each night, though, when she closed her eyes, she dreamed of magical lands, fantastic journeys, grand adventures, never the same dream twice, and she never stopped being astonished by them. She never wrote them down, rarely spoke of them to anyone, and yet in many ways, out of all of them, she was the happiest.
Eurydice Horne walked the grounds drinking in the sights that for years she’d only seen on the screens. She felt the wind on her face, the sun toasting her shoulders. She often sought out the girls’ company, but more often than not, she hung back and did not interfere.
When the sticklike goth girl and the girl with thousands of freckles approached her for autographs, she was startled. She’d forgotten that used to be something she did for people. In her old life, she tended to sign things like “In the world above, the world below, and the world between, I remain EURYDICE HORNE.”
What she wro
te for these girls was rather more personal.
To the sticklike goth girl, she wrote:
There is something I want you to know about quests. When you finish, they leave you with an ache, a longing. Even when you finish, you are never finished. Quests can get into your blood. They can keep you from finding other ways of being happy.
I do not think this will happen to you, though.
With admiration, EURYDICE HORNE
To the girl with thousands of freckles, she wrote a story:
Ten years from now, a young chemist with thousands of freckles will succeed in creating the world’s first synthetic universal antivenom. It will be cheap and easily transportable. One dose will fit into a small vial worn around the neck. And it will go on to save the lives of thousands of people around the world.
When asked how she had thought it up, the girl with thousands of freckles will only say that the idea had come to her many years before at summer camp.
Your friend, EURYDICE HORNE
Next, Eurydice Horne made her way over to the pasture. There she watched as Vivian and Kimber sat propped up against the side of the stable, staring at the sky. Cressida was sitting on top of the fence, watching Dora teach Kadie how to ride a horse. Kadie clung fearfully to the saddle while Dora led Helena by the bridle, the steel pocket watch hanging from a belt loop at her side.
At the end of the week, Dora’s mother would worry that her daughter was every bit as pliant and eager to please as she had been before, but the rest of Cabin 1 had learned that Dora was made of steelier stuff. She was bold enough to throw her grandfather’s pocket watch at a supernatural creature, stubborn enough to recover it from a manure-soaked theater, and patient enough to open it up and fix its broken gears. Dora would be fine.
Eurydice Horne muttered these stories to herself. She suspected that after what had happened to Kadie’s memory, the girls from Cabin 1 would not want to hear stories about themselves from the future any more than they wanted to hear made-up stories about the past.