It had been a surprise to recognize some of the same staff members from my time as a camper—as if they’d been here all along, year-round, day in and out, for the last five years. One of them was the camp manager, Camden Pierce. When I was younger, he’d seemed so effortlessly, naturally cool—enthusiastic and supportive and authoritative, all at once. Now I saw that this was a veneer for his real persona, the wannabe frat boy who had never grown up, who hit on all the female counselors, farted openly when we stood in line together for breakfast, and turned into a child when things didn’t go his way. Megan would have put up with him for all of five seconds. If he’d patted her casually on the ass, the way he did to me each morning, she would have snapped, “Hands off, bitch.” I only smiled when he stood behind me in line and tried to maneuver myself out of arm’s reach.
Despite his morning overtures and the odd suggestive remark, Camden was okay, though. He let me take charge of the new darkroom, formerly a janitor’s storage room, equipped with a sink and countertop. I spent the first week in it by myself, completely absorbed in arranging equipment and getting ready for the first campers to visit. When it became clear that the supply of developing fluid and photo paper wouldn’t last more than a few weeks, I ordered more out of my own meager check.
The darkroom wasn’t as big of a hit with the campers as I’d hoped—most of them had come equipped with digital cameras, and although their shots lacked artistry, they were content with the instant gratification of the medium. Still, my Monday-Wednesday-Friday photography lessons gained a following, and I ended up with a small troop that hiked with me through the forest and down to the water, trying to capture the extraordinary in the ordinary—light and color and feeling. On Saturdays and Sundays I held darkroom sessions, taking students into the tiny space two at a time to watch the images emerge before our eyes—deep blacks and silvery grays and alabaster whites, faces and places and things preserved now, more permanent than memory.
I emailed Megan from one of the rickety computers in the staff lounge, nearly drifting off while I waited for the dial-up connection. Maybe I should take some education classes, I wrote. What if I’m even the tiniest bit good at this? It was a question I wouldn’t have asked anyone in my family, where their disbelief would have been difficult to hide, their sneering too obvious.
I could hear Megan’s voice in her reply: Of course you’d be good at it, you moron. You’d be good at anything.
If only she knew me—really knew me, she would never have believed that. But I rode that compliment for days, trying it out. Lauren Mabrey, good at anything.
* * *
One Saturday I was in the darkroom after the last trio of girls had left, their prints still hanging from tiny clips around the room, fluttering in the slight current from an overhead vent. There were supplies to put away and tools to rinse, and I was puttering around, thinking that I needed to write Megan back and take a stack of dirty camp polo shirts down to the staff laundry when I heard voices outside the door. I’d locked it behind me—my usual habit whenever something could be exposed accidentally, a very real threat in a place teeming with eight-to fourteen-year-olds.
It didn’t take much to recognize Camden’s voice, bursting with confidence. The other voice belonged to Julia, the counselor he had been flirting with for the last few weeks, his admiration for her lanky volleyball-playing physique obvious. She was saying something about her classes at Brown—it had been Brown this and Brown that all summer from her, and I stood motionless, a bottle of developing fluid in one hand, waiting for them to wander in another direction. It wasn’t until the door handle jiggled that I realized what they wanted—a private room, the most precious commodity in the camp.
Camden swore, and the doorknob continued to rattle aggressively.
“Isn’t there a key?” Julia asked.
It sounded like Camden was jumping, taking sweeping stabs at my hiding place on the ledge above the door. Not such a great hiding place, I realized now. How long had he been using my darkroom for his rendezvous?
“Dammit,” he said. “It’s supposed to be right here.”
I reached down with one hand and felt the reassuring outline of the key in my pocket.
“Lauren must have it,” Julia said. “Want me to go look for her?”
“Hold on,” Camden said. “Let me just try—”
This time it seemed like he was jamming something in the lock. Another key? A toothpick? If the lock broke, would I be trapped here, at the mercy of one of the girls in my cabin to notice that I was missing? It was too late to announce my presence now, to call casually through the door for them to hold on, or suggest they find a different room.
“I don’t like her,” Julia was saying. “She’s so snooty.”
“Who, Lauren?”
“Yeah. The senator’s daughter.” I could hear the way she was rolling her eyes.
Bitch. I’d never done anything to her.
The doorknob seemed to be moving more loosely now, Camden’s jerking motions sending it backward and forward. What would happen if the door popped open and we came face-to-face with each other?
Julia was still talking. “She’s a complete snob. You know she never does anything with the rest of the counselors?”
I held my breath, shaking. Up until this point, I’d never given Julia, or any of the other counselors, much thought. I’d been focused on doing my job, making the darkroom work. But apparently by not being chummy, I was aloof—no, snooty. It explained why conversations paused when I entered the dining hall, then adjusted themselves around me, as if I’d displaced the air by entering the room.
Camden laughed. “You want me to fire her or something?”
“You can do that?”
“Actually, no. Probably not. But if I’d had a choice, I wouldn’t even have hired her.”
“What do you mean?” Julia asked. “I thought you were in charge of hiring the staff.”
Yes, I thought, my heart thudding. What do you mean?
Another laugh. “I got a phone call from her mother. It was basically a threat—if I hired Lauren, she would donate money to the camp, and if I didn’t, we could count on never seeing a cent of their money.”
“Fucking A,” Julia said.
My insides twisted like a sheet in the laundry.
“Yeah, some people think they can just buy their way into anything.” Camden laughed. “Of course, it worked, didn’t it? Lauren’s here and I got a raise. The Mabreys can take credit for sending three underprivileged kids to camp, and we got a darkroom out of the deal, which I happen to believe is useful in many ways.”
“Hold on—” Julia squawked, apparently rebuffing his advances. “They paid for three kids? Are you saying her mom donated thirty thousand dollars just so you would hire her?”
Thirty thousand dollars. I turned the number over in my mind. Probably Camden had settled for too little. Mom might have gone higher—fifty thousand, maybe. Thrown in a resurfacing of the pool, a new diving board, a commercial oven.
“Julia, hold on. You can’t say anything to anyone. I mean it.”
She laughed. “Why not? You’ve got the money. Oh, I see. You want to see if you can squeeze out a few more drops down the road.”
“I’m a businessman second,” Camden said, and then, in a husky voice that made me gag, “but I’m a lover first.”
Whatever he did next must have been convincing, because Julia moaned and asked, “What about the storage room behind the pool?”
I stayed in the darkroom for another twenty minutes, leaning against the counter, not trusting my feet to hold me up. I was both the senator’s daughter and the charity case. If Camden knew, others knew—Julia now, but later her friends, other staffers and counselors. So much for the hours I’d put into that application, the careful proofreading from Megan, the recommendations that had made me seem like an ideal applicant rather
than an average or questionable or shitty one.
Apparently, none of that had mattered.
Mom had paid Camp Watachwa to hire me for the summer. It made sense, the more I considered it. The camp got a pile of Mabrey money, with the caveat that they had to hire the Mabrey with the least potential. And since I was only going to earn two thousand dollars for eight weeks of round-the-clock labor, plus room and board—it was a good deal for them. All things considered, it was a fucking bargain.
* * *
Over the next few weeks, I tried to write this to Megan. She would have reassured me somehow, either by calling my mom a bitch or reminding me that she was essentially in the same position—a temp employee at the tax office because her mother was dating (schtupping, Megan would have said) the county tax assessor. She would have told me that those things happened all the time—it was all about knowing the right person, having the best connections. But in the end I was too humiliated—it was better to lie and say that Camp Watachwa was amazing, the summer was amazing, everything was amazing.
During the final week of camp, one wall of the cafeteria was dedicated to the art show. I had the campers help me choose their best work to put on display, the artists and titles of the work identified on three-by-five cards. There was “Sunset on Lake Watachwa” and “Spirit of Watachwa” and “Best Friends at Watachwa” and then, after they left, there were a few I’d added myself, “Camden and Julia”—a picture I’d taken of the two of them behind the pool shed, “Camden and Monique” behind the counselor’s bathroom, “Camden and Carly” down by the lake.
My pictures of Camden and his conquests were gone by the time the campers streamed in the next morning, leaving gaping holes in the display. When I sat down to breakfast, some of the girls at the table stood up with their trays and moved to the far end of the room. But some of them stayed, and one of them said, “It’s about time.”
In the end, though, it wasn’t really about Camden. My own mother had set me up for humiliation. I thought about throwing it in her face the moment I met up with my family again on The Island. You pretend to care about reputation, but you were pretty quick to ruin mine. How many girls had Camden told about my mother’s generous checkbook, her charity-case daughter? The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that she wouldn’t have denied it. She would have said, in the calm voice of a senator’s wife, that she was only looking out for my best interests.
Maybe it was time, then, that I started doing that for myself.
Megan
I spent most of the summer missing Keale like a phantom pain, half expecting to wake in the dorm room I shared with Lauren, to see her sleeping face buried beneath a dark swatch of hair. Instead, I’d opened my eyes to the beige walls of the spare bedroom in Gerry Tallant’s house, unpacked clothes spilling out of my duffel bag, a novel spine-down on the floor next to the bed. The few boxes stacked in the corner were all that remained from my childhood.
From eight to five, Monday through Friday, I sat at a desk tucked into the back of the tax assessor’s office, inserting numbers into templates, then printing and posting the letters for mailing. “A payment in the amount of $841.62 is due by the 15th. For every day after this date, a charge of $76.00 will accrue. After ninety days of delinquency...” It was depressing as hell to think of people opening these letters and scrambling to find the money for their payments, or living in fear of the moment that Uncle Sam would become the official owner of their property.
Sometimes, I borrowed Mom’s car to drive past our old house. New people lived there, now, and they’d spray-painted the rusting screen door and repaved the driveway—things Dad had always meant to do. There were yellow curtains hanging in the kitchen window and rose bushes along the south side of the house. Everything was familiar but different, changing and moving on.
I wondered what Dad would think of me, a college student with one year under my belt. Thinking about him never ceased to fill me with an aching emptiness. He’d never get to ask about my classes, never see me in a cap and gown, even though he’d made it all possible. For her part, Mom was interested in my life only insofar as it intersected with Lauren’s. How rich are they, really? Is her father as handsome as he looks on CNN?
After a week, I wrote to Lauren: I changed my mind. Maybe I want to work at Camp Fancy Pants after all.
She wrote back: Camp Fancy Pants wants you, too.
I asked for the last week of the summer, the week before I headed back to Scofield, off from work. I’d envisioned going to the community pool but spent my mornings in front of the TV and my afternoons driving around aimlessly, remembering things Dad and Mom and I had done together. At the end of the week, I visited the mall in Junction City with two hundred dollars from my temp earnings, wishing Lauren were there to advise me, fashion-wise. Of course, her advice would have been to go to nicer stores, to buy “higher quality” than what was available in the mall. I was coming out of the dressing room at Maurice’s with two pairs of jeans and an armful of shirts when I ran into Becky Babcock, holding a purple sheath dress on a hanger.
We hugged tightly, and Becky invited me to her end-of-summer party. “For everyone heading back to college. The whole gang. You should totally come,” she said, giving my arm a chummy squeeze.
“Thanks. That’s so nice, but...” Idiot, I cursed myself. I couldn’t even come up with a plausible excuse. Still, I’d stopped myself before saying, I’d rather stay at home and read a book or watch old movies with my mom and her boyfriend.
Becky’s eyes narrowed. “We’re probably not as exciting as your new friends, from what I hear.”
“Hey, no. It’s not like that,” I assured her, although it might have been exactly like that. “I’ll try to come.”
And so I’d gone to Becky’s party, and I’d refilled my red plastic cup more than once at the punch bowl, and I’d laughed with the girls I’d known in high school, most of whom hadn’t come to my dad’s funeral, and I’d listened to the gossip about who was dating whom and who was engaged or getting engaged, and who was knocked up or who wanted to get knocked up. I forced a smile until it felt real. What was the harm, being here? Soon enough I could be back at Gerry’s house, eating ice cream directly from the container, and in a week I’d be back in Connecticut with Lauren, back in the life that felt more like mine than this one did.
I was standing with Becky and her friends Shelly and Yvette, girls from neighboring towns who attended KSU, when Kurt Haschke stepped onto the patio. We locked eyes, and he came over.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Becky trilled, her voice rising dramatically. “I forgot that you two know each other.” She looked between the two of us, like she expected either sparks to fly or a fight to erupt, Jerry Springer–style, maybe with thrown chairs or pulled hair. Okay. If Becky Babcock knew about Kurt and me and last summer, everyone knew. Growing up in Woodstock should have taught me that nothing was private, that secrets only stayed intact if the other person died.
“How’s Massachusetts?” Kurt asked.
“Connecticut.” I smiled. “It’s fine.”
We stood a few feet apart, as if we were mere acquaintances, high school classmates who hadn’t seen each other since graduation day. He looked the same as the last time I’d seen him—a summertime tan, hair shorter on the sides, but otherwise the same guy who’d once drawn a heart on the riverbank and written our names inside.
“How’s here?” I asked.
“It’s fine.” He smiled. “It’s good.”
There was nothing else to say. We turned to look at the pool, where Becky and I used to float on giant rafts, holding cans of Diet Coke. Now it was swarming with bodies and beach balls. A guy wearing jeans and tennis shoes was pushed into the water, and then someone else in only a pair of striped boxers cannonballed in, to wild cheers.
“That idiot,” Becky said w
ith affection.
“Becks, come here,” someone called, and she wandered away.
Kurt and I stood side by side, not looking at each other. I wanted to ask about his auto tech program, but decided against it. If I’d said yes to his proposal, we might have been married already, living in someone’s basement apartment, scoping out furniture at garage sales and eating Pasta Roni for dinner. The truth was that we’d barely known each other then, and we knew nothing about each other now.
I crinkled my empty cup until the plastic snapped, the sides shattering. Since alcohol was officially forbidden in the dorms at Keale and high school barn parties were long behind me, I was out of the habit of serious drinking. My head felt heavy, and I thought longingly about Mom’s car, parked a block away.
Another guy ran past, jostling my elbow as he headed for the pool.
Kurt turned to me. “Do you want to get out of here?”
And I knew—of course I did—exactly what he meant. Later, I would try to explain it to myself, offering up rationalizations. I was drunk, I was lonely and maybe I didn’t care.
We were quiet as we navigated our way back through Becky’s house, out onto her front porch. My hair, damp with sweat, stuck to the back of my neck. Kurt still had his same truck, the lifted Dodge I’d been in so many times before. I grabbed the handle and hoisted myself upward, surprised at how the motion came back to me, like muscle memory. The engine sputtered and caught, and I knew where we were heading: the river, our old spot.
In that moment, it was as if there were two Megan Mazeroses—one who had gone to the party and left early, changed into pajamas and settled in front of the television. I could see her on the corduroy couch, could imagine her listless boredom as she flipped through channels on the remote, finding nothing. The other Megan, the one whose body I was trapped inside, sat motionless as Kurt reached for her waistband, tugging so hard that the metal button sprang off and clanged against the dashboard. He kept the A/C blasting while he rolled her jeans down her hips, while his hand unhooked her bra.
Here We Lie Page 11
