by Lexa Hillyer
She saw Tali’s antics from afar an hour ago and wonders if her mother will see fit to dole out punishments for her, too. It looked like so many of the campers had gotten involved that there was probably no way the Cruz could make all of them face the consequences. Besides, they might have been streaking, but none of them was the Cruz’s daughter. None of them was expected to be perfect.
“What’re you doing time for, anyway?” Rob asks, slacking off again on his duties by kicking a lost Nerf ball.
“None of your business.” She scrunches her face, watching as he retrieves the ball, which looks like it’s been half-eaten by vultures, and pokes his thumb into a hole in its yellow foam. “And this isn’t ‘doing time.’”
She knows she’s being huffy, but who cares? Rob Gurns is a basketball player, an all-around slacker, and fruit of the loins of not just one but two Okahatchee alums. He’s been at camp as many summers as Luce has, and she’s steadfastly stayed out of his way for just as long.
“We’re out here by the lake cleaning up other people’s shit. That’s doing time,” Rob insists, ripping the Nerf ball into two mangled halves.
“Well, I guess you would know,” Luce snaps bitterly. “You’re always in trouble for something, right?”
“Yeah,” Rob sighs. “But it’s such a deliciously delightful, herbally stimulating something. Just can’t help myself.”
Luce puts the garbage bag back down again. It’s getting heavy. They’ve been out here for almost three hours, collecting everything from used food containers to empty sunscreen bottles. She can’t believe what a wreck the lakeshore is. But that’s nothing compared to what a wreck Luce is. After getting caught in just her underwear two nights ago with Andrew, she never thought she’d hear the end of it from her mom. She can’t help but think she’s getting extra punished.
First, there was the humiliation of how they were caught: the midnight “moon walk” for the under-tens. Second, the unfairness of the punishments—all Andrew had to do was scrub down the tennis courts. But third, and far worse, was the look on her mother’s face. Luce can’t take it when her mom looks at her like that, and she has been trying to avoid her since.
Usually, Luce is the one who can be counted on—to make sure Julian and Silas have had their dinner and finished their homework, to give Amelia her medication before bed, to leave the light on for Dad. And not just at home, either: if it weren’t for Luce, there would be no SAT-prep course at Brewster, the Trivia Team would be no match for the Massachusetts Mathletes, and the National Merit Scholars would have no local spokesperson. Luce is the number-one problem solver, the girl who gets things done.
Now here she is, that same girl everyone relies on, that girl who never screws up, doing community service with Camp OK’s most notorious pot dealer, with utterly no hope of ever laying her hands on the merit badge.
Tonight is the fateful talent show, where Joy has to be voted Miss Okahatchee. And then tomorrow is the end-of-summer carnival and reunion. After tonight there’s only one day left to make sure they have everything they need for the photo booth. Twenty-four hours to make it back to the present, back to their real lives. And then, if their plan doesn’t work . . . well, it’s going to be two more years of doing everything exactly right—applying to Princeton all over again. Getting straight As. The tutoring, the babysitting, the committee leading, the student organizing, the plans, the rules, the—
“So let me guess,” Rob says, interrupting her thoughts. “You broke into the kitchens at night and scarfed all of the chili dogs?”
“Ew,” Luce says.
Rob shrugs. “Tell me, then. Imagination’s worth a thousand words.”
“That’s not the phrase,” Luce mutters.
“Huh?”
“It’s a picture. A picture’s worth a thousand words. Anyway, it’s nothing. I was just, um, out past curfew.”
Rob turns his face toward her. “Alone?”
“With Andrew,” she admits, her face flaming.
“Ah. Got it,” he says, and even though he’s clearly assuming wrong, she lets it go.
“Okay, let’s cut west,” she says with a sigh. “We still need to cover the area by the volleyball—”
“Why do you care so much?” Rob asks, cutting her off. He’s looking at her like she’s a science experiment—some chemical that could either explode or dissolve when placed into a substance.
“What do you mean?” Luce can feel her face heating up. “I’m just trying to clean up the beach, like we’re supposed to.”
“Do you always do everything you’re supposed to? Forget it. Don’t answer. I know you do.” He turns his back to her.
“You don’t even know me,” Luce says, fighting down the urge to slap him.
“I know you’re the Cruz’s daughter. Total good-girl type. Nerd. Cute, but still a nerd,” he says, adding up the facts as though he hasn’t completely insulted her. “Anyway,” he goes on, locating another mangled ball, tossing it into the air, and catching it. “It’s human nature to screw up. So just chill out already.”
Luce huffs out the breath she’s been holding. “Even you wouldn’t be chill if you knew what I have to deal with,” she says angrily, quietly, balling her hands into fists and then flexing them again.
“Oh yeah?” He still hasn’t turned around. He lets the ball drop, then fumbles in his pocket and—she can’t frigging believe it—actually pulls out a joint, lights it, and begins smoking. “Go on. Try me.”
Luce just stands there, uncertain. Should she report him? Finish cleaning up alone? Go back before the dining hall closes and give up for the night? Instead she says: “You wouldn’t get it.”
“Ah. So it’s girl stuff.”
“No, actually, it isn’t. It’s . . . it’s way more complicated than that.” She squints out over the lake, which has gone dark in the waning evening, the mountains swallowing the sunlight with one final shrug.
“Dude, what could be that complicated?” he asks, letting the smoke out of his slack-jawed mouth, like he can’t even be bothered to purse his lips around it. “Come on, Cruz. What’s got you so wound up?”
“Wound up?” Suddenly Luce is intensely, uncontrollably enraged. She throws her garbage bag into the sand, not even caring that some of the trash billows out of the top. “Oh, I’m not wound up, Rob. I’m freaking furious, okay? First you accuse me of caring too much, when really, ya know what? I’m the only one who cares. I have to care. When I don’t, when I let go, everything falls apart. Does that seem fair to you? Do you think I like being stuck out here with you? I mean, I never break rules. Never. I’m supposed to be Little Miss Merit Badge. Everyone else is always skipping curfew and never getting caught, so what are the chances? Why me? Is the whole freaking universe against me right now? Because that’s what it seems like, Rob. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask to be trapped back here in this horrible rehash of a life.”
Realizing she’s gone too far, Luce cuts off her own tirade. She shouldn’t have said that stuff about the universe, about rehashing her life. But it’s true, she is furious at the universe, or the unknown, or whatever it is, for throwing her back into the past without any say-so. She remembers how she used to go fishing with her dad, and they’d always have to toss the small ones back into the lake. That’s what she feels like: some rejected little fish, not good enough, tossed back into the murk. A furious fish. A furious fucking fish, who everyone takes for granted—her boyfriend, her family, her friends, even Rob fucking Gurns.
Finally, she registers Rob’s face—one of complete calm, as though he’s just channel surfing, as though she didn’t just fly off the handle and completely insult him in the process.
With a small heft of his long, awkward limbs, he moves closer to her. She stands there, numb, as he takes the joint out of his mouth—thinner and shorter than a cigarette—and wordlessly offers it to her.
She takes it automatically and holds it before her like a laboratory specimen.
“Don’t inhale too deep,” he says.
Luce stares at the rolled stub in her hand for a second longer. She’s done being angry, done worrying, done thinking. She pinches the rolled paper between her thumb and index finger like she’s seen Rob do, and tentatively puts it to her mouth. As she breathes in, she has the sensation of inhaling the overpowering scent of her aunt Alice’s matcha green tea while simultaneously choking on an ashtray. Her chest seizes and she begins coughing hard.
Rob pats her on the back roughly. “Okay, now try again,” he says, his voice strangely soothing. It feels good to just take orders from someone else, to not be the one running the show. This is Rob’s game now, his territory, and she can sense his authority taking over. “This time,” he adds, “go gentler, let it fill your mouth.”
She does what he says, mechanically, with precision, as though practicing playing the clarinet. This time it goes a bit better, and he coaches her on how to let the smoke back out of her mouth slowly; she still coughs but not as harshly as before.
Rob retrieves the joint from her and takes another hit, then says, “You’re a swimmer, right?”
Luce is startled—surprised that he knows this fact, when, even after almost ten summers of camp together, she knows so little about him. “Um, yeah. I am.” She wonders what else he knows about her.
“Okay, so it’s kinda like swimming. You breathe in, you hold, you release gradually. It’s pretty comfortable once you get the hang of it. Here, try again.”
He hands it back and she takes another hit, then imagines herself going under, delving into the tranquil turquoise of the Brewster athletic pool, the reassurance of water pressing in all around her, filling her ears and drowning out the whistles and shouts of the spectators above. Drowning out everything, until it’s just Luce and the water, and the constant push forward.
“Nice,” he comments as she releases the smoke. “Like a pro.”
In the middle of breathing out, Luce laughs. She didn’t expect to laugh, but there’s something so absurd about being told she did a good job by Rob Gurns, of all people. King of fuckups. Master of failing. She hands the joint back to him.
“So what’s this Red Badge of Courage that’s gotten your panties all tangled up?” he asks, and sits down on the sand, stretching his long legs out in front of him.
Luce does the same, with a long sigh, not even caring that he said panties, a word she usually can’t stand. By now it’s gone from dusk to darkness and cool wind from the mountains wraps around her, the same wind that’s gently rippling the lake’s surface. But she isn’t cold. The warmth of the weed is winding through her, making her feel like she’s floating just a centimeter above the ground.
She shakes her head, twisting the cheesy plastic purple ring around her finger—the one she’s been wearing ever since Andrew won it for her on the cruise. The one he gave to her, promising to be good to her forever. Its painted-on smiley face almost seems ironic to her, like a taunt.
Finally she says, “Jade Marino has been promised the merit badge this summer, but I wanted it—I needed it. I still do.” She takes another slow breath—in, hold, release. In, hold, release. “I’ve always won it: three summers in a row. But this summer, for some reason, everything’s gone differently.” She explains it all as though it’s a story about someone else, not her. “And it’s not even about actual merit. It’s sort of, like, a promise I made to someone else. I can’t really tell you why it’s important, but it is.”
Rob juts up his lower lip in thought. “So what you’re saying is, it’s the having it, not the meaning of it, that you’re after.”
“Exactly,” Luce responds as he hands the joint back to her. Some of the tension restricting her chest releases. It feels good to tell someone.
“In that case, there’re other ways you could go about getting your hands on that puppy,” Rob says.
Luce turns to him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, why don’t we just steal the thing?”
Luce gasps, causing herself to choke on smoke.
Rob starts laughing.
Luce gives him a hard look through her coughing, which turns into laughter as well.
They both lie back against the sand, giggles rippling easily out of them like water. Before Luce knows it, she’s snorting. She can’t even remember the last time she laughed in such a relaxed, effortless way.
“If it weren’t so absurd,” Luce says between snorts, “I would say that’s actually a really good idea, Rob.”
“If it weren’t so absurd, it wouldn’t be a good idea.” Rob sits up, takes the butt of the joint and puts it out, burying it in the sand. She feels light-headed as he leans over, grabs her hands, and pulls her back to her feet.
Before Luce really knows what’s happening, she’s following Rob through the musky, darkened woods with their trash bags in hand, snickering. The trees and branches form an obstacle course and Luce dodges them, keeping her eyes on the white of Rob’s T-shirt, barely noticing a scratch here or a near-tumble over roots there.
“Slow down!” she whisper-shouts. “I’m supposed to be heading to the talent show! It’s gotta be starting soon.”
Rob turns around. “Are we on a mission or not?”
She feels a ripple of dread now. “Wait. Crap. Are we gonna get caught? I can’t get in trouble again. Forget it. This was a terrible idea, Rob. I need to go. I need to get to—”
“Shhhhh.” He puts his hand to his lips. “You’re getting paranoid. It’s just the pot. Come on, follow me.”
She does. Sooner than she expected, the back of the main office building emerges through the inky night, lit from within by the after-hours emergency lights.
“To the right,” she commands. “My mom keeps all the trophies and badges in the prize shed.” Saying it aloud confirms what they’re really up to, but for some reason she doesn’t care. The acceptance speeches are scheduled for tomorrow afternoon, and that’s when the badges will actually be doled out. If Luce steals the merit badge, her mother will be forced to hand Jade a different honor, and Luce can then sneak off with her friends later that evening, get inside that photo booth, and make it back to the present. Then none of this will matter. It will all be erased.
Or none of this will work, and she’ll be stuck living her life over again, stuck on what she’s now realizing is a miserable repetition of expectations and assignments and tasks and awards and hard work and lots and lots of winning badges just to win badges. She tries to shut off the spiraling thoughts. Like Rob said, it’s probably the marijuana making her paranoid.
They deposit their trash bags into the big green Dumpster, and Rob accidentally lets the lid clang shut afterward. They both cringe at the sound, but no one shows up to scold them. Luce waves Rob over to the back of the main offices next, where she gestures for him to crouch down. She peers through her mother’s office window.
Bernadette Cruz is fastidious in her neatness—the room is spare, with two matching leather chairs, a set of filing cabinets, a bookcase, and a series of ribbons and medals won by Luce. For a brief second, she feels a wave of not quite sadness . . . something more like distance. As much time as she’s spent inside that very office, she has the odd feeling that she’s peering in on someone else’s life. The room is dimly lit, the computer’s screen saver casting an eerie blue glow as pictures of Luce, her two brothers, and their little sister pop up on it like shuffled cards. There’s one of the twins in braces and hockey uniforms, one of Amelia in the helmet she used to have to wear before her surgery, one of Luce and her dad hugging after Luce completed a swimming competition, coming in third place. She remembers how she had to fake a smile while swallowing her anger and frustration about failing to secure first place, even though she’d beaten her record.
Rob taps Luce on her shoulder and she
squats back down. “She’s gone. Come on.” They crawl across the grass to the shed and Luce points to a high window, the same one that Tali used to boost Zoe up into when they were kids stealing from Bernadette’s spare-candy stash. Luce always refused to be directly involved, though once they were safely stowed away in the Stevens she was happy to partake of an equal share of the hard-won goods.
“Boost me up,” she commands in a whisper.
Rob botches the first try. Luce falls into Rob’s chest awkwardly.
He snickers. “Sorry, dude, I wasn’t ready.” He holds out his hands again.
She grabs his shoulders, and puts one foot into his hands, holding on as he easily hoists her up to the window. It’s smaller than she remembers. She pushes the glass pane upward and thrusts the upper half of her body through. Her bottom half proves a bit trickier, and she wavers there for a second, feeling like a total idiot with her butt hanging out in the night air, trying not to dissolve into laughter again. Then she grabs onto a sturdy metal shelf and heaves herself farther into the darkened shed, managing to get one leg through and then the other, climbing down the shelves.
She stands there waiting for the objects inside the crowded shed to take form as her eyes adjust. It smells of must and plastic and, faintly, Skittles. All sounds from outside seem muffled by the thick darkness within.
Gradually she is able to see that the metal shelves are lined with plastic Container Store bins, each labeled with an age group, a cabin, an activity, an accolade. Luce can barely make out the writing on the labels, even up close, with only the light from the moon through the window to read them by, but she manages to locate the three bins designated for the badges, alphabetically ordered. In the bin labeled K through R, she is shocked to find not just one but several copies of each badge. There are about twenty-five kinship badges in a row at the front of the box. Her head feels thick, her eyes slow, her hands clumsy. Something about this box makes Luce’s stomach drop. It’s not like she ever thought winning the badge was all that special, but still . . . Seeing them all lumped together like that, unceremoniously, makes the whole thing seem like a joke. Meaningless.
