by Una LaMarche
“You wish,” Skylar said. She leaned forward and spun the bottle for her turn, and all the boys sat with rapt attention. After a few seconds, the bottle came to rest, pointing at Adam Loring.
“Yes!” Adam jumped up and pumped his fists like a boxer doing a victory lap around the ring. Jo glanced over at Emma nervously. Emma never said it outright, but Jo was pretty sure she had a crush on Adam. They had been spending a lot of time together lately. Emma caught Jo looking and turned away, pretending to be interested in a sailboat out on the lake.
“Ugh, Adam, you are so weird,” Skylar said.
“You know you love it,” he said, getting back down on his knees and leaning in for his kiss. Skylar tried to peck him, but he smushed his face into hers and grabbed her chin. Skylar shoved him away, but when she sat back down Jo saw that she was smiling and blushing.
“Best kiss of my life,” Adam said.
“Only kiss of your life,” Skylar teased.
“I get another one, though,” Adam said, reaching for the bottle. “Who’s it going to be? Which lady is feeling lucky today?” None of them were, as it turned out; the bottle landed on Greg. “Do-over!” Adam cried, but Greg snatched the bottle before he could get it.
“Nope, that means you get skipped,” Greg said, smiling. “My turn again.” He flicked his wrist and the bottle whipped around. Jo looked back over at Emma to make sure she was okay, and so she didn’t even notice that Greg’s low whistle of satisfaction was intended for her. “Yes! Gotcha! I knew I would get you!”
Jo looked down at the mouth of the bottle, a perfect little round O that matched her own mouth as it dropped open. She felt her face turn bright red. The older boys started slapping their hands on their knees and chanting “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” A few of the older girls joined in, along with Adam—of course. Adam loved any sort of spectacle, even if he wasn’t a part of it.
“No way,” Jo said, but the crowd drowned her out. She looked at Skylar and Maddie for support but they were busy laughing at Greg, who had gotten to his feet and started doing comical calisthenics, stretching his lips wide and blowing raspberries like an athlete warming up for an event. Jo craned her neck to look for Whitney. How long could a fight with a talking tooth really last, anyway? Why didn’t her dad hire more responsible counselors?
“I’m ready,” Greg said, beckoning to her from across the circle.
“Dream on,” she said, giving him the finger.
“Playing hard to get. I like it.” He leaned forward, and Jo saw beads of sweat clinging to the sparse hairs on his upper lip. This cannot be my first kiss, she thought.
“NO!” At first Jo thought she was having an out-of-body experience brought on by stress, but then she realized that it was Maddie who had screamed, not her.
“She said she’s not playing, jerkface, so leave her alone.” Maddie stood, moving in front of Jo, and put her hands on her hips. She was so tiny compared to Greg that it was like watching David face off with Goliath. Greg sat back on his heels and rolled his eyes.
“Fine, Freckles. It’s not like I would do anything anyway, since her dad runs camp.” He whispered something to the friends sitting next to him and they laughed.
“Didn’t you recently almost get expelled?” Emma piped up from behind them. “I bet instigating a kissing game with a bunch of young girls wouldn’t help your case.”
“We could have you out of here faster than you can say Clearasil,” Skylar snapped. Jo reached into the sand and grabbed the Coke bottle, flinging it into the nearby trees.
“Game over,” she said. She stalked off through the woods, trying to breathe deeply; the air in Onan always calmed her down, not like the frigid air conditioning at her mom’s house, scented liberally with seasonal Glade PlugIns, or the thin, stuffy air at school, which always made her feel like she had to take a nap. She took a few gulps and felt a little better, but when she stopped to wait for the others, in the clearing by the old toolshed, Jo realized she was shaking. She was usually so good at standing up for herself, but she’d frozen for a minute back there.
“I’m sorry,” Maddie said, ducking into the clearing with Skylar and Emma trailing behind her. “I shouldn’t have tried to fight your battle. I know you are more than capable. Actually, I’m kind of surprised you didn’t hit him.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jo said. “I needed the backup.”
“I should have stopped it before it got that far,” Skylar said. “I forgot that you’d never . . .”
“It’s embarrassing,” Jo mumbled at the ground.
“I’ve never, either!” Emma said. “That could have been me. Except no boys even want to kiss me, so at least you have that.”
“Yeah, if I change my mind I know those flaky, sweaty lips are waiting for me,” Jo joked, almost gagging at the thought. She couldn’t really imagine kissing anyone yet, but Greg was especially disgusting.
“Well, none of you should be embarrassed,” Skylar said. “My first kiss was during spin the bottle and it was awful. The guy shoved his tongue down my throat like . . . like an octopus tentacle!” The girls shrieked. “It wasn’t the way I wanted it to be at all,” Skylar said, wrinkling her nose at the memory.
“Mine, either,” Maddie said. “It was on the railroad tracks behind a trailer park! So romantic!”
“A trailer park?” Skylar asked incredulously. “Did you know someone who lived there?” Maddie shrugged.
“Boys are always ruining things,” Emma said. “We could have been collecting rocks or climbing trees or something, instead of worrying about them putting their tongues in our mouths.”
Jo nodded gravely. “I shouldn’t have let it happen,” she said. “They took advantage of my authority.”
“Jo, no offense, but—you’re twelve,” Maddie said, hugging her.
“Well, we have to be able to do something,” Jo said. “Let’s make a deal. We still have three weeks left, and the boys aren’t going to stop being annoying.”
“They can’t,” Maddie sighed. “It’s in their DNA.”
“So let’s make this summer about us doing what we want to do. No boys pushing us around, tricking us, or ruining our fun. And no kissing.”
“Hey!” Skylar cried.
“How about . . . unless it’s someone special that we really like?” Emma suggested.
“Fine,” Jo said. She knew that made her safe. None of the boys at Camp Nedoba seemed special to her. She hoped they never would.
Emma
Reunion: Day 2
RUNNING THROUGH THE WOODS BACK TO THE cabin with tears streaming down her face was becoming a theme in her relationship with Adam, Emma realized. Only last time she was in this state she was dying to turn around and go back to him, and this time she couldn’t get far enough away.
He’d barely said good-bye. He’d offered a hand to lift her out of the boat once they’d reached the mainland, but then he’d just hugged her and kissed her forehead. Her forehead. He might as well have given her a noogie.
“Come find me later,” she’d said, meeting his eyes for the first time since they’d left the island. I dare you to not to be a coward, she thought. I dare you to come find me tonight and prove to me that I didn’t just make a huge mistake.
“Yeah,” he’d said, “definitely.” And right then she’d realized precisely why people tried not to hook up with their friends. Coming from any other guy, she would have believed it. But she knew Adam. She knew that the scar on his shin was from crashing his bike when he was seven. She knew that he picked all the melon out of his fruit salad. And she knew from his tone that he was feeding her a line. Like she was anyone. Or, more accurately, like she was no one.
Emma had forced herself to turn and walk away at a normal pace. It was only once she was sure he couldn’t see her through the trees that she’d started to run.
She burst through the door of
Souhegan prepared to sob while her friends held her and then listened to her perform an exhaustive recap of her entire day, followed (hopefully) by the consumption of something full of trans fats. But the scene she found threw her for a loop.
There they were, the three of them, sitting and laughing in sweatpants and tank tops, flipping through magazines just like she hoped they would be. The setting was right, even down to the props: an open bag of Cheetos, teardrop-shaped bottles of candy-colored nail polishes, someone’s iPod cranked up to full volume so that it was audible through the headphones, Katy Perry’s vibrato reduced to a thin warble that sounded like the Dormouse from Alice in Wonderland, babbling inside his teapot to a techno beat. Everything was what she expected—except for the people.
Aileen, Jess, and Kerry looked up as she came in, their mouths dropping open.
“What happened to you?” Kerry asked, her eyes drifting down to Emma’s muddy shorts and scratched legs.
“Just a bad canoe trip,” Emma said. She braced herself on the edge of a bunk bed and tried to catch her breath. “Where is everybody?”
“At dinner, I think?” Aileen said, opening one of the nail polishes and turning her concentration back to her toes.
“Skylar and Maddie were here when we got back,” Kerry said. “I think mini-Ma . . . Jo went on a date.”
“A date?” Emma said. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” Kerry said. She leaned in conspiratorially. “Reunion makes everyone desperate.”
“Seriously,” Jess groaned. “Sunny needs to move on.”
Aileen looked up from her nail-painting and frowned at Jess. “Stop saying that,” she scolded. “We need to let her make her own decisions.”
“But Mark is such a d-bag,” Jess cried, pulling her tight curls up into a bun. “I literally cannot listen to one more monologue about how he was the one that got away.”
“I’m just saying, we’re not gonna change her mind,” Aileen said.
“Sorry,” Kerry said, rolling her eyes and smiling up at Emma. “We’re just having a little bit of drama this weekend.”
“Believe me,” Emma said, kicking her muddy flip-flops out into the grass, “I understand.”
She took a long shower in the vast, white-tiled room, grateful for the late-night solitude and for the din of the steamy streams that ricocheted off the seafoam green floor. It was calming white noise, and she needed to be calmed. She didn’t know what to think about Adam. They’d gone from such a high high to such a noncommittal middle that she started to think she might have done something wrong, something to make him change his mind. Maybe if she had agreed to stay overnight with him . . . maybe if she had waited that morning and gone over in a boat with him . . . maybe if she had just been more confident the night before, on the sandbar, or at the bonfire, or at dinner . . . maybe if she had never left camp . . . maybe if she had kissed him the last night of their last year . . . maybe if . . . maybe.
But she knew playing that game never went anywhere. It was simple logic, the kind of stuff she’d learned in elementary school: an exclusive disjunction. If she had done things differently, then things would be different. But she hadn’t. And neither had Adam. They had done things, and those things had consequences, and now she had to face them. And no amount of self-flagellation under a terrible low-flow showerhead was going to change that.
When she got back to the cabin, her skin scrubbed raw and pink, and her hair wrapped turban-style in a thin towel, Emma found Jo, Maddie, and Skylar in their beds, sleeping, reading, and listening to an iPod, respectively. The other girls had moved their slumber party back over to their side, but Sunny was still nowhere to be found, and Emma found herself hoping that she was off somewhere with Mark Slotkin, locked in a passionate embrace—one that would not end with a big blow off in a tiny boat.
“Hey,” she whispered, poking Skylar’s arm. Skylar rolled over and pulled out her earbuds. Her eyes still looked red and tired.
“Where have you been?” she asked. “You keep leaving.”
“I know,” Emma said. “It’s a long story.”
Skylar propped herself up on her elbows. “I’m really sorry about last night.”
“It’s okay,” Emma sighed. “Let’s talk tomorrow. I’m exhausted.”
“Okay . . .” Skylar was looking at her funny, like she was trying to read her face, but eventually put her earpiece back in and closed her eyes. Emma could hear strains of what sounded like the Pixies.
She sat on her bunk and dried her hair, keeping one eye on the door. Adam might come by—after all, he’d said he would. Maybe she wasn’t giving him enough credit. With this in mind, Emma put on a pink tank top with no bra and a pair of black silky pajama shorts.
“You look nice,” Maddie yawned, leaning over her bunk. “Got a hot date later?”
“I don’t think so,” Emma laughed. “Hey,” she said, lowering her voice. “They said Jo went on a date? Is that true?”
Maddie shook her head and grimaced. “Don’t ask,” she whispered. “She’s been in a bad mood ever since she got back.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” Jo grumbled with her face in her pillow.
See? Maddie mouthed, and turned back to her book.
Emma climbed into bed and stared up at the initials she’d scribbled onto the underside of the bunk. E + S = BFF. She wished it still felt true. She had never needed her friends more, but even though they were so close she could touch them, they’d never felt farther away.
Emma
Reunion: Day 3
EMMA WOKE WITH A START. SHE’D BEEN DREAMING about being out on the lake again with Adam, in the canoe. Only this time, they were in the middle of a thunderstorm and the lightning was hitting the water all around them. Emma was terrified and kept crying out for Adam to hold her, but he just kept rowing and rowing without turning around. A huge clap of imaginary thunder had woken her up, and for a few confused seconds she thought the storm must be real, especially when she heard tapping on the outside of the cabin, like heavy raindrops. But through the window right next to her bed she could see early moonlight on the grass outside, and it was dry. Emma sat up. Maybe Adam had finally come to apologize.
“Do you hear that?” Jo whispered. She was peering through the slats of the adjoining bunk. Emma nodded, just as a paper airplane flew into the cabin and landed on Jo’s lap. If it really was Adam, he had terrible aim.
“What the—” Jo jumped out of bed in her sports bra and shorts and was headed for the door when half a dozen other paper planes came whizzing in, hitting her in the legs and chest.
“Now!” cried a male voice. Fists beat against the cabin walls from the outside. Across the cabin, Sunny screamed. Emma was freaked out, but she was also pretty sure that serial killers didn’t usually take the time to fold origami before making their attack.
“Incoming!” Jo yelled, diving down into Emma’s bed. Maddie sat up in her top bunk and banged her head on a ceiling beam. Across the cabin, Sunny screamed as a silhouette appeared in the doorway. Emma thought for a second that it might be Adam—was this some kind of grand gesture? Because if so it was really weird so far—but as the figure stepped into the cabin she saw it was Matt Slotkin, wearing a tank top and pajama bottoms, and holding Jo’s megaphone.
“On your feet, ladies,” he shouted through the loudspeaker. Emma heard movement above her; Skylar was finally stirring. Three more boys clambered into the cabin, shining flashlights into the girls’ faces. Once her eyes adjusted to the glare, Emma could make out Mark, Bowen, and Zeke.
“Did I stutter?” Matt yelled. “On your feet. Now!”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jo demanded, standing up and shielding her eyes. “Is this some weird wake-up call?” She looked at her watch. “It’s not even five.”
“Silence!” Bowen yelled, and Jo flipped him off.
&n
bsp; “We’re just paying you a visit to make sure you’re in shape for the big game today,” Mark said, circling the cabin and banging on the bunks of the girls who hadn’t gotten out of bed yet. Emma saw Sunny shoot him a withering look. She stood up and crossed her arms over her chest, wishing she had kept her bra on. Adam was nowhere to be seen, but she was sure he had known about this—and maybe even helped plan it. It felt even more humiliating than being stood up.
“What are you talking about?” Skylar yawned, climbing down the ladder with a sheet wrapped around her.
“They’re making sure we’re tired, is what they’re doing,” Jo said angrily.
“That’s it, Putnam, drop and give me twenty,” Zeke yelled, pointing at the floor. “And you!” he waved his flashlight at Maddie. “Start doing jumping jacks.” This was not the sensitive art wunderkind Emma remembered, who used to make glazed vases by the dozen.
“Oh, shut up,” Skylar groaned. “What are you even doing here? Why are you even friends with them?”
“You guys can’t make us do anything,” Jo added. “We outnumber you!” She sneered at the boys, who had momentarily stopped their attack to pretend they were fighting each other with light sabers.
“Don’t worry, there’s no way I’m jumping up and down with no bra on, regardless,” Maddie said.
“Well,” Zeke said, turning to the twins and shrugging, “if they won’t do the boot camp I guess we should just go to plan B and take their clothes.” Bowen and Mark started grabbing suitcases and heaving them out onto the grass.
“No!” Sunny cried, guarding her bags. “I’ll do squats! I need to work on my glutes anyway.”
Jo snatched the flashlight out of Matt’s hand and shined it back in his face. “You think taking our clothes is going to keep us from beating you today?” she asked, narrowing her eyes. “It’s just going to make us beat you worse.”
“You can beat me naked anytime, sweetheart,” he taunted. Jo punched his arm, hard, and he cried out in pain.
