by Kim Fu
Camp Forevermore
Siobhan was awoken the next morning by her full bladder. Daylight showed through the nylon of the tent. She was surprised that Jan hadn’t woken them, as the cabin counselors had, with clapping and merry shouts.
Siobhan became aware of a sickly sweet, mammalian smell that made her worried that she’d wet her sleeping bag. Her eyes still bleary with sleep, she stumbled as she stepped over Dina, accidentally kicking the other girl in the back, and Dina squealed in waking and protest. Siobhan unzipped the flap and sat at the entrance with her legs sticking out to put her shoes back on. She hobbled away from the tents to squat behind a tree.
As she pulled her pants up, she heard Dina screaming.
Siobhan sprinted back. The other three girls rushed out of their tent. Dina stood in her socks by the flat, scorched spot where their fire had been, her mouth wide and blaring like a siren. Nita shoved her feet into her sneakers. She grabbed Dina by the shoulders, shaking her and yelling her name. “What is it? What? Why are you screaming?”
Siobhan ducked her head back into the tent. Jan was still there, lying flat on her back. Bundled tightly, mostly hidden by her yellow sleeping bag, she looked like an enormous caterpillar. Her eyes were open and staring up at the pitched apex of the tent. The wildness that Siobhan had seen in them the night before was gone. A faint blue stained Jan’s temples, the color of veins or an old bruise.
Siobhan knelt at the threshold of the tent, unwilling to go closer. “Jan?” Jan didn’t move or blink. Her jaw hung loosely open. Not like she was surprised, but like a dentist had just said, Open wide!
Siobhan waited. Part of her believed that Jan would cough, flutter her eyes, sit upright, apologize for scaring them. Dina’s screaming died down outside. She could hear the other girls talking. Andee said, “Did you try to wake her up?”
When Siobhan reemerged, Nita asked, “Well?”
Siobhan found she didn’t have the air in her lungs to speak. She just shook her head.
“I did it!” Dina yelped.
They turned to her.
Dina was crying and hiccupping, barely able to get out the words. “I talked about her dying and then she did. I cursed her.”
Siobhan felt a flash of annoyance. Now, she thought, is not the time for this babyish nonsense. The annoyance was a relief, a way of galvanizing around a different emotion, something other than the terror that hovered like movement at the edge of her vision.
Nita put her arm around Dina’s neck and guided her roughly so that the five girls stood together in a circle, in front of the tents and Jan. Isabel had her arms crossed, shivering as she rubbed her upper arms.
“What do we do?” Andee said.
“We need to get help,” Siobhan said.
“Right,” Nita said. “We should start kayaking back to Forevermore.”
“What? No,” Siobhan said. “We’re already on the big island. We just need to walk to town and find a phone.”
Nita gestured around them, at the enclosed beach and the pathless woods. “And which way is town?”
“We just walk away from the water, and we’ll hit a road eventually. Jan had a compass. I think it’s . . .” Siobhan hesitated. “I think it’s in our tent.”
“We know Forevermore is four, five hours away. We know we can make it because we did it yesterday. We don’t know how far town is.”
“We know it’s closer than Forevermore! We’re already here!” Siobhan yelled.
“Don’t you remember what Jan said? She said we’d camp somewhere that was miles from anyone, and no one would ever stumble upon us. But if we get in the boats, we just keep paddling east and we’ll be back to the mainland!”
“We didn’t get here in a straight line,” Siobhan said. “The route was complicated. I’m sure there was a good reason. Rocks and . . . stuff. Water that’s not safe.” The inherent safety of land over water seemed obvious to Siobhan. Her incredulity made the words jumble in her mouth, made her sputter, like having to argue that the sky was blue as it hung above them, plain to see.
“There’s a map of the islands in Jan’s bag,” Nita argued.
“But we don’t know where on the big island we are!”
“Exactly!”
Dina was still sniffling. Through her tears, she said, “They’ll notice when we don’t come back today. They’ll come looking for us. Maybe we should just stay here.”
“But nobody knows we’re here,” Andee said, with dawning horror. “They think we’re on Lumpen.”
Nita rubbed her forehead. “We could go back to Lumpen and wait there. Or half of us could wait on Lumpen in case rescuers come, and the other half could continue on to Forevermore in case they don’t.”
“No,” Siobhan said. “We’re not splitting up. That’s the worst thing we could do.”
“Why?” Dina asked.
“It . . .” Again, Siobhan felt stymied by the obviousness of what she wanted to say. Why did Dina have to be so stupid? “It just is!”
“Guys,” Isabel said, very softly, like she didn’t want to wake a dangerous animal. “Look.”
The girls turned in the direction Isabel pointed, toward the water. Nothing immediately appeared to be amiss. The bland slapping of the waves on the shore, the dull-colored water and rocky sand, the overcast morning, the thorny vines. “What?” Andee said.
“The kayaks,” Isabel said.
The pile of boulders held no sign of the anchor loop that Jan had jammed in the day before. Off in the distance, static at the horizon as though teetering over the edge of the world, far enough to look unaffected by the motion of the waves, a sliver of red was tethered to a bundle of neon green. The kayaks had sorted themselves into their most buoyant arrangement.
Dina’s crying escalated again, piercing as a newborn’s. Siobhan looked around and took stock of the supply bags: two by the tents, one in the tent with Jan, one tied between the trees. “There were water jugs and stuff in Jan’s kayak,” Siobhan said, “and the first-aid kit.”
“We should go after them,” Nita said.
“What? How?” Siobhan said.
“We should swim after them. Quickly, while we can still see them.”
“Are you crazy? The water is freezing cold. And look how far away they are.”
“We need those kayaks! You know we do! The longer we spend talking about it, the farther away they get!”
“And then what? We’re going to pull them back to land?”
“We can jump in and paddle them back!”
“The paddles are still here,” Isabel said.
“So we’ll swim out holding the paddles, and—and . . .” Nita stomped her foot. “I don’t care what you do, but I’m going.”
“Nita,” Siobhan said. The other girl looked agitated, keyed up for a fight. “Nita, you’ll drown. Or freeze. Okay?”
Then Nita was crying too. Not like Dina was—angry, defiant tears seemed to escape under their own power and Nita shoved them away by the cuffs of her sweatshirt. “What happened to Jan?”
“I don’t know,” Siobhan said. Watching Nita cry stung her eyes. Before she realized it, Siobhan was crying too. She tried to sound brave. “I guess she was sick.”
“Maybe that cut on her leg got infected? Or there was something poisonous in her tea?” Nita suggested, almost reflexively.
“Can that kill you in one night?” Andee asked.
Siobhan tried to think of things that killed people quickly. What part of you, if it failed, immediately meant the end? “Or, like, her heart? A heart attack? Or her brain?”
“An aneurysm,” Nita said.
“Maybe she was sick and she didn’t tell us,” Isabel said. They’d never heard Isabel use full sentences before this conversation. She still spoke in a tiny, breathy whisper, but there was something solid underneath, a surprising conviction.
“Why do adults do that?” Dina wailed.
“Maybe that’s why she wanted to do the trip this year, even though she’s not a counsel
or,” Isabel continued. “Maybe she knew it would be her last chance.”
Siobhan doubted this, from what she knew about grown-ups. It seemed unlikely Jan would intentionally spend her last days with a bunch of unfamiliar children. How could anyone, even Jan, like Forevermore that much? Why wouldn’t she do adult stuff? Drink and smoke cigarettes and stay up late and go to nightclubs and travel anywhere in the world she wanted?
Nita blew her nose into her pinched fingers and wiped her hand on her sweatshirt. “Well,” she said, “I guess we have no choice but to try and walk to town. Which way should we go?”
Four pairs of eyes rested on Siobhan, and one stared blankly into infinity inside the tent. Siobhan didn’t want to be the leader; she just didn’t want to get back into the kayaks. “We should eat breakfast first,” she declared. “Before we set out. And—see what supplies we have left.”
Lowering the food bag took on a serious, ceremonial air, like lowering a flag to half-mast. They each took a turn at puzzling over the pulley-winch system, before Nita climbed the tree and yanked the whole setup down. “If Nita can do it, a bear could have,” Siobhan said under her breath. She was criticizing the arrangement, not comparing Nita to a bear, but Andee heard and glowered at her.
“Really?” Andee muttered, watching Nita shimmy down the tree. “You’re going to keep being a bitch? Now?”
No one had ever called Siobhan a bitch before. Her legs wavered underneath her and then steadied, like she’d just caught a medicine ball in gym class.
Nita rooted around the food bag. “More camp food. One pouch of instant oatmeal, one pouch of instant hot cocoa. Six wrapped PB and Js, six cookie packets, six cans of fruit cocktail—”
“We should write this down,” Siobhan said.
“Why?” Nita asked.
“I don’t know.” It was something they would have done in an adventure book. Take inventory.
Nita continued, “There’s two leftover hot dogs from last night, half a bag of marshmallows. Two big bottles of water.”
“Oh, good—so they weren’t all in the kayak,” Dina said.
“And this.” Nita took out a drawstring cloth bag. She opened it and the girls gathered in closer. There was a bag of trail mix, a package of gummy bears, and a single candy bar. “Jan’s secret stash, I guess.” Nita plucked something out of the cloth bag and held it up for the others to see. It was a Ziploc bag rolled up around a white twist of paper.
“What is that?” Siobhan said.
“Seriously?” Andee said.
Siobhan guessed that Dina and Isabel didn’t know either, from the looks on their faces, but they were smart enough to keep their mouths shut.
“It’s a joint,” Andee said, exasperated. “Pot. Weed. Marijuana. Drugs.” She added another synonym each time Siobhan failed to rearrange her confused expression.
“Jan wouldn’t do drugs,” Siobhan said firmly. Teenagers with greasy hair, the ones who shoved Siobhan and stole her beloved frog-shaped wallet last summer, while she was waiting to be picked up outside the amusement park—they did drugs. The basement-dwelling uncle her family visited briefly on Christmas morning every year, because he wouldn’t leave his dark, dank house. Not straight-laced, tough-love Jan, singing the camp song louder than anyone, with the force of the hundreds of girls she’d heard in the past. And I shall love my si-is-ters . . . She’d never sing it again, Siobhan realized. She shuddered.
Andee rolled her eyes. “Clearly she did.”
“She’s dead,” Siobhan said.
“So?”
Isabel murmured, “So you shouldn’t say bad things about a dead person.” Andee looked chastened. Once again, Isabel had the last word. Siobhan noticed that Isabel’s gaze and attention kept drifting, her head cocking to sounds, as though she were expecting a visitor.
Nita tucked the weed back into the cloth bag. “So, oatmeal?”
At the fire pit, Siobhan was able to recite highlights from Jan’s lecture on how to build a fire, but when she looked down at the remains of the previous fire, and the remaining fuelwood—in the cold morning light, the branches looked larger and damper, like they’d swollen with absorbed night moisture and dew—she had no idea how to act upon it. Nita listened to Siobhan’s faltering recitation, and then said, “We’ll need her lighter and starter.”
“Where are they?” said Dina.
“In her bag,” Siobhan said. “In the tent.” After a pause, she added, “I’ll get it.”
Siobhan dashed in and out of the tent as quickly as she could, grabbing Jan’s bag and a bundle of her own things, trying not to look. She almost crashed into Isabel, who had trailed behind her as stealthily as a shadow. “I just wanted to see her,” Isabel said.
“I don’t,” Siobhan said, hurrying past.
Nita got a faint glow to appear at the center of last night’s woodpile and the girls sighed with outsize relief. Siobhan thought of a scene in the last book she’d read before leaving home, where some children find a dead fairy, a winged woman the size of a fist, and bring her back to life. Nita and Andee fanned the glow gently to flames. Dina poured water into Jan’s pitted metal pot before asking how they were supposed to suspend it over the fire. Siobhan stuck a long branch through the pot handle, and she and Nita held it up on either end. Andee swapped in for Siobhan when her arms got tired.
They scraped the oatmeal into the camp-issue, disposable foam bowls. Andee was the first to lick her bowl clean, pushing her whole face into the bowl, then they all did. What went unspoken was how much work this meager meal had been, how strangely draining, even for Isabel and Dina, who had done nothing but stand to the side, looking anxious.
“We should get walking,” Nita said.
Dina was staring into the fire. She still wasn’t wearing shoes or a jacket. She hadn’t gone back to the tent, and her socks must have been soaked through. “I don’t want to put out the fire.”
Nita was rooting through Jan’s bag. “Where’s her compass?”
Siobhan didn’t want to say, but it couldn’t be avoided. “She wore it around her neck.”
“We need it,” Nita said carefully. Not volunteering.
“I’ll get it,” Isabel said.
They turned to her, surprised. Tiny, pocket-size Isabel. Nita said, “Can you get her watch too?”
“You don’t have to,” Siobhan said quickly. Lifting the compass over Jan’s head was bad enough, but to get the watch, Isabel would have to unzip the sleeping bag, undo the clasp around Jan’s cold wrist, and run off with it while Jan watched, as a mannequin watches. Grave-robbing.
“I can do it,” Isabel said.
“And my stuff,” Dina added, her voice falling, uncertain. “My sleeping bag, and my dry bag, and my jacket, and my shoes.”
Isabel nodded.
As they waited for Isabel, they stared silently at their feet, ashamed and apprehensive. They listened to Isabel scrabbling around inside the tent, trying to interpret the soft, small sounds. When she emerged, she had everything. She had even rolled up Dina’s sleeping bag and stuffed it back into its carrier.
Thanking Isabel seemed insufficient, so no one said anything. They turned their attention to the problem of carrying everything, how to consolidate and divide the tents, sleeping bags, dry bags, and food bag between them. The larger bags had cross-body straps that were not made for long-distance carrying, and they were so loose around the girls’ bodies that they’d have to knot them. “Do we need the tents and sleeping bags?” Dina asked. “Is it really going to take more than a day to walk to town?”
“Probably not,” Siobhan said. “But . . . just in case?”
“But they’re so heavy. All of this is so heavy.”
“We can’t leave her,” Isabel said suddenly.
“What?”
“Jan. We can’t just leave her.”
“Why not?” Andee demanded.
Isabel had a strange, vacant expression. “Someone has to stay with her.”
“She’s dead,” Andee
said harshly. “She doesn’t care.”
“She might get eaten by a bear,” Dina whispered.
“Crows, more likely,” Nita said, peering up at the sky.
“Don’t joke about that!” Siobhan snapped.
“I wasn’t joking.”
“Someone has to stay with her,” Isabel repeated. “She can’t be alone, in case . . . I’ll stay with her. You guys go.”
“No,” Siobhan said. She repeated it louder. “No. No, no, no. We are not splitting up. We are not leaving anyone behind.”
“We need you to help carry stuff,” Nita said.
Isabel gave her a weary look and offered up her palms, as though to remind them of her toddlerlike stature. “I’ll wait here in case someone from Forevermore comes to look for us. Maybe someone knows about this spot, or they’ll see the kayaks and figure it out. And if not, when you guys get to town, you can send help for me and Jan.”
“Jan’s dead!” Andee insisted, a waver in her voice like she might cry. Siobhan felt it too, the urge to start crying again, furious with Isabel: Why was she doing this?
“That way you’ll only have to carry one tent,” Isabel went on, like she hadn’t heard. “You can all fit in one.”
“What if we’re gone all night?” Siobhan said. “Are you going to sleep . . . in the tent . . . with Jan?”
“If I have to,” Isabel said.
“Isabel makes a good point,” Nita said. “If someone finds her, she can tell them which way we went. Or if we get to town first, we can tell them where Isabel is.”
“And Jan,” Isabel added.
“Jan’s dead.” Andee seemed unable to say anything else. “What is wrong with you?”
“We’ll leave you some of the food and one of the water bottles,” Nita said, already pulling packets out of the food bag, making decisions. Leaving Isabel one sandwich, one cookie pack, and all the heavy cans of fruit cocktail. “We should get going. It’s getting later and later.”
“You saw her,” Siobhan said. Isabel stared at her feet through her eyelashes.
