The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore

by Kim Fu

  Isabel walked closer than she needed to, passing her locker and turning into the stairwell by the end of the hall. Her first thought was: Well, that makes sense.

  Such was the consensus. Mira and Elliott made so much sense everyone wondered how they’d never thought of it before; their coupledom held the satisfaction of solving a riddle. Mira was the tallest girl in school, for starters, five-ten barefoot and five-eleven in the lace-up boots she wore most of the time. Like Elliott, she was exquisitely pretty but unapproachably weird. Despite her height, she looked fragile, fine-boned, her long arms and legs the circumference of broomsticks, her mouth a tiny rosebud, her face angelically pale. She spaced out of conversations and class, preferring to draw, sometimes abstract doodles and sometimes near photo-realistic sketches of what was in front of her. She was a satellite friend of one group of girls, as Mira seemed to like clothes and talking about them, but they wearied of her sudden silences and disappearances. They accused her of thinking she was superior, floating above the sweaty masses, keeping her hands clean. She just floated away from the accusation. She was untouchable.

  Together, embracing against the radiator, Elliott and Mira looked like normal teenagers. Smiling, a little shy, caught up in each other.

  The destruction of his home had only slightly dampened Mr. Greeley’s enthusiasm. The class worked on a quickie midyear production of A Christmas Carol.

  Isabel was last to leave, besides the teacher, on a cold afternoon in early December. She felt woozy from spray-painting food for the feast scene. She went out through the prop closet door, trying not to think about everything that had happened there. She let it slam locked behind her. The winter sun set against the fast-encroaching night, an orange blossom on black.

  Elliott sat on the railing outside the door, staring out.

  Isabel stopped in her tracks. Before Mira, she had schemed and wished for a meeting just like this. Now she just wanted to skulk past, unseen.

  He turned his head lazily in her direction. “Hey, Isabel. I was waiting for you.”

  Isabel couldn’t process this statement.

  He jumped down from the railing. “Do you need to be someplace? Can you go for a walk with me?”

  Her voice finally emerged. “Okay,” she croaked.

  They walked together. No one saw them. The school campus was deserted. They crossed the parking lot, past the edge of the woods where the stoners would have been, along the road, farther down toward the overpass. Elliott didn’t speak, so Isabel didn’t try. They walked west, into a sun that blinded but offered no warmth. Isabel shivered in her thin coat. She wished, wistfully, that Elliott would put his arm around her.

  He led Isabel off the path, through some low scrub, the weeds that survive frost, down to a gap between the pillars of a pedestrian bridge. Hidden there, pressed against the mossy brick, freezing, they embraced, Elliott drawing Isabel into a kiss. His hands wove inside her clothes and she felt as if their glorious and terrible summer had never ended.

  Afterward, she felt even colder than before. Darkness had fallen in full. Isabel became conscious of the roar of cars in the near distance and the occasional footsteps above their heads. She asked in a whisper, “What about Mira?”

  Elliott took a while to answer. “This has nothing to do with Mira.” He started scrambling up the hillside without her.

  It happened a few more times that month. Twice more under the bridge. Once under the outdoor bleachers of the football field, a frozen metal ledge digging into her back. Once in a gully in the woods that edged the parking lot, the icy creek rushing just past their feet.

  It seemed unreal that this was going on in the early dark before she went home for dinner with her parents. Even as a young child, she’d been aware that her parents adored her, and that they didn’t know her at all; somehow she’d known not to believe them when they told her she was the smartest, sweetest, most beautiful girl in the world. They’d bought her clothes that were too large, the size on the tag for an average-size child her age, in what they said was her favorite color—it wasn’t, but she didn’t correct them. When she’d returned from Forevermore, she felt it was her job to reassure and comfort them, to downplay the grisliest details, and not the other way around.

  Now they stared at her across the table with those well-meaning, puzzled expressions, as she struggled to smile for them, to humor them as she always had. She still had to wake up and go to school, walk the fluorescent-lit halls, absorb the trivia she was supposed to be learning, listen to the juvenile concerns of her peers, when all the while she was committing an adult sin.

  Ebenezer Scrooge brought down the house.

  Shortly before Christmas, out shopping for presents for her family, Isabel stood at a mall kiosk that sold goldfish in filterless, cube-shaped tanks. She stared into their bulging, empty eyes and tried to justify buying one for her mother. When she looked up, she found herself staring into another set of bulging, soulless eyes: Gabe’s.

  He was standing on the other side of the kiosk grinning at her. A place to lay her rage. A target nobody would care about. Everything was his fault; nothing was his fault. Gabe winked and then walked away, almost vanishing into the Christmas-shopping crowds. Without a plan, Isabel followed him. She stalked him all the way to his car in the parking lot, the red paint growing patches of rust that looked like a fungal disease.

  Gabe appeared to be looking around for someone else when he spotted her. A flash of fear crossed his face before his bravado returned, his big, leering smile. He opened his mouth to say something but Isabel cut him off. “Stop telling people I slept with you, you creep.”

  She watched him turn this over in his mind. It had been so long that he’d forgotten. “Oh, yeah,” he said, the light coming on. “At the cast party last year, right?” His smile widened at the memory. “It was just a goof. Nobody believed me anyway.” He opened his arms and made a welcoming gesture with his hands. “We could go make it true.”

  As Isabel sputtered, clenching her fists, Gabe waved at someone behind her. The boy was unmistakably related to Gabe, with the same features and small head, the same olive skin, even the same bowl haircut. He was a hair taller and had large, round glasses like Isabel’s. He walked right past Isabel as though she weren’t there. “Okay,” he said to Gabe, dully. “I’m ready to go.”

  “This is my cousin Eugene,” Gabe said. Eugene got into the unlocked car without speaking or even turning in Isabel’s direction. “Want to come with us? We’re going to watch Die Hard at my house.”

  Isabel stared at Gabe incredulously. In what world would she say yes?

  For an instant, she saw herself from the outside. From far above, she and Gabe the size of cockroaches, and just as important. She felt the urge to self-destruct, to grind them both out beneath her shoe. She felt a remote curiosity about Gabe, what life he could possibly live outside of school.

  Without agreeing out loud, she opened his backseat door and climbed in. She left the door open. She crossed her arms and threw Gabe a hard, challenging look, straight in the eyes. Eugene continued to face forward, uninterested.

  Gabe put one hand on the roof of the car and leaned in, his brow furrowing. He thought better of whatever he was going to say. His expression brightened and he slammed Isabel’s door shut, walking around to the driver’s side.

  Garbage filled the floor of the backseat, mostly school papers and fast-food bags and drink containers. Isabel didn’t listen as Gabe nattered on and Eugene stayed stone silent. She was busy trying to keep her pants clean and dig out a space with the tip of her boot.

  When they pulled into Gabe’s parents’ carport, Isabel realized Gabe had been bragging about something the whole way there. He kept talking as they got out of the car. “Even have my own entrance. So my parents have no idea when I come and go.”

  He led them through a door at the back of the carport, directly into a large basement bedroom. An L-shaped black leather couch dominated the space, packed tightly with an unmade bed, a
n empty aquarium, and a computer desk. The leather was cracked and worn, flaking off at the seams, and the rank smell of sweat and unwashed sheets filled the room. A pyramid of empty energy-drink cans stood against one wall. Two haphazard holes, each the size of a fist, had been cut high up on the wall across from the couch. Gabe noticed Isabel looking at them. “I’m wiring in a speaker system,” he explained.

  She drifted over to the aquarium. “What happened to your fish?”

  Gabe shrugged. “They died.”

  Eugene flopped down on the couch. He stared at the blank wall. “I thought we were watching a movie,” he said in his deadpan voice.

  Gabe fiddled with a hacked-together machine on a shelf, which appeared to consist of a VHS camcorder, an overhead projector, and a thick mess of wires and glass plates. Isabel sat beside Eugene, who continued to ignore her. The couch sighed and squeaked beneath her. Eventually Bruce Willis appeared on the wall, fuzzy and overstretched. “I rigged the projector up myself,” Gabe said. He produced three cans of energy drink from a mini-fridge under the desk. In spite of herself, Isabel was a little impressed by the separate entrance, the mini-fridge, the couch, the faint, slimy resemblance to her idea of a grown-up apartment. Nobody she knew had a bedroom like that.

  “No, you didn’t,” Eugene said, taking the can from Gabe without looking, without any more movement than was strictly necessary. “I did.”

  Gabe sat on the other side of Isabel, trapping her between them. His sidelong glances revealed disbelief that she was there at all.

  Twenty minutes into the movie, with another squeak of the couch, Gabe lunged. He tried to kiss Isabel on the cheek. She turned her head and caught him on the mouth. Their eyes stayed open. She watched his eyebrows jump up his forehead. A perverse note of glee sang through her, black laughter bubbling up. She felt powerful. The mother of chaos. They leaned toward each other, their arms hanging limply at their sides, not touching anywhere else. A foot away, Eugene watched the movie and sipped at his drink. He got up to go to the bathroom, returned, and sat down in the exact spot he’d left.

  Isabel drew away. She reveled in Gabe’s dumbfounded expression for a moment longer, and then stood up and walked out. Nobody would believe him anyway.

  Christmas break rolled on. In the dead space between Christmas and New Year’s, Isabel met up with Marcy. They had hot chocolate in a café that had fake snow sprayed in the window corners, shiny red paper trees spinning idly on strings.

  Isabel knew Elliott and Mira hung out in this café, and masochistically hoped to see them there. She got half her wish. Mira had a large corner table to herself, her tea cold and forgotten. Art supplies covered the table: a drafting board, paper-cutting knife blades, pencil crayons. She worked at something in a sketchbook, concentrating so intently her mouth hung slack.

  Marcy had a gift for Isabel, a childish-looking bracelet she’d made from fishing wire and beads. Isabel had nothing for Marcy.

  “I have to tell you something,” she began.

  “About why you’ve been so weird all semester?” Marcy asked, looking around.

  “Yes.”

  Marcy put her chin in her hand, in mock interest. “Okay. Explain it to me.”

  “I was seeing this older guy.”

  “Oh my God!” Marcy shrieked. Other patrons turned to look at her and she drew Isabel down, their heads nearer to each other and the table. “What older guy? Who is he?”

  “You don’t know him.” This felt true. “And we were . . . sleeping together. And I know we promised to tell each other but I just couldn’t. I didn’t know how.”

  Marcy covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh my God,” she said again, muffled. “Was it . . .” She lowered her hands. “How was it?”

  Isabel didn’t have the words to answer. The euphoria and terror of falling. “It was . . . nice.” They mulled over that for a second. “But then he stopped calling. He just kind of disappeared, and I think he had a girlfriend, and—and . . .” She felt tears welling up. They felt soothing, luscious, like her eyes were full of grit to be washed away. “And I loved him so much.”

  Marcy held Isabel’s hands across the table. This version felt no less real than what had actually happened. “You idiot,” Marcy said affectionately. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I had.” Isabel let her eyes wander to the corner. Mira hadn’t noticed them. She seemed scarcely aware of anything beyond her sketchpad.

  After a pause, Marcy said, “He sounds like an asshole.”

  Isabel let free a laugh. “Yeah.”

  Isabel remained hyperaware of Elliott until he graduated. She knew his class schedule; she knew beyond sight whether or not he was in a room. They were never alone again, after December.

  In the spring, she went on a single strange date with Gabe. They went to the community pool on a Sunday afternoon, one lane filled with seniors with paddleboards, the rest with young children. They acted unabashedly like those children, Gabe standing a head above the line for the rope swing and the slide. They hogged the pool noodles and the water guns. They chased each other. Their screams and giggles melted into the din of higher-pitched ones, echoing off the high glass ceilings. He kissed her primly goodbye outside in the daylight. He tasted of chlorine. He asked her out again a few days later at school, in the mad scrum of people trying to leave at the end of the day. When she said no and kept walking, he seemed neither hurt nor surprised. Or that was how she chose to remember it.

  3

  The second one had no name.

  Isabel had just moved into an apartment with three other girls. They came as a set: the three had been best friends in the dorms their first year, fallen in love with a four-bedroom walk-up, and recruited Isabel through a Craigslist ad.

  The stairs were winter-thaw rotten and the whole building was sinking—the wood floors warped and wavy as a stormy sea, frozen in time—but the apartment was large and beautiful. Iron railings and one exposed brick wall, floor-to-ceiling back windows, an open kitchen. Cheap crap was everywhere. Four-dollar necklaces, ten-dollar shoes with cardboard soles, thin, fraying clothes from H&M and Forever 21. It overflowed their closets and secondhand IKEA wardrobes, broken slats and chipped particleboard. Their kitchen was comparatively spare, a communal set of five pots and pans, mismatched dishes in acrylic and soft plastic.

  The three girls, Zoe, Lisa, and Kelly, were pretty enough on their own, but exceptionally pretty together. One blonde, one brunette, one redhead. A sampler effect, like a wine flight or a box of chocolates. They were kind to Isabel, and good roommates, but none of them tried to pierce the veil of her exclusion. Isabel had entered a brooding phase, sighing and rolling her eyes a lot. She was five feet and one hundred pounds, and had no discernible muscle mass, a jiggling layer of fat between her yellow-ivory skin and her weak bird bones. Round silver glasses covered most of her face and she wore aggressively dowdy clothing—wide, pleated slacks, oversize cardigans, scarves. Layers of flowing, shapeless fabric enveloped her petite frame. She looked owlish and ageless, like a child dressed as an old woman or an old woman dressed as a child. Her roommates were better at keeping whatever private darkness they carried to themselves.

  The evening of their housewarming party, Isabel sat on the couch, reading, as her roommates appeared at the doors of their rooms in different outfits to solicit one another’s opinions. Isabel said little more than “That’s nice” and “That one’s nice too.” She hadn’t been helpful with the party preparations either; the other girls had done the lion’s share of the cleaning, prepped snacks, Jell-O shots, and a candy-sweet, vile-smelling punch. The playlist they’d put together was already booming from Kelly’s speakers.

  The girls settled on their clothes and congregated in Lisa’s bedroom to do their makeup. Isabel gave up her pretense of uninterest and joined them, sitting on the end of Lisa’s bed. Kelly and Lisa went for a girlish, natural look in pink and peach, while Zoe—less successfully—chose a dark-red lip and smoky eye. The
y offered to do Isabel’s, but didn’t push.

  Isabel saw herself as an observer. She liked the alchemy of their makeup, envied their hopeful coloration and refined profiles, but was afraid to admit—so publicly, on her face—that she wanted attention too. It felt too late, or like hypocrisy. Her life in the audience.

  As the party reached its peak, an uncountable number of people shoulder to shoulder in their living room, kitchen and bedrooms, and on their fire escape, Isabel found herself pinned near the front door by a continuous stream of ingress and egress. Tiny, invisible, at risk of being trampled.

  Isabel listened to a group of boys plot their seduction of her roommates. Legally men, she supposed, but still chubby or stringy, overeager, their bodies glowing with the heat of unfinished, half-grown creatures. They saw Zoe, Lisa, and Kelly as unattainable because they were inseparable. The girls couldn’t be divided, so they couldn’t be conquered. They discussed the rumor that the three had stayed celibate all through what the boys had perceived—though not experienced—as an orgiastic first year in the dorms. A fog of body spray clung to them and nauseated Isabel. She was standing almost within their circle, backed up against a wall, but they talked over her head without noticing.

  One of these boys watched Zoe’s back with his eyes narrowed, an expression both pensive and predatory. He took a deep swig of his drink and then started mock-dancing, his movements as big and stupid as he could manage in the tight space. No one else was dancing. He danced his way through the crowd until he was behind Zoe, his arms up, his pelvis out, leaning into her, wiggling against her clownishly.

  Another took the opportunity to try to talk to Kelly, delivering a long, low speech. In response, Kelly laughed, gentle and dismissive. She turned and she and Lisa converged, as though magnetically drawn, on Zoe. Kelly and Lisa danced, surrounded Zoe, wedging expertly between her and the boy. With a dribble of fake laughter, he returned to his group. They stunk of failure now, on top of the body spray. Isabel decided to get some air.