The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore

by Kim Fu

  Outside, their stairwell was filled with people smoking and chatting. Under the din of voices, she heard the wood creaking as it swayed. She hurried to the bottom, not wanting to be there when it collapsed.

  It had rained earlier that day, clearing up just in time for their party, leaving an inviting cool and a shine to the streets. She’d chugged one cup of punch and nursed another, and the sobering air filled her lungs, loosed the stuffing in her head. Isabel thought: I’ll just walk around the block and come back. Two blocks away, she thought: Maybe I’ll get something to eat, then go back. Four blocks and she accepted that she’d just ditched the party.

  She found a major road closed off. There was a festival on, as there was always a festival on in this city, an art film being shown on an outdoor screen. People sat on blankets and camping chairs in the center of the intersection. Isabel stood and watched. Scored to a fun world-pop soundtrack was a long clip of live baby chicks falling down a metal flue and being ground to their deaths by high-speed blades.

  Isabel stayed through a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes, trying to puzzle out a thesis. The film ended before she’d figured anything out. She was at the edge of the crowd, who were oddly quiet as they packed up to leave. Only the sound of chairs being folded, feet shuffling on the ground. A nervous laugh here and there. An old man’s voice carried through the near silence: “What in God’s name was that?”

  As she walked away, a man hurried to her side. He talked quickly, too quickly, as though he needed to say a lot before he ran out of breath. “Excuse me. Are you Thai? I lived in Thailand for two years. I speak Thai.”

  “No,” Isabel said.

  “You look just like this Thai pop star. Mai Charoenpura. Have you heard of her?”

  “No.”

  “That’s so crazy. Just like her.”

  He was older than the boys currently sweating into their shirt collars in her living room, and he filled out a gray T-shirt and a pair of camo-patterned cargo pants better than they would. His blue eyes shimmered like a gas flame, too bright, too interested. Serial-killer eyes, Isabel thought. She was still just a little, just enough, flattered to be compared to a pop star of any nationality.

  She thought: I’ll just walk with him for a little bit.

  “So, you like Stan Wilder?”

  “Who?”

  “The director. Video artist.”

  “Oh. I actually just came upon the festival by accident.”

  “God, lucky you. I’d give anything to discover him all over again.”

  He was staring at her intently, walking sideways. She kept looking away. This wasn’t the first time someone had tried to strike up a conversation with her on the street, but it was one of only a few, and the first time she’d ever responded. She’d seen it happen to Zoe almost every time they went outside. The seeming randomness of the encounter appealed to her, at this point in her life. Like in the movies. The meet-cute and the suspense. Not knowing what comes next.

  He talked at some length about the director before circling back to the film they just saw. “You know, it’s the second in a trilogy. I don’t know why they would screen it by itself. You can’t truly understand what Wilder is trying to say unless you see all nine hours at once.”

  “I only saw the last twenty minutes and I have no idea what he’s trying to say.”

  “Exactly!”

  Isabel had been mindlessly walking, following him in the opposite direction from her apartment. It was just before midnight, when the bars were full but the streets were empty, everyone settled into wherever they were going to be for the evening.

  “You really need to see the whole thing,” he said. “At the least the first part, to contextualize the second. What do you say?”

  Isabel thought he meant see it sometime, in a theater. “Sure.”

  “Great. We’re just around the corner from my apartment. I have the whole thing.”

  Isabel opened her mouth to object, by instinct. She thought about the conversation she’d listened to at the party, about first year in the dorms, those boys tortured by the idea that people all around them were fucking their brains out while they shuffled from the library to the communal bathroom to their lonely, cell-like rooms. That they were missing out on the prime of their lives, a bacchanal just beyond the wall.

  He lived in a squat, painted-brick building surrounded by chain-link fence, a seedy-looking standout on a fancier block. He led her through the front entrance, up three flights of linoleum stairs, and into a studio apartment, just enough room for a single bed in one corner and a stove in another. A fabric scroll written in Asian characters acted as a curtain over the one window. A harsh, uncovered lightbulb hung from the ceiling. There was a shrine of red candles and a golden laughing Buddha on a crowded bedside table.

  The bed was high, two mattresses stacked on the boxspring. He gestured for Isabel to sit down on it, as there was nowhere else. He dug around in a plastic storage box under the bed, kneeling at her feet. He showed her one of Mai Charoenpura’s albums, the cover a picture of her face. She looked nothing like Isabel.

  He cleared a spot on the table and put a laptop on it, loaded up the movie, turned off the light. They sat with their backs against the wall, their legs sticking straight out in front of them.

  After the title card, the first vignette opened on a face in profile, mostly hidden by the furry hood of a parka, watching the sun rise over a snow-covered field. Isabel kept her arm across her lap, where she could see her watch, the hands just visible in the light from the screen. Each scene seemed unnecessarily long. Seven minutes of the sunrise. Nine minutes of a woman walking naked along a busy cobblestone street, passersby agog or prudishly angry or pointedly uninterested. Initially Isabel was shocked, and then she grew bored of that too, inured to the nudity. Four minutes of children standing on a vast garbage heap, a whole landscape of garbage.

  During twelve minutes of macro-lens close-ups of chocolates being made, her new friend put his hand on her knee. He didn’t move it for eight minutes. Long enough for her to get used to his hand’s idle weight, forget it was there. To decide she must be okay with it.

  Her back started to hurt from the way they were sitting. It was almost a relief when he, as if just becoming aware of her size, lifted her bodily and turned her ninety degrees, lying her back on the bed. Hovering over her as the film played on, the moody instrumental music. His hand slid up her shapeless, ankle-length skirt, on the inside of her leg. He took her glasses off and put them on the table. His apartment looked better that way, blurred, the clutter undifferentiated. His lips and skin felt dry, unsatisfying. A surface barrier, the door to a room she wanted to enter but could not.

  She remembered, with Elliott, a barely suppressed urge to bite—to consume and destroy. A bucking, electric version of herself, clawing and clinging, all want. Here, now, she was passive as a rag doll. Her eyes started to adjust to the dark. She squinted at a blotch on the ceiling, unidentifiable without her glasses.

  He balanced on his arms. He looked her over and smiled. “You’re so pretty,” he said. “Without, you know, dressing like a slut and wearing ten pounds of makeup. I hate it when girls do that.”

  An alarm rang in Isabel, a dull clang of warning, an instinct not yet honed into meaning. She smiled back reflexively. He took ceremonious pauses as he undressed her, moving quickly, methodical, all her protective layers—jacket over scarf over sweater over shirt over camisole over bra—on the floor by the bed in minutes. She shifted her weight here and there as necessary, scarcely moving, not touching him below the shoulders. She was naked while he remained fully clothed.

  She watched his hand move down her abdomen. His fingers were very white, very thin. Skeletal. The landscape it navigated—her body, was it her body?—seemed dark by comparison, a tawny brown filled with shadows.

  All at once, the room snapped into focus, as it did each morning when she put her glasses on. She was back inside her skin, could feel the cold crawl of those bo
ne hands. Light pressure, an unpleasant shiver, a spider crossing a grave. He pushed his fingers inside her, to the hilt, his knuckle hitting her pubic bone, and the alarm became a wail in her brain. Louder and louder, and only when it reached its crescendo did it speak in words: She didn’t want this. She wasn’t attracted to him. She didn’t know what she was doing there. She was afraid.

  It wasn’t too late. Yet it was. He unbuckled his belt. Like his fingers, his hips were death-white in the dark room. The word “condom” floated to the top of her consciousness, rested dumbly against her palate. Still she lay there, mute, convinced she was inflicting this violence on herself.

  He offered to let her stay the night, suggested they get breakfast in the morning. He lay contentedly back on the pillow and started in on a long anecdote about the best breakfast he’d had in Thailand, a soup of mixed pig entrails and coagulated blood. Isabel numbly reassembled her outfit and left.

  When she got back to the apartment, the front stairs were intact. Six strangers were passed out on the sofa and the living room rug. Beer bottles, plastic cups, and glasses covered every surface. The standing lamp was flat on its side, in a pile of broken glass that was once the globe that housed its lightbulb.

  She could hear her roommates talking in low, excited voices in Lisa’s bedroom. “Isabel?” Lisa called. “Is that you? Come join us!”

  Isabel walked stiffly into Lisa’s room. Her limbs felt heavy, exhausted. The three girls were sitting on Lisa’s bed, side by side with their backs against the headboard. “Where did you go?” Zoe asked.

  “Just for a walk.”

  “Hell of a party, huh?” Lisa said. “Don’t worry—we kept everybody out of your bedroom.”

  Zoe grimaced. “I walked in on Nicole and Calvin in my room.”

  “Eww!” Kelly squealed.

  “Was that before or after Calvin puked off the balcony?” Lisa asked.

  “After.”

  “Ewwww!”

  “Were you here when Rodney tried to show everybody his karate moves?” Zoe asked.

  “No,” Isabel said. She curled up at the end of the bed, perpendicular to her roommates’ feet.

  “Long story short, Rodney doesn’t know karate.”

  “Is that what happened to our lamp?” Isabel mumbled.

  “No. Oh, god, the lamp.”

  Their voices sounded alert and happy, melodious, an assertion that all was right with the world, like birdsong. Isabel closed her eyes.

  Isabel woke up in the same position, her forehead pressed against the footboard of Lisa’s bed. She rolled over and saw that she was alone. Lisa’s alarm clock, analog and shaped like a cartoon cat, presumably left over from childhood, revealed that it was past eleven.

  She walked out to the living room. The apartment was empty. The smashed lamp was gone, along with all the beer bottles and cups. Clean glasses dripped on the dish rack. The broom leaned against the wall of the kitchen as though pleased with itself. She glanced out the back window and saw several full garbage bags on the porch, the handles tied in neat bows.

  Her roommates came up the steps just then, Kelly at the front with a pink cardboard bakery box, Zoe behind her with a tray of coffees. Isabel let them in. “We returned all the bottles and cans,” Lisa said.

  Kelly raised the box triumphantly. “We used the recycling money to buy croissants!” They bustled inside, the door hanging open as they took off their coats and shoes, passing the warm pink box and cardboard tray to Isabel, filling the apartment with the smell of coffee and butter and kindness and the world outside.

  Isabel went to the student health clinic for the first time, housed in a grand, churchlike building. There were several waiting rooms on several different floors, and it was unclear why you were shunted to one room or another. Isabel was alone in hers. There were only four chairs, upholstered in scratchy, faded blue wool, and a corkboard of colorful posters on morbid topics.

  The doctor walked into the room and called to Isabel. Her name tag read DR. NAKIMURA; she was a slight young woman with bobbed black hair, her lab coat hanging to her knees. She seemed shy and awkward as she led Isabel to another room. Isabel wished she and the doctor were less similar, as human beings. Somehow that would have been easier.

  Sitting on the paper-covered table, Isabel told Dr. Nakimura what had happened in as few words as possible.

  Dr. Nakimura didn’t press for details. “Okay,” she said. She reached down to a drawer under the table and pulled out a gown. “Undress from the waist down.” She walked out. Upon her return, she knocked once and didn’t wait for a response. She put a dual pack of Plan B and a pamphlet on the counter.

  They reoriented themselves so Dr. Nakimura could take a swab. At the strangest moment, perhaps because the process was taking too long, she broke what had felt like almost ten minutes of silence by asking Isabel how many sexual partners she’d had.

  Isabel didn’t respond right away. She was focusing her attention elsewhere, beyond this room and the present. “Two,” she said finally.

  That afternoon, Isabel choked down the first of the huge blue pills and waited. The pamphlet warned of nausea, vomiting, cramping, bleeding, mood swings. Isabel felt nothing. She felt worse that she felt nothing. She wanted to be punished in some way, wanted her body to formally reject what had happened. She would have liked to throw up. To bleed.

  Until Dr. Nakimura had asked, she’d never thought of her life that way, defined by Elliott Mars and this guy, whose name she’d forgotten immediately and hadn’t asked again. The lesser entries: Gabe, every unrequited crush, passing infatuation, childhood kiss, anonymous pair of hands. Her life as a series of men. What an absurd way to mark the time.

  4

  Of the five girls who’d been stranded together, only Isabel and Dina had any contact after Camp Forevermore. When the internet first brought everyone within reach, Isabel got an email from Dina. Her family had moved to the mainland in the intervening years. She suggested they meet up and Isabel agreed, but they never made concrete plans. They each possessed half the story, and if they met up, if they were alone together, they’d have to hear the rest, and relive events they thought they’d moved beyond.

  Dina only had access to the version of Isabel that was a table of information—school, program, classes—and she eventually sent another email that said, “Hey, my older brother is taking a class with you this fall. Isn’t that a funny coincidence?”

  That summer, on a short trip to Toronto, Isabel had gotten on the subway and ended up in the same car as Elliott Mars. He didn’t notice her, or he pretended not to, as she slumped down and hid her face behind a book. He looked even more handsome, stubble now grounding his elfin features. Funny coincidence, maybe, or they lived in a country that was geographically huge but psychically, unbearably small.

  The third was Victor Chang.

  The Arts building in the center of campus suited the study of the classics and an ancient, lofty idea of education—the entryway had Roman columns over a stone stairwell, and a swath of ivy growing up one wall. White and pink buds had appeared on the surrounding trees, while clumps of snow lived on in the shade. The very cusp of spring.

  As soon as Isabel walked through the elaborate entrance, she saw him, and she knew he was Dina’s brother.

  He sat on one of the bench windowsills of the large, arched windows. The morning light came in at a sharp slant, pooling on the windowsill, giving him a backlit, religious glow. A brand-new copy of Ulysses rested against his thigh, cardboard cover and onionskin pages, fat as a Bible. He studied notes in a binder in his lap so intently that Isabel felt free to stare. She leaned against the opposite wall, an equally shiny and unsullied Ulysses in her bag. He had tight black curls, Asian features, and a puffy, pockmarked face—the memory of bad acne—with tan skin that made his white T-shirt and teeth seem luminous. He was short and stocky, thickly but solidly built.

  She knew he was Dina’s brother because she remembered how Dina had looked that second morning
of camp, something irresistible in the set of her face and the lines of her body, filling all the girls with desire at once erotic and familial: they wanted her, they belonged to her.

  He looked up, startled, directly into Isabel’s eyes.

  Isabel made a point of sitting next to Victor that first class. Their twenty-person seminar on Ulysses began with an icebreaking exercise about why they were taking the class. Each person either bluffed something about modernism and Joyce or admitted to needing the core credit, feigning passion to impress the professor or dispassion to impress fellow English majors.

  Dina’s brother introduced himself as Victor, then said something charmingly stupid: he was a computer science student who hadn’t had time to read a book in years, and thought he would use one of his electives to get back into it. He saw that this course read a single book over a semester and that sounded perfect. Victor turned in his chair with an airy smile, passing the conversation to the person who should have been next to speak. A snide silence followed instead.

  “Well,” the professor said, slowly, toying with his suspenders, “we welcome you back to the land of the literate.”

  A titter of laughter united the English majors, including Isabel, in their expectation that Victor would drop the class, though many of them had chosen it for the same reason. One book, no matter how difficult, had to be relief from the rate at which they’d been swallowing books for their other courses. Three a day, with meals.

  The day of the third class, two other students from the seminar happened to be walking down Isabel’s street as she left the apartment. She followed them the rest of the way at a polite distance. Bits and pieces of their conversation drifted back to her; they were already talking about Ulysses, and about another class in semiotic theory, another in Old English translation, another on Spenser and Milton, as though they weren’t going to spend the next ninety minutes and the rest of the day and the rest of their academic careers talking about these things. Isabel felt stupid and exhausted. By the time they reached campus, Isabel understood a little better why so many of her papers had been labeled in red pen “uninspired” or “poorly thought out.”