The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore

by Kim Fu

  They were finally making progress, the tent resembling its intended shape. “It’s getting hard to see,” Nita said. “Can someone grab a flashlight?”

  Both Siobhan and Andee had their hands full. “Dina,” Andee said, “get a flashlight.”

  Siobhan looked around. “Where’s Dina?”

  Nita turned her head. “What? Did she leave? I thought she was right next to us.”

  Siobhan already knew. “Where’s the food bag?”

  They dropped their poles. “Dina,” Nita called. Shrieked. “Dina!”

  “She’s over there,” Andee called, pointing to some motion behind a rise close to the water.

  They ran. Dina, seeing them approach, stuffed gummy bears into her cheeks at an accelerated rate.

  “You stupid bitch!” Andee shot ahead. She tried to yank the package of gummy bears out of Dina’s hands, and it tore between them. The remaining bears scattered on the ground.

  Nita dove for the food bag at Dina’s feet, but Dina grabbed it first. Nita caught the end of one strap. “I’m not going to die first!” Dina screamed. “You’re not going to eat me!”

  Nita wrestled and pulled, choking up on the strap to get a better grip. “It’s been one day. One day! You couldn’t go one day!”

  Andee was kneeling in the sand, trying to gather up the gummies and dust them off, but it was impossible to tell them apart from the rocks and other detritus in the dark. The tide rushed toward them, washing over the edge of where the candy had landed. “You saw her,” Dina said, struggling to get the bag back. “We all saw her! I woke up beside her. You saw what’s going to happen to us.”

  Siobhan joined Nita, and the two of them wrested the bag away from Dina with such force that all three of them fell backward onto the ground. Siobhan sat up and peered into the food bag. She could just make out the shredded ribbons of the empty candy-bar wrapper. The trail mix was the only thing left. Siobhan’s stomach growled awake, vicious once more. “How could you?” she snarled.

  “Andee said you’d eat me!”

  “She was joking! You’re insane!”

  Andee rose. She pitched the few dirty gummies she’d recovered into the ocean. Something twisted in her face. She’s going to hit her, Siobhan thought, almost excited, her own body tensing to anticipate the blow. But instead Andee turned away. “Leave her,” she said, over her shoulder. “We have to get the tent up.”

  Siobhan stared at Andee’s back as Andee walked back toward the half-built tent. She looked at Dina, who was blubbering pathetically, pulling at the fabric of her thin jacket, clutching at herself around the armpits. Siobhan and Nita came to a silent agreement. They followed after Andee, Nita clutching the near-empty food bag to her chest.

  They worked quickly and quietly now, without any more bickering. Nita held the flashlight between her teeth. Each pole slid into place, and the tent came together at last. They stood back to admire their work, before hurriedly tossing everything inside.

  Nita hadn’t let go of the food bag. “Should we try to hang it?” Siobhan asked. “So it doesn’t attract the . . .” She caught herself. “So it doesn’t attract any animals?”

  “I don’t know how. And it’s too dark.” Nita said.

  They could hear Dina continuing to snuffle and weep.

  “Can we just leave her out there?” Siobhan said. “It’s getting kind of cold.”

  “Serves her right,” Andee said.

  “We can’t trust her anymore,” Nita said. “I don’t want her in the tent with us and the last of the food.”

  But Nita was eyeing Andee and Siobhan too. Siobhan knew she didn’t trust any of them anymore, and she wasn’t wrong; as angry as Siobhan was at Dina, she was also jealous. That she’d gotten to the food first, that she’d been the one to seize a moment when Nita was distracted, that she no longer had to bear this emptiness in her rib cage, this singlemindedness of need.

  “Let’s tie her up,” Andee said.

  Andee had already dug the food-hanging rope out of one of the supply bags. She held it in one hand and rubbed it against the opposite palm.

  Siobhan found herself nodding. “Yes,” she murmured. She quickly added, to Nita, “Then you—then we won’t have to worry about her anymore. We can let her into the tent, and she won’t freeze, but she won’t run off with the trail mix in the night either.”

  Slowly Nita replied, “I guess that makes sense.” Her grip on the bag loosened. She placed it carefully inside the tent.

  They marched toward the dune where they’d left Dina. She was sitting in the sand, her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, rocking gently on her tailbone. She jumped to her feet when she saw them, poised to bolt.

  Nita and Andee, quicker and stronger or just readier than Siobhan, leapt upon Dina. Andee dropped the rope. It took both of them to yank Dina’s arms behind her back while Dina squirmed and bucked. Dina screeched in a way that made Siobhan’s abdomen clench. She didn’t want to be responsible for that sound.

  “You have to do it, Siobhan,” Nita shouted. “Tie her up.”

  The rope, Jan’s rope, was industrial yellow. Coiled on the ground, it looked like a venomous snake, a bright color of warning.

  “Siobhan!” Andee snapped.

  Siobhan picked up the rope. She circled behind Dina. She looped the rope around the other girl’s soft wrists, laying it gently at first, just resting against her skin. She felt faraway, disconnected from the moment. She knew they were crossing a line, going somewhere they couldn’t come back from. But also—what? That this had to happen to someone, and she was glad it wasn’t her. She pulled the loop taut. She looped it again, tightened it, again and again. She tied a knot, she doubled the knot, she tripled the knot. Like a shoelace. A package. Not a person, a girl, Dina, howling in her ear.

  Several feet of rope still trailed from the ends. Nita and Andee released Dina, and Andee picked up the loose rope like a leash. “Walk,” she commanded. “To the tent.”

  Tears and snot coated Dina’s face. They left her kneeling at the entrance of the tent, bound, as they unrolled and arranged their sleeping bags. Siobhan took off Dina’s shoes. Dina cried and cried as they ordered her into her sleeping bag, as they zipped her inside with her shoulders still forced backward. She cried as they took turns guarding her and walking a discreet distance away to go to the bathroom, as they climbed into their own sleeping bags, as they turned off their flashlights. Dina cried as they lay breathing in the dark. She was still crying when Siobhan slipped easily into a black, emotionless sleep.

  Dina

  1

  Dina was dropped off by a friend’s mother after ballet class. Her father was shoveling the mashed-potato mush of salt and snow from their driveway; she blew by him without saying hello. She ran inside the house and straight into her mother’s study without knocking, barely pausing to kick off her mud-and-ice-encrusted boots.

  She held out a costume pattern to her mother, gripped in her six-year-old fists. “Mom! You’re supposed to sew this for me!”

  Mrs. Chang peered at her daughter over her reading glasses. She turned back to the contracts on her desk. “I don’t have time for that,” she said.

  Dina stood there, blinking dumbly, arms extended.

  Her mother looked up a second time. “What are you still doing here? Out, out.”

  The following week, Dina went to the fabric store after ballet class with her friend and her friend’s mother. The week after that, she burst into her mother’s study again to show her: shoulder-strap wings and a red tulle skirt with suspended black dots. She held the skirt against her body and spun around. “Isn’t it pretty? Don’t I look like a ladybug?”

  Dina twirled until she started to feel dizzy. She realized her mother’s silence had gone on for an ominously long time.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Jenny’s mom sewed it.”

  Mrs. Chang rose slowly from her chair. “Why do you insist on embarrassing me this way?”
r />   “What?” Dina stopped spinning. She wavered slightly on her feet.

  “If it was that important, you should have said so. I would have given you the money to buy your costume. Instead you run around town begging for charity.”

  “You can’t buy the costume. The moms have to make them.”

  Her mother smacked the wall. Dina jumped. “You can buy anything! Stupid girl.”

  Dina flung the skirt into the corner.

  “Ungrateful!” Mrs. Chang shouted. “Pick it up! Pick it up right now.”

  Dina snatched it up again. “I hate you! You don’t understand anything!”

  “Who do you think pays for ballet, eh? You think they teach you out of the goodness of their hearts? Apologize to me for talking back.” Dina raised her chin defiantly. “Apologize to me on your knees, since you insist on acting like a beggar.” Still Dina didn’t move. “Apologize to me or no more ballet classes.”

  “Fine! I won’t dance!” Dina fled. She felt exhilarated, like she’d just poked a tiger in the face with a stick, convinced her mother would chase after her and something new and terrifying was about to take place. Instead, her mother just shut the study door with a controlled, final-sounding click, and that was that. No more ballet classes.

  For the rest of her life, Dina was secretly convinced she could have been a prima ballerina, if not for her mother. She saw Swan Lake on a field trip to the mainland, and though she fell asleep for part of it, the finale worked itself into her fantasy life. She saw herself as the white swan, lithe arms undulating to the rippling of the harp and the imagined lake as though she had no elbows or shoulder joints, her calves as fine as an insect’s legs. The swelling, bombastic sadness of the music. Even more vividly, she pictured the curtain call. Curtsying to her adoring audience as they flung roses and cheered with frenzied admiration.

  She practiced her useless curtsy around the house, right leg far behind the left, arms spread. She spaced out while she was supposed to be doing her homework, hearing the clapping and the whooping, until her mother struck Dina on the back of her head.

  Sometimes a tap with an open hand. Sometimes a thrown object, a slipper, a hairbrush, a melamine bowl. Mrs. Chang had impeccable aim.

  In the waiting room for an audition, many years later, Dina fell into a conversation with a group of other Asian actresses (the call: “Asian woman, early to mid-twenties, VERY sexy, non-speaking, non-union”) about how their parents had beat them as children. Dina said, “Oh, my parents never hit me,” and as she said the words she realized that of course her mother had. It just didn’t fit her idea of “parents who hit.” She was never spanked as punishment, never taken over her mother’s knee as the direct result of something she’d done. It was constant, casual, meaningless. Mrs. Chang didn’t even stop walking as she slapped Dina’s skull, her palm like a swinging cat door. Dina didn’t fear it. She was almost fond of it, the dull sting through her childhood and early teens, something like affection.

  Dina would always remember her mother as a withholding tyrant, a wall of no, but if she thought about it, Mrs. Chang wasted unfathomable sums of money on her: ballet lessons, piano lessons, swimming lessons, soccer camp, horseback riding camp, French classes, Mandarin classes, all before the age of ten, all rapidly quit and immediately forgotten.

  An all-girls’ sleepaway adventure camp on the coast.

  Mrs. Chang blustered about a lawsuit that never materialized. She seemed unconcerned that Dina, after Forevermore, lost interest in eating. Putting food in her mouth made her stomach seize up; she could feel it closing like a fist in refusal. She felt stalked by a predator, like she couldn’t let her guard down long enough to eat. For years, she preferred soft, bland, quickly swallowed food, bananas and vanilla pudding, tofu and rice porridge, and being left alone at the table. Her parents talked about it when Dina was lying on the couch in the same room, as though she couldn’t hear them. “Oh, it’s fine,” her mother said. “My sister was like that at her age, picky picky. She’ll get over it. The women in our family all get fat eventually.”

  Until he got sick, Dina saw her father as a quiet man who did or said little of note. His only hobby or vice was watching hockey in his recliner after dinner with a single can of Kokanee. When Dina kissed him goodnight, he patted her on the arm as though embarrassed, urging her to hurry up.

  Dina thought he and her mother were mismatched, especially when they left for work in the morning. Her father, a contractor, had gnarled hands and a dark complexion. When he put on his denim overalls, he looked physically tough but spiritually diminished, hunched into his sunken chest and small potbelly. Her mother, a real estate agent, strode out the door resplendent in silk blouses and trousers, a sleek bun, the many rings on her fingers clicking against one another: real gold and fake, diamonds and cubic zirconia, creamy mutton-fat jade tapping bits of painted glass.

  Mrs. Chang liked to talk about Mr. Chang after he died, even in front of her eventual second husband, Mr. Davies, who only smiled his perpetual, inscrutable smile behind his bushy gray mustache. In retrospect, she said, Mr. Chang was sick much longer than they realized, but he didn’t like doctors, didn’t want to cause a fuss. His bones had always ached, his stomach had always troubled him, and so what if it was getting worse, wasn’t that just getting older? And wasn’t he lucky to have a team of young men who worked under him so he could scale back his hours, to have an industrious wife who brought in more than enough money on her own?

  Mrs. Chang claimed Mr. Chang had been demonstrative and affectionate in private. What a wonderful, clever, beautiful wife I have, he’d say.

  Dina could not recall ever seeing her parents touch.

  Mr. Chang started coming home from work in the afternoon. He took off his overalls and hung them on a hook by the door, and cooked dinner in just his white boxers and long-sleeved white shirts, both bought in bulk at the Real Canadian Superstore, a fact that embarrassed Dina so much she stopped bringing friends home. With a cleaver, he hacked up large joists of meat and overgrown vegetables from the Chinese market—carrots thicker than Dina’s arms, bundles of bok choy and Napa cabbage the size of babies—and either fried them in soy sauce and garlic or boiled them for soup. He ate a little less, went to bed a little earlier, slept in a little later, slipping away from them unnoticed.

  Dina announced at the dinner table that she was going to be a movie star.

  Mrs. Chang set down her bowl of rice. “You want to act?”

  “Or sing,” Dina said. Movie star, rock star, the generalized famous. She’d seen how, once you broke into one, you were allowed to switch at will. “Or model.”

  Mrs. Chang looked at her daughter appraisingly, tilting her head from side to side. “Yes, you have a very pretty face.” She addressed her husband and son. “Doesn’t she have a pretty face?”

  “Very pretty,” Mr. Chang mumbled agreeably.

  “I don’t see it,” Victor said. He speared a piece of meat with his chopsticks for emphasis.

  Mrs. Chang made a scolding sound with her tongue. “Eat properly, Victor.” She turned back to Dina. “Little bit chubby,” she added. “But maybe you’ll grow taller and it will balance out. Are you the prettiest girl in your school?”

  “No way,” Victor said.

  “One of them,” Dina said. She kicked Victor under the table and the dishes jumped.

  “Hmm,” Mrs. Chang continued, ignoring their bickering. “How many girls in your school? Let’s say two hundred. You are pretty, but not the prettiest of two hundred.” She spoke methodically, solving a math problem aloud. “How many schools do you think there are in Canada? And the U.S.? And China? All of Asia? Those are the girls you’d be competing with eventually—girls with your kind of face. Not very likely, you see. Who do you like? Who is your favorite actress?”

  Dina slumped in her chair and scowled, refusing to answer.

  Victor piped up. “She likes Jennifer Aniston.”

  “I don’t know her,” Mrs. Chang said. “Is she rich
?”

  “Super rich,” Dina said, brightening.

  Mrs. Chang nodded. “How many Jennifer Anistons do we need? The world, I mean. How many do we need?”

  “One,” Victor answered.

  “Yes. And there is one already. What do you want to be, Victor?”

  “I want to work with computers.”

  “Suck-up,” Dina muttered. “Mama’s boy.”

  “Shut up!”

  “You shut up!”

  “And how many computer people do we need?” Mrs. Chang asked.

  “Thousands? Millions?” Victor guessed.

  “Right. And they make good money.”

  Dina interrupted, “Actresses make lots of money.”

  “No. A few of them, the Jennifer Anistons, make all the money. The other actresses make nothing, or almost nothing.” Mrs. Chang picked up her bowl and resumed eating, the matter resolved. “You could teach, maybe. Teach acting or singing. Or you could design clothes, write songs. These are hard, but not so hard.”

  Dina knew her mother’s argument was flawed, but she was too angry to articulate why. She was telling Dina to capitulate to failure without even trying. Like she was a born failure. At school, they always said the opposite. You can be anything you want to be, as long as you work hard and stick with it! They said it in slogans. They said it in songs. They said it on stickers.

  And Dina knew she was pretty, perhaps the prettiest. She was sometimes transfixed by her own reflection when it caught her unawares, when she passed a reflective surface unexpectedly, polished metal or still water. As they fussed with their hair in the girls’ room during first recess, one of her white girlfriends remarked, “You’re lucky. Asian girls can be so weird-looking, but you look totally normal.” Yes, Dina had thought, now seeing herself through that prism: she had relatively round eyes, a relatively high, neat bridge in her nose, paintable folds in her eyelids. She had her mother’s height and her father’s delicate bone structure, a combination that surpassed them both.