The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore

by Kim Fu

  “It still sounds better than what I’ve been doing.”

  Janice drove with one hand, leaning back in the driver’s seat, her knees apart in a masculine pose. “I’ll be honest with you. There’s a lot less demand for ethnic girls. Maybe that’s changing—I don’t know. But your best bet would be to go back to Asia, make a splash there, and use that to leverage a career here. That’s the only way I’ve seen it happen.”

  “I can’t go ‘back’ to Asia. I’ve never been there.”

  “I thought you said you were from Hong Kong.”

  “No, I said my mom’s there now.” Dina felt a squeeze in her a chest, a cold grip. No more talk of her mother.

  “You have a lot working against you. You’re short for high fashion, you don’t have the boobs for lingerie or swimwear. Plus, your look is a little generic. Your face isn’t—interesting. Memorable. I’d say you’d do best in teen/college commercial stuff, but they mostly want whites and maybe a handful of light-skinned blacks. Has to play nationally.”

  Dina crossed her arms over her chest, mortified. “Why didn’t you tell me all this when we first met?”

  “You know why.”

  “Because you were shilling for Steve.”

  “Because Steve’s system was supposed to change everything. Even though I couldn’t see where you’d fit, I thought maybe it would create opportunities I didn’t know about. Maybe everything was changing. You hear all these things. Plus-size working mainstream, minority breakouts in Vogue. You hear it, but I’ve never seen it.”

  They passed through another town marked by American flags, towering palm trees, and stubby, solitary oaks. Past another craft store, another dry cleaner, another fast-food restaurant styled like a hacienda, another pink-stucco motel. Empty strip-mall parking lots. Farther and farther from Los Angeles County. “How long have we been driving?” Dina said, unable to keep the dejection out of her voice. “Are you going to drive me all the way to San Francisco?”

  “Not quite,” Janice said. “I’ll leave you at a bus station that’ll take you the rest of the way, as promised. I want to show you something on the way.”

  They turned off the main highway onto a state road, uphill, the elevation climbing. They passed a school bus with missing wheels, propped on cinder blocks on a turnout, the windows covered from the inside by cardboard. Below the guardrail, red and brown canyons and crags began, every now and then a jut of white rock like some giant and ancient bone.

  They turned again at a wooden sign, onto an unpaved road. The sign was written in white spray paint: SWIMMING HOLE. Dina asked, “Where are you taking me?”

  Janice tried to look at Dina as they bounced over the deeply rutted gravel. “You’ve been thinking about your body one way for a long time. I know—I’ve been doing it a lot longer. This is something that helps me—maybe it’ll help you too.”

  The road widened where it ended. Cars, camper vans, and a couple of RVs were parked at haphazard angles. Janice pulled up alongside the others. She and Dina stepped out of the car and into the brutal desert light. It was around two in the afternoon, the hottest part of the day. Janice grabbed a couple of towels from the trunk and slung them under her arm.

  Dina followed Janice up and then downhill, over a rise, on a path through dry scrub and a scattering of bare-branched trees. They were descending into a valley. At the bottom, sheltered by slopes on all sides, lay a mud hole the size of a small lake, with a wooden platform at one end. Dina could hear voices and laughter, smell meat on a grill. Closer, and the figures pinkening in the sun and splashing in the murky water resolved: Everyone was naked. Families with children, clusters of young people, elderly couples.

  Janice put down the towels beside a group of middle-aged women who smacked a volleyball back and forth without a net. One of them had a sunburnt face and arms while the rest of her was startlingly pale, white as the forebody of a stork, as if her legs and torso had never felt the open air before. Dina stared openly. “Why did you bring me to a nude beach?” she asked.

  Janice kicked off her sandals. She peeled off the sundress she was wearing and stepped out of her underwear. Dina thought Janice’s tan, statuesque body—tall enough for high fashion with the boobs for lingerie and swimwear, Dina thought grimly—would attract more attention, but no one paid them any mind. “Just hang out for a bit,” Janice said. “You don’t have to take off your clothes if you don’t want to.”

  Dina held her hand over her face. She could feel, almost hear her skin starting to cook.

  Janice added, “I’m going to get in the water to cool off.”

  Dina peered down. “But that water looks disgusting.”

  “Again, your call. See you in a second.”

  Dina watched Janice run to the end of the platform, jump, and pierce the water feet-first like a blade. Her blond head resurfaced and she lazily paddled around the crowded mud hole.

  Dina didn’t want to go to her brother’s house anymore. She didn’t want to call again either. His unanswered phone could have meant anything. Even though Dina didn’t believe her mother, she was afraid to find out for sure. She wanted to stay in this suspended moment for as long as possible, her logic as an unbroken circle: it wasn’t true, because it couldn’t be.

  She took off her shorts and T-shirt, felt the light on more of her skin, the dry heat melting her brain and relaxing her joints. She looked out on the valley. The scaly, scarred, bloated, potato-shaped bodies littering the beach, flopping along the dirt paths, bulging out of the opaque water. Vulnerable, raw as a wound, plucked chickens or hairless cats. But also anonymous, nonspecific in their nakedness, a contiguous blur of humanity. Taken at a distance, taken in aggregate, Dina thought, surprised at herself, they were almost beautiful.

  The bus leaves Dina at the Greyhound station in San Jose. She takes a cab to Victor and Isabel’s house. Their front walkway is overgrown, the tall yellow grass concealing the flat stones that lead to the door. She rings the bell.

  The door swings inward slowly, Isabel appearing sliver by sliver. Isabel grips the door handle, cowers mostly behind the door. She seems even smaller than before, broken in a way that Dina suddenly remembers. She hears Isabel screaming at Andee to stop, hears the loose-nail rattle of the knife flipping open. The years compress. They’d succeeded for so long at not talking about it. “We left you,” Dina says. “We left you behind.”

  “I asked you to,” Isabel says, as though they’re continuing a conversation. “I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Dina confesses, “I stole food and they tied me up.” Isabel looks confused, and Dina tries to shake her head clear, find her footing in reality, in this moment. “Is Victor home?”

  Isabel’s face crumples, holding herself upright by the door handle. Dina presses on as though she hasn’t seen. “I’m sorry for just springing on you like this. Our mother told me the most hideous lie.”

  Camp Forevermore

  (Siobhan)

  Siobhan woke just before dawn, a bare gray light seeping in. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that Nita and Andee were both awake, sitting up in their sleeping bags. The murmur of voices came to Siobhan. They’d been engaged in a low conversation, but stopped when they noticed Siobhan pushing herself upright. Nita looked like she hadn’t slept, her eyes red-rimmed and cradled in purple. She’d used the food bag as a pillow. “Let’s get going,” she said.

  In a small voice, Dina said, “Can you untie me now? It really hurts.”

  The other girls looked to one another. Nita unzipped Dina’s sleeping bag and Dina rolled onto her front with a moan. The ropes had loosened slightly in the night and rubbed the skin of Dina’s wrists raw, leaving bands of pink and red.

  “Please?” Dina said, her face muffled by the stuffing of the sleeping bag.

  Nita picked up the free ends of the yellow rope. “Help her get up,” she said.

  Andee and Siobhan pulled at Dina’s limbs until she was on all fours, then guided her in a crawl out of the tent. A
ndee put Dina’s shoes back on, closing the Velcro tabs with a strange, hesitant tenderness, like putting a Band-Aid on a baby.

  Nita sat beside Dina, one end of the rope wrapped around her fist, as Siobhan and Andee packed up and disassembled the tent. Then Nita passed the rope to Andee, and she transferred the water bottles and Jan’s cloth drawstring bag—the trail mix, Jan’s tin cup and pot—to the tent bag, leaving the food bag itself behind. It contained only garbage—balls of tinfoil, their dirty bowls and spoons. Siobhan thought of Jan’s absent knife, which likely remained where it had rolled from Andee’s grip, on the floor of the tent they had left behind, beside Jan.

  Nita handed the tent-and-food bag to Siobhan, and she felt both touched and unnerved. Uniting against Dina had worked almost too well.

  Dina said quietly, to no one in particular, “I hate you. I’ll hate you forever.”

  Siobhan kept her eyes down, hoisting the bag onto her back. Andee said, “We know.”

  Siobhan lifted her shirt to examine her stomach, and saw that her skin was pink and inflamed. She must have been scratching in her sleep. They got Dina to stand and tied bags to her as well as themselves.

  They reentered the woods. Nita, pulling up the rear again, held Dina’s leash as the younger girl stumbled before her. Siobhan wore the compass around her neck, as Jan had, and pointed them due north.

  The girls had lost all interest in talking. Siobhan’s lips were cracked and dry, and her mouth lacked the lubrication necessary for words.

  Siobhan was having more trouble orienteering than she had the day before. “North” often pointed through closed thickets of bushes taller than the girls themselves. She followed thin breaks in the foliage, likely cut by animals, which began heading north before veering in all directions, and once, up a vertical, impassable cliffside. She followed a dry creek bed that gradually bent ninety degrees. She always tried to steer them north again, but she kept getting turned around. She worried she was leading the girls in circles. The trees seemed to repeat, a trunk split and seared by lightning reappearing again and again.

  When she looked back to see if the others girls had noticed, if they were beginning to doubt her, she saw that they weren’t paying attention. Their bodies walked mindlessly, blindly going through the alternating motions, one foot in front of the other. Their heads were down, chin bouncing on their chests, like a line of sleepwalkers.

  Siobhan heard Nita make a small, surprised noise behind her. She turned and saw that Nita had slipped on a muddy patch, paused, and quickly righted herself. But Dina kept walking. She was yanked backward, her feet slipping out from under her with a yelp. The rope pulled out of Nita’s grasp as Dina landed on her back in the mud, on top of her bound hands.

  With an impassive expression, Andee said, “Let’s take a break.”

  They found a relatively dry, mossy spot to sit. They drank the last of the creek water. It did nothing to slake Siobhan’s thirst. It almost made it worse, like drinking sand.

  Dina’s back and hair were coated in clumpy smears of mud. “Can someone wipe the mud away from my eyes? Please?” Nita obliged, cleaning Dina’s face with her sleeve, tucking her filthy hair behind her ears. “You have to help me go to the bathroom,” Dina added. “Or just fucking untie me.” Her voice went high and unsteady on fucking, as though unaccustomed to its sound, the notes of its melody.

  Siobhan had never felt so tired in her entire life.

  Andee looked to Nita, who nodded. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll stand guard while you go. Siobhan, watch the food.”

  Andee picked the knots apart, and she and Nita helped Dina stand, still holding her elbows. Her wrists had swollen and were red and indented, like a roast that’s been tied with butcher’s twine. For no reason, a dumb sense of propriety, they guided her until she stood against a tree. They let go long enough for Dina to tug down her pants and underwear, pausing to shake the feeling back into her hands. Her feet were unsteady on the slick mud.

  The other three turned away in different directions. Sio­bhan gazed purposefully into the distance. A pop of color caught her eye, pea-size orange berries that had also grown around the edges of Camp Forevermore. They’d been warned that the berries were poisonous, but they looked plump and alluring to her now.

  In science class, Siobhan had been taught that people could go weeks without food. She counted in her head: it had been only something like sixteen hours since the bite of hot dog and sugary cocoa powder, and she was weak with hunger, reconsidering the pinched, sour-looking berries. Half of her mind had been on the trail mix all morning, going over each component one at a time: buttery cashews, clusters of honeyed granola, dense, sweet raisins. She’d patted the bag on her back, knowing it was in there. They would eat it soon. She lowered her eyes to the ground, where the girls had left boot prints in the squishy mud.

  “Hurry up,” Andee said.

  “I’m trying,” Dina said. “It’s hard to go with all of you right here.”

  By Siobhan’s feet, she noticed an imprint that looked different from the others. Like it had been left by someone who wasn’t wearing shoes, all five bare toes pressed into the mud, wide in the pad and tapered at the heel. A large, stout man, she imagined, like a troll. “Hey,” she said aloud, excited. She was about to point out the footprint to the other girls when she realized each toe well had another divot above it, a tiny hole. The point of a claw.

  “What?” Nita said, her back still to the others.

  “Uh.” Siobhan hesitated. What good would it do to alarm them? She resolved to just head in the opposite direction from the way the tracks faced. “There’re some berries over there. Maybe we can eat them.”

  Nita glanced behind her. “Those are poisonous. They tell you that the first day of camp.”

  “Oh, right. Of course.” Siobhan swiped her boot through the mud, erasing the paw print.

  They left Dina untied as they continued on, Nita still following close behind her, and Andee showily between Dina and the pack on Siobhan’s back. Siobhan’s attempts at due north led them to where a long, deep ravine cut straight across their path. They turned and walked along the edge, looking for a place to cross, until they found a spot where it appeared relatively shallow and narrow, and they could see a small waterfall rolling down an embankment on the other side.

  Nita approached the edge. “It’s pretty sheer. It’s not a long way to go down, but I don’t know how we’d get back up again.” She peered down. “Oh, there’s a log down there. Maybe we can . . .” Nita suddenly staggered backward.

  “What’s wrong?” Siobhan asked.

  Nita made a frantic shushing noise. She pointed into the ravine. The girls gathered close to her, pushing through the saplings that blocked their view.

  Two black bears were in the recessed ground below them, less than twenty feet away. “They’re cubs,” Dina whispered.

  The two bears were on a log that had fallen into the ravine at an angle. They pawed at each other, knocking each other off the log, climbing back up again, in play. They were old enough that their fur had come in full and thick, while still a fraction of the size of a full-grown bear—about the same size as the girls themselves.

  They were too small to have made the print that Sio­bhan saw. She felt the blood draining from her face, pooling in her feet, leaving her cold. She had led the girls here. “Their mother must be nearby,” she said.

  “We have to get out of here,” Andee whispered.

  “But which way do we go?” Nita whispered back. “We don’t know where their mother is. We don’t want to get stuck between her and them.”

  “Let’s just get away,” Andee said. Too loudly. The bear cubs looked up and stopped their game. One cub rose up on its back legs and peered at them. The other cub lumbered toward the girls on all fours. It reached the sharply slanted wall of the ravine and started to climb.

  The girls scrambled away from the edge. Siobhan was closest to the cub, and as she tried to turn and flee, she felt something gr
ab onto her, holding her in place. She screamed and flailed, trying to figure out what had happened, why she couldn’t move. She finally realized that the strap of her bag had snagged on a branch. She struggled to untangle the strap from the tree, but couldn’t turn far enough around. She tried to untie the bag from her body, her shaky fingers unable to penetrate the knot. She tried to wiggle her arms out of the straps that remained tied around her waist and hips.

  The bear crested the ravine. It hoisted itself clumsily onto the edge where Siobhan was trapped. It looked different up close. Not cute. Almost lupine, its snout more pointed, its eyes small and mean, the kind of affectless curiosity Siobhan associated with teenage boys. She was still struggling, trying to free herself, her legs flopping, tossing her head wildly.

  The bear toddled over to Siobhan. It went up on its hind legs and swayed unsteadily, before tipping forward onto its front paws again. It ran around her in a circle. It swatted lightly against her leg, testing her. Siobhan fought against the strap and felt her shoulder wrench out of place. She screamed again.

  She thought she could see the girls’ faces where they’d stopped a short distance away. They didn’t look panicked, as she thought they would. They were staring straight at Sio­bhan. Dina was rubbing her wrists. She thought she heard Andee say, “The tent. The food.” Their expressions were familiar; they were weighing a choice.

  They were deciding whether to leave her here.

  The cub paused in front of Siobhan. Something in the distance had caught its attention. Siobhan craned her neck to see over her own shoulder, to see what it was looking at.

  On the far side of the ravine, at the top of the hill where water flowed down a carved, curving path, stood the shape Siobhan had seen from the beach—its majestic bulk and bristling fur, its thick haunches and forelegs, a demon queen in a glossy black coat, a shard of night invading the day.