Not Now, Not Ever

by Lily Anderson

  “Praise to the Flying Spaghetti Monster,” Leigh whispered. “My eyes just adjusted to the darkness.”

  “Mine too,” Jams said. He and Leigh shared a giggle.

  Kate and Perla stumbled through the trees next. Perla had braided her hair into two long pigtails. A fork was dangling from the end of one. She ripped it out and threw it on the ground.

  “Where’s Meg?” Kate panted.

  “Where are any of the counselors?” I asked, scanning the crowd. Every flashlight seemed to be held by a camper.

  “Maybe we should go back and make sure they got out of the building okay,” Hunter said.

  “There she is!” Galen said, pointing at the trees.

  Meg trotted out, a flashlight in her hand. She broke into a smile as she saw all of us together.

  “You all made it!” she said. “Good job!”

  “What’s going on?” Hunter asked.

  She ignored him, unclipping a walkie-talkie from the waistband of her yoga pants. She pressed it against her mouth. “Team One checking in.”

  The walkie-talkie coughed static as the other counselors checked in. Team Two, Team Three—that meant Isaiah was safe—Team Four, Team Five, Team Six.

  “We don’t have Hari!” Kate said, panicked.

  “Oh, he’s around here somewhere,” Meg said. “He’ll find us.”

  “We are a go,” crackled the walkie-talkie.

  The trees erupted in Christmas lights that refracted off every piece of trash strung up in the branches. The distant sirens cut off mid-yowl. There was a loud crack as a butcher paper sign unrolled from the low branches of the largest tree in the clearing. It read “Aut Vincere Aut Mori.”

  “Victory or death?” Brandon hissed at Meg.

  “You know she likes to make an entrance,” Meg murmured back.

  Perla glanced at Brandon. “You speak Latin?”

  He blinked, seemingly surprised to find that he wasn’t invisible. He opened his mouth to say something, but Meg shushed him.

  “Welcome to Mudders Meadow!” the counselor from Bryn Mawr called from under the banner. “I am Mary-Anne France, your activities counselor. And this—” She lifted a trophy high over her head and struck a pose. “Is the Cheeseman trophy. Four of you will win the Melee. One of you will win the Cheeseman. Or, as the camp directors call it, the counselors’ endowment. The twelve of us can grant a full ride to one of you based on your achievements in this tournament. Each counselor will choose a Cheeseman event. The person who wins the most events gets the endowment.”

  The meadow drowned in gasps and shouts. The idea of a fifth scholarship plucked the breath out of my lungs and carried it off into the garbage trees. Leigh huddled closer to me, trembling in barely contained delight as she squealed, “Plot twist!”

  “Still talking,” Bryn Mawr snapped. She shook the trophy in annoyance. It glittered in the Christmas lights. “You can’t prepare for the events. You won’t know when they’re coming or what they will entail. Participation isn’t mandatory, but attendance is. Clearly.” She planted the trophy in the dirt and crossed her arms over her chest as she barked, “Faulkner?”

  Faulkner, the blond counselor in charge of our music class, broke apart from her team. Her long, spray-tanned legs stuck out from under pajama shorts printed with kitten faces as she skipped into the center of the field.

  “Tonight’s event is a Mudders Meadow tradition,” she said. She flung her arms out wide, as if to embrace the trash trees as her throat ululated, “Amoeba tag!”

  Every dream catcher, fork, and Christmas ornament trembled as a dubstep beat dropped.

  “What. The. Hell,” I breathed.

  “Hidden speakers,” Leigh called over the music, bursting into applause. “Very impressive. There must be a generator somewhere! Or possibly solar paneling!”

  “They pulled us out of bed to play tag?” Galen asked.

  Perla tore at her hair and screamed “Dicks!” at the clear night sky.

  14

  “You’re in or you’re out,” Faulkner said, bringing everyone back to the matter at hand. “If you’re in, step forward. If you’re out, take a seat.”

  Hunter, Kate, Leigh, and I stepped forward. Brandon stumbled, as if shoved, and thrust his hands into his armpits. I glanced back, but the rest of our team was helping Meg get a blanket she’d stashed in the nearest tree. Perla was sulking in the dirt, her knees pulled up to her chest.

  “The rules are simple,” Faulkner said over the persistent beat of the music. “Two people are it. If you get tagged, you join the amoeba and become responsible for absorbing the next person. The chain may split off into two or more players and reabsorb itself at will. The last person not attached to the chain wins.”

  With a ballerina’s grace, she swept an arm out. Bryn Mawr’s cocaptain walked into the center of the clearing and gripped Faulkner’s wrist.

  “Maxwell and I are it,” she said, lifting their tethered hands into the air. “The game starts in three, two—”

  A whistle sounded, high and shrill over the music. I didn’t have a chance to check to see where it had come from. Faulkner and Maxwell were already speeding through the field, scooping up two campers who hadn’t moved fast enough.

  “And that’s two down right after the whistle.”

  Who had given Lumberjack Beard a bullhorn? I could see him sitting in the tree above Bryn Mawr, his spindly legs dangling over the Latinate sign.

  I broke away from my teammates and ran, pell-mell, out of the way of the amoeba’s wobbling path. Shouts rose up from the edges of the meadow. Team numbers. People’s names. Cheers and boos. Complaints that we could all be asleep right now.

  “We have our first split,” Lumberjack Beard boomed.

  I spun and saw three groups of pajama wearers, linked together at the wrist. Hungry hands extended in all directions. I leaped back out of the way and skidded sideways on a lost flip-flop.

  I thought of the week when Ethan had become obsessed with somersaults. Beth had dragged us to the theater and we’d ended up learning parkour rolls with the cast of Julius Caesar. Ethan had made me practice with him in the backyard for hours. It’d never been a particularly useful skill.

  Use the momentum, my brain screamed.

  I threw myself forward, tucking my head to the side. My shoulder landed in a patch of dead grass and my legs flew over. I propelled forward and jumped back to my feet, grateful to find myself momentarily out of harm’s way.

  It’d be hell of embarrassing to get tagged while showing off my rusty stage combat skills.

  The amoeba had connected again into a long chain. Leigh and Brandon had been absorbed. But they moved slower with so many people connected together. The line of people billowed out in the center, where Faulkner and Maxwell were struggling to regain control.

  “Only ten players left on the field,” Lumberjack Beard announced. “Finish them, Faulkner!”

  “Split!” Faulkner screamed.

  One chain became six. I could see the girl who’d been assigned to hang my Firefly poster careening toward me, her face flushed under her cat-eye glasses. I kicked off my shoes, leaving them as land mines behind me. There were screams in my wake as the small chain fell. Twigs bit into the soles of my feet as I feinted between another cluster.

  In the distance—underneath the butcher paper sign and Lumberjack Beard’s feet—a glimpse of dreadlocks.

  Isaiah had always been a hopeless cheater. He stashed Monopoly money in his sleeves and moved battleships and double dribbled so much they’d kicked him off his fifth-grade basketball team.

  There was no way I was going to let him hide until he was the last person standing.

  I pivoted on my heel, throwing myself toward the amoeba. Faulkner took the bait. I could hear the feet pounding behind me. I darted between clusters of other runners and heard Lumberjack Beard announce another three people being absorbed. I didn’t know how many of us were left.

  I careened between the observers, ignoring
as Lumberjack Beard cried foul above me. Isaiah’s back was to me as I swept around him. I could see his shoulders hiccup as he breathed—incorrectly—from his chest. I reached out, grabbed a fistful of dreadlocks, and pulled him backwards.

  “Are you still in play?” I shouted into his ear.

  “Are you insane?” he screeched back.

  I tightened my grip on his hair and chopped up my words. “Are you still playing?”

  “Yes! Jesus!”

  I dropped his hair. Before he could protest, I gripped his wrist and tugged him onto the field. Hunter was hopping near the rest of our team, stuck to his remaining flip-flop. Leigh scooped up his hand, cackling over the music. A girl in striped pajama pants was joining hands with Faulkner, who was rallying her troops together again. The chain was nearly long enough to span the entire meadow.

  Isaiah tugged on my arm. I wouldn’t be able to hold him for much longer. I had one chance to make this work.

  “Victor Onobanjo has been absorbed,” Lumberjack Beard called. “Would that I had a trumpet for you, Onobanjo. Three players left.”

  I scanned the field for the third person. A girl with a long ponytail was bouncing from side to side, debating the safest route.

  I bolted for her, forcing Isaiah to follow. Her eyes went wide as she scampered, thinking that she was being targeted by a small chain. Together, Isaiah and I chased her toward the last person on the end of the real chain, the scrawny kid who’d stumbled in the lobby. His hand shot out, his fingertips grazing the girl’s elbow.

  I dug my heel into the dirt and spun, following the line of the chain in the opposite direction. Isaiah was pulling so hard that my shoulder was threatening to pop its socket. My hands were sweating, loosening my grip on him in clammy increments. Lumberjack Beard was talking, but I couldn’t break my focus long enough to listen. I watched as the line of the amoeba started to break apart. They were going to swarm us.

  I flung myself hard to the side, stretching my arm as far as it would go while still holding on to Isaiah’s wrist. I ran as fast as I could, making a full circle in the dirt while Isaiah frantically tried to shake me off.

  My lungs burned. I could taste dust and salt on my lips. My ears were clogged with dubstep and screams and the static from the bullhorn.

  I let go.

  Isaiah and I careened away from each other, both momentarily airborne. I collapsed to the ground, my palms slicing against dead blades of grass. Isaiah landed on his feet and staggered. He pressed his hands to his chest like he was taking inventory of his organs. He seemed satisfied that everything was in place.

  And then Faulkner appeared behind him and set one hand on his shoulder.

  He looked at me and swore.

  Sorry, bro, I mouthed back.

  The whistle sounded again. Game over.

  “I’ve just been informed that our first winner of the Cheeseman trials,” Lumberjack Beard boomed from the treetop, “is Ever Lawrence from Team One!”

  My body went limp. My hands and feet stung in dubstep throbs, but I could feel myself smiling.

  Brandon appeared above me, his hair mussed, his dark eyebrows drawn together above his nose. His cheeks were flushed and shining.

  “So,” he panted, extending an arm to help me up. “You know parkour.”

  “Not, like, a lot,” I wheezed, carefully taking his hand while my palms screamed. My legs resisted straightening, but Brandon was stronger than he looked. I swayed into a standing position and took my hand back, blowing a cool breath over the broken skin. “Why do you speak Latin?”

  He coughed, stuffing his hands back into his pockets. “I took two years of it. It was that or Mandarin.” He glanced up at my face and sensed more questions coming. “Messina Academy. It’s pretty much as weird as people say it is. Weirder, really.”

  “You go to—” I tried to take a step and hissed. Brandon gripped my elbow to keep me from tipping over. “Balls. I need to find my shoes.”

  “Leigh’s getting them,” he said. His head popped up. “Cornell’s coming this way with your ribbon.”

  I craned my neck to see past him. Cornell and Bryn Mawr were striding across the field. The audience had given up on participating. There were already scads of people marching back through the trees.

  “Brandon,” I breathed, turning my head discreetly toward his shoulder. “I need you to promise me something, right here, right now.”

  His Adam’s apple rose and fell with a gulp. “Okay?”

  “You are prepared to do this terrible thing?” Shit. Accidental Wilde. I barreled ahead, trying not to let my mortification show. “Do not, under any circumstance, let Cornell shake my hand right now. Or at any point until I have taken a bath in Neosporin.”

  His laugh was an abrupt rising sound, like footsteps running up stairs. “I can do that.”

  15

  Even with Meg pushing our wake-up call forward to our new weekend schedule, I could barely drag myself out of bed the morning after amoeba tag. My palms were scabbed and the soles of my feet burned as I set them against the carpet.

  By the time I made it to the communal bathroom with my towel and ziplock bag of toiletries, Bath and Body Works steam was pouring out of all four beige shower stalls. The smell was aggressively fruity, like being punched with candied apples and vanilla frosting while pretending worse smells weren’t hanging out around the corner.

  I had come to expect having to get ready out of order. For all of Rayevich’s state-of-the-art facilities elsewhere on campus, the bathrooms were plain and barely functional. I had a hard time believing that the same shower stalls that my fellow campers and I had to share would serve twice as many students in the fall. How could anyone ever be on time to anything?

  Unless everyone was like Leigh and adjusted to waking up predawn to shower in peace.

  Avoiding my ragged reflection in the water-speckled mirror, I unloaded my supplies onto the nearest sink. I lathered my cheeks in face wash, tuning out the noise in the showers behind me. Every morning, there was a din of splashing and bottles clacking and razors dropping that drew way too much attention to how communal this whole situation was. I’d considered asking Meg how often the janitorial staff was cleaning the residence hall, since the school was technically closed for the summer, but had decided against when I realized that I’d never seen any sign of a janitor who wasn’t Lumberjack Beard.

  I didn’t consider myself a clean freak, necessarily; it was just that the idea of our entire floor’s filth being rinsed down the same drains made me uneasy. The other girls all seemed fine to run their bare feet over the tiles. I didn’t believe that germs could be deterred by body wash alone, especially the super perfumed stuff that everyone seemed to favor. I’d heard one too many drunk girls peeing—and worse—in the showers at boot camp stories from Sid and the rest of the Lawrences to not wear flip-flops. They were hidden under my towel so that I could slip into them once I was safely behind the shower curtain.

  The bathroom door crashed open. The girl with the cat-eye glasses from across the hall staggered in, her arm looped around her roommate’s hunched shoulders. The roommate shimmied away, made a heaving sound, and rushed into the closest toilet stall.

  No one ever went into the stalls without checking them first. That was public bathroom common sense.

  “Fallon,” the girl with the cat-eye glasses called, as the toilet stall slammed. “Are you going to be—”

  Behind the metal door, there was a wet splash and the unmistakable gurgle of bile.

  I loaded my toothbrush with toothpaste and popped it into my mouth, hoping to smother sympathy gags in minty freshness.

  A shower curtain rustled as a damp head peeked out. It was one of the brunettes from Isaiah’s team. “Meuy, who’s puking?”

  “It’s Fallon,” said Meuy, pushing up her glasses.

  Fallon moaned inside of her stall, probably trying to ask her roommate not to blast her illness to the world.

  “Did she realize how gross breakfas
t is gonna be?” asked a voice behind a closed shower curtain.

  “Hey, Fallon.” I recognized Perla’s voice coming from the farthest shower stall. “You pregnant?”

  “No,” Fallon’s wavered voice came out of the toilet stall.

  “Leave her alone,” Meuy snapped at the wall of closed shower curtains. “She’s having a panic attack. Her binder is missing.”

  I spat a mouthful of toothpaste into the sink, wiping the remnants from my lips with the back of my hand. “Seriously?”

  Meuy widened her eyes at me and nodded solemnly. “An entire week’s worth of work—poof! Gone.”

  Fallon gave another bark of barf. I winced, resuming my toothbrushing with vigor.

  “Someone probably stole it. Someone took my shampoo and my flip-flops,” said the voice behind the farthest shower curtain.

  “Are you sure she didn’t try to take her binder with her when the fire alarm went off?” asked the girl in the shower next to her.

  “Do not even talk to me about that fire drill,” said another voice. “That was beyond cruel.”

  Meuy glanced back at me, possibly waiting for me to announce my presence to the other girls or to gloat over last night’s win. When I did neither, she twisted her shoulders in a shrug and lowered her voice to a hush, “It’s her own fault. She left her binder in the lounge. What did she think was going to happen? I’m sorry that she’s got an anxiety disorder, but come on. We are in a competition, right?”

  I spat another wad of foam and frowned. I wasn’t comfortable blaming the puking girl for her own misfortune.

  Meuy seemed to sense my weakness. She whirled away from me and strode from the door, calling over her shoulder, “Fallon, I’m gonna go get you a bottle of water.” She left the bathroom without waiting for a response.

  Perla yanked back her shower curtain, sticking her face out and craning her neck to see around the corner. Her hair was twisted on top of her head in a thick white lather.