One S'more Summer

by Beth Merlin

  After the last girl was signed up for activities, I dismissed the different bunks back to their cabins to change for instructional swim and went to the office to drop off the activity sheets. Gordy was at his desk doing busy work. I smiled at him and went to my mailbox. Inside was an envelope from my mother, along with a schedule of the Cedar evening activities. I quickly folded the envelope in half and stuffed it in my back pocket. Then, I looked over the calendar. Tonight’s activity was the Dating Game with Birch.

  “What did you stuff in your pocket, Princess? Letter from your boyfriend?”

  “What? Huh?” I said, spinning around to face Perry.

  “The thing you just stuffed in your pocket,” he said, pointing to the envelope sticking out of my pants.

  “It’s a letter from my mom, and stop calling me Princess.”

  He looked down at his clipboard and scanned it. “So I see we have a date tonight?”

  “What?”

  “Your girls and my boys, the Dating Game at the Lakeside Rec,” he said, pointing to the calendar.

  I yawned. “Oh, right, yeah, I just saw.”

  “Tired?”

  “A little.”

  Perry intentionally raised his voice louder. “A late night can do that,” he said.

  Gordy looked up from his papers and I shot Perry a dirty look. “I’m just adjusting to the schedule.”

  “Getting up before noon must be tough when you aren’t used to it, Princess.”

  “You don’t know a thing about me. And stop calling me Princess.” I emphasized the words through gritted teeth.

  He snapped the top of his clipboard closed. “Oh I know enough,” he said in his posh accent.

  “Just because someone is daring to challenge you for The Gordy for the first time in three years doesn’t mean you should lash out in frustration.”

  He laughed. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I’m just having a good time giving you a hard time, Princess—I mean, Gigi. See you tonight.”

  Gordy chuckled behind me. I turned to face him.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he answered, still laughing.

  I stamped my feet close together. “Gordy, what is it?”

  “I like listening to the two of you. It’s going to be one fierce competition this summer.”

  “If I don’t kill him,” I said.

  “You won’t,” he said.

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “None of the other ones have.”

  Not that I imagined someone as good-looking as Perry hadn’t had his share of summer flings, but I was utterly unimpressed that he was using Chinooka as his own personal hunting ground.

  “Well, just for the record, he’s not my type at all,” I answered.

  Gordy laughed again. “Dost thou protest too much? Maybe you’re just as wrong about who he is, as you seem to think he is about you?”

  “Well, he is wrong about me. But I highly doubt I am about him,” I answered.

  “He’s a good guy, Gigi. One of the best. He’s just working through a few things.”

  “Like what? How to be civil to another human being?”

  “Like I said, it’s going to be a good competition this year.”

  I picked up the rest of my paperwork and added it to my clipboard. “We have this one in the bag. Speaking of which, let me go make sure the girls are at instructional swim like they’re supposed to be.”

  Although there was a pool, most of the activities and even the swim instruction was done at Lake Chinooka. Since it was only late June, the water hadn’t fully warmed up yet, and I could see the lifeguards were having a tough time coaxing the girls into the cold water. I was grateful this was one battle I didn’t have to fight. To keep an eye on everything, I sat down at the shore on a wooden chaise lounge, which was probably as old as the camp. Leaning back, I felt the envelope I’d forgotten in the midst of my spat with Perry. I pulled it out of my pocket and ripped it open.

  And there it was. The thing I’d been dreading. Alicia and Joshua’s wedding invitation. I slowly pulled it out of the larger manila envelope and read it line by line.

  MR. & MRS. THOMAS SCHEINMAN

  REQUEST THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY

  AT THE MARRIAGE OF THEIR DAUGHTER

  Alicia Leigh Scheinman

  To

  Joshua Adam Baume

  SATURDAY, THE FIFTEENTH OF AUGUST

  EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

  THE ST. REGIS HOTEL

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  Seeing their names printed together, embossed on white card stock that would be mailed out to several hundred guests, was a finality I was not ready for. I was in the midst of wishing the chaise lounge would clamp down and swallow me whole when Tara shook the back of it, causing me to jump several feet in the air.

  I put my hand over my heart. “Jesus, Tara, you scared me.”

  “Sorry, you seemed sort of distracted,” she said, taking a seat at the end of the lounge. “Whatcha doing?” she asked in a sing-songy voice.

  “Reading something. What do you need? Shouldn’t you be watching our girls down at the lake?”

  “They’re covered. Jordana and the lifeguards are all over it.”

  I tilted my head to the side. “So what is it I can do for you, Tara?”

  “I just wanted to know if you’d mind if I went after Perry?”

  “What?”

  “Perry, the head counselor of Birch.”

  “I know who he is, Tara. He’s probably a good ten years older than you,” I said.

  “So you like him? Okay, fine, I’ll stay away.”

  “What about your boyfriend? The one from home? Brian, right?”

  “We’re on a break for the summer,” she said.

  I thought back to the scene she’d made before getting on the camp bus. “Weren’t you just sobbing into a cell phone, telling him how much you’d miss him?”

  “Some of the campers told me you like Perry,” she said, completely ignoring my question. “If you do, I’ll stay away.”

  “I don’t even know him. But either way, you’re way too young for him. Why don’t you set your sights on someone more age appropriate, like one of the other CITs?” I asked, pointing to where a few of them were standing on the dock.

  “Perry likes younger girls. Michelle told me.”

  “Michelle, the counselor from Bunk Eleven, Michelle?”

  “Yeah, she told me that last summer she heard he was seeing Brooke, who was only eighteen at the time.” Tara leaned in closer. “He also supposedly had a pretty hot and heavy relationship with a counselor a few summers ago. They took some crazy cross-country road trip together after the summer was over.”

  I’d had a feeling he was a player, but getting his kicks going out with girls almost ten years his junior put him in a totally different category. “Tara, I’m not your mother, but I have a feeling it’s prohibited for a counselor to date a CIT.”

  “But you’re sure you aren’t interested, right?”

  “No, Tara, I’m not interested,” I replied.

  “So you have to help me, then.”

  I shook my head. “Help you? I’m definitely not going to help you.”

  “Gigi,” she whined.

  I sat up in the lounge chair. “Seriously, how could I possibly help you?”

  She walked behind me to try to get a glimpse of the clipboard on my lap. “What’s tonight’s activity?”

  “The Dating Game,” I answered.

  “Perfect. Okay, you have to put me in it,” she said. “Play a couple of rounds with the campers, and then do a counselor round. Have Perry be the bachelor, and I’ll be one of the contestants.”

  “I’m not doing that,” I said.

  “Gigi, please,” she begged.

  “Tara, there’s no point.”

  “Please,” she said again, getting on her hands and knees.

  “I’ll think a
bout it, but he really is too old for you.”

  “Don’t be so serious, Gigi. I’m not marrying the guy. I’m just looking for a summer fling. You are familiar with the concept of a fling, right?”

  “Vaguely familiar, yes,” I answered.

  “So, will you set it up for later?”

  “I told you I’ll think about it, okay?”

  Tara went running back toward the lake, probably to tell Michelle and Brooke about her small victory. I wasn’t surprised that Perry liked younger girls, given how immature he seemed. Maybe he kept returning to camp so that he could date people who’d be deemed wholly inappropriate back home? Either way, it really wasn’t my concern. If he wanted to spend his time with girls like Tara, that was totally and completely his prerogative, and I was staying out of it. Well, not completely out of it since I’d just agreed to consider rigging the Dating Game so she could have a shot with him.

  After instructional swim, the girls went off to their morning activities. I walked around, making sure they were exactly where they’d signed up to be so we didn’t get any Gordy points deducted. Cedar had a reputation for cutting activities and smoking behind abandoned bunks and The Canteen. The whole practice was ridiculous since they invariably got caught. But, as a rite of passage, a whole new set of girls tried to be the first to get away with it each year. I started my rounds at arts and crafts and was relieved to see all ten of the Cedar girls happily tie-dying T-shirts behind the cabin.

  From there, I walked over to the archery fields, where another five of my campers were slated to be. Instead, I found Dominick, the archery instructor, a really muscular Irishman, fuming.

  “I’m missing five of your girls,” he shouted at me as I crossed the field toward him.

  I started jogging. “I have a good idea of where they might be. Don’t deduct any points yet. Get started with the rest of the kids, and I’ll get them.”

  I rushed down from the fields and over to the abandoned bunks, which were a good distance from the rest of the camp. The girls weren’t there, so I hurried to some other spots I thought they might be. Finally, I made my way to the total opposite side of the camp and saw smoke wafting out from behind The Canteen. When I heard girls giggling in the distance, I knew I’d found them. I crept up and saw Candice, the tall, willowy girl who’d given me a hard time about the bat in the bunk, and four other girls from Bunk Eleven passing around a cigarette. When they spotted me, Candice threw the cigarette on the ground into a pile of dried leaves. The pile immediately started smoking, and the girls started shrieking. I ran over and stomped out the emerging fire.

  “This is why there’s no smoking allowed on camp grounds,” I shouted at them. I realized from the smell of the smoke, they weren’t passing around a cigarette, but a joint. “Are you girls smoking pot?”

  They started laughing again.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  Candice stepped forward. “I brought it from home. I took it from my father’s stash. Geez, you look like a mess, Gigi,” she said, commenting on my disheveled clothes and the sweat that was now pouring off my forehead.

  “I just spent the last forty minutes running around this camp like a lunatic and you’ve been right here smoking your father’s pot?”

  She flipped her hair back. “He never notices. It’s so not a big deal.”

  “It’s a huge deal. It’s definitely against camp rules, and all rules, actually. It’s illegal,” I said, lifting up my T-shirt to wipe the sweat off my face.

  “God, Gigi, you’re so old school,” she said.

  “So, Candice, you tell me, how should I handle this?”

  She crossed her arms. “Call it strike one?”

  “This is strike two, actually. Strike one was when you conspired with the girls in my bunk so that they could sneak out last night.”

  Candice looked around at the other girls for support. “Okay, so strike two, big deal.”

  “I would definitely say it’s a big deal. The five of you are going to be sitting out of evening activity tonight and the rest of the week. You should also plan on missing the first half of the camp social so we can talk about the hazards of drug use.”

  They looked miserable. I’d just taken away two very crucial social events. “If we hit strike number three, well… I don’t have to explain what happens at strike three. Just know that I won’t hesitate for one second to tell Gordy about all this. Don’t test me. Got it?”

  “Got it,” they mumbled.

  “Got it?” I repeated.

  “Yeah, we got it,” Candice answered for them.

  “You’re expected in archery. Now!”

  The five of them went running back to the archery fields, and I collapsed into a pile of leaves. I felt disgusting. Sweat was dripping from everywhere. The last time I was this hot was over a year ago when Joshua invited me to meet him at a Bikram Yoga class downtown. Yoga wasn’t my thing, but it was the first real date he’d ever asked me on and I wasn’t about to say no.

  The morning of the class, I’d woken up extra early to get ready to meet him. Although my body was far from perfect, my spandex outfit had done an excellent job of sucking everything in. I flat ironed my hair until it was stick-straight and applied my makeup so I looked natural, but with a glow.

  I met Joshua in front of the yoga studio. He looked adorable in Adidas tear-away pants, a white T-shirt, and a gray zip-up hoodie. His hair was slightly tousled from sleep, but I always liked it better like that than when he tried to tame it. He handed me my own bottled water. I thought it was a sweet variation on the flower-giving date ritual and told him so.

  “I didn’t know if you would know to bring it, and you’ll definitely need it for hot yoga,” he said.

  “So what’s so hot about it anyway?” I asked in my most seductive voice.

  He zipped up his hoodie. “What do you mean?”

  “You said it was a hot yoga class? What makes it so popular?”

  “It’s not that popular. It’s Bikram Yoga. I tried to get Alicia to go a couple of times, but she likes efficiency in her workout—on and off the treadmill in forty minutes, nothing extraneous.”

  “Oh, right, Bikram Yoga. I’ve been dying to try it,” I said.

  I didn’t have a clue what Bikram Yoga was. We went inside and waited for the class to begin. The instructor gave us each mats and started with some basic stretches. It wasn’t so hard at first, but then it began to get really warm in the studio. At first, I thought it was just me, but everyone else was sweating profusely, too. I looked at Joshua. His shirt was soaked through with sweat, but he looked like he couldn’t be happier. When we were in Downward Dog, I turned to him. “Joshua,” I said in a whisper, “I’m roasting in here.”

  “It’s great, right? All your muscles feel loose and your whole body feels centered?”

  My whole body felt sweaty, and I was feeling a little light-headed.

  “Maybe we should come back and do this when the air conditioner is working?” I said.

  “Gigi, this is Bikram Yoga. It’s supposed to be this hot.”

  “Oh, right.”

  I spent the next forty-five minutes the most uncomfortable that I’d ever been, with sweat coming out of places I didn’t even know I had. I later found out that during Bikram Yoga, the room temperature was pushed up to 105 degrees, so that you could supposedly cleanse your body of all toxins. When the class was over, I made a beeline to the ladies’ room to wash my hands and face and whatever else I could stick under the faucet in cold water. I had makeup smeared everywhere, and mascara was running down both my cheeks. My once pin-straight hair was a curly, matted mess, and my cute spandex outfit was almost transparent from sweat. I was horrified. There was no way I was going back out to face Joshua looking the way I did.

  I scanned the bathroom for a window I could climb out of but realized, sooner or later, I’d have to leave the ladies’ room. I washed the makeup off my face the best I could and smoothed my hair into a bun. When my cheeks were no lo
nger an embarrassing shade of crimson, I bit the bullet and emerged.

  “You look—” he started to say before I interjected.

  “Disgusting, I know. I lied to you. I had no idea what Bikram Yoga was. I wasn’t prepared for what just happened in there,” I admitted.

  “I was going to say that you look beautiful,” he finished.

  “Really? ‘Cause I feel anything but.”

  He handed me his gray hooded sweatshirt, which I gratefully zipped up over my exposed self. “You look perfect. So what’d you think of it?” he asked.

  “The class? I think I didn’t know what I was missing.”

  “Are you lying to me again, Ms. Goldstein?” he teased.

  “No, I’m completely serious. I didn’t know what I was missing, and now that I do, I can keep on missing it,” I teased.

  He laughed, flashing his white smile.

  “Wanna grab breakfast?” he asked, putting his arm around me.

  “I need to shower first,” I answered.

  “Okay, so let’s go to my place. We’ll take a shower and then go.”

  We never made it to breakfast. We didn’t leave his apartment all day.

  The following day, I met Jamie for brunch. As soon as I sat down, he said, “You absolutely had great sex last night. Or a facial. You’re glowing.”

  I told him I’d tried Bikram Yoga, which seemed to pacify him. Little did he know I’d followed it up with great sex. The truth was, I wasn’t just glowing. Something had shifted. After that morning, Joshua and I couldn’t write off what we were doing as a one-time mistake. For the first time ever, I was making the conscious choice to put my own needs and feelings ahead of my friendship with Alicia. The realization had shaken me to the core then and still did now.

  I picked up the joint from the ground, pressed on the ends a few times so it relit, and took a few drags. The sound of Gordy’s voice over the loudspeaker announcing that the auditions for the show were starting at the Lakeside Amphitheater in a few minutes snapped me right back into reality. I threw the joint back on the ground and stamped it out.

  The amphitheater had been built especially for the Camp Chinooka Centennial Celebration. It was a beautiful theater in the round, set against the backdrop of the lake with trees surrounding it on all sides. Any production put on there was going to be an event. I scanned the crowd of girls waiting patiently to audition, and I spotted Hannah pacing nervously in line. I went up to wish her luck.