Summer at Meadow Wood

by Amy Rebecca Tan

  But the night before I left for camp, when she thought she hadn’t sent in a permission form, she didn’t head calmly to her filing cabinet to solve the problem. She frantically rooted through a giant stack of junk on her bedside table, and then through a pile of mail on the kitchen counter, and then through a tower of newspapers and magazines on the laundry room floor.

  I went straight to her cabinet in the kitchen to look in the file labeled CAMP, but ended up never even opening the drawer. My breath caught in my throat when I saw what a mess her precious cabinet had become. It was hidden under a pile of papers, catalogs, coupons, empty glasses, and one bowl of partially eaten pretzel rods. The plant was pushed to the back and its leaves wore a thick layer of dust. There were fingerprints, gray and filmy, on the handles and sides of the cabinet.

  I went back upstairs to her bedroom and saw that the order in her closet had also disappeared. Half the shoe boxes were empty. Stray shoes lay all over the floor like giant pieces of fallen fruit. Some hangers had shirts hanging off by one shoulder while others were completely bare. Skirts and tops were crumpled in balls on the carpet. The fabric rainbow was completely gone.

  When had it happened, this change in my mom, and how had I missed it? What else had I missed?

  She ended up printing out a new permission form that night for me to hand in Saturday morning before I boarded the bus. And when I did hand it in, the counselor told me that it was already on file. My mom had sent it in weeks ago but had completely forgotten about it. Apparently, it was all too much to keep track of—camp forms for your two kids and a secret boyfriend.

  When I finally got back to Yarrow, I could hear Pictionary shouting from outside the cabin.

  “It’s a pile of pennies!” Jaida C guessed.

  “Nope,” Jodi answered.

  “They’re marbles,” Sasha tried.

  “Nope,” Jodi said again, and then I heard the squeak of the marker against the board as she drew more.

  “How about those bouncy balls we use for playing jacks? They’re balls!” Sasha guessed, and everyone laughed.

  “Nope.”

  “Over the course of this evening,” Chieko’s voice called out, and I could tell that she was still on her bed in the counselor room, “your skills at this game have not improved one iota.”

  “It’s harder than it looks, Chieko,” Jaida C defended herself.

  “Time’s running out . . . ,” Jodi reminded everyone.

  “It’s a bunch of grapes,” Carly guessed.

  “Nope,” Jodi said. “Not grapes.”

  When I heard that, I walked over to the side of the cabin where the window was. I looked through the screen at the drawing on the board, shook my head, and then said, “They’re blueberries.”

  They all screamed in surprise at my sudden appearance. Their screams morphed into laughter, but Jodi still managed to say, “You’re right! Blueberries is right!”

  “We get Vic!” Carly called once she caught her breath. “Our team gets Vic.”

  “No way! We get her,” Jodi argued.

  It felt good, being wanted, even if it was just for a silly game.

  I walked around to the front door of the cabin and let myself in.

  “Greetings, stealth Pictionary master,” Chieko said, lowering her book onto her chest.

  “Greetings. Wanna play a round?” I asked her.

  She surprised me when she closed her book without even marking the page and slid off her bed. “Why not?”

  And we walked back to the camper room together.

  Day 8—Saturday

  When Earl and I pulled into the market lot at seven fifteen the following morning, there were already two long rows of tents set up, facing each other like partners in a line dance. Each tent had a truck parked behind it, trunks opened, baskets and crates of brightly colored foods bursting out of them.

  I noticed all this through half-closed eyes, of course. Chieko had to set her watch alarm for me and rip me out of bed to get me to Earl on time. Being in a truck with him now was way worse than a school morning, when I never had to set my alarm earlier than seven a.m. Luckily, I was a roll-out-of-bed-and-go girl. I went to bed in the sweatshirt and shorts I was wearing now so I wouldn’t have to bother getting dressed, and my hair was in the lopsided ponytail I’d slept on all night. All I did when I got up was brush my teeth and zombie-walk to Earl’s cabin. It was painful, but I kept reminding myself that I was going to get paid.

  “We’re space sixteen,” Earl told me. “Down by that end.”

  He maneuvered the truck carefully down the middle aisle, which would soon be full of shoppers, and then turned behind the row. He stopped when we reached a rock on the ground with 16 chalked onto it.

  “Very high-tech,” I commented.

  “Help me get the tent up and then we’ll unload.”

  I pretty much just stood there, holding one leg of the tent steady while he fiddled with the other three. I helped him carry the two folding tables into the tent and open them. I wiped them clean so he could lay a waxy tablecloth on top. The cloth was pale yellow with different kinds of flowers printed all over it.

  “Earl,” I said, eyeing the fabric suspiciously, “please don’t tell me those are all the flowers the Meadow Wood bunks are named after.”

  “Because you said please”—he looked straight at me—“I will definitely not tell you that.”

  “But they are, aren’t they?”

  “I plead the Fifth,” Earl said, then turned to pull more boxes out of his truck.

  I lined up the baskets of blueberries on one table while Earl set out his kale and lettuce bunches on the other.

  “Dang it,” he cursed.

  Dang it was a curse for Earl.

  “I knew I’d forget something.” He shook his head and pursed his lips.

  “What’d you forget?”

  “Signs,” he answered. “Forgot my price signs.”

  “So we’ll just tell them what they cost.”

  “No, people don’t like to ask,” he told me. “People like to see it themselves.”

  “Oh.”

  “We just need some paper. Or cardboard. I got a marker in the truck. Go to a stand and ask if we can have a piece of paper.”

  “Me?” I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I still wasn’t even 100 percent awake. Vera probably would have gauged me at about 68 percent.

  “Yes, you. Go on.” He shooed me away.

  “But I don’t want to,” I resisted.

  “It’s part of the job.” He stared me down to show he wasn’t joking.

  I turned and stalked off.

  People were bustling around me, lifting and lugging and setting up displays. Some were talking in clusters of two and three, thermoses in their hands, shouting greetings across the lot. No one looked like they knew how early it was.

  And no one was dressed in shorts. Every person I saw wore long pants, mostly faded and worn, but still pants that went all the way down to their ankles. I felt a cold breeze rush across my thighs and suddenly felt self-conscious, just like I did the day I showed up for the sixth-grade town hall field trip in jeans while all the other girls were in dresses and skirts.

  I pulled my thick hoodie over my head and hid inside it. The sun was up but was acting as groggy as I felt, so there was still a chill in the air. I wandered past two stands of strawberries, a stand of mixed greens, one of gourmet mushrooms, and another of blueberries that looked identical to ours.

  I stopped in front of a stand that looked like someone had picked every single flower in five acres of meadow and arranged them all together in one small space. Buckets covered the tabletop and the ground around it, each stuffed full of flowers bunched in pouffy bouquets. There were hundreds of flowers. The sight of so much color boosted me to a full 89 percent awake.

  “We’re not open yet, but you can still shop if you want.”

  I looked up to see a guy about my age with a Ramos Family Flowers apron standing before me, his hands wrappe
d around a paper coffee cup. His hair was dark and cut close to his head, and he was looking at me with eyes green as the kale I had pulled that morning with Earl.

  “Are you wearing contacts?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Colored contacts, on your eyes?” I clarified.

  He made a face. “No.”

  “Oh,” I said, and continued to stare at his eyes.

  They were crazy green.

  Captivating green.

  Mind-controlling green.

  His dark olive skin made them stand out even more.

  He kind of laughed then, maybe at me.

  “Did you want to buy something?”

  “What? Um, no.” I broke my stare and scanned the table of flowers in front of him. “But do you have a piece of paper, or cardboard, that you don’t need? That I could have?”

  “Probably.” He bent down and searched behind his table. I saw that he was wearing jeans, too, except his weren’t ripped or stained anywhere. They were a deep blue and looked as though they had been ironed.

  When he couldn’t find any paper behind his table, he walked over to the Ramos Family Flowers truck and pulled a piece of torn cardboard out of the back. There was no way he was old enough to drive that truck. He couldn’t have been more than a year older than me. Then I noticed someone stretched out in the passenger seat, leaning back with their eyes closed and their feet on the dashboard. He had the same dark hair.

  “Will this work?” He held it out before me and flipped it to show me both sides.

  “That’s perfect. Thanks a lot.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, but then he didn’t let go when I tried to take the cardboard.

  “Are you waiting for a secret password or something?” I asked, squinting at him.

  “Kind of, yeah,” he answered, then said again, “You’re welcome . . .” He was staring at me, his mouth open, like he wasn’t quite done with his sentence.

  And then I got it.

  “Vic,” I said. “My name is Vic.”

  “You’re welcome, Vic,” he said, emphasizing my name in a way that made me blush.

  I turned quickly to hide my face and leave.

  “And I’m Angel. Since you asked.”

  I heard him laugh as I hurried back to Earl.

  Three hours later our two tables were completely bare and we started to break down our area, a whole hour before the market ended. The smell of kettle popcorn filled the air, even though that stand was at the complete other end of the lot. The salty-sweet aroma had been making my stomach growl all morning. Earl had packed two peanut butter sandwiches for us since we left camp before breakfast was served, but we’d eaten those hours ago and my stomach seemed to have no memory of mine.

  “Very successful day,” Earl announced.

  “Great,” I managed to get out before a yawn stretched my face into a wildly unattractive state.

  Earl laughed at me. “You’ll be tired all day now. Which reminds me.” He rooted around in his pocket and pulled out a wad of five- and ten-dollar bills. He counted through them, then handed some to me. “Here’s your cut.”

  It was more than I expected. And something about that, about Earl handing me money I had worked for all on my own, lifted me up. I suddenly felt taller, and older. I felt the tiniest bit in charge of my life for the moment, and it warmed me from the inside out.

  “And here.” Earl handed me a white paper bag.

  When I opened it, a waft of warm cinnamon sugar hit me. Two cider doughnuts nestled beside each other in the bottom of the bag, heating my hands through the paper.

  “They’re from Hoefel’s Donuts. Best you’ll ever eat.”

  “Wow.” I had to close my mouth to stop drool from sliding out. “Thank you. So much.”

  “You’re welcome. So much.” Earl imitated me perfectly. I realized then that just because I couldn’t relate to his joy of weeding didn’t mean I couldn’t relate to him.

  I offered the bag to him. “Want one?”

  “Nah, gotta watch what I eat, on account of my ticker.” And he pointed at his chest, the left side, where his heart was. “You enjoy them.”

  And I did. I tried to take small bites and I chewed as slowly as I could, but I still finished them both before we even found our way out of the lot and onto the main road back to Meadow Wood.

  Day 9—Sunday

  I spotted Freddy the moment I stepped out of the van, his skinny arms and legs pumping like machinery as he sprinted toward me.

  “Vic!” he shouted. “Hey, Vic!”

  He was a whole shade darker from the sun, and the buzz cut he’d gotten before camp was already growing out. It was the first brother-sister visitation of the summer. Every Sunday a few vans would load up girls at Meadow Wood and drive them over to Forest Lake so siblings could spend some time together.

  “Freddy Spaghetti!” He launched himself into my arms with such force I almost fell over. His hug felt bony and soft at the same time. “I really missed you,” I told him, finally peeling him off me and running my hand over his stubbly hair.

  “It’s only been a week,” he said, trying to balance out the enthusiastic greeting he’d just given me. “You usually go four weeks without seeing me, until I come up on Visiting Day with Mom and Dad.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I admitted. “It just feels different this year.”

  Because it was different this year.

  “So how’s camp? Do you like it? Do you like your counselors? What’s your favorite activity?” I had so many questions I was worried we wouldn’t have time to cover even half of them during our visit.

  “They have the best rolls in the world in the mess hall, and we can eat as many as we want!” Freddy’s eyes lit up, and he licked his lips as he thought about them.

  “Rolls, huh?” That was the answer I got to all my questions. They must be pretty amazing rolls.

  “We have a chart in our bunk, and we’re keeping track of who eats the most by the end of the summer.”

  “You’re charting your bread consumption?” That was definitely a summer-camp first.

  “My counselor Michael is going to be a teacher, so he has us do a lot of charts and graphs and stuff. He’s practicing on us, but it’s fun. We’re gonna start a bar graph tonight after canteen, but it’s gonna be a candy bar graph. Get it? Candy bar. Bar graph.”

  I laughed and slipped Freddy’s hand into mine. “I get it. Very clever.”

  We walked down to the waterfront and sat where the grass met the sand. The sun was soft and the sky was dotted with cotton-candy clouds. A whisper of a breeze came off the water. The lake was flat and still, disturbed only by a family of ducks that landed on the surface, one after another in a triangle shape, then paddled off together toward one of the floating docks.

  “See that brown building over there?” I pointed across the lake at Meadow Wood. “The second one from the end?”

  “Uh-huh.” Freddy held his hand over his eyes like a visor and followed my arm.

  “That’s my cabin. My bed is in the back half of that building, on the left side.”

  “Cool. So I can see you.”

  “And at night you’ll know exactly where I am, sleeping right across the lake from you.”

  “Can you send smoke signals, like one puff of smoke to say hi and two puffs to say good night?”

  “There’s no chimney in the cabin, Freddy. And playing with fire is generally frowned upon at Meadow Wood. Just like it is here.”

  “Only counselors are allowed to light the bonfires,” he admitted. “Your camp looks pretty.”

  I watched Freddy scan the shoreline across the lake. Every shade of green sparkled back at us in the gleaming sun. If you were a beach-ocean-coast kind of person, the scenery in New Hampshire might not do much for you, but if you were a lake-trees-mountains person, there was no place more breathtaking than the land Forest Lake and Meadow Wood stood on.

  “Does my camp look like that,”
Freddy wanted to know, “when you look over here from your side?”

  “Yeah, it does,” I answered. “Both our camps are insanely beautiful.” I hated to admit my mom might have been right when she used the word luxury to describe this place. It really was a blue-and-green kind of paradise.

  Freddy and I braided stalks of grass still attached to the ground while we caught up. He told me about his bunkmates and about his counselor Michael, who taught him how to throw a Frisbee and lent him comic books at rest hour. He told me about the beginning of Color War and his swimming group and how cool it was to have a top bunk.

  I asked enough questions to realize that Freddy had no idea what was going on at home. His first canteen was later that day, so he hadn’t learned yet that his account was empty.

  After the thirty-minute visitation was up and counselors started to gather the girls back to the vans, I asked Freddy to introduce me to Michael.

  Michael took the money I handed him and agreed not to tell Freddy about it. I could tell that my brother was in good hands. It actually brought tears to my eyes to know my kid brother was okay. Getting up before dawn on a Saturday had been more than worth it.

  Day 10—Monday

  The archery range was tucked back in one corner of Meadow Wood, the tire-size targets set in front of a wall of trees. Chieko was the instructor, which was kind of hard to imagine at first. But once we had a session with her and saw her in action, it made sense.

  At the beginning of the period she reviewed the names of all the equipment with us and made a big deal about safety practices. She actually sounded like a mom when she went through the list of dos and don’ts, and she called on us one at a time to repeat them.

  Then we watched her shoot.

  Five arrows.

  Five bull’s-eyes.

  She practically split an arrow with another arrow, like they do in cartoons.