by Dahlia Adler
“We’re on a recovery mission, not a walk down memory lane,” I said.
“I know,” Cece said. “I can’t help that I’m also just a tiny bit excited to be back at camp. With my camp friends. And I don’t even have to spend the night! It’s what I always wanted camp to be.”
“I’m so glad that my parental abandonment is working out for you,” I said coolly.
“What if your dad doesn’t want to be found?” Lando asked me. “Didn’t you say he turned off his phone?”
I extended summer by a week or so, Dad’s last message had said. Like he had the power to control the seasons, to stretch weeks into an indefinite or so. Like it was an option to mistake one week for three.
“You know reception is spotty here,” I said, chewing on the inside of my cheek. Spotty reception wouldn’t account for him ignoring my messages. Or the lack of Wi-Fi signal in the office.
“Oh, we are going to find him,” Cece said emphatically. “I did not spend eight summers here for no reason!”
“In a literal sense, you did,” I said. “We didn’t get college credit or learn a skill or anything.”
“But in a figurative sense,” Cece said, stabbing a finger victoriously into the sky, “I could find my way around here blindfolded. All of us could.”
“You’re just describing blackout tag,” I said.
“Blackout tag,” Lando repeated, with all the rough angst and gravitas of a brooding superhero. “That game is way too dangerous for kids! I almost cracked my head open on a tree branch.”
“Must have been a low one,” I teased.
“How are you gonna make short jokes when I’m taller than you now?” he asked, gazing down at me with an intensity that made my hairline sweat. I wanted to tear out my braided pigtails. They had seemed like a good idea when Cece suggested them but now made me feel like a giant toddler in overall shorts and too much lipstick.
“You can be taller than me all you want,” I said, scrunching my nose at my reflection in his glasses. “But I’m here to keep you height humble. I won’t let you forget where you came from. The top of your head used to be my armrest. You started at the bottom. Of my elbow.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re ridiculous.”
I smiled at him. “Yeah, but you must have missed me a little.”
He smiled back. “A little.”
Finding my dad on the first try had been a long shot, and yet we left the office without the gusto we’d entered with.
Outside seemed hotter, the buzzing bugs louder.
Following the signs for the lake, we passed the rebuilt ceramics hut and the health center.
“So, Lando,” I said. “Are you totally loving being an only child?”
Cece sucked in an appalled breath, just like I knew she would. “God, Rosie! It’s not like Oliver died. He went to college.”
“Tomato, potato,” I said, catching Lando’s eye and sharing a private, silent joke through telepathy. Pretending not to know about Cece’s endless crush on Ollie Cohen-Kersey was one of life’s great joys. It was hilarious that she thought people didn’t know when she was physically incapable of not calling him Oliver rather than Ollie.
“Fill us in on real life, Lando,” I prompted.
“As opposed to fake life?” He chuckled.
“Exactly,” I said. “I only know what you put online.”
“Which means we have already heard your favorite movies of the year,” Cece reminded him. “We want to know the fun stuff. Secret stuff. Did you get a girlfriend yet?”
“Your priorities are so specific,” I told her. My cheeks prickled with secondhand embarrassment like she’d blurted out something rude, even though she hadn’t. I tugged on the ends of my pigtails and tried to make my face stay still.
She stuck her tongue out at me. “Let me be nosy!”
Shoulders raised to his ears, Lando grumbled, “No, I did not get a girlfriend.”
“Because you’re too busy still pining over the embodiment of feminine perfection?” I asked him.
“Who?” Lando asked, taking this moment to clean his glasses.
“You know who,” I said. “The Secret Camp Crush.”
I drew out the last syllable so it whispered down the path ahead of us.
“It’s Madison Poffenberger,” Cece guessed. “Wait, no, Tinsley Poffenberger.”
“No way,” Lando scoffed. “Cabin Tenners? Please. The Poffenbergers don’t care about art. I’d prefer someone who didn’t think reality TV counts as cinema verité. Besides, I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a secret crush.”
“Two years ago, you said, and I quote!” I said, striking the end of each word like the hammer in a bell. “‘I have always had the same camp crush.’”
Cece wriggled a finger at him, the tips of her fingers still dyed chocolate-cherry red from helping me with my roots last night. “It’s the always that gave you away.”
“You had a crush on one of the twenty-five girls who was here every summer, and you never told us who it was,” I said to Lando.
“I bet it was Rachel,” Cece said. “She was the only person short enough to three-legged race with you for a couple years.”
“And she bullied me for not being fast enough the whole time!” Lando said. “Taking three-legged races too seriously is immediate crush disqualification.”
“We’re at camp for the last time,” I reminded him. “I’m pretty sure that means you have to confess who Camp Crush is.”
He snorted, looking at the trees that were starting to block out the sky. “First of all, she’s Secret Camp Crush. And secondly, I would rather chug lake water than talk about who likes whom.” He whipped his backpack around to the front and unzipped it in one motion. “Let’s stop fishing for secrets. Have some contraband breakfast.”
From within the well-stocked depths of his backpack, the three of us split a meal of 7-11 donuts and Takis. In the shade of the tree canopy, eating convenience store food on the walk from the cabins toward the lake, it was almost like the old days.
“Was junior year everything you wanted it to be, Rosie?” Lando asked.
“Pretty uneventful. Except, you know, my dad bought a summer camp.” I kicked a pinecone off the path. “So far? Less fun than a zoo.”
Lando scoffed. “Uneventful? You skipped another grade!”
“Sort of.” I sucked spicy dust from my fingertips. “I was a sophomore with junior standing.”
“What’s the difference?” he asked.
“I actually did more work than I needed to, so I’m technically still a sophomore—they just ran out of classes for me to take. When I skipped second grade, I didn’t have to do the work.”
It was odd to talk about school here. The sharp, evergreen smell of the forest was the total opposite of the glass-and-cement high school I attended.
Camp used to be the one place I wasn’t constantly reminded that I was younger than everyone else. People asked, shrugged their interest, eventually forgot. It didn’t matter that you skipped a grade when there were no grades. There were only campers and counselors, opposite ends of a spectrum. And I had always clung to Cece, hoping people would assume we were the same age, instead of two years apart, an advantage that I definitely did not have in my regularly scheduled life.
“Who skips two grades?” Lando asked. He patted donut sugar from the front of his shirt. “You’re a year younger than me, but you get to graduate the year before! That’s wild, Rosie. You aren’t even a little bit excited?”
“Sometimes we get to have the same homework now. That’s exciting,” Cece answered for me.
“That’s true,” I said. I fished out my water bottle and took a long drink. “But I’m mostly excited to be done next year. I can’t wait to just work on classes that actually matter.”
“It’s not like it’s all cinchy,” Cece said, frowning at me with a sudden strange seriousness. She snagged the water bottle out of my hands. “You skipped to a grade so that it’d be a challenge.
Now you have to study like the rest of us.”
“I never said I didn’t,” I said. “But I’d rather be in college than in high school.”
She thrust the water bottle back into my hands. “Stop wishing your whole life away. You’ll get older just like everybody. You’re rushing.”
“I wonder why,” I snapped back at her. “I don’t see anyone else having to beg their parents to be parents.”
The door to the nearest bath cabin burst open. A middle-aged guy holding a beer can came staggering out. Whether the beer had originated inside the bathroom was worryingly unclear.
“Lookit, some newbies!” shouted the drunk man to no one in particular. “You guys are just in time! They’re tapping the kegs!”
Lando looked affronted. “Dude. We’re underage.”
Surrendering as best as he could without dropping his can, the guy held up his hands and started backing toward the ceramics hut. “Be cool, man, you’re the one trespassing.”
Lando started to speak but couldn’t quite orient his mouth around an entire phrase, so I leapt in front of him, catching the drunk man’s attention.
“We’re looking for Duke,” I said.
“Duke?” the man echoed. He was wearing a Camp Arden T-shirt. Dad hadn’t changed the design, but he had printed them on better-quality shirts than the scratchy, straight-out-of-the-bulk-bag kind we used to get. These were prefaded olive green.
“Duke Castillo,” I said. “The camp director? He’s my—”
“Duke!” the man howled at the sky. It echoed through the pine trees and ricocheted back to us. When no one appeared, he said, “Guess he’s not over here.”
“I guess not,” I said.
Cece and Lando both took a step back. Their eyes screamed at me to do the same. I didn’t.
“The thing is,” I said. “Duke also wasn’t in his office, so—”
“Duke has no office!” the man said, throwing his arms out wide so all of his scraggly pit hair sneaked out of his sleeves. “The world is his office! And the woods are his world!”
“Okay,” Cece said, smiling beatifically. “Thank you so much for all your help. Bye-ee!”
She turned and steered us away, muttering, “Go, go, go.”
Once we were down the first small hill and out of sight, Lando asked, “Have we ruled out the possibility that it’s a cult?”
“Everyone we’ve passed so far is wearing the same shirt,” Cece said. “That’s definitely cultish.”
It seemed like a thousand years ago that I’d texted our group thread asking whether or not they thought my dad could be brainwashing people into paying hundreds of dollars to sleep in communal cabins. At the beginning of summer, it had been funny that Dad was going to camp and we weren’t. When there had still been clothes in his closet. When he answered his phone.
I didn’t find it funny anymore.
“We wore matching shirts when we were campers,” I said. Our matching shirts had been an eye-watering shade of lime green that made us easy for counselors to spot. Half a dozen of them in different sizes lived in a box under my bed. Cece still slept in hers.
“We were children,” Lando said. “We had no choice but to match.”
He had a point.
We were coming up on residence row, where all of the cabins had been upgraded. None of them had tarps covering holey roofs or boards eaten to dust by termites. Even with the cosmetic upgrades, I couldn’t imagine my dad agreeing to sleep in a bunk bed in a room with strangers.
“Let’s go check Cabin Twelve for our initials!” Cece said.
“Okay, but just for a second,” I said.
She was already running off the path, toward the big-kid cabins. They were in the same order. The numbers still skipped unlucky thirteen out of tradition. The cabins themselves had been upgraded, painted barn-door red, and given new wooden railings.
The summer after I turned thirteen, I had done the honors of carving our names on the back of Cabin 12 with the pocketknife Dad thought I wanted for my birthday that year. I’d added Lando’s name as an honorary member of the cabin after first pretending that I hated the idea when Cece presented it because it had seemed very important that no one think I wanted his name there.
And now, all of the boards were repainted or replaced, leaving no hint as to where we had started.
* * *
The deeper into the trail we got, the more attention we drew. We passed a group of campers lawn bowling beside a silver keg of beer and another group with a keg and no visible activity.
Like zombies scenting brains on the wind, the campers would stop talking and watch us pass. Near the archery field, a sunburned couple stopped making out long enough for one of them to ask, “Are those kids?”
I would have taken offense at that, but both of them looked to be older than my parents. Or at least more wrinkled.
As we crested the hill behind the archery field, we could see a large group of campers laughing and chasing each other.
Cece squealed and spun away, pushing us back down the hill. “Someone please warn me if I am about to see an orgy because my virgin eyes can’t handle it! My mother said that there was a chance that this place was some kind of sex thing, and I never should have doubted her—”
“What are you talking about?” I interrupted her. “I didn’t see any naked people!”
I started to go back over the hill to get another look, but my cousin stopped me, pulling me out of sight of the people below.
“I saw blindfolds,” Cece whispered loudly. “Haven’t you seen Fifty Shades?”
“No!” I said at the same time Lando said, “Yes!” Then he added, defensively, “It was shot by the same cinematographer as Jurassic World.”
I goggled at him. “And that’s a positive?”
Cece side-eyed us both and sniffed. “I saw a redband trailer. Blindfolds were part of it!”
Sometimes it was hard to believe that I was the baby cousin.
I marched back up the hill, braced to see something life-ruining. Instead, I saw campers, fully clothed in their matching olive-green shirts and bandana blindfolds.
“You guys,” I said to Cece and Lando. “It’s blackout tag.”
Once we got closer, it was easier to tell that there were multiple teams of people playing. The blindfolded people who were “it” were chugging beers before each turn, making their tags lurching swipes that everyone else laughed at, easily dodging out of the way.
It didn’t look fun. It looked mean.
“Do you see your dad?” Lando asked me.
My stomach churned at the idea of my dad being part of the mocking crowd, but I looked carefully as we walked by them. It was almost a relief that he wasn’t there.
“Hey, kids, you’re at the wrong camp!” someone called from the keg.
The product of strict and attentive parents, Cece was momentarily frozen in place by the sound of adult disapproval. To her, rules were rules, even when set in place by strangers at an adult summer camp. But we had practiced for this.
“Go home to your jobs!” I shouted back at them.
It broke the spell. While the campers jeered back at me, Cece burst into motion, running at full speed away from the adults. Lando and I followed, laughing too hard to catch up until we were around the corner and nearly to the arts and crafts pavilion.
“The wishing steps!” Cece said.
“Think of a good one,” I said. “It’s the last wish you’ll get here.”
The path was partially blocked by a huge fallen tree the camp had never paid to have moved. Instead, stairs had been nailed to the trunk so you could climb over it. When we were kids, the stairs were split boards so rickety that the only logical wish was “I hope the stairs don’t break.”
Now, it looked like part of an Aztec pyramid built over the fallen tree. Not only was there a railing and a platform at the top, but the new steps were painted to say, Tell the tree your wish. Running up the sturdy stairs didn’t make you feel like you’d ear
ned a wish. It felt like construction scaffolding redirecting traffic. But we wished anyway.
“I wish to find Uncle Duke,” Cece said dutifully.
“Oh, good,” I said, running up the steps behind her. “Then I can wish to find out who Lando’s Secret Camp Crush is.”
“Secret!” Lando repeated, chasing me down the stairs. “Wait, I missed my wish!”
“Too bad, so sad!” Cece and I giggled.
Lando paused on the bottom step, teetered on the tips of his toes, and swung back around. “Hold on! I’m going back over!”
His long legs took him up two stairs at a time.
“If your wish is to undo my wish, then I’m gonna double-wish it!” I shouted after him.
I followed him, trotting up the stairs and then leaping off the platform.
“You can’t cross back over the wishing tree! It’s a one-way wish!” Cece protested from the other side. And then she gasped. “Oh no.”
“Oh no?” I asked, pushing Lando back up to the top of the platform so I could see the path again.
Lando froze at the top of the platform. “Oh no.”
On the other side of the tree, a deep voice said, “Orlando? Celia?”
Lando’s older brother was standing on the trail. The olive-green camper shirt matched Ollie Cohen-Kersey’s eyes almost as well as it mirrored his little brother’s queasy complexion.
Trotting down the stairs, I waved. “Hi, Ollie. I wonder who wished for you.”
Cece flashed her eyes at me like warning lights.
Ollie didn’t notice. He was pinching the bridge of his nose and shaking his head. “Of course. You’re all together. None of you can be here!”
“Well, my dad owns the place,” I said. “So, if he wants to throw me out, he can do it himself.”
“Shouldn’t you be at college?” Lando asked his brother.
“Shouldn’t you be at home?” Ollie shot back.
“I’m here to find my dad,” I said. “Camp was supposed to end weeks ago. What the fuck happened here?”
Ollie frowned at me like he was considering giving me a demerit for cursing. Remembering that he no longer had that power, he opened his hands and said, “Your dad gave us a do-over.”
