Not a Happy Camper (22 page)

“Cheese!”

Next, Philip's parents entered the set-up along with Saul, and Kenny captured my act of fraud on film. After the photo op, there was a buffet lunch featuring a choice of falafel or tuna fish sandwiches.

“Thanks for letting them pose with us,” Philip whispered. “I know it can be really embarrassing to be seen with my parents.” I tried convincing myself it wasn't so bad I was doing this. After all, this was the closest Philip would get to having a girlfriend, so he was getting something out of it. And if it made him look better then it made me look better and then Kenny might be jealous and then we'd all benefit.

“Saul invited us to dinner at his house tonight,” Philip said. “What do you think he'll serve? I'm betting on a big bowl of leftover tuna-falafel casserole.”

“Unless there's a train wreck with something better on board,” I added before biting into my sandwich.

My mouth was still full when Philip's mother asked me if I wanted to join them the next day for Sunday brunch at Flo's. I nodded okay and kept chewing. But about half an hour later, Kenny came over to me and asked if I wanted to go canoeing with him the next morning. “I have something really important I need to ask you,” he said.

It could only be about one thing. Obviously, Kenny liked me after all. Maybe he'd liked me all along and dated Autumn Evening first just to work up his nerve. But now, seeing me with Philip and his parents, he finally realized there was no time to spare. He had to make his move. He'd been away for ten days, enough time for Autumn Evening to recover and forget about him and not be mad at me for taking her place. Now he could ask me out.

I couldn't go to breakfast with Philip's family. I had to go canoeing with Kenny. But today was Philip's day. Philip's one perfect
day and I didn't want to ruin it. I'd wait until Sunday morning to cancel.

“Why can't you go?” Philip wanted to know as his parents sat waiting in their Dodge Dart.

I had an excuse all planned, but it wasn't coming out.

“Well, it's just that...”

“Is it my parents?” he asked.

“No, of course not,” I insisted.

“So then what?” he asked.

“Just... something else.”

“Kenny?” he questioned, now more angry than hurt.

“Well...”

“Okay, fine.”

But really, it wasn't. I knew it was the wrong thing to do, but when a girl like me has a chance to spend a day—and maybe a lifetime—with a boy like Kenny, there really is no other choice to make. It's like chicken or chateaubriand.

“... The boys we call our own
Will wear glasses and braces and smell of b.o....”

L
ONG BEFORE
F
REDDY
K
RUEGER
,
F
RIDAY THE
13
TH
AND THE ONSLAUGHT
of low budget slasher flicks, there was the original story of murder and mayhem, the legend of the Cropsy Maniac. Story goes that Cropsy was just your average Joe until he was tragically disfigured in a fire, a fire started by kids at camp. Sporting a hook for a hand and hate in his heart, Cropsy was bent on revenge, waiting at night in the dark of the woods, waiting for campers to cross his path, waiting for a chance to capture and kill them. And, coincidentally, whatever camp you were at when you heard this tale, well my friend, that was the one where Cropsy lay waiting.

Unless you went to Camp Kin-A-Hurra. We didn't believe in the Cropsy Maniac because we didn't need made-up stories about a homicidal madman because we had the real thing. This was not the stuff of urban legend; it was the stuff of rural reality. Just two summers earlier, in August of 1972, a sixteen-year-old girl from the town of Hinckley had been hired on to help out at the stables. When she disappeared at the end of her first day, everyone assumed she didn't like the job and had decided not to come back. In truth, she never left.

Horseback riding was never particularly popular at Kin-AHurra. For campers, it meant wearing heavy corduroy pants and helmets in the rain, and for the saggy-backed, ancient horses Saul
rented for the summer, it meant having to move. Consequently, the two groups of mammals tended to leave each other alone. But a few days after the girl's disappearance, the horses were extremely active, running around erratically, whinnying, spooked.

Sixty-year-old Amanda Bernhardt, a retired rodeo performer who ran the stables, discovered the reason when she spotted the 16–year-old girl's hand sticking up from the mud by the water's edge. At first, all of the male foreign counselors were under suspicion—because they were male and because they were foreign—but the killer turned out to be a local man, the girl's jealous ex-boyfriend.

I knew this was a true story because Autumn Evening had photos of the police and FBI taping off the area. To her disappointment, they wouldn't let her get closer, to question the hovering soul of the lifeless body. Today was the second anniversary of the murder and this was the romantic spot on the lake Kenny had chosen for our rendez-vous.

“Nothing ever happens at this stupid camp,” Kenny complained as he stared at the sky while I slapped at mosquitoes landing on my feet and arms, since I'd forgotten to spray on Off. “Have you ever been more bored in your life?”

I thought back on the summer so far: the bunk burning down, the prowlers breaking in, Mindy Plotke falling from the mountain and the miniature golf excursion that ended in carbon monoxide poisoning.

“You're right,” I said. “Nothing much happens here. But at least Nixon got to end the war before he had to leave office.”

Kenny looked at me. “Nixon?”

I needed to sound like an informed Republican. This was my chance to show off for him. I needed to summon up my full knowledge of current events.

“I heard Henry Kissinger is Jewish.”

“Are you a Republican or something?” he asked.

“Aren't you?”

“Me?” Kenny shouted. “I hate the Republicans. My parents are Republicans. I am not a Republican.”

“Then how come you were crying when Nixon resigned?”

“I wasn't crying,” he shouted defensively. “I was just mad. And it had nothing to do with Nixon. The back of my camera opened up and the film fell out. All of my Allagash pictures? Gone.”

Kenny reddened again at the memory.

“Couldn't other people make copies of theirs and mail them to you?” I asked. “They wouldn't be exactly the same, but-”

“I want my own!” he yelled.

“Well, maybe you could go again next year and take some more.”

“I don't think I'm coming back,” Kenny muttered, pushing off the shore and paddling a short ways back into the lake.

I panicked. “Where would you go?”

I couldn't lose track of him. I needed to know where he'd be.

“Maybe I'll go to some other camp.”

I knew this was ridiculous. The names scrawled on the walls and painted high on the rafters made it clear that this almost never happened. All of the North American-born campers returned year after year to Kin-A-Hurra with only a couple of exceptions, when their parents insisted they have other experiences. This usually meant a summer picking fruit on a kibbutz in Israel or six weeks on a bus traveling cross-country with a temple group. Summer school if you really screwed up; Hawaii if you were good. No one from Kin-A-Hurra ever signed on for Outward Bound. It would have been redundant.

“Didn't you think Saul's house was really nice?” I asked. I needed to change the subject. “You're so lucky you got to see it.”

“I got to see it cuz I was kind of unconscious.”

“Oh. Yeah. So I guess you don't remember.”

“I've been in it before. It's like a house. I don't know. Like the one my family has in the Poconos.”

“I thought you lived in Westchester County.”

“We have a vacation house in the Poconos. For skiing.”

Skiing. Now there was a sport I had no interest in. So much clothing. So much equipment. So much snow.

“I'd love to learn to ski,” I said.

“That's nice. Look, here's the thing I need to ask you about.”

I gave him my full attention. “Uh-huh.”

“Autumn Evening and I broke up before the Allagash, so I'm not going with anybody now.”

This was it. Kenny was going to ask me out. Even if he didn't come back to camp, he'd be mine for the rest of this summer. My fairy godmother was tapping me on the head. I could feel the magic wand.

“So,” he said slowly, “think I should ask Hallie to the Banquet Social? She's not exactly my first choice or my second choice or my third, but there's nobody good-”

I didn't hear the rest of what he was saying because when you're a balloon that's deflating, wanting to fly about willy-nilly, smacking into walls and making obscene noises before crashing to the ground, lifeless and dead, it takes everything in you to sit still in a boat.

“Has she ever said anything about me?” he asked.

She'd said he was a jerk a bunch of times. Every time she told me I should like Philip.

“I don't think that's a good idea,” I mumbled.

Kenny thought about it a moment. “Hhmm, might make me look desperate.”

“That's not what-”

“You and Phil are pretty lucky,” he said. “You're a good match. You're both—different.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” I asked, even though I knew what he meant.

“Just different from the others, somehow. Just, you know, different.”

But how could Kenny know what I was different from when he hardly knew me at all?

“You belong together,” he said. “You're lucky.”

But I wasn't feeling lucky. On behalf of Philip, and myself, I was feeling insulted. And then, surprisingly empowered by the insult.

And I'm not exactly sure at what point I'd stood up, but I was towering over Kenny now and looking down at him. Looking down and really, truly wondering what it was I had liked about him, what I had liked so much for so long. Maybe it was because I looked menacing or maybe it was just the humidity, but a single bead of sweat was slowly dripping down the middle of his nose.

“Why don't you have a seat?” Kenny suggested.

“Why?”

“Cuz you're gonna tip us over. C'mon, sit down!” he yelled.

But like always, I just froze. And I stood there watching that bead of sweat as it made its way down his beautiful nose. His flawless nose. His perfect, perfect nose.

I thought I had adored Kenny for his many good qualities, his affinity for the outdoors, his natural leadership skills. All the things I didn't possess. But alas, I was as shallow as the ice cream dishes at Howard Johnson's. Staring down at him, really studying him, it finally hit me. Kenny was not what he appeared to be. Or maybe he was exactly what he appeared to be and I had failed to notice it. I knew now that I had loved him for one reason alone; it was as
plain as the nose on his face. And it wasn't even that I wanted him for his nose, I just wanted that nose for me.

“What are you staring at?” he yelled. “Sit down!”

“Maybe I should tip us over,” I suggested.

“Are you nuts?”

“They say it's good to try new things. Maybe it'll give you one interesting story to tell about this summer,” I suggested, leaning towards the side and rocking the boat.

“Cut it out!” he yelled, worried I might actually try to overturn us.

Which I wasn't really planning to do, but I also wasn't planning on Kenny pulling out a paddle and using it to push me back. And I really wasn't planning on tripping over the paddle and falling overboard. Alone.

“Happy now? Was this a good new thing to try?”

No. It was a very bad idea, one of many bad ideas I'd had this summer, on a par with our government's attempt to get us to switch over to the metric system. And now I was in the water, in the dirty smelly water. We hadn't brought lifejackets and I was still, at best, a lousy swimmer and being in my clothes made it even harder.

“Um, could you help me get back in?” I gulped.

“No way,” Kenny snickered.

“You want me to drown?”

“Are you that bad a swimmer?” he asked. “You're gonna drown in three feet of water?”

I put my feet down and stood up. The water came to my waist.

“Oh. It's not deep. It's just kind of muddy at the bottom.”

“That's not all mud,” Kenny corrected me.

“Then what-?”

“Ask the horses,” he sneered. “And you're not bringing that into this canoe.”

Kenny began paddling away, then stopped.

“Um, you're not going to mention this to Hallie, are you?”

No. I was not. I was not going to tell her how hard I'd worked to be rejected. I was going to sneak back to Girls' Side and throw my “muddy” clothes into the shower, in an attempt to wash away the memory of this day.