Authors: Diana Spechler
When I finally got caught, it was Eden who caught me, Eden who was awake at five in the morning, having left her room to sprawl on the hallway floor in an odd, splayed shape, like a body that had fallen from a window.
“What are you doing?” we asked in unison.
“Going for a run,” I said, which, though true, made no sense because for one thing, I was coming in from outside, and for another thing, I was wearing a dress. “Do you . . . want to come?”
“Running at five in the morning?” Eden snorted. She was sucking on her Jewish star, the gold chain making an arrow over her chin to point to some place inside her.
“Why are you lying on the floor?” I asked, glancing nervously at all the closed doors. “Here, come into my room. You can lie in my bed while I’m out running.”
“Why would I lie in your bed?”
“Changing beds might help you sleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep.”
“You’ll feel better,” I said.
“If I sleep, I’ll have to wake up. And if I wake up, I’ll have to have another day. And I’m sick of the days here. I’m sick of life. No way I’m staying here the rest of the summer.”
I skimmed over her words, rejecting their gravity, the way I skimmed over bombs in foreign countries when I read the morning news.
Eden sat up, then stood. She was wearing a long T-shirt that said
APPLE-BOBBING FOR A CURE!
Two leaves surrounded an apple’s stem. It was an image of an apple that the world had agreed on, though it looked different from an actual apple.
She followed me into my room, where I changed quickly into running clothes. Eden flopped onto my bed and crossed her arms over her face.
“You’ve lost a lot,” I pointed out. “What, twelve pounds?”
“Fourteen and a half.”
“So that’s really fantastic.”
“Whatever.”
“You can’t leave while you’re on such a roll!”
“I thought you’re
supposed
to quit while you’re ahead.” Eden uncovered her eyes and looked at me, and I wished I could call my mother and tell her: I was looking at my father’s eyes.
“Gray?”
“Eden?”
“Did you have sex with Bennett in the arts and crafts building?”
“What?” I stood, crossed the room to the window, and opened it, exposing a sky that was starting to lighten—a strangled, shamed pink. I turned on the window fan.
“It’s what everyone’s saying. That you guys are having sex. But isn’t he, like, forty-something? And aren’t you, like, twenty-something?”
I sat on the windowsill, letting the air hit my back. “In any closed environment, you’re going to hear a lot of rumors,” I said. “I used to work with comedians, and you wouldn’t have believed the rumors. Really vicious, life-destroying rumors. I guess it was because they were all in competition, but it was also because they were together so much. Every night, they’re all hanging out at the same clubs, trying to get onstage. They’re spending all this time together. They can’t get away from one another. So they become overly interested in one another’s lives. It’s this really amazing phenomenon that—”
“So you didn’t have sex with Bennett in the arts and crafts building?”
I splayed my fingers in front of me and inspected the mess of my nails, the tiny crescents of dirt beneath the white, the fringes of peeling cuticles.
“Because I think it’s poisonous to get that close to spilled paint and all that other stuff. You shouldn’t be naked around spilled paint.”
I curled my fingernails into my fists. “You don’t have to be naked to have sex.”
“I
know
. But—”
“Just kidding,” I said. I bit my lip. “I have a boyfriend back home. He’s a comedian.”
“Is he funny?”
“He’s funny. Anyway, that’s how I started working with comedians. We’ve been together for years.”
“Okay.”
“Rumors are terrible.” I saw myself on a picket line, with a sign on a stick that read
RUMORS ARE TERRIBLE
.
“People like to judge when they don’t know the whole story. It’s a good thing to remember—not to judge when you don’t know the whole story.”
“You sound like a Sunday school teacher.”
“You sound like my mother! You’re interrogating me like I missed curfew.”
Eden smiled. I had come to love her smile, how it swallowed up her eyes, consumed her whole face. “My mother made me come to camp,” she said.
I stood.
“I told her, fine, I’d go, just not to one in Virginia because if anyone ever found out, I would die. And now . . . I hate Kimmy.”
“What’s she going to do, tell your whole high school?”
“Yes.”
“Then they’ll know she was here, too.”
“So? Kimmy doesn’t care. She probably had a going-away party. Bon voyage, fatty! A theme party. That’s so Kimmy. Or at least, it’s something Lily would do. Their family’s, like, rich. Lily gets professional massages. And facials. And she has one of those dads who brings her chocolates on Valentine’s Day.”
“My dad banned Valentine’s Day,” I said. I waited. Eden said nothing. I waited until it became difficult to draw a breath. I added, “Because it’s a saint’s holiday.”
“And nothing embarrasses the Jackson girls,” Eden said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Everyone was probably like, ‘That’s so adorable that Kimmy’s going to fat camp!’ I’m sure Lily’s told everyone in our whole grade that I’m here. It’s fine if Kimmy goes to fat camp. But me? Not so much. Now everyone will call me fat, which they probably already do. And they’ll call me a liar because I said I was going to my grandmother’s for the summer.”
“Your grandmother?”
My father’s parents were long dead. His mother had died of ovarian cancer when I was a child. Many years before that, when my father was only six years old, his father, having suffered all his life from depression, wrote a letter to his wife and sons, and then swan-dove two hundred feet off a suspension bridge. (At my lowest point that winter, I’d thought of him, of the freedom of his demise. Oh, to be airborne, weightless, then gone!)
“Is your grandmother your mother’s mother?”
“It was a lie, Gray,” Eden said. “I told you, I made it up. Anyway, they’ll also call me all the other really nice stuff they’ve been calling me all year.”
“What have they been calling you?”
Eden pulled her eyelashes and turned her eyelids momentarily inside out. She looked dead.
“Did you ask Kimmy not to tell anyone that you’re here?”
She blinked her eyes back to normal. “Gray. That’s really dumb. If you tell someone not to say something, then they’ll know you’re hiding things.”
“True, true, sorry.”
“And then they’re more likely to tell the whole universe.” Eden crossed her arms over her face again. “Too late anyway. She told. God, I did something so stupid last year. Stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life. And everyone found out about it. I mean, part of why it was so stupid was that everyone was obviously going to find out.”
“What was it?”
“I can’t wait until I’m a chef. I can’t wait to get out of Bridger and go to culinary arts school.” Eden sat up. “No one asked me why I did it.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Are you seriously going running?”
“Planning on it.”
“You’re crazy.” Eden leaned back against the wall, pulling her knees up to her chin and her T-shirt over her knees, the silk-screened apple stretching and growing like something important. “We were wasted,” she said. “We were drinking forties. Do you know what forties are? I barely even remember anything,” she said, closing her eyes and resting her cheek on her knees.
I thought of my father telling me when I was much younger than Eden, “Boys think about nothing but sex.”
I had contemplated his claim for days. I had watched the boys in my class—carving drawings into their desks, eating lunch from orange trays, running wind sprints in shin guards— and I had decided that my father couldn’t possibly be correct, that boys could not live the lives of boys with the array of activities that entailed, and all the while be solely focused on a thing they’d never done.
“If boys only think about sex,” I’d finally said to him, “then why don’t they just have sex all the time?”
My father threw his head back and laughed—I was always waiting for that laugh—his mouth flung open, his fillings gleaming, the laugh that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him, his digestive system maybe, making his belly shake inside his shirt, the laugh I still hear in crowds and in laugh tracks. He suspended my chin on the tips of his fingers, as if my head were a thing for display. “If you remember nothing else in life, remember this: If you give boys what they want, they’ll never give you what you want.”
Had I gotten through high school without doling out blow jobs only because of my father’s love? Or was it because I hadn’t been fat, hadn’t felt compelled to provide sexual favors in exchange for male attention?
“Eden,” I said. “Just so you know, everyone makes mistakes.”
“Sunday school teacher!”
“But listen. I mean this. Sometimes, you’ll think one event is the most important thing that could possibly happen in your whole life. But it never is.”
“Something has to be.”
“But you won’t know what it is until the very end of your life. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“You’re saying I can do anything I want and it won’t matter.”
“Kind of.” I bit my thumbnail and thought of my father choosing my college major, and then of his fingers flipping through his record collection, extracting a cardboard square with a sigh. “No. That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Where were you coming from just now?” Eden asked.
The skin around her eyes was puffy, her irises as brown as puddles; I would have liked to splash around in them.
But I had time. I did. I had more than half the summer.
I sighed. “Do I have to tell you?”
Eden shrugged inside the bubble of her T-shirt. “Now I know your secret and you know mine.”
After Lights Out a few nights later, I sat across from Sheena on her bed as she dragged the bristles of a nail polish brush across my big toenail. “When is he going to stop pretending this is a real camp?”
She meant Lewis, who wanted us to choose a camper to win an award. “ ‘Kindest Camper Award,’ ” he had told the counselors after dinner, “which is better than ‘Most Improved’ or ‘Most Valuable’ because it highlights what’s truly important. Tomorrow we will have Awards Night. And then a slideshow. Pudge and I have been working on a soundtrack, and we’ve come up with the perfect songs. They’re both carefree and wistful. Everything from hip-hop to the Eagles. It’s sure to make everyone cry. Or at least the girls. They’ll tell their parents about the lifelong bonds they’re forming at my camp, and then their parents will want to send them back here next summer. And the next. It’s all about retention. I’m a businessman. But what sets me apart is that I also care about the kids.”
“Real camps are at camps,” Sheena said, “not at boarding schools. Real camps have lakes.” She scraped stray polish from my cuticle.
I kept glancing at Sheena’s window. The branches of a tree outside ticked gently against the pane. And through the branches, the seductive smile of the moon. I could see Bennett’s face on it, like a president on a coin. As a child, I’d seen my father’s. He’d once told me he was the man in there.
“Let’s give Eden an award,” I said.
“I’d like to give Eden a muzzle.” Sheena grabbed my knees. “Can you tell I’ve lost weight?”
I looked at her. She looked freshly showered. At Camp Carolina, at all times, everyone was either freshly showered or unspeakably filthy. We showered three times a day. We watched our hair go dry and brittle from sun and too many showers. Our flip-flops made squishing sounds when we walked. We twisted towels over our heads like soft ice cream.
Sheena’s thick wet hair was caught up in a high copper bun. She wore a strapless pink terry-cloth dress with a Velcro fastening near her armpit. Some of the fat had vanished from her wide white arms.
“I keep telling you,” I said. “You look fantastic.”
She had tucked a towel under my feet and was wiping the excess polish on it.
“How much?”
“Twenty-one pounds. I want to lose forty more. At least.”
“Wow. Twenty-one pounds. Everyone will notice.”
“He’ll notice.” Sheena waved her hand over my right foot, then filled her lungs with air and blew on the wet polish.
“Who, your ex?”
Sheena’s walls were covered in glossy photographs, solo shots of Sheena—Sheena in a polka-dot teddy, Sheena posed like a baseball player at bat (but with no bat), Sheena on a worn couch, Sheena fully clothed on the closed lid of a toilet, Sheena wearing a cowboy hat and holding a bag of groceries.
“Yeah. He’ll probably still be in jail.”
“Jail?”
“Soon as he gets out, though, I’ll find him. By then, I’ll have lost everything.” She bit her lower lip, her teeth fitting neatly into the grooves of her scar. “Can we give Miss the award?”
“She’s not kind. She just has good hair. I think she put those bugs in Eden’s bed.”
“Nah.”
“I do.”
“Eden had those bugs coming to her.” Sheena looked at the bristles of the wand, stuck her tongue out, and licked the polish off. She swallowed. “I’ve always wanted to know what that tastes like.”
“What did it taste like?”
“Earwax.” Sheena began polishing the big toenail on my left foot. “I get so hungry here, I want to eat nail polish. Sticks. Rocks. Dirt.”
“Why is your ex-boyfriend in jail?”
“Because he’s a fuckup.”
“The abusive guy?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that why he’s in jail?”
Sheena looked up at me and smiled. Then her smile faded like a Polaroid in reverse. “You’re staring at my scar,” she said, touching it.
“No, I’m not.”
“People have been staring at it all my life. You think I don’t notice?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“If you must know, my biological father almost killed me. I’ve had twelve surgeries. It’s still not perfect. And it gave me a lisp.”
“You don’t lisp.”
“I sort of do,” she lisped. She tasted the nail polish again, and then bunched her fingers together at her mouth, kissing her fingertips like an Italian chef.
“Magnifique!”
she said. “Try it sometime. When you recover from your anorexia.”
“When I
what
?”
Sheena scaled my arm with her eyes. “It’s delicious to eat something that’s not supposed to be food.” She paused, and then said, “He poured boiling water over my head.”
“Good God. Your boyfriend?”
“My dad. My biological father.”
My chest compressed like an accordion. Why had I been so angry with my father? He’d never burned me, or scarred me, or raised me to be a person who taste-tested cosmetics.
“Do you . . . remember it?”
Sheena elongated her tongue to touch the tip of her nose, then retracted it in a wet pink flash. “People have stared at me since I was a kid. So I stared back. Now I see everything. There’s hardly anything I don’t notice.” She scraped more polish from under one of my toenails, scratching the skin so hard, I gasped.
The room was stuffy, practically airless. I gathered my hair into my hands and pulled it into a ponytail. “Why don’t we give an award to Spider?”
“Spider?”
“She’s got those allergies. I just feel bad for her.”
“Spider is gross.”
“You don’t think she’s funny?”
“How about Whitney? Whitney’s kind. Whitney gave Miss her Jell-O today at lunch.”
“That’s against the rules,” I said.
“She broke the rules in order to be kind. That’s true kindness.”
I thought of Bennett in his bed, the hard lines of his body. “Whatever you want,” I said. “I really don’t care.”
Sheena used tweezers to pluck a hair from my toe.
“Ow.”
“How’s Mikey?”
“Fine,” I said. “Same as always.”
When I called Mikey, I pumped him with questions that made him talk and talk; steroid questions that infused his talking with energy, and then I’d end the call so fast (“Shit! Gotta run!”), he had no chance to come down from the high and tell me that he loved me. Now I pictured our apartment, and then pictured it empty of furniture—the standing Kmart lamp with the three-piece stem, the chest of drawers that was missing a drawer, the full-length mirror with the Big Apple Comedy Club sticker. Gone, gone, and gone.
“So no more Bennett?”
I touched the place on my toe where the hair had been. It felt hot with loss.
“You know,” Sheena said. “I lied to you about something.” She polished my last toenail and blew on it. “When we first met. Me and you shouldn’t lie to each other, since we’re friends. Right?”
I pressed my toe harder.
“I didn’t leave my boyfriend because he was abusive,” Sheena said. “I helped the cops bust him for drugs.”
I searched Sheena’s eyes for her pupils. They were invisible, seamlessly incorporated into her irises.
“So he’s in jail. And now he’s like, ‘Fuck you,’ ‘Never speak to me again,’ ‘Everyone’s against me,’ blah blah blah. That man has a temper like a red-tail boa.”
The stubble on my legs rose to attention. Sheena yanked the towel from under my feet.
“He wasn’t dealing or anything, but they thought he was. He was just a pothead. They made an example of him.”
“And . . . you helped?”
“Sure. I made a hundred bucks.” Sheena waved her hand over my toes and glanced at me.
My heart was chopping in my chest, a bonus cardio workout. I looked at my toenails. The red was darker than it looked in the bottle. It looked like blood. Why had I told Sheena about Bennett? Didn’t I know this about secrets: that to give them away was to relinquish control to the person who received them? What had I been thinking, granting Sheena power? This summer was far too crucial to wreck by giving up power.
But I was in good company. Everyone told Sheena everything. She was the lenient gatekeeper of all camp gossip. We liked to hand her secrets like jewels, then kneel at her feet while she donned them and basked in their sparkle.
“I did love him,” Sheena said. “I’ve never loved anyone like that. And I know I never will again.”
I stood, keeping my toes spread as I pressed my feet into my flip-flops.
When I turned toward the door, Sheena grabbed my wrist. “Here.” She was holding the nail polish bottle out to me, her fingers wrapped so tightly around me, I could feel my flustered pulse. “Taste it. It’s good.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s toxic.”
Sheena studied the bottle. “Are you saying you just let me poison myself?”
I yanked my arm away from her and backed toward her door. “You didn’t eat much of it,” I said. “Not enough to do damage. You know . . . I really don’t care who gets the award. You can pick.”
“Figured.”
“I trust you,” I said, slipping out into the hallway, closing her door, running from Sheena who knew one of my secrets, who charged one hundred dollars for her betrayal services. I ran into the night and the moon followed.
When I got to Bennett’s, I burst in without knocking and found his room dark and filled with music, his body a bump under his top sheet.
“What’s up, Angeline?” His voice was sleepy and far away.
I crawled on top of him.
“Hey,” he said, chuckling in slow motion.
“Bennett.” I wanted to unzip my skin and let my insides fall out. It made no sense. He was not a proper receptacle for my refuse. He would jump out of the way, let it all splash to the floor at his feet. And yet. This was the man I kept choosing.
I pulled my shorts off, my underwear, my shirt.
“Give me a minute,” Bennett said. “I gotta wake up. Slow down.”
“Please just . . .”
“What?” he said.
I slid my arms around his arms, under his body. I hugged him with all of my muscles. He was a floating log in the sea. I clung even as he warped. “Tell me something,” I whispered into his ear.
“Like what?”
“Something that will make me feel better.”
“But I don’t know why you’re feeling bad.” He tapped my arm, signaling me to move. I clung more tightly, wrapping my legs around his legs. “You want some vodka? I picked up some of those red plastic Solo cups from Walmart. Those things remind me of college keg parties.”
I stayed as still as I could, fusing our heartbeats until I couldn’t distinguish them.
“Come on, Angeline. You trying to kill me?” He loosened my arms and lifted me off him, cast me aside, and stood.
“You’re trying to kill me,” I said.
“Now why would you say something like that?” he said, but he wasn’t really asking. His voice was far away. He turned on the lamp by the bed. “You know this song?” He was naked and perfect in lamp light. He was an Olympian.
“Everyone knows this song.”
It was Fleetwood Mac. Bennett sang along. He extracted vodka and a bag of ice from the freezer of his mini fridge and then banged the bag on his leg. The ice fell apart against the rocks of his thigh.
“Do you know that Stevie Nicks used to work as a waitress so Lindsey Buckingham could play music?” I propped myself on one elbow.
“God, I was in love with Stevie Nicks back in the day.”
I covered my body with the top sheet. “She hated waitressing, but she loved to picture him lying on his floor, playing his guitar, getting more and more brilliant. She just wanted him to be as brilliant as possible.”
Bennett brought two cups to bed and slid in next to me, handing me one, sucking condensation off his knuckle. “That right?”
The crowd cheered. Stevie Nicks thanked them in her sexy, raspy voice.
I took a long drink. The vodka was bitter and cheap-tasting and cold. The summer was half gone. “I don’t want to go home,” I said.
“You don’t have to leave for another month.”
“A month is nothing.”
“Why are you thinking about it?” Bennett leaned his head back against the wall, resting his cup on the plane of his abdominal muscles. “You think too damn much.”
“I think between twelve thousand and fifty thousand thoughts a day. Same as everyone.”
Bennett laughed.
“Spider told me that.”
I took another sip and began to feel better. The summer wouldn’t end without my consent. Bennett and I would continue our routine. Eden and I would merge in an elegant, organic fashion. Sheena would keep on being Sheena, eating nail polish, teaching the same yoga postures day after day.
“Just tell me something good,” I said, leaning my head on Bennett’s shoulder and closing my eyes.
I love you
. I tried to send him the message, to make him think that he’d thought of it, the words looping from my brain to his brain, from his mouth to my brain, and so on, forever.
Let me take you out of your life and insert you into mine.
I was so close to his tattoo, the red heart, another woman’s name.