Abby didn’t bother to reply. Both of her parents knew she’d been planning all year to go to theater camp in Maine. Abby had taped her own application, singing “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” which she’d learned playing Tzeitel in her middle school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. She’d loved the camaraderie of rehearsals, how all the kids, the actors and the crew, had become friends, and on the night of the first show, she hadn’t been nervous at all. She loved performing. Even though she’d been, at the time, a head taller than both the girl playing Golde, her mother, the boy playing Tevye, her father, and bigger than almost every other kid in the cast, she hadn’t felt ashamed, and everyone told her what a good job she’d done. Her father had had tears in his eyes as he’d handed her a bouquet. Even her mother had looked impressed.
Abby had been so happy when she’d gotten accepted to theater camp in March. She’d been corresponding with her fellow campers online, all of them trying to guess what the summer’s musical would be. Then Eileen had sprung the fat-camp trap.
Abby had gone to her father, begging him to intervene, but all he’d done was say things about shalom ha’bayit, which was Hebrew for peace in the house. Which, Abby knew, really meant peace between her parents, at Abby’s expense. And now here she was, in the middle of Nowheresville, New York, stuck in a cabin that smelled faintly of mold at a camp that didn’t even have a theater, preparing for six weeks of starvation when she should have been getting ready to sing her audition piece, which was going to be “Adelaide’s Lament,” from Guys and Dolls.
“Dad,” Abby said quietly. “Do I really have to do this?”
Her father pushed his hands into his pockets. The dusty shafts of sunlight coming through the cabin’s windows highlighted his potbelly, the weary slump of his shoulders, and the new strands of silver in his hair. Abby found herself startled by how old he looked.
“Your mother wants you to be healthy,” he said, a little woodenly, like an actor who’d memorized his lines but hadn’t yet figured out how to deliver them with any conviction.
“I am healthy,” said Abby. “Nobody’s saying I’m unhealthy. Dr. Raskin has never said I’m unhealthy. I’m just not thin. And neither are you! And neither is Grandma! And—”
“More active, then. Your mom wants you to be more active and make movement more of a habit. She didn’t think there was going to be enough physical activity at that theater camp.” This, too, sounded like something he’d been told instead of something he believed.
“There was swimming! And volleyball!” Abby’s throat was tight, her eyes felt hot. She still couldn’t quite believe that she was here, not in Maine; that her father wasn’t going to rescue her. That this was really going to happen.
“Abby.” Her father took her hands and gazed into her eyes. “Please. I am begging you. For the sake of everyone’s sanity, please just get through this summer, and next year you can go anywhere you want.”
“You promise?” she asked, thinking that the summer before eighth grade wasn’t too late. “You swear?”
“I promise,” said her dad, and he kissed her goodbye. “I’ll get your mother,” he said, once he’d reached the cabin’s door. “I know she’ll want to say goodbye.”
“We said goodbye already.”
“Well, then, she’ll want to make your bed.”
Abby shook her head again. “I can do it myself,” she said, and waited, in stony silence, until her dad hugged her again and walked out the door.
Abby unpacked her sheets and pillow and smoothed her comforter out over the thin plastic-covered mattress. When she saw that most of her bunkmates had stuck their “before” Polaroids to the wall beside or above their beds, she did the same. She put her clothes in the two drawers she’d been assigned, shorts and tee shirts in one; bras and underwear and swimsuits and socks in the other. Then she went outside to sit on the cabin’s steps to watch two girls play a desultory game of tetherball and take in her surroundings. The cabin looked like the pictures from the website, with pine wood walls, screened windows, and picnic tables out front, but the website hadn’t communicated the smell, a blend of must, mildew, and old bug spray—the essence of buildings that had been shut up tight since September. Abby slapped at a mosquito and opened her folder, scanning the sample meal plan—four ounces grilled chicken breast, one-half baked sweet potato with one teaspoon butter, unlimited steamed broccoli, one serving ice milk. She wondered if she was expected to measure things like a teaspoon of butter or four ounces of chicken breast, or if the camp would do that for her.
When all eleven of her fellow campers had arrived, it hadn’t taken Abby long to realize, with a feeling of shameful pleasure, that she was actually one of the smaller girls in the bunk. After a lifetime of always being the biggest, in her class or on her team, in a play or at the pool, this was a refreshing change. Not only was she relatively small compared to her bunkmates, but she also had the most desirable of the three silhouettes described on one of the handouts she found in her folder.
“Lucky you,” murmured Leah, who’d taken the bunk above Abby’s. “You’re an Hourglass.” Abby could hear the capital H when Leah pronounced the word.
“What are you?” Abby asked.
“Oh, she’s an Apple,” said Marissa Schuyler, who had the lower bunk opposite Abby’s. “I am, too.” Marissa’s hands were pale and graceful. Her nails, Abby saw, were manicured and polished pale pink. She wore delicate gold rings, a pair of patent leather slides, and a rose gold bangle that fit tightly on her wrist.
“What are the other options?” Abby asked.
“Pyramids,” said Leah, reading from her handout. “Apples are round all over. Pyramids are smaller on the top, bigger on the bottom.”
“Hourglass, Apple, and Pyramid,” Abby repeated. “What about the boys?”
Marissa and Leah looked at each other. “I don’t know,” Leah finally said. “I think they’re just boys.”
Kelsey from the parking lot, with her shiny ponytail and permanent smile, was their counselor. She bounded in, made them do a round of introductions—“Tell us where you’re from, and give us an adjective that starts with the first letter of your name that describes you!” Abby had picked Amazing, even though Angry would have been more true. As soon as Kelsey had bounded out again, Marissa reached into her pillowcase and produced a bag of sour gummy bears.
“Enjoy them,” said Marissa, when Abby hesitated. “It’s probably going to be the last sugar you have for a while.” Marissa and Leah were both Camp Golden Hills veterans. Marissa had started the previous summer, and Leah’s first summer had been the year before that. As Abby watched, Marissa walked around the cabin, going from girl to girl, laying a single gummy bear on each of their tongues like a Communion wafer. Then she’d linked her left arm through Leah’s and her right arm through Abby’s. “Come on,” she’d said. “Let’s go look at the boys!”
Abby had planned on hating everything about Camp Golden Hills, but in spite of herself, she’d ended up having a surprisingly good time. She’d made friends. She’d had her first boyfriend, her first real kiss. And, of course, she’d also gotten her first taste of the dieting life, not to mention previews of how the world would treat girls like her.
The last weigh-in of the summer was the day before everyone’s parents came to take them home. Abby listened as her bunkmates emerged from the cabin with the scale to either exult or mourn over the news. Marissa had been celebrating because her parents had promised her a Tiffany heart necklace if she lost twenty pounds, which she had. Kara was fretting because she’d lost only nine and a half pounds—“But I’m going to round up and say it’s ten. Ten is good, right? Ten pounds isn’t nothing!” And Vicki had lost thirty-eight pounds, which Abby thought was tragic, because the truth was, you couldn’t really tell.
On pickup day, her parents arrived late, so she’d gotten to see everyone else’s parents and how they had reacted to their daughters. She saw how Kara’s mother scowled and snapped, “If they hadn’t told me you’d lost weight, I wouldn’t have guessed.”