“Relax, weirdo.” It was Hailey. She took her hand off my mouth. I tried to breathe, but my throat felt frozen. “Where are Jenn and Vicky?”
I shook my head. My vocal cords were starting to function again. “I don’t know. Did you come out to look for them?”
“Yeah.” Hailey shifted, like maybe that hadn’t really been what she was doing out here, but the truth was, I didn’t care. I was just so happy to see her. “Do you think they went up to the bathrooms?”
“Probably.” I didn’t want to go that way again. I kept following the path to the cabins. Hailey walked with me. “What if they—”
That was when the whispering started again.
It was so close this time. It was inside my ears. Inside my head. And this time I could hear it more clearly than ever.
Go away! You don’t belong here!
I swallowed my scream.
“Did you just—” Hailey started to say as we turned past the grove of trees.
And saw Jenn and Vicky.
They were on the ground near the woodpile, with Jenn lying on top of Vicky. They were kissing. Vicky had her hand up Jenn’s shirt.
I screamed for real that time.
Hailey saw them too, but she didn’t scream. At first she just stared while Jenn and Vicky leaped up and straightened out their clothes. Then she turned and ran back into the lodge house.
Jenn and Vicky were both talking at once, tripping over their words, trying to ask me what I’d seen and if I was going to tell anyone. I didn’t really care about that, though. I was just glad that now, I knew what all those strange whispers had been, and the shadows in the trees.
I guess we forgot about Hailey in the awkwardness of the moment, until a couple of minutes later when she came out of the lodge house with her phone. Our phones were all supposed to be hidden somewhere, but Hailey must’ve figured out where they were because she was already talking to her dad. Telling him he needed to come get her, because two of our counselors were sinners, and Hailey wasn’t about to have sinners taking care of her.
Well, that was the end for Jenn and Vicky. Hailey’s dad must’ve called someone else right away because it couldn’t have been more than half an hour before the camp director rolled up in her car with a couple of other leaders.
They brought Jenn into the lodge house first. Vicky had to wait outside with Hailey and me. Vicky was crying by then, and I felt kind of bad for her, but Hailey stood as far away from us as she could, doing something on her phone.
“You should’ve just said for us to go away in your normal voice,” I told Vicky because it was embarrassing just standing there, watching her cry. “We would’ve left you alone. It’s not like we wanted to catch you.”
“Yeah, right.” Vicky sniffed and glared down the path at Hailey.
“Well, either way, you didn’t have to whisper all creepily like that. You scared me. That’s why I screamed that first night, you know. I didn’t even see you guys then.”
“What are you talking about?” Vicky scrubbed at her eyes. “All I knew was you two kept showing up, screaming like weirdos, every time we—”
“Vicky?” The camp director was on the back steps. One of the other leaders was getting into the car with Jenn. “Come inside. We’re ready for you.”
The other leader told Hailey and me to go to our regular cabin for the rest of the night, so I don’t know exactly what happened to Jenn and Vicky after that. I only know they were both gone before we came down to brush our teeth that morning. Instead, there were two new counselors at the lodge, grown-ups who told us Jenn and Vicky had gotten sick and needed to go home early.
Well, Hailey wasn’t about to let that story stand. Over breakfast, she told everyone what had really happened. She’d decided not to leave camp, since Jenn and Vicky were gone, but all through the day, she took every opportunity to tell the other girls how revolting it had been finding them the way we did.
Every time she told the story, it got worse. By the time dinner rolled around, I heard her whispering to someone that Jenn and Vicky had been totally naked when we caught them. And that they didn’t stop, even after they saw us, until Hailey called the camp director. She even said Vicky had tried to grab her. Everyone was shocked, and they all kept saying how sorry they felt for Hailey and talking about how gross the whole story was.
That night, in our cabin, I tried to tell the other girls what Hailey said wasn’t true, but that only made Hailey mad. So instead of telling ghost stories, she told everyone about how I’d been going outside and screaming every night because I was that scared of the stupid Spirit of Death, which she’d only made up in the first place.
Then she told them the reason I was defending Jenn and Vicky was because I was a lesbian too.
Which was just totally absurd. But that didn’t matter. Now everyone in the cabin thought I was a big paranoid lesbian weirdo. They all kept whispering things I couldn’t quite hear, then giggling when I looked their way.
It really sucked, to be honest. And the way Hailey looked at me after that sucked most of all. As if I was nothing. As if I’d been a complete waste of her time.
I didn’t think I’d ever fall asleep that night. But I’d barely slept the night before, so I guess I nodded off eventually.
When I woke up it was still dark, and the girls were whispering at me again. That’s what I remember the clearest now. Whispers and giggles. Then footsteps. A door opening and closing.
I was only half awake, but I’d already figured out what was happening. I’d been coming to camp for years.
The girls were playing a prank on me. They’d waited for me to fall asleep, and when I opened my eyes, they were going to jump out and try to scare me, or something dumb like that.
Well, I’d show them. I started to get up, ready to tell them they couldn’t scare me.
But when I sat up and opened my eyes, the whispers and giggles were gone.
The cabin was empty. It was dark—not a single flashlight was on—but I could see the bunks around me.
No one was there. All the other sleeping bags were empty. It was totally silent, too.
I reached toward the foot of my bunk for my flashlight. It felt too light in my hand, though, and sure enough, nothing happened when I turned the switch. My cabinmates must have stolen the batteries on their way out.
What a boring prank this was. When I’d played tricks with my friends in other years, we’d always stayed in the cabin. That was the whole point of pranks—to laugh at the girl when she woke up and saw that we’d put her hand in a glass of water, or written on her forehead with markers, or whatever.
I climbed down from my bunk and reached for the light switch by the door. But when I flipped it on, it was still just as dark in the cabin as ever.
That was weird. The light had worked the night before. The girls couldn’t have climbed all the way up to the ceiling to mess with the lightbulb. It must have burned out by coincidence.
Whatever. Hailey and the other girls were probably hiding right outside the cabin, waiting to jump out at me when I went outside.