“She’s in seventh grade, Fee,” said Liam.
Fiona was a freshman at a small college in Pennsylvania; she had always played the role of uppity older sister to Helen. Liam was a junior at Yale: smart, quietly confident. Fiona’s work ethic had enabled her to graduate in the top 10 percent at Mamaroneck High School, but she would never, despite her most laborious efforts, have anything close to Liam’s sharp wit or near-photographic memory.
Fiona looked around the table for support, her face considerably more swollen than it had been six months ago. She had definitely gained the Freshman 15. Their father was working late, closing an important case that had to do with the stuff inside diapers and whether or not it was flammable.
“Helen, you do have a lot of free time these days,” their mother said, getting up from the table and walking into the kitchen to refill her glass from the magnum bottle of Barefoot Chardonnay in the fridge.
“I do not!” Helen called from the dining room table. “Seventh grade is really hard.”
“Maybe you would have more time for homework if you spent less time with Marla Steinberg and all of those girls,” Fiona said.
“She’s a really good person,” said Helen.
“She’s a slut,” Fiona hissed quietly, so their mother wouldn’t hear.
“Just because you’re a prude doesn’t make everyone else a slut,” Helen hissed back.
Fiona tried to burn Helen with her eyes but didn’t have anything to say in return.
“Too far, Helen,” Liam said.
Their mother returned to the table. “What about lacrosse?”
“I hate lacrosse,” Helen said. Liam and Fiona played lacrosse. And Helen did not do anything she didn’t want to—that had been clear since she was an infant, when she would let only Liam hold her, unless she was nursing. Passed to Fiona, to any other relative, or even to her own father, Helen would scream her throat sore until she was returned to the only person who could calm her. That was eight-year-old Liam’s role in 1993—caretaker for his youngest sister, his thin arms tentatively cradling her into the night.
After Helen was born, their mother got her tubes tied. At the time, the kids had pictured plastic cylinders inside her body that babies traveled through, like the suction tubes in the ball pits at the Discovery Zone.
Without Camp Marigold, Helen and her siblings wouldn’t exist. Their parents had met there when they were nine, a fact that was unfathomable to Helen. It seemed utterly impossible that she could have already met someone—four years ago—that she was going to spend the rest of her life with.
Liam hadn’t gone to Marigold since he was eleven, when he replaced it with lacrosse camp. This upcoming summer, Fiona would be a counselor at Marigold with her own tent of campers.
“I think it’s terrifying that you’re going to be in charge of a whole tent of nine-year-old girls,” Helen told her sister later at dinner.
“They wouldn’t have hired me if they didn’t think I was ready,” Fiona said defensively, as if she too was slightly terrified by the prospect.
—
When Helen told Marla about how her parents met, Marla said, “I didn’t think anyone actually met people they married at camp.”
Marla thought the idea of summer camp was a riot, and yet she seemed intrigued by it. She’d never been friends with anyone who had gone, the kids from Mamaroneck tending to hang out only with one another and the same for the kids from Larchmont, and hardly anyone from Mamaroneck went to camp.
“So you pay to live outside? Shouldn’t that just be free?” Marla gestured to the woods around them. They were in their usual spot on an afternoon in April—just the two of them that day—leaning and smoking against that same oak tree.
“Well, you pay for the activities and stuff.”
“What kinds of activities?”
“Everything,” Helen said. “Swimming, boating, theater, sports, arts and crafts. There’s even a radio station.”
“Boating?” Marla said. “Where do you do that?”
“There’s a lake.”
“A lake?” She considered this. “That’s cool.”
They could hear the sports teams practicing on the other side of the gym. Mr. Browne, who was also the girls’ lacrosse coach, was yelling.
“What the hell are you doing, Kayla? You look like a chicken with your head cut off.”
Marla laughed, and Helen imagined her childhood friend, fast but uncoordinated, blushing uncontrollably in front of her teammates.
They continued smoking as Helen and Marla imitated all Mr. Browne’s sports-isms: “Good idea, Kayla. Bad execution.” “?‘Can’t’ is a four-letter word, Kayla. Watch your mouth.”
“God dammit, girls,” they then heard. “I am so sick and tired of this crap. Five laps of Indian drills around the gym. Go.”
There was a collective groan from the team.
“Ten? You want ten?”
Marla and Helen took a beat and then, realizing they could easily be seen from the side of the gym closest to them, put out the joint, fanned the cloud of smoke that had emerged around them, and began to run deeper into the woods.
It was all thick and undeveloped back there, and Helen concentrated on the ground below her, avoiding upturned roots and fallen branches. Ahead, Marla was laughing; she knew they wouldn’t get caught. But as Helen looked down, she felt a dizziness begin to overtake her—white and purple spots appeared over everything, coloring the wooded ground into a misty pointillist vortex.
“Helen?” she heard. “You okay?”
The woods swirled and twirled and tipped onto their side, as if Helen had entered some carnival funhouse where everything was tilted and distorted. Her sneakers began to lose their traction, and the mossy ground slipped from under her. She felt a lurching in her stomach propel her forward. She accepted it with a sort of grace. Nowhere to go but down.
—
When she came to, Marla was standing over her, waving her hands in front of Helen’s face.
“Blink twice if you can hear me!” Marla said.
Marla walked Helen all the way home, even though it was out of her way, with her arm draped over her friend’s shoulder. She bought Helen a Gatorade from the gas station. Helen had experienced a fall like this before, during gym class when she was in fifth grade; the school nurse had given her a juice box and told her she needed to eat more frequently. She wasn’t sure if she’d fallen this time for the same reason or because she’d been too high.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Marla asked when they got to Helen’s front door.
Helen nodded. “Don’t tell anyone about this, okay?” She was embarrassed.
“Of course not,” Marla said, and they linked pinkies and shook them.
Inside, Helen told her parents the fall had happened in gym class again; she was sprinting after a soccer ball, she said, when she passed out and fell face-first onto the field. A lump the shape of a goose egg, throbbing on her forehead, had turned a deep purple, the color of an eggplant. She would have to steal her mom’s makeup to cover it for school the next day.