“Helen,” Mrs. Larkin said, turning to look at her daughter in the backseat, “your father has lost it.”
Helen was looking out the window, marveling at the speed at which the scenery was moving by. Recently, she had been feeling a certain fear about being in a car, especially on a highway, where her dad’s speedometer regularly inched past eighty miles per hour. How did all the cars trust the other cars not to crash into one another? They were full of strangers entering into a life-or-death pact every time they got on the road. But there was something about the way that her parents bickered that made her feel a special kind of ease; as they did so, she could disappear into her own thoughts, and that in itself was a relief. More often than not, as someone six years younger than anyone else in the family, she felt like the attention was always on her.
The ride to camp always felt longer than it actually was. Helen was jittery. She wasn’t hungry; she couldn’t nap; she didn’t want to talk to her parents even if they weren’t bickering, because she had too many thoughts. But none of them could be formed into words because what Helen felt was unnamable—a vague sense of waking up to the wild possibilities of that summer and an innate knowledge that camp’s magic, at its core, was unexplainable.
They arrived at camp around ten in the morning, and they parked their SUV on the grassy lot among all the other SUVs. Camp smelled exactly the same, like wet grass and damp soil that was perpetually drying off from the morning dew. She saw some new faces and some old. Then she spotted Fiona in her navy Camp Marigold staff polo, over with the youngest girls, holding their hands and chatting with their parents. She had come separately, driving up with her friend Rachel a week earlier for staff training. Helen’s mom seemed to spot Fiona at the same time, and she lifted her hand to begin to wave to her older daughter, but Helen’s father said to her mother, “I don’t think she’ll want to acknowledge us.”
“Why not?” Helen’s mom asked. “I’m just saying hi.”
Helen caught Fiona’s eye, and Fiona quickly looked down at the girl whose hand she was holding.
“She’s working,” Helen’s father said. “Let her feel independent. It’s good for her.”
“I don’t see how the two things are mutually exclusive,” Helen’s mother said, but she dropped her hand.
When Helen finished checking in, her parents drove her up to the girls’ Hemlock section. She was in tent three; she already knew that Sarah would be in her tent, because they had requested each other, and that Rachel, Fiona’s best friend, would be their counselor. Sarah lived in Simsbury, Connecticut, and the last time the girls had seen each other was over Christmas break. But they were the kind of friends who could pick up exactly where they’d left off.
Helen and her parents entered the tent. The bunks were still about half-empty, and Rachel was helping a new girl and a man Helen presumed to be the girl’s father put up a mosquito net.
“Hi, Rach,” Helen said, grinning. Helen loved Rachel, and she didn’t understand why Rachel was still best friends with Fiona. Maybe when they were younger their personalities had been more alike, but her sister was so negative these days, and Rachel continued to be such an upbeat, confident person. When she was in a group, all the attention was on her, and it wasn’t even like she was asking for it. Fiona just brought that energy down.
“Helen!” Rachel finished fastening a corner of the new girl’s mosquito net to the canvas siding and approached Helen with a wide smile and open arms. “So good to see you!” She gave Helen a tight squeeze. “I was so happy when Fiona told me you’d be in my tent.”
“Me too,” Helen said.
“Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Larkin,” Rachel said, climbing over trunks to give both of Helen’s parents equally warm hugs. They responded in kind.
“How are you, sweetheart?” Helen’s mother asked.
“Yes, how’s Michigan?” her father said. Helen found it funny that her father, who was so bad at remembering details about people, remembered this.
“It’s great,” Rachel said. “I’m super overextended between classes and activities, but I guess that’s what I’m there for.”
“Big party school, from what I’ve heard,” Helen’s father said.
“John,” her mother said by way of warning, as if Helen had never heard the word “party.”
Rachel grinned knowingly. “It has its moments.”
Helen looked over at the man and the girl by the back of the tent, who were still waiting politely for Rachel to help them finish the job; the mosquito net was only half-fastened with safety pins, the whole front of it flopping over the bunk.
Rachel followed Helen’s gaze to the pair, remembering she still had work to do. She hurried over and finished fastening the mosquito net like she’d done it a thousand times before. “Helen, this is Sheera. She’s new to camp this year. She’s from the city, like me.”
The two younger girls waved shyly at each other. Sheera was tall and developed; she was wearing a pink T-shirt and oddly fitting khaki shorts, too tight around her waist and hips but then looser at the legs, reaching all the way down to the tops of her knees. She had light brown skin, and her black hair was arranged in tight braids across her scalp, which were fastened at the ends by elastics with baby pink baubles.
“Arthur Jones,” her father said, a man so tall that Helen was sure if he lay down on one of the bunks, his legs would dangle over the edge. He lumbered across the tent and shook the hands of both Mr. and Mrs. Larkin.
“John Larkin,” Helen’s father said in the deep voice he put on when he was talking to other men. “And my wife, Amy.”
Mrs. Larkin looked as if she was about to say something, and Helen knew that she was wondering what Helen herself also was—where was Mrs. Jones? But Helen was glad for the interruption that ensued: Sarah bouncing into the tent and squealing as she engulfed Helen in a hug.