Sarah and Helen had met on the first day of their first summer at camp, when they were nine years old. They were in the Maple section then, the youngest group of campers. Helen didn’t want to be there; she was homesick. Her parents had insisted that she go away to Camp Marigold that summer because Fiona was also nine when she first went. Fiona “could not have been happier that summer,” her mother had explained—so surely for Helen it would be the same. She had tried to fight it at first, but her mother was so sure that Helen—sweet, lighthearted Helen—would have no trouble adjusting. But when her mother gave her one last hug before driving away, Helen whispered, “Don’t go,” which made the both of them tear up with regret.
All day long Helen didn’t talk to anyone in her section. She saw Fiona at the dining hall at dinner, and they ignored each other, Fiona too busy chasing behind Rachel to notice her sister’s sadness. Some counselor got up in front of all of girls’ camp and made a speech about marigolds. They were annual flowers: They grew only throughout the course of one summer, and the following year, they had to be replanted in order to bloom again. The counselor welcomed all the newcomers: all the little seed girls who would soon grow into beautiful marigolds.
After dinner, the counselors organized an icebreaker activity in the Maple section. The thirty girls were arranged in two circles—an inside circle and an outside circle—and one of the counselors posed questions to the group. (“What’s the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you?” “Who’s your favorite Disney princess?”) The girls facing each other introduced themselves and discussed their answers. Then the outside circle rotated one person to the right, another question was posed, and this kept going until everyone in each circle met everyone in the other.
The first two girls Helen talked to were shy and quiet like her. They answered the questions quickly and then stared at each other waiting for the next turn. Already Helen was dreading bedtime; she felt there was no doubt that she would cry herself to sleep. What if she wet the bed? She’d done that once, at her first sleepover, earlier in the year.
But the third girl stepped in front of Helen smiling widely, revealing a gap between her two front teeth. They protruded slightly out of her mouth in a V shape. She had a pale face and thick, dark hair parted straight down the middle.
“I’m Sarah,” she said, still smiling wide.
Their section leader said, “What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?”
“You wanna go first?” Sarah said, eager.
“Um,” Helen said. “I don’t know. I guess I don’t have a favorite.”
“Really? I have so many favorites that I’m not sure which to pick!” She had a slight lisp, so that she slurred the s in “so.”
“I guess I like cookies and cream.”
“I love cookies and cream. I also really like chocolate chip cookie dough, and I like strawberry but more in a milkshake. The problem with chocolate chip cookie dough or really anything with chunks like that is they get stuck in my palate expander.” She opened her mouth wide and tipped her head back, pointing to the roof of her mouth and revealing an industrial-looking metal contraption lodged behind her teeth.
Helen giggled a bit, though she hadn’t meant to.
“I know!” Sarah said. “Weird, right?”
“Yeah,” Helen said. “What’s it for?”
“I used to suck my thumb too much,” Sarah said. “Actually, up until last year. Late. It screwed up my teeth.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Only when I have to turn the key.”
“There’s a key?”
“Yeah.” She grinned. “I can show you later, if you want.”
“Okay,” Helen said. Then there was an immediate feeling of ease, a feeling that she wouldn’t be alone there.
Helen was shocked now by how much Sarah had developed in the six months since they saw each other over Christmas. Her breasts, which used to be like two golf balls in a bra, had swelled and were straining against the text on a T-shirt that read GIRL POWER in purple bubble letters. Her belly button peeked out from under the shirt’s hem. It seemed as if Sarah’s perceptions of herself hadn’t quite caught up with the realities of her body.
Helen was mortified to notice both of her parents’ glances lingering a beat too long on her friend’s body.
“Hi, Sarah dear,” Mrs. Larkin said, giving the girl a chaste hug and kiss on the cheek. “Are your parents here? We’d love to say hi.”
“No, they left already,” Sarah said. “It was Davey’s first day too.”
“Oh, too bad,” Mrs. Larkin said.
“I saved you a spot,” Sarah said to Helen, patting the top bunk next to her own.
—
When Helen awoke the following morning, the first thing she noticed was the distinct smell of urine.
“Who pissed themselves?” said Jessi, a tomboy who’d been going to Marigold as long as Helen had.
“Not me,” Sarah said.
“Me neither,” said Helen.
Helen noticed Rachel’s face pucker and sour for a brief moment, but then turn quickly toward neutral.
“I don’t smell anything,” Rachel said. “Girls, go take your showers.”
“Must have been the new girl,” Helen heard Jessi mutter to Sarah and the other girls as they all grabbed their towels from their hooks and their shower caddies from their cubbies and made their way out of the tent.
Only Helen, Rachel, and Sheera, the new girl, were left in the tent now. Sheera was pulling herself out of her bunk slowly, but once her entire body was exposed, Helen noticed a distinct wet spot in between the girl’s legs. Then Sheera hurried toward the back of the tent, where her towel hung.
She reemerged a few moments later from behind the cubby with only a towel around herself and her pajamas heaped into a ball in her arms. She approached her bunk again and zipped up the sleeping bag, straightening it neatly over the mattress. She turned and noticed that both Helen and Rachel were looking at her.
Rachel approached Sheera. “It’s okay, sweetie,” Rachel said in a quiet voice, as if Helen couldn’t hear her.
Sheera neither nodded nor said anything to confirm or deny Rachel’s presumption. Instead, she looked away from her counselor and walked straight out of the tent, being careful not to make eye contact with Helen.
Once Sheera had left the tent, Rachel said to Helen, “Please don’t tell the girls about that. She’s probably pretty embarrassed.”
“I won’t,” Helen said.
But later she did find herself telling Sarah during free period. She couldn’t help it. The thing was, friendships were so much sweeter when there were secrets to be kept.
4
Their first night off: a Monday evening in Torrington, Connecticut, a place that felt so void of personality or style that Fiona was embarrassed by it with non-Americans in her presence. Her Jeep was parked in the lot of a strip mall on Route 4. The boys—Chad, who was English, and Yonatan, who was Israeli—were both twenty-one and went into the liquor store while the girls waited in the car.
Steph, whom Fiona knew the least, lit a cigarette from the backseat.
“Could you smoke that outside?” Fiona asked. “I have asthma.”
Steph apologized, got out of the car, and leaned against the parked Jeep while she smoked.
“Liar,” Rachel said in the front seat.